And, the surgical technique for this procedure has an added bonus: It’s less complicated than other strategies, according to the report released online in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the journal Microsurgery.

“When implants aren’t used, the most common technique for reconstructing breasts after a mastectomy is to make breast tissue from a flap of fat and skin from the abdominal region,” study co-author Dr. Ariel N. Rad, an assistant professor of cosmetic surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said in a news release from the school. “Thin, athletic women don’t have enough tissue there. But even they often have some excess fatty tissue in that space between the hip and waist. For them, using those love handles is a new option.”

This is an alternative to pulling fat from the buttocks, a strategy that can be deforming and often requires follow-up surgery, Rad said.

Rad and colleagues tested the technique on 12 patients between 2008 and 2009. All successfully underwent breast reconstruction.

The technique won’t be appropriate for every thin woman, Rad said. But for those who are eligible for it, the treatment can actually make their waists and hips look better, he added.

SOURCE: Johns Hopkins Medicine, news release.

Georgetown University Medical Center researchers found that morphine protected rat neurons from HIV toxicity, a discovery that could lead to the development of new drugs to treat people with HIV-related dementia, which causes depression, anxiety and physical and mental problems.

“We believe that morphine may be neuroprotective in a subset of people infected with HIV,” lead investigator Italo Mocchetti, a professor of neuroscience, said in a Georgetown news release.

He and his colleagues conducted the study because they knew that some people with HIV who are heroin users never develop HIV brain dementia. Morphine is similar to heroin.

In their tests on rats, the researchers found that morphine triggers brain cells called astrocytes to produce a protein called CCL5, which activates factors that suppress HIV infection in immune cells.

CCL5 “is known to be important in blood, but we didn’t know it is secreted in the brain,” Mocchetti said. “Our hypothesis is that it is in the brain to prevent neurons from dying.”

The study was to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society of NeuroImmune Pharmacology, April 13 to 17 in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

“Ideally, we can use this information to develop a morphine-like compound that does not have the typical dependency and tolerance issues that morphine has,” Mocchetti said.

SOURCE: Georgetown University Medical Center, news release.

In fact, most adolescents blog to maintain friendships and engage in positive discussions of everyday teenage life.

The finding, based on a month-long review of teen content on a popular blogging Web site, may help relieve parental concerns that teens are hopping online to participate in violent, drug-laced or sexual discourse.

“There’s a lot of hype about the use of online technology and the abuse of it, but here we found that it seems that it’s just another example of typical adolescent behavior,” said study author Dawn Anderson-Butcher, an independent social worker and associate professor in the college of social work at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Anderson-Butcher and her colleagues reported their findings recently in the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal.

To explore the world of teen blogging, in 2007 the authors analyzed an entire month’s worth of quotable content posted by 100 American teens from across the country (aged 13 to 18) on the Xanga.com social networking Web site (pronounced “Zanga”).

The goal: to count up how many times teens remarked on so-called “good” or “bad” behaviors.

About three-quarters of the teens were female, and teen usage was uneven, with some teens adding posts daily while others threw in their two cents just once or twice a month.

Teens did engage in some degree of complaining and expression of negative feelings. Sixty-five percent blogged about being bored, while others discussed feeling blue (30 percent), feeling angry (28 percent), and/or feeling like they didn’t fit in (22 percent). The age-old reluctance to do homework was a subject raised by 16 percent of the teens, while concern about bad grades was mentioned by 11 percent.

But there was relatively little mention of “bad” behavior: just 8 percent said they had cut class, 6 percent said they had consumed alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes, and only 1 percent referred to engaging in sexual activity.

Instead, the bulk of teens used blogging to discuss positive events and behaviors central to teen living.

Video game playing was the prime topic for 65 percent of the teen bloggers, followed by TV-viewing (45 percent), homework (40 percent), after-school non-religious activities (38 percent), Web surfing (29 percent), and religious activities (22 percent).

The researchers did not explore whether or not the very public nature of this particular Web site — which has relatively less restrictive access policies than sites such as Facebook — influenced the positive nature of the observed teen content.

Parental supervision of the site — self-described as “accessible to anyone, including people who are not registered Xanga users” — was not assessed. Nor was the degree to which teen users might have engaged in self-censorship.

Nonetheless, Anderson-Butcher said the study demonstrates that the world of teen blogging is not the social threat some have suggested.

“Contrary to what many people might assume, the kids we looked at weren’t describing problem behaviors very often or rambling on about negative interactions,” she noted. “They were just talking about their day in ways that we might have talked about ours on the phone when we were kids.”

One expert wasn’t surprised by the findings.

“There only has to be a very, very few inappropriate uses of new media to grab our attention and get us to jump to the wrong conclusion that inappropriate behavior online is common,” said Sam Gosling, a personality and social psychologist and professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. “But it’s clear that what makes the latest media so popular with teens is that they are actually just using it to maintain social bonds and keep in touch, just as with any other form of communication.”

Jeffrey Hall, an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, concurred.

“Parents and others are often very afraid of their children doing things online that will be negative or detrimental,” he noted. “But this really points to the growing use of computer media to do things that are relatively mundane — to seek social support, build friendships, share social experiences and communicate with people that you already like.”

SOURCES: Dawn Anderson-Butcher, Ph.D., associate professor, college of social work, Ohio State, Columbus, and licensed independent social worker; Jeffrey Hall, Ph.D., assistant professor, department of communication studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence; Sam Gosling, Ph.D., professor, department of psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, online.

In a large study of Medicaid patients, researchers found that the more closely a person adhered to his or her doctor’s recommendations for filling their blood pressure medication prescription, the lower his or her risk of stroke and death.

Taking just one more pill as recommended each week (from a one-a-day regimen) cut stroke risk by 9 percent and death risk by 7 percent, Dr. James E. Bailey of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis and colleagues report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

They looked at the medical records of about 49,000 Tennessee Medicaid patients for 1994 to 2000 to determine if blood pressure medication refill adherence or frequency of physician visits influenced risk of stroke or death. The researchers also investigated whether the type of blood pressure-lowering drugs a patient took was associated with stroke or risk of dying.

Patients were taking two different types of blood pressure drug on average, although some were taking as many as six. Sixty percent of the patients filled their prescriptions less than 80 percent of the time, and were classified as non-adherent to their medication.

During follow-up, which ranged from 3 to 7 years, 619 study participants had a stroke and 2,051 died.

Patients who were non-adherent were a half-percent more likely to die over a five-year period compared to adherent patients. Blood pressure drugs known as thiazide diuretics, ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers and beta blockers all cut death risk by 3 to 4 percent, while thiazide diuretics also cut stroke risk.

“This study demonstrates that medication adherence, a factor very amenable to change, is among the most important cardiovascular risk factors” for people with high blood pressure, Bailey and his colleagues note.

Based on the findings, they say, increasing US patients’ refill adherence to 80 percent or greater could save about 200,000 lives over the next five years.

Patients in the study averaged about five doctor office visits a year, although there was a wide range, with some not seeing a doctor at all and others logging nearly 90 visits a year.

Patients who visited the doctor more often were 1 percent less likely to die, even after the researchers took other illnesses into account, a finding they call “striking.”

While the benefit was small, the researchers note, this study is the first to their knowledge to give “clear evidence” that office visits are beneficial for patients with high blood pressure.

SOURCE: Journal of General Internal Medicine.

University of Washington researchers looked at 124 men enrolled in a larger study of treatment intervention for domestic violence. The men, who had committed violence against a partner in the previous 90 days, were asked to estimate the percentage of men who had ever engaged in seven forms of abuse: throwing something at a partner that could cause injury; pushing, grabbing or shoving a partner; slapping or hitting; choking; beating up a partner; threatening a partner with a gun; or forcing a partner to have sex against their will.

The men overestimated by two to three times the actual rates of the seven forms of abuse. For example, the participants on average believed that about 28 percent of men had thrown something with the intent of hurting a partner, but the actual rate in the United States is around 12 percent. The men also believed that close to 24 percent of men had forced a partner to have sex, compared to the actual rate of near 8 percent.

The study is published in the April issue of the journal Violence Against Women.

“We don’t know why men make these overestimations, but there are a couple of likely reasons,” lead author Clayton Neighbors said in a news release. “Men who engage in violent behavior justify it in their mind by thinking it is more common and saying, ‘Most guys slap their women around so it is OK to engage in it.’ Or it could be that misperceptions about violence cause the behavior,”

“Another way of looking at this would be wearing a red shirt. If you think everyone is wearing a red shirt then it is okay for you to wear one too. Or if you wear a red shirt you might overestimate the number of other people who are wearing red shirts,” said Neighbors, a UW affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a professor of psychology at the University of Houston.

“The more we can correct misconceptions about the prevalence of intimate partner violence, we have a chance to change men’s behavior. If you give them factual information, it is harder for them to justify their behavior,” he added.

SOURCE: University of Washington, news release.

The five-year, $26 million study called Investigation of Serial Studies to Predict your Therapeutic Response with Imaging and Molecular Analysis, or I-SPY2, will aim to use DNA to match the best drug to each patient and to more quickly toss out approaches that do not work or are too toxic.

“They’ll get the latest and greatest in terms of targeted drugs,” Dr. Anna Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, said in an interview.

“I think it’s the future. Government couldn’t have done it on their own and these companies couldn’t have done it on their own.”

Unusually, the companies agreed to share information on using genes to predict how well a patient will respond as part of the Biomarkers Consortium, which includes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

“I-SPY 2 will provide a path to personalized medicine,” said Dr. Laura Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon at the University of California San Francisco who will help lead the clinical trials. “We intend that every drug will graduate with a companion marker.”

The trial will match patients to one of five experimental drugs:

– ABT-888 or veliparib, being developed by Abbott Laboratories. The pill is a PARP inhibitor, which blocks a cell repair enzyme used by cancer cells.

– AMG 655 or conatumumab, a targeted drug being developed by Amgen. It boosts a protein called APO/TRAIL that causes cancer cells to self-destruct.

– Amgen’s AMG 386, an angiogenesis inhibitor that stops tumors from growing blood vessels to nourish themselves.

– CP-751,871 or figitumumab, being developed by Pfizer Inc to target the insulin growth factor receptor or IGFR.

– Pfizer’s HKI-272 or neratinib, another targeted therapy called a Pan ErbB inhibitor that targets several related receptors used by cancer cells.

EARLY TREATMENT

The group is negotiating with other companies to add their experimental drugs to the mix.

“It’ll speed up the whole process,” Barker said.

The drug company lobby group PhRMA estimates it can take as long as 15 years and cost more than $1.3 billion dollars to take a new drug from laboratory to pharmacy.

Patients at 20 cancer centers will be tested right after they get tiny samples of tissue taken in biopsies. Before they ever get surgery, they will be treated with one of the drugs to see if this helps prevent tumor spread.

Up to 12 different cancer drugs will be tested. Unusually, the group has FDA approval to drop and add drugs throughout the course of the trial without having to stop it to write a whole new protocol.

Safeway Inc’s charitable foundation is paying for a large part of the experiment. Johnson & Johnson, Roche AG subsidiary Genentech and Eli Lilly and Co will also provide funding.

“This approach could apply to other diseases and other cancer,” said Barker.

The approach could save the U.S. healthcare system money, said University of California San Francisco Chancellor Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann.

“It has the opportunity to make clinical trials more efficient so we will spend less to develop new remedies,” Desmond-Hellmann, a former drug company executive, said in a telephone interview. “I predict that companies will be watching this.”

More information is available at http://www.ispy2.org.

(Editing by John O’Callaghan)

Symptoms of IBS, which affects 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans, include recurrent abdominal pain or cramping in connection with altered bowel habits. The condition is more common among women than men.

“Patients and doctors get nervous about the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. They think the symptoms represent something more sinister,” lead author Dr. William D. Chey, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in a news release from the school. “This study should reassure doctors and patients that typical IBS symptoms are not indicators of a more serious disease.”

He and his colleagues conducted the largest evaluation of the results of colonoscopies in IBS patients, they said. About one-quarter of all colonoscopies performed in the United States are for IBS-related symptoms.

Chey and his team concluded that colonoscopies aren’t necessary for typical cases of IBS, unless there is a family history of colorectal cancer or the patient has alarming symptoms such as unexplained weight loss or anemia, or bleeding from the gastrointestinal tract.

“Lay people and doctors overuse colonoscopies, which are very expensive procedures, in patients with typical IBS symptoms and no alarm features. Of course, patients over the age of 50 years or who have alarm features should undergo colonoscopy to screen for polyps and colon cancer,” Chey said.

The researchers did find that 2.5 percent of IBS patients older than 35 had a disease called microscopic colitis, which can be mistaken for IBS in patients with diarrhea. It’s important to diagnose this condition because it requires different treatment than IBS, Chey said.

The study was released online in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Japanese researchers had 788 dialysis patients complete a fatigue questionnaire and found that about 16 percent of them had a high fatigue score. After two years of follow-up, patients with high fatigue scores were more than twice as likely to have suffered cardiovascular events, such as a heart attack or stroke.

The fatigue questionnaire used in the study differentiates fatigue from many factors associated with it, including anxiety, depression, pain, infection and overwork. The researchers found that fatigue was the strongest predictor of cardiovascular risk, even in patients with known risk factors, such as diabetes, malnutrition and previous cardiovascular disease.

“Our research identifies fatigue as an important bio-alarm to predict cardiovascular events in dialysis patients, particularly those who are well-nourished and healthy-looking,” study co-leader Dr. Hidenori Koyama of Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, said in a news release.

The study will appear in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Koyama and colleagues said further research is needed to learn more about the relationship between fatigue in dialysis patients and increased risk of cardiovascular events.

“Another important question is whether interventions for fatigue will be effective in preventing cardiovascular events,” Koyama added.

SOURCE: American Society of Nephrology.

Researchers at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas report that a drug reduces the obsessiveness in the mice, raising hopes that it might do the same thing in people, although that’s not yet proven.

“Clinically, this study highlights the possibility that some autism-related behaviors can be reversed through drugs targeting specific brain function abnormalities,” said study senior author Dr. Craig Powell, an assistant professor of neurology, said in a university news release. “Understanding one abnormality that can lead to increased, repetitive motor behavior is not only important for autism, but also potentially for obsessive-compulsive disorder, compulsive hair-pulling and other disorders of excessive activity.”

The researchers studied a protein called neuroligin-1, which helps nerve cells better communicate with each other. The mice who had a disabled form of the gene were normal in some ways but obsessively groomed themselves and took longer to learn a maze than other mice.

A drug called D-cycloserine seemed to help, however.

“Our goal was not to make an ‘autistic mouse’ but rather to understand better how autism-related genes might alter brain function that leads to behavioral abnormalities,” Powell said. “By studying mice that lack neuroligin-1, we hope to understand better how this molecule affects communication between neurons and how that altered communication affects behavior.”

The study appears in issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The study, which followed 13,549 middle-aged Americans for 19 years, looked at stroke risk associated with several measures of obesity, emphasizing body mass index (BMI), a ratio of weight and height, but also such measures as waist circumference.

“We found that the risk of stroke was increased with each measure of obesity,” said Dr. Hiroshi Yatsuya, a visiting associate professor of public health at the University of Minnesota and lead author of a report published online Jan. 21 in Stroke.

The degree of risk varied by sex and ethnic group. For example, people in the highest BMI category had a 1.43 to 2.12 times higher risk for stroke, with variations by race and sex. The risk ratios ranged from 1.65 to 3.19 when obesity was measured by waist circumference and from 1.69 to 2.55 when the ratio of waist to hip was used.

The risk was especially high for blacks, the study found. For example, the incidence of stroke was 1.2 per 1,000 person-years for white women and 4.3 per 1,000 person-years for black women. In the highest BMI category, rates ranged from 2.2 for white women to 8.0 for black men.

That higher incidence of stroke for blacks has been found in many previous studies, and it also is seen in Asians, Yatsuya said. The reason is unknown, but “there may be a genetic difference,” he said.

But the increased risk linked to weight was evident in every ethnic group, the study found. Throughout, men and women in the highest obesity category had about double the risk for stroke as did those in the lowest category.

Obesity appears to act by increasing the incidence of high blood pressure and diabetes, two major risk factors for stroke and other cardiovascular problems, the study indicated. When blood pressure readings and diabetes were factored into the calculations, the association between obesity was weakened, “suggesting these major risk factors explain much of the obesity-stroke association,” Yatsuya said.

And despite the mountain of evidence linking obesity and stroke, “we don’t have clear evidence that obesity reduction reduces stroke rate,” he said. Controlled trials are needed to prove that obesity prevention or reduction reduces stroke risk, he said.

Daniel Lackland, a professor of epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina and a spokesman for the American Heart Association, said that the exact relationship between obesity and stroke risk has not been established, but the new study “contributes to a better understanding of it.”

“Obesity contributes to both diabetes and hypertension [high blood pressure], which are associated with stroke and at an earlier age,” Lackland said.

And though definitive proof might be lacking that obesity prevention or reduction reduces the risk for stroke, the American Heart Association and other major organizations stress the need for weight control by proper dieting and physical activity, he said.

A BMI of 20 is regarded as normal, with overweight beginning at 25 and obesity at a reading of 30.

SOURCES: Hiroshi Yatsuya, M.D., Ph.D., visiting associate professor, public health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Daniel Lackland, Dr.P.H., professor, epidemiology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, S.C.