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HHS Challenges Health Insurer Rate Increases

September 18, 2010 By

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius threatens that insurers seeking “unjustified” increases could be shut out of the health insurance exchanges in 2014.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is calling on health insurers to cease “misinformation and unjustified rate increases” that blame provisions of the Affordable Care Act for rising 2011 premiums.

In a Sept. 9 letter to Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, Sebelius said she wanted “AHIP’s members to be put on notice: the Administration, in partnership with states, will not tolerate unjustified rate hikes in the name of consumer protections.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business & Economy Tagged With: ,

Organic Market Seen To Double By 2012

September 3, 2010 By

The global sales of certified organic products is expected by the UN Conference on Trade and Development to increase to 52 billion euros by 2012, up nearly half from the 30 billion euros in 2006, in turn a 20 percent increase over the previous year.

The major markets are North America and Europe and South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. Exports from developing countries, including the Philippines, are increasing.

The attraction is that organics are priced higher, up to 150 percent more expensive than conventional products in Europe and 20 percent to 50 percent higher over non-organic products in Philippine supermarkets. [Read more...]

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Probiotic Use In Mothers Limits Eczema In Their Babies

July 22, 2010 By

Mothers who drank milk with a probiotic supplement during and after pregnancy were able to cut the incidence of eczema in their children by almost half, a new study published in the British Journal of Dermatology has shown.

The randomized, double-blind study, conducted by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), compared mothers who drank one glass of probiotic milk a day to women who were given a placebo. Use of the probiotic milk – which the mothers drank beginning at week 36 in their pregnancy up through to three months after birth — reduced the incidence of eczema by 40 percent in children up to age two, the researchers found. The study is a part of a larger research project at the university called the Prevention of Allergy Among Children in Trondheim, or PACT, an ongoing population-based intervention study in Norway focused on childhood allergy. [Read more...]

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Twin Study Shows Mediterranean-Style Diet Improves Heart Function

June 17, 2010 By

A study of twins shows that even with genes that put them at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, eating a Mediterranean-style diet can improve heart function, according to research reported in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal.

Using data from the Emory Twins Heart Study, researchers found that men eating a Mediterranean-style diet had greater heart rate variability (HRV) than those eating a Western-type diet. Heart rate variability refers to variation in the time interval between heart beats during everyday life – reduced HRV is a risk factor for coronary artery disease and sudden death.

“This means that the autonomic system controlling someone’s heart rate works better in people who eat a diet similar to a Mediterranean diet,” said Jun Dai, M.D., Ph.D., study author and assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Eating a Mediterranean-style diet — one characterized by low saturated fats and high in fish, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, olive oil, cereals and moderate alcohol consumption — reduces a person’s heart disease risk. But until now, the way the diet helps reduce the risk of coronary disease remains unknown. [Read more...]

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Static in Cellphone Study

May 30, 2010 By

The final results of a major international study of the potential link between cellphone use and cancer were published last week. The finding: Using a cellphone seems to protect against two types of brain tumors.

Even the researchers didn’t quite believe it.

The apparent shield of cellphone radiation, most likely fictitious, illustrates how hard it is to analyze, let alone quantify, the potential for a small elevated risk in a rare disease from a widespread, mundane activity.

“They found that ever having used a cellphone appeared to be protective [against] brain cancer,” says David O. Carpenter, director of the University at Albany’s Institute for Health and the Environment, in Albany, N.Y. “And that just simply makes no sense.”

The study was funded in part by the Mobile Manufacturers’ Forum and GSM Association, two wireless industry groups. The researchers had protections in place they say guarded their independence. Most criticisms of the study haven’t focused on the funding.

The researchers conducting the study, which was called Interphone, were flummoxed at nearly every turn. They tried to find a control group that matched participants who had suffered a brain tumor, but potential subjects were reluctant to participate, for various reasons. Then there were subtle behavioral differences between individuals with and without brain tumors. Internal squabbling over how to interpret the results delayed publication for so long that usage patterns of study participants didn’t match those of mobile users today.

The Interphone researchers acknowledged in their resulting paper, published online last week by the International Journal of Epidemiology, that something had probably gone wrong with the controls.

The study tracked cellphone use across 13 countries. It looked at a group of adults 30 to 59 years old who had been diagnosed with glioma or meningioma, types of brain tumors that can be either benign or malignant, between 2000 and 2004. They were compared with control subjects, people selected to match the individuals with tumors in terms of age, gender and place of residence.

Then both groups were interviewed extensively about their cellphone use. If the two groups matched in other ways, and the group with brain tumors used cellphones more frequently, that would suggest that cellphone use might have caused the tumors.

But they didn’t really match. For one thing, just 53% of people selected to participate as controls agreed, and a survey of those who declined showed that they were less likely to use cellphones than those who participated. That may have artificially raised cellphone use in the tumor-free control group and made mobile phones seem less dangerous than they are.

The result is a strange set of numbers. Many levels of cellphone use appeared to reduce the chance of developing a tumor. Only the people who talked on cellphones the most had a significantly greater chance of developing glioma—40% greater—than those who didn’t use cellphones.

Yet, as some of the study’s authors themselves pointed out, if those who never used cellphones—who were more prevalent among those with tumors—were excluded, and the lightest users were contrasted with the more avid ones, then the bizarre protective effect of cellphone use mostly disappeared, and the risk among the heaviest users was 82% greater.

Even in this analysis, the risk doesn’t steadily increase with use, which is what epidemiologists typically look for—a discernible dose-response relationship. “It’s certainly less compelling than if you saw some kind of graded response,” says David A. Savitz, director of the Disease Prevention and Public Health Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Disputes about how to interpret these numbers held up publication of the research, says Christopher Wild, director of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, which coordinated the study. The study was published more than six years after its conclusion, by which time cellphone use had both surged and changed.

“Interphone made more effort than most other studies to identify and quantify its own flaws,” says co-author Martine Vrijheid, a researcher at the agency. “It has thereby also attracted more attention to these flaws.”

A U.K. study under way will take a different approach, tracking cellphone users over time to see if heavy use is tied to a greater incidence of cancer. But the study will still need to enlist hundreds of thousands of volunteers to yield useful results, and it could take decades to spot any divergence in cancer rates.

Epidemiologists say such research may be difficult and expensive but is important.

“Even if you think it’s very, very unlikely that it’s a problem,” Dr. Savitz says, “it’s always worth some effort to make sure you haven’t done something really terrible” as a society by enabling widespread cellphone use. Such open questions, and the difficulty of solving them, he says, “keep epidemiologists in business for a long time.”  By Carl Bialik, Wall Street Journal

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With:

Crying While Cutting Onions

March 22, 2010 By

The body sensors that bring tears in your eyes when you’re cutting onions have been around for 500 million years, says a new study.

According to a report by Brandeis University scientists in Nature , whenever a person chokes on acrid cigarette smoke or feels like he/she is burning up from a mouthful of wasabi-laced sushi, the response is triggered by a primordial chemical sensor conserved across some 500 million years of animal evolution.

Such substances contain tissue-damaging and irritating chemicals. When you get a taste or waft of them, a protein found throughout your body is thought to sense these irritating chemicals and send signals to your nervous system. The result is pain, which results in the tears, reports Live Science.

In the new study, chemical-sensing protein, called TRAPA1, was found in flies. And, according to the boffins, the protein could date back millions of years to the common ancestor of all the varied creatures in the animal kingdom.

“While many aspects of other chemical senses like taste and smell have been independently invented multiple times over the course of animal evolution, the chemical sense that detects these reactive compounds is different,” said study author Paul Garrity, a biologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. “It uses a detector we have inherited in largely unaltered form from an organism that lived a half-billion years ago, an organism that is not only our ancestor, but the ancestor of every vertebrate and invertebrate alive today.”

Using a variety of bioinformatic methods (bioinformactics applies computer programs and statistic techniques to study biological data), Garrity and his colleagues reconstructed TRPA1′s family tree back some 700 million years.

They then used several computer programs to figure out how the proteins would relate to each other in terms of evolution.

“We discovered that a new branch split off the tree at least 500 million years ago, and that this new branch, the TRPA1 branch, appeared to have had all the features needed for chemical sensing even back then,” Garrity said. “Since that time, it appears that most animals, including humans, have maintained this same ancient system for detecting reactive chemicals.” The Times of India

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Obese Colon Cancer Survivors Face Poorer Prognosis

March 10, 2010 By

Colon cancer survivors who are moderately or severely obese face tougher survival odds following treatment compared with their normal-weight peers, a new study reveals.

The finding builds on prior research that established that being obese raises the risk for developing colon cancer in the first place.

“Previous studies have shown that obesity does influence the risk of developing colon cancer, but this study takes it one step further,” said study author Dr. Frank A. Sinicrope, a professor of medicine and oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “Because now we know that if you’re obese, you have a higher risk of cancer recurrence or death for patients who have established colon cancer.”

Sinicrope and his colleagues, whose work was funded in part by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, report their findings in the March 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

The American Cancer Society estimates that last year more than 106,000 Americans were newly diagnosed with colon cancer, while nearly 50,000 men and women died from the disease.

To explore a potential connection between obesity and colon cancer survival, the authors analyzed data concerning 4,381 men and women who had been diagnosed with either stage II or stage III colon cancer. All of the patients had undergone both surgical removal of their cancer and subsequent chemotherapy.

Based on body mass index (BMI), which is a measurement that takes into account weight and height, the researchers determined that approximately 20 percent of the patients were obese (above 30 on the BMI chart). Among that group, about seven in 10 patients were classified as “moderately obese” (BMI between 30 and 34.9), while slightly more than one-quarter were “very obese” (BMI of 35 and up).

About 37 percent of the patients were normal weight (BMI of 20 to 24.9), while a similar number were deemed overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9). Six percent were classified as underweight (BMI under 20).

Tracking all the cancer survivors for an average of eight years, Sinicrope and his associates observed that 36 percent went on to experience cancer recurrence, while 42 percent ultimately died.

Furthermore, the researchers found that, taken as a group, being either moderately or very obese was associated on average with a 19 percent increase in the risk for death, when compared with normal-weight cancer patients.

Although the pool of underweight patients was considerably smaller, the researchers found that the underweight group also had a much poorer survival rate than normal-weight patients. And while overweight patients actually seemed to fare slightly better (by 6 percent) than normal-weight survivors, Sinicrope indicated that more sophisticated obesity measurements that take into account muscle-mass ratios (not revealed by BMI) could yield slightly different results.

Gender differences were also apparent.

With a patient pool that was more or less evenly divided between men and women, the authors found that taken on their own, the most severely obese men faced the highest risk for cancer recurrence and death — tagged as a 35 percent increase, relative to normal-weight patients.

However, women on the lowest end of the obesity scale were linked to a 24 percent increased risk for death — a risk that actually dropped down to 11 percent as obesity rose.

“For now, we don’t really have a clear explanation for why the moderately obese women did worse than the very obese women,” said Sinicrope. “Menopausal status and hormone replacement therapy — which could be protective against colon cancer — could both be factors. But we don’t know which women were pre- or postmenopausal and which were taking this medication.”

As for what general underlying cause accounts for the obesity-survival risk connection, Sinicrope said the question remains unanswered. But he speculated that the association might result from the presence of higher insulin and insulin-like growth-factor-1 hormone levels in obese patients.

“We know the obese patients have higher levels of both these hormones, which have been associated with both obesity and colon cancer risk in the past,” he noted. “So we think that could be playing a role in this risk.”

A number of variables could explain the findings, said Dr. Joseph Martz, chief of the division of colorectal surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.

“Obesity is often associated with a higher likelihood for diabetes and other diseases, and overall secondary immune dysfunction. And since colon cancer is somewhat of an immune disease, that is going to be a driving factor,” he noted.

“There is also a good deal of data already regarding the supportive benefit of exercise and activity after colon cancer treatment in terms of prognosis,” Martz added. “So I think that goes along with the concept that obese individuals are less likely to be in shape. Also, there may be some inherent surgical limitations that could compromise the technical ability to achieve complete removal of the cancer and the potentially affected lymph node tissues when operating on an obese person. All of this may play a role.”

On a related front, a separate study published this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute provides fresh evidence that being obese does appear to be linked to a higher risk for colon cancer.

However, the research team — led by Peter T. Campbell of the epidemiology research program at the American Cancer Society — also found that the obesity-survival link does not seem to hold for all tumors, but only for those that are so-called “microsatellite stable.” Obese patients who had this common type of tumor had lower five-year survival rates than obese patients with “microsatellite-high” tumors, suggesting that obesity has a varying impact on prognosis, depending on the kind of colon cancer at hand. By Alan Mozes, Yahoo Daily News

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