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Feb 16, 2009 | 21
Vitamin D is the vitamin du jour these days, with many doctors urging more sun exposure following years of campaigns advising us to cover up and use sunscreen to prevent skin cancer. Many of us, especially in cloudier areas, don’t get enough of the sunshine vitamin. The elderly and post-menopausal women are more at risk for deficiency, as are those who live in northern climes.
But today comes news that one group seems to be at particular risk, doctors report in the journal Endocrine Practice. Arab-American women who wore the hijab (a Koran-derived dress code that includes a scarf or veil over their hair and modest dress) and didn’t get enough vitamin D through their diet had half the levels of the vitamin of those who didn’t adhere as closely to the dress code. There was no difference in rates of health problems linked to vitamin D deficiency, such as bone or joint pain or breaks, or muscle weakness. The study involved 87 women in Dearborn, Mich., which has a large Arab population.
Jan 30, 2009 | 15
A new stem cell therapy improved the symptoms of early-stage multiple sclerosis (MS) in 80 percent of patients enrolled in a small clinical trial published today in The Lancet Neurology.
But lead author Richard Burt, chief of immunotherapy for autoimmune diseases at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, cautions that the results have yet to be confirmed in large randomized clinical trials.
MS is a chronic debilitating neurological disorder that may cause symptoms including numbness of the arms and legs, and, in later stages of the disease paralysis and vision problems. Scientists believe that it's an autoimmune disorder in which the body's immune system – which ordinarily goes after invading germs—attacks healthy tissue. In the case of MS, the patient's immune system destroys protein sheaths that protect the nerve cells, or neurons, disrupting signals between the brain and the rest of the body.
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