Health Discovery | New Research in Medicine & Health | Herbal Care

Clay may be best cure for infections, say researchers

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:49:00 +0000

Dirt may soon be prescribed by doctors, if researchers investigating the age-old healing properties of a type of French clay have their way.

Previous research has shown that the clay fights against a “flesheating” bug (M ulcerans) on the rise in Africa and the germ called MRSA, which was blamed for the recent deaths of two children in Virginia and Mississippi. Now an interdisciplinary team of microbiologists and mineralogists is trying to determine exactly how the clay cures.

“There are very compelling reports of clay treating infections, but that’s anecdotal evidence, not science. They would mix clay with water and make a paste and put it on the horrible wounds,” said Lynda Williams, an associate research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Tempe. Williams is coordinating three teams of US researchers (at ASU, USGS, and SUNY-Buffalo) studying healing clays under a two-year, $440,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. “We’re beginning to generate the first scientific evidence of why some minerals might kill bacterial organisms and others might not,” said Williams.

In laboratory tests at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, co-PI Haydel, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences, showed that one clay killed bacteria responsible for many human illnesses, including: Staphylococcus aureus, methicillinresistant S aureus (MRSA), penicillin-resistant S aureus (PRSA), and pathogenic Escherichia coli (E coli). It also killed Mycobacterium ulcerans, a germ related to leprosy and tuberculosis that causes the flesheating disease Buruli ulcer.

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ANI

Level of testosterone impacts longevity

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:49:00 +0000

Older men with low levels of the testosterone hormone may die sooner than other men of their age with normal testosterone levels, a study suggests. Researchers found that among 794 generally healthy older men, those with the lowest testosterone levels were 40% more likely to die within the 1985-2004 study period. The findings do not mean, however, that older men should start taking testosterone supplements to achieve a longer life, the study authors are quick to point out. The study shows only an association between low testosterone and earlier death — not a causeand-effect relationship, lead author Dr Gail A Laughlin said.

What’s more, there was no evidence that having above-average testosterone levels gave men any longevity advantage. “We cannot recommend that any man take testosterone based on these results,” Laughlin stressed. She and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, report their findings in the ‘Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism’. In theory, low testosterone could affect older men’s longevity through metabolic effects. Some past studies have found that low testosterone can precede the development of abdominal obesity and the metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease that includes obesity, high blood pressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels.

In their study, Laughlin and her colleagues found that low testosterone was associated with abdominal obesity and aspects of the metabolic syndrome, but when these factors were excluded, low testosterone remained independently linked to earlier death. The study included 794 men between 50 and 91 year old (average age 73.6 years) who were followed for an average of 11.6 years. Overall, the one quarter with the lowest testosterone levels at study entry were 40% more likely to die over the course of the study than men with higher levels of the hormone. There is some disagreement among experts on how to define overt testosterone deficiency, with some saying it should be diagnosed when levels fall below 300 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) and others advocating lower cutoffs. There was no evidence in this study that raising older men’s testosterone above 300 ng/dL might boost survival.

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REUTERS

Sleep is not just for the rest

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:49:00 +0000

The task looks as simple as a “Sesame Street” exercise. Study pairs of Easter eggs on a computer screen and memorize how the computer has arranged them: the aqua egg over the rainbow one, the paisley over the coral one — and there are just six eggs in all. Most people can study these pairs for about 20 minutes and ace a test on them, even a day later. But they’re much less accurate in choosing between two eggs that have not been directly compared: Aqua trumped rainbow but does that mean it trumps paisley? It’s hazy. It’s hazy, that is, until you sleep on it.

In a study published in May, researchers at Harvard and McGill Universities reported that participants who slept after playing this game scored significantly higher on a retest than those who did not sleep. While asleep they apparently figured out what they didn’t while awake: the structure of the simple hierarchy that linked the pairs, paisley over aqua over rainbow, and so on. “We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” said study author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred “only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.”

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection. They know, too, that some people get by on as few as three hours a night, even less, and that there are hearty souls who have stayed up for more than week without significant health problems. Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation. Yet the new research underscores a vast transformation in the way scientists have come to understand the sleeping brain. Once seen as a blank screen, a metaphor for death, it has emerged as an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play — and to work — during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms known as deep sleep. “To do science you have to have an idea, and for years no one had one; they saw sleep as nothing but an annihilation of consciousness,” said Dr J Allan Hobson, a psychiatry professor at Harvard. “Now we know different, and we’ve got some very good ideas about what’s going on.”
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NYT NEWS SERVICE

Latest News About Health & Fitness

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:48:00 +0000

Researchers have found a way to kill intestinal cells that may develop cancer:

Researchers in Singapore have worked out a way to kill intestinal stem cells that may develop into colorectal cancer, the second largest cause of cancer related deaths in Western countries. Writing in the latest issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, the scientists said this potential method of cancer prevention had to do with the protein Wip 1, which appears to bring down the risk of cancer when it is inactivated. In their experiment, the researchers cross bred male mice suffering from intestinal polyps with Wip 1-deficient female mice — and their offspring turned out to be relatively cancer free. Intestinal polyps can develop into colorectal cancer over time.

Mother’s smoking may harm baby’s sleep:

Babies whose mothers smoke cigarettes before breast feeding sleep less and not as well, according to a study published on Tuesday. A test involving 15 nursing mothers found smoking “altered their infants’ sleep/wake patterning. Infants spent significantly less time in active and quiet sleep and woke up from their naps sooner,” the study said. Julie Mennella and other researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia said nicotine passed to the infants through breast milk was the culprit. The researchers said about 250 million women worldwide smoke tobacco.

Most Chinese kids spent summer holidays by surfing the net:

The vast majority of Chinese schoolchildren chose to stay home and surf the Internet during the summer holidays rather than play outside, a survey has said. The poll of 103 children aged 4 to 14 found that just 4% chose to do outdoor activities during the holidays and only 9% took part in summer educational camps. School began again across China on Monday. “Five years ago, when the Internet was not so popular among students, they preferred going out during summer holidays. Nowadays they prefer to stay at home and play Internet games,” a medical official said. About 13% of China’s 20 million Net users under 18 are classed as addicts, state media has said.

Heart cures for men and women may be different – said Researchers:

In their hearts, it seems, men and women really are different. The same invasive treatments for acute heart problems that can save lives in men may actually harm women, although reasons for this are unclear, researchers told the European Society of Cardiology annual meeting on Monday. A small-scale analysis involving 184 women patients by Swedish doctors found eights deaths among those receiving aggressive treatment, compared to just one death after a year in a group given more conservative care. “We should be cautious about these results but, taken together with findings from previous studies, it suggests that results from men do not necessarily apply to women,” said lead researcher Eva Swahn of University Hospital, Linkoping, Sweden.

Overweight US children suffer iron deficiency:

Overweight US children run an alarmingly high risk of iron deficiency, a condition which can lead to learning and behaviour problems, researchers said on Tuesday. It was the first time an association had been found between obesity and iron deficiency in children as young as 1, the researchers said, and they said junk food may be to blame. “The reasons for the strong association in this age group are unclear and need to be elucidated,” Dr Jane Brotanek of the University of Texas and others cautioned in their study, published in the journal Pediatrics. “Dietary practices may play an important role since diets high in calories but poor in micronutrients may lead to both iron deficiency and overweight” children, they added. Iron deficiency anemia in infancy and early childhood can impair learning, hamper school achievement and lower scores on tests of mental and motor development, they said.

Age difference between Male and Female is the key for having maximum children

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:24:00 +0000

To have the most children, men should find a partner six years younger and women a mate four years older, Austrian researchers said on Wednesday. The researchers tried to use evolution to explain why men often prefer younger women and what typically drives women’s desire for older men, said their leader, Vienna University anthropologist Martin Fieder. While it is no surprise to hear that men pick younger women to bolster their reproductive fitness and that women choose older partners for security, the study is the first to quantify the age difference that results in the most children, he said. “Nobody has shown before this has consequences for the number of offspring,” Fieder said in a telephone interview. “We have shown for the first time this is the case.” The researchers wanted to find the most beneficial ages for both men and women to have the most offspring, so looked at the data with that in mind and came out with different numbers for each. Writing in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters on Wednesday, the researchers said they collected information from Swedish national registries to track the number of births and age of parents going back 55 years. The researchers looked at men and women who did not change their partners between the birth of their first and last child and found the age differences among couples that produced the most offspring. For both men and women, having a partner of the optimal age meant having an average of 2.2 children compared with 2.1 children when they picked partners of the same age — a significant number in evolutionary terms that accumulates over time, Fieder said. The findings are the result of a statistical analysis and do not mean that every man can find a woman six years younger and that every women would find a man four years older. “It was a very systemic pattern,” Fieder said. “We don’t think it is random.” The study of couples during their typical child-bearing years also showed that both men and women who changed partners usually chose a person younger than the one they had before for their second one, Fieder said.

Remember five numbers for fitness

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:12:00 +0000

1. BLOOD PRESSURE

The top number (systolic pressure) is the pressure that’s put on the artery walls when the heart beats. The bottom number (diastolic pressure) represents the pressure on the arteries between heartbeats. High blood pressure can cause nicks in your arteries, leading to inflammation and dangerous blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes.
What’s normal

• 115/75 mm Hg is ideal

• 120/80 mm Hg is normal

• 140/90 mm Hg or above is high
When to get screened
At least once a year

2. CHOLESTEROL

Besides your total number, the three numbers you need to focus on the most are HDL (the ‘good cholesterol’, responsible for eliminating cholesterol from the body), LDL (the ‘bad cholesterol’, which leads to cholesterol build-up in arteries), and your triglycerides (fats in the bloodstream). The higher your HDL, the lower your chance of heart disease, while the more LDL and triglycerides you have, the greater your chance of heart disease.
What’s normal

• Total cholesterol should be less
than 200 mg/dL.

• HDL levels at 60 mg/dL or above are ideal and can even reduce heart-disease risk; levels below 40 mg/dL can increase risk.

• LDL levels should be below 160 mg/dL if you have none or one of the following heart-disease risk factors—obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, low HDL, family history of heart disease or are a woman over 55; below 130 mg/dL if you have two or more of these risk factors and below 100 mg/dL if you have heart disease, peripheral vascular disease or diabetes.

• Triglycerides should be below 150.
When to be screened

• Every five years, if level is normal

3. BLOOD SUGAR

This is a measure of how much sugar (glucose) there is in your blood. High blood sugar can signal diabetes.
What’s normal

• Levels below 100 mg/dL are healthy; levels between 100 and 126 mg/dL are considered pre-diabetes and need to be lowered; levels of 126 mg/dL or higher typically result in a diabetes diagnosis.
When to be screened

• Starting at age 45, get tested every three years if levels are normal. However, if you’re at risk of diabetes (you’re overweight, have high blood pressure or have a family history of the condition), ask your doctor if you should get a bloodsugar test rightaway.

4. BODY MASS INDEX (BMI)

This figure, based on a calculation of height and weight, determines whether a person is overweight.
What’s normal

• A BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 indicates a healthy weight, 25 to 29.9 is overweight and 30 or higher is considered obese.
When to be screened

• Now! Calculate your BMI with this formula: Height (in cms) divided by weight in kgs.

5. WAIST CIRCUMFERENCE

It’s the number of inches around your unclothed abdomen, just above your hip bone. Larger waistlines have been linked to higher risk of diseases because of the fat’s proximity to your organs.
What’s normal

• You want a measurement of 35” or lesser; anything higher puts you at greater risk of myriad diseases, including heart disease.
When to be screened

• Now! Get that measuring tape.

A new study find "how HIV develops into AIDS"

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:48:00 +0000

A new study has analysed how HIV develops into AIDS, and has suggested a possible way to block the deadly transformation. The UC Irvine study led by biologist Dominik Wodarz has shown for the first time that the development of AIDS might require HIV to evolve within a patient into a state where it spreads less efficiently from cell to cell. This counters the current belief that AIDS develops when the virus evolves over time to spread more efficiently within a patient, ultimately leading to the collapse of the immune system. The study also finds that multiple HIV particles must team up to infect individual cells, called co-infection, in order for deadly strains to emerge and to turn the infection into AIDS. If just one virus particle infects a cell, the deadliest strains may not be able to evolve, stopping HIV from progressing to AIDS. By keeping more than one HIV particle from infecting a cell, scientists might be able to ward off AIDS, the study suggests. “If this is true, a new approach to therapy could be to block the process of co-infection in cells. This would prevent deadly HIV strains from emerging and the patient would remain healthy, despite carrying the virus,” said Wodarz, who used a mathematical model to draw his conclusions. HIV develops in three stages. During the first few weeks, the virus grows to very high levels and can cause symptoms similar to a general viral infection such as the flu. The virus then drops to lower levels and the patient enters the asymptomatic phase that lasts on average 8-10 years. During the last stage, AIDS develops and the immune system collapses. Without an immune system, the patient cannot survive. It is not well understood how the asymptomatic phase transitions into AIDS. The common notion is that HIV evolves to grow better over time following Darwin’s theory of natural selection, eventually killing the patient. But Wodarz’s mathematical model, which takes into account how well the virus spreads and how quickly it kills the cells it invades, shows that the most deadly HIV strains do not spread the fastest from cell to cell. This surprised Wodarz because evolution tends to allow strong organisms to thrive, while weaker organisms become extinct. According to him, the explanation rests with the fact that multiple HIV particles can invade a single cell. Wodarz’s calculations show that, in this situation, viral evolution within a patient is fundamentally altered, allowing the deadly, slower-spreading strains to emerge over time and trigger the onset of AIDS.

Fever spot in brain has been found

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:48:00 +0000

A tiny spot in the brain triggers fever in mice, US researchers said on Sunday, and understanding how it works may lead to more specific drugs to control fever and other ills in humans. When people get sick, white blood cells send chemical signals called cytokines to marshal defences in the body. These messengers tell blood vessels in the brain to make a second hormone, prostaglandin E2. “This triggers the brain responses during an infection or inflammation,” said Dr Clifford Saper of Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, whose study appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Researchers knew that prostaglandin E2 acted on the hypothalamus, an area of the brain that controls basic functions like eating, drinking, sex and body temperature. Saper and colleagues wanted to find which nerve cells in the brain generate fever. To do that, they used special laboratory mice and systematically eliminated genes for specific EP3 receptors — a part of the brain that picks up on the prostaglandin E2 hormone. Many cells in the brain make EP3 receptors, which Saper thinks may trigger other symptoms such as fatigue, loss of appetite, and fatigue associated with infection. “What we found is if you take the EP3 receptor out of this one site that is about the size of the head of a pin, you no longer get a fever response,” he said. “We expect this is exactly what is going on in the human brain as well.” Pain killers like aspirin act on all prostaglandin receptors in the body, but they have lots of other effects as well, Saper said. Knowing how to find and eliminate receptors linked with fever may help with the development of highly specific drugs that act on a specific receptor, he said.

1 in 85 people may have the Alzheimer’s disease by 2050

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:48:00 +0000

More than 26 million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s disease, and a new forecast says the number will quadruple by 2050. At that rate, one in 85 people will have the brain-destroying disease in 40 years, researchers from Johns Hopkins University conclude. The estimates are not very different from previous projections of the looming global dementia epidemic with the graying of the world’s population. But they serve as a sobering reminder of the toll to come if scientists cannot find better ways to battle Alzheimer’s and protect aging brains.
“If we can make even modest advances in preventing Alzheimer’s disease, or delay its progression, we could have a huge global public health impact,” said Johns Hopkins public health specialist Ron Brookmeyer, who led the new study.
The biggest jump is projected for densely populated Asia, home of almost half of Alzheimer’s cases, 12.6 million. By 2050, Asia will have 62.8 million of the world’s 106 million Alzheimer’s patients, the study projects.

Alzheimer’s may be detected on early stage

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:48:00 +0000

New tests involving blood and brain scans can detect symptoms of Alzheimer’s, and brief appraisals of real-life functioning can predict who is likely to develop it, researchers have said. No drugs can significantly affect Alzheimer’s disease though four have a very modest impact if given early on. The disease is very difficult to detect until it has progressed from mild memory loss to clear impairment. Detecting the disease early can help patients and their families plan better for the future but can also help researchers develop drugs to treat and perhaps even prevent the disease. Anders Lonneborg and colleagues of DiaGenic, a biotech company based in Oslo, found a set of 96 genes that look different in the blood of Alzheimer’s patients when compared to the same genes in healthy people. Their study of more than 100 older people, half from memory clinics and half from senior centres, found Alzheimer’s accurately 85% of the time.
They identified genes related to the immune system, to inflammation and to cell division. The company has applied to regulators in the US and Europe to approve the test, Lonneborg told a meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Washington.
Christos Davatzikos and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania used a combination of PET and MRI scans to diagnose Alzheimer’s. Positron emission tomography or PET scans can be used to measure blood flow in the brain in real time, while magnetic resonance imaging or MRI can clearly show the shape and size of physical structures in the brain. This method found all 15 cases of mild cognitive impairment — a first step towards Alzheimer’s — and cleared 15 healthy volunteers. “This abnormal pattern of brain structure and blood flow detected not only mild cognitive impairment but even earlier ... when they were clinically normal,” Davatzikos said. Deborah Barnes and colleagues at the University of California San Francisco used simpler measures. They included measures like taking down scores on a simplified version of a standard cognitive exam.

Gene can help to predict Alzheimer’s

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 08:48:00 +0000

A team of Arizona researchers think they have found a gene that could help better predict a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The gene — called GAB2 — seems to affect the odds that some people will get the progressive neurological disease that afflicts about 5 million Americans, according to the research team led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute and Banner Alzheimer’s Institute. “This is a major breakthrough in Alzheimer’s genetic research that will have an impact on the clinical treatment of the disease,” said Dietrich Stephan, director of TGen’s neurogenomics division. Researchers believe that the study marks a new milestone for genetic research of Alzheimer’s disease.

A pill to delay menopause has been discovered recently

noreply@blogger.com (shaha) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:57:00 +0000

The new drug could show the way to a fertility revolution, allowing women to wait longer to have a child. It has been revealed that the new drug, being developed in the United Kingdom, could hold off the menopause. This could lead to a fertility revolution, allowing women to wait longer to have a child. The dramatic news came from fertility expert professor Robert Winston. He told a conference that researchers had found a protein which they believe could be developed into a pill or an injection to extend the life of women’s eggs. This would give new hope for the thousands of women who find themselves left childless in later life. Last week it was revealed that the number of women in their 40s having IVF treatment has soared more than tenfold over the past 15 years. But the chances of success fall dramatically after the age of 37 and are negligible by 45 - because by then very few eggs are being produced. Professor Winston, professor of fertility studies at Imperial College, said: “We think we have identified a protein which might be used to prolong the life of those eggs. Women are much healthier than they were and the period before the menopause could be extended without risk. David Hodgson, medical director of the London Fertility Centre, said such a drug would have a dramatic impact. But he warned there would have to be thorough trials to make sure the treatment was safe. Professor Winston, who has made frequent TV appearances, told a meeting at the Cheltenham Science Festival that research was still in the early stages. He said more and more women were finding problems with infertility if they delayed having babies until later in life. Professor Winston said: “What we are seeing is, increasingly, a society where women are waiting later and later to have their first baby. That’s wholly admirable in every way. “It shows how women are gaining full status as women in our society. They are getting educated and having careers.” But he stressed: “Their biology is working against them.” At the age of 16, said professor Winston, a woman had 400,000 eggs — but by the age of 46 there will be virtually none left. He said women lost around two eggs an hour. “In the time you’ve been listening to me speaking, every woman of child-bearing age in the audience will have lost two eggs,” he said. “By contrast, I will have made 150,000 new sperm. “We either arrange for women to train, and rear and care for children at the same time, or science can help by extending the length of life of eggs in the ovaries.