Health briefs

Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 5, 2001

Drug may cut chemo-linked hair loss

Researchers report they're making progress in developing a new drug that can prevent hair loss as a side effect of chemotherapy.

Writing in the journal Science today, scientists at Glaxo Wellcome Research and Development report they have been able to reduce chemo-induced hair loss in up to half the rats they treated with the new drug, called a cyclin-dependent kinase 2 inhibitor.

Many chemotherapy drugs cause hair loss because they are aimed at destroying rapidly dividing cancer cells. But they also kill normal dividing cells, including those of the hair follicle.

Although most cancer patients see hair loss stop at the end of chemo treatments, "the traumatic visual reminder and the stigma (of hair loss) reinforces a sense of helplessness and the perception that the patient may not survive his or her disease," the researchers noted.

Staph infections traced to patients' own noses

A study shows for the first time that hospital patients often catch life-threatening staph infections from germs they harbor in their own noses.

Staph infections are a serious threat to patients in hospitals and nursing homes who are already sick and whose immune systems are weak. Such infections can spread quickly and can be deadly if they enter the bloodstream.

Until now, these infections have been blamed largely on germs that spread from person to person, often on people's hands. Experts caution that this is still a common means of transmission.

In the latest study, researchers in Germany looked at two groups of patients with staph blood poisoning. In more than 80 percent of the patients, they found the same strain of staphylococcus aureus in the blood and the nasal passages of the patients. The nasal tract is a common site for the ordinarily harmless staph bacteria.

That showed that the patients had infected themselves with their own germs, according to Dr. Christof von Eiff, one of the researchers at the University of Muenster in Germany. It was not clear whether they picked up the bacteria in the hospital or brought them with them, he said.

The study, sponsored by drug maker SmithKline Beecham, was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Study: Chlamydia can raise cervical cancer risk

CHICAGO -- Some strains of the common sexually transmitted disease chlamydia appear to raise women's risk of cervical cancer as much as sixfold, researchers say.

Another common sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus, or HPV, is known to be the leading cause of cervical cancer, but the risks of chlamydia have been much less clear.

The new findings, based on 128 women with advanced cervical cancer in Finland, Sweden and Norway, appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The findings "suggest that cervical malignancy should be added to the complications and costs associated with genital chlamydial infections," Dr. Jonathan Zenilman of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Chlamydia is the most common bacterial STD in the United States, with between 4-million and 8-million new cases reported yearly.

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