Two football players from the University of Florida in Gainesville were involved in a traffic crash on I-10 in Madison County.
On Sunday, August 28, around 2:30 p.m., the vehicle the players were driving left the roadway heading east bound at the 246 mile marker. The car hit small trees and bushes in the median. Jon Halapio and Earl Okine were checked out by Madison County EMS at the scene. Also assisting were New Home Fire and Rescue, Florida Highway Patrol and Greenville Fire and Rescue.
When treating an eating disorder, exercise is rarely considered therapeutic; it’s more likely to be viewed as dangerous for patients already obsessed with their weight. But a new University of Florida study shows that the psychological benefits of exercise could be used as an intervention for — or even a way to prevent — eating disorders.
Despite the documented mental and physical benefits of exercise, health care practitioners have long assumed that people with eating disorders shouldn’t be encouraged to burn calories through physical activity. While it’s true that compulsive exercisers risk further harm, healthy exercise that’s not compulsive could help people with eating disorders or people who are at risk for eating disorders, said Heather Hausenblas, a UF exercise psychologist who co-authored the study, published in the January issue of European Eating Disorders Review.
“When it comes to eating disorders, exercise has always been seen as a negative because people use it as a way to control their weight. But for most people, exercise is a very positive thing,” Hausenblas said. “Our results show it’s not necessarily bad for people with disordered eating to engage in exercise. The effects on self-esteem, depression, mood and body image can reduce the risk of eating pathologies.”
In the study, co-authored by Brian Cook, an exercise psychologist at the University of Kentucky, Peter Giacobbi, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and former UF doctoral student Daniel Tuccitto, Hausenblas and her colleagues surveyed 539 normal-weight students, most of whom were not at risk for eating disorders. They evaluated the students’ drive to be thin, along with their exercise habits and risk for exercise dependence, and used statistical models to find potential relationships. She found that, more than its physical benefits, the psychological effects of exercise could help prevent and treat eating disorders.
The study’s findings could have far-reaching impact, said Danielle Symons Downs, director of the Exercise Psychology Laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University.
“The public health implications of this study are important,” she said. “This research is important for understanding the complex interactions between exercise behavior and eating pathology, and it can assist clinicians with better understanding how to intervene with and treat eating pathology.”
Beyond offering an affordable treatment to address the needs of people with eating disorders, exercise therapies also could help relieve the burden of such diseases on the health-care system, Hausenblas said. “If a patient is extremely underweight, you’re not going to have them exercising two or three hours a day. But once they’re at a stable level, exercise could have a big positive effect,” she said. Hausenblas hopes to launch another study that would follow at-risk individuals over a period of several months to see if exercise impacts their symptoms.
“We’d like to assess them over time, and we hope to see their risk factors go down,” she said.
University of Florida researchers have received four grants totaling almost $4.7 million to develop therapies for improving the health and quality of life of people with hemophilia.
New treatments are urgently needed because those in current use are often rejected by the patient’s immune system and are very expensive, in some cases costing up to $1 million for a round of therapy.
Two of the grants are from the National Institutes of Health and the others are from Bayer HealthCare.
“The portfolio of grants allows UF to build and sustain a robust hemophilia research program covering both forms of the disease, hemophilia A and B, and fulfill an unmet need in Florida and the region,” said Roland Herzog, an associate professor in the UF College of Medicine’s department of pediatrics, who is principal investigator on both NIH grants and co-investigator on both Bayer awards.
The other principal investigators, also faculty members in the pediatrics division of cellular and molecular therapy, are division chief, Arun Srivastava, the George H. Kitzman professor of genetics and a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, and associate professor Sergei Zolotukhin, also of the department of molecular genetics and microbiology. All are members of the UF Genetics Institute.
A four-year, $2.6 million grant from the NIH National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute will fund all three researchers in their efforts to develop and test better gene therapy methods for the form of the disease known as hemophilia B.
A five-year, $1.7 million grant to Herzog, also from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, supports work to prevent the immune system from rejecting gene or protein therapies. That work is in collaboration with the Wistar Institute, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Harvard Medical School.
In addition, a two-year, $200,000 Bayer Hemophilia Award to Srivastava will fund development of better gene therapy delivery vehicles for hemophilia A, and a second two-year $200,000 Bayer award funds Herzog as co-investigator with University of Central Florida professor Henry Daniell, to develop ways to induce tolerance to protein therapy for hemophilia A by orally introducing the protein before therapy is needed.
Hemophilia is characterized by defects in the gene that produces a protein required for blood to clot. People with the disease can suffer from spontaneous internal bleeding or severe bleeding from minor injuries. Males get the disease, which is linked to the X chromosome, while female “carriers” rarely show symptoms.
Many people around the world have hemophilia — 1 in 5,000 boys are born with hemophilia A, the more common form. Standard treatment is intravenous infusion of the missing protein. But in 25 percent of patients with the severe form of hemophilia, the immune system rejects that clotting protein and makes inhibitors that prevent it from working.
To help patients tolerate therapy, doctors try to exhaust the immune system by administering the therapeutic protein intravenously at frequent intervals and for long periods until the body no longer produces inhibitors in response.
That brute force approach works for hemophilia A, but often doesn’t for hemophilia B, in which patients risk death from severe systemic allergic reactions if exposed to the protein used in therapy. In addition, treatment is very expensive. A single round of therapy can cost up to $1 million, including hospitalization charges.
“There have to be better ways to do this,” Herzog said.
One study will investigate how minor chemical changes to viruses that are used as gene therapy vehicles to deliver working copies of malfunctioning genes to the liver, and reduce the chance that the protein produced will be rejected.
“The hope is that you can now treat the disease using less of this virus, so you can deliver more, in a more stealthy manner and make it less likely that the immune system will target cells infected by this virus,” Herzog said.
To find new ways to make the immune system more tolerant of protein therapy, the researchers will focus attention on enlisting the help of certain cells that normally suppress the body’s immune system as a way to prevent autoimmune diseases.
Other key studies include developing ways to administer the clotting factor protein orally in an effort to build immune tolerance before patients are in need of therapy.
“New and safer ways to deliver therapy would be far more welcome than what we’re doing now,” said Dr. Vishwas Sakhalkar, director of benign hematology in the division of pediatric hematology/oncology, who treats patients with hemophilia and other blood disorders. “Patients, their families, caregivers and doctors will embrace those advances, after seeing all that patients have to go through now for treatment.”
