Scientists have found important genetic differences that significantly raise the risk of stroke, and they are found in millions of people.
The study is the first to identify common genetic variants influencing stroke risk in the United States and may lead to better treatments, they reported on Wednesday.
While other stroke-related genes have been discovered, none involved such a wide portion of the population, said Eric Boerwinkle of The University of Texas Health Science Center.
China on Saturday approved a long-awaited food safety law, state media reported, in a bid to end repeated scandals involving dangerous food products in the country.
The law has been in the works since October last year after a huge scandal erupted over contaminated milk which killed at least six children and sickened nearly 300,000 others in China.
“The law will see the establishment of a monitoring and supervision system, a set of national standards on food safety, a recall system, and severe punishment for offenders,” the official Xinhua news agency said.
The FDA today announced that it will require makers of epilepsy drugs to add a warning about increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors to the products’ prescribing information or labeling.
The warning — which won’t be a “black box” warning — applies to all antiepileptic medications, including those used to treat psychiatric disorders, migraines, and other conditions, as well as epilepsy.
Adding to the long list of cancers caused by smoking, Italian researchers report that the risk of getting colorectal cancer is higher in smokers, as is the risk of dying from that disease.
Smoking increases the risk of developing colorectal cancer by about 18 percent and the risk of dying from the malignancy by about 25 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Dec. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The human brain is a truly amazing organ. Roughly the size of a small head of cauliflower, the brain contains all our thoughts, actions, emotions, perceptions, desires and dreams. Although housed inside the skull for protection, the brain is extremely vulnerable to damage and degeneration from poor nutrition, lack of oxygen, toxic overload and chemical deposits, including drugs. Both smoking and drinking has been shown to affect the brain, damaging cells and synapses (neural connections) and high alcohol consumption is known to result in shrinking of the brain and cognitive deficit. However, researchers have discovered that even modest amounts of alcohol have the same negative effect.
Tests on leading brands of bottled water turned up a variety of contaminants often found in tap water, according to a study released Wednesday by an environmental advocacy group.
The findings challenge the popular impression — and marketing pitch — that bottled water is purer than tap water, the researchers say.
However, all the brands met federal health standards for drinking water. Two violated a California state standard, the study said.
BEIJING – Premier Wen Jiabao promised Saturday to improve Chinese food safety, seeking to tamp down public anxiety in the widening scandal over tainted milk that has sickened more than 50,000 children.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in the port of Tianjin, Wen did not announce new initiatives but he said the government would work to instill business ethics in light of the milk contamination and a string of earlier product safety disasters.
It is only a minor heart defect, one attributed to one out of every four adults. And while the defect is not said to cause strokes, about 40% of people who suffer strokes–ones with no known cause–are said to have the defect. As the cause and effect has been explored for years, another medical case recently brought the connection back into the news.
In December of 2007, a 35-year-old Illinois woman began to feel stroke-like symptoms during intercourse. With numbness on one side of her face, slurred speech, and weakness in her left arm, she sought care at a medical facility and her condition worsened considerably over the next few hours. Face paralysis, garbled speech, and no movement in the left arm led the doctors to apply a clot-dissipating drug directly to the clot in her brain in an urgent effort to stop the stroke from progressing, and it worked. There was immediate improvement, and the stroke symptoms were nearly erased within 12 hours of the procedure.
SHANGHAI — A lion cub and two baby orangutans have developed kidney stones at a zoo near Shanghai, making them the latest victims of China’s tainted milk crisis.
The three animals had been nursed with milk powder for more than a year, said Zhang Xu, a veterinarian with the Hangzhou Zhangxu Animal Hospital.
The orangutans and lion cub at the Hangzhou Safari Park near Shanghai were found to have kidney stones Wednesday after concerned officials sent them to Dr. Zhang for a checkup.
BEIJING — Two weeks after Chinese companies began recalling infant milk formula because of contamination by an industrial chemical, foods tainted with that chemical — melamine — are turning up in other parts of China and Asia, fanning fears in other parts of the world.
In Hong Kong, Heinz Foods this week recalled its vegetable formula baby cereal after some samples of it tested positive for melamine. In Taiwan, Pizza Hut said it had found cheese packets similarly contaminated. Officials in Macao, a Chinese territory, said Friday that the chemical had turned up in koala-shaped cookies made by a Japanese-owned company. And several African nations moved to ban imports of Chinese dairy products this week.
