Neanderthals used toothpicks to alleviate the pain of diseases related to teeth

An IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana I Evolució Social) research done in collaboration with UAB, documents the oldest case of palliative treatment of periodontal disease. Published in PLOS ONE, is another step to characterize the Neanderthals as a species with a wide range of adaptations to the environment and, even, resources in medicine. 

Removing food scraps trapped between the teeth one of the most common functions of using toothpicks, thus contributing to our oral hygiene. This habit is documented in the genus Homo, as early as Homo habilis, a species that lived between 1.9 and 1.6 million years ago. A new research based on the Cova Foradà Neanderthal fossil shows that this hominid also used toothpicks to mitigate pain caused by oral diseases such as inflammation of the gums (periodontal disease). It is the oldest documented case of palliative treatment of dental disease done with this tool.

The research, done by  Marina Lozano, Carlos Lorenzo and Gala Gomez of the IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana I Evolució Social), in collaboration with Maria Eulalia Subirà, Biological Anthropology professor and researcher at the UAB, and José Aparicio of the Diputació Provincial de València, is based on toothpicking marks on the Neanderthal teeth related to periodontal disease.

The chronology of the fossil is not clear, but the fossil remains were associated with a Neanderthal Mousterian lithic industry (about 150,000 to 50,000 years). The research showed that the remains had maxillary porosity, characteristic of periodontal disease and alveolar bone loss (where the teeth are inserted), with a bone mass reduction of four to eight millimeters exposing the roots of the teeth, usually inside the alveoli.

Resrachers believe that this individual attempted to alleviate the discomfort caused by periodontal disease. This disease usually causes bloody and inflamed gums, so the systematic use of toothpicks could mitigate sore gums.

The examples of grooves caused by toothpicking are numerous between Neanderthals and usually are not associated with any dental disease. However, in the case of Cova Foradà the toothpick was not only used as a primitive method of dental hygiene, but it is associated with a dental disease and with the clear intention to alleviate the pain, and that makes it unique.

This means that we have one of the first examples of palliative treatment with toothpicks, the oldest documented. Therefore, this study is a step to characterize the Neanderthals as a species with a wide range of adaptations to their environment and wide resources even in the field of palliative medicine.

Source: http://www.uab.es

Amazing facts about humans revealed!

An average human being eats approximately 35 tons of food and grows 590 miles of hair in their lifetime, it has been revealed.

The new book ‘Numberland’ by Mitchell Symons has revealed that 19 percent of British people have never visited a McDonald’s and10 percent of British adults admit to wearing the same item of underwear three days in a row, the Daily Express.

The book published by Michael O’Mara Books disclosed some fascinating facts and statistics about humans which shows that a person who smokes 20 cigarettes a day, on an average loses 2 teeth every 10 years and a person will walk 3 times around the world in the average lifetime.

The book also uncovered that an average human could lift 25 tons if all 600 muscles in the body pulled in one direction and a person can go without sleep for 10 days before dying.

Some interesting facts about human body as revealed in the book are that an individual sheds 121 litres of tears in a lifetime; human sneeze travels 100 miles per hour and that the human brain is capable of recording 86,000,000 bits of information per day

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Baby born with heart outside body celebrates first birthday

Audrina Cardenas was born one year ago Tuesday with her heart outside her body. The very next day, she endured a six-hour surgery at Texas Children’s Hospital in which a team of surgeons actually put it back inside her!

Audrina was born with a rare condition called Ectopia Cordis. Only 8 in one million babies are born with that condition and 90 percent of them are either stillborn or die within the first three days of life, according to Texas Children’s Hospital.

Audrina was able to celebrate her birthday free of medications, but is still on oxygen. Her development is improving every day and she’s now crawling and even trying to walk.

She will still require another surgery in the next few months to construct a chest wall to protect her heart and repair cardiac defects associated with her condition.

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Pakistan polio outbreak puts global eradication at risk

A Taliban ban on vaccination is exacerbating a serious polio outbreak in Pakistan, threatening to derail dramatic progress made this year towards wiping out the disease worldwide, health officials say.

Health teams in Pakistan have been attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccines as a Western plot to sterilise Muslims and imposed bans on inoculation in June 2012.

In North Waziristan, a region near the Afghan border that has been cordoned off by the Taliban, dozens of children, many under the age of two, have been crippled by the viral disease in the past six months.

And there is evidence in tests conducted on sewage samples in some of the country’s major cities that the polio virus is starting to spread beyond these isolated pockets and could soon spark fresh polio outbreaks in more densely populated areas.

“We have entered a phase that we were all worried about and were afraid might happen,” Elias Durry, head of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in Pakistan, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“The risk is that as long as the virus is still circulating, and as long as we have no means of reaching these children and immunising them to interrupt virus transmission, it could jeopardise everything that has been done so far – not only in Pakistan, but also in the region and around the globe.”

CORNERING THE VIRUS

Polio is a highly infectious disease that invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis in a matter of hours. A $5.5 billion global eradication plan was launched in April with the aim of vaccinating 250 million children multiple times each year to stop the virus finding new footholds, and stepping up surveillance in more than 70 countries.

The virus has been cornered to just a handful of areas in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the three countries where polio is endemic. Global cases have dropped by more than 99.9 percent in less than three decades, from 350,000 in 1985 to just 223 last year, according to the GPEI.

But so far in 2013, there have already been 296 cases worldwide. Forty-three were in Pakistan, the vast majority in children in the semi-autonomous Pashtun lands along the Afghan border known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which include North Waziristan.

Accusations that immunisation campaigns are cover for spies were given credence when it emerged that the United States had used a Pakistani vaccination team to gather intelligence about al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was found and killed by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in 2011.

The Taliban ban, and associated security threats, mean the polio virus could easily escape and spread back into previously cleared areas.

Tariq Bhutta of the Pakistan Paediatric Association said there was little prospect that the militant Islamist group would change its stance. He said attacks on health teams attempting to reach children to immunise them were becoming both more frequent and more violent.

“The vaccination teams are still going out, but at risk to their lives,” he told Reuters. “People can come up on motorbikes and shoot them, and they’ve also started attacking the police put there to protect the vaccination teams.”

A Taliban bomb that exploded earlier this month near a polio vaccination team in the northwestern city of Peshawar killed two people and appeared to target police assigned to protect the health workers.

“This will only be solved if the polio teams can get access to those children – either inside FATA, or when the children move out into other areas,” Bhutta said. “Without that I don’t see how things can improve. Rather I think things might get more serious when the polio virus gets out into settled areas.”

The GPEI says the FATA is the area with the largest number of children being paralysed by wild poliovirus in all of Asia.

Four polio cases in children in Pakistan were reported in the last week. Because the virus spreads from person to person, the World Health Organization says as long as any child remains infected, children everywhere are at risk.

Source: Reuters.com

Brain scans could one day help diagnose autism earlier

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/

 

 

Treatment of hypothyroidism not linked to weight loss

Decreased thyroid function, or hypothyroidism, is commonly associated with weight gain, but a new study has found that effective treatment with levothyroxine (LT4) to restore normal thyroid hormone levels is not associated with clinically significant weight loss in most people.

Researchers SY Lee, LE Braverman, and EN Pearce describe the retrospective review of patients with newly diagnosed primary hypothyroidism over an 8-year period, not caused by thyroid cancer or other forms of disease or associated with pregnancy or use of prescription weight loss medication.

It was found that about 52 percent of the patients lost weight up to 24 months after initiation of treatment with LT4.

Ronald J. Koenig , M.D., Ph.D, Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor, said because obesity and hypothyroidism are very common, there are many patients who have both conditions.

Koenig said that these patients and sometimes their physicians often assume the hypothyroidism is causing the obesity even though this may not be the case.

This study is important because it shows, unfortunately, that only about half of hypothyroid patients lose weight after the successful treatment of their hypothyroidism.

The study will be presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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Family’s Untrained Pet Dog ‘Predicts’ Toddler’s Epileptic Fits

Animals have aided the blind for quite some time now. More recently, they have been trained to help calm children with autism and detect health conditions like cancer and diabetic episodes. However, there’s little evidence to indicate that dogs can actually detect epileptic seizures. But you couldn’t tell an Irish family that. They say that Charlie, their Great Dane, can detect their daughter’s epileptic fits before they happen.

Three-year-old Brianna Scanlan, whose episodes were detected at just three months of age, has had epilepsy since birth. Her seizures can range anywhere from a trance-like state where she simply stares off into space to full-on violent convulsions that put her at risk for bodily harm.

“If you see a child having a seizure, it’s pretty horrific, it’s frightening, it’s terrible, it’s gut-wrenching,” Brianna’s mother, Arabella Scanlan told BBC News.

But with Charlie around, the family feels just a little safer.

According to Arabella, Charlie is not a trained “seizure alert dog.” In fact, he’s just a normal family pet. But some time ago, the family started to notice that Charlie would become agitated and walk in circles around Brianna, just minutes before a seizure would happen.

“Charlie would know about 15 to 20 minutes before she’s going into a seizure,” Arabella said. “He’ll get ever so panicky and giddy, almost as if you’d think ‘this stupid dog is going to knock her over.’”

In fact, the family initially thought they would have to re-home Charlie because of his agitation. He is, after all, a Great Dane.

“He’s a big boy – it isn’t like he’s agile. When Charlie turns the whole room turns with him,” Arabella said.

But as the family watched Charlie, they started to notice a pattern in his behavior. His agitation seemed to precede Brianna’s epileptic fits.

“We kept an eye on this and, sure enough, I went into the yard one day and she (Brianna) was buckled over to the side, on top of him (Charlie). She was actually having a seizure,” Arabella said. “She was leaning against the wall, bent over him and he just looked at me as if to say ‘I don’t know what to do.’ But he stayed with her, he didn’t move.”

Since then, the family says that Charlie rarely ever leaves Brianna’s side. If she goes into a seizure, he’ll gently pin her against the wall or another surface to keep her from falling over. He’ll then guard her and watch over her until help arrives. And, according to Arabella, he hasn’t once knocked her over.

“I actually don’t know the psychology behind it but, no shadow of a doubt; people are mesmerized when they see him in action. It would actually melt you hear to see them together.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of science to back up this family’s amazing story. Though dogs have been found to “sense” a number of health issues – dysregulation in individuals with autism, blood sugar spikes and drops in diabetic patients, cancers and more – there’s only been a few studies done on dogs and epilepsy.

One preliminary study, published in Seizure, European Journal of Epilepsy, suggested that “some dogs have innate ability to alert and/or respond to seizures.” It added that the success of this ability was found to rely heavily “on the handler’s awareness and response to the dog’s alerting behavior.”

Yet, the lack of scientific information regarding a dog’s ability to sense seizures doesn’t stop the Sheffield-based charity, Support Dogs, from training “seizure alert dogs.” According to the training facility, their trained dogs are able to detect seizures anywhere from 10 to 55 minutes before it occurs.

Dr. Claire Guest, a Medical Detection Dogs chief executive, says that she’s seen other trained dogs in action. In fact, she even had a cancer dog “warn her” during training, and that dog ended up being right; a little while later, she was diagnosed with first stage breast cancer. But Guest says she’s never really seen a dog predict an epileptic fit. However, she did state that it’s not impossible.

Dogs that are highly expressive and attentive to humans tend to show a general concern and desire to protect their owners from harm, and it could be that some dogs could predict seizures through smell, but it’s also likely that they’re picking up on visual signs, she said.

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Tiny, wireless pacemaker launched in Europe

Developed by US start-up Nanostim, the device is designed to be implanted intravenously directly in the heart.

It is less than 10% of the size of a conventional pacemaker and uses a built-in battery.

Experts said it was an “exciting development” but at a very early stage.

The pacemaker has yet to receive full US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

Conventional pacemakers require a patient to be cut open and a pocket created in the body to house the pacemaker and associated wires.

Such wires are regarded as the component of pacemakers most likely to fail. The pocket created for the pacemaker is also liable to infection.

By contrast the Nanostim pacemaker is delivered via a catheter inserted through the femoral vein near the groin.

It has a built-in battery, smaller than an AAA battery, that lasts between nine and 13 years. Eliminating the need for wires lowers the risk of infection or malfunction and means that patients are not restricted in the amount of activity they do, the firm behind the device claims.

The procedure to fit the pacemaker typically lasts around half an hour. The device is designed to be easily retrievable so that the battery can be replaced.

Because the device is delivered intravenously, it also means patients will have no scarring.

One doctor, involved in its trials, described it as “the future of pacemaking”.

“For the past 40 years the therapeutic promise of leadless pacing has been discussed, but until now, no-one has been able to overcome the technical challenges,” said Dr Johannes Sperzel of the Kerchhoff Klinik in Bad Nauheim, Germany.

“This revolutionary technology offers patients a safe, minimally-invasive option for pacemaker delivery that eliminates leads and surgical pockets,” he added.

Better understanding

But others were more cautious.

Prof Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “This is a potentially exciting development but it’s early days.

“Before this leadless pacemaker becomes widely available, we need a better understanding of how long it will last, as well as how easy it is to replace if necessary. As our knowledge of this new pacemaker widens, so too will the expertise needed to fit this potentially exciting device.”

The company behind the device has recently been bought by global medical device firm St Jude.

It has had several wire-based pacemakers recalled in recent years.

Other device makers are also planning to go wireless. The Wireless Cardiac Stimulation system has been developed by US start-up EBR Systems and UK-based tech firm Cambridge Consultants and uses a tiny wireless electrode no bigger than a grain of rice powered by an ultrasonic pulse generator, inserted lower down in the chest.

In 2011 the device was implanted in 100 patients in hospitals across Europe.

Cardiac pacemakers are used to treat slow heart rates. The devices monitor the heart and provide electrical stimulation when the heart beats too slowly.

The first pacemaker was fitted in 1958. Currently more than four million people around the world have some sort of cardiac rhythm device with an additional 700,000 people getting one each year.

Source: http://www.techinvestornews.com

Air pollution ‘still harming Europeans’ health’

Air pollution is continuing to damage European citizens’ health and the environment

The European Environment Agency (EEA) listed tiny airborne particles and ozone as posing a “significant threat”.

However, the authors said nations had significantly cut emissions of a number of pollutants, including sulphur dioxide, lead and carbon monoxide.

In a separate study, research identified a link between low birth-weight and exposure to air pollution.

EEA executive director Hans Bruyninckx said that EU nations had made considerable progress over recent decades to reduce the visible signs of air pollution, with cities now no longer shrouded in blankets of smog.

However, he added: “Air pollution is causing damage to human health and ecosystems. Large parts of the population do not live in a healthy environment, according to current standards.

“To get on to a sustainable path, Europe will have to be ambitious and go beyond current legislation.”

The EEA report showed that data suggested that up to 96% of the EU’s urban population was exposed to fine particulate matter concentrations above UN World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.

Even more, 98%, were subject to ground-level ozone concentrations above WHO recommended levels.

As well has urban outdoor air quality, the report also highlighted that the natural environment was also continuing to suffer.

It said ecosystem were subject to the pressure of air pollution impairing vegetation growth and harming biodiversity.”

The EEA also produced country-by-country breakdown of air quality data.

Responding to the report’s findings, Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik said: “Air quality is a central concern for many people.

“Surveys show that a large majority of citizens understand well the impact of air quality on health and are asking public authorities to take action at EU, national and local levels.”

He added that he was willing to address those concerns in the Commission’s Air Policy Review.

Infant concerns

A separate study, also published on Tuesday, concluded that a substantial proportion of the cases of low birth-weight (less than 2.5kg at 37 weeks of gestation) “could be prevented in Europe if urban air pollution was reduced”.

A pan-European study identified a link between low birth-weight and air pollution

The findings, published in the The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal, said: “The population attributable risk estimated for a reduction in [particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less] concentration to 10 micrograms per cubic metre during pregnancy corresponded to a decrease of 22% in cases of low birth-weight at term.”

A team of European researchers carried out what they describe as one of the largest studies of its kind, collating data from more than 74,000 births between 1994 and 2011 across 12 European nations.

They explained that babies with low birth-weights were at greater risk of mortality and health problems than infants with higher birth-weights.

“Low birth-weight has been associated with wheezing and asthma in childhood, and with decreased lung function in adults,” they observed but added that there was inconsistency in the findings.

“In addition to active and passive smoking, atmospheric pollution exposure is a highly prevalent and controllable risk factor for low birth-weight.”

Lead author Dr Marie Pedersen from the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, Spain, observed: “The widespread exposure of pregnant women worldwide to urban ambient air pollution at similar or even higher concentrations than those assessed in our study provides a clear message to policymakers to improve the quality of the air we all share.”

Current EU legislation has sent the annual mean limit on fine particulate matter at 20 micrograms per cubic metre for particles measuring 2.5 microns (PM2.5) or less.

This is twice the concentration outlined in World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, which recommends an annual mean limit for PM2.5 exposure to 10 micrograms per cubic metre.

These microscopic particles (the diameter of a human hair ranges between 15 and 180 microns) end up in the atmosphere from a range of sources, including road transport emissions, and have been linked to heart and lung disease, cancer and premature death.

Prof Bruyninckx described the Lancet paper’s findings as “very concerning”, adding that despite progress being made in some areas, more action was needed to tackle air pollution.

“It is the explicit goal of the European Commission to narrow that gap, and in the long run, close that gap because we are… concerned about citizens’ health,” he told BBC News.

But he explained: “Before you make binding legislation, you want to be on absolutely solid ground scientifically.

“Now, we know that [particulate matter] is having a significant impact so we need to adjust our rules and regulations accordingly.”

Commenting on the findings published in The Lancet, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists spokesman Dr Patrick O’Brien said the research was “very helpful in providing further evidence on the potential health impacts of air pollution”.

But he added: “Exposure to some level of air pollution is unavoidable in day-to-day life and the risk still remains fairly low.

“Other factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure or excessive alcohol consumption, may contribute more to the risk of having a low birth weight baby.”

Read More at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24493530

Parents who used donor eggs struggle to tell kids

Many people who used donor eggs to become parents are grappling with the issue of whether they should tell their children how they were conceived, according to a new study. Up to 60 percent of donor-egg recipients weren’t sure if they would inform their child how they came to be for fear of facing cultural disapproval or being ostracized by their community, researchers found.

 And even parents who did plan to tell their children about their genetic history often had trouble deciding exactly how and when to have this conversation.

A second study followed up on parents who had their children via egg donation at least 10 years ago, to find out if they’d actually gone on to tell them and how it felt before and after the revelation.

The findings are scheduled for presentation Thursday at a meeting of the International Federation of Fertility Societies and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), in Boston.

“Even though many parents through egg donation remain uncommitted to discussing it with their children, we see a trend toward greater openness which reflects our society’s increasing comfort level with [fertility treatment] and increasing recognition that there are many different ways to create a family,” Richard Reindollar, president-elect of the ASRM, said in a meeting news release.

“Counseling and resources need to be made available to parents who use egg donation, not just at the time of their [fertility treatment] cycle, but into the life of their family to assist them in the disclosure process,” he added.

Experts generally advise that children conceived with a donor egg be informed about their genetic heritage and medical history. Still, the study authors, from Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, found that many parents are hesitant to have this discussion.

The researchers asked 438 patients who received donated eggs between 2008 and 2012 about their plans to reveal or withhold this information to any children they had through the process.

Over the course of the study, the percentage of donor-egg recipients willing to talk to their children about their origin fluctuated significantly. In 2008, 42 percent of recipients said they planned to inform their children. This dropped to just 21 percent by 2009, but later rebounded to 47 percent of parents in 2012.

Parents who planned to talk to their kids about their genetic history said they did not want to keep secrets and wanted their children to have important information about their medical history.

The study found that 40 percent to 60 percent of parents were undecided about whether they would tell their kids about how they were conceived. Aside from fear of disapproval from their community, these parents did not want their child to be confused about their identify or how they perceived themselves, the study found.

In a separate study, researchers from the Weill Cornell Medical College, in New York City, asked parents who used egg donors between 1992 and 2003 if they followed through on their decision to talk to their child about how they were conceived. Of the 64 families involved in the study, 43 percent had told their children about their genetic history.

These families had a combined 73 children between 2 years old and 19 years old, all conceived with the help of a donor egg. On average, the children learned about their conception at the age of 6. Parents who revealed this information by the time their child was 10 years old reported being anxiety-free and happy with their decision.

Of the 57 percent who had not yet spoken to their child about their conception, 87 percent still planned to do so at some point. Of these parents, however, 43 percent were not sure how to go about having the discussion, which was causing the delay.

Parents who had not made the revelation by the time their child became a teen felt a significant amount of anxiety about it.

 

Source: http://medicalxpress.com