New research from the University of California Davis has identified two biologically different subtypes of autism.

The findings another important step forward in understanding the causes of autism and developing effective treatments – and maybe even a cure.

The Autism Phenome Project at UC Davis’s MIND Institute has been ongoing since 2006, studying the brain growth, environmental exposure and genetic make-up of 350 children.

The two autism strains identified by the project target different systems of the body. One group of children, all boys, had enlarged brains, and most regressed into autism within 18 months, while another group all appeared to have improperly functioning immune systems that contributed to their autism.

The research complements earlier findings that have linked some cases of autism with genetic alterations that affect brain development in children.

Again, the significance of this study is that it could help specifically tailor treatments for different children and therefore improve the ability of early intervention in changing some of the behavioral and social patterns affected by autism.

For example, if a child has the autism strain associated with a dysfunctional immune system, it would likely do little good to prescribe a treatment that targets the synaptic functioning in the brain.

Lead researcher David Amaral, a UC Davis psychiatry professor, made a comparison between treating autism and treating cancer when he said, “If we were trying to cure all cancer at the same time, it would be hopeless. Well, the same is true for autism. My guess is that there just isn’t going to be a single diagnostic marker for autism – there’s going to be a whole panel.”

I hope these scientists will continue with their groundbreaking work in identifying the different strains of autism, so we can move forward in treating the condition and finding a cure.

Forgiveness is a virtue…and maybe even a health tactic? It appears so, because too much bitterness can actually make a person ill, according to a new study.

French researchers examined the relationship between failure, bitterness and quality of life. They found that persistent bitterness may actually play a part in biological deregulation, affecting g metabolism, immune response and organ function.

“Persistent bitterness may result in global feelings of anger and hostility that, when strong enough, could affect a person’s physical health,” said Carsten Wrosch, a professor in the Concordia University Department of Psychology.

Bitterness is defined as laying blame for failure on external causes, unlike regret, which is essentially self-blame.

When harbored for a long time, according to Wrosch, it can forecast patterns of physiological impairment.

Some psychologists, beginning with Michael Linden in 2003, propose that extreme, persistent bitterness be classified as a medical disorder called post-traumatic embitterment disorder (PTED). Linden estimated that approximately one to two percent of the population suffers from it and that classification could encourage them to seek therapeutic help.

To help let go of bitterness, the researchers recommend that people who experience failure find other ways to achieve their goals. If this is not possible, it is important to let go of the fruitless effort and engage in something that may be different but equally meaningful.

This process, called disengaging and reengaging, can be essential in avoiding bitter emotions.

“Any effective therapeutic intervention,” the researchers said, “hinges on the affected individual finding ways to self-regulate.”

In some cases, overcoming bitterness requires more than self-regulation. When bitterness arises from blaming other people, then recovery may involve others.

“In order to deal with bitter emotions there may need to be something else required to enable a person to overcome the negative emotion — that something is forgiveness,” said Wrosch.

Heart transplant patients appear to have an increased risk of serious skin cancers, including cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma, according to a new study.

Scientists say this may be because when people receive heart transplants, they require immune medications to keep the body from rejecting the transplant.  The changes to the immune system as a result of the medication may also make them more susceptible to developing cancers.

Northwestern University researchers studied 10 years of data on more than 6000 heart transplant patients at 32 U.S. transplant centers.  They found that heart transplant patients were significantly more likely to get skin cancers than other patients.

The risk increased post-transplant from 4- to 30-fold.

“Improved patient education and appropriately increased screening and detection of skin cancers in heart transplant patients may potentially reduce their risk of serious morbidity and mortality,” advised lead researcher Murad Alam, MD, MSCI, of Northwestern University.

The study was published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

Scientists have successfully developed a fast and accurate test to distinguish between bacterial and viral infections.

As anybody who frequently finds themselves in the doctor’s office knows, these two types of infections tend to have similar symptoms but vastly different treatments.

The main difference between them is that bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics, while viruses, such as influenza and the common cold, cannot.

Determining the source of infection as soon as possible is crucial in order to begin the right treatment.  If left untreated for too long, bacterial infections can get worse.

The current tests to identify infections are typically time-consuming and not always accurate.  Researchers sought to develop a new test that would enable doctors to quickly make the right diagnosis.

In studying bacterial and viral infections, the researchers discovered the immune systems of patients reacted differently according to which type of infection they had and developed a test based on those differences.

“The method is time-saving, easy to perform and can be commercially available, thus, having predictive diagnostic value and could be implemented in various medical institutions as an adjunct to clinical decision making,” the researchers said in a press release.

After further trials, the researchers hope the test will be widely available to doctors and patients in need of it.

The study was published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

Nobody wakes up one morning and suddenly decides to be a smoker. Smoking is a habit picked up from others who smoke. It’s a social disease. Individuals do it in imitation of somebody they respect who smokes, like parents or teachers, or they do it because their high school or college friends smoke and they want to fit in.

But once you put a cigarette in your mouth, you are exposed (not to mention that you are exposing everyone around you, as well) to the effects of nicotine, which is one of the most highly addictive drugs available today. And the more you smoke, the greater is your urge to smoke, and the more addicted you become.

The smoking habit will wreak havoc throughout the decades of your life because once you start to smoke, its deleterious effects spiral out of control, much like credit card debt. Smoking is associated not only with all kinds of cancer, from oral cancer to cervical cancer, but also with heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States today for both men and women. Since smoking also affects the respiratory system, chronic smokers have a higher incidence of bronchitis (an inflammation of the lining of the tubes that connect the windpipe to the lungs) and emphysema (a chronic lung disease usually caused by exposure to toxic chemicals or tobacco smoke) than those who don’t smoke.

And smoking interferes with the immune system as well; that is, smokers are more prone to getting chronic diseases, flu, and viral illnesses than are nonsmokers.

Then there are the secondary effects that smoking has on others. Pregnant women who smoke have smaller-sized babies and have higher rates of premature babies. And children who are exposed to secondhand smoke have higher levels of asthma.

If you are a smoker, there may be no better thing you can do for your health than to quit smoking, and the best time to quit is as a young adult. You may have started smoking in high school or college, but now you are on your own, away from the peer pressures of your schoolmates and the influence of your parents (who may be smokers themselves), and making a new life for yourself. This is the easiest time to kick the habit.

Of course, quitting is easier said than done. As Mark Twain remarked: “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

The reason it’s so difficult to quit is that it’s really a dual challenge, and you are unlikely to succeed in your quest unless you meet both challenges head-on.

The first challenge involves breaking the physical dependency that smoking causes. An absence of nicotine leads to withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, nervousness, and an overwhelming desire for more nicotine. Very few people can go cold turkey and never pick up another cigarette again. Most people need to be gradually desensitized of their nicotine addiction.

One way to do that is with Nicorette gum or the nicotine patch. These products allow you to alter, over a course of weeks, the amount of nicotine that you ingest, until your body gets used to having no nicotine at all. Acupuncture and hypnosis have also helped people reduce or eliminate the withdrawal symptoms–irritability, depression, and lack of energy–that come from kicking the nicotine habit.

The second challenge for the smoker seeking to quit involves breaking the mental habit that smoking reinforces. The best way to do that is through the same system that got you smoking in the first place, through a peer support system. Just as in overcoming any addiction, breaking the smoking habit requires a support group, which can consist of friends, family, and/or coworkers. But you have to have somebody who is willing to be there for you, to give you the support you need when you are most likely to want to pick up another cigarette.

Quitting should be celebrated at every little step of the way because you’ll be seeing the benefits of your efforts in the minutes, days, weeks months, and years after you quit:

–Twenty minutes after you smoke your last cigarette, your heart rate drops.

–Twelve hours later, the carbon monoxide level in your bloodstream returns to normal.

–Two to three weeks after quitting, your circulation improves, and your lungs begin to function normally.

–One year after you quit, the excess risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker.

–In five years’ time, your risk of stroke is reduced to that of a nonsmoker.

–In ten years’ time, your risk of dying of lung cancer is about half that of a smoker.

–And in 15 years, your risk of coronary heart disease is like that of someone who never smoked.

The long and short of it is, the sooner you quit, the quicker you’ll regain your health.

I think Americans generally pay more attention to the gasoline they put in their cars than to the food they put in their mouths. We are a society of excess, and one of our more impressive excesses is the way in which we eat and what we choose to put in our mouths.

We are the leading country in the world in almost everything, yet our mortality rates, our cancer rates, and our neonatal death rates don’t rank among the best in the world. We lead in research, we lead in academic training, we lead in freedom of information, yet we don’t lead in taking care of our health.

We have all the knowledge in the world about everything in life, but that has made no impact on our health. Why? I think nutrition is part of the reason, and I think I know why.

No one is ever taught about nutrition. We certainly don’t teach the subject in grammar school, and it’s rarely taught in high school. Some colleges may offer it as an elective. But our parents certainly don’t talk to us about carbohydrates and proteins the way they do about the birds and the bees. If you combine this lack of knowledge with our appetite for diversity, taste, and presentation, what you have is a lot of people who know nothing about the food on their plate.

It’s never too late to learn about nutrition. The fundamental issue with nutrition is learning how to balance your caloric intake with the number of calories you burn. Everything we eat has a caloric value. If you take in more nutrients that contain a lot of calories and you don’t burn them up, the excess caloric energy is going to be stored as fat, and you’re going to gain weight. That weight and that fat will then interfere with all the normal functions of your body.

On the other hand, if you consume too few calories, say fewer than 1,200 calories a day, then your body doesn’t have sufficient energy to maintain adequate functioning. The caloric intake for a normal adult should range between 1,500 and 2,000 calories a day.

The body requires certain nutrients in order to work properly. Nutrients are the chemicals our body gets from food. These nutrients are used to build muscles, improve cell-to-cell transmission, and manufacture hormones. In describing nutrients, the word “essential” means that the body must consume them; it cannot produce them on its own. The nutrients we need include:

Essential amino acids.
The body requires amino acids to produce new body proteins and replace damaged proteins to build and maintain the body.

Vitamins and minerals.
These are recognized as essential nutrients that are specifically linked to the functionality of cells. If we’re deficient in vitamins and minerals, we develop a weak immune system, cell metabolism disorders, premature aging, scurvy, goiters, and bone loss.

Fatty acids.
Also essential, fatty acids are crucial for maintaining the body’s normal health. They are responsible for the normal formation of hormones and creation of some of the biological pathways responsible for dealing with inflammation and cell repair.

Sugars.
They are essential because they provide the fuel our cells need to function adequately, which allows the other nutrients to be utilized properly. If cells don’t have the sugar molecule necessary to generate the energy required for repairing, functioning, transmitting, and utilizing nutrients, then cellular damage and disease will result.

Each nutrient carries out one or more unique tasks your body needs to function. And because you need many nutrients to stay healthy—protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals—you have to eat a wide variety of foods to get them all.

It’s when we don’t recognize the necessity of all those elements that we begin getting into trouble. It’s like filling your gas tank with gasoline and forgetting to change the oil every 3,500 miles, or forgetting to put water in the radiator. The car needs the gasoline, the oil and the water, all in the proper proportions, in order to function properly. The same is true of the human body.

The problem, as I’ve mentioned before, is that about one-third of all American meals are prepared foods. And the problem with prepared foods is that their contents are not nutritionally balanced.

Our lack of knowledge of nutrition, combined with our obsession with processed foods, is really damaging our health. So we have to get back to fundamentals, a good example of which is the diet of people who live in the Mediterranean. Their diet is well balanced with vegetables and fruit, fish and lean meat, and the good unsaturated fats like olive oil.

Today, many people think that if they stick to low-fat or nonfat foods, they won’t gain weight. That’s a myth, because gaining weight has to do with calorie intake. If you take a salad and you add cheese and eggs and everything else in the book, even if you select low-fat ingredients, you’re still consuming a tremendous load of calories. And size matters, too; the size of your portions does make a difference in terms of the total amount of calories consumed. It’s just a plain mathematical calculation.

There are no magical foods that are going to help you burn calories or increase your cell metabolism either. There is no such a thing as a food that is more active in the body than others. People think that eating a grapefruit each day or having cabbage soup for lunch is going to burn off their fat. But that’s a myth. There is only one way to burn off those extra calories: exercise, any exercise at all.

How to Eat
It’s not just what or how much we are eating that’s the problem these days, it’s the way most of us eat. Many people skip breakfast, gulp down a quick lunch at noon, and then consume a large meal at seven o’clock at night.

Trouble is, they don’t need all that fuel at night. They need a little bit throughout the day when they are active—either moving, thinking, or both.

So what happens in the middle of the day if this is the way we eat? Without a supply of energy, our metabolism gets altered. Our blood sugar level is erratic. Our hormones go haywire trying to figure out where to obtain the fuel we need. People are always telling me, “I don’t eat, so how come I’m not losing weight?”

That’s the answer. Their metabolism is out of whack, and they need to get it back in order.

Supplements
If you eat a balanced diet with fruits, vegetables, grains, fish, and all the rest, you don’t need to take supplements. But how many of us really eat such a balanced diet?

And even if we do, because we are all predisposed for certain diseases and the aging processes, being proactive and adding certain supplements to our diet may be a good idea. But before popping supplements like candies from a bag of M&M’s, check with your doctor about what’s best for you. Some supplements can be toxic. Others may cause allergies or cross reactions with medications you may be taking. But there is no doubt that certain supplements can have specific health benefits and can lower the cost of health care at the same time.

An Important Word About Supplements
Many supplements contain active ingredients that can have strong effects on your body, and some supplements can interfere with prescription medicines. Always consult with your doctor or pharmacist before taking supplements.

I am particularly bullish on five supplements that have been well studied and are proven to support optimal health.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids
I love the omega-3 fatty acids. They are an important contributor to the improvement of human health. Some studies have shown that omega 3s are good for the prevention of heart disease, as well as for depression, rheumatoid arthritis, and asthma. You can get omega 3s by eating leafy greens and fish or by taking a fish oil tablet. Omega 3s assist with fat metabolism and help maintain a balance of good and bad cholesterol.

Calcium
Calcium is another very good supplement, specifically calcium with vitamin D. Calcium intake is an important factor in bone health and may play a role in the prevention of colon cancer, though it doesn’t appear to be the silver bullet that everyone hoped it would be. Research has shown that calcium supplements can significantly lower the occurrence of hip fractures among those aged 65 and older.

Folic Acid
Folic acid and folate are forms of a water-soluble vitamin B that occur naturally in leafy vegetables such as spinach and turnip greens, dry beans and peas, fortified cereal products, and some other fruits and vegetables. Folic acid supplements have been a lifesaver in the prevention of neural tube defects in children. They are also very beneficial for cell function and the prevention of heart disease.

Glucosamine
I also like glucosamine. It has good anti-inflammatory effects, especially for individuals with arthritis. It doesn’t prevent arthritis, and it doesn’t repair or rejuvenate cartilage, but I think it’s a very good supplement because it helps promote joint function and relieves the symptoms of inflammation and pain.

Other supplements that are thought to make a positive contribution to health include saw palmetto, the fruit of the fan palm, for men. Native Americans consumed it as food and used it to treat urinary and genital problems. Some research has shown that it could be effective for the treatment of an enlarged prostate in men. It increases urinary flow and has no known safety hazards.