MONDAY, Oct. 30, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Patients with sickle cell disease may soon have two new treatments to try. On Tuesday, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee will weigh the merits of a new gene therapy for the painful, inherited condition, which typically strikes Black people. The agency is expected to make a decision on that therapy in early December, and it also plans to decide on a second new treatment before year’s end, the Associated Press reported. The treatment being reviewed Tuesday is based on CRISPR technology, a gene-editing tool. The inventors of that tool won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for their work, the AP reported. A one-time treatment, “exa-cel” is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, and it permanently changes DNA in a patient’s blood cells. How does it work? Stem cells are removed from a patient’s blood, and then CRISPR knocks out a gene that triggers the development of defective, crescent-shaped blood cells. Meanwhile, medicine kills off flawed blood-producing cells in patients, who are then given back their own altered stem cells. “Anything that can help relieve somebody with this condition of the pain and the multiple health complications is amazing,” Dr. Allison King, a professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told the AP. “It’s horribly painful. Some people will say it’s like being stabbed…  read on >  read on >

Fighting climate change could come down to choosing chicken for your burrito or using soy milk for coffee creamer, a new study suggests. Making simple substitutions to an everyday diet can reduce the average American’s food-based carbon footprint by more than 35%, according to an article published online Oct. 26 in the journal Nature Food. “What we’re looking at here is a small changes approach. What happens if somebody just changes one thing in their diet?” said senior researcher Diego Rose, nutrition program director at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. “What we found was that if you just made one change — if everybody that was eating a high-carbon footprint food in those categories just made one change on a given day — that you could really lower the overall carbon footprint,” Rose continued. What’s more, these substitutions also tended to improve the quality of a person’s diet, the researchers noted. A person might scoff at the thought of their bacon cheeseburger contributing to global climate catastrophe, but they would be wrong, Rose said. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that human food systems globally account for a third of greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. To assess how small substitutions might help the climate, Rose’s team analyzed diet data from more than 7,700 adults and children…  read on >  read on >

High triglycerides, widely known as an enemy of the aging heart, may not be as threatening to older adults’ brains, new research suggests. The study, of over 80,000 older adults, found those with triglycerides in the “high-normal” or moderately high range were less likely to develop dementia, versus their peers with lower triglyceride levels. Over six years, 3% of older folks with the highest triglyceride levels developed dementia — half the rate seen in the study group with the lowest triglycerides, at 6%. Experts stressed some important caveats around the findings, published Oct. 25 in the journal Neurology. The main one is the study doesn’t prove that triglycerides somehow shield the aging brain. “This particular study is not enough to derive recommendations and claim with certainty that changing triglyceride levels will affect future dementia risk,” said Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, a neurologist at Columbia University in New York City. The findings are still important, though, said Scarmeas, who cowrote an editorial published with the study. He noted that blood “lipids” — cholesterol and triglycerides — can be easily modified with diet or medication. So, if further studies show they directly affect dementia development, that would offer one way to lower the risk. Zhen Zhou, a research fellow at Monash University in Australia, led the study. She said there could be various explanations for why low triglycerides…  read on >  read on >

Think twice about ordering that double cheeseburger, salami on rye or juicy T-bone. Just two servings of red meat a week — processed or unprocessed — can increase your risk of type 2 diabetes by 62%, according to a new study. “A modest but statistically significant increase in risk was seen with even two servings of red meat per week, and risk continued to increase with higher intakes,” said lead author Xiao Gu, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “Our findings suggest that replacing red meat with healthy plant-based protein sources, such as nuts and legumes, or modest intakes of dairy foods, would reduce the risk of diabetes.” The study can’t prove that eating red meat causes type 2 diabetes, but there appears to be a link. And a serving of meat is likely smaller than you might suspect. One serving of unprocessed red meat is about 3 ounces of pork, beef or lamb; a serving of processed red meat is about 1 ounce of bacon or 2 ounces of hot dog, sausage, salami, bologna or other processed red meats, Gu said.Red meat is usually high in saturated fat and low in polyunsaturated fat, Gu said. “Studies have shown that saturated fat can reduce beta cell function and insulin sensitivity, which results in type 2 diabetes,” he…  read on >  read on >

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has proposed a ban on the use of formaldehyde in hair relaxers over concerns about its link to respiratory problems and certain cancers. Right now, the FDA only discourages using such hair-straightening products, which are typically used by Black women. Recent research has helped raise awareness about the potential dangers of using chemical hair relaxers. “We know that these products are very poorly regulated by the federal government in terms of what goes in there,” said Kimberly Bertrand, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and the lead author of a recently published study on the dangers of relaxers. “You can’t look at an ingredient label and know that it contains these endocrine disruptors. They don’t list phthalates and parabens on the box — they say fragrance and preservative. So, women don’t really know what they’re being exposed to.” In that study, data from Boston University’s Black Women’s Health Study, which began in 1995 and tracks the health of 59,000 Black women, showed that postmenopausal Black women who used chemical hair straighteners had a higher risk of developing uterine cancer, NBC News reported. Another study published recently by the American Journal of Epidemiology found lower fertility in current and former users of hair straighteners. Women who used hair-straightening chemicals more than four times in the…  read on >  read on >

Fluctuating blood pressure can be a harbinger for both dementia and heart disease, a new study finds. Ups and downs within 24 hours or even over several days or weeks were linked with impaired thinking, researchers from Australia reported. Higher variations in systolic blood pressure, the top number, were linked with stiffening of the arteries, which is associated with heart disease. “Clinical treatments focus on hypertension, while ignoring the variability of blood pressure,” said lead author Daria Gutteridge, a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia’s Cognitive Aging and Impairment Neuroscience Laboratory. “Blood pressure can fluctuate across different time frames — short and long — and this appears to heighten the risk of dementia and blood vessel health,” Gutteridge said in a university news release. Researchers studied this in 70 healthy older adults aged 60 to 80 who had no signs of dementia or thinking impairment. The team monitored participants’ blood pressure, gave them a cognitive test and measured arterial stiffness in their brains and arteries. “We found that higher blood pressure variability within a day, as well as across days, was linked with reduced cognitive performance. We also found that higher blood pressure variations within the systolic BP [blood pressure] were linked with higher blood vessel stiffness in the arteries,” Gutteridge said. “These results indicate that the different types of BP variability likely…  read on >  read on >