University of Guelph researchers have created the first-ever vaccine for gut bacteria common in autistic children that may help control some autism symptoms.

Brittany Pequegnat and Guelph chemistry professor Mario Monteiro developed a carbohydrate-based vaccine against the gut bug Clostridium bolteae.

C. bolteae is known to play a role in gastrointestinal disorders, and it often shows up in higher numbers in the GI tracts of autistic children than in those of healthy kids.

More than 90 per cent of children with autism spectrum disorders suffer from chronic, severe gastrointestinal symptoms. Of those, about 75 per cent suffer from diarrhea, according to current literature.

"Little is known about the factors that predispose autistic children to C. bolteae," said Monteiro.

Although most infections are handled by some antibiotics, he said, a vaccine would improve current treatment.

"This is the first vaccine designed to control constipation and diarrhea caused by C. bolteae and perhaps control autism-related symptoms associated with this microbe," he said.

Autism cases have increased almost six fold over the past 20 years, and scientists don`t know why. Although many experts point to environmental factors, others have focused on the human gut.

Some researchers believe toxins and/or metabolites produced by gut bacteria, including C. bolteae, may be associated with symptoms and severity of autism, especially regressive autism.

Pequegnat, a master`s student, and Monteiro used bacteria grown by Mike Toh, a Guelph PhD student in the lab of microbiology professor Emma Allen-Vercoe.

The new anti- C. bolteae vaccine targets the specific complex polysaccharides, or carbohydrates, on the surface of the bug.

The vaccine effectively raised C. bolteae -specific antibodies in rabbits. Doctors could also use the vaccine-induced antibodies to quickly detect the bug in a clinical setting, said Monteiro.

The vaccine might take more than 10 years to work through preclinical and human trials, and it may take even longer before a drug is ready for market, Monteiro said.

But this is a significant first step in the design of a multivalent vaccine against several autism-related gut bacteria, he said.

The groundbreaking study appeared this month in the journal Vaccine.

International experts probing China`s deadly H7N9 bird flu virus said Wednesday it was "one of the most lethal influenza viruses" seen so far as Taiwan reported the first case outside the mainland.

China has confirmed 108 cases and 22 deaths since the first infections were announced on March 31 and Taiwan Wednesday confirmed its first infection in a man who had recently returned from working in eastern China where most cases have been reported.

"This is definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far," said Keiji Fukuda, one of the leading flu experts for the World Health Organization, which has led a team on a week-long visit to China to study H7N9.

Fukuda told a news conference that the H7N9 virus was more easily transmissible than the more common H5N1 strain of bird flu. Experts had previously remarked on the "affinity" of H7N9 for humans.

"We think this virus is more transmissible to humans than H5N1," he said, referring to the strain the WHO estimates has killed more than 360 people globally since 2003.

"When we look at influenza viruses this is an unusually dangerous virus," he said, but he added: "We are really at the beginning of our understanding."

Taiwanese health authorities said their first case, a 53-year-old man who had been working in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, showed symptoms three days after returning to Taiwan via Shanghai.

Health Minister Chiu Wen-ta told reporters the patient said he had not been in contact with poultry or eaten under-cooked birds or eggs while staying in Suzhou.

The WTO team, however, said poultry were the likely source of the H7N9 outbreak as chickens, ducks and pigeons from markets had tested positive, but nevertheless warned over the potential for human-to-human transmission.

"So far no migratory birds or their habitats have tested positive for H7N9," said team member Nancy Cox, director of the influenza division at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"At least we can now understand that the likely source of infection is poultry, the virus originates from poultry," she said.

Experts have previously said the animal reservoir for H7N9 appeared to be unspecified birds.

There are worries over the prospect of such a virus mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, which could then have the potential to trigger a pandemic.

But a statement released by the team, which includes Chinese experts, repeated that no human-to-human transmission has been discovered.

"No sustained person to person transmission has been found," it said. "What remains unclear is whether the virus could gain the ability to become transmissible between people."

A WHO official said last week more than 50 percent of those with the virus had remembered coming into contact with birds, raising questions over how the remaining cases became infected.

Chinese health officials have acknowledged so-called "family clusters", where members of a single family have become infected, but have so far declined to put it down to human-to-human transmission.

Such cases could be examples of what health officials call limited human-to-human transmission, in which those in close contact with the ill become infected, as opposed to widespread, or "sustained", transmission.

So far most H7N9 cases have been confined to the commercial hub Shanghai and nearby provinces in eastern China.

But the number of reported new cases in Shanghai has seen a "dramatic slowdown", Cox said, calling the reduction in the frequency of new cases "very encouraging".

Tuesday marked the fourth consecutive day where no new cases were reported in Shanghai.

A new study by scientists including one of an Indian origin has found that aspirin slowed the growth of breast cancer cell lines in the lab and significantly reduced the growth of tumours in mice.

The age-old headache remedy also exhibits the ability to prevent tumour cells from spreading.

Results of the study by researchers at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., and the University of Kansas Medical Center, suggested that regular use of low-dose aspirin might prevent the progression of breast cancer in humans.

Anecdotal evidence indicated that breast cancer was less likely to return in women who took aspirin to lower their risk of heart attack or stroke. But the science behind this relationship is not well understood.

The VA study found that aspirin might interfere with cancer cells` ability to find an aggressive, more primordial state. In the mouse model the researchers used, cancer cells treated with aspirin formed no or only partial stem cells, which are believed to fuel the growth and spread of tumours.

Senior author Sushanta Banerjee, director of the cancer research unit and a professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan, said that first-line chemotherapy treatments do not destroy stem cells.

Eventually, the tumour will grow again. "If you don`t target the stemness, it is known you will not get any effect. It will relapse," said Banerjee, a professor of medicine in division of hematology and oncology.

In lab tests, aspirin blocked the proliferation of two different breast cancer lines. One of the lines tested is often called triple-negative breast cancer, a less common but more difficult treat form of the disease. "We are mainly interested in triple negative breast cancer, because the prognosis is very poor," Banerjee stated.

Triple-negative breast cancers, which will be addressed in a special thematic program at the ASBMB annual meeting, lack receptors for estrogen, progesterone and Her2. Aspirin also may improve the effectiveness of current treatments for women whose breast cancers are hormone-receptor positive.

In the team`s study, aspirin enhanced the effect of tamoxifen, the usual drug therapy for hormone-receptor positive breast cancer.

Aspirin is used in the treatment of a number of different conditions. Banerjee said its ability to attack multiple metabolic pathways is what makes it potentially useful in the fight against cancer.

Aspirin is a medicine with side effects, including gastrointestinal bleeding. Researchers will continue to explore if the positive effects of regular use of the drug outweigh the risks.

The lead author of the study, Gargi Maity, a postdoctoral fellow who works in the cancer research unit at the VA Medical Center, presented the team`s findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which is being held in conjunction with the Experimental Biology 2013 conference in Boston.

More young women suffer from cardiovascular problems than men, heart experts have revealed.

According to British Heart Foundation (BHF) research, there are 710,000 women across the UK, aged 16-44, living with heart disease compared to 570,000 men, the Independent reported.

Professor Peter Weissberg, BHF medical director, said clear signs of heart complaints are going unnoticed by women.

"There's a great tendency for women to ignore symptoms because they think of it as a man's problem. Women are affected by heart disease and sometimes more than men," he said.

Doctors believe the higher rates among women are due in part to their susceptibility to certain rarer diseases, such as coronary artery dissection, where around eight out of ten cases are women.

They warn these rare conditions are going seriously under-researched.

Amongst the conditions which young women are prone to - and which experts say need more research - are valvular heart disease, dissection of the coronary artery and heart complications associated with lupus.

The number of young women living with cardiovascular disease has remained higher than men for several years.

In 2006 there were 760,000 women living with heart conditions, compared to 580,000 men.

It is estimated that one in every four men and one in every six women die from heart disease.

Almost 180,000 people die every year from circulatory system failures in the UK - and 91,550 of them are women.

This higher number of women is not thanks to the younger cohort, however, but largely because of the high number of fatal strokes in women over-75.

Dr Martin Landray, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, says that one reason for a knowledge gap between the sexes is that drug trials and medical research into heart conditions still struggle to include as many women as men.

A particular style of thinking that makes people vulnerable to depression can actually "rub off" on others, increasing their symptoms of depression six months later, a study has found.

Studies had shown that people, who respond negatively to stressful life events, interpreting the events as the result of factors they can`t change and as a reflection of their own deficiency, are more vulnerable to depression.
This "cognitive vulnerability" is such a potent risk factor for depression that it can be used to predict which individuals are likely to experience a depressive episode in the future, even if they`ve never had a depressive episode before.

Individual differences in this cognitive vulnerability seem to solidify in early adolescence and remain stable throughout adulthood, but psychological scientists Gerald Haeffel and Jennifer Hames of the University of Notre Dame predicted that it might still be malleable under certain circumstances.

The researchers hypothesized that cognitive vulnerability might be "contagious" during major life transitions, when our social environments are in flux. They tested their hypothesis using data from 103 randomly assigned roommate pairs, all of whom had just started college as freshmen.

Within one month of arriving on campus, the roommates completed an online questionnaire that included measures of cognitive vulnerability and depressive symptoms. They completed the same measures again 3 months and 6 months later; they also completed a measure of stressful life events at the two time points.

The results revealed that freshmen who were randomly assigned to a roommate with high levels of cognitive vulnerability were likely to "catch" their roommate`s cognitive style and develop higher levels of cognitive vulnerability; those assigned to roommates who had low initial levels of cognitive vulnerability experienced decreases in their own levels. The contagion effect was evident at both the 3-month and 6-month assessments.

Most importantly, changes in cognitive vulnerability affected risk for future depressive symptoms: Students who showed an increase in cognitive vulnerability in the first 3 months of college had nearly twice the level of depressive symptoms at 6 months than those who didn`t show such an increase.

The findings provide striking evidence for the contagion effect, confirming the researchers` initial hypothesis.

Based on these findings, Haeffel and Hames suggested that the contagion effect might be harnessed to help treat symptoms of depression.

According to the researchers, the results of this study indicate that it may be time to reconsider how we think about cognitive vulnerability.

The research has been published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.