November 1st, 2011 by PJSkerrett in Opinion, Research
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Heart disease. Stroke. Diabetes. Asthma. Osteoporosis. These common scourges are often pegged to genes, pollution, or the wear and tear caused by personal choices like a poor diet, smoking, or too little exercise. David Barker, a British physician and epidemiologist, has a different and compelling idea: these and other conditions stem from a developing baby’s environment, mainly the womb and the placenta.
Barker was the invited speaker at this year’s Stare-Hegsted Lecture, which is a big deal at the Harvard School of Public Health. In just over an hour, he covered the basics of what the British Medical Journal used to call the Barker hypothesis. It has since come to be known as the developmental origins of chronic disease. (You can watch the entire talk here.)
It goes like this: During the first thousand days of development, from conception to age 2, the body’s tissues, organs, and systems are exquisitely sensitive to conditions in their environment during various windows of time. A lack of nutrients or an overabundance of them during these windows programs a child’s development and sets the stage for health or disease. Barker and others use low body weight at term birth is a marker for poor fetal nutrition.
When a fetus is faced with a poor food supply, it Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
October 21st, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Women who smoke begin menopause a year earlier than nonsmokers, researchers concluded, adding that earlier menopause is associated with osteoporosis and heart disease.
Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of the available data about smoking and menopause, finding 11 studies comprising about 50,000 women, using age 50 as a threshold for early or late age at natural menopause (ANM). Results appeared in Menopause.
In five studies, participants were classified as Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
October 18th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Oropharyngeal cancers caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV) are on the rise in the United States since 1984, as changes in sexual habits further the virus’ spread. But the focus of the HPV vaccine will remain on preventing genital warts and cervical cancer.
Reuters reported one clinician’s opinion that throat cancer linked to HPV will become the dominant cause of the disease, ahead of tobacco use.
To study the issue, researchers determined HPV-positive status among 271 of all 5,755 oropharyngeal cancers collected by the three population-based cancer registries in Hawaii, Iowa and Los Angeles from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program from 1984 to 2004. Prevalence trends across four calendar periods were estimated by using logistic regression. The study appeared online Oct. 3 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
HPV prevalence Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
September 14th, 2011 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Research
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The idea that heart disease mortality rises dramatically at menopause has been one of the truisms of medicine that spawned a generation of hormone use by women and led to the rise and subsequent fall of Prempro in the Women’s Health Initiative, the end-all-be-all study that failed to prove the truism. The truism is still so strongly believed that research to prove it right continues, using different hormone formulations and different cohorts of women, in the hopes that the hormonal fountain of youth was just misbranded and given to the wrong aged cohort.
Now comes a landmark study that suggests that what we’ve thought all along about heart disease and menopause may actually be wrong.
Dhananjay Vaidya and colleagues at Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama have re-analyzed mortality data on men and women in the UK and US and concluded that, contrary to popular belief, heart disease rates and mortality do not increase dramatically with menopause, but rather rise more gradually as a function of age in both men and women.
“Our data show there is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog That Ate Manhattan*
August 13th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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British researchers identified a faulty gene associated with a one-in-11 chance of developing ovarian cancer, and they think drugs for breast cancer might also work in these women.
Researchers from England’s Institute of Cancer Research reported that they compared DNA from women from 911 families with ovarian and breast cancer and to a control group of 1,060 people from the general population.
They found eight gene faults in theRAD51Dgene in women with cancer, compared with one in the control group. TheRAD51Dgene repairs damaged DNA, and when it’s faulty, cells are more likely to turn cancerous.
Results appear Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
