For the first time in France, a couple has just been given authorisation to entrust a private company with the storage of umbilical cord cells from their unborn child, in view of a potential therapeutic need.

In its Order dated 21 November 2016, the Grasse court authorised the couple to “take and store haematopoietic cells from the umbilical cord and from the placental blood, along with cells from the cord and placenta (…) in light of duly justified therapeutic needs.”

Winner of the 2010 Inserm Honorary Prize, Eliane Gluckman, a haematologist at Saint Louis Hospital, Paris, an Inserm researcher, and a specialist in blood stem cell transplantation, was the first to have performed, in 1987, an umbilical cord blood transplant in a 6 year old child.

See press release from 30 November 2010

Cord blood is currently used to treat patients with blood diseases (leukaemias and lymphomas), and, for certain indications, replaces bone marrow.

Sentinelles network’s bulletin of 19 October 2016

According to the Sentinelles network’s weekly bulletin of 19 October 2016, the incidence rate of acute diarrhoea reached epidemic levels in metropolitan France last week, with 155 cases observed in general medicine clinics per 100 000 inhabitants.

The Sentinelles network adds that the current level of gastroenteritis is higher than the mean level observed in previous years in the same period. The Grand-Est, Ile-de-France and Pays de la Loire regions are particularly affected, with respective estimated incidence rates of 297, 213 and 211 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

The Sentinelles network is national surveillance system developed by Inserm and Pierre and Marie Curie University. Made up of 1,300 general practitioners and about a hundred private paediatricians, it has allowed the development of large databases on several diseases, for health surveillance and research purposes.

To obtain further information on gastroenteritis in France, you may contact Thierry Blanchon, Deputy Head of the Sentinelles network.

To resist the temptation of a beer in order to save and buy a bike later? At the end of the day, fatigue would encourage us to choose the immediate reward instead. This is what is revealed by a study published in PNAS and conducted by Bastien Blain, a researcher at Inserm Unit 1127.

Behavioural experiments were carried out on 50 people with an average age of 24 years, divided into 3 groups. One group of participants had to solve complicated exercises for a period of over 6 hours. By comparison, the second group had to work on simple exercises, while the last group played video games or read articles. At regular intervals, the researchers asked all participants to choose between receiving a small sum of money immediately, or a larger sum of money later.

Results show that a prolonged cognitive task favours impulsive choice, and that this decision is linked to reduced activity in a region of the brain involved both in these exercises and in monetary choices.

In conclusion, several hours of intense work may lead us to choose the short-term reward instead of a greater, more long-term benefit. It is therefore better to avoid making an important decision, especially of a financial nature, at the end of the day.

(c) Fotolia

Organised by the French National Union of Dermatologists (SNDV), and supported by the French National Cancer Institute (INCa), the 18^th edition of the National Day of Screening for Skin Cancer will be held on Thursday, 26 May 2016, to highlight the risks of UV exposure, and to raise awareness about the measures for protecting oneself from this cancer, and for detecting it.

During this day, free screening consultations will be on offer throughout France.[1]

Although less common than carcinoma, melanoma is the most “serious” type of skin cancer, because of its propensity for rapid progression to the metastatic stages.

In 2015, melanoma was responsible for 14,325 new cases, and 1,773 deaths in France.[2]

At Inserm, research is actively underway to improve understanding of the mechanisms involved in metastatic spread, and to develop new therapeutic strategies.

Work done at Inserm Unit 981 by Caroline Robert, winner of the Inserm Research Prize 2015, has contributed to the development of immunotherapy and targeted therapies, major advances in the treatment of metastatic melanomas. Her team is currently focusing on the adverse effects of new drugs in order to develop more effective treatments.

[1] Further details available on: http://www.syndicatdermatos.org/

[2] Source: INCa

In 2015, a study conducted by Pierre Meneton, entitled “Unemployment is associated with high cardiovascular event rate and increased all-cause mortality in middle-aged socially privileged individuals,” was published in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health.

The results suggest that there may be an association between unemployment and poorer cardiovascular health, unlinked to other conventional risk factors, such as age.

Consult the scientific article to find out more

(c) Fotolia

This Thursday, 24 March, the Ministry of Agriculture confirmed an isolated case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, at a farm in Ardennes. The case was detected in a 5-year-old cow sent for rendering, “a method for processing animals that die on farms, and are therefore not intended for human consumption,” states AFP. In France, the last case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy dates back to 2011.

BSE is a prion disease that affected UK farms in the 1980s, and spread to Europe and the rest of the world. Feeding animals meat and bone meal contaminated with crushed carcasses resulted in the spread of BSE.

The appearance of a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans in the UK and France, and then in many countries around the world in the 1990s, raised deep concerns among consumers who worried about the risk of transmission of the bovine prion to humans. The link between the BSE epidemic and the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans was easily established by researchers.

The ban on meat and bone meal, livestock surveillance and BSE testing are some of the measures that have been developed since then, in order to limit the risk of contamination.