Ecstasy 'could be used in cancer treatment'

Researchers from Birmingham University claimed the designer drug, also known as MDMA, could be used to treat leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma after making it 100 times more effective at suppressing growth.

Ecstasy was already known to be effective against more than half of white blood cell cancers, but previously the large dose required to treat a tumour would also have killed the patient.

In a study published in the Investigational New Drugs journal, the scientists said the new drug could be used by doctors to treat cancer if it can be produced in a safe form.

Lead author Professor John Gordon said: "This is an exciting next step towards using a modified form of MDMA to help people suffering from blood cancer.

"While we would not wish to give people false hope, the results of this research hold the potential for improvement in treatments in years to come."

Dr Julie Sharp of Cancer Research UK said: "As MDMA is a dangerous drug, the researchers need also to find out if they can create safe versions to treat people with the disease.

"Although survival rates for leukaemia have improved over the past thirty years new approaches to treatment are still needed to tackle this disease even more effectively."

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Tropical plants could be used to fight cancer

The extracts, blends of chemicals and other ingredients found inside several plants from tropical regions, could form the base ingredients of new medicines to combat the disease, experts said.

Prof Ian Cree of the University of Portsmouth, who led the research, said: "This is a first – no one has managed to use cells obtained directly from cancers to screen an entire library of plant extracts and we are very excited by the results obtained.

"The key now will be to obtain further funding to produce drugs from those samples showing that they can kill cancer cells.

"It should be stressed that drug development is a very lengthy process and that these results, though exciting, are a long way from being used in patients."

Prof Cree is now working with University of Strathclyde researchers to develop a programme aimed at identifying other plant extracts with cancer-fighting properties.

Ovarian cancer, is the fifth most common cancer in women and one of the most deadly, killing more than 4,000 women a year in Britain.

Alan Harvey, Professor of Pharmacology at Strathclyde's Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, said: "Our collection of natural plant samples gives us a broad range of possibilities for treatment and we have had good results from many plants.

"A great many samples have been studied in our collaboration with Portsmouth and a lot of activity has been detected that wouldn't have been picked up in conventional tests.

"We are hoping that more tests will bring new treatments a step closer."

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Brain scans could detect Alzheimer's before symptoms develop

The scanner is used to monitor the build up of the protein Amyloid-beta which is known to be connected to dementia and cognitive decline Photo: ALAMY

A study of 311 people in their 70s and 80s who had shown no signs of memory loss or thought impairment found that a third had high levels of plaques in their brains which have been heavily linked to the disease.

Those patients with high levels of the proteins, known as amyloid-beta deposits, also tended to have unusually elevated levels of chemicals in the brain which are associated with mental decline.

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, America, said the patients needed to be assessed over several years to find out whether the hi-tech imaging technique, called proton MR spectroscopy, had accurately detected early signs of Alzheimer's.

Lead researcher Dr Kejal Kantarci said: "This relationship between amyloid-beta deposits and these metabolic changes in the brain are evidence that some of these people may be in the earliest stages of the disease."

In an editorial accompanying the study in the Neurology journal Dr Jonathan Schott, from the Dementia Research Centre, University College London, said: "There is increasing evidence that Alzheimer's disease is associated with changes in the brain that start many years before symptoms develop.

"If we could identify people in whom the disease process has started but symptoms have not yet developed, we would have a potential window of opportunity for new treatments – as and when they become available – to prevent or delay the start of memory loss and cognitive decline."

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Research shows thousands of patients could be taking statins needlessly

Scientists said they have found a much better way to work out which people are in danger of developing heart problems.

Half of the middle-aged adults they studied were found to have no coronary artery calcium, and only a handful went on to suffer a heart attack or a stroke.

They said the findings have “important public health implications” and could mean significant cost savings if cholesterol-lowering drugs are prescribed only for those who would genuinely benefit.

But other experts point out that the test for coronary artery calcium is an expensive scan that involves exposing the patient to radiation, so is unlikely to be used widely. In addition, they say statins do have long-term benefits, such as slowing hardening of the arteries, so doctors are unlikely to take patients off them.

However the paper, published in The Lancet today, is the latest in a series suggesting too many people are taking the medicine once seen as a wonder drug. Up to 7million middle-aged and older people in England are thought to take statins, at a cost of ?500million a year to the NHS. There are growing fears many are the “worried well” at low risk of heart problems, and other studies have linked statins to liver or kidney problems.

In the latest paper, Dr Michael Blaha at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and colleagues studied 2,083 people with an average age of 67 who had low cholesterol, were not on statins and did not have diabetes. Of those, 46 per cent had high levels of high-sensitivity protein, which a previous study known as Jupiter had suggested would make them suitable for statin therapy.

The researchers used cardiac scans to work out the levels of calcium in the arteries of the patients, and followed up their progress about six years later. They found 47 per cent of the patients had low levels of arterial calcium, and hardly any had suffered heart complications.

Only six per cent of the coronary heart disease events (interruption of the blood supply, leading to heart attacks) and 17 per cent of the cardiovascular disease events (heart attacks or stroke) were in those with no signs of calcium in their arteries. The researchers concluded just one person in every 549 with a low calcium score would be stopped from having a heart attack by taking statins for five years. The study suggests statins may be best prescribed just for those with higher levels of calcium in their arteries.

The experts said their findings show doctors should try to measure atherosclerosis – thickening of the artery walls – by calculating calcium levels rather than just using blood tests and traditional risk factors such as family history or obesity. They added this may “represent a more appropriate allocation of resources, and reduce overall health-care cost”.

Prof Peter Weissberg, the medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “The greatest challenge for preventive medicine is identifying people who are at highest risk of heart disease and who should be given drugs, particularly statins, to reduce that risk.

“The study shows coronary artery calcium is better than protein for identifying people at highest risk of a heart attack. But the former is expensive and involves radiation so is unlikely to be offered as a screening test for everyone.”

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