Widely prescribed antibiotic Amoxicillin useless harmful.

Commonly prescribed antibiotic - amoxicillin - is ineffective for treating coughs and other chest infections, and can be harmful if overused, experts claim.

The overuse of the antibiotic can lead to side effects such as diarrhoea, rash, vomiting and the development of resistance, researchers warned.

"Patients given amoxicillin don't recover much quicker or have significantly fewer symptoms," said researcher Paul Little from the University of Southampton.

Indeed, using amoxicillin to treat respiratory infections in patients not suspected of having pneumonia is not likely to help and could be harmful," Little said in a statement.

LRTI (chest infections) are one of the most common acute illnesses treated in primary care in developed countries.

In the study, 2,061 adults with acute uncomplicated LRTI from primary care practices in 12 European countries - including England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain and Poland - were randomly assigned to receive either amoxicillin or a placebo three times a day for seven days.

Little difference in severity or duration of symptoms was reported between the two groups. This was true even for older patients aged 60 or more who were generally healthy, in whom antibiotics appeared to have a very limited effect.

Although significantly more patients in the placebo group experienced new or worsening symptoms (19.3 per cent vs 15.9 per cent), the number needed to treat was high (30), and just two patients in the placebo group and one in the antibiotic group required hospitalisation.

Patients taking antibiotics reported significantly more side effects including nausea, rash, and diarrhea, than those given placebo.

"Our results show that most people get better on their own. But, given that a small number of patients will benefit from antibiotics the challenge remains to identify these individuals." Little said.

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Antibiotics simply can't cure colds

Widely prescribed antibiotic useless, harmful

Widely prescribed antibiotic useless, harmful

Above info was published in lancet.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099%2812%2970300-6/abstract#

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Diabetes Drug Improves Glucose Control Without Increasing Risk of Hypoglycemia

Diabetes Drug Improves Glucose Control Without Increasing Risk of Hypoglycemia

Too high? Too low? Only about half of those with type 2 diabetes have their blood sugar levels on target, but a new drug shows promise in managing glucose levels.  TAK-875 works by boosting the release of insulin from pancreatic B cells, but only when diabetics need it most – such as when glucose and fatty acids rise in the blood after a meal.

TAK-875, a new treatment for type 2 diabetes, improves blood sugar control and is equally effective as glimepiride, but has a significantly lower risk of creating a dangerous drop in blood sugar, called hypoglycemia, according to a new study.

Takeda Pharmaceutical has reported the positive results from its Phase 2 trial of TAK-875 in patients with type 2 diabetes.

TAK-875 is a selective agonist of GPR40, one of the GPCRs that are expressed in pancreatic islet cells.

The Phase 2 trial is a randomized double-blind placebo- and active (glimepiride) comparator-controlled multicenter study, intended to evaluate once-daily treatment with five different doses of TAK-875 (6.25 mg, 25 mg, 50 mg, 100 mg, and 200 mg) and glimepiride (2 mg -4 mg), over 12 weeks.

The study showed that at doses ranging from 6.25 to 200 mg a day, the drug has met its primary endpoint of significantly lowering HbA1c (blood glucose) levels.

The primary objective of the study is the change from baseline in HbA1c levels at week 12, while the secondary endpoints included fasting blood glucose, area under the curve (AUC) for glucose and insulin during an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT), and body weight.

Takeda Development therapeutic area head Thomas Strack said because of its observed ability to potently stimulate insulin secretion and improve glycemic control with less or no hypoglycemia, these data further support TAK-875 as a potential therapy for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

TAK-875 is the first GPR40 agonist to reach late-stage Phase 3 clinical development, the company said.
The results of the phase 2 randomized trial were published in The Lancet.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61879-5

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Stem cell-generated human eggs may help treat infertililty

Stem cells put women on fertile ground

    Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital say they have extracted stem cells from human ovaries and made them generate egg cells. The advance, if confirmed, might provide a new source of eggs for treating infertility, though scientists say it is far too early to tell if the work holds such promise.

    Women are born with a complement of egg cells that must last throughout life. The ability to isolate stem cells from which eggs could be cultivated would help not only with fertility but also with biologists’ understanding of how drugs and nutrition affect the egg cells.

    The new research, by a team led by the biologist Jonathan L Tilly, depends on a special protein found to mark the surface of reproductive cells like eggs and sperm. Using a cell-sorting machine that can separate out the marked cells, the team obtained reproductive cells from mouse ovaries and showed that the cells would generate viable egg cells that could be fertilized and produce embryos.

    They then applied the same method to human ovaries donated by women at the Saitama Medical Center in Japan who were undergoing sex reassignment because of a gender identity disorder. As with the mice, the team was able to retrieve reproductive cells that produced immature egg cells when grown in the laboratory. The egg cells, when injected into mice, generated follicles, the ovarian structure in which eggs are formed, as well as mature eggs, some of which had a single set of chromosomes, a signature of eggs and sperm.

    The results were published online Sunday by the journal Nature Medicine.  Tilly and colleagues wrote that their work opens up “a new field in human reproductive biology that was inconceivable less than 10 years ago”, and that access to the new cells will make possible novel forms of fertility preservation.

    David Albertini, an expert on female reproduction at the Kansas University Medical Center, called the report “a real technological tour de force”, but added that it was not yet clear whether the procedure yielded real egg cells that could be used in human fertility. “None of the criteria that we in the field use to establish that a cell is a high-quality oocyte are satisfied here,” he said, using the scientific term for an unfertilized egg. Tilly has long disputed the accepted belief that a woman makes no new egg cells after she is born.

Full article available at: Nature Medicine, 2012)
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.2669

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Tissue Damaged By Heart Attack Could Be Repaired By Injectable Gel

Tissue Damaged By Heart Attack Could Be Repaired By Injectable Gel

The hydrogel is made from cardiac connective tissue that is stripped of heart muscle cells through a cleansing process, freeze-dried and milled into powder form, and then liquefied into a fluid that can be easily injected into the heart. Once it hits body temperature, the liquid turns into a semi-solid, porous gel that encourages cells to repopulate areas of damaged cardiac tissue and to preserve heart function, according to Christman. The hydrogel forms a scaffold to repair the tissue and possibly provides biochemical signals that prevent further deterioration in the surrounding tissues.

"It helps to promote a positive remodeling-type response, not a pro-inflammatory one in the damaged heart," Christman said.

The study by Karen Christman and colleagues published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

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http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/8/751

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Blood test that tells you how long you'll live

The controversial test measures vital structures on the tips of a person's chromosomes, called telomeres, which scientists believe are one of the most important and accurate indicators of the speed at which a person is ageing.

Scientists behind the €500 (£435) test said it will be possible to tell whether a person's "biological age", as measured by the length of their telomeres, is older or younger than their actual chronological age.

Medical researchers believe that telomere testing will become widespread within the next five or 10 years, but there are already some scientists who question its value and whether there should be stronger ethical controls over its wider use. In addition to concerns about how people will react to a test for how "old" they really are, some scientists are worried that telomere testing may be hijacked by unscrupulous organisations trying to peddle unproven anti-ageing remedies and other fake elixirs of life.

The results of the tests might also be of interest to companies offering life-insurance policies or medical cover that depend on a person's lifetime risk of falling seriously ill or dying prematurely. However, there is a growing body of scientific opinion that says testing the length of a person's telomeres could provide vital insights into the risk of dying prematurely from a range of age-related disorders, from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer's and cancer. "We know that people who are born with shorter telomeres than normal also have a shorter lifespan. We know that shorter telomeres can cause a shorter lifespan," said Maria Blasco of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, who is the inventor of the new commercial telomere test. "But we don't know whether longer telomeres are going to give you a longer lifespan. That's not really known in humans," she added.

Telomeres: a short history
* 2003 Scientists studying 20-year-old blood samples from 143 people show that telomere length is good indicator of whether someone is likely to live for 15 years or more once they reach 60.

* 2004 Women living with stress of having a sick child are found to have shorter telomeres. Other research suggests that meditation or other forms of stress reduction may lengthen telomeres.

* 2007 Study of men in Scotland shows those with the longest telomeres were half as likely to develop heart disease than those with shorter telomeres. Telomere length was as good as cholesterol levels at predicting the risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

* 2009 Short telomeres linked with inherited bone marrow disease.

* 2010 GM mice with no telomerase, an enzyme that elongates telomeres in some cells, age prematurely compared to normal mice. The ageing effects were reversed after injections of telomerase.

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Drop Of Blood is enough to Test For Cancer

Drop Of Blood is enough to Test For Cancer

A drop of blood or speck of tissue may be enough to diagnose cancers and assess their response to treatment, research suggests. New technology that allows cancer proteins to be analysed in tiny samples could end of surgical biopsies, which involve removing lumps of tissue, often under general anaesthetic. This study focused on blood cancers.

Full article is published in Nature Medicine (12 April 2009) | doi:10.1038/nm.1903;

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