A multi-specialty hospital here has successfully used stem cells to cure a hip joint disorder, relieving affected patients from expensive surgery and conservative treatment.

"We have so far treated seven patients, including two non-resident Indians (NRIs) suffering from hip joint disorder using their stem cells and helped them to resume normal life within months," Live 100 Hospital chairman HN Nagaraj said.

Known medically as avascular necrosis, the uncommon disease leads to temporary or permanent loss of blood supply to hip joint bone and causes disorder. If not treated early, the dislocation of the hip bone with joint surface can result in disability. Any serious injury, medications such as steroids, blood coagulation or excessive alcohol can cause blood loss.

"Stem cell therapy has been used for the first time in the world to treat the hip bone disorder by rejuvenating its tissues with the bone marrow of the patient. Stem cells in the marrow of the affected bone are separated from red blood cells and blood plasma through a clinical process and injected into the hip joint of the patient," Nagaraj said, demonstrating a case study.The private hospital on the city`s outskirts has tied up with a Pune-based laboratory to harvest the stem cells and transplant them through four injections over four weeks to restore the hip joint function lost due to damage to its cartilage. The stem cells also repair bone cells as they can differentiate between bone and cartilage cells.

"The novel treatment has no bleeding or scar formation as the process does not involve surgery. The patient has to visit our hospital for a day in a week for each of the four injections," Nagaraj said.

Though the treatment costs a patient Rs.350,000 currently, the hospital hopes to bring it down over time when awareness of the stem cell therapy spreads and more patients opt for the treatment.

The hospital will soon submit the therapy treatment protocol for publication in the Journal of Mass & Heat Transfer in the United States and Britain and file for international patent and intellectual property rights.

Among the patients cured at the hospital are two NRIs from the United States - Jayadeep Panduranga, 37, and Aishwariya, 18, who could not get relief from shooting pain due to hip disorder despite years of conventional treatment like core decompression.

"Though I underwent core decompression for nine years in California, there was no relief. Stem cell therapy has reduced pain and hip movements are almost normal," Panduranga said.

Similarly, Aishwariya, an under-graduate in Detroit, suffered pain in the right hip and faced difficulty in moving around.

"I`m able to walk again with a walker," Aishwariya said.

Adolescents' abuse of prescription painkillers (analgesics) like vicodin, valium and oxycontin at a rate 40% higher than previous generations, is turning into an epidemic in the US, says a study.

"Prescription drug use is the next big epidemic," said Richard Miech, professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, who led the study.

"Everyone in this field has recognised that there is a big increase in the abuse of non-medical analgesics but our study shows that it is accelerating among today's generation of adolescents," said Miech, the Journal of Adolescent Health reports.

That makes it the second most common form of illegal drug use in the US after marijuana, according to Miech.

The study drew on data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a series of annual, nationally representative, cross-sectional surveys of US drug use. The analysis used data from 1985 through 2009, according to a Colorado statement.

Miech said that the prevalence of prescription pain medication abuse among the current generation of youth was "higher than any generation ever measured".

"The increasing availability of analgesics in the general population is well documented, as the total number of hydrocodone and oxycodone products prescribed legally in the US increased more than fourfold from about 40 million in 1991 to nearly 180 million in 2007," the study said.

"Youth who observe their parents taking analgesics as prescribed may come to the conclusion that any use of these drugs is OK and safe," Meich said. Yet, the consequences are often severe.

Miech said there were now more deaths due to accidental overdoses of these drugs than deaths due to overdoses of cocaine and heroin combined. Most people who abuse prescription pain relievers report that they obtained them from family or friends.

"While most people recognise the dangers of leaving a loaded gun lying around the house," said Miech, "what few people realise is that far more people die as a result of unsecured prescription medications."

Those who skip breakfast to lose weight not only eat more for lunch, they also crave fatty and sugary foods, researchers say.

Over time, this could lead to slimmers piling on the pounds, despite their best intentions, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

The warning comes from doctors and scientists at Imperial College London who scanned the brains of 21 healthy young men and women while they looked at pictures of various foods.

The volunteers also rated how appealing they found the foods, which ranged from salads and vegetables to calorie-laden chocolates, desserts, cakes, pizzas and burgers.

The river Ganga, lifeline to millions of Indians and the most holy river to Hindus, has become a source of carcinogens as well.

With pollutants being continuously dumped into the river, a study has found that people living along its course are more susceptible to cancer than anywhere else in the country.

According to the National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP), the river is suffused with heavy metals and poisonous chemicals, especially along the stretches in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

"Ganga water is now laced with toxic industrial discharge such as arsenic, choride, fluoride and other heavy metals," Jaideep Biswas, director of Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, an associate of the National Cancer Registry Programme, was quoted saying to a leading newspaper.

Gallbladder cancer cases in these areas are the second highest in the world and prostate cancer highest in the country.

The research revealed that of every 10,000 people surveyed, 450 men and 1,000 women were gallbladder cancer patients. Other forms of cancer were also found among the people living along the river course, such as kidney, oesophagus, liver, urinary bladder and skin cancer.

"Those who've been bathing in this poison river are equally at danger," said Biswas.

For at least eight years, a Philadelphia heart specialist and his colleagues have been smuggling used cardiac devices in suitcases to India to help poor people who might die without them.

Now, Dr. Behzad B. Pavri, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, reports that recycled implantable cardioverter-defibrillators or ICDs -- devices that jolt a failing heart back into rhythm -- can be collected safely from U.S. patients and funeral homes, transported, sterilized and re-implanted in people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.

"The patients who are getting these devices are the sickest of the sick, the poorest of the poor," Pavri said.

In a review of 81 patients who received recycled ICDs between 2004 and 2011, Pavri and his colleagues found no evidence of infection or malfunction of the ICDs. Nine of the patients died during follow-up, but the deaths didn't appear related to the ICDs, the authors said.

Though there's been growing evidence that heart pacemakers may be safely reused, this is one of the first published reports to suggest that the more sophisticated ICD device may also be recycled, Pavri said.

"The outcomes were what we expected and hoped for," Pavri said of the study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

But the study also renews ongoing questions about the legality -- and ethics -- of reusing cardiac devices, a practice that is prohibited by federal regulators and device manufacturers in the U.S.

In an accompanying editorial, Harvard Medical School experts Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Gene Bukhman caution that such well-meaning efforts should be careful not to offer inferior treatment to the poor.

"Flagship projects must remain free of the taint of the secondhand, in part by making it clear when devices can safely be reused," wrote those authors. Farmer is a renowned expert in global health disparities and one of the co-founders of Partners in Health, the international health and social justice organization.

The patients in Pavri's study, conducted in cooperation with Holy Family Hospital in Mumbai, included 66 men and 15 women. They ranged in age from 27 to 79 and were all at highest risk for life-threatening irregular heart rhythms that could be treated with ICDs.

All told, the patients received 106 reused devices, including 22 who got a second device and three who received a third ICD during the course of the trial.

More than 40 percent of the patients got life-saving shocks from the ICDs, including one 27-year-old patient, Mohd Asif, who received more than 300 pacing charges or larger jolts during so-called ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation "storms," in which the heart runs wildly out of rhythm.

He is "still very much alive," said Dr. Yash Lokhandwala, a cardiologist at the Mumbai hospital who treated Asif and others.

The patients who got the ICDs were those who otherwise could not pay for them. In India, a new ICD might cost 3 lakhs, the equivalent of $6,000 U.S., far beyond the reach of ordinary Mumbai residents who earn about 1.41 lakhs a year. Those who can pay foot the bill themselves, but those who can't are treated with other, often inferior methods, including drug therapies.

Cost is the chief barrier preventing use of cardiac devices such as ICDs and pacemakers in developing nations, Pavri said. Rates of new ICD implantation are about 1 per million in many Asian and South American nations, compared with 434 per million new ICD implantations per year in the U.S., according to the World Society of Arrhythmia.

At the same time, ICDs are removed every day from patients in the U.S. who get new devices or who die each year, Pavri said. Modern ICDs have a projected battery life of six to 10 years, and many used ICDs have three years or more of remaining charge when they're explanted.

Funeral directors frequently remove ICDs from bodies to prevent explosions during cremation. Perhaps one-fifth to one-third of devices discarded by funeral homes may have sufficient battery life to save someone else.

"We don't know exactly how many but it's clearly in the thousands," said Pavri.

For his study, Pavri and his colleagues collected the devices one by one over several years from consenting patients or from funeral homes. Shipping them by traditional methods was difficult because of the explanation involved, so the doctors packed them into checked luggage and transported them themselves.

Reusing ICDs is prohibited in the U.S. by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which classifies them as single-use devices. However, the FDA has no jurisdiction over the devices if they're treated and implanted elsewhere and Lokhandwala said the Cardiological Society of India has authorized the practice.

The ICDs were collected, cleaned and sterilized during a multi-step process and then re-implanted into the new patients.

Researchers were able to follow up on 75 of the 81 patients; those who survived appeared to be doing well, Pavri said.

This study offers important new information about the apparent safety of reusing ICDs, but it also highlights obstacles, said Dr. Thomas Crawford, a cardiologist at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the research.

Crawford is part of Project My Heart-Your Heart, a program that is collecting used pacemakers for future donation in developing countries. So far, they've amassed some 10,000 devices. However, researchers involved with that program have petitioned the FDA for permission to conduct a clinical trial to confirm the safety and efficacy of the reused devices in living people.

As it stands now, projects like Pavri's aren't officially sanctioned.

"It's a very uncharted territory," Crawford said. "It's not exactly legal."

Pavri acknowledged as much in the study, saying "any complications associated with such off-label use could be grounds for legal action."

But, he added, such off-label research is necessary to bolster arguments that regulators and manufacturers should allow reuse of these devices on humanitarian grounds.

"It is worse practice, in my opinion, to not offer a patient anything," Pavri said.

"A secondhand device is better than no device at all."