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Women who take high-dose vitamin C supplements may be increasing their risk of age-related cataracts, hint findings of a Swedish study.

Among nearly 24,600 adult women followed for more than 8 years, those who reported regular or occasional vitamin C supplementation of about 1000 milligrams per serving were about 25 percent more likely than those who did not take supplements to have age-related cataracts removed.

Women who took extra vitamin C for 10 years or longer; or in combination with being 65 years and older, or taking hormone replacement or corticosteroid medications had even greater risk, researchers found.

However, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Alicja Wolk, of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and colleagues caution that the apparent association between vitamin C and cataract risk does not involve vitamin C obtained from fruits and vegetables.

Rather, their study assessed cataract risk related to the high-dose vitamin C supplements common in Sweden. Their findings, the researchers note, support results from some previous studies.

Overall, 59 percent of the 49 to 83 year old otherwise healthy women said they used some sort of dietary supplement. Of these 5 percent said they only took vitamin C supplements and 9 percent said they took only multivitamins that contained about 60 milligrams of vitamin C.

Of the 1,225 women who took only vitamin C supplements, 143 (nearly 13 percent) had cataracts removed during the study period.

By comparison, cataracts were removed in 878 of 9,974 women who did not use any supplements (roughly 9 percent) and in 252 of 2,259 multivitamin-only users (about 11 percent).

The higher cataract risk among the supplement users versus non-users remained evident in analyses that allowed for age by 5-year increments, waist girth, education, smoking, alcohol drinking habits, and use of medications such as hormone replacement therapy.

Wolk and colleagues call for further research to confirm their findings, particularly among older women on hormone replacement therapy or using steroids, as well as investigations into mechanisms that may fuel the association.

While physicians and surgeons are getting better at treating heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, too many Americans are ignoring the basic rules for preventing them, according to new statistics from the American Heart Association.

Topping the list: too little exercise, too much weight.

In fact, 59 percent of adults surveyed last year reported no activity vigorous enough to prompt sweating and a significant increase in breathing or heart rate, according to the update. The findings are published online Dec. 17 in the journal Circulation.

“The things people need to focus on are our weight and our waist,” said Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, chair of the heart association’s statistics committee. “Those are driving a lot of other risk factors, such as cholesterol and diabetes.”

Tackling inactivity and overweight will be key to turning heart health statistics around said Lloyd-Jones, who is also chairman of the department of preventive medicine and staff cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The American diet also demands more attention, he said. “There is just too much availability of very calorie-dense food,” he said. “We’re not doing anything to burn off those extra pounds.”

Data from 2003-2006 shows that 11.3 percent of children and teenagers were at or above the 97th percentile in body mass index for their age. That’s ominous, because oerweight teens have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight adults, the report notes.

Preventive measures should be emphasized for younger people, Lloyd-Jones said. “We need to be thinking about this as a life-long problem, not just when you turn 50,” he said.

Cholesterol control is ignored by many who would benefit from it most, according to the Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics 2010 update. Fewer than half the Americans with symptomatic heart disease are receiving treatment to lower their blood levels of fats, and only a third of people getting treatment are achieving the target levels of LDL cholesterol, the “bad kind” that clogs arteries.

“Everything is coming together in the worst way — obesity, inactivity, smoking,” said Dr. Clyde W. Yancy, heart association president and medical director of the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute in Dallas. “In our younger group, instead of seeing improvement, it is getting worse.”

One relatively bright spot is better control of high blood pressure, a major cardiovascular risk factor, Lloyd-Jones said. “In the last few years, we have taken a bump up, and that gives us reason to hope, especially in prevention of heart failure,” he said.

Other findings:
Death rates from cardiovascular disease declined about 30 percent between 1996 and 2006, as treatments improved.
In 2006, 7.2 million in-hospital cardiovascular procedures were performed, a 33 percent increase over the 1996 level.
The cost of treating cardiovascular disease is expected to rise 5.8 percent in 2010, to $503.2 billion, a figure that lends real urgency to prevention efforts, Lloyd-Jones said.

“So we are spending half a trillion dollars on cardiovascular disease,” Yancy said. “And we recognize that, as in our younger population the incidence of sedentary life style, obesity and smoking are going up, that expenditure will continue to rise.”

By 2020, the association hopes for a 20 percent improvement in the cardiovascular health of all Americans and a 20 percent reduction in deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke.

Human embryonic stem cell lines currently used for research come mostly from white donors, a new report finds.

That could mean that nonwhites will benefit less from any medical breakthroughs that emerge from that research down the line, experts say.

Blacks could be especially affected. In fact, none of the most widely used stem cell lines studied showed any traces of recent African ancestry, the team reported online in a Dec. 16 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.

To increase the diversity of embryonic stem cell lines, the researchers urge increased efforts to include stem cells from other populations.

“We have examined the population ancestry of a large collection of human embryonic stem cell lines that are commonly used in research,” said study co-author Noah Rosenberg, an associate professor in the department of human genetics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“Most of these lines appear to derive from European or Middle Eastern populations,” he added. Only two of the lines were linked to East Asians, and “none of these lines derive from populations with recent African ancestry,” the researchers wrote.

Included in the embryonic stem cell lines Rosenberg’s team examined are about 10 of the 20 embryonic stem cell lines recently approved by the U.S. National Institutes of Health for federally funded research.

This suggests that most of the research being done in this area is being done on a very small slice of the human population, Rosenberg noted.

The importance of stem cell lineage remains uncertain, he added. “We don’t yet know the extent to which the ancestry of embryonic stem cell lines will affect the ultimate utility of therapies and drugs developed using stem cell research,” he said.

However, to ensure that new stem cell-derived therapies or drugs will work in a wide range of people, there needs to be an effort to include embryonic stem cell lines from blacks, Asians and other populations.

“New efforts to derive and disseminate additional stem cell lines need to focus on underrepresented populations,” Rosenberg said.

Dr. Camillo Ricordi, scientific director of the Diabetes Research Institute and Cell Transplant Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, called the lack of diversity in stem cell lines “something that should be corrected as new cell lines are being produced.

Ricordi noted that they have started the Florida stem cell bank to add diversity, because right now 85 percent of the cell lines are from whites.

Diversity in stem cell lines is essential, Ricordi believes. “If you are developing therapies for everyone, you cannot leave out anyone of African descent or others,” he said.

Another expert noted the timing of the study was critical.

“It’s a very well-done study with irrefutable findings,” said Dr. Diane Krause, a professor in the departments of laboratory medicine, pathology and cell biology at Yale University School of Medicine. “The timing of this study is important because, with the increased use of inducible pluripotent cell lines from adult donors, it is important to remember that the diseases we are working to cure are often found in patients with specific genetic backgrounds.”

A protein switch called TAK1 helps prevent liver damage, including inflammation, fibrosis and cancer, according to a team of scientists from the United States and Japan.

Learning more about how TAK1 works could improve understanding about the development of liver disease and cancer, and lead to new therapies, the researchers noted in their report, released online the week of Dec. 14 in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“TAK1 appears to be a master regulator of liver function,” study co-leader Dr. David A. Brenner, a professor of medicine and dean at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, said in a university news release.

It was already known that TAK1 activates two proteins that play a role in immunity, inflammation, programmed cell death and cancer. But it wasn’t clear whether TAK1 promotes or prevents liver cancer.

To investigate this question, Brenner and colleagues created mice with liver cells that lacked TAK1 and found that the mice had a high rate of liver cell death. To compensate, the rodents’ livers produced too many cells, resulting in liver damage that led to liver cancer, the researchers found