What do heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke and cancer have in common?

Good news!

As Hippocrates is attributed as saying, “Let food be thy medicine.”

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The New Science Behind America’s Deadliest Diseases

• By LAURA LANDRO

  THE INFORMED PATIENT
  Updated July 16, 2012, 8:14 p.m. ET

  What do heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, stroke and cancer have in common? Scientists have linked each of these to a condition known as chronic inflammation, and they are studying how high-fat foods and excess body weight may increase the risk for fatal disorders.

  

  While much focus has been on fighting inflammation with drugs, researchers are getting a better understanding of the links connecting diet, inflammation and illness and discovering ways that foods can help keep inflammation in check. Laura Landro has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

  Inflammation is the body’s natural response to injury and outside irritants. But when the irritants don’t let up, because of a diet of high-fat foods, too much body fat and smoking, for example, the immune system can spiral out of control and increase the risk for disease. Experts say when inflammation becomes chronic it can damage heart valves and brain cells, trigger strokes, and promote resistance to insulin, which leads to diabetes. It also is associated with the development of cancer.

  Much of the research on chronic inflammation has

Pradaxa & Xarelto: Are they worth the risks & costs?

What dangers lurk ahead for new “blood thinner” medications?

Could we unwittingly be participating in our own destruction?

Not only that, but these new medications are exorbitantly expensive, as well.

Are they worth it in the long run?

Should we continue to use the ready stand-by?

The new meds have no antidote. The old one does.

Too little too late, or too much too soon?

Are we playing with fire?

Only time will tell.

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Insight: Top heart doctors fret over new blood thinners

6:50am EDT, 14 June 2012

By Ransdell Pierson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For millions of heart patients, a pair of new blood thinners have been heralded as the first replacements in 60 years for warfarin, a pill whose hardships and risks have deterred many from using the stroke-prevention medicine.

But growing complaints of risks and deaths tied to the new crop of drugs have made some top U.S. cardiologists hesitant to prescribe them. Some are proposing a more rigorous monitoring regimen for when they are used.

Most concerns revolve around Pradaxa, a twice daily pill from Boehringer Ingelheim that was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October 2010 to prevent strokes in patients with an irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation. It was the first new oral treatment for that use since warfarin was introduced in the 1950s.

“The good news is

New Hope in Cancer Treatment May Soon Be Widely Available

In a nutshell, cancer is simply a case of good and normal cells which have “gone bad,” which are typically characterized by rapid reproduction of those mutated cells, accompanied by the development of its own network of blood vessels to feed its growth (angiogenesis).

The initial findings in this research are indeed promising.

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Drug Helps Defense System Fight Cancer

June 1, 2012 By ANDREW POLLACK

CHICAGO — One of the great frustrations for researchers in the war on cancer is that the body’s own defense system does not do a better job fighting the disease. Tumors, it turns out, have a molecular shield that repels attacks from the immune system.

Now, a new study says, an experimental drug is showing promise in disabling that shield, unleashing the immune system and causing shrinkage of some lung, skin and kidney cancers that had defied treatment with existing drugs.

“We are seeing responses in heavily treated patients — three different cancers, one drug,” Dr. Suzanne L. Topalian, a melanoma specialist at Johns Hopkins University and lead investigator in the study, said in an interview. “This is a group of patients whose life expectancy was measured in a few months.”

The results are from