HONG KONG, Aug 25, (Agencies): Some diabetics are at risk of developing chronic kidney disease if they have mutations of a certain gene, a long-term study in Hong Kong has found.
Kidney failure is an important cause of death for people with type 2 diabetes, and ethnic Chinese diabetics are more prone to developing chronic kidney disease than Caucasians.
The finding would help identify diabetes patients prone to developing kidney disease so they could be rigorously monitored and given more intensive preventive treatment, wrote the lead researcher in reply to questions from Reuters.

“Identification of those genetically at risk of developing renal complications can help identify these subjects for intensive management, and also may help to motivate individuals to be more compliant to treatment,” wrote Ronald Ma of the Chinese University and Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong.
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Wednesday, Ma and colleagues said they tracked for nine years 1,172 diabetes patients in Hong Kong who were free of kidney disease at the start of the study.

By the end of the nine-year study period, 90 of them had developed kidney disease.
The researchers analysed the DNA of all the participants and found that four mutations of a particular gene — PRKCB1 — occurred far more frequently in the group with kidney disease.
“The risk for end-stage renal disease was approximately six times higher for patients with 4 risk alleles (mutations) compared with patients with 0 or 1 risk allele,” they said.
The same findings were confirmed in another group of 1,049 diabetes patients.
Type 2 diabetes is caused by the body’s inability to adequately use insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, to control glucose sugar produced from food. Sugar levels rise and can damage the eyes, kidneys, nerves, heart and major arteries.

Diabetes is exploding in China due to changes in diet, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking and a worsening obesity problem. China has 94 million diabetic adults and another estimated 148.2 million Chinese are living with prediabetes.

Pesticidee: Children whose mothers were exposed to certain types of pesticides while pregnant were more likely to have attention problems as they grew up, US researchers reported on Thursday.
The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, adds to evidence that organophosphate pesticides can affect the human brain.
Researchers at the University of California Berkeley tested pregnant women for evidence that organophosphate pesticides had actually been absorbed by their bodies, and then followed their children as they grew.
Women with more chemical traces of the pesticides in their urine while pregnant had children more likely to have symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, at age 5, the researchers found.
“While results of this study are not conclusive, our findings suggest that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides may affect young children’s attention,” Amy Marks and colleagues wrote in the study, available at http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi/10.1289/ehp.1002056
To test for ADHD, the researchers questioned the mothers and also gave the children standardized tests.
Organophosphates are designed to attack the nervous systems of bugs by affecting message-carrying chemicals called neurotransmitters including acetylcholine, which is important to human brain development.
The researchers tested Mexican-American women living in the Salinas Valley of California, an area of intensive agriculture.
They looked for breakdown products or metabolites from pesticides in urine samples from the mothers during pregnancy and from their children as they grew.
Few symptoms showed up at age 3, but by age 5 the trend was significant, Marks and colleagues found.
A tenfold increase in pesticide metabolites in the mother’s urine correlated to a 500 percent increase in the chances of ADHD symptoms by age 5, with the trend stronger in boys.
A smaller increase in risk was seen if the children had pesticide metabolites in the urine.
In May a different team found children with high levels of organophosphate traces in the urine were almost twice as likely to develop ADHD as those with undetectable levels.
There are about 40 organophosphate pesticides such as malathion registered in the United States. Studies have also linked exposure to Parkinson’s, an incurable brain disease.

Pregnancy complications: A daily dose of aspirin in pregnancy could help prevent complications in women with, or at risk of, high blood pressure, the British health watchdog said on Tuesday.
High blood pressure in pregnancy can be dangerous and is linked to the condition pre-eclampsia. It is more common in first-time pregnancies and can lead to premature birth, stillbirth and babies being smaller than average.

Mothers are also at an increased risk of developing high blood pressure later in life, which is linked to heart disease and strokes.

Around 20 women die each year from conditions linked to high blood pressure while up to five percent of first-time mothers will develop pre-eclampsia.

Between 10 percent and 15 percent of pregnant women will suffer high blood pressure during their pregnancy while a small number will have it before they become pregnant.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has recommended that women with high blood pressure at moderate to high risk of pre-eclampsia take a low dose (75mg) of aspirin.
This should be taken every day from the 12th week of pregnancy until birth, according to the guideline for the National Health Service in England and Wales.
Aspirin is not routinely given to pregnant women and Nice hopes the advice will ensure consistent standards across the country.