Health News - Monday, January 15, 2007
Doctors rarely note the sleep problems of older patients, although two-thirds of them report these complaints, according to a new study. Researchers at the U.S. Northwestern University studied 1,503 patients aged 60 and older who visited their primary-care doctors.
They surveyed the patients about sleep problems and found that 69 percent of the patients had at least one sleep complaint, and 40 percent had two or more. Forty-five percent of the patients said they had "difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or being able to sleep." Continue reading
Scientists at Imperial College, London, are developing an appetite suppressant drug based on a naturally occuring hormone that could be used to tackle obesity and eventually be dispensed as a gum that is chewed after a meal.
The project, which is led by Professor Steve Bloom of the Division of Investigative Science at Imperial College, who has been working on it for some years, has been awarded 2.3 million pounds by the Wellcome Trust which is pouring 91 million pounds (178 million dollars) into research projects to tackle obesity, cancer and other diseases under its Seeding Drug Discovery Initiative. Continue reading
Scientists have taken a major step closer to understanding one of the causes of Alzheimer's disease and identifying people who run a higher risk of losing their minds and lives to the condition in their later years. An international research effort has discovered a gene that, when defective, results in the buildup of a toxic protein byproduct in the brain and contributes to the onset of Alzheimer's around age 70.
Scientists estimate that people who carry mutated versions of the gene, known as SORL1, could face as much as a twofold increase in the risk of developing Alzheimer's, compared to the average. The findings, based on DNA samples from 6,000 people, were replicated in four ethnic groups and confirmed in nine separate DNA collections, which included about 200 families from Canada, sporadic cases, healthy control subjects and the corpses of Alzheimer's patients. Continue reading
Nondiabetics with heart disease who take the diabetes drug pioglitazone (Actos) along with the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin (Zocor) appear to have a reduction in insulin resistance. Perhaps more important, there also appears to be a lowering of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation and a possible warning sign for increased risk of heart attack and heart disease, German researchers report.
But at least one U.S. expert questioned the significance of the findings, which were published in the Jan. 23 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In the study, lead author Dr. Markolf Hanefeld, director of the Center for Clinical Studies at GWI-TU in Dresden, and colleagues randomly selected 125 people with heart disease, but who did not suffer from diabetes, to receive Actos alone, Zocor alone, or Actos plus Zocor. Continue reading
Can taking an aspirin each day stop asthma from developing in adults? Maybe, suggests new research published in the January issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine that found adult-onset asthma risk was reduced by 22 percent in men who were already taking a daily aspirin for heart-disease prevention.
"Our findings suggest that low-dose aspirin may have beneficial effects on asthma," said study co-author Dr. Tobias Kurth, an assistant professor of medicine and an associate epidemiologist in the division of aging at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. But, Kurth added, it's too soon to recommend that anyone start using daily aspirin solely for asthma prevention. Continue reading