Injected Dyes More Dangerous Than MRI
December 9, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
By now most Natural News readers are aware of the dangers from excessive CT scans, X rays, and other imaging health screenings. But what about those dyes injected into your body for the purpose of increasing image contrast and clarity?
If you take a dye for an MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) examination orally, your chances of danger from that dye are slim and none. It’s the ones that are injected that can cause problems. They are known as gadolinium based contrast agents or GBCAs.
GBCA warnings for patients with obvious kidney disorders have usually been heeded. But the GBCA manufacturers dispute notions that their products cause a certain unusual skin disorder known as Nephgrogenic Systemic Fibrosis (NFS) or Nephrogenic Fibrosing Dermopathy (NFD). By either name it’s a horrible and potentially fatal disease.
NFS/NFD symptoms include extreme swelling of extremities, loss of feeling with leathery skin, and locked joints forcing victims to become wheel chair bound. Allopathic medicine has no cure for NFS/NFD. This disease is rare because only gadolinium based contrast agents cause it!
As a metal, gadolinium is very responsive to the magnetic imaging of MRI machines. But it is a poison. Its toxicity is temporarily curtailed by chelating it with chemicals to liquefy it so that it will be sorted out by the kidneys and eliminated. This is why patients with obvious kidney or liver problems should not be injected with GBCAs.
How We Came About Current Cancer Guidelines
November 23, 2009
New York Times
By Gina Kolata
A few years ago, an independent group that issues guidelines on cancer screening decided to review its recommendations for breast cancer. It had last issued guidelines in 2002, but things had changed — there was new science and researchers had become more sophisticated in analyzing existing data.
So the group, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, started what it thought would be a straightforward job: gathering the newest science and asking about the benefits and risks of breast cancer screening, the best time to start and how often women should be screened.
The group ended up recommending that most women forgo routine mammograms in their 40s and test every other year instead of every year.
The response was swift and angry. Professional groups, like the American College of Radiology, advocacy groups, like the American Cancer Society, and politicians said the guidelines would deprive women of a life-saving test. And some said the guidelines were politically motivated to save money.
Panel members have been taken aback by the response. Their work seemed almost mundane, they say, just an effort to gather and evaluate the best possible evidence.
The task force, a 16-member panel of experts appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, began its work as usual. It went to an academic center, in this case the Evidence-Based Practice Center at the Oregon Health and Science University, and asked for an extensive review of all the relevant papers published on breast cancer screening, including ones used in the last review. At that time, the task force recommended routine screening starting at 40, saying that there were benefits although they became greater as age increased. The Oregon group had done similar reviews for the panel, including a review for the 2002 guidelines.
This time, the panel hoped that it could get missing pieces of the puzzle. New studies allowed scientists to zero in on benefits and harms for women in their 40s and to evaluate with far more certainty not just whether women should be screened but also how often.
The Oregon scientists began by combing the literature. By November 2007, the researchers, led by Dr. Heidi D. Nelson, a professor of medicine, medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at the university, had finished its review and sent its work to 15 outside scientists for review, then sent it to the panel. Finally, the researchers were ready to make their first full presentation to the panel members.
Part of that evidence, which Dr. Nelson’s group included, was new results from a huge study in England of mammograms for women in their 40s. This study, published in 2006, compared 54,000 women offered mammograms starting at age 40 with 107,00 women the same age who were not offered them. Previous studies of women in their 40s had them starting at various times in that decade of their lives and so were less useful.
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Recent Mammography Findings Under Fire
November 20, 2009
The Wall Street Journal
By Shirley S. Wang, Jonathan D. Rockoff and Barbara Martinez
The federally funded task force that loosened guidelines for breast-cancer screening this week clarified its position Thursday, in response to an intense backlash generated by its new recommendations.
Seeking to dispel confusion over some aspects of the new guidelines, task-force members said they never meant to convey that women in their 40s shouldn’t get mammograms, nor that they sought to discourage women from examining their breasts for signs of cancer.
Diana Petitti, a professor in biomedical informatics at Arizona State University who is vice-chairwoman of the panel — the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — said she felt its conclusions were misinterpreted.
The task force is not against women having mammograms in their 40s,” Dr. Petitti said in an interview. Instead, she said, it is in favor of women in that age range deciding on their own, after consulting with their doctors, whether to undergo regular screenings.
Similarly, the task force merely intended to signal that primary-care physicians no longer need to teach women how to conduct self-examinations because of a lack of evidence that such outreach is effective. But it didn’t mean to deter women from the practice, which can sometimes lead to the early detection of cancerous lumps.
Dr. Petitti and other panel members expressed surprise at the uproar caused by their paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, while conceding they could have handled the message better. “We probably, in retrospect, could have been more clear,” Dr. Petitti said.
The new guidelines reversed a longstanding recommendation that women in their 40s automatically undergo an annual mammogram, an X-ray used to detect breast cancers, and stated that women aged 50 to 74 could reduce the frequency of such screenings to once every two years, from once a year.
Critics of the new guidelines have complained that the task force consists entirely of primary-care experts rather than oncologists, and that the panel’s decision may lead to a decline in coverage of mammography among health insurers for women in their 40s. Some critics say the new guidelines may lead to breast-cancer deaths among women in their 40s who forgo screening.
In reaching its conclusions, task-force members said they relied on large quantities of research published since 2002. They weighed the benefits of frequent screening against the harms of false positives, such as anxiety and unnecessary additional tests and biopsies.
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Annual Pap Smears Thing of the Past?
November 20, 2009
ABC News
By Lauren Cox and Dr. Joshua Hundert
Pap smears may no longer be called “annuals” if doctors follow new cervical cancer screening recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
The group announced today that women should start getting cervical cancer screenings at age 21 instead of 18, and that women could wait longer between the screenings — regardless of when a woman starts having sex.
Women in their 20s with normal Pap smear results now should get screenings every two years instead of every year, and women in their 30s can wait three years between screenings, according to the new ACOG guidelines.
After a week of uproar over the controversial recommendations for less mammogram screenings for women, doctors say they will have to wait and see how the public reacts to the new pap smear guidelines.
“This is not a radical change in screening practices. This is something that’s been coming gradually since the 1980s,” said Dr. Alan G. Waxman, who helped write the new guidelines.
Some doctors hailed the decision as a way to reduce a host of problems caused by excessive screening; yet, a few others worried it might trigger more women to neglect annual checkups with gynecologists.
Waxman said the move toward fewer screenings will reduce unnecessary treatment in young women and protect them from future pregnancy complications.
On one hand, college-aged women have very high HPV infection rates. Dr. John Curtin, of The Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City said 70 percent of all college-aged sexually active people have contracted HPV. These high infection rates translate into a high number of abnormal pap smears.
Scientists Admit Genes Don’t Predict Disease
November 09, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Genetic analysis is essentially useless in predicting a person’s risk of cancer, heart attack or other common diseases, according to a set of commentaries published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The decoding of the human genome in 2003 led to a flood of research into the contributions that genetic variation might make to the risk of various chronic diseases that tend to develop late in life, such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer. Since then, a number of for-profit companies have begun offering genetic screenings and disease risk assessments.
“With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” said David B. Goldstein of Duke University, author of one of the commentaries. “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”
A few diseases, such as sickle cell anemia or Tay Sachs disease, can be caused by a mutation on a single gene. Most diseases, however, are much more complex, and develop due to an interaction between environmental factors and the contributions of a variety of genes.
In order to calculate the genetic contribution to these diseases, geneticists developed the technique known as genomewide association study, in which the genomes of groups of healthy people are compared with the genomes of those with a certain disease. The hope among researchers has been that this analysis could point out genetic differences between the groups that might be linked to disease risk.
While genomewide analysis has successfully identified some differences between the genetic codes of healthy and diseased patients, these differences provide little information about disease risk. Researchers expected to find a small number of common genetic variations that were responsible for each disease. Instead, common gene variants appear to contribute to disease risk only very marginally.
Goldstein suggests that the genetic component of chronic disease risk might arise from a large number of rare genetic variants, making genetic screening far less helpful in predicting risk. If only a small number of variants are involved, they might provide information on the biological pathways that lead to the development of the disease. If many different variations are implicated, however, this would tell researchers nothing except that an error in the functioning of nearly any bodily system can contribute to disease risk.
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