A coffee habit, coupled with regular exercise, may help prevent skin cancers better than either factor alone, new research suggests.

Both caffeine and exercise seem to help kill the UVB-damaged cells before malignancy sets in. "We really don't know how that happens," said Dr. Allan H. Conney, senior author of the study.

In the study, his team looked at four groups of hairless mice. The rodents' exposed skin is very vulnerable to the sun.

Four groups of mice were studied in the experiment. The caffeine drinkers showed a 96 percent increase in damaged cell death compared to the control group and the exercisers showed a 120 percent increase. Even more significant, the mice that drank caffeine and ran on the training wheel had a nearly 400 percent increase in cell death of damaged cells.

This is not a reason to skip out on sunblock, though. Learn more at livescience.

A vaccine that is capable of delivering a double whammy against AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus by both providing immunity against the infection while at the same time destroying cells infected by the virus is ready for clinical trials, a group of Russian researchers announced.

The vaccine is an artificial virus-like particle whose outer casing consists of the TBI (T- and B cell epitopes containing immunogen) protein constructed by the researchers combined with the polyglucin protein.

The scientists emphasize that as the combiHIVvac vaccine not only stimulates antibody production but also destroys the cells infected by the virus, this vaccine can be considered not only a prophylactic one but also as a therapeutic one.

The vaccine they developed is ready for clinical trials.

Read the entire release here.

Eating a diet consisting largely of fast food could cause your waistline to bulge more than eating the same amount of fat from healthier sources.

Monkeys fed a diet rich in trans-fats--commonly found in fast foods--grew bigger bellies than those fed a diet rich in unsaturated fats, but containing the same overall number of calories. They also developed signs of insulin resistance, which is an early indicator of diabetes.

After six years on the diet, the trans-fat-fed monkeys had gained 7.2% of their body weight, compared to just 1.8% in the unsaturated group. CT scans also revealed that the trans-fat monkeys carried 30% more abdominal fat, which is risk factor for diabetes and heart disease.

"We were shocked. Despite all our enormous efforts to make sure they didn't gain weight, they still did. And most of that weight ended up on their tummies," says Kylie Kavanagh, who presented her findings at the American Diabetes Association meeting in Washington DC, on Monday. "This is walking them straight down the path to diabetes."

Read the full Why fast foods are bad, even in moderation article at New Scientist.

Folic acid supplements may prevent cancer progression and promote regression of disease, according to a new study published in the July 15, 2006 issue of CANCER (a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society).

The small study found that 31 of 43 patients with the precancerous laryngeal lesion called leucoplakia demonstrated 50 percent or greater reduction in the lesion size after six months of taking folate supplements. In 12 of 31 responders, there was no evidence of the original lesion.

The investigators enrolled 43 patients with untreated laryngeal leucoplakia and treated them with folic acid (5mg three times a day) and evaluated the progression of leucoplakia every 30 days for six months.

Over six months of treatment, 12 patients (28 percent) had complete resolution of their leucoplakia lesions; 19 patients (44 percent) had reduction of 50 percent or more in the size of their lesions and 12 patients (28 percent) had no response. Mean folate levels increased and mean homocysteine levels decreased significantly. There were no moderate or severe adverse events reported.

Folate deficiency is the most common vitamin deficiency in the United States. Folate is incorporated into coenzymes that are essential in facilitating a variety of reactions in nucleic acid and amino acids metabolism. Some of which are critical to healthy life, such as DNA synthesis, DNA repair, and converting homocysteine to methionine. The latter is particularly important because excess homocysteine is linked to chronic health problems, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Reference article "Pilot Phase IIA Study for Evaluation of the Efficacy of Folic Acid in the Treatment of Laryngeal Leucoplakia," Giovanni Almadori, Francesco Bussu, Pierluigi Navarra, Jacopo Galli, Gaetano Paludetti, Bruno Giardina, Maurizio Maurizi, CANCER; Published Online: June 12, 2006 (DOI: 10.1002/cncr.22003); Print Issue Date: July 15, 2006.

The first human recipients of laboratory-grown organs were reported by Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. In The Lancet, Atala describes long-term success in children and teenagers.

The engineered bladders were grown from the patients’ own cells, so there is no risk of rejection. Scientists hope that laboratory-grown organs can one day help solve the shortage of donated organs available for transplantation. Atala reported that the bladders showed improved function over time – with some patients being followed for more than seven years.

To create the new bladders, the researchers took a biopsy from patients whose bladders functioned poorly due to an inherited nervous system disorder. The team then placed muscle cells and cells from the bladder lining on a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold and allowed them to grow for about two months.

The scaffolds were made of the structural protein collagen, in some cases adding polyglycolic acid, a polymer used in surgical sutures. The scaffold was designed to degrade as the bladder tissue integrated with the body. Testing showed that the engineered bladders functioned as well as bladders that are repaired with intestine tissue, but with none of the ill effects.

“We have shown that regenerative medicine techniques can be used to generate functional bladders that are durable,” said Atala. “This suggests that regenerative medicine may one day be a solution to the shortage of donor organs in this country for those needing transplants.”


See the Wake Forest press release or the Bio-engineered bladders successful in patients article at New Scientist.

Dogs with three weeks of training can best the latest CAT, PET and MRI scanners at detecting some forms of cancer by sniffing breath samples.

A peer-reviewed study, led by Michael McCulloch of the Pine Street Foundation in San Anselmo, California, and Tadeusz Jezierski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Genetics and Animal Breeding, reveals scientific evidence that a dog's scenting ability can distinguish people with both early and late stage lung and breast cancers from healthy controls.

Lung cancer, when symptoms arise, is usually diagnosed at Stage III or IV, when the prognosis is rarely good. Aiming to develop a feasible and effective early detection method, the investigators based their work on the observation that cancer cells emit different metabolic waste products than normal cells. The differences between these metabolic products are apparently so great that they can be detected by a dog's keen sense of smell, even in the early stages of disease.

The researchers found that ordinary dogs, could be rapidly trained to identify lung and breast cancer patients by smelling samples of their breath, and that their diagnostic performance was not affected by disease stage of cancer patients, age, smoking, or most recently eaten meal among either cancer patients or controls.


The study will be published in the March 2006 issue of the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies and more details are available now on the Pine Street's Diagnostic Accuracy of Canine Scent Detection of Lung and Breast Cancers in Exhaled Breath, BrightSurf's Can dogs smell cancer? and in the Dr Dog, the cancer specialist article at Times Online.

Scientists have managed to protect and regenerate the part of the brain that is damaged in Parkinson's disease, by genetically engineering cells to bypass the blood-brain barrier.

The blood-brain barrier protects the brain from harmful substances, but also prevents drugs from entering, so experimental treatments have involved injecting drugs directly into the brain.

The drugs can be sneaked past the blood-brain barrier by engineering and implanting progenitor brain cells derived from stem cells to produce and deliver a critical growth factor that has already shown clinical promise for treating Parkinson's disease.

Writing in the journal Gene Therapy, University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Clive Svendsen and his colleagues describe experiments that demonstrate that engineered human brain progenitor cells, transplanted into the brains of rats and monkeys, can effectively integrate into the brain and deliver medicine where it is needed.

"This work shows that stem cells can be used as drug delivery vehicles in the brain," says Svendsen. The new study, Svendsen argues, proves that progenitor cells--cells that can now be made in large quantities in the laboratory--can be crafted to help clinicians deliver drugs where they are needed most in the body. Delivering medicine to the brain, whose blood-brain barrier effectively excludes more than 70 percent of all drugs, would be an especially valuable use for the cells. Such a new method may be useful for treating a number of neurodegenerative diseases beyond Parkinson', he says.

Read the full story in the Wisconsin-Madison press release, Engineered stem cells show promise for sneaking drugs into the brain at BrightSurf or NewScientist's 'Trojan cells' treat brain diseases from the inside article.

A study conducted at the San Francisco VA Medical Center has identified a protein found in both mice and humans that appears to play a key role in protecting neurons from oxidative stress, a toxic process linked to neurodegenerative illnesses including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

The study, led by Raymond Swanson, MD, chief of neurology and rehabilitation services at SFVAMC, identified the protein--known as EAAC1 in mice and as EAAT3 in humans--as the main mechanism through which the amino acid cysteine is transported into neurons.

EACC1-deficient mice were found to have many conditions which also occur in Alzheimer's patients, such as abnormally enlarged ventricles, fewer neurons in the hippocampus, and that all neurons in the hippocampus and cortex showed evidence of oxidative stress. They also found that it took ten times less hydrogen peroxide--a powerful oxidant--to kill slices from the EAAC1-deficient mice, indicating that these were ten times as vulnerable to oxidative stress.

The good news is that, for several days, a group of gene-deficient mice were fed N-acetylcysteine, an oral form of cysteine that is readily taken up by neurons. When their neuron slices were compared with slices from untreated gene-deficient mice, it was found that N-acetylcysteine (NAC) "had completely corrected the biochemical defect" in their neurons, recounts Swanson. "Their glutathione levels were normal, their ability to withstand hydrogen peroxide toxicity was normal, and the oxidants we saw in the neurons in response to oxidative challenges were normal."


NAC is a form of the amino acid cysteine which enhances the production of the glutathione, one of the body's powerhouse antioxidants.


Read the full Key brain antioxidant linked to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's article at BrightSurf.

Acetaminophen, the popular painkiller found in Tylenol and similar products, is now the leading cause of acute liver failure in the US - and almost half of those cases are accidental overdoses.

Between 1998 and 2003, the proportion of cases of liver failure caused by the drug nearly doubled.

Of the 275 people with acetaminophen poisoning, in a recent study, 8 per cent received a liver transplant, 65 per cent survived without one and 27 per cent died. People who intentionally overdosed had similar damage to those who overdosed accidentally. That suggests a clear threshold for what constitutes a safe dose of the drug.

Many of the people who had accidentally poisoned themselves did so by taking just 10 grams of the medication each day for about three days - the equivalent of about 20 pills per day instead of the recommended eight, an overdose that might be less serious with other drugs. Other people had unwittingly taken two products that both contained the drug.

Read the full story at NewScientist.

High doses of vitamin E may help mice live longer, according to a new study by Spanish and Argentinean researchers.

Male mice given the vitamin lived an average 40% longer than their peers and showed a much higher level of acrobatic prowess when they performed on a high-wire tightrope, the researchers found. The improvements were due to the vitamin’s antioxidant properties, they say.

But long life is not necessarily associated with quality, so Ana Novarro and colleagues from the University of Cadiz in Spain, and Alberto Boveris and colleagues from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, looked at the creatures’ abilities to perform various tests.

They found that those on the vitamin E diet were better than the others at crossing a 50 centimetre-high wire tightrope and negotiating a T-shaped maze. And as they reached a grand old age, the differences were more stark – while those on a normal diet deteriorated rapidly, the mice given regular vitamin E continued to perform well, performing up to 45% better at tests.

Vitamin E gives mice a longer, more acrobatic life at NewScientist.