The overlooked Diagnosis of Celiac Disease

This week in class we have been learning about the digestive system and what happens to it as we age and some of the conditions that can occur. One of the interesting articles that I found was about Celiac Disease and how difficult it can be to diagnose and how hard and long of process it can be to diagnose. Celiac disease is not only a disease that affects the elderly but can affect anyone at any age, and is a digestive disorder when damage is caused to the small intestine when gluten, which is a protein that is found in wheat is eaten. For people who have this disease they need to follow a strict gluten free diet, to avoid getting any serious heath complications or other diseases or disorders such as osteoporosis and lymphoma. For patients of this disorder it takes about ten years for a diagnosis to occur if one occurs at all. A study has shown that there are 3 million Americans who suffer from Celiac disease and about 95 percent of them are yet to know that that's the diagnosis. Some of the symptoms of Celiac disease include bloating, diarrhea and weight loss. For one patient her symptoms began in childhood but as she aged they only continued to worsen.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-celiac-ess.html

F.D.A backing Respiratory Distress Drug for Babies

In class this week we have been learning about the respiratory system and the different conditions that can happen in the respiratory system as we age. I find this topic to be interesting because my mother suffers from severe asthma, and other people in my family have suffered from respiratory diseases from asthma to COPD, so I have seen the effects that respiratory conditions can have when we age. I thought that this article was interesting because as a premature baby myself I have always wondered what kinds of drugs they were using and what kind of problems were being found with these medications. I found this article about the F.D.A approving this respiratory distress drug for babies to be interesting as well because it discusses how the drug surfaxin would be used to prevent respiratory distress disorder that could turn out to be potentially fatal in infants and premature babies. What this drug will do is coat the air sacs in the lungs to keep them open. Surfaxin will create the surfactant which many premature babies usually do not make themselves, which makes it difficult to breathe. The lab Discovery that has been working on this drug surfaxin has estimated that there are about 90 million premature babies who are treated with a surfactant every year in the United States. Even though this was not about the aging population but about babies I felt this was relevant because it spoke about the respiratory system and how distress to the system could be harmful and life threatening.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/health/policy/fda-backs-surfaxin-respiratory-distress-drug-for-babies.html

How Alzheimer's is able to Spread in the brain

The last few weeks of class we have been learning about the nervous system as well as some of the conditions that go along with the nervous system as it goes through the aging process. One of the conditions that occurs is that of Alzheimer's disease. This disease is very interesting and is still having studies done it to see how it spreads through the brain, as well as causes, and possible treatments. One of the interesting articles that I came across was about how Alzheimer's spreads through the brain like a virus. The study that was performed was done on mice, and what the study showed was instead of the infection spreading like a bacteria would spread, it spread because of the break down of the tau proteins. This is interesting because these are also the proteins that are affected in Parkinson's. This study showed that they could put a halt in the disease if they were able to put a stop in cell to cell transmission and stop tau. If they were able to stop or at least slow this down they would be able to slow the cell death and how it moves across the brain.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/health/research/alzheimers-spreads-like-a-virus-in-the-brain-studies-find.html?_r=1