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Popular Articles

You're More Likely A Conservative If You Are Easily Grossed Out, Suggests Cornell Psychologist
Are you someone who squirms when confronted with slime, shudders at stickiness or gets grossed out by gore? Do crawly insects make you cringe or dead bodies make you blanch?
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Reform Editorials Examine Rationed Care, Taxing Health Benefits
Wall Street Journal: A recent decision by CMS to end Medicare coverage of virtual colonoscopies is "a preview of how health care will be rationed when Democrats" create "a new "universal" health insurance entitlement for the middle class," a Journal editorial states. According to the editorial, the prospects of such a health system are "playing out in miniature in Medicare" where CMS has decided that offering an alternative to the traditional colonoscopy is "too pricey." The editorial states that the situation features "precisely the sort of complexity that the Democrats would prefer to ignore as they try to restructure health care" and use comparative effectiveness research to determine what works best for the majority of patients. According to the editorial, "The problem is that what "works best" isn"t the same for everyone." It continues that CMS "made the hard-and-fast choice that it was cheaper to cut [virtual colonoscopies] ... for all beneficiaries. If some patients are worse off, well, too bad." The editorial concludes that the situation is "merely a preview of the life-and-death decisions that will be determined by politics" if Democrats enact their ideal system (Wall Street Journal, 5/19).
News of the day
Classifying Antiabortion-Rights Crimes As 'Terrorism' Unnecessary, USA Today Opinion Piece States
Scott Roeder, who is charged with the murder of abortion provider George Tiller, and James von Brunn, who is charged with last week"s shooting death of a Holocaust Memorial Museum guard, "appear to be murderers, not terrorists," Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. Although "liberals denounced" the tendency of conservatives to call "every possible crime an act of terrorism" while former President George W. Bush was in office, now that there are antiabortion-rights and anti-Semetic suspects, "there is an insistence that these crimes must be treated as terrorism -- as if to call them "murder" or "hate crimes" would diminish their significance," Turley states. Many people who "kill strangers out of hate for their race or religion or some other association" are "loners or rogue operators who seek to satisfy a blood lust against different groups," Turley contends, noting that classifying a crime as an act of terrorism allows for a different types of prosecution, investigation and punishment. According to Turley, the "term "terrorism" once had a clear meaning before it was used as a point of emphasis to evaluate or distinguish certain crimes." The Bush administration"s broadening of the definition to include "any prosecution that disrupts a "potential" terrorism threat" served to further divert the term from its historical definition, he adds. Now, "many want to see terrorism investigations targeting antiabortion activists and other groups that use violent speech," Turley writes."We do not advance our efforts by classifying every hate crime as terrorism," Turley continues, adding that it would be "the terrorists who will benefit from our lack of focus" in the definition. According to Turley, the "fact is that even an authoritarian nation can do little to stop a determined rogue operator from walking into a church and killing someone like Dr. Tiller." Referring to "someone such as Roeder as a murderer does not diminish the crime or the victim" because "we do not have to call murder "terrorism" to take the crime or its causes seriously," Turley writes (Turley, USA Today, 6/17).
Oncology

$1.7 Million Grant To Study Stem Cells In Intervertebral Discs Of The Spine Received By Jefferson

Scientists at Jefferson Medical College have received a five-year, $1.7 million National Institutes of Health grant funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases to study mechanisms regulating stem cell self-renewal and differentiation with the aim of regenerating diseased and painful intervertebral discs. A previous study by the same group showed that stem cells exist in both animal and human intervertebral discs. This grant will enable the researchers to continue studying the disc cells and determine factors which govern their activities in health and disease. "Disc degeneration and the associated back pain that goes with it costs the U.S. healthcare industry approximately $100 billion annually," said Irving M. Shapiro, Ph.D., associate director of Orthopedic Research and the director of the Cell and Tissue Engineering Graduate Program at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. "As a major cause of lost productivity worldwide it is critical that we develop a treatment that will regenerate intervertebral disc structure and function." A variety of factors contribute to the degeneration of the intervertebral disc including age, genetics and biomechanical factors. Several surgical procedures are available to pacify the pain associated with the degenerative disc, but the most common procedures often only provide symptomatic relief. No current therapy can completely restore the function of a degenerated disc nor prevent its further deterioration. Historically, investigations of the intervertebral disc have been limited in scope, leading to a lack of understanding of the biology and function of both healthy and diseased tissues. "Researchers have tried repairing the discs by injecting them with agents that are thought to have beneficial effects on cell function," said Makarand Risbud, Ph.D, associate professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. "However, these treatments are limited in their effectiveness in restoring disc structure and function. Our ongoing studies suggest that a group of proteins that compromise the notch signaling pathway in the intervertebral discs are central to this process. These proteins regulate a variety of activities of stem cells including proliferation, self-renewal and differentiation. Our goal is to harness the body"s own regenerative potential and activate endogenous cells." Drs. Risbud and Shapiro are collaborating with Drs. Todd Albert and D. Greg Anderson, their clinical colleagues at the Rothman Institute at Jefferson, as well as Dr. Ernestina Schipani, an expert in molecular genetics at Harvard University. The investigators plan to develop a genetically engineered mouse model that lacks selected proteins of the notch signaling pathway in the intervertebral disc. This model will provide important mechanistic insights into the role of the notch signaling pathway in controlling disc cell activities. "Eventually, we hope to be able to regulate the activities of the disc cells including fostering their inherent regenerative potential," said Risbud. "If we are able to do this it could lead to development of new therapies to treat degenerative disc disease providing relief to millions of back pain suffers." Rick Cushman Thomas Jefferson University


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