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health
New way to repair heart attack damage
Jan 10th
British scientists have developed a stem cell treatment that could dramatically boost the body’s ability to repair itself.
The treatment, which makes the bone marrow release a flood of stem cells into the bloodstream, could heal serious tissue damage caused by heart attacks and even repair broken bones.
Scientists already use stem cell therapy to treat leukemia patients, getting the marrow to release a type of stem cell that can only make fresh blood cells. British researchers said, “They have found a way to get the bone marrow to release two other types of stem cell that can repair bone, blood vessels and cartilage.”
“The bone marrow of treated mice released 100 times as many stem cells, which help to regenerate tissue”, said Sara Rankin who led the research team at Imperial College. “We hope that by releasing extra stem cells, as we were able to do in mice in our study, we could potentially call up extra numbers of whichever stem cells the body needs, in order to boost its ability to mend itself and accelerate the repair process,” she said.
The group hopes to begin trials later this year to investigate how effective it is at repairing tissue damage in rodents. “All the evidence suggests these cells will make a significant difference to the natural repair process,” Rankin said.
Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation, which co-funded the research along with the Welcome Trust, said: “It now seems increasingly likely that the bone marrow also contains cells that have the capacity to repair damaged internal organs, such as the heart and blood vessels, but that too few of them are released to be effective.”
He further added, “This research has identified some important molecular pathways involved in mobilizing these cells. It may be possible to develop a drug that interacts with these pathways to encourage the right number and type of stem cells to enter the circulation and repair damage to the heart.”
Two drugs can help in fight against fat: study
Jan 7th
The hormone leptin, combined with one of two US-approved drugs, may suppress appetite in overweight people, making it a potentially powerful weapon in the fight against obesity, according to a study published on Tuesday.
Leptin tells the brain to stop eating once the stomach is full, but fails to work effectively in most obese people, according to the study by researchers at the Harvard Medical School.
The research found that the two drugs — Phenyl Butyric Acid (PBA) and Tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA) — appeared to act in mice as “leptin sensitizers,” combatting “leptin resistance” in the brain’s hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the primary brain region that responds to leptin, sending a signal that curbs appetite.
“The results presented in this study provide evidence that chemical chaperones, particularly the PBA and TUDCA, can be used as leptin-sensitizing agents,” said Umut Ozcan, a physician and author of the Harvard study, which appears in the January 7 edition of the journal ‘Cell Metabolism.”
“Normal mice treated with the drugs dropped some weight,” he said. “Our study is the first success in sensitizing obese mice on a high-fat diet to leptin,” he said.
Scientists hope the drugs may enhance the hormone’s ability to trigger feelings of satiation that tell most healthy people when to put down their forks.
“Our results may define a novel treatment option for obesity.” Ozcan said, hailing the results as “very exciting.”
“If it works in humans, it could treat obesity,” he said, while touting the safety and effectiveness of the two drugs.
The two medications are normally used to treat maladies other than obesity, including neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s.
PBA also often is prescribed to treat liver dysfunction and cystic fibrosis, while TUDCA has been used for centuries in Chinese medicine, and is used to treat liver ailments.
Sunlight can help children avoid myopia: Aussie researchers
Jan 6th
Spending a couple of hours outdoors each day could help children avoid becoming short-sighted, Australian researchers said Tuesday.
Exposure to bright light for two to three hours daily helps regulate the eye’s growth, dramatically reducing the risk of myopia, an Australian Research Council study found.
Short-sightedness, traditionally a problem among the highly educated, has reached record levels in east Asia, lead researcher Professor Ian Morgan told AFP.
Growing numbers of children in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and China are struggling with their vision, with up to 90 percent of Singaporeans wearing glasses by the time they leave school, he said.
“That would compare with about 20 percent of Australians. We were quite intrigued by this — that for a country that’s quite well educated we have a serious lack of myopia in Australia,” Morgan said.
A comparative study showed 30 percent of six and seven-year-old Singaporean children had already developed the condition, compared with just 1.3 percent of Australians of the same age.
The figures were similar when contrasting children of Chinese descent from both nations, allowing researchers to eliminate ethnicity as a factor.
The one significant difference between the populations was time spent outdoors — children from Singapore spent an average 30 minutes outside every day, compared with two hours for the average Australian.
Both groups spent about the same amount of time reading, watching television and playing computer games, debunking the theory that flickering screens were ruining children’s eyes, he said.
“There’s a driver for people to become myopic and that’s education,” Morgan said. “And there’s a brake on people becoming myopic and that’s people going outside.”
“What we would suggest is that what’s happened in east Asia is that they have got the balance totally out of kilter.”
The study is part of a long-term project on eyesight at the government-funded council.
Cancer patients may have hope for treatment
Jan 6th
Patients with locally advanced squamous cell cancer of the head and neck may be cured of the disease if a worldwide clinical trial on a new targeted therapy drug to treat cancer is proven a success.
The clinical trial, to be completed in three to five years, will involve at least 22 institutions from 12 countries including Pakistan.
The National Cancer Centre Singapore NCCS is taking lead role as main cancer centre coordinating the trial which is to begin this March.
NCCS formalised its collaboration with Imogene Kalbiotech Pte Ltd, a Singapore based company that develops and commercialises innovative drugs. It aims to have first results of the clinical trial reported in about five years.
The countries involved in the trial span from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel to South Africa and Cuba. Participation of Australia, Canada, Philippines & UK was also under consideration.
The trial would involve 700 patients and include those with locally advanced squamous cancer of the head and neck and who had had surgery, NCCS said.
Half of patients would be treated with new targeted drug, Nimotuzumab, which would be administered weekly for an eight-week period, and would be given together with standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
The trial was expected to offer an assessment of the drug’s efficacy, tolerability, influence on disease-free and
progression-free survival for this particular indication.
High fibre diet helps in healthy weight loss
Jan 6th
Whole grains high in fibre help in weight loss and also provide some healthy nutrients to those who diet.
Researchers from Kingston conducted a six-month long study of 180 overweight adults and found that whole-grain cereals helped people lose weight while boosting their consumption of fibre, magnesium and vitamin B-6, Health News reported.
Their intake of these nutrients was higher than that of dieters who cut calories but did not eat whole-grain cereal. The implication is that fibre-rich cereals can help people cut calories while maintaining or improving the quality of their diet.
A problem with cutting out calories or certain foods to shed pounds is that nutrients can be lost from the diet. The current findings suggest that whole-grain cereals can help prevent some of these losses.
The researchers compared three weight-loss strategies: exercise only; exercise plus a reduced-calorie diet that emphasised whole-grain cereals; and exercise plus a low-cal diet that included no cereals.
They randomly assigned 180 overweight, sedentary men and women to one of the three groups. Those in the cereal group were given packets of whole-grain breakfast cereal and were told to eat a serving twice a day for the first half of the study, then once a day for the remaining time.
In the end, both diet groups lost more weight than the exercise-only group, with dieters in each dropping roughly 12 pounds, on average.
But the cereal group cut down on saturated fat to a greater extent and increased their fibre, magnesium and B-6 intake. On the other hand, all three groups were short on calcium and vitamin E.
Many study volunteers who were in the cereal group ate their cereals directly as snacks rather than with milk or yoghurt, because of which their calcium intakes did not increase as much as expected.
Besides having their cereal with milk, dieters can get calcium from foods like green vegetables, almonds and canned fish with bones.
Vitamin E sources include vegetable oils like canola and safflower, some fish, wheat germ, almonds, peanut butter, avocado and mango. Some of these foods, like nuts and oil, are high in calories, so people trying to lose weight will have to exercise portion control.
Gene link to rare cause of baldness
Jan 5th
PARIS ( 2009-01-04 18:57:04 ) :Scientists say they have pinned down a DNA mechanism that gives rise to a rare but distressing form of baldness that strikes before adulthood.
Flaws in a gene called U2HR are to blame for a condition called Maria Unna hereditary hypotrichosis, or MUHH, named after the German trichologist who identified the problem.
Children with MUHH have sparse or no hair at birth, followed by wiry or coarse hair in childhood but progressively lose it at puberty.
Researchers led by Xue Zhang of the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing found that U2HR, located on Chromosome 8, acts as a key switch in the process.
U2HR controls a small peptide — a kind of mini-protein — that in turn affects a previously-identified protein called the human hairless monolog, or HR, which is crucial for the regeneration of hair follicles.
Sifting through the genome of 19 Chinese families with a history of MUHH, the team found mutations of U2HR led to increased levels of HR, the death of hair follicles and thus greater likelihood of this kind of baldness.
The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics, offers a potential target for drugs that would block this pathway, offering the hope that youngsters who inherit the mutations will one day keep their hair, say the authors.
Bugging mosquitoes to fight dengue
Jan 3rd
WASHINGTON ( 2009-01-03 01:12:12 ) :Old mosquitoes usually spread disease, so Australian researchers figured out a way to make the pests die younger – naturally, not poisoned.
Scientists have been racing to genetically engineer mosquitoes to become resistant to diseases like malaria and dengue fever that plague millions around the world, as an alternative to mass spraying of insecticides.
A new report on Friday suggested a potentially less complicated approach: Breeding mosquitoes to carry an insect parasite that causes earlier death. Once a mosquito encounters dengue or malaria, it takes two weeks of incubation before the insect can spread that pathogen by biting someone, meaning older mosquitoes are the more dangerous ones.
The Australian experts knew that one type of fruit fly often is infected with a strain of bacterial parasite that cuts its lifespan in half. So they infected the mosquito species that spreads dengue – called Aedes aegypti – with that parasite, breeding several generations in a controlled laboratory.
Voila: Mosquitoes born with the parasite lived only 21 days – even in cozy lab conditions – compared to 50 days for regular mosquitoes, University of Queensland biologist Scott O’Neill reported in the journal Science.
The study funded by American billionaire Bill Gates Mosquitoes tend to die sooner in the wild than in a lab. So if the parasite could spread widely enough among these mosquitoes, it “may provide an inexpensive approach to dengue control”, O’Neill concluded.
New Year’s resolutions can be bad for you: mental health charity
Jan 1st
LONDON ( 2009-01-01 10:54:13 ) :Making self-improvement New Year’s resolutions often leaves people feeling worse, the British mental health charity Mind warned on Thursday.
Mind urged people not to make resolutions focusing on physical imperfections — such as attempting to lose weight — because they create a negative self image and lead to feelings of low self-esteem, hopelessness and even mild depression.
And when such optimistic resolutions fail, that could spark feelings of inadequacy and failure, the charity warned.
“New Year’s resolutions can sometimes focus on our problems or insecurities such as being overweight, feeling unhappy in our jobs or feeling guilty about not devoting enough time to friends and family throughout the year,” said Mind chief executive Paul Farmer.
“We chastise ourselves for our perceived shortcomings and set unrealistic goals to change our behaviour, so it’s not surprising that when we fail to keep resolutions, we end up feeling worse than when we started.
“In 2009, instead of making a New Year’s resolution, think positively about the year to come and what you can achieve.”
Mind suggested resolution-makers focus instead on being active, connecting with nature, learning something new and working for one’s community.
Adding milk to tea alters its health benefits
Jan 1st
ISLAMABAD ( 2008-12-31 21:05:58 ) 
rinking tea reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke, but adding milk alters the effect.
Previous research has shown that drinking tea improves blood flow and the ability of arteries to relax.
Researchers from the Charite Hospital at the University of Berlin in Mitte found that adding milk to the tea eliminates the protective effect against cardiovascular disease, Health News reported.
Tea is second only to water in worldwide consumption so any benefits could have important public health implications. But until now it was not known whether adding milk had an impact.
The researchers discovered that proteins called caseins in milk decrease the amount of compounds in tea known as catechins, which increase its protection against heart disease.
The researchers compared the healthy effects of drinking boiled water and tea with and without milk on 16 healthy women. Using ultrasound, they measured the function of an artery in the forearm before and two hours after drinking tea.
It was found that black tea significantly improved blood flow as compared to drinking water but adding milk blunted the effect of the tea.
Whereas drinking tea significantly increased the ability of the artery to relax and expand to accommodate increased blood flow as compared to drinking water, the addition of milk completely prevents the biological effect.
Tests on rats produced similar results. When rodents were exposed to black tea they produced more nitric oxide, which promotes dilation of blood vessels. But adding milk blocked the effect.
The findings could explain why in countries such as Britain, where tea is regularly consumed with milk, have not shown a decreased risk of heart disease and stroke from drinking tea.
Tea has also been shown to have a protective effect against cancer so the findings could have further implications.
Since milk appears to modify the biological activities of tea ingredients, it is likely that the anti-tumour effects of tea could be affected as well.
Deep thinking can make you fat
Jan 1st
LONDON ( 2009-01-01 02:55:11 ) :Researchers at the University Laval in Quebec, Canada, have concluded that too much thinking can make you fat.
According to Jean-Philippe Chaput, the study’s main author, students who participated in the research consumed 23.6 per cent more calories after intellectual tasks.
The research team, supervised by Dr Angelo Tremblay, measured the spontaneous food intake of 14 students after each of three tasks. The first was relaxing in a sitting position, the second reading and summarizing a text, and finally completing a series of memory, attention, and vigilance tests on the computer. After 45 minutes at each activity, participants were invited to eat as much as they wanted from a buffet. The researchers had already discovered that each session of intellectual work requires only three calories more than the rest period.
However, despite the low energy cost of mental work, the students spontaneously consumed 203 more calories after summarizing a text and 253 more calories after the computer tests. This represents a 23.6 per cent and 29.4 per cent increase, respectively, compared with the rest period.
Blood samples taken before, during, and after each session revealed that intellectual work causes much bigger fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels than rest periods. “These fluctuations may be caused by the stress of intellectual work, or also reflect a biological adaptation during glucose combustion,” claimed Chaput.
Chaput added: “Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries.
“This is a factor that should not be ignored, considering that more and more people hold jobs of an intellectual nature.”