Baldness as a Signal of Heart Disease Risk

Courtesy : NY Times and BMJ online.

Baldness may indicate an increased risk for coronary heart disease.
The risk is associated only with male pattern baldness, the kind that starts at the top or back of the head, and not with a receding hairline, according to researchers who reviewed six studies that included 37,000 participants.
The analysis, published online in BMJ Open, found that baldness increased the risk for heart disease by between 30 and 40 percent compared with men with a full head of hair. They found the association among men 55 to 60 as well as among older men, and the more severe the baldness, the greater the risk.
The reason for the association is unclear, but the authors suggest that known risk factors for heart disease — hypertension, high cholesterol, smoking and others — may affect both conditions, and that baldness may be a marker of atherosclerosis. In previous studies, baldness has been linked to an increased risk of prostate cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure.
“It may be premature to confirm this relationship on the basis of only six studies,” said a co-author, Dr. Kazuo Hara, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Tokyo. “But the ultimate aim is to be able to predict the risk for heart disease more precisely in clinical practice.”

Comments

Monoclonal Antibody Targets, Kills Leukemia Cells

Monoclonal Antibody Targets, Kills Leukemia Cells Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center have identified a humanized monoclonal antibody that targets and directly kills chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells The findings, published in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 25, 2013 represent a potential new therapy for treating at least some patients with CLL, the most common type of blood cancer in the United States. CLL cells express high levels of a cell-surface glycoprotein receptor called CD44. Principal investigator Thomas Kipps, MD, PhD, Evelyn and Edwin Tasch Chair in Cancer Research, and colleagues identified a monoclonal antibody called RG7356 that specifically targeted CD44 and was directly toxic to cancer cells, but had little effect on normal B cells. Moreover, they found RG7356 induced CLL cells that expressed the protein ZAP-70 to undergo apoptosis or programmed cell death.

Stem Cell Treatment May Become Option to Treat Nonhealing Bone Fractures

Stem Cell Treatment May Become Option to Treat Non healing Bone Fractures Stem cell therapy enriched with a bone-regenerating hormone, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), can help mend broken bones in fractures that are not healing normally, a new animal study finds. The results are being presented at The Endocrine Society's 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston. A deficiency of fracture healing is a common problem affecting an estimated 600,000 people annually in North America, according to the principal investigator, Anna Spagnoli, MD, associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This problem is even more serious," Spagnoli said, "in children with osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease, and in elderly adults with osteoporosis, because their fragile bones can easily and repeatedly break, and bone graft surgical treatment is often not successful or feasible" Fractures that do not hea

Erythropoietin as a Retinal Angiogenic Factor in Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy

Although vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a primary mediator of retinal angiogenesis, VEGF inhibition alone is insufficient to prevent retinal neovascularization. Hence, it is postulated that there are other potent ischemia-induced angiogenic factors. Erythropoietin possesses angiogenic activity, but its potential role in ocular angiogenesis is not established. METHODS We measured both erythropoietin and VEGF levels in the vitreous fluid of 144 patients with the use of radioimmunoassay and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Vitreous proliferative potential was measured according to the growth of retinal endothelial cells in vitro and with soluble erythropoietin receptor. In addition, a murine model of ischemia-induced retinal neovascularization was used to evaluate erythropoietin expression and regulation in vivo. RESULTS The median vitreous erythropoietin level in 73 patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy was significantly higher than that in 71 patients with

MEDICAL RESEARCH BANGLADESH ( BD )

Search This Blog