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A new technique that transforms embryonic and adult stem cells into six types of mature white blood cells could produce blood cells with specific defects for use by researchers studying the development and treatment of disease.

The method, devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, could also be used to grow specific types of immune cells to target specific infections or tumors, or to test the safety of new drugs, they said.

The researchers exposed two types of stem cells to a variety of compounds and eventually found a “recipe” that caused the stem cells to turn into different types of adult cells. Their study appears in the Aug. 10 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“While we now can make almost all types of blood cells from embryonic and adult pluripotent stem cells, the next major challenge is to produce blood stem cells (called hematopoetic stem cells) that might be used in a bone marrow transplant,” study leader Igor Slukvin, an assistant professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine, said in a university news release.

Bone marrow transplants can save the lives of patients with blood cancer, but more than one-third of patients can’t find a well-matched bone marrow donor. These patients are at risk for graft-versus-host disease, a sometimes fatal attack on the patient by the transferred immune system. Using blood-forming stem cells created from a patient’s own stem cells should eliminate bone marrow compatibility problems, Slukvin said.

Healthy adults are likely to fare better during the flu season by getting a flu shot than by depending on antiviral drugs to make them feel better, new research from the UK shows.

The research team headed by Dr. Jane Burch found that Tamiflu (oseltamivir), a flu drug made by Swiss-based Roche, and Relenza (zanamivir), made by GlaxoSmithKline, will quash symptoms no more than one day earlier than no drugs at all.

Although the researchers did not compare the benefits of vaccines to the benefits of antiviral drugs, they note that vaccination has the advantage of being a preventive measure. That’s part true in those years where there is a “good match” between the vaccine and the influenza virus circulating that year.

As a result, making more people eligible for vaccination “might be a more appropriate choice for healthy adults,” the authors state in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, published online on August 8.

The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) asked Burch, at the University of York, UK, and her team to review 26 scientific studies to determine the effectiveness of zanamivir and oseltamivir as treatments for seasonal flu in adults. NICE is responsible for assessing drugs for reimbursement by the state health service.

Flu symptoms went away one half to one day earlier than they would have if no drug had been used.

With results like that, drug treatment is “unlikely to be the most appropriate course of action,” Burch and colleagues write. They believe a better policy for healthy adults would be to extend recommendations so that all healthy adult can get one.

In fact, they point out, the findings might be relevant to the current swine flu (H1N1) pandemic.

As a result of this work, NICE now only recommends use of the antiviral treatments for influenza in people considered to be at risk. These include people aged 65 and older, and anyone over 6 months old with other serious health conditions, such as chronic disease affecting the lungs, heart, liver, or kidney, as well as those with diabetes or a suppressed immune system.

Their primary concern, the paper says, is lowering the risk of influenza-related complications, such as pneumonia or exacerbations of other underlying illnesses, though research has yet to prove such a benefit.

In addition to vaccination, Burch’s team lists other approaches that may be more effective than starting an anti-viral medication once people are sick. These include having those who are exposed to the flu start one of the medications immediately and making the drugs available over the counter for purchase.

They also propose that family doctors have rapid tests for diagnosing flu on hand. That way, patients won’t be treated with a drug that will have no effect at all if they don’t even have the flu.

One of the nine members of the research team has received funding from drug companies that make vaccines and antivirals, and another has received “funding from the pharmaceutical industry to attend an influenza-related conference.”

Children with high IQs live longer, but it is not clear exactly what role IQ plays in longevity, new British research shows.

Previous studies have shown an association between IQ and mortality, but an explanation for that has proved elusive. This is an important question because identifying those mechanisms would help in understanding the origins of health inequalities, the researchers said.

“The IQ-mortality association emerges already early in adult life, even when most life-threatening diseases are not yet that common,” said lead researcher Markus Jokela, who is now with the department of psychology at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. “So the role of IQ is not only restricted to how people become ill or cope with their illnesses in old age.”

The report is published in the Aug. 10 online edition of Pediatrics.

For the study, Jokela’s team collected data on 10,620 men and women who participated in the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study and had their IQs tested when they were 11. Researchers followed these individuals until they were 46 years old.

The investigators found that IQ assessed in childhood at age 11 predicted mortality risk from age 11 to age 46, so that the risk of dying by midlife was about two times higher in individuals with low IQs compared to those with high IQs (3.4 percent versus 1.7 percent, respectively).

This association was largely independent of several measures of childhood developmental characteristics and family background such as birth weight, childhood height at age 11, problem behavior, father’s occupation, parents’ interest in child’s education, family size and family difficulties, Jokela said.

Adult sociodemographic variables such as education, occupation, marital status and health behaviors such as smoking, weight, alcohol use and psychosomatic symptoms “explained only relatively little of the IQ-mortality association,” he said.

“The findings imply that IQ is an important determinant of health and mortality risk independently of many well-established health risk factors,” Jokela said. “This calls for new lines of research identifying the mechanisms by which IQ becomes associated with health and mortality risk.”

Perhaps individuals with high IQ are better at distilling important health information from public health messages and thereby better in making healthy everyday choices that are not captured by the usual measures of health behaviors, Jokela said.

“We currently have an incomplete understanding of health inequalities originating from individual psychological characteristics, such as IQ,” he said. “Identifying these mechanisms could inform us how to plan more effective public health interventions accessible to wider audiences.”

Ellen deLara, an assistant professor of social work at Syracuse University, thinks that nurturing parents may be the key to living longer, regardless of IQ.

“Positive adult/parental attention is typically a contributor to positive youth outcomes in terms of development and behavior,” deLara said. “This applies across the board to all youth, all socioeconomic groups, all levels of intelligence.”

Conversely, negative adult attention in the form of rejection or neglect, for example — something that some parents exhibit towards lower IQ children — is associated with poor outcomes for these children in terms of their development, and their childhood and adult behavior, she said.

“What it boils down to is, no matter your IQ, if you feel accepted — your parents are interested in your education and your future — you thrive,” deLara said.

“If you feel that you are rejected — your parents show little or no interest in you or your future — you don’t feel good about yourself,” she said. “That in itself, promotes poor decision-making. If your decision-making ability is already compromised by lower IQ, this does not bode well for a successful or long life.”