Health Updates

Study links teens' body image to suicide

2005-06-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Suicidal impulses and attempts are much more common in teenagers who think they are too fat or too thin, regardless of how much they actually weigh, a study found.

Using actual body size based on teens' reports of their height and weight, the researchers found that overall, overweight or underweight teens were only slightly more likely than normal-weight teens to have suicidal tendencies.

But teens who perceived themselves at either weight extreme -- very fat or really skinny -- were more than twice as likely as normal-weight teens to attempt or think about suicide.

The study was based on a nationally representative 2001 survey involving 13,601 students in ninth through 12th grade. The findings appear in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, published Monday.

About 19 percent said they had considered suicide in the previous year and about 9 percent said they had attempted it.

About 65 percent of students were in the normal-weight range, but only about 54 percent perceived themselves as "about the right weight." Some thought they weighed too much; others thought they were too thin.

"Suicide ideation was more likely even among students whose perceptions of body size deviated only slightly from 'about the right weight,"' said lead author Danice Eaton, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Because nearly half of the students perceived themselves as too thin or too heavy, "these results suggest that a sizable proportion of students may be at increased risk" for suicide, the researchers said.

Perceptions of being very overweight were linked with an increased risk for suicide attempts among whites. But black and Hispanic students who saw themselves as being very overweight were no more likely to say they had attempted suicide than blacks and Hispanics who thought they were about the right weight.

The link between perceptions of being very underweight and an increased risk for suicide attempts existed for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike.

The study did not determine which came first -- perceptions of extreme weight or suicidal tendencies. But the results suggest that extreme weight perceptions might be a suicide warning sign, the researchers said.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Alain Joffe of Johns Hopkins University said widespread media images of perfect bodies might help shape adolescent perceptions of normal.

But he said it is also possible that adolescents who are already concerned with body image pay more attention to media images.

Peru's 'miracle baby' doing well

2005-06-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Doctors on Thursday gave the world its first peek at 13-month-old Milagros Cerron since surgery to separate her fused legs in the second such successful operation on record to correct "mermaid syndrome."

Grasping a pink and green plastic toy dog, the bright-eyed baby was alert and tranquil while Dr. Luis Rubio flexed her toes and spoke to her softly.

Rubio on Thursday defended the unprecedented media coverage of Milagros' case after criticism from the regional dean of Peru's medical board that graphically televising her surgery live on Peru's Tuesday night news broadcasts violated medical ethics.

At the end of the 4 1/2 hour operation, Rubio held up the girl's legs in a V-shape for the cameras, displaying the line of stitches extending up from her heels to her inner thighs, and declared the surgery "a true success."

"This is an exceptional case. I don't know if we are going to see another one and the world has a right to be informed," Rubio told The Associated Press on Thursday.

He said that like many poor people in Peru's Andes, Milagros' parents -- young, humble and devoutly religious people -- at first saw her deformity as a punishment from God and had to be convinced that a medical solution existed.

Other babies born with congenital defects are often abandoned to die, Rubio said.

"Those are the beliefs in our Andean communities," he said. "In our Andes, Peruvians who do not have medical information do not know where they can turn to resolve a problem.

"If we do not educate ourselves, inform ourselves through the normal education systems, the press and communications media, we will not advance. What we cannot do is stay with our arms crossed and we are not going to be resigned to our poverty nor our misinformation."

Milagros -- whose name means "miracles" in Spanish -- was born with her legs fused together from her thighs to her ankles inside a seamless sack of skin and fat.

Rubio said Thursday, 28 hours after the operation, that her condition was satisfactory with full blood flow in each of her legs.

"The blood is reaching the tips of her toes with good pressure, constant temperature," he said, adding that the stitches would be removed in 10 days.

Rubio said his medical team hopes Milagros will be able to walk within two years, but cautioned that she will need years of corrective surgery to repair her sexual, digestive and other internal organs.

Among other problems, she has a deformed left kidney and a very small right one located very low in her body and her urinary tract, anus and genitals end in the same opening.

He said Tiffany Yorks, a 16-year-old American girl with the same condition, was the only other known case of surgical correction of the congenital defect, which occurs in one out of every 70,000 births and is almost always fatal within several days.

He said there is a third person living somewhere in Asia with the deformity, also known as "sirenomelia," but that details about the person's identity and circumstances were sketchy.

Milagros' mother, Sara Arauco, 20, said Thursday that her "heart is filled with joy" after her daughter's successful operation.

"I feel really good, seeing her smiling, seeing her playing quietly. She doesn't seem to feel any pain," she said. "I prayed to God that everything would turn out all right and that his blessing would be passed to the hands of the doctors. I have had a lot of faith."

Study: Calcium, Vitamin D may reduce PMS

2005-06-14T20:07:00.000-07:00

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Women searching for ways to ward off the anxiety and irritability caused by premenstrual syndrome may be able to find answers as nearby as their local supermarket.

A study published Monday finds that a diet rich in calcium and Vitamin D -- available in milk, cheese, yogurt and fortified orange juice -- appears to help women reduce the risk of PMS symptoms.

The findings support earlier research indicating calcium seems to help women cope with PMS. But the new study also suggests that when calcium is combined with enough vitamin D, it may help prevent PMS altogether.

"It seems that women who eat more foods high in calcium and vitamin D have less risk of experiencing PMS," said the study's lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson of the University of Massachusetts. "It's very exciting, and could end up being good news for many women out there."

She said, however, that the research is too preliminary to recommend diet changes for women in general and that more thorough studies are needed.

Researchers say women who ate four servings or more a day of a dairy product, including milk, were less likely to develop feelings of anxiety, loneliness, irritability, tearfulness and tension that characterize PMS.

Estimates are that 8 percent to 20 percent of women may have premenstrual syndrome.

The study compared the diets and supplement use over 10 years of 1,057 women, ages 27-44, who were diagnosed with PMS to 1,968 women who didn't have PMS. All the women were part of the large, long-running Nurses Health Study and answered food questionnaires and other health surveys in 1991, 1995 and 1999.

Bertone-Johnson said researchers were able to control for other factors that might affect PMS.

The study, which appears in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine, was supported by a grant from GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of calcium supplements, as well as grants from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services. A co-author, Adrianne Bendich, is an employee of GlaxoSmithKline, but the scientists said the company had no control over the study design or analysis.

Death toll climbs from Ebola-like fever

2005-06-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

LUANDA. Angola (Reuters) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that Angola's Marburg fever outbreak was not over as the death toll from the disease climbed.

"We've seen new cases in new municipalities that don't have obvious links to earlier cases of Marburg. We are very concerned about the situation," WHO spokesperson Aphaluck Bhatiasevi told Reuters by phone from northern Uige province, the epicenter of the outbreak.

"We are trying to do as much tracing as possible. But some of the cases we have seen in the last 10 days don't have a clear link to previous cases," she said. "The outbreak is not over."

The death toll in the worst-recorded outbreak from the rare hemorrhagic fever has risen during the past 10 days to 292 -- out of the 336 known cases -- from 277, officials said.

Overcoming cultural barriers remains the biggest obstacle in the battle to contain the Ebola-like disease, Deputy Health Minister Jose Van Dunem said.

"We're working hard on social mobilization in communities in Uige, trying to motivate a change of behavior," Van Dunem told Reuters.

"We have some cultural problems. People think if they don't bathe the dead body then they are not properly putting them to rest," he said in an interview.

The fever is spread by bodily fluids like blood, saliva, tears and sweat. There is no cure.

Experts say protection is essential when dealing with corpses. Bodily fluid secretions increase after death, meaning the corpses of Marburg victims are highly contagious.

Some six traditional healers were among the dead, Van Dunem said. But others had started changing their behavior to protect themselves.

"We are reaching the people in the communities more than before. But it is very challenging because they have a strong culture," he said.

Van Dunem said two Marburg patients being cared for in the isolation unit in Uige hospital could be among the few people known to have survived the disease.

"We've had the two cases there for a week and we're hopeful they're not going to die," he said.

A total of 123 people died in a Marburg epidemic in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998-2000.

Plan to train kids about eating healthy

2005-06-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Choose food portions no larger than your fist. Eat "go foods" -- like lowfat milk, oatmeal and veggies -- every day and save chips and other "whoa foods" for special occasions.

This advice is part of a new government campaign to use kid-friendly nutrition tips to prevent preteens from getting fat.

Simple training did get 8- to 10-year-olds to eat healthier for three years, concludes the biggest study ever to track the impact of childhood nutrition education. But there's more work to do: Snacks, desserts and pizza still made up an astonishing one-third of those youngsters' diets.

Nevertheless, "kids can learn to take small, positive, healthy steps," said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, chief of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which sponsored the research and on Wednesday begins the "We Can!" program to spread the results. "It suggests that kids who learn to eat healthy during their adolescence will continue to eat healthy."

One key: Don't forbid the foods that children find yummy, but teach balance. For example, eating a healthy breakfast is important for staying fit. Unsweetened whole-grain cereal, like oatmeal, is a go-food choice. Prefer waffles or pancakes? Those are "slow foods," perhaps for the weekend. Croissants, doughnuts or sweetened breakfast cereals are "whoa foods," maybe for a holiday or vacation treat.

Getting grade-school children in the habit of drinking lowfat milk instead of whole milk, eating an apple a day, or choosing carrot sticks or raisins as an after-school snack makes them more likely to continue those habits when they're old enough to choose foods on their own, said Northwestern University dietitian Linda Van Horn, who led the new study.

But children must have access to tasty, healthy choices, stressed Van Horn: If only hot dogs are served at the baseball game, that's what they'll eat. Noses turn up when the only vegetable choice at the school lunch program is mushy beans.

Already, the nation has 9 million children ages 6 to 16 who are overweight, according to federal health officials. Overweight children usually grow into overweight adults, at increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, asthma and other disorders -- not to mention the childhood turmoil of being teased and left out of sports and other fun activities.

The new study tracked 595 children, half of whom had received, with their parents, special education on how to make healthier food choices. Three years later, kids who had attended the nutrition classes were eating more "go" foods than their peers in every food group except fruit, Van Horn reports in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. They also ate fewer "whoa" foods, with one exception: pizza. And for desserts, they were more likely to pick lower-fat options like frozen yogurt.

Still, neither group ate enough fruits or vegetables, and the high amount of daily snacking and pizza was stunning, said Van Horn.

The $2.6 million "We Can!" campaign aims to extend those food lessons -- along with encouraging more physical activity -- to all 8- to 13-year-olds.

It's a two-pronged program. First, more than 35 communities so far have signed up to offer youth and parent education materials, or to offer hands-on activities such as summer camps that teach nutrition and afterschool programs that promise healthy snacks.

Second, a government Web site aimed at parents -- http://wecan.nhlbi.nih.gov -- provides education on ways to fight obesity, including such tips as:

Make it easier to get healthy snacks and harder to get unhealthy ones. Don't keep chips in the house, but keep a bowl of fruit within reach on the kitchen counter. Choose a checkout line without the candy display.

Limit TV or video games to two hours or less a day. Don't just sit and watch -- challenge your children to a jumping-jack contest during commercials.

Go on an after-dinner family walk or bike ride; make outdoor play, or visits to gyms or recreation centers, routine.

Many children live in communities where traffic, distance or crime make outdoor play or getting to a park or gym impossible. The National Institutes of Health is bringing together researchers Wednesday to debate how much a child's environment increases the risk for obesity, and how to help.

Association offers advice on buying insurance

2005-05-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

A national association of state insurance regulators is helping to arm service members and their families with information for making wise decisions about insurance needs, and to make it easier to file complaints against agents and companies.

Buying the right kind of insurance is challenging enough under the best of circumstances, but military life brings additional uncertainties and circumstances, according to officials with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

The “Insurance Issues for Military Personnel” section on the association’s Web site helps troops assess their needs for different types of insurance.

Their new online brochure “Life Insurance for Military Personnel,” lists questions to consider when thinking about shopping for life insurance and offers information about consumer rights, along with a list of phone numbers for insurance regulators in every U.S. state and territory. It also links to the Pentagon’s list of actions taken by installation commanders against life insurance companies.

The brochure lists “red flags” such as:

• Non-military or former military personnel acting as investment or financial advisors in a group or classroom setting.

• Agents selling without a valid license from a state insurance department.

• Agents selling on base without authorization.

For decades, concerns have been raised about some companies taking advantage of troops by selling them expensive life insurance products they don’t need.

Some state regulators have taken actions, such as Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, who in January ordered American Amicable Life Insurance Company of Texas to refund $1.3 million in life insurance premiums to soldiers who were solicited and sold term life insurance policies while they were in a training brigade at Fort Benning, Ga., in 2002.

NAIC developed the resources for military families in conjunction with state insurance departments, the Pentagon, the Department of Labor, and the Better Business Bureau.

Bill aims to create national health insurance market

2005-05-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

House Speaker Dennis Hastert endorsed legislation to allow individuals to buy health insurance from any state, regardless of where they live.

The legislation would lower the cost of health insurance by allowing individuals to get around their state's coverage mandates and pick a less-comprehensive plan, says Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., the bill's sponsor.

These mandates add thousands of dollars to the cost of health insurance in some states, bill supporters say.

"Where you live should not determine whether or not you can afford a health insurance policy," says Angela Hunter, federal affairs director for the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.

Shadegg says his bill would "create a national market for health insurance." This additional competition would keep a lid on premiums, he says.

Under the legislation, any insurer that meets the regulatory requirements of its home state could sell in any state.

Senate sponsor Jim DeMint, R-S.C., says the bill is a "great start" toward the day when every individual will have their own "personal, portable and permanent" health insurance. Most people now are covered by employer-based plans.

Hastert, whose support boosts the bill's chances, calls the legislation "one of the more innovative ideas" for the health insurance market.

Online auctioneer eBay agrees. The legislation would allow consumers to go online and find more choices for health insurance just like eBay gives consumers more choices for a whole host of products, company officials say.

The legislation also would help the 400,000 Americans who make a living selling on eBay, says Brian Bieron, the company's senior director of federal government affairs. These individuals now have a tough time finding affordable insurance.

"That is a problem that has to be solved," Bieron says.

Two small business organizations, the National Federation of Independent Business and the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, also have endorsed the legislation. So has Golden Rule Insurance Co., which specializes in the individual market.

Fat People, Smokers Should Pay More For Health Insurance

2005-05-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

LAVAL, QUE - A majority of Canadian employees surveyed believe people who engage in unhealthy habits should pay more for their healthcare coverage.

In an Ipsos-Reid poll of 1,500 employees with supplementary health programs, 54 per cent said the cost of employee health benefit plans should be higher for employees who smoke, don't exercise or are seriously overweight. The survey was commissioned by Sanofi-Aventis, the world's third-largest pharmaceutical company.

Around 70 per cent of the respondents said that employees who do not smoke should pay less for coverage.

About 63 per cent agreed the government should promote healthy living by providing tax credits or deductions for personal gym memberships or recreational fees.

Almost 70 per cent said they'd be willing to pay a small fee – such as $5 – for some publicly funded services, if the money were invested in services such as home or community care, palliative care or costly drugs.

The survey suggests services people would be willing to pay for include a visit to the emergency room, to the doctor's office, or for a day in the hospital.

First Graders' Behavior Problems Linked to Caffeinated Cola

2005-05-24T17:16:00.000-07:00

ATLANTA, May 23-Children who are inattentive, restless, and having difficulty sleeping may be reacting to the caffeinated cola drinks in the school vending machine or the home refrigerator.

First-graders have more behavior problems on the days that they are exposed to caffeinated colas than on the days that they have caffeine-free drinks, according to Chicago investigators who reported today to the American Psychiatric Association meeting here.

The findings may provide a simple answer to some instances of children's hyperactivity, according to principal investigator Alan R. Hirsch, M.D., director of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation and an assistant professor of both neurology and psychiatry at Rush Medical College.

"Exposure to caffeinated cola drinks impaired children's learning ability by causing restlessness, hyperactivity, and inattention," he said. "On the days that the children were drinking caffeinated drinks, their Connors scores increased an average of 5.5 points compared to the days that they were only drinking caffeine-free drinks." Dr. Hirsch is the director of the Smell and Taste. The Connors test is a standard screen for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Twenty first-grade children, 10 boys and 10 girls, participated in the study. In three-hour time segments that occurred sequentially over a two-week study period, the students consumed up to 12 ounces of either a caffeinated cola drink or a caffeine-free cola drink. The children were given 10 dimes with which they could "buy" repeat servings of their designated drink for the study session after an initial serving of two ounces. At the end of each session, the children's teacher, who did not know the purpose of the study or the type of soda each child consumed, assessed each child's behavior with a modified Connors test.

On the study days, the children consumed an average of 7.55 ounces of caffeine-free cola and 9.45 ounces of caffeinated cola (p = 0.03). On the days without caffeine, the children had an average modified Connors score of 1.55. On the days they drank caffeinated cola, the children had an average score of 7.00 (p = 0.002). Among the individual students, 60% had elevated Connors scores on the caffeine days, while 15% had higher scores on the caffeine-free days (p = 0.008). The remaining 25% had consumed the maximum servings of both types of drinks and were not included in the analysis.

After adjusting for non-caffeine related factors, such as the number of ounces consumed and the amount of sugar in the drinks, the scores were still higher on the caffeine days (p = 0.015).

"Children ages six to 11 years old conservatively drink an average of seven to eight ounces of carbonated soda per day," said Dr. Hirsch. As the findings show, "this can have a substantial impact on children's behavior in school."

"These findings are consistent with prior researchers' results," said David W. Fassler, M.D., in a comment seeking an independent perspective. "Although the sample size is small, the authors demonstrated that behavior difficulties can be caused by caffeinated beverages." Dr. Fassler is a clinical professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and a member of the American Psychiatric Association's board of trustees.

"The study shows why it is so important to completely evaluate young children who are having behavioral and emotional problems, and to review the child's dietary habits, including caffeinated beverages, as part of the evaluation," Dr. Fassler said. Although questions about caffeine consumption are typically part of the screen for anxiety disorders, pediatric insomnia, and ADHD, the findings are a reminder not to neglect this part of the evaluation.

Health Watch: Battling Mesothelioma

2005-05-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

Ben Swann-KFOX Morning News Anchor/Reporter

Mesothelioma is a rare, but devastating cancer diagnosed in approximately 3,000 people each year in the U.S., mostly in men. Researchers now have encouraging news that a combination of surgery and radiation treatment is extending some patient's lives.

Countless U.S. workers were exposed to asbestos before it was banned in the early 1980s. Two years ago, when his doctors suspected he developed Mesothelioma as a result of being exposed to asbestos, John Ross and his wife Dorothy weren't given many treatment options.

Dorothy Ross-Wife of Cancer Patient: "So few people know about Mesothelioma, really. And it's a deadly disease. It is deadly."

That's when Mr. Ross enrolled in a clinical trial at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston treating Mesothelioma patients with a combination of surgery followed by intensity modulated radiation therapy or IMRT.

Dr. Craig Stevens-M. D. Anderson Cancer Center: "What we've done here at M. D. Anderson has actually been to develop some treatments that would probably work quite well in early stage disease."

Mesothelioma develops in the lining between the lungs and the chest wall. It can invade the lungs, abdomen and lining of the heart. Surgeons remove the affected lung and nearby tissue and implant titanium clips along the chest wall to mark where tumors were found. The clips are used to create computer-generated images and give doctors more exact targets for radiation therapy. Using IMRT, targeted doses of radiation are delivered only to the areas where the disease is found, sparing nearby organs, such as the lung and heart. In the clinical trial, Dr. Stevens says IMRT following surgery has greatly reduced the number of recurrences.

Dr. Craig Stevens-M. D. Anderson Cancer Center: "This is in contrast with historical series that used surgery alone that has as high as 80% recurrence right in the area where the tumor was originally."

Dr. Stevens reports a 55% three-year survival rate. Typically patients diagnosed with Mesothelioma are only given months to live. Dr. Stevens and his colleagues are continuing their research by now giving patients chemotherapy before surgery to prevent the disease from spreading to other organs.

Now that treatment options are lengthening and improving quality of life for people with Mesothelioma, researchers urge those with previous asbestos exposure to talk with their doctor about screening options.

Koreans Say They Cloned Embryos for Stem Cells

2005-05-19T19:18:00.000-07:00

Scientists in South Korea reported making nearly a dozen cloned human embryos that are genetic twins of patients with various medical problems and have isolated from those embryos batches of stem cells with the potential to replace failing tissues in those patients.

The experiments mark a significant advance in therapeutic cloning, the fast-paced but controversial field that aims to make customized heart tissues for heart attack patients, nerves for patients with spinal cord injuries and a host of other laboratory-grown spare parts genetically tailored to the patients who need them.

The single previous claim that stem cells had been derived from a cloned human embryo, reported last year by the same team at Seoul National University's College of Veterinary Medicine, left some scientists doubting the results. Moreover, the process appeared to be hopelessly inefficient, requiring almost 250 human eggs extracted from female donors to get just one cloned embryo with its precious cache of stem cells.

In the new experiments, described in yesterday's online version of the journal Science, the team needed only 17 eggs on average to make each batch of stem cells, which have the capacity to develop into any type of tissue. That means just a single egg-retrieval procedure of the sort used routinely in fertility clinics is now adequate to produce a colony of personalized cells with the potential to treat a wide spectrum of diseases.

If therapeutic cloning can indeed be achieved with the same efficiency as such a widely accepted medical procedure, it would deeply undercut one of the major ethics arguments against it: that it would require egg donations by countless women -- at some risk -- to make enough embryos and stem cells to be medically useful.

"I think this paper will have enormous impact on the political discussion," said Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

The report comes at a delicate time in the escalating U.S. battle over funding of embryonic stem cell research. Within the next week, a closely divided House is expected to vote on legislation that would, for the first time, loosen the restrictions that President Bush imposed on federal funding for the field in 2001.

That legislation would not allow funding of cloning research like that done in South Korea -- a kind of research the House has twice voted to ban and which the Senate has deadlocked over for years. Rather, it would facilitate the less contentious use of frozen embryos about to be discarded by fertility clinics.

Unknown at this point is whether the Korean advance will bolster the bill's opponents -- who have painted the legislation as a step down a slippery slope that could lead to cloned babies -- or strengthen the bill's supporters by making the pending bill look relatively modest by comparison and by heightening concerns that the United States is falling behind in one of the hottest arenas of biomedical research.

Several countries, including South Korea, Singapore and Britain, not only support research on unused fertility clinic embryos but also have given their blessings to research on cloned human embryos and promulgated ethics rules for such work.

The new research was led by Woo Suk Hwang, a cow-cloning expert whose recent rise to international fame for his stem cell work has made him somewhat of a folk hero in Korea.

A cloned embryo is made from a single cell -- often a skin cell -- taken from the person or animal to be cloned, which is then fused to an egg from a donor. In the latest experiments, the team started with 185 eggs donated by 18 women. The women underwent a month-long series of hormone shots followed by the extraction of about a dozen ripened eggs from their ovaries. None of the women was paid.

Each egg had its own DNA removed and then was fused to a single skin cell taken from one of 11 patients. The patients, ages 2 to 56, had either a spinal cord injury, diabetes or an inborn disease of the immune system.

Of those 185 treated eggs, 31 grew into early embryos in laboratory dishes. The team was able to extract stem cells from 11 of them. Each of the resulting colonies of stem cells is a genetic and immunological match to the patient who supplied the original skin cell.

The overall efficiency was 11 self-perpetuating colonies -- or cell lines -- from 185 eggs, or about one cell line for every 17 eggs. But the procedure was even more efficient with eggs from the youngest donors. For eggs retrieved from women under age 30, one cell line was obtained for every 14 eggs.

In another major advance, the Koreans said they are cultivating the stem cell lines in dishes without any animal cells. Virtually all other human embryonic stem cell lines to date have been grown for at least a while on mouse cells, which secrete a cocktail of hormones that support the growth of finicky stem cells.

By growing the stem cells on a bed of human support cells instead of mouse cells, the team does not have to worry that animal viruses or other contaminants may prevent transplantation of the stem cells, or tissue grown from them, into patients -- the ultimate goal.

"We want to find a way to cure devastating diseases, and one of the big points of our research is patients [now] have immune-matched, cloned, embryonic stem cells," Hwang said in a telephone interview.

The team is now working to transform the cells into various kinds of tissues -- a process at which scientists are becoming increasingly adept -- but has no current plans to put them into patients, Hwang said.

Several experts said they were extremely impressed and predicted that the first therapeutic cloning treatment would come more quickly than they had imagined.

"They have increased the efficiency tenfold over what their paper was a year ago, and this is very important," said John Gearhart, a stem cell researcher at Johns Hopkins University. "It's kind of remarkable. It tells you how quickly things are moving."

Judy Norsigian of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, who supports stem cell research but has warned against therapeutic cloning's potential to exploit egg donors, said she was relieved that the process would need fewer eggs but still had concerns because the ovarian stimulation used to mass-produce the eggs can lead to complications.

"Young women would still be providing eggs to treat men, children and older women. We need to make sure that those women aren't put at unnecessary risk," she said.

Others voiced greater concerns.

"You're placing the woman at risk to create an embryo that has a 100 percent risk of death, to attempt to treat patients who themselves will face significant risks," said Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"To say something was initially impossible but is now possible is not enough," Doerflinger said. "We have to make moral decisions about whether we should do this."

Money can't buy happiness -- just ask geriatrician

2005-05-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

ORLANDO, Florida -- Dr. David Reuben is the anti-Peter Pan.

Peter urged his followers to "never grow up." Reuben is in the business of helping people grow old.

He is a geriatrician, a physician who is specially trained to care for the elderly.

When the specialty was founded three decades ago, caring for elderly usually meant caring for patients who were over 65.

"But that has changed as aging has changed," says Reuben, who is president of the American Geriatrics Society, which just held its annual meeting in Orlando.

Today most people in their 60s are healthy, active and -- increasingly -- not yet retired individuals who receive their medical care from family physicians and other primary care doctors.

Typically Reuben's patients come to him when they are beginning to show signs of the diseases of aging --memory loss, dementia, and a mixed bag of chronic diseases that often worsen with age. These include heart disease, arthritis, chronic obstructive lung disease and diabetes.

In general, they are patients "on the other end of life," Reuben says.

As he talks about his work as chief of the division of geriatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles, Reuben often becomes caught up in the emotion of his patients' stories.

He laughs as he recalls stories from a woman who was involved in Hollywood glamour from the 1920s through the era of movie musicals in the 1940s and 1950s.

He is clearly torn up as he relates "awful" stories of patients who "died without dignity."

A compact, tanned 53, Reuben doesn't come across as a physician who spends much of his time in the company of 80- and 90-year-olds. But, as he says, "I love it. I've learned from every one of my patients."

One patient in particular, Freda Sandrich, taught him about a "polished death."

Now, he says, "my goal is to help every patient achieve a polished death -- a death that is dignified, where the patient is in control, a death that is orchestrated so as to be painless, dignified and respectful."

Freda Sandrich became Reuben's patient when she was 98. "She lived in an apartment in West Los Angeles," he says. "Since this is California -- where almost no one is a native -- I always ask new patients how long they have lived here.

"She told me she moved to Los Angeles from New Jersey -- in 1925. She came here to get married, and her husband was once a movie director, one of the very few who made the transition from silent films to talkies."

Teaching medical students

So, one of the joys of being Sandrich's doctor was "hearing all these wonderful stories about people like George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire," he says. "These were the people who were her friends."

When Sandrich came to him, she was still "sharp as a tack," with a "wonderful sense of humor and great dignity. She was beginning to have some disability, but she was very good at covering it up," Reuben says.

Every year, Reuben asked Sandrich to put in an appearance "when I was teaching medical students. I wanted them to find out what someone in their 90s was like," he says.

Sandrich faithfully made her medical school visits every year until she died at age 103.

My goal is to help every patient achieve a polished death -- a death that is dignified, where the patient is in control, a death that is orchestrated so as to be painless, dignified and respectful.

-- Dr. David Reuben

Now medical students and residents are still enjoying her annual visits because "I made a movie about Freda Sandrich. We videotaped all of her annual visits, and it is very interesting for me to watch that movie because I can see the differences -- the decline -- from year to year," Reuben says.

Reuben says his job satisfaction is fairly typical of geriatricians, a specialty that likes to promote itself as the one with the "highest job satisfaction."

That claim is backed up by a survey published in 2002 in the Archives of Internal Medicine in which "practicing geriatricians reported unusually high job satisfaction," even though they were, and remain still, the lowest paid of all specialties.

At the mention of income, Reuben shakes his head.

"We like the work we do, but for most geriatricians it is economically difficult," he says. "My situation is unique: I teach, I do research and I care for patients one day a week.

"If I had to make a living just by seeing patients, I don't think I could do it. I could do it mentally, but I don't think I could do it financially.

"It's a tragedy. These [geriatricians] are the people with the biggest hearts. They love their patients and they want to do the right thing -- but it costs them economically to do their jobs," he says.

That cost, Reuben says, is probably why so few doctors chose geriatrics as a specialty.

Last year fewer than 300 physicians entered geriatric training programs, which is especially disturbing, "because we only have about one geriatrician for every 5,000 elderly Americans."

When boomers grow old

That means a geriatrician gap of about 14,000 in 2005 and an anticipated gap of 36,000 by 2030 -- when the last of the baby boomers turns 65.

Those figures prompted the American Society of Geriatrics to issue a special report called "Caring for Older Americans: The Future of Geriatric Medicine."

As expected, the report makes a case for more money for geriatricians, but since, as Reuben says, "you can't just demand more money," the report also suggests ways to turn geriatricians into multi-tasking doctors who teach "geriatric approach" to all physicians that treat older patients.

The report also proposes that geriatricians enlist the aid of patients in a lobbying effort to change Medicare payment rules so that geriatricians will get a pay raise.

But Reuben doesn't expect immediate changes. Geriatrics, he says, has taught him patience.

Using foster kids in experiments scrutinized

2005-05-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Standards for enlisting foster children in federal medical experiments vary widely among the states, and the Bush administration is examining how best to protect "the most vulnerable in our population," a top government health official says.

"Foster children are certainly vulnerable and failing to protect them will not be tolerated," Health and Human Services Deputy Assistant Secretary Donald Young said in testimony prepared for delivery Wednesday to a congressional panel investigating the use of foster children in federal research.

The House Ways and Means human resources subcommittee called the hearing to examine the practice after The Associated Press reported earlier this month that federally funded researchers had tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children since the late 1980s, often without providing independent advocates to safeguard the children's interests.

Young said his agency began surveying states and found a wide variance in how and when permission is given to enlist foster children in research.

"Information gathered from several state foster care agencies suggests that authority to provide permission for other than standard medical treatment typically lies either with the judge supervising the foster care case, with a senior official within the foster care agency or with a guardian" appointed by the court, he explained.

"Some states continue to preclude the enrollment of foster children in experimental trials altogether, or will provide permission on behalf of the child only if the biological parents also give permission for the child's participation."

Nonetheless, the administration believes drug testing on children is "essential" to ensure the best medicines for children suffering from ailments like AIDS reach the marketplace and that current federal regulations, if followed, offer adequate protections, he said.

"We also recognize, however, the importance of continued vigilance to ensure the regulations are adhered to by investigators and the IRBs (institutional review boards) that oversee their activities," he testified.

Dr. Alan R. Fleischman, a top medical ethicist, told the panel he believed research on foster children can be conducted safely and ethically and that it would have been wrong to exclude foster kids outright from AIDS drug testing during the height of the U.S. AIDS crisis in the 1990s.

"The only way to provide the best treatment to any child with HIV at that time was through the clinical trials -- the drugs were just not available any other way," he told the panel in prepared testimony.

AP reported that researchers and the review boards that supervised their work often did not provide independent advocates for the foster children enlisted in AIDS drug trials, even in cases where they had signed agreements in New York and Illinois promising to do so in exchange for gaining access to the child wards.

Federal law also requires the appointment of such advocates in studies where there is a greater than minimal risk and the benefits to the patient aren't as certain as current treatments in the marketplace.

Marjorie A. Speers, executive director of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protections Programs, told the panel in her prepared testimony that the use of foster wards presents "special ethical dilemmas" to the review boards that oversee federal studies.

The boards "must make specific determinations regarding the level of risk involved in a proposed study and whether there is a prospect of direct benefit to the individual subjects," she explained.

"These determinations are not easy to make because IRBs must interpret regulatory terms, such as 'minimal risk' or 'minor increase over minimal risk,' she added.

It is those concerns that led several states to decline enrolling foster children for medical experiments.

Roberta Harris, a top Wisconsin health official, told the panel that her state has declined to enroll foster children in medical experiments for several reasons, including a desire to protect the mostly poor, disadvantaged families in the system from "giving consent under duress."

"The types of research that have unfortunately occurred in our nation in the past also make it difficult for us to earn the trust and confidence of the families we are seeking to help," Harris' prepared testimony added.

Peanut allergy can be deadly

2005-05-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

BALTIMORE, Maryland (CNN) -- Peanuts are as American as baseball -- Americans ate nearly 1.7 billion pounds of them last year, according to the Georgia Peanut Council.

But for those with peanut allergies, even 1/1,000 of a peanut can cause a severe reaction.

The chicken that 15-year-old Robert Bigelow Rubin chose at a bar mitzvah because he thought it was safe was prepared with peanut oil. His night ended in the emergency room.

"I couldn't breathe, and then I started wheezing, and then they called 911," he said.

Food allergic reactions cause an estimated 30,000 emergency room visits and kill 150 to 200 people a year.

Anaphylaxis, the massive allergic reaction triggered in some sufferers, can also be triggered by bee stings, latex rubber and even vigorous exercise.

According to the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), 11.4 million Americans have food allergies.

Reactions can be triggered by even trace amounts of peanuts.

"There are true risks when ... enough peanut protein is really being disturbed. So if people are cracking open peanuts, especially in a confined space, a waiting area of a restaurant, you could have a very severe reaction because there's enough peanut airborne there," said Dr. Robert Wood of Johns Hopkins University.

At least five U.S. airlines have stopped serving peanuts: American, Delta Shuttle (not all of Delta Airlines), Northwest, United, and US Airways.

A study by FAAN and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York showed the number of children allergic to peanuts doubled between 1997 and 2002.

Jacqui Corba, 15, had her first reaction when she was 2, even though she wasn't eating peanuts herself.

"I was on an airplane flight with my mom, and she ate peanuts and gave me a kiss on my face, I blew up like all over and I was red."

She also had an anaphylactic reaction at school after a classmate opened a bag of peanuts near her.

Many schools now reserve separate tables where no peanut butter is allowed.

The medical community cannot fully explain the phenomenon. But there are theories.

Noticing that developing countries have almost no allergy led doctors to suspect that our society is too germ-free.

"As a country becomes more developed, allergy rises and rises. And the notion there is that in the more-developed countries, you may be getting less exposure to infections and germs and other things that may stimulate your immune system in a direction other than allergy," Wood said. "The more your immune system is kept busy by exposure to germs and infections early in life, the less time it can devote to things like allergy."

Anne Muñoz-Furlong, head of FAAN, says "Perhaps our homes are too clean -- we've done too much to take away the job of the immune system. We don't have parasites, a lot of the childhood diseases you vaccinate and don't have, so maybe for some people, the immune system is looking for something to do and decides, 'Aha, I don't like milk' or 'I don't like peanuts,'" and the body then attacks the food protein as if it were an enemy invader."

Another theory researchers are looking at is that children are exposed too early to peanuts.

Adding to the confusion is that in countries like Indonesia and Thailand, where peanuts are ubiquitous, there is virtually no peanut allergy, leaving the experts to concede they really don't know for sure why food allergies are on the rise.

Doctors can only prescribe avoidance

For now there is no cure. Doctors can only prescribe strict avoidance. But that's not easy as so many candies might contain traces of peanuts inside.

Brandon Katona, a 13-year-old allergy sufferer, explains "you never know where peanuts ... will show up in anything you eat or touch."

Epinephrine offers treatment for a reaction. Those with serious food allergies carry EpiPens -- epinephrine obtained by prescription that they can inject quickly to the thigh.

Without epinephrine, these reactions can lead to a sudden drop in blood pressure or even death and it can happen fast.

Wood lost three teenage patients who had anaphylactic reactions. One had eaten a baked good, another Chinese food, the third a piece of candy. None had epinephrine available.

"People shouldn't be dying of allergic reactions," he said. "Because if you get epinephrine in a timely way after reactions, we can be very reassuring to our patients that they are not going to have a fatal reaction ... and timely means within a few minutes."

But even experts inadvertently expose themselves.

Wood, who has had a lifelong allergy to peanuts, has rules about what he eats. And he doesn't accept baked goods from others.

But he made what he thought was a safe exception and accepted a homemade cookie from a colleague, another expert on food allergies, who assured him it was safe.

"You know quickly, typically, if you're having an allergic reaction -- you get an immediate sensation in your mouth that you've been exposed to something," Wood said. "So I knew it within seconds, literally."

His colleague had used the same spatula and maybe cookie sheets in making one batch of peanut butter cookies and a second batch of peanut-free cookies that he gave to Wood.

"But that amount of contamination just from a spatula when it comes to peanut allergy, is enough to cause severe reactions," he said.

It took five shots of epinephrine to stop Wood's reaction.

A few minutes isn't always enough

Michelle Risinger, 20, is allergic to peanuts and tree nuts like pistachios. She once ate a cookie in her dorm room she was told had white chocolate chunks, which really turned out to be macadamia nuts.

"Within seconds, my throat started closing. It was tingling. I started to get hot all over. And I went to my desk drawer, used my EpiPen, and I called 911."

Even though she injected herself, the reaction wasn't over.

"As the ambulance was pulling up, my throat started closing again, and by the time we got to the hospital, which was maybe a five minute ride, I was having severe respiratory trouble," she said.

She ended up spending the night in intensive care.

Risinger and a boyfriend had earlier found out about the severity of her allergy the hard way.

"I've had a reaction from kissing once ... he started kissing me, and my lips started tingling, and immediately I was like, 'we have to stop, and I need to take Benadryl.'"

To avoid what literally could be the kiss of death, Risinger gives her dates a choice: It's either peanuts and nuts, or her.

CNN senior medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and senior producer Sharona Schwartz contributed to this report.

Consumer Reports rates diets

2005-05-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast top ratings

Meetings and shakes trump counting carbs when it comes to long-term weight loss, according to a recent analysis of diets by Consumer Reports magazine.

The publication, best known for rating cars and electronics, put Weight Watchers, with its support group meetings, and Slim-Fast, whose shakes let you opt out of cooking, at the top of the heap.

The ratings were based on pounds lost, nutrition, how easy the diet was to follow and dropout rates after six months and a year.

Though low-carb diets have dominated headlines, the highest marks went to Weight Watchers, which uses weekly meetings to reinforce its decidedly simple philosophy -- eat less and exercise more. After a year, its followers were far more likely to stick with the plan.

Weight Watchers did not, however, earn the strongest scores on weight loss, a distinction that went to second-ranked Slim-Fast, which replaces parts of two meals a day with shakes and bars.

Atkins, which has led the low-carb charge, got good scores for short-term weight loss, but landed at the bottom of the ratings because of poor marks on retention and nutrition.

The report, released in the magazine's June issue, said the Atkins diet calls for too much fat and saturated fat, too few fruits, too little fiber and "might have a negative effect on some dieters' health."

Colette Heimowitz, vice president of education and research at Atkins Nutritionals, criticized the study, saying it focused only on Atkins' weight-loss components, ignoring its more flexible weight maintenance stages.

The magazine's conclusions are based on a review of published clinical research on each diet, and a nutrient and calorie analysis of a week's worth of menus, including how closely they follow federal dietary guidelines.

Heimowitz took issue with the use of the federal guidelines as a way to evaluate the diets, saying those standards are intended for maintaining a healthy weight, not losing fat.

All of the diets reviewed are low enough in calories to produce results, but success relies on sticking to the plan, said Nancy Metcalf, a senior editor at Consumer Reports.

That accounts for the strong showing by Weight Watchers, which backs up a flexible, low-calorie, low-fat approach with weekly motivational meetings, Metcalf said.

"We are not necessarily the fastest kids in town, but we're livable and sustainable, and we feel that's very important," said Karen Miller-Kovach, chief scientist at Weight Watchers.

Slim-Fast, which sells its bars and beverages in grocery and drug stores, was praised for its ease and balanced nutrition. Its retention matched Weight Watchers' during the first six months, but then dropped considerably.

The high-protein "Zone" diet, from a book by Dr. Barry Sears, was the magazine's No. 3 program. Though its followers tended to drop out over time, the diet earned points for having considerably less fat than the Atkins approach.

The fourth-ranked ultra-low-fat, high-fiber vegetarian Ornish diet, from Dr. Dean Ornish, had the worst retention rate, though it had good long-term weight loss and was praised as a treatment for heart disease.

Thomas Wadden, a University of Pennsylvania weight loss expert, said the ratings seem sound, but noted the challenge of making comparisons when some diets involve structured meetings and others are do-it-yourself.

He added that the Atkins diet might have ranked better if weight loss was the only criterion. But Wadden said the magazine rightly considered the overall healthfulness of the diets' approaches.

Four other programs, Internet-based eDiets, Jenny Craig, South Beach and Volumetrics, were included in the review, but not ranked because not enough independent clinical studies had been done on them to allow comparison, the magazine said.

Landmark blood test fuels hope for mesothelioma cure

2005-05-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

The world's first blood test for the lung cancer mesothelioma is being launched with the hope it will lead to a cure.

The 700 Australians diagnosed with the disease every year can now have a blood test that detects proteins released by the tumour.

Research team head, Professor Bruce Robinson, says there is no cure for the asbestos-related disease, but early detection and treatment could lead to a breakthrough.

Professor Robinson says the blood test will mean immediate diagnosis and says more money needs to be channelled into research.

He says it is exciting Australia's scientists and clinicians are world leaders in asbestos research, but he says it is also frustrating.

"I think it's kind of hard sometimes to get companies like James Hardie and even the government to realise that hey, there's a chance that we really might be successful in this disease," he said.

"When you think about it, they're all spending billions of dollars in compensation and yet here's a chance - well, I think they are thinking of putting some money into this kind of research, around the country, because for the first time there might be a cure, might save them some money."

Professor Robinson hopes early detection will lead to a breakthrough in finding a cure.

"I think that's one of our main hopes at the moment," he said.

"Sometimes it can take a very long time to diagnose this cancer but if you've got a blood test, it can help you diagnose it straight away, then the possibility exists that you could get in and treat earlier."

Professor Robinson expects the blood test to be available to the public within the next few weeks.

Man who 'inhaled asbestos' as a child dies

2005-05-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

A 32-YEAR-OLD man thought to have developed cancer after inhaling asbestos dust from his stepfather’s work overalls when he was a toddler has died after a year-long battle with the disease.

Barry Welch, a father-of-three, is thought to be the youngest person in Britain to suffer from mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer linked to asbestos exposure.

His widow, Claire, said she was "devastated" by his death, which came earlier than doctors had predicted. She said she would carry on with a compensation claim her husband had been pursuing against the company his stepfather, Roger Bugby, had worked for.

"He was a loving, caring man who would do anything for anyone," said Mrs Welch, from Leicester. "He was everything to me. It seems so unfair."

Law firm Irwin Mitchell, which is pursuing a compensation claim for Mr Welch’s widow, said they were now seeking colleagues of his stepfather, who worked as a scaffolder at Kingsnorth power station in Kent during the 1970s.

When Mr Bugby came home from work at Kingsnorth, Mr Welch’s mother, Kate, would brush down his overalls at the family home in Chatham, Kent, each evening, to remove the dust.

Mr Welch, who was diagnosed with the disease in June last year, had been pursuing a claim on the grounds that exposure to the dust, which contained asbestos, as a child made him susceptible to the disease in later life. Children are more susceptible to the rare form of cancer than adults.

He said last year: "I haven’t really come to terms with the fact that I am going to die and leave behind my wife and three children because of this disease.

"It seems so unfair that my life will be cut short even though I never knowingly came into contact or worked with asbestos. I am an innocent victim."

Mrs Welch said her husband wanted to provide for her and his three daughters, Natasha, 11, Samantha, nine, and six-year-old Leticia, after his death.

She said that the speed of the disease had taken the family by surprise.

"He became ill last May," said Mrs Welch. "We thought it was an asthma attack. The doctors didn’t think it was cancer. In fact he asked them and they laughed it off because he was so young. It was in June that he was finally diagnosed.

"Baz kept grasping at other things, thinking it would be OK, but I was devastated. I listened to the doctors a bit closer than he did. There was nothing they could do."

A spokesman for the lobby group Clydeside Action on Asbestos said Mr Welch’s death was a "tragedy".

"It is very unusual for a child to be affected," he said. "Usually it is the wife of the workers. But sadly the disease is set to peak around 2015/2020."

Mesothelioma affects about 2,000 people in the UK each year and kills most victims within a year of diagnosis.

Martyn Hayward, of Irwin Mitchell, said that he would still be seeking compensation for Mr Welch’s family.

"We are still putting together the claim against Mr Bugby’s former scaffolding company," he said.

"We would like to hear from any of Mr Bugby’s colleagues from the time who might have helpful information."

Polio's Back. Why Now?

2005-05-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

The fear of vaccines helped the virus spread from Africa to Indonesia. Could it reach the U.S.?

By JEFFREY KLUGER

Mothers in the Indonesian village of Cidadap don't have big dreams for their kids. Surviving infancy is often as much as they hope for, with everything else left to luck. Fikri Ramdani looked like one of the fortunate ones--active and well and, at 19 months, deep into toddlerhood. Today, however, he lies limp in his mother's arms, his eyes rolled back and his face shiny with sweat. "He used to like playing ball," says his mother Yayat. "Now he can't even stand up."

Yayat is hopeful. She tickles the boy's foot to show it still has feeling, but the foot hangs limp. It may never move again. Just last week polio was officially diagnosed in Fikri, the first Indonesian child to test positive for the virus in 10 years. Three other cases have been confirmed in the area, and hundreds of other children--some suspiciously sick already--are being examined. "The virus has probably been circulating for a month," says Dr. Georg Petersen, an on-site representative of the World Health Organization (WHO). "We can expect more cases."

The sickly village of Cidadap is not alone in its woes. Even as Americans celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Salk vaccine--the magic bullet that all but wiped out polio in the U.S.--the disease is on the march around the world. Since 2003 polio has been spreading in a fevered band across 16 countries mostly in western and central Africa and the Middle East. And with the news last week that the virus had leaped the Indian Ocean to Indonesia, other nations, including the U.S., have begun to worry about where the disease might turn up next.

What's behind the re-emergence of polio? More important, can the new outbreaks be contained and others prevented, or is the disease truly on the loose again?

For 15 years health officials were remarkably successful in trying to eradicate polio. In 1988 there were 350,000 fresh cases of polio in 125 countries, most of them in the developing world. That year four groups--WHO, Rotary International, UNICEF and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)--made it their goal to vaccinate polio out of existence, and with the help of private and government funding, they came tantalizingly close. By 2003, the virus was confined to six countries--Nigeria, Niger, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India--and was seemingly headed for extinction by 2005. But nobody reckoned on the Muslim clerics in northern Nigeria.

In the summer of 2003, leaders of the region stopped polio inoculations after rumors spread that the vaccine could transmit AIDS and render girls infertile. It was a bad time--and a very bad place--to halt vaccines. There are now 35 million Nigerian kids under age 5, and 20% have no polio vaccinations. Says Oliver Rosenbauer, spokesman for WHO's Global Polio Eradication Initiative: "That's a lot of breathing space for the poliovirus to survive."

And thrive: the Nigerian case load grew from 202 new victims in 2002 to 355 in 2003, then jumped to 792 in 2004. And although vaccinations resumed last summer, by then it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Cases of polio genetically consistent with the Nigerian strain had begun popping up, in succession, in more than 10 neighboring countries, including Chad, Cameroon, Central African Republic, CÃ´te d'Ivoire and Sudan. Last November the same virus appeared in Saudi Arabia, two months before the hajj, when 2 million Muslims from around the world descended on Mecca and then returned to their home countries, perhaps carrying more than just their memories with them. Investigators are still looking into the possibility that the outbreak last week in Indonesia was linked to the pilgrimage. Only a 2003 case in Lebanon is unconnected to either the hajj or Nigeria.

Can the spread be reversed? For now, the numbers remain relatively tiny. As of last week, the global new-case count for 2005 was still only 124. Even combined with last year's Nigerian totals, that's microscopic, epidemiologically speaking, in a world in which more than 1 million people die each year of malaria and 3 million die of AIDS. But big contagions start small. What's more, only 1 in 200 cases of polio actually causes paralysis, with the rest simply leading to fever, flu-like symptoms or no apparent illness at all. That means that for every child with paralytic polio, 199 may be carrying--and spreading--the virus. "This is a disease that can't be controlled," says Rosenbauer. "It has to be eradicated."

Indonesia is trying. With the help of WHO, Rotary and the other groups, 5 million at-risk kids will be vaccinated in the next few weeks. The immunization rate in Indonesia is already high--90% or more--but in places like Cidadap, it's less than 50%. "The challenge is to respond quickly and make sure we get vaccine to these low-coverage areas," says Robert Keegan, deputy director of the CDC's global immunization division.

The other countries in which polio has re-emerged are getting intensive attention too. In Nigeria there are six nationwide rounds of vaccinations scheduled for 2005. In other countries, such as Yemen, Egypt and India, the immunization program is getting a boost from a so-called monovalent vaccine, which more effectively knocks out the Type 1 poliovirus circulating in those areas. But even the best immunization campaign will leave a lot of poliovirus at large, at least for a while. WHO and other groups still hope to eradicate the disease this year in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where polio was endemic before the current outbreaks and good vaccination campaigns were in place. The other affected countries will take longer, giving the virus more time to spread elsewhere--including the U.S.

For now, U.S. officials claim not to be worried about the risk of a domestic outbreak. "Our coverage rates are at all-time highs," says Keegan. "The chance of an epidemic in the U.S. is very low."

But low does not mean nonexistent, and the parents of a lot of at-risk kids are doing nothing to reduce the danger. Ninety-two percent of U.S. children ages 19 months to 35 months receive three or more doses of polio vaccine, but those numbers aren't distributed evenly. Up to 2.1 million children in that age group may be either undervaccinated or entirely unvaccinated each year. Many come from poor or uninsured families with no access to health care or health information. Others are on the opposite end of the demographic arc--well-educated and comparatively wealthy Americans who opt out of vaccinations for their children either because they are suspicious of vaccines in general or because their religious beliefs forbid them. Home-schooled kids may be at particular risk, since their parents can sidestep the rules requiring vaccinations for all children in the public school system.

Kids left unprotected become part of a dangerous underbrush that can burn fast when a virus hits. The last polio outbreak in the U.S., in 1979, struck a vaccine-averse Amish community, paralyzing 14 people. That virus originated outside the country. "There are people in the U.S. who question vaccinations," says Heidi Larson of UNICEF. "But I think it's because they don't see the impact of the disease around them."

That's not a problem in the countries now struggling with outbreaks of polio and others that lie in the path of the virus. Polio could yet be snuffed out around the world, like smallpox, which was officially declared eradicated in 1980. But it will take more work in the developing world--and less complacency in the developed one--before that happens.

Study: Obesity death risk overstated

2005-05-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Packing on the pounds is not nearly as deadly as the government thought, according to a new calculation from the CDC that found people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that obesity accounts for 25,814 deaths a year in the United States. As recently as January, the CDC came up with an estimate 14 times higher: 365,000 deaths.

According to the new calculation, obesity ranks No. 7 instead of No. 2 among the nation's leading preventable causes of death.

The new analysis found that obesity -- being extremely overweight -- is indisputably lethal. But like several recent smaller studies, it found that people who are modestly overweight have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

Biostatistician Mary Grace Kovar, a consultant for the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center in Washington, said "normal" may be set too low for today's population. Also, Americans classified as overweight are eating better, exercising more and managing their blood pressure better than they used to, she said.

The study -- an analysis of mortality rates and body-mass index, or BMI -- was published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Last year, a CDC study listed the leading causes of preventable death in order as tobacco; poor diet and inactivity, leading to excess weight; alcohol; germs; toxins and pollutants; car crashes; guns; risky sexual behavior; and illicit drugs.

Using the new estimate, excess weight would drop behind car crashes and guns to seventh place -- a ranking the CDC is unwilling to make official, underscoring the controversy inside the agency over how to calculate the health effects of obesity.

Last year, the CDC issued a study that attributed 400,000 deaths a year to mostly weight-related causes and said excess weight would soon overtake tobacco as the top U.S. killer. After scientists inside and outside the agency questioned the figure, the CDC admitted making a calculation error and lowered its estimate three months ago to 365,000.

The new study attributes 111,909 deaths to obesity, but then subtracts the benefits of being modestly overweight, and arrives at the 25,814 figure.

CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said because of the uncertainty in calculating the health effects of being overweight, the CDC is not going to use the new figure of 25,814 in its public awareness campaigns. And it is not going to scale back its fight against obesity.

"There's absolutely no question that obesity is a major public health concern of this country," she said. Gerberding said the CDC will work to improve methods for calculating the consequences of obesity.

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said the agency will probably start using a range of estimates for obesity-linked deaths.

Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said she is not convinced the new estimate is right.

"I think it's likely there has been a weakening of the mortality effect due to improved treatments for obesity," she said. "But I think this magnitude is surprising and requires corroboration."

The analysis was led by Katherine Flegal, a senior research scientist with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. The study that had to be corrected was conducted by a different arm of the CDC, the Division of Adult and Community Health, and its authors included Gerberding.

One major reason for the far lower number in this latest study is that it used more recent data, researchers said.

"This analysis is far more sophisticated," said Kovar, who was not involved in the new study. "They are very careful and are not overstating their case."

A related study, also in Wednesday's JAMA, found that overweight Americans are healthier than ever because of better maintenance of blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Diabetes is on the rise among people in all weight categories, however.

Flegal said the two studies raise questions about what definitions to use for obesity and "where to draw the line." Under current government standards, a BMI, or weight-to-height measurement, of 25 or higher is overweight; 30 and above is obese.

In recent years, the government has spent millions of dollars fighting obesity and publicizing the message that two out of three American adults are overweight or obese, and at higher risk for heart disease, arthritis and diabetes.

Teens becoming 'Generation Rx'

2005-05-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK (AP) -- About one in five teenagers have tried prescription painkillers such as Vicodin and OxyContin to get high, with the pill-popping members of "Generation Rx" often raiding their parents' medicine cabinets, according to a study by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

The 17th annual study on teen drug abuse, released Thursday, found that more teens had abused a prescription painkiller in 2004 than Ecstasy, cocaine, crack or LSD. One in 11 teens had abused over-the-counter products such as cough medicine, the study reported.

"For the first time, our national study finds that today's teens are more likely to have abused a prescription painkiller to get high than they are to have experimented with a variety of illegal drugs," said Partnership Chairman Roy Bostock. "In other words, Generation Rx has arrived."

According to the study, the most popular prescription drug abused by teens was Vicodin, with 18 percent reporting they had used it to get high. OxyContin and drugs for attention-deficit disorder such as Ritalin/Adderall followed with one in 10 teens reporting they had tried them.

Fewer than half the teens -- 48 percent -- said they saw "great risk" in experimenting with prescription medicines. "Ease of access" was cited as a major factor in trying the medications, with medicine cabinets at home or at friends' homes a likely source, the survey found.

It was only the second year that the survey had studied abuse of legal drugs. In 2003, the Partnership grouped together three prescription pain relievers: Vicodin, OxyContin and Tylox, and found that 20 percent of teens had tried them.

The 2004 study looked at Vicodin and OxyContin separately but excluded Tylox, and found that 18 percent had tried Vicodin and 10 percent had used OxyContin. The 2004 figures indicated the same or a slight increase in use compared with 2003, said Barbara Delaney, director of research at the Partnership.

For the first time, the 2004 survey included a question about the use of over-the-counter products to get high. Nine percent, or about 2.2 million teens, had experimented with cough syrup and other such products, the survey reported.

It also found that the number of teens reporting marijuana use declined to 37 percent last year, compared with 42 percent a half-dozen years earlier. Over the same amount of time, Ecstasy use declined from 12 percent to 9 percent, while methamphetamine use dropped from 12 percent to 8 percent.

A University of Michigan study released in December also noted the apparent growing popularity of OyxContin among teens. Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, head of the Phoenix House drug treatment facility, said his agency has watched the use of painkillers by adolescents rise in recent years.

"Adolescents find the line between drugs that do good for you and drugs that make you feel good becoming fuzzier every year," said Rosenthal, whose non-profit organization treats 6,000 patients in nine states. "This is a wake-up call to parents."

The 2004 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study surveyed more than 7,300 teens, the largest ongoing analysis of teen drug-related attitudes toward drugs in the country. Its margin of error is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

The nonprofit Partnership for a Drug-Free America was launched in 1987.

Researchers: Antibody may treat West Nile

2005-05-10T19:22:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Targeted proteins called monoclonal antibodies may work to treat West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne disease that came to North America in 1999, researchers said Sunday.

They found the laboratory-engineered antibodies cured mice infected with the virus, which usually causes only mild fever but which can cause deadly brain inflammation in some patients.

"We could give this antibody to mice as long as five days after infection, when West Nile virus had entered the brain, and it could still cure them," said Dr. Michael Diamond of Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study.

"It also completely protected the mice against death."

West Nile, common in North Africa, parts of Europe and the Middle East, first appeared in New York in 1999 and quickly spread across the continent, affecting Canada and Mexico as well.

It infects birds, horses and people and is spread by mosquitoes. In 2003 it infected a reported 2,300 people and killed 264, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2004 it infected 2,470 and killed 88.

"West Nile virus has emerged in the United States as a regular seasonal threat, particularly for people over 50," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded the study.

"We currently do not have a proven therapy for people with serious West Nile disease, so we will continue to aggressively pursue all promising leads for an effective treatment," Fauci said in a statement.

The researchers decided to develop monoclonal antibody after finding that antibodies taken from the blood of people who recovered from West Nile fever could cure mice infected with West Nile virus.

Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, the team said it

made 46 monoclonal antibodies and screened them until they found the most effective ones against West Nile virus.

Rockville, Maryland-based MacroGenics Inc., made a human-like version of the most effective antibody.

They tested it in mice bred to be susceptible to West Nile virus. It protected them from death even if they got severe cases of the disease.

"Our results are the first successful demonstration of a humanized monoclonal antibody as postexposure therapy against a viral disease and suggest that antibody-based therapeutics may have more broad utility than previously appreciated, especially in the treatment of central nervous system infections," they wrote.

Hibernation might lead to new treatments

2005-05-10T18:18:00.001-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It sounds like science fiction, yet an experiment in which mice were forced into hibernation and then revived with no apparent ill effects, might ultimately lead to new ways to treat the critically ill.

Consider it hibernation-on-demand, a way to drastically reduce the amount of oxygen needed to survive, researchers from Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center report Thursday in the journal Science.

It works, essentially, like hypothermia.

Recall those miraculous cases of people who fall into icy ponds and appear dead but recover after they're warmed up? The extreme cold preserves their brain cells from the certain death that would otherwise quickly follow oxygen deprivation.

Following that logic, doctors now sometimes use ice to chill stroke victims in hopes of minimizing the damage to their brains.

Chilling might help other illnesses, too, such as by buying time for surgeons to stop a trauma victim's hemorrhaging. But inducing hypothermia is difficult and can take time that patients may not have, so scientists are hunting ways to lower body temperature more effectively from the inside-out.

The new experiment does that in a novel way, by using a small amount of hydrogen sulfide gas to force the mice into a state of hibernation for six hours.

"We wonder whether we've stumbled on a way to access this quiescent state in a way that could be beneficial for medicine," said lead researcher Mark Roth, a cell biologist at Fred Hutchinson. "It's engaging metabolic flexibility, which heretofore was not widely recognized as something that exists."

Within minutes of inhaling the gas, the mice appeared unconscious. Their body temperature plummeted from the normal 98 degrees down to 59 degrees and their respiration slowed to fewer than 10 breaths a minute, down from a normal 120 breaths a minute, Roth reported.

Overall, their metabolic rate dropped by 90 percent -- meaning normal cellular activity slowed to almost a standstill, thus reducing the need for oxygen.

Fresh air revived the mice, and testing uncovered no differences in behavior or functional ability between the treated mice and untreated ones, the study concluded.

The research is "very intriguing," said Dr. David Sachs, a Harvard University transplant specialist, who said it might point to ways to help donated organs survive longer before transplant.

"Being able to decrease the metabolic rate by, they're saying, 90 percent and have an animal that's not injured by it is rather remarkable," he added.

The next step is to see whether large animals can be pushed into this hibernating state, too, and if doing so while an animal is ill actually helps.

Being able to decrease the metabolic rate by, they're saying, 90 percent and have an animal that's not injured by it is rather remarkable.

-- Dr. David Sachs, a Harvard University transplant specialist

"Certainly what happens in mice may not happen in larger animals," cautioned Dr. Samuel A. Tisherman, a critical-care specialist and associate director of the University of Pittsburgh's Safar Center for Resuscitation Research. He induces hypothermia by infusing animals with large amounts of cold salt water, but is considering collaborating with Roth to see if the hydrogen sulfide might help.

"It's got great potential," stressed Tisherman. "It conceivably could help tremendously to, specifically, help preserve organs but also help induce the hypothermia" faster.

Hydrogen sulfide, a component in sewer gas, is known to be highly toxic. But the body naturally produces some hydrogen sulfide, which helps regulate normal body temperature by adjusting how much oxygen cells burn to produce energy, Roth explained. He said the experiment used amounts considered safe.

Man who sought new liver on billboards dies

2005-05-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- A man who got a new liver by advertising on billboards has died eight months after a transplant.

It was not clear whether Todd Krampitz, who died Wednesday, succumbed to liver cancer, transplant-related complications or some other cause, the Houston Chronicle reported in Tuesday's editions.

Family members, who did not return calls seeking information, thanked supporters in a statement.

The family said Krampitz, 32, donated his corneas for transplantation.

Krampitz was suffering from liver cancer when he made his appeal in the summer of 2004, which led to his transplant that August.

The family of a dead man had heard about Krampitz and opted to donate the dead man's liver directly to him.

Critics said Krampitz's transplant might have diverted a liver from a patient in greater need. Supporters argued that the family that donated the liver might not have donated anything at all without the media attention.

"We hope his story has heightened awareness of the dire need for organ donation," said Sherrill Lanthier, director of the Multiorgan Transplant Center at The Methodist Hospital, where Krampitz received his transplant.

"While we don't condone advertising for an organ we feel that transplanting Todd was the right thing to do for him.

Runners find union of exercise, nature

2005-05-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

SARATOGA SPRINGS, New York (AP) -- Laura Clark hit the trail running years ago and never looked back.

She runs the woodsy trails near her upstate New York home, up Adirondack mountains and on rollercoaster courses up and down through the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

"It's much more fun to be out there in the woods, instead of breathing in exhaust fumes," she said.

Clark, 58, still runs on pavement but mostly does "trail running," a pursuit that might sound foolish to the uninitiated -- navigate trails full of ups, downs, dips and rocky bits at jogging speed. Oh, and watch out for slippery rocks and snakes.

But trail runners describe it as a sublime union of exercise and nature. It's gentler on the legs than pounding the pavement, they say, and more majestic: Imagine a runners' high at the summit of a mountain rather than on the shoulder of a road.

"More gentle, more beautiful, more fun," said Barb Ordell of Tallahassee, Florida. "I get a real thrill zipping by trees and jumping rocks on narrow single-track trails."

Trail running is nothing new. People were dashing through the wilderness well before there were sneakers. Consider the Dipsea, a scenic 7.1-mile race in the San Francisco area, which began in 1905. Other off-road runs are decades old.

But trail running, like so many outdoor activities, appears to be getting more popular. Nancy Hobbs, executive director of the All-American Trail Running Association, said the number of trail events has grown three to four times since the mid-1990s. The association's Web site now lists more than 1,000 runs a year, most of them in the United States.

Meanwhile, sporting goods shoe racks are giving more space to "trail running shoes" -- built light like sneakers, but with nubbier soles -- though a portion of these fashionable shoes will never tread on anything wilder than back lawns.

There is easy trail running and hard trail running. Easy could be a 3-mile run through scrubland with a soft trail and little hills. Hard would be heading into thin air up a 4,000-foot peak.

The sport is sometimes lumped in with mountain running, which is sort of a tougher, older brother. Mountain running, though, can be done on roads as well as trails.

Some of the most daunting runs in America are mountain runs. Participants in the Pike's Peak Marathon gain 7,815 feet in altitude to the summit, then head back down. The course for the White River 50 Miler by Mount Rainier rises and falls 17,400 feet.

That sort of wild diversity in courses is why trail runners seem less obsessed with personal times than road runners. Running seven minutes through West End Trail in Bangor, Maine, is different from the Lone Star Hiking Trail in Texas. Even a single trail can be dusty one day, muddy the next.

Some people believe that you can't enjoy the trail when you are running -- they are wrong. True, one must focus on the footing ahead, but the senses are hyper aware.

-- Trail runner Barb Ordell

No matter the conditions, ankle injuries are a big concern for runners because of the unpredictable topography. Runners should watch where their feet are falling, Hobbs said, and building up your ankle muscles helps, too. On the plus side, runners say the risk of ankle injuries is outweighed by the benefits to knees and arches, which are less likely to develop repetitive-impact injuries.

"The injuries are more dramatic," Clark said. "You can fall down and come up all bloody, but you're not going to get those nagging injuries that road runners get."

Trail running is not for everyone. Road runners contemplating the transition must resign themselves to a bumpier ride featuring boulders, switchbacks and 45-degree inclines. And forget about stopping to smell the roses. Still, trail runners insist they can soak in the sights and smells of nature, even at a hustling pace.

"Some people believe that you can't enjoy the trail when you are running -- they are wrong," Ordell said. "True, one must focus on the footing ahead, but the senses are hyper aware."

Active older patients demanding surgery

2005-05-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

Surgical advances mean quicker recovery

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Vito Buffalo didn't let his age stand in the way of open spine surgery to relieve his back pain. The 73-year-old retired butcher from Wauconda, Illinois, said he needs to feel good because he leads an 18-piece swing band.

"I'm a singer, and there are a lot of songs I have not yet sung," he said, explaining his decision to try surgery.

Active senior citizens like Buffalo are choosing -- sometimes demanding -- surgery that once would have seemed extreme for older patients. Healthier older people and medical advances make it possible for surgeons to say yes to those demands.

"Obviously we turn some patients away, but that group is getting smaller and smaller," said Dr. Dean Karahalios, the Chicago neurosurgeon who did Buffalo's surgery.

Surgical advances mean quicker recovery. Dr. Richard Berger of Rush University Medical Center has been doing outpatient hip and knee replacements with small incisions and epidural anesthesia for several years.

Now he's teaching the procedures to other surgeons and predicts the technique will be done on an outpatient basis across the country in five to 10 years. He's even done these surgeries on patients in their 90s.

"Age is not such an issue anymore," he said.

In the past, research on surgery excluded patients older than 75, so there was little evidence on risks and benefits for older people.

But with life expectancy increasing and the baby boomers looking forward to retirement, researchers are giving the elderly a close look.

One study found that people 76 and older recovered more slowly than younger patients after heart bypass surgery. But one year later, the improvements they felt in pain relief and quality of life were the same as for younger patients.

"That was very encouraging and gave us confidence," said Dr. John Spertus, professor of medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a researcher on the bypass study. Heart doctors are treating more older patients and need guidance on how to counsel them, he said.

Doctors should tell older patients to expect their recovery from bypass to take a full year, he said, but they can tell them to expect good results.

Cardiologist Dr. Louis Cohen and his patient Donna Tutlewski, 86, of Pentwater, Michigan, discussed risks before her April 6 bypass operation.

It's a discussion he doesn't take lightly.

"Every cardiologist carries ghosts on his shoulder, things that have not worked out as is hoped," he said. "It always gives one pause."

Other than her blocked arteries, Tutlewski was in good health, which she credits to twice-daily beach walks with her golden retriever Gingersnap.

Her heart doctor told her that improvements in surgical techniques could help her, she said. She talked it over with her family and decided on the surgery. It went well.

How quickly she came home after surgery surprised everyone.

"They had told us to expect, at the minimum, 10 days" in the hospital, said one of her daughters-in-law, Delores Tutlewski. But after five days, "the nurses told us, 'We can't keep up with her. She's walking down the hallway.' She had cleaned her room. She was making her bed."

Staying healthier into old age also means that more older Americans want facelifts and other cosmetic surgery.

One survey of plastic surgeons found the number of cosmetic procedures in patients age 60 and older increased by 35 percent from 2000 to 2003. The numbers are reported as an average number per surgeon. In 2000, per-surgeon average was 98; in 2003, it was 133.

In a published study, plastic surgeon Dr. Ferdinand Becker found that his older facelift patients had no greater risk for complications when he compared them to younger patients with the same risk factors. An 80-year-old patient with well-controlled diabetes, for example, had no greater risk than a 50-year-old in the same physical condition.

Becker said he sees vibrant, healthy octogenarians at his plastic surgery clinic in Vero Beach, Florida.

"Let's face it, these people chose their parents well," he said. "They have good genes."

'Where the action is'

The over-65 crowd accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. population, but undergoes 40 percent of surgeries, said Dr. John Burton, who directs the Geriatrics for Specialists Initiative of the American Geriatrics Society.

As the nation ages, surgeons will find more of their time spent treating older patients, he said. "It's where the action is."

Burton, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, predicts a rise in the number of geriatric surgeons as doctors realize that managing an elderly patient's care requires special knowledge.

At age 91, Katie Shears wasn't an obvious candidate for surgery to remove a tumor, said Dr. Michael Simon, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Chicago. Most patients her age, not counting on many more years of life, would choose radiation alone to treat the cancer growing in her thigh, he said.

But Shears chose radiation and surgery, and the doctor went along with the decision, although he feared she would end up sicker, facing a long hospital stay.

Shears surprised the surgeon. "She whizzed through it with no complications at all," Simon said. She now is free of cancer and is back home with her daughter in the Avalon Park neighborhood of Chicago.

"I talked to God about it and asked him to be with the doctor to give him the knowledge to do it," she said.

Buffalo, the singer who had spine surgery, said he's free of the excruciating back pain that had slowed him down. He said the pain from surgery and the hard work of physical therapy are worth the results.

"I don't care if I have one year left or three or six," Buffalo said. "I want to be able to go and see my grandkids."

Study: Gay men's brains react differently to scent

2005-05-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A compound taken from male sweat stimulates the brains of gay men and straight women but not heterosexual men, raising the possibility that homosexual brains are different, researchers in Sweden reported on Monday.

It also strengthens the evidence that humans respond to pheromones -- compounds known to affect animal behavior, especially mating behavior, but whose role in human activity has been questioned.

The pheromone in question is a derivative of testosterone called 4,16-androstadien-3-one, or AND.

"AND is detected primarily in male sweat," the researchers write in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a previous study, Ivanka Savic of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and colleagues found that the hypothalamus region of the brain became activated when women smelled AND and when men smelled a corresponding compound in female urine called EST.

This time they compared the reactions of 12 women, 12 heterosexual men and 12 homosexual men.

They let them smell EST, AND, and ordinary odors such as lavender, and used positron emission tomography to watch their brain responses.

"In contrast to heterosexual men, and in congruence with heterosexual women, homosexual men displayed hypothalamic activation in response to AND," Savic's team wrote.

And a region of the brain called the anterior hypothalamus responded most strongly -- an area that in animals "is highly involved in sexual behavior".

But other smells were processed the same in all three groups.

"These findings show that our brain reacts differently to the two putative pheromones compared with common odors, and suggest a link between sexual orientation and hypothalamic neuronal processes," Savic's team wrote.

In most animals, pheromone signals go to the hypothalamus region of the brain via a pit-like structure in or near the nose called the vomeronasal organ.

People have a vomeronasal pit but there are no nerves connecting it to the brain, leading biologists to question whether humans respond to pheromones.