National Post

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Remember Dolly? Critics of a new embryonic skin cell breakthrough do
The prospect of using a patient’s skin to generate healthy heart, liver or nerve cells for transplant operations has moved a step closer after a breakthrough by scientists, but some researchers are concerned the development leaves the door open too wide to the cloning of human babies.
[Getty Images]

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Could ‘lab-grown’ kidneys mark a breakthrough for patients awaiting transplants?
Researchers say there’s still a long way to go before engineered kidneys will be used in human transplants, but they say preliminary work on rats has proved that it is possible to bio-engineer a kidney that’s created specifically for an individual patient.
[Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images files]

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New moms eating their placentas in attempt to beat post-partum depression
Susan Stewart collects fresh human placentas, takes them home and steams them with lemon, ginger and cayenne pepper. Once cooked, she puts the organs in a dehydrator overnight then grinds them and measures the powder out into gel capsules.

The service – the Calgary single mother makes a living at this – costs about $200.

Within a day, she presents new moms with their placentas in pill form – an average human placenta yields about 150 capsules – with promises of renewed energy, better lactation and no post-partum depression. They keep indefinitely.

Placenta-eating has gained some cachet among the natural-birth set, including Mad Men’s January Jones. Ms. Stewart said she became interested in it in 2009, after she was knocked down by depression following the birth of her first child, and she could see little downside from trying it.

“It was natural, it wasn’t from a drug. It was an organ that comes from your body and it’s typically thought of as a disposable organ or medical waste,” she said. (Keith Morison for National Post)

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Chemical seduction: How ‘love drugs’ may one day help couples save failing relationships
And so he ran a study: Over a three-week period, 40 Australian couples took a hit of oxytocin (or a placebo) through a nasal spray before starting couples’ therapy.

The results aren’t yet published, but the data show that with the help of oxytocin, that repetitive loop breaks — couples recall memories with more emotion and detail, they appear more open to the other person’s perspective, the fractured bond begins to rebuild, Dr. Guastella said.

“If we can make it so that an ‘a-ha’ moment occurs, it’s going to save a lot of heartbreak, a lot of hostility between couples.”

It’s a seductive idea — that somewhere in the near future failing marriages and partnerships can be rescued by manipulating our brains to keep us from falling out of love. (Mike Faille/National Post)

Doctors call for ban of antibiotic use in farm animals as drug-resistant human infections hit ‘dangerous level’ 
The common practice of using antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals must be banned immediately as part of a campaign to combat drug-resistant infections in humans, one of the country’s largest doctor groups urges in a new report.

The problem of bacteria impervious to antibiotics has moved beyond the oft-reported super bugs like MRSA (methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureus) and C. difficile, and affects a “multitude” of common infections from strep throat to salmonella, the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) warns.

People are already suffering more serious illness and spending longer in hospital because of the resistance, something that will become routine without prompt action, it adds.

“The impact on patients has reached a dangerous level,” says the report. “Patients are now dying from infections that physicians have been successfully treating for decades.” (Postmedia News files)

Holy Spock! BlackBerry inventor now wants to build Star Trek-like tricorder
Mike Lazaridis, inventor of the BlackBerry smartphone, is starting a $100 million quantum technology fund that’s aiming to turn devices like the medical tricorder from “Star Trek” into reality.

“What we’re excited about is these little gems coming out,” Lazaridis said in an interview in Toronto. “The medical tricorder would be astounding, the whole idea of blood tests, MRIs — imagine if you could do that with a single device. That may be possible and possible only because of the sensitivity, selectivity and resolution we can get from quantum sensors made with these quantum breakthroughs.”

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There’s a dancing gorilla in this CT scan — and 80% of the radiologists asked didn’t spot it
The image above has a dancing gorilla in it, but 20 out of 24 radiologists couldn’t see it in a psychological study administered by Brigham and Women’s hospital. The study, which appears in this month’s Psychological Science, tested the eyesight of 24 radiologists with the best credentials.

These radiologists were asked to look at a five typical lung cancer screenings — four of which were gorilla-free — and in the stack of screenings from the fifth patient was the dancing gorilla, waving his arms in the top right hand corner of the scan. The radiologists in the study ran their eyes over the scan four times on average. (Trafton Drew/Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School)f

‘I just want to get the most out of these arms’: Soldier who lost all four limbs in Iraq gets new arms in historic transplant
A U.S. soldier who lost all four limbs in a roadside bombing in Iraq says he’s looking forward to driving and swimming with new arms after undergoing a double-arm transplant.

“I just want to get the most out of these arms, and just as goals come up, knock them down and take it absolutely as far as I can,” Brendan Marrocco said Tuesday.

The 26-year-old New Yorker spoke at a news conference at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was joined by surgeons who performed the operation.

After he was wounded, Marrocco said, he felt fine using prosthetic legs, but he hated not having arms.

“You talk with your hands, you do everything with your hands, basically, and when you don’t have that, you’re kind of lost for a while,” he said. (AP Photo/Gail Burton)

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How scary is a world where antibiotics no longer work?
A top U.K. doctor explains the ‘apocalypse’ of drug-resistant bacteria we could be facing in years ahead.
[What does antibiotic resistant bacteria look like? Like this. Photo credit: Handout/Canadian Press]

Jonathan Kay: The Suzanne Somers effect — How Internet-fuelled medical conspiracy theories are making us sicker
In the realm of public health, distrust and the need to explain human suffering, have combined to produce stubbornly popular conspiracy theories that inhibit life-saving medical therapies: Ironically, an irrational fear of government schemes to engineer human suffering have caused many citizens to forsake therapies that have been engineered to save their lives. This month, for instance, Britain’s Guardian newspaper published a heart-rending tale of Pakistanis who refuse to eat salt containing iodine — a necessary chemical that helps prevent goiters, mental retardation, birth defects and other problems — because they believe the ingredient is part of a government conspiracy to render them infertile.

Here in the West, we like our iodine just fine. Yet many of us still give the time of day to other conspiracy theorists, such as anti-vaccine activists who falsely claim a linkage between the widely administered MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism spectrum disorder.

Much of the blame goes to celebrity laypersons such as former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy. Since 1998, when the vaccine/autism theory first was put forward in a study published in the Lancet medical journal (subsequently retracted in 2010), untold millions of parents across the Western world have avoided vaccinating their children, leaving them exposed to deadly, and entirely preventable, diseases such as measles, whooping cough and Hib influenza.

The myth that vaccines cause autism permits emotionally vulnerable parents to blame politically accountable, human evildoers — the big pharmaceutical companies and their apologists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada — for a trauma that might otherwise be seen as a mere act of God. The myth thereby allows them to substitute their frustration and disappointment with the more psychologically manageable emotion of anger. (Three Rivers Press)

Without fanfare, Jehovah’s Witnesses quietly soften position on blood transfusions
For years, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ fiercely held belief that blood transfusions are contrary to God’s will led to emotional and very public disputes, hospitals clashing with parents over whether to infuse sick children.

That long history of messy legal confrontations appears to be vanishing, however, amid changing approaches to the issue on both sides, health-care officials say.

The church’s ban on accepting blood still stands, but some major pediatric hospitals have begun officially acknowledging the parents’ unorthodox beliefs, while many Jehovah’s Witnesses are signing letters recognizing that doctors may sometimes feel obliged to transfuse, they say.

As institutions show more respect toward parents’ faith and try harder not to use blood, Witnesses often seem eager to avoid involving child-welfare authorities to facilitate transfusions, and more accepting that Canadian case law is firmly on the doctors’ side, some hospital officials say.

“They get it that we’re going to transfuse where it’s medically necessary. They’ve lost that battle; they understand that,” said Andrea Frolic, a bioethicist at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ont. (Calgary Herald/Files)

After having jaw, teeth, tongue and nerve tissue replaced, face transplant recipient regains speech
Fifteen years ago, Richard Lee Norris was shot in the face in a gun accident. He lost his nose, lips and most of the movement in his mouth.

He was horribly disfigured, and he spent most of the next decade and a half in hiding, venturing out only occasionally at night in a cap and a surgical mask.

Today, after receiving the most comprehensive face transplant to date, he says he’s able to walk past people without a second look. (University of Maryland Medical Center / Getty images)

Toddler received world’s smallest artificial heart as he waited for a transplant
Italian doctors have saved the life of a 16-month-old boy by implanting the world’s smallest artificial heart to keep the infant alive until a donor was found for a transplant.

The tiny titanium pump weighs only 11 grams and can handle a blood flow of 1.5 liters a minute. An artificial heart for adults weighs 900 grams.

Surgeon Antonio Amodeo said the baby had become family and his team wanted to do everything to help him.

“Every day, every hour, for more than one year he was with us. So when we had a problem we couldn’t do anything more than our best,” he said. (Photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

Lab mice: The tiny footprints behind 100 years of medical discovery
Last week, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh announced they had unlocked a rodent fountain of youth.

The university is host to a colony of progeria mice, mice infected with a rare disease that leads them to die of old age after only three weeks. But when researchers took progeria mice standing on death’s door and injected them with stem cells from their younger, healthier cousins, the dying mice immediately rebounded and lived another two to four weeks.

“We could basically triple their size and their lifespan in some cases,” said lead researcher Dr. Laura Niedernhofer.

Researchers have been thusly probing, tweaking and testing mice for 100 years. The mice engineered by researchers now have much in common with those researchers, sharing blood, livers, even brain tissue. Those Pittsburgh progeria mice are still too much unlike us to expect that a cure for human old age is just around the corner, or even inevitable. But the rodents have been remade, through decades of genetics and breeding, to be more human than ever. And as the difference between man and mouse narrows, we not only know more about the tiny, good-natured rodents than almost any other creature on the planet — we need them more than ever.

A mouse was the first to be vaccinated against cancer. Mice already have a cure for baldness and a pill to stave off Alzheimer’s. Mice remain the only animals to have experienced hoverboard-style levitation and have their brain simulated in a computer — and they were the first non-human mammals to have their genome mapped. (Illustration: Andrew Barr)

Few missed chances for battlefield medics during Afghan mission, study finds
Some bled to death from massive abdominal wounds, others suffered catastrophic brain injuries and many were thrown about so violently inside bomb-blasted armoured vehicles, their spinal cords were fatally severed.

The vast majority of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan never had a chance, concludes a grim but revealing analysis of autopsy reports on many of the deaths, a rare look at information previously kept confidential.

Only two of the fatalities examined were considered potentially preventable; the wounded troops might have lived had medics managed to cut holes in their throats to allow them to breath after shrapnel penetrated and blocked airways, said the study.