The operation to remove the gland went well, but when it was later analyzed it turned out to have never contained cancerous cells, said spokesman Alfredo Scoccimaro.

“The original diagnosis has been modified,” he told a news conference. “The presence [...]]]> The government announced just after Christmas that the recently re-elected leader had thyroid cancer.

The operation to remove the gland went well, but when it was later analyzed it turned out to have never contained cancerous cells, said spokesman Alfredo Scoccimaro.

“The original diagnosis has been modified,” he told a news conference. “The presence of cancer cells was discarded.”

Fernandez was originally diagnosed with papillary carcinoma.

Buenos Aires-based thyroid cancer expert Eduardo Faure, who is not on the president’s medical team, said a small number of such cases turn out to be “false positives,” meaning that no cancer is present.

“The cells may originally appear to be cancer but in 2 percent of cases, after the operation, when a more thorough examination can be performed, it turns out they are not,” the doctor said in an interview.

“This result was always within the realm of possibility. It does not mean that the original diagnosis was mistaken.”

Several hundred Fernandez supporters had camped out near the hospital where she was treated, carrying banners that said “Strength Cristina.” A cheer went up from the crowd when Scoccimaro made the announcement.

The president, who won re-election with 54 percent of the vote in October, is popular among Argentines who agree with her generous welfare spending. Business leaders and farmers in the country’s key grains sector however say her state-centric interventions in the economy scare away investment.

Vice President Amado Boudou, the former economy minister and a loyal Fernandez ally, assumed the presidency this week during Fernandez’s scheduled 20-day leave of absence.

A skilled orator fond of glamorous clothes, high heels and make-up, Fernandez still wears black as she mourns her husband and closest adviser, former President Nestor Kirchner, who died in 2010.

Many thought his death spelled the end of the couple’s idiosyncratic blend of state intervention, nationalist rhetoric and the championing of human rights in grains exporting powerhouse Argentina, a major world supplier of soy and corn. source: www.reuters.com

Swiss researchers who [...]]]> When an elderly person’s chronic disease is impossible to cure, many doctors might assume that patient would chose to improve the quality of his or her remaining life rather than to extend it as is. Those doctors would be mistaken most of the time, according to a new study.

Swiss researchers who surveyed more than 500 elderly heart failure patients found three quarters wouldn’t trade a longer life with symptoms for a shorter life without them, and the severity of symptoms was not a good predictor of who would pick a measure of relief over more time.

“I was quite surprised by the results,” said lead author Dr. Hans-Peter Brunner-La Rocca, of University Hospital Basel in Switzerland.

“Often we think we know what is best for a patient, but this is often wrong,” he told Reuters Health in an email.

“When patients get to an age where the chance of dying in the near future becomes more evident, pure survival may be more important,” said Brunner-La Rocca, who is also affiliated with the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

Heart failure is a chronic and incurable condition, in which the heart is too weak to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. It affects around six million people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Symptoms include shortness of breath, fatigue, weakness and swelling in the legs and feet, reducing a person’s ability to walk or exercise. Heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes can weaken the heart muscle over time, which can lead to heart failure.

The researchers surveyed 555 heart failure patients, most in their seventies and eighties, asking a series of questions about end-of-life preferences. Then they repeated the survey after 12 months, and again after another six months.

At the start of the study, 74 percent of the respondents said they would not choose to live one more year in excellent health over living two more years in their current state. After a year had elapsed, 80 percent were unwilling to trade more time for symptom relief.

At 18 months, few had changed their minds. When asked about whether they wanted CPR in a crisis, about a third said they didn’t want to be resuscitated.

Even among people with “do not resuscitate” orders in their medical files, about a third said they in fact did want CPR. Dr. Eugene Storozynsky, who studies cardiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, noted that the study participants represented a broad range of people with heart failure — from those with a just a few symptoms to those with many more severe problems.

Those with milder disease might not consider it bad enough to trade-off their remaining time.

“For these patients, it seems oral medications are still adequate enough to relieve their symptoms so they don’t need to be frequently hospitalized,” said Storozynsky, who was not part of the study.

Patients with end-stage heart failure require multiple hospitalizations in a short period of time due to their symptoms, he pointed out.

“Life expectancy may be six months or less without advanced therapies,” he told Reuters Health.

“Patients in this study were less bothered by their symptoms, so I would define them as less sick than those with end-stage heart failure.”

Participants in the study who were willing to trade more time for symptom relief were older, often female and had more heart failure symptoms, suggesting people may change how they manage their disease over time.

“We couldn’t find particular patterns to predict what individuals would want,” Brunner-La Rocca told Reuters Health.

“So it’s crucial to individually discuss these issues with the patient.” Storozynsky also thinks doctors should be upfront with patients.

“We should discuss all stages of heart failure to make them aware that at its end stage, their life will likely shorten,” he said.

“Not to scare them, but inform them and tailor our treatment to their wishes.” SOURCE: www.reuters.com/news/health

Analyzing data on more than 10,000 patients, University of Kansas researchers found that 70 percent were [...]]]> In people with low blood levels of vitamin D, boosting them with supplements more than halved a person’s risk of dying from any cause compared to someone who remained deficient, in a large new study.

Analyzing data on more than 10,000 patients, University of Kansas researchers found that 70 percent were deficient in vitamin D and they were at significantly higher risk for a variety of heart diseases.

D-deficiency also nearly doubled a person’s likelihood of dying, whereas correcting the deficiency with supplements lowered their risk of death by 60 percent.

“We expected to see that there was a relationship between heart disease and vitamin D deficiency; we were surprised at how strong it was,” Dr. James L. Vacek, a professor of cardiology at the University of Kansas Hospital and Medical Center, told Reuters Health.

“It was so much more profound than we expected.”

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a range of illnesses, but few studies have demonstrated the reverse — that supplements could prevent those outcomes.

Vacek and his team reviewed data from 10,899 adults whose vitamin D serum levels had been tested at the University of Kansas Hospital, and found that more than 70 percent of the patients were below 30 nanograms per milliliter, the level many experts consider sufficient for good health.

After taking into account the patients’ medical history, medications and other factors, the cardiologists found that people with deficient levels of vitamin D were more than twice as likely to have diabetes, 40 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and about 30 percent more likely to suffer from cardiomyopathy — a diseased heart muscle — as people without D deficiency.

Overall, those who were deficient in D had a three-fold higher likelihood of dying from any cause than those who weren’t deficient, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Cardiology. Moreover, when the team looked at people who took vitamin D supplements, their risk of death from any cause was about 60 percent lower than the rest of the patients, although the effect was strongest among those who were vitamin D deficient at the time they were tested.

The study does not prove that vitamin D is the cause of the effects seen — other factors, like disease, could be responsible both for the differences in health and the differences in vitamin D levels, for instance.

Previous research has indicated that many Americans don’t have sufficient levels of vitamin D, however. The latest National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimated that 25 percent to 57 percent of adults have insufficient levels of D, and other studies have suggested the number is as high as 70 percent.

Vacek said he believes so many people are deficient because we should get about 90 percent of our Vitamin D from the sun and only about 10 percent from our food. The human body makes vitamin D in response to skin exposure to sunlight.

Certain foods, like oily fish, eggs and enriched milk products are also good sources of D. A sufficient amount of Vitamin D absorption from the sun would require at least 20 minutes of full-body exposure each day in warmer seasons, and most people aren’t outside enough, Vacek said.

In the northern United States and throughout Canada, experts say the sun isn’t strong enough during the winter months to make sufficient vitamin D, even if the weather was warm enough to expose the skin for a long time.

It means that adults should consider getting their Vitamin D levels checked through a simple blood test, Vacek said, and take vitamin D supplements. Generally, Vacek recommends that adults take between 1,000 to 2,000 international units (IU) of Vitamin D each day.

“If you’re not deficient, Vitamin D is not a magic pill that will make you live longer,” Vacek said.

“Its benefit is in people who are deficient. If you’re low, it makes sense to be put on replacement therapy and have a follow-up a couple months later to make sure your levels come up.” SOURCE: www.reuters.com/news/health

Once again, eating a diet based on fish, legumes, vegetables and moderate amounts of alcohol is linked to lower chances of dying from a heart attack, stroke or other vascular “events,” according to a new study of New York City residents.

The mostly Hispanic and black study participants [...]]]>

Once again, eating a diet based on fish, legumes, vegetables and moderate amounts of alcohol is linked to lower chances of dying from a heart attack, stroke or other vascular “events,” according to a new study of New York City residents.

The mostly Hispanic and black study participants did not necessarily eat traditional foods from Mediterranean countries, but the closer their diets were to the spirit of Mediterranean eating — with plenty of fish, healthy fats like olive oil, whole grains and vegetables — the lower their risk of death from vascular problems including heart attacks.

“While it’s not the Mediterranean diet, it is comparing a healthier diet to a less healthy diet, and there was some improvement,” said Teresa Fung, a professor at Simmons College in Boston who was not involved in the study.

For nine years, Dr. Clinton Wright at the University of Miami and his colleagues followed more than 2,500 residents of northern Manhattan, a neighborhood with about 63 percent Hispanic residents, 20 percent African Americans and 15 percent whites. Information about the health benefits of a so-called Mediterranean diet in the black and Hispanic populations in the U.S. is lacking, Wright’s group notes in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Because both groups are burdened by high rates of heart disease, the team set out to study how much of a difference diet might make.

A little more than half of the study participants were Hispanic, while the other half was split roughly between non-Hispanic blacks and whites. All were over 40 years old when the study began.

At the outset, researchers asked participants about their health history, and ranked their eating habits along a nine-point scale: the higher the number, the closer the person’s diet was to the Mediterranean ideal, with lots of fish, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and vegetable oils and very little meat or animal fats.

The group then tracked how many people later experienced a stroke, heart attack or death related to a vascular problem like pulmonary embolism and aneurysm. More than 300 people in the study died from a vascular issue.

Each point higher that a person scored on the nine-point Mediterranean diet scale reduced the risk of vascular death by nine percent.

The study did not find that the diet had any effect on the risk of having a stroke, however. Among the 171 people who suffered a stroke, those at the high end of the diet scale were just as likely to have had one as those at the low end of the scale.

The researchers did detect slight protection from heart attack among those whose diets ranked in the top-four on the Mediterranean scale, but the finding could have been due to chance.

The results back up previous research that also reported benefits to heart health from eating a Mediterranean diet (see Reuters Health stories from March 7, 2011 and January 27, 2010).

The current study does not prove that diet is responsible for the benefits the researchers saw. But the Mediterranean diet is rich in elements like fiber and omega-three fatty acids, which could influence heart health, Wright said.

The evidence isn’t conclusive, he added, but overall, the Mediterranean diet appears to be good for people’s heart health.

“There’s very little evidence to suggest that it’s harmful compared to some other diets that we consider harmful, such as diets rich in red meat,” Wright said.

“So it seems like there isn’t much harm in it and there’s increasing evidence that it’s beneficial.”SOURCE: www.reuters.com/article/

A protein that helps transport cholesterol inside cells may be a key to developing drugs to treat Ebola, a rare but lethal virus for which there are no known treatments, U.S. researchers said.

Laboratory mice bred to produce low levels of this protein — known Niemann-Pick C1 — survived exposure to both Ebola, which causes a [...]]]>

A protein that helps transport cholesterol inside cells may be a key to developing drugs to treat Ebola, a rare but lethal virus for which there are no known treatments, U.S. researchers said.

Laboratory mice bred to produce low levels of this protein — known Niemann-Pick C1 — survived exposure to both Ebola, which causes a hemorrhagic fever, and its cousin, Marburg virus.

“This research identifies a critical cellular protein that the Ebola virus needs to cause infection and disease,” said Sean Whelan of Harvard Medical School, who worked on one of two studies published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The discovery also improves chances that drugs can be developed that directly combat Ebola infections,” Whelan said in a statement.

Ebola is one of the most deadly infections known, killing 90 percent of people infected by it.

It first emerged in 1976 in villages along the Ebola River in the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is usually fatal in humans and in other primates such as monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees.

So far, there have been about two dozen Ebola outbreaks in Africa.

No one knows how the virus is spread, and there are no available vaccines or anti-viral drugs that fight the infections.

But the new research suggests the virus has a weakness in the form of a well-known protein called Niemann-Pick.

People who have two abnormal copies of this protein develop Niemann-Pick disease, in which cells of the spleen, liver and brain become clogged up with cholesterol.

KEY PATHWAY

But this same protein also appears to be the key pathway Ebola uses to get deep inside cells.

“What we showed is this virus needs this protein,” Kartik Chandran, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said in a telephone interview.

“Mice that have less of this protein are very resistant to being killed by Ebola and the Marburg virus,” said Chandran, who worked with researchers at Harvard, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Chandran’s work focused on the mechanism used by Ebola to gain access to cells.

But a compound he helped discover in 2005 as a young researcher working in the lab of James Cunningham at Harvard has shown promise in blocking the Niemann-Pick protein in human cells, according to a separate paper led by Cunningham and co-authored by Chandran.

“Essentially, they were able to show this compound can block infection by the virus,” Chandran said of Cunningham’s team.

The compound has not yet been tested in mice, and would still need to show it is effective in non-human primates.

Chandran said blocking this critical compound long term would likely cause illness.

People with Niemann-Pick disease have two abnormal copies of the gene that make this protein, but the mice used in Chandran’s lab only had one working copy of this gene, suggesting that simply reducing the amount of the Niemann-Pick protein may help protect people from the virus.

Besides, Chandran said, most outbreaks are short-lived, so treatment would be needed for only a short time.

The researchers are optimistic that this new understanding of how Ebola gets into cells may eventually lead to treatments. But he acknowledges it will take many years, and possibly even a decade, before treatments would be available for human use.source: www.reuters.com/article/

Jobs said on Wednesday that he could no longer be chief executive of the company he co-founded. He had gone on medical leave in January for an [...]]]> Patients with the rare form of cancer suffered by Apple Inc’s Steve Jobs face a tougher battle if the disease recurs, because of the methods used in fighting it.

Jobs said on Wednesday that he could no longer be chief executive of the company he co-founded. He had gone on medical leave in January for an undisclosed condition after years of fighting a rare type of pancreatic cancer and other health issues.

He gave no new details on his health in his latest announcement.

The type of pancreatic cancer is caused by an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.

Jobs was reported to have undergone a liver transplant in 2009 to fight off the spread of the neuroendocrine tumor. The procedure is experimental and is fraught with complications.

Jobs has never publicly stated the reason for his liver transplant.

Dr. Simon Lo, director of pancreatic and biliary diseases at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said the most likely serious complication after Jobs’ liver transplant would have been further spread of the cancer, which could have forced Jobs to leave his position permanently. Lo has not treated Jobs.

As many as 80 percent of patients who get liver transplants to treat this type of cancer live for at least five years, according to the University of California San Francisco.

Lo said a recent study showed about three-quarters of patients who got a liver transplant because of cancer saw their cancer return within two to five years. The cancer can return to the liver or spread to other organs in the body.

The immunosuppressant drugs necessary for a liver transplant also make it harder for the body to fight the return of the disease.

Jobs may be “confronting both the liver transplant related specific problems, as well as the cancer itself,” Lo said. “Whenever you put patients on immunosuppressant medications, there’s always a risk that it could take away natural resistance, so the cancer could grow faster.”

Although this cancer is broadly lumped in with pancreatic cancer, neuroendocrine tumors have a different nature from most pancreatic tumors, which are highly lethal and which kill 95 percent of patients within five years.

Neuroendocrine tumors are more easily treated and less aggressive. According to the National Cancer Institute, there are only 200 to 1,000 new cases a year.

Jobs had a neuroendocrine tumor removed in 2004 and said afterward all the cancer was gone, and that he did not require chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

But he remained noticeably thin, even gaunt, and took time off in 2009 to deal with what he initially termed a hormone imbalance, again giving few details.

Islet-cell tumors can cause over-secretion of hormones, including insulin, into the bloodstream, wreaking havoc on digestion and leading to drastic weight loss. They are usually easily removed surgically, but recur in roughly half of patients, doctors say, possibly spreading to other organs. source: www.reuters.com/article/

They found that children who were exposed to animals at a young age had lower rates of nasal [...]]]> Good news for families that would love to have a furry dog or cat but hesitate for fear the kids might become allergic: Fido or Kitty might actually be good for children’s health, scientists say.

They found that children who were exposed to animals at a young age had lower rates of nasal allergies as adolescents.

“Family pets, in particular dogs…need not be removed to prevent allergies, and in fact may protect against them,” Melanie Matheson of the University of Melbourne, lead author of the study, told Reuters Health in an email.

Looking at survey responses from nearly 8,500 adults from Europe and Australia, Matheson and colleagues focused on those who grew up around house pets or farm animals, and those who had the troublesome runny noses, itchy eyes, and sore throats that plague nasal allergy sufferers.

Growing up with pets has already been linked to a lower risk of other types of allergies. A 2010 study from the University of Cincinnati showed than owning a dog may decrease the risk of childhood eczema, a skin condition (see Reuters Health story of October 13, 2010). Similarly, a 2011 study from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that growing up with pets cut kids’ risk of developing pet allergies by half.

In the new study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, more than one in four respondents said they had nasal allergies. In most cases, people said their allergies started when they were adolescents.

A number of factors were linked to a higher risk of nasal allergies in the study. Some, like a family history of allergies and the mother smoking while pregnant, are well documented risk factors.

But the research team also found that small children who had lots of exposure to other little kids – because they had young siblings, for instance, or attended day care – had lower risks of nasal allergy. And the more siblings a child had, the lower the odds that the child would have nasal allergies later in life.

The scientists saw a similar pattern among people who grew up on a farm or had pets before age five. Compared to rates in people who didn’t have those experiences in early childhood, the odds of having nasal allergies in adolescence were 30 percent lower in people who grew up on a farm, while having a dog and cat were each associated with a 15 percent reduction.

Furthermore, people who’d had siblings and animal exposure had lower rates of nasal allergies compared to those who’d had only one or the other experience.

These results were consistent in the 13 countries surveyed, “despite the differences in pet ownership and farming between countries,” Matheson told Reuters Health in an email.

Since nasal allergies can put people at risk for asthma and other allergic diseases, the authors wrote, exposure to pets could potentially reduce the child’s risk of developing asthma in the future.

The study design cannot prove that exposure to pets or other children are the cause of the lower risk of nasal allergies. Although the authors accounted for several factors, including education and family history of allergies, there may be another cause of the reduced nasal allergy risk that is associated with pets and siblings.

Also, the researchers only had information on exposure to animals before age five, so they don’t know whether being around animals at an older age would have any effect on allergy risk.

While the results of the study are promising, it would be premature to suggest that parents buy pets or have more children, said Dr. Jonathan Bernstein, professor of medicine of University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and a co-author of an earlier report on the same topic.

Still, the results provide further evidence that avoiding exposures may not be the best way to protect children against allergies, Bernstein said. source: reuters.com/article/helath

“They can have almost a normal life expectancy, and live approximately two thirds as long as if they had not had HIV,” said Edward [...]]]> Ugandan HIV and AIDS patients receiving antiretroviral “cocktail” therapy can expect to live nearly as long as their compatriots who don’t have HIV, a new study finds.

“They can have almost a normal life expectancy, and live approximately two thirds as long as if they had not had HIV,” said Edward Mills, a professor of global health at the University of Ottawa in Canada and lead author of the study. “This is very good news.”

In the United States and other developed countries, combinations of antiretroviral therapies are known to increase the life spans of people with HIV to near-normal lengths, but how far these drugs can go in settings where patients don’t have excellent health care was unclear.

Mills and his colleagues looked at the health records of more than 20,000 people who received medications from The AIDS Support Organization in Uganda.

The total cost of an individual’s AIDS treatment in Uganda averages about $1,000 a year. Much of the funding for the drugs, which became available to these patients in 2004, has come from the United States.

About 1,500 of the patients died between 2000 and 2009.

From the data, the researchers predicted that patients in their 20s and 30s who are on the drugs would be expected to live an additional 27 years.

The normal life expectancy in Uganda is 55.

“One of the reasons this study is important is it looks at the most simple therapy available,” Mills said, referring to the lack of laboratory testing and treatments for other diseases that are available to HIV patients in the U.S. “Given that, we still demonstrate excellent outcomes.”

“We were heartened” by the results, said Dr. Deborah Cotton, deputy editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, where the study was published.

“Even in a country like Uganda that has fewer options for drugs and people start later than is ideal, there’s a significant benefit of treatment,” said Cotton, who was not involved in the research.

The results do reveal some weaknesses in the HIV initiatives.

Children do not achieve life spans as long as adults do, and men do not fare as well as women.

Mills said children with HIV don’t live as long as adults because many of them were born with the disease and did not get early treatment.

A teenager starting therapy, for instance, can expect to live an additional 26 years, falling short of the average life span in the country. source: reuters.com/article/health

But an outside researcher said that the chance of going to a special school was [...]]]> Babies who get low scores on a test of heart, lung and brain function given just a few minutes after birth may be more likely to need special education as teenagers, suggests a new study from Sweden.

But an outside researcher said that the chance of going to a special school was still low enough that parents shouldn’t be concerned so long as their kids with a low so-called “Apgar score” do fine early in life.

Apgar scores are measured one minute after birth and again five minutes after birth. They’re rated on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 meaning a baby is very pink and breathing well, has a fast enough heart rate and has good reflexes and muscle tone.

“It’s simply a measure of how well the baby has transitioned from intrauterine life,” said Dr. Nigel Paneth, a pediatrician at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

While a low Apgar score might mean that something went wrong during delivery — for example, the baby was deprived of oxygen at some point — “Apgar score to some extent reflects the underlying condition of the baby and the baby’s brain,” added Paneth, who was not involved in the new study.

A couple of things are known for sure about babies with very low Apgar scores, he said: they have a higher risk of dying soon after birth, and they also are more likely to have cerebral palsy, a group of brain disorders that originate during development.

Other than that, Paneth added, only weak connections have been found between Apgar scores and how well a kid does later on.

In the current study, researchers led by Dr. Andrea Stuart of Central Hospital in Helsingborg used large Swedish databases to link Apgar scores with kids’ grades in school and their chances of being in a special-education school.

The researchers had data on close to 900,000 babies born between 1973 and 1986.

Most of those kids had a normal Apgar score of 9 or 10 at the five-minute test. Only about 1 percent had a score below 7 and one-third of those were below 4, indicating serious immediate problems.

In total, about 23,000 of the kids were going to a special-education school at age 16.

Kids with an Apgar score below 7 were about twice as likely to go on to special schools as kids with high Apgar scores. Kids who had scores as low as 2 or 3 were about three times more likely to need special education.

Still, the authors point out in Obstetrics & Gynecology, only 1 in 44 babies with a score below 7 will go on to need special education because of whatever caused that low score at birth.

That shows that the Apgar score really doesn’t help predict which kids will end up needing more help in school, Paneth said.

“The vast majority of these kids with Apgars of 7 or less are going to normal schools and they’re getting good grades,” he said — though on average, these kids did slightly worse in normal schools than kids who had scores of 9 or 10.

The findings also can’t prove that low Apgar scores — or whatever made babies have trouble early on — caused more of them to need extra help in school as teens. But “the reasons leading to a low Apgar score…might have an impact on future brain function,” Stuart told Reuters Health in an email.

She added that kids with low scores shouldn’t be singled out.

“Children born with a low Apgar score should not be seen as a separate group, but each child should be treated individually, both medically and academically, based on its medical needs and academic capacity.”source: reuters.com/article/health