Health

Dozens of studies on the issue have shown no link, but have not ended the debate. Any requirement for warning labels could be a headache for cell phone manufacturers.

Maine's bill, the Children's Wireless Protection Act, was the subject of emotional testimony on Tuesday in the joint House-Senate Health and Human Services Committee in Augusta, the state capital.

The committee will next schedule one or more work sessions that could kill the bill outright, or advance it to debate by the state's House and Senate. Votes in the full Democratic-controlled state House and Senate could come as early this month, a legislative aide said.

The state's Democratic governor, John Baldacci, has not commented on the measure.

Representative Andrea Boland, a Democrat, introduced the bill after her concerns were raised by a 2006 study by the Swedish National Institute for Working Life showing a correlation between brain tumors and heavy cell phone use.

Numerous other studies have shown no such link. More research is under way.

If passed, cell phone companies selling in Maine would need to put prominent labels on phones and packaging, warning of the potential for brain cancer associated with electromagnetic radiation from the devices.

The warnings would recommend that users, especially children and pregnant women, keep the devices away from their heads and bodies.

San Francisco is also considering warning labels on cell phones. Mayor Gavin Newsom has suggested that packaging show radiation absorption levels for each phone "in a font at least as large as the price."

About 89 percent of the U.S. population used a wireless phone in June 2009, according to the CTIA, the international wireless trade association. Twenty percent of U.S. households had dispensed with land lines to go "wireless only."

(Editing by Mark Egan and Peter Cooney)

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U.S.  |  Health

Children snack so often that they are "moving toward constant eating," Carmen Piernas and Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina reported.

More than 27 percent of calories that American kids take in come from snacks, Piernas and Popkin reported in the journal Health Affairs. The researchers defined snacks as food eaten outside regular meals.

The studies will help fuel President Barack Obama's initiative to fight obesity in childhood, something Obama's wife, first lady Michelle Obama, notes could drive up already soaring U.S. healthcare costs.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote a commentary calling for taxes on sugary drinks and junk food, zoning restrictions on fast-food outlets around schools and bans on advertising unhealthy food to children.

"Government at national, state, and local levels, spearheaded by public health agencies, must take action," he wrote.

Piernas and Popkin looked at data on 31,337 children aged 2 to 18 from four different federal surveys on food and eating.

"Childhood snacking trends are moving toward three snacks per day, and more than 27 percent of children's daily calories are coming from snacks. The largest increases have been in salty snacks and candy. Desserts and sweetened beverages remain the major sources of calories from snacks," they wrote.

"Children increased their caloric intake by 113 calories per day from 1977 to 2006," they added.

CONSTANT EATING

"This raises the question of whether the physiological basis for eating is becoming deregulated, as our children are moving toward constant eating."

In a second study in the journal, Christina Bethell of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and colleagues analyzed data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health to find the rate of obesity for children 10 to 17 rose from 14.8 percent in 2003 to 16.4 percent in 2007.

The percentage of children who are overweight stayed at around 15 percent, they found.

"While combined overweight and obesity rates appear to be leveling off, our findings suggest a possible increase in the severity of the national childhood obesity epidemic," Bethell said in a statement.

Parents, educators and policymakers all hold responsibility for this, Michelle Obama told the School Nutrition Association conference in Washington on Monday.

"Our kids didn't do this to themselves," Obama said.

"From fast food, to vending machines packed with chips and candy, to a la carte lines, we tempt our kids with all kinds of unhealthy choices every day."

Other studies have shown that obese children are more likely to stay obese as adults, and they develop chronic conditions at younger ages, burdening the healthcare system.

"You see kids who are at higher risk of conditions like diabetes, and cancer, and heart disease -- conditions that cost billions of dollars a year to treat," Michelle Obama said.

The administration has launched an initiative to tackle the issue by improving nutritional standards, getting food companies to voluntarily improve nutrition standards, help kids exercise more and educating parents.

The effects extend beyond health. Bethell's study found that overweight or obese children were 32 percent more likely to have to repeat a grade in school and 59 percent more likely than normal weight kids to have missed more than two weeks of school.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Health

Bapineuzumab -- being developed by Pfizer Inc, Irish drugmaker Elan Corp and Johnson & Johnson -- is a potential game-changer because it could be the first drug to treat the underlying cause of the degenerative brain disease.

Investor confidence in the antibody medicine, however, took a big hit in July 2008 when it failed to meet its main goal in a mid-stage trial and caused brain swelling at higher doses. The new study, which only involved 28 patients, is modest fillip.

"It demonstrated that the drug has an effect on the pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease," lead researcher Juha Rinne from Finland's University of Turku told Reuters.

Rinne and colleagues used a novel imaging substance called carbon-11-labeled Pittsburgh compound B, which sticks to areas of the brain where there is a lot of beta amyloid plaque.

After 78 weeks, they found that patients given bapineuzumab had about a 25 percent reduction in plaque compared with those on placebo. The effect was similar with three different doses of the drug, they reported in the journal Lancet Neurology.

The treatment was generally well tolerated, although two patients on the highest dose had transient brain swelling. The drug's developers have since dropped the top dose from large ongoing Phase III trials.

Commenting on the results, Sam Gandy from New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine said it was too early to say effective disease-modifying drugs were at hand, but the ability to measure plaque in living subjects was "something of a breakthrough."

Experts are divided on the root cause of Alzheimer's and hence the best way to tackle it.

Most advanced drugs, like bapineuzumab, have focused on removing clumps of amyloid plaques, which are thought to stop brain cells from functioning properly. But a rival school blames toxic tangles caused by an abnormal build-up of the protein tau.

Rinne's imaging study was funded by Elan and Wyeth, which is now part of Pfizer.

(Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)

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Health

A study of 60 patients who had unexplained severe allergic reactions suggests that a compound in meat known as alpha-galactose may be the culprit, according to research presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology in New Orleans.

They found immune system proteins called IgE antibodies in 25 out of 60 patients who had unexplained allergic reactions.

"We believe that the presence of IgE antibody to this sugar is wider spread in the human population as a whole than we had initially expected," Dr. Scott Commins of the University of Virginia, who led the research, said in a telephone interview.

"What we're finding is that this traditional notion of allergy to meat being very rare may, in fact, not be true," Commins added.

Alpha-galactose is produced in most mammals but humans and great apes make an antibody to the sugar, Commins said.

"So the problem becomes when people make IgE antibody to this sugar and then they eat meat or dairy products that contain the sugar then they get a delayed reaction," Commins said.

The anaphylaxis may seem to appear out of the blue because the meat or dairy may have been eaten four to six hours earlier, Commins said.

"The typical scenario has been if you don't react to food within two hours, then it's not the food, in this case that doesn't seem to be true, Commins said.

Typically, anaphylaxis occurs within minutes.

Commins and colleagues screened blood samples from 60 patients, testing for the antibody to alpha-galactose. The people in the study -- 22 at the University of Virginia, 20 at the University of Tennessee and 18 at John James Medical Center in Australia, had anaphylaxis and no apparent cause for it, Commins said.

Twenty-five tested positive for alpha-galactose and no other patterns were found that would have otherwise explained the cause of their anaphylaxis, the researchers said.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Sandra Maler)

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Health  |  Lifestyle

Test scores dropped more than one point for each extra minute it took middle and high school students to complete a one mile run/walk fitness test, according to Dr. William J. McCarthy and colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Schools and parents seeking to optimize their students' academic performance should take heed, McCarthy noted in an email to Reuters Health.

For optimal brain function "it's good to be both aerobically fit and to have a healthy body shape."

McCarthy and colleagues compared physical fitness and body weight measures with scores on California's standardized math, reading, and language tests among 749 fifth-graders, 761 seventh-graders, and 479 ninth-graders who attended schools in Southern California between 2002 and 2003.

About half of the students were girls, 60 percent were white, 26 percent were of Hispanic ethnicity, and about 7 percent each were African American and Asian/Pacific Islander.

Almost 32 percent of the students were overweight and about 28 percent were obese, the researchers report in The Journal of Pediatrics. The researchers estimated students' aerobic fitness according to their one-mile run/walk time on a flat track. With a 15-minute maximum allowed time to complete the test, the boys averaged slightly less than 10 minutes, while the girls averaged a little less than 11 minutes.

McCarthy's team found that nearly two thirds of the students (65 percent) fell below the state fitness standard for their age and gender. Compared with these students, students who met or exceeded fitness standards had higher average test scores. Allowing for age, social and economic status, gender, ethnicity, and body size did not significantly alter this association.

Compared with students of desirable weight, overweight and obese students also scored significantly lower on tests, the researchers found.

These findings, McCarthy's team notes, confirm and extend those of previous investigations. They say further studies are needed to figure out why aerobic fitness may play a role in academic performance.

If future studies confirm a cause-and-effect link between lower fitness and reduced academic performance, "schools will have to reverse their recent disinvestment in physical education ostensibly for the purposes of boosting student achievement," they concluded.

(Reporting by Joene Hendry of Reuters Health, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

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Health

In the United States alone there are probably around 36 million Darryls, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which created the character, played by an actor on its website to help train doctors.

He doesn't exercise as much as maybe he should so he's a little overweight. At an average of four drinks a day, he is no alcoholic: but some experts now see him as a high-risk drinker and say he could succumb to "alcohol use disorder."

Millions more people across the developed world -- who drink a few glasses of wine every night after work or look forward to three nights of repeated shots with chasers on the weekends -- may today be adding up to a major health and social problem.

Could there be a pill to help them?

A reassessment of the nature of addiction, particularly to alcohol, is starting to pique Big Pharma's interest. For years the industry has been lukewarm, assuming either that finding a cure for alcoholism is impossible, or else that the target market -- homeless drop-outs, jobless bums and convicted drink drivers -- would not make for great returns.

Now changing western attitudes and cheap supermarket-supplied alcohol have made excessive drinking normal, including among the middle classes. Some experts predict the arrival soon of a new generation of drugs to help everyday drinkers.

"The potential market for medications that can be prescribed for these functional alcoholics is huge," said Mark Willenbring, an addiction expert and psychiatrist in the United States.

Just as with depression treatment 30 years ago, he says alcoholism research could be approaching a "Prozac moment" when it will become more natural, and more acceptable, for doctors to prescribe a pill to help people through a bad patch.

There are already drugs available to treat alcoholism, but their effects vary widely. As scientists' understanding of what alcohol does to our brain functions deepens, so, potentially, does the range of possible treatments.

Data from Thomson Pharma, a ThomsonReuters company that monitors the drug industry, show there are 24 drugs in development for alcoholism, including around 10 or more in mid-stage trials.

BIG BOOZERS ATTRACT BIG PHARMA

Drug giants Merck and Eli Lilly are the biggest hitters stepping up to the plate at the moment: each is pursuing two possible drugs through mid-stage human trials for treating alcoholism.

Biotech firm Alkermes is also very active in this area, with three drugs in development -- two new compounds, and the third a new format of an existing medicine.

As is often the case when drugmakers show renewed interest in an expanding concern, critics may accuse the firms of seeking to create a "new disease" to generate a market for otherwise unnecessary medicines.

But others argue the outcome could prove a lifeline to millions whose drinking presents a risk to their health, and a big bill to society.

"They don't need the intensity of treatment that more severe cases do," said Willenbring. "They don't need to go to alcoholics anonymous for the rest of their lives, they can respond well to some medication and brief behavioral support."

Alcohol and its consequences kill 2.3 million people a year around the world, according to the World Health Organization: that amounts to 3.8 percent of all deaths, ranking drink just below unsafe sex and just above malnutrition in the top 10 causes of death.

When it comes to the burden of disease caused by alcohol, the evidence against drink really stacks up.

As well as contributing to traumatic death and injury in car crashes and other accidents, alcohol is associated with chronic liver disease, many cancers, acute alcohol poisoning, fetal alcohol syndrome and heart disease -- which is itself the No. 1 killer of men and women in industrialized nations.

"Here in the U.S. we have at least 18 million adults who suffer from alcohol use disorder, and probably twice that many who are high-risk drinkers who don't have a diagnosis. We also have roughly 7.5 million adolescents who are binge drinkers, and at least a 1.5 million who are alcohol dependent," said Raye Litten, the NIAAA's chief of medications development.

"That's quite a market -- and it is intriguing to large pharmaceutical companies."

In Britain and other parts of Europe, the need may even be greater. Almost a quarter of Britons -- 33 percent of men and 16 percent of women -- are hazardous drinkers, and binge-drinking and its consequences are daily fare for newspaper headline writers and the politicians who must respond to them.

"The toll of alcohol-abuse-fueled aberrant behaviors, from interfamilial violence to slaughter on the highways, wreaks havoc in a scope and intensity that is leagues ahead of all illegal drugs put together," wrote Harry Tracy, a psychologist and publisher of NeuroInvestment, a monthly publication specializing in central nervous system disorders, in a recent report.

DRUGS -- THE OLD AND THE NEW

The race to find more effective drugs is among the hottest areas in alcoholism research, according to the NIAAA's Litten. Of those available so far, none comes close to being a "magic pill" for drunks, or even high-risk drinkers.

Naltrexone, which cuts the desire to drink by blocking the brain's opioid receptors, has been around for years. Disulphiram works on the enzymes that metabolise alcohol to make users feel awful if they drink, while acamprosate is thought to ease withdrawal symptoms such as anxiety and insomnia.

The problem is that one drug can work well in some people, yet have virtually no effect on others. Some make people feel so bad they stop taking them and go back to the bottle.

Of the potential new drugs tracked by Thomson Pharma, many are in very early experimental stages, and given the slow and uncertain pace of drug development it could be a decade or more before something -- if anything -- comes of them.

Those in clinical trials have a 30 percent likelihood of approval rating on BioMedTracker, an analysis tool from Sagient Research, which also works in partnership with Thomson Pharma. That's average for a drug at that stage.

Yet addiction experts are encouraged -- not least by progress in what scientists know about alcohol what it does to the brain.

"In the alcohol field over the past 10 years, what we've found is that it's not just one neurotransmitter system, it's multiple neurotransmitter systems that are involved in alcohol-seeking and drinking behavior," said Litten.

"Because of that, researchers are looking at a variety of sites in the brain and coming up with new types of medications to be tested."

Eli Lilly's OpRA II drug targets the brain's opioid receptors, as does Naltrexone, but neither Lilly nor Merck has disclosed the targets for their other experimental drugs. Alkermes's three projects are all aimed at opioid receptors.

A couple of firms, AstraZeneca and Transcept Pharma, are looking at compounds that hit dopamine receptors -- the "reward" pathway in the brain.

Another possibility showing early promise is topiramate, a medicine which hits multiple sites in the brain and is used in epilepsy and migraine treatment. It has shown some ability to cut alcohol intake in heavy drinkers in a small clinical trial.

And other scientists, like Colin Drummond at the National Addiction Center and Britain's Institute of Psychiatry in London, are focusing on the brain's stress pathways.

He is about to start a small experiment with mifepristone, which researchers hope may be able to reduce the extreme levels of the stress hormone cortisol released in the brain when alcoholics quit drinking.

"We're going to start a trial where we will give it to alcoholic patients who come in for detox, with a view to reducing the brain effects of withdrawal," he told Reuters.

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Health

Researchers from Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark studied 20,000 single pregnancies and found a four-fold increased risk of stillbirths for women who had IVF or ICSI compared with women who conceived naturally.

"The results from our study emphasize the need for continuous follow-up of the outcome of fertility treatments so that the information given to infertile couples seeking treatment can be differentiated to their individual circumstances," Kirsten Wisborg, who led the study, wrote in the Human Reproduction journal Wednesday.

She added, however, that the risk of stillbirth was still very low for IVF and ICSI pregnancies. The rate of stillbirth after IVF/ICSI was 16.2 per thousand, compared to 3.7 per thousand in fertile couples who conceived without medical help.

The researchers said it was not yet clear whether the increased risk was due to the fertility treatment itself or because of unknown factors specific to couples who IVF or ICSI.

IVF is the fertilization of an egg by sperm in a laboratory dish. In ICSI, an egg is fertilized by injecting a single sperm into it.

Doctors previously thought the greater risk of bad outcomes like stillbirths in assisted reproduction might be something to do with the underlying infertility of couples who have it.

But Wisborg and colleagues found that fertile couples who conceived within a year of trying, and so-called "sub-fertile" couples who took longer to conceive, had a similar risk to each other.

"This may indicate that the increased risk of stillbirth is not explained by infertility and may be due to other, as yet unexplained factors, such as the technology involved in IVF and ICSI or some physiological difference in the couples that require (it)," Wisborg wrote.

(Editing by Andrew Roche)

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Health

There is no cure for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, but combinations of drugs can keep the virus from replicating and damaging the immune system.

Doctors normally do not start treatment until there is some evidence of damage to this system, measured by counting the number of immune cells, called CD4 T-cells.

In developed countries, HIV treatment usually begins when CD4 numbers drop below 350 cells per microlitre of blood.

Some treatment guidelines also recommend that therapy be started more quickly for people whose CD4 counts decline rapidly.

But the study, involving an international team of researchers, found that the pace of decline did not result in any substantial differences to the outcome of the illness.

"What we looked at was whether it matters how a person reached his current CD4 cell count, whether the CD4 count declined very quickly, or very slowly, and we found that the CD4 cell dynamics don't provide additional information about the patient's prognosis on top of the current CD4 cell count," said Marcel Wolbers of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

Wolbers, a biostatistician and one of the principal investigators of the study, and his colleagues examined records of 2,820 HIV patients from Australia, Canada and Europe with varying rates of CD4 declines.

They found no significant differences in their progression to AIDS or the number of deaths.

"The current rate of CD4 cell decline is neither a strong predictor of whether a person is progressing to AIDS or dies, nor does it predict future CD4 cell decline," he said. "Therefore, it shouldn't guide clinical decisions, in particular the decision whether to initiate (drug) therapy or not.

"A further implication of our study is that the patient's CD4 cell count should be monitored regularly regardless of the prior rate of CD4 decline and that should be done according to current guidelines, i.e. every three to six months."

The study, published in the latest issue of PLoS Medicine, is available for free here%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourn

al.pmed.1000239 (Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn, Editing by Ron Popeski)

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Barack Obama  |  Health

Gearing up for a bipartisan meeting it hopes will help seize back control of the healthcare debate, the White House will unveil its own plan on Monday for how to overhaul the $2.5 trillion medical care system.

Obama will add a measure targeting insurance companies, a White House official said, something that had not been included in Democratic healthcare overhaul bills reached after months of debate and compromise in the House of Representatives and Senate.

The White House has been targeting health insurers with particular vehemence as it makes its case for the overhaul in recent days, seeing corporate profits as a relatively easy target for public anger in the face of flagging voter interest in the healthcare fight.

Obama's plan will be posted on the White House's website at 10 a.m. EST Monday to allow ample time for review before Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress meet Republicans on Thursday for a televised conference on the proposed overhaul, one of Obama's top domestic policy priorities.

"As bad as things are today, they'll only get worse if we fail to act. We'll see exploding premiums and out-of-pocket costs burn through more and more family budgets," Obama said on Saturday.

White House officials have said little on the record about what exactly will be posted, as they wait for official word from the president, beyond saying they expect it will combine the best features of the House and Senate bills.

The bills are broadly similar. Both would extend coverage to many of the 46 million Americans who now lack health insurance and impose restrictions on insurance companies such as requiring them to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Congressional Republicans, who have remained solidly united in opposition to the healthcare bills, have called on Democrats to scrap both and start over with a far less sweeping agenda.

They had not formally accepted the invitation to the summit, expressing wariness about the Democrats' intentions, but Republican leaders have said they planned to attend.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

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Health

AIDS experts have long been searching for a microbicide -- a cream, gel or vaginal ring that women or men could use as a chemical shield to protect themselves from sexual transmission of the deadly and incurable virus.

Several substances have been tried unsuccessfully but experiments presented this week at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, a scientific meeting of AIDS experts, suggested HIV drugs might hold the key to making such gels work.

"The next wave of compounds is all going to be based on antiretroviral drugs," Dr. John Moore of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York told reporters.

Moore's team tested Pfizer's new drug maraviroc, sold under the brand name Selzentry. It is in a new class of drugs called CCR5 entry inhibitors, designed to stop the human immunodeficiency virus from getting into human cells using a type of cellular doorway or receptor named CCR5.

"The CCR5 inhibitors are compelling candidates as an alternative because these drugs are not being used for treatment in, for example, Africa," Moore said.

That means there is less risk of resistance developing -- when viruses evolve to get around the effects of drugs.

Moore's team took a unique approach to formulating their experimental microbicide using Selzentry.

"We found a friendly physician, scrounged a tablet, ground it up," Moore said. "I assure you it actually works very well," he told the San Francisco meeting.

Tests in monkeys showed it would protect a female from sexual transmission for about four hours. "You couldn't apply these gels in the morning and have protection in the evening," Moore said.

A vaginal ring with a time-release formula may work better for longer-term protection, Moore said.

The approach is affordable, he said. "A single maraviroc tablet, about 300 mg, retailing for about $15 on the Internet, contains enough drug to fully protect around 15 macaques. That is broadly going to be applicable to women."

Laura Guay of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation said the approach sounds reasonable. Her group supports the development of microbicides to protect women and by extension their children.

"The hope is by putting antiretrovirals into the microbicide, you can prevent the virus from either entering or replicating," she said in a telephone interview.

Last year researchers found Gilead Sciences Inc.'s drug Truvada also might work as a microbicide. But a gel made by Massachusetts-based Indevus Pharmaceuticals that did not include an HIV drug failed in human trials.

The AIDS virus, which infects 33 million people globally and has killed 25 million, is mostly passed sexually. In Africa women account for more new cases than men and are often infected by their husbands.

Abstinence and condom use are not options for women trying to have children, but a microbicide would be. Microbicides using HIV drugs would represent a large new market for the companies that make the drugs, which are currently now used only to treat infection.

(Editing by Alan Elsner)

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