Vitamin E May Lower Women’s Lung Disease Risk

April 28th, 2011

WebMD

By: Kathleen Doheny

Long-term, regular use of vitamin E supplements appears to reduce the risk of chronic obstructive lung disease or COPD in women, according to a new study.

But men may not get the same benefit, according to another study. Both studies were presented this week at the American Thoracic Society international conference in New Orleans.

The risk reduction for women on vitamin E supplements was equal in people who smoked — the primary risk factor for getting COPD — and people who didn’t, says Anne Hermetet Agler, a PhD candidate at Cornell University and lead author of the study involving women.

”We saw a 10% reduction in risk,” she says. The women took 600 IU of vitamin E every other day. Of the effect, she says, “It is limited to just women.”

Vitamin E, an antioxidant, has been looked at as a lung disease preventive because it is thought to protect against free radicals, molecules that damage cells and one of the proposed processes by which lung disease is thought to develop. But previous research has found little or no effects of antioxidants on lung outcomes, Agler says. And other research has found increasing vitamin E may slightly increase lung cancer risk and other ill effects.

More than 16 million Americans have COPD, also known as emphysema and chronic bronchitis, according to the National Lung Health Education Program.

Vitamin E and Women’s COPD Risk

Agler and her co-researchers analyzed data that had already been gathered for the Women’s Health Study. The long-term research effort ended in 2004 and focused on what effects aspirin and vitamin E had in the prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer in nearly 40,000 women, age 45 and older.

During that study, women were randomly assigned to groups that took either 600 IU of vitamin E every other day, 100 milligrams of aspirin every other day, or placebo. None of the women had COPD at the start of the study.

During the nearly 10-year follow-up, there were 760 new reports of COPD in the vitamin E group and 846 in the placebo group, translating to a 10% risk reduction for the supplement group.

The effect held when Agler considered a number of other factors, including smoking status, age, and multivitamin use.

Even though the vitamin E reduced the overall risk of COPD in both smokers and nonsmokers, the current smokers were more than four times as likely as never smokers to get COPD, the researchers found.

Agler also looked at the effect of vitamin E on new diagnoses of asthma, but found little or no association.

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FDA Calls Lung Drug Misleading

August 31st, 2010

Reuters

By: Lisa Richwine and Susan Heavey

U.S. health officials have issued a warning to Baxter International Inc (BAX.N) for misleading patients and doctors about the benefits of its Aralast lung drug.

In the warning released on Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said a company brochure made misleading claims about the drug, which treats emphysema patients with a specific genetic abnormality.

The FDA warned Baxter about similar violations in April 2009 and July 2008.

“We are very concerned by your continued violative promotion of your products,” the FDA wrote.

In the brochure, Baxter misleadingly implied the drug had a protective effect, even though the clinical benefit for certain effects of the drug have not been shown, the FDA said.

Baxter said in a statement it took the FDA’s concerns seriously and has put the brochure on hold.

Baxter shares fell 0.4 percent to $43 in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The FDA posted the letter, dated Aug. 3, on its website at link.reuters.com/qex48n

Click here for the full report from Reuters

Recession is Causing Towns to Stop Polluting Water Supply with Fluoride

September 17, 2010

Information Liberation

By Chris

Who said the recession is all bad? On the bright side, it’s forcing some towns to stop adding fluoride to their water supplies. A small town in Alabama has decided to stop fluoridating their water due to economic reasons, they say it will save them 50k a year.

“I guess we wound up saving about 50-thousand dollars a year in the production of our water, and we’re a small system so 50-thousand dollars a year is a big savings,” said Joe Beasley, Red Bay Water and Gas Department.

Apparently, they actually looked at the science, so perhaps they felt the recession was as good an excuse as ever to stop force drugging everyone.

“They had officials look at several studies and never found any evidence that supported keeping the fluoride in the water.”

The Montgomery Advertiser reports 18 other water systems in Alabama have also put their forced drugging program on hold.

Goode said that unlike some states that mandate by legislation that public water systems add fluoride to their water, Alaba ma does not.

“Water systems may decide to discon tinue fluoridating, which is a concern for the department and the communities.”

Yes, what a terrible tragedy that the government doesn’t mandate by law people’s own tax money be used to forcibly drug their water supplies.

He told the members of the committee that the state might be “losing the battle on fluoridation.”

Williamson said that the economy might be causing some systems to decide that it is too costly to maintain the equip ment that provides the fluoride, or they have done away with the service all together.

“That’s a problem,” he said.

A problem for the state, yes. A problem for the people, no.

There is absolutely no evidence fluoride helps anyone, in fact, the opposite is true. To quote from an excellent exposé:

The history of forcing fluoride on humans through the fluoridation of drinking water is wrought with lies, greed and deception. Governments that add fluoride to drinking water supplies insist that it is safe, beneficial and necessary, however, scientific evidence shows that fluoride is not safe to ingest and areas that fluoridate their drinking water supplies have higher rates of cavities, cancer, dental fluorosis, osteoporosis and other health problems. Because of the push from the aluminum industry, pharmaceutical companies and weapons manufacturers, fluoride continues to be added to water supplies all over North America and due to recent legal actions against water companies that fluoridate drinking water supplies, precedent has been set that will make it impossible for suits to be filed against water suppliers that fluoridate. There is a growing resistance against adding toxic fluoride to our water supplies, but unfortunately, because fluoride has become “the lifeblood of the modern industrial economy”(Bryson 2004), there is too much money at stake for those who endorse water fluoridation . The lies of the benefits of water fluoridation will continue to be fed to the public, not to encourage health benefits to a large number of people, but to profit the military-industrial complex. - The Fluoride Conspiracy

A chronicle of the abuse of power and of the manufacture of state sponsored medical propaganda, The Fluoride Deception reveals how military and industry scientists and public health officials buried information about fluoride’s potential for harm, while promoting its use in dentistry.

The book reveals that fluoride pollution was the greatest legal threat facing the Manhattan Project and how a group of powerful Cold War industries, who all faced extensive litigation for fluoride pollution, collaborated with officials from the National Institutes of Dental Research, laundering fluoride’s public image.

We’ll sit with the famous doctor who reported in the 1950′s that fluoride was a systemic poison, with tens of thousands of citizens uniquely sensitive to even tiny doses. We’ll walk the cobbled streets of Donora, Pennsylvania, in the aftermath of the nation’s most notorious air pollution disaster in 1948, and meet the scientist who blamed fluoride for the deaths. And, when a superstar toxicologist is fired in 1995, after discovering that fluoride affects the central nervous system, we’ll uncover a stunning connection to the WWII atomic bomb program. Today that scientist joins a growing number of health experts who call fluoride a venomous and hydra-headed poison. They suspect its involvement in a host of modern illnesses, including arthritis, bone cancer, and emphysema, and a spectrum of central nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and attention deficit disorder.

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Genetics May Help Detect Lung Cancer at an Early Stage

April 8, 2010

Reuters

By: Maggie Fox

Researchers have identified a group of genes that are especially active in lung cancer patients — even in healthy tissue — and said they may be used to predict which smokers will eventually develop lung cancer.

And, they said, a natural supplement derived from food that is being tested to prevent lung cancer appears to halt the precancerous changes.

“Even in normal cells or premalignant cells prior to cancer development we see this pathway being turned on,” said Andrea Bild of the University of Utah, who worked on the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The main gene is called PI3K and it affects a pathway of other genes, Bild, Avrum Spira of Boston University and colleagues reported. And it can be found in the windpipes of smokers, meaning they do not need more dangerous and uncomfortable lung tests.

“These cells are like a canary in the coal mine,” Spira said in a telephone interview. “Even though lung cancer develops deep down in your lungs when you smoke, these cells can tell you whether you are on the way to developing lung cancer. It is sort of a window into the lung.”

Cigarette smoke causes 90 percent of all cases of lung cancer, which kills 1.2 million people a year globally.

But only about 10 percent of smokers ever develop lung cancer, although they often die of other causes such as heart disease, stroke or emphysema.

Spira and Bild put together results from two ongoing trials of smokers.

“The patients walk in the door and they have something wrong with them — we don’t know what. Maybe they have lung cancer, maybe they have something else,” Bild said in a telephone interview.

Lung cancer is so deadly precisely because it causes vague symptoms. Most patients are not diagnosed until it has spread and can no longer be treated.

ACTIVE GENES

The researchers used a brush to collect cells from the windpipes of the smokers. They put these on a gene chip or microarray to see which genes were active in the cells.

“We found this certain pathway, PI3K, was turned on in patients that had lung cancer as opposed to patients that had other problems,” Bild said.

PI3K had long been suspected in lung cancer. But another experiment got the researchers more excited.

These were patients with precancerous lesions in their lungs called dysplasia. PI3K was also active in their lesions.

And the second group was taking the natural supplement, myo-inositol, to try to prevent lung cancer. In the patients whose lesions shrank after taking the supplement, PI3K also became less active, the researchers found.

“Together it gives us the story of the importance of this pathway,” Bild added. “Whether it is going to save millions of people, who knows?”

Spira said he is working with Boston-based Allegro Diagnostics, which is halfway through a 60-patient clinical trial of the test.

The researchers have patented their findings through the universities but Bild said myo-inositol supplements are cheap and freely available.

Myo-inositol is also found in fruits, beans, grains and nuts, although Bild said the finding does not necessarily explain why people who eat more of these foods have a lower risk of cancer in general.

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