People who have a condition putting them at high risk for a bone marrow cancer may be able to ward off the malignancy with a high-fiber diet, new research shows. The study focuses on patients with what’s known as monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS). It’s a bone marrow abnormality that’s often a precursor to multiple myeloma, one of the most common forms of blood cancer. The small study — just 20 MGUS patients — found that a change of diet that boosts fiber intake may slow or prevent the onset of multiple myeloma. That makes sense, the research team said, since prior studies have suggested that poorer, meat-rich diets put folks at higher risk for the cancer. The new findings “support how we as physicians can empower patients, especially those with precancerous conditions, with knowledge on reducing their cancer risk through dietary changes,” said study lead author Dr. Urvi Shah. She’s a myeloma specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Her team presented its findings Saturday in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). The new study involved patients with MGUS who were also overweight or obese. As the researchers noted, obesity is also a risk factor hiking the odds that MGUS will progress to full-blown cancer. For 12 weeks, participants switched to a plant-based…  read on >  read on >

Taking even high doses of supplementary vitamin D won’t lower an older person’s odds for type 2 diabetes, new research confirms. Vitamin D supplements may have other benefits, but in otherwise healthy folks with sufficient levels of the nutrient, “our findings do not suggest benefits of long-term moderate- or high-dose vitamin D3 supplementation” in warding off type 2 diabetes, the team of Finnish researchers concluded. They published their findings Dec. 2 in the journal Diabetologia. The new research followed on data from other studies that had suggested that people with especially low levels of vitamin D might face a higher risk for diabetes. That was true for people who were already prediabetic, especially. So could a relatively high dose of vitamin D supplements help lower type 2 diabetes rates among people without prediabetes — those at no special risk for the blood sugar disease? To find out, researchers led by Jirki Vyrtanen, from the University of Eastern Finland, randomly assigned nearly 2,300 people aged 60 or older to receive either placebo pills or 40 or 80 micrograms of vitamin D3 supplements per day, for five years.  At the end of the five years, “105 participants developed type 2 diabetes: 38 in the placebo group, 31 in the group receiving 40 micrograms of vitamin D3 per day, and 36 in the group receiving 80 micrograms of vitamin…  read on >  read on >

Men with heart risk factors tend to lose their brain health more quickly than women with similar heart risks, a new study finds. These men face brain decline as early as their mid-50s, while women are most susceptible from their mid-60s onward, researchers report in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. “These results suggest that mitigating cardiovascular risk is an important therapeutic target in the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, and indicate that this should be addressed aggressively a decade earlier in males than in females,” concluded the research team led by senior researcher Paul Edison, a professor of neuroscience with the Imperial College London. Heart disease risk factors like type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and smoking have previously been associated with a higher risk of dementia, researchers said in background notes. However, it’s not been clear when these heart health factors begin to take their toll on brain health, and whether there’s any differences between men and women, researchers noted. For the study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 34,500 participants in the UK Biobank, an ongoing large-scale research project.  Imaging scans helped track changes in the participants’ brains over time, and researchers calculated their heart disease risk using their recorded health data. Results showed that heart risk factors, obesity and high levels of belly fat caused a gradual loss of brain volume…  read on >  read on >

A wearable patch the size of a postage stamp that can monitor blood pressure continuously could soon help people manage their hypertension. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, who developed the wearable ultrasound patch report Nov. 20 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering that it has worked well in tests with more than 100 patients. Maintaining a normal blood pressure — 120/80 — helps prevent many illnesses, from heart disease and stroke to kidney problems, dementia and vision loss, so many patients with high blood pressure use a cuff-and-meter device to track their levels. “Traditional blood pressure measurements with a cuff, which are limited to providing one-time blood pressure values, can miss critical patterns,” said study co-author Sai Zhou, who recently received his doctorate degree from the University of California, San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.  “Our wearable patch offers continuous stream of blood pressure waveform data, allowing it to reveal detailed trends in blood pressure fluctuations,” he added in a university news release. The soft, stretchy patch adheres to the skin and is worn on the forearm. An array of tiny transducers inside it send and receive ultrasound waves that track changes in the diameter of blood vessels. These changes are then converted into blood pressure values. Developers said the patch produces results comparable not only to those of a standard blood…  read on >  read on >

In a move guaranteed to alarm many, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal opponent of vaccines and other tenets of mainstream health care, to head the massive U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The department encompasses numerous key agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, Medicaid and Medicare. Trump’s nomination, which came Thursday, shifts the 70-year-old Kennedy from a fringe character railing against many long-accepted medical practices to one of the most powerful people in the federal government, charged with overseeing Americans’ health care and safety. In a statement, Trump, who has already said he’d let Kennedy “go wild on health,” reinforced his would-be appointee’s image as a maverick. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the nomination. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!” It’s been a dramatic arc for Kennedy, whose namesake father was assassinated in 1968 in the midst of a campaign to become the Democratic Presidential nominee that year. Kennedy Jr. was himself a Democrat until he campaigned in this year’s presidential campaign as…  read on >  read on >

People with both type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease face a heart health double-whammy, a new study says. Men with both diabetes and kidney disease will develop heart health problems 28 years earlier than those without either condition, researchers reported today at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. Women with diabetes and kidney disease will develop heart problems 26 years earlier, results show. “Our findings help to interpret the combination of risk factors that will lead to a high predicted cardiovascular disease risk and at what age they have an impact on risk,” lead study author Vaishnavi Krishnan, a researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago and a medical student at Boston University School of Medicine, said in a news release. “For example, if someone has borderline-elevated levels of blood pressure, glucose and/or impaired kidney function, but they don’t yet have hypertension or diabetes or chronic kidney disease, their risk may not be recognized,” Krishan said. For the study, researchers used federal health survey data from 2011 to 2020 to create heart risk profiles for people who have type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, or both. Kidney disease and type 2 diabetes are two of the four components of cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM), which the heart association defines as the overall health risk that arises from the interplay of heart disease, kidney problems, diabetes and obesity.…  read on >  read on >