Fitness club memberships help insurance plans to enrol healthier patients |  |
- Fitness club memberships help insurance plans to enrol healthier patients
- Shock therapy to eradicate Escherichia Coli
- Deep brain stimulation is effective at improving motor symptoms patients with advanced Parkinson's disease
- Interferon-stimulated gene 15 (ISG15), a ubiquitin like protein, is a new therapeutic target for breast cancer
- Animals in confined shelters harm human health
- Best way to boost adult immunizations is through office-based action, study finds
- ALMA early science result reveals starving galaxies
- Berkeley Lab seeks to help US assert scientific leadership in critical materials
- Tapping the body's own defenses, researchers look to cutting-edge gene therapy for bladder cancer
- The path less traveled: Research is driving solutions to improve unpaved roads
| Fitness club memberships help insurance plans to enrol healthier patients Posted: 12 Jan 2012 02:15 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Because healthy enrollees cost them less, Medicare Advantage plans would profit from selecting seniors based on their health, but Medicare strictly forbids practices such as denying coverage based on existing conditions. Another way to build a more profitable membership is to design insurance benefits that attract the healthiest patients. In a study published in the Jan. 12, 2012, edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, Brown University researchers report that plans have managed to do just that by offering fitness club memberships as a covered benefit. "Offering a fitness membership does not mean that you are denying people coverage, but you are changing your benefits to appeal selectively to people who are healthy," said co-author Amal Trivedi, a Brown public health professor and a physician at the Providence VA Medical Center. "Policymakers intended for Medicare Advantage plans to compete on the basis of improving quality and reducing costs, rather than on their ability to attract healthier patients. What we found in the study is that offering coverage for fitness membership is a very effective strategy to attract a much healthier population." That conclusion comes from Trivedi's and lead author Alicia Cooper's rigorous statistical comparisons among thousands of patients in 22 Medicare Advantage plans — 11 "case" plans that added fitness club memberships in 2004 or 2005 and 11 similar "control" plans that didn't. They looked at when each plan member enrolled, when plans started offering the benefit, and what each plan member said about his or her health in the Medicare Health Outcomes Survey from 2006 to 2008. One analysis compared the self-reported health of seniors who enrolled in case plans before the fitness club benefit was offered to the health of those who enrolled after the benefit was offered. While 29.1 percent of the seniors who enrolled before the benefit was available described themselves to be in... http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| Shock therapy to eradicate Escherichia Coli Posted: 12 Jan 2012 02:03 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) According to a study published in the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition and Public Health, a short burst of low voltage alternating current can effectively eradicate E. coli bacteria growing on the surface of even heavily contaminated beef. The technique offers an inexpensive and easy to implement approach to reducing the risk of food poisoning, which can occur despite handlers complying with hygiene standards. Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a bacterium that is commonly found in the gut of humans and warm-blooded animals. Most strains of E. coli are harmless. Some strains however, such as enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), can cause severe foodborne disease. It is transmitted to humans primarily through consumption of contaminated foods, such as raw or undercooked ground meat products, raw milk and contaminated raw vegetables and sprouts.Infection with this bacterium causes serious diarrhea, dehydration, kidney problems and can lead to serious long-term problems or even be fatal in children, the elderly and people with pre-existing health problems. Tens of thousands of people are affected by E. coli infection each year through eating contaminated beef and other food products. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about 2500 people are hospitalized and there are several dozen deaths each year. Now, Ajit Mahapatra and colleagues at Fort Valley State University, in Georgia and Virginia Tech have demonstrated that applying a low-voltage alternating current to beef samples inoculated with large numbers of the potentially lethal E. coli O157:H7 can almost completely deactivate the bacterium, which is usually present on the surface of contaminated meat. The team points out that the level of contamination used in their tests far exceeded the contamination that would be seen in commercial carcasses after slaughter. Previous researchers had demonstrated that electricity can kill bacteria... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Posted: 12 Jan 2012 01:54 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Researchers from the University of Florida and 14 additional medical centers reported results in the online version of The Lancet Neurology journal indicating that deep brain stimulation — also known as DBS — is effective at improving motor symptoms and quality of life in patients with advanced Parkinson's disease. The study, sponsored by St. Jude Medical Inc., tested the safety and effectiveness of a constant current DBS device developed by St. Jude Medical to manage the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The device aimed to reduce tremors, improve the slowness of movement, decrease the motor disability of the disease and reduce involuntary movements called dyskinesia, which are a common side effect of Parkinson's drugs. After treatment, analysis of 136 patient diaries revealed longer periods of effective symptom control — known as "on time" — without involuntary movements. "On time" for patients who received stimulation increased by an average of 4.27 hours compared with an increase of 1.77 hours in the group without stimulation. Patients also noted overall improvements in the quality of their daily activities, mobility, emotional state, social support and physical comfort. "I think it is safe to say since dopamine treatment emerged in the 1960s, DBS has been the single biggest symptomatic breakthrough for Parkinson patients who have experienced the fluctuations associated with levodopa therapy," said Michael S. Okun, M.D., first author of the study, administrative director of the UF College of Medicine's Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration, and the National Medical Director for the National Parkinson Foundation. "This study validates the use of mild electrical currents delivered to specific brain structures in order to improve Parkinson's disease in select patients with advanced symptoms, and additionally, it explored a new stimulation paradigm. Future improvements in devices and the delivery systems for... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Posted: 12 Jan 2012 01:44 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) In a study published in the January 2012 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, Dr. Shyamal Desai and her co-investigators report that gene knock-down studies demonstrate that elevated ISG15 pathway results in disruption of the cytoskeletal architecture of breast cancer cells. ISG15 also inhibits degradation of cellular proteins involved in cell motility, invasion, and metastasis, promoting breast cancer cell migration. Interferon-stimulated gene 15 (ISG15), a ubiquitin like protein, is highly elevated in a variety of cancers including breast cancer. Dr. Desai said "Using ISG15 and UbcH8 gene knocked-down approach, our recent published and unpublished results explicitly demonstrated that the ISG15 pathway inhibits the ubiquitin-mediated proteasome-dependent protein degradation in breast cancer cells. We were the first to recognize this antagonizing effect of ISG15 in cancer cells"; however, others are increasingly coming to the same conclusion in their observations that ISG15 conjugation stabilizes cellular proteins. Dr. Arthur Haas said "Given the crucial role of the ubiquitin/26S proteasome pathway in normal cell homeostasis, one expects that ISG15-induced downregulation of the ubiquitin pathway must contribute to breast tumor cell viability. Concurrently, in this manuscript we demonstrate that ISG15 promotes breast cancer cell migration by inhibiting ubiquitin-mediated degradation of cellular proteins associated with cell motility, invasion and metastasis". The authors report that the elevated ISG15 pathway results in disruption of the cytoskeletal architecture effecting actin polymerization and formation of focal adhesions in breast cancer cells. Targeted knockdown of both ISG15 and UbcH8 resulted in reconstitution of the cytoskeletal architecture. Dr. Desai said "Disruption of cellular architecture is a hallmark of cancer. The ISG15 pathway is also elevated in a variety of tumors. Our results therefore reveal... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Animals in confined shelters harm human health Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:54 PM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, Jan 11 - Confinement of animals in industrial facilities threatens human health, degrades the environment and diminishes income-earning opportunities in rural areas, a report said Wednesday. The Impact of Industrial Farm Animal Production on Food Security in the Developing World by NGO Humane Society International, the report is critical of the idea that inhumane confinement of animals in industrial production facilities enhances food security. 'There is strong scientific evidence of the negative impacts of these animal factories on people and animals,' said Chetana Mirle, director of farm animal protection for HSI. 'We must do a better job of supporting small-farmer led and animal welfare-friendly agriculture as well as implementing stronger environmental and farm animal welfare regulations.' According to the report, in India, 140-200 million egg laying hens were confined to barren, wire battery cages so restrictive they cannot even spread their wings. Each bird has less living space than an A4 sheet of paper. With no opportunity to experience most natural behavior, such as nesting, dust bathing, perching and foraging, these birds endure lives wrought with suffering. Factory farms that confine more than 50,000 birds within a single shed are increasingly common in the country. 'The HSI report reviews the growing body of evidence showing that industrial farm animal production fails to improve food security,' said the report. For example, the growing confinement of India's egg laying hens in cramped battery cages has failed to significantly improve the nutritional outcomes for low-income communities. http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Best way to boost adult immunizations is through office-based action, study finds Posted: 11 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Promoting immunizations as a part of routine office-based medical practice is needed to improve adult vaccination rates, a highly effective way to curb the spread of diseases across communities, prevent needless illness and deaths, and lower health care costs, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Increasingly, vaccinations are being offered outside of physician offices at pharmacies, workplaces and retail medical clinics. Even so, office-based medical practice continues to be central to the delivery of recommended vaccinations to adults. Regardless of where vaccines are actually administered, office-based providers are uniquely positioned to identify patients who need vaccination, to communicate credibly about the benefits and risks of vaccination, and to ensure that vaccination histories are properly maintained, said Katherine Harris, the study's lead author and a senior economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. The RAND study outlines improvements needed to strengthen the role of office-based medical providers to promote vaccination to adult patients. These include creating tools to improve communications between patients and providers about vaccinations, and stronger incentives to encourage health providers to refer patients to community sites that administer vaccinations if they do not offer them. Diseases that can be readily prevented by vaccines take a heavy toll on adults in the United States despite the wide-spread availability of this generally safe and effective preventive care. The yearly health care and productivity costs blamed on influenza -- a common illness that can be prevented by vaccination -- is as high as $90 billion, depending on the severity of the annual outbreak. In contrast to childhood vaccination rates, which are generally high, adult vaccination rates remain disappointingly low. Even in the case of influenza, inoculation rates for even those at the highest risk of death do not... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| ALMA early science result reveals starving galaxies Posted: 11 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Astronomers using the partially completed ALMA observatory have found compelling evidence for how star-forming galaxies evolve into 'red and dead' elliptical galaxies, catching a large group of galaxies right in the middle of this change. For years, astronomers have been developing a picture of galaxy evolution in which mergers between spiral galaxies could explain why nearby large elliptical galaxies have so few young stars. The theoretical picture is chaotic and violent: The merging galaxies knock gas and dust into clumps of rapid star formation, called starbursts, and down into the maws of the supermassive black hole growing in the merger's core. As more and more matter heaves onto the black hole, powerful jets erupt, and the region around the black hole glows brilliantly as a quasar. The jets blowing out of the merger eventually plow out the galaxy's potential star-forming gas, ending the starbursts. Until now, astronomers had never spotted enough mergers at this critical, jet-plowing stage to definitively link jet-driven outflows to the cessation of starburst activity. During its Early Science observations in late 2011, however, ALMA became the first telescope to confirm nearly two dozen galaxies in this brief stage of galaxy evolution. What did ALMA actually see? Despite ALMA's great sensitiviy to detecting starbursts, we saw nothing, or next to nothing - which is exactly what we hoped it would see, said lead investigator Dr. Carol Lonsdale of the North American ALMA Science Center at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lonsdale presented the findings at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas on behalf of an international team of astronomers. For these observations, ALMA was tuned to look for dust warmed by active star-forming regions. However, half of Lonsdale's two dozen galaxies didn't show up at all in ALMA's observations, and the other half were extremely... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Berkeley Lab seeks to help US assert scientific leadership in critical materials Posted: 11 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) A few short decades ago, few could have imagined that the world would be seriously concerned over something called dysprosium. Also known as number 66 on the periodic table, dysprosium was once just another element for chemistry students to memorize but is now one of the most sought-after and critically needed materials on the planet. Belonging to a family of elements known as lanthanides-also called rare earths-dysprosium and other rare earths are used in almost every high-tech gadget and clean energy technology invented in the last 30 years, from smart phones to wind turbines to hybrid cars. Although the United States was self-sufficient in rare earths or obtained them on the free market until the early 2000s, the vast majority are now mined in China and the supply has been subject to fluctuations. The Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) aims to change the status quo by reviving the study of these critical materials to better understand how to extract them, use them more efficiently, reuse and recycle them and find substitutes for them. In its 2011 Critical Material Strategy released last month, the DOE said that supply challenges for five rare earth metals (dysprosium, neodymium, terbium, europium and yttrium) may affect clean energy technology deployment in the years ahead. It also recommended enhanced training of scientists and engineers to address vulnerabilities and realize opportunities related to critical materials. If we are going to achieve what we need to do in terms of managing climate change, we absolutely have to fix the materials problem-it's the linchpin for clean energy technologies, said Frances Houle, a Berkeley Lab scientist who is Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Chemical Sciences Division. Because Berkeley Lab is such a broad institution, many of the pieces required are already here. We have the chemistry, the earth science, the materials science, the... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Tapping the body's own defenses, researchers look to cutting-edge gene therapy for bladder cancer Posted: 10 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) CLEVELAND -- Bladder cancer, most frequently caused by smoking and exposure to carcinogens in the workplace, is one of the top 10 most common forms of cancer in menand women in the U.S. More than 70 percent of bladder cancers are diagnosed in stage T1 or less and have not invaded the muscle layer. At these early stages, standard treatment is surgery (transurethral resection) and the burning away of tumors with high energy electricity (fulguration). Many patients also may receive subsequent intravesical chemotherapy because there is often a high-risk for cancer recurrence. The prognosis for recurrent cancer is poor, which drives clinician-scientists like William Larchian, MD, Urologic Oncologist, University Hospitals Urology Institute at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, and Associate Professor of Surgery, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and his colleagues to develop an immunotherapy for bladder cancer that will stimulate the body's own natural defense mechanisms to cure the disease and prevent recurrence. What is interesting is that our bodies are capable of identifying, responding to and killing tumor cells naturally, explained Dr. Larchian. We are developing a vaccination system to enhance this response and drive an effective immune response against existing and future bladder tumor cells in patients diagnosed with bladder cancer. IL-2, a cytokine-signaling molecule, stimulates the T-cell immune response to cancer cells in the bladder. Dr. Larchian and his colleagues have developed a system that reliably introduces multiple copies of IL-2 DNA into bladder cancer cells. This method allows for more gene copies to enter the cells, he said, and we are able to see higher rates of transfection compared to retroviral methods. The enhanced IL-2 protein expression has been shown to successfully stimulate T-cell response and eliminate bladder tumors in a mouse model, particularly when followed by... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| The path less traveled: Research is driving solutions to improve unpaved roads Posted: 10 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) MANHATTAN, KAN. -- A Kansas State University graduate student sees the unpaved road ahead, and it's filled with biomaterial. Wilson Smith, master's student in civil engineering, Independence, Mo., is working with lignin, a plant-based sustainable material that can be added to improve the quality of unpaved roads throughout Kansas. More than 70 percent of the 98,000 miles of roads in Kansas are unpaved, Smith said. One of the problems with unpaved roads is that they are made from loose granular soils with particles that are not bound to each other on the road surface, Smith said. This limits the speed of vehicles and often generates a lot of dust, denigrating the quality of the road. But possible solutions could come from lignin, a biomass product that is present in all plants, including wheat straw, sugar cane and corn stover. Lignin is a waste product from other industries, including the production of biofuel and paper. These industries take plant mass and use the process of hydrolysis to separate useful materials, including cellulose and hemicellulose, from lignin. What we're trying to do is find new uses for this lignin co-product, which ties into sustainability, Smith said. Several properties make lignin a valuable material. It is adhesive when it becomes moist, making it good for binding soil particles together and providing cohesion. As a result, lignin works very well on unpaved roads by providing better support for vehicles and protecting the road from erosion. Because Kansas is an agricultural state, lignin is an abundant resource and has the potential to improve unpaved roads, leading to less maintenance costs throughout the state, Smith said. Lignin can be extracted from many types of crop residue, and it can also be an extra source of income to farmers and the agricultural community if there is a demand for this crop residue, Smith said. Lignin is a sustainable product. It's 100 percent nontoxic, unlike... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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