Health Meaning

wildlife veterinarians working on distance Guafo island Chile discovered deadly heart damage, known as cardiomyopathy in five South American fur seal pups they had captured and placed in bags up to 30 minutes, a common practice to consider the smaller seals. As part of a biological survey during the island, researchers had caught and released fur seals for 4 years without deaths captivity, but the sudden cluster triggered an investigation. Necropsy revealed that the puppies had chronic hookworm infection, which worsened their immune system and sent their adrenal glands in hyperdrive. The adrenal glands produce stress hormones that speed up the heart, the team believes that the captivity and the trauma of bagging pushed the baby seals on the edge. The examinations, reported in Marine Mammal Science , revealed unmistakable lesions of cardiomyopathy in heart muscles of the puppies. Fur seals become the second marine mammals, after the dolphins, shown to develop heart disease after handling or captivity. Biologists suggest that field officers should look for signs of chronic infections in seals, such as discomfort or unusually rapid breathing before handling animals and risking further damage.

See Science . Shots

jump into the fray with a controversial topic, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues published a report this afternoon on how to handle incidental findings, discovered on the DNA of an individual, and other information related to health that arise during the hunt for something else. These potentially problematic results could include an individual's risk of certain cancers, the chances of transmitting a deadly disease to his children, or a chromosomal abnormality that could cause infertility. Incidental findings have attracted increasing attention and concern of late, particularly in genetics, where large genome scans turn unexpected information that nobody really knows what to do with.

The bioethics commission, chaired by Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, says that doctors, researchers and companies selling DNA tests need to reframe the way they think all this: of course, nobody knows what will be buried in a given gene sequence, that ancillary conclusions can be part should hardly be a surprise. Practitioners, the Commission contends, should be prepared to discuss this possibility with patients or research subjects. Gutmann wrote an article in this week's issue of Science summarizing the rationale for the recommendations.

The commission has left some of the stickier details to others, who conclusions to return, for example, and if biobanks have an obligation to provide fortuitous discoveries to people whose DNA they store and share. In general, the commission recommended that researchers, doctors and companies describe the findings to potential beneficiaries that might occur; that beneficiaries have a say if they get these results back; and research continues on incidental findings to determine how common certain variants of DNA, for example, could be in the general population. A full list of recommendations can be seen here with the full report.

The Committee suggests that the researchers had the right to exclude studies of people who do not want potentially lifesaving results returned to them and wondered if the researchers have a legal obligation to return some conclusions and can be sued if they do not.

The new report is the latest in a pile more and more to try to clarify the issue. This spring, a group of geneticists urged laboratories to actively seek incidental findings, as some genes predisposing to breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and return the results if people want it or not. That's something the bioethics commission did not support. As science that picks incidental findings moves fast, decision makers do what they can to follow.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare today asked prosecutors to investigate a possible violation criminal laws on the marketing of the drug by the Japanese subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis. The department says the company may have exaggerated the benefits of its hypertension drug valsartan.

Last July, Novartis Pharma has admitted that a former employee has created a conflict of interest in participating in clinical studies of valsartan, sold under the trade name Diovan led by five Japanese medical schools while concealing his affiliation with the company. Several studies have been retracted after investigations by the medical schools and the Ministry of Health turned to the manipulation of data which skewed the results. Novartis Pharma ads emphasized studies showing that the use of Diovan reduces risk of heart attack and stroke in patients better than hypertension replacement drugs. According to Japanese media reports, the potential fines could be just $ 20,000, but there is a small chance executives could face prison sentences.

Also today, Novartis Japan issued a statement in Japanese on its website acknowledging the investigation and apology "to patients, their families, health workers and citizens to have caused great anxiety and trouble. " As in previous statements, Novartis has pledged to cooperate fully with the authorities but did not acknowledge any wrongdoing.

[Please hit refresh on this page if the video is not playing and it is after 3 p.m. EDT. Leave your questions in the comment section at the bottom of the page. Our moderator will address them during the chat.]

Alternative medicine is a broad label that includes everything? herbal? remedies and acupuncture to massage and meditation. Although very popular, many of these potential therapies are poorly understood. There is much interest in combining alternative therapies with conventional medicine, but the best ways to do this are not clear. Researchers and doctors are making progress in the study of alternative therapies that can be combined with conventional treatments and ways to combine them to deal more effectively with a range of different diseases. What are the current plans for the integration of alternative and conventional medicine? What are the most promising alternative therapies being studied today? And are there alternative practices that are specifically known to be harmful in combination with conventional therapies?

Join us on Thursday, February 6 at 15 pm EST on this page for a live video chat with experts that reviews the recent progress at the intersection of alternative medicine and conventional.

Antiretroviral drugs can protect people against infection with HIV. But so-called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, only works if people take pills daily, which studies show they have trouble doing. Now the monkey experiments with an integrase inhibitor that is injected show how one shot protects against the AIDS virus for 11 weeks on average. The drug lasts even longer in humans, which may provide a promising new approach for PrEP.

For the complete story, see this week's issue of Science .

Many people with profound hearing loss were helped by devices called cochlear implants, but their audience is still far from normal. They often have trouble distinguishing different music sites, for example, or to hear a conversation in a noisy room. Now researchers have found a clever way to use cochlear implants to deliver new genes into the ear therapy which, in guinea pigs, significantly improves hearing.

The most common cause of hearing loss is the loss of tiny hair cells inside the cochlea, a spiral hollow structure in the inner ear that converts sound into nerve impulses. Hearing aids, which simply amplify sounds do not help people who have lost these hair cells. Thus, since the 1970s, more than 320,000 children and adults around the world who are deaf or severely hearing impaired have received cochlear implants. Instead of relying on hair cells, the device converts the sounds into electrical impulses and then uses electrodes to transmit these signals to the auditory nerve to the brain. But because the auditory nerve is buried in the tissue, the implants do not work as well as they could if the electrodes were closer to the nerve.

Some researchers have stimulated new neurons to grow inside the cochlea using a protein known as a growth factor. They injected growth factor in the inner ear, or a virus used to deliver a gene encoding it into cells. But growth factor pumped-in does not work for long, unless it is replenished. And viral gene therapy still not put the gene in the right cells, and has risks, as a reaction of the immune system to the virus.

Graduate student Jeremy Pinyon and colleagues in the laboratory of neurosciences Gary Housley at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, tested another type of gene therapy to deaf guinea pigs made with a drug that kill the hair cells in the cochlea. The researchers created DNA encoding a gene loops of a neurotrophic factor called brain-derived growth factor (BDNF). Upon insertion of a cochlear implant in animals, the team injected the cochlea with a solution of BDNF DNA and then used electrical impulses from the device to create pores in the cells that line the cochlea and cajole DNA to enter the cells. The loops also included a gene for green fluorescent protein so that the scientists could see whether the inserted DNA was taken up by the cells and translated into protein.

In the coming days, the cells began pumping BDNF, which, in turn, stimulated the growth of neurons long bristled at the electrodes. Two weeks after treatment, the researchers tested the sensitivity of the brain of animals were sounds of different frequencies. The results were closer to those of normal animals and much better than those seen in animals that had only a cochlear implant.

"We closed the neural gap," said Housley. Although it is difficult to accurately measure sound perception in guinea pigs, if applied in humans, "we hope that the tonal colors and the wealth will be improved," says Housley, whose team's report appears today ' hui in Science Translational Medicine .

One caveat is that the improved hearing did not last long cells stopped producing BDNF after about 6 weeks and new nerves began to die. DNA loops must be modified to work longer in the cells, Housley said. another potential problem is he does not know how long the cells that received DNA last before dying and ability of BDNF-how is lost. Housley believes that these problems can be solved, however, and he hopes to start a small clinical trial to test the procedure in people within 2 years.

"idea [of using BDNF] was around. But this study is the first to put this idea in collaboration with cochlear implants, "says neuroscientist Jeffrey Holt Hospital Medical School and Harvard Boston Children. The technique is "smart", says researcher hear Yehoash Raphael of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the group used a virus to insert the gene BDNF in the cochlear cells. Housley hope other implanted devices could also offer gene therapy, such as small electrical appliances sometimes inserted into the brain of patients with Parkinson's disease to relieve their symptoms.

Great fanfare accompanied the results of several large studies in recent years anti-HIV pill a day can keep the virus far. The interim guidelines of the Centers for Disease and Prevention supported the approach known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for individuals at high risk of being infected, and the US Food and Drug Administration also approved the strategy in 2012. But PrEP has not had much traction with young gays men, one of the highest risk groups in the US and elsewhere. And the number of new infections per year in the US has remained stubbornly at around 50,000 people for more than a decade.

now, the public health service of the United States released clinical guidelines finalized it hopes to carry out more widespread use of PrEP, many of the same so many take statins to reduce the risk of heart disease. The guidelines recommend daily use of the drug Truvada, which combines two antiretroviral-for sexually active men who have sex with men, heterosexual "at high risk" of infection "(including those with an infected partner HIV), and people who inject drugs. Although daily doses of Truvada costs about $ 13,000 per year, insurance plans generally cover the expense. the company that makes Truvada, Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City , California, also help the uninsured.

Placenta you and every person ever born for 9 months supported, for your lungs and kidneys and hormones while pumping you developed in the womb. Problems with this fabric disk-shaped mass can contribute to everything from premature births to diseases of middle age. But when a baby is born, hospitals usually throw away the placenta.

"It is the least understood human body," explains Alan Guttmacher, director of the National Child Health and Human Development Institute (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. "Much of the scientific community never think the placenta at all. "He and others hope to change that, however, by researchers and rallying donors, including other parts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), around a effort to better understand the organ underestimated. At a workshop of NICHD-sponsored last week, some 70 researchers prepared their ideas for what NICHD called human placenta Project, including ways to better monitor the placenta during pregnancy, and medications to strengthen when it moved.

forms of human placenta primarily from cells that develop from the outer layer of fetal cells that surround an early embryo. In early pregnancy, these trophoblasts invade the uterine wall and later develop a complex network of tiny projections called villi, which contain fetal blood vessels. This tree structure of the villi absorbs oxygen and nutrients from the maternal blood; waste from the fetus and carbon dioxide in the interval broadcast in maternal blood. Other specialized cells connect the placenta that develops on the umbilical cord. To avoid rejection by the immune system of the mother, the placenta uses various tricks, like not the expression of certain proteins. The role of the placenta during pregnancy is "an incredibly interesting biological time" that offers lessons for everything from cancer to organ transplantation, says physician-researcher Kimberly Leslie University of Iowa in Iowa City.

a malfunction, too small, or low placenta attached can kill the fetus of hunger, its growth stunted, and can also contribute to preeclampsia, or pregnancy-related high blood pressure, a condition that occurs in up to 6% of pregnancies and may necessitate premature delivery of a baby. adult diseases, too, from cardiovascular disease with insulin resistance, appear to be related to the morphology of the abnormal placenta poorly understood reasons.

during the recent strategic planning at the NICHD, the researchers concluded that the placenta deserved further study. "He came several times," said Guttmacher. He hopes that the Human Placenta project will focus on the understanding of both normal and abnormal placenta in real time during pregnancy. It will also look at possible interventions for example, a drug that stimulates the growth of an abnormally small placenta.

Some of the workshop hope adapt ultrasound and magnetic imaging resonance techniques now used to study the heart and brain to measure blood flow and oxygenation in the placenta. Inject tracers, however, can be a sensitive ethical territory. "People are very afraid to do things for pregnant women," said researcher placenta Nicholas Illsley, Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, at the meeting. Another idea is to search the bloodstream of the mother for cells and nucleic acids made by the placenta as a window into the function of the organ.

the researchers also thought to create a "placenta on a chip" that mimic the tissue in the laboratory or the development of molecular sensors that could monitor the placenta during pregnancy. "It sounds like science fiction, but if you show me an iPhone it 20 years ago, I would have said this was science fiction," said Yoel Sadovsky, of the Research Institute Magee- Women in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the meeting.

participants described some immediate objectives. one is to come up with standard definitions of normal and abnormal placenta. placenta morphology varies greatly, and those of a healthy pregnancy can still have visible defects, while those sick babies often look completely normal, says Brian Cox systems biologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Even before the NICHD meeting, the international community the placenta researchers had begun to coordinate their efforts by planning a site that list biobanks placenta and help match existing employees.

when the budget NICHD is flat, the money could be a limiting factor for human Placenta project, Guttmacher hopes will fund its first grants in 2016 and go for a decade or more. It provides that, in addition to set aside new money for the project, NICHD can give extra weight to high-quality grant applications focused on the placenta. NICHD's own contribution can only be "in the millions" of dollars, said Guttmacher. But he said that eight other NIH institutes have expressed interest in contributing, as the March of Dimes, an organization long focused on maternal and child health. After a long, a disposable body may get the attention it deserves

* Clarification, June 3, 2:25 p.m. :. An earlier version of this item incorrectly reported that NICHD do not expect to set aside funding Human Placenta project.