UPDATE: More info here.

Maggie Fox reports for Reuters:

The United States fails on most measures of health care quality, with Americans waiting longer to see doctors and more likely to die of preventable or treatable illnesses than people in other industrialized countries, a report released on Thursday said.

Americans squander money on wasteful administrative costs, illnesses caused by medical error and inefficient use of time, the report from the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund concluded.

“We lead the world in spending. We should be expecting much more in return,” Commonwealth Fund senior vice president Cathy Schoen told reporters.

The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation, created a 100-point scorecard using 37 indicators such as health outcomes, quality, access and efficiency.

They compare the U.S. average on these to the best performing states, counties or hospitals, and to other countries. The United States scored 65 — two points lower than in 2006.

One key measure is prevention of premature deaths from easily treated conditions such as asthma and heart attacks.

The United States fell from 15th to last among 19 industrialized nations on this measure from 2006 to 2008. The report estimated the U.S. health care system could save 100,000 lives if it matched Japan or France, the top performers.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is surprising — (UPDATE: the surprise is explained: see comment by John below):

Cognitive behaviour therapy is effective in treating the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, according to a recent systematic review carried out by Cochrane Researchers. Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a potentially long-lasting illness that can cause considerable distress and disability. Some estimates suggest it may affect as many as 1 in 100 of the population globally. There is no widely accepted explanation for the disease and patients are currently offered a variety of different treatments. Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) uses psychological techniques to balance negative thoughts that may impair recovery with more realistic alternatives. In treating CFS, these techniques are combined with a gradual increase in activity levels.

Read the rest of this entry »

Arthur Allen in the Washington Indpendent notes the latest celebrities to emerge in the vaccine wars:

Move over, Jenny McCarthy. The former Playboy playmate-turned vaccine basher has competition from a Hollywood newcomer, Amanda Peet. In a profile featured on the cover of this month’s Cookie magazine, Peet discloses that Dr. Paul Offit, inventor of an important rotavirus vaccine and public enemy number one of the anti-vaccination crowd, assuaged her anxieties over vaccination after the birth of her baby in 2007. She has fully vaccinated the tot, is quite happy about it, and says that parents who don’t vaccinate are “parasites.” Peet’s comment, and her decision to do a pro-vaccine promotional ad infuriated the vaccine skeptics, some of whom wrote menacing letters to Peet and her retinue. Has the public zeitgeist turned on the activists who, blaming vaccines for autism, urge parents to delay or avoid vaccinating their kids?

Recent reports indicating that we’re in the midst of the worst measles outbreak since at least 1997 haven’t helped. Some recent commentators (including me, in an upcoming issue of Mother Jones magazine) note that the decision not to vaccinate your kid has implications beyond the health of your own family. Also, while Handley and others are apoplectic at Offit for daring to stand up for vaccines while owning a patent on one (I’m shocked–shocked!–that someone is allowed to own their intellectual property!), fact is that Offit’s Rotateq vaccine seems to be doing some wonderful things for public health. A recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report shows that Rotateq, which Offit and his colleagues developed, and Merck produces, has prevented tens of thousands of cases of the painful and sometimes dangerous gastrointestinal disease. As a further annoyance to his critics, Offit has a book coming out in September that lays bare the legal, scientific and public relations campaigns behind the vaccines-cause-autism theory (full disclosure: I’m quoted in it).

Does it amaze you that celebrities are quoted as if they are scientists?

Encouraging:

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston believe they have uncovered the Achilles heel in the armor of the virus that continues to kill millions. The weak spot is hidden in the HIV envelope protein gp120. This protein is essential for HIV attachment to host cells, which initiate infection and eventually lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS. Normally the body’s immune defenses can ward off viruses by making proteins called antibodies that bind the virus. However, HIV is a constantly changing and mutating virus, and the antibodies produced after infection do not control disease progression to AIDS. For the same reason, no HIV preventative vaccine that stimulates production of protective antibodies is available.

The Achilles heel, a tiny stretch of amino acids numbered 421-433 on gp120, is now under study as a target for therapeutic intervention. Sudhir Paul, Ph.D., pathology professor in the UT Medical School, said, “Unlike the changeable regions of its envelope, HIV needs at least one region that must remain constant to attach to cells. If this region changes, HIV cannot infect cells. Equally important, HIV does not want this constant region to provoke the body’s defense system. So, HIV uses the same constant cellular attachment site to silence B lymphocytes - the antibody producing cells. The result is that the body is fooled into making abundant antibodies to the changeable regions of HIV but not to its cellular attachment site. Immunologists call such regions superantigens. HIV’s cleverness is unmatched. No other virus uses this trick to evade the body’s defenses.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Cohn is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price (currently a Bargain Book on Amazon at the link). He has some cautionary words for people like me, who are strong advocates of the single-payer system. His article begins:

If you are one of those people who believes the government, rather than for-profit corporations, should provide all Americans with health insurance, then you haven’t had much trouble finding evidence to support your view. “Single-payer” systems, as these schemes are known, don’t fritter money away on marketing, profits, and the constant efforts insurers make to enroll only healthy, cheap-to-insure customers. Single-payer systems also offer free choice of doctor and hospital, a privilege your typical managed-care enrollee covets. Most important of all, the people who get insurance from single-payer systems seem to be rather happy. Just go ask the citizens of France, who enjoy a system that combines legendary convenience with cutting-edge cancer care. Or, closer to home, ask a senior citizen: Medicare, which covers virtually every American 65 and over, is a single-payer system of sorts; it is also, according to surveys, far more popular with its enrollees than private insurers are with theirs.

But, if you were hoping that Washington would take your views seriously, then you’ve probably been pretty disappointed. The votes for creating a single-payer system just don’t exist on Capitol Hill. So, when Washington gets serious about reforming the nation’s health care system, as it is right now, the single-payer crowd inevitably ends up on the margins. You can see it in the press coverage, as reporters, myself included, hype the work of lawmakers like Senator Ron Wyden, who has been pushing a bipartisan bill that would give everybody private insurance. Meanwhile, almost nobody bothers to interview Representative John Conyers, even though his single-payer bill has 90 co-sponsors–not enough to earn it passage, perhaps, but surely enough to earn it a place in the conversation.

For you, then, July 8 should have been a day to celebrate. That’s when …

Continue reading.

Very odd—and bad. Rob Stein reports in the Washington Post:

Increasing numbers of young women continue to be diagnosed with the most dangerous form of skin cancer even as the rate has leveled off in young men, federal health officials reported today.

An analysis of government cancer statistics between 1973 and 2004 found that the rate of new melanoma cases in young women had jumped 50 percent since 1980, but had not increased for young men in that period.

“It’s worrying,” said Mark Purdue, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute, who led the analysis published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. “What we are seeing in young adults right now could foretell a much larger number of melanoma cases in older women.”

The new research did not examine the reasons for the trend, but Purdue said it could be due to such factors as women spending more time outdoors and indoor tanning. Young women are much more likely than young men to frequent tanning salons, Purdue and others said.

“One possible explanation is increases among young women of recreational sun exposure or tanning bed use,” Purdue said. “Both of these things have been identified as risk factors. It’s possible increases in these two behaviors may be responsible.”

About 62,000 melanoma cases are diagnosed each year in the United States, and more than 8,400 people die from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. Previous studies have shown that the rate of new diagnoses has been increasing among adults overall, but it was unclear what was happening with younger adults.

More at the link.

Suicide is often the act of a moment’s impulse, and if a slight barrier is put in the way, the result is that no suicide occurs. Via Mind Hacks, this interesting article by Scott Anderson in the NY Times. From the article:

One of the most peculiar — in fact, downright perverse — aspects to the premeditation-versus-passion dichotomy in suicide. Put simply, those methods that require forethought or exertion on the actor’s part (taking an overdose of pills, say, or cutting your wrists), and thus most strongly suggest premeditation, happen to be the methods with the least chance of “success.” Conversely, those methods that require the least effort or planning (shooting yourself, jumping from a precipice) happen to be the deadliest. The natural inference, then, is that the person who best fits the classic definition of “being suicidal” might actually be safer than one acting in the heat of the moment — at least 40 times safer in the case of someone opting for an overdose of pills over shooting himself.

And from the post at Mind Hacks:

If you want a flavour of really how simple the safety measures need to be to make a difference in the suicide rate, research has found that putting pills in blister packs reduces lethal overdoses.

It’s amazing if you think about it: simply making it necessary to pop each pill out of its plastic packaging rather than tipping them out of a bottle means fewer people kill themselves.

The difference is likely a matter of minutes, but it gives time for brief impulsive urges to pass, and every popped pill requires a single deliberate action towards suicide that gives a chance for the distressed person to reconsider. Obviously, many do.

The article merits a read in full, and Liz Spikol has an interesting video commentary on the piece that’s also well-worth checking out.

New finding:

Women who have risk factors commonly associated with Type 2 diabetes also have much greater odds of being diagnosed with an advanced breast cancer, according to research to be presented today (Tuesday 8 July 2008). University of Melbourne researcher Dr Anne Cust was a key collaborator on an international study which will today be presented to the Population Health 2008 Conference in Brisbane.

The study found that women who were overweight or had signs of insulin resistance – such as elevated blood glucose or insulin levels – were about 50 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with an advanced breast cancer tumor.

Researchers tracked more than 60,000 Swedish women over a 20-year-period from 1985 to 2005. All were cancer free when recruited and their blood tested for glucose, insulin and other hormones associated with obesity and diabetes risk.

Insulin resistance is most commonly caused by being overweight and inactive and is often a precursor to Type 2 diabetes.

Dr Cust said that previous research had shown a strong link between being overweight and increased breast cancer risk in post menopausal women– but this study was the first to demonstrate the influence of insulin resistance on the stage of cancer diagnosis.

“Women with insulin resistance or who were overweight were less likely to be diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancers but at greater risk of being diagnosed with stage 2 to 4 tumors – larger more advanced cancers,” she said. “We know that being overweight and having insulin resistance is a risk factor for getting cancer but - in the case of breast cancer - our study indicates that the cancer will be more advanced.”

Dr Cust said the research findings were particularly significant at a time when there were major public health concerns about obesity and Type 2 diabetes rates.

A while back I blogged about the increase in cases of autism, with further research showing that the increase is in part due to artifacts of diagnosis: better diagnoses combined with a broader definition of autism. OTOH, it does now seem that environmental factors definitely play a role, with polution continuing so that the environment becomes progressively more hazardous for all forms of life. Here’s a note in Scientific American:

Dear EarthTalk: What’s going on with all the cases of autism cropping up and no one seems to know why? It stands to reason it must be something (or some things) environmental, yet every study allegedly turns up no conclusion? What are the possible causes?
– Jessica W., Austin, TX

No doubt about it, autism rates have skyrocketed in the U.S. and beyond in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease affects one in every 150 children born today in the U.S., up from one in 500 as recently as just 10 years ago. It’s become the fastest-growing developmental disability—more prevalent than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes and pediatric AIDS combined—and it continues to grow at a rate of 10 to 17 percent per year.

While researchers think there is a genetic component to autism, they also believe environmental factors are playing a role in its recent increase. Environmental mercury and other heavy metal exposure, contaminated water, pesticides, a greater reliance on antibiotics—and even extensive television viewing by very young children—may be factors in mounting autism rates. Researchers at the American Academy of Pediatrics and other institutes have also identified flame retardants as possible culprits.

Vaccines containing the mercury preservative thimerosal (now mostly removed from the market) have long been blamed for causing autism, but scientific links are inconclusive. In lieu of a smoking gun, a more complex picture of autism’s environmental causes is now emerging.

Some researchers are focusing on the role of food in a young child’s development. Many autistic children suffer from digestive diseases or have genetic dispositions rendering them unable to naturally rid their bodies of toxins. As such, exposure to heavy metals, pesticides, contaminated water and even processed food could have a devastating cumulative effect, some researchers think. According to Brian MacFabe, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario who has studied autism triggers in rats, simple changes such as removing wheat and dairy from the diet could potentially bring about improvements.

Groups such as the nonprofit Healthy Child Healthy World say it’s about time researchers are looking at environmental factors. “Whatever triggered this current autism epidemic…autistic kids clearly need extra protection from further environmental assault,” the group writes on its blog. They advise parents to be vigilant about the industrial cleaners used in school buildings and the pesticides sprayed on playing fields, where kids spend 25 to 30 hours per week. They and other groups are also looking at the role of untested chemicals in common cleaning products: phthalates, glycol ethers and other known toxins.

Others wonder if a collective “nature deficit disorder” among children plays a factor in rising autism rates. Outdoor exposure has long been associated with healthier cognitive functioning in children, with reduction in Attention Deficit Disorder symptoms and greater emotional capacity. But new findings suggest it could impact autism, too. Last year, Cornell University researchers found higher rates of autism in counties where more households subscribed to cable and children under the age of three regularly watched TV. The Amish, with almost no exposure to TV, have little evidence of autism, notes the study.

Good thing to know:

A combination drug taken within an hour after the start of a migraine is effective in relieving symptoms, according to research published in the July 8, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The drug combines sumatriptan, a migraine-specific drug that affects the constriction of blood vessels, with naproxen sodium, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that works on the inflammatory aspect of migraine and relieves non-traditional migraine symptoms such as sinus pain and pressure and neck pain.

“Unfortunately, many migraine sufferers put off treatment,” said study author Stephen Silberstein, MD, of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. “This study provides more evidence that treating a migraine at the first sign of pain increases the likelihood of relief.”

The research involved two studies with a total of 1,111 people with migraine who had experienced two to six attacks per month in the three months before the study started. Half of the people were given the sumatriptan/naproxen drug within an hour after migraine pain started and while the pain was still mild; the other half were given a placebo.

Two hours after the dose was given, about 50 percent of those who received the drug were free of any pain, compared to about 16 percent of those who got the placebo. The people who took the placebo were also two to three times more likely to progress to moderate or severe pain over four hours than those who took the drug.

Those who took the drug also had fewer traditional migraine-related symptoms such as nausea and sensitivity to light and sound and fewer non-traditional symptoms such as neck and sinus pain than those who took the placebo.

Silberstein noted that only people whose migraines had a mild pain phase were included in the study, so it is not clear whether the results would apply to people whose migraines start at the moderate or severe pain level.

Interesting article. Not only do the very rich have the common run of human problems, those problems can be exacerbated by the riches they possess, which make it difficult to find people who will speak honestly and directly to them—including therapists. Great riches tend to induce sycophancy in others.

As the family knows, I am a person with a real need to declutter—but it’s hard. Still, I am gradually moving out the books, but God knows there are many other categories that need sharp reduction. I was interested to see in Cool Tools an excellent review by Merlin Mann of It’s All Too Much, by Peter Walsh. Along with the review you’ll find a good selection of excerpts. Kevin Kelly writes:

Merlin Mann’s review turned me onto this fantastic book. We’ve rethought our household because of it. We were reminded that life is not about stuff; it’s about possibilities, which the right tools can enable. For a world of expanding stuff, this book is the necessary anti-stuff tool. If you are reading Cool Tools, you need to read this. It will help you distinguish between that which is fabulous for you personally and that which is just more junk to organize. I’ve learned so much from the author that I’ve excerpted it generously in the hope that even if you don’t read the book, you’ll glean a bit of its wisdom.

Among things we suspected:

Mothers and fathers of twins conceived either spontaneously or with assisted reproductive technology (ART) suffer more mental health symptoms after delivery and one year later than do parents of singleton babies, according to research presented to the 24th annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Barcelona today (Monday). However, the mothers of ART twins had fewer symptoms of depression before the birth than did mothers of twins conceived spontaneously. “This may be due to better counselling and preparation of infertile couples for twins,” Dr Leila Unkila Kallio told the conference. “The good mental health during pregnancy may also reflect the couples’ satisfaction with successful treatment and fulfilment of hopes for parenthood,” she added. After birth, fathers of twins in both groups showed more depression, anxiety, social dysfunction and sleeping problems than did fathers of singletons.

The study is the first to investigate the mental health of both mothers and fathers of twins conceived either spontaneously or through ART using their own sperm and eggs, covering the transitional period to parenthood from pre-birth through to one year afterwards. Dr Unkila Kallio said that it showed that psychological well-being of prospective parents should be taken into account when deciding how many embryos to implant during ART – as well as the health risks of twin pregnancies to both mothers and babies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Arthur Allen in the Washington Independent has an article that suggests that the salmonella problem may have come from jalapeños, not tomatoes. (Inexplicably, “jalapeño” is misspelled “jalapeno” throughout the article: a copy editor asleep at the switch.) The article begins (with misspellings in place):

It’s been nearly three months since the first of more than 900 people fell ill with salmonella poisoning in the outbreak that the Food and Drug Admin. has linked to tomatoes. Now, it seems likely that it wasn’t tomatoes that done it. But, it could be the jalapenos.

“Unfortunately, I’m becoming increasingly confident in saying this outbreak is going to end up being one in which the initial data got the regulatory folks going down the wrong path,” said Dr. Tim Jones, the state epidemiologist of Tennessee, which has had a handful of cases linked to the outbreak. “There’s a decent chance it’s not tomatoes at all.”

At a news conference last week, officials from the Food and Drug Admin. and Centers for Disease Control said they were expanding the probe beyond tomatoes, “to include items that are eaten with tomatoes.” When asked if, in other words, the culprit might not be tomatoes, CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell demurred. “We’re not saying that.” She added, “It would be premature to list any other particular food item.”

FDA officials hinted strongly that some other component of salsa might be the source of the bacteria. If that’s the case, it could well be jalapenos, which are stored and kept long enough to keep infecting people for months. Tomatoes — and for that matter, cilantro — are usually thrown away within a few weeks. The Wall Street Journal had some of the story here and NPR followed up here.

Federal warnings about tomatoes have cost the food industry upward of $250 million thus far, so it isn’t surprising that CDC isn’t eager to point fingers at another vegetable. Restaurant owners, tomato growers and packers are up in arms over this drubbing. “They killed an industry,” said Batista Madonia, president of East Coast Brokers and Packers, a major tomato grower based in northern Florida. “My business is off 75 percent, and who knows if it will recover. Look at the spinach thing. It ended a year ago. But whenever I eat spinach, there’s still something in the back of my mind that says it’s dangerous.”

Many have complained about the FDA’s lack of transparency, and fault officials for failing to consult industry and academic experts. FDA and CDC needed to publicize more of their data during such investigations, and “take advantage of outside expertise that could speed these investigations,” said Roberta Cook, a tomato marketing expert at the University of California-Davis. “These things are important for protection of public health — and to avoid devastating entire commodity industries for no reason.”

Continue reading.

Science really does pay off. Another pandemic will undoubtedly at some point ensue, but now there’s a rational strategy to stop it. Davide Castelvecchi explains in Science News:

When deadly bird flu strikes, six degrees of separation could be the distance from here to hell. Even if a vaccine is found to be effective, it may be impossible to produce enough shots for everybody quickly enough, so authorities would have to decide how to use the doses they have in the most effective way. Researchers are now proposing a new strategy for targeting shots that could, at least in theory, stop a pandemic from spreading along the network of social interactions.

Vaccinating selected people is essentially equivalent to cutting out nodes of the social network. As far as the pandemic is concerned, it’s as if those people no longer exist. The team’s idea is to single out people so that immunizing them breaks up the network into smaller parts of roughly equal sizes. Computer simulations show that this strategy could block a pandemic using 5 to 50 percent fewer doses than existing strategies, the researchers write in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.

Much more at the link, including a graphic showing different strategies of interrupting the network.

I had believed that depression lowers the immune system. Quite the contrary, it turns out, as explained by Amy Maxmen in Science News:

… Certain immune proteins in the body appear to mess with the minds of otherwise healthy, but depressed people as well. Those who suffer from major depression have higher levels of cytokines, immune proteins the body makes to fend off infections and to patrol the body for disease, and which laboratories mimic. Excess cytokines have also been found lurking in the postmortem brains of suicide victims. “It raises the issue, how much of how we feel — how much of who we are as people — is dictated in terms of our immune system?” says Miller, a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta.

Though the connection between the body’s immune response and depression has only gained firm support in the last five years, it’s already catalyzing a revolution in antidepressant drug development. In hindsight, an emotional reaction to surging immune molecules does not seem so surprising. Cytokines are among the first immune proteins to respond to infection. Some direct swelling and fevers. Others order the body to rest, and so the sick take to the bed and decline party invitations, showers and even homemade dinners. The powerful molecules influence wants and needs by altering levels of substances like serotonin in the brain. Essentially, cytokines command the body to conserve energy when it’s sick. “A little depressed behavior is a survival mechanism in that sense,” Miller says. But when inflammation is artificially or erroneously triggered, prolonged sickness behavior may morph into depression and do more harm than good. …

Much more at the link, including a graphic.

Probably following Michael Chertoff’s instructions. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings discusses the story and the sorry state of CDC facilities under the Bush Administration.

Interesting, and hopefully leading to prophylactic measures. Daniel DeNoon reports for WebMD:

A new clue to the cause of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) comes from baby mice that suddenly die when their brain serotonin levels go haywire.

Serotonin is a signaling chemical that has far-reaching effects in the brain and other organs. But while too much or too little serotonin can cause many kinds of problems, death wasn’t supposed to be one of them. Until now.

Cornelius Gross, PhD, and colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory near Rome genetically engineered mice to have abnormally low levels of serotonin. They didn’t think this would kill the mice. After all, genetically engineered mice with no serotonin at all manage to survive.

But Gross’ team was amazed to see that many of their mice did indeed die — at an early age roughly equivalent to the age range at which human infants succumb to SIDS — 1 month to 1 year old.

“The similarity to SIDS is there is sudden death during a restricted period of early life — and it is caused by a change in the serotonin system,” Gross tells WebMD.

During early life, Gross’ mice appeared to be normal. Then they underwent a series of “crises” during which their heart rate and body temperature unpredictably dropped. More than half of their mice died during one of these crises.

What triggered the crises? Gross doesn’t know, but he suspects that the crises were most likely to occur during the transition from sleep to wakefulness.

Gross is quick to point out that what’s wrong with his genetically engineered mice isn’t the same thing that happens when kids die of SIDS. The mice carry an overactive gene that signals the body to make less serotonin. SIDS kids have no such overactive gene.

Even so, the finding suggests that researchers who have previously linked serotonin to SIDS are on the right track.

“Maybe there is some kind of signature we could find in these mice before they have a crisis, some way they respond when they wake up from sleep,” Gross says. “That might help us identify those kids most at risk of SIDS and provide parents with some kind of monitoring to catch them before a crisis occurs.”

Gross and colleagues report their findings in the July 4 issue of the journal Science.

The article specifically discusses herpes simplex virus 1, which causes cold sores, but it might offer a way to treat herpes simplex virus 2 (genital herpes) and the chicken pox virus.

Now that Duke University Medical Center scientists have figured out how the virus that causes cold sores hides out, they may have a way to wake it up and kill it. Cold sores, painful, unsightly blemishes around the mouth, have so far evaded a cure or even prevention. They’re known to be caused by the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1), which lies dormant in the trigeminal nerve of the face until triggered to reawaken by excessive sunlight, fever, or other stresses.

“We have provided a molecular understanding of how HSV1 hides and then switches back and forth between the latent (hidden) and active phases,” said Bryan Cullen, Duke professor of molecular genetics and microbiology.

His group’s findings, published in Nature, also provide a framework for studying other latent viruses, such as the chicken pox virus, which can return later in life as a case of shingles, and herpes simplex 2 virus, a genitally transmitted virus that also causes painful sores, Cullen said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting:

Scientists from Hungary, Germany and the U.K. have discovered that our own body not only makes chemical compounds similar to the active ingredient in marijuana (THC), but these play an important part in maintaining healthy skin. This finding on “endocannabinoids” just published online in, and scheduled for the October 2008 print issue of, The FASEB Journal could lead to new drugs that treat skin conditions ranging from acne to dry skin, and even skin-related tumors. “Our preclinical data encourage one to explore whether endocannabinoid system-acting agents can be exploited in the management of common skin disorders,” said Tamás Biró, MD, PhD, a senior scientist involved in the research. “It is also suggested that these agents can be efficiently applied locally to the skin in the form of a cream.”

Biró and colleagues came to this conclusion by treating cell cultures from human sebaceous glands (the glands that make the oil on our skin) with various concentrations of endocannabinoids (substances produced by the body that are similar to the active ingredient in marijuana). Then they measured the production of lipids (fat cells, such as those in skin oil), cell survival and death, and changes in gene expression and compared these outcomes to those in an untreated control group.

“This research shows that we may have something in common with the marijuana plant,” said Gerald Weissmann, MD. “Just as THC is believed to protect the marijuana plants from pathogens, our own cannabinoids may be necessary for us to maintain healthy skin and to protect us from pathogens .”

Maybe that’s why marijuana slows the growth of lung and cervical cancer and shrinks tumors.