Gleeman’s Daily News—06/25

Olaparib, a new PARP inhibitor, shows great promise treating some cancers

"It's giving patients who have already tried many conventional treatments long periods of remission, free from the symptoms of cancer or major side-effects."

Olaparib is the first successful example of a new type of personalised medicine using a technique called "synthetic lethality" - a subtle way of exploiting the body's own molecular weaknesses for positive effect.

In this case the drug takes advantage of the fact that while normal cells have several different ways of repairing damage to their DNA, one of these pathways is disabled by the BRCA mutations in tumour cells.

This is an easier ordeal than chemo, a first in personalized medicine, and a completely new way to treat some forms of cancer. Good work!

Artificial self-contained heart implanted in first commercial patient

AbioCor is considered self-contained because it has a built-in battery, unlike earlier artificial hearts such as the Jarvik (now called CardioWest), which are tethered to external consoles. It also contains a microprocessor that sends radio signals to a computer monitoring the patient’s health.

The device is not designed to keep a patient alive indefinitely, but to extend the lives of dying patients who are too sick to receive transplants.

In addition to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, two other hospitals have been approved and trained by Abiomed to implant AbioCor: Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital.

A miracle of a machine, the unit is for dying patients, I wonder if they are working on a more permanent concept for longer use.

Bronx H.I.V. Testing Campaign seeks to test every adult

Department of Health and Mental Hygiene The H.I.V. testing initiative is carried out under the slogan “The Bronx Knows.”

An ambitious effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough, has resulted in a roughly 28 percent increase in H.I.V. tests, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene announced on Wednesday, the one-year anniversary of the three-year testing effort.

I am not for mandatory HIV testing, but by making the test free and the medication freely available, we can beat down this terrible killer virus.

For a long life, the Mediterranean diet may have benefits

Research has found that sticking to the diet can protect the brain against developing Alzheimer's and other memory problems Photo: GETTY

The latest study, which followed 23,000 people, found that those who adhered most closely to a typical Mediterranean diet were 14 per cent more likely to still be alive at the end of eight years.

Prof Dimitrios Trichopoulos, from the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study, said: "The analysis suggests that the dominant components of the Mediterranean diet... are moderate consumption of alcohol, mostly in the form of wine during meals, as it traditional in the Mediterranean countries, low consumption of meat and meat products, and high consumption of vegetables, fruits and nuts, olive oil and legume."

This diet keeps coming up in the news as a research item, probably because there is some scientific reasoning behind it, and lots of people eating it up.