Science: HIV in the news also Vitamin D in the news

Vitamin D and breast cancer.

Often times a news item's headline will suggest one thing then as you read the opening paragraphs will suggests another and then you realize, the story is a bit more complicated.

Anyway, the large scale study seemed to show no difference between the women who took vitamin D and those who didn't.

HOWEVER, the amount they took might not have been enough. Excerpt:

For one thing, the dose of vitamin D supplementation used in the trial, 400 IUs, was relatively low. In the years since the study began in 1993, nutritionists have learned much more about the critical role that vitamin D plays in a wide range of cellular functions, and many now recommend up to 2,000 IUs daily for adults. Most people get very little vitamin D from their diet - the richest sources of the vitamin are dairy products and green leafy vegetables - so supplementation is the only way to reach recommended levels. "Four hundred IUs is just not a lot," says Dr. Larry Norton, a breast-cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "The supplementation wasn't adequate to raise blood levels enough in susceptible individuals to have a biological impact." Indeed, the women in the study who began with the highest blood levels of vitamin D's most active breakdown product, 25-hydroxyvitamin D, showed no change in their levels even after taking the 400 IUs daily.

Personally, I've been taking 1000 IU a day.

Meanwhile, an HIV story of someone who might have been cured of the virus that causes AIDS.

The patient had both AIDS and leukemia. Leukemia is sometimes treated with bone marrow transplant. In this case, the doctors looked for bone marrow donors with a particular genetic feature: a defect in CCR5. Think of CCR5 as the doorway that lets HIV into the cell. In a small number of people, this doorway doesn't work so the virus can't get in. Excerpt:

Roughly one in 1,000 Europeans and Americans have inherited the mutation from both parents, and Huetter set out to find one such person among donors that matched the patient's marrow type. Out of a pool of 80 suitable donors, the 61st person tested carried the proper mutation.

Before the transplant, the patient endured powerful drugs and radiation to kill off his own infected bone marrow cells and disable his immune system — a treatment fatal to between 20 and 30 percent of recipients.

He was also taken off the potent drugs used to treat his AIDS. Huetter's team feared that the drugs might interfere with the new marrow cells' survival. They risked lowering his defenses in the hopes that the new, mutated cells would reject the virus on their own.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases in the U.S., said the procedure was too costly and too dangerous to employ as a firstline cure. But he said it could inspire researchers to pursue gene therapy as a means to block or suppress HIV.