Insulin receptor

stops progression of

Alzheimer's disease

Researchers have found that peroxisome-proliferator activated receptor (PPAR) agonists prevent several components of neurodegeneration and preserve learning and memory in rats with induced Alzheimer's disease (AD). They found that an agonist for PPAR delta, a receptor that is abundant in the brain, had the most overall benefit.

"This raises the possibility that you can treat patients with mild cognitive impairment who have possible or probable Alzheimer's disease. This is really amazing because right now, there's just no treatment that works," says lead author Suzanne M. de la Monte, MD, MPH, a neuropathologist at Rhode Island Hospital and a professor of pathology and clinical neuroscience at Brown Medical School in Providence, RI.

The study appears in the September issue (Volume 10, Issue 1) of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

In previous studies, the researchers demonstrated that Alzheimer's is a brain-specific neuroendocrine disorder, or a Type 3 diabetes, distinct from other types of diabetes. They showed that insulin and IGF-I receptors are produced separately in the brain, and begin to disappear early in Alzheimer's and continue to decline as the disease progresses. As insulin signaling breaks down, it leads to increased oxidative stress, impaired metabolism and cell death - all causing neurodegeneration.

Scientists were also previously able to replicate Alzheimer's in rats with Streptozotocin (STZ), a compound that is known to destroy insulin producing cells in the pancreas and cause diabetes. When injected into the brains of rats, the compound mimicked the neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease - plaque deposits, neurofibrillary tangles, diminished brain size, impaired cognitive function, cell loss and overall brain deterioration.

Having created an animal model for Alzheimer's, researchers in this study induced Alzheimer's with STZ and then administered treatment with three classes of PPAR agonists - alpha, gamma and delta. All are found in various tissues and organs in the body, including the brain, and PPAR gamma is already FDA approved as a treatment for Type 2 diabetes, or adult-onset diabetes. The two other classes of PPAR agonists have not yet been approved for clinical use.

Following treatment, many of the abnormalities associated with Alzheimer's were reduced or nearly disappeared. The agonists affected different regions of the brain, with PPAR delta producing the most striking effect in preserving the hypothalamus and temporal lobes, areas of the brain responsible for memory, learning, and behavior. In these brain regions, PPAR alpha and PPAR gamma were effective in reducing amyloid gene expression. PPAR delta had the most benefit for reducing oxidative stress and improving learning and memory.

"That was the most spectacular," de la Monte says, "because everybody wants something for cognitive impairment, and that was the most improved with the PPAR delta agonist."

Researchers were not able to stop the deterioration of insulin and its receptors. However, by administering PPAR, they were able to bypass the defects in insulin signaling and preserve the cells that need insulin to thrive. PPAR molecules go directly to the nucleus of cells and tell DNA to turn on or off genes that are normally regulated by insulin, thus preventing them from dying and allowing them to communicate with each other. The major effects of the PPAR treatments were to increase brain size, preserve insulin and IGF-II receptor bearing neurons, and preserve learning and memory.

"The trigger for dementia is the loss of insulin and IGF producing cells. The cells that need those growth factors subsequently die. This study shows you can block the second phase, which is responsible for dementia. This is great news for patients since you treat early stages of disease," de la Monte says.

Another promising result for Alzheimer's patients is that these drugs could be given in the form of a pill, de la Monte says. In the study, the drugs were injected to control the amounts administered.

"One of the most exciting findings was that peripheral (intraperitoneal) injection of the PPAR agonists either partially or completely rescued the brains from neurodegeneration," the authors write.

Alzheimer's appears to be caused by parallel abnormalities - impaired insulin signaling and oxidative stress, which is regulated by the genes NOS and NOX. The PPAR agonists treatments target both problems. They preserve the cells regulated by insulin and IGF, and they decrease oxidative stress, resulting in fewer lesions in the brain.

"If the diagnosis is suspected or patients are in the early phases of AD, there's a good possibility they could get treatment that will help them. It's possible that in the moderate phase, treatment will also help, but more work needs to be done to show that," de la Monte says.

Treatment is not likely to work in the late stages of the disease, she says, because the cells have already died.

Former Skeptics

 Call for Action on Global Warming – Bush Silent

Thanks to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, along with Katrina and this summer’s blistering heat waves, the threats posed by global warming have morphed from a far-fetched possibility to a clear and present danger in the minds of voters, scientists, politicians and theologians. Even those who previously scoffed at the notion are true believers now:

* “It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a build-up of carbon dioxide in the air. We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels. If we are contributing to the destruction of this planet, we need to do something about it,” said Rev. Pat Robertson on a recent broadcast of the “700 Club.” He also added that the recent heat waves had made a “convert” out of him on the issue.1

* “…science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous. As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data, I’m now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert.” Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution and senior editor of The New Republic.2

* Representative Bob Inglis (R-NC and chairman of the House Science Research subcommittee) says he “pooh-poohed” global warming until a trip to the South Pole in January convinced him otherwise. “I think we should all be concerned. There are more and more Republicans willing to stop laughing at climate change who are ready to get serious about reclaiming their heritage as conservationists.”3

* “I was a certified global warming skeptic…[but] I eventually came to the judgment that I was wrong and global warming was real, largely caused by human activities and profoundly changing the planet on which we live,” admitted Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist and director of weather communications for The Weather Channel.4

* “I used to be skeptical…but now I’m absolutely convinced that the world is spiraling out of control. CO2 is like a brushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year.” Richard Branson, founder of The Virgin Group.5

* A national LA Times/Bloomberg poll conducted in July found that 74 percent of Americans consider “global warming a serious problem” and want the government to do more to solve it.6

The Bush administration's response? Silence. President Bush remains resolutely incurious while the planet heats.

Take Action - sign the petition to put a cap on global warming

Sources

1. 8/3/06, The Christian Post, "Heat wave makes Pat Robertson a global warming convert," the Associated Press.
2. 5/24/06, The New York Times, "Finally feeling the heat," by Gregg Easterbrook.
3. 4/24/06, Bloomberg News, "Bush faces growing dissent from Republicans on climate change," by Kim Chapman.
4. 9/24/06, The Weather Channel Blog, “If this isn’t global warming, I don’t know what is (confessions of an ex-skeptic), by Stu Ostro.
5. 7/27/06, Business 2.0 Magazine, “Branson’s next big move,” by Carleen Hawn.
6. 7/28-8/1/06, LA Times/Bloomberg poll of 1478 adults nationwide

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Five Years After and We Still Don’t Know

By Paul Craig Roberts

In the five years since three World Trade Center buildings collapsed into their own footprints in virtually free fall time, the convincing power of the official explanation of that day’s events has evaporated.  Polls show that 36% of Americans do not believe the official account. As Lev Grossman writes in Time magazine (September 3, 2006), “Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.”

Grossman acknowledges that alternative explanations of 9/11 are more compelling than the official explanation.  Grossman offers a psychological explanation for the success of alternative explanations: “a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it.”

However, Grossman’s psychological explanation fails on its own terms.  Which is the grandest conspiracy theory? The interpretation of 9/11 as an orchestrated casus belli to justify US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the interpretation that a handful of Muslims defeated US security multiple times in one short morning and successfully pulled off the most fantastic terrorist attack in history simply because they “hate our freedom and democracy”?  Orchestrating events to justify wars is a stratagem so well worn as to be boring. Indeed, it is the fantastic conspiracy of the official explanation that makes it unbelievable.

The scientists, engineers, and professors who pose the tough questions about 9/11 are not people who spend their lives making sense of their experience by constructing conspiracy theories.  Scientists and scholars look to facts and evidence.  They are concerned with the paucity of evidence in behalf of the official explanation.  They stress that the official explanation is inconsistent with known laws of physics, and that the numerous security failures, when combined together, are a statistical improbability. 

The call by 9/11 skeptics for an independent investigation by an international panel of  experts is not a conspiracy theory.  In principle there is nothing wrong with such an investigation.  In practice, it might be difficult to create a truly independent panel.  How many physicists, for example, have careers independent of government grants, and how many engineering firms would risk being branded “unpatriotic” and lose business by coming down on the “wrong” side of the issue?

Nowhere is there a surfeit of brave men.

I do not know what happened on 9/11, and I don’t expect to ever find out.  Neither government nor media show any interest in providing us with anything except a political commission’s report.

9/11 skeptics have pointed out a large number of problems with the 9/11 Commission Report.  Here is a very short list:

(1) There appears to be a very large energy deficit in the official explanation of the collapse of the two WTC towers, and no explanation for the collapse of WTC 7.  What is the source of the energy that brought down the three buildings?

In the PBS documentary, “America Rebuilds,” broadcast in September 2002, Larry Silverstein, who had the lease on the World Trade Center, said that WTC 7 was brought down by a decision of the authorities on the scene: “I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”

Two striking facts jump out from this quote.  One is that fire was not raging in WTC 7. The other is that “to pull” a building means to bring it down by engineered demolition.  For WTC 7 to be pulled on the late afternoon of September 11, it would already have had to be wired for demolition.  Why was WTC 7 wired for demolition?  

Brigham Young University Professor of Physics Steven Jones has suggested that thermite, or some other powerful, high temperature, high explosive capable of slicing the powerful steel columns that comprised the WTC towers central core, provided the energy missing in the official account.  

In a September 1, 2006, New York Times article, “U.S. moves to debunk ‘alternative theories’ on Sept. 11 attacks,” Jim Dwyer reports that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, disputes Professor Jones’ suggestion. NIST believes that such “enormous quantities of thermite would have to be applied to the structural columns to damage them” that engineered demolition is not feasible.  

Gentle reader, note what NIST is saying.  If no reasonable quantity of the explosive thermite, which is used for engineered demolition, could damage the powerful buildings, the measly energy from an airliner, a bit of jet fuel, and gravity could not have collapsed the buildings. 

The fact of the matter is that there has been no investigation of why the three buildings collapsed.  Bill Manning, the editor-in-chief of “Fire Engineering” got it right when he wrote in the January 2002 issue of that publication that “the ‘official investigation’ blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. . . . As things now stand . . . the investigation into the world Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to paper- and computer-generated hypotheticals.”

Manning complained about the “destruction of evidence . . . of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history” and wrote that nowhere in the ”national standard for fire investigation” is there “an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence.”

Obviously, we were not meant to know why the buildings collapsed.  

This conclusion does not automatically lead to the conclusion that some elements of the US government and/or Israeli intelligence destroyed the buildings, using airliners as cover, in order to justify invasions to achieve US/Israeli hegemony in the MIddle East or US control of oil supplies. No doubt, neoconservatives in the Bush administration used 9/11 for this purpose.  However, perhaps the buildings failed for reasons that involve enormous liabilities, and those liabilities were covered up with a bogus explanation.

According to news reports, insurance payments to Silverstein for the buildings were many multiples larger than the price he paid for the lease. If the reports are correct, perhaps money explains the story.

(2) The belief that Muslims pulled off the attacks is based on the concreteness of the 19 names identified as the hijackers by the FBI. The fact that the FBI attests to the identity of the hijackers is the source of the official story’s credibility.  

Considering the official story’s dependence on the identity of the hijackers, how is it possible for the official story to survive for 5 years after the BBC’s report (September 23, 2001) that a number of the alleged hijackers are alive and well?  

According to BBC News World Edition, “Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.  His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world. Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports. He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.”

Obviously, Waleed Al Shehri would not be alive if he had crashed an airliner into the World Trade Center.  It would appear that the FBI’s confidence in the identity of the hijackers is more public relations than reality.  As the FBI has been proven wrong about the identity of a number of the hijackers, how do we know the FBI is right about any of them?

There are many holes in the official 9/11 story and very little evidence in its behalf.  Did the government, terrified by possible public reaction to the catastrophe and expected to have an explanation for the terrifying event, simply concoct a story?  

The reason so many people doubt the 9/11 story is not because they have psychological needs for conspiracies, but because the 9/11 story is not believable.

Paul Craig Roberts , was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington ; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Pentagon moves toward monitoring media

BY MATTHEW PERRONE

AP Business Writer

The U.S. command in Baghdad is seeking bidders for a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for monitoring the tone of Iraq news stories filed by U.S. and foreign media.

Proposals, due Sept. 6, ask companies to show how they'll "provide continuous monitoring and near-real time reporting of Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international, and U.S. media," according to the solicitation issued last week.

Contractors also will be evaluated on how they will provide analytical reports and customized briefings to the military, "including, but not limited to tone (positive, neutral, negative) and scope of media coverage."

The winner of the contract will likely also be required to develop an Arabic version of the multinational force's web site.

Attempts by The Associated Press to contact officials connected to the project via telephone and e-mail were not successful Thursday night.

The program comes during what has appeared to be a White House effort, before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, to take the offensive against critics at a time of doubt about the future of Iraq.

President Bush addressed the American Legion's national convention in Salt Lake City on the issue Thursday, stressing that a U.S. pullout from Iraq would lead to its conquest by America's worst enemies.

He continued a theme set by both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when they spoke to the administration-friendly group earlier in the week.

The military last year was criticized for a public relations program in Iraq that included hiring a consulting firm that paid Iraqi news media to carry news stories written by American troops.

Pentagon officials have defended the program as a necessary tool in the war on terror. But critics have said it contradicts American values of freedom of the press.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

The Gap

is getting

W I D E R

By Isaiah Poole

You can imagine that the latest release of income and poverty statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau landed with a thud at the White House.

The headline is that for the first time since George Bush has been in office, the poverty rate has not increased; it has instead remained stable. But there is worse news under the headline: Because the poverty rate was unchanged, but real median household income rose 1.1 percent between 2004 and 2005, that can only mean one thing: Income inequality between the rich and the poor in America is getting worse.

It gets still worse: According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the increase in median income in 2005 was driven by an increase in the income of elderly households. Non-elderly households—working families—saw their median income actually fall by 0.5 percent. Since 2001, the median income for non-elderly households has fallen 3.7 percent, or $2,000. "That is both stunning and unprecedented," said economist Robert Greenstein with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in a conference call with reporters.

Uneven Economic Recovery

Economist Jared Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute said that the 2001 recession has been followed by "an unusually uneven economic recovery," making a mockery of the promises the Bush administration and congressional Republicans made when they rammed record tax cuts for the wealthy and for businesses through Congress. Those tax cuts, combined with the low-interest-rate policies of the Federal Reserve and a booming real estate market, were supposed to be a rising tide for everyone. As progressives warned, they were not. Now, interest rates are up, the housing boom is over and the caffeine buzz from the tax cuts is long gone. "I’m concerned that for many working families, this is as good as it gets," he said.

The Gini Index, which is used to measure income inequality, has increased 4.2 percent since 1995, according to the Census Bureau. Today, the wealthiest 20 percent of households earn 50.4 percent of the nation’s gross income; the poorest 20 percent earn just 3.4 percent. The real median income of the top 10 percent of households increased 13 percent in that period, while it increased just 2.3 percent for the bottom 10 percent.

As George Bush travels through New Orleans and makes more promises about the rebuilding effort, these statistics show the consequences of an administration that has done nothing to bridge the gap between the rich and poor; in fact, his policies have widened that gap.

© 2006 TomPaine.com

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK