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China plans to train 300,000 general practitioners

China will train up to 300,000 general practitioners within 10 years to satisfy the needs of primary-level medical and health care institutions, Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.
The plan, announced by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), will also encourage doctors to serve at primary-level hospitals or clinics.
General practitioners provide primary care, treating acute and chronic illnesses in community-level medical institutions. They also provide preventive care for local residents.
To implement the plan, the country will push forward reforms in the medical education system and adjust student enrollment numbers as well as majors, Xinhua said.
To encourage college graduates to work in primary-level clinics, authorities will offer tuition fee remission, student loans and an early promotion.
Students who agree to work as general practitioners in county and village-level clinics in rural areas of west and central China after graduation can get their medical training free.
In this year\’s government work report, Premier Wen Jiabao promised to accelerate reform in health care and support development of village clinics and rural doctors.
Training general practitioners for primary-level hospitals is also an important part of China\’s public hospital reform. A medical student will have to complete his residency before becoming a general practitioner in the future, according to the reform plan released on February.

Chocolate may be good for heart, blood pressure


Chocolates are pictured during the opening of the Nestle Chocolate Centre of Excellence in Broc near Fribourg September 7, 2009. The Chocolate Centre of Excellence is dedicated to the research and development of chocolate products.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
German researchers recently found having a moderate amount of chocolate may be good for blood-pressure control and therefore better protect the heart, according to a report published on European Heart Journal.
Researchers in German Institute of Human Nutrition conducted a study on more than 19,300 people.
Over a decade\’s study, they discovered that those who ate the most amount of chocolate, that is, an average of 7.5 grams a day, had lower blood pressure and a 39 percent lower risk of having a heart attack or stroke compared to those who had an average of 1.7 grams a day, the least among the subjects.
\”Small amounts of chocolate may help to prevent heart disease, but only if it replaces other energy-dense food, such as snacks, in order to keep body weight stable,\” said Brian Buijsse, leader of the study.
But Buijsse warned those who may use the finding to indulge themselves with the sweets.
The researchers contribute the reason why chocolate seems to be good for people\’s blood pressure and heart health to flavanols in cocoa. Since dark chocolate has more cocoa, it is believed to have a greater effect.

New breast study to tailor drugs to patients

Researchers launched a clinical study Wednesday to test five experimental breast cancer drugs in a collaboration between the U.S. government and three major drug companies, Reuters reported Friday.
The study called I-SPY2, will aim to use DNA from the tumors of individual patients to match the most effective drug to each patient and to find the most promising treatments.
Five new experimental anti-cancer drugs will be tested as part of the study, which is expected to cost 26 million dollars over five years.The trial will match patients to one of five experimental:ABT-888, AMG 655, AMG 386, CP-751,871 and HKI-272.
\”I-SPY 2 promises to leverage convergence of progress on a number of research fronts to speed the evaluation of promising new breast cancer drugs using molecular cancer biomarkers to identify those agents that are effective in specific subpopulations of breast cancer patients,\” said Anna Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute
\”I-SPY 2 will provide a path to personalized medicine,\” said Dr. Laura Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon at the University of California San Francisco who will help lead the clinical trials. \”We intend that every drug will graduate with a companion marker.\”
If the study is a success, it is hoped it might cut both the costs and time to develop new drugs for the public. More importantly, the most promising treatments can then be matched with patients.

China catches up with West in diabetes, too

After working overtime to catch up to life in the West, China now faces a whole new problem: the world\’s biggest diabetes epidemic.
One in 10 Chinese adults already have the disease and another 16 percent are on the verge of developing it, according to a new study. The finding nearly equals the US rate of 11 percent and surpasses other Western nations, including Germany and Canada.
The survey results, published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found much higher rates of diabetes than previous studies, largely because of more rigorous testing measures. With 92 million diabetics, China is now home to the most cases worldwide, overtaking India.
\”The change is happening very rapidly both in terms of their economy and in terms of their health effects,\” said David Whiting, an epidemiologist at the International Diabetes Federation.
\”The rate of increase is much faster than we\’ve seen in Europe and in the US.\”
Chronic ailments, such as high blood pressure and heart disease, have been steadily climbing in developing countries like China, where many people are moving out of farms and into cities where they have more sedentary lifestyles.
Greater wealth has led to sweeping dietary changes, including eating heavily salted foods, fatty meats and sugary snacks – boosting obesity rates, a major risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90 percent to 95 percent of all diabetes cases among adults.
\”As people eat more high-calorie and processed foods combined with less exercise, we see an increase of diabetes patients,\” said Huang Jun, a cardiovascular professor at the Jiangsu People\’s Hospital in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.

The heart matters in impotence

Men with heart disease who also complain of erectile dysfunction die sooner than other male heart patients, researchers reported on Monday.
They found that men who had both conditions were twice as likely to die from any cause and twice as likely to have a heart attack than men with heart disease alone.
The researchers expressed concern that using drugs such as Pfizer\’s Viagra or Eli Lilly\’s Cialis to treat erectile dysfunction could mask the symptoms that point to widespread heart and artery disease, and said men complaining of impotence should be checked by a cardiologist.
\”Erectile dysfunction is something that regularly should be addressed in the medical history of patients; it might be a symptom of early atherosclerosis,\” Dr Michael Bohm of the University of Saarland in Germany, who led the study, says in a statement.

His team studied 1,519 men in 13 countries taking part in some larger studies of various heart disease treatments. As part of the study the men were also asked if they had erectile dysfunction.
More than half of them, 55 percent, did, Bohm\’s team said in a report published in the journal Circulation and also presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology.
During the two years of the study, 11.3 percent of the patients who reported erectile dysfunction died, compared to 5.6 percent of those with mild or no impotence problems.
\”It has long been known that erectile dysfunction is a marker for cardiovascular disease,\” says Dr. Sahil Parikh at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not involved in the study.
The first impotence drug, Pfizer\’s Viagra, known generically as sildenafil, was at first developed to lower blood pressure, he said.
\”They realized it had this other effect, which patients quite enjoyed,\” Parikh says in a telephone interview.
Viagra and rival drugs such as Eli Lilly\’s Cialis and Bayer AG\’s Levitra all work by increasing blood flow.
\”In order to have proper erectile function, you have to have adequate blood flow to the genitals. If you have atherosclerosis, whether in the arteries on the neck, which can cause stroke, or the arteries of the heart, which can cause heart attack … it is the same disease.\”
But while the erectile dysfunction drugs help blood flow all over the body, they do not treat the underlying hardening and narrowing in the arteries that is causing the problem.
\”If patients have erectile dysfunction, we have to be very aggressive about screening and treating them for heart disease,\” Parikh says.
When Viagra came onto the market, many health experts welcomed it as a way to get men who might otherwise neglect their health to go to a doctor. But Bohm and Parikh both agreed that patients – and their doctors – need to look hard at the hearts of men with erectile dysfunction.
\”Men with ED going to a general practitioner or a urologist need to be referred for a cardiology workup to determine existing cardiovascular disease and proper treatment,\” Bohm says.
\”The medication works and the patient doesn\’t show up any more,\” he adds. \”These men are being treated for the ED, but not the underlying cardiovascular disease.\”
The drugs are wildly popular. Viagra alone had sales of nearly $2 billion in 2009.

Thinner smokers get higher risk of lung cancer: research

A recent research showed that thinner smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer than their fatter counterparts, local media reported on Wednesday.
Researchers from the National University of Singapore surveyed 63,257 middle- aged and elderly Chinese Singaporeans from 1993 onwards. It examined the relationship between smokers\’ body mass index (BMI) – a measure of obesity – and their chances of lung cancer, local English newspaper the Straits Times reported.
The research found that pack-a-day smokers with a BMI of at least 28 were six times as likely to get lung cancer as equally heavy people who had never lit up.
But thinner pack-a-day smokers, who had a BMI of less than 20, were 11 times as likely to get the disease as non-smokers of a similar weight and BMI.
Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in men in Singapore, and the third most common in women.

Muscle cells can control fatty acid uptake

Swedish researchers have found that blood vessels and muscles of the heart could regulate the uptake of fatty acids that people take through meat, milk products and other food.
The researchers showed that VEGF-B can control levels of fatty acid transport proteins (FATPs) in the vascular wall. VEGF-B signaling from the muscles to these cells led to an increase in FATPs and thus a greater intake of fat through the vascular walls, according to a statement issued by Sweden\’s medical university Karolinska Institute (KI) on Monday.
\”Mice that lacked either the VEGF-B protein or its receptors in the walls of the blood vessels had a lower intake of fat to the muscles and the heart, and less accumulation of fat in the different tissues,\” said associate professor Ulf Eriksson, who led the study at KI\’s Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics.
\”Instead, we found that the residual fat accumulated in the white adipose tissue, causing a slight weight increase in the mice, \” he added.
Their most striking finding was that the mice that lacked VEGF- B, and that consequently had lower muscular fat uptake, increased the uptake of sugar to the heart, the statement said.
It is hoped that these results can one day be developed into new treatments for several metabolic diseases, including type II diabetes.
Karolinska Institute becomes famous around the world partly because the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is decided here every year.

Quitting smoking improves artery health

Smokers who quit have a significant improvement in the health of their arteries within a year of their last cigarette, as media reported quoting a new study Monday.
The improvement is the equivalent of a 14 percent reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
\”A lot of people are afraid to quit smoking because they\’re afraid to gain weight,\” said the study\’s leader, Dr. James Stein, a University of Wisconsin-Madison cardiologist.
The research shows these people gained a health benefit even though also gaining an average of 9 pounds after they quit, researchers found. Their levels of so-called good cholesterol improved, too.
Hardening of the arteries is an early step to heart disease. About one-third of premature smoking deaths are due to cardiovascular disease.
However, smokers who quit face a 70 percent increased risk of developing diabetes within the first two to three years. Within 10 years, that increased risk goes down to zero, said Neal Benowitz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who was not a part of the study.

Scientists discover primitive organism to help with disease research

A newly discovered primitive organism can be used in medical research in battling Huntington\’s disease and Alzheimer\’s disease, said a report released on Saturday.
The organism, called Hydra, is a microscopic animal that lives in freshwater and each organism has 24,000 genes, roughly as many genes as a human, the University of California in Irvine said in a news release.
The small creatures have genes similar to the particular human genes that mutate to cause Huntington\’s disease and Alzheimer\’s disease. It makes the Hydra an easy and inexpensive lab animal for genetic research, which may bring major breakthroughs for the dread illnesses, the release said.
\”While Hydra doesn\’t have a brain, it does have a nervous system,\” said Rob Steele, chairman of biological chemisty at the university.
\”So it might be interesting and informative to see what would happen\” if the mutated human disease-causing versions of human genes were spliced into the small creatures, he said.
\”I think Hydra\’s simplicity and ease of experimental manipulation make it an attractive system for exploring the basic mechanisms of biological processes that are relevant to human disease,\” Steele said, \”And Hydra is really cheap to use as a lab animal.\”
The research was conducted by an international team led by Steele, said the release.
Huntington\’s disease is a disorder passed down through families in which certain nerve cells in the brain waste away, or degenerate.
Alzheimer\’s disease is a progressive and fatal brain disease that destroys brain cells, causing memory loss and problems with thinking and behavior severe enough to affect work, lifelong hobbies or social life.

Women on birth control pill may live longer: study

A study has found that women who take the contraceptive pill can expect to live longer rather than increasing the risk of death, media reports on Saturday.
The research, published in the British Medical Journal on Friday, observed 46,000 women for nearly 40 years. Researchers compared the number of death of women on the pill with those who never took it.
British researchers said their study should reassure many millions of women across the world who have taken oral birth control pills. In general, the health benefits of the pill outweigh any risks.
In the study, women on the pill generally took it for four years. Experts concluded that the pill cut the risk of dying from bowel cancer by 38 percent and from any other diseases by about 12 percent.
But the scientists said their findings may only be true for women who have taken older-style pills rather than those on more modern types of drugs, since their study began in 1968.
Moreover, the research describes a slightly increased mortality risk in women younger than 45 who are recent or current users of the pill. The effects in younger women disappear after around 10 years, said the study authors.