Thursday, March 13, 2008

Dopamine and Cancer

Dopamine, a drug currently used to treat Parkinson's disease and other illnesses, also might work in cancer patients. Note however, the study was conducted only in animals (a mouse). It is not necessarily a cure all and certainly has not been proven in humans:

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates movement and affects
behavior. In its synthetic form, dopamine is used to treat heart attack victims,
Parkinson's disease and pituitary tumors. But it wasn't known until now that
dopamine worked by blocking the growth of new blood vessels (a process called
angiogenesis).

"Researchers now can test this concept in solid tumors
where angiogenesis plays a critical role in the growth and progression of these
cancers," says Sujit Basu, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic scientist who conducted
this study with Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, Ph.D., a scientist with the
Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Calcutta, India.; and, Debanjan
Chakroborty, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at Mayo Clinic and
CNCI.

more

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

ibuprofen is better than both acetaminophen and codeine

For relieving a child's pain from acute musculoskeletal injuries, ibuprofen is better than both acetaminophen and codeine. - more here

Friday, March 2, 2007

Starbucks No More

Yikes:

If your daily routine includes swinging by Starbucks for a quick latte, you may be well on your way to diabetes, obesity, or both. A grande cafĂ© mocha with breve ends 580 calories and 40 grams of fat down your system. The recommended calorie intake is about 2,000, which means that one cup has roughly the same calories as a full meal, without the nutritional value. In fact, according to News Target, Starbucks’ drinks can hardly be called coffee – coffee-flavored sugar is more like it. The coffee itself is not bad, but with all the sugar, cream, and other heavy add-ons that go into each cup, you might as well have ordered ice cream.

That's about equivalent to eating a Big Mac.