BiomedNews

Stem cells found to repair human hearts

Stem cell diagram illustrates a human fetus st...
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Didn’t it have to be only a matter of time? I’m happy but not surprised to find that heart patients are beginning to benefit from having stem cells injected into their body’s operating plant. So far studies are limited, but they involve human hearts, not mice or pigs, and are yielding some very promising results.

In one case patients who’d had a heart attack had their hearts injected with bone marrow stem cells and experienced stronger healing. Even some scars in heart tissue began to fade. In another study patients battling heart failure after a heart attack benefited from injections of their own cardiac stem cells.

Research indicates that timing and sourcing are important. Using cardiac stem cells seems more effective than those from bone marrow. Injecting stem cells too soon or too late can cut short or even nullify benefits.

All the heart patients today have got to be on pins and needles hoping this research will progress rapidly enough to make a difference for them and those who love them.

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BiomedNews

Create your own nitric oxide to protect your hearts

Simplified diagram of the human Circulatory sy...
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Exercise. Yeah I know. Do you really want to hear about another way exercise is good for you? Well, this appears to be a slightly new take. It’s about how nitric oxide (NO), a short-lived gas produced by the body during exercise, benefits the heart.

A recent study published in the journal, Circulation Research, says that voluntary exercise (as opposed, I guess, to sitting in some machine that moves your body for you) produces nitric oxide which then “turns on chemical pathways that relax blood vessels to increase blood flow and activate survival pathways [emphasis mine].” Exercise was found to boost “levels of an enzyme that produces nitric oxide (eNOS, endothelial nitric oxide synthase).”

So in short, you choose to exercise. Your body produces NO, then the NO is “stored in the bloodstream and heart in the form of nitrite and nitrosothiols,” which are then withdrawn from storage as needed. And even cooler, these reserves remain elevated for a week after exercise has stopped—“unlike other heart enzymes stimulated by exercise”—and don’t return to baseline until four whole weeks after exercise. So it seems we get a lot for a little effort.

I once had a book called Dr. Naglier’s Body Maintenance and Repair Book. He said, emphatically, that even five minutes of movement a day is so much better for your body than nothing, that you should never not do anything because you’re afraid you couldn’t possibly do all the exercise “they” recommend.

Score another big one for nitric oxide. It’s truly a health friend, and it doesn’t take much to put it to work for you.

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BiomedNews

Nitric oxide, genetics and alcohol consumption

Total recorded alcohol per capita consumption ...
Image via Wikipedia - Total recorded alcohol per capita consumption (15+) in liters of pure alcohol

Many a drinker felt a burst of hope/support when scientists first began finding connections between genetic makeup and the urge to drink alcohol. The hope was, if you drank too much, they might find a way to “cure” it, just as they have found cures for so many diseases. And hopefully a gentler cure that doesn’t involve making you violently ill when you take a drink.

The search continues. Researchers have previously established that a “neuronal nitric oxide synthase 1 (NOS1) gene promoter polymorphism, EX1f-VNTR (exon 1f-variable number tandem repeats)” (***see note below) influences both impulsivity and psychopathology.

A recent study now says there may be a reverse correlation between one allele (one member of a pair of genes), the short one, and its pair. The short one, associated with psychpathology and impulsivity—long thought to be linked to alcoholism—has been  considered the “risk” gene for alcohol consumption in humans.

The study indicates it’s actually the long allele that’s a marker for starting drinking at an earlier age, drinking more, and experiencing more severe effects of alcohol. And the study results were significant enough for Clinical Psychiatry News to use the headline: Allele Appears Protective Against Alcohol Use. So they’re getting closer to identifying a genetic link—and creating new hope for treating alcoholism more effectively.

*** Looking up the definition of this incredibly long name didn’t enlighten me much, but it led me to an article about it in relation to allergic diseases in the Czech people, and one in relation to Parkinson’s disease in Taiwan…

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BiomedNews

Nitric oxide: a magic bullet against infection?

HAMBURG, GERMANY - JUNE 02: A lab technician ...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife - Positive for infection

Nitric oxide (NO) is already known to block the growth of certain bacteria and protect the body against certain infections as well as keep some good substances from producing too much of themselves. Wow, a regular health watchdog.

Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph sh...
Image via Wikipedia - Salmonella under the scope

“Nitric oxide is naturally produced in the nose and the gut and other tissues in the body to ward off infection,” says the author of the report on a new study. The study used salmonella to show that “nitric oxide’s antimicrobial actions are due to its interference with the metabolism, or energy production, of pathogens.” Inhibiting the bad guy’s ability to reproduce itself produces a condition called nitrosative stress—which starves the bad guys and is tough on bacteria but benign for the host organism.

It’s not exactly magic, but it might as well be, since it opens a new pathway for scientists. By “learning how the body naturally controls the energy supplies and growth of varied disease-causing organisms” they may be able to create antimicrobial drugs that perform similar actions and thus strengthen nature’s own natural defenses against infection. Read the article.

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BiomedNews

Drugs improve health by delivering extra nitric oxide

“The Baptist” was the site of one of the first...
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As we’ve discussed in previous posts, nitric oxide is a “crucial biological mediator” that helps the body in a dozen different ways—from sexual performance enhancement to easing arthritis to potentially preventing or reversing atherosclerosis. So scientists have been searching for ways to improve the delivery of nitric oxide to critical systems when needed. In their efforts they’ve discovered what they call nitric oxide donor drugs, logically enough, since their main purpose seems to be to help the body generate more nitric oxide and use it more effectively.

Just read about a new such drug, naproxcinod, they’ve tested in comparison with placebo and naproxen, which is a standard NSAID for arthritis. Looks promising for treating the hip pain of osteoarthritis. Having been a hip replacement patient—and having spent more than 10 months in twice-a-week therapy trying to recover semi-normal activity levels—I can vouch for what a great thing it would be to be able to relieve that pain and keep from having that terribly invasive surgery. But of course my real hope for future hip-and-knee-pain-sufferers is that researchers will find a way—they’re already saying it’s promising—to use stem cells to regenerate lost cartilage in our joints. The big issue with that is getting the stem cells to differentiate into the three needed types of cells for cartilage, including the “scaffolding” that has the powerful weight-bearing capabilities of our natural cartilage.

What an amazing thing is the human body. I hope I’m around long enough to see these studies result in actually saving someone from a brutal hip replacement operation.

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BiomedNews

Summer=watermelon=nitric oxide=lower blood pressure

Watermelons
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Yep. Eating watermelon boosts your nitric oxide which in turn lowers your blood pressure, according to this report.  It’s not that watermelon introduces NO directly into your body. Rather, your body converts into nitric oxide a substance watermelon has lots of, L-citrulline.

The Emory University professor says this juicy fruit is also full of lycopene, the antioxidant carotene that tomatoes have been bragging about for years now. Good to hear, I guess. ‘Cuz I always thought the watermelon my parents served us out in the yard some hot summer nights was just a big messy excuse for spitting stuff out—an activity normally proscribed by good manners.

Reminds me of the time I discovered a new nutritional fact about one of my favorite vegetables, green beans. I’d wondered for years what the hell made these little guys so tasty since I couldn’t find any listing showing they had any  significant quantities of any known-to-be-valuable vitamins or minerals. And then scientists discovered flavonoids—and wow, turns out green beans promote the production of NO and are really good for us. I’m guessing the same thing may happen one day with other foods that people love but for which scientists haven’t yet figured out redeeming nutritional values.

Potato chips
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I’m wishing potato chips would fall into that category one day.

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BiomedNews

New marker for diagnosing heart failure

The illustration shows the major signs and sym...
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If you find yourself not being able to breathe very well—gasping or huffing and puffing on slight exertion or on lying down—your doctor can go down a number of different routes to find out what the problem is. Since I know from personal experience they don’t necessarily go down the right road, even when they keep reaching dead ends on the ones they do pursue, this could be a good thing for you to know yourself.

If you already know you have heart trouble, your doc will probably look down that route first. And now there’s a way for even your internist to tell if your troubled breathing might be due to congestive heart failure rather than to a respiratory or other issue. A simple blood test for BNP (B-type natriuretic peptide) can tell whether you have much higher levels than someone who’s breathing trouble is lung- or other-related. Any doctor can read the test–doesn’t have to be a cardiologist. And even happier, the BNP test can be done quickly–as in emergency room speed–so docs can treat for the right thing right away.

Earlier treatment can vastly improve quality of life and potentially extend a patient’s lifespan. It can also mean savings in treatment costs over the course of the condition. So it’s good news for hospitals as well as for patients.

Well, I guess it’s never too early to  learn the truth if docs can give you medications to ease the symptoms. Plus, it gives you more time to decide if there’s anything you want to get done before your number’s up.

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BiomedNews

Bone marrow stem cells help donor blood vessel save a life

Human bone marrow.
Image via Wikipedia - Human bone marrow

Little girl in Sweden develops a potentially fatal blood clot during her first year. At age ten she undergoes surgery to replace the affected blood vessel with one from a donor. Doctors removed tissue and DNA from the donor vessel and seeded it with the little girl’s bone marrow stem cells. No anti-rejection drugs required.  Far lower risk of failure than when a patient’s existing blood vessel is used and proves inadequate. Her prognosis is good three months post-op.

This approach has worked, too, to regenerate organs such as a tuberculosis-damaged windpipe.  The hope is that further research will lead to adapting this technique for use with kidney dialysis patients or to replace defective arteries leading to the heart. And while we’re at it, human lung stem cells have been used to rebuild airways and blood vessels in mice in only a couple of weeks! Eventually we’ll probably learn how to use them to treat the nervous system and the immune system as effectively as the circulatory system.

Let’s face it. We’re in the barest infancy of understanding to what limits healing may extend with proper use of stem cells. I send positive thoughts to all the researchers out there braving the exploration of this untold treasure of nature.

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BiomedNews

Ask your heart doctor: die quickly & painlessly or linger and be sick?

A patient having his blood pressure taken by a...
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As baby boomers age, heart doctors are having to look at things a little more broadly. Cardiologists need to start thinking like generalists, according to a recent paper published The Journal of Cardiology. Because so many older patients are considered “complex”–they have other conditions and may be taking several other types of medications–cardiologists must use more systematic treatment. They can’t think so narrowly about their specialty–in other words, they need to stop treating the cardiovascular system as if it exists in a relative vacuum.

New treatment options may allow doctors to extend lifespans. But the end results for patients will sometimes mean choices people didn’t used to be able to make. Do I want to live longer but with a much greater chance I’ll be disabled/sickly/fragile for certain of those months/years? In the old days more people died of sudden, painless heart attacks or relatively quickly from other heart diseases.

Instead today we can keep people alive for years with heart conditions. One I know about personally is mitral stenosis–a valve disease that leads to atrial fibrillation at some stage and eventually to heart failure. Today doctors can replace the mitral valve. And with medications to control a-fib, patients can live relatively comfortably. But if they have a stroke–a common complication of a-fib–they could then end up paralyzed or damaged in other ways. Other diseases present even more complex challenges.

It can only be a good thing that cardiologists start thinking more holistically. And that advisory should be given across the board to every medical specialist. There’s no telling how many people suffer for years with missed or incorrect diagnoses because some specialist doesn’t look beyond his/her expertise to find out why that person is having specific symptoms.

Let’s hope this idea passes like lightning through the ranks of medical educators and practitioners.  And maybe we’ll see more doctors with a greater understanding and appreciation for the benefits of Eastern and alternative therapies which already tend to treat the patient as a whole.

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BiomedNews

Exhaled breath tool may hasten Parkinson’s diagnosis

An experimental setup used to measure the frac...
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Levels of exhaled nitric oxide can be used to gauge the severity of asthma and of mitral stenosis (see photo for experimental equipment).  Now doctors may eventually be able to tell by the composition of exhaled gases whether a patient will develop Parkinson’s Disease.

They’re calling it a “breath print” and they say it’s fairly simple to obtain. Samples, with plastic bags rigged to exclude room air from exhaled breath, can take about two minutes to get, and then they are “evaluated by a portable device containing an array of ‘nano-sensors.”

All I could think of when I was reading this report was how we are once again trying to find the secrets of nature–in this case, how a dog can tell its master is sick with certain diseases long before the person knows there’s something wrong. The dog’s nose takes its own “prints” from the smell of our breath, our skin, our body fluids, and instinctively knows things about us.

We’re already teaching dogs to recognize some of the smells we need to know about, like cancer or oncoming diabetic attacks. Now if we could just teach them to know what the smells mean—and then tell us…

Speaking of which, recently read an interesting novel written from the viewpoint of a dog who has an idea of its own “evolution.” It’s called The Art of Racing in the Rain, a quick and engaging read.

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Looking at how bioscience news affects business, higher education, government – and you and me