According to a new study, treating HIV infections right away could lower patients’ chances of spreading the AIDS virus to sexual partners, US News and World Report reported.

This, in turn, could prevent millions of infections around the world.

The major international study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.  Its findings could encourage doctors and health care policymakers to administer medication sooner.

In a study of nearly 2000 couples with one infected partner, those who began taking oral antiretroviral drugs immediately upon diagnosis were 96 percent less likely to transmit the AIDS-causing virus to their uninfected partner than those who started therapy later.

The study began in 2005 and was expected to run 10 years through 2015, but the results were so clear that researchers stopped four years ahead of schedule.

Because HIV drugs are expensive—$12,000 or more a year—and can cause side effects like nausea and liver damage, patients often don’t start treatment until they’re far sicker.

“This breakthrough is a serious game changer and will drive the prevention revolution forward,” said Michel Sidibé, the executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, in a press release. “It makes HIV treatment a new priority prevention option.”

Click here to read more from US News and World Report.

These days, it seems like there’s an app for everything.

Take this one, for example: an iPhone application that can diagnose a stroke with the same accuracy as a medical computer workstation.

Neuroradiologists examined 120 brain scans and 70 head scans obtained through a national stroke database.  The scans were read by to neuroradiologists, one on a medical diagnostic workstation and one on an iPhone.

Based on the data from the study, they concluded that the iPhone application was between 94 percent and 100 percent accurate compared to a medical workstation for diagnosing acute stroke.

Doctors who used the application praised its advanced visualization capabilities and its ability to handle large amounts of data.

The application, scientists believe, will be particularly useful in rural medical centers because it allows for real-time access to specialists such as neurologists, regardless of where the physician or patient is located.

“Time is critical for diagnosing stroke and starting treatment,” Dr. Mayank Goyal, a study researcher from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, said in a press release. “There are definitely benefits for doctors to have the ability to analyze and diagnose these images from virtually anywhere.”

The application was developed by Dr. Ross Mitchell, PhD, and colleagues, then further enhanced and commercialized by Calgary Scientific.  It has been licensed to a number of medical imaging companies, and over 50,000 hospitals around the world will have access to it in the next 2 years.

The study was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

According to a preliminary study, a breath test that can sniff out cancer may be a realistic possibility, the BBC News reported.

Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology are working on a “nano artificial nose” device that is able to identify chemical signals of cancer in the breath of patients with lung or head and neck cancer.

The breath test uses a chemical method to spot markers of cancer present in breath.

Eighty volunteers were involved with the study.  Of these, 22 had various head and neck cancers, 24 had lung cancer, and 36 were healthy.

Scientists hope that this method will someday be used by doctors to give an instant diagnosis of head and neck cancers, which are often diagnosed too late and are therefore more difficult to treat successfully.

“There’s an urgent need to develop new ways to detect head-and-neck cancer because diagnosis of the disease is complicated, requiring specialist examinations,” said lead researcher, Professor Hossam Haick.

“We’ve shown that a simple ‘breath test’ can spot the patterns of molecules which are found in head-and-neck patients in a small, early study.  We now need to test these results in larger studies to find if this could lead to a potential screening method for the disease.”

Click here to read more from the BBC News.

The statistics for type 2 diabetes are staggering. There are about 20 million Americans with type 2 diabetes, a high sugar condition caused by poor nutrition, being obese, and a lack of exercise—factors that can all mostly be prevented.

About two-thirds of the people with type 2 diabetes have been diagnosed, which leaves about 6 million people walking around with undiagnosed diabetes. That’s a huge number of people who have a very serious disease and don’t know it. And that makes type 2 diabetes, like hypertension, another silent killer.

Unlike type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes is not a failure of the pancreas, but an inability to produce adequate amounts of insulin for a body that is out of control. On top of that, the insulin that is being produced is not acting the way it should, a situation called insulin resistance that occurs when the insulin can no longer stimulate the cells to process the sugar in the blood. This causes the sugar to build up in the blood, ultimately doing damage to the heart, eyes, and kidneys, and creating small-vessel disease.

Type 2 diabetes is now an epidemic, and if not corrected in this generation, it will probably be responsible for most of the strokes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease that we will encounter in our sixties and seventies. Type 2 diabetes is especially common among African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and certain Asian populations.

Most people develop type 2 diabetes because they are overweight. Basically the human body does two things: it takes in calories, and it burns calories. When you consistently bring in more calories than you burn off, all those extra calories turn into fat. That fat first gets stored in the abdomen and the intestines, and then it begins to infiltrate the muscle mass of our body. And what you end up with looks very much like a marbleized piece of sirloin that you see at the butcher shop. That marbleization is one of the hallmarks of people with type 2 diabetes.

If you keep piling on the extra calories, the pancreas, whose function begins to slow down anyway with age, is no longer able to meet the demand for large quantities of insulin needed to metabolize all that sugar in the blood.

If you were to lose weight, a significant amount of weight, I mean, your type 2 diabetes could disappear almost overnight. Yes, it’s that simple. I, myself, was a diabetic. I had very elevated sugars. I was overweight, excessively stressed, and exercise-phobic. I had a very clear, black-and-white case of type 2 diabetes. So I lost 50 pounds; I now exercise three times a week, and I’ve maintained that weight loss.

Today, I am no longer diabetic. If, like me, you have not had type 2 diabetes for very long, and if you can overcome it by simple weight loss, you will end up with no permanent damage to your organs.

If you have any choice in the matter, diabetes is a road you don’t want to go down. Just to give you an idea, here are a few numbers:

–Heart disease from diabetes accounts for 65 percent of deaths in diabetics.

–The risk of stroke is two to four times higher in diabetic patients than in nondiabetics.

–Seventy-three percent of adults with diabetes have hypertension.

–Diabetic retinopathy, which is damage to the vessels of the retina, creates about 24,000 cases of blindness in America every year.

–Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure.

–One-third of people with diabetes have gum disease.

–About 10 percent of pregnant women who are diabetic may experience a spontaneous abortion or have children with major birth defects, including spina bifida.

–About 82,000 people lost a foot or a leg last year because of diabetes.

The list of damage diabetes does to the body is virtually endless. If you are a diabetic, you must learn to prevent complications and stay ahead of the game. Being a diabetic is a full-time job, and there are several measures you will have to take to ensure you keep your health on track.

You will constantly have to monitor your cardiovascular risks by monitoring your blood pressure and keeping it under control.

You will have to watch your cholesterol levels.

You will have to visit your ophthalmologist regularly to ensure you don’t development retinopathy.

You will need very comprehensive dental and foot care.

But, most important, you will have to monitor and control your sugar levels. Several times a day you must take a glucose reading either by using Accu-Chek or doing a finger prick. You will look at your morning sugar and at your sugar two hours after you eat. For the most part you want your morning sugar to be less than 100 milligrams per deciliter, and you want your postdinner values, usually two hours after you eat, to be 120 and 130 milligrams per deciliter.

If your sugar is high, you will need either to inject yourself with insulin or to take an oral hypoglycemic. This kind of supply-and-demand treatment model may soon give way to more convenient methods, made possible by new research into diabetes. Devices are now being developed in which a sensor that continuously monitors your sugar levels triggers a tiny pump when your blood sugar is elevated to release small doses of insulin.

Other new research is focusing on the possibility of transplanting the pancreatic cells, called isolet cells, into those who need them, in the hope of restimulating insulin production inside their body and minimizing the amount of insulin that needs to be injected. The hope is that this research will one day lead to a cure, whereby insulin will once again be naturally produced in the body. But as of right now, diabetes is not cured; it is treated.

Diabetes can be managed. Ultimately, if you’re talking about juvenile diabetes and you start very early in the game by getting diagnosed and getting effective treatment, you can probably expect a normal life expectancy, but it’s a very dedicated type of life.

If you are now in your forties and you develop type 2 diabetes, and you continue for a decade or more without any checks and balances, it’s very unlikely that you’ll make it into your late seventies or eighties. There’s just not enough time in the pot. In other words, if you are 40 years old, 50 or more pounds overweight, with high blood sugar levels and high cholesterol, and you don’t exercise and you don’t watch what you eat, you will without doubt see the effects 10 to 15 years from now.

By the time you’re in your sixties, you will most likely have hypertension, stroke, and cardiovascular disease. Don’t go there.

Sweet Questions

“I’m a fifty-five-year-old woman with two married daughters. We all have a sweet tooth in our family, and I’m worried that we might all become diabetic. Can people who eat a lot of sweets become diabetic?”

No. If you exercise and for the most part follow a balanced diet, you can like sweets and not become diabetic.

“Can people with diabetes eat sweets?”

If it’s part of a healthy lifestyle involving a good diet and exercise, a diabetic can eat sweets.

“Can you catch diabetes from someone else?”

No, though some people think they can. Diabetes is probably largely a matter of genetics for Type 1 and lifestyle factors for Type 2.

“Are people with diabetes more likely to get colds or other illnesses?”

No. Your immune system is not compromised when you have diabetes. However, people with diabetes should get regular flu shots because any infection can interfere with blood-sugar management.