Anti inflammatory drugs without serious side effects

Those suffering from inflammatory conditions such as asthma and other chronic diseases are usually prescribed corticosteroids, and although these are highly effective they do carry the risk of some serious side effects. Of particular concern is when they are used to treat a child’s asthma, but these drugs can stunt their growth over time. In adults, they are used to treat Addison’s disease, but again their use can lead to the development of diabetes and hypertension.

Dr. Henry J. Lee has led research in anti-inflammatory, anti-AIDS and anti-cancer drugs for nearly 30 years and he and his team have been working to develop a safer approach that would eliminate inflammation without causing damage to the body. Reported to the MLA American Physiological Society on April 19, these so-called “antedrugs”, have now been developed at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, at Tallahassee in Florida.

Antedrug design is a new approach to create safer drugs that attack a problem such as inflammation then quickly become inactive before they can cause damage. The researchers were able to synthesize a new group of corticosteroids that have anti-asthmatic and anti-inflammatory properties that are isoxazoline derivatives, from prednisolone, and without adverse side effects or any systemic damage.

In fact, they found that antedrugs effectively reduced inflammation and were five times more potent than prednisolone in doing so.

Not into juicing buy a bar instead

I am a very big fan of juicing as you get the maximum nutrition from raw foods, and it tastes good. However, if you don’t have a juicer, or are away from home, then a winner of Best New Food Product at this year’s Natural and Organics Show might be something to add to your shopping list.

Very good juicers are made by a company called Juice Master and they have now developed a 100% natural, 100% raw Vege Juice in a Bar you can stick in your pocket and unwrap at your leisure. No artificial anything and it combines the raw power of natural ingredients with a wide range of chlorophyll rich juices from vegetables and plants. I have to admit that doesn’t sound that great, but you need to taste them to experience how well they have combined healthy vegetables, plants, algaes and friendly bacteria infused with the natural sweetness of raw dates and creamy smooth raw almond butter. Because the fruit and vegetable juices are dried at low temperatures they preserve their nutritional value and so this could be an ideal way to fill that gap in your lunchbox, or when travelling. Nor is this something only natural or raw food fanatics would enjoy, as this award comes from a panel of judges, but also from members of the public. If you can’t find them in your local health shop you can order online from here juicemaster.com

Gardening by the moon

Not actually by moonlight, but using the phases of the moon. Something old and gnarled countrymen – actually my previous landlord in Burwash’s very old gardener – have been doing this for years, as have herbalists who gather plants at certain moon phases. However, it’s not something you would associate with a couple of our major food retailers – Tesco and M&S. It’s certainly something that you might want to investigate if you do any growing of your own vegetables, or fruit and flowers for that matter, and it uses something called the biodynamic calendar.

It divides days into roots, leaves, fruit and the senior product development manager at Tesco no less definitely gives it credence. For instance, if he is organizing a wine tasting he avoids root and leaf days and has it on a fruit day. Although risking sounding like an old hippie, he is very clear that if he that wine tasting on a root day then it alters the taste of the wine, making it worse, but if it is on a fruit day it tastes at its best. Nor is he alone as M&S wine buyer Jo Ahearne, said this week that “We swear by lunar cycles at M&S.”

As they are in business to make a profit, you have to give them credit for admitting to something which sounds odd – but that they definitely see a benefit to. To give you a heads up, this week Thursday and Friday are the days best for attending to fruit plants, (including tomatoes) and Saturday and Sunday are root days so good for root vegetables and apparently composting as well.

Where do the phases of the moon fit in? Well, the waning moon draws energy downwards and inwards, so a good time for planting whereas a waxing moon draws energy upwards and outwards, which is a better time for harvesting and picking. To save you gazing at the night sky and wondering, there is a very handy website which gives you each month the moon phases and biodynamic calendar. If it comes up in German – as it did when I went online – you just click English and then the white button next to it which resets it. The German word for reset isn’t in my vocabulary – but eventually I worked out that’s what it meant: www.astrologie-info.com/mocal.cgi

Britain’s third biggest cancer – New genetic link

Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK with 36,500 people being diagnosed each year. It is also the second greatest cause of cancer death, currently around 100 people each day.

Anything that can help identify and treat a disease which kills over 15,000 people a year is very welcome and now a joint study funded by Cancer Research UK has found a genetic variant which they believe can promote the development of bowel cancer.

The study involved scientists in the UK, Spain and The Netherlands and sheds new light on how this disease develops and could lead to new treatments being designed. Common genetic variants that give people a higher risk of bowel cancer have already been identified, but scientists didn’t know how they might be driving cancer development. This new study goes one step further by showing how a precise DNA sequence could cause the biological changes that ultimately lead to cancer.

They identified 10 different genetic variants that increasedbowel cancer risk, concluding that people who had all the variants were at six times higher risk of developing it. They honed in on the genetic variant that conferred the strongest risk of bowel cancer, hypothesising that it was therefore key to driving cancer development. Laboratory experiments supported the scientists’ theory, showing the key genetic variant stopped the nearby SMAD7 gene turning on properly, and that disrupting this gene promoted cancer development. The SMAD7 gene is normally involved in cell growth and death so, by reducing the gene’s effect, the variant allows cancerous cells to grow.

Although the extra risk from having this DNA is modest, it is still highly significant because a large proportion of the population have the variant as part of their genetic makeup. Understanding cancer development in such detail will help in the search for new drugs, as any steps identified in the cancer process are potential places to intervene with treatments and research is now reaching a point where cancer drugs will be able to be targeted at the individual’s own genes for maximum effectiveness.

Want millions of people to read your health records?

Technology just keeps marching on, and here’s another US import I hope we manage to avoid. Mega search engine Google has just got access to millions of prescription records as they announced a partnership between CVS/pharmacy, one of the largest pharmacy chains in the U.S. and Google Health.

Google Health currently allows people to import their medical records from over a dozen pharmacies, medical centers, and health insurance providers and once imported, you can review those records and keep them updated. So no more wondering just what prescription you need renewing because with a click of a mouse you can send it to your regular pharmacist to be filled. If you have bought your drugs from any of the major pharmaceutical chains Google now has all that information on record, but how confident are we that it cannot be hacked or accessed by others?

I can quite see how attractive it would be for an online supplier of non-prescription medicines to want your details so they send you attractive offers to buy online – and if they know what you are buying then they know what you are buying it for so any level of privacy or confidentiality could be breached. Medical insurers too could find it very useful to know what medicines you are regularly taking as it might affect your cover, or their liability.

Am I being paranoid or is Big Brother not only here but keeping an eye on my medicines?

Hope for vegetative patients

One of the most terrible decisions we can be faced with can be dealing with a patient in a vegetative state. New research now suggest that 40% of coma patients in such a condition may be misdiagnosed and only an estimated 20% of patients return, like the Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, after his car crash in September, to fully functioning normality after serious brain injury.

Hope comes from Cambridge neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen who has instigated a groundbreaking neuroscientific research programme that is set to transform the prospects of diagnosis for long term vegetative state patients. He has devised a scanner that can reveal evidence of fluctuating levels of brain activation in such patients when offered visual stimuli such as family photographs. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, and a capacity to suffer and it is time to stop the tragic myth that a persistent vegetative state can reliably be diagnosed just by observing the patient. If Dr Adrian Owen’s pioneering work can help reduce that tragic 50% of misdiagnosed patients then he is to warmly encouraged and hopefully supported with plenty of grant money that I see too often wasted on pointless research.

Exercise moderately for best effect

You know that you need to exercise to stay healthy and lose weight, but if you are feeling guilty because you haven’t enough time, don’t want to ‘go for the burn’ or end up red faced, sweating and out of breath then take heart. You don’t need to exercise like a fast forward Jane Fonda video, in fact it is much better if you don’t.

Aerobic and/or cardiovascular exercise for at least an hour, four days a week is often recommended, but the best way to lose fat, build muscle, strengthen your heart and lungs, and add years to your life is with short duration, high intensity exercises.

Typical cardio and aerobic exercises can not only put you at risk for repetitive motion injuries, but can make your heart and lungs less resistant to stress. Exercising over a longer period means they get used to the routine and don’t have to work as hard so can actually shrink. A recent study showed that the muscle fibre of marathon runners actually had decreased and atrophied – in other words they had shrunk.

If you exercise to lose weight and look leaner, then be aware that those who train at low to medium intensity for long periods have a much higher body fat percentage and less muscle than people who train for strength with short duration, high intensity, interval-type exercises. Working out in short bursts of high intensity exercise will burn glycogen stored in muscles as fuel rather than fat. This then teaches your body to store more energy in the muscles and not as fat. This process helps you burn fat and get lean.

A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that men and women who exercised at a higher intensity had lower blood pressure, lower triglycerides, higher HDL (good cholesterol) and less body fat. Plus, short bursts of high intensity exercise can also help you exceed your aerobic capacity, which increases your lung volume and lung capacity is the best predictor of longevity and absence of disease.

Back to that red-faced sweating, because when you push yourself to where you need to stop and pant, as with high intensity exercises such as a 50-yard sprint or a good set of calisthenics, you are asking your lungs to provide more oxygen than they are able to use at that time. This response signals your body to increase your lung volume. It is important because as you age, you lose lung capacity so that by the time you are 70, you will have lost 50% of your lung capacity. If you stick with high intensity, short duration exercise, you can prevent this from happening. But if you run marathons or do hour-long aerobics classes, you will make this loss even worse.

Ideal Workout? Really 10 to 20 minutes a day is ideal to strengthen your heart and lungs, and exercise so you work at a pace that gives them a challenge. You want to break a sweat, but not so intense that you can’t finish at least 10 minutes.

This is a simple routine you could try:

Run sprints, walk briskly on a treadmill, or cycle at high intensity for one minute and follow up with a period of recovery. During recovery slow down to an easy pace to give your body a chance to rest and recover. Repeat that sequence 5 times.

Do this outdoors if you can for maximum benefit and if you want to increase the degree of difficulty exercise on streets with an incline, or use your staircase.

Cholesterol screening for two year olds in the USA

Often in health matters we follow the USA, but this is one case where I sincerely hope we don’t. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is recommending cholesterol screening for children as young as two if there are weight issues or a family history of heart attacks or high cholesterol.

That might sound like a good health preventive, except that the response if high cholesterol is found is to recommend statin drugs, not dietary changes. Statins work by blocking the action of a certain enzyme in the liver which is needed to make cholesterol. Proponents say there is growing evidence that the first signs of heart disease show up in childhood – which is true – but their claim that cholesterol-lowering drugs, called statins, may be their best hope of lowering their risk of early heart attack is much more controversial.

Dr. Jatinder Bhatia, a member of the AAP nutrition committee, has said that “The risk of giving statins at a lower age is less than the benefit you’re going to get out of it”. A statement that is seriously undermined when he went on to say that there is not “a whole lot” of data on pediatric use of cholesterol-lowering drugs. So how on earth can he recommend it foThe use of statins in adults is currently under debate, so why on earth promote a drug that has been shown to actually cause heart problems in healthy subjects? Last year, US researchers at the University of Illinois examined the effects of the statin drug Lipitor on subjects with no history of heart problems. After taking the drug for three to six months, some subjects showed deterioration in at least one marker for heart function, and a smaller number were found to have deterioration in three different heart function markers. Natural Alternatives|:

Statins have been heavily promoted to reduce cholesterol, but there are plenty of healthy alternatives instead. CoQ10, artichoke leaf, red yeast rice and sugar cane are all being used to reduce cholesterol and if you have a history of heart disease in your family, or are concerned about your cholesterol levels – or those of your children – then these are some other things you can try:

* Follow a low-glycaemic diet (low processed carbohydrates), which lowers cholesterol

* Eat foods containing high levels of beta-sitosterol, found in most plants, especially soybeans, as they can reduce cholesterol by at least 10 per cent

* Take omega-3 fatty-acid supplements, preferably with vitamin B6

* Eat a high-fibre diet based on vegetables, fruits and nuts and oat bran, apple pectin and psyllium are especially helpful

* Try blue-green algae supplements; they contain large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids which may reduce cholesterol

* Garlic lowers cholesterol so cook frequently with it

Sour cherries have a sweet effect

One fruit I particularly love are dark, sweet cherries, but for maximum health effect it is the tart, sour, cherries that bring most benefit. Available as juice or powder, not suitable for eating raw, they have powerful antioxidant qualities but a new benefit has just been announced by researchers from the University of Michigan.

They have found that regularly including tart cherries in the diet can reduce the symptoms of metabolic syndrome and the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of symptoms including high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high fasting blood sugar, low HDL (“good”) cholesterol and obesity (particularly around the stomach). The study found that cholesterol levels and stomach fat were both reduced in the trial and, more importantly perhaps, that the cherries were found to reduce inflammation at a systemic level. Our body’s natural response to injury is inflammation as it seeks to heal the affected part, but as I mentioned in last week’s Health News, chronic inflammation has been linked to increased risk for many diseases including depression.

If you are interested in finding out more, or for the name of your local stockist or ordering online, then a good website is www.cherryactive.co.uk or call them on 08451 705 705

More proof that attitude is all you need for healthy ageing

Those who have heard me speak about healthy living know I often quote the statistic that optimists live on average 7.5 years longer than pessimists – so it pays to be cheerful. Now some new research has shown that the children of parents who live to be 100 are on average more outgoing, agreeable, and less neurotic. As children usually inherit both longevity and personality traits from their parents it seems your attitude not only increase your own lifespan, but those of your offspring as well.

The research was done at New England Centenarian Study at Boston University Medical Center and their chief finding was that long life was linked to being more outgoing, sociable and friendly. With those attitudes people are able to manage stress better, and your ability to successfully do that definitely improves your health and your longevity. Less outgoing and more neurotic or nervous people in the study were found to be less able to handle stress than the more cheerful subjects. This unique study is the first to study the children of centenarians and from a questionnaire they measured qualities such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Children is not quite accurate as the average age of the participants was 75, not unusual in parents around 100 years old. The women participants rated higher on the agreeableness scale, but on all other factors men and women scored equally. It has been observed in previous research that centenarians tend to have sunny dispositions, which is just as well as who wants to be miserable for 100 years?

In Okinawa, it is known that these particular Japanese people live longer than their countrymen and Nobuyoshi Hirose, an expert on ageing, put it down to the fact that they are all likeable, sociable people. Plus we know that eating less meat and having a strong sense of purpose in your life also increases your life expectancy – and the quality of it

Short of emigrating, just do what you can to keep cheerful and be as sociable as you can – and never mind if your children think it’s undignified!

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