Health News

World Water Day 2014: 5 Reasons You Can’t Survive Without Water

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March 22 is World Water Day.

60% of our body-weight is made up of water and without it our organs wouldn’t function properly. A reduction of more than 10% of our normal body water percentage can be termed as a medical emergency and can be fatal. Despite being so important, a lot of people don’t drink enough water. The reason might be laziness or indifference, but not staying hydrated can be extremely dangerous. Here are some of the top reasons why your body needs water.

1. It maintains the balance of body fluids

Maintenance of body temperature, digestion and absorption of food, circulation of blood – these are all functions your body will be unable to perform if you don’t give it enough water.

2. Helps get rid of toxins

Without water, your body wouldn’t be able to get rid of toxins that can cause damage to your cells and organs. If you drink adequate water, your body will excrete harmful toxins like blood urea nitrogen through your kidneys.3. Keeps your digestive system in mint condition

3. Digestive System:

If you don’t get enough water, your colon will pull water from the stools to get enough water for your digestive system. This will result in dry stools that are difficult to pass through your colon. Drinking water or eating foods rich in water like cucumber or papaya will help prevent this problem.

4. Keeps you looking beautiful

Many actresses swear by water when it comes to maintaining their beauty. (Katrina Kaif drinks 4 glasses of water after waking up!) Drinking a lot of water will ensure that everything from your eyes to your skin look great.

5. Keeps you active

A loss of just one percent of your normal body water percentage can leave you feeling tired. A loss of more than 2-4% can affect your mental functioning too. This is why you need to drink enough water to keep yourself active and free from any sort of fatigue. Read more about how water is the fuel that keeps your body running.

These are just some of the basic health benefits of water. Besides this, it can also help you lose weight and prevent heart disease as it is a much healthier substitute to sugar-loaded soft drinks for quenching thirst. You may already be drinking water a few times in a day, but are you drinking enough?

Source: Alibaba clinic

Spices and herbs helps adults reduce salt intake

Teaching people how to flavor food with spices and herbs is considerably more effective at lowering salt intake than having them do it on their own, according to research presented on Wednesday at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology & Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity & Metabolism Scientific Sessions 2014.In the first phase of the study, 55 volunteers ate a low-sodium diet for four weeks. Researchers provided all foods and calorie-containing drinks. Salt is the main source of sodium in food.

In the second phase, half of the study volunteers participated in a 20-week behavioral intervention aimed at reducing their sodium intake to 1,500 mg/day by using spices and herbs. The other half reduced sodium on their own.
More than 60 percent of the participants in the study had high blood pressure, 18 percent had diabetes and they were overweight.

The researchers found:
In the first phase, sodium intake decreased from an average 3,450 mg/day to an average 1,656 mg/day.

In the second phase, sodium intake increased in both groups. But those who received the behavioral intervention consumed an average 966 mg/day of sodium less than the group that didn’t receive the intervention.

“People in the intervention group learned problem-solving strategies, use of herbs and spices in recipes, how culture influences spice choices, how to monitor diet, overcoming the barriers to making dietary changes, how to choose and order foods when eating out and how to make low-sodium intake permanent,” said Cheryl A. M. Anderson, Ph.D., M.P.H., lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California San Diego.

Those assigned to the behavioral intervention group had cooking demonstrations and had a chance to share how they were changing traditional recipes to remove salt and include spices. The researchers didn’t emphasize specific spices, and encouraged participants to try different things to find out what they liked most.

“Salt is abundant in the food supply and the average sodium level for Americans is very high — much higher than what is recommended for healthy living,” Anderson said. “We studied the use of a behavioral intervention where people learn how to use spices and herbs and less salt in their daily lives.”

“Given the challenges of lowering salt in the American diet, we need a public health approach aimed at making it possible for consumers to
The McCormick Science Institute funded the study.

Source: Science daily

Cerebrospinal fluid test may detect Alzheimer’s

Researchers at the University of Texas, in Houston, analysed CSF samples from 50 people with Alzheimer’s disease, 37 people with other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, and 39 people with other brain diseases who had normal memory and thinking abilities. They set out to discover whether small fragments of the protein amyloid, which accumulates into clumps in the brain during Alzheimer’s, were present in the CSF of people with the disease.

Their results showed more of these fragments of protein in the CSF of people with Alzheimer’s compared to those with other diseases. The researchers suggest that more research is needed to explore whether the method could detect the disease at its earliest stages.

Dr Simon Ridley, Head of Research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, the UK’s leading dementia research charity, said:
“This very small study suggests a potential way to identify people with Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s too early to tell how accurate this method might be or whether it can distinguish people with the disease from healthy people. We need to see further research in much larger groups of people before we can know whether this approach will be successful.

“Diagnosing Alzheimer’s can be difficult, and the ability to give an accurate diagnosis would be a real boost, allowing people access to the right care and existing treatments. The ability to detect Alzheimer’s accurately is also a key goal for research, as it’s important to be able to test potential new treatments in the right people. Investment in research is vital to develop better diagnosis tools and, crucially, for better treatments to be made available to those who desperately need them.”

Source: alzheimers Research

 

Poor diagnosis driving global multidrug-resistant TB, WHO warns

Half a million people fell sick with dangerous superbug strains of tuberculosis (TB) in 2012, but fewer than one in four were diagnosed, putting the rest at risk of dying due to the wrong medicines or no treatment at all.

Latest data from the World Health Organisation (WHO), which says drug-resistant TB is a “global health security risk”, showed a third of the estimated 9 million people who contract TB in any form each year do not get the care they need.

This has led to drug resistance spreading around the world at an alarming rate and has given rise to incurable strains of the bacterial infection – known as totally drug-resistant TB – which cannot be treated with any known medicines.

“Earlier and faster diagnosis of all forms of TB is vital,” said WHO director general Margaret Chan as the U.N. health agency published new TB data on Thursday. “It improves the chances of people getting the right treatment and being cured, and it helps stop spread of drug-resistant disease.”

Last year the WHO called for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) to be recognized as a public health crisis. It says the contagious, deadly superbug forms of the disease carry “grave consequences for those affected”.

Treating even regular TB is a long process. Patients need to take a cocktail of antibiotics for six months and many fail to complete the treatment.

This in turn has fuelled the emergence of drug-resistant TB – a man-made problem that has grown in the past decade because people sick with regular TB were either being given the wrong medicines or wrong doses or did not complete their treatment.

HURDLES

Experts say one of the major hurdles to tackling drug-resistant strains effectively is that so many patients who have contracted them do not know it and so continue with the wrong treatments or are not treated at all.

Some of the poorest and most ill-equipped countries have only one central laboratory, which often has limited capacity to diagnose MDR-TB. In other cases, patient samples have to be sent to other countries for testing.

Traditional diagnostic tests can take more than two months to get results, leaving a dangerous gap in which the patient is not getting the right treatment and is putting others at risk of catching the contagious disease.

The WHO says up to 2 million people worldwide may be infected with drug-resistant TB by 2015.

Newer, speedier diagnostic tests have been developed in recent years, but the problem has been getting the technology and know-how to the countries where they are needed most.

However, Chan cited encouraging signs from an international project known as EXPAND-TB (Expanding Access to New Diagnostics for TB), financed by UNITAID, which has helped to triple the number of MDR-TB cases diagnosed in participating countries.

In 2009, UNITAID backed the EXPAND project with $87 million to new TB diagnostic technologies in 27 low- and middle-income countries, which together account for around 40 percent of the global MDR-TB burden.

“The gap in access to TB diagnostics and care is far from filled, but it is narrowing,” said Mario Raviglione, director of WHO’s global TB program. “Increased capacity and reduced prices mean that we can reach more people.”

UNITAID was launched in 2006 by the governments of Britain, Brazil, Chile, France and Norway to give sustainable funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. About 70 percent of its funds come from a levy on airline tickets.

Source: Reuters

Mindfulness Meditation May Reduce Drug User Relapse

Many people who undergo treatment for addiction will relapse and begin using drugs again soon after their therapy ends, but a new study suggests that meditation techniques may help prevent such relapses.

In the study, 286 people who had been treated for substance abuse were assigned to receive one of three therapies after their initial treatment: a program that involved only group discussions, a “relapse- prevention” therapy that involved learning to avoid situations where they might be tempted to use drugs, and a mindfulness-based program that involved meditation sessions to improve self-awareness.

Six months later, participants in the both the relapse prevention and mindfulness group had a reduced risk of relapsing to using drugs or heavy drinking compared with participants in the group discussions group.And after one year, participants in the mindfulness group reported fewer days of drug use, and were at reduced risk of heavy drinking compared with those in the relapse prevention group. This result suggests that the mindfulness-based program may have a more enduring effect, the researchers said.

The researchers emphasized that mindfulness-based programs are not intended to replace standard programs for preventing drug relapse.

“We need to consider many different approaches to addiction treatment. It’s a tough problem,” said study researcher Sarah Bowen, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Mindfulness therapy is “another possibility for people to explore,” she said.

More research is needed to identify which groups of people benefit most from the approach, Bowen said.

Meditation for addiction

About 40 to 60 percent of people who undergo addiction treatment relapse within one year after their treatment ends, the researchers said.

Although 12-step and traditional relapse-prevention programs have value in preventing relapse, “we still have a lot of work to do,” Bowen said.

Mindfulness-based relapse prevention, a program developed by Bowen and colleagues, is essentially a “training in awareness,” Bowen said.

In this program, each session is about two hours, with 30 minutes of guided meditation followed by discussions about what people experienced during meditation and how it relates to addiction or relapse, Bowen said. The meditation sessions are intended to bring heightened attention to things that patients usually ignore, such as how it feels to eat a bite of food, or other bodily sensations, as well as thoughts and feelings.

The mindfulness program may work to prevent relapse in part because it makes people more aware of what happens when they have cravings.

“If you’re not aware of what’s going on, you don’t have a choice, you just react,” Bowen said.

The program also teaches people how to “be with” or accept uncomfortable feelings, such as cravings, rather than fight them, Bowen said. In this way, people learn skills that they can apply to their everyday lives, and not just situations in which they feel tempted, which is usually the focus of other prevention programs, she said.

Addiction and emotions

Dr. Scott Krakower, assistant unit chief of psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., who was not involved in the study, said people with addiction often suffer from other conditions that involve problems regulating emotions, such as depression, anxiety or self-harm.

Emotional problems, such as feelings of numbness with depression, can be a reason people turn to drugs, he said.

The mindfulness program helps teach people to “tolerate feelings of emotional distress, so when they feel like they’re going to use [drugs], they don’t,” Krakowe said.

Krakower noted that mindfulness meditation programs have already been shown to be useful for depression.

Future studies are needed to examine the effectiveness of the therapy for substance abuse over longer periods, Krakower said. But at the very least, it seems that the program can be helpful for people with emotional dysregulation, which is the majority of the substance abuse population, Krakower said.

The study is published online today (March 19) in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Source: Live science

Diabetes in Middle Age May Cause Memory Problems

People who develop type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure in middle age appear more likely to suffer brain damage that can contribute to dementia as they grow older, a new study finds.

Diabetes might actually shrink the brain over a long period of time, reducing the size of crucial areas like the hippocampus, which plays an important role in short- and long-term memory, according to the study.

Additionally, diabetes and high blood pressure both seem to increase a person’s risk of micro-strokes and other damage to the blood vessels that feed the brain, the study authors said.

“People who had diabetes earlier in life had much worse brain [structure] than those who had it later in life,” said lead author Dr. Rosebud Roberts, a Mayo Clinic researcher. “These scans are showing us that cognitive impairment happens over a long period of time. The earlier you develop type 2 diabetes, the more likely you are to have damage.”

Diabetes has long been linked to problems with thinking and memory later in life, but this study is the first to provide solid evidence explaining why that occurs, said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs and outreach for the Alzheimer’s Association.

“We are very excited about this study,” Fargo said. “It has been known for quite some time that there is some kind of link between diabetes and cognitive ability later in life. What has not been known yet is why this link exists and how it develops over time.”

The study involved more than 1,400 people with an average age of 80, according to the report published online March 19 in the journal Neurology. The study participants had at most slight memory and thinking problems called mild cognitive impairment. The researchers assessed the participants’ thinking and memory skills, noting any signs of mild impairment.

The study participants then underwent MRI brain scans to look for signs of brain damage that can be an early indication of dementia.

Finally, the researchers reviewed the participants’ medical records to see whether they had been diagnosed with diabetes or high blood pressure in middle age, which, for the purposes of this study, ran from 40 to 64.

The study authors found that people who developed diabetes in middle age had brains that were on average 2.9 percent smaller than people who didn’t have diabetes. And their hippocampi were even smaller — an average of 4 percent smaller than those of non-diabetics.

“When your hippocampus begins to shrink, you begin to lose your long-term memory and your ability to remember recent events,” said Roberts, who also is a member of the American Academy of Neurology.

Source: web md

Smartphone gets smarter, can detect eye defects

Apps and downloads are old hat. The smartphone can now be adapted to test a person’s eyes, and is claimed to be India’s first mobile phone ophthalmoscope.

The phone-cum-scope can capture high-quality photographs of the retina in the eye to detect defects. Converting the smartphone to an ophthalmoscope is quick and easy: fix an LED bulb near the camera of the mobile, a connecting wire and battery. It costs not more than Rs 35-50. The device was invented by ophthalmologists of Sankara Eye Hospital. These pictures can then be sent to doctors for diagnosis.

“We aren’t sure if patients can use it themselves. But it helps eye specialists in rural areas who probably don’t have high-end ophthalmoscopes. We are networking with doctors in rural areas who can send us photographs of patients’ eyes taken through a mobile phone, that can help evaluate the disorder. We’ve had cases of eye tumours, glaucoma and other disorders related to the optic nerve, detected through photos taken from mobile phones with a minimum 5-mega pixel camera,” said Dr Divyansh K Mishra, retina fellow, Sankara Eye Hospital, who was one among the doctors who invented the new technique.

A team of ophthalmologists consisting of Dr Mishra, Dr Madhu Kumar, Dr Rajesh R, Dr Srinivasulu Reddy and Dr Gladys Rodregues, led by Dr Mahesh P Shanmugam, is the think-tank behind this innovation.

Back in 2002, Dr Shanmugam had tried taking pictures of eyes through a handycam. “Technology is now advanced and some cell phones have 21 pixels. We won’t stop using ophthalmoscopes but this is an added advantage. Eye care field technicians can now immediately diagnose a serious eye condition as they’re able to instantly send images of the patient’s retina to doctors in the city, via social networking sites,” said Dr Mishra.

MIT’s mobile gadget

In 2010, a team of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology came up with a device to be attached to a mobile phone that can test the visibility of eyes and find out the refractive errors. It was called NETRA (Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment). The user has to place the device in front of the eye and look into the lens attached to the phone. While pressing the arrow keys, the user can see green and red lines which overlap. The same process is repeated eight times, with the formation of green and red lines on the screen at different angles. The assessment of the eyes is done based on the visual index and prescriptions are made based on the same.

Source: Times of India

Shift workers beware: Sleep loss may cause brain damage, new research says

Are you a truck driver or shift worker planning to catch up on some sleep this weekend? Cramming in extra hours of shut-eye may not make up for those lost pulling all-nighters, new research indicates.

The damage may already be done — brain damage, that is, said neuroscientist Sigrid Veasey from the University of Pennsylvania.

Alzheimer’s & Sleep

The widely held idea that you can pay back a sizeable “sleep debt” with long naps later on seems to be a myth, she said in a study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Long-term sleep deprivation saps the brain of power even after days of recovery sleep, Veasey said. And that could be a sign of lasting brain injury. Veasey and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania medical school wanted to find out, so, they put laboratory mice on a wonky sleep schedule that mirrors that of shift workers.

They let them snooze, then woke them up for short periods and for long ones.
Then the scientists looked at their brains — more specifically, at a bundle of nerve cells they say is associated with alertness and cognitive function, the locus coeruleus.

They found damage and lots of it.
“The mice lose 25% of these neurons,” Veasey said.
This is how the scientists think it happened.
When the mice lost a little sleep, nerve cells reacted by making more of a protein, called sirtuin type 3, to energize and protect them.

But when losing sleep became a habit, that reaction shut down. After just a few days of “shift work” sleep, the cells start dying off at an accelerated pace.
The discovery that long-term sleep loss can result in a loss of brain cells is a first, Veasey said.

“No one really thought that the brain could be irreversibly injured from sleep loss,” she said. That has now changed.

More work needs to be done on humans, she said. And her group is planning to study deceased shift workers to see if they have the same kind of nerve damage. They hope their research will result in medicines that will help people working odd hours cope with the consequences of irregular sleep.

Source: CNN

New drug target for controlling high blood sugar discovered

Researchers have identified a new potential therapeutic target for controlling high blood sugar.

Researchers showed that lipid molecules called phosphatidic acids enhance glucose production in the liver. These findings suggest that inhibiting or reducing production of phosphatidic acids may do the opposite.

Senior author Dr. Anil Agarwal, Professor of Internal Medicine, said that their study establishes a role for phosphatidic acids in enhancing glucose production by the liver and identifies enzymes involved in the synthesis of phosphatidic acids as potential drug targets.

These observations were made while studying a mouse model of lipodystrophy, a rare metabolic disease in which the body is devoid of fat. Lipodystrophy patients often develop diabetes and accumulate fat in the liver because of an imbalance in the body’s ability to properly regulate lipids and glucose.

The causal gene, AGPAT2, which is involved in the synthesis of phosphatidic acid and triglycerides, was removed in the mice, resulting in rodents with generalized lipodystrophy. The research team then examined what impact this genetic manipulation had on phosphatidic acids and glucose production.

The buildup of these lipid molecules was due to an increase in the levels of two enzymes in the liver, diacylglycerol kinase and phospholipase D. Researchers also discovered a marked increase in glucose production in the livers of the lipodystrophic mice.

The lack of normal insulin signaling in these lipodystrophic mice led to unrestricted production of phosphatidic acid, Dr. Agarwal explained, contributing to development of hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar.

The study has been published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Source: Business standard

Sodium intake double in Bangladesh

As many as 12 million people suffer from high blood pressure in Bangladesh which is the main cause of heart attacks, brain strokes and kidney diseases, says a study

Excessive intake of sodium is resulting in serious health problems like high blood pressure, as people have been found to be taking more than double the required amount of sodium through salt.

As many as 12 million people suffer from high blood pressure in Bangladesh which is the main cause of heart attacks, brain strokes and kidney diseases, according to a survey conducted by National Heart Foundation Hospital and Research Institute (NHFHRI).

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an adult man or woman should take only five grams of salt every day. The NHFHRI survey, however, found that in urban areas, people take 10.3 grams of salt a day, with males taking 11 grams and females 9.3 grams.

Findings of the survey was disclosed at a seminar organised by the NHFHRI at the institute’s auditorium in the capital yesterday. The seminar was titled “World salt awareness week-2014” while Dr Sohel Reza Chowdhury, Professor of the Department of Epidemiology and Research at NHFHRI, presented the keynote paper.

The keynote paper said heart attacks and strokes are the leading causes of death globally. Each year, 1.73 crore people die of these diseases while more than 80% of the deaths occur in lower and middle income countries.

In Bangladesh, the prevalence of non-communicable disease (NCD) is on the rise while heart attacks and strokes are the most common among the NCDs.

Health minister Mohammad Nasim spoke as the chief guest at the seminar. He said in order to ensure proper investigation into the incidents of deaths due to negligence of doctors, the government was planning to introduce new rules for Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council (BMDC).

“BMDC will be given the power to cancel the registration of a doctor if the allegation of negligence against him is proved. The health ministry will sit with renowned and senior health professionals to discuss the issue,” he said.

The minister urged the authorities of big hospitals to provide the poor patients with special facilities.

Source: dhaka Tribune