Health A-Z

Heavy drinking in middle age may speed men’s mental decline

Middle-aged men who drink heavily show declines in memory, attention and reasoning skills up to six years sooner than those drinking less alcohol, new research suggests.

European scientists found that men drinking 2.5 or more alcoholic beverages daily at midlife were more likely to experience more rapid mental losses over the next decade than light or moderate drinkers.

Heavy drinking’s effects on women could not be accurately assessed because far fewer middle-aged females participated in the research, the study authors said.

“Heavy alcohol consumption is known to be detrimental for health, so the results were not surprising . . . they just add that [it’s] also detrimental for the brain and the effects can be observed as [early] as 55 years old,” said study author Severine Sabia. “There is no need to be an alcoholic to see a detrimental effect of heavy alcohol consumption on cognition [thinking skills].”

Sabia is a research associate in the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London. The study was published online Jan. 15 in the journal Neurology.

Scant research has examined the impact of alcohol consumption on brain aging before old age, according to study documents. The new study, however, included data from more than 5,000 men and 2,000 women at midlife.

Participants’ alcohol consumption was assessed three times in the 10 years before the first of three tests of memory and executive function, which deals with attention and reasoning skills needed in achieving goals. The first test was taken when participants were an average age of 56.

No differences were found in memory and executive function decline between men who didn’t drink alcohol and those who were light or moderate drinkers, consuming up to two servings of beer, wine or liquor each day. Heavy drinkers exhibited mental declines between 1.5 and 6 years faster than those drinking less.

Although the study found an association between heavy drinking in men and earlier decline in mental function, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

“We have lots of clinical experience to suggest that heavy drinking can have adverse effects on cognition. But what was new about this study, at least in men, was that it didn’t seem that light or moderate drinking” was more harmful than not drinking alcohol at all, said Dr. Marc Gordon, chief of neurology at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., who was not involved in the research.

“A relative strength of this study was that it looked at drinking at much younger ages than waiting until participants were elderly,” added Gordon, also an Alzheimer’s disease researcher at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y. “And nothing in this study [contradicts the idea] that having one drink a day is OK.”

Sabia agreed, saying the results echo previous studies and suggest that moderate alcohol consumption is not likely to harm people’s memory and executive function.

Source: web md

 

FDA approves Mental Disability Blood Test for Infants

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday cleared a first-of-a-kind blood test that can help diagnose mental disabilities in babies by analyzing their genetic code.

The laboratory test from Affymetrix detects variations in patients’ chromosomes that are linked to Down syndrome, DiGeorge syndrome and other developmental disorders. About 2 to 3 percent of U.S. children have some sort of intellectual disability, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The test, known as the CytoScan Dx Assay, is designed to help doctors diagnose children’s disabilities earlier and get them appropriate care and support. It is not intended for prenatal screening or for predicting other genetically acquired diseases and conditions, such as cancer.

While there are already genetic tests used to detect conditions like Down’s syndrome, doctors usually have to order them individually and they can take several days to develop. Pediatricians said Friday that Affymetrix’s test should offer a faster, more comprehensive screening approach. Dr. Annemarie Stroustrup stressed that such tests are generally only used after children exhibit certain physical or behavioral signs that suggest a disorder.

“When there’s something about the child that strikes us as unusual or pointing to a potential genetic disease, that’s when we would use this testing,” said Stroustrup, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “This is not a screening test to be done on all newborns to predict how they are going to do in school when they are 5.”

The technology behind Affymetrix’s test has already been used for several years to screen fetuses for potentially debilitating diseases. Known as microarray analysis, the technique involves a high-powered computer scanning a gene chip of the patient’s DNA for slight chromosome imbalances. Older techniques involve scientists looking at chromosomes under a microscope for major irregularities.

The FDA said it approved the new test based on studies showing it accurately analyzes a patient’s entire genome and can accurately spot variations associated with intellectual disabilities.

Currently hospitals in all 50 states are required to screen newborns for at least 29 disorders that can be detected though laboratory testing, including sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis. Generally those tests pickup irregularities in metabolism, not genetic variations. The mandatory screening program, begun a half-century ago, is considered one of the nation’s most successful public health programs.

Affymetrix Inc. is based in Santa Clara, Calif. Shares of the company declined 22 cents to close at $9.26 in trading.

Source: ABC news

9 foods that boost metabolism naturally

Your metabolism is partly ruled by genetics, but you can rev it up naturally by eating right. Fill up on the following nine foods to increase your body’s fat-burning power.

Egg whites

Egg whites are rich in branched-chain amino acids, which keep your metabolism stoked, says Chicago nutritionist David Grotto. Eggs are also loaded with protein and vitamin D.

Lean meat

Lean meat is full of iron; deficiencies in the mineral can slow metabolism. Eat three to four daily servings of iron-rich foods, such as chicken or fortified cereal.

Water

If you’re even mildly dehydrated, your metabolism may slow down, says Dr. Scott Isaacs, clinical instructor of medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. Tip: Drink water cold, which forces your body to use more calories to warm it up.

Chili peppers

Chili peppers contain capsaicin, a chemical compound that can kick metabolism into higher gear, Isaacs says. He suggests adding a tablespoon of chopped chili peppers to a meal once a day. Chili peppers are also an unexpected source of vitamin C.

Coffee

A study published in Physiology & Behavior found that the average metabolic rate of people who drank caffeinated coffee was 16% higher than that of those who drank decaf.
Green tea

The brew contains a plant compound called EGCG, which promotes fat-burning, research suggests.

Milk

Studies conducted by Michael Zemel, former director of The Nutrition Institute at the University of Tennessee, suggest that consuming calcium may help your body metabolize fat more efficiently.

Whole grains

Whole grains help your body burn more fat because they take extra effort to break down than processed grains, like white bread and pasta. Whole foods that are rich in fiber, like brown rice and oatmeal are your best bets.

Lentils

About 20% of women are iron deficient, which is bad news for your waistline — your body can’t work as efficiently to burn calories when it’s missing what it needs to work properly. One cup of lentils provides 35% of your daily iron needs.

 

Prawns Show Promise in parasite Control

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Reintroducing prawns to lakes and rivers in which they have been partially or fully lost may be a sustainable way of controlling the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, which kills more than 200,000 people every year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, says a study.

Researchers have found some native prawns to be voracious predators of the freshwater snails that transmit schistosomiasis parasites and so could be used as a biological control, they report in a study in press in Acta Tropica.

Field tests are under way in Senegal, and researchers suggest that farming the edible prawns could help local populations cut disease while also providing an additional source of income.

“Prawns may offer a simple and affordable transmission control solution in rural poor communities where few alternatives exist and drug treatment is failing to achieve long-term disease reductions,” the study says.

People get infected from contact with water containing schistosomiasis parasites, which are released by infected snails.

Although people who carry schistosomiasis can be treated with the drug praziquantel, reinfection from fresh exposure to infested waters hampers disease control and eradication.

In laboratory experiments, researchers based in the United States set out to measure the rate at which prawns eat uninfected snails. They found that they consume an average of 12 per cent of their body weight in snails each day.

The researchers also found that young prawns that are still growing are more efficient at controlling snail numbers than large, fully-grown prawns. The larger prawns ate more snails but the smaller ones were more efficient as they ate more snails per gram of body weight and fed on snail eggs and hatchlings, too, the study shows.

These results support the idea of the aquaculture of native prawns, and their reintroduction to freshwater bodies where their numbers have fallen, the authors say.

When prawns are too small to be sold at market they are “high-efficiency snail killers”, says Susanne H. Sokolow, lead author of the study and a researcher at Stanford University in California. “When they grow and their efficiency declines, we can harvest them.”

Source: All Africa

 

NHL injuries cost an estimated $218M US a year

About half of NHL players suffer an injury such as a concussion that benches them, costing the league an estimated $218 million in lost time, say Canadian doctors who want arenas to be safer workplaces.

About 63 per cent of National Hockey League players missed at least one game because of an injury over three seasons between 2009 and 2012, researchers said in Monday’s issue of the British Medical Journal’s Injury Prevention.

The injuries added up to a total salary cost of about $218 million US a year.

“While league owners and management are wary of making changes to the game to decrease aggression that could in turn affect profits, they must also consider the costs of injuries,” Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and his co-authors concluded.

“It is hoped that consideration of these costs will provide sufficient motivation for professional sports leagues like the NHL to consider taking further action to prevent player injuries.”

Cusimano is particularly concerned about concussions, which he said is related to violent acts in 88 per cent of cases.
The researchers pegged salary loss to concussions at $42.8 million a year. After head/neck injuries, leg and foot injuries were the most common injury in the sample, accounting for 30 per cent of the total cost and about $68.2 million.

They estimated games lost to concussions cost insurance companies $7.2 million a year and teams $15 million a year. Insurance companies pick up part of the salary tab for players with long-term injuries.

Head shot rule changes enough?

In 2010, the NHL enacted Rule 48, banning blindside hits to the head. The following season, the rule was expanded to include targeted head shots from any direction.

Both of these seasons were included in the study. Cusimano said the findings show the need for stiffer penalties, such as red cards in soccer that mean losing a player for the game.

The full costs of injuries are greater than estimated if the costs of treatment, personal suffering, potential later lost income and future medical care are considered.

At a practice, some Toronto Maple Leafs players said there’s not much more that the league can do.

“I think it’s always going to be a dangerous game,” said forward Joffrey Lupul. “The league is doing a great job taking some of the high hits away and the checking from behind and those are two cases where there’s been a lot of injuries.”

Fellow forward James van Riemsdyk said he’s seen improvements over the last couple of years.

“Instead of hitting him in the head, you’re making more of an effort to hit in a place where you’re not going to basically kill him,” he said.

A concussion lawsuit against the NHL originally launched by 10 former players argues the league did not do enough to protect them from concussions. The NHL has said it intends to defend it case.

In August 2013, the National Football League agreed to pay nearly $800 million US to settle lawsuits from thousands of former players over concussion-related brain injuries.

The NHL did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study’s findings from CBC News.

Source: CBC news

 

Hesperia woman gives birth to 15-pound baby

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A woman from Hesperia delivered what could be one of the largest babies born in the United States in 2014

Vanessa Cervantez, 28, gave birth to Andrew Jacob, who weighed in at a whopping 15 pounds, 2 ounces, by an emergency cesarean section. He was 24 inches long.

“I couldn’t even believe it,” Cervantez said by phone Saturday. “They had to double check because I didn’t believe them; I thought the machine was broken.”

Cervantez said that doctors told her it was the largest baby they had ever delivered at Desert Valley.

“None of the doctors have ever delivered or heard of a baby being born that big here,” Cervantez said. “My sister’s been doing research and she doesn’t think a baby weighing 15 pounds has ever been born in California.”

According to media reports, the largest baby born in the United States in 2013 reportedly weighed 14 pounds and was delivered in Utah. Guinness World Records show that Ann Bates of Canada gave birth to the biggest newborn, in 1879, when her baby weighed in at 23 pounds, 12 ounces.

Cervantez said she is 5’1” and heavyset, and was 38 weeks along at the baby’s birth. She went in for a routine pregnancy stress test on Thursday when doctors discovered decreased fetal movement. That is when the decision was made to conduct a C-section the same day, Cervantez said. The mother of three said she was expecting a large baby, but wasn’t prepared for one weighing 15 pounds.

“My other ones have also been big,” Cervantez said. “My son was 10 pounds, 10 ounces and my daughter was 9 pounds, 14 ounces.”

Due to patient confidentiality laws, a nurse at Desert Valley in the labor and delivery department said she couldn’t go on record about the details of the birth. However, she said the mother has documentation confirming the baby’s weight.

Baby Andrew was immediately sent by air flight to Loma Linda Children’s Hospital following his birth, Cervantez said. She said she hadn’t been able to hold him yet and was waiting to be discharged from the hospital as of Saturday afternoon.

“He’s having trouble breathing on his own,” Cervantez said, “that’s what they’re monitoring him for right now.”

Daniel Cervantez, 29, is the baby’s father and was spending time with him at the hospital in Loma Linda on Saturday, Vanessa Cervantez said. Briana Pastorino, a spokeswoman for Loma Linda, confirmed that a baby by the name of Andrew Cervantez was in the neonatal intensive care unit, but she said she couldn’t release more information about the patient.

Source: VVDaily Press

How vitamin D controls blood pressure

A research team has decrypted the one of the biological mechanisms about Vitamin D deficiency triggering a range of diseases.

Vitamin D regulates the elasticity of blood vessels and thus also affects blood pressure amplitude.

The two primary authors, molecular biologist Olena Andrukhova and medical doctor Svetlana Slavic, of the Institute of Physiology, Pathophysiology and Biophysics at the Vetmeduni Vienna, found that prolonged vitamin D deficiency can stiffen blood vessels.

Examining the aorta, an elastic blood vessel that expands with each pulse of blood and then constricts again, the researchers showed that vitamin D deficiency makes the vessel less flexible.

Andrukhova explained that Vitamin D enhances the production of the enzyme eNOS (endothelial nitric oxide synthase) in the inner layer of blood vessels, the endothelium. This is critical for the regulation of blood pressure.

She said that the enzyme produces a molecule called nitric oxide (NO), an important factor for the relaxation of smooth muscles in the blood vessels.

Andrukhova explained added that when too little NO is formed, the vessels become less flexible, which ultimately leads to higher blood pressure which can give rise to other circulatory diseases, asserting that indirectly, vitamin D controls blood pressure.

The results have been published in the journal Molecular Endocrinology.

Source: sify

Fish oil ‘cures’ brain damaged kid

A teenager, who had severe brain damage after a brutal hit-and-run has made miraculous recovery due to consumption of fish oil.

Grant Virgin, who suffered from a torn aorta, a traumatic brain injury, compound bone fractures and spinal fracture after being struck by a car, was told by the doctors that he wouldn’t be alive by next morning, News.com.au reported.

However, the boy’s family vowed to save their kid, who underwent multiple surgeries remained in a coma with severe brain damage, and rubbed progesterone cream on their son, and soon saw him waking up and speaking simple words and phrases.

The Virgins thought about giving their son fish oil, after learning that the brain’s cell wall is partly comprised of the same omega-3 fatty acids, and put him on a regimen of 20-gram-per-day.

The teenager is still a long way from making a full recovery, but the family claimed that he is progressing by the day.

Source: Business standard

FDA approves post-natal test to help diagnose developmental delays

The US Food and Drug Administration has authorized for marketing the Affymetrix CytoScan Dx Assay, which can detect chromosomal variations that may be responsible for a child’s developmental delay or intellectual disability. Based on a blood sample, the test can analyse the entire genome at one time and detect large and small chromosomal changes.

According to the National Institutes of Health and the American Academy of Paediatrics, two to three per cent of children in the United States have some form of intellectual disability. Many intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome and DiGeorge syndrome, are associated with chromosomal variations.

“This new tool may help in the identification of possible causes of a child’s developmental delay or intellectual disability, allowing healthcare providers and parents to intervene with appropriate care and support for the child,” said Alberto Gutierrez, director of the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health in the FDA’s Centre for Devices and Radiological Health. “The FDA’s review of the test provides clinical laboratories with information about the expected performance of the device and the quality of the results.”

The FDA reviewed the Affymetrix CytoScan Dx Assay through its de novo classification process, a regulatory pathway for some novel low-moderate-risk medical devices.

For the de novo petition, the FDA’s review of the CytoScan Dx Assay included an analytical evaluation of the test’s ability to accurately detect numerous chromosomal variations of different types, sizes, and genome locations when compared to several analytically validated test methods. The FDA found that the CytoScan Dx Assay could analyse a patient’s entire genome and adequately detect chromosome variations in regions of the genome associated with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Additionally, the agency’s review included a study that compared the performance of the CytoScan Dx Assay to tests that are commonly used for detecting chromosomal variations associated with a developmental delay or intellectual disability. A comparison of test results from 960 blood specimens showed the CytoScan Dx had improved ability over commonly used tests, including karyotyping and FISH chromosomal tests, to detect certain chromosomal abnormalities.

This device should not be used for stand-alone diagnostic purposes, pre-implantation or prenatal testing or screening, population screening, or for the detection of, or screening for acquired or genetic aberrations occurring after birth, such as cancer. The test results should only be used in conjunction with other clinical and diagnostic findings, consistent with professional standards of practice, including confirmation by alternative methods, evaluation of parental samples, clinical genetic evaluation, and counselling as appropriate, according to a statement issued by the FDA.

Interpretation of test results is intended to be performed only by healthcare professionals who are board certified in clinical cytogenetics or molecular genetics, the statement said.

Affymetrix CytoScan Dx Assay is manufactured by Affymetrix, Inc, located in Santa Clara, California.

Source: India Medical Times

Smoking during pregnancy could make your baby gay

Smoking and drinking during pregnancy could make your baby gay and stupid, if the claims of a neuroscientist are to be believed.

A controversial study has found that a pregnant woman’s lifestyle could influence their child’s IQ or sexuality.

Dr Dick Swaab – professor of neurobiology at Amsterdam University – claims that drinking, taking drugs or living in a area with high pollution levels have an impact on the development of foetuses and could affect children later in life.

Taking synthetic hormones and smoking while pregnant can increase the chances of girls becoming lesbian or bisexual, while drinking and drug-taking could lower a child’s IQ, Dr Swaab suggests.

And the more older brothers a boy has, the more it is thought to increase his chance of being gay, it is reported. The study claims this could be because the mother’s immune system develops stronger responses to male hormones with each son that is born.

Dr Swaab also believes living in an area of high pollution is linked with an increased risk of autism.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘Pre-birth exposure to both nicotine and amphetamines increases the chance of lesbian daughters.

‘Pregnant women suffering from stress are also more likely to have homosexual children of both genders because their raised level of the stress hormone cortisol affects the production of foetal sex hormones.’

He added: ‘In women who drink a lot, cells that were meant to migrate across the foetal brain can end up leaving the brain altogether.’

However, Dr Swaab recognised lifestyle factors were a small influence and added that genetics play the most important role in child development.

Source: Metro News