A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Study to find out what lurks within
FANCY KNOWING a bit more about the microbes that live in your gut? A new study is offering participants the chance to have genetic material from their intestinal bacteria sequenced from stool samples. Those who take part can find out their individual results and the data then fed into a study on "enterotypes".
“Knowing which microbes live in us can lead to better, personalised diets, early diagnosis, and treatment of diseases,” states the project’s website, my.microbes.eu.
MS patients positive about out-of-patent LDN drug
IRISH PATIENTS who claim that a cheap out-of-patent drug has improved the symptoms of diseases including MS, cancer, arthritis and fibromyalgia will tell their stories at a conference in Dublin this weekend.
While Irish and international medical experts remain dubious about the claims surrounding Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN), proponents and patients claim it is a new, safe and inexpensive way of treating MS and other autoimmune diseases.
The Association of General Practitioners and the LDN Research Trust (UK) are hosting the conference on new developments in medicine on Saturday to coincide with LDN Awareness Week in the UK.
Kilkenny GP Dr Patrick Crowley said the aim of the conference was to raise awareness of LDN, particularly among his medical colleagues, and the benefits it can have for sufferers of autoimmune diseases, cancer and MS.
The conference also aims to highlight the recent discovery of a new condition called CCSVI (chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency) discovered by Prof Paolo Zamboni, a vascular surgeon/researcher in northern Italy, which may have significance for MS and other conditions. A generic drug which was first licensed by the FDA in the 1980s as a treatment for heroin addiction, LDN has been used to treat autoimmune diseases in the US since 1985. Dr Crowley said there were now about 500 GPs in the UK prescribing LDN. However, many physicians are sceptical of the anecdotal benefits of the drug in the absence of any large-scale evidence-based clinical trials.
MICHELLE MCDONAGH
Breast cancer survival rates same for under 40s
YOUNG WOMEN with breast cancer have the same survival rates as women over 40, NUI Galway professor of surgery Michael Kerin has told the annual symposium of the American Society of Breast Cancer Surgeons.
The commonly held belief that young women have worse outcomes than older women did not match up to outcomes at Galway University Hospital, Prof Kerin told the meeting of breast cancer experts in San Francisco on Friday.
Prof Kerin was speaking about his recently published co-authored study of patients at Galway University Hospital over 20 years. Data from some 3,000 breast cancer patients, 8.8 per cent of whom were under 40, was included in the study of younger age as a prognostic indicator.
While the young women needed different treatments from older women, their survival rates were the same, Prof Kerin said. Younger women tended to present with higher grade tumours and at a later stage than older women, and their tumours were more aggressive.
However, it found no difference in both disease-free survival and overall survival between younger and older women. The study found a significant trend towards more aggressive treatment, with young women getting more mastectomies.
Prof Kerin said immediate reconstruction should be offered to all women who have had mastectomies. Ireland’s reconstruction rate was one of the highest in the world, with 93 per cent of younger women and 70 per cent of older women at Galway having it, he said.
GENEVIEVE CARBERY