‘Tickle’
your ears for a super heart
How
often do you want to kill that itchy feeling in your ears? Well if we believe
researchers, tickling your ears can actually improve the health of your heart!
When they applied electrical pulses to the tragus – the small raised flap at
the front of the ear immediately in front of the ear canal – they found that
the stimulation changed the influence of the nervous system on the heart by
reducing the nervous signals that can drive failing hearts too hard.
The
technique works by stimulating a major nerve called the vagus that has an
important role in regulating vital organs such as the heart. The researchers
applied electrodes to the ears of 34 healthy people and switched on the
standard TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machines for
15-minute sessions. They monitored the variability of subjects’ heartbeats and
the activity of the part of the nervous system that drives the heart.
‘The
first positive effect we observed was increased variability in subjects’
heartbeats. We found that when you stimulate this nerve, you get about a 20
percent increase in heart rate variability,’ said lead researcher Jennifer
Clancy from University of Leeds’ school of biomedical sciences. ‘You feel a bit
of a tickling sensation in your ear when the TENS machine is on but it is
painless. It does have the potential to improve the health of the heart and
might even become part of the treatment for heart failure,’ claimed Jim
Deuchars, a professor of systems neuroscience at University of Leeds.
The second positive effect was in
suppressing the sympathetic nervous system, which drives heart activity using
adrenaline. ‘We measured the nerve activity directly and found that it reduced
by about 50 percent when we stimulated the ear. This is important because if
you have heart disease or heart failure, you tend to have increased sympathetic
activity,’ Clancy explained. A lot of treatments for heart failure try to stop
that sympathetic activity – beta-blockers, for instance, block the action of
the hormones that implement these signals. ‘Using the TENS, we saw a reduction
of the nervous activity itself,’ researchers noted.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
21.08.2014
‘Government
aims to immunise every child against fatal diseases’
The
government aims to immunise every child in the country against fatal diseases,
Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said here Tuesday. ‘The Indian government
is very serious about achieving total immunisation in India and it aims to
immunise almost every child against the fatal diseases,’ Harsh Vardhan said
speaking at the launch of a music video ‘Phool Khil Jayenge’, a awareness
campaign for child health and immunisation.
The
music video highlights the importance of immunisation in saving lives of Indian
children. Vardhan said every year lakhs of young children die of diseases in
India, most of which can be prevented by simple immunisation. ‘Lakhs of
children in India die from the diseases that are easily preventable. Even 29
years after the launch of the immunisation programme, only 65-70 percent of
children got immunised. The rest are susceptible to diseases which often turn
fatal,’ he said.
According to the health ministry
over 14 lakh children in the age group of 1-5 years die every year due to
preventable diseases, like pneumonia and diarrhea. Emphasising the role of
various stake-holders, Vardhan said: ‘Each of us needs to volunteer and turn
into a ‘health soldier’ to achieve 100 percent immunisation. The support of all
political and religious leaders is essential in this endeavour.’ ‘I am
confident that this music video will help us repeat the success story of polio
(immunisation programme) with many other preventable diseases as well, by
creating awareness about how essential immunisation is in saving lives,’
Vardhan said.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
21.08.2014
If we don’t learn to control our thoughts, we will never
learn to control our behavior
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