Eideard

A Newcastle University team has discovered that Type 2 diabetes can be reversed by an extreme low calorie diet alone…

In an early stage clinical trial of 11 people, funded by Diabetes UK, all reversed their diabetes by drastically cutting their food intake to just 600 calories a day for two months. And three months later, seven remained free of diabetes.

Professor Roy Taylor of Newcastle University who led the study and is also Director of the Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre said …, “This is a radical change in understanding Type 2 diabetes. It will change how we can explain it to people newly diagnosed with the condition. While it has long been believed that someone with Type 2 diabetes will always have the disease, and that it will steadily get worse, we have shown that we can reverse the condition.”…

Under close supervision of a medical team, 11 people who had developed diabetes later in life were put on an extreme diet of just 600 calories a day consisting of liquid diet drinks and non-starchy vegetables. They were matched to a control group of people without diabetes and then monitored over eight weeks…

After just one week, the Newcastle University team found that their pre-breakfast blood sugar levels had returned to normal.

A special MRI scan of their pancreas revealed that the fat levels in the pancreas had returned from an elevated level to normal (from around 8% to 6%). In step with this, the pancreas regained the normal ability to make insulin and as a result, blood sugar after meals steadily improved.

The volunteers were then followed-up three months later. During this time they had returned to eating normally but had received advice on portion size and healthy eating. Of the ten people re-tested, seven remained free of diabetes…

The usual precautions apply: Don’t go putting yourself on a 600 calorie a day diet; don’t make too many assumptions or draw too many conclusions from a single small study; etc. All that said, this is indeed interesting.

Thanks, Tom, for finding the story; and Eid, for letting me steal it.

Poo isn’t something generally talked about in polite company but like it or not, all of that human waste has to go somewhere. In smaller rural communities, it usually goes to wastewater lagoon systems; the alternative is mechanical treatment plants which process waste far more quickly but are expensive, labor intensive and often use chemicals. Enter the “Poo-Gloo,” or Bio-Dome as it is officially known – an igloo-shaped device that can reportedly clean up sewage as effectively, but far more cheaply, than its mechanical counterparts.

The Poo-Gloo, developed by Wastewater Compliance Systems, Inc., uses a combination of air, dark environment and large surface area to encourage the growth of a bacterial biofilm which consumes the wastewater pollutants. It is claimed that Poo-Gloos can treat pollutants just as quickly as mechanical plants while operating at a fraction of the cost – hundreds of dollars a month rather than thousands – and can be retrofitted to existing lagoon systems.

The Poo-Gloos work in clusters, with two dozen or more arranged in rows fully submerged at the bottom of the lagoon. Each Poo-Gloo consists of four concentrically nested plastic domes filled with plastic packing to provide a large surface area for bacterial growth. Rings of bubble-release tubes sit at the base of every Poo-Gloo and bubble air up through the cavities between domes. The air exits a hole in the top of each dome. As air moves through the dome, it draws water from the bottom of the lagoon up through the dome and out the top…

Taylor Reynolds, director of sales for Wastewater Compliance Systems says that most of the projects he quotes are between US$150,000 and $500,000, a far more palatable option for an average municipality than the $4 million to $10 million they are quoted for a mechanical plant…

The Poo-Gloo is not just for consuming poo, however. Wastewater Compliance Systems is in the process of filing patents for other applications and markets, hence the rebranding as Bio-Dome, which the company agrees is “less fun” but more appropriate for their diversification.

A significant topic in our household – since we’re only a couple of miles from the city’s wastewater treatment plant. Founded on a less-than-successful design decades ago, the vapors attendant upon it’s function are also less-than-desirable. Something that would be a significant issue in our little community outside the city limits – if we weren’t favored by the prevailing winds.

Donald Stein

Emory University professor Donald Stein became captivated years ago with a question:
Why would women recover better from brain injuries than men?

After years of research in the lab, he found a simple answer in progesterone. The developmental hormone turned out to have a remarkable ability to help lab rats recover from brain injuries. And Stein suspected that it could also help people recover from the devastating effects of car crashes, falls and assaults.

Stein’s theory immediately encountered resistance in the scientific and medical community. “Everybody said this is ridiculous, it’s just a female hormone, it’s not going to work. You’re a dreamer,” Stein said…

Emory University is now leading a major evaluation of Stein’s theory, with a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that is testing the healing possibilities of progesterone on brain injury patients at 17 medical centers in 15 states…

Dr. David Wright, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Emory School of Medicine, is leading the national study and Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital is its lead hospital…

Progesterone is best known as a hormone that helps support pregnancy. But progesterone is also present in the brains of both men and women, and studies suggest is it a critical component of normal brain development. A brain injury begins with an event but continues as a process, with damage continuing after the trauma occurs. Stein discovered that progesterone administered within hours of the trauma can protect cells and tissues that might otherwise be damaged…

The breakthrough that began to silence many doubters came when Kellermann and Wright persuaded the National Institutes of Health to authorize a small three-year study of 100 patients to determine whether the hormone was safe to use in brain injury patients. The results of the experiment conducted between 2001 and 2005 were electrifying: Not only did the study show progesterone to be safe, it strongly suggested that the hormone helped patients survive and recover…

The [current] study, which began last year, has already enrolled 130 patients. It will take about four years to complete the experiment, with a total of 1,140 patients. Half get progesterone. Half get a placebo. None of the doctors will know until the study concludes which patients got the drug…

“Thanks to the NIH, they’re in a position to get the definite answer,” Kellermann said. “If the answer is positive, this is Georgia science done in Georgia’s top trauma center in a leading medical school based in Atlanta. And that’s really cool.”

The ancient Chinese practice of tai chi may be effective as a therapy for fibromyalgia, according to a study published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

A clinical trial at Tufts Medical Center found that after 12 weeks of tai chi, patients with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, did significantly better in measurements of pain, fatigue, physical functioning, sleeplessness and depression than a comparable group given stretching exercises and wellness education. Tai chi patients were also more likely to sustain improvement three months later.

“It’s an impressive finding,” said Dr. Daniel Solomon, chief of clinical research in rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the research. “This was a well-done study. It was kind of amazing that the effects seem to carry over.”

Although the study was small, 66 patients, several experts considered it compelling because fibromyalgia is a complex and often-confusing condition, affecting five million Americans, mostly women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since its symptoms can be wide-ranging and can mimic other disorders, and its diagnosis depends largely on patients’ descriptions, not blood tests or biopsies, its cause and treatment have been the subject of debate.

If you suffer from fibromyalgia, take a look at this and tell me if you find it interesting. Thanks.

Mentally ill prisoners in Ohio are more likely to get into trouble and end up back in prison after they are released because state officials turn them loose without the follow-up care they need.

A lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, asked a judge to order the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and the Ohio Department of Mental Health to provide the care necessary to help keep mentally ill offenders from returning to prison.

Advocates for prisoners and the mentally ill said they are suing to help not only the released prisoners, but also the taxpayers who must pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep them locked up when they commit new crimes and are sent back to prison.

They say the cost of providing treatment to a mentally ill person in the community is about $7,400 a year, compared to the $25,000 a year it costs to incarcerate them.

But instead of treatment, the lawsuit claims, ex-convicts with mental problems get $65 to $75, a bus ticket and two weeks of medication upon their release. The suit said many of those former inmates soon move into homeless shelters or drug-infested neighborhoods, where their mental health quickly deteriorates.

“Dumping prisoners with mental illness at homeless shelters creates a revolving door phenomenon,” said Bess Okum, staff attorney with the Cincinnati-based Ohio Justice and Policy Center, which filed the suit on behalf of nine current and former prisoners. “Many of these former prisoners commit new crimes because of their untreated mental illness.”

Like the great state of Ohio gives a damn about civil rights or how they waste taxpayers’ money.

And our favorite ignorant electorate will march in lockstep down that always-safe middle of the road.

Some of the most egregious and disgusting politics of any imperial war.

Simple aspirin may prevent liver damage in millions of people suffering from side effects of common drugs, alcohol abuse, and obesity-related liver disease, a new Yale University study suggests.

The study documents that in mice, aspirin reduced mortality caused by an overdose of acetaminophen, best known by the brand name Tylenol. It further showed that a class of molecules known as TLR antagonists, which block receptors known to activate inflammation, have a similar effect as aspirin.

Since these agents seem to work by reducing injury-induced inflammation, the results suggest aspirin may help prevent and treat liver damage from a host of non-infectious causes, said Wajahat Mehal, M.D.. “Many agents such as drugs and alcohol cause liver damage, and we have found two ways to block a central pathway responsible for such liver injury,” Mehal said. “Our strategy is to use aspirin on a daily basis to prevent liver injury, but if it occurs, to use TLR antagonists to treat it.”

Promising drugs that have failed clinical trials because of liver toxicity might be resurrected if combined with aspirin, Mehal said.

I’m one of those elderly geeks whose physician simply told me several years ago – “Take a baby aspirin every day! It will help prevent a number of ailments and it ain’t ever going to harm you.”

This started life as a sewer plant. That’s what everyone called it.

Then, it became a Municipal Wastewater treatment Plant. Bureaucrats seem to inflate their importance – while mainstreaming whatever niche their lives are dedicated to.

This is what they’ve recently grown to add.

For many residents of this liberal bastion, President Bush’s name is mud. Now activists here want to make that moniker stick.

A group calling itself the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco this week submitted a proposal to rename a sewage treatment plant after the outgoing chief executive in recognition of the political and environmental “mess” they say will be his legacy.

Supporters submitted 12,000 signatures with San Francisco election officials, hoping to place on the ballot an initiative that would rechristen the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

“We think this is a fitting tribute to this president,” said Brian McConnell, a member of the group, whose insignia shows the presidential seal with a bald eagle holding two plungers…

Sadly, we have no shortage of politicians who deserve such a memorial. Bush simply is the worst of an American tradition of corruption and cronyism.