Overweight elderly 'live longer'

Moderately overweight elderly people may live longer than those of normal weight, an Australian study suggests.

But being very overweight or being underweight shortened lives.

The report, which was published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, said dieting may not be beneficial in this age group.

But the study of 9,200 over-70s also found that regardless of weight, sedentary lifestyles shortened lives, particularly for women.

The study by the University of Western Australia set out to find out what level of body mass index (BMI) was associated with the lowest risk of death in the elderly.

Concerns have been raised about encouraging apparently overweight older people to lose weight Professor Leon Flicker, University of Western Australia

For younger people, there is a well established health risk from being overweight or obese.

Overweight best

The team tracked the number of deaths over 10 years among volunteers who were aged 70 - 75 at the start of the study.

It found that those with a BMI which classed them as overweight not only had the lowest overall risk of dying, they also had the lowest risk of dying from specific diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer and chronic respiratory disease.

The overall death rate among the obese group was similar to that among those of normal weight.

But those who were very obese had a greater risk of dying during the 10 year period.

Lead researcher, Professor Leon Flicker said: "Concerns have been raised about encouraging apparently overweight older people to lose weight.

"Our study suggests that those people who survive to age 70 in reasonable health have a different set of risks and benefits associated with the amount of body fat to younger people."

The conclusion of this study, that being overweight may be less harmful for elderly people, corroborates the findings of previous research.

Staying still

Sedentary lifestyles shortened lives across all weight groups, doubling the risk of mortality for women over the period studied, and increasing it by 25% for men.

Physical exercise "really matters", said Professor Flicker.

As well as helping to build muscle mass, it has broader health benefits for elderly people, he said.

The authors believe BMI may give a poor reflection of fatty mass in elderly people.

"It may be time to review the BMI classification for older adults," says Professor Flicker.

Professor Kay-Tee Khaw from Cambridge University agreed, noting that optimal weight appears to be higher in older age groups.

"This is important since under-nutrition is an important problem in older people.

"Waist circumference, which assesses abdominal obesity, appears to be a better indicator of health consequences of obesity" she said.

Smokers With Lung Cancer: Not Too Late to Quit

Smokers with lung cancer who have asked "Why quit now, I'm already sick?" may find new motivation in this answer: Doing so could double their odds of survival over five years.

A report published online in BMJ suggests that people who give up smoking after being diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer live longer than patients who continue the habit.

The findings underscore the importance of the notion that it is never too late to quit smoking.

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death, according to the American Lung Association. And smoking causes most cases of lung cancer.

Medical evidence has repeatedly shown that as soon as a person quits smoking the body begins to repair the damage done by tobacco-smoke-related chemicals, and it's been theorized that continued smoking can influence the behavior of lung tumors. But until now it was not clear if ending the smoking habit after being diagnosed with lung cancer had any impact on a patient's survival.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham in England reviewed the results of 10 studies that evaluated how smoking cessation after lung cancer diagnosis affected a patient's prognosis. The review included patients with both non-small-cell and small-cell forms of lung cancer.

Among their findings:

• Patients with early-stage lung cancer who continued to smoke had a "substantially higher risk of death" than those who quit after their diagnosis. The increased death risk appeared to be due to the cancer spreading.
• The five-year survival rate for the quitters was 64%-70% compared with 29%-33% for those who continued to smoke.
• The continued smokers were also more likely to have their cancer return than those who quit.

The researchers say their findings suggest that smoking-cessation programs may benefit patients with early-stage lung cancer, but they add that more research is needed.

Catching up on lost sleep a dangerous illusion

The study followed participants who each took up residence for 38 days at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

The study looked at three things: the number of consecutive hours awake, the number of days or weeks of chronic sleep reduction, and what time it was in the person's day. "How those three factors combine determine how well we perform at any moment," says Cohen.

"It's very hard to cheat the sleep system. You will pay a price sooner or later," says David Dinges, a professor of sleep studies at the University of Pennsylvania school of medicine. This research suggests "it takes longer to recover from sleep debts than has been believed in the past."

This study shows for the first time in humans that sleep regulation is actually composed of at least two separate processes acting on different time scales. The short-term process causes performance to decline with each hour awake, and this process can be rapidly overcome with one extended sleep episode.

The long-term process builds over weeks of too-little sleep. It causes a faster decline in performance for each hour a person is awake, particularly during the biological late night, the equivalent of 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. It is unknown how many nights of good sleep it takes to recover from this longer-term component.

This work in humans parallels work in animals showing more than one mechanism that promotes sleepiness in the context of reduced sleep hours. The sleep-inducing chemical adenosine appears to increase with hours spent awake. Recently a second mechanism, which is affected by long-term sleep deprivation, has been found. In this, the number of receptors in the brain for adenosine increase as long-term sleep deficit becomes bigger.

In effect, the brain becomes sensitized to the effects of adenosine, and the same number of hours awake has a bigger impact on performance.

"Sleep appears to be a crucial process, and evolutionary mechanisms have evolved so that more than one mechanism kicks in to promote sleepiness," says Cohen.

H1N1 Flu Is a False Pandemic - Wolfgang Wodarg

A leading health expert said the swine flu scare was a "false pandemic" led by drug companies that stood to make billions from vaccines, The Sun reported Monday.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, claimed major firms organized a "campaign of panic" to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic.

He believes it is "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century," and he has called for an inquiry.

An emergency debate on the issue will be held by the Council of Europe later this month.

The Council of Europe covers 47 European countries and seeks to develop common and democratic principles between the nations.

Wodarg said, "It's just a normal kind of flu. It does not cause a tenth of deaths caused by the classic seasonal flu.

"The great campaign of panic we have seen provided a golden opportunity for representatives from labs who knew they would hit the jackpot in the case of a pandemic being declared.

"We want to clarify everything that brought about this massive operation of disinformation. We want to know who made decisions, on the basis of what evidence, and precisely how the influence of the pharmaceutical industry came to bear on the decision-making."

He added: "A group of people in the WHO is associated very closely with the pharmaceutical industry."

The WHO recently reaffirmed its stance that the pandemic is not over. However, the number of swine flu deaths is dramatically lower than expected.

In an interview with France's L'Humanite Sunday, Wodarg also raised concerns about swine flu vaccines.

"The vaccines were developed too quickly. Some ingredients were insufficiently tested," he said.

"But there is worse to come. The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now.

"This was not necessary. It has also led to a considerable mismanagement of public money.

"The time has come at last for us to make demands on governments. The purpose of the inquiry is to prevent more false alarms of this type in the future."

"We must make sure people can rely on the analysis and the expertise of national and international public institutions. The latter are now discredited, because millions of people have been vaccinated with products with inherent possible health risks."

TOP Discovery 2009 - 3. Gene Therapy Cures Color Blindness

Modern science already offers ways to enhance your mood, sex drive, athletic performance, concentration levels and overall health, but a discovery in September suggests that truly revolutionary human enhancement may soon move from science fiction to reality. A study in Nature reported that a team of ophthalmologists had injected genes that produce color-detecting proteins into the eyes of two color-blind monkeys, allowing the animals to see red and green for the first time. The results were shocking to most — "We said it was possible, but every single person I talked to said, 'Absolutely not,' " said study co-author Jay Neitz of the University of Washington — and raised the possibility that a range of vision defects could someday be cured. That's a transformative prospect in itself, but the discovery further suggests that it may be possible to enhance senses in "healthy" people too, truly revolutionizing the way we see the world.

TOP Discovery 2009 - 2. The Human Epigenome, Decoded

The decoding of the human genome nearly a decade ago fueled expectations that an understanding of all human hereditary influences was within sight. But the connections between genes and, say, disease turned out to be far more complicated than imagined. What has since emerged is a new frontier in the study of genetic signaling known as epigenetics, which holds that the behavior of genes can be modified by environmental influences and that those changes can be passed down through generations. So people who smoke cigarettes in their youth, for example, sustain certain epigenetic changes, which may then increase the risk that their children's children will reach puberty early. In October, a team led by Joseph Ecker at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., studied human skin and stem cells to produce the first detailed map of the human epigenome. By comparing this with the epigenomes of diseased cells, scientists will be able to work out how glitches in the epigenome may lead to cancers and other diseases. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, is a giant leap in geneticists' quest to better understand the strange witches' brew of nature and nurture that makes us who we are.

TOP Discovery 2009 - 1. Our Oldest Ancestor, "Ardi"

With her long, elegant fingers, 4-ft. frame and a head no larger than a bonobo's, it's hard not to feel a certain fondness for little Ardi, the oldest skeleton of a prehuman hominid ever found. Painstakingly pieced together from more than 100 crushed fossil fragments unearthed in Ethiopia, this female specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus (Ardi, for short) lived 4.4 million years ago and had remained anonymous until 1992, when her fragments were first discovered. After 17 years of research, a team of scientists led by Tim D. White from the University of California, Berkeley, published a comprehensive analysis of Ardi in October, in a series of articles in the journal Science. Among the team's revelations: Ardi was surprisingly unchimplike despite being the earliest known descendant of the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps. Also, she was capable of walking on two feet despite living in an area of woodland and forest — a finding that downplays the importance of open grasslands to the evolution of human bipedalism

How Cocaine Scrambles Genes in the Brain

It's hardly a secret that taking cocaine can change the way you feel and the way you behave. Now, a study published in the Jan. 8 issue of Science shows how it also alters the way the very genes in your brain operate. Understanding this process could eventually lead to new treatments for the 1.4 million Americans with cocaine problems, and millions more around the world.

The study, which was conducted in mice, is part of a hot new area of research called epigenetics, which explores how experiences and environmental exposures affect genes. "This is a major step in understanding the development of cocaine addiction and a first step towards generating ideas for how we might use epigenetic regulation to modulate the development of addiction," says Peter Kalivas, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, who was not associated with the study.

Though we think about our genes mostly in terms of the traits we pass onto our children, they are actually very active in our lives every day, regulating how various cells in our bodies behave. In the brain this can be especially powerful. Any significant experience triggers changes in brain genes that in turn produce proteins — those necessary to help memories form, for example. But, says lead author Ian Maze, a PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, "When you give an animal a single dose of cocaine, you start to have genes aberrantly turn on and off in a strange pattern that we are still trying to figure out."

Maze's research focused on a particular protein — called G9a — that is associated with cocaine-related changes in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region essential for the experience of desire, pleasure and drive. The role of the protein appears to be to shut down genes that shouldn't be on. One-time use of cocaine increases levels of G9a. But repeated use works the other way — suppressing the protein and reducing its overall control of gene activation. Without enough G9a, those overactive genes cause brain cells to generate more dendritic spines, which are the parts of the cells that make connections to other cells.

Increases in the numbers of these spines can reflect learning. But in the case of addiction, that may involve learning to connect a place or a person with desire for more drugs. Maze showed that even after a week of abstinence, mice given a new dose of cocaine still had elevated levels of gene activation in the nucleus accumbens, meaning G9a levels were still low. It is not known how long these changes can last. Maze also showed that when he intervened and raised G9a levels, the mice showed less of an attaction to cocaine.

It's a big leap from a mouse study to a human study, of course — and an even bigger leap to consider developing a G9a-based treatment for addiction. The protein regulates so many genes that such a drug would almost certainly have unwanted and potentially deadly side effects. But better understanding of the G9a pathways could lead to the development of safer, more specific drugs. And studying the genes that control G9a itself could also help screen people at risk for cocaine addiction: those with naturally lower levels of the protein would be the ones to watch. Still, there's a lot to be learned even from further mouse studies — particularly if the work involves younger mice, unlike the adults used in Maze's research.

"We know that the greatest vulnerability [to addiction] occurs when adolescents are exposed," says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the study. "Would you see the same results in adolescent [mice]? And what happen during fetal exposure?"

New treatments are definitely needed for cocaine: there are helpful medications for addiction to heroin and similar drugs but so far, none are terribly useful against stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine. And with federal reports now showing that more than two-thirds of all cocaine in the country is cut with a veterinary de-worming drug called levamisole that can cause potentially fatal immune system problems, the risks from cocaine are greater — and the search for new answers more urgent than ever.