Month: January 2014

6 gross side effects of chewing gum

Chewing gum can lead to symptoms of temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), which includes jaw pain associated with the chewing muscles and joints that connect your lower jaw to your skull. Ouch. “Overuse of any muscle and joint can lead to pain and problems,” says Don Atkins, a dentist in Long Beach, California.

Many people end up with contracted muscles of the jaw, head, and neck, which can lead to headaches, earaches, or toothaches over time. Eat an apple instead, which satisfies the urge to chew and reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease at the same time.

For more healthy ways to de-stress, check out these 2-minute stress busters.

You could develop GI problems

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a GI disorder characterized by abdominal pain, cramping, and changes in bowel habits. “Chewing gum can contribute to IBS, as excess air can be swallowed, which contributes to abdominal pain and bloating,” says Dr. Patrick Takahashi, chief of gastroenterology at St. Vincent Medical Center, Los Angeles, California. In addition to swallowing air, artificial sweeteners such as sorbitol and mannitol can cause diarrhea in otherwise healthy people.

Here are natural diarrhea remedies and what could be causing your stomach woes.

You’ll rot your teeth

In an effort to avoid the laxative effect of artificially sweetened gum, switching to sugar-sweetened gum may sound logical, but it’s fraught with its own issues. “Sugar-sweetened gum bathes the teeth in sugar and is a source of tooth decay,” says Atkins.

You’re chewing a sheep by-product

Lanolin, an ingredient found in skincare products, keeps chewing gum soft. It doesn’t sound too bad until you find out it’s a yellow waxy substance secreted by the sebaceous glands of sheep. Known as “wool fat,” lanolin is harvested by squeezing the sheep’s harvested wool between rollers. “In the amounts utilized in chewing gum, it hardly poses a threat to one’s health, although the thought of digesting it may be a bit unsavory,” says Takahashi. Unsavory indeed.

You’re releasing mercury into your system

Silver fillings known as amalgam dental fillings consist of a combination of mercury, silver, and tin. And research shows that chewing gum can release the mercury from the fillings into your system. The problem? High levels of mercury can cause neurological issues as well as chronic illnesses and mental disorders. Fortunately, the small amount released through dental fillings isn’t likely to harm you, says Takahashi, as it typically passes easily through your intestinal tract. That said, do you really want metal in your body?

Source: fox news

New device may put DNA testing in doctors’ hands

handheld-genetic-test

It can take days for doctors to determine if a patient infected with malaria carries a drug-resistant version of the disease. The same is true of tuberculosis.

But a new testing device could reduce that time lag to 15 minutes, potentially helping to ensure that patients are correctly treated right away, says the company developing this device.

United Kingdom company QuantuMDX now has a working prototype for a device intended to quickly test a sample of blood, sputum (saliva mixed with mucus) or even tumor cells for genetic markers that provide information to guide a doctor’s decisions on how to treat a patient.

“We want to put a full diagnostic test into the palms of health professionals’ hands,” said Elaine Warburton, chief executive officer of QuantuMDX and the companys cofounder.

The prototype is about the size of an iPad 5, or 6.6 by 9.4 inches (17 by 24 centimeters), but thicker. In about six months, Warburton said she anticipates the device will be reduced to about the size of an iPad mini, 5.3 by 7.9 in. (13 by 200 cm).

The device, currently known as Q-POC (pronounced Q-pock), is still a long way from being used in the clinic. The company still has work to do on the cartridges for use with the handheld prototype, and it needs to run clinical trials testing the device, followed by regulatory approval from bodies such as FDA, Warburton told LiveScience in an email.

Earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jonathan O’Halloran, inventor of the technology and the company’s cofounder, announced plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign. The campaign is expected to begin on Feb. 12 on the site Indigogo.com, to support further development of the Q-POC. The company is also interested in suggestions for a new name and design for the device, Warburton said.

If all goes well, QuantuMDX anticipates commercially launching the device and malaria test cartridge in Africa in 2015, she said.

Source: Fox news

Belgian researchers use groundbreaking surgery to repair bones

Bonesurgery.JPG

Belgian medical researchers have succeeded in repairing bones using stem cells from fatty tissue, with a new technique they believe could become a benchmark for treating a range of bone disorders.

The team at the Saint Luc university clinic hospital in Brussels have treated 11 patients, eight of them children, with fractures or bone defects that their bodies could not repair, and a spin-off is seeking investors to commercialize the discovery.

Doctors have for years harvested stem cells from bone marrow at the top of the pelvis and injected them back into the body to repair bone.

The ground-breaking technique of Saint Luc’s centre for tissue and cellular therapy is to remove a sugar cube sized piece of fatty tissue from the patient, a less invasive process than pushing a needle into the pelvis and with a stem cell concentration they say is some 500 times higher.

The stem cells are then isolated and used to grow bone in the laboratory. Unlike some technologies, they are also not attached to a solid and separate ‘scaffold’.

“Normally you transplant only cells and you cross your fingers that it functions,” the centre’s coordinator Denis Dufrane told Reuters television.

His work has been published in Biomaterials journal and was presented at an annual meeting of the International Federation for Adipose Therapeutics and Science (IFATS) in New York in November.

BONE FORMATION

“It is complete bone tissue that we recreate in the bottle and therefore when we do transplants in a bone defect or a bone hole…you have a higher chance of bone formation.”

The new material in a lab dish resembles more plasticine than bone, but can be molded to fill a fracture, rather like a dentist’s filling in a tooth, hardening in the body.

Some of those treated have included people recovering from tumors that had to be removed from bones. One 13-year-old boy, with a fracture and disorder that rendered him unable to repair bone, could resume sports within 14 months of treatment.

“Our hope is to propose this technology directly in emergency rooms to reconstitute bones when you have a trauma or something like that,” Dufrane said.

A spin-off founded last year called Novadip Biosciences will seek to commercialize the treatment, initially to allow spinal fusion among elderly people with degenerated discs.

It may also seek to create a bank of bone tissue from donors rather than the patients themselves.

IFATS president Marco Helder, based at Amsterdam’s VU university medical centre, said the novelty was the lack of solid scaffold.

“It is interesting and it is new, but it will have limitations regarding load-bearing capacity and, as with other implants, it will need to connect to the blood vessels of the body rapidly to avoid dying off,” he said, adding:

“Any foreign object can cause irritation and problems, so the fact that this is just host tissue would be an advantage.”

Source: Top News Today

Traditional Chinese medicine may reduce risk of diabetes

Diabetes Definition

New research shows Chinese herbal medicine may hold promising solutions for people with pre-diabetes, reports a study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

A prediabetes diagnosis indicates that an individual has elevated blood sugar levels, but his or her glucose levels are not high enough to have developed Type 2 diabetes.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) focuses on establishing balance in the body in order to treat disease, according to study author Dr. Chun-Su Yuan, director of the Tang Center for Herbal Medicine Research at the University of Chicago.

“It’s a more holistic approach, using medicine to change the overall body function instead of very specifically on symptoms and organs [like Western medicine],” Yuan, who is also the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Chinese Medicine, told FoxNews.com.

For this study, researchers combined TCM’s traditional principles with modern medicine by identifying herbs that have proven effective in treating people with diabetes.

In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study, 389 participants with impaired glucose tolerance (a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes) were tested every three months to monitor whether they had developed diabetes – or if they had experienced a restoration of normal glucose tolerance (NGT), meaning they were no longer at risk for diabetes.

Half of the participants were treated with a Chinese herbal mixture called Tianqi. Tianqi is a capsule containing 10 Chinese herbal medicines including Astragali Radix and Coptidis Rhizoma, which have been previously shown to improve glucose levels. All subjects received dietary education and were advised to maintain their usual physical fitness routines.

Overall, the study found that Tianqi appeared to reduce the risk of diabetes among study participants by 32.1 percent, compared to the placebo group. At the end of the study, 125 subjects (63.13 percent) in the Tianqi group had achieved normal glucose tolerance, compared to only 89 (46.6 percent) in the placebo group. Among the participants who went on to develop diabetes, 56 subjects (29.32 percent) were in the placebo group, compared to only 36 (18.18 percent) in the Tianqi group.

There were no reported severe adverse side effects from Tianqi.

“We are excited about this,” Yuan said. “It’s an advantage that we did not observe bad side effects.”

Furthermore, researchers believe Chinese medicine may be almost as effective as Western drugs used to tread diabetes.

“The data from our study showed that Chinese medicine has comparable effects ,” Yuan said.

However, Yuan noted that because the study was conducted in China, further research may be needed in order to prove the effectiveness of Tianqi for patients in other countries. Future research will also need to focus on quality control issues surrounding the use of herbal medicines in clinical studies, Yuan said.

“It’s not easy to do controlled trials of herbal medicine and this study did it and showed promising effects,” Yuan said. “But we need to do more studies with the possibility that in five to seven years TCM has better utility in the U.S.”

Source: Fox News

 

 

Hitachi unveils medical content management blueprint

storage-210x1462

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, on Wednesday announced the first medical content management blueprint for Electronic Medical Records Adoption Model (EMRAM). The model, devised by Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Asia Pacific helps health organizations optimize their IT investments on the journey to full electronic medical records (EMR) adoption.

“Medical content is the lifeblood of health organizations. To ensure it runs smoothly, health organizations need a robust system to manage and control its storage, operation and security,” said Steven Yeo, vice president and executive director of HIMSS Asia Pacific. “It is encouraging that HDS has developed solutions with each stage of the EMR Adoption Model in mind.”

Health organizations around the world are fast adopting EMR applications to enhance care quality and efficiency. To support and guide these organizations, HIMSS offers an eight-stage Asia Pacific EMRAM which helps healthcare professionals understand their EMR needs.

Many physicians and managers find it challenging to identify the appropriate solutions to store and manage medical content when they adopt EMR. Drawing on its expertise in information innovation, HDS developed the new medical content management blueprint for HIMSS EMRAM.

“Healthcare is a big data industry that is experiencing a rapid, exponential increase in both the volume and variety of data when adopting EMR applications. As patient data continues to grow, health organizations need highly scalable, available IT infrastructures to support patient care as well as lower the total cost of ownership,” said Johnny Ma, general manager, APAC Industry Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems. “Through HIMSS consulting services, we ensure that we help healthcare organizations optimize their IT assets and manage costs while delivering excellent services.”

HDS content management solutions for EMRAM include seven elements, namely business continuity, file and content, unified storage, storage economics, cloud enablement, virtualization, and enterprise-class storage platforms. Health organizations can implement each element separately according to their adoption stage or deploy an integrated infrastructure with multiple solutions to support their specific environment and growth plan.

By referring to the medical content management requirements for EMRAM, health organizations can formulate a solution algorithm to architect the best solution to meet the specific requirements of each stage. This solution algorithm comprises all the essential components to not only meet the needs of that individual EMRAM stage, but to integrate with the solutions implemented at later stages, according to a statement by HDS.

Source: India medical Times

 

Sperm robots on way to deliver babies

Apart from their natural act, sperms are set to be used as biological motors for transporting drugs, genes and other sperms to help treat infertility and other issues.

Called spermbots – sperms turned into micro-robots – they could be controlled from outside a patient’s body to deliver drugs, and even sperm itself, to parts of the body where it is needed, says a path-breaking research.

Researchers at Dresden Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany are looking for a way to propel micro-robots through bodily fluids safely.

“We thought of using a powerful biological motor to do the job instead and we came up with the flagella of a sperm cell, which is physiologically less problematic,” professor Oliver G Schmidt, director of the institute, was quoted as saying in Gizmag.com that covers new and emerging technologies.

To create these tiny robots, scientists designed microtubes, which are thin sheets of titanium and iron rolled into conical tubes and having a magnetic property.

They put the microtubes into a solution in a Petri dish and added bovine sperm cells, which are similar size to human sperm, said the report.

When a live sperm entered the wider end of the tube, it became trapped near the narrow end.

The scientists also closed the wider end, so the sperm wouldn’t swim out.

The trapped cell pushed against the tube, moving it forward.

Then, the scientists used a magnetic field to guide the tube in the direction they wanted it to go, relying on the sperm for the propulsion, the report said.

Source: Times of India

Do multiple pills increase hospitalisation risk?

Researchers have termed as ‘misleading’ the commonly-held assumption that taking several medicines for multiple health conditions is hazardous.

According to them, polypharmacy – where patients, generally older adults (those aged over 65 years), use multiple medications – needs more sophisticated approaches to assess the suitability of each patient’s set of medicines.

“Today, we have more elderly people and also a rising number of people are being diagnosed with multiple health conditions,” said lead author Rupert Payne who works at the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research.

Working with colleagues in Nottingham and Glasgow, Payne analysed data for 180,815 adults with long-term clinical conditions.

They found that for patients with only a single medical condition, taking 10 or more medications was associated with a more than three-fold increase in an unplanned hospitalisation compared to patients who took only one to three medicines.

However, patients with six or more medical conditions who used 10 or more medications only increased their chance of admission by 1.5 times – compared to the group taking one to three medicines, said the study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

“This work is highly relevant to the development and assessment of prescribing skills in general practice where the majority of long-term clinical care is undertaken and where doctors often prescribe drugs for long periods of time,” said Payne.

“The research demonstrates the need for more sophisticated and nuanced approaches when measuring the impact of polypharmacy in future clinical research,” he added.

Source: DNA India

UK govt health adviser warns against drinking orange juice

Contrary to the popular beliefs about the health benefits of fruit juices, the UK government’s leading adviser on obesity has said people should stop taking orange juice due to high sugar content in it.

Professor Susan Jebb, head of diet and obesity research at the Medical Research Council’s Human Nutrition Research unit in Cambridge, UK, says orange juice has as much sugar as Coca-Cola and warned that fruit juice should not be counted as part of a healthy five-a-day diet.

“Fruit juice isn’t the same as intact fruit and it has got as much sugar as many classical sugar drinks. It is also absorbed very fast so by the time it gets to your stomach your body doesn’t know whether it’s Coca-Cola or orange juice, frankly,” she told The Sunday Times.

The development comes after the health experts urged the food industry to cut 30 per cent from processed in the UK while warning that sugar has become as dangerous as alcohol or tobacco.

They also claim that reduction in sugar could shave 100 calories from each person’s daily intake and reverse the UK’s growing obesity epidemic.

While many branded fruit juice contain as little as 10 percent fruit juice with lots of added sugar, several research has linked intake of sugary sodas, fruit juices with an elevated risk of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.

Professor Susan Jebb, who said she had herself stopped drinking orange juice also asked people to dilute it with water and drink if they cannot quit juice.

“I have to say it is a relatively easy thing to give up. Swap it and have a piece of real fruit. If you are going to drink it, you should dilute it”, she added.

Source: Zee news

 

Stem cell breakthrough explains how breast cancer spreads

Breast cancer stem cells exist in two different states and each state plays a role in how cancer spreads, a new study has revealed.

Study’s senior author Max S. Wicha from University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center said the lethal part of cancer is its metastasis so understanding how metastasis occurs is critical.

“We have evidence that cancer stem cells are responsible for metastasis – they are the seeds that mediate cancer’s spread. Now we’ve discovered how the stem cells do this,” Wicha said.

First, on the outside of the tumor, a type of stem cell exists in a state called the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) state. These stem cells appear dormant but are very invasive and able to get into the bloodstream, where they travel to distant parts of the body.

Once there, the stem cells transition to a second state that displays the opposite characteristics, called the mesenchymal-epithelial transition state (MET). These cells are capable of growing and making copies of themselves, producing new tumors.

The study looked specifically at breast cancer stem cells but the researchers believe the findings likely have implications for other cancer types as well.

The study was published in the journal of Stem Cell Reports.

Source: ANI

 

Sleeping on one side may worsen glaucoma: study

In a new study from South Korea, people with worsening glaucoma on just one side were also more likely to sleep with the affected eye facing downward.

The researchers say that position raises the eye’s internal pressure and probably hastens deterioration of the eye.

In glaucoma, the optic nerve is often damaged by increased intraocular pressure. The damage causes tunnel vision and eventual blindness.

According to the World Health Organization, glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness around the world, after cataracts.

“There is prior data from the early nineties, suggesting that in patients with glaucoma who sleep on their sides, the eye in the dependent position tends to have greater damage of the optic nerve,” Dr. Jeffrey Schultz told Reuters Health in an email.

Schultz directs Glaucoma Service at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York and is an associate professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

He was not involved in the study, but said it is “important in letting us know that there is potential for behavior changes in lessening the risk of blindness from glaucoma.”

The study was led by Dr. Kyoung Nam Kim, a researcher in the Department of Ophthalmology at the Chungnam National University hospital in Daejeon.

Treatments to decrease pressure in a patient’s eyeballs can slow progression of glaucoma in some cases. But other patients continue to progress even when intraocular pressure appears to be under control, Kim’s team writes in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.

Since lying down raises the pressure in the eyeball, and sleeping on one side consistently more than the other could be problematic for the eye on that side, the researchers decided to investigate whether a side- sleeping position might be part of the problem.

Kim and colleagues examined the sleeping habits of 430 glaucoma patients who had a visual field loss that was worse in one eye.

They found 132 of the patients preferred to sleep on one side. Of these patients, 67 percent usually slept with the worse eye downward.

They also compared the sleeping habits of patients who had glaucoma with elevated intraocular pressure (high-tension glaucoma) with those with normal pressure (normal-tension glaucoma).

Approximately 66 percent of the patients with normal-tension glaucoma preferred to sleep with the worse eye downward and 71 percent of the patients with high-tension glaucoma slept that way.

The results don’t prove that sleeping position accounts for worsening glaucoma on one side.

But they at least verify a link “between the preferred sleeping position and asymmetric visual field loss between eyes,” the authors write.

“Unfortunately, it is very difficult to control your body position during sleep,” Schultz said.

“Certainly, if one has severe damage in one eye it would seem to make sense to attempt to avoid sleeping on your side with that eye down,” he said.

It may help to sleep on the side with less eye damage – or on your back. But Schultz warns that sleeping on your back may not be the answer for people who are predisposed to sleep apnea, which is another risk factor for worsening glaucoma.

At this point there is no way to improve visual field loss in patients with glaucoma once it occurs, he said.

“The best thing that patients can do to lessen the risk of worsening, is to be compliant with the medical regime and to follow up as directed by the patient’s physician,” Schultz said.

Source: Reuters