(Press-News.org) DALLAS – May 12, 2011 – A cancer drug already used to treat adults and school-age children with sickle cell anemia is safe and significantly reduces pain and other complications of the disease in children as young as 9 months, according to a national study involving a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher.
Pediatric researchers at UT Southwestern and 13 other academic medical centers say hydroxyurea should be offered to all young children with sickle cell anemia, regardless of disease severity and clinical symptoms. The findings of the Pediatric Hydroxyurea in Sickle Cell Anemia, or BABY HUG, trial appear online and in the May 14 edition of the Lancet.
"We've offered hydroxyurea at Children's since 1992 to severely involved patients with frequent or severe complication down to age 3. On the basis of the BABY HUG study's findings, our sickle cell team has made a conscious decision to now offer hydroxyurea to all sickle cell anemia patients in the first year of life," said study co-author Dr. Zora Rogers, professor of pediatrics at UT Southwestern and clinical director of the general hematology and bone marrow failure program at Children's Medical Center Dallas.
The findings, Dr. Rogers said, likely will change how all medical professionals treat very young children with sickle cell anemia.
"This medication reduces painful events, the major crisis patients fear about sickle cell disease, as well as the problems doctors fear, which include chest syndrome – a unique complication of pulmonary infarction and infection that only occurs in sickle cell disease – hospitalization and transfusions," she said. "The study also showed a trend of reducing organ damage in the spleen, but the study sample was too small to prove protection."
Sickle cell anemia is an inherited genetic blood disorder in which the bone marrow produces mutant, inflexible, sickle-shaped red blood cells. These cells may aggregate and block small blood vessels within the body, causing pain, organ damage, stroke and premature death. Approximately 100,000 Americans suffer from the disease.
Babies born with sickle cell disease are protected for about six months by fetal hemoglobin. As fetal hemoglobin levels drop, however, the disease starts its damaging effects. Although hydroxyurea is effective at raising fetal hemoglobin and thus reducing painful events and other crises in adults and older children, researchers were uncertain until now whether the drug could also help babies.
In BABY HUG, researchers wanted to determine whether hydroxyurea therapy would prevent early organ damage in very young children with sickle cell anemia.
From October 2003 to September 2007, researchers enrolled 193 children between the ages of 9 and 19 months and randomly assigned each to receive hydroxyurea or the placebo for two years. A total of 167 (including 12 at Children's) completed the trial – the first randomized double-blind trial to examine the drug's effect in very young children with sickle cell anemia.
"We found a decrease in chest syndrome and hospitalization among trial participants who received hydroxyurea," said Dr. Rogers, adding that the findings represent the culmination of 15 years of work at UT Southwestern and Children's. "We used to offer hydroxyurea as secondary prevention, but with these findings, it could become the primary preventive measure."
She stressed that the drug is only effective as a preventive measure. "This is not a therapy when a crisis occurs," Dr. Rogers said. "Patients may still experience painful crises, but the events are much less frequent and severe."
The next step, Dr. Rogers said, is to make available a standardized liquid form of the drug. The results of BABY HUG may be used to support a Food and Drug Administration application of such a new preparation.
###
In addition to UT Southwestern's participation, researchers from St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital; SUNY Downstate Medical Center; University of Mississippi Medical Center; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Children's National Medical Center; Howard University College of Medicine; Duke University Medical Center; Medical University of South Carolina; University of Miami; Emory University School of Medicine; Children's Hospital of Michigan; University of Alabama at Birmingham; Medical College of Georgia; the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; and the Clinical Trials & Surveys Consortium contributed to the study.
The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development supported the study.
Visit http://www.utsouthwestern.org/pediatrics to learn more about UT Southwestern's clinical services in pediatrics.
This news release is available on our World Wide Web home page at
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/home/news/index.html
To automatically receive news releases from UT Southwestern via email,
subscribe at www.utsouthwestern.edu/receivenews
Existing drug treatment reduces pain in young sickle cell anemia patients
2011-05-13
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Guoman Hotels' The Royal Horseguards Unveils The Equus Bar
2011-05-13
Guoman Hotels' flagship five star hotel, The Royal Horseguards, has opened the doors to The Equus Bar, London's newest destination bar created specifically with the modern gent in mind.
The transformed stylish bar and lounge area of the AA London Hotel of the Year has a strong gentlemen's club feel, styled with crushed velvet reds, chain mail gold and period oil paintings to signify the hotel's historic past. Fabrics in leather, chenille and rich weaves give it a luxurious touch whilst illuminated carved glass panels display cognacs and fine malts.
The bar menu - ...
Latitude and rain dictated where species lived
2011-05-13
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Aggregating nearly the entire landmass of Earth, Pangaea was a continent the likes our planet has not seen for the last 200 million years. Its size meant there was a lot of space for animals to roam, for there were few geographical barriers, such as mountains or ice caps, to contain them.
Yet, strangely, animals confined themselves. Studying a transect of Pangaea stretching from about three degrees south to 26 degrees north (a long swath in the center of the continent covering tropical and semiarid temperate zones), a team of scientists ...
Was Millionaire Entrepreneur Keith Middlebrook Telling the Truth About Partying With Lindsay Lohan?
2011-05-13
From private dinners with Paris Hilton at the Sundance Film Festival to the Men's Luxury Toy Expo, to the Muhammed Ali "Night of Champions" charity dinner, millionaire entrepreneur Keith Middlebrook has a long standing reputation for funding charity events, funding promotions, and for funding just plain fun. This includes several weekends of partying at the Chateau Marmont Hotel with Lindsay Lohan.
Keith Middlebrook was recently featured on the cover of Star magazine when someone from inside the Chateau Marmont sold his American Express credit card receipts ...
African Americans and the general public support banning menthol in cigarettes
2011-05-13
According to a new study released online today, a majority of Americans, including most African Americans, stand together in support of banning menthol in cigarettes just as other cigarette flavorings have now been banned by the FDA. According to established reports, 83 percent of African American smokers and 24 percent of white smokers smoke menthol cigarettes.
This new study was done by the Center for Child and Adolescent Health Policy at MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC), the American Academy of Pediatrics' Julius B. Richmond Center of Excellence, and the ...
Mixing fluids efficiently in confined spaces: Let the fingers do the working
2011-05-13
Getting two fluids to mix in small or confined spaces is a big problem in many industries where, for instance, the introduction of one fluid can help extract another — like water pumped underground can release oil trapped in porous rock — or where the mixing of liquids is the essential point of the process. A key example of the latter is microfluidics technology, which allows for the controlled manipulation of fluids in miniscule channels often only a few hundred nanometers wide.
Microfluidic devices were first introduced in the 1980s and for many years were best known ...
NREL's multi-junction solar cells teach scientists how to turn plants into powerhouses
2011-05-13
Plants can overcome their evolutionary legacies to become much better at using biological photosynthesis to produce energy, the kind of energy that can power vehicles in the near future, an all-star collection of biologists, physicists, photochemists, and solar scientists has found.
A U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) workshop that drew a prestigious collection of 18 scientists to compare the efficiency of plants and photovoltaic solar cells led to an important and provocative scholarly article in today's issue of the journal Science. Two of the scientists are from DOE's ...
Risking one's neck for better grog: Mutinies reveal tipping points for collective unrest
2011-05-13
Films depicting the 1787 mutiny aboard the British ship HMS Bounty show sailors living cheek by jowl, being forced to dance, enduring storm-ridden Cape of Good Hope crossings to satisfy the ship captain's ego and being flogged for trivial reasons.
We may not think that these harsh conditions have much relevance today. But mutinies continue to occur, especially in the armed forces of developing nations. And mutinies have similarities to other types of rebellions, including worker strikes, riots, prison rebellions and political uprisings.
University of Washington sociologists ...
Solar cells more efficient than photosynthesis -- for now
2011-05-13
EAST LANSING, Mich. — In a head-to-head battle of harvesting the sun's energy, solar cells beat plants, according to a new paper in Science. But scientists think they can even up the playing field, says researcher David Kramer at Michigan State University.
Plants are less efficient at capturing the energy in sunlight than solar cells mostly because they have too much evolutionary baggage. Plants have to power a living thing, whereas solar cells only have to send electricity down a wire. This is a big difference because if photosynthesis makes a mistake, it makes toxic ...
Diagnosing 'seizures' in the US economy
2011-05-13
Since 2008, the U.S. economy has been "seizing" uncontrollably. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher says that a comparison of the multifaceted economic downturn with the uncontrolled spasms of an epileptic is not inappropriate — and may say something about the origins of the disaster.
In a recent article published in the journal PLoS ONE, Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy, his doctoral student Dror Y. Kenett and economist Dr. Gitit Gur-Gershgorn examined the dynamics of the S&P 500 over the last decade, employing methods originally ...
Wildlife Conservation Society recommends health measures for Argentina's caiman ranches
2011-05-13
The Wildlife Conservation Society and other organizations released a new study recommending a disease screening program for farm-raised caiman in ranching facilities in Argentina to ensure the safety of people and wildlife alike.
The recommendations focus on two crocodilian species, the yacare caiman and broad-snouted caiman, both of which are reared in caiman ranches for sustainable harvest. The research team sought to assess the presence of potentially harmful bacteria in captive-raised caiman at a typical ranching facility in Argentina's Chaco region, where several ...