1 April, 2016

Live in a polluted area? It may make you obese

Exposure to air pollution leads to obesity and makes people prone to other lifestyle diseases such as hypertension and heart disease, a study has revealed. The study published in the Journal of Federation of the American Society of Experimental Biology said surveys have shown that high exposure to air pollution also increases insulin resistance, which is the precursor of diabetes Type 2. ‘The link between air pollution and obesity is indeed a new subject of concern. While it is already well established that toxic air is causing more damage than just to the respiratory system, but its link with obesity is certainly worrisome, because then indirectly it will also lead to a rise in obesity linked complications, like hypertension, heart diseases and type 2 diabetes etc,’ it said.

Researchers reached the conclusion after they placed pregnant rats and their offspring in two chambers, one exposed to outdoor air and the other containing an air filter that removed most of the air pollutant particles. After 19 days, the lungs and livers of the pregnant rats exposed to the polluted air were heavier and showed increased tissue inflammation. These rats had 50 percent higher LDL (bad) cholesterol and 97 percent higher total cholesterol. Their insulin resistance level, a precursor of Type-2 diabetes, was also higher. At eight weeks old, female and male rats exposed to the pollution were 10 percent and 18 percent heavier respectively than those exposed to clean air.

Talking on the prevention of obesity due to air pollution, S.P. Byotra, head of the department of medicine at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said: ‘Given the level of pollution people are exposed to in metros, installing air purifiers at home can be one of the best solutions for air pollution, which is a cause for various types of diseases.’ According to the study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2015, indoor exposure to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) from outdoor sources was a major health concern, especially in highly polluted developing countries.  

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

01.04.2016

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work

Bette Davis

31 March, 2016

WHO wants South East Asia to be more wary of diabetes

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday urged the Southeast Asian countries to promote educational campaigns regarding self-management of diabetes and make its treatment cost effective. "Diabetes is of particular concern in the South East Asian Region. More than one out of every four of the 3.7 million diabetes-related deaths globally occur in this region," said Poonam Khetrapal, director for WHO South East Asian region.

"If diabetes prevalence continues to rise, the personal, social and economic consequences will deepen," Khetrapal said. The South East Asian Region is generally considered to be made up of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Singapore, and East Timor.

World Health Day this year focuses on diabetes and calls for scaling up efforts to prevent, care for and detect the disease to arrest the global epidemic which is hitting the low and middle income countries the most. According to WHO records, over 96 million people in the world do not know that they are suffering from diabetes. "Diabetes rarely makes headlines, and yet it will be the world's seventh largest killer by 2030 unless intense and focused efforts are made by governments, communities and individuals," said Khetrapal.

Nearly 90 percent of all diabetes cases are of Type 2 diabetes, largely the result of excess bodyweight and physical inactivity, she said.

"Diabetes is both preventable and treatable if detected early. If not properly managed the disease causes serious damage to every major organ in the body, resulting in heart attacks, strokes, blindness and nerve damage," said Khetrapal.

World Health Day is celebrated on April 7 every year to mark the anniversary of the founding of WHO in 1948.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

31.03.2016

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it

Margaret Fuller

30 March, 2016

First vaccine against Rota virus launched in India

Bhubaneshwar: Aiming to slash the prevalence of violence-borne diarrhoea, the health ministry on Saturday launched the Rota Virus vaccine here, which will be available free of cost at public healthcare facilities, initially in four states.

Terming the occasion historic in the Indian health system, Health Minister J.P. Nadda said: "This is not a routine programme. This Rota virus launch sets the goal in the field of Indian health system. By launching this, we aim to immunise 27 million children across the country to prevent diseases caused by Rota virus." Rota is a highly contagious virus that infects majority of children before their first birthday. It is the most common cause of severe diarrhoea among children, leading to hospitalisation and death.

Nadda said that the government was aggressively working for the eradication of a slew of other diseases, including leprosy and TB. In the first phase, Rota virus vaccine will be introduced in four States -- Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh. It will be provided at government health facilities to children from six weeks of age. The vaccine was launched in Odisha as the state records high diarrhoea cases among children and deaths due to improper treatment.

"We are making appropriate investment, and this has been possible because we have an effective healthcare system with more and more facilities capable of providing the vaccine to the needy children," said Health Ministry Additional Secretary C.K. Mishra. 

Currently, 9.2 percent of Odisha's total disease burdens consists of diarrhoea patients.

The infant mortality rate in Odisha is 51 per 1,000 live births, while the mortality rate of children under five years is 68 per 1,000 births, both far higher than in the other states where the Rota virus vaccine was launched in the first phase on Saturday. The diarrhoea burden due to Rota virus in Andhra Pradesh stands at eight percent while the figure in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh is 8.5 percent and 5.5 percent respectively.

Globally there are 453,000 child deaths due to Rota virus every year. In India, Rota Virus diarrhoea causes about 78,000 deaths and about 8.7 lakh hospitalisations each year. Additionally, 32.7 lakh children under five years of age are treated as outpatients.

Source: www.zeenews.india.com

30.03.2016

Correction does much, but encouragement does more

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

29 March, 2016

Study finds that people everywhere use same facial expression to say NO!

Researchers have identified a single, universal facial expression that is interpreted across cultures — whether one speaks Mandarin Chinese or English — as the embodiment of negative emotion. This facial expression that the researchers call ‘Not face’ consists of furrowed brows of ‘anger’, raised chin of ‘disgust’ and the pressed-together lips of ‘contempt’, the study said. ‘To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,’ said Aleix Martinez, cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Ohio State University in the US. The look proved identical for native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL), the researchers said.

The study, published in the journal Cognition, also revealed that our facial muscles contract to form the ‘not face’ at the same frequency at which we speak. For this new study, the researchers hypothesised that if a universal ‘not face’ existed, it was likely to be combination of three basic facial expressions that are universally accepted to indicate moral disagreement — anger, disgust and contempt. To test the hypothesis, they recruited 158 Ohio State students in front of a digital camera. The students, divided in four groups, were filmed and photographed as they had a casual conversation with the person behind the camera in their native language. In all four groups — speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin and ASL — the researchers identified clear grammatical markers of negation. The students’ answers translated to statements like ‘That’s not a good idea,’ and ‘They should not do that.’

The researchers manually tagged images of the students speaking, frame by frame, to show which facial muscles were moving and in which directions. Then computer algorithms searched the thousands of resulting frames to find commonalities among them. Regardless of language, the participants’ faces displayed the ‘Not Face’ when they communicated negative sentences.  

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

29.03.2016

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit

Baltasar Gracian

28 March, 2016

Your name can give you a longer life

The study, co-authored by Michigan State University economist Lisa D. Cook, is one of the first to find benefits of having a racially distinctive name. Other studies that looked at current black names such as Jamal and Lakisha suggest that having these modern-day monikers leads to discrimination. Cook said a number of studies indicate that modern black names can act as a burden, whereas their findings show that historical black names conveyed a large advantage over a person's lifetime.

Using historical death certificate data from four states Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, the researchers previously established the existence of a set of distinctive names given to black men, mainly in the early 20th century. The names range from Abraham to Booker to Isaac. The current study examined mortality rates among men with those names. It found that having a distinctive black name added more than one year of life relative to the other black males. The researchers ruled out socio-economic and environmental factors such as single-parent households, education and occupation.

Many of the distinctive names come from the Bible and possibly denote empowerment. Cook, who has five generations of Baptist ministers in her family, said one theory is that men with these Old Testament names may have been held to a higher standard in academic and other activities, even implicitly, and had stronger family, church or community ties. These stronger social networks could help a person weather negative events throughout his life.

Cook further said when the people see a name that's foreign or strange to them in their profession, implicitly they shut down, as these studies have shown. Then there is an extra layer of bias suggesting this is possibly a female, poor or somehow unqualified candidate. Research has found that it is associated with racial discrimination in the United States and class discrimination in Britain, he added.

The research is published in the journal Explorations in Economic History.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

28.03.2016

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

Napoleon Hill

22 March, 2016

Government asks HC to lift the interim stay on FDC drugs

The central government on Monday asked the Delhi High Court to vacate the interim stay on ban on some fixed dose combinations (FDC) medicines sold by pharma majors saying they ‘endanger patient safety’. Defending its decision to ban 344 FDC medicines through its March 10 notification, the government in an affidavit filed before the high court said: ‘The interim order granted to the Petitioner (pharma companies) would be against the public interest and endanger patient safety.’ ‘Their objective is only to gain profits and the petition has been filed only to gain time and obstruct the legitimate functions of the government of India,’ the affidavit read. Meanwhile, the Delhi high court on Monday deferred, to March 28, the hearing on pleas of pharma companies challenging the ban which means some of popular durgs such as Pfizer’s Corex cough syrup, Reckitt’s D’Cold and P&G’s Vicks Action 500 extra will be available to consumer till next Monday. Justice R.S. Endlaw also directed the government to provide the experts committee report, which recommended the ban, to all the pharma companies that are in court against the ban.

The high court had last week stayed operation of the ban on some FDC drugs of around 30 pharma companies including Cipla, Procter and Gamble (P&G), Pfizer, Glenmark, Glaxo Smithkline, Abbott Healthcare, Reckitt Benckiser, Piramal, etc. Justice Ednlaw had asked the government not to take coercive steps against these companies till March 21. In its affidavit, the government said FDC medicines are ‘new drugs’ and require fresh licence from Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI). It said licences for FDCs were obtained from state authorities without seeking DCGI approval between 1988 to 2012. A report of Parliamentary Standing Committee on health had said unauthorised FDCs that posed a risk to people need to be withdrawn immediately, the government said

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

22.03.2016

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort

John Ruskin

21 March, 2016

New blood test diagnoses Alzheimer's at initial stage

Scientists have developed a novel blood test that may potentially facilitate the detection of Alzheimer's at an early stage, giving people up to 15 years warning before the condition develops. "If we wish to have a drug at our disposal that can significantly inhibit the progress of the disease, we need blood tests that detect Alzheimer's in its pre-dementia stages," said lead researcher Klaus Gerwert, professor at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.

The novel test can pick up the "tell tale" proteins - known as amyloid-beta peptides - that characterise the disease as they seep into the bloodstream.

The study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, analysed samples from 141 patients and found that the blood test achieved a diagnostic precision of 84 per cent in the blood and 90 percent in cerebrospinal fluid, compared with the clinical gold standard.

Based on an immuno-chemical analysis using an infrared sensor, its surface is coated with highly specific antibodies, which extract biomarkers for Alzheimer's from the blood or the cerebrospinal fluid. The infrared sensor analyses if the biomarkers show already pathological changes, which can take place more than 15 years before any clinical symptoms appear.

"By applying such drugs at an early stage, we could prevent dementia, or at the very least delay its onset," said one of the researchers Jens Wiltfang, professor at University of Gottingen in Germany.

A major problem of Alzheimer's disease diagnosis is the fact that by the time the first clinical symptoms appears, massive irreversible damage to the brain has already occurred. The patients are left with only the symptomatic treatment.

There is at present no drug capable of stopping the physical onslaught of Alzheimer's disease, the researchers explained.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

21.03.2016

Today is a gift. That's why it's called the present

19 March, 2016

Can calcium-rich foods help you get a good night’s sleep?

Calcium not only helps your bones stay strong, but it also controls how long we sleep, according to a recent study. Researchers at the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) and the University of Tokyo in Japan have unveiled a new theory for how sleep works. The work shows how slow-wave sleep depends on the activity of calcium inside neurons. ‘Although sleep is a fundamental physiologic function, its mechanism is still a mystery,’ according to group director and corresponding author Hiroki Ueda. The team used a variety of scientific techniques, including computational modeling and studying knockout mice, to search for the fundamental mechanism underlying sleep.

Co-first author Fumiya Tatsuki said that their model made four predictions, which provided them with four starting points to search for critical genes involved in sleep. Each prediction was tested and proven correct in experiments with knockout mice or by pharmacological inhibition and they were ultimately able to identify seven genes that work in the same calcium-related pathway to control sleep duration. Ueda noted that these findings should contribute to the understanding and treatment of sleep disorders and neurologic diseases that have been associated with them. In addition to becoming new molecular targets for sleep drugs, the genes they have identified could also become targets for drugs that treat certain psychiatric disorders that occur with sleep dysfunction. The study is published in the journal Neuron.  

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

19.03.2016

To succeed, we must first believe that we can

Michael Korda

18 March, 2016

What your parents eat can affect your health

In a study, researchers used mice that had become obese and developed type 2 diabetes due to a high-fat diet and then obtained their offspring solely through In ViFro fertilisation (IVF) from isolated oocytes and sperm, so that changes in the offspring could only be passed on via these cells. The offspring were carried and born by healthy surrogate mothers.

This enabled researchers to rule out factors such as the behaviour of the parents and influences of the mother during pregnancy and lactation. The results showed that both oocytes and sperm passed on epigenetic information, which particularly in the female offspring led to severe obesity. In the male offspring, by contrast, the blood glucose level was more affected than in the female siblings. The data also shows that like in humans, the maternal contribution to the change in metabolism in the offspring is greater than the paternal contribution. This kind of epigenetic inheritance of a metabolic disorder due to an unhealthy diet could be another cause for the dramatic increase in the prevalence of diabetes since the 1960s.

The increase in diabetic patients observed throughout the world can hardly be explained by mutations in the genes themselves (DNA) because the increase has been too fast. Since epigenetic inheritance -as opposed to genetic inheritance -is in principle reversible, new possibilities to influence the development of obesity and diabetes arise from these observations, according to the scientists.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

18.03.2016

Dreams and dedication are

a powerful combination

William Longgood

17 March, 2016

Indian scientists develop new technology to detect milk adulteration

A new technology to detect adulteration in milk has been developed by CSIR-Central Electronic Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-CEERI) at Pilani in Rajasthan, Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Wednesday. ‘The new technology is based on acquiring electrochemical fingerprint coupled with multivariate data analysis technique. Globally, there is no system available based on similar methods. This is a fully Indian concept,’ the minister said. CSIR-CEERI is a premier research institute in the field of electronics established in 1953 under the aegis of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. The technology will cost around Rs.70,000 to Rs.1 lakh. The milk detection process will take nearly 40-45 seconds and the cost of testing will be as low as Rs.0.05 to Rs.0.10. The technology has been transferred to two industries — Rajasthan Electronics and Instrument, Jaipur and Alpine Technologies, Surat.

In a written response in the Lok Sabha, the minister said: ‘The technology excels in its ability to detect known and unknown adulterants in milk and it has great potential to be used widely in dairy industries. ‘The adoption and deployment of this technology in as many villages and milk societies as possible would be a step forward in enhancing the standards and quality of milk. Besides, it will also help in generating employment.’ According to a FSSAI (Food Safety and Standards Authority of India) survey in 2011, the most common adulterants in milk are addition of water, glucose, skimmed milk powder, urea, detergent, caustic soda, which are very hazardous to life.

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

17.03.2016

The struggle alone pleases us,

not the victory

Blaise Pascal

16 March, 2016

Medical students at higher alcohol abuse risk: Study

New York: A team of US researchers has found that medical students, especially who are young, single and under high debt are twice as likely to abuse alcohol than their peers who are not attending medical school.

Burnout factors such as emotional exhaustion or feelings of depersonalisation were highly associated with alcohol abuse or dependence among the medical students.

"Our findings clearly show there is reason for concern," said Liselotte Dyrbye from Mayo Clinic in the US.

"We recommend institutions pursue a multifaceted solution to address related issues with burnout, the cost of medical education and alcohol abuse," Dyrbye added in the paper published in the journal Academic Medicine.

The researchers surveyed 12,500 medical students and one-third of those responded. Approximately 1,400 of that subgroup experienced clinical alcohol abuse or dependence. 

The results indicate three factors that were independently associated -- a younger age than most peers in medical school, being unmarried and amount of educational debt.

No statistical difference was found between differing years of medical school or between men and women.

"In our paper we recommend wellness curricula for medical schools, identifying and remediating factors within the learning environment contributing to stress and removal of barriers to mental health services," added first author Eric Jackson.

Source: www.zeenews.india.com

16.03.2016

It takes less time to do things right than to explain why you did it wrong

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

15 March, 2016

500 more drugs may face ban

Around 500 more medicines, including popular antibiotics and anti-diabetic drugs, may soon face a ban for being "irrational", unsafe and inefficacious, official sources said. The health ministry, which banned 344 fixed-dose combinations (FDCs) including popular cough syrups like Phensedyl, Corex and Benadryl last week, is evaluating a list of over 6,000 products. According to a senior official, at least 1,000 such FDCs are currently under "severe scrutiny" and 500 of them are likely to face a ban within six months.

"There is primary evidence in around 1,000 cases, which shows these are irrational FDCs. However, in some cases the data is incomplete so we have asked for further studies. In around 500 cases, we are at the last leg and waiting for some documents," an official told TOI.

TOI was the first to report the ban on 344 FDCs including Phensedyl and Corex on Saturday .

The health ministry is of the view that irrational FDCs are causing anti-microbial resistance and in some cases the toxicity is so high that it can even lead to failure of organs. There are also concerns many of these FDCs being available over-the-counter without doctors' prescription, which is leading to their misuse.

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court on Monday granted Pfizer a stay order, pending a further hearing, on the ban on its popular cough syrup Corex.

While some drug makers including Pfizer have argued that some of the banned drugs have been available in India for around 30 years to make a point for safety and efficacy , health ministry officials argue that a long market life is not enough to prove safety . "Just because adverse events have not come to notice or have not been reported so far does not mean we ignore scientific evidence showing discrepancies," the official said.

While many of these products are sold at the chemists level, officials and health experts say often adverse events are not reported because patients do not come back to doctors unless these drugs are used repetitively, leading to severe problems.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

15.03.2016

Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough

Mary McLeod Bethune

14 March, 2016

Good cholesterol can also be bad for you!

It turns out what’s referred to as ‘good’ cholesterol might actually put you at a much greater risk of heart disease. The generally accepted medical maxim that elevated HDL cholesterol (HDL-C) is ‘good’ has been overturned by a multi-center, international study, led by researchers from the the University of Pennsylvania. They show that a certain genetic cause of increased HDL-C may actually be ‘bad,’ noting that a specific mutation in a gene which encodes a cell receptor protein that binds to HDL prevents the receptor from functioning.

The mutation causes an increased risk of coronary heart disease even in the presence of elevated levels of HDL-C or ‘good’ cholesterol. Senior author Daniel J. Rader said that the results indicate that some causes of raised HDL actually increase risk for heart disease. This is the first demonstration of a genetic mutation that raises HDL but increases risk of heart disease. Rader and his colleagues sequenced the lipid-modifying regions of the genomes of 328 people with markedly elevated HDL (along with a control group with lower HDL) to identify genetic causes of high HDL. One of the genes they focused on was SCARB1, which encodes for Scavenger Receptor B1 (SR-B1), the major receptor for HDL on cell surfaces.

In the course of this sequencing, they identified, for the first time, a person without any SCARB1 function, typified by an extremely high HDL-C level of about 150 mg/dL, whereas the normal level is about 50 mg/dL. The subject had two copies of a SCARB1 mutation called P376L, which the team showed caused a breakdown in HDL receptor function. Rader suggests that a therapeutic approach to increase the expression or activity of SCARB1 could be a new way to reduce the risk of heart disease even though it would reduce HDL blood levels.

He added, ‘The work demonstrates that the protective effects of HDL are more dependent upon how it functions than merely how much of it is present,’ Rader concluded. ‘We still have a lot to learn about the relationship between HDL function and heart disease risk.’

Their findings are published in Science.

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

14.03.2016

If a man does his best, what else is there?

George S. Patton

12 March, 2016

Lead exposure in early stages ups obesity risk

Exposure to lead during the development stages and early childhood is likely to increase the risk of obesity in adulthood, finds a new research.

The results of the study conducted on mice found that exposure to lead during early development stages of life can change the gut microbiota -- a complex community of micro-organisms that live in the digestive tracts of animals -- in a way that it significantly raises the chances of obesity in adulthood.

"Early life exposure to lead causes a long lasting impact on gut microbiome, and the change of gut microbiome may partially contribute to the increased body weight in adult life," said lead author Chuanwu Xi, associate professor at the University of Michigan in US.

Adult male mice exposed to lead during the gestation period and infancy stages were 11 percent larger than those not exposed. Mice exposed to lead during early development stages showed differences in their gut microbiota and had fewer aerobes and more anaerobes in their gut.

In both males and females, developmental lead impacted the adult microbiome, the researchers maintained, adding that the study only observed adult onset obesity in the males.

Lead was added to the drinking water of mice mother prior to breeding through nursing their young. The lead levels were carefully designed to be within human population exposure levels.

Once weaned, the offspring were raised to adulthood without additional exposure, and then tested for lead effects acquired from their mothers, the researchers explained in the study published in the journal Toxicological Sciences.

Lead is found throughout the environment in natural and man-made settings. For decades, researchers have found many health problems associated with exposure, even at levels lower than the threshold for safety set by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In the study, the researchers used deep DNA sequencing of bacterial specific genes to examine the guts of both males and females. Those exposed to lead had all of the similar complexity in microbiota as those not exposed. The differences were in the balance of the different groups of micro-organisms.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

12.03.2016

Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open

Elmer G. Letterman

11 March, 2016

Kidney failures have doubled in last 15 years in India: Doctors

New Delhi: If health experts are to be believed, the number of Indians suffering from kidney failures has doubled in the last one and a half decade. The number of Indians suffering from various types of kidney ailments and undergoing dialysis has seen a rapid rise of 10 %.

Doctors have also mentioned that the citizens of India are more susceptible to chronic kidney diseases and therefore, they should take extra precautions. An approximate estimation of 75,000 patients has been made who are on dialysis and the number is only growing each day.

Diabetes is believed to be the most common cause for kidney failures and with it's exponential growth, the number of kidney patients is likely to rise.

The health ministry has also jumped in and admitted that it is a serious concern for the country. They have also thought about setting up 2,000 new dialysis centres within next couple of years to address the problem.

Source: www.zeenews.india.com

11.03.2016

Weakness is nothing more than an opportunity to grow

Rod Williams

10 March, 2016

Did you know your height and weight could affect your income

Men who are shorter in height and women who are obese are more likely to be socio-economically deprived with lower levels of education, occupation, and income, suggests new research. ‘These data support evidence that height and BMI play an important partial role in determining several aspects of a person’s socio-economic status, especially women’s BMI (body mass index) for income and deprivation and men’s height for education, income, and job class,’ said lead researcher Timothy Frayling, professor at University of Exeter in Britain. The findings were reported in the journal BMJ. The researchers tested whether genetic variants influencing height or BMI play a direct (causal) role in socio-economic status. They analysed genetic variants with known effects on height and body mass index from 119,000 individuals aged between 40 and 70 in the Britain’s Biobank — a database of biological information from half a million British adults — using a technique called Mendelian randomisation.

Five measures of socio-economic status were assessed — age at the time of completing schooling, degree level education, job class, annual household income, and Townsend deprivation index (a recognised social deprivation score). Analyses were repeated separately for men and women, the researchers maintained. ‘These findings have important social and health implications, supporting evidence that overweight people, especially women, are at a disadvantage and that taller people, especially men, are at an advantage,’ the researchers concluded.  

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

10.03.2016

You always pass failure on the way to success

Mickey Rooney

9 March, 2016

Cancer cells get their fuel from neighbours' 'words'

A recent study has revealed that cancer cells get 30-60 percent of their fuel from eating their neighbours' 'words'.

Researcher Deepak Nagrath from Rice University said their original hypothesis was that cancer cells were modifying their metabolism based on communications they were receiving from cells in the microenvironment near the tumor, but none of them expected to find that they were converting the signals directly into energy.

The results were part of a four-year study by Nagrath, his students and collaborators at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and other institutions about the role of exosomes in cancer metabolism.

His work is the latest in a series of discoveries about cancer metabolism that date to German chemist Otto Warburg's 1924 discovery that cancer cells produce far more energy from the metabolic process known as glycolysis than do normal cells.

The exosome study began four years ago based upon a growing realisation that exosomes might play a role in regulating cancer metabolism.

First author Hongyun Zhao said a growing body of evidence suggests that exosomes can facilitate crosstalk between cancer cells and other types of cells that are nearby in the microenvironment that surrounds the tumor.

Zhao added their results show that not only do exosomes enhance the phenomenon of the Warburg effect in tumors, but exosomes also contain off-the-shelf metabolites within their cargo that cancer cells use directly in their metabolic processes.

The research is published in the Journal eLife.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

09.03.2016

Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory

Norman Vincent Peale

4 March, 2016

Here’s what your hair and nails tell about your health

Researchers have found that hair, toenails and fingernails can provide an easy way to measure how much one is exposed to potentially harmful chemicals called flame retardants, which are frequently added to plastic, foam, wood and textiles. Exposure to flame retardants in various forms has been linked to obesity, learning disabilities, neuro and reproductive toxicity, and endocrine disruption. ‘Little is known about the human exposure to flame retardants, especially new classes of the retardants,’ said one of the researcher Amina Salamova from Indiana University Bloomington in the US. ‘The first step is to establish a relatively easy and reliable way of measuring chemical levels in people, especially children, and we’ve determined that hair and nails can provide exactly that,’ Salamova noted.

Until now, researchers depended on samples of human milk, blood and urine, and those samples are more difficult to obtain than hair and nails. For the study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the researchers collected hair, fingernails and toenails from 50 students in Bloomington and compared the levels of chemicals found in those samples with what was found in blood from the same people. Salamova and colleagues found that there was a strong relationship between the levels of a large group of flame retardants, the polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs, in hair and nails, on the one hand, and those in serum, on the other. 

Source: www.thehealthsite.com

04.03.2016

Be great in act, as you have been in thought

William Shakespeare