A cancer drug that won't cause hair loss

Good morning friends. I don’t say it’s a good news for all cancer patient, but I may say that cancer patient will not be worry now for that they found a new drug that won’t cause hair loss.

Researchers have developed a way to deliver cancer drugs, which they claim will not cause the usual sickness and hair loss by just using a fat-rich coating.

Until now, treatment of cancer has relied mainly on surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy. Though these strategies have benefited millions of cancer patients to date, the lack of tumor specificity of some of these agents make patients feel sick or result in significant hair loss.

Now, an international team, led by Queensland University, has developed the way which can specifically shut down cancer-causing genes in tumor cells while sparing normal healthy tissues.

According to lead researcher Sherry Wu, the new method which involves the use of coatings rich in fats, will hasten the application of RNA interference or gene-silencing, a technology which can inactivate individual genes.

Using this technology, the team observed a 70% reduction in tumor size in a cervical cancer mouse model.

"The traditional ways of packaging these drugs into suitable carriers are often complex and labor-intensive. The resulting products are also unstable at room temperature which is obviously not ideal for their clinical use.

"In order to deliver these gene-silencing drugs safely and efficiently into tumor tissues in the body, we have to package them in lipid-rich carriers," Wu said. Added co-researcher Nigel McMillan: "We are excited about our findings and we are currently investigating the feasibility of combining this gene-silencing technology with low dose chemotherapeutic agents in cancer treatments." –The Times of India

Snoring may stunt kids' growth

Good morning everybody. Time again for our health tips. And I'm sure mothers may be bother with it.

A new study from Yeshiva University has found that snoring and other nighttime breathing problems may delay growth in kids.

Researchers have long suspected these problems - collectively known as sleep disordered breathing (SDB) - contribute to growth delays in children but the studies have still not drawn definitive conclusions.

It is believed to interrupt deep sleep, a period of the sleep cycle when the body typically secrets large amounts of growth hormone.

And children with SDB are thought to produce a lesser amount of growth hormone.
To gain deeper insights, Karen A. Bonuck, Ph.D., associate professor of family and social medicine at Einstein collected and re-analyzed data from 20 well-designed studies, a statistical technique known as a meta-analysis.

These studies involved children with enlarged tonsils and/or adenoids - the principal causes of SDB. All the children had their tonsils/adenoids surgically removed, either to treat symptoms of SDB or recurrent infection, or both. "Our meta-analysis found significant increases in both standardized height and weight following surgery," said Bonuck.

"In other words, while all the children were expected to continue to grow after they underwent surgery, their growth rates were much greater than expected.

Our findings suggest that primary-care providers and specialists should consider the possibility of SDB when they see children with growth failure," Bonuck added.