Doctors stumbled upon a medication that greatly reduces patients’ risk of “minor amputation” onset by diabetes. The physicians gave diabetics a drug originally intended to lower their cholesterol and were astonished to see that they were 36 percent less likely to require a limb removed, a new analysis of research says. In Australia, Finland and New Zealand, researchers studied about 10,000 patients, between 50 and 75 years old who had type 2 diabetes, the kind linked to obesity. Half of them were given fenofibrate, a drug available generically and sold as Antara, Fenoglide, Lipofen and others. The other half were given fake pills. After five years, 115 patients had at least one lower limb amputation because of diabetes, which damages nerves and blood vessels, and can lead to amputation in severe instances. About one diabetes patient in 10 loses part of a leg. The study, first published in 2005, aimed to see if fenofibrate prevented heart disease. It didn’t. But in this new analysis, experts found patients on fenofibrate had a 36 percent lower risk of a first amputation than those on placebo. Patients who lost part of their legs were more likely to have heart disease, smoking, skin ulcers or previous amputations. Amputations were labeled minor if they were below the ankle and major if they were above the ankle. The risk of minor amputations in patients without large vessel disease, the narrowing of blood vessels, was nearly 50 percent lower in the group taking fenofibrates. The risk of a major amputation was not substantially different between the two groups. Taller people were also more likely to suffer amputations. The results were published Friday in the medical journal Lancet.

 Stem cell research, approved by President Obama earlier this year, could help patients fight type 1 diabetes, new research shows. A few people with the disease have been able to survive for nearly three years without insulin shots after having their own blood stem cells removed and injected into them, U.S. and Brazilian researchers reported Tuesday. So far, a couple dozen boys and men have been treated within six weeks of being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, generally forcing individuals to take insulin shots to survive. (People with type 1 make up only about 10 percent of all diabetics; most people have type 2, which can be controlled with diet, exercise, oral drugs, or insulin shots.) “After the transplant, 20 of the 23 patients became insulin-free for at least a few months or even years,” reports Health.com. “Twelve of them stayed free of insulin for an average of 31 months and eight patients had periods ranging from six to 47 months in which they were free from insulin.”

Black teens are less likely to smoke than Whites. During their teen years, Blacks are much less likely to smoke than Whites, a new study says. However, most of this advantage disappears by mid-adulthood, researchers say. There is a puzzle here in that usually the health disadvantages in African Americans show up early in life and get worse as they get older,” says Fred Pampel, Ph.D., a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “For cigarette-smoking, African Americans tend to act in a more healthy way during their teens, but that advantage goes away by middle age.” The study appears in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Pampel used data from two surveys to look at groups of White and Black teens to see how their cigarette-smoking patterns changed as they aged. “Resources, such as higher income, more education, better access to medical care and greater use of nicotine replacement products, help Whites quit at a faster rate,” Pampel said. But C. Tracy Orleans, Ph.D., of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said the study did not factor in possible socio-demographic differences in exposure to higher tobacco prices and taxes, which “deter youth onset and promote quitting, especially among low-income smokers, and protection by worksite and comprehensive smoke-free airs laws, which affect adult cessation more than youth initiation.”

 Celebrities stand up to diabetes. Several celebrities are talking about their battles with diabetes during National Diabetes Month. To see what they have to say, go to BET.com/Body & Soul.

Tweens, teens double their diabetes drug use. America’s tweens and teens more than doubled their use of type 2 diabetes medications between 2002 and 2005, with girls between 10 and 14 years of age showing a whopping 166-percent increase. What is behind the increase? The most likely cause, scientists say, is obesity, which is closely associated with type 2 diabetes. The finding is included in a study of chronic medication use in children ages 5 to 19 released today in the journal Pediatrics by researchers from the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts and the Kansas Health Institute. In addition to diabetes, the study found that the use of blood pressure, cholesterol, attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD), asthma and depression medications increased at varying levels during the four year period. For help with controlling diabetes, see BET.com’s “Stand Up To Diabetes” feature.

Teens who need flu shots aren’t getting them. Too few American teens with asthma and other high-risk illnesses aren’t getting their flu shots, a new study finds. Researchers looked at vaccination rates from 1992 to 2002 for 18,703 adolescents with asthma, cardiac disease, immune system disorders and other conditions. What they discovered is that during the study period, vaccination rates improved, but only from 8 percent to 15 percent. From 1999 to 2002, only 11 percent of the patients received vaccinations during all four seasons, and more than 56 percent received no flu shots during those four years. Doctors are somewhat at fault, the researchers say, because from 45 percent to 55 percent of the teens who had one or more health-care visits during the flu season didn’t get a flu shot. Those who had preventive visits were more likely to receive the influenza vaccine. “Influenza vaccination has been recommended for adolescents with high-risk conditions for well over a decade,” study author Mari Nakamura, a clinical fellow in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, said. In children and adolescents with high-risk conditions, flu can lead to severe illness, hospitalization and even death. The study’s findings can be found in the November issue of Pediatrics.

HPV virus is linked to 25,000 cancers over five years. The human wart virus  known as HPV caused 25,000 cases of cancer in the United States between 1998 and 2003, including not only cervical cancer but also anal and mouth cancers, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Monday.  The study suggests the need for screening of both men and women to be expanded for human papillomavirus, or HPV, said another team of researchers, who did a similar study. HPV includes about 100 different viruses, and they are the leading cause of cervical cancer. The viruses, transmitted sexually and by skin-to-skin contact, can also cause anal and penile cancers, as well as cancers of the mouth and throat. HPV also causes common warts. Both Merck and Co. and GlaxoSmithKline make vaccines against some of the strains of HPV most strongly linked with cervical cancer, but not all. The vaccines are recommended for girls and young women who have not yet become sexual activity.  ”Currently available HPV vaccines have the potential to reduce the rates of HPV-associated cancers, like oral and anal cancers, that are currently on the rise and for which there is no effective or widely applied screening programs,” the CDC’s Dr. Mona Saraiya, who led the study, said in a statement. “This gives us baseline data to measure the impact of HPV vaccine and cervical cancer screening programs in reducing the incidence of cervical cancer and other HPV-associated cancers… .”

Sleep is seen as the newest obesity fighter. Consistently getting a good night’s sleep may help protect children from becoming overweight adults, a study published Monday suggests. Researchers found that among more than 1,000 people followed from birth to age 32, those who got too little sleep as children were more likely than their well-rested counterparts to become obese adults, Reuters News reports. The link between sleep deprivation during childhood and obesity risk later in life held up even when the researchers figured in things like the impact of a child’s weight or TV habits, and adulthood exercise level. All of this supports the idea that early sleep habits have a direct effect on weight in the long term, according to Dr. Robert John Hancox, the study’s senior author. “Although we cannot prove that this is a cause-and-effect relationship,” he told Reuters Health, “this study provides strong evidence that it probably is.”

Eating more fish can help you control diabetes. Centering your dinner around a fish dish at least twice a week might help people with diabetes lower their risk of kidney disease, a study suggests. In the November issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, British researchers analyzed the records of more than 22,300 middle-aged and older English men and women who were part of a large European cancer study to determine the effect of fish on kidney disease. What they found is that of the 517 study subjects who had diabetes (most of whom had type 2), those who on average ate less than one serving of fish each week were four times as likely to have albumin in their urine than people with diabetes who ate fish twice a week. Adler speculates that the nutrient content of fish may affect kidney function and improve blood glucose control. But the researchers could not say what type of fish had the biggest impact, reports USA Today.To get more help with diabetes, go to BET.com/Body &Soul.

Diabetes rates nearly double. New cases of diabetes nearly doubled over the last decade in the United States, a trend made worse by high rates of obesity and inactivity in the South, a study of 33 states found. The U.S. rate of diabetes increased to 9.1 cases for every 1,000 people in 2005-2007, up from 4.8 in 1995-1997, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s study. It’s the first study to describe the cases by geographic region, the agency said. Diabetes is the seventh-leading cause of death in the United States and can lead to heart diseases, blindness, kidney failure and amputation, according to the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency. More than 23 million Americans have diabetes, and last year about 1.6 million new cases were diagnosed in people 20 or older, the CDC reports. African Americans are twice as likely to get diabetes as Whites, according to federal health figures. Studies have shown that obesity, idleness and too much sugary soda and fruit juice can increase risk of contracting the disease. For more on diabetes, go to BET.com/Body & Soul.

Voters: Major changes are needed in U.S. Health Care.  Seven in 10 registered voters say major changes are needed in the U.S. health care system, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and the Kaiser Family Foundation say. “Voters want a major change in health care,” said Robert J. Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, in the second article of a series of reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). “But a new administration is going to have to face the very real divide that exists between McCain and Obama supporters on the shape of future reform,” Blendon added. Health care is a major economic worry for many families, the researchers say. “People are having major problems getting and paying for health care and, if this trend continues, addressing health care as part of the nation’s economic turmoil may be a priority for the nation’s next president,” said Drew Altman, Kaiser president and CEO. While voters are dissatisfied with the current health care system, they have very different views about how the next president should fix it, particularly those who say they plan to vote for Sen. John McCain versus those intending to vote for Sen. Barack Obama. When asked to choose the most important issue relating to their vote choice, health care ranked second among Obama voters and tied for fourth among McCain voters. Further, while a large majority of voters favor changes in health care, supporters of the two candidates differ greatly on how to do it or how much of a change is necessary, the researchers found. The findings, however, confirm what surveys have shown in the past: that there is wide support for a variety of approaches to health care reform, though there may not be agreement on the best way to move forward.

People are losing sleep over the economy. Nine of 10 American workers are losing sleep over financial worries, according to a survey released Monday by a company that helps workers deal with wellness issues. Keeping up with the rising costs of living and credit card debt were top concerns preventing people from falling asleep, according to the results from ComPsych Corporation, which surveyed employees of companies it serves. Thirty percent of respondents reported worrying about the cost of living while 29 percent cited credit-card debt. Making mortgage payments and building retirement accounts also kept people awake, with 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively, listing those as their main concerns, the survey said. How to afford children’s school tuition and health care costs robbed just 3 percent of sleep, the survey said. Only 8 percent of respondents said they are not worried and have no trouble sleeping. The study was compiled and released by ComPsych Corporation, which contracts with companies to provide employee assistance programs.

The cost of Diabetes has doubled. Diabetes drug costs in the United States have almost doubled in six years to $12.5 billion as more people are diagnosed and patients receive newer, more expensive treatments, a study found. However, researchers are questioning whether the new drugs are actually better than the old ones, according to the report in this week’s issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. About 18 million people in the United States were diagnosed with diabetes in 2007, an increase from 8.1 million in 1994, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Are the newer costs worth it, is really the million dollar question,” said lead author G. Caleb Alexander, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. The study found the cost for diabetes drugs rose 87 percent to $12.5 billion in 2007 from $6.7 billion in 2001. Type 2 diabetes, which is linked to age, obesity, and lack of exercise, accounted for as many as 95 percent of diabetes cases in the United States. People with the condition don’t produce enough insulin, or their cells ignore the insulin needed for the body to convert blood sugar to energy, according to the National Institutes of Health. Diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney damage, and heart disease.

Plastic water bottles are linked to heart disease, diabetes. The first major study of health effects in people from a chemical used in plastic baby bottles, food cans and a host of other products shows a connection between them and a higher risk for heart disease and diabetes. People who have a higher exposure to bisphenol A or BPA have a 39-percent higher risk for those diseases, the study’s authors say. And because of the possible public health implications, the results “deserve scientific follow-up,” the scientists added. But the study is preliminary, far from proof that the chemical causes heart disease and diabetes, The Associated Press reports. Two Dartmouth College analysts of medical research said the study raises questions but provides no answers about whether the ubiquitous chemical is harmful. The findings were released Tuesday to coincide with the researchers’ presentation of their findings at a Food and Drug Administration scientific advisers’ hearing. The FDA has the power to limit use of BPA in food containers and medical devices but last month released an internal report concluding that BPA exposure is not enough to warrant action. Since then, another government agency released a separate report concluding that risks to people, in particular to infants and children, cannot be ruled out. Past animal studies have suggested reproductive and hormone-related problems from BPA. The new study is the largest to examine possible BPA effects in people and the first to suggest a direct link to heart disease, said scientists Frederick vom Saal and John Peterson Myers, both longtime critics of the chemical. Dr. Ana Soto of Tufts University said the study raises enough concerns to warrant government action to limit BPA exposure. No government action has been taken so far. However, health officials recommend that you limit your use of plastic water bottles with the number 7 on the bottom, and avoid microwaving plastic containers.

Drug war is devastating Black communities. A $45 billion policy has had devastating consequences for millions of African Americans, says a drug policy expert, who is to debate his position before a London crowd. Absent fathers, orphaned children and growing numbers of HIV and Hepatitis C infections are what some African Americans are facing due to the U.S. war on drugs. Exactly 25 years ago, former president Ronald Reagan announced his zero tolerance measure to tackle what he saw was a growing epidemic of illegal drug use in the nation. Politicians believed that millions of federal dollars should be spent on prosecuting and sentencing drug users in the hope that it would reduce drug addiction and send out the message of zero tolerance. In 2005, the Office of National Drug Control stated that the federal government has spent more than $45.5 on the war on drugs, and it appears that African Americans are facing the brunt of this no-nonsense policy, reports the Voice of London. According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15 percent of drug users but they account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Deborah Peterson Small a former director of the Drug Policy Alliance will speak about the racism within the war on drugs policy at the conference. “The war on drugs policy has had a devastating effect on African-American communities, particularly poor communities that already suffer from a whole host of economic and social problems,” she said. Pointing to prison sentencing, Small, a New Yorker, says the mandatory-minimum-sentence policy for low-level drug offences subjects people who are low-level participants to the same or harsher sentences as major drug dealers. Currently, crack cocaine is the only drug for which the first offense of simple possession can trigger a federal mandatory-minimum sentence. Possessing 5 grams of crack with a street value of $1,000 carries an automatic five-year jail sentence. Despite the high rate of African-American drug convictions, a recently released report by Human Rights Watch, found that African Americans are not the greatest users of drugs. According to Jamie Fellner, author of the report, Whites are more likely to be drug users.

Diabetics have another worry: cholesterol. LDL cholesterol that’s either too high or two low signals an increase cancer risk in people with type 2 diabetes, a Chinese study shows.  Researchers studied 6,107 diabetes patients, none of whom was taking cholesterol-lowering statins. The researchers found that LDL levels below 2.80 mmol/L were associated with an increased risk of cancers of the digestive organs and peritoneum, genital and urinary organs, and lymphatic and blood tissues. LDL levels above 3.80 mmol/L were associated with increased risk of oral, digestive, bone, skin, connective tissue and breast cancers. The findings suggest “the use of these levels as risk markers may help clinicians to assess their patients more fully and thus to prevent premature deaths in patients who have high risk,” wrote the team from the Hong Kong Institute of Diabetes and Obesity, the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. However, factors such as lifestyle, socioeconomic status and indication for use of statins need to be considered when examining the association between LDL levels and cancer risk, Drs. Frank Hu and Eric Ding of the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in an accompanying commentary. The study was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Most female sports injuries come from cheerleading.

Over the past 25 years, cheerleading accounted for two-thirds of all catastrophic sports injuries experienced by high school and college females in the United States, HealthDay News reports. This is a much higher proportion than previously thought, a new report says. Cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of female high school athlete injuries and for 66.7 percent of female college athlete injuries, according to this year’s report from the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was previously believed that cheerleading accounted for 55 percent of injuries among high school females and 59.4 percent of injuries among college females. But the percentages increased when new data was used for this year’s report. Center Director Frederick O. Mueller, a professor of exercise and sports science who’s authored the annual report since it began in 1982, said catastrophic injuries to female athletes have increased over the years. “A major factor has been the change in cheerleading activity, which now involves gymnastic-type stunts,” he said in a university press release. “If these cheerleading activities are not taught by a competent coach and keep increasing in difficulty, catastrophic injuries will continue to be a part of cheerleading.” Between 1982 and 2007, there were 103 fatal, disabling or serious injuries recorded among female high school athletes. The vast majority of those (67) occurred in cheerleading, followed by nine in gymnastics and seven in track.

HIV/AIDS groups to candidates: Where’s Your National HIV/AIDS Plan? Vital Signs: HIV/AIDS groups are concerned that as Black HIV/AIDS numbers grow, little attention is being given the deadly disease from the folks who want to run the country. Vital Signs tells you what they say the candidates must do to win their support.

The uninsured get the worse health care. People who are uninsured received about half as much care as those who are fully insured, according to a report appearing in Monday’s online edition of Health Affairs. A person who is uninsured all year will average $1,686 in medical costs, while someone who is privately insured will average $3,915, says the report by Jack Hadley, of George Mason University, and John Holahan, Teresa Coughlin and Dawn Miller, of the Urban Institute, who analyzed figures on medical spending in people who are insured versus those who are uninsured. The uninsured pay an average of $583 (35 percent) of their costs, while the insured pay an average of $681 (17 percent), the researchers point out. “The uninsured receive a lot less care than the insured, and they pay a greater percentage of it out of pocket,” study author Hadley, a senior health services researcher at George Mason, said in a news release from the journal. “Contrary to popular myth, they are not all free riders,” he added.  The researchers also estimated that the federal government pays for about three-quarters ($43 billion) of the uncompensated care bill, including roughly $18 billion in special payments to hospitals by Medicare and Medicaid; $15 billion in tax appropriations and indigent care programs by state and local governments; and almost $10 billion in spending by the Veterans Health Administration, the Indian Health Service, community health centers and similar direct-care programs, Forbes online points out. “From society’s perspective, covering the uninsured is still a good investment,” Hadley says. “Failure to act in the near term will only make it more expensive to cover the uninsured in the future, while adding to the amount of lost productivity from not insuring all Americans.”

One in four Americans struggles with health care costs. Roughly one in four Americans (24 percent) continues to struggle with health care costs, according to the latest Kaiser election 2008 tracking poll. Health care ranks as a “serious problem,” above paying for food (18 percent), problems with debt (16 percent) and paying the rent or mortgage (15 percent), and below paying for gas (37 percent) or getting a good-paying job or raise in pay (26 percent). Half of the people who were uninsured say that paying for health care is a serious concern. Members of two minority groups, Hispanics (39 percent) and African Americans (35 percent), say problems paying for care are particularly a concern.

Mercer University gets $3.1 million to fight diabetes. The National Institutes of Health awarded Dr. John Boltri, a physician at the Mercer University School of Medicine, $3.1 million for church-based diabetes-prevention and education programs. Mercer medical professors will be working with The Medical Center of Central Georgia in a five-year study that will launch next spring, said Boltri, who conducted earlier research showing that the rate of diabetes was 50 percent higher in Blacks than in Whites. “We’re going into African-American churches and doing screenings for diabetes,” said Boltri, a physician at the Family Health Center in Macon. “We’re looking to see who has pre-diabetes.” Boltri said his research started a few years ago when he was looking at ways to prevent diabetes. His studies showed a higher risk in Blacks. Working with researchers from the University of Connecticut-Hartford, Boltri and his team developed a detailed program, which will use a combination of education and religion to try to reduce the risk of the disease. The educational component involves improving diets, reducing fat, increasing physical activity and making the participants more aware of the complications diabetics face. “We’re going to ask people to keep a diary of the foods they eat and switch to lower-fat foods,” he said. Monique Davis-Smith, another researcher from Mercer’s Department of Family Medicine, said religion will also play a part in the program. “We’re going to encourage prayer as part of the program and bringing knowledge of one’s own faith [to the program],” she said. “We’re encouraging people to lean on their faith.”