After drinking this tea,
THIS WOMAN IS  ASTHMA-FREE!

Hasn’t had an attack in several years!

“How on earth do you find all these remedies?” I asked them. “Actually,” they replied, “some of the best ones find us! For example…

“A woman phoned in to our radio show with a wild-sounding asthma remedy. She’d been suffering for years, but she said her life has been totally changed by…

WILD CHERRY-BARK TEA! “She swore she hasn’t had an asthma attack since she started drinking it 5 years ago. Still, we wondered…

“WILL IT WORK FOR ANYONE ELSE?”

“Does it ever! Ever since that radio show, folks with breathing problems have been telling us THANK YOU! They say it’s great for asthma, bronchitis and coughs.”

NOTE: This unusual tea can be hard to find.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Experimental shock therapy device offers hope for sleep apnea sufferers

Noisy snoring is not just a tiring irritation for partners but also can be a sign of sleep apnea. The National Institutes of Health reports that more than 12 million Americans suffer from the most common of the three varieties – obstructive sleep apnea, where the upper airway is repeatedly blocked during sleep. There are several treatment options already available and Minneapolis-based Inspire Medical Systems is about to add a shocking new addition to the treatment options on offer. The new system – which is about to enter clinical trials – electrically stimulates the nerve at the base of the tongue & keeps it from blocking the air’s journey to and from the lungs, and so offers the patient a good night’s sleep. Read More

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Early Lung Cancer Detection:

Optical Technology Shows Potential

for Prescreening Patients at High Risk

Science (Oct. 9, 2010) — Researchers from Northwestern University and NorthShore University HealthSystem (NorthShore) have developed a method to detect early signs of lung cancer by examining cheek cells in humans using pioneering biophotonics technology.

Early detection is critical for improving cancer survival rates. Yet, one of the deadliest cancers in the United States, lung cancer, is notoriously difficult to detect in its early stages. Now, researchers have developed a method to detect lung cancer by merely shining diffuse light on cells swabbed from patients’ cheeks.

“By examining the lining of the cheek with this optical technology, we have the potential to prescreen patients at high risk for lung cancer, such as those who smoke, and identify the individuals who would likely benefit from more invasive and expensive tests versus those who don’t need additional tests,” said Hemant K. Roy, M.D., director of gastroenterology research at NorthShore.

The optical technique is called partial wave spectroscopic (PWS) microscopy and was developed by Vadim Backman, professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Backman and Roy earlier used PWS to assess the risk of colon and pancreatic cancers, also with promising results.

The lung cancer findings are published online Oct. 5 by the journal Cancer Research. The paper will appear in print in the Oct. 15 issue.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Survival rates are high with surgical resection (removal of the tumor) but only if detected at an early stage. Currently there are no recommended tests for large population screening to detect lung cancer early. The disease is already advanced by the time most lung cancer patients develop symptoms. The five-year survival rate for lung cancer patients is only 15 percent.

PWS can detect cell features as small as 20 nanometers, uncovering differences in cells that appear normal using standard microscopy techniques. The PWS-based test makes use of the “field effect,” a biological phenomenon in which cells located some distance from the malignant or pre-malignant tumor undergo molecular and other changes.

“Despite the fact that these cells appear to be normal using standard microscopy, which images micron-scale cell architecture, there are actually profound changes in the nanoscale architecture of the cell,” Backman said. “PWS measures the disorder strength of the nanoscale organization of the cell, which we have determined to be one of the earliest signs of carcinogenesis and a strong marker for the presence of cancer in the organ.”

“PWS is a paradigm shift, in that we don’t need to examine the tumor itself to determine the presence of cancer,” added Hariharan Subramanian, a research associate in Backman’s lab who played a central role in the development of the technology.

After testing the technology in a small-scale trial, Roy and Backman focused the study on smokers, since smoking is the major risk factor related to 90 percent of lung cancer patients. “The basic idea is that smoking not only affects the lungs but the entire airway tract,” Roy said.

The study was comprised of 135 participants including 63 smokers with lung cancer and control groups of 37 smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), 13 smokers without COPD and 22 non-smokers. The research was not confounded by the participants’ demographic factors such as amount of smoking, age or gender. Importantly, the test was equally sensitive to cancers of all stages, including early curable cancers.

The researchers swabbed the inside of patients’ mouths, and then the cheek cells were applied to a slide, fixed in ethanol and optically scanned using PWS to measure the disorder strength of cell nanoarchitecture. Results were markedly elevated (greater than 50 percent) in patients with lung cancer compared to cancer-free smokers.

A further assessment of the performance characteristics of the “disorder strength” (as a biomarker) showed greater than 80 percent accuracy in discriminating cancer patients from individuals in the three control groups.

“The results are similar to other successful cancer screening techniques, such as the pap smear,” Backman said. “Our goal is to develop a technique that can improve the detection of other cancers in order to provide early treatments, much as the pap smear has drastically improved survival rates for cervical cancer.”

Additional large-scale validation trials are necessary for PWS. If it continues to prove effective in clinical trials at detecting cancer early, Backman and Roy believe PWS has the potential to be used as a prescreening method, identifying patients at highest risk who are likely to benefit from more comprehensive testing such as bronchoscopy or low-dose CT scans.

The paper is titled “Optical Detection of Buccal Epithelial Nanoarchitectural Alterations in Patients Harboring Lung Cancer: Implications for Screening.” In addition to Roy, Backman and Subramanian, other authors of the paper are Dhwanil Damania, Thomas A. Hensing, William N. Rom, Harvey I. Pass, Daniel Ray, Jeremy D. Rogers, Andrej Bogojevic, Maitri Shah, Tomasz Kuzniar and Prabhakar Pradhan.

Editor’s Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

High amounts of heavy metals found in China tobacco

HONG KONG, Oct. 7, 2010 (Reuters) — Some Chinese cigarettes contain amounts of lead, arsenic and cadmium that are three times higher than levels found in Canadian cigarettes, a study has found.

While consuming such heavy metals is widely known to be harmful to health, there is little research done so far about their impact when inhaled into the body.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Tobacco Control on Thursday, said more investigation was needed.

“While the per-stick levels of metals are what we measured, the real issue is repeated exposure. Smokers don’t smoke just one cigarette, but 20 or so a day every day for years because cigarettes are addictive,” wrote lead author Richard O’Connor of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.

“These metals get into smokers along with a cocktail of other toxicants. The effect of cumulative exposure to multiple toxicants, including metals, is the public health question that needs to be sorted out.”

The researchers used Canadian cigarettes for comparison in their study because Canadian manufacturers and importers are required to test for metals content in tobacco, and Health Canada, the country’s public health agency, recently released data concerning this.

China has more than 320 million smokers and a million Chinese in the country die each year from tobacco-related illnesses. Smoking has been causally linked to hypertension, stroke, diabetes, cancer, heart and respiratory diseases, among others.

China has the world’s largest smoking population and is also the biggest producer of tobacco, manufacturing 2.16 trillion cigarettes in 2007, according to the Tobacco Atlas.

O’Connor and colleagues analyzed 78 varieties of popular Chinese cigarette brands and found significantly elevated levels of heavy metals, with some containing three times the levels of lead, cadmium and arsenic compared with Canadian cigarettes.

“The higher yields of cadmium and lead in cigarettes manufactured in China are worrisome given current smoking prevalence in China and China National Tobacco Company’s export ambitions,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

A member of the team, Geoffrey Fong from the University of Waterloo in Canada, said the heavy metals content was due to contaminated soil.

“Tobacco like other crops absorbs minerals and other things from the soil, so if the soil has cadium, lead or arsenic, they will be absorbed into the tobacco,” Fong said.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Scientists Grow New Lungs

Using ‘Skeletons’ of Old Ones

Science (June 28, 2010) — For someone with a severe, incurable lung disorder such as cystic fibrosis or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung transplant may be the only chance for survival. Unfortunately, it’s often not a very good chance. Matching donor lungs are rare, and many would-be recipients die waiting for the transplants that could save their lives.

Such deaths could be prevented if it were possible to use stem cells to grow new lungs or lung tissue. Specialists in the emerging field of tissue engineering have been hard at work on this for years. But they’ve been frustrated by the problem of coaxing undifferentiated stem cells to develop into the specific cell types that populate different locations in the lung.

Now, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have demonstrated a potentially revolutionary solution to this problem. As they describe in an article published electronically ahead of print by the journal Tissue Engineering Part A, they seeded mouse embryonic stem cells into “acellular” rat lungs — organs whose original cells had been destroyed by repeated cycles of freezing and thawing and exposure to detergent.

The result: empty lung-shaped scaffolds of structural proteins on which the mouse stem cells thrived and differentiated into new cells appropriate to their specific locations.

“In terms of different cell types, the lung is probably the most complex of all organs — the cells near the entrance are very different from those deep in the lung,” said Dr. Joaquin Cortiella, one of the article’s lead authors. “Our natural matrix generated the same pattern, with tracheal cells only in the trachea, alveoli-like cells in the alveoli, pneumocytes only in the distal lung, and definite transition zones between the bronchi and the alveoli.”

Such “site-specific” cell development has never been seen before in a natural matrix, said professor Joan Nichols, another of the paper’s lead authors. The complexity gives the researchers hope that the concept could be scaled up to produce replacement tissues for humans — or used to create models to test therapies and diagnostic techniques for a variety of lung diseases.

“If we can make a good lung for people, we can also make a good model for injury,” Nichols said. “We can create a fibrotic lung, or an emphysematous lung, and evaluate what’s happening with those, what the cells are doing, how well stem cell or other therapy works. We can see what happens in pneumonia, or what happens when you’ve got a hemorrhagic fever, or tuberculosis, or hantavirus — all the agents that target the lung and cause damage in the lung.”

The researchers have already begun work on large-scale experiments, “decellularizing” pig lungs with an eye toward using them to produce larger samples of lung tissue that could lead to applications in humans. They’re also taking on the challenge of vascularization — stimulating the growth of blood vessels that will enable the engineered tissues to survive outside the special bioreactors that the researchers now use to keep them alive by bathing them in a life-sustaining cocktail of nutrients and oxygen.

“People ask us why we’re doing the lung, because it’s so hard,” Cortiella said. “But the potential is so great, and the technology is here. It’s going to take time, but I think we’re going to create a system that works.”

Other authors of the Tissue Engineering Part A paper are UTMB research associate Jean Niles, associate professor Gracie Vargas, medical student Sean Winston, graduate student Shannon Walls, summer research fellows Andrea Brettler and Jennifer Wang, Andrea Cantu of Stanford University and Dr. Anthony Pham of Brown Medical School

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Genetic Secrets That Allow Tibetans

to Thrive in Thin Air Discovered

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2010) — A new study pinpoints the genetic changes that enable Tibetans to thrive at altitudes where others get sick.

In the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team has identified a gene that allows Tibetans to live and work more than two miles above sea level without getting altitude sickness.

A previous study published May 13 in Science reported that Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude. Now, less than a month later, a second study by scientists from China, England, Ireland, and the United States pinpoints a particular site within the human genome — a genetic variant linked to low hemoglobin in the blood — that helps explain how Tibetans cope with low-oxygen conditions.

The study sheds light on how Tibetans, who have lived at extreme elevation for more than 10,000 years, have evolved to differ from their low-altitude ancestors.

Lower air pressure at altitude means fewer oxygen molecules for every lungful of air. “Altitude affects your thinking, your breathing, and your ability to sleep. But high-altitude natives don’t have these problems,” said co-author Cynthia Beall of Case Western Reserve University. “They’re able to live a healthy life, and they do it completely comfortably,” she said.

People who live or travel at high altitude respond to the lack of oxygen by making more hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component of human blood. “That’s why athletes like to train at altitude. They increase their oxygen-carrying capacity,” said Beall.

But too much hemoglobin can be a bad thing. Excessive hemoglobin is the hallmark of chronic mountain sickness, an overreaction to altitude characterized by thick and viscous blood. Tibetans maintain relatively low hemoglobin at high altitude, a trait that makes them less susceptible to the disease than other populations.

“Tibetans can live as high as 13,000 feet without the elevated hemoglobin concentrations we see in other people,” said Beall.

To pinpoint the genetic variants underlying Tibetans’ relatively low hemoglobin levels, the researchers collected blood samples from nearly 200 Tibetan villagers living in three regions high in the Himalayas. When they compared the Tibetans’ DNA with their lowland counterparts in China, their results pointed to the same culprit — a gene on chromosome 2, called EPAS1, involved in red blood cell production and hemoglobin concentration in the blood.

Originally working separately, the authors of the study first put their findings together at a March 2009 meeting at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC. “Some of us had been working on the whole of Tibetan DNA. Others were looking at small groups of genes. When we shared our findings we suddenly realized that both sets of studies pointed to the same gene — EPAS1,” said Robbins, who co-organized the meeting with Beall.

While all humans have the EPAS1 gene, Tibetans carry a special version of the gene. Over evolutionary time individuals who inherited this variant were better able to survive and passed it on to their children, until eventually it became more common in the population as a whole.

“This is the first human gene locus for which there is hard evidence for genetic selection in Tibetans,” said co-author Peter Robbins of Oxford University.

Researchers are still trying to understand how Tibetans get enough oxygen to their tissues despite low levels of oxygen in the air and bloodstream. Until then, the genetic clues uncovered so far are unlikely to be the end of the story. “There are probably many more signals to be characterized and described,” said co-author Gianpiero Cavalleri of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

For those who live closer to sea level, the findings may one day help predict who is at greatest risk for altitude sickness. “Once we find these versions, tests can be developed to tell if an individual is sensitive to low-oxygen,” said co-author Changqing Zeng of the Beijing Institute of Genomics.

“Many patients, young and old, are affected by low oxygen levels in their blood — perhaps from lung disease, or heart problems. Some cope much better than others,” said co-author Hugh Montgomery, of University College London. “Studies like this are the start in helping us to understand why, and to develop new treatments.”

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 11th June 2010

Surprise: A Pfizer Cancer Drug Works

Robert LangrethBio | Email
Robert Langreth is a senior editor at Forbes, in charge of health care coverage