Tracking the evolution of antibiotic resistance

Feb. 1, 2013 ? With the discovery of antibiotics, medicine acquired power on a scale never before possible to protect health, save lives, and reduce suffering caused by certain bacteria. But the power of antibiotics is now under siege because some virulent infections no longer respond to antibiotic drugs.

This antibiotic resistance is an urgent public health threat that a team of researchers from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and Harvard Medical School and Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., aim to stop. Their approach is based on an automated device they created that yields a new understanding of how antibiotic resistance evolves at the genetic level. The team will present its work at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society (BPS), held Feb. 2-6, 2013, in Philadelphia, Pa.

Called the "morbidostat," the device grows bacteria in various concentrations of antibiotic. This enabled researchers to identify the concentrations at which the antibiotics stopped working and the bacteria became resistant to therapy. Next, they targeted key genes involved in creating the drug-resistant states. Their approach documented real-time changes in genes that gave bacteria an advantage in evolving to "outwit" antibiotics.

Knowledge at the gene level can be applied to the molecular design of the next generation of bacteria-killing antibiotics.

"Morbidostat is designed to evolve bacteria in conditions comparable with clinical settings," explains Erdal Toprak of Sabanci University. "Combined with next generation genome sequencing technologies, it is possible to follow the evolution of resistance in real time and identify resistance-conferring genetic changes that accumulate in the bacterial genome."

Data show an unusual survival profile of the common bacteria they used, Escherichia coli. "We identified striking features in the evolution of resistance to the antibiotic trimethoprim," Toprak says. It was these unusual features that helped them isolate the gene involved in conferring antibiotic resistance through multiple mutations.

The team's next steps will involve determining how this genetic information might one day be applied to drug design to develop new antibiotic therapies.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Biophysical Society, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/health_medicine/genes/~3/aCTG1TV3cl8/130201095949.htm

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Outdoor fast food ads could promote obesity

Jan. 30, 2013 ? Past studies have suggested a relationship between neighborhood characteristics and obesity, as well as a connection between obesity and advertisements on television and in magazines.

Now, new research from UCLA has identified a possible link between outdoor food ads and a tendency to pack on pounds. The findings, researchers say, are not encouraging.

In a study published online in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Public Health, Dr. Lenard Lesser and his colleagues suggest that the more outdoor advertisements promoting fast food and soft drinks there are in a given census tract, the higher the likelihood that the area's residents are overweight.

"Obesity is a significant health problem, so we need to know the factors that contribute to the overeating of processed food," said Lesser, who conducted the research while a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the UCLA Department of Family Medicine and UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health.

"Previous research has found that fast food ads are more prevalent in low-income, minority areas, and laboratory studies have shown that marketing gets people to eat more," said Lesser, now a research physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute in California. "This is one of the first studies to suggest an association between outdoor advertising and obesity."

For the study, the researchers looked at two densely populated areas in Los Angeles and New Orleans, each with more than 2,000 people per square mile. They focused on more than 200 randomly selected census tracts from those two areas, which included a mixture of high- and low-income residents.

The team used data on outdoor food advertising in those areas gleaned from a previous study on ads and alcohol consumption (which had tracked all the outdoor ads). They then linked that information with telephone-survey data from the same study, in which nearly 2,600 people between the ages of 18 and 98 from those areas were asked health-related questions in addition to questions about their height, weight, self-reported body mass index (BMI) and soda consumption.

The researchers found a correlation: The higher the percentage of outdoor ads for food, the higher the odds of obesity in those areas.

"For instance, in a typical census tract with about 5,000 people, if 30 percent of the outdoor ads were devoted to food, we would expect to find an additional 100 to 150 people who are obese, compared with a census tract without any food ads," Lesser said.

Given that the study focused on only two areas, the authors urge further research to determine if the findings would be replicated in other areas. Because the study was cross-sectional, the researchers do not claim that the ads caused the obesity. They also note that self-reported information about weight is subject to recall bias, and people often under-report their true weight.

But this study suggests enough of a link between outdoor food advertising and "a modest, but clinically meaningful, increased likelihood of obesity" to warrant further examination, the researchers conclude.

"If the ... associations are confirmed by additional research, policy approaches may be important to reduce the amount of food advertising in urban areas," the researchers write, while noting that outright bans on such ads might be deemed unconstitutional. "Innovative strategies, such as warning labels, counter-advertising, or a tax on obesogenic advertising should be tested as possible public health interventions for reducing the prevalence of obesity."

Frederick J. Zimmerman of UCLA and Deborah A. Cohen of the RAND Corp. co-authored this study, which was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The original article was written by Enrique Rivero.

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Journal Reference:

1. Lenard I Lesser, Frederick J Zimmerman, Deborah A Cohen. Outdoor advertising, obesity, and soda consumption: a cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health, 2013; 13 (1): 20 DOI: 10.1186/1471-2458-13-20

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/living_well/~3/LMH33gt3od8/130131083803.htm

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Uninsured less likely to get heart meds

New York (Reuters Health) - Uninsured Americans were less likely to get the best treatment for heart troubles than those with insurance in a new study that hints the blame may lie with the quality of physicians who typically treat the uninsured.

In a group of about 61,000 Americans, researchers found that those without any health insurance were between 6 percent and 12 percent less likely than people with either public or private insurance to be prescribed drugs that are considered standard care for heart disease.

"There is some difference of treatment. It only applies - interestingly enough - to uninsured patients," said the study's senior author Dr. Paul Chan, of Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri.

In the past, studies found uninsured Americans have worse health outcomes, compared to the insured. They're also less likely to get screenings and preventive care - possibly because they don't often go to a doctor.

Less is known, though, about uninsured people who do go to doctors and whether they receive worse care than insured people.

For the new study, Chan and his colleagues used data from 2009 on 60,814 heart patients at 30 doctors' offices around the U.S.

Of those patients, about 9 percent were uninsured, 71 percent had private insurance, and 20 percent had public insurance, such as Medicare or Medicaid.

The researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, looked to see which patients received the recommended medications for their heart conditions and whether the treatment they got was linked to their insurance status.

Overall, patients with public or private insurance received about the same number of prescriptions, but the uninsured patients were less likely to be prescribed drugs, compared to the insured patients.

For example, about 73 percent of uninsured patients were prescribed beta-blockers after a heart attack, compared to about 81 percent of privately insured patients. And about 89 percent of uninsured patients received medication for high cholesterol, compared to about 95 percent of privately insured patients.

But those differences seemed to disappear when the researchers took into account where the patients were being treated.

"That seems to suggest that at lot of this is being mediated by the clinics that are seeing lots of uninsured patients. They're underperforming compared to clinics that are seeing insured patients," said Chan.

"It speaks to the idea that the higher the number of uninsured patients in your practice, the more financially unstable it is... and quality goes down," said Dr. Ed Havranek, a cardiologist at the Denver Health Medical Center in Colorado.

Havranek, who wrote a commentary accompanying the new study, told Reuters Health, "If it's just the lack of insurance, it should not affect the physicians' decisions to sit down and prescribe (a drug)." It could be driven by doctors' perceptions of their patients, he said.

Chan added that uninsured people tend to be sicker and their other conditions may take priority over their heart problems.

"Truth be told, when many of these patients come in it's not just cardiovascular disease. It's diabetes, obesity and smoking too," Chan said.

Havranek said the first step to solving the problem is doing what Chan and his colleagues did by shining a light on it, and then finding a practical solution.

"You have to be open to the possibility that you're not doing things accurately or fairly across patient populations," he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/WHGbw0 Journal of the American College of Cardiology, January 2013.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uninsured-less-likely-heart-meds-215347325.html

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Google Updates Its Google+, Google Play Music Android Apps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2013 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Android, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Facebook Drives Most Social B2B Traffic, but Twitter is Top for Conversions: Report

Author:

David Moth

Source:

Despite the huge attention lavished on social media, it still accounts for only a fraction of the traffic and leads for US B2B websites according to a new report from Optify.

Overall, social accounts for 1.9% of traffic compared to 41% for organic search, however there is potential for it to become a more important and effective channel.

This is a topic we touched on recently in a post about how to use social media to widen your sphere of influence in B2B and in an infographic looking at how B2B companies are currently using social...

Source: http://www.emailinstitute.com/social-media/facebook-drives-most-social-b2b-traffic-twitter-top-conversions-report

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RNA Fragments May Yield Rapid, Accurate Cancer Diagnosis

A new method to noninvasively diagnose cancer and monitor its progression could eliminate the need for painful and sometimes life-threatening biopsies

By William Ferguson

Strands of genetic information preserved inside microvesicles, called exosomes, may help scientists diagnose certain forms of cancer and monitor tumor progression. Image: everystockphoto

Fragments of RNA that cells eject in fatty droplets may point the way to a new era of cancer diagnosis, potentially eliminating the need for invasive tests in certain cases.

Cancer tumor cells shed microvesicles containing proteins and RNA fragments, called exosomes, into cerebral spinal fluid, blood, and urine. Within these exosomes is genetic information that can be analyzed to determine the cancer?s molecular composition and state of progression. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells in 2008, however exosomes have not seen widespread clinical testing as a means of cancer diagnosis until now.

?We have never really been able to detect the genetic components of a tumor by blood or spinal fluid,? says Harvard University neurologist Fred Hochberg. ?This is really a new strategy.? He says exosome diagnostic tests could potentially detect and monitor the progression of a wide variety of cancers. He is one of the lead researchers in a multicenter clinical study using new exosomal diagnostic tests developed by New York City-based Exosome Diagnostics to identify a genetic mutation found exclusively in glioma, the most common form of brain cancer.

When treating other forms of cancer, surgeons are able to biopsy tumors to diagnose and monitor the state of the disease. For brain cancers like glioma, however, multiple biopsies can be life threatening. Bob Carter, head of neurosurgery at the University of California, San Diego, says well-preserved RNA in blood and spinal fluid enables researchers to test and monitor for these genetic changes noninvasively.

He says study researchers separate exosomes from bio-fluids with a diagnostic kit and then extract the relevant genomic information. Once the specific cancer mutation is identified, clinicians will periodically draw additional bio-fluids to monitor the mutation levels to determine whether a patient is responding to therapy.??

Whereas Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a useful tool, tumors only show up on imaging scans once they are at least one millimeter in diameter and comprise about 100,000 tumor cells. By that time, it may be too late for an early intervention. On the flip side, MRIs can also yield false positives. Hochberg says individuals who have been treated with conventional radiation therapy often have benign residual tissue from dying tumor cells that have been killed by the treatment but which the body has not yet eliminated. This tissue is often mistaken for tumor growth on a MRI scan. ?You would identify to the patient that the drug is not working when in reality it is doing well,? Hochberg says. ?On the other hand, having an easily accessible biomarker for glioma would give you a clear response.?

There are 18 U.S. hospitals participating in the clinical trial, sponsored by the Accelerated Brain Cancer Cure Foundation. Hochberg says study researchers have recruited 41 of 120 patients so far. Preliminary results will be presented in April at the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles Symposium in Boston.

From a technical standpoint I don?t believe there is a barrier,? Carter says. ?This test can certainly be used now, what we are trying to finalize is the sensitivity and specificity of the test.?

Exosomes may be a reliable method of screening for prostate cancer as well. A PSA test is currently the most common, noninvasive means to screen for prostate cancer in the U.S. PSA testing measures for elevated levels of prostate-specific antigen, a protein produced by the prostate gland that is used to liquefy semen in men. The higher a man?s PSA level, the more likely it is that he has prostate cancer, says James McKiernan, director of urologic oncology at Columbia University Medical Center. There are additional reasons, however, for high PSA levels-and some men with prostate cancer do not always have elevated PSA, he added. In addition, for many cases of prostate cancer, new research published in May 2012 in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that treatment does not actually extend the life of the patient.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=5629bb349b0d4beb3ae23339ccf900c9

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Deadly tornadoes batter central, southeast U.S.

In this image made from video and released by WSB TV in Atlanta, a tornado moves through the town of Adairsville, Ga. on Wednesday, Jan 30, 2013. A fire chief says a storm that roared across northwest Georgia has left overturned vehicles on Interstate 75 northwest of Atlanta, and crews are responding to reports of people trapped in storm-damaged residential and commercial buildings. (AP Photo/WSB TV) MANDATORY CREDIT

In this image made from video and released by WSB TV in Atlanta, a tornado moves through the town of Adairsville, Ga. on Wednesday, Jan 30, 2013. A fire chief says a storm that roared across northwest Georgia has left overturned vehicles on Interstate 75 northwest of Atlanta, and crews are responding to reports of people trapped in storm-damaged residential and commercial buildings. (AP Photo/WSB TV) MANDATORY CREDIT

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/photos/deadly-storms-batter-south-slideshow/

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