5 healthy late-night snacks

Let’s get real: It’s not always possible to avoid eating after dark. Some situations (a late work shift, a delayed flight) call for legit midnight meals — and hey, other times you’re just still hungry.

When you are, you should eat, says Angela Lemond, R.D.N., of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. The trick is to munch on fare that won’t spike your blood sugar, incite cravings, or pack on pounds. Any of these light-but-filling combos should tide you over till morning.

1 medium banana + 1 tablespoon almond butter

1 medium apple + 1 ounce low-fat cheese

1/4 cup black beans + 1 small corn tortilla

1 cup blueberries + 6 to 8 ounces plain, non-fat yogurt

1 cup carrot sticks + 3 tablespoons hummus

Source: airing news

Seasonal flu widespread in the United States, CDC says

Nearly half of the United States is reporting widespread influenza activity, most of it attributed to the H1N1 virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 2009, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

Thousands of people die every year from flu, which peaks in the United States between October and March. The flu is spreading quickly this season, with 25 states already reporting cases, the CDC said.

“We are seeing a big uptick in disease in the past couple of weeks. The virus is all around the United States right now,” said Dr. Joe Bresee, chief of Epidemiology and Prevention in the CDC’s Influenza Division.

In 2009-2010, the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, spread from Central Mexico to 74 other countries, killing an estimated 284,000 people, according to the CDC.

While younger people were more susceptible to H1N1 in 2009, Bresee said it is too early to tell whether the same will be true this year.

This season’s virus has killed six children in the United States, according to CDC data. The agency does not track adult deaths, but dozens have been reported around the country.

“There is still a lot of season to come. If folks haven’t been vaccinated, we recommend they do it now,” Bresee said.

Texas has been one of the harder hits states, where at least 25 people have died this season from the flu, local health officials said.

The Texas Department of State Health Services issued an “influenza health alert” on December 20, advising clinicians to consider antiviral treatment, even if an initial rapid-flu test comes back negative. Texas health officials also encouraged people to get a flu vaccination.

“The flu is considered widespread in Texas,” Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the state’s health department, said.

Source: news.nom

Finley Boyle: Girl Dies After Dental Procedure

A three-year-old girl has died after suffering brain damage during a visit to the dentist.

Finley Boyle visited Island Dentistry for Children in Kailua, Hawaii, with her mother Ashley on December 3 to get four root canals done.

According to court documents, she was given different drugs to sedate her but she then went into cardiac arrest.

The lawsuit claims she was left unattended for 26 minutes without CPR, leading to extensive brain damage.

Her family has said it will file a wrongful death lawsuit against the Honolulu dentist.

Family lawyer Rick Fried told KHON-TV her death was “tragic”.

He said: “I think the parents felt that Finley wouldn’t want to live. I don’t think anyone of us would.

“She didn’t know she was alive basically.”

Source: Sky news

Man ‘unaware’ of nail lodged in skull after an accident in home

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A man who had a 8 cm-long nail embedded in his skull after a home improvement accident had no idea until doctors carried out a CT scan.

The 55-year-old Chinese man, named by local media as Mr Yang, was using a cutting machine when the accident happened.

“The nail that got stuck in the cutting machine flew out when I turned on the machine. It ripped into my head and left a small hole on the skin,” Mr Yang told the Sky News.

Not realising the nail had embedded Mr Yang went on with his day. But after he got sick he went to doctors who discovered the nail had penetrated his eye socket.

Neurosurgeons at the hospital in Nanjing, in China’s Jiangsu province, operated on the Mr Yang to remove the nail.

Mr Yang’s story is not the first time such a thing has happened in China. According to the Shanghaiist, a man in Chengdu province had a chopstick lodged into his cranium for nine months without noticing.

Source: news.com

E-cigarette vapor contains nicotine, not other toxins

People standing near someone using an e-cigarette will be exposed to nicotine, but not to other chemicals found in tobacco cigarette smoke, according to a new study.
E-cigarettes, or electronic cigarettes, create a nicotine-rich vapor that can be inhaled, or ‘vaped.’

Researchers and regulators have questioned whether e-cigarettes are a smoking cessation aid or may lure more young people toward smoking, as well as what effects they have on health.

“There is ongoing public debate whether e-cigarettes should be allowed or prohibited in public spaces,” study co-author Maciej Goniewicz told Reuters Health in an email.

Goniewicz is a cancer researcher in the Department of Health Behavior at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.

“E-cigarettes contain variable amounts of nicotine and some traces of toxicants. But very little is known to what extent non-users can be exposed to nicotine and other chemicals in situations when they are present in the same room with users of e-cigarettes,” Goniewicz said.

He and his colleagues conducted two studies of secondhand exposure to e-cigarette vapors in a laboratory. Their results were published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

In the first study, the researchers used an electronic smoking machine to generate vapor in an enclosed space. They measured the amount of nicotine as well as carbon monoxide and other potentially harmful gases and particles in the chamber.

The second study included five men who regularly smoked both tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes. Each man entered a room and smoked his usual brand of e-cigarette for two five-minute intervals over an hour while the researchers measured air quality. The room was cleaned and ventilated and the experiment was repeated with tobacco cigarettes.

The researchers measured nicotine levels of 2.5 micrograms per cubic meter of air in the first study. Nicotine levels from e-cigarettes in the second study were slightly higher at about 3.3 micrograms per cubic meter. But tobacco cigarette smoking resulted in nicotine levels ten times higher at almost 32 micrograms per cubic meter.

“The exposure to nicotine is lower when compared to exposure from tobacco smoke. And we also know that nicotine is relatively safer when compared to other dangerous toxicants in tobacco smoke,” Goniewicz said.

E-cigarettes also produced some particulate matter, but regular cigarettes produced about seven times more. E-cigarettes didn’t change the amount of carbon monoxide or other gases in the air.

“What we found is that non-users of e-cigarettes might be exposed to nicotine but not to many toxicants when they are in close proximity to e-cigarette users,” said Goniewicz.

“It is currently very hard to predict what would be the health impact of such exposure,” he added.

He said more research is needed to find out how the current findings correspond to “real-life” situations, when many people might be using e-cigarettes in a room with restricted ventilation.

Source: Ahram online

Indo-American leads possible treatment for diabetes

In a significant discovery, a team of researchers led by an Indian-American has found that a single gene dysfunction in mice results in developing fasting hypoglycemia, one of the major symptoms of Type 2 diabetes.

The discovery by researchers, led by Prof. Bellur S Prabhakar, focused on a gene MADD for the study and may enable a new potential treatment for diabetes patients.
If MADD is not functioning properly, insulin is not released into the bloodstream to regulate blood sugar levels, said Prabhakar, professor and head of microbiology and immunology at University of Illinois at Chicago.

In previous work, Prabhakar isolated several genes from human beta cells, including MADD, which is also involved in certain cancers. Small genetic variations found among thousands of human subjects revealed that a mutation in MADD was strongly associated with Type 2 diabetes in Europeans and Han Chinese.

People with this mutation had high blood glucose and problems of insulin secretion – the “hallmarks of type 2 diabetes”, Prabhakar said.

But it was unclear how the mutation was causing the symptoms, or whether it caused them on its own or in concert with other genes associated with Type 2 diabetes.

To study the role of MADD in diabetes, Prabhakar and his colleagues developed a mouse model in which the MADD gene was deleted from the insulin-producing beta cells. All such mice had elevated blood glucose levels, which the researchers found was due to insufficient release of insulin.

“We didn’t see any insulin resistance in their cells, but it was clear that the beta cells were not functioning properly,” Prabhakar said.

Examination of the beta cells revealed that they were packed with insulin. “The cells were producing plenty of insulin, they just weren’t secreting it,” he said.

Prabhakar said that the work shows that Type 2 diabetes can be directly caused by the loss of a properly functioning MADD gene alone.

“Without the gene, insulin can’t leave the beta cells, and Blood sugar levels are chronically high,” he said.

In the future, the researchers plan to look into effects of a drug that allows for the secretion of insulin in MADD-deficient beta cells.

“If this drug works to reverse the deficits associated with a defective MADD gene in the beta cells of our model mice, it may have potential for treating people with this mutation who have an insulin-secretion defect and/or type 2 diabetes,” he said.

Type 2 diabetes affects roughly 8 per cent of Americans and over 366 million people worldwide. It can cause serious complications, including cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, loss of limbs and blindness.

Source: The Sen Times

New breakthrough brings Muscular Dystrophy Defect drug closer to reality

Researchers have revealed an atomic-level view of a genetic defect that causes a form of muscular dystrophy, myotonic dystrophy type 2.

The scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have used this information to design drug candidates with potential to counter those defects and reverse the disease.

“This the first time the structure of the RNA defect that causes this disease has been determined,” lead author Matthew Disney said. “Based on these results, we designed compounds that, even in small amounts, significantly improve disease-associated defects in treated cells.”

Myotonic dystrophy type 2 is a relatively rare form of muscular dystrophy that is somewhat milder than myotonic dystrophy type 1, the most common adult-onset form of the disease.

Both types of myotonic dystrophy are inherited disorders that involve progressive muscle wasting and weakness, and both are caused by a type of genetic defect known as a “RNA repeat expansion,” a series of nucleotides repeated more times than normal in an individual’s genetic code.

The repeat binds to the protein MBNL1, rendering it inactive and resulting in RNA splicing abnormalities-which lead to the disease.
Using information about the RNA’s structure and movement, the scientists were able to design molecules to improve RNA function.

The new findings were confirmed using sophisticated computational models that show precisely how the small molecules interact with and alter the RNA structure over time.
Those predictive models matched what the scientists found in the study-that these new compounds bind to the repeat structure in a predictable and easily reproducible way, attacking the cause of the disease.

The study is published in journal ACS Chemical Biology. (ANI)

Source: Yahoo news

Fibre rich diet may ward off asthma

A new study has revealed that eating a diet rich in fibre can protect against allergic asthma by triggering changes in the immune system.

Benjamin Marsland from the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland and colleagues found that levels of dietary fibre, found in fruit and vegetables, can influence the balance of microbes in the gut in ways that make the airways more or less prone to the inflammation seen in allergic airway diseases, New Scientist reported.

The researchers, who looked at how the immune and inflammatory responses of mice varied with the fibre in their diet, found that when the mice were exposed to an extract of house dust mites, those fed with less fibre had double the number of a specific type of immune cell associated with asthmatic inflammation in their airways, than those on a standard diet.

It was found that mice given additional fibre supplements on top of a standard diet showed a reduction in these immune cells, but only if the supplement was easily fermentable in the gut.

The study was published in Journal Nature Medicine.

Source:  Zee news

Birth control type tied to time between pregnancies

Women using intrauterine devices (IUDs) and other types of long-term reversible birth control after having a baby are less likely to get pregnant again quickly, a new study suggests.

Women who used those methods were four times more likely to wait more than 18 months between pregnancies compared to those relying on condoms, researchers found.

The World Health Organization endorses a two-year period between birth and a woman’s next conception.

Still, one third of all repeat pregnancies in the U.S. occur within 18 months of the previous child’s birth. And a growing body of evidence shows this close timing increases the risk a baby will be born early or at a low birth weight.

The time between pregnancies “cannot be explained only by the mother’s preferences,” Heike Thiel de Bocanegra said.

She and her colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco investigated the link between access to birth control or family planning services and pregnancy spacing.

In the current study of 117,644 California women who’d had at least two children, 64 percent waited 18 months or more between pregnancies and the rest did not.

All women included in the study filed claims through the state’s Medicaid program for the poor, called Medi-Cal, or through health providers offering state-funded family planning services.

The researchers matched data on claims for contraceptives to California’s birth registry.

“We assumed that access to contraception . . . would improve birth spacing,” Dr. Anitra Beasley wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

“This study actually examines this assumption,” she said.

Beasley, who studies family planning at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, was not part of the current research.

Women who used long-acting reversible contraception, including IUDs or implants, were four times more likely to wait at least 18 months to conceive again, compared to those who only used “barrier” contraceptives like condoms or spermicide.

More than half of women started using birth control pills, the ring or the patch after giving birth. They were twice as likely to wait at least 18 months between pregnancies as condom users.

Those relationships stood firm even when the researchers looked at possible influences like the mother’s race, education, age and whether she was born in the U.S., according to the report published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Women in the study counseled by a certified family planning service provider were 67 percent more likely to wait 18 months between pregnancies, compared with women who utilized Medi-Cal services only.

“Low-income women are sometimes seen only once after giving birth,” Thiel de Bocanegra said.

“Some women receive contraception – some do not,” she said.

Women in the study received four months worth of covered contraceptives, on average. That number was dragged down by the one third of women in the study who had no contraceptive claims at all.

For Meredith Matone, a researcher with PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the study’s large size helps build a better understanding of how public health initiatives work in the real world.

“The results we find in clinical trials do not always translate well when implemented on a large scale, where they are subject to challenges that include provider performance, patient compliance and operational hurdles,” Matone wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

“Under health care reform, there are opportunities to continue to support such evidence-based public health programs for families,” said Matone, who was not involved in the new research.

“Health care providers should know that the optimal pregnancy interval is 18 months or more, and should encourage the use of highly effective contraception during this period,” Thiel de Bocanegra said.

“Pediatricians can help, too, by asking the mother what type of contraception she is using,” she said.

USDA allows more meat, grains in school lunches

The Agriculture Department says it’s making permanent rules that allow schools to serve larger portions of lean meat and whole grains in school lunches and other meals.

Guidelines restricting portion size were originally intended to combat childhood obesity, but many parents complained their kids weren’t getting enough to eat. School administrators say that rules establishing maximums on grains and meats are too limiting and make it difficult to plan daily meals.

The department eliminated limits and on meats and grains on a temporary basis more than a year ago. On Thursday officials made the rule change permanent.

The change was announced by Kevin Concannon, an undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services.

He says the department has delivered on its promise to give school nutritionists more flexibility in meal planning.

Source: USA Today