Health News

Gout sufferers: Advised to abate forgo sugary drinks

Gout sufferers: Advised to abate forgo sugary drinks

Sufferers of gout might soon be advised to forgo sugary drinks to avoid pain and flaring up of the crippling affliction, according to a New Zealand study released Thursday.

Scientists at the University of Otago and the University of Auckland have discovered a human gene variant that can “turn bad” when affected by sugary drinks, Xinhua reported citing the study.

It showed that when the variant of the gene SLC2A9 behaved correctly, it helped transport uric acid out of the bloodstream and facilitated its excretion through the kidney.

“But when people with this gene variant consume sugary drinks, the apparent function of the gene variant reverses, such that we think uric acid is instead transported back into the blood stream and the risk of gout is increased,” Tony Merriman, associate professor in University of Otago’s biochemistry department, said in a statement.

SLC2A9 is a newly identified urate transporter influencing serum urate concentration, urate excretion and gout.

“So not only does sugar raise uric acid in the blood due to processing in the liver, but it also appears to directly interfere with excretion of uric acid from the kidney. This was a quite unpredictable interaction,” he said.

“Daily 300-millilitre serving of sugar-sweetened drink increases the chance of gout by 13 percent,” said the professor.

He recommended people with gout to avoid sugary drinks.

Gout is caused when uric acid in the blood crystallises in the joints, causing them to become inflamed. It is the most common form of arthritis in New Zealand, particularly among men.

The disease has strong links with other metabolic diseases such as diabetes, heart and kidney disease.

 Source: Zee News

High-fat diets interrupt stomach’s signals to the brain

the nerves in the stomach which signal fullness to the brain appeared to be desensitised after long-term consumption of a high-fat diet.

Indulging in fatty foods could destroy stomach’s signals to the brain, according to a new study which gives insight why many dieters tend to regain the weight after losing it.

New University of Adelaide research has found the nerves in the stomach which signal fullness to the brain appeared to be desensitised after long-term consumption of a high-fat diet.

The findings could explain why many dieters tend to regain the weight they have lost.

PhD student Stephen Kentish investigated the impact of high-fat diets on the ability of the gut to signal its fullness, and whether those changes revert back to normal by losing weight.

Study leader Associate Professor Amanda Page said laboratory studies showed the stomach’s nerve response does not return to normal upon a return to a normal diet.

“This means you would need to eat more food before you felt the same degree of fullness as a healthy individual,” she said.

“A hormone in the body, leptin, known to regulate food intake, can also change the sensitivity of the nerves in the stomach that signal fullness.

“In normal conditions, leptin acts to stop food intake. However, in the stomach in high-fat diet induced obesity, leptin further desensitises the nerves that detect fullness.”

Associate Professor Page said the two mechanisms combined meant that obese people needed to eat more to feel full, which fuels their obesity cycle.

She said the results had “very strong implications for obese people, those trying to lose weight, and those who are trying to maintain their weight loss”.

“Unfortunately, our results show that the nerves in the stomach remain desensitised to fullness after weight loss has been achieved,” she said.

Associate Professor Page says the researchers were not yet sure whether the effect was permanent or just long-lasting.

Source: Zee News

A novel use for mosquito nets

A novel use for mosquito nets

We live in an age where the latest technology and gadgets are king, but sometimes the most low-tech methods can produce good medical results.

Mosquito nets, key in the fight against malaria, are now also being used to repair hernias – the most common operation in the world.

The hope is to save some of the estimated 50,000 lives lost in Africa each year to untreated hernias.

  • The two most common types of hernia are called ‘inguinal’ (75% of cases) and ‘umbilical’ (10-15%).
  • Inguinal hernias appear in the groin and mostly affect children under two and men over 55.
  • If left untreated, inguinal hernias can balloon to massive proportions – known as wheelbarrow hernias (see image).
  • Men are more susceptible than women due to a natural weakness in the abdominal wall caused by the spermatic cord exiting the body to connect with the testes.
  • Hernias can have a dramatic impact on people’s lives and ability to work. If the blood supply to the hernia is cut off when it becomes too large, the patient can die.

Globally, one in four men will be affected during their lifetime.

“In the UK and US, we usually mend hernias with surgical mesh, but these cost around US$30 each and are too expensive for hospitals in resource-poor countries,” says Prof Andrew Kingsnorth, a hernia specialist at Plymouth’s Derriford Hospital.

“Then a doctor in India called Ravi Tongaonkar came up with the idea of using mosquito mesh as an alternative.”

Beating the bulge

Hernias occur when a part of the bowel gets pushed through a hole or tear in the muscle wall of the abdomen. This is usually caused by straining, heavy lifting, chronic constipation or even having a severe cough.

Due to a quirk of anatomy, men are nine times more susceptible than women.

In most people, a hernia first appears as a small lump in the groin, which pops out when a person coughs or strains. But if left untreated, more intestine can be pushed out – resulting in hernias the size of a football.

Even more serious is when the hole in the abdominal wall starts restricting the blood supply to the intestines on the outside, causing a painful and potentially life-threatening ‘strangulated hernia’.

The most effective way to treat hernias is to patch up the hole with a piece of mesh. It’s a simple procedure that completely cures the problem.

But in 1994, Indian surgeon Dr Ravi Tongaonkar investigated using sterilised mosquito mesh as a low-cost substitute for the expensive commercial meshes currently in use.

“Polypropylene mesh is the best material available, but it’s very costly,” says Dr Tongaonkar. “In a developing country like India, poor patients cannot afford this.”

His mosquito meshes work out around 4,000 times cheaper than imported mesh and he has used them to fix 591 hernias.

But using them doesn’t necessarily mean they’re as good as the real thing.

‘Makes no difference’

To investigate their effectiveness, specialist gastrointestinal surgeon David Sanders carried out a study which looked at the two meshes under powerful microscopes and performed stringent tests on their physical properties.

He found that it was pretty much impossible to tell them apart.

The only difference is the polymer used to make them,” says Dr Sanders, “but it makes no difference clinically.”

Sanders is also keen to point out that doctors should not go out and use any old mosquito mesh, as they are not all made in the same way and some are impregnated with chemicals such as DEET.

“It’s really important to standardise the type of mesh that’s used so we know it’s safe,” he told the BBC. “These experiments mean we now know what it should look like.”

Prof Kingsnorth, who leads the charitable organisation Operation Hernia, is now looking to introduce the mosquito mesh in places where hernia repair costs are currently prohibitive.

“We have trained surgeons in Ghana, Nigeria, Cote D’Ivoire, Gambia, Rwanda, Malawi, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, India, Moldova, Ukraine and Cambodia,” he told the BBC.

“In mid-September we will also be travelling to a remote area of Mongolia.”

Not everyone is convinced by using mosquito mesh. In Rwanda for example, it’s been decided that hospital staff must stick to using conventional surgical brands.

But evidence is already building that could one day see mosquito mesh as an alternative in which people can feel confident.

And a long-term follow-up study of over 700 patients has shown that even 10 years later, mosquito mesh was still going strong.

Source: BBC News

Child cataract blood test developed

Child cataract blood test developed

A blood test that may improve treatment for children born with congenital cataracts has been developed by researchers in Manchester.

It analyses every known mutation in the DNA which can cause the condition.

The team, which is presenting the test at the British Society for Genetic Medicine, hope it will spread up diagnosis and help decide the best treatment.

The charity RNIB described the test as a “welcome step forward”.

About 200 children are born with cataracts in the UK each year.

“Diagnosing a congenital cataract is very easy at birth, but diagnosing the cause takes considerably longer,” Prof Graeme Black, from the University of Manchester, said.

The problem is there are more than 100 different mutations in a child’s DNA which have been linked to congenital cataracts.

“If you have a child with no family history then finding the cause can take months or years,” he told the BBC.

‘Faster treatment’

A complete diagnosis can help doctors work out the best course of treatment, inform families on the risks of cataracts if they have more children or diagnose severe diseases which have cataracts as an early symptom.

At the moment, each mutation has to be tested for individually.

A team of researchers, at Manchester University and the Central Manchester Health Care Trust, has used advances in genetics to look for all the errors in the genetic code in a single test.

Dr Rachel Gillespie said: “Our test looks at all of these genes in parallel, so patients can be diagnosed much faster and receive the treatment, clinical management and genetic counselling they need.”

Hospitals in Manchester will begin offering the test from December.

Steve Winyard, from the charity RNIB, said: “This is very interesting research as approximately 200 children in the UK are born with some form of congenital cataract every year.

“Any development which enables children to be diagnosed quicker and gain faster access to treatment is a welcome step forward.

“It will be exciting to watch how this research progresses and how the genetic information might be used to manage congenital cataracts in the future.”

Source: BBC News

Love hormone play role in social interaction

A special type of social behavior tied to the presence of oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that oxytocin – often referred to as “the love hormone” because of its importance in the formation and maintenance of strong mother-child and sexual attachments – is involved in a broader range of social interactions than previously understood.

The discovery may have implications for neurological disorders such as autism, as well as for scientific conceptions of our evolutionary heritage.

Scientists estimate that the advent of social living preceded the emergence of pair living by 35 million years. The new study suggests that oxytocin’s role in one-on-one bonding probably evolved from an existing, broader affinity for group living.

Oxytocin is the focus of intense scrutiny for its apparent roles in establishing trust between people, and has been administered to children with autism spectrum disorders in clinical trials. The new study, to be published Sept. 12 in Nature, pinpoints a unique way in which oxytocin alters activity in a part of the brain that is crucial to experiencing the pleasant sensation neuroscientists call “reward.” The findings not only provide validity for ongoing trials of oxytocin in autistic patients, but also suggest possible new treatments for neuropsychiatric conditions in which social activity is impaired.

“People with autism-spectrum disorders may not experience the normal reward the rest of us all get from being with our friends,” said Robert Malenka, MD, PhD, the study’s senior author. “For them, social interactions can be downright painful. So we asked, what in the brain makes you enjoy hanging out with your buddies?”

Some genetic evidence suggests the awkward social interaction that is a hallmark of autism-spectrum disorders may be at least in part oxytocin-related. Certain variations in the gene that encodes the oxytocin receptor – a cell-surface protein that senses the substance’s presence – are associated with increased autism risk.

Malenka, the Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has spent the better part of two decades studying the reward system – a network of interconnected brain regions responsible for our sensation of pleasure in response to a variety of activities such as finding or eating food when we’re hungry, sleeping when we’re tired, having sex or acquiring a mate, or, in a pathological twist, taking addictive drugs. The reward system has evolved to reinforce behaviors that promote our survival, he said.

For this study, Malenka and lead author Gül Dölen, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in his group with over 10 years of autism-research expertise, teamed up to untangle the complicated neurophysiological underpinnings of oxytocin’s role in social interactions. They focused on biochemical events taking place in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens, known for its centrality to the reward system.

In the 1970s, biologists learned that in prairie voles, which mate for life, the nucleus accumbens is replete with oxytocin receptors. Disrupting the binding of oxytocin to these receptors impaired prairie voles’ monogamous behavior. In many other species that are not monogamous by nature, such as mountain voles and common mice, the nucleus accumbens appeared to lack those receptors.

“From this observation sprang a dogma that pair bonding is a special type of social behavior tied to the presence of oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens. But what’s driving the more common group behaviors that all mammals engage in – cooperation, altruism or just playing around – remained mysterious, since these oxytocin receptors were supposedly absent in the nucleus accumbens of most social animals,” said Dölen.

For more : medical news today

Holy water may harm health more than heal

 

Holy water, which is known for its purported cleansing properties, could actually be more harmful for your health than healing, a new study has revealed.

Researchers at the Institute of Hygiene and Applied Immunology at the Medical University of Vienna tested water from 21 springs in Austria and 18 fonts in Vienna and found samples contained up to 62 million bacteria per milliliter of water, which is not safe to drink, an English news website reported.

Researchers found that 86 percent of the holy water, commonly used in baptism ceremonies and to wet congregants’ lips, was infected with common bacteria found in fecal matter such as E. coli, enterococci and Campylobacter.

The water contaminated with these bacteria can lead to diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain, and fever.

It was found that the water also contained nitrates, commonly found in fertilizer from farms.

The research also suggested that while all church and hospital chapel fonts contained bacteria, the busier the church, the higher the bacterial count.

The study is published in the Journal of Water and Health.

 

Mom’s diet during pregnancy can affect kid’s behaviour

Researchers looked at the effect of, B-vitamins, folic acid, breast milk versus formula milk, iron, iodine and omega-3 fatty acids, on the cognitive, emotional and behavioral development of children from before birth to age nine.

Professor Cristina Campoy, who led the project, said that short term studies seem unable to detect the real influence of nutrition in early life, asserting that ‘NUTRIMENTHE was designed to be a long-term study, as the brain takes a long time to mature, and early deficiencies may have far-reaching effects. So, early nutrition is most important.

Many other factors can affect mental performance in children including; the parent’s educational level, socio-economic status of the parents, age of the parents and, as discovered by NUTRIMENTHE, the genetic background of the mother and child. This can influence how certain nutrients are processed and transferred during pregnancy and breastfeeding and in turn, affect mental performance.

Cristina Campoy said that it is important to try to have good nutrition during pregnancy and in the early life of the child and to include breastfeeding if possible, as such ‘good nutrition’ can have a positive effect on mental performance later in childhood.

 Source: Zee News

 

 

Bypass surgery lowers risk of dying by 30% for diabetics

Study finds 30 percent lower risk of dying for diabetics with bypass surgery vs. stentA new study by Indian origin researcher has suggested that diabetic people have a 30 percent less chance of dying if they undergo coronary artery bypass surgery rather than opening the artery through angioplasty and inserting a stent.

Dr. Subodh Verma, a cardiac surgeon and principal author of the paper, said that although bypass surgery is more invasive than stenting, it is imperative that physicians and patients realize that long term mortality reduction is best achieved with bypass surgery.

Verma and Dr. Jan Friedrich, an intensivist at St. Michael’s, decided to conduct a meta-analysis of all existing randomized control trials comparing the two procedures- coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) and the angioplasty.

They also found that while patients with diabetes did better with CABG, the procedures was associated with an increased risk of non-fatal strokes. They said this may be related to the fact the heart has to be stopped during the procedure.

The study is published in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.

 

Doctors doing little to promote sunscreen use

Doctors rarely talk to patients about using sunscreen, even when patients have a history of skin cancer, according to surveys of U.S. physicians over two decades.

Despite professional guidelines encouraging doctors to educate their patients about sun protection, in more than 18 billion patient visits from 1989 to 2010, sunscreen was mentioned less than one percent of the time.

Even dermatologists managed to mention sunscreen in less than two percent of visits, researchers found.

“The rate of discussing sunscreen at visits, especially for high-risk patients with cancer or pre-cancerous lesions, was lower than we would have expected,” said one of the study’s authors, Scott Davis, of the dermatology department at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The survey data may not capture all mentions of sunscreen with complete accuracy, but that does not change the conclusion that frequency is much too low, Davis told Reuters Health.

Failing to mention sunscreen often enough is contributing to excessive unprotected sun exposure, especially for children, that will lead to skin cancer later in life, he said.

Davis and his co-authors examined data from an ongoing annual government survey that asks randomly selected doctors representative of their areas to record their patient interactions in detail for one week.

Over the two decades of the survey, there were about 18.3 billion patient visits to outpatient physician offices, and based on doctors’ survey responses, sunscreen came up at less than 13 million of those visits, which is 0.07 percent.

When visits specifically concerned skin disease, doctors still mentioned sunscreen less than one percent of the time, according to the results published in JAMA Dermatology.

Dermatologists talked about sunscreen more than any other specialty, at 1.6 percent of all visits and 11.2 percent of visits involving a patient with current or past skin cancer.

“I don’t think the results are surprising, at least not for someone who is familiar with what research has said about skin cancer counseling practices,” said Dr. Jennifer S. Lin, who studies evidence-based healthcare decision making at The Center for Health Research of Kaiser Permanente Northwest in Portland, Oregon.

“It is certainly disappointing,” said Lin, who has conducted reviews to support the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force for the past seven years, but is not herself part of the USPSTF.

In the study, Davis and his coauthors found that doctors mentioned sunscreen most often to white patients, and to those in their 80s, but least often during visits by children.

Evidence supports UV and sun protection counseling to prevent skin cancer, especially for kids and teens, so extremely low counseling for those groups is “incredibly problematic,” Lin said.

But she cautions that sunscreen is only one part, and not the most important part, of UV protection, which includes avoiding midday sun, wearing appropriate clothing and avoiding tanning beds.

“My belief as a primary care doctor, not based on my research, is that our health system does not value counseling or patient education as much as it does procedures, testing, medications, etcetera,” Lin said.

Even for patients who already know about sunscreen, discussing it can help, Davis said.

As with smoking and unhealthy eating, most people are aware of the risks, but bringing it up during an office visit shows the patient that the doctor is concerned and wants to help change the behavior, he said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends bringing up sun protection at annual checkups, Davis said.

“The fact that it was recommended least frequently to children is very concerning, since children tend to get the most sun exposure, and may develop lifelong habits of poor sun protection,” Davis said. “This may be where physicians have the greatest opportunity to fight the ongoing, growing epidemic of skin cancer.”

Skin cancer continues to be the most common form of cancer in the U.S., diagnosed in more than 60,000 people yearly, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Patients may need to take the initiative and bring up sun protection themselves if they have questions, he said.

“Physicians are pressed for time and feel they cannot take the extra time needed for discussion of preventive care topics,” Davis said.

“But the main thing may be that physicians just aren’t thinking of it. This research may make health care providers more aware of the need to encourage commonsense sun protection, especially for younger patients,” he said.

Source: zee news

Education helps women from poor places beat obesity

A new study has suggested that educational status could help protect women living in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas fight obesity.

The new report’ authors said that income and education are frequently used as markers for studying health inequalities, although they are ‘conceptually distinct.’

They said that it’s possible that education is a marker of an individual’s access to health information, capacity to assimilate health-related messages, and ability to retain knowledge-related assets, like nutrition knowledge.

Lead author Lauren K. Williams, Ph.D., formerly of the Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research, School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, said that education is particularly important for women with low incomes who live in deprived areas.

She said that the research team mailed surveys to a large random sample of more than 4,000 women, ages 18 to 45, living in low-income towns and suburbs in Victoria. Women reported height, weight, education and personal income.

The authors said that women of amplified disadvantage, those living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with both low education and personal income, may be at higher risk for high BMI.

 

Source: Zee news