First ever face transplant in US - success

A horribly disfigured woman who lived like an outcast because of her appearance woke up Wednesday with a brand new face.

The Cleveland Clinic announced it has performed the first ever face transplant operation in the U.S. - and the most radical makeover of its kind ever.

Doctors replaced all but the woman’s chin, lower lip, upper eyelids and forehead. The other 80% of her face was replaced with one donated from a female cadaver.

They also grafted on facial nerves and muscles so the woman’s new face functions - and is not just a mask.

“Our patient was called names and humiliated,” said Dr. Maria Siemionow, who led that team that performed the 22-hour operation two weeks ago. “You need the face to face the world.”

Siemionow did not identify her patient and said even less about the female donor beyond saying that she “deserves our thanks.”

Before the operation, the transplant patient - whose face was ruined by some kind of traumatic accident - could not smile or smell or taste. Now, she can, doctors said.

“We never thought for a moment that our sister would ever have a chance at a normal life again, after the trauma she endured,” the woman’s sibling said in a statement. “There are tears of joy, and tears of pain that it took one to pass for one to have the life.”

Dr. Warren Breidenbach, a surgeon at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Ky., who did the nation’s first hand transplant in 1999, said the woman with the new face was in good hands.

“She’s a leader in this field,” Breidenbach said of Siemionow, a graduate of the Poznan Medical Academy in Poland.

It is only the fourth face transplant ever.

Full article from the NY Daily News

Father uses the Internet to spark medical breakthrough

Five days into her young life Sarah Jane Donohue was shaken by her baby nurse.  Today the three year old girl who suffers from Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury (PTBI) is called “the Diva” at her pre-school. Read more

Melissa Daly loses over 200lbs to become ironwoman

A few years ago Melissa Daly weighed 380 pounds.   Today, after becoming one of the clinical trial patients for gastric bypass surgery, Melissa has shed over 200 pounds and competes in Ironman endurance races.  She runs now for Team in Training to help raise funds for Leukemia research.  Melissa is driven to help find a cure for Leukemia in honor of Christian Stafford, her godson, who died from the disease.

9 year old is Health Hero of 2008

Winter Vinecki, a nine-year-old girl who honored her father’s fight against prostate cancer by helping to raise more than $100,000 for Athletes for a Cure and the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF), has been named a WebMD 2008 Health Hero. She is featured in the November/December print edition of WebMD and on the publication’s online site.

Prostate Cancer Foundation
Dan Zenka, APR
Vice President, Communications
310.570.4714 (Direct)
310.903.1112 (Mobile)
dzenka@pcf.org

Dean can’t stop running

Let’s say you’ve run 300 miles non-stop, you’ve run 1310 miles in 50 days (make that 50 marathons, in 50 different states), and logged over 5000 race miles in a single year.  What do you do next?  How about becoming the first human to run across all five major deserts in the world in a single calendar year.  Does that sound crazy?  It sounds like Dean Karnazes.

In between desert runs - he just ran across the Sahara Desert and leaves for the last desert run in Antarctica in two weeks - Dean is out and about promoting his new book 50/50: Secrets I learned Running 50 Marathons in 50 Days along with his continued commitment to improving youth health through his Karno Kids organization.

At the end of the day Dean is all about Inspiration.  He is inspired to test the limits of human endurance, inspired to live a life of activity, inspired to help improve the health of kids,  as well as to inspire everyone to achieve goals greater than they thought possible.  “It’s a two-way street.  I also draw inspiration from the many people I meet along the way,” says Karnazes.

Dean described his goal of running 50 marathons in 50 days, in 50 states as his ultimate family vacation.  The original inspiration was a family traveling by camper, seeing the country, and testing his ability to chain together daily endurance runs.  “I remember hearing about a George Thorogood tour where they played 50 concerts in 50 days in 50 states and thought, ‘wouldn’t that be fun to do with running.’”

But when The North Face jumped in to sponsor the effort along with hiring a world class logistics company the idea was hatched to make this a much larger event where people could join Dean for runs.  The formalized logistics team and sponsors worked with race directors in every state to make sure they were covering official marathon courses with official start and stop times.  The marathon tour also took advantage of premier events that are held on weekends such as the marathons in Boston, San Francisco, and New York.

“I really enjoyed running with people every day.  I am normally an introvert and enjoy the solitude of running but I found during the course of the 50 marathon journey that I really looked forward to meeting with a new group of people the next day.” said Karnazes.  “I ran with one woman who was 53 years old and was completing her 50th marathon on the day she ran with me.  By the way, she never ran a marathon before she turned 50 and she had survived a battle with breast cancer.  Talk about inspirational.”

How does one train to get ready to tackle 50 consecutive marathons?  “I worked with Chris Carmichael who trained Lance Armstrong for the Tour de France races and ran eight 100 mile or greater races leading up to the 50:50 effort.   The thinking was that if I could run and recover from races over 100 miles then 26.2 miles wouldn’t feel so bad every day.”

In response to why he did it and why he wrote the book Dean had a pretty simple response.  “One, for the challenge.  But also to get peoples attention that you can do great things.  My hope for the book is really that when the reader turns the last page of the book that they are inspired to go out and do something.”

When asked about his favorite local run - Dean lives in Marin County - he lit up in describing the course.  “I like to tuck the kids in bed on Friday night and then head out north of San Francisco, through Nicasio and Napa Valley to Calistoga.  It is a 75 mile route and when the kids wake up in the morning the family drives up to Calistoga and meets me for breakfast.”

That is a story that might make you feel a little guilty for sleeping in on Saturdays.  Run, Dean.  Run.

Carmani Boozer fights sickle cell disease

“E:60″ talks with Carlos and CeCe Boozer about their fight against sickle cell anemia.   Carmani Boozer has now been disease free for the past year after treatment.

Sickle-cell disease or sickle-cell anaemia (or anemia) is a blood disorder characterized by red blood cells that assume an abnormal, rigid, sickle shape. Sickling decreases the cells’ flexibility and results in their restricted movement through blood vessels, depriving downstream tissues of oxygen. The disease is chronic and lifelong: individuals are most often well, but their lives are punctuated by periodic painful attacks and a risk of various other complications. Life expectancy is shortened, with older studies reporting an average life expectancy of 42 and 48 years for males and females, respectively.

This has been Boozer’s plight ever since May 31, 2006, when Carmani was born with sickle cell disease, an inherited disorder that affects more than 70,000 people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Boozer is among more than 2 million people who carry the gene that allows them to pass it on their children. The disease creates abnormal blood cells that can clog blood flow through small blood vessels. It causes pain, blood clots and other serious problems, including death.

The condition was detected while Carmani was in the womb. Boozer and CeCe, who have been together since they met nine years ago at Duke, elected to try a risky new treatment that involved a bone marrow transplant and in vitro fertilization

Add 14 years to your life

I haven’t exactly discovered the fountain of youth, but I have stumbled upon something that comes as close as possible at the moment. According to a study in the journal PLoS Medicine, it’s possible to add 14 years to your life by simply adopting four easy lifestyle habits: exercising, eating lots of produce, drinking alcohol only in moderation and never, ever smoking. Not only do each of these practices help prevent heart disease, the number-one killer of American women, but each also helps send your cancer risk way, way down.

Because I’d love to become one of those little old ladies who gets written up in the local paper for celebrating her 100th birthday (while, of course, not looking a day over 75 and still skiing the black diamond trails with my great-grandkids), I’m trying my hardest to incorporate all of these habits into my everyday life.

By Lucy Danziger, SELF Editor-in-Chief

Read the full article

Stroke, Back or Brain – More Evidence on the Benefits of Exercise

Medically speaking it was a good week for the proponents of exercise.  At the same time that Ali Vincent has become the new spokeswoman for 24 hour fitness, five studies have been released within the last several days highlighting the benefits of exercise.

Proper exercise and physical activity can speed up recovery from back surgery, lessen stroke severity, reduce uterine cancer risk, as well as reverse mental decline in older adults.

Here are the results:

• Dr. Lars-Henrik Krarup, from Copenhagen University Hospital, and colleagues looked at 265 people who had suffered a first stroke. “Subjects with the best outcome were up to 2 hours more physically active than the most sedentary subjects on a daily basis,” he added. “The activities included not only specific exercises but also physical work in the garden and heavy housework,” emphasizing that physical activity can be incorporated into daily routines.

• Dr. Alpa V. Patel and colleagues at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta identified 466 women who developed endometrial cancer between 1992 and 2003 among approximately 43,000 older “postmenopausal” women. Questionnaire responses showed that physically active women engaged primarily in low- to moderate-intensity activities, such as walking, biking, aerobics or dancing, equivalent to about 2 hours of moderately paced walking per week.

• Prof. Art Kramer, of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, says there is substantial evidence showing the benefits of aerobic exercise and physical activity on such executive-control brain functions as task coordination, planning, goal maintenance, working memory and the ability to switch task.  Some studies found that six months of aerobic exercise reversed age-related decline and that older adults’ brains retained plasticity — the capacity to grow and develop.

• Exercise therapy after surgery for a slipped disc may help people get over their pain and disability more quickly, a research review suggests.   And there was no evidence that rehab raised the risk of repeat surgery.

Related Links and information:

• Physical Activity May Lessen Stroke Severity (Reuters Health)
• Exercise May Cut Uterine Cancer Risk in Heavy Women (Reuters Health)
• Aerobics Can Reverse Mental Decline in Older Adults (HealthDay)
• Exercise After Back Surgery May Speed Recovery (Reuters Health)
• Strength Training Good for the Aging Brain (Reuters Health)

LiveStrong Winner - meet Zach

Enjoy this video and story of a true everyday hero.   Zach is the winner of the recent Lance Armstrong livestrong contest “Dare to”.

While battling cancer Zach ran six road races, completed eight triathlons, one duathlon, and one century bike ride.

More information about Zach and the new livestrong.com site can be found at http://www.livestrong.com

Scientists win Nobel prize for Green Jellyfish protein

Three U.S.-based scientists won a Nobel Prize for turning a glowing green protein from jellyfish into a revolutionary way to watch the tiniest details of life within cells and living creatures.

Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese citizen who works in the United States, and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the chemistry prize for discovering and developing green fluorescent protein, or GFP.

When exposed to ultraviolet light, the protein glows green. It can act as a marker on otherwise invisible proteins within cells to trace them as they go about their business. It can tag individual cells in tissue. And it can show when and where particular genes turn on and off.

Researchers worldwide now use GFP to track development of brain cells, the growth of tumors and the spread of cancer cells. It has let them study nerve cell damage from Alzheimer’s disease and see how insulin-producing beta cells arise in the pancreas of a growing embryo, for example.

In awarding the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy compared the impact of GFP on science to the invention of the microscope. For the past decade, the academy said, the protein has been “a guiding star ” for scientists.

GFP’s chemical cousins produce other colors, which let scientists follow multiple cells or proteins simultaneously.

“This is a technology that has literally transformed medical research,” said Dr. John Frangioni, an associate professor of medicine and radiology at Harvard Medical School. “For the first time, scientists could study both genes and proteins in living cells and in living animals.”

Last year, in what the Nobel citation called a “spectacular experiment,” Harvard researchers announced that they had tagged brain cells in mice with some 90 colors. The technique is called “Brainbow.”

GFP was first discovered by Shimomura at Princeton University. He’d been seeking the protein that lets a certain kind of jellyfish glow green around its edge. In the summer of 1961, he and a colleague processed tissue from about 10,000 jellyfish they’d collected near the island town of Friday Harbor, Wash. The next year, they reported the finding of GFP.

Some 30 years later, Chalfie showed that the GFP gene could make individual nerve cells in a tiny worm glow bright green.

Tsien’s work provided GFP-like proteins that extended the scientific palette to a variety of colors. Tsien “really made it a tool that was extremely useful to lots of people,” Chalfie told reporters.

Shimomura, 80, now works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and the Boston University Medical School. Chalfie, 61, is a professor at Columbia University in New York, while Tsien, 56, is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The trio will split the $1.4 million award.

Chalfie said he slept through the Nobel committee’s phone calls early Wednesday because he’d accidentally adjusted his telephone to ring very softly. He found out about the prize only when he checked the Nobel Web site to see who had won.

“It’s not something out of the blue, but you never know when it’s going to come or if it’s going to come, so it’s always a big surprise when it actually happens,” Chalfie said.

Shimomura told reporters that he, too, was surprised.

“My accomplishment was just the discovery of a protein. … But I am happy,” he said.

Speaking to reporters by telephone, Tsien thanked scientists worldwide. When they do “good things with GFP and its progeny,” Tsien said he can “bask in the warmth of that glow a little bit too.”

Gunnar von Heijne, the chairman of the chemistry prize committee, demonstrated the award-winning research to reporters by shining ultraviolet light on a tube with E. coli bacteria containing GFP. The tube glowed green.

Von Heijne said that kind of result “gets scientists’ hearts beating three times faster than normal.”

The winners of the Nobel Prizes in medicine and physics were presented earlier this week. The prizes for literature, peace and economics are due to be announced Thursday, Friday and Monday.

Three Americans, three Japanese, two French and one German researcher have won Nobel Prizes so far this year.

The awards include the money, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

___

Associated Press writers Karl Ritter, Matt Moore and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm, Online Video Reporter Ted Shaffrey in New York, Mark Pratt in Boston and Alicia Chang in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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