Monthly Archives: July 2007

Do Selenium Supplements Cause and Increase in the Risk of Developing Diabetes?

New research led by Dr. Saverio Stranges of Warwick Medical School in Britain, showed that people who took 200 mcgs of selenium daily, had a 50% increased risk for developing type-II diabetes over a 7 year period than those taking placebo. Published in the Journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the Dr. Stranges group said 58 of 600 people taking selenium and 39 of 602 taking placebos developed type-II diabetes over the 7.7 years. The study was well constructed although quite small in my opinion.

Here are my thoughts about the study. First off, if you take another 1202 people and tried it again, it may show up differently. Secondly, they measured the levels of blood selenium for their patients and the higher the level, the higher the risk of developing diabetes. Well, duh! My work over the years has clearly shown that excessive amounts of nutrients, especially trace minerals have a double-edged sword to them. If deficient, they need to be repleaded. If in excess, they need to be eliminated. It has to do with this quirky idea called biochemical individuality. If they were monitoring peoples selenium levels as has been indicated, did they stop the people from taking the selenium supplement?  If not, then a serious breech of ethics was committed. Excessive selenium is known to be toxic. This is a major problem and should cause serious review of the researchers protocols.

There are other problems with the study. They studied people with skin cancer. Could it be that having skin cancer and taking selenium together may increase the risk of developing the disease but not with healthy people? No healthy cohorts is a bad error in their study design.

Now get this, the researchers relied on participants’ reports that they developed diabetes and did not confirm those reports with measures of blood sugar. Huh?  You didn’t confirm the reports? Terrible research error again.

Next, did they measure other nutrient co-factors like vitamin C, E, amino acids, and dietary intake of foods? Of course not. They blindly rely on one-to-one analysis which is hideously poor. They also only looked at elderly white people yet they make the sweeping statement that selenium supplementation causes people to have an increased risk of developing diabetes.

Another example of poor research and equally poor reporting.

Omega 3 Fatty Acids and Premature Babies – Saving Eyesight

In a study about to start soon led by Dr. Lois Smith, an ophthalmologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, omega 3 fatty acids will be used to try and prevent a serious retinal disease that affects many premature babies.  The impetus to do this study came from research done on premature mice and the results were quite promising. This type of treatment shows how very valuable omega 3 fatty acids can be.

Usually, infants get most of their supply of omega 3s from their mothers in the third trimester of pregnancy which is why those who are born prematurely may not get the full benefit of these important nutrients. What is nice abou this research is that is shows that you don’t necessarily need expensive pharmaceutical drugs to treat certain diseases. Still, I would bet my last dollar that they would be working on it if the market were bigger.

Read the full article here, posted on MSNBCs website

Antidepressant Use in America. A Depressing Situation.

Don’t like the way your husband is handling the family finances?  Take some antidepressants! Angry with the school about your child’s report card? Take some antidepressants.  According to a government funded study, more Americans take antidepressants than any other drug family. Over 118 million prescriptions were written last year which is up a staggering 48% over the past decade. Some of this increase is the fact that more physicians are becoming adept at diagnosing the disease but I feel that the majority of it is due to marketing done by the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Richard Dworkin even states, “Doctors are now medicating unhappiness. Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives.”

While depression is a serious disorder, there are way too many cases where physicians are prescribing drugs for issues that have nothing to do with the disease. These medications have serious side effects and should be used only when a clinical diagnosis of depression is clear. Still, an even better solution would be to try using amino acid therapy first. The book The Healing Nutrients Within recalls many stories of patients with depression improving using amino acid therapy.

It’s so much about profits, so little about really helping patients. Amino acids can help people far more than antidepressants can. They just won’t make the pharmaceutical industry any money. America, the land where we medicate unhappiness.

Is The Ban On Smoking Indoors Really Helping Non-Smokers? Should We Ban Outdoor Smoking As Well?

In a news feature article in the latest issue (June 28, 2007) of Nature, Kris Novak writes how effective the ban on smoking in bars, restaurants and workplaces has been worldwide. It seems that people smoke less in states and countries where smoking has been banned. In California, 23% of the citizens were smokers in 1988 and in 2006 the number dropped to 13%. That should be good news to the health care system due to smokings incredible cost to human health.

The other issue has to do with second-hand smoke and has a difference been seen here. The big reason indoor smoking was banned was the hubabaloo over the effect of second-hand smoke on health. From all the media hype you would think that it’s a slam dunk. Second-hand smoke kills, right?  Well the answer is yes and no.

When it comes to reducing lung cancer, the answer is a resounding yes. Since smokers have a 25 times greater risk of developing lung cancer and non-smokers who are around smokers inhale 1% of the amount of smoke you would expect a decrease in the incidence of lung cancer in non-smokers to be about 24% lower and that fits. As for cardiovascular disease drops, the data is not all that convincing. We really don’t have the kind of evidence that we do with lung cancer.

Still, banning indoor smoking is a good thing in my estimation. Here in Nevada, we have put a small venue ban on smoking in bars which has created an economic hit on them which according to the article is a short-term problem. But should we go further and ban outdoor smoking?  If you try to use the argument that this will protect non-smokers then you are barking up the wrong tree because that just doesn’t make sense. The amount of exposure you would get from outdoor smokers is extremely minimal. But if you do it with the thought that more people would quit smoking because it would be so difficult to find a place to smoke, then yes, you have a backer here.

Smoking kills, tobacco companies are purveyors of death and I would be much happier if there was no more smoking by anyone.

Vitamin C and Type 1 Diabetes – A Big Time Winner

According to the journal Diabetes Care, researches found out that injecting type 1 diabetics with vitamin C “neutralized the reactive molecules that were responsible for the damage” that is caused by the disease. This important nutrient did as well as the blood-pressure-lowering drug telmisartan. Of course, and sad to say, the researchers were not happy with this finding since people would have to stay on vitamin C forever (so?) and they want to develop a drug that permanently stop the effect of reactive molecules on certain proteins.

There have been previous experiments showing the benefits of alpha-lipoic acid on neutralizing reactive oxygen species (ROS) and it is likely other antioxidant compounds like acai, may have similar benefits. My suggestion is that anyone with type 1 diabetes should be on a bunch of antioxidant compounds like acai, vitamin C and vitamin E, although testing your oxidative stress levels would be a good idea as well.

The Edge of Evolution – Is Michael Behe Right or Wrong?

Michael Behe is one of the leading advocates of Intelligent Design over Evolution and he just published a book called The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. In it he argues that while yes, parasites and viruses (to name a few) do show definitive evolutionary steps because of their ability to become drug resistant, humans, could not possibly have mutations like those by chance because in his words “…we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years. Since that is many times the age of the universe, it’s reasonable to conclude the following: No mutiation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years.” This is why he belives that humans could not have have evolved from apes. Nice argument but unfortunately, as pointed out by Professor of Biology Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University, his math is wrong as is much of his reasoning.

In this weeks issue (June 28th, 2007) of Nature, Dr. Miller puts forth a brilliant rebuttal of Michael Behe’s fundamental argument in his book. His comment about Behe’s error is powerful. He states, “It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics.” He further goes on to say “Behe obtains his probabilities by considering each mutation as an independent event, ruling out any role for cumulative selection, and requiring evolution to achieve an exact, predetermined result. Not only are each of these conditions unrealistic, but they do not apply even in the case of his chosen example.”

Behe is an example of someone who creates a supposed scientific fact using the right words but makes incorrect assumptions. His claim that life is irreducibly complex because “every part of such a system had to be in place for natural selection to favor it.” As Dr. Miller states, “A nice argument, except for the annoying fact that it is wrong.” He points out that many protein subsets have selectable functions that Behe claims don’t occur.

This is why intelligent design promoters fail in courts when they try to get I.D. taught in school science programs. Their science isn’t there. Not even a shred of scientific data to prove it.

It’s Time to Just Say No to Drug Ads

In an editorial from the journal New Scientist, one of the best arguments against allowing pharmaceutical companies to continue to advertise to the general public.  I have been a supporter of a ban of drug ads for years. There is no purpose and I believe it causes illicit drug use to go up. As long as the image is that drugs will solve all of your health problems, instead of talking about leading a healthy lifestyle, we are going to be a sick society with way too expensive of a health system.

Here is the editorial.

BACK in 2001, a series of poster advertisements appeared in US cities depicting athletic young men climbing mountains and sailing boats. The sun was always shining and everything seemed right with the world, though the men all had HIV. The clear implication of the ads, which came from pharmaceutical companies, was that thanks to a new generation of drugs, HIV-positive men could now live life to the full.

As marketing campaigns go, it was something of a failure. Gay activists complained that the ads did not reflect the reality of life on anti-retroviral medication. Eventually the Food and Drug Administration told the companies to stop using such unrealistic images, but by then the damage had been done: a survey by health officials indicated that by playing down the consequences of becoming infected with HIV the posters were encouraging unsafe sex.

This may be an extreme example of the dangers of “direct-to-consumer” drug advertising (DTCA), but the lesson has not been learned. Drug companies now spend more than $3 billion annually on DTCA, twice what they spent in 2001, despite the fact that the ads have repeatedly been shown to result in unnecessary or potentially harmful prescriptions. So it is worrying that US policy-makers are backing away from moves to restrict DTCA, and that in Europe, where such advertising is banned, drug companies are trying to bring it in by the back door.

Lobbyists for the industry argue that DTCA is a win-win business: the public gets access to information about new medicines at no cost to the taxpayer, and people who would benefit from them are prompted to visit their doctor to discuss treatments. None of these claims stands up. DTCA does encourage people to see their doctor, but it doesn’t follow that they get the right treatment. Very often their enthusiasm for a drug they have seen advertised persuades the doctor to prescribe it inappropriately. This was illustrated by a 2005 study in which actors claiming to be suffering from “adjustment disorder” – a strong emotional reaction to a stressful event – visited doctors and asked for an antidepressant they said they had seen in a television advert. It is unusual to prescribe such drugs for this condition, since it normally goes away of its own accord, yet more than half the doctors agreed. Many physicians admit it can be hard to resist pressure from patients, something drug companies are well aware of.

Part of the problem is that adverts rarely tell the whole story. Patients are often framed by the setting sun or pictured freewheeling down leafy avenues. The subtext is: here is a pill that can end your pain. What most adverts fail to mention is that many diseases can be tackled or prevented with lifestyle changes, such as diet or exercise. Little wonder that most doctors find DTCA unhelpful.

What everyone agrees on is that the adverts work. In New Zealand, the only other country that permits DTCA, a 1998 marketing campaign resulted in 16,000 asthma sufferers persuading their doctors to switch them to a new brand of inhaler. The adverts angered many doctors, who felt the new inhaler offered little or no extra benefit, and since it was more expensive the switch is estimated to have cost taxpayers over $2.5 million.

That kind of tale should be enough to kill off DTCA everywhere. Some US policy-makers want the government to be able to ban TV commercials for a new drug for up to three years if it thinks the drug poses unknown risks, but last week a House of Representatives subcommittee stripped the proposal from a bill making its way through Congress. Politicians in Europe are likely to face a similar battle as the pharmaceutical industry tries to introduce DTCA under the guise of providing health information to patients.

There is nothing wrong with giving consumers access to information – generally the more the better. The problem with DTCA is that the information is at best incomplete, at worst biased. There is a better way to provide people with data about medicines: the US Consumers Union, for example, produces free drugs guides in partnership with independent researchers who have no financial interest in the drugs they may recommend. It seems the US Congress has thrown away the chance to follow this enlightened approach. The European Commission should embrace it.