Health and Disability

Both studies were on patients receiving immunotherapy, which boosts the body's own defences to fight tumours.

One study, at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus in Paris, looked at 249 patients with lung or kidney cancer.

They showed those who had taken antibiotics, such as for dental infection, damaged their microbiome and were more likely to see tumours grow while on immunotherapy.

One species of bacteria in particular, Akkermansia muciniphila, was in 69% of patients that did respond compared with just a third of those who did not.

Boosting levels of A. muciniphila in mice seemed to also boost their response to immunotherapy.

Meanwhile, at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, 112 patients with advanced melanoma had their microbiome analysed.

Those that responded to therapy tended to have a richer, more diverse microbiome than those that did not.

Tissues samples showed there were more cancer-killing immune cells in the tumour of people with the beneficial bacteria.

The team then performed a trans-poo-sion, a transplant of faecal matter, from people to mice with melanoma.

Mice given bacteria from patients with the "good" mix of bacteria had slower-growing tumours than mice given "bad" bacteria.

Dr Jennifer Wargo, from Texas, told the BBC: "If you disrupt a patient's microbiome you may impair their ability to respond to cancer treatment."

She is planning clinical trials aimed at altering the microbiome in tandem with cancer treatment.

She said: "Our hypothesis is if we change to a more favourable microbiome, you just may be able to make patients respond better.

Starting from the time of President Harry Truman in 1945, policymakers from both parties have introduced dozens of plans to protect all or most Americans against the high costs of getting sick. Truman wanted to create a national health insurance fund run by the federal government (a pre-Medicare single-payer system). Over decades, Senator Edward Kennedy proposed multiple plans with varying designs. President Bill Clinton in 1993 advocated for government-regulated managed competition as a means to cover all Americans. But in 1974, President Richard Nixon advanced one of the most interesting proposals —introducing a number of novel ideas that have since been incorporated into many reform efforts.

Perhaps because of a childhood plagued by health problems (two of Nixon’s brothers died of tuberculosis, and he likely had a mild case himself), Nixon was deeply sympathetic to the health challenges facing Americans, and he came to believe in the necessity to cover everyone. As a Republican and advocate of limited government, however, Nixon sought narrow, targeted solutions to improve access to health care, relying as much as possible on private markets. The two main pillars of Nixon’s plan were an employer mandate and expanded coverage for the poor to “assure every American financial access to high quality health care.”

Nixon proposed that all employers be required to offer insurance to full-time employees. Employers and employees would share the premium “on a basis which would prevent excessive burdens on either,” a novel idea that would have extended coverage to a large proportion of working Americans. There would be a limit on total medical expenses per covered family, and the federal government would provide temporary subsidies to small and low-wage employers to offer employees affordable insurance.

As it turns out, you really can overdose on candy—or, more precisely, black licorice.

Days before the biggest candy eating holiday of the year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) encourages moderation if you enjoy snacking on the old fashioned favorite.

So, if you’re getting your stash ready for Halloween, here’s some advice from FDA:

If you’re 40 or older, eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could land you in the hospital with an irregular heart rhythm or arrhythmia.

FDA experts say black licorice contains the compound glycyrrhizin, which is the sweetening compound derived from licorice root. Glycyrrhizin can cause potassium levels in the body to fall. When that happens, some people experience abnormal heart rhythms, as well as high blood pressure, edema (swelling), lethargy, and congestive heart failure.

FDA’s Linda Katz, M.D., says last year the agency received a report of a black licorice aficionado who had a problem after eating the candy. And several medical journals have linked black licorice to health problems in people over 40, some of whom had a history of heart disease and/or high blood pressure.

“We managed to provoke an illusion: the illusion that the subject’s legs were being lightly tapped, when in fact the subject was actually being tapped on the back, above the spinal cord lesion,” explains Blanke, lead author of the study and holder of the Foundation Bertarelli Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics. “When we did this, the subjects also reported that their pain had diminished.”

Paraplegics suffer from no longer feeling their legs again, but the condition is often accompanied by neuropathic pain due to the spinal cord lesion. The patient feels pain originating from the legs, even though nothing else can be felt below the lesion. The sensation of pain is real and yet completely resistant to drug therapy. Now, virtual reality may be the key to providing pain relief for this type of pain, and the solution comes from restoring a sense of touch.

“We tapped the back of the subject near the shoulders and the subject experienced the illusion that the tapping originated from the paralyzed legs,” explains Polona Poeg, co-author of the study and now neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). “This is because the subject also received visual stimuli of dummy legs being tapped, viewed through the virtual reality headset, so the subject saw them immersively as his or her own legs.”

The experimental setup involves a pair of dummy legs, a camera, virtual reality goggles and two rods. The legs are filmed by a camera. In real-time, the video is relayed into virtual reality goggles worn by the paraplegic patient. The subject sees the dummy legs viewed from above, as if looking down on one’s owns legs. With this setup in place, the scientist taps the patient’s back with one rod while simultaneously tapping the dummy legs with the other.

Most people are familiar with type-1 and type-2 diabetes. Recently, though, a new type of diabetes has been identified: type-3c diabetes.

Type-1 diabetes is where the body’s immune system destroys the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas. It usually starts in childhood or early adulthood and almost always needs insulin treatment. Type-2 diabetes occurs when the pancreas can’t keep up with the insulin demand of the body. It is often associated with being overweight or obese and usually starts in middle or old age, although the age of onset is decreasing.

Type-3c diabetes is caused by damage to the pancreas from inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), tumors of the pancreas, or pancreatic surgery. This type of damage to the pancreas not only impairs the organ’s ability to produce insulin but also to produce the proteins needed to digest food (digestive enzymes) and other hormones.

However, our latest study has revealed that most cases of type-3c diabetes are being wrongly diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. Only 3% of the people in our sample—of more than 2 million—were correctly identified as having type-3c diabetes.

Small studies in specialist centers have found that most people with type-3c diabetes need insulin and, unlike with other diabetes types, can also benefit from taking digestive enzymes with food. These are taken as a tablet with meals and snacks.

Ketamine, a medication commonly used for pain relief and increasingly used for depression, may help alleviate migraine pain in patients who have not been helped by other treatments, suggests a study being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2017 annual meeting.

The study of 61 patients found that almost 75 percent experienced an improvement in their migraine intensity after a three- to seven-day course of inpatient treatment with ketamine. The drug is used to induce general anesthesia but also provides powerful pain control for patients with many painful conditions in lower doses than its anesthetic use.

Crossover Treatment find of the week...

https://goo.gl/uKfN9n

Research from the Universities of Dundee and Oxford has shown how combining the tetanus vaccine with a viral particle that normally affects cucumbers can be used to treat psoriasis and allergies, and may even protect against Alzheimer’s disease.

Scientists led by Dundee’s Dr John Foerster and Oxford’s Professor Martin Bachmann, were able to take the protein coat of cucumber mosaic virus and incorporate a tetanus vaccine-derived protein structure known to stimulate the immune system in order to create vaccines to treat multiple chronic diseases.

The vaccine showed positive results in models of psoriasis and cat allergy and was shown to raise antibody levels thought to be beneficial in Alzheimer’s disease. These vaccines can be either preventative, which is the hope for Alzheimer’s but also therapeutic, meaning they can cure a disease like psoriasis after it has already been established.

Almost one-quarter (24%) of patients with rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, or ankylosing spondylitis who switched from infliximab (Remicade) to its biosimilar CT-P13 discontinued the biosimilar by 6 months, primarily for subjective reasons, Dutch researchers found.

"The discontinuation rate of 24% in the transition group is much higher than expected," the authors commented.

"In our view, the reason for the substantial discontinuation rate in open-label studies is the awareness of both patients and physicians of the transition to the biosimilar," they wrote.

In recent surveys, some patients expressed concerns about the safety and efficacy of biosimilars, suggesting that the lower cost might mean decreased efficacy.

"Pretreatment expectancy" is a recognized influence in treatment outcomes. "Patients' own negative expectations may induce negative symptoms (hyperalgesia or adverse events) during treatment, the so-called nocebo response," the researchers observed. In addition, adverse events that occur following the transition could be incorrectly attributed by patients to the treatment even if they are independent of the medication.