'Insulin pill' hope for diabetes

UK company Diabetology, with experts at Cardiff University, says it has solved a crucial problem with oral insulin.

The capsule's special coating protects the drug from acids in the stomach, allowing it to pass into the small intestine where it is absorbed.

The researchers will present their early trial results in 16 patients to the American Diabetes Association.

Needle free

The details of Dr Steve Luzio's presentation cannot be released until he has made it, but are expected to show that oral doses achieve the necessary changes in the body's blood sugar handling to treat diabetes.

The trial is expected to show that the oral dose, taken twice daily before breakfast and dinner, controls glucose levels successfully, at least in patients with type 2 diabetes.

Other scientists have also been looking at ways to deliver insulin by mouth without it being degraded in the stomach. Taiwanese investigators are using a chemical found in shrimp shells to protect the drug.

And inhaled insulin is already available to those diabetics with a proven needle phobia or people who have severe trouble injecting.

Cautious welcome

Diabetes UK welcomed the new research but said the findings were very early and should be treated with caution.

Dr Iain Frame, research manager at Diabetes UK, said: "There are currently 700,000 people in the UK who take insulin injections, sometimes up to four times a day, so being able to take their insulin orally would have a great impact on their quality of life.

"This research, however, is still in its early stages. We would like to see further results."

People with type 1 diabetes rely on insulin injections.

Often, type 2 diabetes can be controlled by diet alone or other oral diabetes drugs. It is only as the disease progresses that insulin may be needed.

Type 2 diabetes is far more common than type 1.

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com

Coffee protects against blinding eyelid disorder

A daily dose of java may help prevent a form of severe eyelid spasm that can cause a person to become "blind," a new study suggests.

In people with primary late onset blepharospasm, the eyelid muscles contract uncontrollably and cause involuntary blinking. In extreme cases, people are unable to prevent their eyelids from clamping shut and, despite having healthy eyes, they become functionally blind, according to background information in the study.

The new study included 166 Italian patients with primary late onset blepharospasm and two control groups - 187 people who were relatives of the patients and 228 people with another kind of facial spasm disorder - who were asked about their coffee consumption.

A team at the University of Bari found that just one to two cups of coffee a day helped protect against late onset blepharospasm and that increased coffee consumption also delayed onset of the condition - 1.7 years for each additional cup of coffee per day.

The study authors noted that previous research has suggested that caffeine may help prevent Parkinson's disease by blocking adenosine receptors, and the same mechanism may play a role in coffee's protective effect against primary late onset blepharospasm.

"Considering that the caffeine content of a cup of Italian coffee (60-120 milligrams) is similar to the average content of a cup of American coffee (95-125 milligrams), the protective effect on the development of blepharospasm may be exerted at caffeine doses greater than 120-240 milligrams, comparable with the caffeine doses suggested to be protective against Parkinson's disease," the study authors wrote.

Their findings were published online June 19 in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Previous studies have suggested that smoking helps protect against blepharospasm, but the authors said they found no evidence to support that theory.

Source: http://www.medical-health-care-information.com/

Lose weight and get drunk faster

People who undergo gastric bypass surgery get drunk quicker and take longer to get sober, according to a US study.

The study conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that the procedure, which is increasingly common in the fight against obesity, heightened the effects of alcohol.

The research was inspired by US talk show host Oprah Winfrey, said John Morton, assistant professor of surgery at Stanford, who has performed more than 1 000 gastric bypass surgeries.

Morton appeared on Winfrey's show last year to discuss the surgery's effects and heard an overwhelming concern among the audience about alcohol.

"I've heard the anecdotes of a patient who will drink one glass of wine and get a DUI (drunk driving arrest), but I wanted to know if there is really a difference before and after surgery," Morton said.

To measure alcohol's effects, researchers gave 19 post-operative gastric bypass patients and 17 people who had not had the surgery five ounces each of red wine. They all drank the wine within 15 minutes.

Each subject then had their breath-alcohol level measured every five minutes until levels reached zero.

The gastric bypass patients reached a breath-alcohol peak of 0.08 percent compared to the control group's peak breath-alcohol level of 0.05 percent

It is a crime to drive with a blood alcohol level at or above 0.08 percent in the United States.

The bypass patients also took longer to return to zero breath-alcohol level, averaging 108 minutes compared to 72 minutes for the control group.

The surgery, which reduces the stomach to the size of a walnut, also alters the way alcohol is metabolised according to the study, being presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery.

About 150 000 Americans a year undergo gastric bypass surgery, which can be a lifesaving procedure for morbidly obese people who are 100 pounds or more overweight.

Source: www.medical-health-care-information.com

Drugs may Help Turn on Gene Switched Off in Cancer

While the existing HDAC inhibitors were found to switch on the BRM gene, the effect was short-lived and reduced as the drugs were taken away. “The HDAC inhibitors are not the perfect answer, but in principle this tells us we can turn our gene back on. If we can turn the gene back on, it may not be a cure for cancer, but it could slow it down or make it responsive to existing drugs,” Reisman says.

The researchers targeted lung cancer cell lines in particular, although they found similar results in a variety of other cancer cell lines tested. “Tumours are not the same from one person to the next, and even the cells within a single tumour are not the same. Giving a single drug or drug combination to 500 people is setting ourselves up for failure, much like a one-size-fits-all clothing store would never succeed,” Reisman says.

“Targeted therapies are now opening the door, because they are essentially given only to those patients who have a high likelihood of response. Their low toxicity means the patient can be treated for long periods of time, which is unlike older and more traditional chemotherapy agents. Even if these new targeted therapies don’t cure the cancer, we can at least have long-term survival,” he adds.

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com

Aspirin a day can keep colon cancer away

A daily dose of common pain killer aspirin could cut the risk of getting bowel cancer by more than a third, says a new study. However, scientists do not recommend its continuous use due to possible side effects.

Bowel cancer refers to malignant tumors in the lower end of the gastro-intestinal tract. About 80 percent of bowel cancers occur in the large intestine and 20 percent in the rectum, with anal cancer being rare.

An Oxford University study showed that taking one 300 mg tablet a day for more than five years reduced the incidence of the disease, reported the online edition of Daily Mail.

Millions of people across the world are already taking small doses of aspirin every day to reduce the chance of suffering a second heart attack or stroke.

However, the painkiller can have serious side effects, including stomach bleeding. Researchers have warned in The Lancet medical journal that widespread use of aspirin as a preventive treatment against bowel cancer was not recommended.

But they argued that the potential benefits might outweigh the dangers for those at increased risk of the disease through family history or other factors.

Andrew Chan, of the gastrointestinal unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, said the results "provide convincing evidence that aspirin, at biologically relevant doses, can reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer".

He added: "However, with the concerns about the potential risks of long-term aspirin use and the availability of alternative prevention strategies such as screening, these findings are not sufficient to warrant a recommendation for the general population to use aspirin for cancer prevention."

Source: www.epsdrugstore.com