Daily Aspirin Cuts Many Cancer Risks

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/12/07/study-daily-aspirin-cuts-cancer-risks/#ixzz17RlnbXiH

Published December 07, 2010 | Reuters


Taking low doses of aspirin can reduce the risk of many kinds of cancer, scientists said on Tuesday, and the evidence is strong enough to suggest people over 40 should take it daily as protection.
The findings will fuel an already intense debate about the merits of taking aspirin, which increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach to around one patient in every thousand per year.

In a study of eight trials involving 25,570 patients, researchers found that cancer deaths among those who took aspirin in doses as low as 75 milligrams a day were 21 percent lower during the studies and 34 percent lower after five years.
Aspirin protected people against gastrointestinal cancers the most, the study found, with rates of death from these cancers around 54 percent lower after five years among those who took aspirin compared to those who did not.

Peter Rothwell of Britain's Oxford University said that while taking aspirin carries a small risk of stomach bleeding, that risk was beginning to be "drowned out" by its benefits in reducing the risk of cancer and the risk of heart attacks.
"Previous guidelines have rightly cautioned that in healthy middle-aged people the small risk of bleeding on aspirin partly offsets the benefit from prevention of strokes and heart attacks, but the reductions in deaths due to several common cancers will now alter this balance for many people," he said.

His suggestion was that healthy people could start taking a small 75 mg dose of aspirin every day from the age of about 40 or 45 and continue doing so until they reached around 70 to 75, when the risk of the aspirin causing stomach bleeding rises.
"REMARKABLE DRUG"

Aspirin, originally developed by Bayer, is a cheap over-the-counter drug used for pain and to reduce fever.
Previous studies have found taking aspirin can cut the risk of developing colon or bowel cancer and suggested it does so by blocking the enzyme cyclooxygenase2 which promotes inflammation and cell division and is found in high levels in tumors.

Alastair Watson, professor of translational medicine at the University of East Anglia, said the study was an important step in scientists' understanding of how to prevent cancer.
"It is further proof that aspirin is, by a long way, the most amazing drug in the world," he said.

In Rothwell's study, published in The Lancet, researchers found the 20-year risk of death was reduced by about 10 percent for prostate cancer, 30 percent for lung cancer, 40 percent for colorectal or bowel cancer and 60 percent for esophageal cancer in those taking aspirin.

Reductions in pancreas, stomach and brain cancers were difficult to quantify because of smaller numbers of deaths.
The researchers added, however, that treatment with aspirin during the trials lasted for only for between four and eight years on average, so the effects on risk of deaths due to cancer may underestimate possible results of longer-term treatment.

Peter Elwood, an expert on aspirin from Cardiff University's medical school who was not involved in this study, described aspirin as "a remarkable drug". "This risk of a bleed is so small compared to the benefits," he told reporters. "Yes, okay, it's a tragedy if a person is rushed into hospital and given a transfusion (because of a stomach bleed) but in relation to the things we are preventing, that is trivial."

Mercury poisoning makes male birds homosexual

01 December 2010 by Michael Marshall


Low levels of mercury in the diet of male white ibises cause the birds to mate with each other rather than with females. As a result many of the females can't breed, and fewer chicks are produced.

It's the first time a pollutant has been found to change an animal's sexual preference. Many chemicals can "feminise" males or reduce fertility, but males affected in these ways still prefer females.

Mercury is extremely toxic, particularly in the form of methylmercury, which reduces breeding in wild birds by disrupting their parenting behaviours. To find out if it also affected mating, Peter Frederick of the University of Florida in Gainesville and Nilmini Jayasena of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, captured 160 young white ibises from south Florida. They gave them food laced with methylmercury and monitored them closely.

The birds were split into four groups. One group ate food with 0.3 parts per million methylmercury, which most US states would regard as too high for human consumption. A second group got 0.1 ppm, and the third 0.05 ppm, a low dose that wild birds would be exposed to frequently. The fourth group received none.

Poisoned

All three dosed groups had significantly more homosexual males than the control group. Male-male pairs courted, built nests together and paired off for several weeks. Higher doses increased the effect, with 55 per cent of males in the 0.3 ppm group affected. Male-male matings were responsible for 81 per cent of unproductive nests in the dosed groups.

Meanwhile the heterosexual pairs courted less and were bad at parenting – patterns of behaviour that were both already known to be caused by methylmercury poisoning. The combined effects of male-male pairing and poor performance by male-female pairs could be severe. "In the worst-case scenario, the production of young would fall by 50 per cent," says Frederick.

Looking for effects on courtship and mating is novel, says Tony Scheuhammer of Environment Canada's National Wildlife Research Center in Ottawa, Ontario. "People normally study pairs that have already mated to see how good they are at parenting," he says.

Other birds would probably be similarly affected, though both Frederick and Scheuhammer say it's far from clear whether other animal groups would be. In particular, there's no evidence for increased homosexuality in humans resulting from mercury poisoning, despite several long-term studies. "If the effect was as strong in humans as in the ibises, they'd have found it," Frederick says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2189

Spray-On Stem Cells Speed Healing Process For Burn Victims

http://www.care2.com/causes/health-policy/blog/spray-on-stem-cells-accelerate-healing-for-burn-victims/




An experimental stem cell treatment is helping to speed up the healing process for burn victims, according to researchers at the University of Utah.

We've all heard of spray-on tans, and (ahem) clothing, but now the same principle of instant-application is being used to provide a speedy recovery process for those that are suffering from serious burns.

In clinical trials, surgeons Amit Patel and Amalia Cochran are testing "a concentrate of [the patient's own] platelets and progenitor cells with calcium and thrombin to create a Jello-like substance accelerates the healing process".

Popular Science reports that "in tests, the spray has proven effective in the treatment of small burns and seems to improve the likelihood that a skin graft will take, which could carry positive implications for the application of this technology to other types of transplants."


A similar treatment, called ReCell, is already being used in Australia, Europe and China and made headlines when it was used to treat of victims of a 2002 bombing in Bali.

So far, the spray-on treatment is only being used on patients with small burns, but the researchers hope that someday they maybe able to scale up the process to treat those who sustain burns on large areas of their body, like military personnel or people that have been caught in a house fire.