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Mental-training Exercises Help Mitigate Effects of “Chemo Brain”

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Published March 10, 2015

UCLA Health
David Geffen School of Medicine
David Geffen School of Medicine

U Magazine

UCLA researchers have developed a program that could improve the day-to-day lives of women with breast cancer by addressing post-treatment cognitive difficulties, sometimes known as “chemo brain,” which can affect up to 35 percent of women after their treatments.

An estimated one-in-eight women will develop invasive breast cancer in their lifetimes, and following chemotherapy treatment, a mental fogginess can prevent them from being able to concentrate, stay organized and complete everyday activities, such as sticking to a schedule or planning a family gathering.
The study builds upon earlier research that found a statistically significant association between neuropsychological test performance and memory complaints among women with early-stage breast cancer following treatment.

“We invited the women to participate in a research study that assigned them to early or delayed treatment with a five-week, two-hour group training session, where a psychologist taught them strategies to help them with their memory and maintain their ability to pay attention to things,” says Patricia Ganz, MD ’73 (RES ’76, FEL ’78), director of prevention and control research at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “These are activities we call executive function and planning, or the things all of us do in order to organize our day.”

The brain image on the left shows how women with breast cancer who had a series of mental training exercises experienced fewer problems with memory and concentration. Graphic: Courtesy of Dr. Patricia Ganz

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Drug That Can Head Off Diabetes Is Rarely Used

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Published Apr 21, 2015 10:37 AM

UCLA Health
David Geffen School of Medicine
David Geffen School of Medicine

U Magazine

A UCLA study finds that few doctors prescribe a low-cost drug that has been proven effective in preventing the onset of diabetes. The study found that only 3.7 percent of U.S. adults with pre-diabetes were prescribed metformin during a recent three-year period.

Metformin and lifestyle changes both can prevent the onset of diabetes, but people often struggle to adopt healthier habits, says Tannaz Moin, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. “Diabetes is prevalent, but pre-diabetes is even more prevalent, and we have evidence-based therapies like metformin that are very safe and that work,” Dr. Moin says. “Metformin is rarely being used for diabetes prevention among people at risk for developing the disease. This is something that patients and doctors need to be talking about and thinking about.”

It is estimated that about one-third of adults in the U.S. are pre-diabetic, a condition marked by higher-than-normal blood-sugar levels. In 2008, the American Diabetes Association added metformin to its “Standards for Medical Care in Diabetes” guidelines for use in diabetes prevention for those at very high risk who are under age 60, are severely obese or have a history of gestational diabetes. Under the guidelines, metformin may also be considered for patients whose blood sugar is above normal but not yet in the diabetes range.

Glucophage (Metformin) 500mg tablet. Photo: Getty Images

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8 WEIGHT MISTAKES How to avoid expanding your bottom line.

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Nutrition Action

Date published: April 1, 2015

Of every three American adults, one is obese, one is overweight, and only one is lean. And all of us are at risk for gaining more.

From the latest “you’ll never be hungry” diet to that “weird tip to lose belly fat,” most dieting myths focus on how to lose weight. Yet myths, misunderstandings, and excuses also explain how we got that spare tire in the first place.

If we knew more about what happens to the excess calories we eat-and how hard it may be to lose them for good-maybe we’d think twice before we reach for that extra slice of pizza or cheesecake.

It’s no secret that losing weight-and keeping it off-is tough. That’s all the more reason to avoid moving up a pants size in the first place. Here we correct 8 common misconceptions to help you play defense in the battle of the bulge.

1 I can lose it later.

Let’s say you’ve been on vacation. Or it’s the holidays. You know you’ve put on a few pounds, but so what? You’ll just cut back when things get back to normal, and your waist will shrink back to its pre-vacation or preholiday size in a few weeks, right?

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HARNESS THE POWER OF YOUR MUSCLE MATRIX

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Men’s Fitness

 

New research suggests that your connective tissue—your tendons, ligaments, and a vast network of fibers called the “extracellular matrix”—is far more important to muscle building than you ever imagined. The good news? You can exercise it, too.

Picture a medieval torture rack for Smurfs. The device, called a uniaxial tensile tester, is about the size of a shoebox. With long tweezers, a doctoral researcher at the UC Davis Functional Molecular Biology Lab plucks a freshly grown, two-weekold anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, from an incubator and clamps the ends to anchors on the tensile tester. A USB cable then hooks it to a laptop, allowing the researcher to tweak how hard and fast the tendon gets yanked, and for how long—hours, sometimes days.

While the thought may be horrifying to anyone who’s experienced the searing pain of snapping an ACL—it connects your femur and tibia, and is prone to blow out if you play basketball, football, soccer, or ski—thousands of ACLs, cultivated from samples donated by knee-surgery patients, have been torn, twisted, and pulverized with this miniature device. The man behind the mayhem is the lab’s director, Keith Baar, Ph.D., a renowned scientist in the emerging field of molecular exercise physiology. Baar is leading a team of researchers attempting to fathom the complex relationship between your muscles and the connective tissue that holds them together.

Your connective tissue consists of tendons, ligaments, and what’s known as the “extracellular matrix,” a scaffold-like network of fibers that permeates muscle. Scientists have long known that lifting heavy weights produces bigger, stronger muscles—it activates genes and proteins that instruct cells to build more muscle fibers. During that exercise, it was always thought, your connective tissue was limited to a simple mechanical function: transfer force from muscles to bones, or for ligaments, bones to bones. (Picture train couplings between railcars.)

But recent discoveries are revealing that connective tissue does a whole lot more. As it turns out, it plays a crucial role in muscle building, a process called hypertrophy. On top of that, it appears that your connective tissue can be improved with specific exercises and nutrient supplements to profoundly impact athletic performance and strength, and prevent injuries.

“The reality is, if you want to be strong, you need to have not only big muscles, but also really good connective tissue,” says Baar. And any exercise routine that overlooks it, he warns, would be like a workout that only targets, say, the left half of your body. Read more →

UCLA study shows feasibility of blood-based test for diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease

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UCLA Newsroom

An effective blood test would be safe, affordable and easy to administer in large groups or in rural areas

UCLA researchers have provided the first evidence that a simple blood test could be developed to confirm the presence of beta amyloid proteins in the brain, which is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

Although approximately 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, no reliable blood-based test currently exists for the neurodegenerative disorder that is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. Using blood-based biomarkers — a signature of proteins in the blood that indicate the presence of a disease — to diagnose Alzheimer’s could be a key advance.

“Blood-based biomarkers would have the important advantage of being safe, affordable and easy to administer in large groups or in rural areas, and therefore could have an enormous impact on clinical care and clinical trials alike,” said Dr. Liana Apostolova, director of the neuroimaging laboratory at theMary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research at UCLA and head of the research team.Results of the study appeared in the journal Neurology.

Alzheimer’s disease can be diagnosed definitively only by examining brain tissue after death. While people are alive, physicians must rely on proxy measures, or biomarkers, along with cognitive symptoms such as memory loss.

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ZONE IN: THE RIGHT WAY TO DO THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET

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Men’s Fitness

Best-selling author and nutritional researcher Barry Sears, Ph.D., reveals how you can turn your health destiny around in this exclusive adaptation of his new book, ‘The Mediterranean Zone.’

Today we hear a lot about the Mediterranean diet. UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, has proclaimed the Mediterranean diet one of civilization’s great treasures. But which Mediterranean diet? There are sixteen countries that border the Mediterranean Sea. I’ve been to most of them for extended periods of time, and I can tell you that there is no single Mediterranean diet.

What is eaten in Spain is very different from that eaten in Italy, and what is consumed in Italy is distinct from the diet in Greece, not to mention the other 13 countries in the region. If you ask most Americans for their definition of the Mediterranean diet, the response is usually eating pasta (and pizza), drinking red wine, using a little olive oil, drinking espresso, and adding some parmesan cheese to their meals. But that American version doesn’t look anything like the real Mediterranean diet. If you eat that way—and think you’re cutting your risk of heart disease and helping your body shed fat—it’s time to rethink. Read more →

Mental Crossfit

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Published Apr 1, 2015 10:37 AM

UCLA Health
David Geffen School of Medicine
David Geffen School of Medicine

U Magazine

 

Does working out do your brain good? Can food choices keep us mentally alert? Does working crossword puzzles or Sudoku really help? Dr. Gary Small ’73 of the UCLA Longevity Center offers pointers for staying mentally fit.

The strategies for living a long and healthy life are well known and relatively simple, if not always easily executed: Maintain an appropriate weight. Eat the right foods. Exercise. Limit stress.

Somewhat less has been known, or said, about ways to keep the mind fit for the duration. But that’s changing.

“As people are living longer, this is becoming a huge issue,” says Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Longevity Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Parlow-Solomon Professor on Aging at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “Age is the greatest risk factor for developing cognitive decline.”

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Unrest in Baltimore: The Role of Public Health

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JAMA

June 23/30, 2015

 

On April 12, 2015, a 25-year-old African American man named Freddie Gray was fatally injured while in police custody in Baltimore, Maryland. His death a week later, on April 19, sparked wide protests about racism, social inequality, and injustice in the United States, coming as it did after the deaths of other African American men around the country. On April 27, the protests in Baltimore led to the destruction of property, fires, and civil unrest.

There are many ways to understand what is happening in Baltimore and, to varying degrees, across the United States. The problems reflect a long-standing dysfunctional relationship between law enforcement and citizens, structural poverty, and the legacy of discrimination in housing and finance policy.1 The problems also deeply engage public health—in addressing immediate needs, in understanding the basis of unrest, and in shaping long-term solutions.

In Baltimore, during the riots and subsequent demonstrations, the Health Department coordinated the readiness and security of area hospitals and health care facilities. The Health Department provided situational updates for hospital emergency planners and led the development of a citywide security plan for hospitals. In the aftermath of the violence, the Health Department—with the assistance of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene—established a hotline for citizens whose access to medications was disrupted by the destruction and closing of more than a dozen city pharmacies. To reach those most in need, the Health Department led door-to-door outreach in public housing for seniors in affected areas and facilitated transfers of prescriptions to other pharmacies and delivery of medications.

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Teaching Blood Stem Cells to Regenerate | U Magazine | UCLA Health & David Geffen School of Medicine

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U Magazine

 

UCLA scientists have shown how a unique protein in human bone marrow can drive stem cells to repair our blood system after an injury. The discovery offers a roadmap that could lead to more effective radiation and chemotherapy treatments for people with cancer and other blood-related diseases.

Hematopoietic stem cells were a key to the new study. Scientists have long investigated hematopoietic stem cells, which have the ability to become any other type of blood cell, such as red or white blood cells, to try to understand how bone marrow regulates and instructs them to regenerate and repair themselves.
In prior research, John P. Chute, MD, professor of hematology and radiation oncology, discovered that endothelial cells — the cells that make up the lining of blood vessels in our bone marrow — play a key role in telling hematopoietic stem cells how to renew and repair themselves. He theorized that following an injury or another stress to our body, the blood system as a whole benefits, as the activity in bone marrow directly drives the stem cells to promote and accelerate recovery. In the new study, Dr. Chute and colleagues built upon their earlier work to identify a new protein called pleiotrophin (PTN). They discovered that the protein binds to hematopoietic stem cells and that it is this process that activates the blood stem cells to stimulate the recovery of our entire blood system.

High-magnification photographs (top row) of the bone marrow of mice 10 days after radiation exposure illustrate that PTN treatment improves the recovery of the blood system and that co-treatment with an inhibitor of the Ras pathway blocks this benefi t. The bottom row demonstrates that irradiated control mice (at left) have depletion of blood stem cells (ckit+sca-1+) at 10 days after radiation exposure, but treatment with PTN accelerates recovery of the blood stem cells. Image: Courtesy of Dr. John P. Chute

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The Healing Heart | U Magazine | UCLA Health & David Geffen School of Medicine

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U Magazine

There has been debate over the question of whether or not heart muscle can regenerate itself. Now, UCLA scientists have provided an answer: yes. A study by Reza Ardehali, MD, PhD, assistant professor of cardiology, and colleagues has demonstrated the first direct measure of heart-muscle cells renewing themselves. The findings have important implications for future research that could lead to the regeneration of heart tissue to repair damage caused by disease or heart attack.

It was initially believed that heart-muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, were unable to replicate themselves and that their total number was set at birth; however, research over the past two decades has indicated that these cardiac cells have limited proliferative activity, though there has been no clear agreement within the scientific community as to why and how much.

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