Breakthroughs Today

HERE'S a question that requires you to answer another one: What is the second largest organ in the body? To answer the question, you must know first what the largest organ is. That’s the catch. Otherwise, there is no way for you to compare sizes.   But I will leave you to Google on that one and give you instead the answer about the second largest organ—the liver. It weighs around 1.5 kilos.   Large as it is, the liver appears the most taken-for-granted organ of the body—so disproportionate to the functions it performs to support life. And if you come to think of it, we simply presume it will continue to function well. So we keep on taking in the good, the bad and the worst. Think of what you eat today—canned goods, fried dishes, medications, alcoholic drinks—the list can go on. Whatever you eat or drink passes through the liver, your body’s principal detoxifying center.   The liver filters the blood that comes from the digestive tract, removes or metabolizes toxins a

Patients of today must learn the lessons of the superbug war in order not to get sucked into it themselves. And that begins by reading this article.   FIGURES available four years ago had estimated 44,000 new multi-drug resistant (MDR) cases recorded around the world. And around 150,000 people have died. The old strains continue to be more lethal even than that of the new entrants.   And experts the world over have agreed that the central cause of the blame has been the mismanagement in the treatment of tuberculosis. Know how these errors in treatment can help us detect any error made by the physician handling our case as well as our role in this debacle.   Based on the review that Meghna Adhvaryu and Bhasker Vakharia conducted and published December last year in Clinical Pharmacology: Advances and Applications, here are indicators of potential mismanagement to be wary of:   First is... [ READ MORE ]     This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 14 Nove

Something humans let go for centuries since they adapted to modern conventions turns out to be an effective cure of insomnia.   THE ex-Marine protagonist in Andrew Peterson’s novel First to Kill (2008) believed in this rule: “Sleep when you can.” This serves well in military operations when, at the sight of enemies, no sleep becomes necessary until the mission has been accomplished.   But insomnia can make ordinary civilians behave like soldiers to their detriment. Who can beat insomnia at its peak? People of advanced age mostly have it, or at least their sleeping hours get shorter and shorter with age. Adults who have an increasingly hectic city lifestyle can be so primed up with stress that they may not put their heartbeats or their minds to rest even as the dawn breaks. Chronic insomnia has been estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars annually in the United States alone.   You cannot just pop down sleeping pills whenever you want it. Drug dependence can be as de

LAST month, we presented here the general picture of kidney transplantation based on the multicenter study conducted by Behzad Einollahi and colleagues as reported in the Journal of Cancer (June 2012).   This week you will know, in more detail, which immunosuppressant drugs have been causing it and briefly how. The study noted that the risk of developing malignancy in organ transplants is three-four times greater than general population.   Before 2000, patients received a two-drug maintenance regimen consisting of prednisone and cyclosporine or azathioprine (AZA); or, a triple therapy with cyclosporine, prednisone and AZA. Afterward, most patients received not just cyclosporine and prednisone but mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) as well. Today, immunosuppressive therapy is a three-drug therapy using cyclosporine/sirolimus, MMF/AZA and steroids.   The Einollahi study noted that more than half of the patients (61.3 percent) received AZA when they developed cancer. The remaining