Health News

Do your muscles hurt more when it’s cold outside?

Cold weather causes muscles to lose more heat and contract, causing tightness throughout the body. Joints get tighter, muscles can lose their range of motion and nerves can more easily be pinched, according to Los Angeles-based orthopedic physical therapist Vivian Eisenstadt.

Thanks to the effects of colder temps, muscles are forced to work much harder to complete the same tasks they complete easily in milder weather. This causes more damage to the muscle tissue and can result in increased soreness. To counteract the damage, be sure to warm up for a little longer than usual.

“It is normal to feel muscle soreness for a few days after exercise, especially if it is a different type of activity or at a more intense level than your body is used to,” says Amy McDowell, a physical therapist and Pilates instructor from ARC Physical Therapy in Chicago.

“If you feel more sore in the winter after the same level of exercise than you do the rest of the year, it could be that your body needs a longer warm-up period.”
Try beginning your workout with light cardio exercises, like brisk walking. This will raise your core temperature and ensure that oxygen and blood are flowing throughout your body.

A basic rule of thumb is that you should warm up for 10 minutes when the temperature is between 35 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit. For each 10-degree temperature drop below 35, extend your warm-up by five minutes.

Some bodyweight exercises — like push-ups, dips, squats, lunges and bicycle crunches — are ideal for getting your blood flowing after your warm-up walk, Mentore says. Then, after those exercises, stretch only the tightest muscle groups in your body; for most people, these groups include the hamstrings, quadriceps, chest and shoulders.

Follow your warm-up with a cool-down that takes about the same amount of time. However, in addition to stretching the body’s tightest muscle groups, also focus on other areas like the back, arms and calves. “This will prevent muscle soreness and enhance your overall performance during the winter,” Mentore says.

Source: upwave

Oral insulin capsule trial a success, company says

Israel’s Oramed, which is racing Novo Nordisk of Denmark to develop the world’s first insulin pill, moved a step closer to its goal on Thursday by announcing successful results from a small mid-stage test.

The oral drug delivery specialist said its insulin capsule had met all primary and secondary endpoints in a Phase IIa clinical trial and it now plans to launch a larger mid-stage study in the third quarter.

Shares in the Nasdaq-listed company opened 10 percent higher at $28.50 on the news. The stock has surged from around $4 since the end of 2012 on rising hopes for its insulin pill.

The concept of oral insulin as a way to relieve diabetics of several daily injections has been around since the 1930s, but making it a reality is extremely difficult because insulin is destroyed by enzymes in the digestive system.

Oramed believes that it has now found a solution to allow enough insulin to survive the onslaught of digestive juices to still do some good.

At least 90 percent of the more than 382 million diabetes sufferers worldwide are in the type 2 category, according to the International Diabetes Foundation, which expects the number of diabetes patients to near 600 million by 2035.

Consensus analyst forecasts suggest that the overall diabetes drug market, worth $37 billion a year at present, will reach more than $57 billion by 2018, according to Thomson Reuters Pharma.

Oral insulin could make it easier for sufferers to start early treatment, slow progression of the disease and delay the need for injections, Oramed said. Unlike injections, the ingested form passes first into the liver, which regulates the secretion of insulin into the bloodstream.

The new year-long Phase IIb study in the United States will study 150 type 2 diabetes patients and mainly test for the drug’s effectiveness, Chief Executive Nadav Kidron told Reuters after the company issued results of the Phase IIa trial.

During the Phase IIa trial, conducted under a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug protocol, 30 patients with type 2 diabetes entered an in-patient setting for one week.

“The FDA wanted us to show one thing – that it was safe so they will let us do a IIb trial,” Kidron said.

While Oramed was not checking for efficacy, Kidron said the IIa trial revealed that it was effective, though the sample size was too small for FDA purposes.

Oramed will also need to conduct a final large-scale Phase III trial before the drug is licensed for sale, so the capsule is still years away from hitting the market.

The company is, however, ahead of Novo Nordisk, which has yet to start Phase II testing.

Oramed is hoping to partner with large pharmaceutical firms for development and sales of the drug. But Kidron said that only preliminary discussions have taken place so far.

The company also plans to initiate a Phase IIa FDA study for type 1 diabetes in the near term.

The global expense for diabetes is about $500 billion and an oral version could bring a large drop in costs.

Oramed noted that the pill would not eliminate the eventual need for injections but could delay the shift to needles by many years.

Source: Yahoo news

Sharing your stress can reduce fears, study shows

A new study from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles suggests stress isn’t something you should keep to yourself.

Research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests sharing your stress with someone who is having a similar emotional reaction may reduce stress levels more than sharing with someone who is not experiencing similar stress levels.

In the study, researchers measured participants’ emotional states, levels of the stress hormone cortisol and perception of threat when faced with the task of preparing and giving a videotaped speech. The 52 female undergraduate participants were divided into pairs and encouraged to discuss how they felt about the situation before giving their speeches.

Researchers found that when the pairs were in a similar emotional state, it helped buffer each individual against high levels of stress.

Their findings could be useful for people experiencing stress at work.

“For instance, when you’re putting together an important presentation or working on a high-stakes project, these are situations that can be threatening and you may experience heightened stress,” study leader Sarah Townsend, assistant professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business, told Medical News Today. “But talking with a colleague who shares your emotional state can help decrease this stress.”

Source; Fox news

China: Three infected with bird flu virus, one dead

A Chinese man has died of H7N9 bird flu and two other members of his family were infected with the deadly virus, raising concerns about the prospect of human-to-human transmission of disease.

Chinese health authorities said a family of three was infected with H7N9 bird flu in east China’s Zhejiang, the province worst-affected by the current spike in cases.

A 49-year-old man in Hangzhou city was on January 20 confirmed to have been infected with the virus. His wife and daughter, who accompanied him to the hospital, were later also confirmed infected.

The man has died while his daughter is in a serious condition and his wife is stable, local officials said. Experts have reached no firm conclusion on how the virus spread between the family members.

They all may have had contact with poultry, or the father may have transmitted the flu to his wife and daughter, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Even if the case is confirmed as person-to-person transmission, there is no need to panic, said Li Lanjuan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a specialist in H7N9 prevention.

“So far there have not been any cases in which one person transmits the flu to another, and the latter transmits the virus to a third person,” said Li. In this year’s epidemic, transmission has been limited to a second person, who does not transmit the virus to a third. H7N9 is not likely to be spread in schools, workplaces or at gatherings, said Chen Zhiping, deputy head of the provincial disease control and prevention centre.

China has already sounded a nation-wide alert like last year, when the virus first struck, leaving 45 dead. Three new human H7N9 cases were reported in Zhejiang yesterday, bringing the number of infections in the province this year to 56. All three are in a critical condition. In neighbouring Fujian province, a two-year-old child tested positive for bird flu, according to the provincial health commission. The patient is now recovering.

South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region also reported one new case yesterday. The National Health and Family Planning Commission said yesterday that live poultry markets would close if a case of H7N9 was detected. Chicken has been a required dish on Chinese dining tables for centuries during Spring Festival, which begins on Friday.

Source: firstpost

Testosterone no hope for early menopause

Bringing testosterone levels up to normal for women who lose ovarian function owing to early natural menopause or hysterectomy is of no good, shows research.

Before age 40, ovaries stop functioning in about 1 percent of women without some obvious genetic abnormality to blame, bringing on an early menopause.

Called ‘primary ovarian insufficiency’ or POI, the condition can spell not only infertility and other physical problems but also depression and decreased quality of life.

Adding back lost estrogen and progesterone helps.

But ovaries normally produce testosterone too which has mental and physical effects.

According to a study by the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, adding testosterone for women who lose ovarian function have not yielded consistent results.

In the controlled study, 61 women used placebo patches and 67 women used patches that delivered 150 micrograms of testosterone a day.

After 12 months, testosterone levels were back up to normal for the women who got the treatment.

The researchers saw no detrimental effects of testosterone but they found no significant improvement either in measurements of quality of life, self esteem and mood compared with placebo, said the study published in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).

“Bringing testosterone back to normal doesn’t help these aspects of life, suggesting that it’s something other than testosterone that plays a role in mood problems for women with POI,” said researchers.

“This study makes an important contribution toward understanding what testosterone can and cannot do,” added NAMS executive director Margery Gass.

Source: Times of India

Study confirms ‘he hormone’ link to heart attacks

Heavily promoted male hormone products may be sending men flocking to stores, but their next stop may be the emergency room, according to a new study published Wednesday.

The research confirms earlier studies that show men with heart disease double their risk of heart attack soon after they start using testosterone gels or other supplements. And testosterone doubled the risk in men over 65 with or without heart disease.

“Patients and their physicians should discuss the risk of heart attacks when considering testosterone therapy,” said Sander Greenland, a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, who led the study.

It’s a similar pattern to women using hormone replacement therapy after menopause — doctors used to think it lowered the risk of heart attacks and cancer, but it in fact has the opposite effect.

The study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, confirms the results of several smaller studies. One published in November found that the use of “low T” therapy boosted the risk of serious problems including heart attack, stroke and death in men who already had heart trouble and who had low testosterone.

And another one released in December found that men with higher levels of the male hormone are more likely to have weak or no response to a flu vaccine, meaning that their bodies don’t mount a strong defense.

Nonetheless, the testosterone products are very heavily marketed to older men. And an influential essay in the New York Times Magazine, titled “The He Hormone,” brought even more attention to the idea of “man-opause”.

Greenland’s team, along with experts at the National Cancer Institute and Consolidated Research, Inc., looked at the records of more than 55,000 men. Heart attack rates more than doubled in men over 65 in the 90 days after getting a testosterone prescription, and it more than tripled for men 75 or older.

To be sure, they compared the men getting testosterone to those getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs, as the two groups are similar in many ways. The ED drugs, which include brands such as Viagra and Cialis, only very slightly raised the risk of heart attack.

“Taken together, the evidence supports an association between testosterone therapy and risk of serious, adverse cardiovascular-related events — including non-fatal myocardial infarction (heart attack) — in men,” they concluded.

Source: NBC news

Peanut allergy treatment ‘a success’

Doctors say a potential treatment for peanut allergy has transformed the lives of children taking part in a large clinical trial.

The 85 children had to eat peanut protein every day – initially in small doses, but ramped up during the study.

The findings, published in the Lancet, suggest 84% of allergic children could eat the equivalent of five peanuts a day after six months.

Experts have warned that the therapy is not yet ready for widespread use.

Peanuts are the most common cause of fatal allergic reactions to food.

There is no treatment so the only option for patients is to avoid them completely, leading to a lifetime of checking every food label before a meal.

The trial, at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, tried to train the children’s immune systems to tolerate peanut protein.

Every day they were given a peanut protein powder – starting off on a dose equivalent to one 70th of a peanut.

The theory was that patients started at the extremely low dose, well below the threshold for an allergic response.

Once a fortnight the dose was increased while the children were in hospital, in case there was an reaction, and then they continued taking the higher dose at home.

The majority of patients learned to tolerate the peanut.

Lena Barden, 11, from Histon in Cambridgeshire, said: “It meant a trip to the hospital every two weeks.

“A year later I could eat five whole peanuts with no reaction at all.

“The trial has been an experience and adventure that has changed my life and I’ve had so much fun, but I still hate peanuts!”

‘Dramatic transformation’
One of the researchers, Dr Andrew Clark, told the BBC: “It really transformed their lives dramatically; this really comes across during the trial.

“It’s a potential treatment and the next step is to make it available to patients, but there will be significant costs in providing the treatment – in the specialist centres and staff and producing the peanut to a sufficiently high standard.”

Fellow researcher Dr Pamela Ewan added: “This large study is the first of its kind in the world to have had such a positive outcome, and is an important advance in peanut allergy research.”

But she said further studies would be needed and that people should not try this on their own as this “should only be done by medical professionals in specialist settings”.

The research has been broadly welcomed by other researchers in the field, but some concerns about how any therapy could be introduced have been raised.

Caution
Prof Gideon Lack, who is running a peanut allergy trial at the Evelina Children’s Hospital in London, told the BBC: “This is a really important research step in trying to improve our management of peanut allergy, but is not yet ready for use in clinical practice.

“We need a proper risk assessment needs to be done to ensure we will not make life more dangerous for these children.

He warned that 60% of people with a peanut allergy were also allergic to other nuts so a carefree lifestyle would rarely be an option.

Prof Barry Kay, from the department of allergy and clinical immunology at Imperial College London, said: “The real issues that still remain include how long the results will last, and whether the positive effects might lead affected individuals to have a false sense of security.

“Another issue to address is whether there will be long term side-effects of repeated peanut exposure even where full allergic reaction does not occur, such as inflammation of the oesophagus.

“So, this study shows encouraging results that add to the current literature, but more studies are needed to pin down these issues before the current advice to peanut allergy sufferers, which is to avoid eating peanuts, is changed.”

Maureen Jenkins, director of clinical services at Allergy UK, said: “The fantastic results of this study exceed expectation.

“Peanut allergy is a particularly frightening food allergy, causing constant anxiety of a reaction from peanut traces.

Source: BBC news

New method makes stem cells in about 30 minutes, scientists report

In a feat that experts say is a significant advance for regenerative medicine, scientists have discovered a surprisingly simple method for creating personalized stem cells that doesn’t involve human embryos or tinkering with DNA.

Two studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature describe a novel procedure for “reprogramming” the blood cells of newborn mice by soaking the cells in a mildly acidic solution for 30 minutes. This near-fatal shock caused the cells to become pluripotent, or capable of growing into any type of cell in the body.

When the reprogrammed cells were tagged and injected into a developing mouse, they multiplied and grew into heart, bone, brain and other organs, the scientists found.
“It was really surprising to see that such a remarkable transformation could be triggered simply by stimuli from outside of the cell,” said lead study author Haruko Obokata, a biochemistry researcher at the RIKEN research institute in Japan. “Very surprising.”

The simplicity of the technique, which Obokata and her colleagues dubbed stimulus triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, caught many experts off-guard.
“So you mistreat cells under the right conditions and they assume a different state of differentiation? It’s remarkable,” said Rudolf Jaenisch, a pioneering stem cell researcher at MIT who was not involved in the study. “Let’s see whether it works in human cells, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.”

Obokata said that researchers had already begun experiments on human cells, but offered no details.

Due to their Zelig-like ability to form any number of specialized cells, pluripotent stem cells are considered the basic building blocks of biology. Scientists are working on ways to use them to repair severed spinal cords, replace diseased organs, and treat conditions as varied as diabetes, blindness and muscular dystrophy.

By using stem cells spawned from the patient’s own cells, replacement tissues would stand less of a chance of being attacked by the patient’s own immune system, researchers say. That would spare patients the need to undergo a lifetime regimen of dangerous, immune-suppressing drugs.

But progress toward these lofty goals has been slow, due in part to the challenges of current stem cell production methods. The practice of harvesting stem cells from human embryos makes many people uncomfortable, and some religious groups have pressed for limits or bans on their use. Even scientists who want to study them say they may not be practical for medical therapies because they could be rejected by a patient’s body.

Another approach is to rewind a patient’s own mature cells to a pluripotent state. Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, the first person to make these induced pluripotent stem cells, won a Nobel Prize for this work in 2012. However, the reprogramming process converts only about 1% of the cells into iPS cells, and questions remain about their long-term stability and safety.

The STAP method presents a simpler, cheaper and faster method of producing stem cells, said Chris Mason, a professor of regenerative medicine bioprocessing at University College London.

“How much easier can it possibly get,” Mason told the Science Media Centre, an English organization that promotes scientific understanding on controversial subjects.
“If it works in man, this could be the game changer that ultimately makes a wide range of cell therapies available using the patient’s own cells as starting material,” he said. “The age of personalized medicine would have finally arrived.”

The STAP approach was inspired by observations of plant cells that changed character when they were exposed to environmental stress, according to the research team from RIKEN and Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Obokata and her colleagues set about “stressing” mouse blood cells in a variety of ways to see if they would change. They exposed them to heat, deprived them of nutrition and repeatedly poured them through narrow glass pipes.

The method they ultimately published involved placing the cells in an acid solution for 30 minutes and then spinning them in a centrifuge for five minutes. The process converted 7% to 9% of the original cells into STAP cells, Obokata said.

To see whether the cells had been reprogrammed, researchers engineered the mice with a gene that would cause their cells to glow a fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if they became pluripotent. After torturing the blood cells, they began to glow after three days and appeared to peak at seven days, suggesting that they had become pluripotent in just a week’s time. The researchers bolstered the cells’ ability to proliferate by treating them with hormones and an immune cell secretion called leukemia inhibitory factor.

To fully prove that they had become pluripotent, the STAP cells were injected into normal mouse embryos. The resulting offspring, called a chimera, were a mix of regular cells and glowing STAP cells.

Andrew McMahon, director of USC’s Eli and Edyth Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine, said the creation of a chimera was critical to proving that blood cells had changed in a fundamental way.

“That’s the most rigorous [test] you could possibly do,” said McMahon, who was not involved in the study. It shows that the STAP cells can make every type of cell in the embryo and that they “can organize in a normal-looking way, so that what comes out is a normal looking fetus.”

McMahon said the study was also surprising in that it showed that mature cells could be reprogrammed without having to divide.

“That’s why the change is so rapid, because the cells don’t have to undergo division for this to occur,” he said. “It’s a really interesting and novel finding.”

Yamanaka, who was not involved in the STAP study, said the research would undoubtedly help scientists understand the basic biology of cellular reprogramming.

“The findings are important,” said Yamanaka, who directs Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research.

The reasons why stress causes cells to drastically alter their function remains a mystery, Obokata and her colleagues said.

She declined to say whether the researchers were seeking a patent on the STAP procedure.

Source: latimes

Diabetes and Pregnancy are a Dangerous Mix

Recently, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force published recommendations in the Annals of Internal Medicine — a widely-respected, peer-reviewed journal — that strongly advise all pregnant women be screened for gestational diabetes, a test which many physicians (including those at the North Shore-LIJ Health System) routinely perform.

Testing guidelines in the article are highly specific and stringent, and if followed, may help reduce the risks associated with undiagnosed and untreated gestational diabetes. Gestational diabetes happens during pregnancy due to the changes that are happening in a woman’s body, and it affects 10 percent to 18 percent of all pregnant women. The changes can cause the blood glucose (sugar) level to go too high. The associated risks include preeclampsia (a pregnancy-related condition associated with high blood pressure and other symptoms), macrosomia (large, for gestational age, babies) and birth-related injuries.

The ongoing obesity epidemic has led to an increased number of women having undiagnosed type 2 diabetes at the time of their child’s conception, as well as an increased number of women who are developing gestational diabetes.

Diabetes during pregnancy carries risk for both mother and baby. In order to avoid complications, screening and appropriate treatment are imperative. Women with such risk factors as being overweight, family history of diabetes, coming from a high-risk ethnic back ground (African American, Latino, Native American or Asian), physicalinactivity, delivering a baby that weighed more than 9 lbs., high blood pressure or polycystic ovarian disease should be screened at their first prenatal visit for type 2 diabetes.

In the first trimester it is recommended physicians screen mothers for diabetes using either a fasting glucose, 2 hour 75 gram glucose tolerance test (where a woman drinks 75 grams of sugar and then has her blood drawn 2 hours later), or an HbA1c test (athree-month average of blood glucose levels). If the mother screens negative, she should be screened again later in the pregnancy for gestational diabetes. Many of the complications caused by diabetes can be avoided if a woman achieves and maintains good glucose control during her pregnancy. Early identification and treatment is key to preventing these complications.

Source: escience news

Obesity Is Found to Gain Its Hold in Earliest Years

For many obese adults, the die was cast by the time they were 5 years old. A major new study of more than 7,000 children has found that a third of children who were overweight in kindergarten were obese by eighth grade. And almost every child who was very obese remained that way.

Some obese or overweight kindergartners lost their excess weight, and some children of normal weight got fat over the years. But every year, the chances that a child would slide into or out of being overweight or obese diminished. By age 11, there were few additional changes: Those who were obese or overweight stayed that way, and those whose weight was normal did not become fat.

“The main message is that obesity is established very early in life, and that it basically tracks through adolescence to adulthood,” said Ruth Loos, a professor of preventive medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, who was not involved in the study.

These results, surprising to many experts, arose from a rare study that tracked children’s body weight for years, from kindergarten through eighth grade. Experts say they may reshape approaches to combating the nation’s obesity epidemic, suggesting that efforts must start much earlier and focus more on the children at greatest risk.

The findings, to be published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, do not explain why the effect occurs. Researchers say it may be a combination of genetic predispositions to being heavy and environments that encourage overeating in those prone to it. But the results do provide a possible explanation for why efforts to help children lose weight have often had disappointing results. The steps may have aimed too broadly at all schoolchildren, rather than starting before children enrolled in kindergarten and concentrating on those who were already fat at very young ages.

Previous studies established how many children were fat at each age but not whether their weight changed as they grew up. While valuable in documenting the extent of childhood obesity, they gave an incomplete picture of how the condition developed, researchers said.

“What is striking is the relative decrease in incidence after that initial blast” of obesity that occurs by age 5, said Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, the vice president of the Emory Global Health Institute in Atlanta. “It is almost as if, if you can make it to kindergarten without the weight, your chances are immensely better.”

Dr. Koplan, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was not associated with the new study, although its lead author, Solveig A. Cunningham, is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at Emory.

The study involved 7,738 children from a nationally representative sample. Researchers measured the children’s height and weight seven times from kindergarten to eighth grade.

When the children entered kindergarten, 12.4 percent were obese — defined as having a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile — and 14.9 percent were overweight, with a B.M.I. at or above the 85th percentile. By eighth grade, 20.8 percent were obese and 17 percent were overweight. Half of the obese kindergartners were obese when they were in eighth grade, and nearly three-quarters of the very obese kindergartners were obese in eighth grade. The risk that fat kindergartners would be obese in eighth grade was four to five times that of their thinner classmates, the study found.

Race, ethnicity and family income mattered in younger children, but by the time the overweight children were 5 years old, those factors no longer affected their risk of being fat in later years.

The study did not track the children before kindergarten, but the researchers had their birth weights. Overweight or obese children often were heavy babies, at least 8.8 pounds, something other studies have also found.

The study’s results, Dr. Koplan and others said, “help focus interventions.”

Most efforts to reduce childhood obesity concentrate on school-age children and apply the steps indiscriminately to all children, fat and thin — improving meals in schools, teaching nutrition and the importance of physical activity, getting rid of soda machines.

“This suggests that maybe one reason it didn’t work so well is that by the time kids are 5, the horse is out of the barn,” said Leann L. Birch, a professor in the department of foods and nutrition at the University of Georgia, who was not involved with the study.

The most rigorous studies of efforts for school-age children, conducted in the 1990s, randomly assigned thousands of children to either participate in intensive programs that encouraged them to exercise and improve their diets, or go on as usual.

One study involved 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where most of the students were Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. A second study included 5,106 children in 96 schools in California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas.

Neither study found any effect on children’s weights.

Some obesity researchers said the new study following kindergartners over the years also hinted at another factor: the powerful influence of genetics on obesity, something that can be a challenge to overcome.

Source: New York Times