July 17, 2012 Clippings

Treat cancer in half an hour

A gentler form of prostate cancer treatment that takes only 30 minutes has been devised by British surgeons.

The technique is just as effective as surgery but is cheaper and has fewer side effects, Daily Mail reported.

This means men are back on their feet and back at work sooner and are much less likely to suffer problems such as impotence and incontinence, the newspaper said Friday.

The treatment, pioneered at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, is an advanced version of brachytherapy, a technique which has been used successfully for more than a decade.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

17.07.2012

Live near mum-in-law for a healthy baby

Married couples who live near their mother-in-law have more babies, a new study has found.

Furthermore, historical records show these children are also less likely to die in infancy.

The research involved analysis of 300 years of church records, the most recent of which were from 2000.

Virpi Lummaa of Sheffield University, who used the data to track births, marriages and deaths in farming communities in Finland, found that sons and daughters tend to marry younger if their mother was alive, the Daily Mail reported.

They also had more children, and left smaller gaps between babies.

Dr Lummaa proposed that as the influence was only evident when a mother-in-law lived nearby, the affected families probably benefited from an extra pair of hands, as well as the additional love and attention the children received.

Her findings showed little difference between maternal and paternal mothers-in-law - but previous research into African families suggests that a mother's mother provides the greatest benefits.

This may be due to age; as men tend to marry later than women, their mothers are also likely to be older, meaning they may be less able to help raise their grandchildren.

Dr Lummaa's work is aimed at working out why women lose the ability to have children when they are still relatively young, while other mammals can reproduce into old age.

Her results back the theory that that menopause is nature's way of stopping women from having children while they are still young enough to become grandmothers.

This allows them to safeguard their genes, by lavishing their grandchildren with love and attention, without having to go through the trauma of childbirth again.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

17.07.2012

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good

Bill Gates