Eaten Alive' By Scabies? No, But Here's How Scabies-Related Deaths Happen.

An elderly woman in a Georgia nursing home died after reportedly being "eaten alive" by scabies, a skin disease caused by parasitic mites. But can these mites really kill a person?

Experts say that while the mites themselves don't directly lead to death, they can set the stage for serious, and potentially fatal, bacterial infections.

The 93-year-old woman, Rebecca Zeni, died in 2015 at the Shepherd Hills Nursing Home in LaFayette, Georgia, according to local news outlet WXIA-TV. An autopsy report lists the cause of death as "septicemia due to crusted scabies," WXIA-TV reported. A number of news outlets, including WXIA-TV, reported that Zeni was "essentially eaten alive" by the mites.

An elderly woman died after reportedly being “eaten alive” by scabies. But can these mites really kill a person?

New lab study reveals how breast cancer drug can accelerate cancer cell growth

               The breast cancer drug lapatinib which is designed to shrink tumours can sometimes cause them to grow in the lab, according to a new study published in eLife. By understanding the molecular basis of this phenomenon, scientists hope that their findings will lead to safer treatment decision-making and drug design in the future.
Lapatinib is used in combination with other cancer drugs and chemotherapy to treat patients with a particular type of advanced breast cancer, but failed clinical trials as a stand-alone treatment.
            Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, King's College London and Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, have shown that lapatinib itself can actually cause breast cancer cells to grow more rapidly in some situations, which might explain the disappointing outcome of the clinical trials.
Lead author of the paper, Dr Jeroen Claus from the Francis Crick Institute, said: "If certain breast cancer drugs can cause cancer cells to grow more rapidly in particular circumstances in the lab, we need to evaluate carefully if that might happen in subsets of patients as well. Determining these risk factors could help doctors decide which patients may benefit most from these drugs."
              Around 20% of breast cancers are caused by a massive excess of a protein called HER2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2), which sends signals telling cancer cells to grow and divide. Lots of treatments for HER2 positive breast cancer work by switching off HER2 to make the cells stop growing or die. They can do this from outside the cell (antibodies such as trastuzumab) or inside the cell (kinase inhibitors such as lapatinib). Lapatanib is one of many kinase inhibitors used to treat HER2 positive breast cancers and HER2 is an important target for other existing and emerging breast cancer treatments.
            Using a combination of biochemical, biophysical, and computer modelling tools, the team discovered that lapatinib causes HER2 receptors on cell membranes to pair up with a partner receptor called HER3. When you combine these inhibitor-induced HER2-HER3 pairs with naturally-occurring growth signals from outside of the cell, they can rearrange themselves into an active, signalling pair. In this state, the HER2-HER3 pair becomes very efficient at telling the cells to divide, more so than cells that haven't been treated with the drug.
Professor Peter Parker, joint senior author of the paper and Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and King's College London (KCL) said: "Although our study was in breast cancer cells, it gives us new insights into the nuts and bolts of what happens to HER2 when you try to block it and raises some interesting questions around how we should approach designing drugs against HER2 positive breast cancer in the future."
           Professor Tony Ng, a clinician scientist heading the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at KCL, and joint senior author of the paper said: "In recent patient studies, HER2 targeted therapies that combined lapatinib with the antibody treatment trastuzumab successfully controlled HER2 positive breast cancers at first, but did not improve longer term disease-free survival. Our new findings could help us design future studies to improve combined HER2 targeted therapies."
Dr Justine Alford from Cancer Research UK, said: "By revealing surprising insight into the biology of HER2 and how this molecule may respond to certain drugs, this important lab research could guide future work into sophisticated new treatments that target HER2 in a more effective way.
           "As many breast cancers are triggered by HER2, drugs blocking its action have become cornerstone treatments for these diseases and they've shown great success. But sometimes these treatments can stop working, so there is a pressing need to develop new drugs that can overcome this issue and help improve the outlook for these women."
Five Johns Hopkins Scientists Among 83 Who Will Share in $15 Million Award From Chan ...Five Johns Hopkins scientists, with specialties spanning computation, genetics, statistics and engineering, are among 83 others from 53 institutions in the U.S and eight other countries, who will share in a $15 million award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.Released: 04/16/2018
Drug Reduces Size of Some Lung Cancer Tumors, Relapse Rate After SurgeryA drug given to early stage lung cancer patients before they undergo surgery showed major tumor responses in the removed tumor and an increase in anti-tumor T-cells that remained after the tumor was removed, which resulted in fewer relapse cases in the patients.Released: 04/10/2018
New Drug Combo Improves Survival of Women with Rare Uterine CancerAdding the monoclonal antibody drug trastuzumab—already used to treat certain breast cancers—to the chemotherapy regimen of women with a rare form of uterine cancer lengthens the amount of time their tumors are kept from growing, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers conducting a small phase II trial of the regimen, testing its safety and value.Released: 03/22/2018
Gene-Based Test for Urine Detects, Monitors Bladder CancerResearchers at The Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a test for urine, gathered during a routine procedure, to detect DNA mutations identified with urothelial cancers.Released: 03/22/2018
Pap Test Fluids Used In Gene-Based Screening Test for Two Gyn CancersCervical fluid samples gathered during routine Papanicolaou (Pap) tests are the basis of a new screening test for endometrial and ovarian cancers developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.Released: 03/14/2018
Aging Ungracefully: Stored Tissue Samples Might Offer Misleading Results for Common Lab Test Over ...A method currently used by thousands of laboratories across the country to preserve tissue could render samples useless over time for a common test to assess gene activity, a study led by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests. The findings, published in the November 2, 2017 American Journal of Clinical Pathology, could eventually lead to significant changes in how tissues are stored for clinical and research purposes.Released: 02/26/2018
Accurate Telomere Length Test Influences Treatment Decisions for Certain DiseasesResearch led by Johns Hopkins physicians and scientists shows that a test for measuring the length of DNA endcaps, called telomeres, which has a variability rate of 5 percent, can alter treatment decisions for patients with certain types of bone marrow failure.
Released: 02/22/2018
Cancer Risk Associated With Key Epigenetic Changes Occurring Through Normal Aging ProcessSome scientists have hypothesized that tumor-promoting changes in cells during cancer development—particularly an epigenetic change involving DNA methylation—arise from rogue cells escaping a natural cell deterioration process called senescence. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Centerdemonstrated that instead, tumor-associated epigenetic states evolve erratically during early stages of tumor development, eventually selecting for a subset of genes that undergo the most changes during normal aging and in early tumor development.Released: 02/21/2018
Five Novel Genetic Changes Linked to Pancreatic Cancer RiskIn what is believed to be the largest pancreatic cancer genome-wide association study to date, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute, and collaborators from over 80 other institutions worldwide discovered changes to five new regions in the human genome that may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer.
Scientists at the University of Delaware and the University of Illinois at Chicago have found a new way to kill liver cancer cells and inhibit tumor growth. First, they silence a key cellular enzyme, and then they add a powerful drug. They describe their methods in a new paper published in Nature Communications.
          This research could accelerate the development of new treatments for liver cancer, which is currently difficult to cure. Often surgery is not an option for liver cancer, and the available drugs are only modestly effective. More than 82 percent of liver cancer patients die within five years of diagnosis, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Manipulating cells to kill cancerThis project originated in labs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where researchers grew liver cancer cells and manipulated their expression of an enzyme called hexokinase-2. Then, the cells were treated with metformin, a diabetes drug that decreases glucose production in the liver.
         The research group of Maciek R. Antoniewicz, Centennial Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware, designed a set of experiments to measure how cancer cells respond to the loss of hexokinase-2, an enzyme that helps cells metabolize glucose, their food source.
Antoniewicz is an expert in metabolic flux analysis, a technique for studying metabolism in biological systems. His research group is one of only a few in the world with expertise in a technique called 13C metabolic flux analysis of cancer cells, and he recently published a paper in Experimental & Molecular Medicine describing his methods.
"The complexities of mammalian metabolism require a systems-level analysis of the underlying networks and phenotypes, and this is what my lab specializes in," he said.
The UD cohort used mass spectrometry to analyze the cancer cells and then determined intracellular metabolic fluxes for cells with and without hexokinase-2. They suspected that cells deprived of hexokinase-2 would starve and die, but surprisingly, they found that targeting hexokinase-2 alone had only a marginal impact on stopping cancer cell growth. Another weapon, metformin, was needed to complete the job.
           "The importance of our paper is that we show that targeting hexokinase-2 can indeed be a successful strategy for cancer therapy, when you also target a second compensatory mechanism with the drug metformin," said Antoniewicz.
His work provided important clues to what this second target should be, providing fertile ground for the next phase of research.
Finally, the research team at the University of Illinois at Chicago tested a combination of hexokinase-2 depletion and sorafenib, a liver cancer drug, on liver cancer tumors in mice. This combo worked better than either treatment alone.
The work was supported by three grants from the National Institutes of Health and a Veterans Administration merit award.

Young Americans are the loneliest, surprising study from Cigna shows

Young people are far more likely than senior citizens to report being lonely and in poor health, a surprising survey of 20,000 Americans released Tuesday shows.
The overall national loneliness score was alarmingly high at 44 on a 20-to-80 scale, but the prevalence of social isolation among those ages 18 to 22 raises even more concern. The younger people, part of Generation Z, had loneliness scores of about 48 compared with nearly 39 for those 72 and older.
The study was sponsored by insurer Cigna, which is concerned about loneliness as a societal problem but also because it's not just making us sad: It can literally make us sick.

• Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent).

• One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them.

• Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent).

• One in five people report they rarely or never feel close to people (20 percent) or feel like there are people they can talk to (18 percent).

• Americans who live with others are less likely to be lonely (average loneliness score of 43.5) compared to those who live alone (46.4). However, this does not apply to single parents/guardians (average loneliness score of 48.2) – even though they live with children, they are more likely to be lonely.

• Only around half of Americans (53 percent) have meaningful in-person social interactions, such as having an extended conversation with a friend or spending quality time with family, on a daily basis.

• Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) is the loneliest generation and claims to be in worse health than older generations.

• Social media use alone is not a predictor of loneliness; respondents defined as very heavy users of social media have a loneliness score (43.5) that is not markedly different from the score of those who never use social media (41.7).

Loneliness isn't just a fleeting feeling, leaving us sad for a few hours to a few days. Research in recent years suggests that for many people loneliness is more like a chronic ache, affecting their daily lives and sense of well-being.
Now a nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that. It finds that loneliness is widespread in America, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel alone or left out always or sometimes.
Using one of the best-known tools for measuring loneliness — the UCLA Loneliness Scale — Cigna surveyed 20,000 adults online across the country ages 18 and above. The UCLA tool uses a series of statements and a formula to calculate a loneliness score based on responses. People scoring between 20 and 80 on the UCLA scale are considered lonely, with a higher score suggesting a greater level of loneliness and social isolation.
More than half of survey respondents — 54 percent — said they always or sometimes feel that no one knows them well. Fifty-six percent reported they sometimes or always felt like the people around them "are not necessarily withthem." And 2 in 5 felt like "they lack companionship," that their "relationships aren't meaningful" and that they "are isolated from others."
The survey found that the average loneliness score in America is 44, which suggests that "most Americans are considered lonely," according to the report released Tuesday by the health insurer.
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Businesses To Benefit From Addressing 'Loneliness Epidemic,' Doctor Says"Half of Americans view themselves as lonely," said David Cordani, president and CEO of Cigna Corp. "I can't help but be surprised [by that]." (Cigna is an NPR sponsor and a major provider of health insurance for NPR employees.)
But the results are consistent with other previous research, says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, who studies loneliness and its health effects. She wasn't involved in the Cigna survey. While it's difficult to compare the loneliness scores in different studies, she says, other nationally representative estimates have found between 20 and 43 percent of Americans report feeling lonely or socially isolated.
Loneliness has health consequences. "There's a blurred line between mental and physical health," says Cordani. "Often times, medical symptoms present themselves and they're correlated with mental, lifestyle, behavioral issues like loneliness."
Several studies in recent years, including ones by Holt-Lunstad, have documented the public health effect of loneliness. It has been linked with a higher risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. It has been shown to influence our genes and our immune systems, and even recovery from breast cancer.
And there's growing evidence that loneliness can kill. "We have robust evidencethat it increases risk for premature mortality," says Holt-Lunstad. Studies have found that it is a predictor of premature death, not just for the elderly, but even more so for younger people.
The latest survey also found something surprising about loneliness in the younger generation. "Our survey found that actually the younger generation was lonelier than the older generations," says Dr. Douglas Nemecek, the chief medical officer for behavioral health at Cigna.
Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.
"Too often people think that this [problem] is specific to older adults," says Holt-Lunstad. "This report helps with the recognition that this can affect those at younger ages."
In fact, some research published in 2017 by psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University suggests that more screen time and social media may have caused a rise in depression and suicide among American adolescents. The study also found that people who spend less time looking at screens and more time having face-to-face social interactions are less likely to be depressive or suicidal.