Encouraging Health

Are you seeing more trans-fat-free offerings in your grocery store? Good. Pick ’em up.

New research shows that trans fat isn’t just bad for your heart. It may increase your risk of colon cancer, too.

When Bad Fats Go Badder
Researchers recently reviewed the health of 622 colonoscopy patients and came up with plenty of fuel for the down-with-trans-fats fire. People who ate the most trans fat — an average of 6.5 grams per day — were 86 percent more likely to have potentially precancerous colon polyps compared with those who consumed the least transfat — about 3.6 grams or less per day. Seems trans fats can mess with the colon’s normal, healthy balance of bile and fatty acids and damage the mucus that protects this organ.

Less Is More
For heart health, the American Heart Association recommends that no more than 1 percent of your daily calories come from trans fat. That means if you eat 2,000 calories a day, no more than 2 grams should come from trans fat. Since trans fat is found mostly in packaged sweets, frozen dishes, and fried foods, steering clear of them will help. Your other option is to closely read the list of ingredients, keeping in mind that even products labeled trans-fat-free can still have up to 0.5 grams of the stuff per serving. So cut down on anything that lists hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils among the ingredients, too — “hydrogenated” is a red flag for trans fat.

So, keep an eye out for those trans fats in your diet.

Scientists have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward the goal of growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases.

The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes. But its implications go beyond diabetes to a host of possibilities, scientists said.

It’s the second advance in about a year that suggests that someday doctors might be able to use a patient’s own cells to treat disease or injury without turning to stem cells taken from embryos.

The work is “a major leap” in reprogramming cells from one kind to another, said one expert not involved in the research, John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania.

That’s because the feat was performed in living mice rather than a lab dish, the process was efficient and it was achieved directly without going through a middleman like embryonic stem cells, he said.

The newly created cells made insulin in diabetic mice, though they were not cured. But if the experiment’s approach proves viable, it might lead to treatments like growing new heart cells after a heart attack or nerve cells to treat disorders like ALS, formerly Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, cautioned that the approach is not ready for people.

He and his colleagues report the research in a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Basically, the identity switch comes about by a reprogramming process that changes the pattern of which genes are active and which are shut off.

Scientists have long hoped to find a way to reprogram a patient’s cells to produce new ones. Research with stem cells, and similar entities called iPS cells that were announced last year, has aimed to achieve this in a two-step process.

Head on over to Mental-Emotional Health to discover why depression accompanies pain.

Due to the extreme organ shortage there is an ever-increasing demand for living kidney donors. Kidneys from living donors have a significantly better long-term survival rate than kidneys from deceased donors (approx. 20 to 30 years versus 10 to 15 years).

They also have better initial function, reducing the need for post-transplant dialysis. Until recently, kidney donation from a living donor could only be accomplished through a surgical procedure called open nephrectomy (kidney removal). This procedure requires a large, muscle-cutting abdominal incision, removal of a rib and a relatively longer hospital stay and recovery period. However, advances in laparoscopic surgery have made an advanced surgical procedure called laparoscopic donor nephrectomy possible. This procedure has significant benefits over the traditional open surgery for kidney donation.

Laparoscopy - also known as “keyhole surgery” - is a minimally invasive surgical procedure in which a special camera called a laparoscope is used to produce an inside view of the abdominal cavity. Surgeons use the laparoscope, which transmits a real-life picture of the internal organs to a video monitor, to guide them through surgical procedures. The laparoscope magnifies these images many times their actual size, providing surgeons with a superior view of the abdomen.
Laparoscopic nephrectomy is a minimally invasive procedure that uses a laparoscope to remove a kidney for donation. Laparoscopic kidney removal is considered minimally invasive because it only requires three or four small non-muscle-cutting incisions rather than one large muscle-cutting incision in the abdomen.

During the procedure, carbon dioxide is passed through one of the incisions into the abdominal cavity to lift the abdominal wall away from the organs below, creating more operating space to perform the surgery. The pencil-thin laparoscope and surgical instruments are then inserted through the other incisions.
At the end of the procedure, the kidney is removed through a 7 cm, incision in the left or right flank.

What are the advantages of laparoscopic donor nephrectomy?
Because laparoscopic donor nephrectomy is a minimally invasive procedure, donor patients experience significantly less discomfort, have a shorter recovery period and return to work quicker than a donor who has had traditional open surgery. Because the incisions are small, laparoscopic donor nephrectomy causes reduced post-operative pain and shorter hospital stays, and patients experience a quicker return to normal eating habits and daily activities.

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