14 August, 2015

How music can benefit you post-surgery

Now that’s the way to recuperate! Scientists have found that listening to music before, during, or after a surgery could help them recover faster. In a most comprehensive study by Brunel University and Queen Mary University of London involving almost 7000 patients, it was found that music significantly reduced pain and anxiety, and decreased the need for pain medication.

Moreover, when patients selected their own music there was a slightly greater (but non-significant) reduction in pain and use of pain relief. Surprisingly, even listening to music while under general anaesthetic reduced patients’ levels of pain, although the effects were larger when patients were conscious. However, music did not reduce length of hospital stay.  

Lead author Dr Catherine Meads said that music is a non-invasive, safe, cheap intervention that should be available to everyone undergoing surgery. Patients should be allowed to choose the type of music they would like to hear to maximise the benefit to their wellbeing. However, care needs to be taken that music does not interfere with the medical team’s communication. The study is published in The Lancet.

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

14.08.2015

Identified — new treatment for diabetics with heart disease

In a breakthrough discovery, an Indian scientist has found new treatment for heart disease in diabetics by targeting a key protein. Lead researcher Rajesh Katare of the University of Otago said that the team sought to confirm their laboratory-based results by collaborating with cardiothoracic surgeons at Dunedin Hospital to collect and study heart tissue samples from coronary bypass patients.

In the study, the researchers used the type-2 diabetic mouse model and matched around 35 such diabetic patients to comparable non-diabetic ones. Analysis revealed markedly increased autophagy in the diabetic patients’ heart tissues compared to the non-diabetic ones. The increase then triggered activation of pro-cell death proteins, which lead to progressive loss of cardiac cells. As more cells die, cardiac dysfunction develops and heart failure ensues.

They also identified that diabetes increases autophagy through activation of the protein (Beclin-1). Katare said that the protein presented an extremely promising target for new treatments of diabetes-related cardiac disease. He said that they found that these molecular alterations begun in the diabetic heart from an early stage of the disease, before any clinically identifiable symptoms, so blocking them could be useful in combating cardiovascular complications in diabetes. The study is published in the International Journal of Cardiology.  

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

14.08.2015

The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear

Brian Tracy