Self-injury is deliberate harm, without suicidal intent, upon one's body to cope with emotional distress. It is more common than most people think. It should not be an issue left in the dark. It should be put in public awareness. Somehow it is "shameful" to talk about, but I think it is shameful to be left ignored and in the dark.

Experts claim serious side effects of flu shots amount to about one in a million - well this is what that one in a million looks like. This has freaked me out enough to bypass flu shots in the future. But what do I know - to each their own. A 25 year old woman in Ashburn, Virginia has come down with a severe debilitating neurological disorder days after receiving a seasonal flu vaccination.

Source the-scientist.com Image: Immune cell memory (Image from the-scientist.com)

A type of antibody long thought to have a minor role in immune system memory may actually be a key player, new findings suggest. Researchers tracked the antibody's function by imaging the immune system's B cells in the act of responding to a pathogen and developing into memory B cells, which can recognize an infectious agent years after first encountering it, they report in a study published online yesterday (October 25) in Nature Immunology.

Source insciences.org Image: LMU logo (Image from insciences.org)

Fragile X tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS) is a recently recognized condition, which is actually one of the most prevalent heritable neurodegenerative diseases. It is assumed that the condition is caused by deficiency for the protein Pur-alpha, which is essential for normal neural function. Structural studies undertaken by a team under the leadership of Dr. Dierk Niessing of the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Gene Center at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich have now determined the three-dimensional structure of Pur-alpha, and gained insights into the molecular function of the protein. The findings provide a possible basis for the development of an effective therapy for the disease. (PNAS Early Edition, 21 October 2009)

Source insciences.org Image: Duchenne muscular dystrophy (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

An international research team that includes The University of Western Australia has released details of a breakthrough which holds promise of a new therapeutic approach for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), an incurable muscle-wasting disease.

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Opioid analgesics should not be used in elderly patients with osteoarthritis even if their pain is severe, because the associated risks are so great, according to a review of previous studies.

“We found that pain reduction with opioid treatment was small to moderate. Increasing the dosage did not appear to result in further pain reduction,” lead author Dr. Eveline Nuesch, from the University of Bern, Switzerland, said in a statement. “However, patients taking opioids have large increases in risks of experiencing adverse effects and frequently stop taking opioid medications for this reason.”

Dr. John Cannell on Vitamin D: Vitamin D prevents osteoporosis, depression, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and even effects diabetes and obesity. Vitamin D is perhaps the single most underrated nutrient in the world of nutrition. That's probably because it's free: your body makes it when sunlight touches your skin. Drug companies can't sell you sunlight, so there's no promotion of its health benefits. Truth is, most people don't know the real story on vitamin D and health.

Disclose.tv Vitamin D - What The Pharmaceutical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know! Video

From Dr. Hillel Rosenfeld: "I made this video in honor of my loving wife, Susie, who is a three year breast cancer survivor. As we are so grateful for everyone's support and at the same time aware of how many people are affected by this disease, I decided to do my part to help enhance people's awareness of this."

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For now at least, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) does not recommend that nontraditional risk factors for coronary heart disease be used for patient assessment due to a lack of evidence to support their utility in individuals at intermediate risk.

Current USPSTF guidelines recommend using the Framingham risk score to identify persons at high risk (10-year risk > 20% for a major coronary heart disease event).

Source insciences.org Image of Autism Awareness Ribbon (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

About 90 percent of autism spectrum disorders have suspected genetic causes but few genes have been identified so far. Now a large international team, including six present and former University of Washington researchers, has identified several genetic links to autism, chief among them a variant of semaphorin 5A, a gene whose protein product controls nerve connections in the brain.

Laura Dominguez was only 16 years old when she suffered a spinal cord injury in a car accident that left her a paraplegic. Now she is starting to walk again with the help of Adult Stem Cells taken from her own body.

Source insciences.org Image of Skin melanoma (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

The Australian research published this week in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Medicinal Chemistry http://pubs.acs.org/toc/jmcmar/current describes a new radiopharmaceutical tracer that promises to give clearer pictures of melanoma and could lead to improved disease treatment.

Source insciences.org Image of Lethal malignant brain tumor-like protein - from Wikimedia Commons

Chemotherapy alone is just as effective as radiation / New positive prognostic factor found.

Initial chemotherapy alone after surgery is just as successful as initial radiation therapy for patients from whom a very malignant brain tumor (anaplastic glioma) was removed. With this treatment, the patients survive on average > 30 months without a recurrence. A study conducted by the Neurooncology Working Group of the German Cancer Society led by researchers from Heidelberg and Zürich showed that patients in primary therapy benefit to the same extent from chemotherapy alone as from radiation alone.

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Increased brain amyloid load is associated with an increased risk of progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer disease (AD), according to a report in the September 8th Neurology.

In a study involving 31 subjects with MCI, in vivo measurement of brain amyloid using 11C-PIB PET proved to be “a potential tool for providing prognostic information” on “increased risk of converting to AD,” Dr. Aren Okello from Imperial College London, London, UK told Reuters Health by email.

http://www.leadershipmedica.com/sommari/2006/numero_07/medicina/Cerbo/Ce...

Abstract
1990 marked the discovery of receptors, which could bind cannabis' active ingredient (THC) as if our body had been made to use cannabinoids. In 1992 researchers found that our body too produces a substance called "endocannabinoid" (anandamide) that can bind the same natural cannabinoid receptors, like the endorphins produced by our body, which act like morphine and heroine (diacetylmorphine) introduced from the outside. Many scientific works highlight the efficacy of cannabinoid treatment in various clinical conditions:
1) treatment of nausea and vomiting in oncological patients who undergo chemotherapy;
2) stimulation of the appetite in patients suffering from AIDS who present the wasting syndrome;

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Gary Falk, MD, MS, Professor of Medicine, Director, Center for Esophageal and Swallowing Disorders, Cleveland Clinic, discusses Barrett’s esophagus and its treatment in patients with dysplasia.

Summary:
1. Barrett’s esophagus with high-grade dysplasia has a 50% risk of cancer at 5 years.
2. The first management step is to have histological review of biopsies by a GI pathologist.

There is a proverb that says: It takes a village to raise a child. If it takes a village to raise a healthy child than what does it take to care for and raise a seriously ill child? It takes palliative care.

Walk With ME is a palliative care program for seriously ill children.

When your child is facing a serious illness, the whole family needs relief and comfort; from the symptoms and from the pain, both physical and emotional. The whole family needs to understand the condition and improve the ability to carry on with everyday life. Pediatric Palliative care is comfort care that focuses on increasing quality of life for children, from the unborn to early adulthood.

These days food comes to us in all manner of attractive packaging: fancy foils, bright boxes, and striking wrappers. But the plants that make up the bulk of our diets can be even more beautiful than the most cleverly designed package. This fact, often lost on modern day consumers, is celebrated in the second edition of The New Oxford Book of Food Plants by plant taxonomist John Vaughan and nutritionist Catherine Geissler.

Source the-scientist.com Image - Dr. Ildiko Lingvay and colleagues are the first in the U.S. to use magnetic resonance spectroscopy to measure the amount of pancreatic fat in humans.

DALLAS — Researchers have long suspected that overweight people tend to have large fat deposits in their pancreases, but they’ve been unable to confirm or calculate how much fat resides there because of the organ’s location.

Until now.

Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center are the first in the U.S. to use an imaging technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to measure the amount of pancreatic fat in humans. Though scientists worldwide already use MRS to investigate a number of diseases including breast cancer and epilepsy, the UT Southwestern group has successfully used the noninvasive method to measure pancreatic fat.

Source cell.com

Image Caption: Figure 1
Regenerative Potential of Cultured SCs from WT and ErbB2 Tumor Mammary Tissues
(A) Left: carmine-stained whole mount of typical outgrowths after injection of 100 cells from WT M2 mammospheres (“Transplanted”; fat pad filling: 50%). Right: anti-K5/K8 staining of paraffin-embedded tissues from the same outgrowths or the normal mammary gland (“Primary”).
(B) Hematoxylin and eosin staining of paraffin-embedded tissues from one tumor derived from the injection of 100 cells from ErbB2 tumor M2 mammospheres (“Transplanted”) and one spontaneous ErbB2 tumor (“Primary”).
(C) FACS distribution of PKHhigh, PKHlow, and PKHneg cells as indicated.
(D) M3 mammospheres obtained after replating of PKHhigh, PKHlow, and PKHneg cells.
(E) Whole mount (left) and anti-K5/K8 staining (right) of typical outgrowths after injection of cell dilutions corresponding to one WT PKHhigh cell (fat pad filling: 50%).
(F) GFP whole mount of M2 outgrowth (“Transplant II”; fat pad filling: 25%) after injection of 105 primary cells from a primary transplant of ten GFPposPKHhigh cells derived from the mammary gland of FVB GFP transgenic mice (“Transplant I”; fat pad filling: 30%).
(G) Hematoxylin and eosin staining of primary tumors or tumors obtained after injection of PKHhigh, PKHlow or PKHneg cells.

SUMMARY

Stem-like cells may be integral to the development and maintenance of human cancers. Direct proof is still lacking, mainly because of our poor understanding of the biological differences between normal and cancer stem cells (SCs). Using the ErbB2 transgenic model of breast cancer, we found that self-renewing divisions of cancer SCs are more frequent than their normal counterparts, unlimited and symmetric, thus contributing to increasing numbers of SCs in tumoral tissues. SCs with targeted mutation of the tumor suppressor p53 possess the same self-renewal properties as cancer SCs, and their number increases progressively in the p53 null premalignant mammary gland. Pharmacological reactivation of p53 correlates with restoration of asymmetric divisions in cancer SCs and tumor growth reduction, without significant effects on additional cancer cells. These data demonstrate that p53 regulates polarity of cell division in mammary SCs and suggest that loss of p53 favors symmetric divisions of cancer SCs, contributing to tumor growth.