Five More Medical Developments on the Way in 2012 and Beyond

The next medical development addresses a world wide epidemic.

6. Vaccination for HIV

AIDS has become a largely manageable disease. With the right treatment, people who have HIV or AIDS can live indefinitely—but even in the United States only about 28% of people with HIV or AIDS take all their drugs regularly enough to keep the virus under control. A vaccination for HIV, however, would make AIDS treatment unnecessary .

The problem with creating a vaccine for HIV has been that the human immune system does not recognize any of the surfaces of the virus. A team of research scientists at (US) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, however, has learned how to make a synthetic protein that triggers the human immune system to make an antibody to HIV. The vaccine is currently being tested on animals and likely will be tested on human volunteers sometime in the next two years.

7. A new drug for diabetes.

Diabetes drugs that increase the body's production of insulin have a way of causing more problems than they correct. All diabetes drugs in this class encourage weight gain, and they also aggravate insulin resistance, making the underlying problem that causes type 2 diabetes even worse. A new drug for diabetes, dapagliflozin , may bypass these problems.

Dapagliflozin works by causing the kidneys to excrete more sugar into urine . Clinical trials in the United Kingdom find that it lowers HbA1C levels on average about 0.8%. This is roughly equivalent to a 15 mg/dl or 1.0 mmol/L reduction in average blood sugar levels. That isn't a cure for diabetes, but it may be quite helpful. The drug also seems to encourage weight loss in most users—although yeast infections may be aggravated.

8. Doctors will be less inclined to prescribe statin drugs to people who have normal cholesterol levels.

Advocates of lowering cholesterol often describe statin drugs as so safe they should be added to the water supply like fluorides. The recent JUPITER study, however, found that people who had normal cholesterol were more likely to develop diabetes if they took the common cholesterol-lowering drugs. Moreover, while giving statins to people who did not have high cholesterol did lower the already-low rates of heart attack and stroke by 50%, it turned out that the drugs were only helpful for people who had abnormally high levels of the CR-P marker for inflammation. As more doctors realize that statins work by lowering inflammation, not by lowering cholesterol, perhaps more will be judicious in prescribing them so that patients do not suffer unnecessary side effects.

9. Some cases of autism will be reclassified as Fragile X Syndrome.

Fragile X syndrome is caused by the a bsence of a gene on the X chromosome everyone needs to make the brain chemical serotonin . About 30% of people who have Fragile X Syndrome suffer autism and another 30% suffer some form of autistic spectrum disorder, such as Asperger's . Dr. Randi Hagerman of the University of California at Sacramento has found that treating autistic children who have Fragile X Syndrome with a drug that stimulates the production of serotonin can sometimes lead to "miraculous" remissions from symptoms.

10. In some cases, doctors may be able to save lives with Salmonella.

For over 150 years, doctors have been recording cases of cancer patients who went into remission after they came down with infections. Now Drs. Dan Saltzman and Edward Greeno are using a single dose of Salmonella taken by mouth (with Gatorade) as a potential treatment for all kinds of cancer . They are currently in Phase III clinical testing of the treatment. Results may be announced in late 2012.