Hot MedFax

Imagine this.  You lose your arm in a horrible accident and new bone is generated using beer waste . Say what? Research has just revealed that a lab has developed biocompatible materials that can be used for bone regeneration from food industry waste, mainly bagasse (residue) from beer brewing. Throw away those prostheses made from processed sheep bones or synthetic materials which are more expensive and more harmful to the environment. According to Medical Design Technology, the waste obtained from the beer brewing process "contains the main chemical components found in bones (phosphorus, calcium, magnesium and silica), that after undergoing modification processes, can be used as support or scaffold to promote bone regeneration for medical applications such as coating prosthesis or bone grafts." A photo at the Web site shows it, a kind of thick cottage-cheesy-looking chunk. So the next time your bone is severely injured, look to beer, experts say. Though I t...

Here's another reason to check it out if you think you might have sleep apnea: you may also develop osteoporosis . Sleep apnea is a condition that causes brief interruptions in breathing during sleep. Obstructive sleep apnea, the most common form, occurs when a person’s airway becomes blocked during sleep. If sleep apnea goes untreated, it can raise the risk for stroke, cardiovascular disease and heart attacks. “Ongoing sleep disruptions caused by obstructive sleep apnea can harm many of the body’s systems, including the skeletal system,” newswise.com quotes one of the study’s authors, Kai-Jen Tien, MD, of Chi Mei Medical Center in Tainan, Taiwan. “When sleep apnea periodically deprives the body of oxygen, it can weaken bones and raise the risk of osteoporosis. The progressive condition can lead to bone fractures, increased medical costs, reduced quality of life and even death.” As someone who broke her wrist in December falling on ice and heard a doctor say, "If you wer...

I can't remember when I started trying to lose weight -- I think it was somewhere around 5th grade.  (Actress Ginnifer Goodwin, now 32, beat me -- she joined Weight Watchers at 9).  But now we're finding that there can be emotional consequences from being put on a diet too early in life. According to Jen Weigel at the Chicago Tribune, the last thing people with children who are a little too pudgy should do is bug them about it.  She quotes a woman, who should know, whose mom was obsessed with her food intake, Karen Kataline, author of "Fatlash: Food Police & the Fear of Thin. "She had unresolved issues about weight and appearance and she wasn't happy with her own body." Kataline says that her mother was obsessed with her weight from infancy. Now mine didn't start quite that early, but almost since I can remember I, and a cousin, were teased about being overweight by our stringy, fast-metabolism siblings. Children as young as six and eight hat...

Researchers are coming a little bit closer to determining which breast cancer cells will go on to spread through the body, and which won't, but now a new study has found that certain cancer cells have a way of thriving that helps them move on to other parts of the body, like our bones. According to newswise.com, "When a cancer cell sloughs off the edge of a tumor in the breast, it faces a tough road to survive. The cell must not only remain physically intact as it rushes through blood vessels, but it also must find a new organ to lodge itself in, take in enough nutrients and oxygen to stay alive, and begin dividing, all while escaping notice by the body’s immune system." Scientists in the new study found that some loose breast cancer cells "have a leg up on survival—the genes they express make them more likely to prosper in bone tissue." Newswise.com reports that the team also found that whether or not cancer cells turn on those genes depends on what their ...

I've been told since day one that women needed calcium  supplements, especially when older, to prevent osteoporosis and other nasty things you get as you age.  But now researchers are saying that, while women undergoing treatment for breast cancer had been told to take calcium and Vitamin D to keep their bones strong, now it's not looking quite so right. According to newswise.com, "New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center finds that the recommended daily doses of these supplements may not prevent loss of bone mineral density (BMD) in these women." Apparently, women with breast cancer lose BMD at a higher rate than their healthier counterparts, increasing their risk of fractures, "which are associated with significant declines in function and health-related quality of life, and in higher mortality rates," newswise.com reports. Now as someone who takes no vitamins -- and who did or didn't have breast cancer, depending on who you talk to ...

You're not going to believe it but it's been around for 120,000 years.  A story today in The New York Times' Science Times reports that it's been found in a Neanderthal man, who was unlucky enough to have cancer of the bones. Before this,the earliest bone cancer was found in specimens 1,000 to 4,000 years old. "Normally ribs are full of spongy bone, but this rib has a big cavity,” said David W. Frayer , an anthropologist at the University of Kansas and one of the researchers involved in the study, told Sindyan N. Bihanoo. The cavity probably came from where cancer ate away the bones. The specimen was found between 1895 and 1905 in what is today Croatia, according to Bihanoo. CT scans and X-rays were used to study the fossil more closely to determine the cause of the gaping hole. Dr. Frayer told Bihanoo that this was an extremely rare find because people didn't live as long as they do today, when the risk of cancer increases as you age, and even more un...