Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis Shows Some Promise in Study

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Gene therapy for cystic fibrosis has for the first time shown slight but significant benefit on lung function, new British research reveals.

In a randomized trial, patients inhaled molecules of DNA that aimed to replace the defective gene responsible for cystic fibrosis with a healthy, working copy of the gene in the lungs.

“Patients who received the gene therapy showed a significant, if modest, benefit in tests of lung function compared with the placebo group, and there were no safety concerns,” study senior author Eric Alton of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, said in a news release fromThe Lancet Respiratory Medicine, which published the study.

Even though the effect was “inconsistent, with some patients responding better than others, the results are encouraging,” Alton said.

Cystic fibrosis is a rare, inherited respiratory disease that is caused by mutations in a gene called cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, (CFTR). The condition affects more than 90,000 people around the world.

Scientists working to develop treatments for cystic fibrosis have identified some 2,000 mutations to the CFTR gene, which can cause the lining of the lungs to ooze very thick mucus. This results in serious and recurring lung infections that damage the lungs and cause the vast majority of deaths among those with the disease, the researchers explained.

A variety of methods have been developed to deliver a normal CFTR gene into the lungs, but no therapy to date has been able to show long-term improvements.

The two-year study involved 136 British cystic fibrosis patients aged 12 or older. Over the course of one year, these patients were randomly assigned to receive either the gene therapy or a “dummy” saline placebo at monthly intervals.

Alton’s team evaluated their lung function by measuring the volume of air forcibly exhaled in one second, known by the abbreviation FEV1.

After one year of treatment, the measure of lung function, or FEV1, of the patients who received the gene therapy was 3.7 percent greater than those who received the placebo, the study found. The team stressed that response appeared to be due to a stabilization of lung function — not actual improvement.

However, “stabilization of lung disease in itself is a worthwhile goal,” study senior co-author Stephen Hyde, from the Gene Medicine Research Group at the University of Oxford, said in the news release.

“We are actively pursuing further studies of nonviral gene therapy looking at different doses and combinations with other treatments, and more efficient vectors,” he added.

The study also showed that some patients respond better to the therapy than others. Those with the worse lung function when the study began saw twice the benefit, the researchers noted.

The gene therapy was generally well-tolerated in patients on the treatment, with negative reactions being similar to that seen in people taking the placebo.

One expert in the United States was encouraged by the findings.

“In order to get the ‘normal’ gene into the lung, it has to be connected to something called a vector,” explained Dr. Joan Decelie-Germana, of the division of pulmonary medicine & Cystic Fibrosis Center at Cohn Children’s Medical Center in Great Neck, N.Y.

“In this study, the vector is a nonviral vector combination that has been shown to be safe in earlier studies,” she said.

The new results are encouraging, but the therapy should be tried “in a larger study including more patients, to see if these results are reproducible in many more patients,” Decelie-Germana stressed. “It will also be important to study this gene therapy in other countries, since different patients are known to have different gene mutations.”

More information

The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute provides more information on cystic fibrosis.

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Behind Many High-Achieving Children…

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Talented children who reach their potential likely have dedicated parents to thank for their success, a new study found.

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that parents play a vital role in helping their kids achieve a national or world-class ranking in their sport, instrument or other pursuit.

“Talent might partially be born, but it is largely made — made by parents who devote their full measure to fostering their children’s talent development,” study leader and educational psychologist Kenneth Kiewra said in a university news release.

The researchers interviewed the parents of 24 elite young people. Included among their children were Olympic champions, a world-champion baton twirler, college athletes and a pre-teen author. The parents were asked about the influence they had on their children.

Many of the parents made major financial sacrifices to support their children. In fact, some of them mortgaged their home, sidelined their careers and drained their retirement accounts. The study authors noted that some of the parents in the study were still in the process of helping to nurture their child’s talent.

Parents played a key role in many aspects of their child’s success, including creating the environment in which their child’s talent could be identified early. Some skaters, for instance, were out on the ice by the age of 2. Musicians began studying their instruments as toddlers. A young author began writing stories with the help his mother at the age of 4.

Many parents begin by coaching their child, but eventually hire top professional coaches, the study found. In some cases working with the best coaches meant parents had to give up their jobs, move or work night jobs to make extra money.

Parents of children with world-class talent also encouraged intense practice and helped keep their child motivated. This included having family life revolve around their child’s practice or competitions schedule. Some children were home-schooled to accommodate their pursuits. One mother in the study took notes during her son’s violin lessons to help him remember what he needed to practice.

“Although the link between natural aptitude and performance area contributes to success, research shows that biological advantages are not sufficient for attaining talent. Certain environmental factors that stem from the parent-child relationship must be in play. And that is certainly the overriding conclusion we draw from the present findings,” the study authors wrote.

The children in the study had exceptional abilities, but the researchers said their findings could help all parents who want to help their children succeed and reach their potential.

“In the end, parents’ actions are instrumental, if not critical, to their child’s talent development,” the researchers wrote.

The study, published recently in Roeper Review, didn’t take cultural influences into consideration since nearly all the parents in the study were white and from middle- or upper-middle class households.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more information on positive parenting.

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Rapid Response Guidelines May Improve Children’s Stroke Care

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A rapid response plan for children who visit the emergency room with stroke-like symptoms can help doctors make a faster diagnosis, new research suggests.

“Just as there are rapid response processes for adults with a possible stroke, there should be a rapid response process for children with a possible stroke that includes expedited evaluation and imaging or rapid transfer to a medical center with pediatric stroke expertise,” senior study author Dr. Lori Jordan, an assistant professor of pediatrics and neurology at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., said in an American Heart Association news release.

“We need the emergency department, radiology, critical care medicine and often many other specialists to work quickly and efficiently together to treat pediatric patients,” Jordan said.

After evaluating information from Vanderbilt’s pediatric stroke program, the researchers created an emergency room “stroke alert” plan. The plan requires children with stroke symptoms to be seen by a neurology resident within 15 minutes. The plan also requires most children to undergo an MRI.

The stroke plan was then used on 124 children who had stroke-like symptoms. Their average age was 11. They were treated between April 2011 and October 2014.

In this group, 24 percent of the children actually had a stroke. Another 2 percent had transient ischemic attacks (TIA), which are also known as mini-strokes.

Results of the study were published July 2 in the journal Stroke.

Of those who had a stroke or TIA, about 13 percent had sickle cell anemia or congenital heart disease, the researchers noted.

The study also found:

• 17 percent of the children had complex migraine, which is associated with neurological symptoms.
• 15 percent of the kids had seizures.
• 14 percent had other serious conditions, such as meningitis, encephalitis or tumors.

Most often, the children went to the emergency room because they experienced weakness. This symptom affected 65 percent of the children. Meanwhile, 44 percent of the kids had a change in mental status and 37 percent had a headache.

The median time between the children’s arrival at the emergency room and a neurology consultation was 28 minutes. From that point, it took a median time of seven minutes for the children to be seen by a neurologist. MRIs were performed about 94 minutes after kids arrived at the emergency room and CT scans were performed within 59 minutes of arrival, the study found.

“Rapid evaluation and appropriate testing is critical,” said Jordan, who also is director of the Vanderbilt Pediatric Stroke Program. “Prior studies have suggested that stroke in children often takes a long time to diagnose due to delays in imaging. In one recent Canadian study, in-hospital delay was 12.7 hours for children with stroke. We were able to initiate the most accurate type of brain scan, a MRI of the brain, within 94 minutes, on average.”

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke provides more information on recognizing and treating strokes in children.

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Lower leg lift combo

 

Want a core of steel? Challenge your stability with this lower leg lift.

TOP TIP: Remember to engage your core throughout and use your arms for balance. It may help if you focus on something directly infront of you.

Repeat for 60 seconds and follow with a plank reach.

Workout from Nikki Fogden-Moore

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Many Americans Trying to Cut Their Salt Intake: CDC

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Worried about links between high daily salt intake, high blood pressure and stroke, half of American adults questioned in a recent poll say they’ve tried to cut back on sodium.

The survey of more than 180,000 people from 26 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., found — perhaps not surprisingly — that people already diagnosed with high blood pressure were more likely to shun the salt shaker.

“Excess sodium intake is a major risk factor for hypertension, and subsequently, heart disease and stroke, the first and fifth leading causes of U.S. deaths, respectively,” noted a team of researchers led by Dr. Jing Fang of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Under current U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the general population is advised to keep daily salt intake under 2,300 milligrams, or about a teaspoon. For people over 51, blacks and those with health conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease, the recommended daily sodium intake is 1,500 milligrams or less.

The new report suggests that messages on reducing salt intake may be getting through. In response to the question, “Are you currently watching or reducing your sodium or salt intake?”, just over 50 percent of respondents said “Yes.”

But the number of affirmative answers varied widely based on residence, Fang’s team noted. While more than 73 percent of Puerto Ricans said “Yes” to lowering salt intake, and 58 percent did in North Carolina, that number dropped to about 39 percent in Utah and about 41 percent in Minnesota, the study found.

People who knew they had high blood pressure were much more likely to be trying to cut down on salt. For example, 80 percent of Puerto Ricans with hypertension said they were avoiding salt, as were about 72 percent of people with high blood pressure in Kentucky and New Jersey, the CDC researchers found.

In contrast, just 39 percent of people in Kentucky without hypertension said they were trying to cut down.

The good news, said the CDC team, is that efforts to avoid salt appear to be highest in areas where rates of high blood pressure are also high.

But they believe much more could be done by health care professionals to inform patients of their risk. When asked if a doctor or other health care professional had ever urged them to watch their salt intake, only 14.5 percent of survey respondents in Utah said “Yes,” and the rate never rose above 41.4 percent (Puerto Rico) in any site included in the survey.

Besides saving lives, reducing salt intake — and its impact on heart disease and stroke — could ease the burden on the U.S. health care system as well, the CDC team said. Looking at projections for 2010 to 2030, they estimated that “reducing sodium intake by 1,200 milligrams daily is projected to save $18 billion in health care costs yearly.”

The study was published in the July 3 issue of the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

More information

Find out more about salt’s effects on your heart at the American Heart Association.

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Americans’ Risk of Dying From Cancer Is Falling, CDC Finds

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — The risk that any one American will die from cancer — the cancer death rate — is going down, regardless of sex or race, a new government study reports.

However, because the United States has a growing aging population, the overall number of people dying from cancer is on the rise, officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

“While we are making progress in reducing cancer death rates, we still have real work to do to reduce cancer deaths among our aging population,” said lead researcher Mary White, a scientist in the CDC’s division of cancer prevention and control.

Between 2007 and 2020, cancer deaths are expected to rise more than 10 percent among men and black women, the report found. Among white women, the number of cancer deaths will start to stabilize, increasing less than 5 percent during this period, according to the CDC researchers.

“Further declines in cancer deaths might be achieved if we can reach other national targets for addressing risk factors,” White said.

These include cutting exposure to tobacco and UV radiation, increasing cancer screening for early detection, and improving access to health care to increase early treatment and survival, she said.

White said that a decline in cancer death rates — even as the actual number of cancer deaths rises — is not a paradox.

“Death rates are calculated by dividing the number of cancer deaths by the number of people in the population,” she explained.

The number of older adults continues to grow, White explained. “Because death rates for many cancers increase with age, the number of people who die from cancer is also predicted to grow, even while death rates decline,” she said.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Conn., agreed that reducing cancer deaths and reducing cancer are not the same.

“Cancer death rates are declining markedly, which is excellent news and testimony to the power of early detection and improving treatments,” said Katz, who was not involved with the study.

And Dr. Rich Wender, the chief cancer control officer at the American Cancer Society, said, “We have made substantial progress for many of the common adult cancers. The key to that progress is applying research about how to prevent cancer, how to detect it early and treat it effectively.”

The report is published in the July issue of the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

According to the study findings, between 1975 and 2009, the number of cancer deaths increased 45.5 percent among white men, 56 percent among white women, 53 percent among black men and 98 percent among black women.

These increases are primarily attributed to an aging white population and an increasing black population, White said. This pattern is likely to continue, she added.

The government’s Healthy People 2020 initiative set a goal of reducing the rate of cancer deaths by 10 to 15 percent for some cancers by 2020. This target was met for prostate cancer in 2010, the study authors said.

Researchers expect to meet the goal for breast, cervix, colon and rectum, lung and bronchus cancers in 2015. The death rates for cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx seem to be stabilizing, the report said.

However, the goal for melanoma is not expected to be achieved. “It’s discouraging to find out that we aren’t reducing deaths from melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer,” White said.

“We know that most cases of melanoma are preventable,” she said. “To lower your skin cancer risk, protect your skin from the sun and avoid indoor tanning.”

White suggested the people can lower their own risk of dying from cancer by learning about screening tests and other steps they can take to prevent cancer.

“While we have seen improvements to lower cancer deaths, everyone can learn about screening tests and the cancer prevention steps that are right for them,” she said.

Katz pointed out that “back in 1981, researchers first highlighted the substantial preventability of cancer by changing one’s lifestyle. Most authorities remain convinced that 30 to 60 percent of cancers could be prevented by avoiding tobacco, having a healthy diet, routine activity and weight control.”

More information

For more about cancer prevention, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Mass Killings, School Shootings in U.S. May Be ‘Contagious’

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Mass killings and school shootings in the United States may be “contagious,” inspiring similar killing sprees, new research suggests.

“The hallmark of contagion is observing patterns of many events that are bunched in time, rather than occurring randomly in time,” study author Sherry Towers, a research professor at Arizona State University’s Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, said in a university news release.

Researchers from Arizona State and Northeastern Illinois University examined databases on widely publicized mass killings and school shootings in America. After applying a contagion model to the data, they found these events motivated similar tragedies. The “period of contagion” lasts an average of 13 days, according to the study, published July 2 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Up to 30 percent of these tragedies seem to arise from contagion, the researchers found.

“In January of 2014, I was due to have a meeting with a group of researchers at Purdue University,” Towers said. “That morning, there was a tragic campus shooting and stabbing incident that left one student dead. I realized that there had been three other school shootings in the news in the week prior, and I wondered if it was just a statistical fluke, or if somehow through news media those events were sometimes planting unconscious [ideas] in vulnerable people for a short time after each event.”

Previous studies have shown that suicide among young people can also be contagious. One suicide can prompt other vulnerable young people to also take their own life, the researchers pointed out.

“It occurred to us that mass killings and school shootings that attract attention in the national news media can potentially do the same thing, but at a larger scale,” Towers said. “While we can never determine which particular shootings were inspired by unconscious [ideas], this analysis helps us understand aspects of the complex dynamics that can underlie these events.”

The researchers said mass killings involving firearms occur in the United States about every two weeks, on average. School shootings occur an average of once a month. These tragedies happen far more often in states where many people own guns.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides data and statistics on school violence.

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Migraine’s Link to Higher Heart Disease Risk May Not Be Genetic

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — People who have migraines have a greater risk for heart disease, but their genes may not be to blame for the connection, new research suggests.

Scientists looked at two large studies that pinpointed genetic variations that can increase the risk for migraine and heart disease. The first study included almost 20,000 people with migraine and more than 55,000 people who didn’t have these severe headaches. The second study involved more than 21,000 people with heart disease and just over 63,000 people who didn’t.

Led by Dr. Aarno Palotie, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston, the researchers tried to find shared genetic variants in people with migraines and heart disease.

But they found no common gene variations between migraine with aura and heart disease — even though evidence suggests these patients have a greater risk for heart disease than those with migraine without aura.

Migraine without aura and heart disease, however, do share some genetic variations. But the shared variations seem to help protect against heart disease, the study published in the July 2 issue of the journal Neurology Genetics revealed.

“In other words, people with migraine without aura seem to have a lower load of genetic factors increasing the risk of heart disease,” Dr. Anne Ducros, of the University of Montpellier in France, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said in a news release from the American Academy of Neurology.

“We now need to understand why people with migraine who are born with a protective or neutral genetic risk for heart disease end up with an increased risk for heart problems,” Ducros said.

Genetic factors not included in these studies could affect the risk for heart disease among those with migraine, Ducros added. Factors other than genetics could also be involved in the increased risk of heart disease, such as obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and depression, she suggested.

More information

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides more on migraine.

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Children with Autism Respond Differently to Smells: Study

By Tara Haelle
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Children with autism spectrum disorders appear to respond to stinky smells differently from children without autism, a new study found.

The difference was pronounced enough that researchers could tell who had autism and who didn’t about 80 percent of the time based only on “sniff responses.”

“The authors have hit upon a novel way of testing differences between children with autism and those without that indeed seems to suggest marked differences in how autistic children process odors,” said Dr. Glen Elliott, chief psychiatrist and medical director of Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Since we know that many children with autism are hypersensitive to touch, sound, taste and visual stimuli, it is especially interesting that they seem not to be responsive to odor in the same fashion,” said Elliott, who was not part of the research.

The study may hold clues to the social difficulties children with autism have, the authors suggest.

“The sense of smell is in fact a major component of human social interaction,” said lead author Liron Rozenkrantz, a Ph.D. student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Given that olfaction is probably altered in autism, could it be that this is a part of the social challenge in autism?”

Results of the study appear in the July 2 issue of the journal Current Biology.

The researchers compared 18 children with autism spectrum disorders to 18 typically developing children. All of the children sniffed pleasant and unpleasant odors while watching cartoons. They were exposed 10 times to pleasant smells, such as rose or shampoo scents. They were also exposed 10 times to unpleasant odors, such as sour milk or rotten fish.

The researchers measured each child’s “sniff response.” This included how much they sniffed, their highest rate of breathing in, their average rate of breathing in and how long they sniffed.

The children without autism changed the way they sniffed the bad odors within 0.3 of a second, the researchers found. They very quickly took smaller sniffs of the bad smells and larger sniffs of the sweet smells. The children with autism, however, continued sniffing without any changes, the study revealed.

Using only the children’s responses to bad smells, researchers were able to identify 17 of the 18 typically developing children and 12 of the 18 children with autism, the study said.

“This raises the hope that these findings could form the base for development of a diagnostic tool that can be applied very early on, such as in toddlers only a few months old,” Rozenkrantz said. “The appeal in using this measure of sniffing in response to odorants is that it is nonverbal and requires no task instructions, which is specifically relevant when studying autism.”

Such early diagnosis could mean more effective interventions, she said, but she adds that a smell test is nowhere close to being used in this way yet. In addition, the youngest participants in this study were 4 years old, the study noted.

“There is a strong effort to find a simple, noninvasive test for identifying autism in younger and younger populations,” Elliott said. “If researchers could show that infants and toddlers have similar robustly different responses, it would be of considerable interest.”

Another finding was that the children who adjusted their sniffing the least when they smelled rotten fish or sour milk were also those with the most severe symptoms of autism, particularly in terms of social difficulties.

Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York in New Hyde Park, N.Y., remarked, “This study is in many ways provocative, since it suggests, in children with an autism spectrum disorder, that there may be a previously unappreciated relationship between their response to smells and their impaired social functioning.

“In some ways, this study raises more questions than it answers,” said Adesman, who was not involved with the study.

The study’s findings do not help explain the cause of autism spectrum disorders, Elliott noted. But he said the findings may open up new avenues of research into why children with autism often respond so differently to environmental cues.

The next step in the researchers’ work may be to explore whether the differences in sniffing relate to social difficulties, Rozenkrantz said. The authors also wonder if younger children, even newborns, might show these differences in sniff responses.

More information

For more about autism, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Children with Autism Respond Differently to Smells: Study

By Tara Haelle
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Children with autism spectrum disorders appear to respond to stinky smells differently from children without autism, a new study found.

The difference was pronounced enough that researchers could tell who had autism and who didn’t about 80 percent of the time based only on “sniff responses.”

“The authors have hit upon a novel way of testing differences between children with autism and those without that indeed seems to suggest marked differences in how autistic children process odors,” said Dr. Glen Elliott, chief psychiatrist and medical director of Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Since we know that many children with autism are hypersensitive to touch, sound, taste and visual stimuli, it is especially interesting that they seem not to be responsive to odor in the same fashion,” said Elliott, who was not part of the research.

The study may hold clues to the social difficulties children with autism have, the authors suggest.

“The sense of smell is in fact a major component of human social interaction,” said lead author Liron Rozenkrantz, a Ph.D. student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Given that olfaction is probably altered in autism, could it be that this is a part of the social challenge in autism?”

Results of the study appear in the July 2 issue of the journal Current Biology.

The researchers compared 18 children with autism spectrum disorders to 18 typically developing children. All of the children sniffed pleasant and unpleasant odors while watching cartoons. They were exposed 10 times to pleasant smells, such as rose or shampoo scents. They were also exposed 10 times to unpleasant odors, such as sour milk or rotten fish.

The researchers measured each child’s “sniff response.” This included how much they sniffed, their highest rate of breathing in, their average rate of breathing in and how long they sniffed.

The children without autism changed the way they sniffed the bad odors within 0.3 of a second, the researchers found. They very quickly took smaller sniffs of the bad smells and larger sniffs of the sweet smells. The children with autism, however, continued sniffing without any changes, the study revealed.

Using only the children’s responses to bad smells, researchers were able to identify 17 of the 18 typically developing children and 12 of the 18 children with autism, the study said.

“This raises the hope that these findings could form the base for development of a diagnostic tool that can be applied very early on, such as in toddlers only a few months old,” Rozenkrantz said. “The appeal in using this measure of sniffing in response to odorants is that it is nonverbal and requires no task instructions, which is specifically relevant when studying autism.”

Such early diagnosis could mean more effective interventions, she said, but she adds that a smell test is nowhere close to being used in this way yet. In addition, the youngest participants in this study were 4 years old, the study noted.

“There is a strong effort to find a simple, noninvasive test for identifying autism in younger and younger populations,” Elliott said. “If researchers could show that infants and toddlers have similar robustly different responses, it would be of considerable interest.”

Another finding was that the children who adjusted their sniffing the least when they smelled rotten fish or sour milk were also those with the most severe symptoms of autism, particularly in terms of social difficulties.

Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York in New Hyde Park, N.Y., remarked, “This study is in many ways provocative, since it suggests, in children with an autism spectrum disorder, that there may be a previously unappreciated relationship between their response to smells and their impaired social functioning.

“In some ways, this study raises more questions than it answers,” said Adesman, who was not involved with the study.

The study’s findings do not help explain the cause of autism spectrum disorders, Elliott noted. But he said the findings may open up new avenues of research into why children with autism often respond so differently to environmental cues.

The next step in the researchers’ work may be to explore whether the differences in sniffing relate to social difficulties, Rozenkrantz said. The authors also wonder if younger children, even newborns, might show these differences in sniff responses.

More information

For more about autism, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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