The power of stem cells has been among the most rewarding discoveries of our time. Now scientists are beginning learn how to truly harness and direct that power. In a study with mice, they’ve been able to harvest stem cells that specifically relate to muscle formation and use them to regrow muscles mice lost as a result of a shortage of a substance such as humans are missing with Muscular Dystrophy.

They found that using undifferentiated stem cells (that could develop into just anything), they ended up causing tumors to grow. But now by using fluorescent dyes they’re finding ways to pick out and harvest just the cells that will only grow into muscles. This is like saying they could pick out from a huge crowd only the people with blue eyes and black hair who are wearing red vests.

To be totally unscientific, WOW. They regrew muscles and improved coordination. What person suffering from a debilitating disease won’t be jumping out of her skin praying for them to get going on this one?

What person suffering from any of a host of diseases won’t be praying really hard that they can perfect this technique immediately? Let us all join those people in prayer, for we never know when our turn may come to enjoy life longer and/or more fully because of the miracle of stem cell science.

It’s not perfected yet, but researchers at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals have discovered a compound that’s reversing the effects of fat-rich diet–at least in mice. And they’re saying it’s 2 to 4 times more effective than the stuff (resveratrol, an SIRT1 activator) in grape skins and red wine–which is credited as one critical factor in the low rates of heart disease among other cultures, especially the French. But work has come far enough along that they’re thinking they may be able to start human clinical trials next year. Diet-In-A-Pill May Be Step Closer.

Putting aside the thought of granting the common American wish to “supersize it” and stay skinny and healthy, the implications for treating diabetes are promising. Results so far indicate the substance reduces insulin levels in mice that are genetically prone to become obese–though not in others. Wow. A powerful diet pill that only works on those who need it. What will they think of next?

The idea that people often sabotage their own success gets some scientific backing in this study. Seems what you believe about your ability to improve your intelligence strongly affects how you react to both a) poor performance, and b) success.

People who are convinced they can improve reacted with improved performance after being told they had, in fact, improved their score on what they were told was an IQ test. People who think they are always going to have the same abilities got really nervous when they were told they had improved.

And now the kicker. When the first group, who believe they can get better, were told that their score on a second test had gone down, they got really nervous and actually performed worse on the next round!

This is good news for all those hundreds of life coaches appearing recently whose mission is to get people to change. All they have to do is convince their clients that all they need to do is change their underlying assumptions about their own abilities.

Drugs that can help people lose weight—great! That was my first reaction. But the more I read, the more I started questioning.

The big question on this issue seems to be, who’s doing the urging? If doctors are getting pressured to agree to start prescribing expensive drugs to people who are overweight, and even to prescribe bariatric surgery, who has the most to gain? Will the insurance industry have a lower overall total output? Not likely, because much of the cost they might save on treating diseases linked to obesity will now be transferred to treating obesity itself. Will the health care industry’s charges go down? Unlikely. Will patients who receive these drugs be able to permanently maintain the weight loss, or if they have relied on the drugs to help them lose weight but haven’t learned new eating habits, how many will relapse—with untold further implications for their health?

And although it may appear at the end of every one of the MedPage today reports, I never noticed until now the disclaimer box at the end of the article announcing that the physician members of the panel doing this urging had to disclose possible conflicts of interess. The list of pharmaceutical companies they all mentioned is like a who’s-who of the drug world—Accumetrics, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Merck/Schering-Plough, and Schering Plough Pharmaceuticals. Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Fournier, GlaxoSmithKline, Kos Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Sankyo, and sanofi-aventis.

If all these potential conficts of interest are real, what are the chances doctors might also get pressured to accept something else for following drug company “prescriptions” for how to practice medicine… Yeah, that disclaimer box makes me nervous. Continue to theAmerican Heart Association panel discussion on doctors being urged to attack obesity as a disease state.

Some of the first forays into nanomedicine are looking pretty exciting. In an experiment with human liver cells, nanotubes inserted into cancer cells in vitro and heated up by radiofrequency fields have succeeded in eliminating the tumors completely. Progress in developing the therapy depends on targeting the nanotubes to hit just cancer cells within a living organism. Investigators are currently testing monoclonal antibodies, peptides, and other potential delivery vehicles for this purpose.

After decades of having no choice but to deliver treatments like chemotherapy and radiation that can’t be targeted specifically at cancer cells, and having patients suffering a raft of unpleasant side effects, doctors must be pretty excited to think the day will soon come that they don’t have to punish their patients with the treatment on top of what they’re already suffering with the disease.

As if the cold wasn’t mysterious enough, we now have multiple infections caused by the strange, many-faceted virus called adenoviruses–related to the looming potential epidemic “bird flu.” A new technique is helping to clear up some of the secrets of the adenovirus. The technique is genotyping, which involves “sequencing of highly variable sections of the adenovirus hexon gene to identify the adenovirus strain,” is dramatically faster (2 days) than the blood work–which took weeks–that was previously the only way to know what you were dealing with. As these viruses can be dangerous and are extremely contagious, speedy diagnosis is of paramount importance.

Where did these viruses come from? Reptiles, dogs, and birds/chickens are known to carry them. It’s the jump to the human organism that’s so worrisome. The problem with these viruses is that early symptoms mimic those of a dozen other common illnesses like colds and flu that involve the respiratory system, eyes, nose, throat, even stomach (diarrhea is common in some varieties). And kids can have them with mild symptoms. So doctors who are not aware might be inclined to dismiss a worried parent’s complaint.

Most people who practice an undesirable habit to one degree or another will fudge when they talk to their doctors about things like how much they exercise, whether they use recreational drugs, how much alchohol they drink, and so on. Now physicians can use some new CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) codes to to indicate they’ve given a patient a more formally structured substance abuse screening service instead of just telling the patient to stop doing it.

The idea is during a regular visit, your doctor can administer a fairly rigorous combination of electronic, verbal and written questionnaires and conduct a brief intervention. A White House deputy director says “‘Screening and brief interventions can keep patients healthier, improve physicians’ performance measures, and reduce hospital and healthcare costs. …screening and brief intervention is the most transformative substance abuse tool for medicine in decades.’ “

A solid prediction: this is going to change how insurance companies investigate and pay for things that might easily have been caused by the patient’s own practice of a bad habit. Here are some sobering statistics on motor vehicle accidents and injuries connected with drug/alchohol use. Like smoking, as alcohol and drug abuse become more public, users will begin to be socially censured.

More impressive stuff from our favorite stuff, nitric oxide. Research shows that red blood cells lose a massive amount of nitric oxide in the the first 3 hours of being stored outside the body. By day 21 the blood is virtually empty of this vital substance. Experiments with dogs are showing that adding it back in greatly improves levels of S-nitrohemoglobin (which carries nitric oxide in blood) and dramatically increases blood flow in hypoxic (oxygen-starved) tissue. The hope is that treating banked blood with nitric oxide may greatly reduce the dangers of transfusion–reducing or eliminating occurrences of heart attack and even death. Read the whole thing Hematology/Oncology, Hematology from MedPage Today

Having been studying the “Frozen Shoulder Workbook” recently in search of a solution for recurring pain in my mouse-hand shoulder, this item caught my eye today. Seems researchers found that, while Pitching Changes Little Leaguer’s Shoulders and some of it results in long-lasting protective changes, too much is a bad thing. Some kids are playing lots of games all year round and are getting into painful situations. Better to vary the sports a kid plays, they say–and even just quit sports for a while and go be a kid (which is not to suggest spending endless hours on video games–which has its own set of perils).

The answers always seem to head in the direction of “moderation in all things.” Not very exciting, of course, but fairly reliable.

Mind over matter. The placebo effect. What you believe is what is real.

However you like to phrase it, researchers just did a pretty tightly controlled test that proves the truth of the concept that our minds control what goes on in our bodies more than most of us are comfortable admitting. Read how acupuncture doesn’t have to be real to work.

But there is a science of pain relief that you can do yourself. It’s a physical release of little knots that form in your muscles–from stress, pain, injury, and so on. When I got myself a stubborn case of shoulder pain recently–brought on by a couple of months of working non-stop on a laptop computer, reaching and holding my arm up constantly to operate that mouse spot in the middle of the keyboard–most of the pain seemed to be in the front, where my arm is attached to the body.

After weeks of rubbing and stretching that did nothing to relieve the pain, I went to a massage therapist. She rubbed and pushed at that area, yet the pain continued as bad as ever. I went to a massage therapist specially trained in trigger point therapy who’s famous for relieving recalcitrant pain in dozens of people I know who couldn’t get relief otherwise. Experienced some relief immediately. But then I noticed that the slightest thing could kick the same pain back in. So at that therapist’s suggestion, I bought a book called “The Frozen Shoulder Workbook” and started studying the science of trigger point therapy for relieving pain.

Turns out the pain I was feeling was mostly likely referred pain, coming from a trigger point in one of my back shoulder muscles. I’ll be writing more about trigger points. This is too important to confine to a single post.