Donna Campiglia is just one of hundreds of parents who were lining up to test their children. She wanted to test her 2 ½ year old son Noah to see what he would be best at. “I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it’s good to match them with the right activity,” Ms. Campiglia from Boulder, Colorado said. “I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration,” she said.

Boulder, Colorado is full of parents who are not only sports oriented – but also health conscious. It is no wonder that many of them are paying $149 to predict what sport their child can win at. The test is very simple and painless. All it requires is a simple swab inside the mouth of the child in order to collect DNA. The DNA will then be sent to a lab for analysis of the ACTN3 gene.

The test will show if the child is better at power, speed, or endurance sports. In 2003 a study was performed that showed a link between ACTN3 and the different athletic abilities. Atlas executives (that are performing these tests) did warn parents to the fact that there are still certain limitations – but they believe it could be a step in the right direction to help their child receive scholarships.

The companies’ goal is to test children from when they are infants till they are 8 years old. There are some experts who believe that testing an infant is completely useless. Dr. Theodore Friedmann, the director of the University of California-San Diego Medical Center’s interdepartmental gene therapy program, called it “an opportunity to sell new versions of snake oil.” “This may or may not be quite that venal, but I would like to see a lot more research done before it is offered to the general public,” he said. “I don’t deny that these genes have a role in athletic success, but it’s not that black and white.”

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“In our own mind it is a very significant advance because we have put the gene into the cells in the body. The vaccine is produced by your own cells,” Wei-Zen Wei of Wayne State University in Detroit, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. “It is made right in your body.”

Tests have shown that the vaccine has the capability to remove tumors in mice from a type of cancer known as HER2 positive cancer. HER2 positive cancer is 20 – 30% of breast cancers. The test also showed the vaccine destroy tumors that had developed a resistance to drugs that were designed to fight them.

Wei’s team created a vaccine using what they call naked DNA from genes that have the ability to produce the HER2 receptor – this is the molecular signal for the breast cancer tumors. They combined this DNA with an immune system stimulant and placed it into a ring of genetic material – which they called a plasmid. The plasmid came from a bacterium.

They then used a process that is known as electro oration. This process uses an electrical pulse to force the compound through the muscle and skin so that it can properly immunize the mice test subjects. Once the compound was safely in the leg muscles the genes would travel to cells where they would then begin to create HER2 receptors. These receptors activated immune cells called killer T-cells and antibodies.
“The immune system goes around the body to look for cancer cells,” Wei said.

When they then injected HER2-positive breast tumors into the mice, their bodies eradicated them. “Both tumor cells that respond to current targeted therapies and those that are resistant to these treatments were eradicated,” Wei said. “This may be an answer for women with these tumors who become resistant to the current therapies.”

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The cells were taken from the patient, cloned, and then given back to him. In spite of the advanced stage of his cancer, which had spread to his lungs and groins, the 52 year old man was completely healthy in 60 days since the cure had started. Two years after, the former melanoma patient did not present any signs that the disease came back.

While the results sound like good news, there is a downside to the story. The treatment was given to another 8 patients, and even though some of them have shown improvement, none had his cancer disappear.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t seem to be interested in the results of this study so far. This method of treatment is based on creating a new cure for every patient, since he or she needs to be given his or her own white blood cell. The companies that are looking for creating a general cure for cancer will have to wait for other studies to be published.

The cost of this new treatment is at least $30,000 and the places where one can get it are few, because artificially growing white blood cells is a complicated process, and only a few facilities have the required equipment.

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Sleepwalking is something that can be found in many kids – but it is common for them to outgrow it according to Dr. Vishesh Kapur the director of the University of Washinton Sleep Disorders Center at the Harborview Medical Center.

Zadra and his team evaluated 40 alleged sleepwalkers and referred them to the Sleep Research Center at Sacre-Coeur Hospital between August of 2003 and March of 2007. “Our study found that sleep deprivation can precipitate sleepwalking in predisposed individuals,” Zadra said.

Subjects who took part in the study agreed to have their baseline sleep patterns monitored during an initial all-night assessment. During a subsequent visit, patients were kept awake for the entire evening and remained under constant supervision.

For the patients who had been awake for 25 hours they were allowed a recovery sleep the next morning. During each sleep period the subjects were videotaped and their behavior evaluated. Some of these behavior patterns consisted of playing with the bed sheets and jumping over the railing of the bed.

Sleepwalking is “a disorder of arousal, a kind of mixed state of being,” Kapur said. There are three states of being in the world of sleep researchers – wakefulness, non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and REM sleep (most associated with dreams). Sleepwalking is a mixture of wakefulness and non-REM sleep, he said.

Some sort of arousal or disruption to sleep can also trigger sleepwalking, Kapur said. So people with sleep apnea (an interruption of breathing – snoring is commonly caused by apnea) sometimes sleepwalk, because apnea can create a state where someone is in between non-REM sleep and wakefulness.

Family genes are also a very large deciding factor, Kapur said. Yet, they still have not been able to fully discover the true reason why some will sleep walk and other not. “We know that sleepwalking happens more often in children than in adults, and the predisposing factor there might be the fact that kids have a lot more of slow-wave sleep, a deep non-REM sleep where sleepwalking often starts,” Kapur said.

There are treatments to help those who sleep walk which include better sleep hygiene, refrain from drinking too much caffeine or alcohol, and staying on a regular sleep schedule.

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