Hormone replacement therapy based on either estrogen-alone or estrogen-plus progestin, which is commonly prescribed to women to ease menopause symptoms, increases risk of breast cancer, particularly hormone-receptor positive malignancies, a new study confirmed.

The study in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention also showed that hormone replacement therapy raised higher risk of breast cancer in women with a healthy body mass index than those with a BMI over 30.
Tanmai Saxena from the University of Southern California and colleagues followed almost 3,000 women who received hormone replacement therapy for about 10 years from 1995 through 2006.
The researchers found the longer a woman used either estrogen-alone therapy or estrogen-plus-progestin therapy, the higher the risk of breast cancer.  Higher risk was found in women who continuously used the treatment than those who took breaks during some period of therapy.  
Specifically, using estrogen therapy for 15 years or longer boosted the risk of breast cancer by 19 percent. This is compared to 83 percent increase in the risk of the disease for using combined therapy for the same time-frame.
Women who used combined therapy continuously faced highest risk.
Previous studies found women who used HRT had high risk of breast cancer and the elevated risk remained even after they discontinued taking estrogen supplements.
Doctors may pursue women to take hormone therapy saying that the estrogen is natural. In fact, hormones are dangerous, particularly endogenous or naturally identical hormones, which are much more powerful than those environmental mimics, according to a Mongolian scientist who made the comment while she visited Harvard University.
Early studies also found hormone replacement therapy increased not only breast cancer risk but risk of heart disease as well.
A health observer suggests that women should try natural remedies before they want to try HRT.  Weight loss, acupuncture, black cohosh, emotional freedom technique or EFT and flaxseed may potentially help ease menopause symptoms like hot flashes.

A new generation of DNA tests for colon cancer seems likely to improve the detection both of cancers and of the precancerous polyps that precede them. The tests, if validated, could reduce the burden of disease substantially by detecting tumors at an early stage, including those not picked up by a colonoscopy.

Colorectal cancers tend to grow slowly and are easily removed if caught early. But many people over 50 do not comply with the recommendation to have a colonoscopy — a time-consuming procedure in which a tube is threaded up the intestine — and even colonoscopies do not catch everything. Colorectal cancer has become the second most common cancer in the United States; each year it causes more than 50,000 deaths and costs about $14 billion to treat.

Colon tumors provide considerable evidence of their presence by shedding blood and cells that are detectable in the stool. Tests for blood have reduced deaths from colorectal cancer only modestly, because they are not very sensitive to precancerous polyps, the stage at which cancer is best prevented. 

Researchers turned to measuring mutations in DNA after Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University discovered the series of mutations by which a colon polyp advances to full cancer. But no single mutation predicts a patient’s risk, and the mutation tests, though more accurate than the blood tests, have not been a decisive improvement.

By 2004 it was clear that looking for the Vogelstein mutations was “neat biology but not a home run,” said Dr. David Ransohoff, an expert on colon cancer screening at the University of North Carolina.

A new generation of tests being developed depends on a different process in cancer cells. All cells switch off the genes they do not need by attaching small chemicals called methyl groups to certain sites along their DNA. In cancer cells, there is generally less methylation than usual, except for certain regions of DNA where the methylation process is taken to excess, perhaps because the cells need to shut down tumor suppressor genes. These and other genes are highly methylated in colon tumors and other kinds of cancer.

Exact Sciences, a company based in Madison, Wis., is developing a colon cancer test based on highly methylated DNA. Its researchers reported last month that by testing for methylated DNA at four markers, pieces of DNA drawn from specific genes, they could detect colon tumors and polyps, distinguishing them from normal tissue with 100 percent sensitivity and with no false positives.

The tests of methylated DNA were performed directly on tumors and are expected to be less accurate in the real world, in which they would have to work in stool samples. Almost all of the DNA in stool is from bacteria, and the methylated DNA is a fraction of the 0.01 percent that is human DNA.

Still, Kevin T. Conroy, chief executive of Exact Sciences, said he expected that the four-marker test, when applied to stool samples, would detect at least half of all precancerous polyps and 85 percent of actual cancers. Results of a trial now under way in 1,600 patients will be reported in October, he said.

The test would cost less than $300, and samples could be collected at home. Patients would be advised to take the test every three years. People with a positive result would then have a colonoscopy to verify and remove any polyps, with the result that colonoscopies could be focused on high-risk patients instead of the population at large.

Exact Sciences’ test is based on work by Dr. Vogelstein, Dr. Sanford Markowitz at Case Western Reserve University and Dr. David A. Ahlquist of the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Ahlquist, who is a scientific adviser to the company, identified some of the highly methylated genes the company is testing as markers for colon cancer.

Dr. Ahlquist said that if the test worked as well as hoped on stool samples, “this will be the first noninvasive test that will reliably detect malignant lesions.” Cervical cancer has been virtually eliminated by the Pap test, he said, and “we feel that colon cancer could be eliminated to the same extent.”

The four-marker test can pick up a kind of precancerous tissue called a serrated polyp which is often missed by colonoscopies, Dr. Ahlquist said. It also ignores most innocuous small polyps.

Using different sets of four markers, other kinds of cancer can be detected. “We can detect all of the cancers above the colon — pancreas, esophagus, stomach, bile duct,” Dr. Ahlquist said. Thus in principle, all the cancers of the gastrointestinal tract, which account for nearly a quarter of all cancer deaths in the United States, should be detectable from stool samples.

Dr. Vogelstein said tests for DNA mutations would be better in theory than tests for DNA methylation because “mutations are entirely specific and they are what is driving the tumor”; the methylation is less causative and increases naturally with age.

But the DNA methylation tests are promising in principle, he said, and it seems feasible for Exact Sciences to get a sensitivity of better than 90 percent and a false positive rate of only 5 to 10 percent. “We can tolerate 5 to 10 percent false positives because those people will just get colonoscopies,” he said.

For cancers above the colon, there are many enzymes that digest DNA, so whether such cancers can be detected efficiently can be answered only with experiments, Dr. Vogelstein said. And false positives would be more of a problem, since for these cancers there is no easy verification method like colonoscopy. “That’s when these false positives really start to be the devil,” he said.

Dr. Ransohoff said the Exact Sciences test was still at a preliminary point. “This is neat and it’s promising,” he said. “But we’ve been down this road before and we need to be hopeful without being carried away.”

REM sleep behavior disorder — in which dreams are accompanied by excessive movement — may be a sign of neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s disease that manifest several decades later, a case series showed.

Among 27 patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple system atrophy, or dementia with Lewy bodies, the median time between the onset of REM sleep behavior disorder and symptom onset of the neurodegenerative condition was 25 years, according to Bradley Boeve, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and colleagues.

In one case, the time span reached 50 years, they reported in the Aug. 10 issue of Neurology. 

Previous studies have found that REM sleep behavior disorder precedes Parkinson’s disease and related conditions by about a decade in most cases, although there were occasional cases with a wider interval.  

“These cases illustrate that [the synucleinopathies] may have extremely long courses, with preclinical periods extending back decades in at least some cases,” the researchers wrote.

A long preclinical phase has important implications for epidemiologic studies, as well as for “the development of therapies that might slow or halt alpha-synucleinopathy progression, which could be implemented well before the cognitive and motor features are manifest,” they wrote.

In an accompanying editorial, Mark Mahowald, MD, of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, and colleagues noted that new treatments — including pharmacologic, mechanical, and cell-based and gene therapies — hold promise for the synucleinopathies.

“In order to employ most effectively the promising new treatments … new quantitative assessments of both motor and nonmotor symptoms are needed,” they wrote. “The subtle and protean early nonmotor manifestations of the synucleinopathies must be identified early, allowing the use of effective neuroprotective treatments as they become available.”

The researchers used Mayo Clinic records to identify 27 patients with some form of synucleinopathy who had onset of REM sleep behavior disorder at least 15 years before neurodegenerative symptoms arose. The patients’ mean age at onset of the sleep disorder was 49 and at onset of neurologic symptoms was 72.

Among the patients, 13 had Parkinson’s disease with or without mild cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s disease dementia, 13 had dementia with Lewy bodies/mild cognitive impairment plus parkinsonism, and one had multiple system atrophy.

Most — 89% — were male.

REM sleep behavior disorder manifested itself for most of the patients through dreams in which the patients were defending themselves or running away from an attacking person or animal. The rest of the patients could not remember the details of their dreams.

Movements during sleep included punching, shouting, getting out of bed, or flailing arm movements.

The patients were evenly split between presentation of their neurologic condition through motor symptoms or cognitive impairment, with the exception of one patient who presented with autonomic symptoms.

At the latest follow-up, nearly two-thirds of the patients (63%) had developed either Parkinson’s disease dementia or dementia with Lewy bodies.

About three-quarters (74%) had concomitant autonomic dysfunction, which was mostly expressed as postural related lightheadedness but also included urinary incontinence or retention and constipation.

The researchers noted that in previous studies not all patients with REM sleep behavior disorder have eventually developed a synucleinopathy.

“However,” they wrote, “the current series documenting very long latencies raises a question whether all patients with REM sleep behavior disorder would later develop such neurodegenerative syndromes if they lived long enough.”

The authors acknowledged that the study — using a convenience sample of patients — cannot establish the incidence or prevalence of long intervals between REM sleep behavior disorder and the synucleinopathies.

A new study suggests that antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft, often prescribed to children and adults with autism, are ineffective in managing autistic symptoms. The study is actually a compilation of findings from earlier studies, some of which are small and only one of which is described as “large and robust.”

The focus of the study was on the ability of antidepressants (SSRI’s) to actually reduce “core symptoms of autism.”  These symptoms are described specifically as problems with social interaction, communication and self-injurious behavior.  It’s important to note that SSRI’s are not typically prescribed as a tool for improving  these challenges. 

According to the study summary:

There is no evidence to support the use of SSRIs to treat autism in children. There is limited evidence, which is not yet sufficiently robust, to suggest effectiveness of SSRIs in adults with autism. Treatment with an SSRI may cause side effects. Decisions about the use of SSRIs for established clinical indications that may co-occur with autism, such as obsessive compulsive disorder and depression in adults or children, and anxiety in adults, should be made on a case by case basis.

Bottom line: children with autism who do not exhibit symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder or depression are unlikely to benefit from SSRI’s, and ARE at risk of serious side effects.  If your child is prescribed an SSRI, be absolutely certain that the medication is appropriate for his/her symptoms, and that there are no other, safer alternatives.  Ask your doctor about potential side effects, and carefully record any positive or negative changes you see from the medication.

Researchers from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington recently conducted a study on the effects of praying directly with someone for healing. According to Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at IU and author of the study, “proximal intercessory prayer”, as she calls it, can actually help to bring about healing.

Published in the Southern Medical Journal, the study is part of a larger research project investigating the power of spiritual healing practices to heal disease. For this particular study, Brown and her team investigated two charismatic Christian groups known for their healing prayer activities, one from Africa and one from South America.

The team measured the hearing and vision capabilities of impaired people both before and after they received proximal intercessory prayer, and discovered a “statistically significant” improvement in many of them after they had received prayer.

Two people with impaired hearing reduced the threshold at which they were able to detect sound by 50 decibels. Three people with vision impairment at 20/400 or worse improved to 20/80 or better after receiving prayer. One woman who was virtually blind before receiving prayer was able to not only see a person’s hand afterward, but was able to count the person’s fingers and read the 20/125 line on a vision chart.

Brown explained that Christian subgroups that practice proximal intercessory prayer are among the fastest growing groups worldwide because of this phenomenon.

“If [people] feel that a particular religious or spiritual practice healed them, they are much more likely to become an adherent. This phenomenon, more than any other, accounts for the growth of these Christian subgroups globally,” she explained.

Yet another reason to rethink a diet heavy in fried, packaged and processed foods: It could be the culprit to blame for the childhood development of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

A study out of the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Perth, Australia, evaluated the diets of 1,800 teens, 115 of whom had been diagnosed with ADHD before the age of 14. 

Dietary habits were divided into two categories. A “Western diet” consisted of takeout, packaged products — in other words, plenty of saturated fat, sodium and sugar — and few fresh fruits or vegetables.

A “healthy diet,” by contrast, offered unsaturated dietary fats, fiber and whole grains.

Western diets were strongly associated with ADHD diagnosis, while researchers found no connection between healthy diets and the illness.

However, researchers have merely established a link, not the full picture. Unsaturated and omega-3 dietary fats are known to benefit brain health. But a Western diet is high in chemicals and additives, some of which are already believed to worsen ADHD symptoms. Or the impulsiveness and inattention associated with ADHD might trigger unhealthy food choices.

But to parents already coping with their child’s ADHD, the precise mechanism might be irrelevant. Already, specialized diets, like elimination regimes (cutting out sugar or dairy) or regularly timed small meals, are growing in popularity as a means of managing ADHD symptoms.

Chomping down on a habanero may have more subtle benefits than bragging rights. According to a new study, capsaicin, the compound that makes hot peppers spicy, may also lower your blood pressure.

The study, published in this month’s Cell Metabolism journal, found that long-term consumption of capsaicin relaxed blood vessels in genetically hypertensive rats. Researcher Zhiming Zhu of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China, noticed that population studies with humans suggest a similar phenomenon: Hypertension rates are only 10 to 14 percent in his native southwestern China, where people regularly eat spicy foods, as opposed to 20 percent in the comparatively bland north. 

Capsaicin has previously been touted as a miracle food in myriad ways, from relieving gastric pain to weight loss and pain relief. That burned-out feeling you get in your nose isn’t just short term, either — capsaicin has also been suggested as a way to fight chronic sinus infection.

And those who can’t stand the heat don’t necessarily need to get out of the kitchen. Apparently the non-spicy capsaicin relative capsinoid could provide many of the same health benefits.

Despite this encouraging news, it’s important to remember that hot peppers should still be consumed in moderation. The memorable scene from 1994’s “Dumb and Dumber” serves as a powerful cautionary tale.

A major U.S. fish research company has tampered with the DNA of Atlantic salmon by adding a quick-growth gene that allows the fish to eat year-around and grow more quickly. And the Food and Drug Administration is about to allow these genetically engineered salmon to head to market, the company says.

But food safety activists insist that the FDA doesn’t have adequate tests and regulations to ensure the safety of modified seafood, and others question whether consumers are even ready for it.

“Far from being a benefit to consumers or the environment, this merely allows factory fish farms to double production rates,” said George Kimbrell, senior attorney for the Center for Food Safety.

Nevertheless, AquaBounty Technologies in Waltham, Mass., near Boston, is already producing tiny red Atlantic salmon eggs that have been injected with a gene from Pacific Chinook salmon and another gene from the ocean pout. This genetic modification gives the engineered fish the ability to grow to market size in half the time of salmon that haven’t been messed with.

The fish would be the first transgenic animal application ever approved by the the FDA, according to the company, which has been developing the product and waiting for approval for 20 years.

AquaBounty says it has launched a “blue revolution,” which brings together biological sciences and molecular technology “to enable an aquaculture industry capable of large-scale, efficient and environmentally sustainable production of high quality seafood. Genetically altered trout and tilapia are the next to be offered up to the nation’s fishmongers.

However, the largest foreign breeders — like Canada, which is the No. 1 supplier of Atlantic salmon to the U.S. — say they see no reason to meddle with a good thing.

Current fish breeding practices are adequate to enable the production of a high-quality product, says the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance.

The alliance “does not support the commercial production of transgenic fish for food production until it has been declared safe by all the relevant regulatory bodies and until the market demands it,” Ruth Salmon, the group’s executive director, told AOL News.

Not So Fast

The science, as inventive as it is, may be ready to go, but there is a significant infestation of obstacles, beyond the FDA’s willingness to sign off on the gene modification, that must be overcome before these fast-growing fish start popping up on backyard grills.

During a happy hour conversation with AOL News at the annual International Food Technologies conference in Chicago last month, two food microbiologists, two research chefs and a market analyst talked about genetically modified animals.

Two thought the time had come to use this technology to produce cheaper, healthier and faster-to-market meat, poultry and fish. The other three predicted that they’d never see it in their lifetimes.

They knew of efforts by AquaBounty with the salmon, of two other labs that had jiggled DNA to get quick-growing jumbo shrimp and tilapia, and a third, somewhere on the New Hampshire or Maine coast, that had done something genetically to significantly shorten the seven years it takes lobsters to grow to a legal size.
Great advancements in fish science, they agree, and at least half of the group believed that the FDA was ready to approve engineered seafood. But absolutely no one thought the North American consumer and those in most of Europe were going to shell out money for genetically modified animals of any kind.

A food economics expert questioned by AOL News at the conference agreed.

“It would take a worldwide famine to get people with more than a grade school education to willingly eat any animal or fish concocted in a laboratory. They would have to be starving,” said the woman who worked on the United Nation’s hunger program.

Can FDA Regulate This New Science?

U.S. federal agencies attempt to regulate biotechnology using outdated statutes, written before biotech products ever came to market, said Kimbrell, the attorney for the Center for Food Safety.

“For example, FDA plans to regulate genetically engineered animals as ‘veterinary drugs,’ not living creatures, and its animal drug safety review was conceived before genetic engineering became a reality,” he said.

Kimbrell called the agency’s tests unacceptable and increasingly dysfunctional. He said the analytical methods used do not address the issues of potential allergenicity and toxicity, and are “grossly insufficient to determine the long-term, unforeseen consequences of eating and producing the (engineered) salmon.”

Not so, FDA spokesperson Siobhan DeLancey told AOLNews Wednesday.

The agency has the regulations and authority to appropriately regulate these genetically engineered fish, she said.

She didn’t explain why it had to be done under the “existing New Animal Drug paradigm” but added, that FDA has issued guidance to the Industry on precisely how it would “rigorously and scientifically evaluate genetically engineered animals.”

Kimbrell said his organization wants to halt the approval, commercialization or release of any new genetically engineered crops until they have been thoroughly tested and found safe for human health and the environment and said his group would consider litigation to stop it.
AquaBounty officials have said they will raise their fish in land-based facilities where ocean escapes are impossible.

This doesn’t appease all.

“What about the masses of corporations that will no doubt race to produce GM fish in the crowded open ocean facilities they already utilize for fish production?” asks Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.

Opposition to the approval of genetic engineering of fish is not new. Last year, of a coalition of 18 fisheries, consumer and food safety group shared their varied concerns on the use of the untried technology with the FDA.

Both Hauter and Kimbrell say those involved in food safety believe that if these genetically engineered fish get to market, they must be properly labeled so consumers will know what they’re really buying.

But AquaBounty says FDA cannot legally obligate the fish producer to label the product as anything other than Atlantic salmon. Anything else is voluntary.