Link Between Western Diet And ADHD
30 Jul 2010 at 7:00am
A new study from Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research shows an association between ADHD and a 'Western-style' diet in adolescents. The research findings have just been published online in the international Journal of Attention Disorders...

Top Of The List For Dropping Out Of High School - ADHD, Conduct Disorder And...
29 Jul 2010 at 7:00am
Teens with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) - the most common childhood psychiatric condition in the United States - are less likely to finish high school on time than students with other mental-health disorders that often are considered more serious, a large national study by researchers at the UC Davis School of Medicine has found...

Mandatory Warnings Placed On Food And Drink Colorings Linked To Childhood Hyp...
24 Jul 2010 at 4:00pm
The European Union announced that now a health warning must be placed on any drink or food that still contains colorings linked to hyperactivity in some children. The Food Standards Agency (FSA), UK, said that this ruling follows the Southampton Study which suggested a possible link between six colors and childhood hyperactivity...

Widely Used Chemicals Linked To ADHD In Children
22 Jul 2010 at 7:00am
A new study led by a team of Boston University School of Public Health researchers suggests a link between polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (PFCs), industrial compounds which are widely used in many consumer products, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children...

Newsfeed display by CaRP COMMON blood-pressure drugs might help protect us against a flu pandemic by preventing the
development of a lethal lung condition.

The condition, called acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), can be triggered by noxious gases
or infections that damage the lung. One such infection was SARS, the virus that emerged in China in 2003.

ARDS is the result of a runaway response of the host's own immune system, and once it starts there
is almost nothing doctors can do. Around half of patients who develop ARDS die, and most of those
killed by SARS had ARDS.

Now researchers have shown that the SARS virus unleashes the runaway immune response by
boosting levels of a signalling chemical called angiotensin II in the lung. The same molecule has long been known to increase blood pressure through its actions elsewhere in the body. Crucially, this and other work by the group shows that some other infections and injuries which cause ARDS work the same way, suggesting this might also be how some flu viruses trigger the syndrome.

Josef Peninger and colleagues in Vienna and Beijing have found that the SARS virus binds to and blocks an enzyme called ACE2, which degrades angiotensin. The result is too much angiotensin.
The team also showed that giving mice extra doses of ACE2 prevented them developing ARDS after
their lungs were damaged by acid or by a molecule that triggers bacterial sepsis. Even better, drugs
such as losartan, which block one kind of angiotensin receptor and are widely used to control high blood pressure, also prevented ARDS, whether it was caused by SARS or by injury (Nature Medicine, DOl: 10.1038/nm1267).
"We now need to make human ACE2 protein to test in patients," says Peninger. "But if we are right
SARS might have been a good thing to happen to us, since it might have shown us a way to prevent
death in many patients with acute lung failure, including in the feared epidemic of bird flu."
Malik Peiris of Hong Kong University, who discovered the SARS virus, suggests that ARDS might well be the real killer in any future flu pandemic, as it was in 1918. If ARDS is always triggered by raised levels of angiotensin, then angiotensin-blocking drugs, or an even older class of blood pressure drugs that prevents angiotensin from being made in the first place, might save many lives, as vaccines and
anti-flu drugs will likely be unavailable or in short supply.

Losartin and other older angiostatin-blocking drugs are widely available through the Internet from foreign pharmacies that will ship without a prescription.