Tag Archives: researchers

Stressful childhood may mean earlier death

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Stressful childhood may mean earlier death

Having a stressful childhood may slash decades off a person’s life, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.

Among people who reported experiencing at least six of eight different bad childhood experiences-from frequent verbal abuse to living with a mentally ill person-average age at death was about 61, compared to 79 for people who didn’t have any of these experiences as children, the researchers found.

Dr. David W. Brown and Dr. Robert Anda of the CDC and colleagues from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente have been following 17,337 men and women who visited the health plan between 1995 and 1997 to investigate the relationship between bad childhood experiences and health.

So far, Anda noted in an interview, they have shown links between childhood stressors and heart disease, lung disease, liver disease and other conditions. “The strength of it really surprised me, how powerfully it’s related to health,” the researcher said.

In the current analysis, the researchers reviewed death records through 2006 to investigate whether these experiences might also relate to mortality. During that time, 1,539 study participants died.

Each person was asked whether they had any of eight different categories of such experiences, including verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse with physical contact, having a battered mother, having a substance-abusing person in the household, having a mentally ill person in the household, having a household member who was incarcerated, or having one’s parents separate or divorce.

Sixty-nine percent of the study participants who were younger than 65 reported at least one of the adverse childhood experiences, while 53 percent of people 65 and older did.

Those who reporting experiencing six or more were 1.5 times more likely to die during follow-up than those who reported none, the researchers found. They were 1.7 times as likely to die at age 75 or younger, and nearly 2.4 times as likely to die at or before age 65.

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U.S. pre-term babies die despite medical care: study

in.reuters.com

U.S. pre-term babies die despite medical care: study

Very early pre-term babies kept alive with ventilators, chest tubes and drugs to support the heart may live a little longer than they did 10 years ago, but are just as likely to die before ever going home, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Their study suggests the emotionally taxing and expensive care given these tiny newborns, delivered at 22 to 24 weeks gestation, does not in the end save their lives. Babies born at 22 weeks included in the study all died as infants, regardless of care.

“This is a very difficult ethical dilemma for everyone involved,” Pamela Donohue of Johns Hopkins Childrens Center in Baltimore, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Most pregnancies last about 40 weeks, and babies born earlier than 37 weeks of pregnancy are considered premature.

Donohue’s team studied 160 women who gave birth at 22-24 weeks during separate two-year periods — 1993-1995 and 2001-2003.

Those who gave birth during the current decade were more likely to receive higher-level care around the time of delivery, including sonograms, antibiotics and steroids to help with fetal lung development.

After birth, their children were more likely to be put on ventilators, drugs to boost heart and blood pressure rates and to have chest tubes inserted.

Infants born in 2001-2003 lived longer on average — seven days, compared to two days in the 1990s.

But mortality rates did not fall, and the researchers urged greater discussion and further study both on intervention and the degree of suffering imposed on children, their families and healthcare providers.

Very early pre-term babies kept alive with ventilators, chest tubes and drugs to support the heart may live a little longer than they did 10 years ago, but are just as likely to die before ever going home, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Their study suggests the emotionally taxing and expensive care given these tiny newborns, delivered at 22 to 24 weeks gestation, does not in the end save their lives. Babies born at 22 weeks included in the study all died as infants, regardless of care.

“This is a very difficult ethical dilemma for everyone involved,” Pamela Donohue of Johns Hopkins Childrens Center in Baltimore, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Most pregnancies last about 40 weeks, and babies born earlier than 37 weeks of pregnancy are considered premature.

Donohue’s team studied 160 women who gave birth at 22-24 weeks during separate two-year periods — 1993-1995 and 2001-2003.

Those who gave birth during the current decade were more likely to receive higher-level care around the time of delivery, including sonograms, antibiotics and steroids to help with fetal lung development.

After birth, their children were more likely to be put on ventilators, drugs to boost heart and blood pressure rates and to have chest tubes inserted.

Infants born in 2001-2003 lived longer on average — seven days, compared to two days in the 1990s.

But mortality rates did not fall, and the researchers urged greater discussion and further study both on intervention and the degree of suffering imposed on children, their families and healthcare providers.

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Vaccine raises hope for cocaine addiction therapy

in.reuters.com

Vaccine raises hope for cocaine addiction therapy

A vaccine helped block the high felt by cocaine users in 38 percent of people who took it, U.S. researchers said on Monday, offering promise of a new approach to treating those addicted to the drug.

The aim is to prevent cocaine’s rewarding effects — the high — in order to reduce cravings that trigger drug relapses.

“The concept works,” Dr. Thomas Kosten of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, whose study appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry, said in a statement.

Cocaine molecules on their own are too small to draw the attention of the immune system. To get the body to recognize cocaine, the researchers designed a vaccine that uses a harmless version of the cholera toxin with a few attached cocaine molecules.

When the immune system reacts to the toxin, it makes both cholera and cocaine antibodies.

“These antibodies bind to the cocaine, preventing it from leaving the bloodstream,” Kosten said. An enzyme called cholinesterase breaks down the cocaine and flushes it out of the body.

For the study, Kosten and colleagues studied 94 volunteers — mostly users of crack cocaine, which is a solid, smokable form of the drug — who were on methadone treatment at the Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System.

Over three months, the participants either got five shots of the vaccine or a placebo injection.

STUDY PLANS

Plans are under way to study the vaccine in many sites.

According to a 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 35.9 million Americans aged 12 and older reported having used cocaine, and 8.6 million reported having used crack. In 2006, cocaine accounted for about 14 percent of all admissions to drug abuse treatment programs.

Kosten said he plans to tinker with the vaccine to make it more effective. He has already tried a different carrier — a modified version of a meningitis bacterium — supplied by drug firm Merck & Co.

Animal studies showed it produced five times the antibody response as the cholera carrier.

He has used a similar approach on a nicotine vaccine called TA-NIC now being tested in Europe. Both the cocaine and nicotine vaccines are being developed through private equity firm Celtic Pharma.

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