A Johns Hopkins Children’s Center study shows that air cleaners can significantly reduce household air pollution and lower rates of asthma symptoms among kids living in homes with smokers.

The improvements are similar to those achieved by using anti-inflammatory asthma drugs.

However, the level of air nicotine remained, leaving kids at risk of some effects of secondhand smoke.

So, the study researchers concluded in the Aug. 1 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine that air cleaners should only be used as a temporary measure as smokers seeks to quit.

“Air cleaners appear to be an excellent partial solution to improving air quality in homes of children living with a smoker but should not be viewed as a substitute for a smoke-free environment,” lead investigator Arlene Butz, an asthma specialist at the Children’s Center and professor of pediatrics at the Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement.

The researchers followed 115 children for six months. Asthma is the most common chronic illness among children, with some 6.5 million affected in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About a third of U.S. kids live with a smoker.

Andrew Buddemeyer was pedaling as hard as he could on astationary bicycle at Washington University’s Center for AdvancedMedicine.

He had a clip holding his nose shut, a tube shoved into hismouth, a blood pressure cuff squeezing his upper right arm and ahalf dozen or so wires running from his chest to echocardiogram andelectrocardiogram machines.

W. Todd Cade, assistant professor of physical therapy atWashington University, urged on Buddemeyer: “Ten more seconds …eight more seconds, Andrew … come on, five more seconds … keepgoing.”

The idea was to push Buddemeyer, 21, of Tampa, Fla., toexhaustion to see whether three months of regular aerobic exercisehad strengthened his heart and increased the efficiency of musclesthroughout his body. Both are severely weakened by a geneticdisorder called Barth syndrome.

Cade received a $40,000 grant from the Barth SyndromeFoundation to do the same test on three other young men withthe condition as part of a pilot study. he hopes to get anothergrant to do a larger study with more participants and more weighttraining.

“And because exercise affects the mitochondria (cellular powerplants), the study can give insight into other conditions such asaging, diabetes and other inherited cardiomyopathies and heartfailure, so potentially a lot of people beyond Barth syndrome willbenefit,” Cade said.

When he reached exhaustion, 5 minutes and 50 seconds into hisride, Buddemeyer quickly got off the bike and lay down on a nearbygurney so a technician could get the echocardiogram andelectrocardiogram readings.

His mother, Leslie Buddemeyer, also of Tampa, was standing inthe doorway to the room watching. she noted how her son had gainedabout five pounds in the past few months and that his arms, legsand even his torso looked bigger, more muscular.

Until recently, patients such as Buddemeyer were told not toexert themselves.

That thinking has begun to change among researchers like Cade,who believe that people with heart conditions like Barth syndromecan benefit from exercise.

Buddemeyer was diagnosed seven years ago with the geneticcondition. it leaves muscles throughout his body unable to processoxygen efficiently and compromises his immune system leaving himvulnerable to bacterial infections. Cardiomyopathy, a conditionthat weakens and inflames the heart, is also usually found in boyswith Barth syndrome.

“Parents are often afraid of exercise, because their childrenare susceptible to an irregular heart beat, so they tend torestrict their activity levels,” Cade said.

Buddemeyer’s test results showed marked improvements in severalareas.

The maximum amount of time and pedal resistance he was able toendure had increased by 17 percent. The muscles in his legs wereable to extract 50 percent more oxygen for energy. and a crudemeasure of his lactic acid production had decreased by 8 percent.That’s good because lactic acid levels drop when oxygen levels risein muscles. his HDL numbers — the good cholesterol — had increasedand so had his quality of life as determined by the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire.

The questionnaire assesses the affects of frequent symptoms,such as shortness of breath, fatigue, peripheral edema anddifficulty sleeping, on daily life.

Buddemeyer was a senior at Florida State University in November2009 when he began feeling unusually weak and short of breath. Hethought he had a bad cold or maybe even pneumonia, so he drovehimself to the hospital.

He had a stroke while there and found out he was in heartfailure. Doctors prescribed medicine to keep his heart musclestrong and implanted an internal defibrillator to keep it fromgoing into arrhythmia. A pink scar marks the spot on his chestwhere it lies beneath his skin.

Buddemeyer was selected to take part in the exercise study whileat a national Barth syndrome convention in July. Cade tested him atthat time to determine his baseline levels then developed athree-month exercise program.

It consisted of cardio training on a stationary bicycle and anelliptical trainer for 45 to 50 minutes, three times a week underthe supervision of medical experts in Tampa. he also did lightweight-lifting.

Before the program, Buddemeyer said he was doing a littleexercise but nothing regular or vigorous.

“When I started I could only do about five straight minutes ofrigorous exercise,” he said. “By the end I could do the full 45 or50 minutes without stopping.”

He knew before the most recent test that it would provebeneficial.

Buddemeyer plans to continue exercising at a cardiac rehabcenter in Tampa, but at a higher intensity.

Shortly after the most recent test, he saw his cardiologist atTampa General Hospital, said Leslie Buddemeyer.

“They were so impressed because they never see such a dramaticimprovement,” she said. “He was being considered for a hearttransplant list. now he’s not.”

Posted on: Friday, 24 December 2010, 07:56 CST

(Ivanhoe Newswire) – by using sophisticated brain imaging, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers are able to predict with 90 percent accuracy which teenagers with dyslexia could improve their reading skills over time.

This is the first study to identify specific brain mechanisms involved in a person’s ability to overcome reading difficulties. It has potential to lead to new interventions to help dyslexics better learn to read."This gives us hope that we can identify which children might get better over time," Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, an imaging expert and instructor at Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, was quoted as saying. "More study is needed before the technique is clinically useful, but this is a huge step forward."

Dyslexia affects 5-17 percent of U.S. children, and is a brain-based learning disability that impairs a person’s ability to read. Affected children’s ability to improve their reading skills varies immensely, with about one-fifth able to benefit from treatment and develop adequate reading skills by adulthood. Up to this point, what happens in the brain that allows for improvement is unknown.

Previous imaging studies have shown greater activation of the inferior frontal gyrus (part of frontal lobe) in children and adults. Experts hypothesize that greater involvement of this part of the brain during reading is related to long-term gains in reading for dyslexic children.For this study, Dr. Hoeft and colleagues aimed to determine whether neuroimaging could predict reading improvement and how brain-based measures compared with conventional educational measures.

The researchers gathered 25 children with dyslexia and 20 children with typical reading skills — all around age 14 — and assessed their reading with standardized tests. they then used two types of imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging (a specialized form of MRI), as the children performed reading tasks. Two-and-a-half years later, they reassessed reading performance and asked which brain image or standardized reading measures taken at baseline predicted how much the child’s reading skills would improve over time.

What the researchers found was that no behavioral measure, including widely used standardized reading and language tests, reliably predicted reading gains. but children with dyslexia who at baseline showed greater activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus during a specific task and whose white matter connected to this right frontal region was better organized showed greater reading improvement over the next two-and-a-half years. the researchers also found that looking at patterns of activation across the whole brain allowed them to very accurately predict future reading gains in the children with dyslexia. "the reason this is exciting is that until now, there have been no known measures that predicted who will learn to compensate," said Dr. Hoeft.

The other exciting implication, Hoeft said, involves therapy. the research shows that gains in reading for dyslexic children involve different neural mechanisms and pathways than those for typically developing children. by understanding this, researchers could develop interventions that focus on the appropriate regions of the brain and that are, in turn, more effective at improving a child’s reading skills.

Hoeft said this work might also encourage the use of imaging to enhance the understanding (and potentially the treatment) of other disorders. "in general terms, these findings suggest that brain imaging may play a valuable role in neuroprognosis, the use of brain measures to predict future reductions or exacerbations of symptoms in clinical disorders," Dr. Hoeft explained.

SOURCE: the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online December 23, 2010

Source: Ivanhoe Newswire

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