How it helps kidney dialysis patients

from complications

A recent study has shown that pomegranate juice helps protect dialysis patients from infections, inflammation and tissue damage.

A good number of studies conducted in recent years have professed support to the wide range of health benefits brought about by the intake of pomegranate juice.  It is said to contain excellent amounts of antioxidants which helps boost a person’s immune system.  Also, pomegranate juice have shown potential effects in lowering bad cholesterol levels and blood pressure – very important effects especially for people diagnosed with diabetes and hypertension.

Aside from the mentioned health benefits, the results of a preliminary study have suggested that pomegranate juice can help protect the body against some complications of undergoing dialysis due to kidney disease, which includes the high death rate due to cardiovascular events and infections.  This is according to a paper presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition of the American Society of Nephrology held in Denver, Colorado.

Effect on Patients under Dialysis

101 patients undergoing dialysis were enrolled in the study.  They were then divided into two groups: one group received pomegranate juice prior to every dialysis session, and another group received a placebo drink, thrice a week for a period of one year.  They were observed by Lilach Shema, a PhD candidate, Dr. Batya Kristal, FASN, (Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, Ruth & Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel) and colleagues.

Results of the laboratory tests revealed that patients who consumed pomegranate juice exhibited reduction in inflammation and diminished oxidative stress damage caused by free radicals.  Furthermore, those who drank pomegranate juice had reduced risk of hospitalization brought about by infections. The findings of this recent study corroborate with the findings of previous studies saying that pomegranate juice contains powerful and effective antioxidant properties.

Pomegranate Juice also Good for the Heart

When data that was not included in the abstract was analyzed, it revealed that patients who consumed pomegranate juice also exhibited improved risk factors for cardiovascular conditions such as a reduction in blood pressure, improved lipid profile and lower cardiovascular events.  This suggests that the patients who drank pomegranate juice had better cardiovascular health compared to those who didn’t.  The said findings are in consonance with the other studied subjects, especially important for patients who are undergoing dialysis because a good number of patients with kidney disease die either from infections or cardiovascular-related causes.

The authors of the study said the their findings indicate that consuming pomegranate juice in controlled amounts coupled with a monitored and safe levels of potassium may help lessen complications that frequently occurs in patients undergoing dialysis.  It is very important to consider the involved risks in too much potassium content, most especially in patients with chronic kidney disease whose diets include potassium restriction.

Dr. Kristal said that more clinical trials should be conducted regarding the effects of pomegranate juice.  The study should be geared towards reducing the high morbidity rate related to cardiovascular events in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and to put a stop to its deterioration to end-stage renal disease. The researchers said that the next decade may bring about an epidemic of CKD.

What is Chronic Kidney Disease?

Chronic kidney disease is a condition in which the kidney gradually, and permanently, loses its function. The kidneys are responsible for filtering the blood in order to get rid of excess water and waste products. Waste and water will convert into urine and will then be flushed out of the body. When the normal function of the kidneys is disrupted, waste products and excess water starts to accumulate.  This becomes toxic to the body which may affect various body parts.

The following conditions may cause chronic kidney disease:

• Uncontrolled hypertension
• Presence of kidney stones
• Heroin abuse
• Sickle Cell disease
• HIV Infection
• Atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)
• Polycystic kidney disease
• Glomerulonephritis
• Diabetes Mellitus (Types 1 and 2)

The worst stage of chronic kidney disease is the Stage 5.  This stage is also referred to as end-stage renal disease or kidney failure.  What happens is that, there is a near-total or total loss of kidney function.  Toxic substances, waste products and excess water start to accumulate which may cause various signs and symptoms to the patient.  When this happens, kidney transplantation or dialysis is needed for the patient to stay alive.

Common signs and symptoms include:

• Easy fatigability
• Pruritus (generalized itching)
• Dry skin
• Nausea and Vomiting
• Loss of Appetite
• Unintentional weight loss
• Headaches
• Swelling of the extremities (hands and feet)
• Problems in sleeping
• Amenorrhea (absence of menstrual periods)
• Excessive thirst
• Easy bruising
• Frequent muscle cramps and twitching
• Confusion
• Drowsiness

How to keep your kidneys healthy

• Avoid eating foods that contain high amounts of salt.
• Drink a lot of water.
• Avoid too much alcohol intake
• Visit your doctor for regular check-ups.
• Eat a balanced diet.  Include vegetables and fruits that are rich in polyphenols.  Examples include carrot juice, dried fruits, cauliflower, sun dried tomatoes, avocados, asparagus, green beans, beetroot, mushrooms and potatoes.

Other Benefits of Pomegranate Juice

As mentioned, numerous studies have been conducted regarding the health benefits of pomegranate juice consumption.  Despite its benefits, pomegranate juice contains high amounts of sugar, so remember to drink moderately.

Other known benefits of pomegranate juice are:

• In a study published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, pomegranate juice helps reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
• In the Clinical Nutrition journal, researchers said that drinking pomegranate juice boosts the quality of sperm in men.
• Pomegranate juice helps stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.  This is the result of a study published in the Neurobiology of Disease journal.
• Studies conducted in Israel have shown that pomegranate juice helps fight breast cancer.  It destroys the cancer cells but leaves healthy cells unharmed.
• Studies conducted with the use of mice have shown that drinking pomegranate juice may prevent lung cancer development.
• For pregnant women, consumption of pomegranate juice helps protect the neonatal brain from damage.
• Pomegranate juice is also good for the heart – it prevents the build up of fatty plaques in arteries which could cause heart attacks and stroke.
• Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha
• 
  

Immunologists Develop Method

To Decrease Rejections

Of Kidney Transplants

A nephrologist has found that a specialized type of anti-rejection therapy using intravenous immunoglobulin can make kidney transplants possible for patients with high ‘anti-donor’ antibodies. 25 to 30 percent of patients on the kidney transplant list could benefit from this therapy. Tissue compatibility issues exist with any organ transplant, but the risk is greatly increased for those with high exposure to antigens received through blood transfusions, previous transplantation, or even pregnancy.

Seventy-thousand Americans are waiting for a kidney transplant. A third of them are parked on dialysis because their antibody levels are too high for a transplant. But that’s no longer a barrier for some people.

“I used to just sit around and throw up,” says former dialysis patient Soraya Kohanzadeh.

Dialysis is something Kohanzadeh would rather forget, but if telling her story saves lives, it’s worth it.

Kohanzadeh — like many kidney failure patients — developed high levels of “anti-donor” antibodies through blood transfusions. Her highly sensitized immune system would likely reject any donated kidney.

“Essentially, she would have a very short, sick life on dialysis,” says Joan Lando, Kohanzadeh’s mother.

But Kohanzadeh is no longer here, thanks to intravenous immunoglobulin therapy or IVIG. Here’s how it works: during dialysis, patients are given blood containing a mix of immunoglobulins, which “turn-off” the anti-donor antibodies’ attack response without suppressing the patient’s immune system.

“A significant other comes forward, donates an organ, and there’s an incompatibility there. We can treat the patient and remove those antibodies. Then the transplant can be done,” Stanley Jordan, M.D., director of nephrology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

More than a year after surgery, Lando’s kidney keeps her daughter alive.

“It was sort of shocking to think I wasn’t going to have to be sick forever,” Kohanzadeh says.

Through their website, this mother-daughter team works to spread the word of a little known therapy that could save thousands in need of a kidney. IVIG is covered by Medicare and can be used in both living and cadaver-donor transplants. Nearly 30 percent of patients on the kidney transplant list might benefit from this therapy.

To learn more go to www.sevenluckystars.com

BACKGROUND: About one-third of kidney patients are often told they cannot have a transplant even if they have a donor with an otherwise perfectly matched tissue and blood type. Their anti-donor antibody levels are so high that any transplanted organ would be rejected by their highly sensitized immune system. Now there is a specialized type of anti-rejection therapy using intravenous immunoglobin (IVIG), which injects antibodies from healthy people into the blood supply, to modulate the immune system without suppressing it. This makes kidney transplant possible for as much as 25-30% of this group of patients, who would otherwise not be eligible for a transplant because of their high antibody levels.

DEALING WITH REJECTION: Tissue compatibility is an issue for all patients receiving organ transplants, but rejection risks are much higher for those with high exposure to human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) that are not produced by their own bodies. Exposure may be the result of blood transfusions, previous transplantation, or even pregnancy if the mother is exposed to the father’s antigens, which are then expressed in the cells of the developing fetus. The immune system is then ‘sensitized’ to those antigens — primed with antibodies that attack any foreign tissue, even if the antigens arrive in the form of a life-saving donated organ.

ABOUT IVIG: IVIG modulates the immune system without suppressing it. In fact, the therapy actually boosts the immune system because the antibodies found in IVIG help fend off infections — a common post-surgery complication. For the most highly sensitized patients, IVIG is combined with a new drug, Rituxan, which reduces treatment time from four months to one before transplantation. The therapy can be used in both living-donor and cadaver-donor transplants. In the late 1980s. Dr. Stanley C. Jordan pioneered the use of IVIG as a way to reduce organ rejection among highly sensitized patients. It is now a fully accepted, Medicare-approved therapy as of 2004, when it was found to be effective in a multi-center study partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

WHAT IS DIALYSIS? Hemodialysis is a treatment for end stage renal disease (ESRD), or kidney failure, in which blood is removed from the body, filtered through an artificial kidney and then the cleaned blood is returned to the body. In the US, hemodialysis is the most common treatment for people who have kidney failure. However, dialysis is also a painful, expensive procedure, and while it cleans the blood well enough to maintain existence, it does little to improve a patient’s overall quality of life. Also, data shows that if patients get a transplant before they get to the point of dialysis, they do better in the longer term.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 12th June 2010

The Rolling Stones changed lives. So do kidney stones. Both can make you keel over like a rugby player who’s been kneed in the groin (for different reasons). Traditionally, keeping stones at bay (kidney stones, not the Rolling Stones) meant treating your body like an empty swimming pool and flooding it with water to flush it out.

That’s still a good idea. But now, there’s also evidence that a little addition and subtraction can dramatically reduce your risk for the stones that create intense pain (and we mean intense) in your lower back and side when you urinate:

What to add: Vegetables, nuts, legumes, nonfat dairy products and 100 percent whole grains. Pile ‘em on.

What to subtract: Sodium, sweetened beverages, and red and processed meats.

What it gets you: People who ate this way had a gigantic 40 percent to 45 percent reduction in kidney-stone risk (men saw the higher drop in risk).

Even niftier about this whole equation (even if you don’t like math) is that the diet the stone-free people were eating was similar to the DASH diet.

That simple diet has been shown to lower blood pressure — a major health boost, since high blood pressure will be responsible for more than 60,000 deaths this year in the U.S. alone.

The diet is also rich in nutrients the rest of your body loves for other reasons, and low in the stuff that treats your body the way pigeons do a statue. So add a little, subtract a little and reap the rewards.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 8th Sept 2009

One million Americans suffer heart attacks every year. Quickly getting their arteries propped open with stents saves lives, studies have found. But millions more develop heart symptoms gradually. Usually it comes in the form of angina, a squeezing pain in the chest or arms caused by clogged arteries that starve the heart muscle of oxygen. The pain comes with exercise or stress, and then goes away.

People often assume they need a stent to get that artery opened up right away–or else. But new results from two big trials are unambiguous: The high-tech procedures don’t save lives or prevent heart attacks for most patients with stable symptoms. “It doesn’t do anything to lower risk of subsequent death or heart attack,” says William Boden, a cardiologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who led one of the trials. Drug treatment alone is just as effective.

The reason for this counterintuitive result is that most heart attacks don’t occur at the locations that appear most clogged on an angiogram. Instead, heart attacks happen when lesser narrowings become inflamed and suddenly rupture, spewing a clot into the bloodstream. The blockage that bursts isn’t necessarily the one that causes symptoms. People think heart disease “is just a plumbing issue, that clogged pipes mean an impending heart attack,” says James Stein of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “A stent is just a local therapy for a systemic problem.”

Stents are installed during angioplasty, in which a balloon is used to unclog an artery. They are necessary if drugs cannot produce enough pain relief, say cardiologists. One of the two trials found that 66 out of 100 patients who received a stent were angina free after a year versus 58 out of 100 who received only drugs; that difference faded after five years.

Another study published in June comparing stents to drugs in diabetic heart patients found no difference in the risk of death or heart attacks, and only a little over 40% of those assigned drugs later got a stent. A more clogged-up group received either drugs or cardiac bypass surgery, in which veins are used to bypass blocked arteries. The bypass patients didn’t live longer but did have fewer nonfatal heart attacks. “I think physicians will be more likely to consider bypass for their diabetic patients and steer away from angioplasty,” says study author Sheryl Kelsey of the University of Pittsburgh.

One diabetic patient who did well without a stent is Earl Anderson of Old Bridge, N.J. The 62-year-old retired FBI agent first felt chest pains while rushing to catch a plane in 2002. An angiogram revealed a narrowing in one artery, and doctors gave him drugs. His angina soon went away and hasn’t come back. Now his cholesterol and blood sugar are down; he plays tennis weekly with his 14-year-old son

• A User’s Guide to Your Heart

• The Mystery of Sudden Cardiac Arrest

• Fighting Heart Failure

• Soothing Angina

• Your Heart: An Interactive Graphic

• Heart Disorder Afflicts Millions

• Thousands Of Children Suffer Cardiac Death

Cardiologists who install stents say that these relieve pain better than drugs and that most patients have more symptoms than Anderson. “Patients with a lot of symptoms don’t do well with drug therapy,” says Gregg Stone of New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

One reason so many stents are implanted is money. “Hospitals are paid handsomely if the patient has bypass surgery or has a stent. But they are not paid [so much] if a patient has drugs,” says cardiologist David Hillis of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. While generally safe, stent procedures can cause heart attacks, bleeding or even death.

Another misconception is that getting a procedure will obviate the need for drugs. “People have this impression that ‘If I get a stent, then I am not going to have to take medicine,’ and that is wrong,” says Mayo Clinic cardiologist Raymond Gibbons. “Everybody is going to get medicines. The real question: Is stenting or surgery going to bring enough benefit in addition?” Patients who get drug-coated stents often must take more drugs; they need to stay on the blood thinner Plavix for at least a year to prevent rare cases of clots forming in the stent.

One key test that is often skipped: stress tests to determine if your heart is getting enough oxygen during exercise. The problem, says Scripps Research Institute cardiologist Eric Topol: Without stress tests, doctors don’t know whether narrowings seen on an angiogram are causing problems.

Heart patients with stable symptoms have choices–and time to consider their decisions. For many of them drug therapy alone, drug therapy and stents, or drug therapy with angioplasty are all reasonable options. If you are not sure which you want, you can ask the doctor doing your angiogram to hold off on the stent if nothing alarming is found. This will give you time to discuss the result with your primary care doctor or referring cardiologist.

Prevention
Eat a healthy diet and exercise to prevent the buildup of artery plaque.

Take statins and blood pressure drugs if your doctor dictates.

Treatment
For most patients, drug therapy can reduce the risk of heart attack and treat chest pain.

A stent/angioplasty procedure can reduce chest pain but has no proved impact on survival in those with stable symptoms.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 28th June 2009

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Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 25th June 2009

New Research Uncovers Amazing Brain Saver!

Clogged arteries prevent blood supply to the brain. Oxygen-deprived brain cells become damaged or even die.

But when scientists induced strokes in laboratory rats and treated them with an amazingly simple nutrient—a remarkable discovery was made. Here’s what happened…

In one experiment, strokes were induced in laboratory rats by blocking the carotid artery for 30 minutes. Once blood flow and oxygen were restored, there was a burst in the production of free radicals. This overwhelmed the brain’s antioxidant defenses and killed 80% of the rats within 24 hours.

In a follow-up experiment, everything was the same, except this time, researchers injected a powerful antioxidant into the rats before blood and oxygen was restored. After a 24 hour period—only 25% of the rats died. The remaining 75% made a full recovery. Further study concluded the brain of the antioxidant-treated rats showed no signs of a stroke at all!

The name of this stellar brain saver?
It’s alpha lipoic acid!

This research and many more demonstrate alpha lipoic acid can deliver remarkable protection to your brain to help prevent damage—and even help restore healthy brain function in the event of a blockage of blood flow to the brain.

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Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 25th June 2009

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