Brain Development And Toxic Chemicals
5 Feb 2010 at 10:00am
The Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative (LDDI) released the first-ever biomonitoring report identifying toxic chemical pollution in people from the learning and developmental disability community...

Alterations In The Brain's Reward System Related To Attention-Deficit/Hyperac...
4 Feb 2010 at 11:00am
Until now, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was related to alterations in the brain affecting attention and cognitive processes. Researchers at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital for the first time have discovered anomalies in the brain's reward system related to the neural circuits of motivation and gratification...

Supernus Announces Positive Results From Phase IIa Clinical Trial For SPN 810...
29 Jan 2010 at 9:00am
Supernus Pharmaceuticals Inc., announced that its Phase IIa U.S. clinical trial for SPN 810 in children with ADHD and persistent serious conduct problems met the primary endpoints of safety and tolerability, as well as showed statistically significant reduction versus baseline in conduct problems across all doses...

Study Says Lead May Be The Culprit In ADHD
29 Jan 2010 at 9:00am
ADHD, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, is among the costliest of behavioral disorders. Its combination of inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity leads to accidental injuries, school failure, substance abuse, antisocial behavior and more. Yet despite nearly a century of study, the disorder's roots remain mysterious...

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.