New Hampshire Health News Digest

New Model Of Cancer Development: Low Vitamin D Levels May Have Role : . "In studying the preventive effects of vitamin D, researchers at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, have proposed a new model of cancer development that hinges on a loss of cancer cells' ability to stick together. The model, dubbed DINOMIT, differs substantially from the current model of cancer development, which suggests genetic mutations as the earliest driving forces behind cancer." "The first event in cancer is loss of communication among cells due to, among other things, low vitamin D and calcium levels," said epidemiologist Cedric Garland, DrPH, professor of family and preventive medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, who led the work. "In this new model, we propose that this loss may play a key role in cancer by disrupting the communication between cells that is essential to healthy cell turnover, allowing more aggressive cancer cells t...

Study demonstrates that key role insulin plays in obesity | Dr Briffa's Blog : The idea that obesity is a disorder of fatty accumulation (and not just down to the calorie principle) is explored in Gary Taubes’ book The Diet Delusion (titled Good Calories, Bad Calories in the USA). In this book, Taubes’ exposes the fallaciousness of the calorie principle, and instead goes after what might cause fatty accumulation in the body. Now, fat is stored in fat cells as substances called triglycerides. Triglyceride is made from substances known as free fatty acids. It takes 3 fatty acids and one molecule of a substance known as glycerol to make triglyceride. The free fatty acids are absorbed from the bloodstream into the fat cells. They can flow out again too. What ‘fixes’ them in the fat cells is their conversion to triglycerides. The conversion of free fatty acids to triglyceride is dependent on the supply of a substance called alpha glycerol phosphate. This is produced when glucose is meta...

Dopamine and Insulin Resistance - Full Text View - ClinicalTrials.gov : "Obese individuals have fewer striatal dopamine type 2 receptors (DRD2) than normal weight individuals. Lower DRD2 levels are associated with addiction and a decreased sense of pleasure. Obesity is also associated with insulin resistance (poor insulin action); however approximately 10% of obese adults are metabolically healthy and do not have insulin resistance. We propose that insulin resistance contributes to low dopamine type 2 receptors and, using PET imaging, aim to determine if DRD2 binding in the brain and insulin resistance correlate."