Health

In an unusual disease known as Bloom syndrome, patients exhibit an extremely high incidence of cancers in many tissues. In fact, some experts consider Bloom syndrome to be among the most cancer-prone hereditary diseases known. Although the illness is rare, it fascinates scientists since it can teach them more about how cancers arise and how the body normally suppresses them. Information gleaned from studies of the syndrome should provide insights into other forms of cancer, they say. Now, working with fruit flies on the gene which, when mutated, causes Bloom syndrome in humans, scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered more about the key mechanisms by which DNA inside cells is repaired.

Women diagnosed with a specific form of benign breast disease called atypical lobular hyperplasia (ALH) are at increased risk of developing breast cancer, but the risk is not the same for both breasts, researchers report this week. The findings, reported in the British medical journal The Lancet, challenge the long-held belief that the risk for breast cancer in women with this diagnosis was the same in both breasts, an assumption that could be used as an argument for double mastectomy to prevent cancer. Instead, the researchers found that women with this type of abnormality were three times more likely to develop breast cancer than are women without this diagnosis, and that three-fourths of subsequent breast cancers occurred in the same breast.

Medical investigators have demonstrated that a particular protein is important for the eye’s pupil to respond to light. The discovery may help scientists learn more about the eye’s role in non-visual functions such as the synchronization of the body’s internal, circadian clock. Reporting in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Science, the researchers say that mice that lack the two main types of photoreceptor cells in the retina ? rods and cones ? as well as proteins in the retina called cryptochromes, lose about 99 percent of their sensitivity to light.

An Australian study has found that a supplement derived from red clover causes early-stage prostate cancer cells to die in numbers five times greater than in an untreated control group. The findings may explain the mystery of why Asian men, who have pre-cancerous prostate cells at similar rates to men in Western countries, see a much smaller percentage of those cells become cancerous. One previously reported study, for example, finds that 1.8 percent of men in China develop prostate cancer versus 53.4 percent of U.S. males. These findings led researchers to consider dietary differences between the cultures, particularly isoflavones.

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis no longer must be considered a death sentence for infected individuals living in resource-poor nations, according to a study by a consortium of researchers led by Harvard Medical School’s Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change. The study, which appears in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, provides the first hard evidence that outpatient community care in poor, urban shantytowns can work for this most difficult to treat form of tuberculosis. The multidrug-resistant tuberculosis treatment model could ultimately help save hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide.

Social support may play a small but potentially important role in helping HIV-positive people adhere to the complicated schedules for taking their drug “cocktails” to control the virus that causes AIDS. A pilot study of primarily indigent black and Puerto Rican men and women at an HIV clinic in New York City suggested that individuals who had the social support they needed were more likely to take their medications. The pilot project was part of a larger study to assess the efficacy of peer support to enhance people’s adherence to their cocktail or Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy.

For over 30 years, physicians have assumed that any expectant mother with genital herpes lesions at delivery must deliver her baby by Caesarian section to minimize chances of transmission of the disease to the infant, although there was no clinical or research information supporting that practice. A study by University of Washington physicians confirms that Caesarian section is indeed the way to go to prevent transmission of HSV (herpes simplex virus).

More than one-fourth of adults over age 45 have abnormalities in the way their heart fills with blood and are at significantly increased risk for premature death, according to results of a study of 2,042 randomly selected residents of Olmsted County, Minn. The study is published in the Jan. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).