Vitamin C may blunt effect of chemotherapy: study - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vitamin C supplements may undercut the effectiveness of cancer drugs including Novartis’ Gleevec, a U.S. study published on Wednesday showed.
ADVERTISEMENT
When used on human cancer cells treated with a form of vitamin C in lab dishes, chemotherapy drugs killed 30 percent to 70 percent fewer tumor cells than usual, the scientists wrote in the journal Cancer Research.
Dr. Mark Heaney of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and colleagues also implanted human cancer cells into mice, and found that when mice got vitamin C supplements two hours before chemotherapy, the tumors grew more quickly.
Study: Postmenopausal hormones via gel, patch less risky for heart - USATODAY.com
A study of hormone use in nearly 700,000 Danish women over 50 suggests that when it comes to heart attack risk, patches or gels are safer than the combination pills most American women use.
The authors say this is the largest postmenopausal hormones study since the Women’s Health Initiative, which randomly assigned 27,000 U.S. women to estrogen or estrogen-plus-progestin pills or to a placebo.
Osteoarthritis solutions: Good news on bad knees - USATODAY.com
The recent news that a common knee surgery does nothing for osteoarthritis of the knee might have sounded like bad news to some patients: one less chance at relief from pain and stiffness.
But experts in arthritis care say the results give them a chance to talk about good news: There’s a lot you can do to prevent or treat this increasingly common problem.
“Most people accept osteoarthritis as a part of aging and have this misperception that there’s nothing you can do,” says Patience White, chief public health officer for the Arthritis Foundation and a rheumatologist in Washington, D.C. “There is no quick fix, but there are things you can do.”
The future of antidepressant pharmacotherapy
Although there are many drugs and psychotherapies available for the treatment of depression, the overall care of depressed patients is usually far from optimal. This review examines how care might be improved in the future, by considering a number of alternative approaches: enhanced use of existing treatments, modifications to existing antidepressant drugs, new targets for antidepressant pharmacotherapy, and non-pharmacological physical treatments. It examines how advances in genetics and neuroscience may lead towards individualised drug treatment, but concludes cautiously, emphasising that theoretical treatment advances can only improve clinical outcomes if used rationally, in collaboration with the patient.
When considering the future of antidepressant treatment, the properties of the notional ‘ideal antidepressant’ need to be examined (Table 1). Clearly, no such drug exists at present. Furthermore, advances in neuroscience may lead to the development of more efficacious antidepressants, but if these are not readily acceptable to depressed patients the impact of new technologies is likely to be limited.
To learn more about innovative therapies for wellness and healthy aging management, we invite you to attend “The Prestigious 7th Asia Pacific Conference on Anti-Aging Medicine and Regenerative Biotechnology, 10-12 October 2008 at Grand Hyatt, Bali – Indonesia” Register NOW!
