Human embryonic stem cells will be tested as a treatment for blindness, a US company announced Monday in the second such clinical trial to examine how the controversial process works in people.

Just 12 adult patients will take part in the trial to see how the treatment using retinal cells derived from human embryonic stem cells affects patients with a common form of juvenile vision loss that can take hold in children as young as six.

The process has been tested on rats and mice and has been found to halt the progressive disease without causing tumors or other side effects, said chief scientific officer Bob Lanza at the biotech company Advanced Cell Technology.

‘These cells have been really performing quite spectacularly in the animals. If we can see that in the human patients we will hit a home run here,’ said Lanza.

The trial, run and funded by the California-based company ACT, was allowed to go ahead after the US Food and Drug Administration cleared its application to start a phase I study.

Another company, Geron Corp, began a similar trial in October, the first of its kind to test human embryonic stem cells in patients with spinal cord injuries.

Scientists say the use of […]

No Comments

The rules, intended to benefit consumers, vastly expand federal authority to direct the use of premiums collected by companies like Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and WellPoint. While some states have had such requirements, Monday’s announcement is the first such mandate by the federal government and grows out of the new national health care law.

‘Millions of Americans will get better value for their health insurance premium dollar,

No Comments

Children who experience a parental divorce are over twice as likely to suffer a stroke at some point in their lives, according to new research presented in New Orleans at The Gerontological Society of America’s (GSA) 63rd Annual Scientific Meeting.

This finding is based on a representative community sample of over 13,000 people from the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey. The data analysis was conducted by Esme Fuller-Thomson, PhD, and a team of colleagues at the University of Toronto.

‘We were very surprised that the association between parental divorce and stroke remained so strong even after we had adjusted for smoking, obesity, exercise and alcohol consumption,’ said Fuller-Thomson.

Of the 13,134 total study respondents, 10.4 percent had experienced parental divorce during their childhood, and 1.9 percent reported that they had been diagnosed with a stroke at some point in their lives. When adjusting for age, race and gender, the odds of stroke were approximately 2.2 times higher for those who had experienced parental divorce.

When other risk factors — including socioeconomic status, health behaviors, mental health, and other adverse childhood experiences — were controlled in a logistic regression analysis, the odds ratio of stroke for those who had experienced parental divorce remained significantly elevated.

No Comments

While a divided nation last Tuesday finally rallied around one bright shining moment of patriotic glory — President Obama’s awarding of the Medal of Honor to Afghan hero Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta — a popular right-wing Christian commentator sharply split opinions even within his own camp. He blasted the award as ‘feminized’ because it honors Giunta for saving his comrades rather than killing the enemy.

The Army’s official citation details how Giunta ‘exposed himself to withering enemy fire’ during a daring effort to engage the enemy and extract his wounded comrades from an ambush. But Bryan Fischer, a columnist for the American Family Association who has often provoked headlines and consternation with his commentaries, read the narrative as hardly the sort of thing American soldiers were once known for.

President Obama awards Medal of Honor to Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta’When we think of heroism in battle, we used the think of our boys storming the beaches of Normandy under withering fire, climbing the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc while enemy soldiers fired straight down on them, and tossing grenades into pill boxes to take out gun emplacements,’ wrote Fischer, director of issue analysis for the AFA, a longtime lobby on the Christian […]

No Comments

Recently, researchers in Finland made the discovery that some people’s bodies do not respond as expected to weight training, others don’t respond to endurance exercise and, in some lamentable cases, some don’t respond to either. In other words, there are those who just do not become fitter or stronger, no matter what exercise they undertake. To reach this conclusion, the researchers enrolled 175 sedentary adults in a 21-week exercise program. Some lifted weights twice a week. Others jogged or walked. Some did both. Before and after the program, the volunteers’ fitness and muscular strength were assessed. At the end of the 21 weeks, the results, published earlier this year in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, were mixed. In the combined strength-and-endurance-exercise program, the volunteers’ physiological improvement ranged from a negative 8 percent (meaning they became 8 percent less fit) to a positive 42 percent. The results were similar in the groups that undertook only strength or only endurance training. Some improved their strength enormously, some not at all. Others became aerobically fitter but not stronger, while still others showed no improvements in either area. Only a fortunate few became both fitter and more buff. As the researchers from […]

No Comments