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Kids with DD gain from exercise
July 2009
FAIRFAX, VA - Group exercise programs, treadmill training, and horseback riding can be healthy choices for children with developmental disabilities, a review of studies concludes.
With these kinds of activities, children with disorders such as Autism, mental retardation and Cerebral Palsy can improve their coordination and aerobic fitness, stares research analyzed by Connie Johnson, physical therapist with the Fairfax County public schools.
The findings are encouraging, since studies show children with DD tend to be less fit than their peers.
In many cases, they lack the resources and community support that would encourage them to be more active, Johnson said.
Children and adults with disabilities "can ill afford to have a downturn in health and yet, when told by their doctor to exercise or lose weight, they’re rarely - if ever - given resources or knowledge to do so," said Dr. James Rimmer, director of the National Center on Physical Activity and Disability.
However, "parents may be more likely to provide their children with opportunities for physical activity if the specific potential benefits for their children are proven," said Johnson, whose review was in the American Journal of Health Promotion.
IOWA CITY, IA - The Disability Law & Policy e-Newsletter of the Law, Health Policy & Disability Center at the University of Iowa College of Law and the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University noted output of the iBOT, the first stair-climbing wheelchair, has stopped. Recent buyers are lobbying Congress for changes to help bring it back; however, the argument may be a microcosm of the way technological innovation for the disabled is handled in the U.S. New technology must come with evidence it changes lives in a nuanced way - something iBOT didn’t do, states Medicare. Because it deemed certain iBOT functions unnecessary for every iBOT consumer, it only paid about $6,000 of the $22,000 cost, cutting the market for iBOT.
MONROEVILLE, PA - In its 101 Ways You Can Help Fight Cancer campaign, the Institute for Good Medicine at the Pennsylvania Medical Society dedicated a Web show to the importance of exams to detect eye cancer. The show can be seen at www.myfamilywellness.org/Videos/Eye-Cancer.aspx, or www.youtube.com. During the three-minute show, Dr. Peter S. Lund, institute founder, hosts Dr. Michael J. Azar, an ophthalmologist who describes eye cancer and offers tips on how to avoid it. Dr. Azar, a member of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, is a past president of the Pennsylvania Academy of Ophthalmology.
LONDON - Disaboom.com reported former clerk Riam Dean, 22, sued Abercrombie & Fitch for $40,0000-plus in damages, claiming A&F discriminated against her because she wears a prosthetic arm due to congenital limb deficiency. Dean, a law student, says she was told she'd violated A&F's "Look Policy" and was forced to work in a back stockroom, where customers couldn’t see her. Riam was hired to work on the sales floor at the flagship London store. She says she was told during employee training to buy a plain white cardigan to wear along with her uniform of jeans and a white polo shirt to cover the join between her prosthetic arm and the partial upper arm with which she was born. The A&F handbook states employees may substitute their own clothes for a uniform as long as the clothing is "Abercrombie style." The look policy requires "clean and natural" hair and fingernails worn one-quarter-inch past the end of the finger. Dean, as instructed, wore a white cardigan while working on the sales floor. She says a member of the store's "visual team" demanded she remove the cardigan. Dean said she'd been given special permission to wear it due to her prosthesis.
VIENNA, VA - "Even when someone looks fine initially, it can still have devastating consequences," says Dr. Greg O'Shanick, national medical director for the Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA), told HealthDay News. "The critical issue is that you don't have to lose consciousness to sustain a significant brain injury," he explains. "Natasha Richardson had what's called an epidural hematoma," O'Shanick adds. More than 1.4 million people suffer a traumatic brain injury each year in the U.S., the BIAA states. Most are treated and released from an E.R., but 235,000 are hospitalized and 50,000 die. Dr. Rade Vukmir, an E.R. doctor, clinical professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, says certain steps should be taken to ensure someone who's taken a blow to the head will be all right: stay with the person; watch for behavior changes, and be particularly cautious with high-risk groups - the very young, the very old, people on blood thinners, and anyone who's intoxicated. There's no reason to take a wait-and-see attitude.
BOSTON - The Disability Law & Policy e-Newsletter of the Law, Health Policy & Disability Center at the University of Iowa College of Law and the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University reported the new Going to Work guide from the Institute for Community Inclusion informs the disabled and service providers about Social Security benefits and how these benefits can be affected by earned income. The guide details how to calculate an estimated Social Security benefit, and how to measure the impact of any earned income. The guide outlines methods on receiving maximum benefits.
LONDON - Men with a diet rich in meat and dairy products may want to put down their forks. Meat and dairy raise a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1). Men with high IGF-1 blood levels are up to 40% more likely to get prostate cancer than men whose levels are lower, state Oxford University scientists, who analyzed 12 studies of almost 9,000 men. BBC News reports IGF-1, critical for rowth/development of children and adolescents, works in adults by regulating cell growth and cell death. IGF-1 has a more sinister side: it can inhibit the death of cells at the end of their natural life cycle. While higher IGF-1 doesn’t raise the risk of prostate cancer per se, it aids cancerous tumors’ spread. Study shows cells fed by IGF-1 grow much more quickly. Although it's still unclear just how much diet affects IGF-1 levels, lead scientist Dr. Andrew Roddam says IGF-1 levels are 15% higher in people who eat a lot of meat and dairy products. "There’s a need to identify risk factors for prostate cancer, especially those which can be targeted by therapy and/or lifestyle changes," he told the BBC. "Now we know this factor is (tied to) the disease we can start to examine how diet and lifestyle factors can affect its levels and whether changes could reduce a man's risk." The study was in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
CINCINNATI - A study shows smokers with a family history of brain aneurysm appear to be significantly more likely to suffer a stroke from a brain aneurysm. Research online at the journal Neurology notes the type of stroke - subarachnoid hemorrhage - is a bleeding type and deadly in 35-40% of cases. Scientists checked 339 people who had a stroke from a brain aneurysm and 1,016 who hadn’t had a stroke due to an aneurysm. Smokers were 50% of the group that had a stroke. The other half had never smoked or stopped smoking. Research found people who smoked and had a family history of stroke were more than six times more likely to suffer a stroke than those who didn’t smoke and didn’t have a family history of stroke or brain aneurysm. The study found people with a family history of stroke could cut their risk by more than half by quitting smoking. Results were the same regardless of high blood pressure, diabetes, alcohol use, body mass index, and education. "While all people should be advised to quit smoking, our findings suggest there’s an interaction so that if you smoke and you have a family history of aneurysms, you are at an extremely high risk of suffering a stroke from a ruptured brain aneurysm," says study author Dr. Daniel Woo, of the University of Cincinnati.
LONDON - About 50% of those who have a major stroke after a warning stroke (transient ischemic attack or mild stroke) have it within 24 hours of the first event, states research in the journal Neurology. "Our study highlights the need for someone who is (hav)ing the symptoms of a mini-stroke to get to an emergency room fast," said Dr. Peter Rothwell, of the University of Oxford. "That's because even after a very minor initial stroke, the immediate risk of a major stroke is very high." Scientists analyzed the medical records of 1,247 people who a TIA, or minor stroke. Of those, 35 had recurrent strokes within 24 hours in the first month after the TIA. Scientists looked at whether patients had another stroke within six, 12, or 24 hours after the first stroke. The timeline started when the person either had symptoms of a stroke or first called for medical help. The study found that after six hours, the risk of a second stroke went up 1.2%; after 12 hours, it rose another percent, and by 24 hours it rose to 5%. Dr. Rothwell said, "We found a second stroke rate of about 5%, with half of all second strokes within seven days occurring in the first 24 hours, and half of these early recurrent strokes being disabling or fatal."
NEW YORK - Maintaining blood sugar levels, even sans disease, may be important for preserving cognitive health, suggests a study by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists. The Annals of Neurology/Senior Moments study shows it as normal aging. Such lapses, states this research, could be blamed partly on rising blood glucose levels as we age. The findings suggest exercising to improve blood sugar levels could be a way for some people to stave off normal cognitive decline with age. "This is news even for people without diabetes, since blood glucose levels tend to rise as we grow older. Whether through physical exercise, diet, or drugs, our research suggests improving glucose metabolism could help some of us avert the cognitive slide that occurs in many of us as we age," said lead investigator Dr. Scott Small, associate professor of neurology at the Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at CUMC. Although it’s widely known early stages of Alzheimer’s damage the hippocampus - brain area essential for memory and learning, studies have suggested it’s also vulnerable to normal aging.
ROCHESTER, NY - HealthDay News noted the largest study of its kind finds deep brain stimulation (DBS) improves physical function and quality of life after six months in patients with Parkinson's disease. DBS performed better than currently available drug treatments, but carried some risks, including one death, states the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "This basically corroborates what has largely emerged over the last decade from literature and clinical experience showing pretty dramatically the potential benefit of DBS for Parkinson's," said Dr. Fred Marshall, medical director of the DBS program at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). Despite abundant clinical experience, there have been few controlled trials on the topic, added colleague Dr. Irene Richard, associate professor of neurology/psychiatry at URMC. "This is corroborative, that surgery is helpful, but it’s associated with more risk." DBS, approved for Parkinson's by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002, is somewhat widely used in patients with advanced Parkinson's who are no longer being helped by drugs.
NEW YORK - MedPage Today disclosed women with bulimia nervosa have self-regulatory neural abnormalities not seen in healthy controls, scientists say. Bulimic women have impaired activity within a brain framework that governs self-regulatory processes, say Dr. Rachel Marsh, of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and colleagues state. The differences were manifested in more impulsive responses on a standard psychological test, the Simon Spatial Incompatibility task, Dr. March and colleagues note in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The greater impulsivity was paralleled by different patterns of activation of frontostriatal regions of the brain, as seen in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers said. They enrolled 20 women being treated for bulimia at the New York State Psychiatric Institute; 20 non-bulimic controls were recruited from the community.
BIRMINGHAM, AL - If a woman who had a Caesarean delivery has another such elective procedure before 39 weeks of gestation, the risk of adverse neonatal outcome rises 50% or more. A large study posted by MedPage Today suggested a repeat elective Caesarean at 38 weeks was tied to an odds ratio of 1.5 for adverse outcomes, rising to 2.1 for such delivery at 37 weeks, Dr. Alan Tita, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his team stated in the New England Journal of Medicine. Adverse respiratory outcomes, need for mechanical ventilation, newborn sepsis, hypoglycemia, admission to neonatal ICU, and hospitalization for five days or longer occurred more often in babies delivered by Caesarean before 39 weeks of gestation. "These early deliveries are (tied to) a preventable increase in neonatal morbidity and admissions to the neonatal ICU, (with) a high economic cost," authors concluded. "These findings support recommendations to delay elective delivery until 39 weeks of gestation and should be helpful in counseling." The rate of Caesarean delivery in the U.S. rose 50% 1996-2006, authors noted.
BALTIMORE - The Greenwall Foundation awarded faculty members of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics a grant to allow Drs. Gail Geller and Cynda Hylton Rushton to explore ethical challenges health professionals face caring for children and families hit by life-threatening neuromuscular diseases (LTNMD). The concept for this latest LTNMD study reflects the work of the international HeartSongs Project funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The project goal: develop a global network of professionals from many disciplines, parents, and affected children with a common vision of comprehensive care for kidfs with LTNMD. Besides the U.S., project nations include England, Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, and Greece. The project aims to meld principles of pediatric palliative care (PPC) into care of persons living with LTNMDs. PPC can be described as a holistic, interdisciplinary model of care that incorporates emotional, spiritual, developmental, and physical areas. The consortium will culminate in a second summit in Greece in March.
LOUISVILLE, KY - An extract from grape seeds forces lab leukemia cells to commit cell suicide, state scientists at the University of Kentucky. They found that within 24 hours, 76% of leukemia cells died after exposure to the extract. They reported their findings in Clinical Cancer Research, from the American Association for Cancer Research. They also teased apart the cell signaling pathway tied to use of grape seed extract that led to cell death, or apoptosis. They found the extract activates JNK, a protein that regulates the apoptotic pathway. While grape seed extract has shown activity in a number of lab cancer cell lines, including skin, breast, colon, lung, stomach, and prostate cancers, no one had tested the extract in hematological cancers, nor had the precise mechanism for activity been revealed. "These results could have implications for the incorporation of agents such as grape seed extract into prevention or treatment of hematological malignancies and possibly other cancers," said study lead author Dr. Xianglin Shi, professor in the Graduate Center for Toxicology at the university. "What everyone seeks is an agent that has an effect on cancer cells but leaves normal cells alone, and this shows grape seed extract fits into this category."
IOWA CITY, IA - The Disability Law & Policy e-Newsletter of the Law, Health Policy & Disability Center at the University of Iowa College of Law and the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University noted output of the iBOT, the first stair-climbing wheelchair, has stopped. Recent buyers are lobbying Congress for changes to help bring it back; however, the argument may be a microcosm of the way technological innovation for the disabled is handled in the U.S. New technology must come with evidence it changes lives in a nuanced way - something iBOT didn’t do, states Medicare. Because it deemed certain iBOT functions unnecessary for every iBOT consumer, it only paid about $6,000 of the $22,000 cost, cutting the market for iBOT.
MONROEVILLE, PA - In its 101 Ways You Can Help Fight Cancer campaign, the Institute for Good Medicine at the Pennsylvania Medical Society dedicated a Web show to the importance of exams to detect eye cancer. The show can be seen at www.myfamilywellness.org/Videos/Eye-Cancer.aspx, or www.youtube.com. During the three-minute show, Dr. Peter S. Lund, institute founder, hosts Dr. Michael J. Azar, an ophthalmologist who describes eye cancer and offers tips on how to avoid it. Dr. Azar, a member of the Pennsylvania Medical Society, is a past president of the Pennsylvania Academy of Ophthalmology.
LONDON - Disaboom.com reported former clerk Riam Dean, 22, sued Abercrombie & Fitch for $40,0000-plus in damages, claiming A&F discriminated against her because she wears a prosthetic arm due to congenital limb deficiency. Dean, a law student, says she was told she'd violated A&F's "Look Policy" and was forced to work in a back stockroom, where customers couldn’t see her. Riam was hired to work on the sales floor at the flagship London store. She says she was told during employee training to buy a plain white cardigan to wear along with her uniform of jeans and a white polo shirt to cover the join between her prosthetic arm and the partial upper arm with which she was born. The A&F handbook states employees may substitute their own clothes for a uniform as long as the clothing is "Abercrombie style." The look policy requires "clean and natural" hair and fingernails worn one-quarter-inch past the end of the finger. Dean, as instructed, wore a white cardigan while working on the sales floor. She says a member of the store's "visual team" demanded she remove the cardigan. Dean said she'd been given special permission to wear it due to her prosthesis.
VIENNA, VA - "Even when someone looks fine initially, it can still have devastating consequences," says Dr. Greg O'Shanick, national medical director for the Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA), told HealthDay News. "The critical issue is that you don't have to lose consciousness to sustain a significant brain injury," he explains. "Natasha Richardson had what's called an epidural hematoma," O'Shanick adds. More than 1.4 million people suffer a traumatic brain injury each year in the U.S., the BIAA states. Most are treated and released from an E.R., but 235,000 are hospitalized and 50,000 die. Dr. Rade Vukmir, an E.R. doctor, clinical professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, says certain steps should be taken to ensure someone who's taken a blow to the head will be all right: stay with the person; watch for behavior changes, and be particularly cautious with high-risk groups - the very young, the very old, people on blood thinners, and anyone who's intoxicated. There's no reason to take a wait-and-see attitude.
BOSTON - The Disability Law & Policy e-Newsletter of the Law, Health Policy & Disability Center at the University of Iowa College of Law and the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University reported the new Going to Work guide from the Institute for Community Inclusion informs the disabled and service providers about Social Security benefits and how these benefits can be affected by earned income. The guide details how to calculate an estimated Social Security benefit, and how to measure the impact of any earned income. The guide outlines methods on receiving maximum benefits.
LONDON - Men with a diet rich in meat and dairy products may want to put down their forks. Meat and dairy raise a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1). Men with high IGF-1 blood levels are up to 40% more likely to get prostate cancer than men whose levels are lower, state Oxford University scientists, who analyzed 12 studies of almost 9,000 men. BBC News reports IGF-1, critical for rowth/development of children and adolescents, works in adults by regulating cell growth and cell death. IGF-1 has a more sinister side: it can inhibit the death of cells at the end of their natural life cycle. While higher IGF-1 doesn’t raise the risk of prostate cancer per se, it aids cancerous tumors’ spread. Study shows cells fed by IGF-1 grow much more quickly. Although it's still unclear just how much diet affects IGF-1 levels, lead scientist Dr. Andrew Roddam says IGF-1 levels are 15% higher in people who eat a lot of meat and dairy products. "There’s a need to identify risk factors for prostate cancer, especially those which can be targeted by therapy and/or lifestyle changes," he told the BBC. "Now we know this factor is (tied to) the disease we can start to examine how diet and lifestyle factors can affect its levels and whether changes could reduce a man's risk." The study was in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
CINCINNATI - A study shows smokers with a family history of brain aneurysm appear to be significantly more likely to suffer a stroke from a brain aneurysm. Research online at the journal Neurology notes the type of stroke - subarachnoid hemorrhage - is a bleeding type and deadly in 35-40% of cases. Scientists checked 339 people who had a stroke from a brain aneurysm and 1,016 who hadn’t had a stroke due to an aneurysm. Smokers were 50% of the group that had a stroke. The other half had never smoked or stopped smoking. Research found people who smoked and had a family history of stroke were more than six times more likely to suffer a stroke than those who didn’t smoke and didn’t have a family history of stroke or brain aneurysm. The study found people with a family history of stroke could cut their risk by more than half by quitting smoking. Results were the same regardless of high blood pressure, diabetes, alcohol use, body mass index, and education. "While all people should be advised to quit smoking, our findings suggest there’s an interaction so that if you smoke and you have a family history of aneurysms, you are at an extremely high risk of suffering a stroke from a ruptured brain aneurysm," says study author Dr. Daniel Woo, of the University of Cincinnati.
LONDON - About 50% of those who have a major stroke after a warning stroke (transient ischemic attack or mild stroke) have it within 24 hours of the first event, states research in the journal Neurology. "Our study highlights the need for someone who is (hav)ing the symptoms of a mini-stroke to get to an emergency room fast," said Dr. Peter Rothwell, of the University of Oxford. "That's because even after a very minor initial stroke, the immediate risk of a major stroke is very high." Scientists analyzed the medical records of 1,247 people who a TIA, or minor stroke. Of those, 35 had recurrent strokes within 24 hours in the first month after the TIA. Scientists looked at whether patients had another stroke within six, 12, or 24 hours after the first stroke. The timeline started when the person either had symptoms of a stroke or first called for medical help. The study found that after six hours, the risk of a second stroke went up 1.2%; after 12 hours, it rose another percent, and by 24 hours it rose to 5%. Dr. Rothwell said, "We found a second stroke rate of about 5%, with half of all second strokes within seven days occurring in the first 24 hours, and half of these early recurrent strokes being disabling or fatal."
NEW YORK - Maintaining blood sugar levels, even sans disease, may be important for preserving cognitive health, suggests a study by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists. The Annals of Neurology/Senior Moments study shows it as normal aging. Such lapses, states this research, could be blamed partly on rising blood glucose levels as we age. The findings suggest exercising to improve blood sugar levels could be a way for some people to stave off normal cognitive decline with age. "This is news even for people without diabetes, since blood glucose levels tend to rise as we grow older. Whether through physical exercise, diet, or drugs, our research suggests improving glucose metabolism could help some of us avert the cognitive slide that occurs in many of us as we age," said lead investigator Dr. Scott Small, associate professor of neurology at the Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at CUMC. Although it’s widely known early stages of Alzheimer’s damage the hippocampus - brain area essential for memory and learning, studies have suggested it’s also vulnerable to normal aging.
ROCHESTER, NY - HealthDay News noted the largest study of its kind finds deep brain stimulation (DBS) improves physical function and quality of life after six months in patients with Parkinson's disease. DBS performed better than currently available drug treatments, but carried some risks, including one death, states the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "This basically corroborates what has largely emerged over the last decade from literature and clinical experience showing pretty dramatically the potential benefit of DBS for Parkinson's," said Dr. Fred Marshall, medical director of the DBS program at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). Despite abundant clinical experience, there have been few controlled trials on the topic, added colleague Dr. Irene Richard, associate professor of neurology/psychiatry at URMC. "This is corroborative, that surgery is helpful, but it’s associated with more risk." DBS, approved for Parkinson's by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002, is somewhat widely used in patients with advanced Parkinson's who are no longer being helped by drugs.
NEW YORK - MedPage Today disclosed women with bulimia nervosa have self-regulatory neural abnormalities not seen in healthy controls, scientists say. Bulimic women have impaired activity within a brain framework that governs self-regulatory processes, say Dr. Rachel Marsh, of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and colleagues state. The differences were manifested in more impulsive responses on a standard psychological test, the Simon Spatial Incompatibility task, Dr. March and colleagues note in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The greater impulsivity was paralleled by different patterns of activation of frontostriatal regions of the brain, as seen in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers said. They enrolled 20 women being treated for bulimia at the New York State Psychiatric Institute; 20 non-bulimic controls were recruited from the community.
BIRMINGHAM, AL - If a woman who had a Caesarean delivery has another such elective procedure before 39 weeks of gestation, the risk of adverse neonatal outcome rises 50% or more. A large study posted by MedPage Today suggested a repeat elective Caesarean at 38 weeks was tied to an odds ratio of 1.5 for adverse outcomes, rising to 2.1 for such delivery at 37 weeks, Dr. Alan Tita, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his team stated in the New England Journal of Medicine. Adverse respiratory outcomes, need for mechanical ventilation, newborn sepsis, hypoglycemia, admission to neonatal ICU, and hospitalization for five days or longer occurred more often in babies delivered by Caesarean before 39 weeks of gestation. "These early deliveries are (tied to) a preventable increase in neonatal morbidity and admissions to the neonatal ICU, (with) a high economic cost," authors concluded. "These findings support recommendations to delay elective delivery until 39 weeks of gestation and should be helpful in counseling." The rate of Caesarean delivery in the U.S. rose 50% 1996-2006, authors noted.
BALTIMORE - The Greenwall Foundation awarded faculty members of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics a grant to allow Drs. Gail Geller and Cynda Hylton Rushton to explore ethical challenges health professionals face caring for children and families hit by life-threatening neuromuscular diseases (LTNMD). The concept for this latest LTNMD study reflects the work of the international HeartSongs Project funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The project goal: develop a global network of professionals from many disciplines, parents, and affected children with a common vision of comprehensive care for kidfs with LTNMD. Besides the U.S., project nations include England, Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, and Greece. The project aims to meld principles of pediatric palliative care (PPC) into care of persons living with LTNMDs. PPC can be described as a holistic, interdisciplinary model of care that incorporates emotional, spiritual, developmental, and physical areas. The consortium will culminate in a second summit in Greece in March.
LOUISVILLE, KY - An extract from grape seeds forces lab leukemia cells to commit cell suicide, state scientists at the University of Kentucky. They found that within 24 hours, 76% of leukemia cells died after exposure to the extract. They reported their findings in Clinical Cancer Research, from the American Association for Cancer Research. They also teased apart the cell signaling pathway tied to use of grape seed extract that led to cell death, or apoptosis. They found the extract activates JNK, a protein that regulates the apoptotic pathway. While grape seed extract has shown activity in a number of lab cancer cell lines, including skin, breast, colon, lung, stomach, and prostate cancers, no one had tested the extract in hematological cancers, nor had the precise mechanism for activity been revealed. "These results could have implications for the incorporation of agents such as grape seed extract into prevention or treatment of hematological malignancies and possibly other cancers," said study lead author Dr. Xianglin Shi, professor in the Graduate Center for Toxicology at the university. "What everyone seeks is an agent that has an effect on cancer cells but leaves normal cells alone, and this shows grape seed extract fits into this category."