19, September 2014

New study provides deeper insight on Parkinson’s disease

Scientists have gained new information on what causes the Parkinson’s disease. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter which affects physical and psychological functions such as motor control, learning and memory. Levels of this substance are regulated by special dopamine cells. When the level of dopamine drops, nerve cells that constitute part of the brain’s ‘stop signal’ are activated.

Jakob Kisbye Dreyer from University of Copenhagen explained that presence of dopamine was crucial in the system to block the stop signal. Parkinson’s disease arises because for some reason the dopamine cells in the brain are lost, and it is known that the stop signal is being over-activated somehow or other. However, they could now use advanced computer simulations to challenge the existing paradigm and put forward a different theory about what actually took place in the brain when the dopamine cells gradually died. Scanning the brain of a patient suffering from the disease revealed that in spite of dopamine cell death, there were no signs of a lack of dopamine, even at a comparatively late stage in the process.

The researchers said that as per their calculations, cell death only affected the level of dopamine very late in the process, but that symptoms could arise long before the level of the neurotransmitter started to decline. The reason for this was that the fluctuations that normally made up a signal became weaker. In the computer model, the brain compensated for the shortage of signals by creating additional dopamine receptors. This had a positive effect initially, but as cell death progressed further, the correct signal might almost disappear. At this stage, the compensation becomes so overwhelming that even small variations in the level of dopamine trigger the stop signal, which could therefore cause the patient to develop the disease.

The findings have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

19.09.2014

India lags behind targets set for reducing malnutrition

The recent UN report ‘The 2014 Committing to Child Survival,’ highlighted that the rate of infant death has been reduced almost to half from 12.7 million to 6.3 million, since 1990. Although the report indicates that India has progressed in reducing malnutrition, hunger as well as child mortality but the developmental goals have still not been achieved, noted two international reports.

According to a Food and Agriculture Organisation report released in Rome, between 1990-1992 and now there are 21 million fewer hungry people in India. Both the international reports also highlight the need for additional efforts that need to be taken, despite the progress. Both in hunger or malnutrition and child mortality, India lags behind the Millennium Development Goal targets set for 2015.  The 2015 target for infant mortality is 42 per thousand against 53 now, suggesting that it unlikely for India to achieve the target.

Between 1990 and 2015, the aim was to reduce the proportion of the hungry to half between, but according to reports the reduction has been only 9.5 percent. The Millennium Development Goals were adopted at the UN Millenium Summit in 2000 and set targets to be achieved by 2015 in eight areas ranging from malnutrition to environment. FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva, who visited India last week, remarked on the nation’s efforts to combat hunger, saying that India has recently approved its National Food Security Act scaling up the country’s effort to end hunger, could create one of the world’s biggest family farming food purchase programme and was scaling up financial inclusion for direct transfers.’

Globally, mortality rate for children under five has dropped by 49 percent between 1990 and 2013. Mickey Chopra, head of Unicef’s global health programmes, said, ‘There has been dramatic and accelerating progress in reducing mortality among children, and the data prove that success is possible even for poorly resourced countries.’ However, according to the UN report, ‘New Estimates in Levels and Trends in Child Mortality,’ the overall progress is still short of meeting the global target of cutting under-five mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. Last year, 6.3 million children under five died from mostly preventable causes.

Even though that is 200,000 fewer deaths than in 2012, it still means that 17,000 children die everyday, the report said. FAO’s report, ‘The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014′, estimates that, around the world, 805 million people were chronically undernourished in 2012-14. This meant, however, that their number is down by 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million less than in 1990-92.

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

19.09.2014

Life brings tears, smiles & MEMORIES…. The tears dry…The Smiles fade…          But the memories last forever….