Showing posts with label NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH. Show all posts

Friday, April 12, 2013

WEIGHT GAIN OR SMOKING; WHICH IS WORSE?

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Smokers gain a little weight when they quit, but they gain a lot more in health. A study checked whether the extra weight could raise the risk of heart disease. James Meigs of Massachusetts General Hospital and his colleagues looked at data on weight gain and cardiovascular disease among participants in the long-running Framingham Heart Study.

The researchers found quitters cut their risk of cardiovascular disease by about half compared with smokers, even though the quitters gained a bit more weight. So Meigs says:

"Patients will gain weight when they stop smoking but that weight gain doesn’t lower the overall benefit of quitting smoking, heart attack risk and stroke risk."

The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Friday, April 5, 2013

ANTIBODY EVOLUTION AND HIV VACCINE DEVELOPMENT

Co-evolution of virus and antibody – The evolution of the viral protein (green) from 14 weeks through 100 weeks post-transmission is compared to the maturation of the human antibody. Image courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory.
 
FROM: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Antibody Evolution Could Guide HIV Vaccine Development

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 4, 2013—Observing the evolution of a particular type of antibody in an infected HIV-1 patient, a study spearheaded by Duke University, including analysis from Los Alamos National Laboratory, has provided insights that will enable vaccination strategies that mimic the actual antibody development within the body.

The kind of antibody studied is called a broadly cross-reactive neutralizing antibody, and details of its generation could provide a blueprint for effective vaccination, according to the study’s authors. In a paper published online in Nature this week, the team reported on the isolation, evolution and structure of a broadly neutralizing antibody from an African donor followed from the time of infection.

The observations trace the co-evolution of the virus and antibodies, ultimately leading to the development of a strain of the potent antibodies in this subject, and they could provide insights into strategies to elicit similar antibodies by vaccination.

Patients early in HIV-1 infection have primarily a single "founder" form of the virus that has been strong enough to infect the patient, even though the population in the originating patient is usually far more diverse and contains a wide variety of HIV mutations. Once the founder virus is involved in the new patient’s system, the surrounding environment stimulates the HIV to mutate and form a unique, tailored population of virus that is specific to the individual.

The team, including Bette Korber, Peter Hraber, and S. Gnanakaran, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, led by Barton Haynes of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, with colleagues at Boston University, the National Institutes of Health, and other institutions as part of a large collaboration, showed that broadly neutralizing antibodies developed only after the population of viruses in the individual had matured and become more diverse.

"Our hope is that a vaccine based on the series of HIV variants that evolved within this subject, that were together capable of stimulating this potent broad antibody response in his natural infection, may enable triggering similar protective antibody responses in vaccines," said Bette Korber, leader of the Los Alamos team.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and by intramural National Institutes of Health (NIH) support for the NIAID Vaccine Research Center, by grants from the NIH, NIAID, AI067854 (the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology) and AI100645 (the Center for Vaccine Immunology-Immunogen Discovery). Use of sector 22 (Southeast Region Collaborative Access team) at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by the US Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, under contract number W-31-109-Eng-38.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

HHS REVIEWS MEDITATION AND INFLAMATION

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat

A study indicates mindfulness meditation might benefit people with chronic inflammatory diseases by reducing the level of inflammation.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Melissa Rosenkranz looked at data on about 60 people. About half got eight weeks of mindfulness training. The others were in a control group that got similar activities but without the mindfulness aspect. Mindfulness is a way to be in the moment without judging things such as how you feel emotionally about them.

Rosenkranz reports:

"Those who participated in the mindfulness training had a smaller post-intervention inflammatory response relative to those who participated in the control intervention."

The study in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

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