The paper was published in Nature Genetics on Monday together with findings of a separate study in Japan, which identified one of the seven genetic clusters as possibly causing the chronic inflammatory disease among Japanese.

“The findings leverage us to better understand the basic biology of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), with the goals of developing new targets for therapy and new biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis,” wrote research scientist Eli Ayumi Stahl at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in the United States, who led the study on European populations.

The study was also intended “to develop better genetic tests for RA risk, especially in people already at risk (such as arthritis patients or relatives of patients with autoimmune disorders),” Stahl told Reuters.

RA affects about 1 percent of the world’s population. Apart from the joints, it may affect the skin, heart, lungs, kidneys and blood vessels. Many end up with deformed hands and feet, resulting in loss of functions and movement.

In the European study, Stahl and colleagues repeated six previous studies involving 5,539 patients, analyzing their genes using the latest technology. They shortlisted 34 genetic variants which they considered most suspect in causing RA.

They then checked if those genetic defects were found in another batch of 6,768 RA patients in Canada, North America, the Netherlands and Britain. Ten of the 34 variants figured most prominently in this replication phase.

“Ten of the 34 variants tested were validated in the replication phase of our study. Three were previously implicated in RA, leaving the 7 new ones mentioned above,” Stahl wrote.

“This is more RA risk variants discovered in a single study than any other study to date, underscoring the importance of large-scale studies and the collaborations that enable them in order to make progress in unraveling common, complex diseases.”

“Our results further suggest that many more RA risk variants remain to be definitively identified,” Stahl added.

In the Japanese study, researchers led by Yuta Kochi at the RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine in Yokohama, Japan, analyzed genes of 7,039 RA patients and identified a common genetic mutant near the CCR6 gene.

The CCR6 gene was also identified in the European study.

Based on initial findings from a preliminary and ongoing analysis of several studies, the FDA says doctors should be aware of the potential risks of GnRH agonists, and carefully consider the benefits and risks of these drugs when deciding on treatment for prostate cancer patients.

The agency also recommended that:
Patients taking GnRH agonists should be checked regularly for signs of the development of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Management of cardiovascular risk factors — including smoking, as well as increases in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and weight — should be stressed.
Those taking GnRH agonists should not stop the therapy unless instructed by their health-care provider.

Drugs in the GnRH agonist class include Eligard, Lupron, Synarel, Trelstar, Vantas, Viadur, Zoladex and several generic products. These drugs suppress production of testosterone, a hormone involved in the growth of prostate cancer.

“While our review of these prostate cancer treatments is ongoing and there are some limitations to the data, FDA believes it is important to tell patients and health-care professionals that there may be an increased risk of serious side effects,” Dr. Robert Justice, director of the drug oncology products division at FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a news release.

Some GnRH agonists are also used to treat conditions in women and children.

SOURCE: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, news release.

“Most patients with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed when the disease is advanced and more difficult to cure,” study author David V. Gold, a member of the Garden State Cancer Center in New Jersey, said in a news release. “In this study, we found that the PAM4 protein is quite accurate at identifying patients with pancreatic cancer and, if validated in larger studies, would be a promising tool for detecting this disease in its earlier, more treatable stages, before it spreads to other organs.”

The researchers were to report their findings Saturday in Orlando, Fla., at the Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, which is co-sponsored by the American Gastroenterological Association Institute, the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Radiology Oncology and the Society of Surgical Oncology.

The team ran the test on 68 patients who had pancreatic cancer surgery and 19 healthy people. The test detected stage 1 pancreatic cancer 62 percent of the time and stage 2 pancreatic 86 percent of the time. Ninety-one percent of the time, it detected cancer in stages 3 and 4.

Overall, the test detected 81 percent of pancreatic cancers.

According to the study, the test rarely picks up cases of pancreatitis — inflammation of the pancreas — which is often confused with pancreatic cancer.

Researchers say the test could become a tool for doctors if its value is confirmed by further research. Currently, only 7 percent of pancreatic cancers are detected before they have spread to other parts of the body.

SOURCE: American Society of Clinical Oncology

“Four experiments show that when consumers encounter temptations that conflict with their long-term goals, one self-control mechanism is to exaggerate the negativity of the temptation as a way to resist, a process we call counteractive construal,” according to the study authors from the University of Texas at Austin.

In one experiment, researchers found that female participants who were asked to estimate the calorie count of a cookie believed it had more calories — and would be more hazardous to their goal of losing weight — if they had a strong dieting goal.

Another experiment found that posters of physically fit models, as opposed to those of nature scenery, helped women stay focused on dieting. “Participants who were exposed to posters depicting fit models were more likely to exaggerate the calories in a tempting drink that they expected to consume later on, and consequently consumed less when offered the drink,” the study authors wrote.

“The mental construal of temptations may be distorted when people experience a self-control conflict, and such distorted construal, rather than accurate representations, determines consumers’ actual consumption, helping them resist the temptation and maintaining their long-term goal,” the researchers concluded.

If there is abnormal bleeding after menopause, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says here are possible causes:
Thinning of uterine lining.
Taking hormone therapy.
Having noncancerous polyps.
Endometrial hyperplasia, a condition characterized by excess growth of the uterine lining.
Endometrial cancer.

The study, published in the December issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine, finds that the procedure could be an alternative to methods that stabilize or reconstruct a shoulder joint by repairing ligaments and tissues.

“In situations where there’s missing bone… the soft tissues see forces that are much higher than they can withstand and they fail,” Dr. Jon Sekiya, surgeon and associate professor at the University of Michigan Health System, said in a university news release.

In the new procedure, doctors “transfer and transplant the tissue from a cadaver to a human by matching it with X-rays to make sure the sizes are appropriate, then in surgery we actually shape it to be the same shape and consistency as the patient and then secure it in there and let it heal,” Sekiya explained.

“We’ve been very successful at this. We’ve been able to stabilize shoulders that have been dislocating recurrently and have even failed one, two, sometimes three surgical procedures that did not address the bone and cartilage damage,” he added in the news release.

“Loneliness can spread from person to person to person — up to three degrees of separation,” said James H. Fowler, co-author of the study published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

“What this means is that if I don’t know anything about you, but I know your friend’s friend is lonely, then I can do better than chance at predicting whether or not you will be lonely,” he said.

Indeed, the study suggests that not only is loneliness contagious, but lonely people tend to isolate themselves in small groups that somehow compound or increase those feelings of solitude.

According to Fowler, the data suggests that the average person feels lonely about 48 days a year, but for the lonely, that feeling can be ever-present. In addition, the study indicated that people who felt lonely were more likely to be friendless, or constantly shedding friends, a few years later: Compared with those who are never lonely, lonely people can lose about 8 percent of their friends over a four-year period, for instance.

Fowler co-authored the findings, funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, with John T. Cacioppo, professor at the University of Chicago, and Nicholas A. Christakis, professor at Harvard University. The researchers worked with more than 5,100 participants who were the offspring of the original subjects of the landmark Framingham Heart Study.

The team constructed graphs tracking the participants’ ongoing friendship patterns over two to four years. They found that, among neighbors, an increase of loneliness of just one day per week triggered a rise in loneliness among neighbor-friends, as well. And that loneliness actually spread throughout the community as affected neighbors saw each other less, the researchers said.

Women appeared more vulnerable than men to “catching” loneliness, the researchers found.

Mark R. Leary, professor and director of the social psychology program at Duke University, whose work zeroes in on the need for social acceptance, called the study impressive in its sample, analysis and conclusion. He added that the contagion of loneliness could be, to some degree, a situation of people mimicking the styles of those around them.

“Non-lonely people who are exposed to lonely people may make others in their network a little more lonely by behaving in these less-affirming ways. Perhaps this is why the effect of loneliness can be seen at three degrees of separation. My friend has a lonely friend, so my friend starts acting less affirming overall, which makes me act a little less positively, which then affects my other friends.”

So what can be done to help the lonely, to integrate them better with others? Leary suggested that those who interact with lonely people recognize that their tendency to pull inward emotionally and be less outgoing is a trait of loneliness, not of something else. “It reflects loneliness and a need for connection, rather than indifference, dislike or rejection. People can reach out to their lonely loved one rather than withdraw themselves,” he said.

Fowler agreed. “For the mental health provider, this means treating not just the patient, but potentially also the patient’s friends,” he said. “For the employer, this means emphasizing activities that help their employees to connect to one another socially. For the family member, this means you should tend to your own networks, too, while you help your kin feel more connected.”

Under current guidelines, women with breast cancer in its early stages should receive tests to see if Herceptin might be appropriate for them.

In the new study, researchers analyzed medical data to see if testing has become routine. Their findings will appear in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Cancer.

As many as two-thirds of patients who were eligible for the testing didn’t appear to have had it. And about 20 percent of those who did take the drug appeared to have not taken the test to see if it could work for them in the first place, the researchers found.

In another complication, the research suggests that about one in five tests is inaccurate.

Filling the gaps in care “may help optimize limited health-care resources and improve care for women with breast cancer,” said study co-author Dr. Elena Elkin, a researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, in a news release from the journal’s publisher.

Doctors are increasingly trying to fine-tune treatments so they specifically target the disease in a particular patient, the researchers noted.

Based on current estimates, substantially more than 1 million new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in the United States every year. Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is being diagnosed more rapidly in men age 65 and older than in the general population. A history of exposure to UV rays is a risk factor for skin cancer.

The Academy has created several tools to make it easy to determine if a mole is suspicious and should be brought to a dermatologist’s attention. The Academy’s Body Mole Map is a tool individuals can use to track their moles. The map provides information on how to perform a skin exam, images of the ABCDEs of melanoma and space for people to track their moles to determine any changes over time. The mole map is downloadable at no cost at www.aad.org/checkspot.

“Performing these checks regularly can help determine if a mole seems to be changing, which could be a sign of skin cancer,” said dermatologist David M. Pariser, MD, FAAD, president of the Academy. “Early detection is a key factor in the fight against skin cancer and ultimately can help save lives.”

One American dies of melanoma every hour (every 61 minutes). The five-year survival rate for people whose melanoma is detected and treated before it spreads to the lymph nodes is 99 percent. For more information about skin cancer, please visit the SkinCancerNet section of www.skincarephysicians.com, a Web site developed by dermatologists that provides patients with up-to-date information on the treatment and management of disorders of the skin, hair and nails.

Headquartered in Schaumburg, Ill., the American Academy of Dermatology (Academy), founded in 1938, is the largest, most influential, and most representative of all dermatologic associations. With a membership of more than 16,000 physicians worldwide, the Academy is committed to: advancing the diagnosis and medical, surgical and cosmetic treatment of the skin, hair and nails; advocating high standards in clinical practice, education, and research in dermatology; and supporting and enhancing patient care for a lifetime of healthier skin, hair and nails.