HEALTH TRENDS

Home pregnancy tests can now say how pregnant you are

Earlier this month a new home pregnancy test kit hit the market, telling women both if they were pregnant and how far along they were.

Sold in Europe since 2008 and recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States, the Clearblue Advanced Pregnancy Test With Weeks Estimator provides a crystal-clear digital readout that's 99 per cent accurate.

The test is also 93 per cent accurate in determining the number of weeks you've been pregnant (1-2 weeks, 2-3 weeks, or 3-plus weeks) and you can get your results within three minutes.

Like all home pregnancy tests, it contains a testing strip that detects the presence or absence of the pregnancy hormone Chorionic Gonadotrophin (hCG) in your urine. But the new test also contains a second strip that measures the amount of hCG in your urine - a sign of how pregnant you are.

There is a catch, though: If you're carrying twins, your hormone levels will throw off the week estimator. (The basic pregnancy test should still be spot on, though.)

The health risk more fruit can fix

Two daily servings of fruit could lower your risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) - the swelling of the blood vessel that supplies blood to your abdomen - by 31 per cent, according to new Swedish research.

Smoking, high cholesterol and high blood pressure are all risk factors of developing aneurysm, and if aneurysms rupture, they can be life-threatening. Antioxidant flavanoids called procyanidins - found in fruit, but not most vegetables - provide protection, noted study coauthor Otto Stackelberg, MD.

Procyanidins inhibit a specific enzyme that can lead to inflammation associated with the condition, Dr Stackelberg added. In fact, eating vegetables didn't make a difference in AAA odds.

AAA is rare - it affects just 1.3 per cent of men between 45 and 54, and 12.5 per cent of men ages 75 to 84, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But research suggests that meeting your fruit quota can do everything from boosting your mood to protecting you from disease - and this study is just another reason to fill up on the two cups of fruit a day the CDC recommends.

Other procyanidin-rich foods include chocolate and red wine.

35 Cuba-trained doctors assigned to SERHA

Thirty-five of the batch of 68 Cuba-trained doctors have been assigned to the South East Regional Health Authority (SERHA).

The Jamaican doctors, who recently graduated from the Medical Faculty of the University of Santiago in Cuba, will be deployed to the Bustamante Hospital for Children, Kingston Public, Spanish Town and Victoria Jubilee hospitals.

"The region welcomes whole-heartedly these additional doctors to the existing cadre. This represents 50 per cent of the recent batch of Cuba-trained doctors joining the health sector," Lyttleton Shirley, board chairman for SERHA, said.

"We have the tremendous task of providing health-care services to more than half of the Jamaican population and so any addition to the workforce is considered a significant boost in our efforts to improve the level of services provided to our patients."

At the same time, Shirley said the Ministry of Health must be lauded for its ongoing efforts to strengthen the public health system through the employment of staff to adequately meet the requirements of patient care at all our institutions.

"Early last year, the ministry deployed 201 new nurses to the region. These nurses were assigned to the various health facilities across the region and have made a significant difference in the quality of healthcare delivered in the region," he said.

Vaccine eradicates virus that causes AIDS in monkeys

Researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in the United States have reported a major breakthrough in the field of HIV research, claiming they have created a vaccine that completely eradicates the virus that causes AIDS in some monkeys.

Their research, which was published in the journal Nature, showed that half of the monkeys they tested responded to the vaccine. The monkeys were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which is similar to HIV in humans but 100 times more deadly.

"It's always tough to claim eradication - there could always be a cell which we didn't analyse that has the virus in it," noted Louis Picker, of the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at OHSU. "But for the most part, with very stringent criteria, here was no virus left in the body of these monkeys."

According to Discovery News, Picker and his team created the vaccine by using a modified version of a common - though mostly harmless - virus called cytomegalovirus (CMV). When the CMV was exposed to the SIV, it prompted the monkey's white blood cells to respond and attack the SIV.

Of the monkeys who responded to the vaccine, they were still SIV-free up to three years later.

While the researchers are still trying to determine why some monkeys did not successfully respond to the vaccine, they are hopeful that this technique could work in humans. They have licensed the CMV method to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and if it is approved by the proper regulatory authorities, Picker said they could potentially start clinical trials in humans in the next two years.

FDA panel backs pre-surgery drug for breast cancer

A United States federal advisory committee cleared the way last week for the first approval of a cancer drug that would be used to treat patients before surgery to remove their tumours.

The advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted 13 to 0, with one abstention, that Perjeta, a Genentech drug approved last year for late-stage breast cancer, could also be used at the disease's earliest stage.

Such pre-surgery treatment might help make some inoperable tumours amenable to surgery, or make tumours small enough to allow for breast-conserving surgery rather than complete removal of the breast.

Moreover, the approval could serve as a model for a new path to quicker approvals of cancer drugs.

"This is a historic moment," Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, an associate professor at the Cleveland Clinic who served as the chairman of the advisory committee, said immediately after the vote. "We are supporting the rapid movement of a highly active drug for metastatic cancer to the first-line setting, with the hope that women with earlier stages of breast cancer will live longer and better."

The FDA still has to formally approve Perjeta for the new use but officials indicated it was likely to do so.