“She was morbidly obese, got sick and couldn’t get out of her chair — and her sister left her there like that for three weeks,” Dearborn County prosecutor Aaron Negangard said. “The paramedics couldn’t get her removed from the chair because she was stuck — she was rotting, basically, in the chair.”

Frieberger’s sister, Vickie Holdcraft, was indicted Friday on charges of reckless homicide, three counts of neglect and two counts of perjury for allegedly making false statements to a grand jury, Negangard said. The charges stem from Frieberger’s death on Oct. 2; as of late Friday, Holdcraft had not yet been arrested, the Dearborn County Sheriff’s Office said.

“It’s just incredible to me,” Negangard said. “I’ve never seen a case where a person has basically been left to decompose in a chair — and a family member could allow that to happen.”

Even though Holdcraft worked for the Dearborn County health department, the two sisters lived in deplorable conditions reminiscent of scenes from the TV show, “Hoarders: Buried Alive,” Negangard said. “The stuff was packed to the ceiling — there’s just a pathway to walk through the rooms.”

Holdcraft called 911 on Oct. 2 because Frieberger was having trouble breathing. When medics and police arrived , the pungent, distinctive odor of rotting human flesh assaulted their senses.

Medics had trouble making their way through the mess, Negangard said. Because Freiberger was stuck to her chair, they had to resort to breaking a window so they could hoist her — and the chair — outside.

Although Frieberger was conscious at first — she told emergency crews she had been in the chair about three weeks — she died hours later at an area hospital, Negangard said. Frieberger was suffering from a blood infection and pneumonia. She also had 10 times the therapeutic level of a powerful painkiller in her bloodstream, Negangard said. Frieberger had worked for the county auditor for more than 30 years, Negangard said, and retired in December 2010. By Janice Morse, Nashville Tennessean

But now Sydney doctors say some obese folk are less at risk from the two potentially deadly illnesses than others – and they’ve launched a new study to find out why.

Experts at the Garvan Institute, the medical research facility at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, say there are “healthy obese people” whose insulin works just as well as in someone who is lean.

These same people also appear to be less at risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

It remains unclear how many of these so-called insulin sensitive obese people are out there – or even exactly why they are less at risk, according to Dr Jerry Greenfield, St Vincent’s Hospital’s head of endocrinology.

“A study of these people to examine what protects them from developing diabetes could be very informative in telling us what causes insulin resistance,” Dr Greenfield said.

“We’re not proposing that insulin sensitive obese people are completely protected from developing heart disease and diabetes.

“Rather, they appear to have a lower risk of these diseases compared to someone who is insulin-resistant, yet as obese.”

Dr Greenfield and colleague Dr Dorit Samocha-Bonet have already carried out a review of existing studies on the topic and are now recruiting obese people to try to find out more.

“The studies we reviewed agreed that there was less fat in the liver of the insulin-sensitive obese person, as well as fewer potentially damaging fat metabolites in muscle,” Dr Samocha-Bonet said. Sydney Morning Herald

That’s right, infectious. As in, something you can catch.

In the study, mice engineered to have a particular immune deficiency developed fatty liver disease and got fatter when fed a Western-style diet. But strikingly, when these immune-deficient mice were put in the same cage as healthy mice, the healthy mice started to come down with symptoms of liver disease, and also got fatter.

The culprit? Microbes in the stomachs of the mice. Because the mice had their immune systems disturbed, the bacteria in their guts got “out of wack,” said study researcher Richard Flavell, a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine. We normally live in symbiosis with the bacteria in our guts, but in the study, the number of “bad,” disease-associated bacteria increased 1,000-fold in mice with immune problems, Flavell said.

And it’s these bad bacteria that were transmitted from mouse to mouse, causing the healthy mice to also experience changes in their gut microbes — and making them fat.

“We could make a mouse fatter just by putting it in the same cage as the other mouse,” Flavell said.

The crucial question is: Could this happen in people?

It’s possible, but we’ll need much more research to find out, Flavell said. The contagiousness of obesity  seen in this study is probably more likely in mice than in people because mice eat each other’s poop, a very efficient way to transmit gut bacteria (add this to your list of reasons not to eat poop).

At minimum, the study suggests “this should be very seriously looked at in people,” Flavell said. Fatty liver disease is very common among obese people, affecting 75 percent to 100 percent of the obese population, the researchers say. In about 20 percent of these individuals, the disease progresses and becomes severe.

Previously, if two family members living in the same household both developed liver disease or became obese, people would have blamed genetics. But the new study suggests the environment may play a role as well.

If the findings apply to people, they would suggest we need to take approaches to obesity and fatty liver disease that address gut microorganisms — perhaps antibiotics or probiotics — in addition to traditional treatments, Flavell said.

“This is a very thought-provoking study that underlines the role of the bugs that we all carry inside us in determining our susceptibility to liver disease and its complications,” said Dr. Jasmohan Bajaj, an associate  professor of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Virginia Commonwealth University,  who was not involved in the study.  More work is needed in humans, who are much more complex than mice, to understand the role of gut bacteria in liver disease, but “these experiments form a key step forward,” Bajaj said. By Rachael Rettner, Yahoo Daily News

A new study has claimed that drinking a glass of milk daily not only boosts one’s intake of much-needed nutrients, but it also positively impacts one’s brain power and mental performance, the ‘International Dairy Journal’ reported.

According to the researchers, certain nutrients in dairy products, such as magnesium, could play a role in staving off memory loss. Moreover, dairy foods also help protect against heart disease and high blood pressure, which in turn maintains the brain’s ability to properly function.

In their study, the researchers at University of Maine have found that adults with higher intakes of milk and milk products did score significantly higher on memory and other brain function tests than those who drank little to no milk.

In fact, they asked 972 men and women, all aged 23 to 98 years, to fill in detailed surveys on their diets, including how often they had dairy products, even if only having milk in their tea and coffee.

The subjects then completed a series of eight rigorous tests to check concentration, memory and learning abilities.

The findings revealed that adults who consumed dairy products at least five or six times a week did far better in memory tests compared with those who rarely ate or drank them.

In fact, in some of the tests, adults who rarely consumed dairy products were five times more likely to fail compared with those who had them between two and four times a week, the researchers found.

“New and emerging brain health benefits are just one more reason to start each day with low-fat or fat-free milk,” the ‘Daily Mail’ newspaper quoted the researchers as saying. Indian Express

That’s the opportunity Ray Clark is offering longtime employees at The Marketing Arm.

Anyone who has been with the Dallas-based marketing and promotions agency for at least seven years is being rewarded with seven days off and $2,500. Those who have made it to Year 15 or beyond get a 15-day bonus and $5,000 to do something they’ve longed to do but didn’t have the time or money for.

“This is something I came up with, but it got wildly embraced,” says Clark, who announced the unexpected perk to start off 2012 with a bang. “This has created quite a buzz.”

Days off have to be taken in one chunk, so when weekends are attached, employees get 11 or 21 days to do something personally rewarding.

A four-person review committee of their peers will give the proposals thumbs up or down or ask for modification. But everyone gets one and has two years to complete it.

Staffers are being asked to:

Do something that betters their lives or the life of someone else.

Learn something they’ve always wanted to learn.

Investigate or pursue something they’re passionate about.

Clark, 47, got the notion a few years ago after giving himself a month off to write a couple of movie scripts. The Marketing Arm chief executive figured he’d be a dandy screenwriter, but he’d always been too busy running the agency he founded in 1993.

He wrote one script and started another. The one he finished, a raunchy comedy aimed at young guys, was actually purchased and produced.

It bombed.

Humbling experience

“I found out I really wasn’t good at it,” he said. “It was humbling, but I was glad I did it.”

Clark wanted to give his full-time employees — 225 in Dallas and another 225 around the world — a chance to expand their horizons.

This year, 50 staffers qualify. The program is a reward for people who reach their seven-year and 15-year anniversaries.

Since it’s new, those who have already passed those milestones get a sabbatical, too. They have two years to take it.

Next year, 25 will qualify for either the seven-year or 15-year bounty. The program will cost between $125,000 and $200,000, depending on how many take advantage of the deal each year.

Clark considers the cost an investment in innovative thinking — something the agency vitally needs to maintain its 100 clients, including AT&T Inc., Frito-Lay Inc., American Airlines Inc. and GameStop Corp. Sabbaticals also increase loyalty and help recruit talent, he says.

Only 21 of Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for have paid-for, formal sabbatical programs, says Chris Anderson, The Marketing Arm’s director of communications, who intends to use his sabbatical to shoot a photo essay in Cuba. “Sabbaticals have typically been ivory-tower stuff. I think you’ll start to see this change as more employers try to help their staffs achieve balance in their lives.”

The agency, which has been part of the gigantic Omnicom since 1999, is doing quite well these days. Revenue and morale have never been higher.

The Marketing Arm is “up more than 30 percent for the last three years during the so-called recession, while the industry average has been flat,” said Clark, who isn’t allowed to give revenue figures but doesn’t contradict published reports of $100 million in fees last year.

Of the 200 agencies under the Omnicom umbrella, The Marketing Arm ranks in the top 10 for its culture and at the top when it comes to having fun.

This is, after all, an agency that loads everyone onto buses and heads to the Ballpark at Arlington to celebrate opening day for the Texas Rangers. By Cheryl Hall, Nashville Tennessean

A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as “resilience”.

According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a slidling scale.

“At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they’ll develop a mental health problem,” she says.

“At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic.” Most of us, she thinks, are somewhere in the middle.

But what is this resilience? Is it something we inherit or do we learn it? Can it be traced in the chemistry of the brain? Or in its wiring, or its electrical activity? And if we lack it, can we acquire it?

The answer, regrettably, to all those questions is much the same. We don’t really know. But we’d like to, and we need to. According to the World Health Organization, depression affects just over 120 million people worldwide.

“We think about a fifth of the UK population will suffer from depression at some point in their lifetime,” says Bill Deakin, professor of psychiatry at Manchester University. Worryingly, he adds that more people are getting depressed now than in the past, and that it is beginning to affect younger people.

With the support of the Medical Research Council, Bill Deakin, Rebecca Elliott and their colleagues are peering into the brain, trying to fathom the origins and nature of resilience. They think that a better understanding of it might pay dividends in helping those who lack it.

The subjects of their study are a mixed bunch – intentionally so. Some have suffered bouts of depression, others have not. Some have had more than their share of adverse life events, while others have had an easier time of it.

In knowing where to start looking for the differences that might underpin resilience to depression the Manchester group has the advantage of being able to draw on previous work that has investigated resilience to post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, says Bill Deakin, has pointed them to several relevant features of brain function. They include cognitive flexibility – our capacity to adapt our thinking to different situations – and also the extent to which our brains concentrate on processing and remembering happy, as opposed to sad, information.

Emotional memory

Each subject in the Manchester study has been allocated to one of four groups based on the four possible combinations of high and low life stress, with or without depression. All have given saliva samples from which their stress hormone levels can be measured, and many of them will undergo a brain scan.

A scanning technique much used by brain researchers called functional magnetic resonance imaging allows them to see which parts of the brain are active while subjects are performing specific tasks.

“In one task we give them pictures to look at which are emotionally charged,” says Rebecca Elliot. “They have to memorise them.” Shortly afterward they’re shown these pictures again, with others, and have to identify those they’ve seen already. “This probes emotional memory – how well people remember material which has an emotional component to it.”

The research is not yet complete, so Rebecca Elliott can’t say whether there are distinct differences in brain function between the groups. But there are encouraging hints, such as the correlations she’s finding between the psychological measurements of her subjects’ resilience and how they perform on some of the tests.

“For example, our early data suggest that people who are more resilient are more likely to recognise happy faces and less likely to recognise sad or fearful faces. The more resilient someone is, the better they remember positive words and pictures.”

Precisely how a clinician might eventually use whatever the Manchester research reveals about our brain activity is still an open question. What we refer to as resilience is the outcome of a complex and continuing set of interactions between our genes, our body chemistry, the wiring of our brains, and our life experiences.

But broadly speaking, the hope is that an understanding of the brain activity that underpins resilience might offer pointers towards new treatments, or better ways of using existing ones.

A resilience pill?

Bill Deakin talks of using brain scanning to create what he calls a “neuroscientific profile” of an individual’s problem. This might be used to identify relevant aims and goals in deciding on the best treatment.

A patient may turn out to have normally functioning cognitive flexibility but a tendency to dwell on sad thoughts. “This might allow you to tailor-make a therapy to reduce the likelihood of a further episode of depression,” says Deakin. In the first instance this would most likely be a talking therapy of some kind.

Responding to the suggestion that a drug, a daily “resilience pill”, tailored to our brain activity or chemistry might be a useful development, Rebecca Elliott is cautious. “I suppose this is something that would theoretically be possible,” she says. “Whether people would be willing to take that kind of drug, I’m not sure.”

But whatever the means, finding some way to boost resilience is an ambition well worth pursuing. To be assured of that you have only to compare Aeron’s experiences with those of Pauline, another of the Manchester research subjects.

While out of work, struggling financially, and single-handedly responsible for three children, Pauline had several bouts of depression during which she felt completely isolated. “And emotionally I was very detached. I would come in and sit on my bed and cry. And when it got so bad I didn’t want to be with the children, that’s when I went to the doctor.”

No clinician can yet prescribe what she most needs – resilience. But one day… maybe.  By Geoff Watts, BBC News

“There can be genes that predict that you’re more likely to respond to chemotherapy. Genes that predict a greater risk of spread to other parts of the body,” explains Dr. Jane Raymond, a cancer specialist at Allegheny General Hospital.

Of the two major types of lung cancer, small cell and non-small cell, the more common is non-small cell. Surgical removal of the tumor is often standard, but what about chemotherapy and radiation?

In some cases it’s clear cut.

“If the tumor is larger, if the lymph nodes are positive, we know those patients benefit from having adjuvent chemotherapy, which is chemotherapy after surgery,” Dr. Raymond says.

In cases where the tumor is still small with no spread, it’s not so clear.

The problem is, in half of the patients, the cancer will come back. This group would benefit from chemotherapy. The other half, if they took the powerful cancer-killing medicine, they would get no benefit and perhaps only side effects.

A new test, studied in the United states and China, analyzes the DNA of the lung cancer cells. Specific genes are thought to be associated with an increased likelihood of the cancer returning.

Two studies of more than a thousand people with non-small cell lung cancer, published in the journal The Lancet, shows this test outperforms traditional tests.

“Right now we go by looking at the tumor under the microscope, size of the tumor, and the number of lymph nodes,” Dr. Raymond says.

But it’s not quite ready for widespread use. Further research has to show that these genes really do make a tumor more risky, and that chemotherapy really does keep the cancer from recurring.

“I think it’s the wave of the future. Certainly, we’re doing that in breast cancer, and we’re looking at it in colon cancer, prostate cancer; so, I think this is the next step,” Dr. Raymond says. By Dr. Maria Simbra, CBS Pittsburgh

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study assessed around 5,500 people aged 14 to 69.

Around 10% of men had oral HPV, compared with 3.6% of women.

HPV causes the majority of cervical cancers, as well as genital and anal – and head and neck cancers.

Smoking and drinking are significant known risk factors for head and neck cancers. But oral HPV infection increases cancer risk by around 50%, according to the research team from Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

They say the incidence of head and neck cancers has significantly increased over the last three decades, and HPV has been directly implicated as an underlying cause.

The researchers used data from a cross-sectional study as part of the 2009-10 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

They all provided a skin cell samples for testing from their mouths, and were interviewed about their lifestyles and sexual history.

Overall prevalence of oral HPV infection was 7%.

Prevalence of HPV increased with lifetime or recent number of partners for any kind of sex, vaginal sex, or oral sex.

Writing in JAMA, the team led by Dr Maura Gillison, said their findings should influence research into the existing HPV vaccines and how effective they could be in preventing oral cancers.

“Vaccine efficacy against oral HPV infection is unknown, and therefore vaccination cannot currently be recommended for the primary prevention of oropharyngeal cancer.

“Given an analysis of US cancer registry data recently projected that the number of HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers diagnosed each year will surpass that of invasive cervical cancers by the year 2020, perhaps such vaccine trials are warranted.”

Jessica Harris, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “As we learn how common HPV infections in the mouth are, and how they are passed on, we can understand more about who is most at risk and how people can reduce the risk of HPV-related cancers.

“Although there isn’t yet any evidence to show whether HPV vaccination is effective at preventing oral HPV infections, results like these are vital to help inform prevention programmes in the future.” BBC News