The fact that embryonic stem cells can develop into nearly any variety of human tissue makes them incredibly powerful tools in efforts to heal a host of human diseases and conditions. But the controversy surrounding their use is full of passion and anger from those who believe that even a bundle of 8 cells is a human being and should receive the full protection of the law regarding its right to life.

Two new discoveries offer promise of leading to ways to overcome human rights objections–though neither is yet free of its own complications. Since this issue hinges directly on the seemingly-eons-old debate about the moment that life begins, a swift resolution isn’t likely. But scientists are stepping up the search because they realize that no matter what their personal beliefs are, they can’t ignore the sizeable portion of society that thinks embryonic stem cells are off-limits as methods for curing human suffering.

The answers will come eventually. The universe would not in its infinite wisdom give humans the ability to discover the power of stem cells without also providing the solution to the objections. So once again as always, one step forward, two steps back.

Once you’ve had a stroke, your chances are higher of having another–not a delightful thing to know for previous stroke sufferers. Now science has found another way to predict who is more likely to have another stroke–in time for doctors to take preventive action. Read about it in the Archives of Neurology.

It’s easy to dismiss things if your life has never been touched by them. If you know anyone who’s had a stroke, you’ll know how welcome this new method is for helping those persons feel a greater sense of control over their destiny.

We’re off to work on an out of town project this week and will be out of touch. Look for us again next week.

Okay. We’re doing what was thought impossible a few decades ago–curing cancer (at least some kinds). Now we’re finding that we aren’t well prepared to help survivors live well afterwards. The myriad of issues that exist for those who go back to the world after having survived cancer was addressed at a recent Institute of Medicine conference.

Legal questions about insurance issues (insurance companies are notoriously uninterested in taking on anyone with a known serious disease or condition–past or present) are among the most challenging. How will the costs of followup care be assigned? Insurance companies won’t want to bear. Doctors can’t afford to give their services away. Patients and their families–who increasingly, as the cost of health insurance steadily climbs, may have gone into debt already from the treatments themselves–will hardly be in a position to support high medical bills over the long term.

Conference attendees discussed training physicians to provide survivors with a carefully laid out “care plan” (including ways to reduce recurrence and ways to get help with the many other problems they will face). I wonder if the oft-mentioned, much-maligned subject of a national health care system came up at all.

Science has long known the relationship between calcium and vitamin D. Now, a new study suggests you don’t need to take a bunch of calcium if your vitamin D levels are sufficient. This could have interesting implications for menopausal women if further studies confirm the findings.

The study was conducted in Iceland–a place not known for heavy-duty concentrations of sun (to provide vitamin D)–and its investigators suggest that probably most people who live in northern climates ought to be taking vitamin D supplements rather than calcium.

Here are a few selected items from Harvard U’s Health Services on the calcium/vitamin D mix:

Dairy products are among the richest sources of calcium (nonfat and low-fat work as well as those made from whole milk. Milk’s added Vitamin D (100 IU/cup) and natural lactose (the natural sugar in milk) also help your body absorb the calcium.

Other sources of calcium include: green leafy vegetables, (like bok choy, collards, and kale)

sardines

broccoli

most tofu

calcium-fortified orange juice

fortified cereals

Other Factors: Positive Calcium Balance

Exercise that causes muscles to tug at bones, or is weight bearing, also helps keep bones strong. Good examples are walking, low-impact aerobics and dancing.

Vitamin D is key to calcium absorption. Vitamin D is manufactured in the skin following exposure to sunlight*. This varies, however, with: time of day

season

latitude

skin pigmentation

use of sunscreen

age.

It is estimated that 30-40% of adults over 50 are vitamin D-deficient. Vitamin D deficiency accelerates bone loss and increases the risk of fractures.

*Sunlight in Cambridge, MA provides inadequate vitamin D between October and April.

Hey, I thought I’d read somewhere that baked potatoes had significant calcium, too, but it turns out it’s really just the lowfat yogurt I put on them.

If you’re over 50, says this review of a study by the International Longevity Center, you probably don’t trust sleeping pills. But half of you might be happy to use other techniques to get a decent night’s sleep (e.g., music, herbal remedies, OTC antihistamines, OTC sleep aids, other medications that make you drowsy, alcohol)

In case you’re like me and you like to know where you fit in the spectrum of “normal,” here are the stats on who’s getting a good sleep in the over-50 crowd:

• 32% of respondents reported getting a good nightís sleep all seven days of the week.
• 29% said they are able to get a good nightís sleep five or six days a week, while 26% reported getting a good nightís sleep from two to four nights.
• 8% said they never get a good night’s sleep.
• 20% reported getting less than six hours sleep each night.
• 26% said they get between six but less thanand seven hours sleep, while 31% reported getting seven but less thanto eight hours sleep each night.

I’d like to see a comparison study of how the under-50s sleep and what they use to help.

But it’s also interesting to see that this Ph.D. argues with a lot of sleep studies about that 8-hour requirement (who sleeps that much anyway?–except maybe your teenagers). His conclusion is that more isn’t better, and that moderation (about 7 hours) will help you live longer.

Ho-hum. Moderation…again. Nothing new under the sun.

Nearly one in ten premature babies born in the Scranton PA area have a defective oxygen-delivery mechanism, according to a local online news source. The writer says that inhaling nitric oxide gas can make such babies better, faster, and avoid “the alternative – a surgical procedure that opens the jugular vein to use a heart-lung machine.” Doctors say more babies will survive this type of problem without long-term effects as NO gas relaxes certain lung cells, allowing them to help get oxygen into the bloodstream.

As a mother, I am always excited about the idea of finding treatment approaches that help the child with as little trauma as possible. And the fact that NO gives premature infants a better chance of avoiding developmental problems is good news–(see here), though clearly it’s not without risks and must be used judiciously with babies who meet certain criteria (and here).

A reader has suggested that the two treatments are not equivalent. (See comments to this entry.) The original story stated that this use of NO would give some parents the choice to save their premature babies from having to endure ventilator surgery. Even if it turns out not to be as ground-breaking as it seemed, still we’re heading in the right direction anytime we work on replacing surgery with non-invasive approaches.

Aside: Hospitals are beginning to realize that giving close attention to parents during the birth process can create an emotional bond that will tend to make the family choose that hospital for a lifetime of services.

So much in medications and treatments comes down to walking a fine line between healing and hurting. Today we see this about the powerful ability of cannabis to relieve severe pain and insomnia in advanced cases of multiple sclerosis, along with a lengthy explanation of the known bad effects of using “weed”–which include its propensity to reveal previously unrecognized psychotic conditions and illnesses in the user that might never have shown up under any other conditions.

The worry is that people who want to continue using marijuana will hear the good and ignore the bad. By constantly printing lists of potentially damaging side effects of various substances, the media could be dulling the public’s ability to notice. Certainly if you use a certain substance and don’t experience any of the side effects listed for it, your tendency is going to be to discount what you read about it anywhere else.

I know I started getting turned off after the first reports saying how bad caffeine was for you were countered shortly aftwards by a round saying it was good for you. Same thing with eggs and cholesterol. After open-heart surgery my father suffered several years of foregoing one of his favorite foods–only to be told by his doctor one day that, well, cholesterol wasn’t all that big a deal after all. Dad was livid.

…and maybe some other people’s trust in media “health” reports went into the toilet along with mine.

And no, the title doesn’t mean a really tiny idea. If you’re into nanotechnology–whether you’re a scientist or a business person–and you’ve got a great idea for how to create a new product or service related to this burgeoning field, today you can feel encouraged–a few from the group of people invited from around the world who submitted their ideas this year are each going to walk away with about 10 grand today.

The 16 finalists in the International Nanotechnology Business Idea Competition are gathering at Case Western Reserve’s Dively Center to see who takes home the prize money. It should be fascinating listening to their presentations (going on right now til about noon). If you’re in Cleveland and you’d still like to run down there and listen, visit this site or call Suzette at 216.368.0598.

At an international conference in Cleveland, Ohio this week, nanoscientists from around the world are meeting with nano-lovers from industry and academia. One of the speakers during aerospace day technical sessions mentioned nano-geo-bio-chemistry–talk about your cross-functional sciences–being able to determine how a small item found in a cave affects the evolution of the earth. He then went on–in dulcet descriptions of complex formulae that only fellow scientists could hope to decipher–to describe in great detail his company’s nano-work in optical lithography. I didn’t have a clue what optical lithography was, so in case you don’t either, maybe this from an IBM research website will help.

An audience member asked the speaker (thank God) to say what this could mean in real-world applications. “Beyond semiconductors and photonics,” he said, they are “concentrating light in higher density than existing techniques for LEDs [possibly for those outdoor electronic billboards popping up everywhere–and creating traffic hazarads if you ask me] and other major applications.” The nanochannels he showed will “make things for medical diagnosis and repair.” Now we’re talking…

But ethical considerations were on everyone’s minds. Many questions from the audience related to what’s being done to control the new variety of contamination that nanoparticle dust will unquestionably cause. No one had any answers–just that everyone’s aware of the potential danger. More here.

If your region–like so many others–is touting itself as a hotbed for bioscience, where do you go when you need something? Is there one organization that serves as a central resource? Or are there lots of them that you must identify and then develop relationships with?

In Northeast Ohio, for example, several organizations split up the duties of providing resources, contacts, and references for startups and other entrepreneurial ventures. Then they put together another organization to try to bring some unity and organization to the many. That one, called Team NEO, sort of “hosts” some of the others on its website thus:

Jumpstart
Nortech
Bioenterprise
Commercial Real Estate
Northeast Ohio Video–these last two links being to the organization’s own internal real estate and video businesses, an unusual practice for a group that’s supposed to represent its region.

But at an event a few weeks ago, attendees discovered there are even more organizations. NEOBio co-hosted the event with the above organization, and another presenter, NEO411.biz, said it offered still another place for entrepreneurs to get information. A dizzying array of places to go, each offering a very broad description of services.

One attendee said afterwards that it had taken him two years of rooting around to discover all the information that was presented. In the process, he said he’d built his own network of contacts. He also said though the presentation was informative, he wished that it had contained more tangibles about products and/or services that might fit the needs of his medical equipment company. Read more about MedXS and Northeast Ohio here.

It’s not easy putting together an organization that will serve the bioscience community thoroughly and fairly. With so many competing to be “the leader” in the local industry, the job gets even more complicated.