Prostate Cancer & vitamin study, flawed?

Life Extension responds to misleading Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article

A problem facing researchers today is that by the time human clinical trials are designed, funded, and conducted over multi-year periods, the primary reason for doing the study often turns out to be obsolete.

Based on a number of favorable reports, the U.S. Government decided to spend over $114 million dollars to see if alpha-tocopherol and/or selenium supplements prevent prostate cancer. Data collected after five years found no reduction in prostate cancer incidence in men taking these supplements.

We have known for over ten years that when alpha-tocopherol is taken by itself, it displaces critically important gamma-tocopherol in our cells. An abundance of evidence points to the gamma-tocopherol form of vitamin E as the most protective against prostate cancer.

By supplementing aging men with only alpha-tocopherol, scientists may have unwittingly increased these men’s prostate cancer risk by depriving prostate cells of critical gamma-tocopherol. This is only a tiny part of the real story behind this terribly flawed study.

The American Medical Association is now using this study to discredit vitamin E and selenium supplements. An AMA editorial concludes by advising:

“…. physicians should not recommend selenium or vitamin E — or any other antioxidant supplements — to their patients for preventing prostate cancer.”

What follows are some succinct facts to rebut the AMA’s misleading assertions, along with links to more detailed discussions about what aging men need to do to reduce prostate cancer risk.

Alpha-Tocopherol, Selenium and Prostate Cancer … An Overview

A JAMA study released December 9, 2008, suggests that nutritional intervention (selenium and synthetic vitamin E) does not reduce prostate cancer risk (the SELECT study): http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/2008.864

In January, 2008, as part of our article “ Merv Griffin’s Tragic Death from Prostate Cancer,” Life Extension predicted that the SELECT trial would fail. We also knew that this flawed trial would be misused by the mainstream medical establishment to “prove” to the lay public that low-cost nutrients like vitamin E and selenium do not reduce prostate cancer risk, and by extrapolation, to impugn other low-cost, efficacious nutrients like vitamin D, fish oil, and soy as having no benefit.

In fact, Life Extension’s members were made aware of a fundamental fact 8 years ago that all but guaranteed trial failure of this most recent attack against dietary supplements.

In the current JAMA trial, men supplemented with synthetic alpha-tocopherol experienced significant gamma-tocopherol depletion. Men supplemented with alpha-tocopherol and alpha-tocopherol plus selenium experienced a 45%–48% depletion in gamma-tocopherol levels by 6 months that was sustained during the course of this 5-year trial.

In March 2001, in an article titled “ Avoiding Prostate Cancer,” Life Extension identified the phenomenon of gamma-tocopherol depletion associated with excess alpha-tocopherol. Furthermore, Life Extension identified the critical importance of gamma- tocopherol supplementation in dramatically lowering the risk of developing prostate cancer — in fact, a study of 10,456 men showed that men who had the highest blood levels of gamma-tocopherol were five times less likely to get prostate cancer.

In addition, Life Extension reported in the landmark article “ Eating Your Way to Prostate Cancer,” published February 2007, about the importance of controlling dietary intake of arachidonic acid and the grave consequences of failing to mitigate up-regulation of the 5-LOX enzyme by poor dietary choices.

To review a draft review of what aging men really need to do to protect against prostate cancer, click here.

To review an in-depth draft of a highly technical rebuttal to this most recent attack against dietary supplements by the American Medical Association, click here.

For longer life,

William Faloon

Copyright © 1995-2008 Life Extension Foundation®. All Rights Reserved.

Study: Analgesic Effects of Meditation

Pain Sensitivity and Analgesic Effects of Mindful States in Zen Meditators: A Cross-Sectional Study
Joshua A. Grant , BSc Pierre Rainville , PhD


Objective: To investigate pain perception and the potential analgesic effects of mindful states in experienced Zen meditators.

While attending "mindfully," meditators reported decreases in pain intensity whereas control subjects showed no change from baseline. The concentration condition resulted in increased pain intensity for controls but not for meditators. Changes in pain unpleasantness generally paralleled those found in pain intensity. In meditators, pain modulation correlated with slowing of the respiratory rate and with greater meditation experience. Covariance analyses indicated that mindfulness-related changes could be partially explained by changes in respiratory rates.

Finally, the meditators reported higher tendencies to observe and be nonreactive of their own experience as measured on the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire; these factors correlated with individual differences in respiration.

Conclusions: These results indicated that Zen meditators have lower pain sensitivity and experience analgesic effects during mindful states. Results may reflect cognitive/self-regulatory skills related to the concept of mindfulness and/or altered respiratory patterns. Prospective studies investigating the effects of meditative training and respiration on pain regulation are warranted.
http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/cgi/content/abstract/PSY.0b013e31818f52eev1?ct

Venus and Jupiter

Original photo by Jan Davies, All Rights Reserved. 2008

Fibromyalgia a ‘Real Disease,’ Study Shows

Researchers Say People With Fibromyalgia Have Abnormalities of Blood Flow in the Brain

By Caroline Wilbert
WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Nov. 3, 2008 -- A new brain scan study concludes that fibromyalgia is related to abnormalities of blood flow in the brain.

"Fibromyalgia may be related to a global dysfunction of cerebral pain-processing," study author Eric Guedj, MD, of Centre Hospitalo-Universitaire de la Timone, in Marseille, France, says in a news release. "This study demonstrates that these patients exhibit modifications of brain perfusion not found in healthy subjects and reinforces the idea that fibromyalgia is a 'real disease/disorder.'"

Fibromyalgia is a chronic disorder characterized by widespread muscle pain and fatigue. It affects 2%-4% of people, mostly women. It has been called the "invisible syndrome" because it can't be diagnosed based on a lab test or X-ray.

For this study, researchers took brain scans on 20 women with fibromyalgia and 10 women without the condition. Participants also answered questions to assess measures of pain, disability, anxiety, and depression.

The brain imaging technique, called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), is able to detect functional abnormalities in the brain.

Past imaging studies of patients with fibromyalgia had shown abnormalities in cerebral blood flow, also called brain perfusion. In some areas of the brain, blood flow was below normal, and in some areas, it was above normal. In this study, by using whole-brain scans on the participants, researchers were able to analyze how perfusion in each area of the brain related to measures of pain, disability, anxiety, and depression.

Researchers confirmed that patients with fibromyalgia exhibited brain perfusion abnormalities in comparison to the healthy participants. These abnormalities corresponded with the severity of the disease. An increase in blood flow was found in areas of the brain involved in sensing pain and a decrease was found within an area thought to be involved in emotional responses to pain.

There seemed to be no relationship between these abnormalities and presence of depression or anxiety. "We found that these functional abnormalities were independent of anxiety and depression status," Guedj says in a news release.

View Article Sources

SOURCES:

Guedj, E. Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 2008; vol 49: pp 1798-1803.

News release, Society of Nuclear Medicine.

American College of Rheumatology web site.

© 2008 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.webmd.com/fibromyalgia/news/20081103/fibromyalgia-a-real-disease-study-shows?src=RSS_PUBLIC

CPR, to a Disco Beat

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October 28, 2008

Vital Signs

PREVENTION: Chest Compressions, to a Disco Beat

By ERIC NAGOURNEY

Well, you can tell by the way he pounds your chest, he’s an E.R. man, and his tempo is best.

That’s right — “Stayin’ Alive,” the song some people might pay to get out of their head, may be just what their heart needs if it suddenly stops.

Researchers say the Bee Gees song, from the 1977 hit movie “Saturday Night Fever,” offers almost the perfect pace for performing chest compressions on people who have had heart attacks. Emergency workers doing cardiopulmonary resuscitation are advised to press down on the chest 100 times a minute. “Stayin’ Alive” has 103 beats a minute.

The findings were presented at a recent conference of the American College of Emergency Physicians by Dr. David Matlock of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.

This is not to say that people would actually be forced to listen to the song.

“We’re not advocating turning on the song in the middle of a resuscitation,” Dr. Matlock said. “If it helps people to sing it out loud, I guess that’s O.K.”

For several years, Dr. Matlock said, emergency workers have been told that compressions done to the tempo of the song are more likely to conform to the recommendations of the American Heart Association. Doing it right can triple the survival rate, the researchers said. But no one had proved that the song actually helped.

For the study, researchers had 10 doctors and 5 medical students practice compressions while listening to the music. When they were retested five weeks later without the song, they did the compressions at an average rate of 113 a minute, within the acceptable range.

“Stayin’ Alive,” by the way, is not the only song found to be helpful. “Another One Bites the Dust,” by Queen, may also work.

“Obviously,” Dr. Matlock said, “ ‘Stayin’ Alive’s a little more appropriate for the situation.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

More studies on high fructose corn syrup

Just this month, researchers from Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago took a look at the link between kidney disease and high-fructose corn syrup. Using data from nearly 9,400 adults in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2004, they tracked consumption of sugary soft drinks, a major source of high-fructose corn syrup in the United States, and protein in the urine, a sensitive marker for kidney disease. They found that overall, people who drank two or more sugary sodas a day were at 40 percent higher risk for kidney damage, while the risk for women soda drinkers nearly doubled.

In June, the Journal of Hepatology suggested a link between consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in sodas and fatty liver disease.

And this summer, a small study published in The Journal of Nutrition suggested that fructose may make people fatter by bypassing the body’s regulation of sugars, which means it gets more quickly converted to fat than do other sugars.

As writer Michael Pollan told The Washington Post earlier this year, high-fructose corn syrup “may be cheap in the supermarket, but in the environment it could not be more expensive.”

Most corn is grown as a monoculture, meaning that the land is used solely for corn, not rotated among crops. This maximizes yields, but at a price: It depletes soil nutrients, requiring more pesticides and fertilizer while weakening topsoil.

“The environmental footprint of high-fructose corn syrup is deep and wide,” writes Pollan, a prominent critic of industrial agriculture. “Look no farther than the dead zone in the Gulf [of Mexico], an area the size of New Jersey where virtually nothing will live because it has been starved of oxygen by the fertilizer runoff coming down the Mississippi from the Corn Belt. Then there is the atrazine in the water in farm country — a nasty herbicide that, at concentrations as little as 0.1 part per billion, has been shown to turn male frogs into hermaphrodites.”

Excerpts from: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/still-spooked-by-high-fructose-corn-syrup/

Quinoa: A Protein-Packed Alternative to Grains

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November 3, 2008

Recipes for Health

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

Quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah) is a relative newcomer to the American pantry. The tiny, ancient Peruvian seed, which has a mild, nutty flavor, is related to leafy green vegetables and is often used like a grain. Quinoa is as versatile as rice but it has a protein content that is superior to that of most grains, because it contains all the essential amino acids. In particular, quinoa is high in lysine, an amino acid important for tissue growth and repair. It’s also a good source of manganese, magnesium, phosphorus and copper, and it has a high iron content.

Quinoa is very easy to cook. It’s important to rinse the seeds well, because they are naturally coated with a bitter substance that protects them against birds and other predators. Most packaged quinoa has already been cleaned, but it doesn’t hurt to soak and rinse it just in case. Quinoa cooks in 15 minutes, and it’s easy to tell when it’s done because the seeds display a little white thread that curls around them.

Basic Steamed Quinoa

Many recipes for quinoa suggest cooking it like rice, in two parts water for one part quinoa. This works, but I find the grains are fluffier if I cook them in three parts water and drain the excess water once the quinoa is tender. The tiny seeds swell to about four times their original size, so 1 cup uncooked quinoa yields about 4 cups, enough for 6 to 8 servings.

1 cup quinoa

3 cups water, chicken stock or vegetable stock

1/2 teaspoon salt (more to taste)

1. Place the quinoa in a bowl and cover with cold water. Let sit 5 minutes. Drain through a strainer and rinse until the water runs clear.

2. Bring the water or stock to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add the salt and the quinoa. Bring back to a boil, reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer 15 minutes, or until the quinoa is tender and translucent, and each grain displays a little thread. Drain and return to the pan. Cover the pan with a clean dish towel, replace the lid and allow to sit undisturbed for 10 minutes. Fluff and serve.

Yield: about 4 cups, serving 6 to 8

Advance preparation: Cooked quinoa will keep for three or four days in the refrigerator and can be reheated in a microwave or in the oven.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Simple bandaging can remove skin tags, wow!

This column is posted on the People's Pharmacy website. They have an informative weekly radio show on National Public Radio stations.

"I have noticed quite a few skin tags appearing on my body. I have had one or two of the larger flaps cut off by my doctor. I was fascinated to read in your column that a reader had success getting rid of skin tags by putting special BandAids on them. I tried this but could never get a bandage to stay on long enough.

I was about to give up when I ran across some liquid bandage in my medicine cabinet. I had a large flap growing on my shoulder and put the New Skin Liquid Bandage on it. Within a week the flap fell off. I put it on some smaller skin tags and they shriveled and fell off too. Have you heard of this before or have I discovered an alternate way to get rid of these unsightly skin growths?"

A. Skin tags are benign fleshy growths that commonly appear in skin folds such as under the arms, in the groin area or on the neck. They can also show up on the face. They are common and not dangerous. Dermatologists can remove them surgically or with an electric needle.

A few years ago a reader suggested applying BandAid Clear Spots tightly over skin tags to get rid of them in a week or two.

People's Pharmacy website, click here