How footballers have helped cancer patients

It’s not a natural connection perhaps, despite the Bobby Moore Fund and its sterling work in raising funds for research into bowel cancer, but a new treatment has linked the two things.

It comes through hyperbaric oxygen therapy that is normally given to treat injured footballers to help them heal more quickly and to treat scuba divers who suffer the bends. It involves the patient sitting in a sealed chamber and breathing 100 per cent oxygen while the air pressure around them is gradually increased. The treatment lasts about 30 minutes and after it finishes the air in the chamber is slowly returned to normal pressure before the patient leaves.

A trial just beginning at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital aims to see if it could also help relieve the side-effects from radiotherapy that pelvic cancer patients often suffer.

These patients may be suffering from cancer of the cervix, ovary, prostate, testis, rectum, bladder and uterus and are left with unpleasant side-effects including diarrhoea, stomach cramps and frequent bowel movements.

Most patients return to normal within a few weeks of stopping radiotherapy treatment, but about 30 per cent develop long-term bowel problems that can interfere with their daily activities and certainly affect their quality of life.

At the moment there is no cure for these symptoms and, as more people are treated for pelvic cancer, an increasing number of people will experience such side effects. A recent small study found evidence that hyperbaric oxygen therapy may be able to improve this situation so a large trial is now underway at specialist centres in Cardiff, Chichester, Great Yarmouth, Hull, Plymouth, North London and the Wirral to properly test whether this therapy works in patients who have been suffering side-effects for at least a year.

Late night eating piles on the pounds

Regular mealtimes are not just something your mother insisted on, they could also be a good way to help you lose weight, and with currently more than 300 million obese adults worldwide every little can help.

A Northwestern University study has found that eating at irregular times, especially late at night, does affect weight gain. Night time is when your body uses sleep to regulate many of your bodily functions and eating before bedtime puts an extra strain on that system. That means that digestion of your food gets put on hold, as it is not so important to the body as the maintenance and repair of more essential functions.

Our circadian clock, or biological timing system, governs our daily cycles of feeding, activity and sleep, with respect to external dark and light cycles. Recent studies have found the body’s internal clock also regulates energy use, suggesting the timing of meals may matter in the balance between caloric intake and expenditure.

Your body’s own circadian rhythm dictates those bodily functions so losing weight may not just be as simple as calories in and calories out. It could also be as simple as changing the time of your main meal.

Shift workers are particularly vulnerable to weight gain because their schedules force them to eat at times that conflict with their natural body rhythms, but all of us could benefit from moving that evening meal to no later than 8pm, and no late night snacks.

Bees can fight tumours

The poor old bees, they are already under threat as their habitat is destroyed and now science has found a new use for them there may be even fewer. It’s down to their sting, because they pump toxic venom into their victims which has been analysed and now harnessed to kill tumour cells by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers attached the major component of bee venom to nano-sized spheres that they call nanobees. Good to know scientists have a sense of humour, bless them, and they found that in mice the bee toxin melittin stopped tumours from growing or shrank them. Hopefully this means they will have a good incentive to also start working out a way to prevent the bees from dying out altogether.

Music therapy helps stroke patients

By now, you all know my feelings on the healing power of music and a new study from Italy gives you another tool to use for anyone who has had a stroke.

The researchers examined the effects that different types of opera and classical music have on cardiovascular measures and they saws distinct physical changes. A fast tempo prompted increased blood pressure and faster breathing and heart rates. Slower tempo lowered blood pressure and brought down heart and breathing rates.

Despite what you might assume, it seems that quiet, soothing music is actually not the best music for the heart. You want something that alternates tempo between slower and faster, as well as lower and higher volumes. They recommend Nessun Dorma as being ideas as it is beneficial for both heart rate and general circulation.

Specifically for stroke patients, Diana Greenman (who heads up a UK charity that brings live music to hospitals and hospices) has said that she hears time and again of stroke patients who suddenly are able to move in time to the music after previously being paralyzed. Sounds pretty amazing, and there is proof to back it up in a study from the University of Helsinki.

Researchers there recruited 60 stroke patients who were divided into three groups; some listened to whatever music they liked, some to audio books, and some had no specific listening plan. All the patients were also receiving standard treatment for stroke rehabilitation. After three months, testing showed that focused attention and mental operation abilities improved by 17 per cent in the music group, but didn’t improve at all in the other two groups. Verbal memory scores were even more impressive: Music group: 60 per cent improvement. Audio books group: 18 per cent. Non-listening group: 29 per cent. Subjects in the music group also tended to be less confused and less depressed than subjects in the other two groups.

One stroke expert has said that more research is needed before widespread use of music as therapy can be recommended for stroke victims. As there are no side effects and plenty of benefits you have to wonder how much more research is needed. If you are in contact with a stroke patient, music therapy is best started as soon as possible, so go out and get a copy of Nessum Dorma and it will lift everybody’s spirit.

Antioxidants not a risk for melanoma

A recent study set up a scare that supplements such as vitamins C and E, beta carotene, selenium and zinc which are used for cancer prevention. It seemed to suggest that daily supplementation with these antioxidants increased the risk of melanoma in women four-fold. This was very worrying as nearly 50 percent of the UK and US populations regularly use supplements so a new study was set up at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Oakland.

Researchers there examined the association between antioxidants and melanoma among 69,671 women and men who were participating in the Vitamins and Lifestyle (VITAL) study, designed to examine supplement use and cancer risk. Their exhaustive study of the records showed that they did not find any link between blood levels of beta carotene, vitamin E and selenium and any subsequent risk of melanoma.

So if you are a regular supplement user, the fear of melanoma has just been debunked.

Cocoa and high blood pressure

Now, I would have thought that a good cup of cocoa would certainly make you feel better but because of its high caffeine content I wouldn’t have thought of it as a treatment for high blood pressure.

But who am I to disagree with researchers from Harvard? It seems that although 3 in 10 of us in the UK suffer from the condition there is one place in the world where it is virtually unknown. The Kuna Indians live on a group of islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama and hypertension does not exist there. Once the islanders reach 60, they have a perfect average blood pressure of 110/70 which is something to be envied and they also have much lower death rates from heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and cancer.

So what’s their secret? It is certainly not their salt intake as that is as high as in the UK, but because they drink 5 cups of cocoa every day. WE know that the flavonols in cocoa stimulate your body’s production of nitric oxide and that boosts blood flow to your heart, brain, and other organs. If you are taking a daily aspirin to thin your blood you might like to know that one study found cocoa thins your blood just as well. Certainly tastes better, and one Harvard Medical School professor claims cocoa can also treat blocked arteries, congestive heart failure, stroke, dementia, and even impotence.

No more to be said really, but I would stick to organic cocoa and I am not sure if the islanders make it with milk or not, but if you do then make sure that’s organic too so you get the maximum benefit

How competitive is your nose?

How competitive is your nose? Did you know, and do you care, that when the nose encounters two different scents simultaneously, the brain processes them separately through each nostril in an alternating fashion? This means your nostrils are competitive and act almost as rivals in tracking down different odours. We are indebted to those find fellows at Rice University in Houston for looking at this as part of a psychology study.

They took 12 volunteers and got them to sample smells from two bottles; one contained phenyl ethyl alcohol, which smells like a rose, and the other had n-butanol, which smells like a marker pen. The bottles were fitted with nosepieces so that volunteers could sample both scents simultaneously, one through each nostril. During 20 rounds of sampling, all 12 participants experienced switches between smelling predominantly the rose scent and smelling predominantly the marker scent. In the laboratory setting in which each nostril simultaneously received a different smell, the participants experienced an ‘olfactory illusion,’ so that instead of perceiving a constant mixture of the two smells, they perceive one of the smells, followed by the other, in an alternating fashion. It is as if the nostrils were competing with one another, and although both smells are equally present, the brain attends to predominantly one of them at a time.

This sort of rivalry is not new apparently as our eyes do the same thing. When they simultaneously view two different images, one for each eye, they are seen alternately one at a time. The same goes for your hearing as when alternating tones an octave apart are played out of phase to each ear, most people experience a single tone that goes back and forth.

This research is aimed long term at contributing to the assessment and cure of olfactory disorders in patients and, in particular, the elderly.

Tobacco cure for ‘cruise ship virus’?

Anyone who regularly travels by plane or ship will probably have fallen victim to norovirus and its unpleasant symptoms of diarrhoea and vomiting. It is sometimes referred to as the “cruise ship virus”, as it has occurred with frightening regularity there, but this microbe can spread like wildfire through any place where people gather such as offices, schools and military bases.

Because of the large numbers of cases, a search has been on for a vaccine and this new certainly is unique in its origin as it was “manufactured” in a tobacco plant using an engineered plant virus. Science has always turned to nature when seeking cures – not always with the best results – but it has been effective in many cases. A study of the top 150 proprietary drugs used in the USA in 1993 found that 57% of all prescriptions contained at least one major active compound derived from plants and we would not have aspirin without white willow bark, or digoxin without digitalis, and many more examples.

Researchers are particularly turning to plants in the battle against fast spreading infectious diseases like norovirus, swine flu, and bird flu. They are doing so because plant biotechnology makes available more efficient and inexpensive ways to bring vaccines quickly to the public and this is especially critical in times when viruses mutate into unpredictable new strains as they are doing more and more today.

It is less expensive than developing conventional vaccines because purification from plant extracts is simpler as there are no infectious agents to clean up. There are no viruses in plants which can infect humans, so you don’t have to worry about viral removal.

Noroviruses are always mutating, making it difficult to produce an effective vaccine in the time scale required. The costs involved in this are huge so it is a great development to be able to use plant biotechnology to create a cheaper, quicker vaccine that is uniquely suited to combat mutating viruses like norovirus and the flu. Plant-based vaccines can be produced and put into clinical tests within eight to 10 weeks and for commercial use that means a fast turnaround of two to four months.

And where does tobacco come in? Well the scientists involved re-engineered plant viruses to produce high levels of specially designed “virus-like” nanoparticles in tobacco plants. These particles are the same size as the norovirus, but they consist only of the outer surface protein — that is the portion of the virus recognized by the human immune system. The particles contain none of the infectious material of the original virus, but they stimulate a robust immune response to fight off an actual infection.

So a good use for tobacco plants, and good news for tobacco farmers who must have seen a serious downturn in profits in the last few years. After successful experiments, a nasal delivery system for the virus-like particles is being developed and will start clinical trials in late 2009.

Antioxidants OK in the sun

Antioxidants help our skin stay healthy and younger looking and skin is adversely affected by being exposed unprotected to the sun. You want to avoid wrinkles, and you want a healthy glow so what do you do? Many people take antioxidant supplements but there have been previous alerts that they could increase the risk of melanoma, particularly in women.

This is now shown not to be true, based on an analysis of data from a population study of almost 70,000 participants. So no need to give up a healthful supplement, but don’t give up using sun protection please!

New bone implants on the way

Throughout our lives our bones continue to break down, and be replaced with new material as part of our body’s natural cycle of growth. However, when whole bones need to be replaced after tumours, or accidents, then there has so far been no way to successfully grow replacement bones. It happened in fiction with J K Rowling’s description of Skele-Gro which magically re-grows bones in around 8 to 12 hours and is a very painful process. Many women with osteoporosis find that using a natural bone growth promoter like natural progesterone may take longer but certainly isn’t painful!

Not sure if the scientists at Imperial College London had this in mind, but it seems that there is a worldwide interest in producing bone-like materials derived from stem cells with stem cell technology. The research results were recently published in the journal Nature Materials and it is hoped will be able to be implanted into patients who have damaged or fractured bones, or who have had parts of diseased bones removed. The idea is that, ultimately, these bone-like materials could be inserted into cavities so that real bone could meld with it and repair the bone.

It is currently possible to grow small ‘nodules’ of what appear to be bone-like material in the laboratory from different types of bone cells and stem cells. It is these different types of material that the scientists from Imperial College London have been comparing and they have discovered significant differences between the quality of the bone-like material that these can form.

For example, they found that materials grown from bone cells from mouse skull and mouse bone marrow stem cells successfully mimicked many of the hallmarks of real bone, which include stiffness. However, they found that the material grown from mouse embryonic stem cells was much less stiff and less complex in its mineral composition when compared to the other materials.

So what we have here is a good starting point as Professor Molly Stevens, from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, says: “Many patients who have had bone removed because of tumours or accidents live in real pain. By repairing bone defect sites in the body with bone-like material that best mimics the properties of their real bone we could improve their lives immeasurably. It brings us one step closer to developing materials that will have the highest chance of success when implanted into patients.”

« Previous Page — Next Page »