medical news

‘Painful’ pinpricks may soon be history for diabetics

A new nanotechnology-based technique for regulating blood sugar in diabetics may give patients the ability to release insulin painlessly using a small ultrasound device, allowing them to go days between injections – rather than using needles to give themselves multiple insulin injections each day.

The technique involves injecting biocompatible and biodegradable nano particles into a patient’s skin. The nanoparticles are made out of poly(lactic-co-glycolic) acid (PLGA) and are filled with insulin.

Each of the PLGA nanoparticles is given either a positively charged coating made of chitosan (a biocompatible material normally found in shrimp shells), or a negatively charged coating made of alginate (a biocompatible material normally found in seaweed).

When the solution of coated nanoparticles is mixed together, the positively and negatively charged coatings are attracted to each other by electrostatic force to form a “nano-network.”

Once injected into the subcutaneous layer of the skin, that nano-network holds the nanoparticles together and prevents them from dispersing throughout the body.

The coated PLGA nanoparticles are also porous. Once in the body, the insulin begins to diffuse from the nanoparticles. But the bulk of the insulin doesn’t stray far – it is suspended in a de facto reservoir in the subcutaneous layer of the skin by the electrostatic force of the nano-network. This essentially creates a dose of insulin that is simply waiting to be delivered into the bloodstream.

Using the new technology developed by Dr. Zhen Gu, senior author of a paper on the research and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill, and his team, a diabetes patient doesn’t have to inject a dose of insulin – it’s already there. Instead, patients can use a small, hand-held device to apply focused ultrasound waves to the site of the nano-network, painlessly releasing the insulin from its de facto reservoir into the bloodstream.

The study has been published online in Advanced Healthcare Materials.

Source: Yahoo News

5 Easy Ways to kick up Your Metabolism

Metabolism is the set of chemical transformations within the cells that is necessary for the maintenance of life. Putting it simple, right from breaking down the food to transforming it into energy, metabolism is the sum total of the entire internal biological processes.

Some people have great metabolism, as what they eat is never seen on their bodies, whereas some have it real slow. Though you can’t blame yourself for the slow metabolic rate you can definitely notch it up by following the simple tips:

Don’t skip your breakfast: ‘Eat breakfast like a king’ goes the adage. Your metabolism slows down during the night and if you skip your breakfast it further goes for a toss to conserve energy. This in turn can lead to unhealthy food choices in the day leading to weight problems. Having a healthy breakfast helps improve metabolism.

Exercise: Muscle burns more calories than fat. So, the harder your muscles work, the more post-workout rebuilding they have to do, thus increasing your metabolic rate. Go for 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day and 30 to 40 minutes strength training twice a week to keep your metabolism up

Switch to Green tea: Green tea contain antioxidant catechin which according to researchers help improve fat oxidation and thermogenesis, your body’s production of energy, or heat, from digestion.

Spice it up: Capsaicin, which gives peppers and spices their heat, helps increase energy expenditure by 50 calories a day. So if you like it spicy, do not worry, all that spice only gives that extra need kick to your metabolism.

Sleep well: Not getting enough sleep throws off your levels of leptin and ghrelin, the hormones that help regulate energy use and appetite thus slowing the metabolism and increasing the risks of obesity.

Source: Mens health

Is Your Child Getting Enough Fiber?

Three out of four children aren’t getting enough fiber, which puts them at high risk for chronic constipation, among other things. Here are some ways to make sure your child isn’t at risk and how to incorporate more fiber in your family’s diet.

Why Fiber is Important 

Fiber is the part of natural foods (plant foods, the only place fiber is found) that isn’t digested. It provides “roughage” for everything that you eat and helps things move through the digestive process. In Dr. Rex Russell’s book, What The Bible Says About Healthy Living, he notes the importance of fiber based on a group of African men, some living in Africa and some attending school in England. The African natives ate a traditional high-fiber diet and rarely needed medical attention. The Africans who were at school in England were enjoying processed foods without fiber. They suffered from episodes of appendicitis, hemorrhoids, ulcers, and gallstones.

The term “processed foods” refers to products made with grains that are heavily processed and very far from their natural state. These include products like enriched macaroni, cookies, cakes, pies, and cereals.

Inadequate fiber intake is also believed to contribute to, and sometimes even cause, heart disease, colon cancer, high blood pressure, and adult onset diabetes. Without sufficient fiber to move food through the body, toxins and bodily waste can fester inside the body for extended periods of time.

A lack of fiber also highly contributes to obesity problems in America. Part of this results from the negligible amount of fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Americans. Both fruits and vegetables, along with other natural foods, contain two types of fiber: soluble and insoluble. Soluble is the kind of fiber that changes as it moves through your digestive system, while insoluble doesn’t change; both are equally important.

Soluble fiber is most often found in dried beans, oats, barley, fruits and vegetables. It stabilizes blood sugar, reduces blood pressure and cholesterol, and speeds up your body’s transit time (the time it takes to move food through your digestive system and complete the digestion process). Most Americans’ transit time is around 50 to 60 hours. That’s a long time, considering the normal transit time should be around 12 to 18 hours. (If you’re interested in finding out your child’s transit time, watch her bowels after she’s eaten corn. Since corn does not digest, you will see it in her bowels and be able to estimate her transit time starting from when she ate the corn to when it was in her bowel.

How Much Fiber Do Children Need? 

Currently, children ages four to 19 years get around 12 grams of dietary fiber per day, according to Dr. Christine Williams, previously with the American Health Foundation. Dr. Williams recommends that children get at least their “age plus five” grams of fiber per day. For eight year olds, this means at least 13 grams of dietary fiber per day.

A minimum of five fruits and vegetables per day, as recommended by the USDA Food Pyramid, will give your child a large percentage of his necessary fiber. The remaining amount should come from sources such as whole grain products, beans, nuts, and seeds.

Source: Pediatrics for parents

Coffee may Help Boost Blood Flow to Fingers

Drinking coffee can certainly help you stay awake during that work meeting or get energized before a test. However, a recent study shows that drinking a cup of caffeinated coffee a day can help boost blood flow in fingers.

Researchers found that the inner lining of the body’s smaller blood vessels could actually produce more blood flow with the help of a caffeinated drink.

In fact, they note that participants who drank a cup of caffeinated coffee a day had a 30 percent increase in blood flow over a 75-minute period compared to those who just drank a decaffeinated cup.

“This gives us a clue about how coffee may help improve cardiovascular health,” lead study researcher Masso Tsutsui, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiologist and professor in the pharmacology department at the University of the Ryukus in Okinawa Japan said, via a press release.

Previous findings have suggested that drinking coffee can help lower the risk of dying from heart disease and stroke, and that high doses of caffeine may improve the function of larger arteries.

Researchers had each participant–ranging in age from 22 to 30 who were not regular coffee drinkers–drink one five-ounce cup of Joe a day or a decaffeinated cup. Following, their finger blood flow was measured via a non-invasive technique for gauging circulation, known as flowmetry. This experiment was repeated with each type of coffee for two days.

The researchers found that when compared to decaffeinated coffee, the caffeinated version was able to help raise participants’ blood pressure and improve vessel inner lining function.

Though it is unclear at this time how this improvement occurred, researchers hope that caffeine may help open blood vessels in order to potentially reduce inflammation.

More information regarding the study was presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2013.

Source: Science World Report

Children at risk of AIDS should be tested at birth – UN

More than a quarter of a million children each year are born infected with the virus that causes AIDS, but too few are being tested early to receive treatment and prolong their lives, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Michele Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, called for diagnostic kits to be improved for detection in babies of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, and for their “still high” current price of $25-50 to be brought down.

Children are the “forgotten” victims of the AIDS epidemic, yet 260,000 babies joined their ranks last year, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, he said.

“Irrespective of the market size we need to make sure that diagnostics are made available for children,” he told a news conference in Geneva ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1.

“We made a lot of progess during the last 2-3 years in terms of treatment, in terms of medicines, in terms of making sure that the molecules are more well-targeted for children. But where we are failing is also making early diagnostics.”

U.S.-based Abbott Laboratories and Swiss drugmaker Roche are among the main manufacturers of HIV diagnostics, according to senior UNAIDS officials.

Some 3.3 million children under age 15 have HIV, but only 1.9 million of them require treatment today, according to the Geneva-based agency. Fewer than 650,000 or 34 percent of the 1.9 million received antiretroviral AIDS drugs in 2012, still a rise of 14 percent from the year before, it said.

Some 14 million adults with HIV need treatment, and 9 million of them or 64 percent are receiving it, a far higher coverage rate than for children.

UNAIDS has identified 22 priority countries for stopping infections in children, 21 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 90 percent of women living with HIV. The other is India.

In three of these priority countries – Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi – fewer than 5 percent of infants at risk are being tested for HIV at birth, UNAIDS says.

“In priority countries, only 3 in 10 children receive HIV treatment. We have seen tremendous political commitment and results to reduce mother-to-child transmission but we are failing the children who become infected,” said Sidibe, who is from Mali.

All children under five who test positive for the virus should be put on treatment, according to Mahesh Mahalingam, UNAIDS director for its global plan for stopping new infections in children.

Current PCR tests are able to detect the virus in a baby only after the age of six weeks and require sending a blood sample to a specialised laboratory, he said.

“What we looking for are easier tests that we can administer earlier on, this will help detect the virus and start them on medicines faster. We recommend that as soon as the child is known to be HIV positive, you start on anti-retroviral drugs,” Mahalingam told Reuters.

He added: “The earlier we can diagnose, the earlier we can treat them which increase chances of child survival. Children are now getting to grow into adults. If we start pretty early they have the same chance of living as any other children.”

Source: New Vision

Nut eaters have lower cancer, heart disease risk

Help yourself to some nuts this holiday season: Regular nut eaters were less likely to die of cancer or heart disease — in fact, were less likely to die of any cause — during a 30-year Harvard study.

Nuts have long been called heart-healthy, and the study is the largest ever done on whether eating them affects mortality.

Researchers tracked 119,000 men and women and found that those who ate nuts roughly every day were 20 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who never ate nuts. Eating nuts less often also appeared to still lower the death risk, in direct proportion to consumption.

The risk of dying of heart disease dropped 29 percent and the risk of dying of cancer fell 11 percent among those who had nuts seven or more times a week compared with people who never ate them.

The benefits were seen from peanuts as well as from pistachios, almonds, walnuts and other tree nuts. The researchers did not look at how the nuts were prepared — oiled or salted, raw or roasted.

Nut eaters stayed slimmer.

“There’s a general perception that if you eat more nuts you’re going to get fat. Our results show the opposite,” said Dr. Ying Bao of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

She led the study, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. The National Institutes of Health and the International Tree Nut Council Nutrition Research & Education Foundation sponsored the study, but the nut group had no role in designing it or reporting the results.

Researchers don’t know why nuts may boost health. It could be that their unsaturated fatty acids, minerals and other nutrients lower cholesterol and inflammation and reduce other problems, as earlier studies seemed to show.

Observational studies like this one can’t prove cause and effect, only suggest a connection. Research on diets is especially tough, because it can be difficult to single out the effects of any one food.

People who eat more nuts may eat them on salads, for example, and some of the benefit may come from the leafy greens, said Dr. Robert Eckel, a University of Colorado cardiologist and former president of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Ralph Sacco, a University of Miami neurologist who also is a former heart association president, agreed.

“Sometimes when you eat nuts you eat less of something else like potato chips,” so the benefit may come from avoiding an unhealthy food, Sacco said.

The Harvard group has long been known for solid science on diets. Its findings build on a major study earlier this year — a rigorous experiment that found a Mediterranean-style diet supplemented with nuts cuts the chance of heart-related problems, especially strokes, in older people at high risk of them.

Many previous studies tie nut consumption to lower risks of heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer and other maladies.

In 2003, the Food and Drug Administration said a fistful of nuts a day as part of a low-fat diet may reduce the risk of heart disease. The heart association recommends four servings of unsalted, unoiled nuts a week and warns against eating too many, since they are dense in calories.

The new research combines two studies that started in the 1980s on 76,464 female nurses and 42,498 male health professionals. They filled out surveys on food and lifestyle habits every two to four years, including how often they ate a serving (1 ounce) of nuts.

Study participants who often ate nuts were healthier — they weighed less, exercised more and were less likely to smoke, among other things. After taking these and other things into account, researchers still saw a strong benefit from nuts.

Compared with people who never ate nuts, those who had them less than once a week reduced their risk of death 7 percent; once a week, 11 percent; two to four times a week, 13 percent; and seven or more times a week, 20 percent.

“I’m very confident” the observations reflect a true benefit, Bao said. “We did so many analyses, very sophisticated ones,” to eliminate other possible explanations.

For example, they did separate analyses on smokers and non-smokers, heavy and light exercisers, and people with and without diabetes, and saw a consistent benefit from nuts.

At a heart association conference in Dallas this week, Penny Kris-Etherton, a Pennsylvania State University nutrition scientist, reviewed previous studies on this topic.

“We’re seeing benefits of nut consumption on cardiovascular disease as well as body weight and diabetes,” said Kris-Etherton, who has consulted for nut makers and also served on many scientific panels on dietary guidelines.

“We don’t know exactly what it is” about nuts that boosts health or which ones are best, she said. “I tell people to eat mixed nuts.”

Source: Dallas news

Aloe vera for winters

As the temperature begins to drop, and the skin begins to dry up, it’s vital to drink lots of water and use water-based organic products like aloe vera.  Due to aloe’s high water content (over 99 per cent water) it is a great way to hydrate, moisturize and rejuvenate the skin.

Aloe vera increases the elasticity of the skin making it more flexible through collagen and elastin repair.  It helps supply oxygen to the skin cells, increasing the strength and synthesis of skin tissue and induces improved blood flow. Aloe vera-based moisturisers should be used to keep your skin soft this winter as they prevent it from drying and keeps them fresh, soft and smooth.

Also, do not forget to drink as much water possible. In addition to that herbal teas and clear soups are more creative ways to get your daily H2O intake and flush out toxins.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Combining breastfeeding and solid food can reduce allergies

Giving a baby solid food besides breast milk after the 17th week of its birth helps it develop a better, stronger immune system to fight food allergies, new research has found.

The University of Southampton study, led by dietician and senior research fellow Kate Grimshaw, revealed that introduction of solid food before this may promote food allergy whereas solid food introduction after the 17th week seems to make the immune system stronger.

“Introducing solid foods alongside breastfeeding can benefit the immune system,” Grimshaw said.

“It appears the immune system becomes educated when there is an overlap of solids and breast milk because the milk promotes tolerogenic mechanisms against the solids,” he said.

The researchers recruited 1140 infants at birth from the Hampshire area.

The diet of these infants was compared with the diet of 82 infants who did not develop food allergy by the time they were two.

Forty one of these children went on to develop a food allergy by the time they were two years of age.

The team found that children who had developed allergies began eating solid food earlier than children with no allergies, roughly at 16 weeks or earlier.

Children with allergies were also more likely to not being breastfed when the mother introduced cow’s milk protein from any source.

Grimshaw said women who are not breastfeeding are encouraged to introduce solids before 17 weeks.

Source: Top News

Playing music at young age can keep brain healthy

A new study has found that playing an instrument at a young age might make you healthier later in life.

Dr. Nina Kraus, professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University, said what is seen in an older adult who has made music is a biologically younger brain, Fox News reported.

Kraus said that the fact that your cognitive sensory reward system is so engaged in the process of playing music seems to strengthen those circuits that are worked for music …and those functions that are important for language.

The study is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Source: ANI

Malaria ‘linked’ to household size

Researchers have found that malaria eradication is related more to household size than to a country’s wealth or temperature.

University of Guelph’s economics professor Ross McKitrick and two Finnish professors, Larry and Lena Hulden, found that when average household size drops below four persons, malaria extermination is much more likely.

Malaria is transmitted by infected mosquitoes. The research team examined data on malaria insect vectors, as well as demographic, sociological and environmental factors for 232 countries. Malaria is still prevalent in 106 countries.

McKitrick said that Malaria-bearing mosquitoes mainly feed at night, and tend to return to the same location for blood meals, asserting that the more people who sleep in one area, the greater the likelihood of an infected mosquito spreading the parasite to a new, uninfected victim.

The researchers looked at factors such as gross domestic product per capita, urbanization and slums, latitude, mean temperature, forest coverage, national DDT use, household size and even religion.

The study has been published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A.

Source: Deccan Chronicle