medical news

Colds and sore throats not helped by ibuprofen

If you have a cold or sore throat, you might want to opt for the acetaminophen over the ibuprofen for symptom relief, a new study suggests.

Research published in the British Medical Journal shows that taking ibuprofen (commonly known by the brand name Advil) doesn’t seem to relieve symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections as well as acetaminophen (commonly known by the brand name Tylenol).

Taking ibuprofen along with acetaminophen also didn’t provide as many symptomatic benefits as taking acetaminophen alone, the University of Southampton researchers found.

Interestingly, people who took ibuprofen or ibuprofen with acetaminophen were more likely to come back to the doctor with new or worse symptoms, than those who took acetaminophen alone.

“This may have something to do with the fact the ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory. It is possible that the drug is interfering with an important part of the immune response and leads to prolonged symptoms or the progression of symptoms in some individuals,” study researcher Paul Little, a professor at the University of Southampton, said in a statement. “Although we have to be a bit cautious since these were surprise findings, for the moment I would personally not advise most patients to use ibuprofen for symptom control for coughs colds and sore throat.”

The findings are based on data from 899 patients who had symptoms of a respiratory tract infection. They were prescribed either acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or both ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and were instructed to take it either as needed, or four times a day. Some patients were also told to try steam inhalation to relieve symptoms.

Researchers also found that steam inhalation didn’t seem to provide any symptomatic benefits — and in fact led to mild scalding among 2 percent of people observed in the study who used this method.

Source: Huffington post

 

Weekly exercise by pregnant moms boost babies’ brains

A new study has suggested when to-be-moms exercised for three 20-minute sessions a week, their babies’ brains showed more mature patterns of activity.

The findings have come from a randomised controlled trial in humans to show that a pregnant mother’s exercise routine can impact her baby’s brain.

Elise Labonte-LeMoyne at the University of Montreal, said that mother’s exercise also impacts their kid’s weight gain in life, the Guardian reported.

Women joined the research group in their first trimester and were randomly assigned to an exercise or a sedentary control group.

The 10 women in the exercise group cycled, walked, ran or swam for three short sessions a week.

The eight women in other group were instructed not to exercise.

Eight to 12 days after babies were born, the researchers measured their brain activity.

They used a hairnet of 124 electrodes, and recorded electroencephalograms (EEG) while they played sleeping babies a series of beeps that were interspersed with different sounds.

Even though they were asleep, brain activity patterns showed how efficiently they were able to discriminate between old and novel sounds.

Source: DNA India

 

 

How brain uses sleep for visual task learning

Particular frequencies to consolidate learning in specific brain regions.

 In August, Brown University scientists reported that two specific frequencies, fast-sigma and delta, that operated in the supplementary motor area of the brain were directly associated with learning a finger-tapping task akin to typing or playing the piano.

The new results show something similar with a visual task in which 15 volunteers were trained to spot a hidden texture amid an obscuring pattern of lines.Takeo Watanabe, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown, said that perceptual learning in general has been found to improve the visual ability of patients who have some decline of function due to aging.

In this case the researchers, led by graduate student Ji Won Bang, devised an experiment to see how sleep may help such training take hold. They measured the brainwaves of the participants during sleep before and the training, and they measured the volunteers’ performance on the task before and after.

The researchers saw significant increases in sigma brainwave power after sleep compared to before in the visual cortical area in the occipital lobe of the volunteers’ brains.

To ensure they were measuring activity related to learning the task, the researchers purposely put the stimulus of the discrimination task in a particular quadrant of the subjects’ field of view.

That position corresponds to an anatomically distinct part of the visual cortical area. The team saw that the measured gain in sigma wave power was greater specifically in that trained part of the visual cortical area rather than in the untrained parts.

They also saw that the difference of power increase between trained and untrained regions of the visual cortical area was correlated with each individual’s performance improvement on the task.

The study has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Source: News Track India

 

Teenagers ‘think slim cigarettes are safer’ says report

Young teenagers rate slimline cigarettes as stylish, feminine and possibly safer than regular brands, say researchers.

Thinner cigarettes were generally seen as weaker, more palatable, and less harmful by a focus group of 15-year-olds from Glasgow.

In fact, some super-slim brands contain more dangerous tobacco chemicals than their bulkier counterparts, according to the study authors.

Teenagers were most attracted to slim and super-slim cigarettes with white filters and decorative features, describing them as “classy” and “nicer”, said Cancer Research UK.

In contrast one long brown cigarettes was viewed as particularly harmful and labelled “disgusting”, “really, really strong”, and “old fashioned”.

The researchers asked 48 teenage boys and girls about eight cigarette brands that differed in length, diameter, colour, and design.

Professor Gerard Hastings, Cancer Research UK’s social marketing expert at the University of Stirling and one of the study authors, said: “Our research confirms previous studies that both the pack and the product are powerful marketing tools in the hands of the tobacco industry which it is using to recruit a new generation of smokers. It’s time policy makers moved to standardise both.”

Co-author Allison Ford, also from the University of Stirling, said: “This important study reveals for the first time that adolescents associate slim and decorative cigarettes with glamour and coolness, rating them as a cleaner, milder and safer smoke.

“It is incredibly worrying to hear that adolescents believe that a stylishly designed cigarette gives a softer option.”

Cancer Research UK is campaigning for plain standardised packaging of cigarettes and has launched an online film accusing the tobacco industry of encouraging children to smoke.

The study found that teenagers thought white tips and longer cigarettes portrayed a cleaner, feminine image reminiscent of glamorous female stars from old movies. The image softened perceptions that smoking was harmful, said the scientists.

Cigarettes with white tips were also associated with menthol, which was perceived as weaker and less harmful.

In their paper, published in the European Journal of Public Health, the researchers wrote: “The slimmer diameters of these cigarettes communicated weaker tasting and less harmful-looking cigarettes. This was closely linked to appeal as thinness implied a more pleasant and palatable smoke for young smokers.

“This exploratory study provides some support that standardising cigarette appearance could reduce the appeal of cigarettes in adolescents and reduce the opportunity for stick design to mislead young smokers in terms of harm.”

Mumsnet chief executive and co-founder Justine Roberts, who supports the campaign, said: “Very few parenting issues are completely black and white, but nobody wants their child to start smoking. Standardised packs may not be a silver bullet, but Mumsnet users are clear that they’d be very happy to see them as part of a range of measures to discourage children from getting hooked.”

Harpal Kumar, Cancer Research UK’s chief executive, said: “This research once again highlights how the tobacco industry exploits any opportunity to lure young smokers to secure a profitable future.

“The evidence shows children are attracted to glitzy, slickly-designed cigarettes and packs and every year more than 207,000 UK children between 11 and 15 start smoking. We are urging the Government to introduce standardised packaging to discourage these children from starting this life-threatening habit and to prioritise children’s health over tobacco company profits.”

The House of Lords will debate standardising cigarette packaging over the next few weeks.

Source: The Independent

 

How diabetic women`s pregnancy chances can be boosted

Watching what you eat, exercising properly and ensuring adequate nutrition with a vitamin supplement which has adequate amounts of folic acid may improve chances of conception in diabetic women.

Women with diabetes face a special challenge-getting and then staying pregnant. Poor glucose control may create an environment where the high sugars prevent both conceiving as well as maintaining the pregnancy, Diabetic Living India reported.

Women who develop diabetes can be prone to developing other disorders such as thyroid disease or autoimmune premature ovarian failure.

Miscarriage rates among women with poorly controlled diabetes can be as high as 30 to 60 percent during that crucial first trimester of pregnancy.

The risk of birth defects is also high, and also stems from uncontrolled blood sugar levels around the time of conception.

A baby’s brain, heart, kidneys and lungs form during the first eight weeks of pregnancy, therefore high blood glucose levels are especially harmful during this early stage.

The main diabetes complication, including gestational diabetes, related to pregnancy is macrosomia – or a big baby (higher than the 90th percentile in birth weight).

Women with Type 1 diabetes will require insulin before, during and after their pregnancy.

However, if a woman has type 2 diabetes then she will require oral medications with or without insulin to achieve appropriate control of your diabetes.

In order to enhance chances of delivering a healthy baby, diabetic women should work with health care team to get their blood glucose under control before getting pregnant.

Source: Smas Hits

Healthy lifestyle changes could help combat depression

New studies have showed that healthy lifestyle choices could have positive impact in depression treatment, the effects of aging, and learning.

The experiences and choices people make throughout life actively impact the brain.

As humans live longer, these choices also affect aging and quality of life. Lifestyle changes to diet and exercise will be important to aging populations as non-drug, easy-to-follow interventions with few side effects, make ideal potential therapies.

One study shows that as few as 12 consecutive days of exercise in aging rats helps preserve and improve movement function, an effect possibly caused by changes in dopamine.

The results suggest that exercise could stave off or reverse the slowed movements that are hallmarks of age (Jennifer Arnold, abstract 334.02).

Practices like yoga or meditation that increase mind/body awareness help people learn a brain-computer interface quicker. This finding may have implications for those who need brain-computer interfaces to function, such as people with paralysis (Bin He, PhD, abstract 16.06).

Long-term exercise in aging rats improves memory function, as well as increases the number of blood vessels in the white matter of their brains – the tracts that carry information between different areas of the brain. Increased blood flow may explain why exercise can help preserve memory (Yong Tang, MD, PhD, abstract 236.09).

Regular, supervised exercise helped young adults with depression overcome their symptoms in a pilot study. The results suggest that exercise could be an important treatment for depression in adolescents (Robin Callister, PhD, abstract 13.02, see attached summary).

A low calorie diet starting in middle-age onward protected rats against the effects of aging on movement. The results suggest that dietary interventions can help preserve movement function in a manner similar to exercise

Source: ani news

How antidepressants work in brain

A new study has allowed researchers better understanding of how antidepressants work in the human brain – and may lead to the better antidepressants’ development with few or no side effects.

The article from Eric Gouaux, Ph.D., a senior scientist at OHSU ‘s Vollum Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator describes research that gives a better view of the structural biology of a protein that controls communication between nerve cells.

The article focuses on the structure of the dopamine transporter, which helps regulate dopamine levels in the brain.

Dopamine is an essential neurotransmitter for the human body’s central nervous system; abnormal levels of dopamine are present in a range of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, drug addiction, depression and schizophrenia.

Along with dopamine, the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and serotonin are transported by related transporters, which can be studied with greater accuracy based on the dopamine transporter structure.

The Gouaux lab’s more detailed view of the dopamine transporter structure better reveals how antidepressants act on the transporters and thus do their work.

Another article published also dealt with a modified amino acid transporter that mimics the mammalian neurotransmitter transporter proteins targeted by antidepressants.

It gives new insights into the pharmacology of four different classes of widely used antidepressants that act on certain transporter proteins, including transporters for dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline.

The second paper in part was validated by findings of the first paper – in how an antidepressant bound itself to a specific transporter.

The two papers have been published in journal Nature.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

 

Hunt for Environmental links to breast cancer

A decade-long research effort to uncover the environmental causes of breast cancer by studying both lab animals and a group of healthy US girls has turned up some surprises, according to AFP

At the center of the investigation are 1,200 schoolgirls who do not have breast cancer, but who have already given scientists important new clues about the possible origins of the disease.

Some risk factors are well understood, including early puberty, later age of childbearing, late onset of menopause, estrogen replacement therapy, drinking alcohol and exposure to radiation, AFP reports.

Advances have also been made in identifying risky gene mutations, but these cases make up a small minority.

“Most of breast cancer, particularly in younger women, does not come from family histories,” said Leslie Reinlib, a program director at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

“We have still got 80 percent that has got to be environmental,” said Reinlib, who is part of the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program (BCERP) program that has received some $70 million in funds from the US government since 2003.

Some of its researchers track what is happening in the human population, while others study how carcinogens, pollutants and diet affect the development of the mammary glands and breast tumors in lab mice.

The program’s primary focus is on puberty because its early onset “is probably one of the best predictors of breast cancer in women,” Reinlib said.

Puberty is a time of rapid growth of the breast tissue. Research on survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombings in Japan has shown that those exposed in puberty had a higher likelihood of developing breast cancer in adulthood.

The 1,200 US girls enrolled in the study at sites in New York City, northern California and the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area beginning in 2004, when they were between the ages of six and eight.

The aim was to measure the girls’ chemical exposures through blood and urine tests, and to learn how environmental exposures affected the onset of puberty and perhaps breast cancer risk later in life.

Researchers quickly discovered that their effort to reach girls before puberty had not been entirely successful.

“By age eight, 40 percent were already in puberty,” said Reinlib. “That was a surprising bit of information.”

Further research has shown that the girls appear to be entering puberty six to eight months earlier than their peers did in the 1990s.

A study published last week in the journal Pediatrics on this cohort of girls found that obesity was acting as a primary driver of earlier breast development.

Other studies on the girls have focused on chemicals that are known as endocrine disruptors because they are believed to cause either earlier or later breast development.

Initial results showed “for the first time that phthalates, BPA, pesticides are in all the girls they looked at,” said Reinlib.

Researchers were taken aback by the pervasiveness of the exposures, but also by the data which appeared to show some plastic chemicals might not be as influential on breast development as some have feared.

“They didn’t find much of an association between puberty and phthalates, which are these chemicals that leach out of plastic bottles and Tupperware,” Reinlib said.

Another major finding regarded blood chemicals from two nearby groups in Ohio and Kentucky, both drinking water that was apparently contaminated by industrial waste.

Girls in northern Kentucky had blood levels of an industrial chemical — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA or C-8) found in Teflon non-stick coating for pans — three times as high as those who drank water from the Ohio River near Cincinnati, where water was filtered with state-of-the-art technology.

“Northern Kentucky did not have granular activated carbon filtration” in their water supply said researcher Susan Pinney, a professor at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine.

“In 2012 they put it in after they learned of our preliminary results.” Families were also notified of their daughters’ blood levels, she said.

The chemicals can linger in the body for years. Researchers were dismayed to learn that the longer the girls spent breastfeeding as infants — typically touted for its health benefits — the higher their PFOA levels compared to girls who were fed formula.

What cannot be studied in the girls is tried on lab mice, who in one experiment are being fed high-fat diets and exposed to a potent carcinogen to see how the two interact.

Mammary tumors develop much faster in the high-fat diet group, said scientist Richard Schwartz of the department of microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University.

Fat mice have more blood supply in the mammary glands, higher inflammation levels and display changes in the immune system.

Follow-up studies suggest that cancer risk stays high even if mice are fed high-fat diets in puberty and switched to low-fat diets in adulthood, he told AFP.

“The damage is already done,” he said. “Does this mean that humans are at risk the same way? We don’t know that with certainty.”

But the findings do reinforce the advice that people often hear regarding how to maintain good health — avoid fatty foods, maintain a normal weight and reduce chemical exposures wherever possible, experts say.

“It can’t hurt, and it can only help,” said Schwartz.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women globally and took 508,000 lives in 2011, according to the World Health Organization.

Source: News OK

New breakthroughs could help make multiple sclerosis history

Researchers are gaining a new level of understanding of multiple sclerosis (MS), which could lead to new treatments and approaches to controlling the chronic disease.

The new findings show that scientists are one step closer to understanding how antibodies in the blood stream break past the brain’s protective barrier to attack the optic nerves, spinal cord, and brain, causing the symptoms of neuromyelitis optica, a rare disease similar to MS.

Understanding how the antibodies bypass the protective blood-brain barrier could provide new approaches to treating the disease (Yukio Takeshita, MD, PhD, abstract 404.09).

A protein involved in blood clotting mightserve as an early detection method for MS before symptoms occur. Early detection of the disease could lead to more effective early treatments ( Katerina Akassoglou, PhD, abstract 404.11).

Low levels of a cholesterol protein correlate with the severity of a patient’s MS in both human patients and mouse models.

The finding suggests the protein, known to protect against inflammation, may protect against developing MS, and possibly even aid in the regeneration of damaged neurons. This research opens the door to cholesterol drugs as a possible new avenue for MS treatment (Lidia Gardner, PhD, abstract 404.01).

A type of immune system cell has been found to directly target and damage nerve cell axons, a hallmark of MS. This may reveal a target for new therapies (Brian Sauer, PhD, presentation 404.06).

While no treatments to rebuild cells damaged by MS currently exist, scientists have found that when exosomes – tiny, naturally occurring “nanovesicles” – are produced by dendritic cells and applied to the brain, they can deliver a mixture of proteins and RNAs that promote regeneration of protective myelin sheaths and guard against MS symptoms ( Richard Kraig , MD, PhD, presentation 812.02)

Source: Zee News

 

Vegetable Protein May Help Kidney Disease Patients Live Longer

Increased consumption of vegetable protein was linked with prolonged survival among kidney disease patients in a new a study. The findings will be presented at ASN Kidney Week 2013 November 5-10 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA.

Due to poor kidney function, toxins that are normally excreted in the urine can build up in the blood of individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Research shows that compared with animal protein, vegetable protein intake in patients is linked with lower production of such toxins. It is unclear whether consuming more vegetable protein prolongs CKD patients’ lives, however.

To investigate, a team led by Xiaorui Chen (University of Utah) studied 1,104 CKD patients in the1988-1994 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III and asked them about their animal and vegetable protein intake.

After controlling for various factors such as age, smoking, and BMI, the researchers found that for each 10 gram increase in vegetable protein intake per day, participants had a 14% lower risk of dying by the end of 2006. “Interventional trials are needed to establish whether increasing vegetable protein will decrease mortality in the CKD population,” they wrote.

Source: Nephrology news