People who sleep five hours or less a night may be at higher risk of developing high blood pressure or worsening already high blood pressure. There’s also an increased risk of high blood pressure for people who sleep between five and six hours a night, although that risk is not as high as it is for people who sleep five hours or less a night.

It’s thought that sleep helps your blood regulate stress hormones and helps your nervous system remain healthy. Over time, a lack of sleep could hurt your body’s ability to regulate stress hormones, leading to high blood pressure.

Sleeping seven to eight hours a night may play a role in the treatment and prevention of high blood pressure. Talk to your doctor for tips on getting better sleep, especially if you have high blood pressure.

The results, published in the Feb. 16 online edition of Science Translational Medicine, represent the first successful test of such a device and could help usher in a new era of telemedicine — delivering health care over a distance, Langer says.

“You could literally have a pharmacy on a chip,” says Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT. “You can do remote control delivery, you can do pulsatile drug delivery, and you can deliver multiple drugs.”

For the full report, click here.

CAVERTA RELAXES THE PENILE BLOOD VESSELS WHEN A MAN IS SEXUALLY STIMULATED. THIS ALLOWS BLOOD FLOW INTO THE PENIS, RESULTING IN AN ERECTION.

Caverta is not a hormone or aphrodisiac, it works only when a man is sexually stimulated.

Caverta should be taken about one hour before you plan to have sex. Beginning in about 30 minutes and lasts for up to 4 hours, Caverta tablet can help you get an erection if you are sexually excited. If you take Caverta after a high-fat meal may take a little longer to start working.

Caverta does not cure erectile dysfunction. Caverta does not protect you or your partner from getting sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-the virus that causes AIDS.

Like all medicines, Caverta (sildenafil citrate) can cause some side effects. These effects are usually mild to moderate and usually don’t last longer than a few hours. Some of these side effects are more likely to occur with higher doses.

The most common side effects of sildenafil citrate are headache, flushing of the face and upset stomach. Less common side effects that may occur are temporary changes in colour vision.

Do not take more Caverta than your doctor prescribes. If you think you need a larger dose of Caverta, check with your doctor. Caverta should not be used in individuals below 18 years of age.

The approach was found to increase drug efficacy by 200-fold in in vitro studies based on the ability of these nanomaterials to both protect the drug from degradation and concentrate it at key target sites, such as regions of the pancreas that contain the insulin-producing cells. The dramatic increase in efficacy also means that much smaller amounts of drugs would be needed for treatment, opening the possibility of significantly reduced toxic side effects, as well as lower treatment costs.

The research was led by Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber M.D., Ph.D. and Kaustabh Ghosh, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow at Children’s Hospital Boston. Their findings appear in the current issue of Nano Letters. Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston, and Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Ghosh is now an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside. Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellows, Umai Kanapathipillai and Netanel Korin, also contributed to the work, as did Jason McCarthy, Assistant Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and an Assistant in Chemistry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Type I diabetes, which often strikes children and young adults, is a debilitating disease in which the body’s immune system progressively destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. According to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, as many as 3 million Americans have the disease and some 30,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. The risk of developing Type I diabetes, which can lead to serious health complications such as kidney failure and blindness, can be predicted with 90 percent accuracy. But therapeutic intervention for people identified as high risk has been limited because many systemic treatments are barred from clinical use due to the severe side effects they produce when used at the high doses required to achieve a therapeutic response.

“The consequences of Type I diabetes are felt in both the people who live with the disease and in the terrible strain that treatment costs put on the economy,” said Ingber. “In keeping with our vision at the Wyss Institute, we hope that the programmable nanotherapy we have developed here will have a major positive impact on people’s lives in the future.”

Using nanoparticles that can be programmed to deliver drug or stem cell therapies to specific disease sites is an excellent alternative to systemic treatments because improved responses can be obtained with significantly lower therapeutic doses and hence, fewer side effects. To date, such nanotherapeutics have been developed primarily to treat cancer, since they can home in on the tumor via its leaky blood vessels. The challenge has been to develop ways to selectively deliver drugs to treat other diseases in which the tissues of interest are not as easily targeted. The research team addressed this problem by using a unique homing peptide molecule to create “smart” nanoparticles that can seek out and bind to the capillary blood vessels in the islets of the pancreas that feed the insulin-producing cells most at risk during disease onset.

The research was supported by the Wyss Institute and a SysCODE (Systems-Based Consortium for Organ Design and Engineering) grant from the National Institutes of Health that supports a group of seven clinical and academic institutions working to develop new ways to induce regeneration of organs, including the pancreas.

I HAVE chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Three months ago, I underwent an allogeneic stem-cell transplant, in which my wise, 52-year-old white blood cells were replaced by bewildered, low-functioning cells from an anonymous European donor. For the next seven months or so, until those cells mature, I have a newborn’simmunity; I am prey to illnesses like chickenpox, the measles and the flu.

These diseases are rarely fatal, unless you’re a newborn or someone with a suppressed immune system like me. My newborn buddies and I do have some protection, however: the rest of you.

Young babies, the immuno-compromised and people who get chemotherapy are not able to process most vaccinations. Live vaccines in particular, like those for measles and chickenpox, can make us sick. But if 75 percent to 95 percent of the population around us is vaccinated for a particular disease, the rest are protected through what is called herd immunity. In other words, your measles vaccine protects me against the measles.

It’s the reasoning of Clarence, the angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life”: If you are vaccinated, you won’t pass a disease on to someone else, who won’t pass it on to six more people, and on and on. To quote Clarence, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives.”

Unfortunately, vaccination rates for many diseases in Europe and in areas of the United States are falling. This is partly due to Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor who published a paper, now discredited, in 1998 in The Lancet tying childhood vaccines to autism. Celebrities like Jim Carrey have also taken a strong antivaccine view. As a result of these unwarranted fears, childhood diseases are returning. The rate of whooping cough cases has spiked over the past 20 years. In 1990, the incidence was 2 per 100,000 people; in 2000 it was 3; by last year, it had risen to nearly 10.

Measles cases are also increasing. For each year between 2001 and 2008, the median number of cases in the United States was 56. In the first six months of this year alone, there were more than 150 reported cases — the most since 1996. A vast majority of those who were sickened had not been vaccinated or had uncertain vaccination histories. Before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, 400 to 500 Americans died of measles every year.

During last year’s flu season there were 55,403 reported cases of influenza A and B; 116 children died of the disease. And now flu season is back.

The truth is, we should not get vaccinated for ourselves alone; we should do it for one another. Having cancer has taught me the value of living in a community. We assist the infirm, pay our taxes and donate to charity, and getting vaccinated — for the flu, for adult whooping cough, for pneumonia — is just another important societal responsibility. After all, we’re in the same herd.

The stem cells, taken from human embryos and grown in the lab, are of unprecedented quality and could be offered to researchers before the end of next year for eventual use in clinical trials.

Previous embryonic stem cell (ESC) trials in humans have used lower-quality “research grade” cells, which are manipulated and reclassified into “clinical grade”.

But the new ESCs, described as the “Holy Grail for regenerative medicine”, are of clinical quality from the moment they are donated by patients and do not require a costly and risky conversion.

They are also untainted by animal-derived products which have been used by other researchers to stimulate growth.

Two lines of stem cells, which can be converted into virtually any type of tissue in the body, have been donated to the UK Stem Cell Bank (UKSCB) by researchers from King’s College London.

Prof Peter Braude, a leading member of the team, said: “The key here is that these are clinical grade lines, they have been set up from the beginning as lines that do not contain animal products and have not got animal products coming into contact with them.”

While ESCs of similar quality could potentially have been cultured in secret by private researchers such as drug companies, these are the first of their kind to be developed for public health benefit.

A line of cells of a similar quality is being developed by Manchester University researchers and is expected to be donated to the stem cell bank next month.

At the UKSCB the cell lines will undergo rigorous testing to ensure they are safe and of a sufficient calibre for use in human trials, but it is hoped they will be a “seedstock” for future experiments.

Prof Braude said the achievement, recorded in the Cytotherapy journal, marked ten years of painstaking research.

He said: “Cells that are ready for clinical use have really been the Holy Grail of everybody in terms of regenerative medicine.

“There is still a long way to go … these are not ready for use now. They get handed over to the stem cell bank and they do exhaustive testing and a lot of lines are going to fail.”

The cells could be handed over to university scientists or private companies by the end of next year, though there would likely be a significant period of preparation by researchers before clinical trials actually began.

Dr Glyn Stacey, director of the UKSCB, said: “They will be released – I wouldn’t like to put a date on it, but some time next year.

“The moment we release them they are ready for use in a clinical trial.”

It is widely believed that ESCs could one day be used to generate healthy tissue to replace damaged cells throughout the body, and potentially form the basis of new treatments for conditions like heart disease and Parkinson’s.

ESCs are taken from frozen embryos the size of a pinhead, which are donated to researchers by IVF patients who have no further use for them and would otherwise have been discarded.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8938523/Gold-standard-stem-cells-created-by-British-scientists.html

Few politicians will ever admit they are wrong, so I salute health ministers who have finally capitulated to medical opinion and last month announced a U-turn on the cervical cancer vaccine that is given to 12- and 13-year-old girls.

Two pills a day for two years reduced the incidence of bowel cancer by 63% in a group of 861 at-risk patients, a study reported in The Lancet said.

Newcastle University’s Prof Sir John Burn, who led the study, said the evidence “seems overwhelmingly strong”.

Other experts said the findings added to a growing body of proof that aspirin could be used in the fight on cancer.

The study was conducted on 861 patients with Lynch syndrome, which affects one in every 1,000 people.

For full story, click here.

It says five or more daily portions should be enough to counteract culprit versions of a gene on chromosome 9, thought to be possessed by a fifth of people of European ancestry.

Healthy diets appeared to weaken its effect.

The US researchers investigated more than 27,000 people for their work.

The findings were published in Plos Medicine journal.

These participants came from from around the globe, including Europe, China and Latin America.

The results suggest that individuals with high risk 9p21 gene versions who consumed a diet packed with raw vegetables, fruits and berries had a similar risk of heart attack as those with a low-risk variant of the same gene.

For the complete article, click here.

“Nitric oxide does a variety of jobs,” explains Dr. Jason Allen of Duke University. “It tends to be antiatherogenic, which means that it helps prevent your arteries from becoming clogged. From start to finish, this is a 40-year process which depends on lifestyle.” That is, it’s a function of what you eat, how you exercise, and the stresses you are under.

Allen and colleagues have been studying the production of nitric oxide synthase, the enzyme that is responsible for producing nitric oxide. They have found that exercise increases production of the enzyme, which then increases the chances that the nitric oxide levels in the blood will increase and protect the artery lining.

The Duke researchers’ first report, which was released in November 2003, found that exercise especially helped those people who were labeled “at-risk” for heart disease. In blood samples taken after exercise, they had an “almost doubling of the brachial artery reactivity,” said Allen. This means that while exercise is beneficial for everyone, those with more risk factors may get extra benefit from exercise.

In terms of biology, it works like this: Extra time on the stairmaster helps boost the nitric oxide levels in the endothelium, the lining of artery walls. One of the initial effects of arteriosclerosis is damage to that lining, which exposes the vessels to harmful circulating cells. Nitric oxide released by the endothelium works to prevent red blood cells from sticking together, or aggregating, and attaching to the vessel wall. It can also work to control vascular tone, allowing the arteries to relax and stay clear.

Nitric oxide is now one of the heroes of human biology. But that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, nitric oxide was best known as that nasty smog-producing stuff that comes out of tailpipes. Then along came three scientists — Louis Ignarro, Robert Furchgott and Ferid Murad — whose pioneering work showing the good side of nitric oxide won them a Nobel Prize.

Scientists have taken this preliminary research and run with it in different directions. Probably the best known is Viagra. The drug increases the levels of nitric oxide and promotes smooth muscle relaxation. This, in turn, allows for extra blood flow to the penis, leading to erection.

Other nitric oxide-based products have made their way onto the market. Some are dietary supplements, such as Niteworks, a citrus-flavored powder developed by Herbalife and Ignarro. “We’ve done a lot of work to show that one does not have to take prescription drugs to be effective in treating cardiovascular disease,” says Ignarro. One can just engage in natural sorts of things — dietary supplements, exercise, diets that are low in fat, and so on. All of these things increase or enhance nitric acid production in the body; and the more nitric oxide that is produced, the more protection you have against cardiovascular disease.”

Researchers are continuing to study the possible uses of nitric oxide and its link to heart disease prevention. In the meantime, scientists recommend that you maximize nitric oxide production in your body by following routines that hopefully are already familiar to you: a low-fat diet, mild to moderate exercise, smoking cessation and better “cellular nutrition.” This includes consuming antioxidants like vitamins A and C, which prevent the breakdown (oxidation) of nitric oxide in the body. And popping a few extra vitamin Cs during this time of year certainly can’t hurt.