Latest Cancer Treatment

A drug that has been used for 40 years for the treatment of skin fungus has been found to be a possible cancer treatment, according to an international team of scientists. Leslie Wilson, professor of biochemistry and pharmacology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that the antifungal drug, griseofulvin, has been shown to inhibit the growth of cancer cells in his laboratory. The results are published in today’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The work is the result of a collaboration between Wilson’s lab, in UCSB’s Department of Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and a lab in the School of Biosciences and Bioengineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in India.

“The drug has remarkably few side effects and has been used for a long time,” said Wilson. Griseofulvin is administered orally, and has been used for decades to treat ringworm and other fungal infections of the skin.

“We discovered that it has the ability to inhibit the growth of cancer cells, in a manner that is similar to much more powerful anticancer drugs such as taxol and vinblastine,” said Wilson. “Although the anti-cancer activity is weak, it is already approved for human use and could be used along with more powerful anticancer agents as an adjuvant in cancer chemotherapy.”

The authors found that the drug inhibits the proliferation of cancer cells by affecting mitosis, or cell division, and mitotic spindle microtubule function. They conclude: “A mild suppression of microtubule dynamics by griseofulvin in tumor cells, combined with the effects of more powerful drugs working through other mechanisms, might provide a therapeutic advantage for treatment of certain tumors.”

High blood pressure (BP) can knock several years off a person’s life, confirm study findings published in the journal Hypertension.

Elevated BP is a major modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and mortality, say the researchers, led by Oscar Franco (University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

“Suboptimal BP (>115 mmHg systolic BP) is estimated to be responsible for 62% of cerebrovascular disease and 49% of coronary heart disease,” they note.

The team studied the effect of hypertension on life expectancy among 3128 participants of the Framingham Heart Study who had their 50th birthday while enrolled in the study.

Results showed that, irrespective of sex, 50-year-old hypertensives had a shorter life expectancy than normotensives, as well as a shorter life expectancy free from CVD, myocardial infarction and stroke, and a longer life expectancy after the diseases developed.

Total life expectancy for those with normal blood pressure was 5.1 years longer in men and 4.9 years longer in women than in people with hypertension.

The 22% of men in the study who were normotensive also lived 7.2 years longer without cardiovascular disease compared with hypertensives, and spent 2.1 fewer years of their life with CVD.

The researchers conclude: “Our results suggest that optimizing the control of BP to keep it at normal levels and avoiding hypertension could potentially lead to a longer life expectancy, and not withstanding the subsequent aging of the population, also to a reduction of CVD in the general population.”

Latest cardiac Treatment

Although heart failure is often referred to as one of the new “epidemics” of cardiovascular disease in the 21st century, there have been few community-based studies that gauge the risks of heart failure in a general population. In a report published in the July issue of The American Journal of Medicine, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School looked at the incidence of heart failure in residents of the Worcester, Massachusetts metropolitan area. The results of this study suggest that heart failure is an important clinical syndrome affecting residents of this large northeast community. Several groups at high risk for developing or dying from heart failure can be identified and targeted for preventive efforts as well as for the receipt of effective treatment modalities.

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PM calls for steps to reduce cybercrime

THE RECENT case of the outsourcer who sold British people’s data to hacks at the Sun has so embarrassed the Indian government, that it has been moved to change its wide open protection laws.

According to CIO-Asia, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a special meeting of software company outsourcers that “stringent punishment” would follow any breach of secrecy, illegal transfers of commercial information and other cyber crimes.

Stung by a recent scandal that rocked India’s booming business processing industry, the government on Tuesday announced that it will tighten laws to prevent cyber crime and ensure data secrecy, an official said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a special meeting of software company representatives Tuesday that stringent punishment would follow any breach of secrecy, illegal transfers of commercial information and other cyber crimes.

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