Gabapentin cools hot flashes as well as estrogen

Technorati Tags: Estrogen or stress and Gabapentin or Medical and hot flashes or menopause and Gynecology or sex hormones and hormone replacement therapy or biology and HRT or postmenopausal and women

Gabapentin cools hot flashes as well as estrogen

Rochester continues search for alternative menopause treatments

University of Rochester researchers, who have been investigating new therapies for hot flashes for several years, report in the July Obstetrics and Gynecology journal that the seizure drug gabapentin is as effective as estrogen, which used to be the gold standard treatment for menopause symptoms.

Estrogen is no longer the preferred therapy because recent, large studies have shown that the hormone increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease for some women. Given that news, millions of women have abandoned hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and are seeking other ways to ease symptoms. So-called natural remedies such as soy, herbal products or acupuncture have not proven safe or effective at this point.

The latest Rochester study is the first to compare gabapentin and estrogen head-to-head against a placebo. Although it showed a substantial placebo effect similar to other menopause studies – women taking the sugar pill reported a 54-percent reduction in hot flashes – the women taking gabapentin and estrogen reported even better results, with a 71 percent to 72 percent decline in symptoms.

"Gabapentin does appear to be as effective as estrogen," said lead author Sireesha Y. Reddy, M.D., assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "Until now its efficacy relative to estrogen was unknown."

Approximately 75 percent of postmenopausal women between the ages of 35 and 60 experience hot flashes. Gabapentin (sold under the trade name Neurontin) was approved by the FDA in 1994 to treat epileptic seizures but has been used off-label for years to treat headaches, shingles pain and other ailments. Scientists hypothesize that gabapentin may reduce hot flashes by regulating the flow of calcium in and out of cells, which is one mechanism for controlling body temperature.

An expert panel on menopause convened by the National Institutes of Health last year cautioned against the tendency to use treatments with scant safety data, and concluded that nothing to date was as effective as estrogen therapy although more research was needed.

In the latest study, Reddy and colleagues enrolled 60 women in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial for 12 weeks. Initially the researchers received more than 1,500 calls from women who wanted to participate, but after screening the callers to meet the study's protocol, the number was whittled to 60, with 53 women complying with every step.

They were randomly divided into three groups: 20 women received gabapentin at 2,400 mg per day and a daily placebo or fake estrogen pill; 20 received estrogen in the form of Premarin at 0.625 mg per day and a fake gabapentin pill; 20 received sugar pills resembling gabapentin and estrogen. The women recorded the frequency and severity of their hot flashes in diaries.

Results were tabulated using two statistical methods to compare the women's hot flash reports throughout the 12-week period with their baseline symptoms. Doctors did find that women who took gabapentin complained more often of headaches, dizziness or disorientation. Researchers believe that slowly ramping up the medication and taking it with meals can alleviate the side effects. ###

The NIH funded the study. Pfizer Inc. supplied gabapentin but had no role in the research. A co-author on the paper, Thomas Guttuso Jr., M.D., has a patent for the use of gabapentin in the treatment of hot flashes. Guttuso is a former neurologist at the University of Rochester who is now on the faculty at the University of Buffalo.

University of Rochester Medical Center Contact: Leslie Orr Leslie_Orr@urmc.rochester.edu585-275-5774

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quarks influence proton structure

Technorati Tags: proton structure or quantum mechanics and Nano or Nanotechnology and nanoparticles or Nanotech and protons or nanochemistry and nanoscale or electrons and quarks or physics and G-Zero or Nuclear physicists and nanostructures or Nanoscience

G-Zero update - Ghostly strange quarks influence proton structure

Description: New data from Jefferson Lab shows the θ+ pentaquark doesn't appear in one place it was expected. The result contradicts earlier findings in this same region and adds to the controversy

over whether research groups from around the world have caught a glimpse of a pentaquark, a particle built of five quarks. Image: JLab, Taken on: April 28, 2005 Submitted On: April 28, 2005, Submitted By: Jessica Ledbetter, mailto:jledbett@jlab.org, Mid-Resolution View Screen (28kbs), High Resolution View Print (908kbs), Copyright and Disclaimer

In research performed in Hall C, nuclear physicists have found that strange quarks do contribute to the structure of the proton. This result indicates that, just as previous experiments have hinted, strange quarks in the proton's quark-gluon sea contribute to a proton's properties. The result comes from work performed by the G-Zero collaboration, an international group of 108 physicists from 19 institutions, and was presented at a Jefferson Lab physics seminar on June 17.
Protons are found in the heart of all matter: the nucleus of the atom. Physicists have long known that protons are primarily built of particles called quarks, along with particles called gluons that bind the quarks together. There are three permanent quarks in the proton that come in two "flavors": two "up" and one "down."

Up and down quarks are the lightest of the possible six flavors of quarks that appear to exist in the universe. In addition to the proton's three resident quarks, the peculiar rules of quantum mechanics allow other particles to appear from time to time. These ghostly particles usually vanish in a tiny fraction of a second, but it's possible that they stay around long enough to influence the structure of the proton. Nuclear physicists set out to catch some of these ghostly particles in the act. They determined that the nextlightest quark, the "strange" quark, would be the most likely to have a visible effect.

According to Doug Beck, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the spokesperson for the G-Zero collaboration, one way to see these strange quarks is to measure them through the weak interaction. "If we look with photons via the electromagnetic interaction, we see quarks inside the proton. And then, if we do it with the weak interaction, we see a very similar, yet distinctly different view of the quarks. And it's by comparing those pictures that we can get at the strange quark contribution," Beck says.

Since the hydrogen nucleus consists of a single proton, G-Zero researchers sent a polarized beam of electrons into a hydrogen target. They then watched to see how many protons were "scattered," essentially knocked out of the target, by the electrons.

Throughout the experiment, the researchers alternated the electron beam's polarization (spin). "We run the beam with polarization in one direction, and we look to see how many protons are scattered. Then we turn the beam around, in polarization at least, and measure for exactly the same amount of time again and look to see how many protons are scattered. And there will be a different number by about 10 parts per million," Beck says. That's because the electromagnetic force is mirror-symmetric (the electrons' spin will not affect the number of protons scattered), while the weak force is not (electrons polarized one way will interact slightly differently than electrons spinning oppositely).

"The relative difference in those counting rates tells us how big the weak interaction piece is in this scattering of electrons from protons. We compare it to the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between electrons and protons, and that gives us the answer that we're looking for," Beck explains.

What the researchers found was that strange quarks do contribute to the structure of the proton. In particular, Beck says the collaboration found that strange quarks contribute to the proton's electric and magnetic fields -- in other words, its charge distribution and magnetization.

"All quarks carry charge, and one of the things we measure is where the strange quarks are located in the proton's overall charge distribution," Beck explains, "And then there's a related effect. There are these charged quarks inside the protons, and they're moving around. And when charged objects move around, they can create a magnetic field. In G-Zero, we also measure how strange quarks contribute to the proton's magnetization."

G-Zero allowed the researchers to extract a quantity representing the strange quark's contribution to a combination of the proton's charge and magnetization. "The data indicate that the strange quark contributions are non-zero over the entire range of our measurements," Beck says, "And there are a couple of points that overlap other measurements. They agree, so that's a good thing."

However, by itself, the G-Zero result does not yet allow the researchers to separate the strange quark's contribution to the charge from its contribution to the magnetization. "There's another G-Zero run coming up in December, and that will help us to try to disentangle this combination of the contribution to the charge and the magnetization. So that will give us one more measurement that will allow us to look at those quantities separately," Beck notes. ###

G-Zero is a multi-year experimental program designed to measure, through the weak force, the strange quark contribution to proton structure. G-Zero was financed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. In addition, significant contributions of hardware and scientific/engineering manpower were also made by CNRS in France and NSERC in Canada. To date, more than 100 scientists, 22 graduate students and 19 undergraduate students have been involved with G-Zero. Beck presented the results at a public physics seminar titled "Strange Quark Contributions to Nucleon Structure? Results from the Forward G0 Experiment" on June 17 at Jefferson Lab. A formal scientific paper was submitted for review and publication in Physical Review Letters that day as well.

Several other experiments, including the SAMPLE experiment at MITBates, the A4 experiment at the Mainz Laboratory in Germany, and HAPPEx at Jefferson Lab were also designed to spot strange quarks in the proton.

DOE/Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

Contact: Linda Ware 757-269-2689 ware@jlab.org Kandice Carter 757-269-7263 kcarter@jlab.org

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