Noted university scientist lands $20m government grant to study link between an unmodifiable human trait and survival.

Scientist finds a borderline significant correlation, but only in tall females who raise llamas.

University press release mistakes correlation for causation, implies findings apply to all people.

Erroneous release tweeted 6 million times.

Scientist appears on 18 morning talk shows (including one with a tall female and 6 random llamas).

Scientist secures $20m from private investors to commercialize test for the unmodifiable human trait.

Sigh.

Industries Lobby Against Nutrition Guidelines. The food and advertising industries have launched a multi-pronged campaign against government efforts to create voluntary nutritional guidelines for foods marketed to children.

Electronic Glasses Can Read Emotions. The ‘emo-specs’ use a camera to record facial motions and facial expression software that interprets the wearer’s emotions based on a database of previously-collected facial expressions. The emotion is then displayed visually within the glasses.

Unlocking Dyslexia in Japanese. Scientists have shown that some dyslexics have an easier time with a character-based language like Japanese, than a language based on phonemes, like English. The observations could help improve teaching techniques for affected individuals.

Colorectal Cancer Screenings Make a Difference. Increased screening during the last decade for colorectal cancer, the nation’s second-leading cause of cancer deaths, has put a dent in the prevalence of the disease and in the number of deaths resulting from it, the CDC said.

CMS Pilot Programs to Analyze Quality Data Collection via EHRs. CMS rules proposed last week provide new details of pilot programs aimed at testing online reporting of clinical quality data from electronic health records.

ONC Agrees to Delay Stage 2 Meaningful Use. The national coordinator for health information technology announced that he’s supporting a delay in Stage 2 of electronic health records meaningful use by one year to 2014 for providers who attest to Stage 1 in 2011.

Celebrex Might Prevent Lung Cancer in Former Smokers. Early studies suggest the Cox-2 inhibitor, which is normally used to treat arthritis and other inflammatory diseases, prevents a proliferation of cells that is linked to lung cancer.

Review Raises Doubt about Cutting Salt Intake. Researchers have found no evidence that moderate cuts to salt intake reduce the risk of developing heart disease or dying prematurely, though it does lead to slight reductions in blood pressure.

Medical Tourism Market Slow to Grow. Traveling abroad for medical procedures was touted as a trend and it even has its own trade group, the Medical Tourism Association. However, some question whether it’s as big a growth market as once thought.

Late-Talking Toddlers Grow Out of Behavioral Problems. Kids who aren’t uttering words by age 2 have no increased risk of behavioral or emotional problems when they reach elementary school, and usually outgrow the language delay on their own, a study shows.

Insured Consumers Caught in Fights Over Ambulance Bills. When you’re calling for an ambulance, chances are good that you won’t think to ask for one that’s in your health plan’s provider network. You probably wouldn’t have much control over it anyway. That could leave you with hassles and extra charges for an out-of-network ride.

Apple iCloud: Intriguing Options for mHealth. Steve Jobs’ ideas for a cloud-based storage network are generating some buzz about its possible effects on healthcare technology, as clinicians continue to adopt iPhones, iPods and iPads in droves.

SDI Offers Grants for New Approaches to Health Care Research. SDI, a provider of de-identified patient-level data analytics, has announced an program to offer academic grants that promote innovative health data research.

Sanofi-Aventis Data Design Challenge to Take Submissions July 1. Winners of the competition will receive over $200k in prize money, industry-leading mentorship and public recognition.

Cardiology Groups Overhaul Quality Measures. Patient outcomes and achieving control are the major focus in new performance measures for coronary artery disease and hypertension issued by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

Unicef Reveals Vaccine Prices. Unicef, one of the world’s largest vaccine buyers, is now publishing the prices it pays individual companies for immunizations. Public health officials hope the move will boost competition and drive down prices for all vaccine buyers.

Will Doctors Heed IBM’s Watson? History Indicates Otherwise. IBM’s supercomputer is being groomed to advise doctors about diagnoses and treatments. But there’s no guarantee physicians will heed its advice, even if it delivers more accurate answers faster than other decision support tools.

Facebook to Pharma: Comments Allowed. The social networking site has told pharmaceutical companies that as of August 15, they will no longer be able to disable the comment feature on their Facebook pages.

Scientists Find an ‘Ultra-Bad Cholesterol’. Ultra-bad cholesterol is more likely than LDL (bad) cholesterol to attach to arterial walls and form plaques. It is more prevalent in the elderly and those with type 2 diabetes.

App Helps Diagnose Concussions in Youth Sports. When a child suffers a potential concussion while playing a sport, parents and coaches can find out what to do from an app on their iOS and Android devices.

How Do They Know He Was Bin Laden? A US intelligence official said a DNA match, using DNA from several family members, provided virtual certainty that Osama bin Laden was killed Sunday night. 

VA-DoD joint EHR to be Commercial, Not Necessarily Proprietary. The agencies want to purchase commercially available solutions for joint use. They would adopt a Department-developed application only if an appropriate commercial solution is not available.

Court Backs Funding Embryonic Stem Cells. In a victory for the White House, a US appeals court overturned an earlier ban against taxpayer-supported stem cell research. 

UW to Punish Doctors Who Gave Sick Notes to Protesters. The University of Wisconsin will discipline physicians who wrote doctor excuse notes for protesters participating in rallies against the Governor’s union-stripping law. The discipline ranges from a written reprimand to loss of pay and leadership position.

At Least 600,000 Young Adults Join Parents’ Health Plans Under New Law. That pace is faster than the government expected. Under the new health law, health plans and employers must offer coverage to enrollees’ adult children until age 26 even if they no longer live with their parents, are not a dependent on their parents’ tax returns and are no longer students.

For the first time in 30 years, an expert panel has updated guidelines for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The long overdue facelift should favorably impact care for millions and accelerate badly needed research on the disease.

The guidelines were produced by representatives from the National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer’s Association. They portray Alzheimer’s for the first time as a three-stage disease. In addition to ‘Stage 3,’—the full-blown clinical syndrome that had been described in earlier versions of the guidelines—the new guidelines describe an earlier ‘Stage 2,’ of mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s, and a ‘Stage 1, or preclinical’ phase of the disease. The latter can only be detected with biochemical marker tests and brain scans.

The guidelines legitimize years’ worth of observations by the family members of Alzheimer’s patients, who recognize in retrospect that Grandpa had a slowly progressive cognitive disorder long before he was diagnosed. The guidelines also reflect progress on the research front, where it has now been established that the disease begins years before patients become symptomatic.

Alzheimer’s patients and their families, and the teetering US health system that supports them, would have been better served by the publication of these guidelines 2-3 years ago.

The science was compelling enough back then, and a 2 to 3 year lead-time on research could have had an enormously positive impact on our economy and our health system. In a report last summer for example, the Alzheimer’s Association concluded that unless disease-modifying treatments are found quickly, the number of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease will jump from 5.1 million to 13.5 million by 2050. The total costs of caring for these folks will have exceeded $20 trillion, in today’s dollars, by then. A lions’ share of these expenses will be borne by government entitlement programs, Medicare and Medicaid.

The New Guidelines Will Improve Care
Meanwhile, several commentators have criticized the new guidelines as confusing and stress-provoking. ‘Why should we rush to tell people they have something we can’t treat?’ is the crux of their argument.

These people have it wrong. Denial is not the way to go with Alzheimer’s. The sooner patients and their families find out they have it or are at risk to develop it, the more time they have to develop care plans that reflect their preferences. Mildly affected individuals get to decide for themselves how to enjoy what may be a limited number of years-worth of relatively unimpaired mental functioning. They also get to decide whether to participate in clinical trials and which ones to participate in. They and their families can access counseling and support groups more quickly, a benefit that can improve the quality of life for everyone involved. Even providers themselves can use the enhanced lead-time to implement a patient support plan that respects the needs of the patient and his family.

Today, full-blown Alzheimer’s affects 5.1 million Americans. In all likelihood, at least that many have mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s (the new ‘Stage 2′). These are the people that will benefit immediately by the expanded definition.

The New Guidelines Will Improve Research
By formally recognizing that Alzheimer’s is slowly progressive and establishing criteria for each stage of the disease, the guidelines facilitate scientific inquiry into various diagnostic and therapeutic options. They allow patients to be grouped by stage of illness (a breakthrough similar to what tumor staging has done for cancer research). Most importantly, they encourage patients to enter clinical trials at a time in the natural history of their disease when treatment success is more likely. (more…)

Tension headaches are a nearly universal affliction. They are characterized by dull, non-pulsatile discomfort on both sides of the temples and forehead. They typically last for 30-60 minutes, but they can go on for days. Tension headaches affect at least 40% of adults in any given year. Nearly 80% of adults have experienced at least one during the course of their lifetimes.

It’s amazing therefore, that scientists don’t yet understand what causes them.

Triggers
To be sure, scientists and those who’ve experienced tension headaches know when they tend to occur and what things trigger them.

Tension headaches occur most commonly in the early morning and late afternoon. The morning variety is often triggered by lack of sleep, awkward sleeping positions, hangovers and caffeine withdrawal.

Afternoon tension headaches are triggered by poor posture or airborne irritants in the office, eyestrain from looking at a computer screen all day, teeth grinding, and plain-old everyday stress (see YouTube video, above). The hypoglycemia associated with missed lunches is another culprit, as is excessive caffeine intake.

But What Causes Them?
This is what scientists don’t yet understand. For years, the prevailing theory was that muscle tension, especially in the neck and shoulders, caused tension headaches. That theory has been disproven by studies in which tools that measure muscle contractions revealed no correlation between muscle tension and headaches.

Today, the prevailing belief is that the tension-type headache is caused by abnormalities in parts of the brain that perceive pain. These poorly understood abnormalities render the brain hypersensitive to the inputs it receives (similar mechanisms are also thought to be involved in fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by diffuse bodily sensations of pain).

Treatment
Typically, tension headaches sufferers just “bear with them” until they subside, or use OTC pain killers like aspirin, acetaminophen and ibuprofen for quick relief. These drugs usually work, but taking them more than 10 days per month can precipitate so-called “rebound” or “medication-overuse” headaches, which feel like the tension headaches they’re supposed to treat. (more…)

Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Japanese scientists have trained an 8-year-old Labrador retriever to detect colon cancer by sniffing samples of breath and stool from people. According to their findings in the journal Gut, the dog nailed the diagnosis 95% of the time on the breath test and 98% of the time on the stool test, a performance that compares favorably with colonoscopy, the expensive, distasteful state-of-the art for such matters. 

The Black Lab was trained at the St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Center in Chiba, Japan. After training was complete, a team led by Hideto Sonada presented the dog a series of 5 sample stations, one of which contained a specimen from a patient with colon cancer. The other 4 came either from volunteers with no history of cancer or patients with a past history of cancer.

Amazingly, the dog correctly identified the cancerous sample in 37 out of 38 stool tests, and in 33 out of 36 breath tests. It seemed to perform better in samples derived from patients that had early stage disease. The dog’s talents were unaffected by colonic polyps, inflammatory disease, cigarette smoking, or the presence of blood in the stool.

This performance is light-years better than widely-available colon cancer-screening procedures. For example, the fecal occult blood test picks-up early-stage cancer only about 10% of the time.

The results in this case were consistent with previous studies in which dogs could detect cancers of the bladder, breast and ovary, as well as melanomas. This dog’s particular skill at detecting early-stage cancer was unique, however. (more…)

Cancer patients usually don’t die from the effects of their primary tumor. Metastatic lesions in other organs like the liver and brain usually do them in. Clinicians would thus love to know, if they could, which cancers are going to spread, and when.

Remarkably, Y. Peng Loh of the NIH and colleagues appear to have made progress in this regard. They claim to have identified a biomarker that predicts which tumors will metastasize in the next 2 years, with accuracy rates approaching 90%…at least in the rare cancers they studied.
 
The marker is a protein, CPE-delta N. It is normally involved in the intracellular response to insulin and other hormones. Loh’s group didn’t actually measure CPE-delta N levels in tumor cells per se. Instead they measured levels of the particular RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecule that codes for CPE-delta N.

The scientists showed that when intracellular levels of CPE delta-N RNA within cancers was at least twice that found in surrounding tissue, the tumors were likely to metastasize within two years. Tumors that had levels below this threshold were unlikely to metastasize. Using this simple cut-point, Loh’s group accurately predicted metastatic events more than 90% of the time, and predicted the absence of metastasis 76% of the time.

Interestingly, the predictive accuracy of the new test surpassed that generated by routine “staging” procedures for cancers of the liver and the other rare tumors that served as the foci of these experiments (pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma). Routine staging typically accounts for primary tumor size, spread to local lymph nodes, and the presence of far-flung metastases.

“Testing for CPE-delta N, if combined with existing diagnostic methods, offers the possibility of more accurately estimating the chances that a cancer will spread,” said Alan Guttmacher, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the study. “Conceivably, a patient’s CPE-delta N levels could be a key guide in individualizing their cancer care to improve outcome.” (more…)