Texas rule requiring burial or cremation of fetal tissue shames women, suit says

A women’s rights group has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block a new Texas rule that requires fetal remains to be cremated or buried.

Accusing the state of a politically-motivated ploy to make it harder for women to have abortions, the Center for Reproductive Rights launched the legal action on Monday, one week before the regulation is set to take effect on 19 December.

The lawsuit against the Texas department of state health services (DSHS), filed in federal court in Austin, alleges that the regulation has no medical benefits, will pose practical burdens by increasing the cost of healthcare services and is an attempt to stigmatise abortion and heap shame on women seeking the procedure.

Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider, is the lead plaintiff in the suit. It claims that the new regulation “burdens women seeking pregnancy-related medical care. It imposes a funeral ritual on women who have a miscarriage management procedure, ectopic pregnancy surgery, or an abortion.

“Further, it threatens women’s health and safety by providing no safe harbor for sending tissue to pathology or crime labs. It also forces healthcare providers to work with an extremely limited number of third-party vendors for burial or scattering ashes, threatening abortion clinics’ provision of care and their long-term ability to remain open, as well as cost increases for women seeking pregnancy-related medical care.”

Current Texas regulations on disposal by healthcare facilities do not generally distinguish between fetal remains and other kinds of human materials that would typically be disposed of in a sanitary landfill. The new rule changes that, creating a category for “fetal tissue” and ordering it to be buried or cremated regardless of how far along the pregnancy is. Miscarriages or abortions that happen at home are exempt and birth or death certificates are not required to be issued.

The plan, strongly promoted by Texas’ Republican governor Greg Abbott, was publicly announced last July, four days after the supreme court struck down key parts of an onerous 2013 abortion law that prompted a drastic drop in the number of clinics in Texas. The court found that the law, which mandated that clinics have standards akin to surgical centres, caused an undue burden on women seeking an abortion and did not offer sufficient medical benefits. Abbott, though, has vowed to continue efforts to restrict abortion.

“I believe it is imperative to establish higher standards that reflect our respect for the sanctity of life. This is why Texas will require clinics and hospitals to bury or cremate human and fetal remains,” Abbott wrote in July in a fundraising email to supporters reported by the Texas Tribune. He said the proposal would “help make Texas the strongest pro-life state in the nation”.

According to the DSHS, the rule will benefit public health and safety “by ensuring that the disposition methods specified in the rules continue to be limited to methods that prevent the spread of disease” and by “protecting the dignity of the unborn”. Texas’s Republican-dominated legislature is expected to formally enshrine the regulation in state law during the 2017 session, which starts in January.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has said the proposal would ‘help make Texas the strongest pro-life state in the nation’. Photograph: Mike Stone/Reuters

“These regulations are an insult to Texas women, the rule of law and the US supreme court, which declared less than six months ago that medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion access are unconstitutional,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “These insidious regulations are a new low in Texas’ long history of denying women the respect that they deserve to make their own decision about their lives and their healthcare.”

The question of how to handle fetal remains became a rallying point for anti-abortion activists after an organisation released a video in 2015 that falsely appeared to show employees at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston illegally selling fetal tissue.

Mike Pence, the Indiana governor and now vice-president-elect, signed a restrictive abortion law in March this year that included a fetal remains provision similar to Texas’s plans. It was stopped by a court in June shortly before it was scheduled to take effect.

Another law in Louisiana is on hold because of an ongoing legal challenge.

Texas rule requiring burial or cremation of fetal tissue shames women, suit says

Stem cell trial suggests damaged heart tissue could be regenerated

People suffering from heart disease have been offered hope by a new study that suggests damaged tissue could be regenerated through a stem cell treatment injected into the heart during surgery.

The small-scale study, published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Translational Research, followed 11 patients who during bypass surgery had stem cells injected into their hearts near the site of tissue scars caused by heart attacks.

One of the trial’s most dramatic results was a 40% reduction in the size of scarred tissue. Such scarring occurs during a cardiac event such as a heart attack, and can increase the chances of further heart failure. The scarring was previously thought to be permanent and irreversible.

At the time of treatment, the patients were suffering heart failure and had a very high (70%) annual mortality rate. But 36 months after receiving the stem cell treatment all are still alive, and none have suffered a further cardiac event such as a heart attack or stroke, or had any readmissions for cardiac-related reasons.

According to the British Heart Foundation, while there are several treatments to help people with heart failure, there is no known cure, and in some cases a heart transplant may be the only option.

Twenty-four months after participants were injected with the stem cell treatment there was a 30% improvement in heart function, 40% reduction in scar size, and 70% improvement in quality of life, as judged by the Minnesota living with heart failure (MLHF) score.

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“Quite frankly it was a big surprise to find the area of scar in the damaged heart got smaller,” said Prof Stephen Westaby from John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, who undertook the research at AHEPA university hospital in Thessaloniki, Greece, with Kryiakos Anastasiadis and Polychronis Antonitsis.

Westaby began theorising about the impact of stem cells on regenerating heart tissue and reducing scarring after observing how scar tissue on the hearts of babies who have had heart attacks and undergone heart failure disappeared by the time they reached adolescence, suggesting that residual stem cells might be able to repair the damaged tissue.

“It’s an early study and it’s difficult to make large-scale predictions based on small studies,” said Ajan Reginald, the founder of Celixir, the company that produces the treatment. “But even in a small study you don’t expect to see results this dramatic.

“These are 11 patients who were in advanced heart failure, they had had a heart attack in the past, multiple heart attacks in many cases. The life expectancy for these patients is less than two years, we’re excited and honoured that these patients are still alive.”

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Jeremy Pearson, the associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation (BHF), said: “This very small study suggests that targeted injection into the heart of carefully prepared cells from a healthy donor during bypass surgery, is safe. It is difficult to be sure that the cells had a beneficial effect because all patients were undergoing bypass surgery at the same time, which would usually improve heart function.

“A controlled trial with substantially more patients is needed to determine whether injection of these types of cells proves any more effective than previous attempts to improve heart function in this way, which have so far largely failed.”

Westaby conceded that the improvement in patients’ health was partly due to the heart bypass surgery those in the study were undergoing, and said the next study would include a control group who undergo bypass but do not receive stem cell treatment, to measure exactly what impact the treatment has.

“These patients came out of heart failure partly due to the bypass grafts of course, but we think it was partly due to the fact that they had a smaller area of scar [as a result of the stem cell treatment]. Certainly this finding of scar being reduced is quite fascinating,” he said.

Westaby will commence a large-scale controlled study later this year at the Royal Brompton hospital in London, and Celixir hopes to make the Heartcel treatment available to patients in 2018 or 2019.

Stem cell trial suggests damaged heart tissue could be regenerated

Research turns skin tissue from infertile males into early-stage sperm cells

Live sperm by means of a microscope. The research suggests infertile men may possibly have misplaced the stem cells in their testes that typically produce into sperm. Photo: Mads Nissen/Panos

Scientists have turned skin tissue from infertile males into early-stage sperm cells in a groundbreaking study that raises hopes for new therapies for the situation.

The unexpected achievement of the method has stunned some scientists, because it was believed to be not possible for the men to make any sperm.

The men who took part in the study had significant genetic defects on their Y sex chromosomes, which meant they could not create healthy adult sperm on their own.

About one% of males cannot make any sperm, a problem acknowledged as azoospermia, while a fifth of men have reduced sperm counts. Male fertility is a concern for approximately half of couples who seek IVF therapy.

In the most current study, researchers took skin cells from three infertile men and converted them into stem cells, which can expand into practically any tissue in the entire body. When these cells have been transplanted into the testes of mice, they designed into early-stage human sperm cells.

“What we located was that cells from guys who did not possess sperm at the time of clinical observation were capable to generate the precursors for sperm,” said Cyril Ramathal, of Stanford University.

Skin cells from infertile males grew into fewer early-stage sperm cells than cells taken from usually fertile men, the research found.

The investigation is at an early stage, but scientists suspect that the converted skin cells might have grown into mature sperm cells if they had been transplanted into the infertile men’s testes.

If additional operate confirms the suspicion, it may be possible to restore male fertility by taking men’s skin cells, turning them into stem cells, and injecting these into their testes. The identical might be accomplished for men who are left infertile soon after getting chemotherapy for cancer.

“Currently being able to efficiently convert skin cells into sperm would let this group to become biologic fathers,” explained Michael Eisenberg, director of male reproduction and surgical procedure at Stanford, who was not involved in the study. “Infertility is one particular of the most widespread and devastating problems of cancer treatment options, specially for young boys and males.”

The examine, published in the journal Cell Reports, suggests that rather than becoming unable to make healthier sperm, the men may just have misplaced the population of stem cells in their testes that typically increase into sperm.

The scientists took skin cells from the guys and produced batches of one.5m induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to transplant into the mice. Every single batch was injected into the seminiferous tubules in mouse testes, in which sperm usually develop. The cells that lodged in the tubules created into early-stage sperm cells, but others turned into little tumours. The danger of leading to cancer in the guys is one of the major hazards that scientists need to overcome.

“It is remarkable that you can make iPS cells flip into early sperm cells in males with these genetic deletions,” explained Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at Sheffield University. “By the time we see them in clinic, they are not creating sperm and don’t have any stem cells to make them from, but that isn’t going to imply they did not have them when.

“This function suggests these infertile guys might have had testicular stem cells at some stage, and the issue is that they are not able to sustain them. So if you can make iPS cells and put them back into the guy, you may possibly be ready to keep ample in the testes for them to create some sperm. You are going to in no way restore them back to normal, but they may have a number of months or many years of producing sperm which is adequate to give them fertility back,” Pacey mentioned.

In the United kingdom, the use of artificially produced sperm to make babies is banned. But sperm created via this strategy – in which converted skin cells are grown into sperm in the men’s testes – may be legal to use as they are produced within the body.

Research turns skin tissue from infertile males into early-stage sperm cells

Fluorescent Green Stem Cells Regenerate Heart Muscle tissue Right after Heart Attacks

Two weeks following possessing heart attacks, three macaque monkeys received injections of a billion heart cells, derived from human embryonic stem cells, to fix their broken muscle. About 40 % of the broken tissue was regenerated n the macaque’s hearts utilizing this strategy, in accordance to a examine published in the journal Nature.

Heart attacks do harm to the cells that make the heart beat, which are named cardiomyocytes. Injury to them makes it more difficult for the heart to pump blood throughout the entire body, which is why several folks usually remain on medication completely right after heart attacks. About one million people in the U.S. have heart attacks each and every yr.

English: A Crab-eating Macaque (Macaca fascicularis) Monkey eating peanuts. Pictured in Bangalore, India Français : Un Macaque crabier (Macaca fascicularis) mangeant des cacahuètes, Bangalore, Inde. (Photograph credit score: Wikipedia)

Men and women generally experience heart attacks when a waxy cholesterol plaque breaks open in an artery, triggering a blood clot to form. The clot, if big ample, can absolutely block blood from flowing by way of the heart’s arteries. The muscle ordinarily fed by the blood movement via that artery commences to die. The dead muscles don’t increase back — rather they are replaced by scar tissue, which helps make it harder for the heart to pump blood. Heart attacks can lead to other severe problems, like heart failure, arrhythmias, and death.

The hope of stem cell therapy is changing the tissue broken by the heart attack with new cells that could enable the heart to heal back to one thing like normal perform. Today’s review suggests that may possibly be attainable. The stem-cell derived heart muscle cells matured and started to beat along with the macaque heart cells, and after three months, they were completely integrated. The scientists were in a position to determine this by making confident the human stem cell-derived cells would express a fluorescent green protein, creating them less difficult to spot. Not only had been they fairly standard, new blood vessels had grown to feed the heart cells, the 1st time that is been noticed.

There have been some hiccups. Very first, all the monkeys needed immunosuppressive treatment to stop their bodies from rejecting the human cells. And ultrasound studies of the animals’ hearts showed that the muscle’s capability to pump blood improved in some but not all of the animals. But the most worrisome thing were episodes of irregular heartbeats that occurred shortly after the stem cell injections. These disappeared following two to three weeks following the injection, as the stem cells matured.

But the method, even though employed in only a couple of animals, might one particular day offer support for heart failure individuals, the examine authors wrote. Of program, a lot more analysis wants to be carried out.

Fluorescent Green Stem Cells Regenerate Heart Muscle tissue Right after Heart Attacks

Scientists grow self-healing muscle tissue which could replace genuine ones

^{Left: the fibres pre-iunjury from 2nd left: 6 hours, 5 and ten days right after the injury (Duke University)}

They also discovered that it was able to integrate into mice speedily, and demonstrated the potential to heal itself both within the laboratory and within an animal, when it was implanted into reside mice.

The research, conducted at Duke University, involved inserting the lab-grown muscle into a small chamber positioned on the backs of the mice.

The chamber was then covered by a glass panel. Every two days for two weeks, the scientists imaged the implanted muscle tissue by way of the window to check on their progress.

By genetically modifying the muscle fibres to generate fluorescent flashes in the course of calcium spikes — which trigger muscle tissues to contract — the researchers could view the flashes turn out to be brighter as the muscle grew more powerful.

“We could see and measure in genuine time how blood vessels grew into the implanted muscle fibres, maturing toward equalling the power of its native counterpart,” stated scientist Mark Juhas who helped perform the study.

Dr Bursac explained that the engineers will now commence operate on establishing no matter whether their ‘fake’ muscle could be used to repair actual muscle injuries and disease:

“The muscle we have produced represents an essential advance for the discipline,” he stated. “It’s the first time engineered muscle has been designed that contracts as strongly as native neonatal skeletal muscle.

“Can it vascularise, innervate and fix the damaged muscle’s perform? That is what we will be functioning on for the subsequent numerous years.”

Scientists grow self-healing muscle tissue which could replace genuine ones

Fascial tissue and the relevance of stretching to get fit

You’ll hear more about ‘fascial’ tissue release and stretching this 12 months, as the specialists say it truly is the secret to boosting your muscle tissue, fitness and body

BY Katy Young |
21 January 2014

If you happen to be one of individuals folks who does not stick all around after class for a very good stretch, go through on. Because in accordance to experts and the new 2014 fitness trends, ‘fascial’ stretching is anything we should all believe about if we consider about fitness at all.

Never heard of ‘fascial’ release? Neither had we, until we learned of two new fascial releasing lessons (at London’s super amazing Equinox and also Virgin Energetic ) and new treaments (at Twenty Two Coaching – the far better entire body destination for Jennifer Lawrence) in a week.

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So what is it? “Fascia is the connective tissue of the body runs from the leading of head to the bottom of toe – the sheath encompassing all muscle tissues and bones. It is important in force distribution around the body, and interestingly a whole lot of persistent injuries are induced by restrictions in the fascia,” explains George Ashwell of Twenty Two Training.

“Release the fascial tissue and you’ll boost muscle tissue hydration, allow a full range or muscle motion, prevent restriction in the course of instruction, recover better after exercising and decrease your chance of damage. It also means a better movement of blood and nutrients to you muscles,” Ashwell explains, giving us some idea as to what the new 2014 fascial fuss is about.

Ashwell and the crew of physios and sports therapists at Twenty Two have produced fascial release massages, designed to assist with persistent injury and sports activities efficiency. “A distinctive deep tissue massage that can actually support adjust the framework and flexibility of our muscle tissue. We are the only area in the United kingdom with this distinct method,” explains Twenty Two’s founder Dalton Wong.

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Interestingly, Twenty Two Coaching has also created a facial treatment to unwind and release thickened and limited fascial tissue. Having spoken to somebody who’s lately attempted and tested the remedy, she informed me that the feeling of relief – particularly in regions of stress all around the jaw – was both physically and visibly noticeable.

At Equinox you may uncover the new RX Series. A totally new concept for the US-born fitness business, these classes are based on self-myofascial massage only, ‘to recharge and prep the physique for larger performances,’ they say.

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Even though the RX Series will appeal to their athlete and pro members who presently comprehend the important of fascial care, the idea is that these courses which incorporate stretches, breath method and self-myofascial massage will hand in excess of the tools to keep damage-cost-free to all their members. In concept, they will also see heightened efficiency, also.

Virgin Active are rolling out their Burn up 360 degrees courses nationwide this 12 months, once more on the premise that obtaining the fascial lines moving gives the muscle tissue more space to move as well. “Burn 360° is a class we have devised to incorporate movements that stretch fascia lines. If worked appropriately, they boost posture and versatility, offering our muscles a lot more space to move and full far more demanding exercise routines.”

This is not just a situation of fitness experts flexing their advertising and marketing muscle tissue: fascial release will show that if you want to remain match you have acquired to stretch.

Fascial tissue and the relevance of stretching to get fit