Not for everyone

Nearly one-third of adults in the United States age 40 and over take a statin drug to decrease cholesterol or to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. New guidelines, established in 2013 by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, would expand recommendations for statin use to 56 million Americans, nearly half of those between the ages of 40 and 75, and would create 12.8 million new statin users, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Statins may lower cholesterol, but side effects can include memory loss, muscle problems, and an increased risk of diabetes. For those suffering from cardiovascular disease the benefits may outweigh the risks, but researchers at Tulane University discovered statin use may be too risky to be a good preventative measure.

Medical researchers know statins help prevent heart attacks and strokes by preventing stem cells from turning into macrophages. Macrophages are immune cells that ingest fat deposits along blood vessel walls and attract other macrophages and proteins to the site, eventually causing plaque buildup. The macrophages also release enzymes that increase the likelihood the plaque will rupture. When plaque ruptures, a blood clot forms, which can break loose and cause a heart attack or stroke.

Until recently, experts believed that macrophages primarily develop from bone marrow stem cells, which mainly become blood cells. But, in a previous study, the Tulane researchers found that macrophages can also develop from mesenchymal stem cells—MSCs—which are found throughout the body. MSCs can become any cell type. In the new study the researchers discovered long-term statin use prevents MSCs from becoming bone, muscle, and cartilage cells; increases the aging and death rate of MSCs; and reduces the ability of DNA to repair them.

It’s this effect on stem cells, the researchers said, that may make statin use inappropriate as a preventive measure for those who do not have cardiovascular disease.

Conversion concerns

Researchers at Stanford University have genetically engineered yeast to produce more effective and less addictive versions of opiate painkillers, such as morphine and hydrocodone. The researchers engineered the yeast with a mix of plant, bacterial, and rodent genes to turn sugar into thebaine, the key opiate precursor to morphine and other painkilling drugs.

But bio-policy experts fear that illicit drug manufacturers, no longer dependent on poppies to make opiates, could use the technique to make home-brewed heroin, a drug that is a simple chemical conversion from morphine.

“Poppy fields are not readily available to someone in Chicago, whereas yeast can be made available to anyone,” said Vincent Martin, a Concordia University microbiologist who has also worked on creating yeast that can produce morphine.

Kenneth Oye, a biotechnology policy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that scientists build genes into the yeast that prevent it from living outside a controlled laboratory environment. —J.B.

Abortion effects

Doctors know that women who have multiple abortions or miscarriages have a higher risk of complications such as vaginal bleeding, preterm birth, low fetal birth weight, and placenta-related difficulties in subsequent pregnancies. But even one pregnancy interruption during the first trimester increases the risk of complications in future pregnancies by as much as 30 percent, according to researchers at Tel Aviv University who just completed a five-year study of 15,000 deliveries at the Rabin Medical Center in Israel. —J.B.