Green Tea Compound Stops Alzheimer's in Mice
An ingredient in green tea has prevented Alzheimer's disease-like brain damage in mice, researchers report.
The compound, called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), decreased production of the protein beta-amyloid, which accumulates in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and causes nerve damage and memory loss.
"The findings suggest that a concentrated component of green tea can decrease brain beta-amyloid plaque formation," senior researcher Dr. Jun Tan, director of the Neuroimmunology Laboratory at the the University of South Florida's Silver Child Development Center, said in a prepared statement.
Reporting in the Sept. 21 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, the research team worked with mice genetically programmed to develop a disease mimicking human Alzheimer's.
The mice received daily injections of EGCG for several months and showed as much as a 54 percent reduction in the formation of brain-clogging beta-amyloid plaques. It appears that EGCG prevents the initial process that leads to beta-amyloid formation in brain cells, the researchers said.
"If beta-amyloid pathology in this Alzheimer's mouse model is representative of Alzheimer's disease pathology in humans, EGCG dietary supplementation may be effective in preventing and treating the disease," Tan said.
The researchers will next study whether multiple oral doses of EGCG improve memory loss in mice with Alzheimer's.
"If those studies show clear cognitive benefits, we believe clinical trials of EGCG to treat Alzheimer's disease would be warranted," Tan said.
Courage and Caring Amid Katrina's Chaos
Of all the surreal scenes playing out across New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this may have been one of the strangest.
As the New Orleans flood waters rose, Dr. Joseph Guarisco, chairman of emergency medicine at the city's Ochsner Clinic Foundation, looked out the center's windows and saw a succession of people perched on boats, rafts and even garbage cans floating by.
Then, finally, a city bus sped through the water. It did not pass the hospital and continue west with the stream but, instead, sped up the ambulance ramp and screeched to a halt. At least there was a dry place to stop: Ochsner is above sea level.
The bus, it turned out, held paraplegics who had been carried down eight flights of stairs at another hospital. The city bus had been commandeered by the paramedics and had been turned away by every shelter and hospital between Ochsner and downtown, a distance of about five miles.
"I'm turning the bus off, parking it and leaving," the paramedic, who was armed, stated.
Guarisco tried to reason with the paramedic: The paraplegics didn't have any acute medical problems, so they really needed to be at a shelter, not a hospital. The hospital needed to be ready for medical emergencies. But the paramedic prepared to leave, so Guarisco summoned Ochsner security (also armed) and, finally, the hospital's CEO.
"The infrastructure of the city was falling apart, police were abandoning their positions, city bus drivers were abandoning running buses. The city's flooding, and here we have paraplegics inside a bus and there's an armed standoff between paramedics and our own security," Guarisco said. "It was right out of a scene about the end of the world."
Ochsner staff finally convinced the paramedic to return the paraplegics to the last shelter they had visited.
The scene was perhaps not too much stranger than other scenes playing out all over New Orleans and, indeed, throughout the Gulf Coast after Katrina unleashed her fury at the end of August.
At the heart of so many of those stories, men and women trained in emergency care used whatever resources were at hand to help others struggling against chaos, confusion and death.
Chapels and operating rooms were turned into makeshift morgues, corpses floated in nursing homes and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials commandeered transportation away from hospitals and nursing homes, according to news reports.
Some patients waited up to 12 hours in stairwells waiting to be airlifted, only to be told it wasn't going to happen that day. There were reports of one hospital evacuating its staff before sick infants. Some 90 patients died in area hospitals, the news reports found.
At the New Orleans International Airport, Concourse D became the initial triage and treatment center for thousand of evacuees from nursing homes, hospitals, private homes, civic centers and the Superdome.
By the time Dr. Russell Bieniek arrived from Erie, Pa., as part of a disaster medical assistance team, the overflow had taken over the rest of that floor and the floor below it.
"It was wall-to-wall people waiting for care and transport," said Bieniek, who is medical director of the emergency department at St. Vincent Health Center in Erie. On the busiest day, about 12,000 people came through.
While many patients simply required wound and other minor care, others were critical.
"Most of the evacuees had not had any medical care in four or five days. This meant no dialysis, blood pressure meds, cardiac meds, seizure meds, insulin," Bieniek. "We had a man having an acute heart attack, several patients seizing, a woman nearing cardiac arrest from high potassium because she missed her dialysis, and many people with sugars out of control from not having any insulin where they were."
For several days, Bieniek slept in the baggage claim area and took showers in a trailer provided by the forestry service and parked between C and D concourses. The number of patients being treated at the airport had dwindled to by the end of the first week of September as patients were moved elsewhere.
In the parking lot of the Houston Astrodome, where thousands huddled in the weeks after the storm, doctors waiting to treat patients arriving by bus saw many of the same issues: chronic diseases gone awry because patients had no access to medication.
Several people were admitted to hospital with diabetic ketoacidosis -- a dangerously high level of ketones, or acids, that build up in the blood and can lead to diabetic coma or death, said Dr. Clinton White, a professor of internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of infectious disease at Ben Taub General Hospital, both in Houston.
One person appears to have died of a heart attack because his blood pressure had skyrocketed, said White, who is also a counselor with the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene.
During that first chaotic weekend in September, medical staff were suddenly faced with an outbreak of diarrhea in the Astrodome. "Hundreds of people were getting sick," White said.
Medical personnel blocked off one area of the arena to isolate people while labs ran tests for free. The culprit turned out to be norovirus, the same germ responsible for many illnesses aboard cruise ships.
The problem was that people in the Astrodome and adjacent Astro Arena were using alcohol disinfectant, which doesn't work well for this particular organism. White had more sinks put in so people could wash with soap and water.
Dr. Hilarie Cranmer was driving to Boston's Logan Airport, preparing to fly to France to speak about her experiences tending victims of the Asian tsunami, when her cell phone rang.
It was the Harvard Humanitarian Institute asking her to fly to Louisiana to help the Red Cross coordinate disaster efforts. She turned the car around and repacked for Baton Rouge.
The devastation, especially in Mississippi, looked a lot like that from the tsunami, Cranmer recalled. And, again, thousands upon thousands of people were displaced. Cranmer was charged with helping to coordinate with the various shelters, making sure they had what they needed.
This proved more difficult than anticipated.
"One of the hardest things was to actually find out where the shelters were because the communications were down," Cranmer said. "We knew there were shelters out there, but we couldn't know what they needed because we couldn't get through." Eventually, they did, and made sure that basic public health standards were being met, things like separating trash from food and cleaning up overflowing toilets.
The Ochsner emergency room saw just a handful of patients during the storm. Once the water started rising, however, they saw people stranded, starved, dehydrated and/or elderly wandering out of the city. "A lot of people were without basic resources of food, water and medication," Guarisco said. "There was a tremendous amount of despair and helplessness. It was truly as if someone had dropped a bomb in the middle of the city."
That stream of desperate individuals included even fellow rescue workers injured in accidents.
Still, as yet another storm -- Hurricane Rita -- loomed Tuesday, Guarisco said Ochsner's emergency department has gotten "back to regular business," ready to face what comes.
At least for now.
Health Tip: Caring for Your Skin
If you're in your 20s or 30s and value your youthful appearance, now's the time to begin a good skin care program. It may help you avoid cosmetic surgery down the road, according to the Facial Plastic Surgery Center at Saint Louis University.
Here are some tips:
Get enough sleep.
Eat healthy.
Limit your caffeine consumption.
Use sunscreen every day.
Wear sunglasses to avoid squinting.
Don't go to tanning salons.
Establish a nighttime skin care ritual.
Use the right skin care products.
Don't smoke.
Consider anti-wrinkle creams.
Health Tip: Prevent Colon Cancer
Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the United States with about 135,000 new cases diagnosed each year, according to Duke University Medical Center.
Here are some ways to minimize your risk of developing colorectal cancer:
Follow a healthful diet.
Exercise regularly.
After age 40, start a screening program that includes an annual digital rectal exam and a stool-sample test. After age 50, get a colonoscopy every five to 10 years.
If there's a family history of colorectal cancer, talk to your doctor about starting a more rigorous screening program.
Be alert for symptoms including blood in the stool, a change in bowel habits, and abdominal pain.
No comments:
Post a Comment