Could acupuncture help relieve seasonal allergies?

By Genevra Pittman

NEW YORK | Mon Feb 18, 2013 5:11pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Acupuncture may help improve seasonal allergy symptoms in some people with runny noses and watery eyes, according to a new study - but the effect seems to be small.

Researchers found 71 percent of people reported an improvement in their allergies after eight weeks of acupuncture. But so did 56 percent of allergy sufferers who were treated with sham acupuncture instead as a comparison.

"It works, but there are a couple of caveats (for) people who might think of using it," said Dr. Harold Nelson, who treats allergies at National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado.

For example, "This is pretty invasive, particularly when you compare it to something like spraying a nasal steroid in your nose once a morning," he told Reuters Health. It's also more time consuming, and requires finding a qualified, licensed acupuncturist, he noted.

"I wouldn't personally go that route," he said.

Previous studies have conflicted on whether acupuncture may help relieve runny noses and other seasonal allergy symptoms, researchers wrote Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Led by Dr. Benno Brinkhaus from Charite-University Medical Center in Berlin, Germany, they randomly assigned 422 people with seasonal allergies to receive real or sham acupuncture or to only take antihistamines as needed.

After eight weeks and 12 treatment sessions, average allergy symptom scores dropped among people in the acupuncture group from 2.7 to 1.7 points on a 0-to-6 scale, where lower scores indicate fewer symptoms.

Among patients treated with sham acupuncture, symptom scores improved from 2.3 to 1.8 points, and from 2.5 to 2.2 in the medication-only group.

However, by another eight weeks after treatment ended, there was no longer any difference in the degree of symptom improvement between groups.

People with allergies would likely notice about a half-point change on the symptom scale in their daily lives, the researchers said - the difference between the real and sham acupuncture groups after eight weeks in the current study.

Acupuncture is generally considered safe, they noted. A typical session runs for about $100 and is often not covered by health insurance.

Researchers aren't sure why it might help people with seasonal allergies, other than its possible beneficial effect on the immune system.

Nelson, who wasn't involved in the new study, said antihistamines might not have been the best drug comparison for acupuncture - since daily use of nasal steroids is better at preventing symptoms.

For people with allergies, "I would suggest they use conventional medication on a daily basis, and I certainly prefer nasal steroids over antihistamines," he said.

But medication doesn't work perfectly for everyone, the researchers pointed out.

"We mostly saw patients in our outpatient practice who have had this disease for years," Brinkhaus told Reuters Health. "They are not very happy taking the medications every day, and some of them suffer from side effects of medications."

For those people, acupuncture could be a good add-on option, said Brinkhaus, an acupuncturist and internal medicine doctor.

"It's not an alternative. We use it firstly as some sort of complementary medicine. If the acupuncture has good results, we can reduce the anti-allergic medication," he said.

Dr. Li-Xing Man, who treats sinus and nasal diseases at the University of Rochester Medical Center, New York, said it can be challenging to find an experienced acupuncture practitioner in some parts of the U.S. And based on this study, "it's hard to know whether it's actually helpful."

Still, he told Reuters Health, there doesn't seem to be much harm in giving acupuncture a try.

"It may even be that acupuncture makes you feel better in general, and that's reflected in these questionnaires," said Man, who wasn't part of the research team. "If you find a good practitioner of acupuncture and you can afford it, then go for it."

SOURCE: bit.ly/MnBiCA Annals of Internal Medicine, online February 18, 2013.

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Arkansas Senate passes bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas | Mon Feb 18, 2013 6:41pm EST

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) - The Republican-controlled Arkansas state Senate approved a measure on Monday to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy except in the case of rape, incest or to save the mother's life.

The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act passed the Senate, 25-7, with amendments that allowed for the exemptions in the case of rape or incest. An earlier version of the bill that passed the Republican-controlled House allowed exemptions only for pregnancies that threatened the mother's life.

The bill, which shortens the existing limit of 25 weeks, now returns to the House for consideration of the Senate amendment.

Democratic Governor Mike Beebe has not said whether he would sign the bill into law.

Seven U.S. states have laws that restrict or ban abortion after the 20-week mark and similar laws approved in Arizona and Georgia are facing legal challenges.

Late-term abortions remain relatively rare. Most of the recent state laws banning most abortions after 20 weeks are based on hotly debated medical research suggesting a fetus feels pain starting at 20 weeks of gestation.

(Reporting by Suzi Parker; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Dale Hudson)

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Australian research provides final clue for anti-malaria drug

SYDNEY | Mon Feb 18, 2013 9:25pm EST

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Researchers in Australia have provided the final piece of a puzzle to develop a new anti-malarial drug, which targets the parasite that causes the disease and kills it with a salt overdose.

The drug, the first discovery in the fight against malaria in two decades, holds out fresh hope for conquering the disease, which claims hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is known for its evolving drug resistance.

The malaria parasite, carried to humans by mosquitoes, lives in red blood cells, which are full of salt. To survive, researchers knew it had to have a way of filtering salt out of its body.

"The parasite is quite leaky, it's letting salt in all the time. But that doesn't matter because it's got a very effective molecular salt pump that keeps pushing the salt out again," said Professor Kiaran Kirk, director at the Research School of Biology at Australia National University (ANU).

Research teams in the United States and Singapore had developed a drug that attacked the protein that makes up the salt pump, but it wasn't until the ANU researchers tested it that they confirmed it worked effectively.

"On the one hand, they had a brand new drug, they didn't know how it worked," Kirk said.

"We knew a lot about salt and salt pumps, and it was clear their drug was knocking out our salt pump. That led us to work together."

The drug attacks the salt pump and disables it, causing the parasite to fill up with salt and die. Targeting such a basic function is crucial because malaria tends to evolve quickly, rendering other drugs ineffective.

Other drugs that combat malaria combine or package older drugs together or are altered chemically.

"This is actually the first drug for 20 years to be genuinely new," Kirk said. "Targeting the pump protein is a structure that has never been used before to treat malaria."

The drug is undergoing clinical trials and it will be several years at least before it hits the market. The other two groups involved are the Novartis Institutes for Tropical Disease in Singapore and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis research Foundation.

Malaria infects more than 200 million people worldwide every year and kills around 600,000 of them -- primarily children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa.

Experts say one of the most challenging features of this parasite is its ability to evolve and overcome anti-malarial drugs -- a factor that is undermining global work towards eradicating the killer disease.

(Reporting By Thuy Ong; Editing by Elaine Lies and Paul Tait)

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Deadly new virus is well adapted to infect humans, study finds

By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent

LONDON | Tue Feb 19, 2013 12:09am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - A new virus that emerged in the Middle East last year and has killed five people is well adapted to infecting humans but could potentially be treated with drugs that boost the immune system, scientists said on Tuesday.

The virus, called novel coronavirus or NCoV, is from the same family as the common cold and as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. There have been 12 confirmed cases worldwide - including in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Britain - and five patients have died.

In one of the first published studies about NCoV, which was unknown in humans until it was identified in September 2012, researchers said it could penetrate the lining of passageways in the lungs and evade the immune system as easily as a cold virus can.

This shows it "grows very efficiently" in human cells and suggests it is well-equipped for infecting humans, said Volker Thiel of the Institute of Immunobiology at Kantonal Hospital in Switzerland, who led the study.

NCoV was identified when the World Health Organisation issued an international alert in September saying a completely new virus had infected a Qatari man in Britain who had recently been in Saudi Arabia.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that includes those that cause the common cold as well as the one that caused SARS - which emerged in China in 2002 and killed about a 10th of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

Symptoms of both NCoV and SARS include severe respiratory illness, fever, coughing and breathing difficulties. Of the 12 cases confirmed so far, four were in Britain, one was a Qatari patient in Germany, two were in Jordan and five in Saudi Arabia.

POSSIBLE TREATMENT

Scientists are not sure where the virus comes from, but say one possibility is it came from animals. Experts at Britain's Health Protection Agency say preliminary scientific analysis suggests its closest relatives are bat coronaviruses.

What is also unclear is what the true prevalence of the virus is - since it is possible that the 12 cases seen so far are the most severe, and there may be more people who have contracted the virus with milder symptoms so are not picked up.

"We don't know whether the cases (so far) are the tip of the iceberg, or whether many more people are infected without showing severe symptoms," said Thiel, who worked with a team of scientists from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. "We don't have enough cases to have a full picture of the variety of symptoms."

Thiel said that although the virus may have jumped from animals to humans very recently, his research showed it was just as well adapted to infecting the human respiratory tract as other coronaviruses like SARS and the common cold viruses.

The study, published in mBio, an online journal of the American Society for Microbiology, also found that NCoV was susceptible to treatment with interferons, medicines that boost the immune system and which are also successfully used to treat other viral diseases like Hepatitis C.

This opens up a possible mode of treatment in the event of a large-scale outbreak, the scientists said.

Thiel said that with the future of the virus uncertain, it was vital for laboratories and specialists around the world to cooperate swiftly to find out more about where it came from, how widespread it was, and how infectious it might be.

"So far it looks like the virus is well contained, so in that sense I don't see any reason for increased fear," he said.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

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British shoppers saying nay to meat after horse scandal

People shop at a supermarket in London February 16, 2013. Nearly half of British consumers said they would avoid buying meat from supermarkets affected by the horsemeat scandal, according to a survey this month for Retail Week magazine.

Credit: Reuters/Luke MacGregor

By Clare Hutchison and Alice Baghdjian

LONDON | Mon Feb 18, 2013 12:30pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - The discovery of horsemeat in products sold as beef has shocked many British consumers into buying less meat, a survey showed on Monday.

The furor, which erupted in Ireland last month and then spread quickly across Europe, has led to ready meals being pulled from supermarket shelves and damaged people's confidence in the food on their plate.

It also raised concerns over food labeling and the complex supply chain across the European Union, putting pressure on governments to explain lapses in quality control.

A fifth of adults said they had started buying less meat after traces of horse DNA were found in some products, according to the poll conducted by Consumer Intelligence research company.

"Our findings show that this scandal has really hit consumers hard, be it through having to change their shopping habits or altering the fundamentals of their diet," David Black, a spokesman for Consumer Intelligence, said.

The online poll, conducted on February 14-15, questioned more than 2,200 adults on their spending habits following the horsemeat scandal. It gave no specific figures on how much meat people were buying, focusing only on broader trends.

More than 65 percent of respondents said they trusted food labels less as a result.

"(Brands) will have to put in place really stringent ways of checking that what's being delivered and what's on the label is indeed what's in there," Black said.

In the month since horsemeat was first identified in Irish beefburgers, no one is yet reported to have fallen ill from eating horse but many supermarkets and fast food chains are already struggling to save their reputations.

Governments across Europe have stressed that horsemeat poses little or no health risk, although some carcasses have been found tainted with a painkiller given to racehorses but banned for human consumption.

Environment secretary Owen Paterson, who met British retailers earlier in the day for talks on how to restore consumer confidence, said Britain was closely cooperating with European countries to investigate what happened.

"Looking ahead, there was absolute determination in the industry to restore confidence in their products," he said in televised remarks. "We look forward to meeting on a regular basis to absolutely make it clear that when consumers buy a product they get what they bought."

British retailers now expect the vast majority of tests on processed beef products to be completed by February 22, according to the British Retail Consortium.

LOCAL BUTCHERS

More than 60 percent of adults surveyed said they would now buy meat from their local butchers, the poll said, while a quarter of adults said they would now buy more joints, chops or steaks instead of processed meat.

Michael Suleyman, who owns a family-run butchers' shop in Brixton, London, said more customers appeared concerned although for now there had not been any difference in sales figures.

"We have seen people panicking and asking us lots of questions like 'where do you get your meat from?'," Suleyman, 51, told Reuters. "We assure our customers by showing them the meat and mincing it for them in front of their eyes."

But with inflation running above central bank targets and an uncertain job market, the spending power of British consumers has been eroded in recent years and, for some, buying more expensive meat is not an option.

Nearly a fifth of respondents said they wanted buy less processed meat such as ready-meals, but could not afford to.

At a London branch of Britain's biggest retailer, Tesco, which found horse DNA in some of its own-brand frozen spaghetti bolognese meals last week, consumers were still buying meat products.

"I've got nothing against horse meat," said Sean Cosgrove, 39, a local government employee. "I think you're being ambitious if you expect top quality meat in those products anyway."

(Writing by Alice Baghdjian and Maria Golovnina; Additional reporting by James Davey and Neil Maidment; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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Program cuts down on unneeded scoliosis referrals

By Andrew M. Seaman

NEW YORK | Mon Feb 18, 2013 1:58pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Educating pediatricians about scoliosis seems to cut down on the number of children who are unnecessarily sent to specialists for curves of the spine, according to a new study.

Researchers found the number of referrals to orthopedic surgeons in one group of pediatricians fell by over 20 percent in the two years after the program was started, compared to the two years before.

"If you're training a certain group of people to treat scoliosis, I think that's good," said Dr. David Feldman, chief of pediatric orthopedic surgery at NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York.

"The question is if that's sustainable," said Feldman, who was not involved with the new study.

Scoliosis, which is a curve of the spine greater than 10 degrees, affects up to 3 percent of children. Mild cases may just need to be monitored by a doctor, but some children need to wear a back brace, or - in extreme cases - need surgery.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-backed group of clinicians, found that routine screening of youths for scoliosis could lead to unnecessary bracing and other specialty care. Those potential harms, they said, outweighed the benefits of screening, but some states still require it.

In the Pediatric Physicians' Organization at Children's, a group of 72 doctors' offices affiliated with Boston Children's Hospital, the researchers found less than 5 percent of the children referred to orthopedic specialists ended up with a back brace, and less than 1 percent had surgery.

The researchers, who could not be reached for comment by deadline, thought starting a training program would teach pediatricians which children should and shouldn't be sent to specialists. That, they write in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, would cut down on the number of unnecessary referrals and save money.

In mid-2009, the researchers held informational sessions to teach pediatricians within the group of doctors at the 72 offices about scoliosis. They also gave the pediatricians tools to decide which children should see specialists, and gave them updates on how many of their patients were being referred.

In the two years before the training, there were about 5 visits to specialists for every 1,000 children per year. In the two years after the training program, that number fell to about 4 visits for every 1,000 children per year.

The researchers estimate the training may have stopped about 131 referrals.

'VERY USEFUL'

The researchers write that they believe the drop in the number of referrals is due to their program, because visits to specialists increased for all other conditions during that time.

Feldman told Reuters Health that it's important that doctors are able to differentiate between scoliosis and other types of malformations, and that they're not postponing treatment for children that need to wear braces.

"I'm concerned about this, but done in the right setting I think it can be very useful," he said.

But the study did have limitations, including that the researchers could not separate children who were referred to specialists by the pediatricians from children who may have been screened for scoliosis at school.

Also, the researchers write that there was a 13 percent increase in the number of x-rays taken by pediatricians to examine the children's spines after the program. They cannot tell whether that is too many.

Feldman added that it's unknown whether this type of program could be applied across the country, or whether it's just effective in this one group of pediatricians.

SOURCE: bit.ly/Y2Ni0Y Pediatrics, online February 18, 2013.

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Thinning attendance pressures Weight Watchers forecast

n">(Reuters) - Weight Watchers International Inc forecast full-year earnings below Wall Street expectations as attendance at its diet meetings remained low so far this year, sending its shares down more than 15 percent after the bell.

The weight management company expects mid- to high-teen declines in attendance in the first quarter.

The company said its marketing strategy has not been effective in an increasingly competitive environment with its diet meetings business losing steam in North America and the United Kingdom.

"Consumers saw their paychecks shrinking by mid-January. Suffice it to say the timing was less than ideal for us," Chief Executive David Kirchoff said on a conference call with analysts.

He said a new program launched in early December failed sustain momentum in 2013.

The company was also weighed down by higher marketing expenses related to first-time TV campaigns in several countries and online ads targeting men in the United States.

"Our January ads lacked the persuasion we needed," Kirchoff said.

The company, which competes with Nestle's Jenny Craig Inc, Nutrisystem Inc and Medifast Inc, said it expects full-year earnings of $3.5 to $4.0 per share. Analyst on average were expecting $4.75 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

However, the company reported fourth-quarter results above expectations, with earnings of $1.03 on revenue of $407.9 million.

Analysts had expected earnings of 87 cents on revenue of $397.6 million.

Shares of the company closed at $54.11 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Juhi Arora in Bangalore; Editing by Don Sebastian)

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