Medicinal marijuana is finding its way into many areas of medicine. It’s a big help for some people with AIDS, providing them with a much-needed appetite. Marijuana is helpful for some people with cancer, helping them manage their side effects, and it’s also been found to help people with glaucoma, just to name a few. There was hope that medicinal marijuana would provide help for people with Alzheimers because earlier animal studies had shown that marijuana could reduce the plaques in the brain that are the hallmark of Alzheimers. Although this new study, from the University of British Columbia, is also an animal study, it was done with mice, which are considered to be a better match for human studies, while the previous ones were... [Read more]

Pancreatic cancer is a serious, often rapidly fatal cancer that isn’t usually detected early enough for effective treatment. Although doctors don’t know how to prevent it, they do know that certain lifestyle issues contribute to the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, namely smoking and obesity. Now, we can add “soft drink consumption” to that list. Your pancreas is a small organ that provides your body with insulin that helps you regulate the amount of sugar enters your blood stream. The more sugar you consume, the harder the pancreas has to work to release enough insulin. Of course, as with many things in life, if something is worked harder than it should be, something will go wrong, and body organs are no different. Researchers... [Read more]

People who live with diabetes know how frustrating it can be to try to maintain a healthy and balanced level of sugar in the blood, particularly if they take insulin. Much progress has been made in terms of developing technology to help manage insulin doses, especially in children, but as good as they can be, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Type 1 diabetes, what used to be called insulin-dependent or juvenile diabetes, cannot be cured. Insulin isn’t a cure, but rather, a way to manage it. The insulin must be given in specific doses and adjusted according to activity and food intake, something which can be quite difficult to do for an active child or teen. When blood sugar isn’t properly controlled, this can lead to... [Read more]

African Americans who develop multiple sclerosis deteriorate more quickly than their white counterparts and don’t respond as well to the currently available treatments, say researchers. It’s not unusual for different races to respond in different ways to various illnesses or treatments. The best known illness where this occurs is hypertension (high blood pressure), but we don’t always know which diseases or disorders will fall into this category. Multiple sclerosis is much more common among whites than African Americans, so not much research had been done regarding any differences in progression and treatment. Researchers from the University of Buffalo began looking into this while examining the magnetic resonance images (MRIs)... [Read more]

Celiac disease is becoming more known as more people are being diagnosed with it. Although it’s not entirely clear if the disease is becoming more common or people are just finally being diagnosed properly, the numbers of affected people are rising and this is presenting problems with some life-long rituals. Celiac disease is a silent disease at first. It is the inability of the body to digest gluten, which is a found protein in wheat, rye, and barley. People with celiac disease should not eat any gluten at all, not even small amounts, as gluten damages the villi, the tiny hair-like structures along the intestines that help move the food forward. If the villi can’t do their job, the result is malnutrition. Besides having to adapt... [Read more]