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Miniature “nanosensors” can detect early signs of cancer in everyday blood samples taken from patients, researchers report.

The sensors hunted for and picked up biomarkers for prostate and breast cancers. Study co-author Mark Reed, associate director of the Yale Institute for Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering in New Haven, Conn., said the technology “can generally be applied to many other types of biomarkers.”

The ultimate, hoped-for outcome is quick, easy and low-cost tests that can be done in a doctor’s office to detect cancer before it becomes troublesome.

“From a personalized medicine point of view, you could take a spot of blood from a fingerprick and get results within minutes. It would be simple, stable and relatively inexpensive,” said William C. Phelps, program director of Translational and Preclinical Cancer Research at the American Cancer Society.

“There’s a crying need for things like this in lung cancer, where you would want to be able to detect biomarkers in a sputum sample, and pancreatic and ovarian cancer,” Phelps said. “You can’t really detect these early, so they’re very hard to treat,” he noted.

“You want to detect a particular protein in the blood that’s indicative of disease and you want to detect it early with high specificity and accuracy. You don’t want false-positives or false-negatives,” Phelps added.

Although the technology has yet to make it to the doctor’s office, it is revolutionary in more than one way.

Previous technologies work in much the same way, but can only detect biomarkers in purified solutions, not the real thing — meaning fluid samples from patients.

“The real achievement here was demonstrating this with blood, which was a longstanding goal,” Reed explained. “It could not be done before because blood has too much salt and other stuff in it, which prevents this type of sensing. We developed a method to filtrate out specifically what we want to detect.”

Only small amounts of blood were needed and the process took all of 20 minutes.

The study findings were published online Dec. 13 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is able to work at the sub-cellular level, said Yoed Rabin, associate professor of biothermal technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

These particular nanosensors in the new study, Reed said, “sense the absorption of molecules on its surface and give an electrical signal output.”

Much of these innovations are a direct outgrowth of the Human Genome Project, which identified and sequenced the entire human genome of about 30,000 genes, Phelps said.

Although not too many cancer biomarkers have been identified, the Human Genome Project should yield many more.

“This gives a wonderful catalogue and characterization of cells and cancer cells that could be markers, so the biological underpinnings to do this are well in hand,” Phelps said. “If you find a protein, you can go back and say this protein is connected to this gene and this gene is more often expressed in cancer.”

Gingivitis is the medical term for inflammation of the gums. A type of periodontal disease, it’s caused by the long-term build-up of bacteria, mucus and food debris on exposed portions of the teeth.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine offers this list of warning signs for gingivitis:
Gums that bleed (check your toothbrush after brushing for blood).
Gums that appear bright red or purple.
Gums that are sore or tender to the touch.
Sores inside the mouth.
Swelling of the gums.
Gums that appear shiny.

If you’ve lost a lot of weight and want to keep it off, banishing high-fat foods and getting rid of your TV sets might help, along with eating less and staying active, new research hints.

Researchers found that people who had lost weight and had maintained a normal weight for 5 years were much more physically active than obese people who hadn’t lost weight and were also being better able to control their food intake.

But people’s home environment also mattered, Dr. Suzanne Phelan of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and her colleagues found. The weight loss maintainers had fewer TVs in their homes, and were less likely to be stocking their shelves with fatty foods.

Phelan and her team looked at 167 weight-loss maintainers and two groups of 153 treatment-seeking obese individuals to investigate behaviors and environmental factors that might promote sustained weight loss. People in the control groups had been participating in two different studies of weight loss interventions, but remained obese.

People who had kept the weight off expended 2,877 calories in physical activity per week, on average, compared to 762 per week for one of the control groups and 1,003 for the other, the team found.

In addition, weight loss maintainers had fewer TVs in their homes and more exercise equipment than the control groups.

There were also marked differences in the kinds of foods people had in the pantry, with the weight loss maintainers having significantly fewer high-fat items and more low-fat foods like fruits and vegetables and low fat dairy foods.

The weight-loss maintainers clearly had stronger self-control than the persistently obese people, Phelan and her team note, but it’s not clear why.

“The home environment of the weight-loss maintainers contained fewer high-fat foods and televisions and, thus, may have demanded fewer self-control resources than the more ‘toxic’ home environments of the treatment-seeking obese,” they note in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

“You have to pay attention to your home environment if you want to succeed,” Phelan advised in a statement from the Health Behavior News Service. “Do you have TVs in every room? When you walk into your kitchen, do you see high-fat food or healthy food?”

“If you want to choose better foods, keep better foods within reach. Don’t just rely on willpower,” Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Connecticut, commented in the statement.

“If you want to be more active, create opportunities for exercise that are always within reach. Don’t just rely on motivation,” added Katz, who wasn’t involved in Phelan’s study. “We should be propagating the awareness that lasting weight control is about skill power, not just willpower.”

Laryngitis is the inflammation of the larynx, which contains the vocal cords. When those vocal cords become inflamed, your voice often turns hoarse and may all but disappear.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine lists these common causes of laryngitis:
The common cold or flu.
Bacterial or viral infection.
Bronchitis.
Pneumonia.
Allergies.
Chemical irritation.
Injury to the larynx.

Children born with a much smaller-than-average head size are more likely to have neurological and cognitive problems, and should be screened for them, new guidelines suggest.

The guidelines, developed by the American Academy of Neurology and the Child Neurology Society, appear in the Sept. 15 issue of Neurology.

More than 25,000 children in the United States are born each year with microcephaly, defined as having a head circumference smaller than that of 97 percent of children. Microcephaly can also become apparent later, though usually by age 2, according to information in an academy news release.

While not a problem in and of itself, children with the condition are at higher risk of having epilepsy, cerebral palsy, cognitive delays, learning disabilities, mental retardation and eye and ear disorders, Dr. Stephen Ashwal, a child neurologist at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California, explained in the news release.

“Forty percent of children with microcephaly also have epilepsy, 20 percent also have cerebral palsy, 50 percent also have mental retardation, and 20 to 50 percent also have eye and ear problems,” Ashwal said.

“For these reasons, it is necessary for doctors to recognize microcephaly and check the child for these associated problems, which often require special treatments,” said Ashwal, lead author of the guidelines. “This is an important recommendation, as it allows doctors to provide more accurate advice and counseling to families who have a child with microcephaly.”

Screening using brain scans such as an MRI or CT scan may be called for, Ashwal said. Genetic testing may help determine the causes of microcephaly.

Even though a small head size may run in families, parents should still have their children screened for the other conditions. Pediatricians should also be told about a family history of neurological diseases, the researcher noted.

Not all children with smaller-than-average head sizes will go on to have health or learning issues. “It should be noted, though, that some children with small head size have normal development and do not develop any related conditions or problems,” Ashwal stated.

A new national survey finds that only about one in four U.S. parents say their child’s high school deserves an “A” for its bullying- and violence-prevention efforts. But nearly four in 10 gave an “A” grade for such efforts at their child’s elementary or middle schools.

“What this poll shows is that parents are still very concerned about bullying in their schools,” said Dr. Matthew Davis, director of the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, in a university news release.

Last May, researchers asked 1,087 parents across the United States about how they would grade their child’s school in five categories: safety of the school overall, building security, bullying and school violence prevention, safety during school-wide emergencies, informing parents of school-wide emergencies.

In regard to overall safety, 59 percent of parents gave their child’s elementary or middle school an “A” grade, but only one-third of those gave an “A” when asked about their child’s high school, the survey found.

As for building security, nearly half gave their child’s elementary or middle school an “A” grade, but only one-third of those said their child’s high school deserved an “A” grade.

What can parents who are concerned about bullying do to improve the situation? If the school or community has a bullying and violence prevention program, parents should get involved, Davis recommended. If such a program doesn’t exist, concerned parents should contact their local legislators to advocate for putting this type of program in place.

And, in the meantime, “parents can listen to their kids, who are their eyes and ears in the schools, especially about issues of bullying,” Davis said. “It can be really hard for children to bring up the topic of bullying so parents may need to ask directly about it and make home a safe place to talk about this important problem.”