Month: November 2013

Smokers’ skin may age faster

Smokers are likely to get bags under their eyes and wrinkles around their lips earlier than non-smokers, according to a new study of identical twins.

Judges who didn’t know which twin smoked said the smoker looked older 57 percent of the time. That pattern held when both twins were smokers but one had smoked for many years longer than the other.

“Smoking makes you look old. That’s all there is to it,” Dr. Elizabeth Tanzi said.

“Besides lung cancer, heart attacks and strokes, just one more good reason to stop smoking is that it’s definitely making you look a lot older,” she told Reuters Health.

Tanzi is a dermatologist at the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery and George Washington University Medical Center. She was not involved in the new study but said it confirms what she and others see in practice.

The findings are based on standardized photos of 79 pairs of identical twins taken at the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.

Dr. Bahman Guyuron from Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals of Cleveland and his colleagues showed the photos to three trained judges, then asked them to grade each person’s wrinkles and age-related facial features.

The twins were in their late 40s, on average. About three-quarters of them were women.

Forty-five sets of twins included one smoker and one non-smoker. Smokers tended to have more wrinkles and other signs of face aging. But the differences were often small.

For instance, on a 0-to-3 scale, where 0 means no wrinkles and 3 is severe wrinkles, upper eyelids were rated at 1.56 among smokers and 1.51 among non-smokers. Jowls were rated at 1.0 among smokers and 0.93 among non-smokers, on average.

There was no difference in assessments of crow’s feet or forehead wrinkles based on smoking.

Other factors related to skin aging like sunscreen use, alcohol drinking and stress at work were similar among smoking and non-smoking twins, the researchers noted.

Of the remaining 34 twin pairs, one twin had smoked for an average of 13 years longer than the other.

Twins who had smoked for more years had more pronounced bags under their eyes and more wrinkles around their lower lips, according to findings published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

“It really just kind of confirms a lot of stuff that most people believed,” said Dr. Alan Boyd. He is a dermatologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and wasn’t part of the study team.

“I can usually spot a smoker from across the room because of some of their facial skin changes,” Boyd told Reuters Health.

Still, he said the study adds another layer of evidence by putting numbers on the effect of smoking on different parts of the face.

The researchers didn’t take into account how many cigarettes people smoked each day. And although weight was similar between smokers and non-smokers, they didn’t know if differences in fat distribution affected facial appearance.

Tanzi said toxins from smoking can speed up the breakdown of collagen, protein fibers that support skin and help it stick together. Smoking also reduces the amount of oxygen going to the skin, she said.

In addition, having a regular source of heat close to the face may play a role in skin aging, according to Boyd.

“The effects are cumulative. So you can benefit from stopping smoking at any time,” Tanzi added. But, “You want to be careful, because some of those changes may be permanent.”

Facial creams and plastic surgery are options for people whose skin has been damaged by smoking, Guyuron told Reuters Health. But he said the goal of releasing the findings was to give people another reason never to start.

“We are hoping that by again emphasizing the harms that come from smoking we can dissuade individuals from smoking … knowing how much it may damage their skin,” he said.

Source:

Number of patients declared ‘brain dead’ decreasing

A new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that the number of patients being declared “brain dead” has decreased over the past 10 years, but this has serious implications for organ donations and transplants.

 The researchers from Canada say they believe their findings may be a result of better injury prevention and improved care. But since the majority of organ donations rely on those who suffer from neurological death, this could lead to increased donor shortage.

To reach their findings, the team conducted a prospective cohort study involving 2,788 patients from Alberta, who were admitted to regional intensive care units as a result of various brain injuries over a 10.5-year period.

 Significant decrease in neurological death

Results of the analysis revealed that the number of neurological deaths as a result of brain injuries decreased over the study period.

The percentage of patients who progressed to neurological death stood at 8.1% in 2002 and 9.6% in 2004, but it reduced to 2.2% in 2010. Patients suffering from traumatic brain injury saw the biggest decrease in neurological death.

The study authors suggest that correlating reductions in traffic collisions and increases in improved care may have had an impact on the reduction of the number of patients suffering neurological death.

Data from Alberta Transportation revealed that the number of traffic-related deaths had reduced by 24%, from 404 deaths in 2006 to 307 deaths in 2010.

The number of nonfatal road collisions also reduced from 18,831 in 2006 to 13,552 in 2010.

Furthermore, the researchers say that clinical care of patients with brain injury has also improved in Canada over the last decade. They note there has also been an increase of specialists in neurocritical care, as well as improvements in surgery that can help reduce brain swelling.

 The study authors say:

“We found that the proportion of patients with brain injury who progressed to neurologic death decreased during the study period, particularly among those with traumatic brain injury.

The reasons for our findings cannot be determined with certainty from these data, but the change may reflect positive societal and health care system developments in injury prevention and care.”

 ‘Negative implications’ for organ donations and transplants

The researchers say although it is positive news that the number of people suffering neurological death has reduced, these findings have negative implications for the number of organ donations and transplants.

According to the researchers, organ donations after neurological death account for around 50% of all kidney transplants, 75% of liver transplants, 90% of lung and pancreas transplants, and all heart and small bowel transplants.

But if neurological deaths decrease, this means fewer organ donations and longer transplant waiting lists. The researchers say their findings may explain Canada’s current shortage of organ donations.

According to the Canadian Society of Transplantation, more than 4,000 Canadians are currently on the waiting list for an organ transplant, and last year there were only 1,800 transplants performed.

“Our results likely help explain the relatively stagnant or even declining rates of deceased organ donation in some Canadian jurisdictions,” the researchers say.

“However, the rates of donation after neurologic death in Canada are unlikely to rise in the future. Thus, if organ transplantation rates are to increase, it will need to occur through alternative approaches, such as living donation, donation after cardiocirculatory death and innovations aimed at improving the use of donated organs.”

Source:

Increased iron in brain ‘may be marker for MS’

Diagnosing multiple sclerosis is not a simple process. It is often a question of ruling out other possibilities for the symptoms a patient is suffering and can be time-consuming. But researchers from The University of Western Ontario, Canada, may have found a way of speeding things up.

Iron deposits in the brain are a common feature of multiple sclerosis (MS), but it is not known if these are a cause or effect of the disease. Ravi Menon, PhD, from the Robarts Research Institute claims a new study brings us closer to finding the answer.

The research, published in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders, found iron deposits in deep gray matter in patients’ brains, suggesting the accumulation begins at a very early stage in the disease.

Worrying time for patients

As the National Multiple Sclerosis Society notes, the onset of MS can be a distressing time for patients. The range of symptoms is applicable to many diseases, which makes it a worrying time, and attacks may be separated by lengthy time intervals.

According to the Society, to reach a diagnosis of MS, doctors must:

  • Find at least two areas of damage in the central nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves
  • Find evidence that the damage occurred at least 1 month apart, and
  • Rule out all other possible causes.

This means that diagnosis is seldom possible after the first attack – these patients are referred to as having clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) – although the study notes that at least half of CIS patients will go on to develop MS.

Menon and his colleague, PhD candidate Matthew Quinn, used 3-Telsa Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans to look for iron deposits in the brains of 22 CIS patients, using 16 age and gender matched people as controls.

 

The results show that iron deposits among the CIS group were significantly higher than those of the control group. They also showed subtle damage to the brain’s white matter in the CIS group, even at this early stage.

And the researchers were able to rule out the connection between vein diameter and iron deposits.

Menon continues:

“So while the iron in the brain correlates with the disability of the subjects, the iron in the brain does not correlate with the actual diameter of the jugular veins. So the Zamboni hypothesis is incorrect as far as the iron being related to some kind of obstruction.”

By continuing to study the CIS patients every 4 months for the next 2 years, the researchers hope that this imaging technique will lead to an earlier diagnosis for MS patients.

Menon concludes:

“We’re looking at a couple of different approaches to diagnostics using this imaging research.  In suspected MS cases – the very first time they appear in clinic, if they have an abnormally high amount of iron in the frontal cortex of the brain – that’s probably a pretty good sign they have MS or some other white matter disease.”

Source:

New 3D virus model explains lack of common cold cure

With all of the medical advances in recent history, it is sometimes surprising that we have not yet found a cure for the common cold. But a new model for rhinovirus C shows unexpected structural differences, creating potential for the development of new cold drugs.

Researchers from the University of Wisconson-Madison, led by Prof. Ann Palmenberg, successfully constructed a 3D model of the cold virus, rhinovirus C, which has been called the “missing link” cold.

Results of their findings, which employ the genetic sequencing of this particular cold virus to make a topographical model of the capsid – protein shell – were published recently in the journal Virology.

Though 3D structures of the A and B families of cold virus have long been known, rhinovirus C was only first discovered in 2006, when researchers discovered it had been “lurking” in human cells along with the A and B strains.

he researchers explain that antiviral drugs operate by attaching themselves to the surfaces of a virus, modifying them along the way. They describe this process as finding the right piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which must properly “fit and lock into the virus.”

Because the scientific community has not been able to accurately describe the surface of rhinovirus C, that meant pharmaceutical companies that were designing cold drugs were essentially “flying blind.”

Rhinovirus C structure ‘significantly different’

The shell of the rhinovirus C virus (right) has structural differences from rhinovirus A (left), which explains why current drugs have not been able to stop the common cold.

Credit: Palmenberg/University of Wisconsin-Madison

To build a model of the cold virus, Prof. Palmenberg and her team used advanced bioinformatics and the genetic sequences of 500 rhinovirus C genomes. They say these supplied the 3D “coordinates” of the viral protein shell.

“The question we sought to answer was how is it different and what can we do about it? We found it is indeed quite different,” says Prof. Palmenberg.

She notes that the new structure, which is significantly different from other strains of cold viruses, shows why previous drugs have failed in trials against rhinovirus.

The team says the drugs that work well against the A and B strains were designed specifically to take advantage of their surface features. These structures were determined years ago using a technique called X-ray crystallography, but it could not identify the rhinovirus C structure.

Potential for new cold drugs

Holly A. Basta, lead author and a graduate student working with Prof. Palmenberg, says that based on the new structure, “we predict you’ll have to make a C-specific drug. All the [existing] drugs we tested did not work.”

The researchers say that it is widely believed rhinovirus C is responsible for up to half of all childhood colds, and it can be a serious complication for those who suffer from respiratory conditions, such as asthma.

Along with the A and B strains, the C virus is responsible for millions of illnesses each year, costing the US more than $40 billion annually.

When thinking of developing new drugs, Prof. Palmenberg says this new C structure will cause drug developers to re-think the design:

Source: Medical News Today

Federal Judge Declares Texas Abortion Restrictions Unconstitutional

A federal judge has declared that recently passed Texas abortion restrictions, which are some of the strictest in the country, are unconstitutional, and the Associated Press reports.

The judge has blocked enforcement of the laws, which were passed in July despite the efforts of State Sen. Wendy Davis (D) and her epic 13-hour filibuster.

The bill was revived weeks after Davis’ filibuster and approved by the Texas Senate.

The bill would have banned most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy while creating new regulations for abortion clinics and doctors. Critics of the bill said it would have shut most abortion clinics in Texas. Supporters said it would have improved women’s health.

Source:

How Video Games Are Getting Inside Your Head

Max Kelmon, 13, has his own little version of a man cave in Palo Alto, Calif. Behind the family kitchen in a converted garage, he has an Xbox, a big-screen TV, headphones and a microphone. There’s an old couch covered in a sheet. And that couch where he parks himself, surrounded by boxes and Christmas lights, is one of Max’s favorite places on the planet.

From that couch, he connects to friends all over the globe — and he spends hours, pretty much every day, honing his skills in Call of Duty.

The first commercially successfully video game, Pong, invaded Americans’ living rooms 38 years ago. Since then, the industry has evolved from a simple bouncing ball in the Atari original to games with astounding graphics and sound, most of them connected to the Internet.

That means that kids like Max can play with people spread across the globe. It also means that gaming companies can analyze how gamers play — each and every decision they make.

So when kids sit down with a game, they are actually sitting across a screen from adults who are studying them — and, in some cases, trying to influence their behavior in powerful ways.

Researchers in game companies tweak games to get players to stay on longer, or to encourage them to spend money on digital goods. They study gamers’ reactions. It’s become a science.

And parents like Max’s mom, Vanessa Kelmon, often feel outgunned.

“I hate it. I really do,” she says. “He could play Xbox for 12 straight hours. [He has] friends in Mexico City and friends in England.”

Vanessa says Max is addicted to video games. “When I took it away, he started to cry,” she says. “My God, I am offering you to go play tennis or go play golf … and I am making you shut this down, and you’re crying about it.”

Tracking Clicks And Purchases

In millions of families, video games are a source of intense love and intense hate because they can be so incredibly compelling. You might not believe that if you don’t play them, but you can get lost in a great game. They make you feel good.

And it’s no accident, says Ramin Shokrizade, the game economist for Wargaming America.

“The technology for this has gotten quite sophisticated,” says Shokrizade, who began his career in neuroscience and behavioral economics. “At this point, every major gaming company worldwide either has in place a fully developed business intelligence unit, or they’re in the process of building one.”

Today’s game design is dominated by research, he says. As we play games, game developers are tracking every click, running tests and analyzing data.

They are trying to find out: What can they tweak to make us play just a bit longer? What would make the game more fun? What can get us to spend some money inside a game and buy something?

So as millions of people play, designers introduce little changes and get answers to all of these questions in real time. And games evolve.

For example, most games today sell virtual goods right inside the game — like a new gun in Call of Duty or a cow in FarmVille. Shokrizade’s job is to get people to buy them.

One of the tricks of the trade is something developers at Zynga — which created FarmVille — used to call “fun pain” or “the pinch.” The idea is to make gamers uncomfortable, frustrate them, take away their powers, crush their forts — and then, at the last second, offer them a way out for a price.

John Davison, who works at video game company Red Robot Labs, says free-to-play smartphone games like Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons have become brilliant at using these tests to figure out how to get people to spend money.

And the research is working. Davison says those games are making millions of dollars — every day.

Kids Who Cash In

When adults play games, they consent to share that personal information about how they play. But Shokrizade worries about the millions of kids who play. “If it’s a child, how do you even get consent for something like that?” he says.

Many of the people spending cash are kids, including Davison’s children. Game consoles sell gift cards at convenience stores that allow kids to make purchases on video games, even if they don’t have a credit card.

Davison’s kids started playing Clash of Clans this year. In the game, developed by Supercell, you get to run your own little Viking village and team up with friends. To protect your clan, you can spend money on forts and weapons.

It’s free to download — but because of these virtual goods, it’s one of the highest-grossing apps in Apple’s store.

Davison’s two boys loved it. “They were clearly getting a lot of enjoyment out of it,” he says. “But it did get to the point where my wife and I were like, ‘Do you really want to be spending everything on this?’ ”

And this is coming from a man who has devoted his life to video games.

“I was trying to sort of total up in my head how much the kids had spent on this game,” he says. “But there was also a degree of admiration for the team at Supercell, that they had managed to get under my 10-year-old’s skin to this degree.”

Apple recently settled a class-action lawsuit about kids making in-app purchases like this without their parents’ permission, and the European Union is considering new regulations on games.

Some regulations are taking place on a smaller scale. In Menlo Park, Calif., Michelle DeWolf banned her 10-year-old son, Austin Newman, from playing games during the school week.

Originally, she gave him 30 minutes a day, but that didn’t work.

“He couldn’t think about doing his homework. He couldn’t think about walking the dog or helping in any other way, because he couldn’t get his mind off the idea that he had 30 minutes coming,” she says.

“Once he knew there was nothing, he didn’t think about it during the week, and he almost — maybe I’m not objective — but he almost seemed relieved.”

Source:

How A Wandering Brain Can Help People Cope With Pain

When some people are in pain, the experience is so intense that they can’t think of anything else. But others can turn their minds elsewhere and feel better.

Why? The difference may be due in part to brain wiring, researchers say, and knowing more about how it works may someday make it easier to match people with effective pain treatments.

Prescription painkillers like Vicodin don’t work for everyone, and alternative treatments like meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy work for some but not all. Right now, doctors can’t tell in advance which pain treatment will work best for a patient.

The problem intrigued Karen Davis, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of Pain, who was in misery from a pinched nerve in her neck. But grant application deadlines loomed, so she just kept working.

“I tried a lot of painkillers, and it didn’t do much,” Davis tells Shots. But she noticed that when she was focused on her work, the pain didn’t bother her as much. “I don’t know if the pain went away, but I certainly didn’t notice it.”

So Aaron Kucyi, a graduate student in Davis’ lab, recreated the painful experience with small electric shocks to volunteers’ wrists. After each zap the researchers asked how the test subjects were feeling and what they were thinking about. Some people’s thoughts wandered from the pain, while others couldn’t disengage.

Then they gave people cognitive tests while zapping them. The mind-wanderers did well. The people focused on the pain floundered.

This isn’t standard-issue daydreaming, Davis says. “Mind-wandering away from pain is different than daydreaming in general.”

Diving deeper, the researchers put 32 of the study participants in an MRI scanner to see what was going on. They found that people who were good at letting their minds wander away from pain had more nerve connections to a brain region that produces painkilling substances. The brain made that connection using a system called the default-mode network, which people typically use for thinking.

And finally, they used newer MRI technology to see how flexible people could be in responding to pain. The mind-wanderers were more flexible.

Overall, most people in the study fell somewhere in the middle, doing some mind-wandering and some focusing on pain. Davis says that suggests that for most people there is a range of pain management techniques that could work.

“People who mind-wander, they might be more able to vary their response to pain on their own,” Davis speculates. They also might be more adept at learning pain-control methods like yoga, meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy. And non-wanderers may need different forms of help.

This is preliminary science. For now, it’s probably not useful in personalizing pain treatment outside the research lab. But it marks a potential path away from a one-size-fits-all approach to pain management that often fails to connect people with treatments that help.

Source:

A Japanese iPhone could bring you the Food Smells

Have you ever wished that your iPhone could bring you the smell of coffee, curry or steak?

No? Well, there’s a gadget for that.

Japanese company Scentee has invented a spherical iPhone attachment that can squirt out aromas ranging from flowery to savory. Each scent comes in a separate cartridge, which you can change out by opening up the device. And to power it up, all you have to do is plug it into you phone’s headphone jack.

In the words of Scentee’s CEO Koki Tsubouchi: “The iPod made music portable. We want to do that for scent.”

If you’re in the mood for food smells, Scentee has an app called Hana Yakiniku, which roughly translates to “nose grilled meat,” programmed with three scents: short ribs, grilled beef and buttered potatoes.

In a promotional video, the message seems to be that the smell of meat and potatoes may be an appealing substitute for actual meat and potatoes.

The video shows a slender woman sniffing grilled beef as she chows down on plain lettuce, and a cash-strapped student happily deluded (through smell) into believing his white rice is topped with short ribs.

This marketing of imaginary meat is a bit strange, frankly. Clearly anyone who can afford this app, and an iPhone for that matter, is sufficiently nourished. And perhaps someone seriously in need of protein would not find it so amusing.

Tsubouchi insists the app is supposed to be fun, even silly. Look no further than the giant dismembered nose and promo copy describing the product as “revolutionary new deliciousness that mankind finally managed to develop after 7 million years of continuous evolution.”

Still, we were curious — could the smell of meat actually satisfy cravings for it? Smell, of course, is very closely connected to taste. According to Marcia Pelchat, sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, our tongues are able to distinguish between sweet, savory, bitter and tart. But “smell provides a lot of the variety in flavor,” she tells us.

It’s no surprise, then, that food manufactures have long beeninterested in using smell to manipulate our sense of taste. But to truly trick your mind into thinking you’re eating beef, you would have to chomp on something that at least feels like meat. “I think you need the texture and the whole context,” says Pelchat. Lettuce won’t work, but fake meat might — which means this could be a good app for vegetarians with withdrawal cravings.

You’ll be able to test it out for yourself in late November, when Scentee makes its U.S. debut. The Japanese will be able to purchase it a bit earlier — by mid-November. The device will retail at about $35, with the scent cartridges for $5 each.

Tsubouchi says his company is in talks with American food manufacturers, who are interested in developing advertisements that entice your nose as well as your eyes.

The company is also releasing a series of apps that link the scents to your phone’s alarm clock, text messages and social media alerts. So you’ll be able to wake up every morning and literally smell the roses

Source: