From www.physorg.com:

Coffee provides more than just a morning jolt; that steaming cup of java is also the number one source of antioxidants in the U.S. diet, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Scranton (Pa.). Their study was described today at the 230th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

“Americans get more of their antioxidants from coffee than any other dietary source. Nothing else comes close,” says study leader Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a chemistry professor at the university. Although fruits and vegetables are generally promoted as good sources of antioxidants, the new finding is surprising because it represents the first time that coffee has been shown to be the primary source from which most Americans get their antioxidants, Vinson says. Both caffeinated and decaf versions appear to provide similar antioxidant levels, he adds.
He cautions that high antioxidant levels in foods and beverages don’t necessarily translate into levels found in the body. The potential health benefits of these antioxidants ultimately depends on how they are absorbed and utilized in the body, a process that is still poorly understood, says Vinson, whose study was primarily funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute.
The news follows a growing number of reports touting the potential health benefits of drinking coffee. It also comes at an appropriate time: Coffee consumption is on the rise in the United States and over half of Americans drink it everyday, according to the National Coffee Association.
Antioxidants in general have been linked to a number of potential health benefits, including protection against heart disease and cancer. For the current study, Vinson and his associates analyzed the antioxidant content of more than 100 different food items, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, spices, oils and common beverages. The data was compared to an existing U.S. Department of Agriculture database on the contribution of each type of food item to the average estimated U.S. per capita consumption.
Coffee came out on top, on the combined basis of both antioxidants per serving size and frequency of consumption, Vinson says. Java easily outranked such popular antioxidant sources as tea, milk, chocolate and cranberries, he says. Of all the foods and beverages studied, dates actually have the most antioxidants of all based solely on serving size, according to Vinson. But since dates are not consumed at anywhere near the level of coffee, the blue ribbon goes to our favorite morning pick-me-up as the number one source of antioxidants, he says.
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Besides keeping you alert and awake, coffee has been linked to an increasing number of potential health benefits, including protection against liver and colon cancer, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease, according to some recently published studies. But there’s also a downside: Java can make you jittery and cause stomach pains, while some studies have tied it to elevated blood pressure and heart rates. More research is needed, particularly human studies, to firmly establish its health benefits, Vinson says.
While the findings would seem to encourage people to go out and drink more coffee, Vinson emphasizes moderation. “One to two cups a day appear to be beneficial,” he says. If you don’t like coffee, consider drinking black tea, which is the second most consumed antioxidant source in the U.S. diet, Vinson says. Bananas, dry beans and corn placed third, fourth and fifth, respectively.
But don’t forget about fresh fruits and veggies, the researcher cautions. “Unfortunately, consumers are still not eating enough fruits and vegetables, which are better for you from an overall nutritional point of view due to their higher content of vitamins, minerals and fiber,” Vinson says. Dates, cranberries and red grapes are among the top fruits for antioxidants on the basis of concentration (antioxidants per serving size), he says.

Love my JAVA in the morning!

From ABCNews.go.com:

With a worsening ulcer and the threat of losing a foot, Pam Mitchell was willing to try something drastic; she had live maggots put in her wound.

“I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t have any options, I had to have [it] amputated,” she recalled.

But she heard about maggot therapy from a friend who had seen it on The Learning Channel. While it took some convincing of her doctors, Mitchell said they agreed to try it before amputation.

Her dermatologist, she recalled, said, “Why not, let’s try it.” The doctors sent off to a lab in California to have specially bred maggots shipped in, although Mitchell believes they probably did it to show her it wouldn’t work.

But in Mitchell’s case, it did.

Consuming the dead tissue, the maggots, it seems, were able to help the wound heal and prevent the foot from being amputated. In the course of 10 treatments with maggots, the ulcer in her foot, which had become a gaping hole before therapy, began to get better. Mitchell also took antibiotics to help avoid further infection.

“Every time we used them, my foot filled in a little bit more, each time,” said Mitchell, 56, of Akron, Ohio, who now speaks about the therapy as a representative of the BioTherapeutics, Education & Research Foundation in Irvine, Calif.

The company is headed by Dr. Ronald Sherman, a now-retired professor at the University of California-Irvine who studied maggot therapy for more than 20 years in healing wounds that other therapies weren’t repairing.

Now a new study in the British Medical Journal, headed by researchers at the University of York in England, reports that maggot therapy is about as effective as conventional therapies at healing leg ulcers. The fly maggots cleaned the wound slightly faster, but did not increase the overall rate of healing. Also, the maggot treatment was much more painful in the early stages.

“In people with leg ulcers, we didn’t find that larval therapy increased healing rates,” said Nicky Cullum, head of the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York. “It cleans it more quickly, but it didn’t heal it more quickly.”

Maggots Not a Turn-Off for Patients

But, like Mitchell, she found that patients were not averse to treatment with the maggots.

“One thing we did find is that patients were not put off. …The patients were very enthusiastic,” she said.

Cullum noted that the procedure, which had been used since ancient Rome, was likely without much hazard. It has been approved by both the United Kingdom’s National Health Service and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“There’s no reason to suspect they’re not safe,” Cullum said.

Researchers used maggots from a species of fly known variably as the sheep blowfly or the green bottlefly, which is probably known to most people for its gathering around deceased humans and animals, although it can congregate around live ones as well.

But some questions remain.

While he declined to speak about the medical effectiveness of the therapy, Richard Wall, a zoologist at the University of Bristol, noted that there is no guarantee that the flies will not eat live flesh as well as the dead tissue.

“They will try to do so, if they are overcrowded,” Wall said. “The key thing is that the number of maggots needs to be kept fairly low to prevent this; then they will feed happily on the [dead] tissue. So, working out the correct numbers is critical. When these maggots kill sheep, it’s because you get very high numbers on a single animal.”

Sherman, who has done a number of trials on maggot therapy during the years, said that he had not observed anything similar in humans. Although he noted that he tries to avoid having too many maggots on a wound, recommending five to eight maggots per square centimeter.

During her treatment, Mitchell said, there were too many maggots in her foot, which caused some pain when they swelled up after eating the dead tissue.

“When they come out, they’re fat, like puffed rice,” Mitchell said.

Not Very Controversial but Not Very Well Known

Dermatologists contacted by ABCNews.com said the therapy appeared to be effective overall, but was clearly not well known.

No Maggot Therapy in Medical School

“If it works, what’s wrong with it?” said Dr. Eliot Ghatan, a dermatologist in Brooklyn, N.Y. “If you have a fancy medication here, it doesn’t mean you can throw out effective therapeutic methods of the past.”

He added, however, that, “It’s not very well known. When you go to medical school, they don’t teach you about maggot therapy.”

Dr. Conway Huang, director of dermatologic surgery and cutaneous laser surgery at the University of Alabama, echoed those statements.

“It’s not something that is taught to doctors in training. Residency programs … we don’t teach our residents this,” he said. “Current methods of wound healing are probably more convenient and nearly as effective, if not as effective.”

Despite their familiarity with the therapy, neither Ghatan nor Huang have performed it on a patient or had it requested by a patient.

For his part, Sherman said that while his own experience has been different, he was pleased that a maggot study was published.

“I think it’s great news that they finally did a study of maggot therapy that follows patients all the way to wound closure,” he said.

The therapy was researched heavily in the 1930s by Dr. William Baer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but was ultimately replaced by antibiotics, which remain the standard of care.

Considering All Options

The British study, commissioned by the National Health Service, was done, in part, to determine the cost effectiveness of maggot therapy versus regular therapy. The researchers concluded that there was not a significant difference in cost effectiveness.

Sherman attributes that to the fact that the form of maggot therapy examined in the British study used more conventional drugs than his own version of the treatment.

While Sherman does not believe conventional treatments should be abandoned as the first line of treatment against skin ulcers, he hopes that maggot therapy will be recognized as an alternative when conventional therapies do not heal patients.

No One Product Works for Everybody
Patients Don’t Seem to Mind Uncommon Therapy That May Ward Off Amputation

From ABCNews.go.com:

“Neither maggot therapy nor the standard of care is 100 percent effective, or else there wouldn’t be 2,000 wound-care products on the market,” he said. “The reason there are so many wound-care products is there isn’t a single product that works for everybody, so what you want to do is pick something that has the best chance of efficacy.

“If that doesn’t work, then you need an alternative, and you want that alternative to have the best chance.”

Yum! Yum!

For all of us who complain about work here is an inspirational man. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Being ‘at peace with God’ affects medical choices, study finds

From Sharp.com:

Addressing the spiritual needs of someone with advanced cancer could be just as important as taking care of their medical needs, a new study suggests.
When asked what was important to them at the end of their lives, people dying of cancer ranked two factors highest: pain control and being at peace with God, the study found.
“Medicine tends to focus on the more scientific aspects of the person, and we’ve made wonderful strides in improving patient care, but there’s another important component of patient health: spirituality,” explained Dr. Tracy Anne Balboni, a radiation oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the study’s lead author. “This is clearly an area where some important advancements can be made.”
The researchers discovered that people with advanced cancer were far more likely to choose hospice care when their spiritual needs had been addressed. And among those who were very religious, meeting spiritual needs increased the odds that a terminal patient would choose to forgo aggressive, yet often unsuccessful, medical treatments, the study found.
However, at least six of 10 people with advanced cancer reported that their spiritual needs were only minimally or not at all supported.
Results of the study were published online Dec. 14 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Earlier research had found that the most religious patients are much more likely to choose aggressive treatments during their last week of life in an attempt to prolong their life — even if those treatments don’t improve their quality of life. Aggressive treatments include mechanical ventilation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
“A religious person might think they need to do aggressive care,” said Balboni, adding that they may feel it’s wrong to give up. “But, if the medical team engages them more, they can help them understand that it’s not necessarily against their religion to forgo futile medical procedures.”
The new study involved 670 people with advanced cancer from seven treatment centers in the Northeast and Texas. The final analysis included information from 343 people who later died and whose caregivers completed a post-death interview. The average time between the start of the study and the person’s death was 116 days.
For purposes of the study, spiritual care was defined as patient-perceived support of their spiritual needs by their medical team and the receipt of pastoral care services.
Most people (60 percent) said that their spiritual needs either hadn’t been met or were minimally supported at the start of the study, and 54 percent had not received pastoral care visits. In the final week of life, 73 percent of the participants received hospice care, and 17 percent received aggressive care.
Those who had greater spiritual support from their medical team, including doctors, nurses, chaplains and more, reported a higher quality of life as they neared death than did those who felt unsupported spiritually.
People who felt they were getting better spiritual support were 3½ times more likely to receive hospice care. And among highly religious people, those whose spiritual needs were supported were five times more likely to receive hospice care and five times less likely to receive aggressive medical care, the study reported.
“We found that patients whose spiritual needs were well-supported seemed to transition to hospice more frequently and had a marked reduction in the use of aggressive care,” Balboni said.
Yet despite the findings, said Dr. Harold G. Koenig, co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center, “few people are getting their spiritual needs met by the medical system.”
“Many doctors are uncomfortable discussing spirituality and haven’t been trained to do so,” he said. “And churches have a role, too. Although it’s not a popular topic, churches need to talk about the end of life in the pulpit. People don’t know theologically what they’re supposed to do.”
Religious people, Koenig said, are often left to think they should always have hope and should always “give God a chance to provide a miracle.” Hospice care, though, can often provide spiritual guidance and help people prepare for death, he said.
Doctors don’t need to actually provide spiritual care, Koenig said, but it’s important for physicians to acknowledge their patients’ spiritual needs and make sure they’re addressed by pastoral care or hospice. “The doctor does have to be the one to orchestrate this,” he said.
But if someone’s spiritual needs are not being met, Koenig and Balboni agreed that the person — or a friend or family member — needs to speak up. And if the patient’s doctor doesn’t feel qualified to discuss end-of-life spiritual issues, the doctor should be able to refer you to someone who can.

From Nutraingredients-USA.com

A naturally occurring compound in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may help protect against asthma and other conditions due to respiratory inflammation, says a new study.
Consumption of broccoli sprouts led to a two- to three-fold increase in levels of antioxidant enzymes linked to the protection of human airways against oxidative tissue damage, which leads to inflammation and respiratory conditions like asthma, according to findings published in Clinical Immunology.

“This is one of the first studies showing that broccoli sprouts – a readily available food source – offered potent biologic effects in stimulating an antioxidant response in humans,” said lead researcher Marc Riedl from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

The tissue of cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and Brussels sprouts, contain high levels of the active plant chemicals glucosinolates. These are metabolised by the body into isothiocyanates, which are known to be powerful anti-carcinogens. The main isothiocyanate from broccoli is sulphoraphane.

“We found a two- to three-fold increase in antioxidant enzymes in the nasal airway cells of study participants who had eaten a preparation of broccoli sprouts,” said Riedl. “This strategy may offer protection against inflammatory processes and could lead to potential treatments for a variety of respiratory conditions.”

The study extends out understanding of the potential health benefits of broccoli, with previous studies reporting that the isothiocyanates exert powerful anti-carcinogenic activity.

Listen to your mother! Eat your broccoli!

Riedl and his co-workers recruited 65 people and assigned them to receive varying oral doses of sulforaphane-containing broccoli sprouts or non-sulforaphane-containing alfalfa sprouts for three days. Rinses of nasal passages were collected at before and after the study and used to quantify gene expression of antioxidant enzymes, including glutathione-s-transferase M1 (GSTM1), glutathione-s-transferase P1 (GSTP1), NADPH quinone oxidoreductase (NQO1), and hemoxygenase-1 (HO-1), in cells of the upper airways.

No adverse effects were reported by the subjects, while the nasal rinses showed significant and dose-dependent induction of the antioxidant enzymes at broccoli sprout doses of 100 grams and higher, compared with the alfalfa placebo group.

Indeed, at a broccoli sprout dose of 200 grams (the maximum tested) a 101-per cent increase of GSTP1 and a 199-per cent increase of NQO1 were reported.

“A major advantage of sulforaphane is that it appears to increase a broad array of antioxidant enzymes, which may help the compound’s effectiveness in blocking the harmful effects of air pollution,” said Riedl.

The results of the study provide “vital information for planning additional clinical trials”, said the researchers. In particular, they noted that future human studies are necessary to “thoroughly investigate the potential beneficial effects of Phase II enzyme induction on environmentally-induced oxidative stress and associated allergic airway inflammation”.

From NYTimes.com:

It took three decades to figure out what was making Donna Sawka so sick. Her symptoms — bloating, chronic diarrhea and weight loss — began early in childhood, and they only became worse as she aged.
Nine years ago, after developing severe anemia, a specialist told Ms. Sawka that she had celiac disease. The digestive disorder causes damage to the small intestine when gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, is ingested. People with the disease need to follow a strict gluten-free diet for the rest of their lives to avoid serious complications like osteoporosis and lymphoma, an immune system cancer.
Ms. Sawka, 48, of Fairless Hills, Pa., said she “was overwhelmed” upon learning she had the disease.
“I kept thinking about everything I wouldn’t be able to eat,” she went on. “I couldn’t even receive communion at church.”
Ms. Sawka’s reaction is a familiar one at the support group she attends. It takes the average patient 10 years to receive a diagnosis. And according to specialists, they are the lucky ones. Studies show that 3 million Americans, or 1 in every 133 people, have celiac disease. But 95 percent of them have yet to learn they have it, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“The entire disease and all of its manifestations are incredibly underdiagnosed,” said Dr. Charles Bongiorno, the chief of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. “Patients often have it for a decade or two before they are diagnosed.”
Celiac disease is often difficult to detect because the symptoms vary so widely from person to person. Ten years ago, the medical community thought it was a rare disorder that affected only 1 in every 10,000 people, primarily children who had digestive problems and failure to thrive.
But physicians now know that the disease is much more common. Most patients never experience the so-called classic symptoms: bloating, chronic diarrhea and stomach upset. Instead, the signs are often as nebulous as anemia, infertility and osteoporosis.
“It’s a problem,” said Dr. Ritu Verma, section chief of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition and director of the Children’s Celiac Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The majority of patients do not have the traditional signs and symptoms. If someone’s only presenting symptom is anemia, physicians will think of a hundred other things before they think of celiac disease.”
As a result, the condition is also commonly mistaken for other ailments. Ms. Sawka, for one, was told she had everything from irritable bowel syndrome to lupus to an allergic reaction from a spider bite before celiac disease was confirmed.
Part of the problem is also a lack of education among physicians, particularly internists. According to Dr. Bongiorno, most primary care physicians are simply unaware of new research that shows the disease is common and can manifest itself in unusual ways.
“They think it is an exotic malady,” he explained. “That persistent fallacy causes a less-than-appropriate effort to order the right blood tests and refer to gastroenterologists for care.”
In 2006, the National Institutes of Health started a campaign to raise awareness of the disease among both the general public and physicians. A goal was to increase rates of diagnosis because, unlike many ailments, there is a definitive way to stop celiac disease from progressing once it is recognized.
“The vast majority of cases experience a complete remission from symptoms once they are diagnosed and go on a gluten-free diet,” said Dr. Stefano Guandalini, director of the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center. “So essentially, you have no disease. That is what makes it all the more important to be diagnosed.”
And there is no better time to be on a gluten-free diet. In 2008, 832 gluten-free products entered the market, nearly 6 times the number that debuted in 2003. Last year, gluten-free even emerged as a fad diet in the general population.
“The quantity and quality of these products is amazing,” said Dr. Alessio Fasano, the medical director of the Center for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
Dr. Fasano said gluten-free products used to taste like cardboard but had significantly improved in recent years. “The only problem,” he said, “is that they cost five or six times more than their normal counterparts.”
Researchers are also beginning to experiment with drugs that may be able to block the immune response to gluten, much like a lactate pill. If the clinical trials are successful, individuals with celiac disease may be someday able to ingest small amounts of gluten.
Until then, the gluten-free diet is working for patients like Ms. Sawka. “I am perfect now,” she said after 35 years of feeling sick. “Every system in my body was in an uproar, and then everything just quieted down.”

I have several patients with Celiacs and many more who are sensitive to gluten. If you have any of these symptoms make sure your M.D or chiropractor tests you. In children you may see learning disabilities,Autism,ADD,AD/HD and a host of other symptoms.