Even With Equal Care, Racial Disparity Persists In Blood Cancer, Study Finds

Black Americans with blood cancer do not live as long as white patients with the disease, a new study finds, even when they receive equal levels of care. Researchers looked at 84 black patients and more than 1,500 non-black patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which is a rare disease in blacks. All patients received the same treatments. The time from diagnosis to referral for treatment was shorter for blacks than whites, but blacks were more likely to have more advanced CLL at the time of referral. Blacks responded as well as whites to first-line treatment, but their cancer progressed more rapidly, and their survival time was shorter. This shorter survival time among blacks persisted even after the researchers grouped patients according to factors related to the severity of their disease, according to the study. The findings indicate that biological factors may account for racial differences in survival among patients with CLL, the researchers said. For reasons that are unclear, minorities tend to have worse cancer outcomes than whites. In black patients, poverty and limited access to high-quality care often play a role, but some experts believe that certain cancers can be more aggressive in minority patients.

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Scientists Create Human Liver From Stem Cells

Scientists have for the first time created a functional human liver from stem cells derived from skin and blood and say their success points to a future where much-needed livers and other transplant organs could be made in a laboratory. While it may take another 10 years before lab-grown livers could be used to treat patients, the Japanese scientists say they now have important proof of concept that paves the way for more ambitious organ-growing experiments. Researchers around the world have been studying stem cells from various sources for more than a decade, hoping to capitalize on their ability to transform into a wide variety of other kinds of cell to treat a range of health conditions. There are two main forms of stem cells - embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from embryos, and reprogrammed "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPS cells), often taken from skin or blood. Countries across the world have a critical shortage of donor organs for treating patients with liver, kidney, heart and other organ failure. Scientists are keenly aware of the need to find other ways of obtaining organs for transplant. The Japanese team, based at the Okohama City University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, used iPS cells to make three different cell types that would normally combine in the natural formation of a human liver in a developing embryo - hepatic endoderm cells, mesenchymal stem cells and endothelial cells - and mixed them together to see if they would grow. They found the cells did grow and began to form three-dimensional structures called "liver buds" - a collection of liver cells with the potential to develop into a full organ. When they transplanted them into mice, the researchers found the human liver buds matured, the human blood vessels connected to the mouse host's blood vessels and they began to perform many of the functions of mature human liver cells. "To our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the generation of a functional human organ from pluripotent stem cells," the researchers said. The suggestion from this new study is that mice transplanted with human iPS cell-liver buds might be used to test new drugs to see how the human liver would cope with them and whether they might have side-effects such as liver toxicity.

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Women With HIV May Suffer More From Hot Flashes

As women infected with HIV live longer, new evidence is suggesting that menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes may affect them worse than women who don't carry the virus. "Perimenopausal HIV-infected women experience greater hot flash severity and greater hot flash-related interference with daily activities and quality of life," compared to non-infected women going through menopause, researchers report. Excessive menopausal symptoms might even compromise the health of HIV-positive women, including their ability to adhere to drug therapy and abstain from drugs and alcohol, the team said. Lead author and her coleagues urged doctors who care for middle-aged HIV-infected women to evaluate their hot flashes and offer effective treatment. For the study, the researchers surveyed 33 HIV-infected women, aged 45-48, with irregular menstrual cycles (perimenopause) and compared their responses with those of perimenopausal women without HIV. The women with HIV typically experienced moderate hot flashes while the women without HIV mild hot flashes. The HIV-infected women also had more sleep problems, more depressed moods, irritability and anxiety. Hot flashes also interfered more with HIV-infected women's work, social and leisure activities, concentration, relationships with others, sexuality, enjoyment of life and overall quality of life. In fact, the harmful effect of hot flashes among women with HIV was greater than what has been reported for breast cancer survivors, according to the study. It's not clear why hot flashes are worse in HIV-infected women and further research is needed to learn the answers, the study authors said.

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New Products of SQUARE Pharmaceuticals Ltd.

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