The scientists have devised a method for giving drugs by inhalation to patients through a nebuliser, rather than the current approach of intravenous delivery.

The system could administer the treatment far more quickly than existing methods and without the harmful side effects associated with current systems, which can cause kidney damage.

It could also enable health authorities to deliver the drugs in smaller doses without diminution of benefit to patients.

Lung cancer and mesothelioma caused 4,147 deaths in Scotland in 2009, and deaths of women from the disease increased by 12% in the preceding decade, despite a corresponding fall of 20% among men.

Dr Chris Carter, a Senior Lecturer the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, led the research, partnered by Professor Alex Mullen and Dr Valerie Ferro. She said: “Increasing awareness of cancer risks and improvements in treatment do not alter the fact that it remains one of Scotland’s biggest killers and lung cancer is its most common form. This means that new, improved treatments are still essential.

“By delivering cisplatin, one of the most widely used drugs for lung cancer, in a vaporised form, we would be able to get it to the cancerous cells and avoid the damage to healthy cells which can be hugely debilitating to patients. It would make the treatment far less onerous for them and we hope it would help them to live longer.”

The research is an example of the pioneering work of the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences in developing new medicines for illnesses and conditions including infectious diseases, cancer, heart disease, and schizophrenia. An £8 million fundraising campaign is underway for the Institute’s new £36 million building, to expand and enhance its innovative research and education in medicine discovery, development and use.

The research received funding from Scottish Enterprise’s Proof of Concept Programme, which supports the pre-commercialisation of leading-edge technologies emerging from Scotland’s universities, research institutes and NHS Boards. It helps researchers to export their ideas and inventions from the lab to the global marketplace and create new sustainable technology businesses in Scotland or license the technology to Scottish companies.

Modern technology allows us to communicate in more ways than ever before, but this virtual communication usually lacks the body gestures so common in face-to-face interactions.

New research, published Oct. 12 in the online journal PLoS ONE, finds that the lack of gestural information from both speaker and listener limits successful communication in virtual environments.

Participants in the study played a communication game, in which one partner had to describe a word’s meaning to his partner so that the partner could guess the word.

Importantly, the partners could only interact through animated avatars; in some cases the avatars were controlled by virtual reality suits worn by the participants, while in other cases the avatars remained static throughout the game or acted out pre-recorded gestures.

The researchers found that the best performance was obtained when both avatars were able to move according to the motions of their owner. Specifically, they found that, in addition to the body language of the speaker being important, the body language of the listener impacted success at the task, providing evidence of the need for nonverbal feedback from listening partners in successful communication.

The researchers note that there are limitations to nonverbal communication in virtual reality environments. First, they found that participants move much less in a virtual environment than they do in the “real world.” They also found that the perspective of the camera in the virtual environment affected the results.

Lead author, Dr. Trevor Dodds maintains, “this research demonstrates that virtual reality technology can help us gain a greater understanding of the role of body gestures in communication. We show that body gestures carry extra information when communicating the meaning of words. Additionally, with virtual reality technology we have learned that body gestures from both the speaker and listener contribute to the successful communication of the meaning of words. These findings are also important for the development of virtual environments, with applications including medical training, urban planning, entertainment and telecommunication.”

Dr. Scott Owens of Camp Hill, urged patients and preventive health care advocates to speak out to preserve prostate cancer screenings and set aside last week’s U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommending an end to routine PSA tests.

“This decision is being made by a panel that does not include urologists or oncologists,” said Owens, practicing with a large Central PA urology group practice. “No new research was cited by the panel, which last considered PSA testing in 2009.”

The Central Pennsylvania doctor noted that recent studies have found that deaths from prostate cancer dropped 44 percent among screened men over a 14-year period, when compared with unscreened men, and found screening efficiency for prostate cancer similar to other cancers.

“PSAs are safe, non-invasive, painless, low in cost and they save lives,” Owens said. “In the current climate of rising health care costs, we should be looking for more preventive health practices like PSAs, not discouraging them.”

This same task force suggested mammograms were unnecessary for women ages 40-49 and recommended against teaching women breast self-exams, which was soundly rejected by Congress after public outcry. “If Congress hears a comparable ground swell of public opposition on this wrong-headed proposal, we can preserve greater access to preventive health care for men, too,” the urologist said.

By not performing routine PSAs, we as clinicians may be jeopardizing the health of men who are most at risk: those who are underinsured, live in rural areas (where health care is not readily available), have a family history of prostate cancer, and particularly African-Americans (who have the highest incidence of and death rates from prostate cancer). Prostate cancer remains the second-leading cause of cancer deaths among men. Early detection with serum PSA is the key to detect, diagnose and treat this disease,” said Owens.

UPAC was founded two years ago by Pennsylvania doctors who treat patients in integrated urology groups to educate policy makers, regulators, insurers and other key stakeholders, including patients and peers, about legislative and regulatory changes that will adversely affect the quality and accessibility to care provided to patients in Pennsylvania and those that will advance care in the Keystone State.

UPAC’s membership includes over 100 practicing urologists and scores of additional healthcare professionals, including radiation oncologists, pathologists, nurses and administrative staff. UPAC supports the integration of cancer care enabling physicians and other healthcare professionals of different disciplines to work together in a team approach to diagnose and treat the cancer patient. This team approach provides the greatest variety of therapeutic alternatives, ensuring that each patient receives the personalized treatment that is right for his or her disease.

Researchers combined the results from a recent Mayo Clinic study with six other studies from across the world and found that estrogen is protective for stroke before age 50. That is roughly the average age when women go through menopause.

“We were very surprised because these results were unexpected,” says study author Walter Rocca, M.D., an epidemiologist and neurologist at Mayo Clinic. “The old idea that estrogen is always a problem in the brain has to be corrected.” Estrogen can be a problem in older women, he explains, but in younger women, estrogen may be important to protect the brain from strokes.

The study has implications for women who experience premature (before age 40) or early menopause (before age 45) from natural causes or from ovary removal. Women in these groups should consider taking estrogen up to approximately age 50 to prevent stroke, Dr. Rocca says.

Ischemic stroke occurs as a result of an obstruction within a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain. According to the American Stroke Association, these types of strokes account for 87 percent of all stroke cases.

Co-authors of the study include: Brandon Grossardt, M.S.; Virginia Miller, Ph.D.; Lynne Shuster, M.D.; Robert Brown, Jr., M.D.

A potentially fatal lung disease, tuberculosis is estimated to cause 1.8 million deaths annually and especially impacts those with reduced immunity such as HIV-infected individuals, according to the World Health Organization.

In an interesting twist, people with darker skin traditionally have had a higher susceptibility to tuberculosis and areas of Africa lead the world with the highest infection rates. Scientists believe this may be partly due to the skin pigment melanin, which is more abundant in darker skin that shields the body from absorbing ultraviolet rays, but also reduces vitamin D production.

Vitamin D — a natural hormone, rather than a vitamin– is known to be instrumental in bone development, but also may protect against cancer and autoimmune diseases, as well as fight infections.

Published online Oct. 12 in the peer-reviewed journal, Science Translational Medicine, researchers examined the mechanisms that govern the immune system’s ability to kill or inhibit the growth of pathogens such as M. tuberculosis, the bacteria causing tuberculosis.

The team found that T-cells, which are white blood cells that play a central role in immunity, release a protein called interferon- that triggers communication between cells and directs the infected immune cells to attack the invading tuberculosis bacteria. However, this activation requires sufficient levels of vitamin D to be effective.

Researchers next tested serum taken from blood samples in healthy humans with and without sufficient vitamin D and found that the immune response was not triggered in serum with lower vitamin D levels, such as those found in African Americans. But, when adequate vitamin D was added to deficient serum, the immune response was effectively activated.

Scientists found that there was an 85 percent reduction of colony-forming tuberculosis bacteria in human macrophage cells that were effectively treated with interferon- in the presence of sufficient vitamin D.

“Over the centuries, vitamin D has intrinsically been used to treat tuberculosis. Sanatoriums dedicated to tuberculosis patients were traditionally placed in sunny locations that seemed to help patients — but no one knew why this worked,” said first study author Dr. Mario Fabri, who conducted the research at UCLA and is currently at the Department of Dermatology at the University of Cologne, Germany. “Our findings suggest that increasing vitamin D levels through supplementation may improve the immune response to infections such as tuberculosis.”

Miller, who lives in Westchester, a suburb of Chicago, described Sunday as “the longest day of my life”. On that day she not only completed the 26.2 mile (42.16km) course, half running and half walking, in 6h 25m, she was also delivered of a healthy 7.7lb (3.5kg) daughter June, thus giving her one-year-old son, Caleb, a baby sister.

While recovering in hospital on Monday, Miller told the Associated Press in an interview that she was “crazy about running”, and that doing the marathon that day “wasn’t anything out of the ordinary” for her as she had been running regularly up to that point anyway.

Miller has been running for over 10 years. She had already signed up for the Chicago Marathon, her eighth, when she discovered she was pregnant. On the advice of her doctor she half ran and half walked it, drank lots of fluids and ate along the way.

She said she heard people cheering her, “Go pregnant lady!” which was a nice surprise as she had been expecting to hear negative remarks.

Although unusual it is not unheard of, for women to run long distance while pregnant. Miller ran the Wisconsin marathon earlier this year while 17 weeks pregnant, and she also ran the Indianapolis marathon in 2009 while pregnant with her son.

The current women’s marathon world record holder, English-born Paula Radcliffe, trained while she was pregnant and went on to win the New York marathon in 2007 only 10 months after her baby was born. She won the Chicago marathon in 2002.

Although she took a season away from competition while pregnant, American long distance runner Kara Goucher kept up her training, running 80 miles a week at times.

The usual medical advice to women who want to continue running long distance while pregnant, is as long as you are fit and healthy and are already used to running long distance, then it should be ok. But as with all exercise during pregnancy, don’t try anything new or anything your body is not used to.

There is little if any research on running during pregnancy, perhaps because, as Dr Rod Jaques, who advised British Triathlon Team at the British Olympic Medical Centre for 17 years until he stepped down in 2007, said in an article published in Runner’s World in 2002, scientists would be hard pressed to find women willing to subject themselves to such experiments while pregnant.

Jaques, advises pregnant women to keep their heart rate at or below 140 bpm while running and to take plenty of fluids.

Other experts suggest avoid running in the heat, and never run to the point of exhaustion.

Another point to bear in mind is that pregnant women are at higher risk of injury because they have higher levels of relaxin, a hormone that relaxes joints and ligaments, so they should ease gently into a run and stretch properly afterwards.

Also, because the hips gradually get wider in pregnancy to prepare for birth, you have a higher chance of overpronating, where the feet roll excessively inwards. This can affect the biomechanics of the knee and hip, so it might also be a good idea to see a podiatrist and ask advice about fitting your shoes with extra cushioning or inserts to improve stability.

When asked if she had to do the day over, Miller said, “definitely again”.
Canadian Prescription Drugs
Written by Catharine Paddock PhD