Word: anemia
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OCCASIONALLY, GREATNESS EMERGES FROM THE commonplace. Scientists have found that an ordinary food additive may help people who suffer from sickle-cell anemia, the inherited illness that afflicts up to 100,000 black Americans. A preliminary study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that butyrate, a widely used flavor enhancer, can overcome the basic cause of the disease. A genetic flaw leads the body to make abnormal hemoglobin, the blood protein that carries essential oxygen...
...patients with either sickle-cell anemia or thalassemia, a related blood disorder, showed dramatic improvement after receiving butyrate injections for two to three weeks. Apparently the chemical reactivates a gene that produces a form of hemoglobin used by the baby in the womb but shuts down soon after birth. Turned on again, the gene directs the manufacture of enough fetal hemoglobin to compensate for the defective adult variety...
Scientists have identified about 5,000 inherited diseases that could, in theory, be spotted in young embryos, including Huntington's disease and sickle-cell anemia. But gene screening to catch these disorders is not likely to be widely available anytime soon -- at least in the U.S. For one thing, it requires couples to go through in vitro fertilization, a costly ($5,000 to $13,000) procedure with a success rate hovering around 10%. The gene-screening test adds an additional $2,000 for each in vitro cycle, a bill the U.S. insurance industry has already indicated it has little interest...
...most effective treatments for leprosy. And last week a research team from Johns Hopkins reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the drug can also improve the survival rate of patients who get bone-marrow transplants, which are used to treat potentially fatal disorders including aplastic anemia and some blood cancers...
...attitudes have been shifting over the past few decades. Despite all the sneering, Pauling's speculations did get more scientists thinking about vitamins' impressive powers. As a class of compounds, they are known to produce hugely dramatic effects when missing from the diet: scurvy, pernicious anemia, rickets. What other exciting properties might they -- or related compounds -- have...