health tips

Ear Wax From Whales Keeps Record Of Ocean Contaminants

How often do whales clean their ears? Well, never. And so, year after year, their ear wax builds up, layer upon layer. According to a study published Monday, these columns of ear wax contain a record of chemical pollution in the oceans.

The study used the ear wax extracted from the carcass of a blue whale that washed ashore on a California beach back in 2007. Scientists at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History collected the wax from inside the skull of the dead whale and preserved it. The column of wax was almost a foot long.

“It’s kind of got that icky look to it,” says, an environmental scientist at Baylor University who was involved in the study. “It looks kind of like a candle that’s been roughed up a bit. It looks waxy and has got fibers. But it’s pretty rigid — a lot stronger and a lot more stable than one would think.”

There are light and dark layers within the column, each layer corresponding to six months of the whale’s life, Usenko says. Historically the rings have been used to estimate the age of the whale, he says, “very similar to counting tree rings.”

But age is not what Usenko was after. He studies how chemical pollutants like DDT and flame retardants are affecting whales. These pollutants get deposited in fatty tissues, such as whale blubber. And scientists often analyze blubber to see what whales are eating.

But analyzing blubber has a limitation, Usenko says.

“I would only know that organism — that [particular] animal was exposed to those contaminants,” he says. “I wouldn’t know when.”

And so he thought, why not look at ear wax, which is also a fatty material that accumulates toxic chemicals.

Because each layer of wax corresponds to six months of a whale’s life, by working through a plug of wax, Usenko could figure out when the animal was exposed to a particular chemical.

In this case, Usenko and his colleagues found that the whale had been exposed to worrisome pollutants throughout its lifetime.

He says the high levels of DDT surprised him.

“It’s been 30-plus years since we’ve stopped using this compound,” he says, “but to still see it showing up at such high concentrations — one of the dominant chemicals we see — was surprising.”

Usenko and his team also determined that “a significant percentage of the exposure occurred in the first, early stages of the animal’s life,” when it was still nursing, and perhaps especially vulnerable. At that point, the pollutants came from the mother, through her milk, the scientist says.

Usenko says he can’t tell just from looking at the wax whether these chemicals are hurting the development of young blue whales. He studied only one animal, and the ear wax alone can’t reveal whether the chemicals caused harm.

But the ear wax also contained a record of fluctuations in stress hormones throughout the animal’s life. And that, in combination with the chemical pollution data, may in the future provide better insight into the potential impacts of these chemicals on whales, Usenko says.

His appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But he needs more data, he says, so he has requested that scientists start collecting ear wax from dead beached whales the world over and mail the samples to him.

Source: npr news

Medical school program trains doctors for the future of medicine

Health care in America has changed drastically over the last decade – but the way doctors are trained has been the same for over 100 years. Now, some of the nation’s top medical schools are revamping their programs.

“Probably the single biggest reason was trying to prepare students for what health care was going to be like in a decade,” Dr. Charles Lockwood, dean of The Ohio State University (OSU) College of Medicine told FoxNews.com. “Because if you think the last 10 years have been quite a change, really when we begin to be able to sequence people’s entire DNA, and identify every conceivable illness that they’re going to have, and begin to design prevention along those lines ― it’s going to require a very different mindset for docs.”

Typically, medical students spend their first two years of medical school hitting the books, but at OSU’s College of Medicine, they’re trained as medical assistants in the first six weeks, and within eight weeks, they are seeing patients as health coaches.

“Working with patients in a service-type fashion early on in the curriculum is extremely valuable to the students ― it keeps them grounded in why they came to medical school,” Dr. Daniel Clinchot, vice dean for education at OSU’s College of Medicine said of the school’s new Lead. Serve. Inspire program. “Having your patient population that you work with over the course of 18 months is very unique, and I think really is inspiring for many of our students.”

Historically, American medicine has always centered around doctors, but a growing shift in health care delivery has put more emphasis on ensuring quality outcomes for patients.

“You have to do a lot more teaching of patients, you have to explain their illness, you have to explain all the options available for their therapy, you have to spend a lot of time talking about prevention,” said Lockwood. “Communication skills are something that are going to be critically important for the future doc, and that’s not something we’ve emphasized before in medical education.”

Advances in technology and a focus on prevention are just two of the health care changes that helped shape the new Lead. Serve. Inspire curriculum. All incoming medical students are given iPads and classes are available as traditional lectures, podcasts and e-learning modules.

In a state-of-the-art clinical skills center on campus, students can practice virtual laparoscopy and robotic procedures. And there are four critical care simulation bays with life-like mannequins that can mimic human illnesses and medical emergencies. From a control room outside the simulation area, instructors create scenarios that test the students’ ability to treat patients under pressure in the emergency room, operating room, trauma center and labor and delivery wing.

“I think the best thing about the simulations is that it helps you practice in a lower-stress environments than when you’re actually working with patients,” Shannon Emerick, a medical student at OSU’s College of Medicine, said. “You can kind of get the jitters out, and by pretending these are real patients, you can make sure you have everything straight by the time you’re working with actual people.”

Learning the business of health care is also at the core of the Lead. Serve. Inspire program. Health care economics classes are built into the curriculum, and students also have the option to minor in business or take time off to get their MBA to help them prepare to run a successful practice in the future.

“It’s crucial that they understand the cost of health care,” said Lockwood. “Every test that they order, they need to understand exactly what that costs, every imaging procedure, every test that they do has a cost, and they need to understand what it is, and is it absolutely necessary or is there another way to get that information?”

Source: Fox News

 

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

How Physical Fitness May Promote School Success

Children who are physically fit absorb and retain new information more effectively than children who are out of shape, a new study finds, raising timely questions about the wisdom of slashing physical education programs at schools.

Parents and exercise scientists (who, not infrequently, are the same people) have known for a long time that physical activity helps young people to settle and pay attention in school or at home, with salutary effects on academic performance. A representative study, presented in May at the American College of Sports Medicine, found that fourth- and fifth-grade students who ran around and otherwise exercised vigorously for at least 10 minutes before a math test scored higher than children who had sat quietly before the exam.

More generally, in a large-scale study of almost 12,000 Nebraska schoolchildren published in August in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers compiled each child’s physical fitness, as measured by a timed run, body mass index and academic achievement in English and math, based on the state’s standardized test scores. Better fitness proved to be linked to significantly higher achievement scores, while, interestingly, body size had almost no role. Students who were overweight but relatively fit had higher test scores than lighter, less-fit children.

To date, however, no study specifically had examined whether and in what ways physical fitness might affect how children learn. So researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently stepped into that breach, recruiting a group of local 9- and 10-year-old boys and girls, testing their aerobic fitness on a treadmill, and then asking 24 of the most fit and 24 of the least fit to come into the exercise physiology lab and work on some difficult memorization tasks.

Learning is, of course, a complex process, involving not only the taking in and storing of new information in the form of memories, a process known as encoding, but also recalling that information later. Information that cannot be recalled has not really been learned.

Earlier studies of children’s learning styles have shown that most learn more readily if they are tested on material while they are in the process of learning it. In effect, if they are quizzed while memorizing, they remember more easily. Straight memorization, without intermittent reinforcement during the process, is tougher, although it is also how most children study.

In this case, the researchers opted to use both approaches to learning, by providing their young volunteers with iPads onto which several maps of imaginary lands had been loaded. The maps were demarcated into regions, each with a four-letter name. During one learning session, the children were shown these names in place for six seconds. The names then appeared on the map in their correct position six additional times while children stared at and tried to memorize them.

In a separate learning session, region names appeared on a different map in their proper location, then moved to the margins of the map. The children were asked to tap on a name and match it with the correct region, providing in-session testing as they memorized.

A day later, all of the children returned to the lab and were asked to correctly label the various maps’ region

Read More: New York times

Why Ear Infections Are So Common?

It’s not your imagination. Kids can get a lot of ear infections. In fact, 2 out of 3 times, when kids get colds, they also wind up with infections in their ears. The main reasons are that their immune systems are immature and that their little ears don’t drain as well as adults’ ears do.

Swimmer’s Ear

An infection in the outer ear is often called Swimmer’s Ear. It usually happens when the ear stays wet long enough to breed germs. But even if your kid hasn’t been swimming, a scratch from something like a cotton swab (or who knows what kids stick in there?) can cause trouble. Watch out if your child’s ear gets itchy or hurts when touched. The answer is usually just medicated ear drops and keeping ears dry.

Diagnosing an Ear Infection

The only way to know for sure if your child has an ear infection is for a doctor to check inside her ear with a device called an otoscope. This is basically just a tiny flashlight with a magnifying lens for the doctor to look through. A healthy eardrum looks sort of clear and pinkish-gray. An infected eardrum looks red and swollen.

Inside Your Ear

The Eustachian tube is a canal that connects your middle ear to your throat. It keeps fluid and air pressure from building up inside your ear. Colds, flu, and allergies can all irritate the Eustachian tube and cause it to swell up.

Bursting an Eardrum

If too much fluid or pressure builds up inside your child’s middle ear, her eardrum can actually burst (shown here). If that happens, you may see yellow, brown, or white fluid draining from her ear. Although this sounds scary, the eardrum usually heals itself in a couple of weeks. Unless it happens a lot, your child’s hearing should be fine. The good news is that the pain may suddenly disappear because the hole lets the pressure go.

Ear Infection Symptoms

The main warning sign of infection is sharp ear pain. Your child may be especially uncomfortable lying down, so he might have a hard time sleeping. Other problems to look for:

  • Trouble hearing
  • Fever
  • Fluid oozing from ears
  • Dizziness
  • Stuffy nose

Ear Infection Symptoms: Babies

With babies or children who are too young to tell you what hurts, ear infections can be sneaky. A lot of times they’ll start tugging or pulling on an ear. Little

kids can also just get cranky, have trouble sleeping, or no  well. Babies may push their bottles away because pressure in their ears makes it hurt to swallow.t eat

Home Care for Ear Infections

While the immune system fights the infection, there are things you can do to fight your child’s pain. Applying a warm washcloth on the outside of the ear can be soothing. Ear drops can give quick relief, but check with your doctor before using them. Non-prescription painkillers and fever reducers, such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen, are also an option. DO NOT give aspirin to children.

Antibiotics for Ear Infections

Ear infections often go away on their own, so don’t be surprised if your doctor suggests a “wait and see” approach. The more we use antibiotics, the less effective they become. That’s because bacteria learn to fight back against common medicines. Also, some ear infections are caused by a virus, and antibiotics only work on bacteria. Yes, antibiotics can help, but your doctor will know best when to use them.

Complications of Ear infections

If your child’s ear infections keep coming back, they can scar his eardrums and lead to hearing loss, speech problems, or even meningitis. If he has lots of them, you might want to have his hearing tested just in case.

Tonsils Can Be the Cause

Sometimes a child’s tonsils get so swollen that they put pressure on the Eustachian tubes connecting her middle ear to her throat — which then causes infections. If that keeps happening, she may need to have her tonsils taken out.

Preventing Ear Infections

The biggest cause of middle ear infections is the common cold, so avoiding cold viruses is good for ears, too. The best way to stop germs is to make sure your child washes her hands well and often. Other ways to prevent ear infections include keeping your child away from secondhand smoke, getting annual flu shots, and breastfeeding your baby for at least 6 months to boost her immune system.

Source: Webmd

New biomarker for diabetes risk identified

Researchers have identified a biomarker, which can help predict diabetes risk up to 10 years before its onset.

Thomas J. Wang, M.D., director of the Division of Cardiology at Vanderbilt, along with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, conducted a study of 188 individuals who developed type 2 diabetes mellitus and 188 individuals without diabetes who were followed for 12 years as participants in the Framingham Heart Study.

Wang said that from the baseline blood samples, that they identified a novel biomarker, 2-aminoadipic acid (2-AAA), that was higher in people who went on to develop diabetes than in those who did not.

Individuals having 2-AAA concentrations in the top quartile had up to a fourfold risk of developing diabetes during the 12-year follow-up period compared with people in the lowest quartile.

Wang asserted that the caveat with these new biomarkers is that they require further evaluation in other populations and further work to determine how this information might be used clinically.

The researchers also conducted laboratory studies to understand why this biomarker is elevated so well in advance of the onset of diabetes.

They found that giving 2-AAA to mice alters the way they metabolize glucose. These molecules seem to influence the function of the pancreas, which is responsible for making insulin, the hormone that tells the body to take up blood sugar.

The findings have been published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

 

US FDA issues import alert for Ranbaxy drugs

The US Food and Drug Administration on Monday issued an import alert against drug products manufactured at Indian drug major Ranbaxy’s facility in Punjab’s Mohali for non-compliance with US drug manufacturing requirements.

Under the import alert which will stand until the company complies with what are known as current good manufacturing practices (CGMP), US officials may detain at the US border drug products manufactured at the Mohali facility, the US regulator said in a media release.

“We want American consumers to be confident that the drugs they are taking are of the highest quality, and the FDA will continue to work to prevent potentially unsafe products from entering the country,” said Howard Sklamberg, director of the Office of Compliance in the FDA’s Centre for Drug Evaluation and Research.

The US drug regulator also ordered that the Mohali facility be subject to certain terms of the consent decree of permanent injunction entered against Ranbaxy in January 2012.

The decree contains provisions to ensure CGMP compliance at certain Ranbaxy facilities, including in Paonta Sahib in Himachal Pradesh and Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, as well as provisions addressing data integrity issues at those two facilities.

Ranbaxy’s Paonta Sahib and Dewas facilities have been on FDA import alert since 2008.

In September and December 2012, FDA inspections identified significant CGMP violations at Ranbaxy’s Mohali facility, including failure to adequately investigate manufacturing problems and failure to establish adequate procedures to ensure manufacturing quality, the FDA release said.

Under the decree, Ranbaxy is required to hire a third-party expert to conduct a thorough inspection of the Mohali facility and certify to the FDA that the facilities, methods, processes, and controls are adequate to ensure continuous compliance with CGMP.

Once the agency is satisfied that Ranbaxy has come into compliance with CGMP, Ranbaxy will be permitted to resume manufacturing and distribution of FDA-regulated drugs at the Mohali facility, the FDA said. [IANS]

Source: India Medical Times

Sleep apnea treatment can make you look better too!

A new study suggests that getting treatment for a common sleep problem may do more than help you sleep better – it may help you look better over the long term, too.

The findings from the University of Michigan Health System and Michigan Technological University, aren’t just about “looking sleepy” after a late night, or being bright-eyed after a good night’s rest.

It’s the first time researchers have shown specific improvement in facial appearance after at-home treatment for sleep apnea, a condition marked by snoring and breathing interruptions.

Sleep apnea affects millions of adults – most undiagnosed — and puts them at higher risk for heart-related problems and daytime accidents.

Using a sensitive “face mapping” technique usually used by surgeons, and a panel of independent appearance raters, the researchers detected changes in 20 middle-aged apnea patients just a few months after they began using a system called CPAP to help them breathe better during sleep and overcome chronic sleepiness.

While the research needs to be confirmed by larger studies, the findings may eventually give apnea patients even more reason to stick with CPAP treatment – a challenge for some because they must wear a breathing mask in bed. CPAP is known to stop snoring, improve daytime alertness and reduce blood pressure.

Sleep neurologist Ronald Chervin, M.D., M.S., director of the U-M Sleep Disorders Center, led the study, which was funded by the Covault Memorial Foundation for Sleep Disorders Research.

Chervin says the study grew out of the anecdotal evidence that sleep center staff often saw in sleep apnea patients when they came for follow-up visits after using CPAP.

The team, including research program manager Deborah Ruzicka, R.N., Ph.D., sought a more scientific way to assess appearance before and after sleep treatment.

“The common lore, that people ‘look sleepy’ because they are sleepy, and that they have puffy eyes with dark circles under them, drives people to spend untold dollars on home remedies,” Chervin, the Michael S. Aldrich Collegiate Professor of Sleep Medicine and professor of Neurology at the U-M Medical School, said.

“We perceived that our CPAP patients often looked better, or reported that they’d been told they looked better, after treatment. But no one has ever actually studied this,” he added.

The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Tattoo-like skin patch that acts as a thermometer

Scientists have developed an ultra-thin tattoo-like patch that when glued to the skin can be used as a thermometer to measure its temperature.

 A team of researchers from the US, China, and Singapore have created the small patch that looks like a bar-code tattoo and is applied using special glue.

It keeps working even when the skin to which it is attached twists and turns.

The patch can measure body temperature (at the skin level) very accurately, and over a continuous period of time.

Also, because it measures heat at multiple locations (at the same skin site) at the same time, the patch is capable of monitoring heat flow and the constriction and dilation of blood vessels as they respond to the environment around them.

The team claims that the patches can work in reverse as well, delivering heat to the skin, if desired, simply by increasing the voltage, ‘phys.Org’ reported.

The patch isn’t ready for use by the general population just yet, however, as it still requires an external power source.

The team is investigating different sources for different types of patches – solar for those applied to the skin and bioelectric for those applied inside the body, such as to the outside of organs.

Source: Zee news

Zydus launches diabetes treatment drug Lipaglyn

Pharmaceutical entity Zydus group today said it has launched Lipaglyn, its patented new drug for treatment of diabetes.

 Lipaglyn will be available across India and is priced at Rs 25.90 per tablet. It is recommended for once administration of once day as a 4mg tablet, the company said in a statement.

Commenting on the launch of the drug, Zydus Cadila Chairman and Managing Director Pankaj R Patel said: “It’s a great milestone for Indian pharmaceutical research today as Lipaglyn completes its journey from the lab to the market.”

The drug is marketed by Zydus Discovery, a new division launched to extensively market the original research product of Zydus group’s research pipeline.

Lipaglyn is a drug for treating diabetic dyslipidemeia, a condition where a person is diabetic and has elevated levels of total cholesterol.

In June, the company had said it expected the drug to be a “blockbuster” and clock over USD 1 billion sales a year when it will be sold globally.

Patel had said the company was in the process of filing applications in developed markets like US and Europe, after which it will tie up with other companies for marketing the drug.

The company had spent USD 250 million in developing Lipaglyn, which took nearly 12 years to fructify. It will be spending another USD 150-200 million to launch the drug in overseas markets in next 3-5 years period, Patel had said.

In India, the company expects Lipaglyn to clock an annual turnover of Rs 100 crore in the next 3-4 years.

Article originally appeared in Zee News

Nanodiamonds boost treatment of chemo-resistant leukemia

By binding multiple molecules of a common leukemia drug with nanodiamonds, scientists have managed to boost the delivery of the drug to leukemic cells and retain the drug within the cells to combat the cancer.

This novel discovery, reported for the first time, addresses one of the major challenges in the treatment of leukemia where the cancer cells develop ways to pump drugs out of the body before they can do their job, particularly after they are exposed to chemotherapeutics.

Developed by Dr Edward Chow, Principal Investigator at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmacology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at National University of Singapore (NUS), in collaboration with Professor Dean Ho of the UCLA School of Dentistry, this innovation shows promise for greater efficacy in treating leukemia, particularly in non-adherent cells.

Daunorubicin is currently one of the most common drugs used to treat leukemia. The drug works by slowing down or stopping cancer cells from growing, causing many of them to die. It is also common, however, for leukemia to become resistant to this drug after treatment.

One mechanism by which this opposition, commonly known as chemoresistance, happens is through the expression of drug transporter pumps in leukemia cells that actively pump out chemotherapeutics, including Daunorubicin.

Current approaches to neutralising chemo-resistance have centred on developing competitive inhibitors. These efforts have limited success, with challenges like high toxicity levels and less-than-promising results during clinical trials.

The team of scientists from NUS and UCLA turned to nanodiamonds, which are tiny, carbon-based particles that are 2 to 8 nanometers in diameter, as an option to address chemo-resistance.

Dr Chow studied the biological basis of how nanodiamonds can potentially overcome chemo-resistance.

The scientists bound the surfaces of nanodiamonds with Daunorubicin, and the hybrid nanodiamond-drug complexes were introduced to leukemic cells.

The research team found that nanodiamonds could carry the drug to the cancer cells without being pumped out.

Due to their non-invasive sizes and unique surface features, nanodiamonds can be easily released without blocking up blood vessels.

The findings are published online in the medical journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine.

Source: Zee News