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Medford kids join Miles for Miracles walk
June 2, 2005 - Two Medford families will be among the teams
raising money to support pediatric research and patient care
at Miles for Miracles, Children's Hospital Boston's annual
pledge walk, which will take place Saturday, June 18.
Miles for Miracles brings patient families, friends and hospital
staff together for a day of fun, food and exercise along the
Charles River. Last year, more than 2,300 walkers joined official
walk mascots - Farley the Tortoise and Hunne the Hare - in
support of Children's, raising $510,000. Funds from Miles
for Miracles are directed toward unrestricted charitable support,
allowing the hospital to allocate monies to areas of greatest
need: medical care of uninsured patients, research, recruitment
and training and capital projects.
Team Halo will walk in honor of Medford residents Shannon
O'Donnell,10, and Deidre Carbone, 9, - two close friends -
who are both Children's patients.
O'Donnell was diagnosed at age 6 with primary
pulmonary hypertension, a rare condition in which the
blood vessels in the lungs have a much higher pressure than
normal, causing shortness of breath and the inability to do
normal activities. Her initial condition was severe and life-threatening
and although a lung transplant was considered, doctors decided
to first try drug therapy to reduce her pulmonary hypertension.
Today, O'Donnell wears a backpack at all times that carries
her medicine and extra oxygen. She's named the backpack Halo,
as it is her angel looking over her as she goes through every
minute of every day.
While a lung transplant is still a possibility further down
the line, doctors are pleased with her progress.
Carbone has been a Children's patient since she was 11 months
old. She suffers from mild mitral stenosis - a narrowing or
obstruction of the opening of the mitral valve, which separates
the upper and lower chambers on the left side of the heart.
The condition prevents adequate blood flow between the left
atrium and ventricle.
Doctors have stabilized her condition and she returns to Children's
annually for an echocardiogram to monitor her heart.
Body's Brain Link to Hunger Identified
STEVEN REINBERG /HEALTHDAY REPORTER
THURSDAY, July 20 (HealthDay News) - Research with mice has identified how diet drugs such as Fen-Phen work to activate the brain chemical serotonin, which curbs appetite.
The finding could lead to new diet drugs that don't have the dangerous cardiac side effects associated with Fen-Phen, which led it to be banned in 1997, after it had been used for almost a decade, the researchers said.
"We wanted to look at the pathways and molecules involved in the anorexic properties of drugs like Fen-Phen," said lead researcher Dr. Joel Elmquist, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and director of the Center for Hypothalamic Research.
Elmquist noted that what was significant about Fen-Phen was that it did suppress appetite and result in weight loss. "But the mechanism and pathways in the brain that were responsible for those actions were largely unknown," he said.
In their study, Elmquist and his colleagues tested the effect of several drugs that alter serotonin levels in the brains of mice. They found that serotonin activates some neurons and melanocortin-4 receptors, or MC4Rs, to curb appetite, and at the same time blocks other neurons that normally act to increase appetite.
The report is published in the July 20 issue of Neuron.
"This is more data that suggests that the melanocortin pathway is a key pathway in your brain that affects food intake, body weight and glucose," Elmquist said. "Our data suggest that serotonin is involved in affecting this pathway."
This dual effect helps explain how such drugs cause weight loss. The findings also reinforce the role of serotonin, which regulates emotions, mood and sleep, in affecting the brain's melanocortin system, a key pathway that controls body weight, he said.
Learning how these drugs work, one could potentially target these pathways and avoid the harmful side effects associated with a drug like Fen-Phen while still controlling the feeling of hunger, Elmquist said.
"The goal of pharmaceutical companies is to identify the neurons that are key for body-weight control and within those neurons the key signaling pathways," Elmquist said. "If you could target those, you could have a more effective and safe treatment," he said.
One expert agrees that it may be possible to develop new safe and effective diet drugs, but for use only as a bridge to lifestyle changes.
"This finding really shows us where we can focus our efforts for new therapeutics that target the receptor they have identified as the one that's key in the regulation of food intake," said Philip Smith, director of the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases at the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Smith thinks that these new drugs could target centers of the brain that effect behavior. "The key is what motivates behaviors like overeating and smoking," he said. "Drugs that target the pathways found in this study are likely to target motivational pathways that are involved with serotonin."
But drugs alone aren't the answer to the growing obesity epidemic, Smith said. "The only hope is that we actually modify lifestyle," he said.
"The question is, can we find drugs that will help enable that? Not something that would be a lifetime drug. But just like a nicotine patch, one could imagine a patch that would get you through the hardest part of losing weight so that you could actually change your lifestyle, and you are not constantly fighting the urge to eat," Smith said. "It is lifestyle change that will really make a dent in the obesity epidemic."
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