GOOD NEWS

Diabetes diet

A low-fat vegan diet treats type 2 diabetes more effectively than a standard diabetes diet and may be more effective than single-agent therapy with oral diabetes drugs, according to a study in the journal Diabetes Care. Study participants on the low-fat vegan diet showed dramatic improvement in four disease markers: blood sugar control, cholesterol reduction, weight control, and kidney function. The vegan diet represents a major departure from current diabetes diets, in that it places no limits on calories, carbohydrates, or portions.

Effective flu drug

A British researcher and his Australian colleague are developing a new kind of drug against bird flu that will not suffer from the same kind of resistance problems as current treatments like Tamiflu and Relenza. Although acting upon the same target on the flu virus as existing treatments, the new drug molecules, neuraminidase inhibitors, target a specific part of the virus that is unable to mutate (change) and makes it impossible for the virus to develop resistance. This action also stops the virus from spreading to new cells and helps to reduce the severity and duration of flu so that the body’s own defence mechanisms, together with other medical interventions, can help aid recovery.The drug will be ready for clinical trials within three years.

BAD NEWS

Addictive puffs

Results of a new imaging study show that the nicotine received in just a few puffs of a cigarette can exert a force powerful enough to drive an individual to continue smoking. The amount of nicotine in one puff can occupy about 30 per cent of the brain’s most common type of nicotine receptors; three puffs can occupy about 70 per cent. “These findings suggest that drug therapies for smoking cessation need to be extremely potent to compete with nicotine,” says the study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Stroke risk

Elderly people with severe sleep apnoea (breathing stoppages during sleep) have more than two times the risk of ischaemic stroke (caused by a blood clot that blocks blood flow to a part of the brain) than elderly people with no or mild apnoea. Earlier studies of stroke and sleep apnoea focused on middle-aged people, but the greatest incidence of stroke is in older people, according to a research reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.