It’s not clear if it will have the same effect on cancer in people, however.

University of Florida researcher Dr. Nam Dang and Japanese colleagues report that the papaya extract appears to affect the regulation of the body’s immune system and doesn’t cause side effects by harming normal cells.

The findings reflect the use of papaya by indigenous people in Australia and Vietnam, Dang, a professor of medicine, said in a news release from the university.

“Based on what I have seen and heard in a clinical setting, nobody who takes this extract experiences demonstrable toxicity; it seems like you could take it for a long time — as long as it is effective,” he said.

The researchers report that four strengths of papaya leaf extract slowed the growth of 10 types of cancer cell cultures, including cancers of the cervix, breast, liver, lung and pancreas.

The study was published in a recent issue of Journal of Ethnopharmacology. Yahoo Daily News

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Getting a bit more calcium in your diet could help you live longer, new research suggests.

Swedish researchers found that men who consumed the most calcium in food were 25 percent less likely to die over the next decade than their peers who took in the least calcium from food. None of the men took calcium supplements.

The findings are in line with previous research linking higher calcium intake with lower mortality in both men and women, the researchers point out in a report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

While many researchers have looked at calcium and magnesium intake and the risk of chronic disease, less is known about the association between consumption of these nutrients in food and mortality.

To investigate, Dr. Joanna Kaluza of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and her colleagues looked at more than 23,000 Swedish men who were 45 to 79 years old at the study’s outset and were followed for 10 years. All had reported on their diet at the beginning of the study. During follow-up, about 2,358 died.

The top calcium consumers had a 25 percent lower risk of dying from any cause and a 23 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease during follow-up relative to men that had the least amount of calcium in their diet. Calcium intake didn’t significantly influence the risk of dying from cancer.

Men in the top third based on their calcium intake were getting nearly 2,000 milligrams a day, on average, compared to about 1,000 milligrams for men in the bottom third. The US Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for calcium intake is 1,000 milligrams for men 19 to 50 years old and 1,200 milligrams for men 50 and over.

“Intake of calcium above that recommended daily may reduce all-cause mortality,” Kaluza and her colleagues conclude.

Calcium could influence mortality risk in many ways, they note, for example by reducing blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar levels. For the men in the study, the main sources of calcium in the diet were milk and milk products and cereal products.

In contrast to calcium, there was no relationship between magnesium consumption and overall mortality or deaths from cancer or heart disease. Study participants’ intakes ranged from around 400 milligrams per day to around 525 milligrams; the RDA for magnesium is 420 milligrams for men 31 and older.

This analysis, the researchers say, may have found no effect for magnesium because all of the men in the study seemed to be getting enough of the mineral in their diet. “Further studies are needed in other populations with lower dietary magnesium intakes to address this issue,” they say.

Future research should also look into calcium and magnesium intake from drinking water, they add, which can be a significant source of these minerals. MSNBC

Fulvestrant appeared to exert maximum anti-cancer effects in vitro when cells produced normal or elevated quantities of the cytokeratins CK8 and CK18, structural proteins that help give the nucleus its shape.

For fulvestrant to work well, the cells must also be responsive to estrogen, and producing the estrogen receptor ER-alpha. ER-alpha’s importance to fulvestrant’s anti-estrogenic action had been established in previous reports. The present study confirms fulvestrant’s binding relationship to ER-alpha, while also showing two other proteins, cytokeratins 8 and 18, can strongly enhance fulvestrant’s anti-estrogenic activity. Testing for the presence of these three proteins, and perhaps many others, could help doctors decide whether fulvestrant should be prescribed to their patients.

“We need an effective panel of markers that inform physicians about what treatment options will be most beneficial to patients,” said Medical Sciences Program Bloomington cancer biologist Kenneth Nephew, who led the study. “These three gene products should be investigated further to determine whether they should be included in that panel.”

Medical Sciences Program Bloomington is a division of the IU School of Medicine. Nephew is a professor of cellular and integrative physiology, and obstetrics and gynecology.

“Normal” breast cancer cells can grow faster in the presence of estrogen, a hormone. Estrogen attaches to receptors embedded in the cancer cell, such as ER-alpha in the cytoplasm and nucleus. The estrogen-ER complex can then act to turn on genes or amplify their expression. Not all cancer cells are responsive to estrogen, however, or to fulvestrant, which counteracts estrogen’s effects.

Although fulvestrant has been used to treat cancer since the late 1980s, and is now commonly prescribed as a second-line defense against metastatic cancer cells, how the drug works is still not completely understood. Nephew said one of the aims of the research is to clarify fulvestrant’s biochemistry, and understand why cancer cells eventually become unresponsive to the drug.

Second-line breast cancer therapies are employed when first-line approaches (tamoxifen, for example) don’t work or stop working.

After conducting analyses of different cell lines and assaying gene and protein activity, Nephew, Xinghua Long (now a faculty member at Jiangnan University), and Meiyun Fan (now an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee-Memphis) believe they are able to present a compelling model for fulvestrant’s action. The scientists believe that when fulvestrant encounters ER-alpha and binds to the receptor, the receptor forms a two-protein complex either with another ER-alpha — or with ER-beta, a related but different estrogen receptor. The alpha-alpha or alpha-beta “dimer” is then removed to the nuclear matrix, where it binds to CK8 and CK18. It’s the binding of ER-alpha to the nuclear matrix that would seem to signal protein-killing proteases to destroy ER-alpha. As the number of available estrogen receptors plummets, the connection between estrogen and cancer-related gene activity is weakened, and estrogen can no longer contribute to the growth of cancer cells.

Because many drug treatments can have a severely negative impact on quality of life, Nephew said fulvestrant and other cancer drugs should only be prescribed when their use is associated with a reasonable chance of successful outcomes. However, compared to frequently prescribed endocrine treatments for advanced disease like tamoxifen, anastrozole, letrozole and exemestane, fulvestrant is well tolerated. If biopsied cancer cells can be shown beforehand to be resistant or unresponsive to fulvestrant, the doctor may prevent some of the commonly reported side effects seen with the drug.

Nephew said that it wouldn’t be easy for physicians to simply order a separate test that analyzes biopsied tissue for the presence of CK8 and CK18.

“It would require a few things a typical hospital doesn’t have on hand,” Nephew said. “But we’re currently investigating how to do that. We also need to be able to show that the expression of the two cytokeratins can be prognostic of fulvestrant’s effectiveness. To that end we are talking with George Sledge at the Indianapolis campus about the feasibility of clinical studies. That would be the next step.”

George Sledge Jr. is the Ballve-Lantero Professor of Hematology/Oncology at the IU School of Medicine’s Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center.

When the study was conducted, report coauthors Xinghua Long and Meiyun Fan were at IU Bloomington as a Ph.D. student and a postdoctoral fellow, respectively. The research was funded with grants from the National Cancer Institute’s Integrative Cancer Biology Program, the Walther Cancer Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. redOrbit

An initial study showed the test detected 70 percent of breast cancer cases, and correctly cleared 100 percent of women who did not have breast cancer, the team at Chronix Biomedical, a privately-owned company in San Jose, California, said.

The experimental test is not ready to develop into a product but provides a basis for further research, they wrote in the journal Molecular Cancer Research.

“It is based on finding the unique DNA fingerprints from dead and dying cells,” Chronix CEO Howard Urnovitz said in a telephone interview.

Technological advances in DNA sequencing made the test possible, Urnovitz said. His team sequenced the entire genomes of 26 breast cancer patients and of 67 apparently healthy women.

They were looking for extra DNA in the blood of the breast cancer patients that would come from cells dying because of the tumors.

“If a breast cell is injured, it will over express the genes that make it a breast cell,” Urnovitz said. In theory, if a patient has excess DNA from breast cells that are dying, there is something going on that is killing breast cells.

The search is not easy. “The entire genome can be found in the blood,” Urnovitz said. And billions of cells die every day in the human body.

But eventually the Chronix team found what they believe is tell-tale DNA from dying breast cells.

“This study supports the potential of an entirely new approach to identifying cancer at its earliest stages when therapies may be most effective,” Dr. William Mitchell of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

SCREENING AND MONITORING

“Laboratory tests using this approach may have the potential both to screen large populations for cancer before symptoms appear and to monitor patients for the recurrence of cancer once treated,” Mitchell added.

Much more testing needs to be done, Urnovitz said. But so far the test seems to specifically home in on breast cells. Unpublished data shows, for instance, that the DNA signature is not found in men with prostate cancer.

The cost of genetic sequencing will have to come down more before the test would be practical, Urnovitz added.

His team used Roche AG’s 454 sequencer at a cost of thousands of dollars per person, but companies are working to speed up sequencing and get the costs down.

The tests might be used to screen women for breast cancer and to tailor treatments, Urnovitz said.

“Imagine we can come in and say ‘you have damage to the protein kinase gene that would preclude you from these 10 cancer drugs, but here are 20 others that should work’,” he said.

“You would be selecting drug treatment based on each person’s lesions. This would be a really good example of personalized medicine.”

Urnovitz also hopes such a test could monitor patients who have completed treatment for cancer. Instead of coming to a cancer center to undergo a PET scan to check for tumors that may have returned, patients could get a blood test at their convenience and have it sent in for analysis.

“You could have one blood test for everything that is going on,” he said. Fox News

Other commodities were mixed. Crude oil inched up while natural gas fell on concerns about huge supplies and warmer weather in the offing.

The ICE Futures US dollar index, a closely watched gauge of the dollar against other currencies, was at 80.1 in the morning and rose as high as 80.5 during the day.

Commodities tend to move opposite to the dollar. A rising U.S. currency makes dollar-denominated commodity contracts less appealing to foreign investors.

Gold for April delivery fell 1 percent to settle at $1,124 an ounce after hovering in the $1,100-an-ounce range since Feb. 25.

“We’re getting a little bit of profit taking,” Lind-Waldock commodities analyst Rich Ilczyszyn said. “We’ve had quite a rise here in the last two to three weeks.”

Energy prices were mixed. Natural gas fell 6.6 cents to settle at $4.527 per 1,000 cubic feet on the New York Mercantile Exchange after some weather forecasts predicted warmer weather in the next several days, said Richard Feltes, MF Global commodity research director.

In other April contracts, benchmark crude for April delivery rose 37 cents to settle at $81.87 a barrel on the Nymex and heating oil rose 0.81 cent to settle at $2.1055 a gallon.

Silver for May delivery fell 11 cents to $17.272 an ounce while copper fell .007 cent to $3.4105 a pound.

In March contracts, platinum rose $21 to $1,600.10 while palladium fell $5.05 to settle at $470.35 an ounce.

Elsewhere, grains were mixed as traders await a government report due Wednesday that will update supply and demand for grains.

Wheat for May delivery gained 1.50 cents to settle at $4.95 a bushel; soybeans added 5.25 cents to $9.48 a bushel and corn fell 0.5 cent to $3.75 a bushel. By Sandy Shore , Star Tribune

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University of California at Berkeley researchers put 39 young adults through a demanding learning task and tested on it at noon. At 2 p.m., they divided the students into two groups and invited half of them to take a siesta for 90 minutes while asking the remainder to stay awake. At 6 p.m., both groups were returned to the day’s learning task and tested again.

The siesta group went into the 6 p.m. task readier to learn and performed 10 percent better on the test than they had earlier. The no-nap group’s performance declined by 10 percent, researchers reported.

Flu shots broadened

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended recently that all Americans over 6 months — except those who are allergic to eggs — should receive a seasonal flu shot every year, beginning this fall. The CDC has been slowly broadening the recommendations for flu shots over the past few years to the point where about 85 percent of the population is now covered. The primary exception now is adults 19 to 49 who do not have underlying medical conditions.

Little on lactose woes

The National Institutes of Health recently convened a panel of experts to reach a consensus on what is known about lactose intolerance. Their consensus: There is no consensus. It is a real condition, but there are no good numbers for its incidence, little is known about its effects on health and even less is known about potential treatments.

Lactose is the primary sugar in all mammalian milk, including human milk. Virtually all babies are born with enzymes, called lactases, in their intestines that digest lactose, turning it into a form that can be used by the body. But beginning at about 5 or 6, many children, particularly those of African and Asian ancestry, begin to lose the ability to digest the sugar. If they continue drinking milk and eating dairy products afterward, bacteria in the gut often ferment the sugar, producing diarrhea, abdominal pain, flatulence and bloating.

Surprisingly, there are no good estimates of how many people have the problem, and the panel didn’t try to make one.

“A lot of people who think they have lactose intolerance don’t,” said Dr. Frederick Suchy of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, chair of the panel. Star Tribune

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“Nutrigenomics involves tailoring diets to someone’s genetic makeup,” said Koushik Adhikari, K-State assistant professor of sensory analysis. “I speculate that in five to 10 years, you would go to a genetic counselor or a physician who could help you understand your genetic makeup, and then a nutritional professional could customize your diet accordingly.”

Adhikari collaborated with Denis Medeiros, professor and department head of human nutrition, and Jean Getz, former K-State graduate student in human nutrition, for an article on nutrigenomics that was published in the January issue of Food Technology. Getz, now a student at the School of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State University, wrote the article while at K-State.

Nutrigenomics is a fast-moving field of research that combines molecular biology, genetics and nutrition to regulate gene expression through specific nutrients. Nutrients have been shown to affect gene expression through transcription factors, which are biochemical entities that bind to DNA and either promote or inhibit transcription of genes. By understanding the roles of specific nutrients and how they might cause diseases, scientists could recommend specific foods for an individual based on his or her genetics.

“Scientists are looking at the molecular mechanisms in the body,” Adhikari said. “At the molecular level, you can look at what specific nutrients can do to your body that would trigger genes to act properly, in a healthy way.”

Medeiros said K-State researchers in human nutrition are doing these kinds of studies. Some are studying the impact plant chemicals have on different types of cancers in terms of their potential prevention effects. Other researchers are looking at how wolfberry, a Chinese fruit, could be used to improve vision.

“These studies not only answer whether the concerned nutrients prevent a disease, but also how they exert their health benefits,” Medeiros said.

Current health recommendations for people in the United States are general for the overall population. However, with nutrigenomics research, health recommendations could be better modified to individuals.

“That is where I think the main focus of nutrigenomics is going to be in the future,” Adhikari said. “It could tell you that you have the propensity for certain chronic diseases so that you could modify your diet accordingly. With a better understanding of how nutrients alter gene expression, there is a potential that food could be used instead of medication to combat problems like high cholesterol.”

Adhikari said this kind of personalized health care is in the near future since the human genome has been mapped. Now scientists are focusing on identifying single-nucleotide polymorphisms, which are a small change in a person’s DNA sequence like sensitivity to bitterness. Polymorphisms could determine if a person has a propensity for different chronic diseases. At K-State, Adhikari and Mark Haub, associate professor of human nutrition, are leading a study of the genotypes of diabetic and non-diabetic individuals to determine if there is a link between the risk for type-2 diabetes and bitter-taste sensitivity.

Nutrigenomics would require a collaborative effort from people in genetics and the industries of public health, food science and culinary. Adhikari said more options should be available so that consumers can make the healthiest choice. He said the food industry should collaborate with the culinary industry to create more healthful and appealing foods.

“This is one of the major issues with the food industry,” he said. “It’s very easy to make good-tasting food. Put some lard or butter in it, and it’s going to taste good. The challenge is how to take the fat out and create healthful but also good-tasting food.”

Consumer education also will be an important factor for the future of nutrigenomics and public health. Adhikari said consumers are often skeptical of genetically modified foods, where scientists modify a food’s DNA by splicing and adding genes. However, this practice is different from nutrigenomics, which focuses on using foods’ natural components to promote better health.

The researchers said a shift in public health is greatly needed, and with an increasing incidence of obesity and chronic diseases such as types 2 diabetes, nutrigenomics might prove to be the panacea in the future. redOrbit