Health and Disability

However, the results of the new study suggest that one-time high-dose immunosuppressive therapy (HDIT), followed by autologous hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT), may lead to long-term remission for patients with RRMS.

The goal of HDIT/HCT is to remove all MS-causing cells from the body.

The therapy involves collecting a patient's blood-forming stem cells, before treating them with high-dose chemotherapy to destroy their immune system. The blood-forming stem cells are then returned to the patient, effectively "resetting" their immune system.

In 2014, Dr. Nash and colleagues reported the 3-year results of their phase II clinical trial for HDIT/HCT. The trial involved 24 patients with RRMS aged between 26 and 52. All patients were using currently available medications for their condition, but none were experiencing a reduction in relapses or disease progression.

For the trial - funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) - each patient received HDIT/HCT. The team found that almost 80 percent of patients experienced no relapses, worsening of disability, or new brain lesions in the 3 years following treatment.

In the new study, the researchers assessed the same group of patients 5 years after HDIT/HCT. They found that 69 percent of patients had still not experienced relapses, disability progression, or new brain lesions since the treatment.

Importantly, none of the patients had used any RRMS medications since treatment with HDIT/HCT.

Reported side effects of HDIT/HCT included cytopenias (a reduction in blood cells) and infections. Three patients died during the 5-year follow-up, but the researchers say that their deaths were not related to their treatment.

So McCreesh, of Wayne, Pa., spent that Friday afternoon at, of all places, the Philadelphia Home Show. She figured she can't change her father's diagnosis, but she can make it easier for him to stay at home, in the house McCreesh grew up in.

"We can see the house through his eyes and find ways to make it easier for him, not knowing what's ahead."

She was there for a presentation by Theresa Clement, an Ambler designer and aging-in-place specialist whose own father succumbed to Alzheimer's disease in September. Clement learned along the way that her line of work was surprisingly relevant to managing certain symptoms of the disease.

"If I had known at the start what I know now, my dad would have been able to live at home with my mom a year or so longer than he did," Clement said. So, consulting with experts including Dylan Wint, a neurologist and psychiatrist at the Cleveland Clinic, she's developed what she calls Design Prescription.

In a report published in the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Journals Library, the researchers showed that there is significant evidence to demonstrate that acupuncture provides more than a placebo effect.

Professor of Acupuncture Research, Hugh MacPherson, working with a team of scientists from the UK and US, brought together the results of 29 high quality clinical trials focused on patients treated with acupuncture and standard medical care.

In the majority of these trials, patients with chronic pain treated with acupuncture and standard medical care were tested against those who were provided with standard medical care alone, such as anti-inflammatory drugs and physiotherapy. The trials involved approximately 18,000 patients diagnosed with chronic pain of the neck, lower back, head, and knee.

The report shows that the addition of acupuncture compared to standard medical care alone significantly reduced the number of headaches and migraine attacks and reduced the severity of neck and lower back pain. It also showed that acupuncture reduced the pain and disability of osteoarthritis, which led to patients being less reliant on anti-inflammatory tablets to control pain.

In the same issue of the journal, researchers of the “HypnoLaus Study” investigated an older population (over the age of 65), with and without cognitive impairment. They performed sleep studies on these groups and found that the group with cognitive impairments had more sleep disturbances attributed to SDB.

“Although this does not necessarily mean that sleep apnea causes cognitive impairment in the elderly, it does highlight the association,” explained corresponding author Sanford Auerbach, MD, associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at BUSM and director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Boston Medical Center.

According to Auerbach the causal link between SDB /obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and cognitive impairment in the elderly is not entirely clear. “Nevertheless, it does raise the issue that clinicians evaluating OSA in the elderly should screen for cognitive impairments. Furthermore, clinicians evaluating cognitive impairment in the elderly should also screen their patients for sleep disturbance and OSA.”

“I never saw one of those suits again,” Mr. Snider, now 58, said in an interview in his kitchen here as he thumbed a yellowing photo he still has from the 1979 shoot. “It was just propaganda.”

Today Mr. Snider has tumors on his ribs, spine and skull — which he thinks resulted from his work on the crew, in the largest nuclear cleanup ever undertaken by the United States military.

Roughly 4,000 troops helped clean up the atoll between 1977 and 1980. Like Mr. Snider, most did not even wear shirts, let alone respirators. Hundreds say they are now plagued by health problems, including brittle bones, cancer and birth defects in their children. Many are already dead. Others are too sick to work.

The military says there is no connection between these illnesses and the cleanup. Radiation exposure during the work fell well below recommended thresholds, it says, and safety precautions were top notch. So the government refuses to pay for the veterans’ medical care.

Congress long ago recognized that troops were harmed by radiation on Enewetak during the original atomic tests, which occurred in the 1950s, and should be cared for and compensated. Still, it has failed to do the same for the men who cleaned up the toxic debris 20 years later. The disconnect continues a longstanding pattern in which the government has shrugged off responsibility for its nuclear mistakes.

On one cleanup after another, veterans have been denied care because shoddy or intentionally false radiation monitoring was later used as proof that there was no radiation exposure.

The link takes you to a pdf file that covers Michigan Medicaid in a 2 page overview. Kaiser has created these overviews for every state.

Specificallly, higher scores on the DII correlated with an almost 50 percent higher risk of hip fracture in white women younger than 63 years old. By contrast, women with the least inflammatory diets lost less bone density during the 6-year period than their high DII counterparts, even though they had overall lower bone mass when they enrolled in the study.

As the authors note, these findings suggest that a high-quality, anti-inflammatory diet - which is typically rich in fruit, vegetables, fish, whole grains, and nuts - may be especially important for younger white women.

"[Our study] suggests that as women age, healthy diets are impacting their bones. I think this gives us yet another reason to support the recommendations for a healthy diet in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans."

Tonya Orchard

Rebecca Jackson, the study's senior author and director of Ohio State's Center for Clinical and Translational Science, adds that their findings confirm previous studies, which have shown inflammatory factors to increase osteoporosis risk.

"By looking at the full diet rather than individual nutrients, these data provide a foundation for studying how components of the diet might interact to provide benefit and better inform women's health and lifestyle choices," Jackson says.

However, it is worth noting that the study did not associate a more inflammatory diet with a higher risk of fracture overall. On the contrary, lower-arm and total fracture risk were found to be slightly lower among women with higher DII scores.

Although the study was observational and could not establish causality, a possible explanation ventured by the authors is that women with lower inflammatory diets may exercise more and have a higher risk of falls as a consequence.

Both methods rely on engineering T cells—the hungry predator cells of the immune system—so they attack leukemic cells.

The British infants, ages 11 and 16 months, each had leukemia and had undergone previous treatments that failed, according to a description of their cases published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. Waseem Qasim, a physician and gene-therapy expert who led the tests, reported that both children remain in remission.

Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it works, but that just hasn’t been shown yet.”

The Science

Before we can get into how the specific combination of Vitamin CK3 kills the cancer, we must first get a better understanding of cancer cells.

From a biochemical point of view, cancer cells have some remarkable features:

• They are deficient in DNase activity
• They have low activities of antioxidant enzymes
• They show high rates of glycolysis
• And most of cancer cells accumulate Vitamin C

The inhibition of both alkaline DNase and acid DNase has been reported in non-necrotic cancer cells at early stages of experimental carcinogenesis. On the other hand, the reactivation of these enzymes has also been seenin the early stages of spontaneous and/or induced tumor cell death. Therefore, the use of compounds able to activate such endonucleases opens the possibility of a new therapeutic approach for cancer treatment…Vitamins C and K3 reactivate acid and alkaline DNases!

The big question is can that combination work with cancer?