According to Don Hooton, chairperson of the foundation and father of the late Taylor Hooton, Mark McGwire is the best man to talk about and spread the word against steroids, its abuse and negative effects.

McGwire’s popularity among kids as well as his persona is an advantage for him as speaker about performance-enhancing drugs. Being back in the spotlight is a great way for him to start getting his message across especially to teens and young students.

Ever since retreating to a more private life after his retirement from Major League baseball, McGwire has been busy with his own foundation. He promised that his foundation would spread the message against steroids and its ill effects to its users.

Several months after the controversial congressional hearings on steroids, Don Hooton received an envelope containing a check from Mark McGwire’s foundation.

The Taylor Hooton Foundation was named after Don Hooton’s son, a high school baseball player who died after committing suicide. It was believed that the reason for his suicide was due to depression, a side effect brought about by his use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

For the past three years, the Taylor Hooton Foundation has been receiving “substantial” amount of donations from Mark McGwire’s foundation, which his representatives, requested that the amounts be kept private.

From St. Louis Today:

Within a few months of the congressional hearings that have come to define baseball’s steroid era, Don Hooton, who testified at the hearings and is the father of a steroid-user who had committed suicide, received a nondescript envelope in the mail.

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Last Tuesday, officers of Cass County Drug Enforcement Team (CCDET) performed a search in the 68,000 block of Morton Drive in Ontwa Township, Cass County. The investigation was jointly conducted by the Cass County Drug Enforcement Team, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the United States Postal Inspectors.

A former South Bend police officer was arrested after police authorities conducted a search in his residence in Eagle Lake, Cass County. Tony Wayne Macik was detained after police discovered steroids, several firearms, and a Taser gun in his residence.

It was not Macik’s first time to get into trouble with the law. In 2007, Macik got into a fight with one of his wife’s co-workers after he went there to fetch his daughter. He pleaded guilty to charges of misdemeanor assault.

After the incident, the chief recommended that he be fired by the South Bend Board of Public Safety.

Last Wednesday, he was arraigned in fourth District Court of Cass County before Judge Stacey Rentfrow. He was charged with creation of a controlled substance or delivery of an analogue, possession, and sale of a Taser, two counts of controlled substance possession and four counts of felony firearms.

The 39-year-old Macik was taken to the Cass County Jail and was held on a $200,000 bond.

From Nile Star:

Tony Wayne Macik of Morton Drive in Edwardsburg was arraigned Wednesday on felony drug charges in Cass County after law enforcement executed a search warrant at his home, reportedly locating suspected steroids.

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India confronts another potential suspension of their national weightlifting body. The body was previously banned in 2004 succeeded by a second ban in 2006, since more than three lifters tested positive in one calendar year.

Male lifters Harbhajan Singh, Rajesh Kumar and female Bijaya Devi failed the anti-doping tests directed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The three were an add-on to last month’s two lifters that also tested positive for anabolic steroids use.

According to Indian Weightlifting Federation (IWF) secretary Baldey Gulati, the three weightlifters screened positive for anabolic steroids use at a training camp for the Commonwealth championships.

Shailajah Pujari, a gold medalist at the 75kg women’s division at the 2002 Commonwealth Games and Vicky Batta, a 56kg weightlifter initially occupied the list of Indian weightlifters that tested positive for banned substances.

Last Thursday, Gulati told reporters that he was surprised to learn all those five weightlifters tested positive for some kind of anabolic steroids.

What is even more questionable is that all five athletes tested for the identical type of anabolic steroids in the similar quantum.

All contenders who tested positive requested their B samples to be examined. They have all refused consuming any sorts of anabolic steroids.

From Reuters India:

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Three more Indian weightlifters have tested positive for doping, taking the latest positive tests to five, and the national body is now facing another suspension.

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An existing osteoporosis drug can regenerate some cartilage lost due to osteoarthritis, as per an early study presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research in Denver.

While the study was on mice, the model of this study closely mimic human osteoarthritis, which develops post knee injuries as per authors of the concerned study.

It is medically suggested that though the currently used medications such as steroids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents, they do not address the cartilage loss behind osteoarthritis that is expected to afflict more than 50 million Americans by 2020.

From News-Medical.Net:

The authors of the current study observed that chondrocytes within injured and degenerating cartilage have more PTH type 1 receptors on their surfaces. This makes them especially sensitive to the PTH signal that prevents harmful chondrocyte maturation into bone in the joint cartilage. Thus, PTH therapy should increase the cartilage supply exactly where cartilage loss is causing disease.

“Right now physicians have no way to bring back cartilage in patients who have lost it to osteoarthritis,” said Randy Rosier, M.D., Ph.D., professor within the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Our current results, at least in mice, show that we can inhibit cartilage degeneration and improve the volume of cartilage in diseased joints. It’s remarkable enough that this compound delays the loss of cartilage, but these results show it also may be able to restore, at least to some extent, cartilage in already degraded joint surfaces.”

Researchers examined the impact of a daily dose of Forteo-/teriparatide, manufactured by Eli Lilly, and a generic version of teriparatide made by Sigma on the progress of OA following injury in study mice.

The study also highlighted the fact that pre-clinical findings provide proof-of-concept support for the use of teriparatide for slowing down joint cartilage degeneration in OA patients, with even a possibility to reverse it.

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The positive effects of anti-angiogenesis drugs for the treatment of the deadly brain tumors (glioblastomas) gives an impression of originating primarily from edema reduction and not from any direct anti-tumor effect.

According to Rakesh K. Jain, PhD, director of the Steele Laboratory in the MGH Department of Radiation Oncology, the study’s co-senior author, the findings of this study suggest that antiangiogenesis therapy can even prove to be effective when it comes to improving patient survival in cases of persistent tumor growth.

From News-Medical.Net:

“This is the first paper to show that vascular normalization alone, without chemotherapy, can be effective against some tumors by controlling edema and that this anti-edema effect is better than that of currently used steroids,” Jain says. “Unfortunately, these anti-VEGF agents did not slow the tumor growth rate in these models; and since recurrent glioblastomas are highly resistant to currently used chemotherapy drugs, even if vascular normalization increases drug delivery, there may be little or no additional increase in patient survival. We urgently need to find better anti-tumor and anti-angiogenic agents.”

Jain also notes that it will be important to identify biomarkers that may indicate which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment with angiogenesis inhibitors and to identify the mechanisms by which glioblastomas and other tumors resist anti-VEGF therapies. Jain is the Cook Professor of Tumor Biology and Sorensen is an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School.

This study is expected to provide great help to physicians treating their patients with glioblastomas, the deadly brain tumors.

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The use of modern immunosuppressive drugs can reduce the need for a steroid therapy as early as seven days after a transplant surgery without an impact on maintenance of functions of the lung, according to a new study by researchers at UC.

Chronic health conditions that are considered to be common to kidney transplant recipients can be minimized via elimination of a daily dose of steroids, as per Steve Woodle, MD, Chief of UC’s transplant surgery division, principal investigator and designer of the study.

From Sciencedaily.com:

“Steroids have long been the primary source of morbidity and complications following successful kidney transplantation,” Woodle says. “This study demonstrates that elimination of even small, daily prednisone (pred-ne-zone) doses does not compromise results while minimizing weight gain, diabetes and bone complications.”

Corticosteroids were the first anti-rejection drug used in transplant patients, dating back to the first transplant surgeries over 50 years ago.

Traditionally patients who have undergone organ transplantation have required life-long steroid treatments given in combination with other drugs that help suppress the body’s immune system and allow the transplanted organ to function properly.

However, the steroid treatment—given as the oral drug, prednisone—can cause serious side effects including cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol and blood pressure, weight gain, diabetes, bone weakness and cataracts.

It was remarked by Woodle that the risk of injection episodes in patients was marginally increased with an early steroid discontinuation process. He hopes that even this minor risk of increased rejection combined with long-term gains would not change much with development of new drugs and modern anti-rejection drugs.

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