Curry Spice Chemical Could Curb Alzheimer's/ Key to a long life -- less insulin in the brain/ Study: Ritalin Stunts Growth

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Curry Spice Chemical Could Curb Alzheimer's

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/news/item.php?keyid=11849Forbes

2007-07-18

WEDNESDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- A chemical found in curry may help the immune system clear away brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests.The findings build on previous research linking curry consumption to reduced Alzheimer's risk, including one study that found that only 1 percent of elderly Indians developed the disease -- a quarter of the rate seen in the United States.For this new study, published July 16 in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles and the Human BioMolecular Research Institute in San Diego looked at blood samples of Alzheimer's disease patients.They found that a chemical called bisdemethoxycurcumin boosted immune cells called macrophages to clear amyloid beta, the protein that forms the brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease.Bisdemethoxycurcumin is the active ingredient in curcuminoids -- a natural substance found in turmeric root. Turmeric is a spice often found in curry powders.The team also identified the genes involved in the process, called MGAT III and Toll-like receptors, which are also responsible for a number of key immune system functions.These findings provide more insight into the role of the immune system in Alzheimer's disease and may lead to a new treatment approach, the researchers said. Future treatments may rely on the innate immune system, which is present at birth, rather than on antibodies produced by B cells -- a part of the immune system that develops later.

 

Key to a long life -- less insulin in the brain

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/news/item.php?keyid=11859Reuters UK

2007-07-20

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Good, old-fashioned diet and exercise might keep you young by reducing the action of insulin in the brain, researchers reported on Thursday.They created mutant mice that over-ate, got fat and even had symptoms of diabetes, and yet lived 18 percent longer than normal lab mice. The secret: they lacked a certain key gene that affects insulin, the hormone that regulates glucose.The genetic engineering mimicked the effects of eating less and exercising, the researchers report in the journal Science."This study provides a new explanation of why it's good to exercise and not eat too much," said Dr. Morris White, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Children's Hospital in Boston who led the study.The findings also raise questions about how desirable it is to use insulin to treat type 2 diabetes, said the researchers.Doctors know that people who exercise regularly live longer on average. Researchers have also learned that putting animals on a strict diet makes them live longer, although this has not yet been shown to work in people.So White's team sought to see if the two effects were linked. They looked at insulin, because both fasting and exercise make cells more insulin-sensitive, meaning they respond more efficiently to the effects of insulin.They looked at the entire insulin pathway -- a series of actions in the cell that control the body's use of insulin.White's team engineered mice that had no working copies of one of the genes involved in this pathway, called insulin receptor substrate 2, or Irs2.BEST USE OF INSULINMice with no copies of Irs2 had defective brains and diabetes. But mice with one working copy lived 18 percent longer than normal mice."What's more, the animals lived longer even though they had characteristics that should shorten their lives such as being overweight and having higher insulin levels in the blood," White said in a statement.They were also more active than normal mice, and after eating, their brains had higher levels of a compound called superoxide dismutase, an antioxidant that protects cells from damage."Diet, exercise and lower weight keep your peripheral tissues sensitive to insulin," White said. That means the body needs to make less insulin."Since insulin turns on Irs2 in the brain, that means lower Irs2 activity, which we've linked to longer life span in the mouse," he said.One obvious question is whether drugs can mimic the effects of having less Irs2, perhaps by interfering with its action. The researchers note that people who live to be 100 or more often have reduced insulin levels and their cells show better insulin sensitivity.New diabetes drugs that increase insulin sensitivity may help, too, White said. But, he added: "The easiest way to keep insulin levels low in the brain is old-fashioned diet and exercise."

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Study: Ritalin Stunts Growth

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/news/item.php?keyid=11862CBS News/WebMD

2007-07-21

(WebMD) After three years on the ADHD drug Ritalin, kids are about an inch shorter and 4.4 pounds lighter than their peers, a major U.S. study shows.The symptoms of childhood ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) usually get dramatically better soon after kids start taking stimulant drugs. But this benefit may come with a cost, says James Swanson, Ph.D., director of the Child Development Center at the University of California, Irvine."Yes, there is a growth-suppression effect with stimulant ADHD medications," Swanson tells WebMD. "It is going to occur at the age of treatment, and over three years it will accumulate."Whether these kids eventually grow to normal size remains a question. Kids entered the study in 1999 at ages 7 to 9. The current report is a snapshot taken three years later. The 10-year results — when the kids are at their adult height — won't be in for two more years."The big question now is whether there is any effect on these kids' ultimate height," Swanson says. "We don't know if by the time they are 18 they will regain the height."The finding appears to end decades of debate over whether stimulant medications affect children's growth. Less than 10 years ago, a National Institutes of Health panel concluded that the drugs carried no long-term growth risk.That opinion was so widely accepted that the study authors — who include most of the leading ADHD researchers in the U.S. — did not warn parents that the study medication might carry this risk.At the time, researchers thought that any short-term stunting of growth would be made up by a hypothesized "growth spurt" that would occur with continued treatment. But Swanson and colleagues saw no evidence of such a growth spurt.Another widely accepted theory was that ADHD itself stunted kids' growth. But in a surprise finding, the study found that ADHD kids who do not take stimulant drugs are much larger than kids without ADHD, and these untreated kids continued to grow much faster than kids taking stimulant drugs.Swanson says that children who had been taking ADHD drugs before the study began were smaller than kids who had not yet started treatment. Those who first began treatment at the start of the study were normal in size, but grew more slowly than normal kids as the study went on.After three years, the growth suppression seemed to reach its maximum effect. That's also when the effect of the ADHD drug used in the study — immediate-release Ritalin, three times a day, every day of the year — seemed to wear off."We compared the effect of medication relative to just pure behavioral treatment," Swanson says. "That effect was substantial at 14 months and reduced a bit at 24 months. But at 36 months the relative advantage of ADHD drugs over behavioral treatment is gone."Swanson and colleagues note that the study did not test the sustained-release stimulant medications that are now the standard treatment for ADHD.Omar Khwaja, M.D., Ph.D., a neurologist at Children's Hospital in Boston, last year analyzed studies of different ADHD drugs and found strong evidence that ADHD drugs do, indeed, stunt children's growth. In fact, Khwaja and colleagues calculated a growth effect that almost exactly matches the effect seen in the Swanson study.But Khwaja agrees with Swanson that nobody yet knows what the long-term results of this side effect will be."Whether there will be rebound growth at end of puberty, the jury is still out," Khwaja tells WebMD."Parents have to be aware that stimulants are an enormous benefit to a lot of children with ADHD, but there is reason to be cautious with all medicines that affect the brain," he says. "Growth monitoring should be standard practice for kids taking these medications."Swanson and colleagues report their findings in the August issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.Other findings from this large study show that both ADHD drugs and behavioral therapy work in children.By Daniel DeNoonReviewed by Louise Chang