Doctors at Boston University School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Medical Center have reportedly discovered that three athletes, all of whom were diagnosed with A.L.S., didn’t actually have it. Tissue samples during the autopsies proved that these athletes had toxic proteins in their spinal cords, meaning that instead of suffering from a neurodegerative disease that affects the motor neuron system, these athletes actually died from trauma sustained through concussions and other brain injuries.
As it turns out, Gehrig, and other athletes like him, might not even have been afflicted by ALS in the first place. Rather, men who suffered ongoing concussive trauma might have died from degradation to the central nervous system caused by that damage.

The finding could prompt a redirection in the study of motor degeneration in athletes and military veterans being given diagnoses of A.L.S. at rates considerably higher than normal, said several experts in A.L.S. who had seen early versions of the paper. Patients with significant histories of brain trauma could be considered for different types of treatment in the future, perhaps leading toward new pathways for a cure.
“Most A.L.S. patients don’t go to autopsy — there’s no need to look at your brain and spinal cord,” said Dr. Brian Crum, an assistant professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “But a disease can look like A.L.S., it can look like Alzheimer’s, and it’s not when you look at the actual tissue. This is something that needs to be paid attention to.”

A.L.S. was given the name Lou Gherig’s disease after Lou Gherig, who was one of America’s best baseball players in the 1920s and 1930s. After his record-breaking performance and coordination suddenly diminished and became significantly worse, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1939. It was on his 36th birthday doctors told him his life expectancy was only three years, as the motor neuron disease is degenerative.
“People are being misdiagnosed clinically while they’re alive as having ALS when in fact they have a different motor-neuron disease,” Dr. Dr. Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, told the Times. “Scientists will be able to get at a faster understanding of the disease in general, and therefore effective treatments, by knowing more about who’s at risk and who’s not.”

Commercial insurance is only one part of the story. It is no secret that treatment of people with diabetes, congestive heart failure, asthma and other chronic conditions account for a high percentage of Medicare costs. Health-service researchers nationally found that the trend over the last decade is for people with multiple chronic conditions to see doctors frequently, with visits financed largely by Medicare Part B, gap insurance and patient co-pays.

The Healthy Families Resource Fair is one of about 50 summits held in the past three and a half years as part of Congressman Sestak’s constituent outreach program. Since first taking office, the Congressman has used this initiative to bring together his constituents with the organizations available to assist them as well as to gather valuable feedback enabling him to bring the concerns of his district to Washington, DC.
“Like with similar events we have held for Veterans, seniors and small businesses owners, this fair provides a valuable opportunity for those that will benefit from health care reform to understand just how and in what way their coverage will improve,” said Congressman Sestak. “As an elected official, it is my responsibility to inform my constituents as fully as possible about how legislation like this will affect their lives, and I look forward to continuing advocating for better healthcare for all.”

Women who have unprotected intercourse have about 1 chance in 20 of becoming pregnant. Those who take Plan B within three days cut that risk to about 1 in 40, while those who take ella would cut that risk to about 1 in 50, regulators say. Studies show that ella is less effective in obese women. Unlike levonorgestrel, the leading postcoital contraceptive now available, ulipristal remained equally effective over time, so women taking the drug five days after intercourse were no more likely to get pregnant than women who took the drug one day after intercourse. Levonorgestrel must be taken within 72 hours after intercourse.
The decision was greeted with enthusiasm by abortion rights groups and denounced by anti-abortion activists. But in recent years both sides have treated the emergency contraceptive pills as a side issue in the wider debate over abortion.

Studies have shown that millions of women who do not want to be pregnant, have unprotected sex every night in the US. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. The drug looks promising the way it is being represented by the FDA and government. Some physicians however, objected that ella is not a morning after pill rather it works as an abortion agent because it works after conception and destroys the life of a day-old unborn child.

Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., of Morristown, N.J. will begin preparations to commercialize the novel type of emergency contraception pill from French pharmaceutical company HRA Pharma of Paris in the fourth quarter this year, under an exclusive distribution agreement, according to several U.S. tabloid reports. The U.S. distributor for ulipristal said it planned to make the drug commercially available in the fourth quarter of 2010. The firm indicated it still needs to finalize production of the drug’s packaging.

NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1) is a new gene that enables a bacterium to become highly resistant to nearly all antibiotics; it is spread in Enterobacteriaceae taken from patients in India and Pakistan. NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like E.coli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of antibiotics – carbapenems.
These are generally reserved for use in emergencies and to combat hard-to-treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bacteria.
And experts fear NDM-1 could now jump to other strains of bacteria that are already resistant to many other antibiotics.

“There are lots of people carrying this resistance,” Timothy R. Walsh, PhD, professor of infection, immunity, and biochemistry at Wales’ Cardiff University says. “The crux of the matter is that when bugs … acquire this type of gene they become resistant to all beta-lactams. And beta-lactams like penicillin are the main therapies to treat these infections with.”
You don’t have to be a microbiologist to know the bugs Walsh is talking about. One is E. coli. Another is Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common cause of pneumonia. Both kinds of infection can be deadly.
There could be “serious consequences,” says Johann D.D. Pitout, MD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Canada’s University of Calgary, in an editorial accompanying the Walsh report in the Aug. 11 online issue of The Lancet.
“The potential is there for a major issue: that we would have common infections, like urinary tract infections, caused by drug-resistant organisms,” Pitout tells WebMD. “It is a huge surprise to see it spread all over the subcontinent. It looks like it is a really rapid spread. It is too early to tell. But it sure as hell is widespread and that is very worrying.”

Ethnicity plays a role in earlier puberty, says researcher Frank M. Biro, MD, director of the division of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati. So does body composition. By age 7, about 10 percent of white and 23 percent of black girls had started developing breasts, the researchers found. This compared with 5 and 15 percent respectively in a study published in 1997.
The new research confirms what many doctors have been seeing in their practices for years, said Lore Nelson, an adolescent medicine specialist at the University of Kansas Hospital.
“It’s one of those things everyone thought was happening, now it looks like it really is happening,” she said. “We’re just seeing girls maturing earlier.”

Besides ethnicity, body mass index or BMI was found to play a role in onset of puberty, Biro’s team found. Girls who had breast development at age 7 were more likely to have a higher BMI. Body fatness has been linked with onset of puberty in girls, other research by Biro and others has shown. Increased rates of obesity are thought to play a major role, because body fat can produce sex hormones. Some researchers also suspect that environmental chemicals that mimic the effects of estrogen may be speeding up the clock on puberty, but that idea is unproved.
They are more likely to have lower self-esteem and a poor body image. Their rates of eating disorders, depression and suicide attempts are higher. They’re more likely to become sexually active at an early age.
“If you’re 8 and look like you’re 12, people have different expectations about you,” Nelson said. “I think it gets them into situations they’re not ready to handle, such as dating.”

The researchers were also surprised to find that black girls developed significantly earlier than whites. But they cautioned that there had been few rigorous studies of puberty, so it was not clear whether their research was detecting a new trend or just discovering that the medical books were wrong.
The study led to a bit of a furor. Some endocrinologists doubted the findings and warned that if doctors and parents started blithely assuming that puberty at 7 or 8 was the new normal, they would overlook serious problems like endocrine diseases or tumors. But others warned that if the new findings were rejected, families would be frightened needlessly and fortunes wasted on batteries of tests for perfectly normal 7- and 8-year-old girls with budding breasts.

Although further research is likely to pinpoint the cause of earlier puberty in girls, the focus now should be on more practical matters, says Warren Seigel, MD, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Adolescence and chair of the department of pediatrics at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn.
“Instead of debating the cause only, let’s talk about what we can do right now, and [that is], we have to be on guard,” Seigel tells.
Pediatricians as well as parents should be talking to children earlier than they previously have thought necessary, discussing sex as well as substance abuse.

Lead researcher Dr Sohinee Bhattacharya from the University of Aberdeen explained the broad contours of the research. “Our research shows that it is unnecessary for women to delay conception after a miscarriage. The current WHO guidelines may need to be reconsidered. As per our results, women wanting to become pregnant soon after a miscarriage should not be discouraged. There may be cases where a delay is desirable, for example if there are signs of infection.”
Dr Sunita Mittal, who heads the gynecology department at AIIMS, told TOI “I agree with the findings. Usually, we ask mothers to start planning a pregnancy within three months of suffering a micarriage once she recovers physically. A woman, who suffers a miscarriage, experiences severe mental strain, and would naturally love to have a proper pregnancy and child birth at the earliest. However, if the would-be mother is very young, we ask her to wait for the second pregnancy as she has a lot of time at hand.”

Researchers say the vision and hearing of patients in their tests improved after healing practitioners prayed for them.
An older Mozambican woman named Maryam could not see two fingers held up just one foot in front of her when she arrived for a Pentecostal prayer intervention in her village. Nor could she see an eye chart from a similarly close distance. But after a healer at the evangelical meeting laid hands on her and prayed for less than a minute, Maryam was able to not only see the fingers held up in front of her but could count them as well. The eye chart also came into view, with Maryam able to read down to the 20/125 line.

The study, published in the Southern Medical Journal, reports measurements taken before and after subjects received proximal intercessory prayer indicate improvements much larger than those typically found in suggestion and hypnosis studies. “We chose to investigate ‘proximal’ prayer because that is how a lot of prayer for healing is actually practiced by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians around the world,” study leader Candy Gunther Brown says in a statement.
The team studied the impact of ‘healers’ on disadvantaged people with vision or hearing impairments in Mozambique and Brazil.
They evaluated 14 rural Mozambican subjects who reported poor hearing and 11 who said they had failing sight, both before and after the subjects received proximal intercessory prayer (PIP). An audiometer and vision charts were used for a direct measure of improvement rather than relying on whether the people said they felt better.

If people with a serious need for healing and willing to try almost anything feel a particular religious or spiritual practice healed them, Brown says, they are much more likely to become an adherent. “This phenomenon, more than any other,” the researcher says, “accounts for the growth of these Christian subgroups globally.”
Brown and colleagues used an audiometer and vision charts to evaluate 14 rural Mozambican subjects with impaired hearing and 11 with impaired vision.

The recall was the first in Valley Meat’s 50-year history, according to a statement on the company’s website.
“We will investigate the matter thoroughly and take any measures deemed necessary to further elevate our safety standards, protect consumers and ensure confidence in our products,” the company said.

E. coli is a potentially deadly bacterium that can cause dehydration and, in the most severe cases, kidney failure, according to the USDA. The very young, seniors and people with weak immune systems are the most susceptible to food-borne illness.

When users would click on this particular widget button, it would share it with the friends of this particular user, showing only the benefits of the particular drug within the Facebook newsfeed.
Secondly, the copy seen via the Share function didn’t properly discern what portion of the leukemia population for which Tasigna could be appropriate. The third citation involved the usage of the copy “next‐generation treatment.” The FDA said the language implied superiority over competing products when such a statement couldn’t be backed by objective research findings.

Novartis, of Basel, Switzerland, said it has taken down the Facebook widget. “Novartis will continue to have active discussions with the FDA to understand fully all of the concerns. We also will assess all of our Web assets and materials based on these concerns,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement. The spokeswoman said the Exforge brochure–which FDA said overstated the drug’s efficacy and omits serious risk information–is no longer being disseminated.
An AstraZeneca spokeswoman said the company is taking steps to address the contents of the FDA letter regarding Seroquel, and will update its promotional materials as appropriate. The FDA said a “leave-behind” sheet prepared by AstraZeneca overstated the drug’s efficacy and omitted risk information.

We will have to wait and see how this plays out, but it is clear the FDA is watching how pharmaceutical companies utilize the internet to attract potential customers.

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