A recent test on rats has revealed to Arizona researchers that a drug that has been used tii now for treating vascular problems in brain can also effectively improve learning and memory.

The drug known as Fasudil, which has been used for more than 10 years to treat vascular problems in the brain, often helping with recovery from stroke, has been found to improve cognition in middle age rats.


However, further studies are required to prove its efficacy in humans.

During the study, the researchers injected hydroxyfasudil, the active form of Fasudil, into middle-aged (17-18 months old) male rats daily starting four days before behavioural testing and continuing throughout testing.

The rats were tested on the water radial-arm maze, which assessed how well they remembered which of the radiating arms had a reward, a sign of accurate spatial learning and working memory.

The team found that rats given a higher dose successfully remembered more items of information than those given a low dose.

Moreover, the high-dose group showed the best learning (and best working memory).

The findings suggest that hydroxyfasudil may be involved in two crucial cognitive processes, learning and working memory, both involving the hippocampus.

Although the mechanism is unclear, but hydroxyfasudil's parent drug, Fasudil, is known to protect the brain by dilating blood vessels when blood flow is curtailed.

"We have identified a drug that seems to benefit both the cardiovascular system, which it was originally designed to do, and the central nervous system, a new indication," said lead author Dr. Matthew Huentelman.

"We are actively exploring options for a clinical trial in the areas of cognitive impairment and dementia using the well-tolerated pro-drug Fasudil," he added.

The finding appears in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

Exposure to sun appears to impact more on the skin of males than females.

Researchers at the Ohio State University in Columbus exposed a breed of hairless mice to ultraviolet rays from a sun lamp.

According to online edition of health magazine WebMD, The mice underwent eight- to 10-minute tanning sessions three times a week for six months. That was enough to give both male and female mice skin cancer.

"We found males got skin tumours earlier, got more of them, and more of the tumours were severe," assistant professor Tatiana M. Oberyszyn was quoted as saying.

The researchers are now looking at human skin to see if men really are like mice.

Previous studies have shown that there's a huge difference between men's skin and women's skin. Men are more likely to get skin cancer than women.

Cancer now kills more people in developing countries each year than AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria, health experts said here on Monday.


Issued ahead of World Cancer Day on Wednesday, their report said more than 12 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed worldwide in 2008, resulting in 7.6 million deaths.

More than half of all new cases and around 60 percent of the fatalities occurred in developing countries, where poor medical infrastructure often means that cancer is a sure-fire death sentence.

"Cancer in the developing world is a hidden crisis that goes largely unreported, undiagnosed and untreated," said David Kerr, a professor of clinical pharmacology and cancer therapeutics at the University of Oxford, who contributed to the report.

"Cancer survival rates in developing countries are exceptionally poor. Lack of awareness, stigma and reliance on traditional healers mean most people do not seek medical help until their disease is advanced, and often incurable."

According to the report, issued by health foundation and consultancy Axios International, there could be 20 million new cases of cancer each year, and 13 million deaths, by 2030.

It points to several reasons why cancer - which previously found a stronghold in rich economies - is expanding so fast in poorer countries.

One is that people there are living longer, and the risk of cancer rises as one ages.

Another is the spread of modern lifestyles, characterised by smoking, drinking, little exercise and diets that are high in fat and sugar and poor in roughage.

The Hindu Business Line (9/22/2003) On November 9, 1979, a man in his 30s died of coronary heart disease, "because he could not afford to go to Houston and pay $20,000 for a heart surgery. That day, I was devastated when I saw his 31-year-old wife with their two children... four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. All that he needed was a simple coronary bypass surgery that September," recalls Dr Prathap C. Reddy, Chairman of Apollo Hospitals.

This incident was the nucleus that resulted in the birth of the Apollo Hospital in Chennai in the September of 1983. Twenty years down the line, a couple of weeks ago, its Cardio-Thoracic unit in Chennai, headed by Dr M.R. Girinath, completed 25,000 open-heart operations, of which over 18,000 were coronary bypass operations. In a way the 38-year-old opened up the avenue for saving the lives of 25,000 people.

"In those days no significant coronary bypass surgery was being done in the country. So I said I must bring international quality health care for our people." Today, the group has 28 hospitals in 38 places, including Sri Lanka and Dubai, and has done 50,000 cardiac surgeries, including heart transplants "with outstanding results and at 10 per cent of the international cost. We've gone right up to liver transplants, doing 27 liver transplants not charging $500,000 but only $38,000."

You almost pounce on him to ask the obvious: how may Indians can even afford a fraction of the cost? "Health insurance is the answer. For six long years, I've been telling the prime minister, the health and finance ministers to make health insurance mandatory."

He wants contributions to health insurance right from the time when a birth certificate is issued (Rs 50) and 10 per cent of school fees. He is appalled that people would willingly insure houses and vehicles against damage or theft but not their lives. He loves to give the example of his little village Aragonda (about 160 km from Chennai) where the Re 1 per person per month insurance scheme "is working beautifully. We have a good hospital there and the scheme caters to the health needs of 52 villages in the area. After all mandatory insurance is not rocket science... South Korea did it in 10 years. If we put our heart and soul into it, we can do it in five years."

A votary of the private sector's participation in the health care delivery system, as the Government can't meet the health care needs of a billion people, he feels that though private hospitals had demonstrated that they could achieve "clinical and surgical excellence at excellent results, it is not yet time to rest on our laurels. India is ready to take on the world in the health sector in two ways," says Dr Reddy.

He hopes more and more Indian hospitals would realise and grab the opportunity to manage several services of western hospitals right from India and with help from IT enabled services. "We now have only 4 million people who are employed in health care; it can easily go up to 30 million if our hospitals exploit all these opportunities. We have to now create economic wealth for our country from our sizable health infrastructure," he says.

University of Michigan Health System researchers have published new data to help answer two dreaded questions: "Is it cancer?" and "What type of treatment should I have?"
Cancer is the primary concern when abnormal skin lesions are detected.

Macroscopic and microscopic features of a lesion usually provide clues about whether it is benign or malignant. However, the distinction is not always clear-cut, and doctors are faced with the question of how to best treat such patients.

The quandary is especially pronounced in atypical spitzoid tumors (ASTs), a rare proliferation of pigmented skin cells. ASTs have many features of melanoma, a potentially deadly form of skin cancer. ASTs tend to appear in patients who are much younger than the age when skin cancer traditionally occurs, which makes determining whether the lesion is malignant or benign even more difficult.

The new research, led by the University of Michigan Multidisciplinary Melanoma Program and published in the journal Cancer, suggests that ASTs behave differently from other types of melanoma. This finding could eventually lead to fundamental changes in the way ASTs are treated.

"As patients with AST appear to do better than conventional melanoma after similar treatment, we are now able to provide some reassurance to concerned parents and loved ones about the implications of the diagnosis," says lead study author Mathew Ludgate, MBChB, FRACP, assistant professor in the U-M Multidisciplinary Melanoma Program.

Although ASTs are rare, the U-M Multidisciplinary Melanoma Program has considerable experience as a preeminent national referral center. ASTs are an increasing challenge for physicians, as the number of ASTs diagnosed throughout the country appears to be increasing for unknown reasons. The researchers focused on long-term outcomes of ASTs to formulate improved evidence-based treatment guidelines.

Doctors generally treat patients with AST similar to malignant melanoma by surgically removing the lesion and in many cases also with a sentinel lymph node biopsy. The sentinel lymph node biopsy involves the removal and evaluation of one or a few lymph nodes nearest the skin lesion to determine whether the skin lesion has spread to the lymph nodes.

Ludgate and his team analyzed U-M's unique comprehensive melanoma database that has been collecting data for almost two decades for all cases of ASTs of uncertain biological potential between 1994 and 2007.

Data were examined to learn the clinical features of a patient, whether the patient underwent a lymph node biopsy and the histological features of the tumor.

Of the 67 patients in the study, 57 had undergone wide excision and sentinel lymph node biopsy, and 27 biopsies were positive.

All 27 of AST patients with positive sentinel node biopsy are alive and disease-free at an average of about 44 months follow-up, researchers note.

"If AST were a form of melanoma, we would expect that at least some of the patients would have had the AST recur throughout the body by this time" Ludgate explains. "This study provides evidence that although ASTs have some features of melanoma microscopically, they do not behave as aggressively."

These findings can be interpreted in three ways, Ludgate says. "The first is that AST is not cancer at all, but has some ability to spread.

The second possibility is that because ASTs often occur in younger people with intact immune systems, the body is able to successfully fight off the beginnings of metastatic disease. The third possibility is that AST is potentially deadly but removal of the primary AST lesion and the sentinel lymph node biopsy is curative."

Each of these possibilities is considered in the treatment strategy developed collectively as a result of this study. One result of this new strategy is that not every patient with AST must undergo a complete lymph node dissection or treatment with interferon-alpha after a positive sentinel lymph node biopsy, depending on the degree of lymph node involvement and the age of the patient. This is important as complete lymph node dissection is a more extensive surgery than a sentinel lymph node biopsy alone, and has considerable more risk of long term side effects.

Given the difficulty determining whether AST is benign or malignant, Ludgate notes, the melanoma team plans to "identify the molecular profile of ASTs to further characterize the true behavior of these tumors."

In addition to Ludgate, authors of the study are senior author Timothy M. Johnson, M.D., as well as Douglas R. Fullen, M.D., Julia Lee, M.P.H., M.S., Lori Lowe, M.D., Carol Bradford, M.D., James Geiger, M.D., and Jennifer Schwartz, M.D. The authors are affiliated with the U-M Department of Dermatology, Department of Pathology, Comprehensive Cancer Center, Department of Statistics, Department of Otolaryngology and Department of Surgery.