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Immune Therapy ‘Cuts Heart Risk’

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Some people with heart failure might benefit from a therapy which helps dampen their overactive immune systems.US researchers treated more than 1,000 patients, and found those with certain types of heart failure had a lower risk of death or hospitalisation.

Writing in the Lancet journal, they said large numbers of patients could benefit if bigger studies confirmed the findings.

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….Heart failure weakens the ability to pump blood around body

UK experts agreed, saying that much more research would be needed.

” Our findings suggest a role for non-specific immunomodulation as a potential treatment for a large segment of the heart failure population “

Houston Methodist Hospital researchers say

Heart failure is caused by a weakening of the organ’s ability to pump blood around the body.

In some cases, this has been linked to the body’s own immune system, which causes damaging inflammation in its tissues.

Up to 24,000 deaths a year in the UK are thought to be related to the condition.

The latest study, at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, tries to “damp down” the immune reaction, and hopefully reduce inflammation.

To test how well it worked, the progress of more than 1,000 patients was compared with a similar number given a “dummy” treatment called a placebo.

Immune signals

The method involved taking blood from the patients, and exposing it to chemicals designed to change some of the body’s own immune signals, and boost anti-inflammatory signals.

This kind of approach is called “immunomodulation”.

After a 22-week cycle of treatment, the patients were monitored for the next 10 months.

Among the treated group, there were 399 deaths or hospital admissions – slightly fewer than the 429 in the untreated group.

This meant that looking at all the patients together, there was either a tiny effect, or none at all, which the researchers described as “disappointing”.

However, in patients with specific types of heart failure, such as those who had not had a heart attack, the effect appeared to be more significant, with between a 25% and 39% reduction in risk.

The researchers wrote: “Our findings suggest a role for non-specific immunomodulation as a potential treatment for a large segment of the heart failure population.”

However, they conceded that a much bigger and more detailed study, involving far more patients, would be needed before the treatment could be adopted widely.

Professor Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation‘s Medical Director echoed this: “The study is interesting, but it’s still early days.

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Source: BBC NEWS . 20TH. JAN ’08

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Eating Longhorn beef

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Eating longhorn beef is good because of these heart healthy facts… “Lean beef is good for you – and the key word is lean. A heart patient can eat steak every meal if it is in the right proportions. Longhorn meat on the average, contains 10 percent less saturated fat than that of other cattle. That puts lean Longhorn beef on par with skinned boneless white meat of chicken and that fact may come as a surprise to many dieticians.” -Dr. Joseph Graham, Cardiovascular Surgeon at St. John’s Medical Center in Joplin, Missouri, and a Longhorn breeder himself. “Red meat is really a treasure trove of nutrients, including protein, iron, vitamin B12, and more. One of the healthiest red meats is Longhorn beef, which is extremely low in fat.” -Cliff Sheats, certified clinical nutritionist, and nationally recognized author of Lean Bodies, Total Fitness. Beef is the number one source of protein, zinc and Vitamin B12, and the third best source of iron in the food supply. You’d have to eat almost 12 cans of tuna to get the equivalent amount of zinc in one 3 oz. serving of beef. It takes seven chicken breasts to equal the Vitamin B12 in one 3 oz. serving of beef. Beef is also a good source of selenium, providing 20-30% of the recommended daily allowance for men and women. Recent research has found that selenium may reduce the risk of heart disease and certain types of cancer (such as prostate) as well as enhance the body’s ability to fight infections.

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Could Stem Cells Make You More Beautiful?

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Stem Cells Could Have Cosmetic Applications, but They’re Likely Far Off.

The prospect is a tantalizing one. To erase wrinkles and fine lines, or to get bigger breasts, without cosmetic surgery. Forget silicone, forget collagen. All you would need is stem-cell therapy.

Realistically speaking, though, such applications remain a pipe dream.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time a medical therapy had been bent in the direction of aesthetics. Take a look at Botox   the deadly botulinum toxin initially used to treat spasms is now used to improve the appearance of frown lines.

And while stem-cell applications for the vanity market may have to wait, some researchers have begun to research the possibilities of stem cells in plastic and reconstructive medicine.

“Stem-cell research appears promising for medicine and particularly for plastic surgery,” said Dr. Ronald Friedman, director of the West Plano Plastic Surgery Center and a board-certified plastic surgeon practicing in Plano, Tex.

“Hair follicular stem cells, tooth stem cells and skin stem cells all show therapeutic promise,” said Denis English, editor in chief of the journal Stem Cells and Development and director of cell biology at the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Fla. “These can restore hair to a bald man, teeth to those in need and skin to scarred patients.”

The use of stem cells to regenerate tissue is believed to hold promise because stem cells can be nudged to develop into specialized cell types. And some researchers have turned an eye toward stem cells for this very purpose.

In October, a University of Pittsburgh team led by Dr. Peter Rubin received a three-year grant from the National Cancer Institute to explore the possibility of using stem cells derived from a patient’s own fat. Rubin, assistant professor of plastic surgery and co-director of the university’s Adipose Stem Cell Center, used those stem cells to create a durable, shaped piece of replacement tissue.

The research may one day allow breast cancer survivors to take advantage of a natural replacement after a mastectomy.

But with these possible applications in reconstruction, could cosmetic applications be far behind?

“Naturally, the public shows more interest in applications like breast augmentation,” said Dr. Peter Constantino, director of the Center for Facial Reconstruction and Restoration at Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

“In our society, there is such a huge demand for these rejuvenation surgeries, despite their significant risks, that the pragmatist in me cannot deny the likelihood that it will not be long before someone offers a two-stage procedure starting with liposuction followed by injection of these autologous stem cells for breast augmentation or into the face to rejuvenate,” said Dr. Daniel Salomon of the department of molecular and experimental medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Real-World Applications Still Far Off
Though initial research into the potential of stem cells in reconstructive surgery is promising, actual applications    particularly those of a purely cosmetic nature    are still distant.

“This is still very far in the future, except for tabloid speculation,” said Dr. Garry Brody, professor emeritus of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. “By the time it becomes practical    and affordable    I suspect it will be beyond our lifetimes.”

“Stem cells do have the potential to revolutionize things, but it is not “just around the corner,'” said Constantino. “You can’t just inject ‘fat’ stem cells into a breast and just assume that it’s going to make a nice-looking breast. You could just end up with something fairly lumpy and unappealing.”

The cosmetic applications of stem cells are “25 to 30 years away, at the earliest,” said Thoru Pederson of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass.

Yet some studies are already under way.
“We are starting to see clinical trials with stem cells for reconstructive surgery,” Rubin said. “A group from Japan reported on enriching liposuctioned fat with fat-derived stem cells and using the material successfully for breast enlargement.”

Cosmetic Uses of Stem Cells a Low Priority
Most experts agree, however, that many other potentially curative and life-saving applications of stem cells take precedence over cosmetic uses.

“Applications to rejuvenation or enhanced personal appearance are much harder to justify at this point and will be driven more by market forces in affluent countries   not just the U.S. certainly    rather than by science,” Salomon said.

“In my opinion, use of any cells for cosmetic surgery is still problematic,” said Dr. Darwin Prockop, director of the Center for Gene Therapy at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. “The trials that can be justified are in patients with terminal diseases in which the potential risks and benefits are carefully evaluated.”

“In all honesty, the more promising (and more quickly realized) aspects of stem cell use in plastic and reconstructive surgery will probably be in producing skin replacement grafts on a large scale,” Constantino said. “This could help many, many burn and chronic wound patients.”

But for now?
“Though there is an enormous amount of promise with stem cells in plastic and reconstructive surgery, the devil is in some pretty important details,” Constantino said.

Source:ABC News.

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