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Consuming increasingly higher doses of powdered milk may help children with milk allergies overcome their condition, a new study suggests.

In the double-blinded, placebo-controlled study of milk immunotherapy, all 12 children receiving milk powder daily significantly increased their tolerance of milk after four months, from no more than 40 milligrams to at least 2,540 milligrams (2.5 ounces). Meanwhile, the seven children receiving a placebo powder showed no improvement.

The findings were published in the Oct. 28 print edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and Duke University.

“Our findings suggest that oral immunotherapy gradually retrains the immune system to completely disregard or to better tolerate the allergens in milk that previously caused allergic reactions,” study senior investigator Dr. Robert Wood, director of Allergy and Immunology at Hopkins Children’s, said in a hospital news release. “Albeit preliminary and requiring further study, these results suggest that oral immunotherapy may be the closest thing yet to a true treatment for food allergy.”

Children regularly consuming milk powder had more milk antibodies in their blood, and were better able to tolerate milk than those on the placebo. As a result, the researchers recommended that these children continue consuming milk daily to maintain and further build their resistance.

The researchers aren’t sure what would happen if the children stopped consuming milk regularly. “It may very well be that this tolerance is lost once the immune system is no longer exposed to the allergen daily,” Wood said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently estimated that food allergies in children have risen 18 percent in the last decade, with 3 million children in the United States having at least one food allergy. Being allergic to milk is the most prevalent one.

Most food allergies are managed through simple avoidance of the trigger foods in hope that the child will outgrow the allergy.

“Given that the quality of life of a child with a food allergy is comparable to the quality of life of a child with diabetes, we urgently need therapies that go beyond strict food avoidance or waiting for the child to outgrow the allergy,” Wood said.

Wood said further research is necessary, so parents and caregivers should not try oral immunotherapy without medical supervision.
By HealthDay

It’s been a stressful two years for Barack Obama. He’s campaigned nonstop, day-to-day, hour-to-hour, flying to different states and sleeping in different time zones. He’s also had to fight off the typical character attacks and mudslinging that hit any candidate for office.

And, on the eve of the election, his grandmother, a woman he credits for helping to raise him, died of cancer.

As studies have shown and many a doctor has seen with his own eyes, stress takes a toll on the body. It can lead to premature aging, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, depression and cancer.

So how old is Obama? Biologically, he’s 47 years and 3 months old. But a program called Realage.com says his “true age” is at least 49 years and 8 months old. The Web site claims it can calculate your “true age” based on a myriad of factors, including how often you visit your doctor, what your vital signs are, how often you exercise, what you eat, what your extracurricular activities are, and how much stress you have in your life.

There are many unknowns concerning Obama’s health. What is known is that he’s been a smoker on and off for many years, he’s African American, he’s middle aged and, as his doctor attested to in a statement released earlier this year, he’s in excellent physical condition.
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Once elderly patients are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the presence of other illnesses and the patients’ ethnic background appear to affect their length of survival, investigators report in the medical journal Neurology.

Led by Dr. Yaakov Stern, the research team at Columbia University Medical Center identified 323 cases of Alzheimer’s disease from a group of approximately 4300 Medicare recipients who were enrolled in the Washington Heights Inwood Columbia Aging Project in New York.

More than half of the subjects were Hispanic, one third were African American and about 10 percent were white. Stern’s group followed these patients for an average of 4 years, to a maximum of about 13 years.

Although overall the overall average lifespan (92 years) and age at diagnosis (83 years) did not differ by racial or ethnic group, the average length of survival after Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed was 8 years among Hispanics, significantly longer than among whites (4 years) and African Americans (5 years).

A history of diabetes and high blood pressure both independently shortened survival. Closer analysis of the data revealed that the mortality risk was increased by 2.6-fold among Alzheimer’s disease patients with high blood pressure, and by 2-fold among patients who also had diabetes, both statistically significant differences.
Age was also a significant predictor of shortened survival time, with an average post-diagnosis survival of 10 years among those between 67 and 74 years old; 7 years among those between 75 and 84 years; and 4 years among those between 85 and 100 years old, all statistically significant differences.

In contrast to most other studies, the team did not detect any association between survival duration and gender, history of heart disease or malignancy, or the presence of APOE-epsilon-4 alleles - the gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease that is detected in some but not all who develop this type of dementia.

The lack of any apparent association with the APOE gene, Stern’s group suggests, “may reflect a differential effect of epsilon-4 in the earlier stages of disease that is eclipsed by other factors (medical, social, or disease-related factors) later in the disease course.”
By FoxNews

The hardest-to-treat form of tuberculosis kills half the people who get it, according to a South Korean study that is one of the few to track survival rates from the condition called extensively drug-resistant TB.

Tuberculosis is an infectious bacterial disease typically attacking the lungs. Increasing numbers of cases of TB that defy standard medical treatment are appearing worldwide.

The study tracked 1,407 patients with two categories of TB: multidrug resistant TB, or MDR-TB, which resists at least one of the two main TB drugs, and extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, which defies nearly all drugs used to treat TB.

Forty-nine percent of those with XDR-TB died compared to 19 percent of patients with ordinary MDR-TB, researchers led by Dr. Tae Sun Shim of Asan Medical Center in Seoul wrote on Thursday in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

The patients were diagnosed between 2000 and 2002 and were followed for up to seven years, the researchers said. About 5 percent of the patients had XDR-TB.

D’Arcy Richardson of the Seattle-based nonprofit group PATH, which supports public health efforts in about 70 nations, called the findings important. But she noted XDR-TB patients today likely would get more aggressive drug treatment than was given to the patients tracked in this study.

“We have so little information on XDR-TB to begin with,” Richardson, who wrote a commentary with two other TB experts accompanying the study, said in a telephone interview.

Cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis are being recorded around the world at the highest rates ever, with parts of the former Soviet Union especially vulnerable, the U.N. World Health Organization said this year.

Such cases account for about 5 percent of the 9 million new TB cases annually, the WHO said. It said that 489,139 MDR-TB cases emerged in 2006, and about 40,000 were XDR-TB.

There has been scant scientific data on long-term survival rates from XDR-TB.

“We know that it’s a very big problem in Eastern Europe. We know it’s a very big problem in Asia, particularly in India and China, where they don’t necessarily have large percentages of MDR and XDR but because of the size of the population with TB we have significant numbers,” Richardson said.

TB killed 1.7 million people worldwide in 2006, the WHO said. It can be spread by breathing in air droplets from a cough or sneeze of an infected person.
by Julie Steenhuysen

In a puzzling twist, women who have a history of migraine headaches are far less likely to develop breast cancer than other women, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

The study is the first to look at the relationship between breast cancer and migraines and its findings may point to new ways of reducing a woman’s breast cancer risk, they said.

“We found that, overall, women who had a history of migraines had a 30 percent lower risk of breast cancer compared to women who did not have a history of such headaches,” said Dr. Christopher Li of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, whose findings appear in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

Li said the reduction in risk was for the most common types of breast cancers — those driven by hormones, such as estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by estrogen, and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by progesterone.

Hormones also play a role in migraines, a brutal type of headache often accompanied by nausea, vomiting and heightened sensitivity to light and sound. Women are two to three times more likely than men to get migraines.

While it is not exactly clear why women with a history of migraines had a lower risk for breast cancer, Li and colleagues suspect hormones are playing a role.

“Women who have higher levels of estrogen in their blood have higher levels of breast cancer,” Li said in a telephone interview.

And he said migraines are often triggered by low levels of the hormone estrogen, such as when estrogen levels fall during a woman’s menstrual cycle.

Women who get migraines “may have a chronically lower baseline estrogen. That difference could be what is protective against breast cancer,” Li said.

For the study, Li and colleagues analyzed data from two studies of 3,412 post-menopausal women in the Seattle area, 1,938 of whom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and 1,474 of whom had no history of breast cancer. Women in the study provided information on their migraine history.

They found women who had reported a clinical diagnosis of migraine had a 30 percent reduced risk of developing hormonally sensitive breast cancers.

“Migraines are typically most severe among pre-menopausal women,” Li said. “This study was all post-menopausal women.”

He said that suggests the protective effect seen in women who get migraines may have a lasting effect at reducing breast cancer risk.

“While these results need to be interpreted with caution, they point to a possible new factor that may be related to breast-cancer risk,” Li said in a statement.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women worldwide, with an estimated 465,000 deaths annually, according to the American Cancer Society.
By: Reuters

Hong Kong will soon begin testing meat, vegetables and processed food for melamine, a move that underlines concerns about environmental contamination and food safety, experts say.

Thousands of children in China fell sick with kidney problems in recent months after consuming milk that had been mixed with the plastic-making industrial chemical to cheat quality tests. Four of them died.

It has since emerged that cyromazine, a derivative of melamine, is widely used in pesticides and animal feed in China, and experts say it is absorbed in plants as melamine and that the chemical is already in the human food chain.

However, no one knows how much melamine is absorbed into raw foods such as meat and vegetables, and experts hope Hong Kong’s tests on vegetables and meat will shed some light.

“It’s possible there may be contamination from pesticides … and there is some concern about vegetables and animal feed,” Kwan Hoishan, a biologist at the Chinese University and member of a government-backed task force working on the melamine problem in Hong Kong, told Reuters.

“We have no idea about the level of contamination in meat and vegetables … it’s hard to say if (such levels of) melamine are harmful to human health, they would first have to be tested.”

Hong Kong imposed a cap on melamine last month, restricting it to no more than 2.5 milligrams per kilogrammkilograme, while melamine found in food meant for children under 3 and lactating mothers should be no higher than 1 mg per kg.

Experts’ opinions are mixed on the effects of constant exposure very low levels of melamine.

“If it causes environmental contamination (gets into food) through pesticides, the harm should not be too much. Unless you eat a lot of it,” said Ng Chi-fai, a urologist at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.

But others worry about long term exposure.

“It would be easier to ban melamine at all levels to stop this,” said Chan King-ming, associate professor of biochemistry at the Chinese University.
By Tan Ee Lyn

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Authorities have detained six more people in China’s contaminated milk scandal, officials said Monday, as the government continued its efforts to restore public trust in Chinese-made food products.

Word of the detentions came a day after health officials in Hong Kong found high levels of the industrial chemical melamine at the center of the scandal in chocolate made in China by British candy maker Cadbury.

The suspects were detained in Hohhot in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region and accused of mixing melamine into raw milk, a city spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman, who refused to give her name as is common with Chinese bureaucrats, said the six were being interrogated. She declined to say when the detentions took place or give other details.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the detentions followed an investigation into two major Chinese milk companies based in Inner Mongolia. The move brings the number of people being held in connection with the tainting scandal to 32 .

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Tobacco use and smoke from coal and wood are likely to claim tens of millions of lives in China over the next quarter-century, according to a study published online on Saturday by the British journal The Lancet.

Smoke from tobacco, biomass and coal will kill 53.3 million Chinese from chronic respiratory illnesses and 13.5 million from lung cancer during the period from 2003 to 2033, its authors calculate, using the current rate of exposure as a benchmark.

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An analysis of the two starkly different approaches to reforming the U.S. health care system offered by John McCain and Barack Obama suggests Obama’s plan has the best chance of making health care more affordable, accessible, efficient and higher in quality.

The report, released on Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, sized up the presidential candidates’ plans for dealing with a health care system which has left nearly 46 million people uninsured and many more underinsured.

According to the report, Democrat Obama’s plan would cover 34 million of the nation’s projected 67 million uninsured people in 10 years, compared with just 2 million covered under Republican John McCain’s plan.

“It’s a plan that tries to deal in a serious way with the uninsured,” Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, said of Obama’s plan in a telephone interview.

“That is clearly a top priority. He doesn’t eliminate it, but in my view he cuts it in half over a 10-year period.”

Obama’s plan seeks to build on the current employer-based insurance system, which now provides coverage to 160 million people, or more than 60 percent of the population under 65.

His plan would require all employers except small businesses to either offer health insurance or contribute to the cost of coverage. It would replace the current individual insurance market with an insurance exchange in which small businesses and those without access to coverage could buy a private or public health plan with tax credits.

The plan also eases qualifications for low-income families to be covered under Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for the poor, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
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Obesity is a worldwide problem and is getting worse. Losing weight is difficult for most people. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine reports fewer than 25 percent of Americans who try diets actually lose weight and a majority who do lose weight have difficulty maintaining the loss. Billions of dollars are spent on weight loss programs. VOA’s Melinda Smith has more on recent findings that may put to rest the argument about which diet works the best.

weigh in

The World Health Organization estimates there are more than one billion adults who are overweight, and 400 million others considered obese.

Another 20 million children under the age of five are overweight. So why can’t we lose weight?

Fad diets often run their course and disappear from popularity as people lose, then regain. But three diets seem to be the most generally accepted: The low fat diet promotes whole grains, fruit and vegetables.

A diet low in carbohydrates is based primarily on protein such as eggs, red meat, chicken and fish and some vegetables.

And lastly — [is] a diet based on the Mediterranean style of cooking. That includes smaller portions of meat and fish, and larger portions of fruit, vegetables, grains, along with nuts, seeds as well as olive oil.

In the studies published recently, several hundred overweight and obese patients were asked to follow one of these three diets. After a period of two years, patients on the low carb diet lost the most.
“It’s not surprising that the low carbohydrate diet led to greater weight loss, because when you’re eating protein and fat it makes you feel full so you don’t want to eat as much,”
Dr. Eric Westman said. He is one of the researchers with the Duke University Medical School.
Being overweight or obese often leads to serious health problems.

Fat laden foods lead to high cholesterol and insulin levels, which often lead to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Researchers found the diet low in carbohydrates helped to lower those levels.

“A low carb diet — one that foregoes rice and pasta and bread and potatoes — works by lowering insulin levels in the body,” Dr. Westman said. “And then with this lower insulin level, the body makes less of harmful cholesterol.”

In previous clinical trials, it has been difficult to measure the effectiveness of weight loss diets over the long term. These recent studies in Israel and the United States have been the longest controlled trials to date.
By Melinda Smith , VOANEWS
Washington