Siting

        Click here: The Institute of Faith and Health has launched a Web site offering support services to catastrophically ill adults and children and their families. Log on to www.faithandhealth.net for a blend of science and spirituality aimed at balancing facts about disease and hopes for recovery.

Shelf Help

        Off the wall(flower): Painfully Shy: How to Overcome Social Anxiety Disorder and Reclaim Your Life by clinical psychologists Barbara G. Markway and Gregory P. Markway (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press; $23.95) looks at the frequently misdiagnosed disorder and the devastating effects it can have on sufferers' lives.

Resource

        Brochure: The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is offering the booklet “Newborn Hearing Screening: Helping Babies Develop Language for Learning and Interaction” free. The booklet covers the importance of hearing screenings for newborns, screening procedures and resources for families of children with a hearing loss. For a copy, call the association's help line, (800) 638-8255, or log on to www.asha.org.

Research

        Connections: A rare genetic condition speeds the development of heart disease and may explain the link between heart disease and insulin resistance, new research reveals.

        Researchers found that Dunnigan-type familial partial lipodystrophy (FPLD) has several similarities with the more common metabolic disorder called insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome X. The gene mutation that causes FPLD causes weight gain the abdomen, chest and face. FPLD carriers also have high insulin levels, blood pressure and triglycerides and low levels of high-density lipoprotein, or the “good” cholesterol.

        Likewise, insulin resistance is characterized by central obesity, high levels of blood insulin, high triglycerides and blood pressure and low HDL levels. Insulin resistance is known to speed up the development of heart disease.

        This study confirmed researchers' suspicions that FPLD also hastens heart disease.

        The study compared data from 23 FPLD carriers and 17 people who did not have the trait. All of the FPLD carriers also had insulin resistance and a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and lipid abnormalities than the control group. FPLD carriers also had six times the risk of coronary heart disease and developed heart disease earlier than members of the control group.

        Studying people with FPLD might give researchers a clearer understanding of how insulin resistance works, says Dr. Robert A. Hegele, the researcher who led the study, which appears in the current edition of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Dr. Hegele is a researcher at the Robarts Research Institute and professor of medicine and biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario.

        Dr. Hegele found that the prognosis for heart disease is especially bad for women who carry the FPLD gene. Six of 23 carriers had heart disease events before age 55, four of the six — all women — needed coronary artery bypass graft surgery.

        Before menopause, women tend to develop heart disease less often than men. But women who become diabetic lose that protection.

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