Your palm an indicator of illness
Your
health is in your hands, and quite literally so. Our hands are the barometers
of our well-being and the littlest changes on them may convey a serious medical
problem elsewhere in the body.
Discoloured nails
Discoloured nails
Your
nails should be a healthy, pinkish colour. If they have a greenish-yellow tinge
then you probably have a fungal infection and should ask your doctor for an
anti-fungal treatment. Besides, yellow nails can be a sign of a lung disease.
Spoon-shaped
nails
A
healthy nail should be slightly raised in the middle and slightly curved down at the
tip. If you nail looks the opposite of this, like a spoon, it's a symptom of
iron deficiency and anemia. You can correct this by taking iron supplements and
including more dark green veggies and some red meat in your diet. Nail
clubbing, where the nail takes on a ball-like shape, is even more worrisome as
it can mean an internal disease such as lung cancer or heart
problems.
Finger lumps
Small
lumps close to the nail beds are the first signs of osteoarthritis. These lumps
come up as the disease causes a loss of joint space, leading to broadening of
joints while new bones begin to form. Osteoarthritis, which is general wear and
tear of the joints, is common among women
and is painful.
Trembling
hands
Everyone's
hands shake to some degree but if yours tremble noticeably, it may be an early
warning sign that you are developing Parkinson's disease, which affects the
nervous system.
Dry skin
Very
dry skin can be a sign of an under-active
thyroid as it causes the skin to lose moisture.
Red palms
For
centuries doctors have associated a reddening of the palm with liver disorders,
in particular cirrhosis.. Red palms can also be a symptom of rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid disorders
and, sometimes, pregnancy.
Sweaty palms
Our
palms often heat up when we are nervous or anxious, but if this is happening to
you on a regular basis, your thyroid could be to blame. An over-active thyroid
causes an increase in your metabolic rate. This means you burn more calories
and sweat more as your body temperature
increases. You may also experience unexplained weight loss, a constant feeling of nervous
energy and a swelling of the thyroid gland in the throat.
Source:
www.timesofindia.com
09.10.2012
Nobel Prize in physiology,
medicine is shared by Briton, Japanese
British
scientist John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan shared the 2012 Nobel Prize
in physiology or medicine Monday for experiments separated by almost 50 years.
Their work provides deep insight into how animals develop and offers hope for a
new era of personalized medicine.
"Their
findings have revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms
develop," the Nobel committee said in the prize announcement.
Gurdon,
79, is an emeritus professor at Cambridge University who still conducts
research at an institute there bearing his name and was knighted in 1995 for
his work in developmental biology. His frog experiments a half-century ago
showed that scientists 'should be able to derive any one kind of cell from
another, because they've all got the same genes," Gurdon said Monday at a
news conference in London.
In
2006 and 2007, Yamanaka extended this insight by turning back time on
individual cells from both mice and humans. By sprinkling four genes on
ordinary skin cells, Yamanaka discovered a virtual fountain of youth: Any cell,
he found, could be reverted to an early embryonic state.
These
"induced" embryonic cells behave much like the ethically contentious
stem cells gleaned from human embryos. Like embyronic cells, they can be grown
into many other types of tissues — but without having to destroy any embryos.
The
breakthrough offered hope that someday skin cells could be harvested from a
patient, sent back to an embryonic state, and then grown into replacement
tissues such as heart muscle or nerve cells.
A
huge global research effort is now under way to develop pluripotent stem cells,
as they're called, into treatments for heart disease, some forms of blindness,
Parkinson's disease and many other disorders.
Because
the cells made by the technique are genetically identical to the patient, the
advance "may one day allow us to transplant rejection-proof tissues,"
said a leading U.S. stem cell researcher, George Daley, director of the Harvard
Stem Cell Institute.
Yamanaka's
work "has now expanded to hundreds of labs around the world that are
exploiting the techniques to study virtually every kind of disease. The impact
cannot be overstated," Daley continued.
09.10.2012
There's only one
way to succeed in anything, and that is to give it everything
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