DALLAS, Sept. 27 (UPI) — People with chronic diarrhea, constipation or painful bloating may be suffering from celiac disease, a condition that affects millions, a U.S. researcher says.

Dr. Prabhakar Swaroop, a gastroenterologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, says celiac disease is a digestive disorder affecting people sensitive to gluten, which is found in wheat, rye, barley and oats.

In people with celiac disease — including Elisabeth Hasselbeck of ABC’s “The View,” and political commentator and sports journalist Keith Olbermann — the immune system responds to gluten by attacking the small intestine and wiping out tiny fingerlike protrusions called villi, which help absorb nutrients into the bloodstream.

More than 2 million people in the United States have been diagnosed with celiac disease.

“It is often difficult to diagnose because its symptoms are similar to other digestive diseases and conditions such as Crohn’s, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis and intestinal infections,” Swaroop says in a statement. “A gluten-free diet is the only treatment for people with celiac disease. Sticking to the diet is a lifetime requirement because eating any gluten will cause more damage.”

DALLAS, April 7 (UPI) — a thorough spring cleaning may help reduce the allergens that can trigger allergies and asthma in children, a U.S. allergist says.

Dr. Rebecca Gruchalla, an allergist and immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, says springtime pollen remains a major cause of stuffy sinuses, runny noses and itchy eyes, but it’s not the most prevalent cause of allergies and asthma in children.

Cockroach allergens are a real problem in the spring and they have a much bigger impact on kids with asthma than either dust mites or pet dander, Gruchalla says.

“Children who are allergic to cockroaches have more asthma symptoms and generally miss more school because of their asthma,” Gruchalla says in a statement. “Inner city kids who live in apartments are most likely to be exposed to cockroaches, but they’re everywhere.”

Cleaning can make a big difference in preventing allergy symptoms and asthma, Gruchalla, advises.

“Some cockroach preventive tactics include fixing leaky faucets, caulking cracks, eating only in the kitchen and dining room, keeping food sealed in plastic containers and taking out the trash daily,” Gruchalla says.

February 12, 2011 10:49 AM

US Scientists Develop New Blood Test Technology to Detect Alzheimer’s Disease

WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Bernama) — University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center scientists have helped develop a novel technology to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease from blood samples long before symptoms appear, Xinhua news agency quoted the centre as saying Friday in a press release. this preliminary technology, which uses synthetic molecules to seek out and identify disease-specific antibodies, also could be used eventually in the development of specific biomarkers for a range of other hard-to-diagnose diseases and conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and immune system-related diseases like multiple sclerosis and lupus, the researchers predict. “One of the great challenges in treating patients with Alzheimer’s disease is that once symptoms appear, it’s too late. you can’t un-ring the bell,” said Dr. Dwight German, professor of psychiatry and an author of the paper that has been published in journal Cell. “If we can find a way to detect the disease in its earliest stages — before cognitive impairment begins — we might be able to stop it in its tracks by developing new treatment strategies.” Because patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) exhibit immune system activation and neurodegeneration in several brain regions, researchers in the study hypothesized that there may be numerous antibodies in the serum of affected patients that are specific to the disease and can serve as a biomarker. Antigens — substances such as protein from a virus or bacteria that triggers an immune response — traditionally have been necessary for the discovery of antibody biomarkers. it has been impossible previously to identify an antibody (a type of targeted immune molecule) without first knowing the antigen that triggers its production. The new study, however, challenges conventional wisdom and uses synthetic molecules (peptoids) rather than antigens to successfully detect signs of disease in patients’ blood samples. these peptoids have many advantages; they can be modified easily and can be produced quickly in relatively large amounts at lower cost. The adaptive immune system is thought to be a rich source of protein biomarkers, but diagnostically useful antibodies remain undiscovered for a large number of diseases, Dr. German said. this is, in part, because the antigens that trigger an immune response in many diseases are unknown. The technology behind this discovery is essentially an immune-system reader, which is designed to pick out antibodies without knowing in advance which ones to look for. The researchers used a combination library of several thousand peptoids to screen serum samples from mice with multiple sclerosis- like symptoms as well as from healthy control mice. The particular peptoids that retained more antibodies from the blood samples of the diseased animals were identified as potential agents for capturing diagnostically useful molecules. The investigators then examined serum samples from six AD patients, six healthy patients and six patients with Parkinson’s. three peptoids were identified that captured six times the IgG antibody levels in all of the Alzheimer’s patients when compared to the control group or to the Parkinson’s patients. Two of the peptoids were found to bind the same IgG antibody, while the third was shown to bind to different antibodies — meaning there are at least two candidate biomarkers for AD. Using an additional set of 16 normal control subjects and 10 subjects at the very early state of AD, the three candidate biomarkers identified AD with 90 percent accuracy. “The results of this study, though preliminary, show great potential for becoming a landmark,” said Dr. German. — BERNAMA

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JUPITER —Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter have developed a new technology that appears to accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, and possibly other tough-to-diagnose diseases, before telltale symptoms appear.

The technology, described in a paper in the respected scientific journal Cell this month, is in a very early stage.

Believing in its potential, a Miami-based company, Opko Health Laboratories, has licensed the technology and is expanding its research and development office in Jupiter, near Scripps, with an eye toward commercializing the test and applying it toward other diseases, including cancer, a spokesman said. Opko’s chairman and CEO is Dr. Phillip Frost, former CEO of Ivax Pharmaceuticals. He is a member of Scripps’ board of trustees.

The research, by Scripps Florida chemist Thomas Kodadek, may represent one of the most significant and commercially important discoveries to come out of the institute since it was founded with more than a half-billion taxpayer dollars in 2004.

Yet the intellectual property rights belong to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School — not to Scripps and Florida. Kodadek, who had his own lab at UT, was recruited to Scripps in 2009.

Scripps President Dr. Richard Lerner predicted there would be more intellectual property to come from Kodadek’s lab, and he noted the discovery will mean jobs for the Jupiter area.

The technology behind the Alzheimer’s discovery is essentially an immune system reader. it is designed to pick out antibodies, the immune system’s targeting system, without knowing in advance what it’s searching for, Kodadek said.

Dr. James M. Anderson, director of the National Institutes of Health Division of Program Coordination, Planning and Strategic Initiatives, which funded Kodadek’s research, credited his group with bold and groundbreaking thinking.

“The results in the paper suggest great potential for using this approach to rapidly develop diagnostic biomarkers for a variety of significant human diseases,” Anderson said.

Kodadek said the idea came to him five years ago, while he was sitting in a UT seminar about lupus, an autoimmune disease which is, like Alzheimer’s, difficult to diagnose and treat. the longer the speakers went on about the difficulty of characterizing and diagnosing lupus, the more frustrated he grew.

“I vividly remember I was thinking, ‘You guys are in the 16th century,’ ” Kodadek said.

He started turning over ways to automate and speed up analysis of the immune system’s record.

Kodadek and his research team were able to create artificial molecules that could snag antibodies so that they could be tagged and identified.

Because they had compared antibodies captured from both sick and well volunteers, they zeroed in on differences, leading them to their likely biomarkers. Further testing validated their theory.

Beyond the technology’s diagnostic usefulness, the findings raise many scientific questions, Lerner said. What are the antibodies reacting to? Inflammation? Are they recognizing an active virus? If so, it would send Alzheimer’s research in a totally new direction. Scripps is studying this now, he said.

“Normally, you don’t make antibodies to yourself,” Lerner said. “We don’t have any clue what these are. either they are antibodies from some exotic thing like a virus, or they are antibodies to self.”

Interestingly, a control subject’s blood turned up some of the same antibodies as the Alzheimer’s subjects. She was a 75-year-old woman who performed well on memory tests and had no outward signs of disease. Kodadek believes the microarray picked up early Alzheimer’s. a key now will be assessing how early these antibody biomarkers appear.

Several other groups of scientists have been trying to find biomarkers that distinguish Alzhiemer’s disease. At Stanford University, Tony Wyss-Coray’s team has found 18 proteins involved in cell communication that appear to be specific to Alzheimer’s disease.

Wyss-Coray called Kodadek’s method “an exciting new tool,” one that had potential to speed immune research. But he cautioned that Kodadek has only studied small numbers, and other studies looking for Alzheimer’s antibodies have had mixed results. more study is needed.

“It remains to be shown how the test would perform if another 1,000 samples were measured,” Wyss-Coray said. Fortunately, he said, that should be relatively easy and quick to do.

If it proves true that these antibodies are attacking some element specific to the progression of Alzheimer’s, that has major implications, he said.

“That would most certainly change the current view of this disease,” he said.

It could also alter the path of Alzheimer’s drug trials.

The lack of a good diagnostic test for Alzhiemer’s is a drag on the search for a cure right now, said Dr. Mark Brody, president of Brain Matters Research, a Delray Beach clinic that conducts drug trials. People are not enrolled until their brain has suffered serious damage, and by then, it may be too late for a drug to change the course of the disease.

Doctors use a combination of brain scans, spinal fluid tests, memory tests and medical history to reach a diagnosis, but because many things can cause dementia, the accuracy isn’t perfect.

“Probably on the order of 15 percent of people in clinical trials for Alzhiemer’s disease don’t actually have Alzheimer’s disease,” Brody said. “If we can pick up people in a reliable way in the preclinical stage, using serum, that would be a paradigm shift.”