Researchers have said that despite trying to find the origins of the sexually transmitted infection syphilis they have come up with an empty hand.

According to the “Columbian” theory, Christopher Columbus’ crews brought the infection from America to Europe while returning home in 1492 and the first recorded epidemic of syphilis occurred, during the French invasion of the Italian city of Naples in 1495.

However, critic’s claim that the disease may have been present in Europe before Columbus’ return, and it just wasn’t distinguished from other conditions like leprosy until 1495, LiveScience reported.

Syphilis is capable of damaging heart, brain, eyes and bones, and can even be fatal if left untreated.

The first mention of the disease appears in the historical record in the 1496 writings of a man who went by the name Joseph Grnpeck.

However, Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro was the first man to use the word “syphilis” in 1530 in a Latin poem.

The study has been published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Source: Yahoo News

China’s Health Ministry will set up a national network within five years to provide a way of monitoring the long-term impact of chronic air pollution on human health, state media said on Monday.

The network will gather data on PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers, in different locations around the country, the report said, citing a ministry statement.

“The document noted that the absence of a long-term, systematic monitoring system has prevented the country from uncovering the link between air pollution and human health,” the report said.

The network will first cover cities where smog is most prevalent, it added.

“The evaluation will be based on the integrated and long-term analysis of PM2.5 data, weather information and cases of local residents’ diseases and deaths,” Xinhua said.

An international study published in July showed that air pollution is shortening the lives of people in northern China by about 5.5 years compared to the south, a legacy of a policy that provided free coal for heating in the north.

Air quality is of increasing concern to China’s stability-obsessed leaders, anxious to douse potential unrest as a more affluent, urban population turns against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has besmirched much of the country’s air, water and soil.

The government has announced many plans to fight pollution over the years, but has made little apparent progress, especially in the north and northeast.

Last week, the PM2.5 index reached a reading of 1,000 in some parts of Harbin, the gritty capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and home to some 11 million people, virtually shutting it down.

A level above 300 is considered hazardous, while the World Health Organization recommends a daily level of no more than 20.

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New research points to a genetic reason behind why some people gain more weight than others regardless of what they eat.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have found that the mutation of a particular gene (called KSR2) may cause slow down metabolism and increase feelings of hunger in people who are obese.

Researchers have known that the KSR2 gene plays a role in regulating energy balance and metabolism, as previous studies in mice have shown that the absence of the KSR2 gene may lead to obesity.

In the new study, researchers found that children with KSR2 mutations had increased appetite, slower metabolism and lower heart rate than children with normal KSR2 genes.

The findings don’t suggest that a healthy diet and exercise should be discarded as effective methods for preventing obesity; however, these findings do suggest that there are genetic factors that can contribute to obesity.

Further studies on the KSR2 gene may lead to the development of new treatment options for obesity and type 2 diabetes, researchers said.

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Such falls featured in congressional discussions about patient safety, and in a new study in the Journal of Patient Safety about medical errors. Falls are one part of a multi state clash between nurses and hospitals over how to improve the safety of hospitalized patients.

 In Washington state, hospitals are required to report falls that happen on their watch to the state health department.

Some hospitals have installed bed alarms to monitor patients prone to sleepwalking.

Gene White sits on his back porch near a garden fountain. Just walking there from his bedroom was an ordeal for the retired airline pilot. “I did have cancer, and it turned out to be lymphoma,” he says.

But White says it’s not cancer that has left him weak. Six months ago, after he’d recovered from his lymphoma, he went to Swedish Medical Center, Seattle’s largest hospital, for back pain. He was set to go home after an overnight stay.

“Four a.m. came, and I hadn’t slept a bit,” White says, so he called a nurse. “She says, ‘I’ll get you something.’ ”

That something was the sleeping pill Ambien. It’s one of a dozen sleep aids that the Food and Drug Administration says can lead to sleepwalking and even driving while asleep. The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota has found that hospital patients who have taken Ambien are four times more likely to suffer a fall.

“I went to sleep almost immediately, and I got in a dreamlike state,” says White. “I was flying a beautiful wooden-interior airplane about the size of a DC-3. I was having a hell of a good time.”

The next thing White knew, he was crumpled on the floor. “So, I had broken three ribs on my left side, hitting the wash basin,” he says.

Instead of going home that morning, he had to spend two more weeks in the hospital, then months in a nursing facility.

Hospitals in 39 states don’t have to report falls. In Washington state, they do. In 2012, falls injured or killed at least 92 hospital patients there.

Falls occur in a small fraction of the many thousands of hospital visits in Washington each year. But safety experts call bad falls “never events.” They should never happen inside the protective embrace of a hospital.

“Zero falls is certainly our goal,” says June Altaras, chief nursing officer at Swedish Medical Center. She says she can’t discuss White’s case because of privacy concerns.

But she says the hospital carefully assesses each patient’s risk of falling. The hospital considers anyone on sleeping pills to be high risk. They’re supposed to get special attention. That would include a bed alarm that goes off when a patient gets up.

“We wanted something very distinctive so you knew exactly what was going on, and you get there very quickly,” says Altaras. “It rises above the level of all the other noises in the unit.”

The alarm is a beeping rendition of the children’s song “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It can be pretty annoying.

“We get complaints almost every day, patients begging the nurses to turn it off,” says Altaras. Annoying or not, alarms work at preventing falls, she says.

White says there was no alarm on his bed. At the time, some beds at Swedish had alarms; some didn’t. Last month, Swedish installed a brand-new fleet of hospital beds. All of them have alarms built in.

Nurses say alarms help, but are no substitute for good nursing. “You still need a person to be close enough nearby to be able to respond to the alarm,” says Bernedette Haskins, a nurse at Swedish.

Nurses’ unions say medical mishaps of all kinds often share a root cause: understaffing. “Every nurse has a story about being short-staffed, about working an entire 12-hour shift without a break,” says Haskins.

The unions are pushing state and federal legislation to force hospitals to beef up nursing staffs. Hospitals say they can reduce errors without government-mandated hiring.

The Washington hospital with the most falls in recent years is Auburn Medical Center. Last year, after new owners bought the small hospital, they overhauled its safety procedures and increased staff by more than 100. Hospital management says Auburn’s rate of falls fell by two-thirds in less than a year.

Source: https://www.healthleadersmedia.com

 

Researchers say MRI scans show very specific brain activity that could help diagnose autism and aid people in determining early treatment options.

 Brain scans may reveal signs of autism, which could eventually aid in early intervention therapies, according to new research.

Researchers using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner measured the brain activity of volunteers with autism spectrum disorders against controls and say the comparisons reveal disrupted brain connectivity that could serve as a neural signature of autism.

While the study is both preliminary and small — including only 30 volunteers — the findings, which appear online Friday in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, joins a wider range of autism research that could ultimately help supplement current behavior-based diagnoses and possibly help in deciding early intervention therapies.

“This research suggests brain connectivity as a neural signature of autism and may eventually support clinical testing for autism,” said Rajesh Kana, an associate professor of psychology and the project’s senior researcher. “We found the information transfer between brain areas, causal influence of one brain area on another, to be weaker in autism. There’s a very clear difference.”

The joint work from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Psychology and Auburn University looked at 15 high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism and 15 control participants ages 16 to 34 years. The team found that brain connectivity data from 19 paths was able to predict which volunteers had autism with 95.9 percent accuracy.

“These are sophisticated, exploratory techniques a long ways from clinical application, but [it’s] encouraging that we are starting to get more and more accurate classifications,” says Jeffrey Anderson, an assistant professor of neuroradiology at the University of Utah who has conducted similar scans. “It’s a smaller step from there to understanding the disease.”

For the study, the 30 participants watched a series of comic-strip stories while in an fMRI scanner that measured their brain activity. They were asked to choose the most logical ending out of three options — with scenes ranging from a glass about to fall off a table to a man enjoying the music of a street violinist. The participants with autism had a harder time finding a logical conclusion to the violin scenario, which involved subtle social cues, and their scans reflected this difficulty.

Basically, Kana said, the disrupted connectivity results in “consistently weaker brain regions.”

Kana said that over the next five to 10 years, the goal is to begin to supplement current behavior-based diagnoses (which starts at the very earliest at 18 months) with more objective medical testing, as well as analyze interventions that aim to improve these connectivity issues.

“Parents usually have a longer road before getting a firm diagnosis for their child now,” Kana said. “You lose a lot of intervention time, which is so critical. Brain imaging may not be able to replace the current diagnostic measures, but if it can supplement them at an earlier age, that’s going to be really helpful.”

Source: http://news.cnet.com/

 

 

The Psychology Department of GGDSD College Sector 32, organised a seminar on ‘Current Perspectives and Future Trends in Psychology’ on Friday with internationally-renowned psychologist Vidhu Mohan addressing the seminar.

Professor Vidhu has an experience of four decades in the field and is responsible for the initiation of Psychology as an independent department in a number of national-level universities across the country.

Also, Mohan is a consultant for the UGC and UPSC.

At the seminar organised by the Psychology Club ‘Aesthesia’, she talked about the importance of the emotional quotient and mentioned different transitional periods in the life of an individual ranging from childhood, adolescent, adulthood, parental age and finally old age.

Vidhu also provided a wider view-point about the impact that takes place due to different types of parenting practices, child rearing methods, school environment, understanding of aptitudes, laying out of career paths, mental preparation of work environments, pre and post parental counselling, inculcation of values, adjustment to peer pressure, drugs, alcoholism, and identification of one’s self.

In an interactive session with the students, she emphasised on the importance of counselling in the areas of education, social, welfare and gender sensitisation.

“When students pass out from Class X, they end up struggling with the question of what they should be doing or what stream they should choose? I personally suggest everyone should take an aptitude test. It helps evaluate one’s interest towards a particular field and enables them to choose the right direction for the future. Psychological counselling is an important aspect of psychology. The schools should conduct counselling sessions at an early stage for both students and parents,” said Mohan.

Source: http://article.wn.com

A new study has revealed that children born to teen mothers have less developed speaking skills at age five than kids of older mothers.

Dr. Julia Morinis, the lead author and researcher in the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael’s Hospital said that they don’t believe that having a baby in your teens is the cause of underdeveloped speaking skills.

It’s likely that being a teen mother is a risk factor that indicates poorer circumstance for development opportunities in some cases.

Morinis points to teen mothers’ limited opportunities for education and well-paid jobs or single parenthood as social factors that have a significant negative impact on childhood development.

“Most differences in non-verbal and spatial abilities between these two groups of children can be attributed to significant sociodemographic inequalities in circumstance. But for verbal ability, there seems to be more going on,” Morinis said.

The study identified parenting involvement – such as playing, reading, and singing with the child – was predictive of higher-level child development.

The study used data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a long-term nationally representative study of almost 19,000 children born between 2000 and 2001 across Britain. These children were assessed for reasoning skills and intelligence when they were five years old.

The study is published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

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For those who have suffered through sleepless nights due to uncontrollable itching know that not all itching is the same.

A new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis explains why.

Working in mice, the scientists have shown that chronic itching, which can occur in many medical conditions, from eczema and psoriasis to kidney failure and liver disease, is different from the fleeting urge to scratch a mosquito bite.

That’s because chronic itching appears to incorporate more than just the nerve cells, or neurons, that normally transmit itch signals.

The researchers found that in chronic itching, neurons that send itch signals also co-opt pain neurons to intensify the itch sensation.

The new discovery may lead to more effective treatments for chronic itching that target activity in neurons involved in both pain and itch.

“In normal itching, there’s a fixed pathway that transmits the itch signal,” senior investigator Zhou-Feng Chen, PhD, who directs Washington University’s Center for the Study of Itch, said.

“But with chronic itching, many neurons can be turned into itch neurons, including those that typically transmit pain signals. That helps explain why chronic itch ing can be so excruciating,” he said.

 

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A global study has found that the world is aging so fast, most countries are not prepared to support their swelling numbers of elderly people.

The study released Tuesday by the United Nations Population Fund and elder rights group HelpAge International ranks the social and economic well-being of elders in 91 countries. Sweden came out on top and Afghanistan was in last place.

The Global AgeWatch Index shows that nations are not working quickly enough to cope with a population greying faster than ever before. By the year 2050, seniors over the age of 60 will outnumber children under the age of 15 for the first time in history.

The study analyzes income, health, education, employment and age-friendly environment in each country.  UN

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