Health

A payoff of pregnancy: Fetal cells may have healing effect

Many a pregnant woman has moments when her fetus seems like a little parasite, all take, take, take. But new research suggests that a fetus may also be giving back a lifelong gift: cells that appear to act like stem cells, migrating to diseased organs in the mother and trying to fix them.

Tufts-New England Medical Center researchers reported in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association that they have found evidence of such transformed fetal cells in the livers, thyroids and spleens of women who have been pregnant.

"If we can prove these are stem cells, and harvest them from the blood or tissue of a woman who's been pregnant, they could have therapeutic potential for that woman, her children and perhaps even unrelated individuals," said Dr. Diana Bianchi, chief of medical genetics at the hospital and senior author on the paper.

The findings could also affect the national debate over stem cells, she said, in that they raise the possibility of obtaining stem cells, which can change into many tissues of the body, without the ethical issues involved in creating or destroying human embryos. President Bush has sharply restricted federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells.

In an editorial, the AMA journal said the work raised "novel and exciting" possibilities, and added: "The time may soon come when the prenatal child heals the mother and perhaps in the far distant future becomes the ultimate health insurance for the whole family."

WASHINGTON - A prestigious health advisory panel called Wednesday for a large-scale effort, akin to the Peace Corps, to battle AIDS worldwide.

The Institute of Medicine issued a new report calling on international aid organizations and governments to take prompt action to help developing nations deal with the epidemic of AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes it.

The report from the IOM, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, comes just a day after the United Nations reported that the world is losing the race against the AIDS virus.

A fast-spreading mutant strain of syphilis has proved resistant to the antibiotic pills that are offered to some patients as an alternative to painful penicillin shots.

Since the late 1990s, doctors and public health clinics have been giving azithromycin to some syphilis patients because the long-acting antibiotic pill was highly effective and easy to use. Four pills taken at once were usually enough to cure syphilis.

But now researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have found at least 10 percent of syphilis samples from patients at clinics in four cities had a strain resistant to azithromycin.

"That suggests that this mutation is pretty widely distributed geographically," said Sheila A. Lukehart, research professor of infectious diseases.

The percentage of samples from San Francisco with the mutant strain jumped from 4 percent in 1999-2002 to 37 percent in 2003, with the increase taking place largely among gay or bisexual men with multiple partners. The study was reported in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

INDIANAPOLIS - Rats fed artificial sweeteners ate three times the calories of rats given sugar, a finding the study's authors said suggests sugar-free foods may play a role in the nation's obesity epidemic.

Other scientists, however, dismissed that conclusion, saying studies on people don't indicate that. One researcher called the rat study nonsense.

The experiment by Purdue University researchers appears in the July issue of the International Journal of Obesity. The scientists said their rodent findings could help explain why Americans have grown fatter over the past two decades even as the nation's consumption of artificially sweetened sodas and snack foods has soared.

They contend that artificial sweeteners could be interfering with people's natural ability to regulate how much they eat by distinguishing between high- and low- calorie sweets.

What they've long known about truck drivers, airplane pilots and doctors, researchers also are discovering about nurses: Those who work more than 12 straight hours make more mistakes.

Nurses who worked shifts lasting 12.5 hours or longer were three times more likely to commit an error, such as giving a patient the wrong medicine or the wrong dose, than nurses who worked fewer than 8.5 hours, about a regular shift, according to a study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs.

Nurses reported that they committed errors on 103, or 5 percent, of the 2,057 longer shifts and made near errors on 97 of those longer shifts. Near errors are errors that nurses intercepted, such as bringing the wrong medication to a patient's bedside but catching the mistake before injecting it.

Meanwhile, nurses made errors on just 12, or 1.6 percent, of the 771 regular shifts, and near errors on only 20 of those shifts.

Working unplanned overtime at the end of a shift also increased the likelihood of a mistake.

Researchers have identified areas on six chromosomes that could harbor genes that increase the risk for suicide.

But the researchers, led by Dr. George Zubenko of the University of Pittsburgh, have not yet pinpointed which genes are culprits.

"We're talking about regions that contain a large number of genes, but at least we're in the right vicinity," Zubenko said. The study was published this week in an online version of the American Journal of Medical Genetics.

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