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Omega-3 supplements improved attention in some youths with ADHD
21 Nov 2019 at 4:00pm
New research finds that omega-3 fish oil supplements can improve attention in youths with ADHD who have low ? but not high ? blood levels of omega-3.

Can you take Adderall and Xanax together?
11 Sep 2019 at 7:00pm
Adderall and Xanax are two medications that affect the central nervous system in opposite ways. Learn about whether it is safe to take them together and about the possible risks here.

Focus boosting drugs not worth the risks, studies warn
12 Aug 2019 at 4:00pm
New research finds that using focus boosting drugs without a prescription has few benefits and may affect memory and sleep quality in the long run.

What to know about skin picking
1 Aug 2019 at 5:00am
Skin picking involves consistently picking, pulling, or tearing healthy skin. It is a psychological symptom in many cases. Treatment includes therapy and medication. Learn more here.

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.