Scientists have found a way to decipher actual words from a person’s brain waves, a feat that sounds very much like mind-reading, a new study shows.

The research may sound like scary science fiction -- once a person’s brain waves can be read, will any thought be private? -- but the positive implications are enormous for patients who have lost the ability to speak through damage, such as stroke, or disease.

In the study, scientists worked with a group of epilepsy patients who were undergoing treatment for intractable seizures. Sensors were implanted deep in their brains in an effort to locate the source of seizures, so doctors could remove the malfunctioning tissue, according to the new report published in PLoS Biology.

Normally that process takes about a week, says the study’s lead author, Brian Pasley, a neuroscientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

“During that time the patients are just sitting around in their hospital rooms,” Pasley explains. “And some of them were generous enough to participate in our experiment.”

While the patients’ brain waves were being recorded, Pasley and his colleagues read words to them. Later, the researchers ran those brain waves through a program they hoped would translate the brain's electronic signals into actual sounds. It worked. Based only on the recordings, the computer was able to pluck out the words spoken to the patients.

Previous research has been able to reconstruct what a person is looking at from brain scans.

Researchers are still a long way from actually reading people’s minds, but it may be possible one day, says Pasley, who acknowledges the technology’s potential to unlock communication for people who can’t speak -- as well as invade our most private thoughts.

“There are ethical concerns,” Pasley says. “Not with the current research, but with the possible extensions of it. There has to be a balance. If we are somehow able to encode someone’s thoughts instantaneously that might have great benefits for the thousands of severely disabled people who are unable to communicate right now. On the other hand, there are great concerns if this were applied to people who didn’t want that." 

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The medical marijuana drug Sativex, which could be approved in the United States in the coming years as a treatment for pain relief, has little potential for abuse, experts say.

The British pharmaceutical company GW Pharmaceuticals is currently testing the drug, which is delivered as a mouth spray and called Sativex, in clinical trials. The company plans to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the drug as a treatment for cancer pain when the trials are completed, likely sometime in 2014, a spokesperson for GW Pharmaceuticals told MyHealthNewsDaily.

The active ingredients in Sativex, known as cannabinoids, are derived from the cannabis plant. It is the first marijuana-based drug to be made by extracting the compounds from the plant, rather than synthesizing them. Two other drugs, Marinol and Cesamet, based on synthetic cannabinoids, were approved by the FDA in the 1980s.

Because the drug contains THC, the ingredient primarily responsible for marijuana's "high," it's possible people would use the drug for recreational rather than medical purposes.

"There is no doubt in my mind that there will be people that abuse it," said Dr. Jeffrey Bernstein, director of the Florida Poison Information Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

However, because the drug is delivered through ingestion, rather than smoking, it would take much longer to have an effect — at least an hour, compared with the minutes it takes to get high after smoking marijuana, said Margaret Haney, a professor of clinical neurobiology at Columbia University. This means drug users seeking a high would be less likely to abuse it. "Smoking is a really effective way to get a chemical into the brain," Haney said. The mouth spray "is a far safer administration,"she said.

And Marinol and Cesamet, which are also administered orally, have a low rate of abuse. "We don’t see a lot of problems from [those]," Bernstein said.

Not the same high
GW Pharmaceuticals intends to market Sativex in the United States for treatment of cancer pain. The drug is already approved in United Kingdom, Spain, Canada and New Zealand to treat muscle spasms due to multiple sclerosis, according to the company website.

Patients can adjust the dose of Sativex to prevent it from entering the blood too rapidly, allowing them to experience symptom relief without the marijuana high, according to GW Pharmaceuticals.

In addition, while marijuana is a hodgepodge of about 64 different substances, Sativex is composed mainly of two ingredients: THC and another cannabinoid called CBD. The latter component is thought to ameliorate some of the side effects of THC, including the high that marijuana users feel, said Dr. Armando Villarreal, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and pain management at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

And for habitual marijuana users, the cultural and ritualistic practices that go along with smoking pot, such as passing a joint, may be an important part of the experience, Bernstein said. These rituals cannot be replicated with the spray. "A lot of people that smoke marijuana would rather smoke it," he said.

Unlikely overdose
Unlike drugs such as painkillers, which come with a risk of death if people take too much, patients who "overdose" on the marijuana spray would be at little risk for acute health problems, Haney said.

"What could happen is the person could get very uncomfortably intoxicated," Haney said. But in terms of other serious health effects, "there's none that I know of," Haney said.

"Marijuana, in the scheme of things, is a relativity safe drug," Bernstein said. "Even as a smokeable drug of abuse, it's relatively safe…compared to cocaine or heroin."

However, Villarreal noted that for people with psychiatric disorders, smoking marijuana has been shown to make the patients' mental problems worse. It's possible Sativex may also cause this problem in some patients, he said.

Could it help patients?
So far, the studies that have been conducted do not provide enough evidence to say Sativex is effective in improving pain symptoms, Villarreal said.

Sativex has mainly been tested as a drug to treat pain caused by damaged nerves. If the drug is approved by the FDA, Villarreal speculated, its use could be restricted to certain pain patients. Those with cancer pain that is not caused by damaged nerves may not be candidates for the drug, Villarreal said.

About 1 in 11 people who try pot end up addicted to it, Haney said. It would be interesting to study whether Sativex could help people in dependent marijuana users quit the drug, she said.

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By Allison Becker
MyHealthNewsDaily

The Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a drug to treat advanced cases of the most common skin cancer, basal cell carcinoma, the agency announced Monday.

The drug, a capsule called Erivedge (generically known as vismodegib), treats basal cell carcinoma that has metastasized (spread through the body), or that cannot be treated with surgery.

In a clinical study in 96 people, 30 percent of those with locally advanced basal cell carcinoma (which had spread to surrounding tissue), and 43 percent of those with metastatic cancer (which had spread to distant sites in the body) saw their tumors shrink or heal while taking the drug, according to a statement from the FDA. Patients took one pill by mouth each day.  

Doctors treat non-metastatic cases with surgery, radiation or topical treatments, and have an extremely high success rate. But no other treatments exist for inoperable cases, such as people with tumors that have extended into the brain, or people who would become disfigured from surgery.

"This is exciting," said Dr. Désirée Ratner, director of dermatologic surgery at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. "I treat high-risk cases that are doable with surgery, but now there is a nonsurgical medical option for large, very advanced cases."

Ratner said she once had a patient whose tumor covered her entire upper back, and spread into her neck. That patient was not eligible for surgery, she said, but would perhaps have been a candidate for this drug, she said.   

Stopping the spread

Basal cell carcinoma originates in the top layer of the skin, spreads slowly and accounts for 80 percent of all skin cancer cases in the U.S. Each year about 2 million people in the U.S. receive a diagnosis of basal cell carcinoma, making it the country's most common skin cancer. However, less than 1 percent of diagnoses are metastatic. 

Factors that raise a person's risk include having fair, freckly skin, and being chronically exposed to the sun.

The FDA statement noted that Erivedge caused a range of side effects, including muscle spasms, hair loss, weight loss, nausea, fatigue, decreased appetite, vomiting and loss of taste. 

Pregnant women should not take Erivedge, as it could kill or harm a fetus, the agency said. 

How it works

Basal cell carcinoma is linked to mutations in genes that are part of a signaling pathway called the hedgehog pathway. Erivedge works by inhibiting the hedgehog pathway. 

In addition to helping patients with skin cancer, Erivedge might also treat people with other cancers, such as medulloblastoma, a malignant brain tumor that occurs in children; pancreatic cancer; and a type of lung cancer. The drug is currently in trials for other cancers.

Erivedge is produced by the company Genentech. 

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Salmonella strain that sickened 109 people, including a man who died, was initially identified only as "strain X" by the CDC.

When government health officials wrapped up a three-month investigation of a salmonella Enteritidis outbreak that sickened 68 people in 10 states, the final report on Jan. 19 included nearly every detail -- except the name of the place that sold the food.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to identify the source, other than as “Restaurant Chain A,” a Mexican-style fast-food chain.

That’s the second time in a little more than a year that the agency has masked the source of foodborne illness at a similar chain. In August 2010, a final CDC report found that 155 people in 21 states were sickened by two rare strains of salmonella traced to an anonymous Mexican-style fast-food chain eventually identified as Taco Bell.

Two other recent outbreaks with initially hidden sources -- laboratory-supplied salmonella Typhimuirium identified only as “strain X,” and an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in romaine lettuce from “grocery store Chain A” -- have spurred new scrutiny of the agency’s willingness to keep the entities behind some infectious outbreaks secret.

Food safety advocates say the practice keeps the public in the dark about which firms have been linked to illness.

“It will eventually come out and it will be the company that looks bad,” said Doug Powell, a professor of food safety at Kansas State University and author of a food safety blog. “A lot of these problems could be reduced if government agencies were more transparent about how they decide when to go public.”

Dr. Robert Tauxe, a top CDC official, defended the agency’s practice of withholding company identities, which he said aims to protect not only public health, but also the bottom line of businesses that could be hurt by bad publicity. The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and state health departments often identify companies responsible for outbreaks, but sometimes do not.

“The longstanding policy is we publicly identify a company only when people can use that information to take specific action to protect their health,” said Tauxe, the CDC’s deputy director of the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases.  

“On the other hand, if there’s not an important public health reason to use the name publicly, CDC doesn’t use the name publicly.”

Because companies supply vital information about outbreaks voluntarily, CDC seeks to preserve cordial relationships.

“We don’t want to compromise that cooperation we’ll need,” Tauxe said.

But critics such as Bill Marler, a Seattle food safety lawyer, say that the government owes the public early and full disclosure during illness outbreaks.

“In today’s society, where transparency is so important for decision-making, I just don’t think government has the right to withhold that information from the public,” said Marler, who has pushed hard for the CDC to identify the firm behind the latest outbreak.

He all but outed Taco Bell in a blog post late Monday that chronicled in which states with illnesses certain Mexican fast-food chains operate.

If Taco Bell were indeed the entity involved in the latest outbreak, the information would allow consumers to decide whether they wanted to continue eating at a fast-food chain implicated in similar outbreaks in 2006 and 2010, Marler said.

In 2010, the CDC withheld the identity of the Mexican-style “Restaurant Chain A.” But when the name was released in error to media outlets, the CDC confirmed it, said Lola Russell, an agency spokeswoman.

The agency has not confirmed that the “Restaurant Chain A” in the 2010 outbreak is the same as in the 2011 incident, and they will not comment on whether it’s Taco Bell, Russell said.

Officials with two other Mexican-style fast-food restaurant chains with sites in the affected states, Qdoba and Chipotle Mexican Grill, told msnbc.com they were not questioned in connection with the outbreak.

Taco Bell officials did not return calls or e-mails from msnbc.com seeking comment.   

In the case of the outbreak of commercially produced salmonella Typhimurium that sickened 109 people between August 2010 and June 2011, including one man who died, the CDC withheld the specific strain that caused the illnesses. The victims of "strain X" were mostly clinical and teaching microbiology lab students and their families, but they could have spread the germs to the general public on contaminated lab coats and cells phones, investigators suggested. It was those lapses in lab practice, not the particular strain of bacteria, that caused most concern, officials said.

“In that case, we don’t think that one salmonella is a lot different from another salmonella,” Tauxe said. “The concern is not the strain, it’s what are the safety procedures and practices they use in the laboratory.”

The trouble, say food safety advocates, is that it’s not clear when or why CDC officials decide to withhold the identity of firms involved in outbreaks and when they decide to go public.

"No one is happy, and that's largely because there are no guidelines people can at least point to, whether they agree with the guidance or no," Powell said.

Tauxe acknowledged there’s no written policy or checklist that governs that decision, only decades of precedent.

“It’s a case-by-case thing and all the way back, as far as people can remember, there’s discussions of ‘hotel X’ or ‘cruise ship Y,” he said.

That just doesn’t pass muster, said Marler and other critics. 

“If the CDC has a good, rational reason for doing what they’re doing, fine,” he said. “Then write it down and hold it up for people like you and I to scrutinize.”

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Measuring blood pressure in both the right and left arm may be an effective way of catching a silent but serious disease of the blood vessels, a new review says.

The findings showed that a difference in systolic blood pressure between the arms was linked with an increased risk of peripheral artery disease (PAD), a condition that involves a narrowing of the arteries in the extremities, particularly the legs and feet.

When researchers examined study participants' systolic blood pressure readings, those who had a difference between their right and left arms of 15 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) or more were 2.5 times more likely to have PAD than those who had a smaller difference between their arms, the researchers said. Systolic blood pressure is the "top" number in a blood pressure reading.

Early detection of PAD is important — while the majority of cases are silent, if the condition is detected, measures can be taken to reduce morality from related cardiovascular disease.

The findings support the need for it to become the norm to take blood pressure readings from both arms, said study researcher Dr. Christopher Clark, of Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Such tests could identify patients without symptoms at high risk for PAD who would benefit from further assessment or treatment, they say.

The researchers reviewed 28 studies that measured blood pressure in both arms of participants. The studies typically included patients at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the researchers noted.

In addition to an increased risk of PAD, a 15mm Hg blood pressure difference between arms was also associated with a 70 percent increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 60 percent increased risk of dying from any cause.

Which arm has the higher pressure can vary between individuals, but it is the size of the difference that counts, not which arm is higher and which is lower, the researchers said.

More work is needed to determine whether a substantial difference in blood pressure between arms should prompt aggressive management of cardiovascular risk factors, Richard McManus, of the University of Oxford, and Jonathan Mant, of the University of Cambridge, both in the United Kingdom, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.

"Ascertainment of differences should become part of routine care, as opposed to a guideline recommendation that is mostly ignored," McManus and Mant wrote.

The study and editorial will be published tomorrow (Jan. 30) in the journal the Lancet.

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Slideshow: Paralyzed teen hockey player struggles to recover

Carlos Gonzalez / Minneapolis Star Tribune via AP

As Jack Jablonski, a Minnesota high school hockey player who suffered a spinal injury during a game, tries to regain the use of his limbs, his family and friends are spreading a message they hope will prevent future injuries on the ice.

Launch slideshow

Two tragic spine injuries in Minnesota high school hockey games in the last month have sparked debate among parents, officials, and fans over how the rough sport can be made safer.

On Dec. 30, 16-year-old high school sophomore Jack Jablonski’s spine was severely damaged at the neck when he was checked twice from behind in a junior varsity game and crashed headfirst into the boards of the rink. After surgery to repair two vertebrae in his neck, the teen has begun rehabilitation, but his doctors don’t expect him to walk again.

Then, on January 6, high school senior Jenna Privette’s spine was injured when she fell either after crashing into the boards on her own or after having been slammed into them by an opposing player. Officials and family members are in vehement disagreement on the cause of the 18-year-old’s injury. It’s unclear whether Privette will recover. 

The Minnesota State High School League acted quickly announcing tougher penalties for three types of infractions that increase the risk of spine injuries: checking from behind, boarding, and contact to the head.

In the boys’ games, for example, the penalty for checking from behind increased to a mandatory 5-minute major penalty, plus a 10-minute misconduct.

However, prevention of these kinds of injuries will take a major effort from everyone involved in youth hockey -- from the leagues and officials, to coaches, parents and players themselves, experts say. It will take a combination of stricter rules, better conditioning, smarter playing techniques – and maybe an overhaul of hockey culture itself.

In the wake of Jablonski's devastating injury, his family has started an effort called “Jack’s Pledge,” which includes a Youtube video of high school hockey players pledging to play more safely.

While the tougher rules will only impact boys’ hockey -- checking has always been against the rules in the girls’ game – they can help protect young players, said Dr. Charles Tator, a brain surgeon and professor of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto who has been studying spine injuries in hockey for over 30 years.

“We’ve shown that these injuries are preventable,” Tator said. “In the 1990s we were seeing as many as 15 [injuries] a year in Canada, but now the number is down to about three or four a year because of new rules against pushing and checking from behind – and awareness on the part of kids, coaches, and parents that this is a dangerous maneuver.”

But rules changes are ineffective unless they’re enforced, said Dr. Michael Stuart, a professor and vice chairman in the department of orthopedics and co-director of the Sports Medicine Center at the Mayo Clinic and chief medical officer at USA Hockey. 

Officials, youth coaches, parents and players have to oppose overly aggressive behavior. “I know coaches who will pull players aside and tell them, ‘this is not what our team represents,’” or who sit out players for violent play even when they haven’t received a penalty, Stuart said.

Better conditioning, such as exercises to improve neck muscle strength, can also help prevent spine injuries in young players.

“The average kid who breaks his neck is about 17-years-old,” Tator said.  “We’ve noticed that in that particular age group they have big biceps and quadriceps that let them skate fast, but their neck muscles are skinny and relatively less developed.”

Players can also be taught better techniques for both receiving and doling out checks, Stuart said. The Mayo clinic specialist has been spearheading programs at USA Hockey to help combat both head and spine injuries.

While the intrinsic roughness of the game makes it more risky to kids’ spines -- as does football -- there are ways to help kids play safer.

One of the biggest issues is how players react when they’re about to crash into the boards, Stuart said. Their tendency is to put their heads down and that can lead to a spine injury.

More from The Star Tribune on the injured hockey players

“That’s why we started promoting a ‘heads up don’t duck’ prevention strategy,” Stuart said. “That makes them more aware of the mechanism of the injury is so they can avoid it.”

But rules changes, muscle strengthening and better playing technique won’t solve everything.

“We’ve witnessed, I think, more violence and aggression than there should be,” Tator explained. “This is one of the things that has been looked at carefully – increasing the emphasis on fair play and trying to reduce the influence of the win-at-all costs attitude. So when parents are in the stands shouting ‘kill em’ or ‘get em,’ they need to realize this isn’t conducive to safe hockey.”

Stuart agreed. “There is a certain culture in sports that overemphasizes winning to the point of promoting intimidation in order to achieve the goal of being victor. We have to teach sportsmanship and respect,” he said.

What changes, if any, do you think should be made? Tell us on Facebook.

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Jessica Wilcox thinks her in-laws still view her ideas about childbirth as kind of out there, but it’s hard to argue with success: In the last five years or so, Wilcox has given birth to two boys and two girls -- each weighing more than 10 pounds -- at her northern Virginia home. And she hopes to do it again one or two more times.

Wilcox is part of a small but growing trend. While home births are still rare in the United States, they've posted a surprising climb in recent years, according to a government report out Thursday.

Courtesy Julia Chemotti

Jessica Wilcox has given birth to her two sons and two daughters at their northern Virginia home.

After declining from 1990 to 2004, the percentage of U.S. births that occurred at home jumped 29 percent from 2004 to 2009, when it hit the highest level since researchers began collecting data 20 years earlier.

Non-Hispanic white women were most likely to give birth at home in 2009, with one in every 90 births, or about 1.1 percent, in that group taking place at home. That represents an increase of 36 percent over 2004.

Still, Wilcox’s children represent only a tiny minority. In 2009, 29,650 U.S. births, or .72 percent of total births, occurred at home. Compare that to, say, 1940, when 40 percent of births took place at home.  

Home births today tend to be more common among women 35 and older and among women with several previous children, according to the new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. They're most common in states with renegade reputations, such as Montana, which had the highest percentage of home births, nearly 2.6 percent, followed by Oregon and Vermont, with nearly 2 percent each.

“It’s women who are consciously rejecting the system,” says coauthor Eugene Declercq, professor of community health sciences at Boston University.

Although she's not older, that would describe Wilcox. Now 30, she delivered a baby in a hospital when she was 17 and gave him up for adoption. “It was a great hospital, but it was not a positive birth experience,” Wilcox says.

She didn’t like getting an epidural or an IV. She didn’t like all the poking and prodding by the nurses. And she didn’t like the fact she never saw the same doctor twice for her prenatal care. “I really wanted that personalized care that a midwife provides,” Wilcox says.

Her husband, Jeremy, 34, needed some convincing that it was safe to give birth at home, she says. “He was raised the same way I was: You get pregnant, you go to the hospital to have the baby.”

But now her husband likes to point out that he’s in good company: The son of Super Bowl-bound Tom Brady, New England Patriots’ quarterback, and his wife Gisele Bunchen, was born at home in 2010.

While the risk of death for a baby in a planned home birth is low, the scientific literature suggests it is two or three times higher than that for a newborn in a planned hospital birth, notes an opinion paper published last year by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Obstetric Practice.

Home births actually had a lower risk profile than hospital births in 2009, though, according to Declercq and his coauthors. Hospital births were twice as likely to be low birth weight or preterm babies as home births. And just under 1 percent of home births involved more than one baby, compared with 3.5 percent of hospital births. In addition, women who opt for home births are less likely to be teenagers or unmarried. This all suggests that midwives who attend home births select low-risk women as candidates, the authors write.

“Home birth isn’t for anybody who walks in the door,” says Marsha Jackson, the certified nurse midwife who attended Wilcox’s first home birth. For example, Jackson says, her practice rarely accepts women who want to have a vaginal birth after a C-section, or VBAC, at home because of their elevated risk of a uterine tear.

Jackson cofounded BirthCare, a certified nurse midwife practice, back in 1987. Today, Jackson says, the group’s six midwives attend 25 to 30 births a month. About 60 percent are home births, while the rest are in BirthCare’s freestanding birth center in Alexandria, Va.

“The babies that we caught are now having babies with us,” she says. “That is wonderful. When we opened our practice, we never imagined that.”

Do you think home births are dangerous? Would you do it? Share with us on Facebook

By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

About 7 percent of adults and teens in the United States are orally infected with the human papillomavirus, or HPV, a new study says. This represents about 14.9 million people.

More men are affected than women: About 10 percent of men ages 14 to 69 have an oral HPV infection, compared with 3.6 percent of women, the study showed.

Oral HPV infections cause some oropharyngeal cancers, or cancers of the tongue, the tonsils or back of the mouth. People who are infected with the strain HPV 16 are 14 times more likely to develop these cancers compared with those not infected with the virus.

The new findings were "reassuring," according to study researcher Dr. Maura Gillison, chair of cancer research at The Ohio State University , because they show that while oral infection with the virus is common, cancer cases as a result of these infections are rare. In other words, most infected people don't get cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates there will be about 40,000 new cases of cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx in 2012.

The findings also show oral HPV infections are, for the most part, sexually transmitted. People who reported engaging in oral sex were twice as likely to have an oral HPV infection as those who did not engage in oral sex. People who had had sex of any kind, including vaginal sex or oral sex, were eight times more likely to have an oral HPV infection than those who had not had sex. Among those who'd had 20 or more sexual partners, one in five had an oral HPV infection.

"Taken together, these data indicate that transmission by casual, nonsexual contact is likely to be unusual," the researchers wrote in their study.

However, there are clues HPV may also spread by kissing. Oral HPV infections were more common among sexually experienced people who had not engaged in oral sex than among sexually inexperienced individuals, a finding that is "consistent with transmission by other sexually associated contact (eg, deep kissing)," the researchers wrote in their study.

"This study of oral HPV infection is the critical first step toward developing potential oropharyngeal cancer prevention strategies," Gillison said. "This is clearly important, because HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancer is poised to overtake cervical cancer as the leading type of HPV-caused cancers in the U.S."

More studies are needed to know whether the HPV vaccine effectively prevents oral HPV infections, the researchers said. Currently, the vaccine is recommended to prevent cervical cancer, anal cancer and genital warts.

How common is oral HPV?

Between 1998 and 2004, incidence of new cases of oropharyngeal cancer in the United States more than tripled (from 0.8 cancers per 100,000 people to 2.6 cancers per 100,000 people).

Despite the rise, little was known about the prevalence of oral HPV infection, and the characteristics of those who have it.

In the new study, Gillison and colleagues analyzed data from more than 5,500 men and women in the United States. Participants answered questions about their sexual behavior and substance use. They were also asked to gargle mouthwash for 30 seconds, and cells that were exfoliated into the rinse were analyzed for evidence of HPV infection.

The researchers found HPV in the cells of 6.9 percent of the participants, and HPV 16 in 1 percent.

The infection was most common among those ages 60 to 64 years, (at 11.4 percent), and those ages 30 to 34 (at 7.3 percent).

Physicians should encourage their patients who engage in oral sex to use barrier protection, Dr. Hans P. Schlecht, of the Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.

Smokers and alcohol users also had a high prevalence of HPV. About 20 percent of those who said they smoke 20 or more cigarettes per day had oral HPV infection.

More research

It's not clear why oral HPV infection was more common among men than women. It could be that HPV is more likely to be transmitted through oral sex on women versus men, the researchers said. Differences in hormone levels between the sexes could also affect the duration of an infection.

Smoking may suppress the immune system, leading to longer infections with the virus, the researchers said.

The researchers noted their findings are based on study participant's reports of their sexual behavior and smoking, which may not be completely accurate.

Researchers need to follow people over time to better understand the effects of age, gender, sexual behavior and smoking on the incidence and duration of oral HPV infections, the researchers said.

The study will be presented this week at the Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancer Symposium in Phoenix. The study and editorial are published online today (Jan. 26) in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Pass it on: Oral HPV infections affect about 7 percent of adults in teen in the United States, and are more common in men than women.

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plos.org

A patient shows the scarring scabs attributed to the odd skin disease Morgellons, in which victims say fibers and other material extrudes from sores on their skin.

A strange disease in which sufferers say they find fibers, fuzz and other debris sprouting from sores on their skin is not contagious and has no clear cause, the largest-ever study of the condition called Morgellons has found.

Government health officials on Wednesday released the results of a four-year, nearly $600,000 review that found no infectious or environmental link to Morgellons, which reportedly plagues thousands of people in the United States and other countries.

“It’s a negative, but it really limits and narrows down the field of possibilities,” said Mark L. Eberhard, director of the division of parasitic diseases and malaria at the Centers for Disease Control and Infection. “By removing a couple of the big players -- infections and the environment -- that still leaves some wide-open territory about what could be the causes.”

The new study should reassure sufferers who worried about infecting family and friends, he added.

Researchers studied 115 people who reported Morgellons-like symptoms from the Kaiser Permanente health system in Northern California from July 2006 to June 2008, amounting to a rate of 3.6 cases of the disorder per 100,000 people. They conducted extensive interviews, tested patients' blood and urine, and studied biopsies of skin samples. It’s considered the first detailed, population-based analysis of “unexplained dermopathy,” which is how researchers describe Morgellons.

The CDC and Kaiser Permanente initiated the study in January 2008, after CDC officials received hundreds of calls and e-mails about an odd, fiber-sprouting skin disease. By the time the study was launched, the agency had heard from some 1,200 people. The mysterious disorder was dubbed Morgellons in 2002 by a Pennsylvania mother of a toddler who reportedly suffered from the disorder first identified in 17^th century France.

But scientists writing in the journal PLoS ONE also found nothing remarkable about the threads and fuzzballs patients reported emerging from lesions on their skin, which laboratory analysis showed were cotton or other fibers, possibly from clothing. They also couldn’t explain the creepy-crawling, tingling or pins-and-needles feeling that many sufferers said they experienced before rashes, sores and ulcers emerged. No parasites or mycobacteria were detected.

The scientists suggested that Morgellons victims may suffer from a condition similar to “delusional infestation,” in which people imagine bugs or other critters invading their bodies.

“No common underlying medical condition or infectious source was identified,” wrote Eberhard and his colleagues.

But people who believe they suffer from Morgellons said that was exactly the result they expected from a government agency trying to cover up a larger problem.

“I’m pretty sure they’ll say we’re all delusional,” said Jan Smith, 62, a Concord, N.H. woman who runs the website “Morgellons Exposed,”which details her 15-year battle with the perplexing disorder. Her theories include fears that Morgellons is caused by alien beings implanting nano-technology in humans.

“There’s so much more to this than a medical condition,” Smith said. “There’s something being hidden.”

Betsy Curry, 65, of Palm Bay, Fla., said she has endured sores and scabs all over her body for eight years, lesions that she said have extruded threads or fluff.  She didn’t expect the government report to offer any more help than the dermatologists and other doctors who dismissed her complaints.

“I’ve had years of doctors telling me something was wrong with me, I was crazy, I was too fat,” said Curry, whose condition was described on Inspire, an online support community.

“After eight years, it’s just something I accept.”

Morgellons sufferers were mostly white, middle-aged women, more than half of whom reported they were in poor health, the study showed. Like Curry, about 70 percent of the victims also suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and more than 60 percent reported ongoing bodily aches and pains.

About 60 percent showed problems with cognitive functioning. About half had evidence of drugs in their system, including drugs to control pain, and nearly 80 percent reported exposure to solvents, the study showed. About 40 percent had skin lesions or abrasions that appeared to be caused by self-inflicted rubbing or scraping, researchers found.

But the study shouldn’t be interpreted to conclude that the problem is all in sufferers' heads, Eberhard stressed. Instead, it should be a baseline for future research and encouragement for patients and their doctors to work together, harder, to find a cause.

“These people are definitely suffering from something,” Eberhard said. “It has impacted their lives greatly.”

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By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

A group of compounds used in a variety of products, including water-resistant clothing and microwave popcorn, may prevent childhood vaccinations from working properly, a new study says.

In the study, children who had higher concentrations of these compounds, called perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), in their blood had lower immune responses to diphtheria and tetanus vaccinations. An insufficient immune response to a vaccination can mean a child is actually vulnerable to catching a disease even though they've been vaccinated against it.

Indeed, the levels of antibodies in the blood of some children exposed to PFCs indicated they were not protected against these diseases by age 7.

"When we take our kids to the doctor's office to get their shots, we expect that the vaccines are going to work," said study researcher Dr. Philippe Grandjean, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. "What we found was that there was an increasing risk that they didn’t work if the kids had been exposed to the PFCs," Grandjean said.

The study is provocative, but the findings are not of immediate public health concern, said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Despite the link found in this study, vaccines have largely protected the public against diphtheria and tetanus over the same period of time that PFCs have accumulated in the environment, Schaffner said.

"These are illnesses that have been virtually eliminated from children," in the United States, Schaffner said.

However, Schaffner said investigations into the link between vaccines' effectiveness and PFCs, along with other potential environmental hazards, should continue.

The study will be published tomorrow (Jan. 25) in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

PFCs have thousands of uses in manufacturing, and most people have the compounds in their bodies, Grandjean said. They are slow to break down and persist for many years in the environment.

Studies in animals have suggested PFCs may lower the body's immune response, but their impact on people's health is unclear.

Grandjean and colleagues analyzed data from 587 children living in the Faroe Islands, in the northern Atlantic Ocean between Scotland and Iceland. These islands were chosen because their inhabitants frequently consume seafood, which is associated with increased exposure to PFCs. Still, overall,levels of PFCs in this area are similar to those found in other countries, including the United States, Grandjean said.

The researchers measured levels of PFCs in the blood of 5-year-old children, and tested the children's  immune response to tetanus and diphtheria vaccinations at ages 5 and 7. The kids received complete vaccinations against these diseases, including a booster shot at age 5.

The higher the levels of PFCs were in the blood, the lower the children's response was to the vaccines.

A doubling of the exposure to PFCs was associated with a 49 percent lower level of blood antibodies in children at age 7, Grandjean said.

Children with some of the highest levels of PFCs were two to four times more likely to have antibodies in their blood at a level below what is thought to protect against these diseases.

The study "emphasizes the importance of making sure that the world does not pollute the natural environment," Schaffner said. "Clearly, greater efforts must be made to keep these perfluorinated compounds out of the environment," hesaid.

It's not clear exactly how people come to accumulate levels of PFCs in their body, so advice on how to avoid them may not necessarily work. But Grandjean said, "It would be prudent to avoid microwave popcorn [and] treatment of furniture, carpets, shoes and clothing with stain repellants," unless they are known not to contain PFCs.

Future studies into the health impact of PFCs should examine their effect on the immune system, Grandjean said. The researchers would also like to know if exposure to PFCs is associated with a reduced immune response to other vaccinations.

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For the first time in two decades, no one in California died from whooping cough last year, a public health victory that followed the deaths of 10 babies in 2010.

The state also cut the total number of whooping cough cases by two-thirds, from a high of nearly 9,000 in 2010 to less than 3,000 in 2011, officials announced Tuesday.

Dr. Gil Chavez, the California Department of Public Health epidemiologist and deputy director for infectious diseases, credited wider availability of vaccines, faster diagnosis, greater awareness and a new law that required pertussis booster shots for middle- and high-school kids.

“Looking at our data, we really identified that there were some gaps in the rates of vaccination of critical populations,” Chavez said.

The push depended on the cooperation of local health departments and health care providers working together to emphasize the need for vaccination against the infection.

Pertussis is a highly contagious bacterial illness spread by coughs and sneezes.

Efforts were targeted particularly toward families, caregivers and health care providers of babies younger than 6 months. Because they can’t be fully immunized until after that age, it’s important that everyone around the infants be protected against the disease, a process known as “cocooning," health experts say.

The number of whooping cough cases remained high in California, however, at nearly 3,000. The last time there were that many cases was in 2005. The last year in which no one died was 1991, when the state recorded just 249 cases of pertussis.

State officials are awaiting final figures that show how vaccination rates increased because of the efforts, Chavez said. The law requiring immunization of 7^th through 12-th graders will apply going forward to all students entering 7^th grade this year and in the future.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention applauded California's rapid response and vaccination efforts, said Alison Patti, a program manager. Pertussis is cyclical, so a drop in infections was expected as the disease made its way through the population. But efforts to accelerate and expand vaccination certainly helped.

Rich Pedroncelli / AP

Ramon Maldonado-Cardenas grimaced as he got a flu shot from pharmacy student Khoa Truong in Sacramento, Calif., last fall. He was protected early from this year's flu season.

It’s been a remarkably mild flu season so far this year, with far fewer reports of the fever, coughing, aches and pains that usually make winter so miserable.

Of the laboratory samples sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the second week of January, only about 3.7 percent have come back positive for flu, compared with about 26 percent of those tested at the same time last year, records show.  

Visits for flu symptoms are only about half the national baseline, and when CDC plots the spread of flu on a national map, it shows only minimal or low flu-like illness nationwide.

So far, Colorado is the only state to report even regional flu activity, and local activity has been reported in eight states. Everywhere else has reported only sporadic flu activity -- or none at all.

But even the mildest flu season doesn’t mean people should be complacent about getting vaccinated against the bug, experts say.

Those who haven’t gotten their shots yet probably still should, said Dr. Neil Fishman, an associate professor of medicine and infectious disease and associate chief medical officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

“I think we have yet to see the peak,” he added.  “Influenza can be a serious disease resulting in anywhere from 36,000 to 43,000 deaths each year. So I would still get vaccinated.’

Flu seasons are quite variable and can start as early as October and run as late as May, according to the CDC. They often don’t peak until February.

But statistics show that most people who are going to get vaccinated do so by the holidays, with only about 20 percent of all flu shots doled out between December and May. About 36 percent of people in the U.S. older than six months had received flu shots by early November, according to the CDC. That was slightly more than the same time last year.

There are two theories as to why this season seems so mild, Fishman said. One  --  which would predict little increase -- is that we’re benefiting from an increased rate of vaccinations in children.  In fact, about 37 percent of kids had been vaccinated by November, up from about 31 percent the previous year.

The other theory is that the season just hasn’t really kicked off yet. If that’s true, some folks who thought they could get by without a flu shot this year might wish they’d gotten the jab after all.

While there was a time that the CDC suggested flu shots only for people at especially high risk, the agency currently recommends the vaccine for anyone over 6 months of age.

That change in recommendations hasn’t percolated down to average Americans, though. Many still think the annual flu shot is just for the very old and those with respiratory conditions.

One clear sign of that complacency comes from a study of the response to the swine flu in 2009. Even when the nation was obsessing over that version of the flu, just 1 in 5 adults aged 36 to 39 actually got vaccinated in 2009, according to a new University of Michigan report that looked at the flu-related behaviors and attitudes of Generation X.

Many reported being concerned about the bug, but that didn’t translate into high rates of immunization against a flu that was especially dangerous among children and young adults.  The author of the study suspects the low rate of immunization is related to how we’ve come to view the flu.

“I think historically young people think the flu affects older people,” said Jon Miller, director of the longitudinal study of American Youth at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “Most people in Generation X have never experienced a major epidemic of any kind.”

Fishman hopes to see a change in people’s attitude towards flu vaccinations.

“This is still the largest cause of vaccine-preventable death in this country,” Fishman said.

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By MyHealthNewsDaily staff
MyHealthNewsDaily

Doing puzzles and reading books have been linked with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease, and a new study may explain why — it reduces the accumulation of harmful proteins in the brain.

In the study, older adults who said they engaged in mentally stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits ofbeta-amyloid, the hallmark protein of Alzheimer's. The findings were true regardless of the participants' gender or years of education.

The findings suggest that cognitive therapies that stimulate the brain may slow the progression of the disease, if applied before symptoms appear, said study researcher William Jagust, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

The researchers note Alzheimer's is a complex disease that likely has more than one cause. In addition, other lifestyle factors not accounted for in the study may influence the link.

The study is published online today (Jan. 23) in the journal Archives of Neurology.

Plaques in the brains

An estimated 5.4 million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, and between 2000 and 2008, deaths from the disease increased by 66 percent.

In the study, the researchers asked 65 healthy, cognitively normal adults ages 60 and over (the participants' average age was 76) to rate how frequently they participated in such mentally engaging activities as going to the library, reading books or newspapers, and writing letters or email. The questions focused on various points in life from age 6 to the present.

The participants also completed tests to assess memory and other cognitive functions, and received positron emission tomography (PET) scans using a new compound that was developed to visualize the amyloid protein.

The brain scans of the older adults were compared with those of 10 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 11 healthy people in their 20s.

The researchers found a significant association between higher levels of cognitive activity over a lifetime and lower levels of in the PET scans. Older adults with the highest reported amounts of cognitive activity over a lifetime also possessed levels of amyloid comparable to young people. In contrasts, older adults with the lowest reported amounts of cognitive activity possessed amyloid levels comparable to patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Lifetime activity matters

The researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposits and levels of current cognitive activity alone.

"What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said study researcher Susan Landau, also of UC Berkeley. ]

However, the researchers said there was no downside to stimulating the brain later in life.

The researchers note that the buildup of amyloid can also be influenced by genes and aging — one-third of people age 60 and over have some amyloid deposits in their brain — but how much reading and writing one does is under each individual's control.

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Courtesy of the Napadano family

Sam Napadano spent months learning how to talk and walk again after he suffered a traumatic brain injury during a motocross accident three years ago when he was 13.

Mark Napadano watched in horror as his 13-year-old son slammed head first into the hard ground after a motocross accident.  In seconds he was at the side of his son, Sam, terrified by the sight of the junior high athlete so full of life just moments before lying limp in front of him - and not breathing. “It was like a nightmare,” Mark remembers.

At the hospital doctors examined Sam and gave Mark the frightening news: Sam had a large pocket of blood pooling near the top of his head and two smaller bleeds in the front and two in the back. “They didn’t say he was going to die, but they didn’t say he was going to live,” recalls the 45-year-old car dealer from Butler, Pa.

Sam was in a coma for days and in critical care for almost a month. By the time he was released to a rehab facility the 5-foot-4-inch teen had dropped from a trim and muscular 114 pounds to just 84. For months Mark and his wife, Sue, watched as their son learned to talk and walk for a second time.  

Now, three years after the wreck Sam is almost back to where he was before, Mark says. Sam returned to school three months after the accident and kept up his rehab for two years. He still has some short term memory problems and though his working memory has improved, it can be a challenge if too many commands are thrown his way at the same time.

While conventional wisdom is that children have a great capacity to overcome damage from a severe traumatic brain injury, or TBI, because their brains are still developing and “plastic,” a new study shows that many may actually end up with some lasting deficits. The study followed 56 children for 10 years after they’d sustained a TBI between the ages of 2 and 7.

During the study, the Australian researchers repeatedly examined the children’s intellectual abilities, as well as social and behavioral skills, according to the report published in Pediatrics. 

The report confirmed earlier research showing that most kids with mild TBIs recover completely, but the prognosis for children with more severe injuries is less predictable.

These new data suggest that “the majority of these kids will have long-term problems,” says the study’s lead author Vicki Anderson, a researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne. “And while there was some ‘spontaneous’ recovery, those who had access to rehab did better.”

Story: ER visits for kids' concussions on the rise

Leary Studios

Three years after his accident, Sam Napadano, now 17, still has some short-term memory problems, says his father, Mark Napadano. "I tell people that he's 80 to 90 percent back to where he was," he says.

Anderson and her colleagues found that kids did continue to improve for years. “It appears that, after a protracted recovery period, these children gradually stabilize and begin to make some developmental gains, suggesting that even many years post-insult, intervention may be effective,” they write.

What researchers like Anderson can’t say is which kids will recover best after a severe injury.

“It’s difficult to predict outcome,” Anderson explains. “But a quality home environment and access to ‘appropriate’ rehabilitation is critical to maximize outcomes.”

The new research echoes Dr. Douglas Smith’s experience. “Kids do recover better than adults,” says Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair and professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. “And the younger [kids] tend to do better than the older ones. That’s because the younger you are the more plastic your brain is. That makes it easier for the brain to rewire.”

The most important factor impacting recovery is the type of brain injury, Smith says. If the injury sites are isolated the prognosis is better than if the whole brain is involved, with connections everywhere being twisted and ripped.

For Dr. Christopher Giza, an associate professor of pediatric neurology and neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, the study raises “a hopeful note that suggests that these kids are still able to advance and develop. And it may suggest that even a long time after the injury there is room for intervention.”

One of the reasons that researchers have assumed that kids are resilient enough to recover from severe TBIs is the many examples of children with epilepsy who have had large parts of their brains surgically removed – and have still gone on to live normal lives because the remaining brain rewired to take over the job of the regions that were removed.

The difference between that scenario and the aftermath of some TBIs may be explained by the fact that a TBI can hurt cells all over the brain, making rewiring difficult.

Q&A: Concussion crisis often a game changer, authors reveal

When it comes to severe TBIs in kids, parents need to realize that their children may require long-term rehab, says Mandeep Tamber an assistant professor of pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. That rehab will help the brain to continue to rewire and also help the child to come up with strategies to compensate for lasting problems like short term memory deficits, Tamber says.

That makes sense to Ryan Bradley’s dad.

Three years ago, Ryan climbed up on the roof of a three story building with some friends and slipped, falling nearly 40 feet to the cement floor of a carport. Along with a host of other serious injuries, 11-year-old Ryan suffered a severe TBI. 

Like Sam Napadano , Ryan spent days in a coma and then years in intensive rehab. He had to learn to walk and talk again. And today most of the injuries to the Santa Monica boy’s body have been repaired, but the damage to his brain has left some lasting deficits.

He’s in high school now, but needs accommodations to make it through the course work.

“There is a program tailored to him,” says Ryan’s dad, Kevin Bradley, 48. “He gets tutoring and teachers know that he sometimes needs longer on tests and breaks during the day.”

Ryan is working towards graduation and plans to go to college, but he will likely have to battle the lingering effect of the brain injury every day of his life.

“There are always some processing issues,” his dad says. “He gets a little information overload at times. He’s learned techniques to help him take better notes.  He has techniques to help him be prepared for class.”

Kevin Bradley’s advice to parents with kids who’ve suffered a brain injury is simple: “Don’t give up hope. Be involved with your child’s care."

Do you know someone who has battled to come back from a severe brain injury? Tell us on Facebook.

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by Linda Thrasybule
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Children with autism tend to also have other disorders, such as a learning disability or depression, which affect them in different ways as they age, a new study finds.

The findings may explain, in part, why children with autism often see a change in their diagnoses as they grow older, the study suggests.

The study was based on 1,366 children who had taken part in a national health survey who either were currently diagnosed with autism, or had been in the past but no longer had the diagnosis.

"Parents should have their child checked for other conditions to make sure an autism diagnosis is properly determined," said study researcher Li-Ching Lee, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"That way, a more appropriate intervention for the child can be planned as early as possible," Lee said.

The study is published today (Jan. 23) in the journal Pediatrics.

Making a proper diagnosis can often be difficult

Autistic spectrum disorders — including autism, Asperger's syndrome and other developmental disorders — affect a child's ability to communicate and interact with people.

About 1 in 110 children in the U.S. is currently diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Boys are four times more likely to have autism than girls.

Symptoms of co-existing medical conditions, such as learning disabilities, hearing and speech problems, depression and anxiety, have been shown to overlap with symptoms of autism, often making it difficult for doctors to make a proper diagnosis.

Previous studies have shown that children with autism have higher rates of co-existing conditions than normally developing children, and those with developmental delays who don't have autism.

How long an autism diagnosis lasts seem to vary over time. One study found that more than 10 percent of children diagnosed with autism at age 2 no longer had the disorder at age 9.

"We're not saying that a child who was diagnosed with autism at age 2 won’t have autism later in life," said lead author Heather Close, a researcher at the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"But there are other mechanisms at work that we don't know about that could take place," she said.

More than one diagnosis is likely

The new study included 2007 data from the National Survey of Children's Health. Parents were surveyed about their child's physical and mental health, current and past medical, behavioral and developmental diagnoses and health care needs.

Researchers looked at data for children in three age groups, including young children who were 3 to 5 years old, children who were 6 to 11 years old and teenagers who were 12 to 17 years old.

They found that young children with a current diagnosis of autism were 11 times more likely to have a learning disability, and nine times more likely to have another developmental delay, than young children diagnosed with autism in the past who no longer had a diagnosis.

Of those in the 6- to 11-year old group, children with a current diagnosis of autism were almost four times more likely to have a past speech problem and suffer from anxiety than those who no longer had a diagnosis.

And among teenagers, those with a current diagnosis of autism were almost four times more likely to have speech problems, and 10 times more likely to have epilepsy than those who no longer had a diagnosis.

"This study looks at a broader population of kids," than previous work, said Tristram Smith, a behavior specialist at the University of Rochester, who was not part of the study.

"It shows that developmental delay and seizures are what can increase the likelihood that autism will stay in someone who has a current diagnosis," Smith said.

Smith said he recommends that parents learn to understand that diagnoses can change, or there can be more than one.

"Parents are often looking for that one answer," he said. "Reality is, it's a moving target, and it's complicated. It can be more than one diagnosis at one time, or it can be different diagnoses at different times too."

Pass it on: Certain co-existing conditions could likely lead to a change in autism diagnosis.

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It took asthma, COPD, emphysema and finally, lung cancer to get Toni Manes, a retired cosmetologist, to try to quit smoking.

Unfortunately, the 58-year-old was so hooked, she couldn't kick the habit even after part of her left lung was removed.

"I remember my surgeon told me 'If you ever smoke again, your husband should break your fingers,'" says the Philadelphia resident, who was diagnosed and had surgery in 2010. "And I was like, 'Okay, I'm not going to smoke again.'  But then I came home from surgery, recuperated for a few weeks and started up again. I couldn't help myself."

According to a new study in the American Cancer Society journal CANCER, Manes is just one of many patients who've found themselves smoking after diagnosis.

Researchers looked at 2,456 lung cancer patients and 3,063 colorectal patients and discovered that at time of diagnosis, 38 percent of the lung cancer patients and 15 percent of the colorectal patients were smokers.

Courtesy of Toni Manes

Lung cancer patient Toni Manes continued to smoke after her diagnosis.

Five months later, despite a cancer diagnosis, 14 percent of the lung cancer patients were still lighting up (ditto for 9 percent of the colorectal patients).

'Why stop now?'
"People think it's a no-brainer and are surprised that cancer patients continue to smoke after they're diagnosed," says Elyse R. Park, a clinical health psychologist and associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School and lead researcher for the study. "But people still struggle to quit even after they're diagnosed. There are a lot of barriers to quitting, including a lot of stigma."

Park says many of the people who can't quit are "hard-core" smokers, i.e., they smoke a high number of cigarettes a day. Many, also, are surrounded by other smokers.

"These people are nicotine addicted, so it's tough for them," says Park. "They also have a lot of self-blame for causing the disease. There are feelings of fatalism. They think, 'Why stop now?' And a lot of people are very judgmental about lung cancer patients causing their own disease."

According to the Lung Cancer Foundation of America, 60 percent of new lung cancer diagnoses happen to non-smokers, 15 percent of whom have never smoked a day in their life (the rest are former smokers who quit 10, 20 or even 30 years prior to diagnosis). The American Lung Association estimates that active smoking is responsible for close to 90 percent of lung cancer cases; radon causes 10 percent, and occupational exposures to carcinogens account for approximately 9 to 15 percent.

Manes says following surgery, she went on to do three rounds of chemotherapy, followed by radiation. And even though she continued to smoke throughout, she worked with her oncologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital on ways to quit.

"We tried everything," she says. "Hypnosis, Chantix, patches, cessation groups, acupuncture, the gum, the lozenges -- and none of that stuff did anything for me. I was depressed and didn't want to face that I had cancer. I saw a death sentence for myself. What difference did it make if I smoked or not?"

Park says she hopes her study will pave the way for more smoking cessation programs and treatment options for patients who are smoking at the time of their diagnosis.

"One of the reasons it's hard to quit is that people think they have enough to worry about," she says. "But it's the best time to quit because it has the potential to improve their cancer treatment, from breathing easier and feeling less fatigue to reducing the chance of infection after surgery."

Parks says studies also show that quitting smoking can increase the efficacy of chemo and radiation and may even double the chances of survival for lung cancer patients.

"We're hoping to integrate evidence-based tobacco treatment into cancer care," she says. "So you don't just ask a patient, 'Do you smoke, yes or no?' But you try to get them to quit as part of their treatment. It's a tough time, but we're hoping to find ways to sit with patients and get them pharmacological and behavior counseling treatment."

The good news? There's some evidence Park's approach might just work.

"On October 31, 2011, I got a sinus cold again and with every puff, I was choking," says Manes. "So I put on a patch and humbled myself before God and begged him to help me. I needed some kind of inner strength. On the 31st of this month, it'll be three months that I've been smoke-free."

Chris Langer / msnbc.com

Jennifer and Jason Schiraldi, of Campbell, Ohio, struggled for two years to have a child, without success. A ground-breaking technique at Cleveland Clinic, however, led to the birth of their daughter, Kenley, 9 months.

Everyone knows it takes just one sperm and one egg to make a baby, but nature usually provides extra, just to be sure.

In the case of 9-month-old Kenley Schiraldi of Campbell, Ohio, however, there was no back-up for the biology, requiring instead what scientists -- and her parents -- are calling a modern-day miracle.

Kenley was born last April, the result of a long-shot infertility treatment, a case Cleveland Clinic IVF experts say is the first time a single sperm has been frozen, injected into a single egg -- and resulted in a healthy pregnancy.

“It was better than hitting the lottery,” said Jennifer Schiraldi, 33, Kenley’s mom. “This never happens.”

Indeed, even Nina Desai, director of the IVF laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic, hasn’t calculated the odds of Kenley’s conception, which occurred even though her father, Jason, produced no sperm in the regular way, and her mom had trouble producing eggs.

“It was like a shot in the dark,” said Desai, who has developed a ground-breaking technique that can find and store tiny amounts of sperm -- or even just one -- in a drop of fluid inside a straw as thin as a sewing needle. The sperm can then be frozen and later thawed for use in an in-vitro fertilization technique known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI.

The new method follows nearly two decades of efforts to save the smallest possible amounts of human sperm by storing the cells inside hamster eggs or on tiny nylon loops for easier retrieval later. It’s expected to be a boon for men with very low sperm counts, a severe form of the male factor infertility that can contribute to the 1 in 8 couples in the U.S. who struggle to conceive.

Jennifer Schiraldi, a hospital dietician, and her husband, Jason, 35, a cardiac catheterization nurse, came to the Cleveland Clinic in 2009, after trying for two years to get pregnant, with no success. High school sweethearts who’ve been married nine years, they were young and healthy with no warning that they’d have trouble having a baby.

“I’d never had any woman problems and you never think it’s the guy,” recalled Jennifer.

In fact, however, tests showed that the Schiraldis were among 30 percent to 40 percent of infertile couples with problems attributed to the man.

“They took a sample and we found out immediately: There’s no sperm,” Jennifer Schiraldi recalls.

The couple could have stopped there, but they decided to pursue aggressive infertility treatment, including a testicular biopsy, which involves surgery to remove tiny bits of tissue to test for evidence of sperm.

The procedure was difficult, admits Jason Schiraldi, but he said he was determined to try everything.

“We always wanted kids and I didn’t want to be the one who couldn’t do that for her,” he said.

But searching for Jason’s sperm proved even harder than imagined. As the surgeon sent down samples, Desai’s lab staffers, three in all, used microscopes to scan the tissue for any sign of viable cells.

A typical male produces 60 million to 100 million lively sperm in a single ejaculation.

After searching Jason’s tissue for a total of nine hours, the scientists found -- one.

“We froze that one sperm and we saved the rest of the specimens,” recalled Desai. “We really had no hope of it doing anything.”

Because any pregnancy with so few sperm would require in-vitro fertilization, Jennifer Schiraldi had to harvest her eggs. But when they went to retrieve them, doctors found she made far fewer eggs than normal.

“I got 12 but only eight were good,” she recalled.

IVF experts searched the rest of Jason’s samples, hoping to fertilize as many of Jennifer’s eggs as possible. When they found only a couple dead sperm, the one frozen viable sperm was the only option.

“They got the one sperm and implanted the one egg,” Jennifer Schiraldi said.

Desai admits she wasn’t optimistic.

“People don’t usually get pregnant when they have only one egg,” she explained, noting that it’s far more common to implant two or three embryos to make sure pregnancy occurs.

But then came the exciting part. With the help of a careful ICSI procedure, the egg was successfully fertilized. Three days later, it had divided into a viable embryo and was implanted in Jennifer’s womb.

Sixteen days after that, she was confirmed pregnant.

“It was very emotional,” said Jason Schiraldi.

Back at the clinic, the staff shared congratulations.

“I was really surprised when I saw she had a positive pregnancy,” said Desai. "This has been one of the real miracles in our IVF program."

The pregnancy was normal but taxing, with a fair amount of nausea and other ordinary complications, Jennifer Schiraldi said. And the baby was in the breech position, which required a C-section.

But when Kenley Karlin Schiraldi arrived on April 20, her parents said there was no doubt about what had occurred.

“Miracle is not a large enough word to describe it,” said Jason Schiraldi. “Of all the fascinating and amazing things we do in the health care field, it’s amazing that this happened to us.”

Jennifer Schiraldi says she looks at her daughter every day and marvels that she’s here.

“It’s crazy. Sometimes I’m, like, ‘Did we cheat?’” she said. “People ask if we’re going to have another child, but we made it this far to get her. I don’t know if I even want to press my luck.”

Desai and her colleagues plan to use the new sperm storage technique to help other patients with very low sperm counts. Next week, in fact, another man with the same problem is scheduled for the treatment.

Jason Schiraldi said other couples should be encouraged by their experience.

“People think once you’re stuck, you’re stuck,” he said. “But there are people who can make wonderful things happen.”

Discuss this story on our TODAY Health Facebook page.

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A 32-year-old pregnant woman from Massachusetts, known only as Mary Moe, is at the center of a heated battle over abortion and sterilization, in a case so complex you could use it to teach an entire course on bioethics.

Moe suffers from severe schizophrenia and bipolar mood disorder. She has been pregnant before: The first time she had an abortion, and the second pregnancy resulted in a boy now being raised by Moe’s parents. Between her abortion and the birth of her son, she suffered what court papers refer to as a “psychotic break," and had to be hospitalized. She now takes medication, but her diseases are so severe that she is still not in touch with reality.

Forced abortion for mentally ill woman? No way, court says

At a court hearing last December the state Department of Mental Health asked that her parents be made her guardians. The parents wanted their daughter, then two months pregnant, to have an abortion. During that hearing doctors testified that the drugs Moe is taking threatened the health of her fetus. They also said stopping them would place her at serious risk of going "deeper into madness."  

The judge found the argument for an abortion persuasive. She ordered that Moe's parents be appointed as co-guardians, and said they could do whatever was necessary including having their daughter "coaxed, bribed, or even enticed ... by ruse" into a hospital where the abortion could be performed. The judge added that Moe should be sterilized after the abortion so that the same situation did not come up again.

The decision was immediately appealed. Now, a Massachusetts appellate court has overturned the lower court, and sterilization is off the table. The appellate court said that if Moe were competent she would not want an abortion, since she has said she does not want one. So no abortion is in store either.

Did the appellate court make the right decision? I think so -- but for the wrong reasons.

The state of North Carolina just paid out big sums of money to people who had been sterilized without their consent in the 1960s and 1970s. Sterilization has been abused again and again in this and other countries. There is no reversing it. Whatever needs to be done to help Moe, it is not sterilizing her.

If she is not to be sterilized, can severely mentally ill persons like Moe be told never to have sex? The court didn't broach the subject, but it is a key ethical question.

It is probably impossible to prevent Moe from having sex.  But given her mental state she is hardly capable of consent.  I think she needs to be on permanent birth control until and unless she somehow recovers from her mental illnesses. Then, and only then, should she be free to have a child.

What about the abortion? She cannot consent to it. The Massachusetts courts are trying to guess what she would want if she were competent using some of her statements to guide them. That is a hopeless quest. Moe is too sick to tell us anything. And, despite the judges’ efforts, it is pointless to pretend to know her wishes about this pregnancy.

Her poor parents do not want to worry about their daughter, raise one of her children and find themselves with another. But their stake in all this disqualifies them to decide what ought to happen.

What we are left with when autonomy is gone and family are conflicted is trying to do what is best for Moe and her fetus. I do not think an abortion clearly meets that principle.

If Moe’s medicines put the fetus at risk, then try to lower the dose. If Moe herself becomes even more impaired, stop. If Moe cannot possibly raise the baby and her parents cannot either, then adoption is the best road to follow.

Allowing Mary Moe to become pregnant again is not in her best interest. Ending the life of her fetus when she cannot tell us what to do is not in the best interest of the fetus. There is a lot to think about in the case of Moe, but forced sterilization and non-consensual abortion should not be part of that thinking.

What do you think about the case of Mary Moe? Tell us on Facebook.

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By Mike Stobbe
Associated Press

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could get pregnant.

What were they thinking, exactly, isn't clear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey didn't ask teens to explain their reasoning.

But other researchers have talked to teen moms who believed they couldn't get pregnant the first time they had sex, didn't think they could get pregnant at that time of the month or thought they were sterile.

"This report underscores how much misperception, ambivalence and magical thinking put teens at risk for unintended pregnancy," said Bill Albert, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Other studies have asked teens about their contraception use and beliefs about pregnancy. But the CDC report released Thursday is the first to focus on teens who didn't want to get pregnant but did.

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex.

"I think what surprised us was the extent that they were not using contraception," said Lorrie Gavin, a CDC senior scientist who co-authored the report.

Some of the teen moms were asked what kind of birth control they used: Nearly 20 percent said they used the pill or a birth control patch. Another 24 percent said they used condoms.

CDC officials said they do not believe that the pill, condoms and other forms of birth control were faulty. Instead, they think the teens failed to use it correctly or consistently.

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

Albert said it would be a mistake to come away from the report saying, "They can't figure this out?" "Most of them are figuring it out," he said.

Many low-income parents feel they must resort to “formula stretching,” to keep their infants fed, even with government food assistance programs, a new study shows.

The study found that 30 percent of parents who brought their infants to an inner city children’s clinic didn’t have enough food to make it through each month. And a full 15 percent, or about 1 in 8, made ends meet by watering down their babies’ formula or by feeding less frequently, according to the study which was published in Clinical Pediatrics.

“We knew this was a high-risk population,” said study co-author Andrew Beck, a fellow in general academic pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “But these numbers are still staggering.”

Up till now there has been little research on infants in families that don’t have enough food, Beck said. Studies of hunger and food shortages across the nation have found that 16 to 22 percent of American families come up short some months.

Beck and his colleagues surveyed 144 parents of infants who attended the hospital’s Pediatric Primary Care Center. The vast majority of families who come to the clinic are covered by Medicaid and receive food stamps as well as assistance getting infant formula through a program called WIC.

 The researchers asked about food availability and feeding behavior in a 37-question survey that also looked at sociodemographic characteristics such as patient age, race, parental age, education, ethnicity and source of insurance.

Even though the majority of parents were receiving help through foods stamps and WIC, many did not have enough food to feed their families. In fact, some 65 percent of families ran out of WIC-supplied infant formula most months. And the result, in many cases, was that parents diluted or cut back on formula for their infants.

This kind of formula stretching may have consequences for the infants, Beck said.

“There will be a subset of children who will have what is called ‘failure to thrive,’” Beck explained. “More often, though, the ramifications of this tend to be less visible -- problems with cognition and behavior. In some it may lead to obesity later in life.”

While some might point to breast feeding as a solution, not every mom is in the position to do this for her child. In some jobs it’s virtually impossible to express milk during the day when a mom is away from her baby.

“Clearly, we encourage and actively support breastfeeding,” Beck said. “The reality is that a relatively low percentage of our patients breastfeed by the time they reach us.  If they do, we continue to encourage it and have a breastfeeding clinic if they need it.  Although they likely wouldn't require formula, we need to do education and a nutritional assessment for mom.  Also, as the first year progresses, even fewer families continue to nurse.”

Many of these patients may be slipping through the cracks, Beck said. At his hospital, residents reported problems with food availability in only 2 percent of parents attending the clinic.

It was clear, Beck said, that residents didn’t know how to ferret out these kinds of issues. In a second study, published in Pediatrics, the researchers showed that the numbers shot up when doctors were given the right questions to ask of their patients.

Right now Beck and his colleagues are working on finding solutions for parents who don’t have enough to feed their kids. But those solutions will only work if doctors can figure out who needs help, Beck said.  

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By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

Researchers in California hope to become the first in the world to build an artificial testicle that produces human sperm. Such a device could allow infertile men to conceive children.

While recent studies have shown it's possible to treat infertile male mice by producing sperm using stem cells from the mouse, the same has not been done for humans, said researcher Dr. Paul Turek, director of the Turek Clinic, a men's health medical practice in San Francisco.

Using a newly received government grant, Turek and his fellow researchers hope to develop a human  "sperm-making biological machine," he said.

Unlike a non-sperm-producing prosthesis – a saline-filled implant for men missing a testicle – the device will not be designed to resemble a testicle. Instead it will most closely resemble a cylindrical bag a few inches long, Turek said, creating a final product that looks something like a transparent, over-sized Tootsie Roll.

Recreating the testicle
Others have tried to grow sperm from cells in lab dishes, but the cells wouldn't go through all the necessary steps, Turek said. Normally cells in the testicle go through about 12 stages on their way to becoming functioning sperm, but in a dish they stop at stage 9 or 10 – only within the highly specialized environment of the testicle can they complete the process.

Turek said he and his colleagues want to "re-create the testicle in an artificial environment, with all of its components."

To make their artificial testicle, the researchers will first focus on growing cells that normally nurture sperm during their development, including cells called Sertoli cells. Then the researchers will add embryonic stem cells, which can turn into virtually any cell in the human body. These stem cells will be "fortified" with genes to steer them down the right path, so that the stem cells develop the properties of sperm precursor cells, Turek told MyHealthNewsDaily.

In essence, the researchers are hoping re-create the environment within the seminiferous tubules, the structures in the testes where sperm are formed.

The artificial testicle would likely last only as long as it takes to go through one cycle of sperm production, about 70 days, Turek said. After that, another one would have to be created.

Ambitious project
"It's an ambitious project," said Kyle Orwig, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh who studies ways to restore male fertility."But it would be fantastic if it happened. It would be a major impact on the fertility field."

No one has yet tried to create sperm by re-creating the "home" of sperm cell production and adding stem cells, Orwig said.

It eventually might be possible to use the model to produce sperm for men who are infertile.

Does the G-spot really exist? Scientist can't find it

To do this, the researchers probably would use adult stem cells from the patient rather than embryonic stem cells. Such cells could be taken from the patient's skin, and researchers would have to "turn back the clock" so the cells  could develop into sperm. But whether this could work remains to be seen, Turek said.

Turek and his colleague Dr. Constance John, chief executive of MandalMed Inc., a biotech company in San Francisco, received a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Such grants are typically less than $500,000, Turek said.

Turek hopes to complete the artificial testicle in five to seven years.

Pass it on: Researchers are starting a project to create an artificial human testicle that can produce sperm.

More from MyHealthNewsDaily:

7 Surprising Reasons for Erectile Dysfunction

Top 10 Mysterious Diseases

Male Infertility Could Be Cured in Future, But Hurdles Remain

Paula Deen came clean to TODAY’s Al Roker that she was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes three years ago. The 64 year-old Georgia-born chef is the Queen of high-calorie, fat-laden, Southern comfort food said she kept the disease hidden from her many food followers because she had to “figure things out in my own head.”

“I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward,” she told TODAY. “I’ve always been one to think that I bring hope.”

It seems that the “something” Deen is bringing to the table is her promotion of a diabetes drug and an online diabetes management program.

There’s an ethically nasty hypocrisy to the timing of Deen coming clean about her condition. Obesity and genetics are leading causes of type-2 diabetes, not just somone's diet. But it’s possible that what Deen has proudly, aggressively and lucratively promoted in her TV kitchen for years may be a factor in her illness. If you are making a living promoting foods that give the American Diabetes Association fits -- such as saturated fats (butter!),  bacon and sour cream -- you certainly have an obligation to let your fans know as soon as you know that you have a disease that is tightly linked to the food you are shilling.

Not only has the First Lady of the Deep-Fryer been less than transparent about her disease, she has inked a multimillion dollar deal with the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk for its once-daily treatment. It is hard to imagine a stickier ethical affair than making a fortune promoting foods that make people fat -- thereby increasing their risk of diabetes -- and then having the nerve to try to sell them a drug to treat the diet-related disease that she has had secretly for years.

Deen never told anyone to eat only what she prepares on TV.  She told TODAY that her show is entertainment and that "you have to be responsible for yourself." But, she has frequently laughed-off the well-known health risks of a diet rich in fried and fatty entrees.  Strictly following her dietary directives puts her viewers and readers at risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and arthritis.

One of her rival TV food floggers, Anthony Bourdain, has called Deen "the worst, most dangerous person to America" for glamorizing unhealthy recipes.  I am not sure she makes it to the top of my most dangerous list. But, given her lack of ethics about what foods she has promoted in the past and a lack of honesty about a disease known to be closely tied to those very foods, I certainly would be extremely wary about following her advice about either what to cook or what medicines to take in the future.

 More on Paula Deen:

Did Paula Deen's diet cause her diabetes?
Deen: Diabetes diagnosis won't change how I cook
Struggling to overcome secret shame of diabetes