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Experts warn over desire to have twins

Women who try for twins through artificial measures should think twice, medical experts warned yesterday.
Interventions such as in vitro fertilization or hyperstimulation of the ovaries will result in a high incidence of premature birth, low birth weight and other syndromes, a forum in the city heard.
The natural incidence of twins is one in every 80 to 90 pregnancies, but doctors at local maternal hospitals said they were seeing more women carrying twins as the result of medical intervention.
Dr Duan Tao, president of Shanghai No. 1 Maternity and Child Health Hospital and director of Shanghai Prenatal Diagnosis Center, said: \”Double children don\’t only mean double happiness but also double trouble. Mortality of twins is also double that of one child and their chances of suffering prematurity, low birth weight and cerebral palsy are also much higher.\”

Fish oils have no mental benefits: study

A new Finnish study shows that the fatty acids of fish oils bring no mental benefits as many people tend to believe, even though they have a number of health-promoting benefits, local media reported Sunday.
Researchers at the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare followed the health records of 12,000 Finnish men and women, many of whom ate a lot of fish, and found neither a high consumption of fish nor omega-3 supplements had any effect on their mental health.
Contrary to popular belief, the Finnish study also found that men, whose blood contains higher levels of docosahexaenoic acid, a fatty acid found in fish, are more prone to suffer from mental distress.
Researchers said that alcohol consumption, smoking and level of physical activity also played a role in the results.

Charities spread awareness of hemophilia

Seven-year-old Lu Zhongqian was born healthy in July 2002 in Beijing but 11 months later his father Lu Jinsheng discovered his son was different from others.

Doctors and an NNHF manager fill in the Chinese calligraphy which reads \”change the course of hemophilia\” at the NNHF\’s second-phase project launching ceremony in Shanghai at the end of last month. [File photo]
\”I found ecchymosis (bruising) on his body and joints that we could not explain. So we sent him to a hospital,\” recalled Lu, a worker with the Ministry of Railways in Beijing.
The boy was soon diagnosed with hemophilia, a congenital bleeding disorder that affects males and which usually becomes apparent in the first years of life when the child starts to move about independently.
It is estimated that about 600,000 males have hemophilia worldwide. Approximately one in every 5,000 men are born with hemophilia A.
The worried parents then began a long quest to seek a cure for their son. Aside from going to hospitals, they contacted volunteers of the patient group Hemophilia Home of China (HHC) to learn about modern treatments through its website and related medical publications.
\”Now my son is almost cured, and I\’m so glad to see him going to primary school as a normal kid, though he is one year behind his contemporaries because of his illness,\” said the proud father, watching his son bouncing on to the stage to sing a song in front of a group of doctors dedicated to treating the disease in Shanghai.
Lu Zhongqian is just one of the hundreds of hemophilia patients in China that received support from HHC and the Denmark-based pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, which have been working together towards improving the care and treatment of hemophilia patients in China.
The latter has launched a two-phase project to help teach medical staff, patients and their families regarding treatments and promote knowledge about the disease in China.
Since 200the Novo Nordisk Hemophilia Foundation (NNHF) has launched a 3 million yuan first-phase project in China focusing on education, screening and registration within the six main medical centers in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Hefei, Guangzhou and Jinan.
In China, a nation with a population of 1.3 billion, only about 5 percent of the estimated 130,000 sufferers are registered and treated, largely because of a lack of awareness of the disease in China\’s vast countryside.
NNHF helped launch China\’s first hemophilia web-based registry system and, so far, more than 6,200 patients have signed up.
NNHF also helps fund six laboratory technicians from three medical centers in China to study at the Royal Free Hospital Laboratory in London and aided the training of 330 physicians, 89 nurses and 65 laboratory technicians in China.
So far, a total of 1,616 people with hemophilia have been tested to confirm their diagnosis and the extent of their bleeding disorder.
With a comprehensive training program for healthcare professionals and patients with their families, the NNHF project team also reached out to a total of 464 sufferers and 275 family members to educate them through workshops over the past two years.
It has printed 34,000 copies of related material such as treatment guidelines and nursing manuals concerning the illness.
NNHF announced at the end of last month it would launch the second phase of its project in China, aiming to promote the project to 10 more cities with another investment of 3 million yuan.
All these efforts received positive feedback and support from the nation\’s health authority, with the Ministry of Health (MOH) of China issuing a formal notice at the end of November last year to require all provincial authorities to launch their registry centers for the illness.
According to Yi Mei, the division chief for Blood Management at the MOH, the ministry will further encourage registration of hemophilia by designating a hospital in each province as responsible for signing up patients and conducting diagnoses.
\”We hope that through charity projects such as NNHF, we can improve society\’s awareness of the project and help educate more patients to improve the quality of their lives eventually,\” Chen Jun, vice-president of strategic business development at Novo Nordisk China, told China Business Weekly.
\”In the first phase, we mainly focus on promoting medical treatment among relatively economically well-off cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. We found out that even in these areas, awareness among doctors and patients was relatively low,\” he said.
\”That\’s why we are now launching the second phase, to further expand the project\’s coverage to more inland provinces in central and western China to enable more people from these areas to get first-hand treatment.\”

Scientists report on way to derail spread of AIDS

A successful AIDS vaccine remains elusive, but researchers say aggressive, early anti-viral therapy might provide a way to derail the spread of disease.
The goal is to catch new AIDS cases early and administer therapy to reduce the amount of virus in the patient\’s system.
Anti-retroviral therapy has increased in the past five years. But it\’s been given too late in the course of infection.
By the time people start therapy they have infected most of those that they would have infected anyway. That\’s according to Brian Williams of the South African Center for Epidemiological Modeling and Analysis.
The research was presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Severe sleep apnea leads to lower frequency of nightmare recall

Patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are more likely to have a significantly lower frequency of nightmares than patients with mild or no sleep apnea, a new study shows.
The findings indicate that OSA suppresses the cognitive experience of nightmare recall, according to the study published in the Feb. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
This is the first large study to address both reported dream and nightmare recall frequency in a clinically evaluated sample of patients with a high frequency of severe OSA, said researchers at the University of Colorado Medical School.
This retrospective study involved 393 consecutive patients who were evaluated by overnight polysomnography over a two-year period. Their mean age was 50.5 years with a range of 13 to 82 years, and 67 percent of participants were male.
The results show that the percent of participants with frequent nightmare recall decreased linearly as sleep apnea severity increased. Frequent nightmare recall, occurring at least weekly, was reported by 71.4 percent of people who did not have OSA and 43. 2 percent of patients with mild OSA, which was defined as an apnea- hypopnea index (AHI) of five to less than 15 breathing pauses per hour of sleep.
The rate of frequent nightmare recall decreased to 29.9 percent in patients with moderate OSA (AHI of 15 to less than 30) and 20.6 percent in patients with severe OSA (AHI of 30 or more).
Sleep apnea severity in people who reported infrequent nightmare recall (mean AHI of 40.3) was significantly higher than in those who frequently recalled nightmares (mean AHI of 24.6).
The authors noted that the study clearly demonstrates that increasingly severe OSA has a much greater negative effect on reported nightmare recall frequency than it does on reported dream recall.
The decline in frequency of nightmare recall may be attributed to the sleep fragmentation that is caused by OSA, leading to a reduction in the amount of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is the sleep stage when nightmares generally occur, according to the study.

Australian scientists find breast cancer link

Australian scientists revealed on Tuesday they had found that gene variants known to increase a woman\’s risk of breast cancer also played a determining role in the density of her breast.
Professor John Hopper, of the University of Melbourne\’s School of Population Health, said the discovery points to new \”pathways\” for the development of breast cancer, and it opens a new avenue for research into targeted treatment.
\”Previous twin studies have suggested there is a genetic link between mammographic density and breast cancer,\” he said.
\”For the first time, we have been able to identify some of the breast cancer genetic variants involved.\”
The research took in mammogram results and blood samples collected from 830 sets of twins and 600 of their sisters recruited via the Australian Twin Registry.
Scientists then looked for any link between women who had lots of \”light areas\” – high-density breast tissue – on their mammogram scans and a range of 12 gene variations known to increase the breast cancer risk.
\”We aimed to determine if these genetic variants associated with breast cancer risk also influenced mammographic density … and we found at least two of the variants were linked,\” said Dr Jennifer Stone, who led the research into mammographic density.
\”This is the beginning of a new research focus on how cancers begin and the role mammographic density plays.\”

New study refutes vaccination-autism link

There is no evidence that autism is linked with the measles vaccine, a new study suggests.
The new findings come about a week after The Lancet retracted a 1998 study suggesting that the MMR vaccine contributes to autism risk.
The 1998 study alarmed many parents and led to major declines in measles and MMR vaccination rates in some places.
In the new study published by HealthDay News on Friday, Polish researchers found that there is no apparent link between autism and the measles vaccine — whether the shot is given alone or as part of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).
The researchers compared 96 autistic children with 192 children who did not have the disorder.
The researchers said they reached their conclusion after adjusting for autism risk factors, including mother\’s age and education, length of gestation, medications during pregnancy and the child\’s condition after birth.
In fact, vaccinated children were found to be less likely to develop autism, especially those who\’d gotten the MMR vaccine, though that finding could be due to other unmeasured factors affecting the children\’s health, according to the researchers.
\”For example, health-care workers or parents may have noticed signs of developmental delay before the actual autism diagnosis and, for this reason, have avoided vaccination,\” wrote the team, led by Dorota Mrozek-Budzyn of Jagiellonian University Medical College, in Krakow.

4,834 died from black lung disease

Pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung disease, is a regular killer among migrant workers in certain industries and has claimed 4,834 lives through 2000 to 2008 in central China\’s Hubei province, a local health official told the Chutian Metropolis Daily.
The disease, caused by inhaling metallic or mineral particles or gas, could lead to a limitation of air flow to and from the lungs, causing shortness of breath. The condition is normally irreversible and usually gets worse over time.
At least 21,760 patients were diagnosed of pneumoconiosis in Hubei province through 2000 to 2008 and the group is growing, according to Li Guangming, deputy bureau chief of the provincial health department, who leafleted lung disease-themed playing cards at a health campaign at Wuchang Railway Station, a hub of homecoming migrant workers.
Bai Yibing, another health official, urged workers to have regular health check-ups, a routine largely ignored by small- and medium-sized factories.

University makes male infertility gene discovery

Shanghai Jiao Tong University\’s School of Medicine has identified one gene involved with sperm development that could lead to new male infertility treatments and new approaches to male contraception.
The discovery was published in the latest version of Genes &Cancer, a United States-based scientific journal.
In the experiments, researchers destroyed the Kifl8a gene in male mice, resulting in poor testicles development and sperm loss.
\”It is the first time in the world that we confirmed the relationship between mutated Kifl8a and sperm development through a mammal animal model,\” said Gu Mingmin from the school\’s medical genetics research unit yesterday. \”We identified that Kifl8a plays an important role in sperm development. Its improper function can influence chromosomes and result in cell death.\”
He said the research unit has started to screen infertile men to study the relationship between Kifl8a on infertility in humans.
Due to social and environmental causes, men\’s sperm quantity and quality have dropped in recent years. Currently, about 15 percent of couples are infertile and a male factor is supposedly present in about half of these cases.
\”Various causes can result in male infertility, but 50 percent of the reasons are still unknown,\” Gu said. \”The discovery of Kifl8a\’s role gives us a new direction to study and could bring hope for new solutions in infertility diagnosis, treatment and birth control measures.\”
He said gene therapy will be developed based on the discovery and help men with Kifl8a disorder.

Can fish oil help guard against schizophrenia?


Taking fish oil may help prevent full-blown psychotic illness in at-risk adolescents and young adults, a study released today hints.
These at-risk individuals may have weak or transient psychotic symptoms, and already show schizophrenia-like brain changes, Dr. G. Paul Amminger of The University of Melbourne in Australia, a researcher on the study, told Reuters Health. But while psychiatrists now know how to identify these individuals, he added, they don\’t know what to do with them. \”At the moment there\’s no state-of-the-art guideline (on) how to treat those people.\”
Prescribing antipsychotic medications may be helpful, Amminger added, but these medications have serious side effects, and can also be stigmatizing. \”For young people they don\’t want to commit themselves to a treatment which they might need to take for the next five to ten years,\” he said. Furthermore, only about a third of people at high risk for psychotic disorders will go on to develop full-fledged mental illness in a given year.
There\’s considerable evidence that abnormal fatty acid metabolism may contribute to the development of schizophrenia, Amminger and his team note in the Archives of General Psychiatry. To investigate whether omega-3 fatty acids might help prevent psychotic illness, they randomly assigned 81 at-risk individuals, 13 to 25 years old, to take 1.2 grams a day of omega-3s in fish oil capsule form or a placebo for 12 weeks and then followed them for another 40 weeks.
The researchers included people who met at least one of the following three criteria: having low-level psychotic symptoms; having transient psychotic symptoms; or having a schizophrenia-like personality disorder or a close relative with schizophrenia, along with a sharp decline in mental function within the past year.
Seventy-six of the 81 study participants, or 94 percent, completed the trial, Amminger noted, which underscores the safety and tolerability of fish oil.
At one year, 5 percent of the study participants taking omega-3s had developed a psychotic disorder (2 of 41 people), compared to 28 percent of those on placebo (11 of 40). People taking fish oil also showed significant reductions in their psychotic symptoms and improvements in function, while they were at no greater risk of adverse effects than people taking placebo capsules.
The effect of fish oil capsules, Amminger noted, was similar to that seen in two trials of antipsychotic drugs in at-risk individuals.
There are a number of mechanisms through which omega-3s could protect the brain, Amminger said; they are a major component of brain cells. They are also key to the proper function of two brain chemical signaling systems, dopamine and serotonin, which have been implicated in schizophrenia. Fish oil also boosts levels of glutathione, an antioxidant that protects the brain against oxidative stress.
Trials of medications for treating mental illness typically don\’t include people younger than 18, Amminger noted, while starting minors on these medications is \”always very difficult, and always quite controversial.\”
But if future research bears out the current findings, he added, fish oil promises to offer a safe way to help prevent psychosis in at-risk people, and could also potentially be used to prevent or delay the onset of chronic depression, bipolar illness, and substance abuse disorder — all of which are far more common than psychotic illness.
He and his colleagues are now planning a multicenter trial of fish oil for the prevention of psychotic illness in 320 at-risk people.