Research

Bearded Dragon Lizards Infect 132 With Salmonella

dragon lizard

Health officials are warning fans of lizards known as bearded dragons to keep them away from young children and use careful hygiene following a two-year, mult istate outbreak of salmonella poisoning tied to the unusual pets.

At least 132 people in 31 states have been sickened since Feb. 21, 2012, including 28 who were hospitalized. Most of the victims were children aged 5 or younger whose parents likely got the critters from pet stores, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The culprit is salmonella Cotham, a rare strain of bacteria that can cause serious illness in the very young, the very old and people with compromised immune systems.

A cluster of salmonella Cotham cases tied to pet reptiles was first reported in Wisconsin in January. Since 2012, 12 people in that state were sickened by the rare strain and 10 of them reported contact with bearded dragons, an analysis showed. Given the rarity of the strain and the outbreak in Wisconsin, CDC officials analyzed all salmonella Cotham cases in the agency’s PulseNet tracking system since 2012 and came up with the latest number.

This is just the latest salmonella outbreak involving bearded dragons. CDC officials warned in 2011 about an outbreak of salmonella that occurred when a home cook who kept pet lizards made turkey gravy that sickened 19 people at a Thanksgiving dinner.

To prevent future outbreaks, CDC officials say that children younger than 5, older adults and people with weak immune systems should not handle or touch the reptiles, or anything in the area where they live and roam.

The critters should not be allowed to roam freely, or in areas where food or drink is prepared, served or stored, including outdoor patios. Bearded dragons should never be bathed in household sinks or bathtubs, where salmonella can linger, but in a tub or pin used only for reptiles. Their cages or tanks should be cleaned outside, too.

Pet owners should use soap and water to wash their hands immediately after touching the reptiles and then thoroughly disinfect any surfaces they touch.

People who become ill after touching bearded dragons should seek medical care.

Source; NBC news

Bone marrow can cure blood disorders

bloodbagcrop

A leading specialty hospital has demonstrated that bone marrow stem cells can cure blood disorders like leukemia, thalassemia and aplastic anemia, a bone marrow failure.

“Bone marrow transplant has emerged as an effective cure for cancerous and genetic blood diseases through transfusion of its stem cells from a healthy donor to an affected patient,” Narayana Health City consultant hematologist Sharat Damodar told reporters here Tuesday.

The corporate hospital in the city’s southern suburb claims to have performed about 300 bone marrow transplants with over 80 per cent success rate.

Bone marrow can be collected from a related donor (siblings), matched unrelated donor (non-family members) and haploidentical donor (father or mother).

“As it is a challenge to find donors in India, there is need for greater awareness to donate bone marrow to needy patients,” said Damodar. A person suffers from leukemia when the bone marrow starts producing abnormal white blood cells.

“Though leukemia can be treated with radiation and chemotherapy, in case of relapse, the option is a bone marrow transplant,” he added. In case of thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder which makes less hemoglobin, the treatment option is regular blood transfusion or bone marrow transplant.

“We are partnering with Cure Thalassemia, an Italian organisation, which pioneered bone marrow transplant for thalaseemia patients,” Damador said. Aplastic anemia (bone marrow failure) occurs when the quantity of each of the three blood cell types is much lower than normal.

“Its symptoms are unexplained infections (due to fewer white blood cells), unexpected bleeding (due to fewer platelets) and fatigue (due to fewer red blood cells). Treatment includes blood transfusion, blood and marrow stem cell transplants,” he said.

With the largest bone marrow transplant facility, Narayana gets about 30 per cent of overseas patients for treating blood disorders. Founded by renowned cardiologist Devi Shetty, Narayana has 26 hospitals in 16 cities with 6,900 beds across the country.

The group’s flagship hospital here has also largest dialysis unit with tertiary care expertise in liver, kidney and heart transplants

Source: Times of India

‘Chaperone’ compounds could help treat Alzheimer’s

health-genetics-alzheimers-369588Researchers have devised a wholly new approach to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease involving the so-called retromer protein complex.

Retromer plays a vital role in neurons, steering amyloid precursor protein (APP) away from a region of the cell where APP is cleaved, creating the potentially toxic byproduct amyloid-beta, which is thought to contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s.

Using computer-based virtual screening, the researchers identified a new class of compounds, called pharmacologic chaperones that can significantly increase retromer levels and decrease amyloid-beta levels in cultured hippocampal neurons, without apparent cell toxicity.

Dagmar Ringe, PhD, Harold and Bernice Davis Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry and Chemistry, said their challenge was to find small molecules-or pharmacologic chaperones-that could bind to retromer’s weak point and stabilize the whole protein complex.

This was accomplished through computerized virtual, or in silico, screening of known chemical compounds, simulating how the compounds might dock with the retromer protein complex. (In conventional screening, compounds are physically tested to see whether they interact with the intended target, a costlier and lengthier process.)

The screening identified 100 potential retromer-stabilizing candidates, 24 of which showed particular promise. Of those, one compound, called R55, was found to significantly increase the stability of retromer when the complex was subjected to heat stress.

The researchers then looked at how R55 affected neurons of the hippocampus, a key brain structure involved in learning and memory.

More important, a subsequent experiment showed that the compound significantly increased retromer levels and decreased amyloid-beta levels in cultured neurons taken from healthy mice and from a mouse model of Alzheimer’s. The researchers are currently testing the clinical effects of R55 in the actual mouse model.

The study has been published online in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Source: zee news

Blame your genes for low tolerance of pain

DNA-double-helix-by-NHGRI

Researchers may have identified key genes linked to why some people have a higher tolerance for pain than others. Study author Tobore Onojjighofia and colleagues evaluated 2,721 people diagnosed with chronic pain for certain genes. Participants were taking prescription opioid pain medications.

The genes involved were COMT, DRD2, DRD1 and OPRK1. The participants also rated their perception of pain on a scale from zero to 10. People who rated their pain as zero were not included in the study. Low pain perception was defined as a score of one, two or three; moderate pain perception was a score of four, five or six; and high pain perception was a score of seven, eight, nine or 10.

Nine per cent of the participants had low pain perception, 46 per cent had moderate pain perception and 45 per cent had high pain perception.

The researchers found that the DRD1 gene variant was 33 per cent more prevalent in the low pain group than in the high pain group. Among people with a moderate pain perception, the COMT and OPRK variants were 25 per cent and 19 per cent more often found than in those with a high pain perception.

The DRD2 variant was 25 per cent more common among those with a high pain perception compared to people with moderate pain.

Source: Pune Mirror

Meet woman who got lab grown vagina implanted

vagina

A woman who was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome was recently implanted with a lab grown vagina and now leads a normal life.

The Mexican women who participated in the study said that she felt very fortunate because she could have a normal life reported.

She said that it is imperative to let other girls that have the same problem to know that there was a treatment and one could have a normal life.

The woman was 18-year-old when she had the procedure said that she was aware that she was the first one who got a vagina implanted.

MRKH is a syndrome where vagina is absent or underdeveloped.

Source; business standard

Infant hair reveals life inside the womb

Hairs can reveal a lot, from your personality to even drug abuse or hormonal changes. Now, add foetus growth in the womb to the hair list.

In a thrilling discovery, a team of researchers including an Indian-origin scientist have found that hair can also reveal the womb environment in which an infant was formed.

They used infant hair to examine the hormonal environment to which the foetus was exposed during development – promising to unleash a wealth of new information in the fields of neonatology, psychology social science to neurology.

“We had this ‘Aha!’ realisation that we could use hair in newborns, because it starts growing one to two months before birth,” said Christopher Coe, director of the Harlow centre for biological psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The findings raise questions about everything from the significance of birth order to stereotypical ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ behaviours in children,” Amita Kapoor, an assistant researcher at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Centre, noted.

Additionally, what happens to a developing foetus while in the womb may impact its risk for chronic disease later in life, Kapoor added.

According to researchers, hair closest to the scalp reveals the most recent information but moving down the shaft effectively transits an individual’s hormonal timeline.

For the study, researchers took small samples of hair from mother rhesus monkeys and their infants using common hair clippers. The hair was cleaned and pulverised into a fine powder using a high-speed grinder.

The hormonal signature was then read using a new mass spectrometry method. They found that cortisone, an inactive form of stress hormone cortisol, was higher in young mothers and in their babies than in hair of the older mothers and their infants.

Babies born to young mothers also had higher levels of estrone (a form of estrogen) and testosterone in their hair than did babies born to older mothers.

“Type 2 diabetes, metabolic disease, coronary artery disease and psychiatric disorders – there may be a whole host of long-term
repercussions of stress in utero,” Kapoor emphasised.  The study appeared in the journal Pediatric Research.
Source: business standard

 

Cheaper blood test to diagnose asthma

Researchers have developed a faster, cheaper and more accurate tool for diagnosing even mild cases of asthma using just a single drop of blood.

The researchers used neutrophil cell function in a clinical study to show accurate asthma diagnosis.

To directly diagnose asthma, David Beebe, a UW-Madison professor of biomedical engineering and co-author on the paper, and his team focused on the cell function of neutrophils. Neutrophils are the most abundant white blood cell in the body and generally are the first cells to migrate toward inflammation.

“Neutrophils are sort of like a dog tracking something. They sense a chemical gradient, like an odor, in the body,” Beebe says.

In other words, the human body emits chemical signals in response to inflammation or wounds and the neutrophils detect those chemical signals and migrate to the site of the wound to aid in the healing process. Researchers can track the velocity at which the neutrophil cells migrate — the chemotaxis velocity — to differentiate nonasthmatic samples from the significantly reduced chemotaxis velocity of asthmatic patients.

UW-Madison students have developed the kit-on-a-lid-assay (KOALA) microfluidic technology, which allows them to detect neutrophils using just a single drop of blood.

The KOALA diagnostic procedure uses simple lids and bases (each being a small, cheap piece of plastic), diagnosticians place a KOALA lid containing a chemical mixture onto the base containing the blood sample. That chemical mixture triggers neutrophil migration — and researchers can automatically track and analyze the neutrophil chemotaxis velocity using custom software.

The team has published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Source: Times of India

 

Degenerated organ fully restored in living animal

Scientists have made a breakthrough in regenerative medicine by fully restoring a degenerated organ in a living animal for the first time.

A team from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Regenerative Medicine, at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, reconstructed the thymus of aging mice, reported medicalnewstoday.com

The thymus is a glandular structure that functions as part of the body’s immune system by creating T cells – the type of white blood cell that is essential for fighting infection.

Located in the front of the heart, the thymus is the first organ to deteriorate as we age.

Scientists have attempted to regenerate the thymus before, using sex hormones. But using this technique, the thymus only temporarily regenerated with limited functional recovery.

In the new experiment, however, the restored thymus was fully functioning and “very similar” to the thymus of a young mouse, say the researchers.

Although the researchers have not yet ascertained whether the immune systems of the mice with a restored thymus were strengthened by the process, they do know that mice receiving this treatment began to produce more T cells.

“One of the key goals in regenerative medicine is harnessing the body’s own repair mechanisms and manipulating these in a controlled way to treat disease. This interesting study suggests that organ regeneration in a mammal can be directed by manipulation of a single protein, which is likely to have broad implications for other areas of regenerative biology,” says a senior MRC researcher.

Source: Press TV

IIT-Delhi student develops pocket sized haemoglobin metre

An innovative device developed by a student of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi could soon make examining haemoglobin and identifying anaemic cases an easy and quick process. In what could be a breakthrough in the field of biomedical sciences, Ambar Srivastava of IIT has developed a haemoglobin metre named as the TrueHb Hemometer to test haemoglobin.

TrueHBThe pocket sized haemoglobin metre is the first case of an innovation from the biomedical engineering department of IIT-Delhi actually getting productized. Developed at the IIT’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering with funding received from the Technology Development Board of the Department of Science and Technology, the device will help in early identification and dealing of anaemia cases, which is a major silent killer in India and is the underlying cause of a majority of maternal and foetal deaths in the country. The department was established in 1971 as a joint venture between IIT Delhi and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to develop healthcare technologies.

AIIMS New Delhi has already authenticated the device for its effectiveness. AIIMS tested the effectiveness and accuracy of the TrueHb in a laboratory set up and found a high level of accurate measure of the haemoglobin level.

Dr Renu Saxena, professor and head of the haematology department at AIIMS New Delhi, told India Medical Times, “Yes, we have tested the efficacy of the TrueHb Hemometer here at AIIMS and I can say it is quite an innovation. It is smart, accurate and cost effective.”

Ambar Srivastava, ?founder and managing director, Wrig Nanosystems, told India Medical Times, “I started working on the idea in September 2010. Bioelectronics has been an area of my interest and I am very passionate about it. I started thinking of this concept during my second year of B Tech, IIT Delhi. After completing my graduation and masters in B Tech, I decided to go for PhD but then I thought why not build this product and start my own company. I learnt a lot from people at IIT, especially my professors. My seniors and a couple of my friends too encouraged me a lot.”

To commercialise and bring the device to the doorstep of every healthcare centre, Srivastava established a company, named Wrig Nanosystems, to produce TrueHb Hemometers.IIT-Delhi student invents device to test haemoglobin

Srivastava said, “I started Wrig Nanosystems Pvt Ltd in 2010. Our product is based upon our patent pending technologies, is only of its kind from India and far superior in performance than others in the world. It is comparatively very affordable, pocket sized, and world class in quality. It will transform healthcare and make the decision taking process faster and accurate. This technology is ultra-convenient, weighing around 60 grams like a glucometer with just a tiny drop of blood from a pinprick on the disposable strip. It not only reads the accurate level within 45 seconds, but also stores upto 1,000 such readings. It can be charged like a mobile phone and allows up to 300 tests per charge. The CBC (complete blood count) counter is the gold standard for haemogram tests in labs. It could cost Rs 4-20 lakh, is at least twice the size of a personal computer and needs regular power supply. Though price of the new product is still to be finalized, but it is going to be much cheaper than any other device available in the market.”

“Right now we are busy finalizing the strategy for launching the first bulk of the product on pilot basis in the Delhi/NCR region,” he said.

Srivastava further said, “It was the combined efforts of people from different disciplines — Biochemistry, Micro-optics, Embedded Electronics, Computational Algorithm, Electrochemistry, and Industrial Designing. The development of such devices is highly multi-disciplinary and requires optimum balance of application of different fields in a right manner. Being a research and development organization, we are currently developing similar ultra-portable and affordable devices for all other blood testing profiles, which are expected to be innovated soon.”

He said, “We have an objective to change the entire healthcare paradigm globally. Today, a doctor writes a test and patients go to path labs for test which in turn is produced to the doctor after some days. We want to cut down that cycle entirely. Providing quick and affordable devices to doctors would cut down the need to go to the path labs, and with our devices 60-70 per cent cases would get tested at doctor’s clinic itself. This is where revolution in faster, smarter and wider healthcare delivery will begin.”

Srivastava further said, “I think doctors should open up in adopting such new technologies which may make their caregiving faster, convenient and affordable. They should be open to the changes that technology is bringing to make healthcare delivery system smarter. For other players that are involved in healthcare equipment research and manufacturing, I believe it is our moral duty to ensure that the deepest corner of the world should have access to our services. If a technology cannot benefit the majority, then the fundamental definition of an innovation loses its ground.”

Handheld devices are an upcoming wave in healthcare and are expected to revolutionize the entire healthcare system in the future. Soon, common people will be able to perform self-tests conveniently in their homes, record and maintain their medical data and monitor their health regularly, provided such innovations are researched and commercialized with domestic funding and support. Once such devices are made available, the average life expectancy of individuals can potentially be increased by a minimum 10-15 years through effective regular home health monitoring.

Source: India Medical Times

Abnormal lipid levels during brain development ups autism risk

Researchers have found that abnormal levels of lipid molecules in the brain could affect the interaction between two key neural pathways in early prenatal brain development, which can trigger autism.

According to the researchers, environmental causes such as exposure to chemicals in some cosmetics and common over-the-counter medication can affect the levels of these lipids.

Professor Dorota Crawford in the Faculty of Health and a member of the York Autism Alliance Research Group said that they have found that the abnormal level of a lipid molecule called Prostaglandin E2 in the brain can affect the function of Wnt proteins. It is important because this can change the course of early embryonic development.

Lead researcher and York U doctoral student Christine Wong adds using real-time imaging microscopy, they determined that higher levels of PGE2 can change Wnt-dependent behaviour of neural stem cells by increasing cell migration or proliferation.

Wong said that as a result, this could affect how the brain is organized and wired. Moreover, we found that an elevated level of PGE2 can increase expression of Wnt-regulated genes — Ctnnb1, Ptgs2, Ccnd1, and Mmp9.

The study has been published at journal Cell Communication and Signaling.

source: dna analysis