Monthly Archives: March 2009

Omega-3 of no added benefit for heart patients: study

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Taking supplements of Omega-3, the fatty acids found in fish, showed no added benefits for heart attack patients, a German study found on Monday, contradicting previous research.

“The Omega trial found no significant differences in the rates of heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac death or death from any cause among patients assigned to guidelines-based optimal medical care alone or optimal medical care plus Omega-3 fatty acids,” the study said.

It was unveiled at the 58th conference of the American College of Cardiology which has been meeting since Saturday in Orlando, Florida.

But it goes against the findings of earlier studies which have said Omega-3 extracts can prolong the lives of heart attack patients.

The study authors said, however, that those studies had been conducted when the treatment for heart conditions was not as advanced as it is today.

“In our study, we saw no beneficial effect. In patients who are already taking optimal medical therapy, cardiac event rates become very low and Omega-3 do not further improve them,” said Jochen Senges, a professor of cardiology at the Heart Center Ludwigshafen, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

The study involved 3,827 patients from 104 German hospitals, heart centers and university hospitals.

Between three to 14 days after suffering a heart attack, patients were randomly prescribed one year’s treatment with highly purified Omega-3 fatty acids or a placebo.

“It would be incorrect to say that Omega-3 fatty acids are not effective, but we could not find any additional benefits after optimizing medical therapy,” Senges said.

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‘Superpill’ may cut heart disease: study

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Healthy people could cut their risk of heart disease in half with a new ‘super pill’ that combines low doses of aspirin and drugs that lower blood pressure and cholesterol, a study said Monday.

“We believe that the polypill probably has the potential to reduce heart disease by 60 percent and stroke by 50 percent,” lead investigator Salim Yusuf told reporters at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting, where the study was presented. “The thought that people might be able to take a single pill to reduce multiple cardiovascular risk factors has generated a lot of excitement. It could revolutionize heart disease prevention as we know it,” Yusuf said.

In the three-month study cardiologists compared the impact on blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate of the combination “polypill” and the medications that make it up, taken individually or together.

The study involved 2,053 patients, recruited from heart centers around India between March 2007 and August 2008.

The polypill contains low doses of three medications against high blood pressure; simvastatin, which lowers LDL — or bad cholesterol — and aspirin, a known blood-thinner. “Before this study, there were no data about whether it was even possible to put five active ingredients into a single pill,” the study said.

“We found that it works,” the researchers said.

Participants in the study were divided into groups and given either the polypill or aspirin, the cholesterol-lowering medication, or one of the three blood pressure medications on their own; different combinations of blood pressure medications, or all three blood pressure treatments with or without aspirin.

The researchers found that blood pressure in participants in the polypill group was lowered as much as in the group taking the three blood pressure medications together, with or without aspirin.

Those blood pressure reductions “could theoretically lead to about a 24-percent risk reduction in congestive heart disease and 33 percent risk reduction in strokes in those with average blood pressure levels,” the study said.

The polypill reduced LDL cholesterol significantly more than in all other groups except the one in which simvastatin was taken alone. The simvastatin group’s LDL levels fell only slightly more than the polypill group, the study found.

Heart rates in the polypill group and the group taking one of the blood-pressure medications, atenolol, fell by seven beats a minute — significantly more than in the other study groups.

Side-effects in patients taking the polypill were the same as when taking one or two medications, the study found. The study was “a critical first step to inform the design of larger, more definitive studies, as well as further development of appropriate combinations of blood-pressure lowering drugs with statins and aspirin,” said Yusuf.

Dr Christopher Cannon, a cardiologist from Harvard University, said the polypill took the medical world a step closer to beating heart disease, a leading cause of death worldwide. Some 80 percent of heart disease cases are thought to occur in developing countries.

“The concept is simple. Several different drugs are available (generically and thus inexpensively) to treat many of the cardiac risk factors. So, combining them in one pill could reduce heart disease by 80 percent,” Cannon said in a comment piece in The Lancet, in which the results of the study were published.

“This approach has obvious appeal and vast implications for global health, because heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide,” he wrote.

Still, some said the pill was unlikely to provide panacea for all heart patients.

Dr. Robert Bonow, a former president of the American Heart Association and co-director of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago, told ABC News that while the pill might be better than nothing for many who would otherwise receive no care, a one-size-fits-all approach makes individualized treatment difficult.

“This is not a tailored treatment, and it’s low doses,” he told the television network.

“So maybe in people with high blood pressure, it is not enough to lower their blood pressure. Or in people with high cholesterol, it is not enough to get them to the target cholesterol levels that their physicians would like to see.”

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Dust plays role in warmer global temps: study

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A decrease in airborne dust and volcanic emissions has contributed to warming the North Atlantic Ocean in the past three decades, a study showed Thursday.

About 70 percent of the Atlantic’s warming since 1980, at an average per-decade rate of a half-degree Fahrenheit (a quarter-degree Celsius), was due to less dust blown from African dust storms or to volcanic eruptions, scientists wrote in the journal Science.

“Volcanoes and dust storms are really important if you want to understand (climatic) changes over long periods of time,” said the study’s lead author Amato Evan, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He said airborne particles producing warmer temperatures can also help cause hurricanes, which thrive on warm water.

Evan and his colleagues had previously shown that African dust and other airborne particles can reduce hurricane activity by allowing less sunlight to reach the water and thus cool the sea surface.

Years with low dust activity, such as 2004 and 2005 — a record-breaking storm year — have been associated with more frequent storms, the researchers noted.

During their study, the researchers used satellite data of dust and other particles along with existing climate models to calculate how much of the Atlantic warming of the past 26 years was due to changes in tropical volcanic activity.

Major such volcanic eruptions that dimmed sunlight were Mexico’s El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.

Although volcanoes are unpredictable by nature, Evan said newer climate models should at least include dust storms as a factor to predict ocean temperature changes accurately.

“We don’t really understand how dust is going to change in these climate projections, and changes in dust could have a really good effect or a really bad effect,” he said.

The researchers attributed a quarter of the warming to the dust storms themselves and said that only about 30 percent of the temperature increases were due to other factors, such as global warming.

“This makes sense, because we don’t really expect global warming to make the ocean [temperature] increase that fast,” said Evan.

Evan wrote the study with other experts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Sun exposure slashes risk of blood clots: report

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While sun exposure has long been linked to skin cancer, a new Swedish study shows it also dramatically reduces the risk of suffering blood clots, one of the authors of the report said on Wednesday.

“We found that women who suntan had about 30 percent lower risk of suffering blood clots,” said Pelle Lindqvist, an associate professor at the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm.

“There is also a 50-percent higher risk of blood clots in December, January and February in Sweden, when there is the least sun here,” he told AFP.

Lindqvist and two colleagues at Lund University in southern Sweden studied the sunning habits of 40,000 Swedish women surveyed in 1990 about their habits, including whether they suntanned in the summer, the winter, used a sun bed or travelled south to catch the golden rays.

The researchers then followed the women’s medical development for the next 12 years, and found that 312 had developed thrombosis, or blood clots.

Even adjusted for factors like exercise, smoking and alcohol habits and weight, the research showed that any amount of suntanning helped lower the risk of blood clots.

The study, which was published in the March edition of the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, only looked at women, but Lindqvist said he suspected men drew similar benefits from sunning.

“By sunning, you avoid a shortage of Vitamin D in the winter when people here in Sweden very often suffer a deficiency of that vitamin. It is only during the summer that we really have enough Vitamin D,” he said.

It remained unclear why Vitamin D was important for the prevention of blood clots, Lindqvist said, adding that and other questions raised by the research would be the focus of future studies.

As for balancing the benefits of sun exposure against the risks of contracting skin cancer, he stressed that people should always avoid sunburn.

“But you should go out a bit every day, and it’s not true that it’s enough to go out late in the afternoon. You really should go out in the middle of the day, because that is when the production of Vitamin D occurs,” he said.

A US study published early last year also showed that moderate sun exposure and the related production of Vitamin D improved survival rates for cancer victims, suggesting the benefits of sunning outweighed the skin cancer risks, especially in northern latitudes.

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Iodine deficiency affects children’s mental growth

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Iodine deficiency disorder affects mental growth of children and they become dull minded while it also creates gynaecological complications resulting in abortion as well as other problems.

Director General (Health) Punjab, Dr Muhammad Aslam Chaudhary said this while addressing awards ceremony of Iodine Salt Processors, here Friday.

Dr Aslam said that government has launched iodized salt programme successfully with the cooperation of Micronutrient Initiatives (MI) in 20 districts of the province under Pure Food Rules and this programme would be expended in the remaining 16 district till June 2009.

National Programme Officer Dr. Tauseef Janjua informed that health Department Punjab and MI with the collaboration of salt processors (salt industries) launched this programme and now 80 percent edible salt prepared in Punjab is iodized which will help control mental weakness and abortion of pregnant women. He appealed to the people to use only iodized salt in their food. He added that government has registered district-wise salt processors throughout the province.

On this occasion, five owners of salt processors were awarded shields and net cash awards.

Sarfraz Ahmad Aulakh of Sheikhupura achieved first prize, Zulfiqar Ali of Khanewal and Pir Mehdi Shah of Khushab got second and third position respectively whereas special encouragement award was given to Fida Hussain of Rawalpindi and Haji Farooq Ahmad of Lahore.

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You owe your intelligence to your parents

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A new kind of brain-imaging scanner has shown that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain’s axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain.

The faster the signalling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain’s wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin the fatty sheath of ‘insulation’ that coats our axons and allows for fast signalling bursts in our brains.

The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses. University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues scanned the brains of 23 sets of identical twins and 23 sets of fraternal twins.

Since identical twins share the same genes while fraternal twins share about half their genes, the researchers were able to compare each group to show that myelin integrity was determined genetically in many parts of the brain that are key for intelligence.

These include the parietal lobes, which are responsible for spatial reasoning, visual processing and logic, and the corpus callosum, which pulls together information from both sides of the body.

The researchers used a faster version of a type of scanner called a HARDI (high-angular resolution diffusion imaging) that takes scans of the brain at a much higher resolution than a standard MRI.

While an MRI scan shows the volume of different tissues in the brain by measuring the amount of water present, HARDI tracks how water diffuses through the brain’s white matter – a way to measure the quality of its myelin.

‘HARDI measures water diffusion,’ said Thompson, who is also a member of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging. ‘If the water diffuses rapidly in a specific direction, it tells us that the brain has very fast connections. If it diffuses more broadly, that’s an indication of slower signalling, and lower intelligence.’

‘So it gives us a picture of one’s mental speed,’ he said. ‘The whole point of this research,’ Thompson said, ‘is to give us insight into brain diseases.’

And could this someday lead to a therapy that could make us smarter, enhancing our intelligence? ‘It’s a long way off but within the realm of the possible,’ Thompson said, according to an UCLA release.

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Fashion robot to hit Japan catwalk

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Japanese researchers on Monday showed off a robot that will soon strut her stuff down a Tokyo catwalk.

The girlie-faced humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and a shoulder length hair-do boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.

“Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C,” said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.

The fashion-bot is 158 centimetres (five foot two inches) tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43 kilograms (95 pounds) — including batteries.

She has a manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.

“If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny,” said one of the inventors, humanoid research leader Shuji Kajita.

“We have deliberately leaned toward an anime style.”

The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment.

Hamming it up before photographers and television crews, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed bright smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly from journalists via bluetooth devices.

The performance fell short of flawless when she occasionally mixed up her facial expressions — a mistake the inventors put down to a case of the nerves as a hail of camera shutters confused her sound recognition sensors.

The preview was a warm-up for her appearance at a Tokyo fashion show on March 23.

Like her real-life counterparts, robot model HRP-5C commands a hefty price — the institute said developing her cost more than 200 million yen (two million dollars).

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Bigger waist, greater tax on lungs

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There’s more bad news for people who carry oodles of fat around their waists. Not only is it associated with diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease and but also with decreased lung function.

The study analysed around 120,000 people from the Paris Investigations Preventives et Cliniques Center, and assessed demographic background, smoking history, alcohol consumption, as well as lung function, including FEV1 (forced expiratory volume in one second) and FVC (forced vital capacity, or the total expiratory volume) with respect to BMI, waistline and other measures of metabolic health.

“After adjustment for age, sex, BMI, smoking status, alcohol consumption, leisure time physical activity and cardiovascular history, metabolic syndrome remained independently associated with lung function impairment,” wrote co-author Natalie Leone, of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (FNIHMR).

“We found a positive independent relationship between lung function impairment and metabolic syndrome due mainly to abdominal obesity,” she said. Abdominal obesity was defined as having a waist circumference of greater than 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men, said an FNIHMR release.

“Prospective studies are needed to determine the temporal relationship between lung function impairment and metabolic syndrome, including abdominal adiposity in particular. Mechanistic studies are also required to clarify the underlying physiopathological pathways,” concluded Leone. The results were published in the second issue for March of the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

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US launches telescope to look for Earth-like planets

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The United States late Friday launched a space telescope whose three-year mission is to find Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Kepler telescope blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, atop a Delta II rocket 10:49 pm (0349 GMT Saturday), according to the US space agency Nasa.

“This mission attempts to answer a question that is as old as time itself — are other planets like ours out there?” said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for Nasa ‘s Science Mission Directorate.

“It’s not just a science mission, it’s an historical mission.”

Kepler will stare at the same spot in space for three and a half years, taking in about 100,000 stars around the Cygnus and Lyra constellations of the Milky Way.

At a cost of nearly 600 million dollars, it will be the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, at just the right distance and temperature for life-sustaining water to exist.

The telescope will be hunting for relatively small planets that are neither too hot nor too cold, are rocky and have liquid water — essential life-sustaining conditions — explained William Borucki, Kepler’s principal investigator based at Nasa ‘s Ames Research Center in California.

“If we find that many, it certainly will mean that life may well be common throughout our galaxy, that there is an opportunity for life to have a place to evolve,” Borucki said.

Equipped with the largest camera ever launched into space — a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices (CCDs) — the Kepler telescope is able to detect the faint, periodic dimming of stars that planets cause as they pass by.

“If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front,” according to Kepler project manager James Fanson.

This is no small feat.

“Trying to detect Jupiter-size planets crossing in front of their stars is like trying to measure the effect of a mosquito flying by a car’s headlight,” Fanson said.

“Finding Earth-sized planets is like trying to detect a very tiny flea in that same headlight.”

Kepler’s discoveries “may fundamentally alter humanity’s view of itself,” Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at the Nasa ‘s Washington headquarters, told a press conference last month.

“The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars.”

Ever since astronomers first turned their telescopes to the sky, humans have been searching for other planets. But the small size of planets compared to stars has complicated the task. Only eight planets have been found in our solar system — Pluto is now considered a mere planetoid.

Since 1995, some 337 planets have been found orbiting around stars outside our solar system, but they are all bigger than Earth and do not have Earth-like conditions that make life possible.

The French-led COROT satellite, which has been in orbit since 2006, has already discovered the smallest extraterrestrial planet so far. At a little over twice the Earth’s diameter, the planet is very close to its star and very hot, astronomers reported earlier this month.

Astronomer Debra Fischer at San Francisco State University said that Nasa’s mission is a cornerstone in understanding what types of planets are formed around other stars.

Information that Kepler will help compile, she said, “will help us chart a course toward one day imaging a pale blue dot like our planet, orbiting another star in our galaxy.”

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