Researchers Study New Drug Combinations to Treat Childhood Leukemia

Scientists from the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit presented data today at the American Association for Cancer Research's 100th Annual Meeting 2009 that could potentially provide a brighter future for children who suffer from a more deadly form of acute leukemia.

Yubin Ge and Chengzhi Xie presented work at the conference revealing that a combination of FDA-approved drugs works synergistically to help children with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Ge is an assistant professor at the Karmanos Cancer Institute and at the Wayne State University School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics. Xie is a postdoctoral fellow with the Developmental Therapeutics Program at Karmanos Cancer Institute and Wayne State University School of Medicine. He also is a lecturer with the College of Life Science at Jilin University in Changchun, China.

AML, which originates in bone marrow, accounts for one-fourth of acute leukemia in children and is responsible for more than half of the leukemia deaths in this population. Approximately 600 children are diagnosed with AML each year, according to Ge and presently there is no effective drug treatment for those children should they relapse.

"Right now, we are at a bottleneck," Ge says. "We really want to find a better treatment for those relapsed cases."

Ge and fellow researchers considered drugs that are already FDA-approved to help fight AML. Resistance among patients to FDA-approved cytarabine is a major cause of treatment failure in AML. Scientists considered clofarabine, approved by the FDA in 2004, and paired it with valproic acid (VPA), typically used to treat epilepsy. They found the two drugs worked together to dramatically stimulate cell death.

"We considered an old drug for a new use," Ge says. "It looks like the increased drug activity or synergy is not due to the transport or delivery of clofarabine, but to enhanced cell death. We were so pleased with the results."

AML afflicts mostly adults -- about 10,000 new cases each year -- and strikes older children. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia usually affects children between the ages of 2 to 5 and is generally easier to treat. Treatment advancements for AML, however, have been less successful.

Ge says that researchers at Karmanos discovered the synergy between VPA and clofarabine only a few months ago, though departmental research has spanned some 15 years in the field of treating childhood leukemias. The current research represents a unique partnership between Ge, his Karmanos colleagues, and Dr. Jeffrey Taub, M.D., a pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital of Michigan, also in Detroit.

Ge expects that their findings will move into the clinical phase in the next few years. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Is now conducting its own clinical drug trial studying the combined effects of VPA and cytarabine to treat newly diagnosed AML patients 21 years old and younger.

"This is truly translational research," Ge says. "We really want to translate what we do in the laboratory to the clinic and hopefully save more lives."

Located in mid-town Detroit, Mich., the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute is one of 40 National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers in the United States. Caring for more than 6,000 new patients annually on a budget of $216 million, conducting more than 700 cancer-specific scientific investigation programs and clinical trials, the Karmanos Cancer Institute is among the nation's best cancer centers.

Watch more breaking news now on our video feed:





Bookmark http://universeeverything.blogspot.com/ and drop back in sometime.

Children's Ability to Describe Past Event Develops Over Time

In the first study to examine how children talk about the time-related features of their experiences--when, how often, in what order events occur--researchers have found intriguing changes as children grow older. The study’s findings may have implications for understanding these aspects of cognitive development as well as for questioning child witnesses and victims.
The study was conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the University of Cambridge. It appears in the July/August 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers analyzed forensic interviews of 250 four- to 10-year-old children who were alleged victims of sexual abuse, focusing on the kinds of references to time they made when describing these real-life events.

The children made increasing numbers of references to time-related characteristics of experienced events as they grew older, the researchers found. However, witnesses under 10 seldom mentioned specific times or dates, or what happened before reported events or actions. There were dramatic increases to such references at the age of 10.

References to the sequence of events or parts of events were most common, and their increase with age may be related to children’s developing capability to elaborate. Children were more likely to mention time spontaneously when asked to recall what happened than when they were asked specific recognition questions. This is pertinent because information retrieved from memory by recall is much more likely to be accurate than information retrieved in response to questions that ask children to select among options offered by the interviewer (such as “Did he …"” or “Was it x or y"”).

The children remembered the times of past events by making references to clock times, events that occurred in the same time frame, or the calendar, the researchers found. While older children were capable of using both short- and long-scale time patterns (such as time of day and day of the month), younger children mostly referred to short-scale time patterns (such as time of day), or they anchored the events to familiar activities (such as “when I returned from school”).

These findings have important implications for forensic interviews, where the ability to provide information about the number of incidents, the time of occurrences, and the sequence of events may allow suspected victims and witnesses to define specific episodes of allegedly experienced crimes. This ability increases children’s competence as witnesses and the prospect that their cases will be pursued in the criminal justice system. In addition, awareness that children acquire some temporal skills late in their development may discourage attempts to discredit child witnesses when they fail to provide the requested time-related information.

“By helping forensic interviewers to recognize children’s capabilities and limitations, our findings may also encourage interviewers to seek essential temporal information using age-appropriate techniques,” according to Yael Orbach, staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the study’s lead author.

Bookmark http://universeeverything.blogspot.com/ and drop back in sometime.

Turn off TV to Improve Children's Health

For parents, National TV-Turnoff Week (April 23-29) isn't just about spending less time in front of the tube. It's about making a change to improve their children's health for life. That's the view of RealAge.com, a personalized health Web site.

Too much TV--and other screen time with computers, video games and movies--has been linked to adult obesity, poor body image and high cholesterol. Scientific studies reveal that limiting screen time in childhood increases the probability that a child will grow into an adult with a healthy BMI.

Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD, RealAge.com parenting expert and author of Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children, cites further studies revealing that, "kids who eat in front of the TV tend to consume fewer fruits and veggies, more snack foods and soda and ultimately, more calories. What's more, the average child watches 20,000 TV commercials per year, most commonly for sugar-laden cereals, candies and sodas as well as fat-packed snack foods--inevitably influencing their choices."

Turning off the TV is optimal, but when that's just not doable, Trachtenberg's rule of thumb is that kids should not have more than two hours of "screen time" including TV, computer, video games and movies per day. She also advocates that kids need one hour of heart-pumping activity each dayto elevate their pulse (i.e., not simply standing in left field).

Trachtenberg offers some tips for regulating TV time:

• Plan ahead: Choose programs together with your child then turn off the TV before the next show begins. Similarly, choose one DVD or one video game with an agreed-upon time limit.
• Watch together: Help your child understand what he or she sees and hears, including ads and music lyrics.
• Hide the remote: It's harder to mindlessly channel surf without one.
• Minimize sets: Allow one or two TVs in the house, never in a child's room or near eating areas.

Bookmark http://universeeverything.blogspot.com/ and drop back in sometime.