A team of researchers St. James Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, conducted a study that found the erectile dysfunction (ED) has a higher prevalence in men who have rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
Previous studies have linked erectile dysfunction to vascular events, such as stroke and heart attacks, but this study indicates that there ...
In one of the most exciting discoveries, researchers at the Hanson Institute in Adelaide and the St. Vincent’s Institute in Melbourne believe they have made great progress on developing a new treatment which will ‘stop’ leukemia and inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.
The discovery relates to the way ...
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an auto-immune, inflammatory disease. People with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have higher levels of inflammatory proteins, called cytokines, and other cytokine related factors in their blood. According to a recent study, those markers are present as many as three years before any RA symptoms emerge.
Previous studies have ...
Researchers at Imperial College London (officially The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) have identified a protein that acts as a “master switch” for certain white blood cells to govern whether they increase or impede inflammation. The results of this study could lead to the development of new treatments ...
Researchers at the University of Toronto have found that physical abuse suffered during childhood may increase the risk for osteoarthritis by as much as 56%.
The researchers studied 11,108 Canadian men and women who had self-reported childhood physical abuse and subsequent osteoarthritis in the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey. They also took into account other factors, like age, sex, race and economic status. They also factored in other risk factors such as concurrent childhood stressors, adult behavior and depression.
“We found that 10.2 per cent of those with osteoarthritis reported they had been physically abused as children in comparison to 6.5 per cent of those without osteoarthritis,” said Esme Fuller-Thomson who led the research.
In addition, after taking into account many known risk factors for osteoarthritis, including age, obesity, income, and education, the relationship between childhood physical abuse and osteoarthritis remained.
Further research is needed to investigate potential pathways through which arthritis develops as a consequence of childhood physical abuse.
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Originally posted 2009-11-28 16:39:34. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Transcutaneous electrical stimulation (TENS) has been used by many to reduce reduce pain from tendonitis, back pain, surgery, etc. There has now been research into the use of neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to determine if it would help relieve symptoms from osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. The conclusions are mixed but generally indicate that NMES is beneficial to retaining and increasing muscle strength in the affected joints.
Aerobic and resistance exercise has long been known to improve the pain and motion limitations resulting from osteoarthritis. Over time, getting regular exercise will decrease pain, improve mobility, improve range of motion and delay disability or need for joint replacement. Unfortunately, 37% of people with arthritis get no exercise at all according to results of a survey published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. This is due to several factors: the fear of aggravating the pain during exercise, belief that exercise will make the joint pain worse, depression resulting from the disease and physical limitations. So an alternative method was needed to get the benefits exercise without actually exercising.
Johns Hopkins University performed a study on the home use of a portable NMES system to improve strength in the quadriceps in patients with knee osteoarthritis. This was a small study of 34 people, all of whom received education and some of whom were provided a NMES unit. The NMES group was directed to use the stimulator 3 days a week for 12 weeks. During that time the intensity of the stimulation was increased up to 40 percent of the maximum of the unit.
The patients who used the stimulator experienced a 9% increase knee extension strength while the control group experienced a 7% decrease. The NMES group also saw their time needed to get up from a chair improve by 11% while the control group had a 7% deterioration. The severity of the pain, however, did not change for either group.
A similar study of 38 older adults measured pain levels 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after muscle stimulation. There was not a significant difference in the pain level between the 2 groups over their 12 week study, but the NMES group did report significant (22%) immediate short term pain relief comparing the pain levels before the treatment to 15 minutes after.
Additional studies have been conducted on the benefits of electrical stimulation on rheumatoid arthritis. This includes impacts on RA in the hand and also concluded that muscle stimulation provided significant benefit in terms of grip strength and fatigue resistance. There was not enough data to draw conclusions regarding the impact on pain.
Ultimately, NMES appears to be a viable option for maintaining muscle strength and improving mobility without making the arthritis symptoms worse. Here are typical home-based units:
A researcher looking at the relationship between gout and heart attacks has discovered that there is a relationship between high uric acid levels and heart failure.
Eswar Krishnan, MD, assistant professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University School of Medicine, has conducted a new study looking into just what that relationship is.
Uric acid naturally occurs in the body as a byproduct of many different foods. High levels are best known as a cause of gout.
“Our study shows that high levels of uric acid significantly increase your risk of developing heart failure later in life,” said Dr. Krishnan. “The novelty is that the test for measuring this is very cheap and easily available.”
In fact, a simple $2-blood test may allow doctors to determine whether a patient is at risk of developing heart failure sometime in their future.
Dr. Krishnan analyzed data obtained from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute participants of the Framingham Offspring cohort study. That study began in 1971 and the participants were followed for cardiovascular events for 25 years.
Dr. Krishnan was looking for the relationship between high uric acid levels (levels above 6 mg per one-tenth liter) and subsequent heart failure.
There were 4,989 participants in the Framingham Offspring study, and of those, 4,912 were eligible for Dr. Krishnan’s study. There were 196 cases of heart failure recorded.
After adjusting for a long list of variables including smoking, weight, alcohol use, diabetes, kidney problems and use of anti-hypertensive medications, Dr. Krishnan found the occurrence of heart failure was significantly higher among those with high uric acid levels.
The use of a simple blood test that is currently available to physicians to determine a patient’s chances of developing heart failure could be an effective screening tool, Dr. Krishnan said. It could help doctors target younger patients who should aggressively reduce other treatable risk factors for heart failure, such as hypertension or obesity.
On the other hand, he noted that it’s not known whether medications that reduce uric acid levels could help reduce future heart failure cases. Future studies could explore this, Krishnan said.
The study appears online in August in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure.
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Originally posted 2009-09-15 12:03:04. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
I posted late last year about research that indicated women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) experienced improvement in their RA symptoms during pregnancy. This research found that the relief was related to the amount of fetal DNA in their blood. The higher the level of fetal DNA, the greater the level of relief.
Now there is a Swedish study that has found that women that breast-feed for more than a year after the birth of their children have a reduced risk for developing rheumatoid arthritis.
The research, conducted by a team from Malmö University Hospital, analyzed case history for 136 women with RA and 544 without. Women who breastfed for 13 or more months had a 54% reduced risk of developing RA and those that breastfed for 1 to 12 months had a 26% reduction in risk compared to women that never breastfed.
In addition, women who gave birth to more children tended to have a lower risk of rheumatoid arthritis by 13% for each child. However, breast-feeding appeared to be a more significant factor in the development of RA.
There has been a dramatic increase in the number of women who breast-feed for more than six months according to the researchers. They concluded that it is difficult to say whether there’s a link between higher rates of breast-feeding and a corresponding decline in the number of women with rheumatoid arthritis. But the result of this study adds to the list of benefits of breast-feeding for both infant and mother.
The results of this study were published May 13th in the online journal Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.
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Originally posted 2008-05-16 22:14:17. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
As a follow up to the last post, Pfizer announced last Friday that they have agreed to pay $894 million to settle 3 lawsuits that alleged Celebrex and Bextra harmed patients in the U.S. and defrauded consumers. The suits claimed that Bextra and Celebrex resulted in increased risks of heart attacks and strokes.
There were rumors as early and May 2008 of a settlement. At that time the Wall Street Journal reported that attorneys for Pfizer were in negotiations with representatives of the plaintiffs. Pfizer did not confirm the settlements until the press release issued last week.
Of the $894 settlement, $745 million will go toward settling injury claims, $89 million for Bextra and Celebrex class action consumer fraud suits, and $60 million for state attorney general settlements over marketing practices related to Bextra.
The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked Pfizer to withdraw Bextra in 2005, less than 4 years after its approval by the FDA. This was due to mounting evidence of increased cardiovascular risks and reports of a potentially fatal skin reaction called Stevens-Johnson syndrome.
Bextra and Celebrex are in the same class of drugs as Vioxx, which was previously withdrawn from the market in September 2004. Merck, the maker of Vioxx, has resolved most of the thousands of claims of injury by U.S. patients in a $4.85 billion settlement.
Celebrex remains as the only cox-2 inhibitor still available on the market today. According to Pfizer, state and federal courts have ruled that there is no reliable scientific evidence that Celebrex increases the risk of stroke and heart attacks. However, the FDA required all prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), including Celebrex, to carry a “black box” warning about potential increased risk of heart attacks, stroke and gastrointestinal problems.
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Originally posted 2008-10-22 11:04:09. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Many in the medical community still believe that fibromyalgia is a psychological condition since there have been no distinct causes found for the condition. In fact it has been called the “invisible syndrome” because it cannot be diagnosed using X-ray or lab tests. But a new brain scan study has found a common factor in fibromyalgia patients.
Researchers from the Centre Hospitalo-Universitaire de la Timone, in Marseille, France, took brain scans of 20 female fibromyalgia patients and 10 without the condition. They also had the participants provide information to measure anxiety, disability pain and depression.
The brain scan technique used in this research is called single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). This type of scan uses gamma rays to create a true 3-dimensional image and can help detect functional abnormalities deep in the brain.
The researchers correlated the data and discovered that patients with fibromyalgia have abnormalities in the blood flow in the brain, which is called perfusion. More, the abnormalities are directly related to the severity of the condition. An increase in perfusion (hyperperfusion) was noted in the area of the brain that measures pain intensity and a decrease in perfusion was noted in the area thought to be involved in the emotional response to pain.
“Fibromyalgia may be related to a global dysfunction of cerebral pain-processing. This study demonstrates that these patients exhibit modifications of brain perfusion not found in healthy subjects and reinforces the idea that fibromyalgia is a ‘real disease/disorder.’” – Eric Guedj, M.D, lead author
The researchers also found that the functional abnormalities had no relationship to depression of anxiety.
The study was reported in the November issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
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Originally posted 2008-11-11 12:48:27. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Researchers from Spain and Portugal have found that fibromyalgia patients experience significant pain relief when they get regular exercise in a heated pool. Current treatments include pain relief medications, exercise, relaxation therapy and low-dose antidepressants.
The study participants included 33 women with fibromyalgia. 17 of them had supervised 1-hour exercise sessions 3 times a week in a heated pool for 8 months, 16 did no aquatic exercise.
The researchers found that the fibromyalgia symptoms were reduced and the women’s health-related quality of life was improved by long-term aquatic exercise. The researchers said: “The addition of an aquatic exercise program to the usual care for fibromyalgia in women is cost-effective in terms of both health care costs and societal costs.”
In an earlier study, the same researchers found that a short-term exercise program helped ease symptoms, but pain returned when patients completed the exercise regimen.
The researchers also noted that starting an aquatic exercise program may be difficult as a result of the distance from the patient’s home to a suitable pool and limits on the number of patients that can participate in a session.
The report also states that further research needs to be conducted in order to compare the benefits of aquatic exercise with low-impact aerobics, walking and tai-chi.
Narcis Gusi, of the University of Extremadura in Caceres, Spain and Pablo Tomas-Carus of the University of Evora, Portugal, were the studies co-leads. It was published in the February 21st issue of Arthritis Research and Therapy.
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Originally posted 2008-02-29 22:44:07. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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