|
|
|
|
|
 | This Month's Articles:
|
|
|
|
November 2008 News Archives
|
November 10: Treating reflux helps kids with asthma, Reuters
By Megan Rauscher
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In children with both asthma and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), treating the latter can improve the former, according to research presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Seattle.
GERD is a common disease in which fluid from the stomach backs up into the esophagus, typically causing chronic heartburn and other symptoms, which can lead to erosion of the esophagus. In addition to drugs that reduce the secretion of this acidic fluid, GERD may be treated with a type of surgery called fundoplication that tightens the junction between the esophagus and stomach.
Previous studies in adults have suggested that as many as four out of five asthmatics experience the chronic cough and hoarseness of acid reflux. While the connections between asthma and GERD remain unclear, researchers have noticed that antireflux medications can sometimes help asthma symptoms.
"About two thirds of patients with asthma have underlying reflux and GERD has been implicated in provoking asthma," Dr. Vikram Khoshoo, a pediatric gastroenterologist from West Jefferson Medical Center, New Orleans, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health.
To investigate this relationship further, he and his colleagues had 62 children, between 6 and 11 years old, with asthma undergo esophageal acid testing. Forty-four children with abnormal results suggestive of GERD received anti-reflux therapy (either medical or surgical), while the remaining 18 patients served as the comparison group and continued their asthma regimen.
After 2 years, children receiving anti-reflux therapy experienced less than one asthma flare-up per year, compared with almost three flare-ups per year among other children.
Breathing tests confirmed improved lung function with anti-reflux therapy.
"We found that when you take children with persistent asthma and GERD and treat them with anti-reflux medication, their asthma outcomes are better, they require significantly less asthma medication over the years, and they have fewer exacerbations of asthma," Khoshoo told Reuters Health.
GERD is being missed in a lot of children who have persistent asthma, Khoshoo noted. "I think the message has to be -- if a child has persistent asthma without any risk factors or he has persistent asthma and despite adequate medication and compliance is not getting better, then it's possible that reflux may be playing a role."
When reflux is treated, there should be an improvement in symptoms outcome, a reduction in the need for asthma medications, and an improvement in lung function, he added.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 10: 'Odourprinting' could be used to identify people, Telegraph
Human beings could one day be identified by our smells, according to research that shows individual "odourprints" cannot be masked by diet.
By Matthew Moore
Every person has a unique fragrance, similar to a fingerprint or DNA sample, which could be used to create a database of human scents, scientists said.
Eating powerful foods such as chili or garlic may change how we smell, but it does not disguise our underlying genetically-determined aroma, tests on mice have shown. Creatures who were given strong-smelling foods were still recognised by their peers.
The signature smells may have evolved to help in choosing mates and marking out territories.
Jae Kwak, lead author of the study at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said that the research suggested that "odourprinting" could soon have a practical use.
"These findings indicate that biologically based odourprints, like fingerprints, could be a reliable way to identify individuals," he said.
"If this can be shown to be the case for humans, it opens the possibility that devices can be developed to detect individual odourprints in humans."
The tests used chemical analyses of urine as well as "sensor" mice trained to use their sense of smell to choose between pairs of test mice, who were fed different foods. The results were published in the online journal PLoS ONE.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 11: Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread, The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT
SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.
That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.
Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu cases had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report was released. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.
The C.D.C. reports are slower because they rely on data collected and compiled from thousands of health care providers, labs and other sources. Some public health experts say the Google data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.
“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Dr. Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. From 5 to 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to roughly 36,000 deaths on average.
The service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.
“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.
The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.
“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Dr. Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and an author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.
Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keeping daily tabs on disease trends in their communities.
“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City.
If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional, free way to detect influenza, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.
A paper on the methodology of Google Flu Trends is expected to be published in the journal Nature.
Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.
But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into them represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they have trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.
Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site.
Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune ad campaigns. And internally, the company has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends.
“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem.”
Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but privacy concerns had generally stopped it from sharing it with outside academics.
Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.
Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service.
“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Dr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.
Google also says it believes the tool may help people take precautions if a disease is in their area.
Others have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic.
HealthMap, a project affiliated with the Children’s Hospital Boston, scours the Web for articles, blog posts and newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.
But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track a disease.
“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 14: Mouth bacteria give some wines, food a flavor boost, Reuters
By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Certain wines, fruits and vegetables pack a delayed but powerful flavor punch thanks to the bacteria living in our mouths, food chemists have demonstrated.
The late Emile Peynaud, considered the father of modern winemaking, remarked that the Sauvignon blanc grape had only a weak taste when one bit into it, but that 20 to 30 seconds later, "you suddenly experience a powerful aromatic rush at the back of the mouth as the Sauvignon fragrance returns." Dr. Christian Starkenmann of Firmenich, a fragrance and flavor developer in Geneva, and his colleagues decided to investigate the mechanism behind this "retroaromatic" effect.
In order to smell something, Starkenmann noted in an interview with Reuters Health, a volatile substance must come in contact with the olfactory tissue lining the nasal cavity. Other researchers had previously shown that retroaromatic foods contain odorless sulfur compounds called cysteine-S-conjugates, and that volatile sulfur compounds released from these precursors called thiols gave such foods their scent.
To better understand how the odorless precursors were transformed into their smelly offspring, Starkenmann and his team had 30 trained panelists sample the sulfur thiol and corresponding cysteine-S-conjugate precursor for grapes, onions, and bell peppers. The panelists spit out each sample after five seconds and then reported their perceptions.
While the panelists perceived the scent of the thiols immediately, it took them 20 to 30 seconds to smell the cysteine-S-conjugate precursors. And while the odor of the thiols lasted for only a few seconds, the smell of the precursors persisted for up to three minutes.
To test which components of saliva might be responsible for releasing the thiols from their parent compounds, the researchers incubated the precursors with saliva that contained normal bacteria and with sterile saliva. Within 24 hours of being in the normal saliva, 80 percent of the compound had been broken down. But in the sterile saliva, the breakdown was much slower; after four days, less than 15 percent of the compound had disappeared.
This suggests, Starkenmann and his colleagues state, that mouth bacteria are responsible for releasing thiols from their precursor compounds contained in retroaromatic food and drink. Free thiols' shorter taste duration appears to occur because they are quickly absorbed by saliva, they add.
The findings should be useful in helping to develop food products with more complex, longer-lasting tastes, Starkenmann told Reuters Health. In a separate line of research, he noted, he and his colleagues have found that a similar process is at work in producing bad breath and underarm odor.
SOURCE: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, November 12, 2008.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 18: People with HIV at increased risk for cancer, study finds, Baltimore Sun
By Stephanie Desmon
Now that people are living longer with HIV, they are at an increased risk for developing cancers not previously linked to the disease, according to new research presented today at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Compared to the general population, people with HIV were twice as likely to get cancer. Meredith Shiels, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said her study could not show which kinds of cancers posed the greatest risk, but previous studies have shown greater risks for anal, head and neck, liver and lung cancers among those with HIV infection.
HIV used to be a death sentence. Now, with the advent of highly effective antiretroviral drug therapy, people with HIV can be expected to live nearly as long as the general population.
Shiels said her study, which was done as a compilation of 11 prior American and international studies, could not determine why people with HIV were more susceptible to certain cancers, but theories abound. She said it could have something to do with the HIV itself, with cancer-causing viruses taking hold in weakened immune systems or because of increased risk factors among people with HIV, such as smoking.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 20: Doctors transplant windpipe with stem cells, USA Today
LONDON (AP) — Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs.
"This technique has great promise," said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.
If successful, the procedure could become a new standard of treatment, said Genden, who was not involved in the research.
The results were published online Wednesday in the medical journal, The Lancet.
The transplant was given to Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian mother of two living in Barcelona, who suffered from tuberculosis for years. After a severe collapse of her left lung in March, Castillo needed regular hospital visits to clear her airways and was unable to take care of her children.
Doctors initially thought the only solution was to remove the entire left lung. But Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, head of thoracic surgery at Barcelona's Hospital Clinic, proposed a windpipe transplant instead.
Once doctors had a donor windpipe, scientists at Italy's University of Padua stripped off all its cells, leaving only a tube of connective tissue.
Meanwhile, doctors at the University of Bristol took a sample of Castillo's bone marrow from her hip. They used the bone marrow's stem cells to create millions of cartilage and tissue cells to cover and line the windpipe.
Experts at the University of Milan then used a device to put the new cartilage and tissue onto the windpipe. The new windpipe was transplanted into Castillo in June.
"They have created a functional, biological structure that can't be rejected," said Dr. Allan Kirk of the American Society of Transplantation. "It's an important advance, but constructing an entire organ is still a long way off."
So far, Castillo has shown no signs of rejection and is not taking any immune-suppressing drugs, which can cause side effects such as high blood pressure, kidney failure and cancer.
"I was scared at the beginning," Castillo said in a press statement. "I am now enjoying life and am very happy that my illness has been cured."
Her doctors say she is now able to take care of her children and can walk reasonable distances without becoming out of breath. Castillo even reported dancing all night at a club in Barcelona recently.
Genden said that Castillo's progress needed to be closely monitored. "Time will tell if this lasts," he said. Genden added that it can take up to three years to know if the windpipe's cartilage structure is solid and won't fall apart.
People who might benefit include children born with defective airways, people with scars or tumours in their windpipes, and those with collapsed windpipes.
Martin Birchall, who grew Castillo's cells at the University of Bristol, said that the technique might even be adapted to other organs.
"Patients engineering their own tissues is the key way forward," said Dr. Patrick Warnke, a surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany. Warnke is also growing patients' tissues from stem cells for transplants.
Warnke predicted that doctors might one day be able to produce organs in the laboratory from patients' own stem cells. "That is still years away, but we need pioneering approaches like this to solve the problem," he said.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 20: Questions on Using Fillers Near Eyes, The New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER
COSMETIC doctors have a new way to mitigate tear troughs, those shadowy under-eye indentations that are the bane of people trying to camouflage an aging appearance: the injection of viscous substances around the eye socket.
But as more doctors embrace the procedure, some physicians said they were seeing more complications.
While the Food and Drug Administration has approved dermal fillers like Restylane and Juvéderm for treatment of facial wrinkles and folds — a use for which those substances have a high safety record — the fillers have not been approved for the eye area. Nonetheless, several thousand physicians now offer off-label under-eye injections, according to the estimates of six doctors interviewed recently. At a recent plastic surgery conference in Chicago, doctors anecdotally reported an increased incidence of short-term under-eye mounds, discoloration and persistent hard nodules. There are also a handful of reports by doctors in Japan, Brazil, South Korea and Austria of blindness caused by cosmetic injections of silicone oil, fat and other materials under the eyes.
Now some doctors are growing concerned. “Certainly I wouldn’t do it myself or have it done on me,” said Dr. René S. Rodriguez-Sains, a Manhattan oculoplastic surgeon. Five years ago, he saw four to six patients a year with problems caused by under-eye injections performed elsewhere. This year, the number has risen to one or two patients a month.
On Tuesday, the F.D.A. held a public meeting to review facial fillers and to examine whether their popularization is getting ahead of safety and efficacy studies. In the past, the agency has required companies that market fillers to conduct small, short-term trials before approval, as well as postapproval studies.
Representatives of manufacturers and medical societies addressed the F.D.A.’s panel to assure them that the materials are safe. A representative of Allergan, for example, said that it had sold a million syringes of Juvéderm in the United States since 2006 and received reports of complaints in less than 0.25 percent of cases; the most common problem was swelling. Juvéderm is a gel made from sugar molecules called hyaluronic acid that temporarily reduces nasolabial folds, the wrinkles from the nose to the corners of the mouth. Another hyaluronic acid filler is Restylane, from Medicis Pharmaceutical. Other approved fillers include Radiesse, and ArteFill, which contains permanent nonabsorbable plastic beads.
Doctors in the United States performed about 1.5 million soft-tissue filler injections last year, up from about 1.2 million in 2006, according to estimates from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. With the growing popularity of the treatments, the F.D.A.’s advisory panel on general and plastic surgery devices met to weigh whether the agency should require makers to conduct longer-term and larger studies with a greater representation of skin types, and histological studies of tissue response to injected particles.
The panel also considered how manufacturers might study safety and efficacy in unapproved uses in the lips, nose, hands and under-eye area. The concern is that other body parts may have a different physiology in which tissue cells may react differently from facial skin, with the potential for complications.
“In a nonapproved case, it’s essentially a little research project going on because we don’t know if these tissues and structures in that area are going to behave in the same way as the tissue the device was approved for,” said Stephen Li, the president of Medical Device Testing and Innovations of Sarasota, Fla., a company that develops materials for medical implants and a consultant to the F.D.A. panel.
Patients aren’t always aware that treatments they are having are off-label. The F.D.A. prohibits companies from marketing unapproved uses. Representatives from Allergan, Medicis, BioForm Medical (the maker of Radiesse) and Artes Medical (the maker of ArteFill) said they did not promote off-label uses. A spokeswoman for Sanofi-Aventis, the company behind Sculptra (approved to treat facial fat loss in H.I.V. patients), said it neither promoted off-label use nor trained physicians to perform such indications.
But doctors are free to use fillers as they deem appropriate for individual patients. For example, several medical societies have created injectablesafety.org, which covers both approved and unapproved uses of dermal fillers; the site is financed by grants from BioForm, Artes and Medicis.
The F.D.A. has reports of facial lumps that formed after off-label use of Sculptra; of localized dead tissue following the off-label use of Radiesse; of lumps, swelling and discoloration after off-label use of Restylane and Juvéderm; and letters from doctors concerned that the off-label use of ArteFill has the potential to cause serious problems, according to the agency’s online database on device complications.
Doctors said that lumps formed by hylauronic acid gels like Restylane and Juvéderm had a remedy: injections of an enzyme that disperses the material. Lumps formed by longer-lasting fillers may require excision. But there are no comprehensive statistics because the agency requires manufacturers, not doctors or patients, to report problems.
Last year, the F.D.A. received 160 reports of problems connected to filler injections, according to the agency’s Web site. But, if even 15 doctors in America treated the same number of complications a year as Dr. Rodriguez-Sains, that would amount to more problems than those listed last year in the F.D.A. database.
In 99.5 percent of cases, doctors inject fillers without incident, said Dr. Bruce L. Cunningham, a plastic surgeon in Minneapolis. “It’s safe most of the time,” he said. “But when there is something that goes wrong like lumps, bumps or, more importantly, necrotic tissue, it does stick out in doctors’ minds because it is so different than what we usually expect.”
Still, Dr. Cunningham told an audience of doctors at the meeting in Chicago that the prospect of increased regulation “is enough to send the shiver of death up your spine.”
Some doctors are concerned that the F.D.A. might interdict such popular off-label uses of fillers as lip-plumping, which many physicians consider safe, he said.
Dr. Brian S. Biesman, an oculoplastic surgeon in Nashville, said he would welcome more study. In his office, patients who undergo under-eye injections sign a form consenting to the nonapproved use of a filler and acknowledging the risk of vision problems, he said. “If the F.D.A. were to encourage the companies to get more data or if the F.D.A. were to require it, I think it would be great,” Dr. Biesman said.
Dr. Julius W. Few, a plastic surgeon in Chicago, said that ancillary medical personnel and doctors who lack expertise in cosmetic treatments were responsible for most filler complications.
But Dr. Richard D. Lisman, an ophthalmic plastic surgeon in Manhattan, said that all injections around the eyes — even steroids or lidocaine for medical purposes — entail rare risks like vision loss, even when performed by eye surgeons. If doctors are reporting more lumps from injections, it is because more doctors are performing the technique more frequently, not because of a flaw in the filler, he said. He himself does not inject fillers in an off-label manner, he said.
“When you have an increased quantity of periorbital injections and an increased number of specialties injecting, it’s a natural consequence to see a very small but very real downside,” Dr. Lisman said.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 24: New tobacco product alarms some health officials, U.S. News
By VICKI SMITH
Associated Press Writer
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) -- They're discreet, flavorful and come in cute tin boxes with names like "frost" and "spice." And the folks who created Joe Camel are hoping Camel Snus will become a hit with tobacco lovers tired of being forced outside for a smoke.
But convincing health officials and smokers like Ethan Flint that they're worth a try may take some work.
Snus - Swedish for tobacco, rhymes with "noose" - is a tiny, tea bag-like pouch of steam-pasteurized, smokeless tobacco to tuck between the cheek and gum. Aromatic to the user and undetectable to anyone else, it promises a hit of nicotine without the messy spitting associated with chewing tobacco. Just swallow the juice.
"I think I'd rather throw up in my mouth," says Flint, an 18-year-old West Virginia University student, emerging from a convenience store with a pack of Winstons and a coupon for free Camel Snus. "I'd rather not swallow anything like that."
Reynolds America Inc., the nation's No. 2 tobacco company, can also expect resistance from the public health community. Experts wonder whether snus will help wean people off cigarettes and snuff, or just foster a second addiction. While snus has been around, it hasn't been prominent in this country.
"I think we're all holding our breath in terms of what's going to be coming down the pike," says Dorothy Hatsukami, director of the Tobacco Use Research Center at the University of Minnesota. "There's not much known about these products - what's in these products, how they're going to be used, who's going to be using them and what the effects of that use will be. ... Will it create more harm or less harm?"
Reynolds is confident its new product will find a following. It launched Camel Snus in Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., in 2006, and has since expanded to test markets nationwide, with customers in nearly every state. Early next year, it's taking snus national with a marketing blitz that spokesman David Howard says will include direct mail, print and Web advertising, and point-of-sale promotions.
Popular for decades in Sweden, where it was invented, snus has been banned in every other European Union nation since 2004 over concerns about carcinogens.
But smokeless tobacco is legal in the U.S., where there are two schools of thought: Some researchers suggest the lower risk of lung cancer makes snus an attractive alternative to smoking, while others fear an increase in problems including mouth lesions or pancreatic cancer.
The American Cancer Society supports any tool that helps smokers quit. "But we don't have any good scientific evidence that snus is one of those tools," said Tom Glynn, director of cancer science and trends.
"If all smokers switched to snus tomorrow, in a few years we'd certainly see less heart disease, less lung disease and fewer cancers," he said. "But there's no evidence that smokers can switch and stay switched."
Prevention officials already have their work cut out for them in West Virginia, which has the third-highest adult smoking rate in the U.S. at nearly 27 percent and the highest rate of "spit" or chewing tobacco use at 16 percent.
"The industry is brilliant, and whatever they want to outspend us by - $1 million, $10 million, $100 million - they can do it," said Bruce Adkins of the state Division of Tobacco Prevention.
To sustain its current level of sales and combat tobacco-related deaths, Adkins says, the industry must find 4,000 "replacement smokers" a year in West Virginia alone.
U.S. tobacco companies developed snus in response to both declining cigarette sales and consumer demand. With more public bans on puffing, they say smokers need socially acceptable alternatives.
Danny Wolfe, a 38-year-old computer draftsman, gave up regular spit tobacco and has been using Copenhagen tobacco pouches for several years. He spits out the juice; it gives him heartburn.
"It's the same product, just packaged differently. It doesn't get in your teeth. It doesn't have the mess," says Wolfe, who was sick of smoking outside his Morgantown office. "You're not quitting anything. You're replacing."
Snus is also popular with hunters, who try to avoid scent detection by their prey, and with coal miners, who work in underground mines where the smallest spark can trigger an explosion.
"I find that more rednecks use it," Wolfe says. "I won't lie to you about that."
At least two tobacco companies besides Reynolds are also test-marketing snus.
"There's no secondhand smoke. There's no spitting. We see it as a win-win," says Howard, the Reynolds spokesman. "It's also in line with company strategy. We're moving toward becoming a total tobacco company."
Reynolds is even developing dissolvable tobacco strips, orbs and sticks that it will start test-marketing early next year in Portland, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.
Though "very appealing" in form and flavor, Hatsukami also finds those products worrisome.
Researchers have little information about nicotine absorption and toxicity for any of the new products, she says, and there's too little data on snus to make per-dose comparisons to cigarettes or spit tobacco.
Still, Camel Snus recently tested by WVU contained at least two carcinogens.
"It's not like chewing gum," warns Robert Anderson, deputy director of West Virginia University's Prevention Research Center. "This product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes."
And because its use is easy to conceal, WVU researcher Cindy Tworek worries children could suck on the pouches in front of oblivious parents or teachers. The brightly colored tins seem designed to attract both female and young users, she says.
The same age restrictions that apply to other forms of tobacco also apply to sales of snus, although they vary from state to state.
Tworek has surveyed more than 600 college students in the Morgantown test market and will release her conclusions next year on whether Reynolds' marketing efforts work.
Flint, the teenage smoker, suspects they do.
"It looks fun, actually," he said of the bright blue camel logo. "As a little kid, I'd probably buy this just because it looks cool. But I know better than that, and I'd rather choke to death."
Howard denies suggestions that Reynolds targets underage users. He says it's selling best among adult male smokers and moist snuff users.
"It didn't quite get as much consideration among female adult smokers just because it's different," he concedes. "They're a little more hesitant. But obviously we think that with continued communication with all adult smokers, they'll come to try it."
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
November 24: Nap without guilt: It boosts sophisticated memory, U.S. News
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Just in time for the holidays, some medical advice most people will like: Take a nap. Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, compelling new research suggests. But on the flip side, taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps us see the big picture and get creative.
"Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember," is how Dr. William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, put it at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last week.
Good sleep is a casualty of our 24/7 world. Surveys suggest few adults attain the recommended seven to eight hours a night.
Way too little clearly is dangerous: Sleep deprivation causes not just car crashes but all sorts of other accidents. Over time, a chronic lack of sleep can erode the body in ways that leave us more vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses.
But perhaps more common than insomnia is fragmented sleep - the easy awakening that comes with aging, or, worse, the sleep apnea that afflicts millions, who quit breathing for 30 seconds or so over and over throughout the night.
Indeed, scientists increasingly are focusing less on sleep duration and more on the quality of sleep, what's called sleep intensity, in studying how sleep helps the brain process memories so they stick. Particularly important is "slow-wave sleep," a period of very deep sleep that comes earlier than better-known REM sleep, or dreaming time.
Fishbein suspected a more active role for the slow-wave sleep that can emerge even in a power nap. Maybe our brains keep working during that time to solve problems and come up with new ideas. So he and graduate student Hiuyan Lau devised a simple test: documenting relational memory, where the brain puts together separately learned facts in new ways.
First, they taught 20 English-speaking college students lists of Chinese words spelled with two characters - such as sister, mother, maid. Then half the students took a nap, being monitored to be sure they didn't move from slow-wave sleep into the REM stage.
Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they'd never seen before. The nappers did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they'd memorized earlier always meant the same thing - female, for example. So they also were more likely than non-nappers to choose that a new word containing that character meant "princess" and not "ape."
"The nap group has essentially teased out what's going on," Fishbein concludes.
These students took a 90-minute nap, quite a luxury for most adults. But even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory, adds Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.
Conversely, Wisconsin researchers briefly interrupted nighttime slow-wave sleep by playing a beep - just loudly enough to disturb sleep but not awaken - and found those people couldn't remember a task they'd learned the day before as well as people whose slow-wave sleep wasn't disrupted.
That brings us back to fragmented sleep, whether from aging or apnea. It can suppress the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus, where memory-making begins - enough to hinder learning weeks after sleep returns to normal, warns Dr. Dennis McGinty of the University of California, Los Angeles.
To prove a lasting effect, McGinty mimicked human sleep apnea in rats. He hooked them to brain monitors and made them sleep on a treadmill. Whenever the monitors detected 30 seconds of sleep, the treadmill briefly switched on. After 12 days of this sleep disturbance, McGinty let the rats sleep peacefully for as long as they wanted for the next two weeks.
The catch-up sleep didn't help: Rested rats used room cues to quickly learn the escape hole in a maze. Those with fragmented sleep two weeks earlier couldn't, only randomly stumbling upon the escape.
None of the new work is enough, yet, to pinpoint the minimum sleep needed for optimal memory. What's needed may vary considerably from person to person.
"A short sleeper may have a very efficient deep sleep even if they sleep only four hours," notes Dr. Chiara Cirellia of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
But altogether, the findings do suggest some practical advice: Get apnea treated. Avoid what Harvard's Stickgold calls "sleep bulimia," super-late nights followed by sleep-in weekends. And don't feel guilty for napping.
|
Return to 2008 News Archive Page
|
|
|
