Environmental Medicine News

The News Review:

- Is diabetes a result of ice age?
- Korean Scientists Make Stem-Cell Cloning Breakthrough
- New kidney test better elder mortality predictor, tests for cystatin
- CJ Online | HealthZone: Not just another headache 12/13/99

Is diabetes a result of ice age?
International Herald Tribune - May 19, 2005
Archaeological evidence suggests countless people froze to death, while others fled south. Sharon Moalem, an expert in evolutionary medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, says she believes that some people may have adapted to the extreme cold. High levels of blood glucose prevent cells and tissues from forming ice crystals, Moalem said. In other words, Type 1 diabetes would have prevented many of our ancestors from freezing to death. Today in Health & Science…
"As a Brit," he said, "this makes perfect sense to me. Robert Hegele, an expert on diabetes and genetics at the University of Western Ontario, said the theory was "interesting," but he added that it has a major shortcoming: It fails to address the autoimmune nature of the disease. Most doctors who treat diabetes are extremely skeptical about the idea. In a typical comment, one doctor said, referring to a dangerous complication of diabetes: "Are they kidding? Type 1 diabetes would result in severe ketoacidosis and early death. " Not necessarily, Moalem said in an interview. Back then, life expectancy was about 25 years for many people.

Korean Scientists Make Stem-Cell Cloning Breakthrough
Daily News Central - May 19, 2005
“This is a very important advance,” said Dr. Janet Rowley of the University of Chicago, a genetics specialist who helped co-author recent ethics guidelines on stem-cell research from the Institute of Medicine. “It’s surprising to me the amount of progress they’ve made in basically a year’s time. ” “This paper will be of major impact,” said stem-cell researcher Dr. Rudolph Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. “The argument that it will not work in humans will not be tenable after this…
” The work marks “a gigantic advance” for another reason, said neuroscientist Fred Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. By cloning stem cells from sick patients, scientists can watch, in a test tube, the very earliest origins of diseases like Alzheimer’s, insight that could point to other ways to prevent and treat illness, explained Gage, who plans to do some of that work. The Korean research “will be a tremendous boon to the investigation of the nature and biology of human disease,” he said. It’s also sure to revive international controversy over whether to ban all forms of human cloning, as the Bush administration wants — or to allow cloning for medical research, so-called therapeutic cloning that South Korea has committed by law to pursue. Culling stem cells destroys the days-old embryo harboring them, regardless of whether that embryo was cloned or left over in a fertility clinic. Because opponents argue that is the same as destroying life, President Bush has banned federally funded research on all but a handful of old embryonic stem-cell lines — and the South Korean work spotlights the frustration many U.

New kidney test better elder mortality predictor, tests for cystatin
Medical News Today - May 19, 2005
25 (4 votes)Article Opinions:. In the study, led by Michael Shlipak, MD, chief of the Department of General Internal Medicine at SFVAMC, the researchers determined that the level of serum cystatin was much more accurate than serum creatinine in predicting risk of death from all causes, and from cardiovascular disease in particular. The results of the study will be published in the May 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers measured levels of cystatin and creatinine in blood samples taken from 4,637 participants in the Cardiovascular Health Study, a national, long-term, longitudinal study of elderly people sponsored by the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute. They found that, for all participants, the higher the level of cystatin, the higher the risk of mortality. In comparison, the test for creatinine revealed the mortality risk only for those participants whose creatinine levels were in the top 10 percent of those measured…
“There are very few risk factors this predictive that we see in clinical research. ” In comparison, only the subgroup with the very highest levels of creatinine was identified as being at greater cardiovascular risk. The researchers believe the reason for the difference in accuracy is in the nature of the two proteins. Both the cystatin test and the creatinine test measure how efficiently the kidneys filter those respective proteins from the blood; the higher the protein level, the less efficient the kidney function. However, Shlipak observes, “creatinine is produced by muscle, so the levels in the body are largely determined by how much muscle mass you have. ” Elderly people have less muscle mass than younger people; women tend to have less muscle mass than men; and African Americans tend to have more muscle mass than Caucasians, he says. “So to take creatinine and attempt to figure out renal function, you have to integrate all these different parameters.

CJ Online | HealthZone: Not just another headache 12/13/99
Topeka Capital Journal - Topeka Capital Journal (subscription) - May 19, 2005
It’s usually a headache that recurs in the same location — a certain part of the head or the eye, said Dr. Eric Voth, an internal medicine physician with the Cotton-O’Neil Clinic who treats patients with migraines as part of the chronic pain spectrum. Some sufferers may experience an “aura,” or unusual visual disturbances, and see flashing lights, blind spots, loss of vision or tunnel vision. They also may be extremely sensitive to light. There’s usually some degree of nausea, sometimes vomiting, and the migraine may last for hours or days. Some patients also experience intermittent numbness in their face or a hand or an arm and may go to the emergency room, thinking they’re having a stroke, when it’s a migraine equivalent, Voth said…
Francis Family Medicine. If you have a sudden, severe headache pain unlike any headache you’ve ever had before that is not eased by the usual migraine treatment and is accompanied by neurological problems such as confusion, muscle weakness, or sudden cloudiness or total blackout of vision, you should get to an emergency room as soon as possible. About 26 million Americans suffer from migraines, according to the National Headache Foundation, a Chicago-based non-profit organization committed to raising public awareness about the debilitating nature of headaches. Many scientists believe that migraines are caused by a sequence of events that cause blood vessels in the brain to tighten, then relax. The distortion of the blood vessels causes nerve endings to transmit sensations of pain, resulting in the throbbing pain of a migraine. The dura mater, or endocranium, is a fibrous membrane covering the brain. It is this lining that doctors feel is the primary source of cranial nerves that get irritated, Franz said.