Scrutinizing Unpasteurized Milk
Unpasteurized milk represents an unacceptable risk to public health, according to a team from the Public Health Laboratory Service in London. The team studied more than 1,000 samples of unpasteurized milk purchased at 242 retail outlets in England and Wales.
They reported in the Feb. 20 British Medical Journal that 41 samples from 26 outlets contained potentially harmful bacteria, including campylobacter (19 samples), salmonella (five samples), and E. coli 0157 (3 samples). In total, samples from 128 of the 242 outlets either contained harmful bacteria or were of unacceptable hygienic quality.
The bacteria risk would be comparable in the United States.
Report: Fetal Cells Trigger Scleroderma
Scleroderma, a severe, sometimes fatal autoimmune disease that affects primarily women, may be triggered by fetal cells that enter a woman’s bloodstream during pregnancy and persist for years, according to a report in the Feb. 21 Lancet. These fetal cells are immune progenitor cells, which have the capacity to form a wide variety of immune cells.
Dr. J. Lee Nelson and her colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle collected blood from 40 women who had given birth to at least one son (the male cells in the women’s blood being easily identifiable as fetal cells).
Seventeen of the women had scleroderma, 16 were healthy and the other seven were healthy sisters of scleroderma patients. The researchers then tested the blood for the presence of male cells. The healthy women had an average of only 0.38 male fetal cells per 16 milliliters of blood, compared to an average of 11.1 in the scleroderma sufferers.
Alternate Bone-Loss Treatment Shows Promise
Alendronate, an alternative treatment for protecting older women from bone loss, is almost as effective as conventional hormone therapy, a new study shows. In tests on 1,609 post-menopausal women at risk for osteoporosis, a team of scientists reports in the Feb. 19 New England Journal of Medicine that the drug, tradenamed Fosamax, increases bone mineral density at most sites in the body.
The proportion of postmenopausal women who lost more than 2% of total-body mineral density was 42% in the placebo group, 19% in the group given the 2.5-milligram dose of alendronate, and 9% in the group given the 5-milligram dose.
But the drug did not work for everyone. The researchers cautioned that some women getting the medicine still lost bone mass, while the conventional estrogen-progesterone hormone combination had few failures. Estrogen also offers a number of other benefits, such as protection against cardiovascular problems and Alzheimer’s disease, that alendronate does not.
Genetic Test May Help Alzheimer’s Diagnosis
A genetic test for Alzheimer’s disease can reduce the number of patients incorrectly diagnosed with the ailment by about 30% when used with other evaluation tools, according to a new study in the current New England Journal of Medicine. The only way to conclusively diagnose Alzheimer’s disease now is by examining the brain during an autopsy.
The test, which identifies which of three forms of a gene called ApoE is found in the patient’s blood, isn’t accurate enough to be used alone to detect the progressive disease, the researchers said.
The team compiled data from 2,188 patients who were examined at one of 26 federally funded Alzheimer’s Disease Centers and who subsequently died.
Doctors using standard evaluation techniques and diagnostic tests like brain scans correctly identified 93% of patients who had the disease. But they incorrectly identified 45% of patients with another form of dementia, a total of 190 patients, as suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
If they had used the ApoE test, the number of so-called false positives would have decreased to 16%, the researchers said.
Test May Benefit Patients With Mild Heart Disease
A technique called stress myocardial perfusion imaging can identify patients with mild heart disease who do not need costly and invasive surgical procedures, researchers from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center report in the Feb. 17 Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Assn.
A team led by Dr. Daniel Berman at Cedars studied 5,000 patients over a three-year period. The test involves injecting a radioactive chemical called Sestamibi and monitoring it to measure blood flow through the heart.
They found that, for patients identified by the technique as having mild heart disease, catheterization of the heart--a technique usually followed by balloon angioplasty or bypass surgery--gave no survival advantage when compared to patients who only took heart medication or made lifestyle changes.
They concluded that screening out patients with mild heart disease could provide a 33.5% total cost savings.
