News - Medicine, Science and Technology

A new drug could prove at least twice as effective in treating Alzheimer’s disease as current medications and significantly slow the progression of dementia, researchers say. Alzheimer’s disease, affects an estimated 350,000 people in Britain and more than 26 million people worldwide.

The team at the University of Aberdeen (UK), working with TauRx Therapeutics - a Singapore-based company spun out of the University - developed a novel treatment based on an entirely new approach which targets the tangles, aggregates of abnormal fibres of tau protein forming inside nerve cells in the brain. These aggregates first destroy nerve cells critical for memory and then destroy neurons in other parts of the brain as the disease progresses.

They used Rember(TM) which, slows progression of the disease by up to 81 per cent. Sufferers taking the drug three times a day for 50 weeks showed a slower decline in blood flow to the parts of the memory that are vital to the memory. Rember(TM) is methylene blue which disrupts aggregation of tau protein.

A recent study conducted at University of Pittsburgh found that overweight and obese women needed to exercise about an hour a day, five days a week to sustain weight loss.
The women who exercised more and stuck to their diets kept off a 10% weight loss over two years, compared with others who maintained only 5%. The report, which appeared in the July 28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, studied 201 women during an intervention that spanned from 1999 to 2003. All the women were asked to consume 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day, and they were assigned to one of four groups: one that burned 1,000 calories a week, one that burned 2,000 calories a week, one that exercised moderately and one that exercised vigorously. Participants also attended group meetings where they learned how to change their diet and activity and received follow-up calls via telephone.

Six months later, all four groups had lost an average of 8% to 10% of their body weight. But it didn’t last. After two years, the average weight of all participants was only 5% lower than their initial weight, and there was no difference among the groups.

But some did better than average. About a quarter of the women who managed to sustain a 10% weight loss exercised more, adhered to better eating habits and engaged more often by phone with the intervention team. For them, exercise amounted to an average of expending 1,835 calories a week, or 275 minutes per week.

Being married to a smoker can significantly raise your risk of stroke, even if you don’t smoke yourself, new research shows. A Harvard University team looked at records of more than 16,000 people. Their study, due to be published in the September issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, found the risk rose by up to 72 percent for some nonsmokers.

If the person had never smoked, living with a smoker raised stroke risk by 42 percent. If he or she had smoked at some point, but gave up cigarettes, the increase in risk was even higher, at 72 percent. Being married to a former smoker did not increase risk, suggesting this extra risk would fall away if the partner stopped smoking. Stroke risk to smokers is well known, but there are fewer studies that have explored the risk from passive smoking. With the advent of smoking bans in public places, the home is now the most likely place for nonsmokers to breathe secondhand smoke.

In India almost 20,000 patients received Botox injections in the last year and it is expected to increase to almost one lakh in the future. Most users in the age group of 30 to 40 years in India, despite a marketing campaign and messages targetting people aged above that category. Mumbai and Delhi have been the major centres where the sale of Botox has been maximum.
The anti-wrinkle effects of the drug lasts for six to nine months and it costs about Rs 16,500 per vial. In addition to its cosmetic application, the drug has found application in treatment of ailments like cerebral palsy and other spastic muscle disorders.

The widely prescribed diabetes drug Rosiglitazone has been linked to a greater risk of heart attack and possibly death, in a new study. Pooled results of dozens of studies revealed a 43 percent higher risk of heart attack and a 64 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death, according to the review published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The drug is used to treat Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, which is linked to obesity. It is being marketed as Avandia by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, both as a standalone preparation and in combination with metformin (Avandamet).

Rosiglitazone is an anti-diabetic drug from the thiazolidinedione class. Like other thiazolidinediones, its mechanism of action is by activation of the intracellular receptor class of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs), specifically PPARγ. Rosiglitazone is a pure ligand of PPARγ, and has no PPARα-binding action. Apart from its effect on insulin resistance, it appears to have an anti-inflammatory effect: nuclear factor kappa-B (NFκB) levels fall and inhibitor (IκB) levels increase in patients on rosiglitazone.

Experts said the overall risk was small and cautioned people not to stop taking the drug on their own but to talk to their doctors. GlaxoSmithKline -which earns $3 billion a year from the drug - downplayed the report of heart risks, saying the analysis by Dr. Steven Nissen and statistician Kathy Wolski at the Cleveland Clinic is not definitive scientific proof.

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new drug for Parkinson’s disease, which will be available in patch form. The once-daily Neupro patch contains a drug called rotigotine. The drug patch, made by Schwarz Pharma AG, is being used for the the first time in the treatment of symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease results from the loss of dopamine-producing brain cells. Dopamine is crucial for the communication between cells that control muscle movement, which explains the trembling commonly seen in Parkinson’s patients. Rotigotine works by activating dopamine receptors in the brain, mimicking the neurotransmitter’s effect.

The most common side effects for Neupro include skin reactions at the patch site, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, drowsiness and insomnia, the FDA said. Most are typical with this class of drugs. Other potential safety concerns include sudden onset of sleep while engaged in activities such as driving or operating machinery, hallucinations and decreased blood pressure when standing up, the agency said.

An estimated 1 million people in the U.S. have Parkinson’s, with an additional 60,000 cases diagnosed each year.

British scientists are to launch the world’s first clinical trials of gene therapy to cure childhood blindness. Researchers will test the treatment on volunteers with a rare inherited form of blindness, in which a single defective gene causes the retina to degenerate and eventually stop working as the child grows up. The condition, called Leber’s congenital amaurosis (LCA), affects one in 80,000 in Britain. Children born with the defective gene are often completely blind by their 20s. If the trials are a success, it could revolutionise the treatment of more than 100 inherited forms of blindness that affect up to 30,000 people in Britain.

The retina is made up of a layer of cells called photoreceptors which detect light, convert it into electrical impulses and then transfer these impulses to the brain via the optic nerve. LCA is caused by mutations in the RPE65 gene that controls production of an enzyme responsible for the recycling of retinol, a chemical necessary for capturing light. This recycling takes place in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a supportive tissue underlying the layer of photoreceptor cells in the retina. If used retinol cannot be recycled, the photoreceptor cells run out of supplies and can no longer function. This results in severely impaired vision from a very young age. In this form of retinal degeneration the photoreceptor cells are present, but not functioning. The researchers aim to restore the activity in these cells and therefore restore vision by implanting healthy copies of the key gene into the RPE at the back of the eye. Patients taking part in the trial will be injected with a virus modified to carry a correct version of the faulty gene. Once inside the eye, the virus ferries the healthy gene into the cells that make up the retina, halting and even reversing the damage caused. The approach being evaluated in this clinical trial utilizes an adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector to deliver a normal copy of the RPE65 gene into the cells of the retina to help them to function normally.

The phase 1 trials are designed to assess the safety and efficacy of the treatment in 12 patients and will be carried out by the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and nearby Moorfields Eye Hospital. The researchers will know whether the treatment has worked in a few months.

An innovation by an Indian company could make computers more accessible to the common man. Chennai-based Novatium Solutions has produced a PC that costs Rs. 4500 (little over 100 dollars). Novatium is targeting 10 million users in the next five years for this innovative product, company CEO Alok Singh told PTI from Chennai. The company has already started a successful commercial pilot for its NetPC computer in Chennai, he said.

The company’s NetPC works on a “thin client” concept. This is a small box and does not contain any software or application. It is linked to a central server, which hosts all applications. There is no individual CPU but terminals are connected to a server installed in the locality. At Rs 350 a month, users get the same benefit of a personal computer, including the Internet in a much simpler way.