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Marathon against dengue - Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) Lahore

Marathon against dengue – Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) Lahore

LAHORE - The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) Lahore organised its second City Marathon and Health Walk for awareness of dengue on Sunday in which a large number of people from all walks of life participated.

According to a press release issued here Sunday, the slogan of the marathon was, “Kadam Barhao, Dengue Bhagao”. The aim of the marathon and health walk was to promote awareness among people about dengue. Speakers on the occasion said every year thousands of lives were lost and affected in Pakistan due to a dengue fever outbreak. They said the PMA was an organization of medical professionals in Pakistan which aimed to protect physical and mental wellbeing of Pakistanis, promote medical services and take measures to improve medical education for a healthier and happier Pakistan. Approximately 4,000 people participated in the marathon and walk including athletes, mentally and physically challenged and health conscious citizen. The five-mile marathon started and ended at the Racecourse Park.

More thorough dialysis may reduce deaths

More thorough dialysis may reduce deaths

ISLAMABAD: A more thorough dialysis technique may help prevent deaths due to heart conditions and infections in people with advanced kidney disease, according to a new study.

Known as hemodiafiltration, that method is better able to clean the kidneys of larger toxins than standard dialysis, which mainly removes small molecules.

When not removed from the kidneys, larger toxins could play a role in inflammation and cholesterol buildup, researchers said, The Indian Express Reported.

People on dialysis are most likely to die of complications such as heart disease and infection, according to Dr. Francisco Maduell, the study’s lead author from the University of Barcelona in Spain.

Maduell said hemodiafiltration has been available in Europe for almost two decades and more recently in Asia and Canada as well. The Food and Drug Administration gave the okay for the first hemodiafiltration devices to be marketed in the United States less than a year ago.

About 350,000 people in the U.S. are on dialysis. Dialysis machines do the work of healthy kidneys for people with end-stage renal disease, filtering clean fluid into the kidneys and toxins out. Many people stay on dialysis for months or years while waiting for a kidney transplant.

For the new study, Maduell and his colleagues randomly assigned 906 people currently on dialysis in Spain to remain on their normal regimen or switch to hemodiafiltration.

Over the next two years, just under 40 percent of those participants left the study because of a kidney transplant, a change in dialysis unit or another reason. Death rates over three years were 27 percent among patients on standard dialysis, compared to 18 to 19 percent for those on the more thorough filtration method.

In particular, people getting hemodiafiltration were less likely to die of infections. That group also had fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease, although the finding could have been due to chance, the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

They calculated that eight people would have to switch from regular dialysis to hemodiafiltration to prevent one death each year.

Dr. Katrin Uhlig, a kidney disease researcher from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said she welcomed the new research.

“Our survival numbers are not great for this population,” said Uhlig, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Hemodiafiltration “has some benefits in terms of the size of the molecules that you can remove, so there is some theoretical benefit that you might be removing stuff that might otherwise be harmful,” she told.

However, she said, the cards may have been stacked against the group of people getting standard dialysis in the study, in that those patients were a bit older, on average, and more of them had diabetes.

Standard dialysis costs between $200 and $250 per session in the U.S., and even for younger adults is covered by Medicare. Maduell said hemodiafiltration is usually slightly more expensive, but not by much.

Patients in his study tended to feel better, and had fewer symptoms such as low blood pressure during treatments with that technique. “The tolerance is equal or better with hemodiafiltration,” he told.

Preventable diseases on rise in Pakistan

Preventable diseases on rise in Pakistan

KARACHI – Pakistan is among the high ranking countries where people are still get affected of preventable diseases like tuberculosis, polio and malaria while non-communicable diseases are raising vigorously in different cities due to apathy of the authorities concerned which is not playing its due role, said Dr Ahmed Salman Khan Ghauri, President of Pakistan Islamic Medical Association (PIMA) Karachi.
He said since the 18th Amendment in the Constitution, the health is now provincial chapter, but till to date there is tug of war among the major institutions due to ill-management that hurt common citizen.
Massive awareness, proper treatment and enabling environments can reduce the prevalence of the high blood pressure, which is the goal of World Health Day 2013. “So far our health authorities have been unable to pay heed to the fact that common citizens do not get the health service promised to them.”
The cases of high blood pressure are on the rise among the working class, which termed 2012 as bad year for the particular strata of the society.
Dr Ghauri, who is also Consultant Cardiologist at National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases, Karachi said this year the theme of World Health Day 2013 is high blood pressure that causes heart attacks and strokes. Dr Ghauri said the risk of developing high blood pressure can be controlled by reducing salt intake; eating a balanced diet; avoiding harmful use of alcohol; taking regular physical activity; maintaining a healthy body weight and avoiding tobacco use.
High blood pressure is a silent killer as it causes no symptoms for many years while damaging certain critical organs, non serious approach towards controlling high blood pressure can cause heart attacks, kidney failure and stroke, President PIMA said. He quoted WHO report stating that the expenditure on health per capita in Pakistan is merely $59 which is very low as it is compared to India with $132 and Sri Lanka with $148. There is a dire need to provide relief to masses, he said, adding that early consultation with doctors can cut down the costs on diseases. There is no population base statistics, which depicts accurately the diseases existence in our society, he added.
The World Health Day was marked on April 7 across the globe to highlight the significance for governments to invest in the key health sector. The focus this year is on hypertensions (Blood Pressure) that have been known as the silent killers. According to the World health Organization (WHO), 40 per cent of adults aged 25 and over have raised blood pressure and 17.3 million people die from cardiovascular diseases in the world. With the kind of stress factors that are an unfortunate part of human existence in Pakistan, the implications of these statistics cannot be over-emphasised.
The Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) and its network of branches across the country have been actively lobbying at all possible tiers to improve the healthcare delivery mechanism in the country which, beyond doubt, is going from bad to worse by the passing day.
At one level, it suffers because not enough funds are allocated to the sector. Subsequent governments have been reminded time and time again that annual allocations for key social sector, including health, have been alarmingly low, causing serious problems to the masses and an equally serious setback to efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to which the Government of Pakistan is a signatory.
The WHO has recommended an expenditure of six per cent of national GDP on health. In Pakistan, less than two per cent is the norm. Moreover, the problem also lies in the manner of expenditure of these precious funds. Vested interest lobbies active in the arena represent the biggest hurdle in the way of any effective execution of whatever funds the health sector gets. The PMA Annual Health Report has been highlighting the simple fact that Public Health is a victim of misplaced priorities and widespread corruption. It’s time the government realised that what the country needs is an efficient primary and emergency healthcare system and provision of basic facilities; not lavish expenditure on tertiary care centres and elite medical towers.
In a country where 70 per cent of the population has no access to primary and emergency care, 1.2 million people die of water-borne diseases annually, a child dies of some disease every minute, and 70 women die of pregnancy-related complications every day, the government has no justification to spend money on lavish projects. The PMA says it is a shame that Iran and Bangladesh had successfully eradicated polio with six and four rounds respectively, while new polio cases are still being reported in Pakistan despite having over 70 rounds of vaccination. PMA demands that, as recommended by the WHO, six per cent of GDP must be spent on health and expenditure must be monitored to ensure transparency. In the absence of such steps, the teeming millions of Pakistan will continue to suffer for no fault of their own.

Cafeterias at hospitals of Islamabad offer substandard food

ISLAMABAD – The substandard food cafeterias and stall in hospitals of capitals are functioning unnoticed, taking a heavy toll on health of visitors while authorities concerned are not even considering it to resolve this issue.The food being sold in these canteens and out side stalls of hospitals is too shoddy and substandard, and is causing many health problems.It was learnt that all such public places in the city are offering substandard food due to no checking by the responsible authorities. Due to lack of any food inspection system in the capital, people are suffering from food poisoning and other related diseases. There are many small food stalls and roadside hotels seen in public parks, hospitals and recreation resorts, where low quality food is sold which is hazardous to the health of people. The patients of food poisoning mostly belong to surrounding areas of Islamabad. Due to lack of health facilities in these areas, they have to visit hospitals in Islamabad for treatment.

New radiation therapy puts cancer into remission

Researchers at University of Missouri have developed a new form of radiation therapy that successfully puts cancer into remission in mice. This innovative treatment produced none of the harmful side-effects of conventional chemo and radiation cancer therapies.
Clinical trials in humans could begin soon after the team led by Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne secures funding. “Since the 1930s, scientists have sought success with a cancer treatment known as boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT),” Hawthorne, a recent winner of the National Medal of Science awarded by President Obama in the White House, said. “Our team at MU`s International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine finally found the way to make BNCT work by taking advantage of a cancer cell`s biology with nanochemistry,” he said.
Cancer cells grow faster than normal cells and in the process absorb more materials than normal cells.
Hawthorne`s team took advantage of that fact by getting cancer cells to take in and store a boron chemical designed by Hawthorne.
When those boron-infused cancer cells were exposed to neutrons, a subatomic particle, the boron atom shattered and selectively tore apart the cancer cells, sparing neighboring healthy cells.
The physical properties of boron made Hawthorne`s technique possible. A particular form of boron will split when it captures a neutron and release lithium, helium and energy.
Like pool balls careening around a billiards table, the helium and lithium atoms penetrate the cancer cell and destroy it from the inside without harming the surrounding tissues.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).
Prostate cancer metastasis switch identified: A University of Colorado Cancer Center study has described for the first time a switch that regulates the production of the protein E-Cadherin, the loss of which is a prerequisite for prostate cancer metastasis.
The transcription factor SPDEF turns on and off production, leading to metastasis or stopping it cold in models of prostate cancer.
When E-Cadherin is lost, cells become `rouge` – they can detach from their surrounding tissues, move effortlessly through the circulatory system, grow and attach at new sites,” said Hari Koul, PhD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and professor and director of Urology Research at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, the study`s senior author.
“In prostate tumors that had lost E-Cadherin, we put in SPDEF and the tumors once again expressed E-Cadherin. They were once again anchored in place and unable to metastasize. We can make these `rouge` cells back into epithelial-like cells and these epithelial cells stay anchored and lose the ability to migrate,” added Koul.
In fact, the work could have implications far beyond prostate cancer, as increasing evidence points to loss of E-Cadherin as a prerequisite for metastasis in many cancers.
Koul and colleagues first showed that E-Cadherin levels varied directly with the addition or subtraction of SPDEF. Then the group artificially knocked down E-Cadherin despite the presence of SPDEF and showed that cells remained able to migrate and invade new tissues (SPDEF didn`t by itself affect metastasis and was instead dependent on modulating E-Cadherin, which is the driver). The group also showed a one-way switch – SPDEF regulates E-Cadherin, but E-Cadherin expression does nothing to affect levels of SPDEF.