Scientists hope to better understand how Parkinson’s develops

The UK's first major investigation of a disease using stem cells that does not involve the need to create and destroy embryos is being launched.

A Oxford University team will use induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, adult stem cells which have the ability to become any cell in the human body, to examine Parkinson's disease.

These cells will be used to grow the brain neurons which die in those with the disorder, a conference will hear.

IPS cells were developed in 2007.

At the time, scientists said it had the potential to offer many of the advantages of embryonic stem cells without any of the ethical downsides.

Three years on, it seems to be living up to that claim.

Compare and contrast

The team at Oxford University is among the first in the world to use IPS to carry out a large scale clinical investigation of a major disease.

Parkinson's is currently poorly understood.

Researchers will be taking skin cells from a 1,000 patients with early stage Parkinson's and turning them in to nerve cells carrying the disease to learn more about the brain disorder, the UK National Stem Cell Network annual science meeting will hear.

The technique is useful because it is difficult to obtain samples of diseased nerve tissue from patient biopsies.

IPS enables the researchers to create limitless quantities of nerve cells to use in experiments and to test new drugs.

"Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the UK and is set to become increasingly common as we live longer," said Dr Richard Wade-Martins, head of the Oxford Parkinson's Disease Centre.

"Once we have neurons from patients we can compare the functioning of cells taken from patients with the disease and those without to better understand why dopamine neurons die in patients with Parkinson's."

The research is being funded by Parkinson's UK.

The charity's director of research, Kieran Breen, described it as "vital research that will help us better understand the causes of this devastating condition and how it develops and progresses.

"We hope the work will pave the way for new and better treatments for people with Parkinson's in the future."

There are about 120,000 people in the UK with Parkinson's.

All hospitals have been told to go for foundation trust status

NHS hospitals will be looking to exploit a host of "exciting" opportunities to move into private health markets, bosses say.

Self-governing hospitals – known as foundation trusts – have had their private income capped to date, but this is to be lifted in the NHS overhaul.

The Foundation Trust Network believes the move will spark a burst of innovation in the sector.

But campaigners said they were worried NHS services would be harmed.

To get foundation trust legislation through parliament in 2003, ministers agreed to a cap on private work to ensure the hospitals remained true to their NHS traditions.

This has stopped some of the leading hospitals in the NHS competing with private firms for patients.

But that will now change under the proposals unveiled in Monday's White Paper. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said he wanted to create a "vibrant" industry of social enterprises by scrapping the rule and ordering all NHS trusts to become foundation trusts within three years.

Sue Slipman, director of the Foundation Trust Network, said the move would make a big difference.

"It is exciting for foundation trusts. We will have to wait to see what exactly happens, but there are huge opportunities to innovate."

She said one of the most obvious areas for expansion would be in fertility services where treatment on the NHS is severely restricted.

"In the past these patients have had their NHS cycles and then left for private treatment. That is money that has been lost to the system."

She also said mental health trusts may be interested in offering talking therapies to businesses for their workforce health schemes.

Joint ventures with the private sector may also prove popular, she added, covering both services and the development of drugs.

Overstretch concerns

University College Hospital in London has already gone down this route with a private US health firm which has located a private unit on its site for cancer treatment.

The firm leases the space as well as paying for the NHS services its uses, such as intensive care, radiology and cleaning and catering.

The trust has also established a joint venture with a private firm to provide pathology services.

Sir Robert Naylor, the chief executive of the trust, said: "These initiatives bring in money which can then be reinvested in NHS services."

Many NHS hospitals also operate their own private wings, although most of these only bring in a small amount of income. The exceptions are specialist centres such as the Royal Marsden cancer hospitals and Moorfield Eye Hospital.

But John Lister, of the union-funded pressure group Health Emergency, said he had concerns.

"Hospitals could overstretch themselves in chasing private patients which in turn takes away from the NHS side of it.

"It also creates perverse incentives whereby they stand to make more money by getting patients into their private wings.

"They say money is reinvested in services, but I am not sure this is always the case. Some of these hospitals have huge surpluses, the money is moved around and does not end back where it should. If we get more and more of this, it will be a step towards the privatisation of the health service."

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said trusts were not being privatised.

"This isn't about turning foundation trusts into profit-driven bodies. The legislation will make clear that they are social enterprises and give them more control over their own futures."

Charlize’s choice could be altering women’s brain activity

Seeing a celebrity endorse a pair of shoes alters a woman's brain activity – even if she does not drop everything to get her feet into the latest Jimmy Choos, a study suggests.

A Dutch team scanned the brains of 24 women as they looked at pictures of celebrities and attractive, non-famous contemporaries sporting certain shoes.

Celebrity endorsement has become increasingly prevalent in recent years.

And the research concluded advertisers are onto something.

The women were presented with 40 colour photographs of famous and non-famous women deemed to be similarly attractive, and wearing the same footwear.

Encoding memories

When confronted with a celebrity, the team documented heightened activity in a certain part of the brain – the medial oribitofrontal cortex. The same was not observed when pictures of an attractive non-celebrity were presented.

Writing in the Journal of Economic Psychology, they suggested that this activity links the celebrity with the product in a part of the brain associated with feeling affection.

Moreover this link could be rapidly recalled.

"The enhanced memory performance for items that were encoded in the context of a famous individual can neither be explained by increased attractiveness of the celebrity nor by a higher level of perceived expertise, but only by the persuasiveness of fame itself," wrote lead author Mirre Stallen of Erasmus University.

However, contrary to expectations, the number of women saying they would go out and purchase these shoes did not differ significantly between celebrity and non-celebrity photographs.

But the researchers stressed there could be a longer term impact, even if it did not manifest itself as an immediate desire to buy.

A future study will investigate whether men are equally swayed by celebrities' footwear.

Better cancer drugs are one reason for the survival improvements

Survival rates for some cancers have doubled over the past four decades, a charity has said.

People with breast, bowel and ovarian cancers, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, are now twice as likely to survive for at least 10 years than in the 1970s.

Cancer Research UK's figures show leukaemia survival is now four times as high, although the charity warned there was still much work to do.

The Department of Health said it was "delighted" by the findings.

Launching a television campaign, the charity said investment in research was key to further boosting survival.

The figures go back to the early 1970s and include estimated survival rates for the latest diagnoses made in 2007.

In breast cancer, 10-year survival has jumped from less than 40% to a predicted 77% currently.

And half of people diagnosed with bowel cancer are now expected to survive at least 10 years compared with 23% in the 1970s.

For ovarian cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, survival has increased from 18 to 35% and from 22 to 51% respectively.

In cancers such as oesophageal cancer and myeloma, although survival rates are still very poor at below 20%, rates have improved almost threefold over the past few decades, Cancer Research UK said.

However, some other cancers have shown little improvement, most notably lung and pancreatic cancer, the figures show.

‘Real progress’

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "There are many reasons for our continuing success in the fight against cancer, including faster diagnosis, better surgery, more effective radiotherapy and many new drugs, all developed using the knowledge that our laboratory research has given us."

He said with further investment in research, he expected the trend to continue.

Professor Michel Coleman, an expert in statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who calculated the figures, said the survival data reflected "real progress" in cancer diagnosis and treatment.

"Ten-year survival figures for patients diagnosed in 2007 are of course predictions, but they are derived from the latest national data on cancer patient survival – and for most cancers, the true 10-year survival for these patients will turn out to be higher than we report."

The figures prompted Professor Mike Richards, the Department of Health's national cancer director, to say: "We are delighted to note these improvements in cancer survival.

"Improving health outcomes is a key priority for the coalition government and will be a major focus of the forthcoming review of the Cancer Reform Strategy."

Harpal Kumar, Cancer Research UK's chief executive, said the improvements being seen in cancer care were "encouraging, but we have to do better".

"We need to develop even more effective treatments that can prolong life further and we need to ensure that each individual patient has optimal treatment."

Chronic migraines can dramatically impair quality of life

Botox has been approved as a preventive treatment for chronic migraine by UK drug regulators.

It comes after a trial of more than 1,300 patients showed success in reducing the frequency of headaches.

But only patients who suffer headaches for at least 15 days a month, half of which come with migraine symptoms, are eligible, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said.

It is thought around 700,000 people in the UK get chronic migraines.

Migraine charities said many of those would not have been properly diagnosed and that some patients can really struggle to find a treatment that works.

Injections of botox, or botulinum toxin, are more commonly associated with smoothing out wrinkles.

It is not exactly clear why it may work in chronic migraines but it is thought that, as well as being a muscle relaxant, it may work to block pain signals.

In clinical trials, patients were given up to five courses of injections of botox into specific head and neck muscles every 12 weeks.

After 24 weeks, those treated with Botox had fewer days with a migraine than those who received a placebo injection.

By one year, nearly 70% of those treated with Botox had a 50% reduction in the number of migraines compared with before the trial.

The final results were published in Headache in May this year.

Prevention not cure

Lee Tomkins, director of Migraine Action, stressed it was not a "cure" but offered hope for those who suffer the most frequent migraines.

"We have been following these studies really closely and the evidence is really pretty solid.

"These people spend half their lives in pain.

"Even if they get half the attacks, it can really improve their quality of life."

She advised people to speak to their GP to find out if the treatment might be suitable for them and whether they should be referred to a neurologist who could carry out the injections.

And she recommended keeping a diary of symptoms to help doctors diagnose the problem.

Wendy Thomas, chief executive of The Migraine Trust, added: "We know that treatment with acute pain medication does not always work for these patients so we welcome new therapies, especially preventative medication, for this potentially disabling condition."