The test uses a highly sensitive and specific technique, known as mass spectrometry, to simultaneously analyse proteins, enzymes and metabolites in the blood, without the need for the large liquid blood samples currently used. Collection of dried blood spots is less invasive for patients and the costs and biohazards associated with sample transport, processing and storage are minimised.

Researchers at King’s College London, together with clinicians from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, as part of King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre, have built on their innovative approaches to dried blood spot screening for inherited metabolic disease and sickle cell disease in newborn babies. This approach can now be used in the early detection and clinical monitoring of chronic health problems, including kidney and heart disease and diabetes.

King’s has officially launched a spin-out company, SpotOn Clinical Diagnostics Ltd, to provide both analytical services and technical support for other clinical laboratories, many of which already have appropriate mass spectrometry instrumentation, to offer this new method.

Requiring only a drop of blood from a simple finger-prick, or heel-prick in newborns, this new blood spot analysis method has many potential applications:

• The method is faster, more specific, and cheaper than the methods currently used to screen all 750,000 babies born each year in the UK for sickle cell disease and other clinically significant haemoglobinopathies (abnormalities in haemoglobin within the blood). The current methods for ante-natal screening for sickle cell disease and thalassaemia require fresh liquid blood samples, which are more expensive to process, store and transport.
• The method has already been successfully used to provide rapid diagnosis of a comprehensive range of inherited metabolic diseases in acutely ill children admitted to intensive care with life-threatening symptoms.
• Pre-symptomatic screening for chronic health problems will introduce personalised clinical diagnostics and cost-effective early detection and monitoring of diabetes and kidney and heart disease.

Dried urine spots can also be used for the very early detection of kidney disease, particularly in patients with a high risk of developing renal complications, for example patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

The test works by converting proteins to peptides and then using a mass spectrometer to select and accurately measure diagnostic metabolites and/or peptides. Liquid blood and urine samples can also be screened using the method.

Compared with conventional clinical laboratory diagnostics the major advantages of the new method are that the measurements for proteins and metabolites can be done simultaneously with both high accuracy and sensitivity. Dried blood spots and/or dried urine spots offer significant cost savings in the logistics of sample collection, transport to the laboratory, sample processing, and storage.

Neil Dalton, Professor of Paediatric Biochemistry at King’s, and co-founder of SpotOn, said: “The lessons we have learned from universal pre-symptomatic screening of newborn babies using dried blood spots can now be cost-effectively applied to provide a personalised medicine approach to the early diagnosis and clinical monitoring of major chronic health problems like diabetes and kidney and heart disease.”

A copy of this article can be found here: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/237852.php

Bad cholesterol (Low density lipoproteins (LDL)) causes plaque on the walls of your arteries, increasing the risk of heart disease and hypertension. Having your cholesterol checked regularly though a Lipid Profile blood test has become even more important.

Blood tests such as the AFP, CEA, CA 125, CA 19-9, and CA 27.29 can support this process by screening for various types of cancer including ovarian, breast, testicular, and lung cancers.

‘Good’ HDL Cholesterol Now Tied to Lower Cancer Risk

But finding is an association and doesn’t prove cause-and-effect, researchers say

By Ed Edelson

MONDAY, June 14 (HealthDay News) — Higher blood levels of HDL cholesterol, the “good” kind that protects against heart disease, are also strongly associated with a lower risk of cancer, a new review of studies suggests.

“For about a 10-point increase of HDL, there is a reduced risk of cancer by about one third over an average follow-up of 4.5 years,” said Dr. Richard Karas, executive director of the Tufts Medical Center Molecular Cardiology Research Institute and lead author of a report in the June 22 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Those numbers come from an analysis of 24 randomized controlled trials, aimed at determining the effect on heart disease of lowering levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, through the use of statin drugs. The review singled out trials that also recorded the incidence of cancer among the participants.

The researchers report a 36 percent lower cancer rate for every 10 milligrams per liter (mg/dl) higher level of HDL. But while the relationship between higher HDL and lower cancer risk was independent of other cancer risk factors, such as smoking, obesity and age, Karas was careful to say the study does not prove cause and effect.

“We can say that higher levels of HDL are associated with a lower risk of cancer, but we can’t say that one causes the other,” he said.

Exactly so, said Dr. Jennifer Robinson, professor of epidemiology and medicine at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, who wrote an accompanying editorial. High HDL levels may simply be a marker of the kind of good traits that reduce both cardiovascular and cancer risk, she said.

“People have a lot of characteristics that are all kind of interrelated,” she said. “They may not exercise, be obese and so on, and so have lower HDL than normal. The higher risk of cancer may have nothing to do with what HDL does.”

That’s a real possibility, Karas said, but he also mentioned some possible physical mechanisms that might give HDL cholesterol anti-cancer activity.

“HDL alters the function of the immune system, which looks for abnormal cells that may be cancerous or precancerous and attacks them,” he said. “It also has antioxidant properties, and there is a lot of interest in the role of antioxidants in reducing cancer risk.”

HDL cholesterol also has anti-inflammatory activity, which might act against cancer, Karas said. His laboratory is “starting to think” about experiments to test these various theories, he said.

The only convincing proof would be a controlled trial testing whether medication that raises HDL levels reduces cancer incidence, Robinson said. No such medication is now on the market (other than niacin, which has a minor effect in raising HDL levels), although several are being tested for their effect on heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular problems.

“We actually don’t know that something is causing the disease unless we do controlled trials,” she said.

The researchers who conduct those studies should monitor cancer incidence as well as cardiovascular disease among the participants, Karas said. The new study’s finding that an appreciable effect on cancer was evident in just a few years “shows the importance in current studies to track cancer,” he said. “Many don’t.”

Until the anti-cancer hypothesis is proved or disproved, Karas and Robinson said, the best thing to do is adopt the healthy lifestyle that can keep HDL cholesterol levels high — exercising regularly, eating a healthy diet, not smoking and consuming alcohol in moderation.

More information

To learn about HDL and LDL cholesterol and other blood fats, visit the American Heart Association.

SOURCES: Richard Karas, M.D. ,Ph.D., executive director, Tufts Medical Center Molecular Cardiology Research Institute, Boston; Jennifer Robinson, M.D., M.P.H., professor, epidemioloy and medicine, University of Iowa College of Public Health, Iowa City; June 22, 2010 Journal of the American College of Cardiology

Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved

The full article can be found here: http://www.healthtestingcenters.com/hdl-cholesterol-blood-testing-and-lower-cancer-risk.aspx

Many of these items, such as scalpels, needles or sponges, go unused; they’re just not needed for that particular procedure. But because of government or hospital regulations in the United States, they are frequently thrown away, even when they are still wrapped.

“There are thousands of tons of medical supplies thrown away every day that are unused or clearly reusable,” said Dr. Bruce Charash, a cardiologist in New York.

Fortunately, some nonprofit organizations, including Charash’s Doc2Dock group, are finding ways to salvage these items and get them to people who need them desperately around the world.

In Uganda, for example, many medical facilities lack the necessary supplies and equipment needed to perform surgery. The outlook is normally grim for children such as Priscilla, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor when she was 7.

But one Ugandan hospital, CURE Children’s Hospital in Mbale, has been able to operate on Priscilla and more than 1,100 other kids thanks to its partnership with MedShare, a nonprofit that collects surplus supplies and equipment from the U.S.

“Brain tumors happen to children all over the world,” said Derek Johnson, executive director of CURE Uganda. “The main difference in Uganda is that there are so few resources. But we were able to save Priscilla with supplies we get from MedShare.”

‘Our trash becomes their riches’

In the United States, surgical supplies aren’t the only useful medical items tossed away.

CNN Hero: Richard St. Denis

Richard St. Denis, one of the Top 10 CNN Heroes of 2011, collects discarded wheelchairs through his nonprofit, World Access Project. With help from another U.S.-based nonprofit, Hope Haven, the wheelchairs are refurbished by senior citizen volunteers and prison inmates in Iowa before being shipped to rural Mexico.

St. Denis first visited Mexico in 1997, and he met many people with disabilities who didn’t have access to wheelchairs, walkers or canes.

“I was shocked to see people using branches for crutches, being pushed in wheelbarrows and crawling,” said St. Denis, who lost the use of his legs during a skiing accident in 1976.

Now, he has a permanent residence in Mexico and continues to do everything he can to help the people around him.

“We want to distribute the more than 75,000 wheelchairs we estimate get thrown away in the U.S. every year,” he said. “What we call our trash becomes their riches, and it makes an incredible difference in their lives.”

A win-win for everyone

In addition to saving lives, there’s another benefit to sending unused supplies abroad.

“We are diverting a certain amount of waste that would be landfilled,” said Dr. William Rosenblatt, a professor of anesthesiology at Yale University School of Medicine and founder of the nonprofit Remedy.

“At the end of a surgical procedure, our staff surveys the scrub table where the kit items remain and segregates all the materials that have been unused,” Rosenblatt said. “It gets sent down to (a) decontamination area, and Yale undergraduate students sort through it and take what is useful. From here, it is packaged in bulk and given to a charity to be taken overseas.”

Sometimes, perfectly good equipment is thrown away.

“Why would (hospitals) throw out a working sonogram machine or a working hospital bed?” Charash said. “One, it’s not pretty enough. Secondly, there might be new technology available. In general, no one wants to use a 2005 (model) if a 2012 is available.”

Occasionally, a hospital will simply switch brands and get rid of an entire line of unused items.

Supply manufacturers have been known to send items directly to the nonprofits if a box is so much as dented in transport — items that could mean life or death for an individual in a Third World hospital.

The need greatly outstrips the supply

“On my first trip to Africa, the hospital director showed me a patient dying of malaria,” Charash said. “He showed me a room with hundreds of bottles of medicine that would save his life, but (the medicine was) not given to him because they had no intravenous lines.

“That day, our Doc2Dock container arrived with reconstituted IV lines and 3,000 to 4,000 syringes. The doctor got an IV line, the patient got the medicine and was saved.”

But while unused medical equipment is saving many people around the world, only a small percentage of hospitals ever actually receive these items.

“If you look at the volume of appeals we get versus the amount we are able to help, we are able to find funding for a quarter of the bona-fide projects,” said David Pass, chief advancement officer for MedShare. “There is a great need out there.”

The effort to find more funding is worth it, said Tanya Weaver of the American Foundation for Children with AIDS. Her nonprofit works in four African countries and has been able to help more than 100,000 people there thanks to surplus medical supplies from a couple of hospitals.

“If we can do this with the help of just two U.S. hospitals, imagine how many more could be served if others got involved,” Weaver said.

By Allie Torgan, CNN

This article can be found at: http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/01/health/cnnheroes-medical-supplies/index.html?hpt=he_c2

Coffee may taste good and get you going in the morning, but what will it do for your health?

A growing body of research shows that coffee drinkers, compared to nondrinkers, are:

• less likely to have type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia
• have fewer cases of certain cancers, heart rhythm problems, and strokes

“There is certainly much more good news than bad news, in terms of coffee and health,” says Frank Hu, MD, MPH, PhD, nutrition and epidemiology professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

But (you knew there would be a “but,” didn’t you?) coffee isn’t proven to prevent those conditions.

Researchers don’t ask people to drink or skip coffee for the sake of science. Instead, they ask them about their coffee habits. Those studies can’t show cause and effect. It’s possible that coffee drinkers have other advantages, such as better diets, more exercise, or protective genes.

So there isn’t solid proof. But there are signs of potential health perks — and a few cautions.

If you’re like the average American, who downed 416 8-ounce cups of coffee in 2009 (by the World Resources Institute’s estimates), you might want to know what all that java is doing for you, or to you.

Here is a condition-by-condition look at the research.

Type 2 Diabetes

Hu calls the data on coffee and type 2 diabetes “pretty solid,” based on more than 15 published studies.

“The vast majority of those studies have shown a benefit of coffee on the prevention of diabetes. And now there is also evidence that decaffeinated coffee may have the same benefit as regular coffee,” Hu tells WebMD.

In 2005, Hu’s team reviewed nine studies on coffee and type 2 diabetes. Of more than 193,000 people, those who said they drank more than six or seven cups daily were 35% less likely to have type 2 diabetes than people who drank fewer than two cups daily. There was a smaller perk — a 28% lower risk — for people who drank 4-6 cups a day. The findings held regardless of sex, weight, or geographic location (U.S. or Europe).

More recently, Australian researchers looked at 18 studies of nearly 458,000 people. They found a 7% drop in the odds of having type 2 diabetes for every additional cup of coffee drunk daily. There were similar risk reductions for decaf coffee drinkers and tea drinkers. But the researchers cautioned that data from some of the smaller studies they reviewed may be less reliable. So it’s possible that they overestimated the strength of the link between heavy coffee drinking and diabetes.

How might coffee keep diabetes at bay?

“It’s the whole package,” Hu says. He points to antioxidants — nutrients that help prevent tissue damage caused by molecules called oxygen-free radicals. “We know that coffee has a very strong antioxidant capacity,” Hu says.

Coffee also contains minerals such as magnesium and chromium, which help the body use the hormone insulin, which controls blood sugar (glucose). In type 2 diabetes, the body loses its ability to use insulin and regulate blood sugar effectively.

It’s probably not the caffeine, though. Based on studies of decaf coffee, “I think we can safely say that the benefits are not likely to be due to caffeine,” Hu says.

Hold the Caffeine?

The fact that coffee contains good stuff does not necessarily mean that it’s good for us, says James D. Lane, PhD, professor of medical psychology and behavioral medicine at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

“It has not really been shown that coffee drinking leads to an increase in antioxidants in the body,” Lane tells WebMD. “We know that there are antioxidants in large quantities in coffee itself, especially when it’s freshly brewed, but we don’t know whether those antioxidants appear in the bloodstream and in the body when the person drinks it. Those studies have not been done.”

Regular coffee, of course, also contains caffeine. Caffeine can raise blood pressure, as well as blood levels of the fight-or-flight chemical epinephrine (also called adrenaline), Lane says.

Heart Disease and Stroke

Coffee may counter several risk factors for heart attack and stroke.

First, there’s the potential effect on type 2 diabetes risk. Type 2 diabetes makes heart disease and stroke more likely.

Besides that, coffee has been linked to lower risks for heart rhythm disturbances (another heart attack and stroke risk factor) in men and women, and lower risk for strokes in women.

In a study of about 130,000 Kaiser Permanente health plan members, people who reported drinking 1-3 cups of coffee per day were 20% less likely to be hospitalized for abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias) than nondrinkers, regardless of other risk factors.

And, for women, coffee may mean a lower risk of stroke.

In 2009, a study of 83,700 nurses enrolled in the long-term Nurses’ Health Study showed a 20% lower risk of stroke in those who reported drinking two or more cups of coffee daily compared to women who drank less coffee or none at all. That pattern held regardless of whether the women had high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, and type 2 diabetes.

Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Diseases

“For Parkinson’s disease, the data have always been very consistent: higher consumption of coffee is associated with decreased risk of Parkinson’s,” Hu tells WebMD. That seems to be due to caffeine, though exactly how that works isn’t clear, Hu notes.

Coffee has also been linked to lower risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. A 2009 study from Finland and Sweden showed that, out of 1,400 people followed for about 20 years, those who reported drinking 3-5 cups of coffee daily were 65% less likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, compared with nondrinkers or occasional coffee drinkers.

Cancer

The evidence of a cancer protection effect of coffee is weaker than that for type 2 diabetes. But “for liver cancer, I think that the data are very consistent,” Hu says.

“All of the studies have shown that high coffee consumption is associated with decreased risk of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer,” he says. That’s a “very interesting finding,” Hu says, but again, it’s not clear how it might work.

Again, this research shows a possible association, but like most studies on coffee and health, does not show cause and effect.

Pregnancy

In August 2010, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) stated that moderate caffeine drinking — less than 200 mg per day, or about the amount in 12 ounces of coffee — doesn’t appear to have any major effects on causing miscarriage, premature delivery, or fetal growth.

But the effects of larger caffeine doses are unknown, and other research shows that pregnant women who drink many cups of coffee daily may be at greater risk for miscarriage than non-drinkers or moderate drinkers. Again, it’s not clear whether the coffee was responsible for that.

Calories, Heartburn, and Urine

You won’t break your calorie budget on coffee — until you start adding the trimmings.

According to the web site myfoodapedia.gov — part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion — a 6-ounce cup of black coffee contains just 7 calories. Add some half & half and you’ll get 46 calories. If you favor a liquid nondairy creamer, that will set you back 48 calories. A teaspoon of sugar will add about 23 calories.

Drink a lot of coffee and you may head to the bathroom more often. Caffeine is a mild diuretic — that is, it makes you urinate more than you would without it. Decaffeinated coffee has about the same effect on urine production as water.

Both regular and decaffeinated coffee contain acids that can make heartburn worse.

The original article can be found at: http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/coffee-new-health-food

(Health.com) — Cardiologists and other doctors already view artery-clogging red meat as a villain, and they now have another reason to urge their patients to steer clear: A new study has found that men have a higher risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer if they consume a lot of ground beef and other red meat — especially if the meat is grilled or well-done.

The men in the study who ate about two servings of hamburger or meat loaf per week were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer as the men who ate none. But most of that increase in risk can be attributed to how the meat was cooked.

When the researchers looked only at the members of the burger-loving group who ate their meat grilled or barbecued, the numbers told a different story: The men who preferred their burgers well-done had double the cancer risk, while those who liked them medium (or rarer) had a negligible increase in risk — just 12 percent. A similar pattern was seen with grilled or barbecued steak.

“This is another piece of evidence for the notion that red meat, particularly grilled meat, contains carcinogens that may relate to prostate cancer,” says Ronald D. Ennis, M.D., director of radiation oncology at St. Luke’s — Roosevelt Hospital Center, in New York City, who was not involved in the study.

When meat is cooked — and charred — at high temperatures over an open flame, a reaction occurs that causes the formation of two chemicals: heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). In animal studies, these chemicals have been shown to cause several types of cancer, including prostate cancer.

Although by now it is well established that red meat increases the risk of heart disease and colorectal cancer, its role in prostate cancer has been less clear. Numerous studies have investigated a possible link between meat consumption and prostate-cancer risk, but the results have been inconsistent.

“This study not only associates red meat with a risk of prostate cancer but it takes it a little bit forward by looking at the method of cooking and the degree of cooking,” says Lee Richstone, M.D., an associate professor of surgery and a prostate-cancer specialist at the Smith Institute of Urology, in New Hyde Park, N.Y. “It helps contribute to our understanding of a potential mechanism in the form of [HCAs] and [PAHs].”

In the study, which was published this week in the journal PLoS One, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco compared about 500 men who recently had been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer to a cancer-free group of similar size who served as controls. All of the participants filled out detailed questionnaires about their diets over the previous year, including the amount of meat they ate and how it was prepared.

Men who ate the most ground beef were 2.3 times more likely than men who ate none to have aggressive prostate cancer. Higher consumption of fatty lunchmeats (such as salami) and liver was also associated with an increase in cancer risk. On the other hand, poultry, bacon, and low-fat hot dogs and sausages appeared to have little influence on cancer risk.

The study “certainly supports the notion that these types of foods may be harmful in some ways,” Ennis says.

Close to one-fifth of U.S. men will at some point in their lives develop prostate cancer, which ranges in severity from benign tumors that need little or no treatment to very aggressive forms that are usually deadly. Age, family history, and genetics all have been shown to increase risk. The evidence for environmental risk factors — including diet — is less clear, though researchers have long suspected they play a role because of the wide geographical variation in prostate-cancer rates.

The study is far from airtight. The data on meat consumption relied on the memory of the participants, for instance. And although the researchers took into account several known risk factors for prostate cancer (such as family history, smoking, and body mass index), it’s possible that other unidentified factors contributed to the apparent link between meat consumption and cancer risk.

Still, the findings are compelling enough that men should consider exercising “moderation and caution,” Richstone says.

“There’s an expanding and building body of literature that does point to this type of connection, and I think papers like this make for a stronger and stronger argument that men need to moderate their intake of highly cooked meat,” he says.

As a large portion of the US population ages, concerns have grown about the potential impact of adverse events from medications. Older adults are especially vulnerable to health consequences of medication adverse events because of physiological changes associated with aging, a high likelihood of comorbid conditions, and use of multiple medications. Adverse events are much more likely to result in hospitalization when they occur in adults 65 years and older, particularly among the oldest individuals.

To better understand which medications pose the greatest risks to older adults, researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University in Atlanta analyzed data from the 2007-2009 National Electronic Injury Surveillance Survey. They estimate that about 100 000 older adults were hospitalized each year because of medication-related problems and that almost half of these hospitalizations occurred in those 80 years or older. Almost two-thirds of the incidents involved accidental overdoses. Four types of drugs—warfarin, insulins, oral antiplatelet agents, and oral hypoglycemic agents—were implicated in 67% of these hospitalizations.

Surprisingly, medications listed as high risk for this age population accounted for only 1.2% of emergency hospitalizations in the group.

“Coordinated efforts to promote the safe management of antithrombotic and antidiabetic agents have the potential to substantially reduceharm to patients,” the authors conclude.

Find this article at http://newsatjama.jama.com/2011/11/23/blood-thinners-diabetes-medications-pose-hospitalization-risk-for-older-adults/