Metabolically Healthy Obese People Still Face Risk Of Heart Disease

Written By: editor
John

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Even if an obese person is metabolically healthy, he or she still faces an increased risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to new research published online in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
While previous studies have produced conflicting reports as to whether or not obese men and women can avoid high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low high-density lipoproteins (HDL) levels and other medical issues that raise the risk of metabolic disease, researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have discovered that even metabolically healthy people with high BMI could be unhealthy.
“Unfortunately, our findings suggest metabolically healthy obesity is not a benign condition,” corresponding author Dr. Carlos Lorenzo, explained Wednesday in a statement. “Regardless of their current metabolic health, people who are obese face an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes in the future.”
Dr. Lorenzo and his colleagues reviewed data from the population-based San Antonio Heart Study (SAHS) to assess diabetes incidence in over 2,800 subjects and cardiovascular disease incidence in another 3,700 people. The SAHS study followed-up with participants for between six and 10 years.
The team behind the newly-published analysis looked at whether or not there was a difference between normal weight people with at least two metabolic conditions and metabolically-healthy obese people when it comes to developing diabetes or heart disease.
In order to determine metabolic health, the study authors examined whether or not the participants had high blood pressure, elevated triglyceride and blood sugar levels, insulin resistance and decreased HDL cholesterol. Subjects were declared metabolically healthy if they had zero or only one of the above characteristics.
“The analysis found that increased body mass index was linked to an elevated risk of developing diabetes,” the Endocrine Society wrote. “Normal weight people who had multiple metabolic abnormalities also faced an increased risk of developing diabetes. Both groups faced an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease after taking into account demographics and smoking behavior.”
“Our data demonstrate the importance of continuing to monitor for diabetes and cardiovascular disease in both people with metabolically healthy obesity and those who have metabolically abnormalities despite being a normal weight,” added Lorenzo. “If physicians and patients are too complacent about assessing risk, we can miss important opportunities to prevent the development of chronic and even deadly conditions.”

Brain Imaging Helps Distinguish Two Similar Learning Disorders

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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The first anatomical evidence that the brains of children with a nonverbal learning disability may develop differently than the brains of other children has been discovered by a Michigan State University researcher. Nonverbal learning disability (NVLD) has long been considered a “pseudo” diagnosis.
The study findings, published in Child Neuropsychology, could someday help educators and clinicians better distinguish between and treat children with Asperger syndrome, a form of high functioning autism, and NVLD. The two conditions are often confused with one another.
“Children with nonverbal learning disabilities and Asperger’s can look very similar, but they can have very different reasons for why they behave the way they do,” said Jodene Fine, assistant professor of school psychology in MSU’s College of Education.
More appropriate intervention strategies could be developed with a deeper understanding of the biological differences in children with learning and behavioral challenges.
Children with NVLD tend to have below average math skills and difficulty solving visual puzzles, although they have normal language skills. Many of these children also show difficulty understanding social cues, leading scientists to argue that NVLD is related to high functioning autism. The current study suggest that this may not be so.
Fine worked with Kayla Musielak, an MSU doctoral student in school psychology to study about 150 children between the ages of 8 and 18. The research team used MRI scans of the participants’ brains to find that the children with NVLD had smaller spleniums than children diagnosed with other learning disorders such as Asperger’s and ADHD, as well as children who had no learning disorders.
The splenium is part of the corpus callosum, a thick band of fibers in the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This region facilitates communication between the two sides, and the posterior part of the corpus callosum serves the areas of the brain related to visual and spatial functioning.
In a second phase of the study, the participants’ brain activity was analyzed after being shown videos while in the MRI, portraying both positive and negative examples of social interaction. For example, a positive event could include a child opening a desired birthday present with a friend, while a negative event could include a child being teased by other children.
The brains of children with NVLD responded differently to the social interactions than the brains of children with high functioning autism, or HFA. This suggests that the neural pathways that underlie those behaviors may be different.
“So what we have is evidence of a structural difference in the brains of children with NVLD and HFA, as well as evidence of a functional difference in the way their brains behave when they are presented with stimuli,” Fine said.
More research is needed to better understand how nonverbal learning disability fits into the family of learning disorders, Fine said, however, that her findings present “an interesting piece of the puzzle.”
“I would say at this point we still don’t have enough evidence to say NVLD is a distinct diagnosis, but I do think our research supports the idea that it might be,” she said.

Fibromyalgia

What A Spine Treatment Could Do For Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

What A Spine Treatment Could Do For Fibromyalgia

Spine treatments administered through specific spine therapy procedures did very little in terms of helping individuals with severe back pain that is similar to the effects caused by fibromyalgia.

Procedures such as epidural steroid injections proved to be minimally effective as a form of treatment for the participants of the study.

Of the patients reporting for the back pain treatment study, nearly 42 percent were considered to have fibromyalgia when their symptoms were compared to the criteria set by the American College of Rheumatology.

The amounts of spine treatments like the ones administered in the study have seen a drastic increase in popularity over the past couple of decades.

Epidural steroid injections and facet joing interventions have seen the greatest jump in popularity, reported at increase levels of 100 percent and five hundred percent, respectively.

Although the procedures have become increasingly popular, the success rates of these procedures are overwhelmingly low. The failure rates of the procedures currently stand between 25 and 45 percent. The spine injection procedures have been recorded to have very little long-term benefit, as well.

There has been some research that argues that that poor response statistics have correlations with depression, the duration of symptoms, history with spine surgery, the use of opioids as a form of treatment, and young age.

Through research and study, it has been made more apparent that because the central nervous system’s abnormal pain processing plays a role in the development of fibromyalgia, local treatments of the spine will not be very successful in treating the symptoms associated to the disorder.

Additionally, individuals suffering from fibromyalgia usually possess low levels of pain-inhibiting neurotransmitters and high levels of neurotransmitters that increase pain sensations. This, of course, affects the success rate of treatments like spine injections.

Because of how unique the fibromyalgia disorder is, modified treatment approaches have become more prevalent than more traditional approaches.

An example would the use of serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressant drug medications, to treat lower back pains.

The use of behavior therapy and an exercise regimen specific to the fibromyalgia patient has seen more effective results than spine treatments have.

Of course, more tests using spine injections and the use of neuroimaging will provide more accurate readings of studies in which these treatments are administered. The limitations of the study may have been its cross-sectional and single site design.

Researchers will continue to test various theories about how to best treat the symptom associated with the fibromyalgia disorder. The condition is becoming more and more prevalent each day and those individuals suffering from its symptoms are in desperate need of answers.

Sleepless nights, depression, and constant muscle soreness and aches are quite the nuisance and can become terribly exhausting. The proper treatment or a possible cure for fibromyalgia has been very elusive because the disorder itself is so unique.

There is no verifiable cause for the development of the disorder so finding a cure for it has proven to be quite difficult for rheumatologists and their research teams.

New Process Cuts 3D Print Time From Hours To Minutes

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[ Watch The Video: 3D Printing Multi-Material Objects ]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Researchers at the University of Southern California have developed a new 3D printing process, and are using it to model and fabricate heterogeneous objects comprised of multiple materials in minutes instead of hours.

3D printing has the potential to transform industries by providing faster, cheaper and more accurate manufacturing options. However, the lengthy fabrication times and complexity of multi-material objects have long been an obstacle to its widespread commercial use.

In the current work, USC Professor Yong Chen and his team were able to reduce the fabrication time to just minutes, bringing the manufacturing world one step closer to achieving its goal.

“Digital material design and fabrication enables controlled material distributions of multiple base materials in a product component for significantly improved design performance. Such fabrication capability opens up exciting new options that were previously impossible,” said Chen, professor in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at USC and the study’s lead researcher.

Traditional modeling and prototyping approaches used to take days to complete. But over the past several decades various additive manufacturing (AM) processes have been developed to fabricate both homogeneous and heterogeneous objects more quickly. Existing AM processes such as multi-jet modeling, which creates a solid 3D object from a digital model by laying down successive layers of material, can fabricate a complex object in a matter of hours.

Last year, Chen and another team of USC researchers improved an AM-related process known as mask-image-projection-based stereolithography (MIP-SL) to dramatically accelerate the fabrication of homogeneous 3D objects. MIP-SL process begins with a 3D digital model of an object, which is then sliced by a set of horizontal planes. Each slice is then converted into a two-dimensional mask image, which is projected onto a photocurable liquid resin surface. Light is then projected onto the resin to cure it in the shape of the related layer.

The team also developed a two-way movement design for bottom-up projection, so that the resin could be quickly spread into uniform thin layers – cutting production time from hours to a few minutes.

In the current work, Chen and his team successfully applied this more efficient process to the fabrication of heterogeneous objects that comprise different materials that cure at different rates.

This new process allows heterogeneous prototypes and objects such as dental and robotics models to be fabricated in less costly and more time-efficient ways than ever before, the researchers said.

Chen and his team now plan to investigate ways to develop an automatic design approach for heterogeneous material distribution according to user-specified physical properties, and to find ways to improve the fabrication speed. The researchers presented their findings at ASME’s 2013 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in San Diego on Wednesday.

Robots Might Make Better Teachers For Children With Autism

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Bryan P. Carpender for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

It’s known that many children with autism have an affinity for technology.

Now, scientists at Vanderbilt University — with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — are leveraging that fact by developing a learning environment for autistic children that is built on the foundation of state-of-the-art technology.

One such example of that technology is “Russell”, a humanoid robot who works with the children to engage them and help them develop an ability to imitate others, a skill essential to learning.

[ Watch the Video: Humanoid Robot Engages Children With Autism ]

“Children with autism spectrum disorders have really early impairments in social interaction and social communication,” says Zachary Warren, a psychologist working on the innovative project at Vanderbilt University.

Nilanjan Sarkar, the mechanical and computer engineer and Warren’s partner on the project, explains that while these children experience difficulty with social interaction, “they tend to understand the physical world much better than the social world.” That’s where Russell comes into play.

Russell the robot isn’t as complex as another human; it has some human characteristics, but it doesn’t over-stimulate or overwhelm a child dealing with autism spectrum disorders. It’s visually stimulating and engages their technological affinity without creating the added pressure of a regular human-to-human social interaction.

The learning environment they have created includes a room where the robot interacts with the children. This room is outfitted with cameras and a video gaming sensor that tracks and records the child’s movements. That information is sent wirelessly to the robot to provide real-time feedback, allowing the robot to gauge and understand how engaged the child is, how well the child is performing, and how well he or she is enjoying the activity.

In a blended learning approach, members of Sarkar’s team also interact with the children, leading them in exercises to encourage them to build their imitation skills. Interestingly, the children tend to be most responsive when interacting with the robot, while they pay minimal attention to the humans.

In addition to this robotic learning tool, Sarkar and Warren are also developing new learning tools to help children to feel more comfortable in real-life social situations. One such tool is an interactive computer game that teaches children to read and interpret facial expressions, which is an issue for many with autism.

Eventually, Sarkar hopes to see the day where children can have their own robot at home to help them navigate these learning tools.

Uncategorized

NASA Looks To Launch Astronauts From American Soil – On Science

Written By: Sam Savage
editor

Experience meets innovation in the future of space exploration.

Ride receives the Medal of Freedom.

A surprise in the origins of Native Americans.

And we’re going nuts! Today…On Science!

Hello and welcome to On Science. I’m your host Emerald Robinson.

NASA is combining their hard knock experience with commercial innovation to realize the dream of astronauts once again launching into space from American soil. The US space agency is asking commercial partners to develop crew transportation systems. Commercial companies have already proven that they can get supplies to the International Space Station but NASA’s asking them to up their game. But they warn such systems need to be safe and efficient and also cost-effective for American taxpayers. Systems will include rockets, spacecraft, and ground transportation. Commercial companies have already made a lot of progress designing and developing the next generation of US crew transportation systems for low-Earth orbit but NASA says the next phase of development will ensure a strong emphasis on crew safety. They said the request for proposals begins the journey for a new era in US human spaceflight. And the goal is to launch by the end of 2017.

And although one astronaut has already made it to that final frontier, she still inspires us today. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom this week in a special 50th anniversary ceremony in honor of President John F. Kennedy. Ride first took flight on the Challenger shuttle on June 18, 1983, at the age of 31. She completed two missions aboard the shuttle and then went on to a career in academia, teaching at the University of California San Diego. However, Ride continued to be a big part of space exploration as an advisor and investigator until her death in 2012 at age 61. As a teacher, Ride shared her pioneer spirit with her students telling them there were no limits to what they can do—no matter race or gender. Thank you Ms. Ride, you’re an inspiration to us all. NASA’s Charles Bolden had this to say—“thanks to Sally’s work throughout her lifetime, young women and girls can now aspire to fly into space.” Sally Ride was a true American hero.

And speaking of Americans, a new study is shedding some light on the origins of Native Americans. Researchers from the Natural History Museum of Denmark and Texas A&M say that DNA from a gene pool discovered in the skeletal remains of a 24,000-year-old young Siberian boy could be responsible for about one-third of all modern Native Americans. DNA sequencing from the skeleton showed that 14-38% of the modern Native Americans had this Siberian connection. How did this make the researchers feel? They said, “well, it surprised us quite a bit.”

What’s not surprising is the cardiovascular decline of children. I rarely see kids running around and playing like we used to. They’re always glued to their technology. A new study from the University of South Australia’s School of Health Sciences revealed that the cardiovascular fitness levels of kids is about 15% less than when their parents were at their age. The study looked at running fitness of kids between 1964 and 2010. The change was consistent over gender, race, region, and age of the kids. The only variations occurred across countries. The decline happened consistently about 5% every 10 years. Researchers warned that if a child is unfit now, then they are more likely to be an unhealthy adult. Don’t get me wrong kids, I love technology, but just put it down every once in a while and run around!

Here’s new research to go nuts over! A recent study from Harvard revealed the strongest evidence yet that eating nuts can reduce a person’s risk of dying from cancer, heart disease, as well as a number of other diseases. Researchers found that study volunteers who regularly consumed a one-ounce daily serving of walnuts, almonds, cashews or tree nuts had a 20% lower risk of dying from any cause during the 10 year duration of the study. Well, that’s got me feeling nutty.

And that’s what’s up today On Science. Go ahead, go nuts!

Uncategorized

When Power Trips Get Petty

Written By: Sam Savage
editor

A new study from the University of Kent and the University of Adelaide lends credence to the old adage—there is no tyranny like petty tyranny. From four different experiments that included nearly 500 participants, researchers found that spite, revenge, and other acts of aggression are responses usually exhibited by those who were new to the possession of power. Those who were more experienced holding a leadership position tended to feel more self-assured and therefore felt less vulnerable to perceived threats. They say this research shows a better understanding of the relationship between power and revenge and that power isn’t simply good or bad. It affects people in different ways.
[ Read the Article: Power Corrupts When You’re Not Used To Wielding It ]

Study Highlights Link Between Insomnia And Cardiovascular Death

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

In addition to being a potentially debilitating disorder, insomnia is also linked to a higher mortality rate among men, according to a new study in the journal Circulation.

“Insomnia is a common health issue, particularly in older adults, but the link between this common sleep disorder and its impact on the risk of death has been unclear,” said study author Yanping Li, PhD, a medical research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston. “Our research shows that among men who experience specific symptoms of insomnia, there is a modest increase risk in death from cardiovascular-related issues.”

The researchers found that difficulty falling to sleep and poor sleep quality were both connected with a higher risk of mortality, largely related to cardiovascular disease.

In the study, BWH researchers tracked over 23,000 men who self-reported any insomnia symptoms for a six-year period. From 2004 to 2010, researchers recorded over 2000 participant deaths using data from government and family sources. After accounting for factors such as age and chronic conditions, researchers discovered that men who said they had either difficulty falling asleep or low-quality sleep had a 55 percent and 32 percent increased risk of mortality related to cardiovascular disease over the six year follow up, when compared to participants who did not report having insomnia-related symptoms.

“We know that sleep is important for cardiovascular health and many studies have linked poor or insufficient sleep with increased risk factors for cardiovascular-related diseases,” said Dr. Xiang Gao, a study author from BWH and Harvard School of Public Health. “Now we know that not only can poor sleep impact disease risk, but it may also impact our longevity.”

“While further research is necessary to confirm these findings, there is overwhelming evidence that practicing good sleep hygiene and prioritizing sufficient and restful sleep is an often overlooked but important modifiable risk factor in overall health,” he added.

The new study was released as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released preliminary results of its own research on Monday that said curing insomnia in patients with depression double their chance for a full recovery from the cognitive disorder. The results were from one of four insomnia trials being funded by the NIH.

Experts familiar with the NIH research told the New York Times that the results were plausible and could lead to major changes in treatment.

“It would be an absolute boon to the field,” said Dr. Nada L. Stotland, professor of psychiatry at Rush Medical College in Chicago.

“It makes good common sense clinically,” she added. “If you have a depression, you’re often awake all night, it’s extremely lonely, it’s dark, you’re aware every moment that the world around you is sleeping, every concern you have is magnified.”

Colleen E. Carney, who is heading up the research at Ryerson University in Toronto, said her team’s part in the study was small, but added that a more definitive picture should emerge as the other teams released their results. Those studies include about 70 patients each and are being conducted at Stanford, Duke and the University of Pittsburgh.

Majority Of Women Able To Have Natural Birth After A C-Section

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A new UK-based study published on Wednesday found that 62 percent of women who delivered their first child by a successful caesarian section were able to deliver their next child by vaginal birth.

Published in in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the study researchers said they wanted to see the attempt and success rate of a vaginal birth after caesarean.

Using data from the UK’s Hospital Episode Statistics on over 140,000 women, the researchers discovered that 52 percent attempted a vaginal birth after caesarean section (VBAC) for their second baby between 2004 and 2011.

“The majority of women with an uncomplicated first caesarean section are candidates for attempting VBAC, but our data found that only half of those women chose this option,” said study author Hannah Knight, a research fellow at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The study authors found that women 24 years old or younger were more likely to attempt a VBAC than women over the age of 34, 60 percent compared to 45 percent. Black women and Asian women living in the UK were also found to have a higher rate of VBAC attempts, 62 percent and 64 percent respectively, for their second delivery when compared to white British women (49 percent).

While almost two-thirds of women who attempted a VBAC were successful, researchers found that black women had a markedly lower success rate compared to white women, 50 percent compared to 66 percent.

“Women from a non-white ethnic background were more likely than white women to attempt a VBAC, but the success rate in non-white women was lower,” Knight said. “This could point to different patient preferences or a lack of access to elective repeat caesarean section for non-white women.

The researchers also discovered that women over 34 had a lower success rate than women 24 or younger, 59 percent to 69 percent respectively. The reason for the first caesarean section was a strong factor in determining the success of a natural childbirth in the second pregnancy, the study researchers said. Additionally, women with a history of labor complications were almost twice as likely to have an unsuccessful VBAC.

“Interestingly, we also found an unexplained variation in the rate of attempted and successful VBAC between hospitals, which was independent of maternal demographic and clinical risk factors,” Knight added. “An informed discussion about whether or not to attempt a vaginal delivery after a caesarean section requires an assessment of the risk of emergency caesarean, and this paper provides valuable information both for women and the obstetricians and midwives caring for them.”

“In England approximately 50,000 women per year are faced with the choice of attempting a trial of labor after having had a c-section for their first delivery,” noted John Thorp, BJOG deputy editor-in-chief. “This study shows encouraging results with the majority of women who attempted a natural delivery after a primary c-section being successful.”

“Current UK guidelines state pregnant women with a primary c-section and uncomplicated healthy second pregnancy should be given the option of a vaginal birth for their next baby, or an elective-repeat c-section, and counseled on the risks and benefits of both,” he added. “Women with any questions about their delivery options should consult with their midwife or obstetrician.”

Preschoolers Learn Heart-Healthy Habits From Sesame Street

Written By: editor

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Preschool-age children can learn heart-healthy eating habits, thanks in part to the long-running television program Sesame Street, according to research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2013 conference in Dallas on Monday.

The data presented at the conference was from a three-year follow-up study of preschoolers in Bogotá, Colombia conducted by Dr. Valentin Fuster, the Director of Mount Sinai Heart and Physician-in-Chief at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, and his colleagues. The youngsters involved in the study took part in a structured curriculum using materials from Sesame Street’s Healthy Habits for Life program.

As a result of their participation in the program, those children reportedly improved their knowledge, attitudes and habits associated with a heart-healthy lifestyle, Dr. Fuster’s team discovered. Furthermore, they found that the percentage of children who were at a healthy weight improved by 13 percent.

Fuster and his co-authors partnered with Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, to come up with a campaign to promote cardiovascular health education in developing nations, Mount Sinai said in a statement.

Colombia was chosen to serve as the pilot for the five-month long program, during which children between the ages of three and five learned heart-healthy behaviors from Sesame Street characters. Topics of the research included how to love and care for your body, the difference between everyday foods (fruits and vegetables) and sometimes foods (cookies and other sweets), and being physically active by playing with friends.

The preschoolers and their parents were retested at the end of the program, and the investigators found that the kids knowledge improved by 15 percent, their attitudes by 51 percent, and their heart-healthy habits by 27 percent. The percentage of children at a healthy weight increased from 62 percent to 75 percent, and a smaller but still significant change in the knowledge and attitudes of parents was also observed.

“As a result of our successful pilot intervention in Colombia, the program has also been implemented in Spain, where we have expanded our reach to 20,000 more children,” Dr. Fuster said. “Additional countries are now joining in the implementation of this vital childhood intervention allowing for increased education about the benefits of a heart-healthy lifestyle to better protect our world’s tiniest hearts.”

“Cardiovascular health promotion should be started as early as possible and be integrated into all aspects of a child’s life, including family and school,” added Dr. Jaime Céspedes, co-author of the study and the director of the Pediatric Hospital at the Cardioinfantil Foundation Institute of Cardiology in Bogotá, Colombia.

Researchers Suspect Link Between Synthetic Marijuana and Stroke

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Neurologists from the University of Southern Florida (USF) have discovered a link between smoking synthetic marijuana and strokes in otherwise healthy young adults.

Their findings, reported online in the journal Neurology Tuesday, feature case studies of two siblings who both experienced acute ischemic strokes shortly after smoking the substance known as spice. This type of stroke occurs when an artery to the brain becomes blocked.

Previous research has linked seizures, abnormal heart rhythms, heart attacks, psychosis, hallucinations and other serious adverse effects to the use of synthetic marijuana, which is also known as K2 and contains synthetic cannabinoid compounds, the university said. Experts have linked an increasing number of strokes to the use of actual marijuana, leading the USF team to explore whether or not spice could have a similar effect.

“Since the two patients were siblings, we wondered whether they might have any undiagnosed genetic conditions that predisposed them to strokes at a young age. We rigorously looked for those and didn’t come up with anything,” senior author said Dr. Scott Burgin, a USF professor and the director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center at Tampa General Hospital.

“To the best of our knowledge, what appeared to be heart-derived strokes occurred in two people with otherwise healthy hearts. So more study is needed,” he continued, adding that spice often contains chemicals that have not been tested or approved for human consumption. “You don’t know what you’re getting when you smoke synthetic marijuana… you may be playing dangerously with your brain and your health.”

According to the university, synthetic marijuana is a term used to describe a mixture of herbs that have been doused with a solution of designer chemicals designed to produce a reaction similar to cannabis. However, according to Dr. Burgin, spice can actually be more potent than regular cannabis because the psychoactive ingredient it contains more completely binds to the cannabinoid receptors in the brain.

“Not identified in standard toxicology screens, spice has become the second only to natural marijuana as the most widely used illicit drug among high school seniors, according to a 2011 survey sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse,” the university said. “In Florida, it is a third-degree felony to sell, manufacture, deliver or possess with the intent sell these synthetic drugs, so they are more difficult to buy… but [are] still readily available online.”

Dr. Burgin said that doctors and medical professionals need to be more cognizant of the potentially toxic effects of spice and other synthetic recreational drugs, particularly when it comes to strokes, heart attacks or other conditions not typically observed in younger patients. He advises physicians to ask about cannabis and spice use, as patients rarely volunteer such information and the substances do not typically show up during routine drug tests.

Brain Changes Could Help Predict Anxiety Disorders In Young Children

Written By: editor

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Measuring the size and connectivity of a region of the brain responsible for processing emotions can help predict the amount of stress that young children are experiencing in their day-to-day lives, according to new research published today in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

In the study, researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine report that kids who have a larger amygdala that is better connected with other parts of the brain also involved in emotional regulation tend to experience higher levels of anxiety.

Since prolonged stress during childhood is said to be a risk factor in developing depression or anxiety disorders during adulthood, the discovery could help doctors find and identify at-risk youngsters. However, the authors note that an enlarged, highly-connected amygdala does not necessarily indicate that a child will develop a mood disorder.

“We are not at a point where we can use these findings to predict the likelihood of a child developing mood and anxiety disorders as an adult, but it is an important step in the identification of young children at risk for clinical anxiety,” stated senior author Dr. Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the California-based university.

Dr. Menon and his colleagues looked at 76 children between the ages of seven and nine. While the changes to the amygdala may have actually occurred earlier in childhood, the researchers explain that cognitive emotional assessments in children younger than seven are deemed unreliable.

In addition, the parents of those subjects completed the Childhood Behavior Checklist, described by the university as a standard measure of a child’s general cognitive, social and emotional well-being. Each child was determined to be developing normally, with no previous history of psychiatric or neurological disorders.

Furthermore, none of them were using medication, and none were considered to be clinically anxious, meaning that they did not experience extremely elevated stress levels prior to the study. The results of the assessment were compared to data pertaining to the size and connectivity of each child’s brain before conclusions were drawn.

“The amygdala is an evolutionarily primitive part of the brain located deep in the temporal lobe. It comprises several subregions associated with different aspects of perceiving, learning and regulating emotions,” the Stanford researchers explained, adding that the enlargement was detected in “the basolateral amygdala, a subregion important for processing emotion-related sensory information and communicating it to the neocortex.”

Shaozheng Qin, a postdoctoral scholar and the lead author of the study, detected the enlargement using MRI scans to measure the size of various subregions of the amygdala, then using functional MRI to measure the connectivity of those regions to other areas of the brain. Qin observed that the basolateral amygdala had “stronger functional connections with multiple areas of the neocortex in children with higher anxiety levels.”

Menon noted that the researchers were shocked that the changes to the amygdala’s structure and connectivity were so significant in children whose anxiety levels were too low to be considered clinical. He and his colleagues believe that their work could shed new light into the developmental origins of anxiety, and that understanding how childhood stress impacts this region of the brain could lead to earlier detection and treatment of at-risk youngsters.

Health

Blood Test Accurately Diagnoses Concussion And Predicts Long Term Cognitive Disability

Written By: editor

Penn medicine researchers discover that high levels of a protein in blood after traumatic brain injury correlate with brain tissue damage

A new blood biomarker correctly predicted which concussion victims went on to have white matter tract structural damage and persistent cognitive dysfunction following a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine, found that the blood levels of a protein called calpain-cleaved αII-spectrin N-terminal fragment (SNTF) were twice as high in a subset of patients following a traumatic injury. If validated in larger studies, this blood test could identify concussion patients at increased risk for persistent cognitive dysfunction or further brain damage and disability if returning to sports or military activities.

More than 1.5 million children and adults suffer concussions each year in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of military personal endure these mild traumatic brain injuries worldwide. Current tests are not capable of determining the extent of the injury or whether the injured person will be among the 15-30 percent who experience significant, persistent cognitive deficits, such as processing speed, working memory and the ability to switch or balance multiple thoughts.

“New tests that are fast, simple, and reliable are badly needed to predict who may experience long-term effects from concussions, and as new treatments are developed in the future, to identify who should be eligible for clinical trials or early interventions,” said lead author Robert Siman, PhD, research professor of Neurosurgery at Penn. “Measuring the blood levels of SNTF on the day of a brain injury may help to identify the subset of concussed patients who are at risk of persistent disability.”

In a study published yesterday in Frontiers in Neurology, Penn and Baylor researchers evaluated blood samples and diffusion tensor images from a subgroup of 38 participants in a larger study of mTBI with ages ranging from 15 to 25 years old. 17 had sustained a head injury caused by blunt trauma, acceleration or deceleration forces, 13 had an orthopaedic injury, and 8 were healthy, uninjured, demographically matched controls.

In taking neuropsychological and cognitive tests over the course of three months, results within the mTBI group varied considerably, with some patients performing as well as the healthy controls throughout, while others showed impairment initially that resolved by three months, and a third group with cognitive dysfunction persisting through three months. The nine patients who had abnormally high levels of SNTF (7 mTBI and 2 orthopaedic patients) also had significant white matter damage apparent in radiological imaging.

“The blood test identified SNTF in some of the orthopaedic injury patients as well, suggesting that these injuries could also lead to abnormalities in the brain, such as a concussion, that may have been overlooked with existing tests,” said Douglas Smith, MD, director of the Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair and professor of Neurosurgery. “SNTF as a marker is consistent with our earlier research showing that calcium is dumped into neurons following a traumatic brain injury, as SNTF is a marker for neurodegeneration driven by calcium overload.”

The blood test given on the day of the mild traumatic brain injury showed 100 percent sensitivity to predict concussions leading to persisting cognitive problems, and 75 percent specificity to correctly rule out those without functionally harmful concussions. If validated in larger studies, a blood test measuring levels of SNTF could be helpful in diagnosing and predicting risk of long term consequences of concussion. The Penn and Baylor researchers hope to determine the robustness of these findings with a second larger study, and determine the best time after concussion to measure SNTF in the blood in order to predict persistent brain dysfunction. The team also wants to evaluate their blood test for identifying when repetitive concussions begin to cause brain damage and persistent disability.

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Engineers Create Smallest FM Radio Transmitter Using Graphene

Written By: editor

Ranjini Raghunath for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A team of engineers at Columbia University have created the smallest ever FM radio transmitter using a form of carbon known as graphene. The paper describing the device and its potential was published online on Nov. 17 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Like diamond or graphite, graphene is made up of carbon atoms that are laid out in hexagonal patterns in a layer a million times thinner than a sheet of paper.

The team used graphene to build a key component used in radio broadcasting called voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), which generates frequency-modulated (FM) radio waves.

In typical radio broadcasts, a transmitter generates an alternating current that is converted into radio waves by an antenna or aerial. Information, such as music or speech, is carried by these invisible radio waves. Using an external source of voltage, these waves can be “tuned,” or in other words, their frequency can be tweaked in different ways to carry different types of information.

The Columbia team used the graphene VCO to send and receive audio signals at a frequency of 100 MHz, which falls within the FM radio bandwidth (87.7 to 108 MHz). Both simple and complex music signals (“Gangnam Style!”) were used to tune the VCO’s output. The team also recovered the audio signal using an ordinary FM radio receiver, and found that it “faithfully reproduced” the original signal.

“This device is by far the smallest system that can create such FM signals,” said James Hone, professor of Mechanical Engineering and senior author of the study.

Graphene’s exceptional strength, heat and electrical conductivity and flexibility combined with its tiny size make it the ideal material for making nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS) — like the FM transmitter. NEMS are electronic devices that integrate multiple properties on a single, tiny chip. NEMS are scaled-down versions of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) commonly used in sensors, such as ones that detect tilting of the tablet screen, Hone pointed out.

With electronic devices becoming smaller each day, it is becoming increasingly difficult to “miniaturize” components for these devices without taking up a lot of space and electrical power, explained Kenneth Shepherd, Columbia University electrical engineering professor and co-author of the paper.

Previous MEMS-based transmitters made using quartz crystals had bulky sizes which made tuning the frequency difficult. Graphene NEMS, however, can be tuned to very high frequencies without showing mechanical strain on the material structure. They also take up a very small on-chip area.

“It’s an important first step in advancing wireless signal processing and designing ultrathin, efficient cell phones,” Hone said in a statement.

Hone and his colleagues previously demonstrated that graphene is the strongest material known to man – about 200 times stronger than structural steel. Graphene is so strong that “it would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap,” Hone said, in an earlier study.

Graphene is already being touted as the next silicon, with potential applications in creating flexible smartphones, boosting Internet speeds and delivering drugs inside the human body.

While demonstrating the promise of graphene-based NEMS, the current work “opens up new regimes for miniature NEMS-based, large scale electronic circuitry,” the researchers wrote.

People Order Healthier Meals When Menu Has Nutritional Info, At Least In Philadelphia

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[ Watch the Video: Nutritional Menu Labels Making A Difference ]

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online


A new study led by Drexel University demonstrated that customers of full-service, dine-in restaurants do use nutritional labeling to help them make healthier food choices.

“This is the first field-based study of mandatory menu labeling laws that found a large overall adjusted difference in calories between customers who dined at labeled restaurants when compared to unlabeled restaurants – about 155 fewer calories purchased,” said Amy Auchincloss, PhD, an assistant professor in the Drexel University School of Public Health.

The team found that overall, patrons of restaurants with labels purchased food with 151 fewer calories (155 fewer calories when counting beverages), 224 milligrams less sodium and 3.7 less grams of saturated fat compared to customers at restaurants without menu labels.

The study, published online in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, reported that 80 percent of customers at labeled restaurants reported seeing labels, and 26 percent of all customers reported using them when deciding what to order. Those who reported that they used labels bought meals with 400 fewer calories (representing a relative difference of 20 percent), 370 milligrams less sodium and 10 grams less saturated fat than the overall average.

Even so, consumers who used the labels still purchased oversized meals. On average, these meals far exceeded what could be considered “healthy” – highlighting the difficulty for consumers when dining out. There is a need to do more to help consumers to eat sensibly and to encourage portion control, according to the study findings.

Currently, Americans get at least one-third of the calories they consume on a daily basis on food prepared away from home. Providing detailed nutritional information on menus and packaged foods is a commonly touted a tactic way to educate consumers and encourage them to make healthier food choices.

“While previous studies have shown mixed impacts of menu labeling in fast food settings, this study suggests that nutrition information may be particularly useful in full-service restaurants,” said Donald F. Schwarz, MD, health commissioner for the City of Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia, restaurants with more than 15 locations nationwide are required by law to list values for calories, sodium, fat and carbohydrates for each item on all printed menus. Menu boards in fast food restaurants must display calories and make other nutritional information available upon request. Philadelphia’s law, enacted in 2010, is unique in requiring more than just calories on menus. The law created the opportunity to observe whether menu labeling affects what consumers purchase by comparing what happens at multiple locations of a single full-service chain restaurant, inside and outside of city limits.

When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is fully implemented, menu labeling will expand nationwide. All fast food and full-service restaurant chains with more than 20 locations will be required to provide nutritional information at the point of purchase.

The team, which included members from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania, assessed whether food purchases at full-service restaurants varied depending on the presence of labeling. To conduct the study, they collected 648 customer surveys and transaction receipts at seven restaurant outlets of one large full-service restaurant chain. Two of the outlets had menu labeling, while the other five did not. Differences in calories and nutrients purchased between those who dined at outlets with menu labeling and those who did not were examined, as well as customers’ reported use of nutritional information when ordering.

On average, customers purchased food that had approximately 1,600 food calories (kcal) – a total that rose to 1,800 calories when also counting beverages. Most people only need around 2,000 calories for an entire day, so a single meal approximated a full day’s worth of calories. The purchased meals had an average sodium content of 3,200 milligrams, with an average of 35 grams of saturated fat – numbers which far exceed the recommended daily limits for an entire day. Recommended daily limits for most people are 2,300 milligrams sodium and 20 grams of saturated fat.

“When you compare the average intake with the recommended daily intake, these consumers purchased almost all their calories, and more than the recommended sodium and saturated fat in just one meal,” said Beth Leonberg, an assistant clinical professor and director of the didactic program in dietetics in Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions.

“In order to not exceed recommended intakes for the day, most adults should consume fewer than 750 calories, 750 milligrams of sodium and 8 grams of saturated fat in a single meal.”

According to the authors, the current efforts don’t go far enough to help consumers to eat sensibly and to encourage portion control. They believe that educating consumers about menu labeling may further increase the small observed impact on healthier consumer choices.

“We also need to pursue approaches that make the healthy choice the default,” said Giridhar Mallya, MD, director of policy and planning for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. “This might include product reformulation, promoting healthier options on menus, and offering smaller portion sizes.”

In contrast, earlier this week, redOrbit reported that researchers from NYU’s Langone Medical Center had released a similar study of menu labeling effects in Philadelphia, finding that food labels do not change purchasing habits or decrease the number of calories that those customers consume.

“What we’re seeing is that many consumers, particularly vulnerable groups, do not report noticing calorie labeling information and even fewer report using labeling to purchase fewer calories,” says lead study author Dr. Brian Elbel, assistant professor of Population Health and Health Policy at NYU School of Medicine.

“After labeling began in Philadelphia, about 10 percent of the respondents in our study said that calorie labels at fast-food chains resulted in them choosing fewer calories.”

Women Who Maintain Consistent Sleep, Wake Times Have Less Body Fat

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Consistently going to sleep and waking up at the same time each day can have an impact on your body weight, researchers from Brigham Young University (BYU) claim in a new study.

BYU exercise science professor Bruce Bailey and his colleagues recruited over 300 women between the ages of 17 and 26 from two major universities in the western US. They studied those female subjects over the course of several weeks, and concluded that those women who had the best sleeping habits also maintained healthier body weights.

Among their findings, which have been published online in the American Journal of Health Promotion, is that a regular bed time and a regular wake up time were associated with lower body fat, and that getting less than 6.5 hours of sleep or more than 8.5 hours of sleep each night were related to higher levels of body fat. Quality of sleep was also found to play an important role in the equation.

In fact, according to a report by Lindsay Whitehurst of The Salt Lake Tribune, changing the time that you go to bed or wake up by just 90 minutes could be enough to impact body fat – meaning that sleeping in for just an hour and a half on the weekends could have an impact on your body composition. Wake-up times were found to have more of an impact than bedtimes.

“Women in the study were first assessed for body composition, and then were given an activity tracker to record their movements during the day and their sleep patterns at night. Researchers tracked sleep patterns of the participants (ages 17-26) for one week,” the university said in a statement. “Study participants who went to bed and woke up at, or around the same time each day had lower body fat.”

“We have these internal clocks and throwing them off and not allowing them to get into a pattern does have an impact on our physiology,” wrote Bailey, who related consistent sleep patterns to having good sleep hygiene. Changes in these patterns can influence biological activity, affecting some of the food consumption hormones in the body and contributing to an overall increase in excess body fat.

Furthermore, those who reported better sleep quality also had lower body fat. While sleep quality is difficult to measure, Bailey suggested a few steps that people could take in order to improve the effectiveness of their slumber. Those recommendations include exercising, maintaining cool room temperatures, making sure that the bedroom is dark and quiet, and using beds solely for the purpose of sleeping.

“Sleep is often a casualty of trying to do more and be better and it is often sacrificed, especially by college students, who kind of wear it as a badge of honor,” Bailey said. He was assisted on the study by co-authors James LeCheminant and Larry Tucker, both exercise science professors, and statistics professor William Christensen, all of BYU.

Reading Eyes May Give Clues To Health Of The Pancreas

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editor

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

An innovative way to study glucose regulation in the body has been discovered by a research team from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

By transferring the vital insulin-producing cells from the pancreas to the eye, the team found that the eye can serve as a window through which health reports can be obtained from the pancreas. The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), are expected to have a significant impact on diabetes research.

Insulin, the hormone that is released into the blood at an amount that is in direct proportion to the amount of food ingested, is produced and secreted in the Islets of Langerhans, the endocrine portion of the pancreas. Large amounts of insulin are required to compensate for the high consumption of food and insensitivity to the hormone in patients with conditions such as obesity.

The Islets adapt themselves to obesity by increasing the number of insulin-producing beta-cells and/or modulating the cells individual secretion of insulin in response to the intake of sugar. This plasticity is necessary for maintaining normal blood sugar levels. The malfunctioning of this plasticity leads to diabetes, a serious disease that has reached pandemic proportions.

Studying the exact workings of the Islets of Langerhans and how they adapt to individual conditions presents challenges. The biggest challenge is their relative inaccessibility — they lie deeply embedded in and are distributed throughout the tissue. The research team has found a new way to study the insulin-producing beta-cells by transferring them to the eye.

“What we’ve done is made the cells optically accessible by grafting a small number of ‘reporter islets’ into the eyes of mice, which allows us to monitor the activity of the pancreas just by looking into the eye,” says Per-Olof Berggren, professor of experimental endocrinology at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, and director of the Rolf Luft Research Centre for Diabetes and Endocrinology. “We’re now able to really study the insulin-producing beta-cells in detail in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

The researchers say that the eye can be used as a sort of reporter by reproducing the activity of the pancreas and allowing readings of the status of the pancreas under different conditions in health and disease.

“The Islets of Langerhans can be visualized repeatedly over a period of several months, and our work shows that during this time, functional and morphological changes occur in them that are identical to those occurring in the pancreas,” says Dr Erwin Ilegems, researcher at the Rolf Luft Centre.

The team used the new monitoring system and pharmacological treatment to reduce food consumption in obese mice models. This stopped the enormous growth in beta-cell population, meaning that the team is now able to individually tweak drug doses.

“We’ll also be using the system to identify new drug substances that regulate beta-cell plasticity and function,” says Professor Berggren. “In the future we may also conceive a similar use of reporter islets in humans in order to find unique, tailored treatment principles, to measure the effects of personal medication, or to diagnose problems with the pancreatic islets.”

Health

Johns Hopkins Heart Researchers Develop Formula To Better Calculate ‘Bad’ Cholesterol In Patients

Written By: editor

Findings follow previous study showing that commonly used equation underestimates heart disease danger for many at high risk

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a more accurate way to calculate low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the so-called “bad” form of blood fat that can lead to hardening of the arteries and increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. If confirmed and adopted by medical laboratories that routinely calculate blood cholesterol for patients, the researchers say their formula would give patients and their doctors a much more accurate assessment of LDL cholesterol.

“The standard formula that has been used for decades to calculate LDL cholesterol often underestimates LDL where accuracy matters most — in the range considered desirable for patients at high risk for heart attack and stroke,” says Seth S. Martin, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease. Martin is first author of the study detailed in a Nov. 19, 2013 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Many studies have shown that higher levels of LDL cholesterol signal greater risk of plaque accumulating in heart arteries. Since 1972, a formula called the Friedewald equation has been used to gauge LDL cholesterol. It is an estimate rather than a direct measurement. However, physicians use the number to assess their patients’ risk and determine the best course of treatment.

The Friedewald equation estimates LDL cholesterol with the following formula: total cholesterol minus HDL cholesterol minus triglycerides divided by five. The result is expressed in milligrams per deciliter. That equation, the researchers say, applies a one-size-fits-all factor of five to everyone; a more accurate formula would take specific details about a person’s cholesterol and triglyceride levels into account.

Using a database of blood lipid samples from more than 1.3 million Americans that were directly measured with a traditional and widely accepted technique known as ultracentrifugation, the researchers developed an entirely different system and created a chart that uses 180 different factors to more accurately calculate LDL cholesterol and individualize the assessment for patients.

“We believe that this new system would provide a more accurate basis for decisions about treatment to prevent heart attack and stroke,” says Martin.

Results of the new study are built on research by the same authors from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In that study, the researchers compared samples assessed using the Friedewald equation with a direct calculation of the LDL cholesterol.

They found that in nearly one out of four samples in the “desirable” range for people with a higher heart disease risk, the Friedewald equation was not accurate.

“As a result, many people — especially those with high triglyceride levels — may have a false sense of assurance that their LDL cholesterol is at an ideal level. Instead, they may need more aggressive treatment to reduce their heart disease risk,” says Steven Jones, M.D., director of inpatient cardiology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and a faculty member at the Ciccarone Center who is the senior author of the study.

The lipid profiles used for the study were from a laboratory in Birmingham, Ala., which provides a detailed analysis of samples sent in by doctors across the country. Except for the age of people on whom the samples were based (59 years on average) and the gender (52 percent of the samples were from women), the patients were not identifiable to the researchers. That database was almost 3,000 times larger than the sample used to devise the Friedewald equation 43 years ago.

Jones, who originated the idea to use the large laboratory database to assess the Friedewald equation, says the information was provided by the lab at no cost. The lab, Atherotech, did not provide any funding for the research or input on the calculations or study article. The database used in the study is registered on the website http://www.clinicaltrials.gov and will be an important resource for ongoing scientific investigation.

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Health

Protein Coding ‘Junk Genes’ May Be Linked To Cancer

Written By: editor

By using a new analysis method, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden have found close to one hundred novel human gene regions that code for proteins. A number of these regions are so-called pseudogenes, which may be linked to cancer. The expectation is now that this recently developed protein analysis method, published in the scientific journal Nature Methods, will open up a whole new field of research.

All information about the human genome is stored in the DNA sequence in the cell nucleus, and was mapped in the early 2000s. Genes are defined sections of DNA encoding different types of proteins. In recent decades, researchers have been able to define around 21,000 protein coding human genes, using DNA analysis, for example. In the different cell types of the body, different protein producing genes are active or inactive, and many medical conditions also depend on altered activity of specific genes.

In humans, only about 1.5% of the human genome or DNA consists of protein-coding genes. Of the remaining DNA, some sequences are used to regulate the genes’ production of proteins, but the bulk of the DNA is considered to lack any purpose and is often referred to as “junk DNA”. Within this junk DNA there are so-called called pseudogenes. Pseudogenes have been considered as non-functional genes, which are believed to be gene remnants that lost their function during evolution.

In the current paper in Nature Methods, researchers present a new proteogenomics method, which makes it possible to track down protein coding genes in the remaining 98.5% of the genome, something that until now has been an impossible task to pursue. Among other things, the research shows that some pseudogenes produce proteins indicating that they indeed have a function.

“To be able to do this we had to match experimental data for sequences of peptides with millions of possible locations in the whole genome”, says Associate Professor and study leader Janne Lehtiö. “We had to develop both new experimental and bioinformatics methods to allow protein based gene detection, but when we had everything in place it felt like participating in a Jules Verne adventure inside the genome.”

The Lehtiö team found evidence for almost one hundred new protein-coding regions in the human genome. Similar findings were made in cells from mice. Many of the new proteins encoded by pseudogenes could also be traced in other cancer cell lines, and the next objective on the researchers’ agenda is to investigate if these genes in the “junkyard” of the genome play a role in cancer or other diseases.

“Our study challenges the old theory that pseudogenes don’t code for proteins”, says Dr Lethiö. “The presented method allows for protein based genome annotation in organism with complex genomes and can lead to discovery of many novel protein coding genes, not only in humans but in any species with a known DNA sequence.”

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Fibromyalgia

The interaction between autoimmune diseases and fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Fibromyalgia is a syndrome that causes chronic pain and hypersensitivity in the muscles. It can also cause pain in the tendons and ligaments. This condition affects 2-4 percent of women, and up to 25% of women who have rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and crohn’s disease, or Sjogren’s syndrome meet the criteria for diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

The cause of fibromyalgia is undetermined, but women with fibromyalgia might have greater pain sensitivities. This could be due to an imbalance of certain brain chemicals. Sometimes fibromyalgia is triggered by life experiences including physical injuries, autoimmune disease, emotional stress or hormonal changes.

Fibromyalgia also runs in families and is therefore likely somewhat genetic.  Fibromyalgia sometimes arises after infections, commonly mononucleosis and Lyme disease.

This condition is definitely more prevalent in women. And it is much more prevalent in women who have an autoimmune disease.  There is a great amount of overlap in conditions and symptoms of those with fibromyalgia and other autoimmune diseases. Chronic fatigue syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome are symptoms of fibromyalgia, and of other autoimmune diseases.

The instances of depression also occur more in people with fibromyalgia.  Women are twice as likely to develop depression as men, and women who have fibromyalgia experience depression in percentages of 40-70%.

Some of the other symptoms of FMS include sleep disruption, pain sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety, memory issues, trouble concentrating, headaches and other issues.

The interaction between autoimmune diseases and fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is defined by the American College of Rheumatology as a person having a history of widespread pain in 4 quadrants of the body, and in the skill, backbone, ribs, chest, as well as experience of pain at 11 of 18 specific tender points on the neck, shoulders, back, hips and knees.

Autoimmune diseases with similar symptoms that can trigger FMS include crohn’s disease, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Lupus is a disease that is leads to long-term chronic inflammation.

Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).  This disease causes inflammation in the digestive tract, leading to abdominal pain, severe diarrhea and other health issues including malnutrition. It can affect people differently, as different areas of the digestive tract are affected in different ways.

Crohn’s disease can spread into deep layers of bowel tissue, and can be extremely painful, sometimes life-threatening.  The most commonly affected areas are the ileum of the small intestine and the colon.

There are various signs of Crohn’s disease that range from mild to severe and can flare up without any warnings.  Diarrhea is very common in people who have Crohn’s disease. The colon is unable to absorb excess fluid produced, leading to diarrhea. Intestinal cramping is also a problem, and well as abdominal pain and cramping.

The bowel walls will sometimes swell and become scarred, causing difficulty with the digestive tract.  Blood in the stool can cause inflamed tissue to bleed.  Blood may be bright red in the toilet or dark blood streaks in the stool.  Ulcers can also form in the intestinal walls.

Symptoms of Crohn’s disease that are similar to FMS include: fever, fatigue, and arthritis.

Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that causes the immune system to attack its own tissues and organs. This inflammation can affect many different body parts including joints, skin, brain, heart and others. Lupus is difficult to diagnose as its symptoms are similar to that of other diseases.

One common occurrence is a rash on the face that resembles a butterfly’s wings spread over both cheeks. The cause of lupus is differential, and it can be triggered by certain drugs, sunlight, or infections.

The condition of lupus may flare up at different times, and can include the symptoms of fatigue and fever, joint pain, stiffness and swelling, facial rash, headaches or confusion.

Fibromyalgia has many symptoms that involve chronic pain, in addition to fatigue and stiffness among others.  About 2-4 percent of women develop fibromyalgia, and of those, 25% have been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

It is important to manage the pain of fibromyalgia by making an adequate treatment that can include various medications, drugs, and other treatments like massage and exercise. Regular massage can help to ease the pain of fibromyalgia.

Exercise is a great way to strengthen and stretch muscles, and different exercise routines are recommended for those who have chronic pain. Low impact exercises are best, as they do not put added strain on joints.

Fibromyalgia and chronic pain is often associated with autoimmune disease, as people who have certain autoimmune diseases are up to 25% more likely to develop fibromyalgia.

Health

Residents Of Most Polluted US Cities — New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles And Miami — Have Increased Risk Of Dry Eye Syndrome

Written By: editor

Study suggests that environmental manipulation should be considered as part of overall management of dry eye syndrome

Residents of major cities with high levels of air pollution have an increased risk of dry eye syndrome, according to a study presented at the world’s largest ophthalmic conference, the 117th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, in New Orleans. Study subjects in and around Chicago and New York City were found to be three to four times more likely to be diagnosed with dry eye syndrome compared to less urban areas with relatively little air pollution. As a result of this study, researchers suggest that environmental manipulations should be considered as part of the overall control and management of patients with dry eye syndrome.

Dry eye syndrome, a deficiency in tear production, is a prevalent condition that effects up to four million people age 50 and older in the United States and whose manifestations negatively affect physical and mental functioning. The symptoms of dry eye syndrome can be very detrimental to patients and severely affect the quality of one’s life, as well as result in loss of productivity due to interruption of daily activities like reading and using computer screens. While it has been suggested that environmental factors impact dry eye syndrome, this is the first study of a large patient population covering the entire continental United States which linked dry eye syndrome treatment location to atmospheric conditions – in particular, air pollution coupled with weather conditions.

Using data from the National Veterans Administrative (VA) database, the National Climatic Data Center and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the researchers examined the health records of 606,708 U.S. veterans who received dry eye syndrome treatment in one of 394 VA eye clinics within the continental U.S. from July 2006 through July 2011. Those living in areas with high levels of air pollution had the highest magnitude of increased risk for dry eye syndrome, at an incidence rate ratio of 1.4. Most metropolitan areas, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami showed relatively high prevalence of dry eye syndrome (17-21%) and high levels of air pollution.

Additionally, the risk of dry eye syndrome was 13 percent higher in zip codes in high altitude areas. Higher humidity and wind speed were inversely associated with the risk of dry eye syndrome when controlled for air pollution and other weather conditions. The research findings suggest that primary care physicians and eye care professionals should be aware of the association between environmental conditions and dry eye, and elicit an environmental history when assessing patients with dry eye syndrome.

“Undoubtedly, many people living in arid and polluted cities would readily attest to the irritating effect air pollution has on dry eye,” said Anat Galor, M.D., MPSH, of Miami Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Assistant Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, and lead researcher. “Our research suggests that simple actions, such as maintaining the appropriate humidity indoors and using a high-quality air filter, should be considered as part of the overall management of patients suffering from dry eye syndrome.”

Dry eye symptoms can range from stinging or burning to excessive tearing and discomfort wearing contact lenses. As the eye responds to the irritation of this condition, the eye will often tear excessively to try to combat the loss of moisture. Many people with dry eye syndrome may find watching television, reading and working for extended periods on a computer to be very uncomfortable. For relief from dry eye syndrome, the American Academy of Ophthalmology advises people to visit an ophthalmologist to determine the best course of treatment.

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Archaeologists Find More Than 600 Ancient Seals And Amulets In Turkey

Written By: editor
editor

University of Münster

Classical scholars from the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” made an unusually large find of seals in an ancient sanctuary in Turkey. They discovered more than 600 stamp seals and cylinder seals at the sacred site of the storm and weather god Jupiter Dolichenus, 100 of which in the current year alone. “Such large amounts of seal consecrations are unheard-of in any comparable sanctuary”, said excavation director Prof. Dr. Engelbert Winter and archaeologist Dr. Michael Blömer at the end of the excavation season. In this respect, the finding of numerous pieces from the 7th to the 4th centuries B.C. close to the ancient city of Doliche is unparalleled.

“The amazingly large number proves how important seals and amulets were for the worshipping of the god to whom they were consecrated as votive offerings”, according to Classical scholar Prof. Winter. Many pieces show scenes of adoration. “Thus, they provide a surprisingly vivid and detailed insight into the faith of the time.” The stamp seals and cylinder seals as well as scarabs, made of glass, stone and quartz ceramics, were mostly crafted in a high-quality manner. Following the restoration work, the finds were handed over to the relevant museum in Gaziantep in Turkey.

Different themes can be found on the seals and amulets: the spectrum ranges from geometric ornaments and astral symbols to elaborate depictions of animals and people. This includes, for example, praying men in front of divine symbols. Another popular theme was a royal hero fighting animals and hybrid creatures. “Even those images that do not depict a deity express strong personal piety: with their seals, people consecrated an object to their god which was closely associated with their own identity”, said Blömer. People wore the amulets found with the seals in everyday life. “Strung on chains, they were supposed to fend off bad luck”, explained the archaeologist.

From the Iron Age until the Roman Empire

Up to now, the researchers were able to identify late Babylonian, local Syrian Achaemenid and Levantine seals. “The large find provides new impetus for research to answer unsolved questions of cult practices, cult continuity and cult extension – above all, these are important for the understanding of the early history of the sanctuary in the 1st millennium B.C., which had been unknown until recently”, according to Prof. Winter. Later, in the 2nd century A.D., Jupiter Dolichenus turned into one of the most important deities of the Roman Empire.

During this year’s excavations at the Turkish mountain Dülük Baba Tepesi, Prof. Winter’s team worked in an area of over 500 square meters. “The results are already extending our knowledge of all periods in this holy place’s long history. It covers the time span from the early place of worship of the Iron Age and the sacred site of the Roman era, famous throughout the empire, to the long phase of utilisation as a Christian monastery, which existed until well into the time of the crusaders”, explained Prof. Winter. The two-month excavation campaign has been particularly fruitful as regards the sanctuary’s early years. “At the peak’s central plateau, in addition to a well-preserved section of the thick Iron Age enclosing wall, parts of structures from the 7th to 4th centuries before Christ were excavated within the enclosure for the first time.” Due to new finds such as columns or capitals dating back to the Roman era, the main temple of the empire’s sanctuary can now be reconstructed. According to the scholars, the location of the temple, on the other hand, is still posing riddles.

Work at the archaeological park is proceeding

After this year’s excavation season had ended, work at the touristic development continued. “We were able to complete a visitors’ path leading to central areas within the excavation site, with signposts in three languages.” Furthermore, according to the researchers, numerous protective and precautionary measures are required in order to secure the remains of the sanctuary permanently. An initial large protective shelter has already been erected this year.

In 2012, the research team announced an archaeological park which is to make the outstanding temple complex and the local medieval monastery ruins of Mar Solomon accessible to the public at large. For that purpose, the ruins had already been preserved and encased with a special fleece material, according to the scholars. The implementation of the complex and costly protection measures was made possible by cooperation with the Turkish University of Gaziantep, which provided about 200,000 Euros for three years, as Prof. Winter said. As regards the digital documentation of the area, the team was supported by the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Münster, where a quadrocopter – a remotely piloted vehicle – with a 3-D camera was developed.

Supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, DFG), the University of Münster’s Asia Minor Research Centre has been doing excavation work at the main sanctuary of Jupiter Dolichenus under the direction of Prof. Winter since 2001. The international group consisting of archaeologists, historians, architects, conservators, archaeozoologists, geoinformation scientists and excavation workers uncovered foundations of the archaic and the Roman sanctuary, as well as of the medieval monastery of Mar Solomon, which had previously only been known from written sources. The Cluster of Excellence’s project B2-20, “Media Representation and Religious ‘Market’: Syriac Cults in the Western Imperium Romanum”, is interlinked with the excavations.

On Tuesday, 19 November, as part of the public lecture series “Holy Places. Origins and transformations – political interests – memory cultures” of the Cluster of Excellence and the Centre for the History and Culture of the Eastern Mediterranean (Centrum für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Mittelmeerraums, GKM), the sacred site of Jupiter Dolichenus will be the topic of a lecture by Prof. Winter. The classical scholar will discuss the transformation and consistency of the religious site. The lecture will be held at 6.15 p.m. in lecture theater F2 of the Fürstenberghaus at Domplatz 20-22 in Münster.

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Fossil Amber Reveals Secrets Of Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Elevated levels of oxygen in the atmosphere may have caused dinosaurs, insects and other organisms to grow to gigantic sizes millions of years ago, according to prevailing theories.

If a new study from scientists at the Universities of Kansas and Alberta is correct, then the atmosphere of the Cretaceous had a relatively low oxygen content – making the high-oxygen theories severely flawed.

“We do not want to negate the influence of oxygen for the evolution of life in general with our study, but the gigantism of dinosaurs cannot be explained by those theories,” said study author Ralf Tappert, from the University of Alberta.

In the study, which was published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, an international team recreated the makeup of the Earth’s atmosphere during the last 220 million years by analyzing modern and fossilized plant resins. Fossilized resins, like amber, are just a few of the organic materials capable of holding reliable data on the Earth’s geological history over millions of years.

“Compared to other organic matter, amber has the advantage that it remains chemically and isotopically almost unchanged over long periods of geological time,” Tappert explained. “During photosynthesis plants bind atmospheric carbon, whose isotopic composition is preserved in resins over millions of years, and from this, we can infer atmospheric oxygen concentrations.”

The study team performed a radioactive analysis of nearly 540 amber samples from amber deposits around the world, with the oldest samples being about 220 million years old. The team compared results from the fossilized amber with modern resins to confirm the validity of their data. They found atmospheric oxygen over the past 220 million years averaged considerably lower than today’s 21 percent.

“We suggest numbers between 10 and 15 percent,” Tappert said.

The results are much lower than those found by previous investigations, which have found levels of up to 30 percent atmospheric oxygen in some cases. The researchers said they looked at the results of their study in the context of events in the Earth’s history.

“We found that particularly low oxygen levels coincided with intervals of elevated global temperatures and high carbon dioxide concentrations,” Tappert said, adding that oxygen may influence carbon dioxide levels and could speed up the influx of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“Basically, we are dealing here with simple oxidation reactions that are amplified particularly during intervals of high temperatures such as during the Cretaceous period,” he said.

The study team concluded that a boost in carbon dioxide levels, possibly caused by volcanic activity, was followed by a decrease in atmospheric oxygen. The scientists noted the comparably low temperatures of the more recent ice ages may be due to the absence of large scale volcanic events and a rise in atmospheric oxygen.

The team also concluded that atmospheric oxygen may indirectly influence the climate, and therefore, the evolution of life on Earth. They suggested future studies be focused on analyzing even older plant resins.

Battling The Overuse Of Antibiotics

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Public health officials have been warning for years about the overuse of antibiotics and a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is calling for the more judicious use of the bacteria-battling drugs.

In the report, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, scientists from the AAP’s Committee on Infectious Diseases noted many children and adults are given antibiotics for symptoms caused by viruses. This practice boosts the risk of fostering antibiotic-resistant bacteria without providing much benefit.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a significant public health threat as they infect over 2 million Americans each year, resulting in about 23,000 deaths – according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria, some are able to survive the drugs, and these survivors pass their resistance along to future generations of bacteria that then multiply.

When an infection does call for antibiotics, the AAP committee said doctors should prescribe amoxicillin by itself or amoxicillin with clavulanate, notably for children with ear infections and sinusitis. For strep throat, the AAP panel said doctors should prescribe amoxicillin or penicillin. They added broad-spectrum antibiotics are more likely to foster the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“You want to use the antibiotic that has the narrowest spectrum, meaning it will kill the germs that are causing the infections but not have collateral damage on all the other bacteria within our bodies,” antibiotics expert Theoklis Zaoutis, from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Reuters Health.

To mark European Antibiotic Awareness Day on Monday, officials from Public Health England and the Royal College of General Practitioners spoke out against the ‘prevailing myth’ that green phlegm is a sign of a bacterial infection. Both institutions said green phlegm and runny noses are both caused by viral infections.

According to research from Public Health England, 40 percent of people they surveyed said antibiotics would help a cold if the phlegm was green and “very few” said the same for clear-colored phlegm.

“It’s a prevailing myth that anyone with green phlegm or snot needs a course of antibiotics to get better,” Dr. Cliodna McNulty, from Public Health England, told BBC News. “Most of the infections that generate lots of phlegm and snot are viral illnesses and will get better on their own although you can expect to feel pretty poorly for a few weeks.

“The problems of antibiotic resistance are growing,” she added. “Everyone can help by not using antibiotics for the treatment of uncomplicated infections.”

“Overuse of antibiotics is a serious public health concern,” added Dr. Maureen Baker, chairwoman of the Royal College of General Practitioners in the UK. “Infections adapt to antibiotics used to kill them and can ultimately make treatment ineffective so it’s crucial that antibiotics are used appropriately.”

To mark the 6th European Antibiotic Awareness Day, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control is releasing European data on incidence of antibiotic resistance and the results of a survey of public health experts from 38 countries.

New Robo-Cowboy May Replace Traditional Cattle Herders

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[ Watch the Video: Rover Robot Herds Cattle From Field To Dairy ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

To herd their cattle, dairy farmers around the world use everything from specialty dog breeds to all-terrain vehicles. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia has revealed the development of a game-changing tool: a robo-cowboy named “Rover.”

The Australian scientists said they were able to effectively use Rover to bring a herd of cattle from the field to a diary for milking, as shown in a video released by the university. They noted that the cows were not bothered by the robot’s presence, a development that will be necessary for the broader adoption of robots in the dairy industry.

University of Sydney professor Kendra Kerrisk told BBC News that Rover moved the cows in at a leisurely pace that was much slower than most conventional methods, noting that this is critical to reducing injuries and lameness among cattle.

To develop Rover, the team converted a robot that was already being used to monitor trees in a fruit orchard. A team at from the university’s Centre for Field Robotics said they converted the robot so that it could be used to gather data on robot-bovine interactions. The current model needs a human operator to run correctly, but the Australian team said they hoped a fully automated version could soon be developed.

Kerrisk said news of the robot’s herding ability was greeted enthusiastically by farmers.

“The research is in its very early stages but robotic technologies certainly have the potential to transform dairy farming,” said Kerrisk, an associate professor of veterinary science. “When we have discussed this concept with farmers they have been extremely excited and we have had a flurry of calls and emails asking how they can get hold of one.”

Use of the robot would effectively reduce the number of accidents involving dairy farmers. Most farmers in Australia use ATVs to round up their cattle, a leading cause of injury. A robotic herder would effectively remove this hazard.

The Australian team added that dairy farmers might be able to use robots for more than just herding. They said a robot could eventually be used to watch the maternity paddock at night for signs that a pregnant cow is due to calve, to gather data on soil conditions, and detect problems with electric fences.

After demonstrating the robot at a dairy symposium earlier in the year, the team said they secured funding to develop the next iteration of their robo-cowboy.

As rhe Sydney team is refining their design, Australian farmers are reporting having trouble finding farm workers. Farmer Yvonne Smith told The Australian recently that the lack of native labor forced her and her husband to look overseas, with two of the couple’s full-time employees having recently migrated from South Africa.

“We, of course, looked locally first,” she said. “But, failing that, we started to look overseas. There just aren’t enough people in Australia that want to work on farms.”

“One thing I’m concerned about is that some of the skills we need on farms aren’t met by the skilled migration list,” she added. “We need someone who’s had a lot of experience farming, who has those skills, not necessarily someone who has a qualification on paper, but it’s very difficult to prove to the Immigration Department that someone has those skills.”

Four New Coronavirus Cases May Indicate The Potential For An Epidemic

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Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Over the past weekend, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been informed of four additional laboratory-confirmed cases of infection with Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). The new cases may actually come as no surprise to an international group of experts who reported last week that the disease may become a “slowly growing epidemic.”

Publishing a paper in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the researchers have estimated that at least 62 percent of MERS cases have gone undetected, likely due to many cases being mild and not requiring hospitalization. Furthermore, surveillance efforts are geared toward the most severe cases. The research team also said it is unclear whether the disease can sustain human-to-human transmission without a recurrence of animal infections.

The scientists, hailing from Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh, and the Institut Pasteur in Paris, have gathered data on 111 of the confirmed and probable cases that have been identified through August 8 of this year.

According to CIDRAP’s Robert Roos, the team followed four cases that occurred in visitors to Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to work out an estimate for the number of undetected cases of MERS. Using these cases, they then calculated the average length of their visits and then noted that that each of the visitors had passed the virus to one or two other people after returning home from their visit.

Assuming that the per-day risk of infection for the visitors was the same for residents in the countries visited and taking into consideration the number of reported cases in the Middle East, the researchers estimated that the number of symptomatic cases of MERS up to August 8 was about 940. The researchers said based on this calculation, at least 62 percent of cases have been missed.

The research team also used MERS-CoV genetic data to estimate the total number of infections in both animals and humans.

Utilizing a method that involves taking estimates of the growth rate of the viral population derived from charting the diversity of genetic sequences, the team estimated that 17,940 infections occurred in both humans and animals between March 2012 and August 8, 2013. Based on their calculations, the team said the virus is continuing to spread, but it is unclear how much of the transmission is in animals and how much is in humans.

“Both the analysis of the genetic sequences and of the epidemic curves suggested that an epidemic is underway either in an animal reservoir or in man. These analyses do not allow us to distinguish between these scenarios and to determine whether MERS-CoV is currently self-sustaining in man,” the researchers said.

If there is an epidemic currently going on in humans, the team note that, given the current low estimated reproduction rate, it is likely that public health measures are sufficient to contain the spread of the disease and reduce morbidity and mortality.

Based on the team’s estimate of missed cases, the current mortality rate is likely at the high end of the clinical spectrum, meaning that far fewer people are dying from the disease than is reported. Currently, the mortality rate for confirmed cases stands at about 42 percent. If the scientists’ estimates of 940 cases through August 8 is accurate, then mortality rates would drop exponentially.

In the latest WHO reports, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health has stated that a previously laboratory-confirmed MERS-CoV patient has died along with an additional new death, bringing the total number of deaths related to the disease to 66.

Additionally, the MOH has confirmed four new cases of MERS, bringing the total number of cases to 157.

The new cases include a 75-year-old man from Oman with underlying medical conditions who became ill on Oct 1 and died on Nov 10; a 61-year-old man from Qatar with underlying medical conditions who became ill on Nov 4 and was hospitalized on Nov 7, currently in critical condition; a 47-year-old man from Kuwait who became ill on Oct 30 and was hospitalized on Nov 7, currently in critical condition; and a 52-year-old man from Kuwait with underlying medical conditions who became ill on Nov 7 and was hospitalized on Nov 10, also currently in critical condition.

Princeton University Students To Get Imported Meningitis Vaccine

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Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A small, but worrisome meningitis outbreak that has affected several people at Princeton University has left school health officials looking for a vaccine that is not available in the United States.
On November 10, 2013, a seventh student this year fell ill from bacterial meningitis at Princeton, according to the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDH). The meningitis has been identified as “Type B,” which is not covered by a standard vaccine administered in the US.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said that the vaccine needed for the Princeton meningitis outbreak is common in Europe and Australia and has agreed to allow importation to try to stop the outbreak from growing.
Fearing the meningitis could continue to spread, Princeton officials warned students to stop sharing drinks and to avoid kissing. The school started a campaign to make students more aware of the dangers of meningitis and implemented that awareness by hanging bright orange posters telling them to “keep healthy and carry on” and handing out red cups with labels stating “Mine. Not Yours.”
This campaign was carried out after the sixth person was diagnosed with the bacterial disease, but it seems warnings are not working as intended since the seventh student became ill last week. Although the previous six patients fully recovered from the disease, which can be fatal in some cases, the school’s leaders made the call for more help from abroad.
New Jersey law requires that meningitis vaccines be given to almost all undergraduates at Princeton and other colleges and universities around the state. And while the vaccine used in the US protects against most strains of meningitis, it has not worked against the Princeton “Type B” cases.
Barbara Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Saturday that the imported vaccine, called Bexsero, would protect students from the Type B strain of bacterial meningitis.
Bexsero is a new experimental vaccine developed by drug maker Novartis, a company with more than 50 drugs under its belt, including the ADHD drug Ritalin. The drug is designed to protect against serogroup B, a meningitis strain not as common in the US as it is in other regions of the world.
Reynolds noted that the Type B outbreak at Princeton is rare but it is not the first case of its kind in the US. “What’s a little different now is this is the first time we’ve had an outbreak and also have had the possibility of using a vaccine that could protect against it.”
Martin Mbugua, a spokesman for Princeton, told AFP on Saturday that the school’s trustees were meeting over the weekend to discuss the outbreak, but would not divulge into the nature of the conversations.
Despite getting FDA approval for Bexsero to come to the US, Reynolds said no timetable has yet to be set on when shipments of the vaccine will come. And the use of the vaccine will be optional for students, not mandatory.
The student who most recently became ill remains hospitalized, according to the NJDH. Five previous patients were treated and made full recoveries. A sixth person who was a visitor to Princeton University is being followed by another state’s department of health. A total of seven cases have been reported since March 2013.
Meningitis is most commonly spread through coughing or exchanging saliva. Campus life gives meningitis an easy transmission route due to the often cramped and crowded living conditions in school dormitories. Outbreaks are often pronounced in these situations due to increased odds of sharing drinks, cigarettes, utensils, kissing and other activities.
Though bacterial meningitis is not as contagious as the common cold or influenza, it does spread through close contact. However, where a cold or flu can be caught by being near a sick person, bacterial meningitis requires closer contact. Still, just because someone avoids an ill person does not mean they are safe from infection. People can catch the disease from carriers who have the bacteria in their system but do not have symptoms. As many as 25 percent of the population are known as carriers.
According to CDC data, nearly 500 people have died in the US each year from 2003 to 2007, the most recent data available.
Symptoms of bacterial meningitis include headache, high fever and a stiff neck. Meningitis can progress rapidly from the onset of symptoms and if left untreated can lead to shock or death. Other complications of meningitis include hearing loss, brain damage and kidney disease.
A big concern right now is the small number of cases. Most students have felt little urgency to change their habits due to the limited number of patients who have fallen ill. Still, the topic has been a common conversation among students, according to a report from the NY Times.
“It’s so at an arm’s length that it’s not something that’s real for most people,” said Emilie Burke, 20, a sophomore. Still, she told the NY Times, her rugby teammates have stopped sharing water bottles and people at her office job had begun wiping down phones between uses.
When asked if students were cutting back on sexual encounters, Burke had this to say: “Maybe it’s something people think about during the day, but it’s not something they’re thinking about on a Saturday night.”
Some students, however, said they are heeding the suggestions, but are mixed on whether they plan to receive the vaccine or not.
“If I got meningitis, I would know early on,” Andrew Jeon, an English major from Wayne, New Jersey, told Bloomberg in an interview. “We’ve gotten plenty of e-mails about how not to share cups.”
Eva Ge, a first-year graduate student in chemistry from Ithaca, NY, said she would get the vaccine.
“I know my lab mates and I got the flu shot after a recent e-mail about another case,” Ge told Bloomberg. “It’s less an issue for grad students since undergrads eat and live together.”

38 Minutes Worth Of CPR Improves Cardiac Arrest Survival Rate

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Sustaining CPR for at least 38 minutes can improve a person’s chances of surviving a heart attack and increase the odds that a cardiac arrest survivor will have regular brain function, according to research presented Saturday at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2013 conference in Dallas.
“Cardiac arrest occurs when electrical impulses in the heart become rapid or chaotic, causing it to suddenly stop beating,” the heart-health organization explained in a statement, adding that “about 80 percent of cardiac arrests – nearly 288,000 people – occur outside of a hospital each year, and fewer than 10 percent survive.”
Previous research has shown that it is critical to resume spontaneous circulation (the name for the condition during which the body pumps blood on its own) as early as possible to preserve normal brain function. However, the American Heart Association points out that few studies have examined the period between the start of a heart attack and the point to which spontaneous circulation is re-established.
In their new study, Dr. Ken Nagao, a professor and the director-in-chief of the Department of Cardiology, CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care at Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo, and his colleagues used data from a registry tracking all non-hospital cardiac arrests that occurred in Japan between 2005 and 2011.
Specifically, they looked at the amount of time that passed between the initial collapse and the return of normal blood flow, as well as how well the brain function of the survivors was preserved one month after their heart attacks. They determined that those who were alert and able to resume regular activities has fared well neurologically, as well as those who had moderate disability but could work part-time or take part in day-to-day activities independently.
According to Nagao’s team, 13 minutes passed between the onset of the heart attack and the return of spontaneous circulation for those who fared well. In comparison, those who suffered severe neurological damage as a result of their heart attack had to wait approximately 21 minutes for normal blood flow to be restored.
“After adjusting for other factors that can affect neurological outcomes, researchers found that the odds of surviving an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest without severe brain damage dropped 5 percent for every 60 seconds that passed before spontaneous circulation was restored,” the American Heart Association said.
“Based on the relationship between favorable brain outcomes and the time from collapse to a return of spontaneous circulation, the researchers calculated that CPR lasting 38 minutes or more was advisable,” the agency also said. Their standards advise those administering CPR to continue doing so until emergency crews arrive on the scene.
The study was conducted by the Japanese Circulation Society Resuscitation Science Study and presented during the conference on Saturday. Co-authors of the research included Dr. Eizo Tachibana, Dr. Tukasa Yagi, Dr. Naohiro Yonemoto, Dr. Morimasa Takayama, Dr. Hiroshi Nogoni, Dr. Shinichi Shirai, and Dr. Takeshi Kimura.

New Algorithm Will Help Curiosity Rover Analyze Mars Soil

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[ Watch the Video: Getting Up Close And Personal With Mars Soil Samples ]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

While the instruments on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity are able to easily identify the chemical composition of rocks, measure the speed of the wind and snap amazing images from mast-mounted cameras, the process of analyzing soil images can be a somewhat daunting task, according to researchers from Louisiana State University (LSU).

After all, the university points out, many times there are several thousand images to analyze, and the soil particles are typically only five to 10 pixels wide. Now, however, a research team led by Suniti Karunatillake of the LSU Department of Geology and Geophysics has come to the rescue with a new algorithm that should make the task easier.

Karunatillake and colleagues from Rider University, Stony Brook University and the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff, Arizona joined forces to create an image analysis and segmentation algorithm specifically to help NASA scientists complete this basic, but nonetheless challenging, part of their mission.

“Planetary scientists use images to identify the distribution of grain sizes of large-scale (centimeter or larger diameter) rocks and small-scale (less than 1 cm) grains,” the university explained in a statement. “These grain sizes tell scientists about the processes that distributed the particles from their source regions to where they are now. For example, were they derived from a water source, blown by wind, or show hydrodynamic sorting?”

The algorithm has been implemented in Mathematica, a computational software program used in several different scientific, mathematical, computing or engineering-related fields. It reportedly uses a variety of different image processing steps to first segment the image into foreground and background grains, then continues the process until nearly all coarser and finer grains are outlined, the researchers explained.

“The code processes a single image within 1 to 5 minutes,” LSU officials said. “The semi-automated algorithm, while comparing favorably with manual (human) segmentation, provides better consistency across multiple images than a human. The researchers are exploring the use of this algorithm to quantify grain sizes in the images from the Mars Exploration Rovers Microscopic Imager (MI) as well as Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI).”

“The grain size distributions identified in those images have the potential to reveal subtle trends with composition not considered previously,” they added. “Ability to identify most of the grains in images also makes detailed, area-weighted, sedimentology possible. Applications extend to terrestrial data from less accessible sites such as deep lake basins or undisturbed river bed sediments.”

On November 7, the Curiosity rover experienced an unexpected software reboot (also known as a warm reset) during a communications pass with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, according to NASA. Following that incident, the rover spent a few days in safe mode before being successfully transitioned back into nominal surface operations mode on Sunday. Curiosity science operations resumed on Thursday.

Safety Milestone Hit For SpaceX-NASA Venture

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Officials from NASA and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announced the successful safety review of the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket that are slated to launch humans into low-Earth orbit later this decade – a major milestone for the endeavor.

In late October, a team of NASA engineers traveled to SpaceX headquarters for two days of presentations and review sessions that involved the company’s safety practices.

“The milestone is not the end of the safety discussion, it’s really the beginning,” said Jon Cowart, deputy manager of the NASA Partnership Integration Team for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP). “Because we’ve been doing this for so long, we all have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t and how safety processes can be strengthened to increase our confidence in the system.”

NASA said it is working closely with SpaceX to ensure the technologies being used for both spacecraft and rocket meet the strict safety requirements that come with flying in space.

“We greatly appreciate NASA’s support and feedback throughout this process,” said Garrett Reisman, commercial crew project manager at SpaceX and a former astronaut. “Together we are taking all the necessary steps to make Dragon the safest, most reliable spacecraft ever flown.”

While the private space company has already flown cargo missions to the International Space Station using its Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, those vehicles did not transport astronauts. The system is scheduled to take crews up to the ISS within the next four years.

The review came just before the first SpaceX launch of a commercial communications satellite later this month. SpaceX President and Chief Operations Officer Gwynne Shotwell announced on Wednesday the launch would be pushed back to Nov. 25 from Nov. 22.

“We wanted a little bit more time to make sure the launch site was ready for us, and we wanted to give the [launch vehicle] crew a little more rest,” Shotwell said during a recent press conference.

The satellite will be launched aboard the Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket, the latest version of the nine-engine Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket debuted on Sept. 29 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California when it launched a weather satellite for the Canadian Space Agency. During the launch, the rocket’s upper stage failed to reignite — something it will have to achieve for the upcoming November launch.

Shotwell said the company is currently working on the Falcon 9 that will launch Thailand’s Thaicom 6 communications satellite.

“The elements [of Falcon 9] are ready and we’re going to start shipping them to the Cape right after a static fire test on Nov. 19,” Shotwell said. “And we will continue to hold the Thaicom 6 launch date of Dec. 20.”

NASA is currently prepping for the launch of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which is scheduled to take place on Monday.The mission will scan high above the Martian surface for patterns of electrons that could explain why the Red Planet is losing its atmosphere.

FDA Fingers Acrylamide In Fried Foods As Cancer Causing Agent

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[ Watch the Video: Put Down The Fries And Eradicate Some Acrylamide From Your Diet ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While some people may be cutting French fries out of their diet to avoid excess carbohydrates, the decision has another major health benefit – lowering the intake of cancer-causing acrylamide.

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) posted an online draft document containing practical strategies for growers, manufacturers and food service operators on how to lower the amount of acrylamide in foods they work with.

The World Health Organization has said, “Acrylamide is known to cause cancer in animals and, in high doses, can cause nerve damage in humans.”

According to FDA officials, acrylamide is a chemical that can form in some foods via cooking processes like frying and baking. Plant-based foods like potatoes, cereals, coffee, crackers or breads and dried fruits are thought to contain the highest levels of acrylamide. The chemical is found in 40 percent of the calories eaten in the average American diet, according to the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

While people have been exposing themselves to acrylamide for as long as they have been using heat to cook, scientists first found the chemical in food back in 2002. Since its discovery, the FDA has been looking into the effects of acrylamide and potential measures to reduce our exposure to it.

“Generally speaking, acrylamide is more likely to accumulate when cooking is done for longer periods or at higher temperatures,” said Lauren Robin, a chemist at the FDA.

The FDA document recommends French fries should be cooked in accordance with manufacturers’ recommendations regarding cooking time and temperature. Overcooking or burning the fries increases acrylamide formation, the FDA says.

The government agency also recommends keeping potatoes out of the refrigerator, as refrigeration can raise acrylamide formation during cooking. Potatoes should be kept in a dark, cool place, such as a closet or a pantry.

According to NBC News diet and health editor Madelyn Fernstrom, stories about the dangers of acrylamide seem to come up every few years.

“There’s no reason to panic,” she said in an article for the TODAY show. “Long-term studies need to be made, but in the meantime, just do your best to lower it. And, mostly, that’s going to be cutting down on fried foods. There’s a lot of reasons to cut back on fried foods, and this is one more.”

The announcement on acrylamide comes about a week after the FDA proposed measures to eliminate artificial trans fats from the food supply. The FDA said their trans fat ruling would be open to public comment for 60 days.

With many already having taken steps to lower trans fats in their products, food producers appeared to have seen this move coming from the FDA.

“Life has many uncertainties, but we are on a clear track,” said FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg last week. “We have solid evidence showing the need for today’s action on trans fat.”

Trans fats are formed by treating liquid oil with hydrogen gas until they become solid. These partially hydrogenated oils became popular in fried foods, baked goods and in margarine.

Biocentrism: Are Life, Death And The Universe Just Constructs Of The Human Mind?

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While opinions about the existence of heaven or hell are firmly entrenched in the public consciousness, a Wake Forest stem cell scientist has put forward a theory that says death is just a construct of the human mind.

In his theory, called biocentrism, Dr. Robert Lanza claims the universe is created by life, not the other way around. The theory posits that a person’s consciousness determines the appearance and behavior of objects in the universe.

For example, if someone looks up at the sky, they may think the color they are seeing is blue. However, the cells in a person’s brain could be changed to make the sky look green or red.

“Bottom line: What you see could not be present without your consciousness,” Lanza said. “Our consciousness makes sense of the world.”

And according to Lanza this also applies to space and time, which he says are “simply tools of the mind.”

If this idea of ‘perception is reality’ is extended to life, then death as we know it “cannot exist in any real sense” because there is nothing to define it, Lanza said on his website.

The Wake Forest professor compares biocentrism to theoretical physicists’ theory of parallel universes, in which every possibility is occurring simultaneously across an infinite number of universes.

To support his theory of human perception shaping the universe, Lanza cited the so-called double-slit experiment in which physicists send a single light particle through a multi-holed barrier. When directly observed, the particle acts like a bullet and passes through a single slit. However, when not directly observed – the particle passes through multiple holes like a wave.

“Life is an adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking,” Lanza mused. “When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix.”

Reaction to Lanza’s theory has been mixed. In an email to USA Today, astrophysicist and science writer David Lindley rebutted many of Lanza’s assertions.

“The view that consciousness creates reality ends up contradicting itself,” Lindley wrote. “Lanza says that ‘the trees and snow evaporate when we’re sleeping. The kitchen disappears when we’re in the bathroom.’ If he’s referring solely to our state of awareness about these things, then yes, he’s right. But are we really supposed to imagine that the kitchen goes away when we’re not in it, and returns in the exact same form when we come back in?”

“To answer this, Lanza asks us to imagine putting a DVD in a player and getting a picture out,” Lindley continued. “You only get the picture when the DVD is in the machine, but we all get the same picture no matter who’s watching. ‘Your brain animates the universe,’ [Lanza] says.

“But in this analogy, if your brain is the DVD player, then what plays the role of the DVD itself? Lanza says that our consciousness creates reality – but to do so, our perceptions have to bounce off something, so to speak,” Lindley wrote. “We have to conclude that there’s something out there that our brains are interacting with, and that something has to be pretty much the same for all us, so that we all ‘construct’ a similar-looking reality. In other words, something outside of us, independent of us, still has to exist.

“Finally, I can’t help thinking that there’s an enormous exercise of vanity in Lanza’s argument – the universe only exists, he says, because we’re here to observe it and be part of it,” Lindley concluded. “I would go the opposite extreme. I think the universe was a real physical thing long before we came on the scene, and we humans are just crumbs of organic matter clinging to the surface of one tiny rock. Cosmically, we are no more significant than mold on a shower curtain.”

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Technology In The Bedroom Disrupts Teens’ Sleep

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Televisions, computers, gaming consoles and mobile phones in children’s bedrooms can cause anxiety and sleep loss, Canadian researchers reported in the current issue of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology.

Having these devices in the bedroom trains the brain to see the room as a place for entertainment, rather than a place for calmness and rest, said the researchers from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

“One of the biggest culprits for inadequate and disturbed sleep is technology,’ said Dalhousie psychologist Jennifer Vriend, the study’s lead author. “Many teenagers sleep with their phones and they are awakened regularly by it ringing or vibrating throughout the night when they get a text, email or Facebook message,” she told The Telegraph.

“Having televisions and games consoles in the bedroom is also a problem. It sets up the brain to see the room as an entertainment zone rather than a quiet, sleepy environment,” she explained.

“So when a teenager is playing a violent video game regularly in his bedroom, his brain starts to associate it as a place where he should be on edge and ready for danger; the brain becomes wired to not want to sleep in that environment.”

The study also found that losing just one hour of sleep can negatively affect school performance by impeding memory and making it more difficult for children to solve math problems. By contrast, moving bedtime up by an hour makes children calmer and better able to concentrate, the researchers said.

Vriend said that adequate amounts of sleep lead to improved emotional stability, positive mood and improved attention, all of which are likely to improve academic success.

“Furthermore, when we sleep, what we learned during the day gets consolidated so children [who aren’t sleeping well] are losing out on two levels,” she said.

The study involved 32 children between the ages of eight and twelve years old who averaged roughly nine hours’ rest per night. During the first week of the study, the children kept to their usual routines. Next, the group was split in half, with one group moving up their bedtime by one hour per night for four consecutive nights, while the other group moved their bedtime back an hour each night during that time.

On average, the study participants who went to bed an hour earlier slept just 73 minutes more per night than those who went to bed an hour later, but the consequences were dramatic, the researchers said.

After each four-day spell, the children were given basic tests to assess their math fluency, attention span and short-term and working memory. Their parents were also asked to keep a log of their children’s’ behavior.

“Even modest differences in sleep duration over just a few nights can have significant consequences for children’s daytime functioning,” the researchers concluded in their report. “One can assume that more chronic sleep loss would result in much greater impairments.”

The researchers said the study highlights the need to educate doctors, teachers, parents and children about the importance of healthy sleep habits, and the potential negative consequences of inadequate sleep.

Fibromyalgia

Treatments And Medications To Help With Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Treatments And Medications To Help With Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia treatments vary between medications and home self-care treatments. While there does not currently exists a 100% effective cure for the condition, fibromyalgia treatments place emphasis on minimizing the symptoms caused by the condition and look to improve the general health of the person that has been affected.

Medications

There are several medications that are often used to help reduce pains and aches that are often attributed to fibromyalgia and can help to improve the sleep that someone with fibromyalgia has been getting. Analgesics, or acetaminophens such as Tylenol, may help to east some pain and the stiffness that is caused by the condition.

These medications, of course, depend on the degree of the fibromyalgia and the patient that has been inflicted. One prescription drug, Tramadol, is a pain reliever that can be taken both with and without acetminophen.

A few anti-inflammatory drugs that do not contain steroids, like the ibuprofens Motrin and Advil, or drugs that naproxen sodium, like Aleve, may be recommended by doctors to take in conjunction with some other medications.

Duloxetine, milnacipran, and other antidepressants may be recommended to help with pain relief and the fatigue that is often associated with fibromyalgia. Prozac may be prescribed so that those inflicted with the condition can get better sleep.

Some medications that are used to treat epilepsy and seizures are sometimes helpful in the reduction of certain pains and aches. The medication Gabapentin can be helpful to reduce symptoms associated to fibromyalgia, as well.

Getting Help

Therapy may be beneficial for those looking for helpful strategies in order to deal with the stresses of a life while living with fibromaylgia. A counselor may be able to reinforce a person’s belief that their can overcome their condition and strengthen their abilities.

Those that have been inflicted by fibromyalgia should constantly look for self-care methods to help them better manage their life with the condition. Reducing stress is absolutely critical. Those with fibromyalgia should try to develop comprehensive plans to help them limit their overexertion and help them manage the emotional toll and stresses that often come because of the condition. Relaxation should be made a priority.

Even though a person will be looking to limit how much work they put into a day, he or she should not completely change the daily routine. Those that quit their jobs and drop all of their usual daily activities oftentimes end up doing worse than the people that continue to go on with their lives and have full days. Techniques that can help alleviate stress are highly recommended. A daily deep-breathing exercise or a few minutes or quiet meditations can go a long way.

Those with fibromyalgia will often have trouble sleeping at night and will often feel symptoms of fatigue. Even though these things are very common among those inflicted with the condition, they should always look to get as much sleep as they possibly can. Fibromyalgia will take a serious toll on the body, so those that have the condition should be sure to allot enough time in order to sleep and should consistently practice good sleeping habits.

Having a set sleeping schedule that has them getting up and going to sleep at the same time each day of the work week will be very beneficial. Those with fibromyalgia should also look to limit the naps they take during the day as much as they possibly can, as well. Daytime naps can seriously alter sleeping schedules and will make it just that much harder to get the adequate amount of sleep needed each night for someone that is suffering from a condition that makes it hard enough to sleep.

While exercise may be the last action a person with fibromyalgia wants to include in their daily schedule, exercising frequently and on a regularly maintained schedule can help to decrease the symptoms of fibromyalgia. The exercises done do not need to be very extensive. Regular exercises such as biking, swimming, and walking have proven to be very effective.

It is recommendable to see a physical therapist in order to work out an adequate home exercise program and workouts that match the person who has been inflicted with fibromyalgia’s needs. Stretching exercises and those that can help with relaxation, as mentioned before, are very beneficial and can help the person to better deal with and overcome many of the symptoms that are attributed to fibromyalgia.

Pacing, like anything else concerning daily routines, is very helpful to those that are struggling with daily activities due to their condition of fibromyalgia. Those with fibromyalgia should look to do things in moderation and not overwork themselves on their good days. However, even they are looking to not overwork themselves on good days, they should not do too little on the days that their symptoms are flaring and causing them problems. Moderation is key.

Overall, maintaining a healthy lifestyle will be very helpful in the battle with fibromyalgia. Eating healthy meals full of vegetable and fruits is very beneficial. Those with fibromyalgias should be wary of their caffeine consumption, if not stay away from it entirely. Finding things that are enjoyable and that seem fulfilling will do the body well and help further with stress.

Alternative Medicines

There are a few alternative medicines that seem to be helpful with stress and help to reduce the pain and severity of the fibromyalgia symptoms. While doctors and those that study medicine have not approved these practices, they have been working their way into the mainstream.

Acupuncture has been used to alternate blood flow and the neurotransmitters that flow through the brain and the spinal cord. This method has seen some good results, but is not consistent enough to be recommended by physicians.

Massage therapy, of course, is a common practice for those in search of relief from the symptoms of fibromyalgia. It can help to relax the muscles and soft tissues and can even reduce heart rates and improve the range of motion of a person’s joints. This technique does help relieve stress and anxiety in those that undergo the practice.

Yoga and tai chi seem to help with relaxation and improving breathing, but no correlation has been found between controlling the symptoms of fibromyalgia and the practice of tai chi.

Caffeine Consumption Within Six Hours Of Bedtime May Disrupt Sleep

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editor

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Consumption of caffeine, even six hours before bedtime, can have significant, disruptive effects on sleep. The study, from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, was published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
“Sleep specialists have always suspected that caffeine can disrupt sleep long after it is consumed,” said American Academy of Sleep Medicine President M. Safwan Badr, MD. “This study provides objective evidence supporting the general recommendation that avoiding caffeine in the late afternoon and at night is beneficial for sleep.”
The researchers found that 400 mg of caffeine (about 2-3 cups of coffee) taken at bedtime, or three to six hours before bedtime, significantly impacts sleep. Objectively measured total sleep time was reduced by more than an hour even when the caffeine was consumed six hours before going to bed. Subjective reports, however, suggest that the study participants were unaware of this sleep disturbance.
“Drinking a big cup of coffee on the way home from work can lead to negative effects on sleep just as if someone were to consume caffeine closer to bedtime,” said Christopher Drake, PhD, investigator at the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Wayne State University.
People tend to be less likely to detect the disruptive effects of caffeine on sleep when taken in the afternoon,” noted Drake, who is also on the board of directors of the Sleep Research Society.
The researchers recruited 12 healthy normal sleepers, as determined by a physical examination and clinical interview. Subjects were instructed to maintain their normal sleep schedule, but were given three pills a day for four days to be taken at six, three and zero hours before scheduled bedtime. Two of the pills were placebos, and one was 400 mg of caffeine. On one of the four days, all three of the participants’ pills were a placebo. The researchers measured sleep disturbance subjectively using a standard sleep diary and objectively using an in-home sleep monitor.
This is the first study to investigate the effects of a given dose of caffeine taken at different times before sleep. The findings suggest that, in order to allow healthy sleep, individuals should avoid caffeine after 5pm.

Grab Some Chocolate Milk After Your Workout

Written By: editor

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Picture it: Jacksonville, Florida, 1965. Players for the University of Florida (UF) Gators football team are sapped and losing exorbitant amounts of weight after strenuous practices and games. Dwayne Douglas, former Gator and Philadelphia Eagles football player and then-assistant coach to the college team approaches UF kidney disease specialist and director of the UF College of Medicine’s renal and electrolyte division, Robert Cade, to look into this never-before-researched phenomenon.

From this fateful encounter, a new beverage was created and the world of sports would never be the same. Gatorade helped the UF Gator freshman squad defeat an early dominating B team squad in a scrimmage. The following weekend, the varsity team soundly defeated the favored Louisiana State University Tigers after that team fell apart in the fourth quarter. And today, when an athlete finishes a grueling game or a demanding workout, they can almost assuredly be seen grabbing a Gatorade or one of the other similar products created in its image.

The benefits of this fluid invention cannot be denied. But what if an easier and more practical answer was overlooked by Cade’s cadre of researchers?

Scientists at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) claim there is a better alternative to helping an athlete achieve recovery after a workout. And that alternative is chocolate milk.

While this dairy beverage may not be as refreshing as the electrolyte-laden sport drink, the Baylor team discovered those who consumed chocolate milk after their workout were, when compared with those who didn’t, were set up to have a better workout the following day.

“If you look at what goes into a good workout recovery drink, it’s a combination of protein and carbohydrates – protein for rebuilding and repairing damage that occurs to tissues and carbohydrates for replenishing the energy that has just been burned. The protein to carbohydrate ratio in chocolate milk actually is very close to what we know is ideal for recovery,” said Dr. Theodore Shybut, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at BCM.

Sure, Gatorade’s benefits are intended to replace fluids lost during exercise. But when you put chocolate milk next to products such as Muscle Milk, this childhood favorite comes off as equally beneficial but more appealing, thanks in no small way to the fact it is a more economical option.

Shybut recommends consuming a single-serving of chocolate milk immediately after you finish your workout and then another serving two hours later.

“The early post-workout period is important because immediately after exercise, your muscles are able to absorb nutrients at a much higher rate,” said Shybut.

There is one caveat, he warns however. Athletes suffering from lactose intolerance should forego the post-workout chocolate milk routine. Additionally, it is not recommended you wait to incorporate this beverage into your routine until just before an upcoming competition. The benefit and the ability to maximize the reward one receives from it is best realized only after it has been a part of a regular training schedule.

When Storytelling Meets Science

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editor

Bryan P. Carpender for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

“Once upon a time…” That’s a familiar intro that we all know, in one form or another. In most cases, we all grew up with folktales. They’re passed down from generation to generation, told by doting parental figures to their children, not just to entertain, but to convey some moral lesson or cautionary warning. Folktales are a way to teach values and, in some cases, common sense.

Now a fascinating new study shows that the Brothers Grimm might not have the market cornered on folktales. It’s no secret that many plots from the Grimm folktales are strikingly similar to stories from diverse and disparate cultures the world over. A new research study uses science to analyze relationships between various folktales. Not just basic science, but phylogenetic analysis, which is quite a mouthful. Phylogenetics is used to investigate the evolutionary relationships between biological species by constructing a taxonomy tree illustrating relationships of common ancestry based on shared traits.

In the study by Jamie Tehrani of Durham University in the UK, published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the author focuses on “Little Red Riding Hood” and related tales, analyzing 72 plot variables to demonstrate the differences between the tales, while highlighting the shared similarities.

Tracking such elements as the character of the protagonist, the featured villain, and the tricks employed by the villain to deceive the victim, Tehrani was able to determine that the African tales are not actually derivatives of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but instead are more closely related to the tales “The Wolf and the Kids.” Further analysis discovered that the East Asian tales synthesized elements from both stories to create another amalgamated folktale altogether.

This suggests that by using phylogenetics, we can identify distinct groups of folktales crossing geographic and cultural boundaries, leading to a deeper understanding of how these oral narratives develop and evolve. The evolution happens organically as the tales are passed down from generation to generation; embellishments are made, new parts are added to the story, and other parts are either eliminated or lost over time. Though there are variants from culture to culture, the common themes endure, gathering us all together around the metaphorical campfire.

“Folktales are excellent targets for phylogenetic analysis because, like biological species, they evolve over generations and adapt to new environments as they spread from region to region,” said Tehrani. “Since folktales are mainly transmitted via oral tradition, it can be difficult to study their development using conventional tools of literary analysis, because there are so few historical texts. My study shows how we can overcome these difficulties by using the same approach that biologists have used to fill the gaps in the fossil record.”

It doesn’t matter if the story you learned had a protagonist that was a single, plucky girl with a deep abiding love for her grandmother (and questionable judgment when it comes to talking to strangers), or a group of siblings escaping the clutches of a tiger, ogre, or other villain archetype. One lesson we all share is that we are all threads in the tapestry woven by the truly universal language of folklore and storytelling — regardless of geography or cultural influences — which is comforting in this digital age. Another universal lesson you can practically bet on: don’t talk to wolves — it usually doesn’t end well.

Scientists Solve Half-Century Old Anthrax Mystery

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

For years, doctors have wondered why someone with an anthrax infection can die days after the bacteria responsible is wiped out from their body. A new study claims the toxin produced by the bacteria uses a “Trojan horse”-like method to elude the body’s natural defenses.

“This remained a mystery for more than 50 years,” said study author Gisou van der Goot, a cell biologist at Switzerland’s prestigious École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). “The bacteria would disappear after the administration of antibiotics, but the subject still died a few days later.

“The anthrax bacteria kills people in a very short period of time, and this is in large part due to the production of the anthrax lethal toxin,” she explained. “This toxin disarms our immune system, but also, as very recently shown, affects our heart.”

Believing the anthrax toxin was behind these somewhat mysterious deaths, the international team focused on how the toxin entered the body’s cells. They found the relevant part of the cell’s defenses is made up of two components – a protective antigen and a lethal factor. This protective antigen ferries the lethal factor into cells by helping it to cross the cell membrane, according to the team’s report in the journal Cell Reports.

Once the toxin is inside the cell, the lethal factor is actually engulfed by the cell’s membrane, forming a sheltering ‘endosome.’ After waiting in the endosome for up to for several days, it can either be released into the cell, disrupting it, or out of the cell, allowing it to enter another cell. The research team also found that the toxin can also be passed on from a cell to its progeny.

“The immune system has no reason to react, since it only detects exosomes whose membrane is composed by the very same molecules making up the cell’s endosomes.” van der Goot explained.

The study team said their findings help to explain not only why an anthrax infection is so deadly, but also how cell membranes interact with various substances.

“By studying these interactions, we can learn more than how to fight anthrax infection,” van der Goot said. “We also learn a lot about how cells work.

“There is still much to learn about exosomes,” she added. “The results of this research will help us to better understand them.”

The team said their study could lead to the development of drugs that target the lethal factor while contained within the cell’s membrane.

Named after the Greek word for ‘coal,’ anthrax can form black lesions on the skin of people it infects. The Ames strain of the bacterium became well-publicized in 2001 after it was linked to several infections in the United States.

The more dangerous Vollum strain of the bacterium was weaponized during the Second World War, but never used. Isolated in 1935 from a British bovine, the Vollum strain was tested by British military scientists on the Scottish island of Gruinard.

For the weapons test, 80 sheep were taken to the island where bombs containing the deadly strain were detonated. The sheep died within days of exposure. Military films depicting the tests were declassified in 1997.

Health

Rapid Testing To Diagnose Influenza Leads To More Appropriate Care In The ED

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When patients in the emergency department (ED) are diagnosed with influenza by means of a rapid test, they get fewer unnecessary antibiotics, are prescribed antiviral medications more frequently, and have fewer additional lab tests compared to patients diagnosed with influenza without testing, according to a new study. Published online in the Journal of the Pediatrics Infectious Diseases Society, the findings suggest that diagnosing influenza with a rapid diagnostic test leads to more appropriate, specific, and efficient care.

In the study, researchers used data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, a nationally representative sample of ED visits in the U.S. They identified children and adults across three influenza seasons (2007-2009) who were diagnosed with influenza in the ED. They looked at how the patients were diagnosed—either with the use of a rapid influenza test or without it—and the subsequent care they received.

Among patients diagnosed with influenza without rapid testing, 23 percent of the ED visits included a prescription for antibiotics, which are not effective in treating influenza, a viral infection. However, for patients who were diagnosed by rapid testing, only 11 percent of ED visits resulted in the patient getting antibiotics. Additional laboratory tests, including chest X-rays, blood tests, and urinalysis, were also ordered less frequently for patients whose influenza illness was diagnosed with a rapid test.

Notably, prescriptions for antiviral drugs, which can be effective in treating influenza when used early and appropriately, were more frequent (56 percent of ED visits) among patients diagnosed with influenza using a rapid test, compared to antiviral use among influenza patients diagnosed without testing (19 percent of ED visits).

“When results of influenza tests are available to physicians at the ‘point of care,’ they use this information to provide more appropriate patient management,” said lead study author Anne J. Blaschke, MD, PhD, of the University of Utah School of Medicine. “While other studies have shown that physicians can accurately diagnose influenza without testing, our results suggest that using an influenza test increases diagnostic certainty and leads to the physician providing more specific and appropriate care.”

The study suggests a significant impact from rapid influenza testing on physician decision making, patient care, and use of health care resources, the authors wrote, despite the limited sensitivity of currently available rapid tests, which miss a number of true cases of influenza. The development of more accurate and faster tests for influenza available at the bedside could further improve care for patients with influenza or other respiratory illness, they noted.

The researchers’ findings build on previous studies by others, focused primarily on children, that found that rapid influenza testing can influence patient care in specific settings. This latest study breaks new ground, Dr. Blaschke said, by using nationwide data and by demonstrating that the findings apply to both adults and children, and across different practice types.

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Health

Deletion Of Any Single Gene Provokes Mutations Elsewhere In The Genome

Written By: editor

Findings call for a rethinking of cancer genetics

Johns Hopkins researchers report that the deletion of any single gene in yeast cells puts pressure on the organism’s genome to compensate, leading to a mutation in another gene. Their discovery, which is likely applicable to human genetics because of the way DNA is conserved across species, could have significant consequences for the way genetic analysis is done in cancer and other areas of research, they say.

Summarized in a report to be published on Nov. 21 in the journal Molecular Cell, the team’s results add new evidence that genomes, the sum total of species’ genes, are like supremely intricate machines, in that the removal of a single, tiny part stresses the whole mechanism and might cause another part to warp elsewhere to fill in for the missing part.

“The deletion of any given gene usually results in one, or sometimes two, specific genes being ‘warped’ in response,” says J. Marie Hardwick, Ph.D., the David Bodian Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences at the school of medicine. “Pairing the originally deleted gene with the gene that was secondarily mutated gave us a list of gene interactions that were largely unknown before.”

Hardwick says the findings call researchers to greater scrutiny in their genetic analyses because they could unwittingly attribute a phenomenon to a gene they mutated, when it is actually due to a secondary mutation.

“This work has the potential to transform the field of cancer genetics,” Hardwick says. “We had been thinking of cancer as progressing from an initial mutation in a tumor-suppressor gene, followed by additional mutations that help the cancer thrive. Our work provides hard evidence that a single one of those ‘additional mutations’ might come first and actively provoke the mutations seen in tumor-suppressor genes. We hope that our findings in yeast will help to identify these ‘first’ mutations in tumors.”

The beauty of working with yeast, Hardwick says, is that it is easy to delete, or “knock out,” any given gene. Her team started with a readily available collection of thousands of different yeast strains, each with a different gene knockout.

At their preferred temperature, each of these strains of yeast grows robustly even though they each have a different gene missing. Hardwick’s team first asked a fundamental question: Within a given strain of yeast, does each cell have the same genetic sequence as the other cells, as had generally been presumed?

“We know, for example, that within a given tumor, different cells have different mutations or versions of a gene,” explains Hardwick. “So it seemed plausible that other cell populations would exhibit a similar genetic diversity.”

To test this idea, her team randomly chose 250 single-knockout strains from the thousands of strains in the collection. For each strain, they generated six sub-strains, each derived from a single yeast cell from the “parental batch.”

They then put each sub-strain through a “stress test” designed to detect sub-strains with behaviors that varied from the behavior of the parental batch. All of the sub-strains grew indistinguishably without stress, but when the temperature was gradually raised for only a few minutes, some sub-strains died because they could not handle the stress. When the Hardwick team examined their genes, they found that, in addition to the originally knocked-out gene, each of the sub-strains that faltered also had a mutation in another gene, leading the team to conclude that the cells in each strain of the single-gene knockouts do not all share the same genetic sequence.

They then tested all 5,000 of the original single-gene knockout strains to find sub-strains that could overgrow when given low-nutrient food — a trait that tumor cells often possess. This was another stress test designed to detect differences between the individual cells taken from the parental batches. They identified 749 such knockout strains and showed that their growth differences were often due to secondary mutations.

In total, the team’s evidence indicates that 77 percent of all the knockout strains have acquired one or two additional mutations that affect cell survival and/or excessive growth when food is scarce.

Hardwick believes that stressing yeast in other ways may lead to an even higher percentage of double-mutant strains. In fact, she said she believes that “essentially any gene, when mutated, has the power to alter other genes in the genome.” Deleting the first gene seems to cause a biological imbalance that is sufficient to provoke additional adaptive genetic changes, she explains.

Furthermore, in all of the strains that they examined, they found that the secondary mutations that appeared after a given knockout were always in the same one or two genes as in their earlier observations. Unexpectedly, Hardwick said, the altered growth of the sub-strains was usually due to the secondary mutations, not the original knockout, and many of those secondary mutations were in genes that are known to be cancer-causing in humans.

Other authors of the report include Xinchen Teng, Catherine Gilbert, Sarah Wheelan, Jef Boeke and Fernando Pineda of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Margaret Dayhoff-Brannigan, Wen-Chih Cheng, Cierra Sing and Nicola Diny of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and Maitreya Dunham of the University of Washington, Seattle.

This work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS083373, NS037402) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (GM077875, P50-GM071508, U54 GM103520).

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Technology

New Technology Advances Wireless Power Transfer For Vehicles

Written By: editor

North Carolina State University

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new technology and techniques for transmitting power wirelessly from a stationary source to a mobile receiver – moving engineers closer to their goal of creating highway “stations” that can recharge electric vehicles wirelessly as the vehicles drive by.

“We’ve made changes to both the receiver and the transmitter in order to make wireless energy transfer safer and more efficient,” says Dr. Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the research.

The researchers developed a series of segmented transmitter coils, each of which broadcasts a low-level electromagnetic field. The researchers also created a receiver coil that is the same size as each of the transmitter coils, and which can be placed in a car or other mobile platform. The size of the coils is important, because coils of the same size transfer energy more efficiently.

The researchers modified the receiver so that when it comes into range and couples with a transmitter coil, that specific transmitter coil automatically increases its current – boosting its magnetic field strength and the related transfer of energy by 400 percent. The transmitter coil’s current returns to normal levels when the receiver passes out of the range of the transmitter.

These modifications improve on previous mobile, wireless power transfer techniques.

One previous approach was to use large transmitter coils. But this approach created a powerful and imprecise field that could couple to the frame of a car or other metal objects passing through the field. Because of the magnetic field’s strength, which is required to transfer sufficient power to the receiver, these electromagnetic field “leaks” raised safety concerns and reduced system efficiency.

Another previous approach used smaller transmitter coils, which addressed safety and efficiency concerns. But this approach would require a very large number of transmitters to effectively “cover” a section of the roadway, adding substantial cost and complexity to the system, and requiring very precise vehicle position detection technology.

“We tried to take the best from both of those approaches,” Lukic says.

Lukic and his team have developed a small, functional prototype of their system, and are now working to both scale it up and increase the power of the system.

Currently, at peak efficiency, the new system can transmit energy at a rate of 0.5 kilowatts (kW). “Our goal is to move from 0.5 kW into the 50 kW range,” Lukic says. “That would make it more practical.”

The paper, “Reflexive Field Containment in Dynamic Inductive Power Transfer Systems,” is published online in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. Lead author of the paper is NC State Ph.D. student Kibok Lee. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Zeljko Pantic, a former Ph.D. student at NC State. The research was partially supported by National Science Foundation grant number EEC-0812121.

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Fibromyalgia

Acupuncture – Can It Really Help With Fibromyalgia?

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Acupuncture - Can It Really Help With Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a syndrome that may not be very well known by most of the people, but it is as real as any other disease or syndrome out there. Its main symptom is experiencing pain all over the body and apparently without any clear reason, which is why some people may be pushed into thinking that Fibromyalgia is just a state of mind or even worse, a mental illness.

As a matter of fact, this syndrome has been considered by many to be a mental disorder. However, recent investigation says that this is more of a neurobiological disorder or a functional somatic one.

Basically, the development of Fibromyalgia is related to certain imbalances that appear in the brain and lead to abnormalities in the way the brain processes pain. In their own turn, these imbalances can be caused by a lot of factors which can vary from one patient to another.

The most common causes that lead to developing imbalances at the level of the brain neuro-chemical processes include stress, anxiety, depression, repetitive injuries, arthritis, Central Nervous System disorders, trauma to the spinal cord (or to the brain), genetics and gender (usually, females tend to develop this syndrome more than men, and they most commonly develop it around the menopause age).

The status in the case of some of these causes (such as depression or arthritis) is quite uncertain and some professionals consider them to be effects, symptoms and disorders that are simply connected to Fibromyalgia and not causing it in the proper sense of the term.

One thing is clear though the signs and the symptoms of Fibromyalgia can differ a lot from one patient to another and that can make the diagnosis quite difficult under these circumstances. When someone is suspect to suffer from this syndrome, a series of medical examinations and inquiries will be necessary.

One of the most common examinations is that of 18 tender points of the patient’s body. When more than 11 of them are painful, the chances are quite high that the person is suffering from Fibromyalgia.

The most encountered symptoms in patients suffering from Fibromyalgia include pain (chronic, for more than 3 months and in different areas of the body), sleep disorders (such as bad sleeping patterns or the Restless Leg Syndrome), stiffness (especially in the area of the joints), numbness (especially in the fingers), fatigue, headaches, the Irritable Bowel Syndrome, painful menstruation and even cognitive and memory issues.

Most often, the medical professionals will recommend patients with Fibromyalgia a series of medications that should be combined with some alternative methods of relieving pain and stress. Among these, acupuncture has been proved to be both popular and effective.

How can acupuncture help patients with Fibromyalgia?

To understand better whether or not this alternative remedy is good or not for you or for someone you know who is suffering from this syndrome, you should first understand the basic principles that stand at the basis of acupuncture.

This Chinese alternative medicine method has been known “back home” for thousands and thousands of years and it has helped many people ameliorate various medical conditions they had. In the Western countries, it only started to become popular in the 1970s, when a wave of information related to alternative therapy hit the world.

This was the time when America, as well as the rest of the Western world found out about yoga, meditation, acupuncture and about other such relaxation methods and healing natural remedies.

With the increasing popularity in these kinds of practices, nowadays many insurance agencies include them in their policies, and acupuncture does have a special place among them. Why is it so popular and how is it that it works though?

Studies have shown that acupuncture can help sending certain signals to the brain and the Central Nervous System. In the case of Fibromyalgia patients therefore, this alternative remedy can be very helpful in ameliorating their condition because it can help them with the way their brain perceives pain (which, as mentioned before, is what actually causes the development of this syndrome).

Pain is not the only thing that can be ameliorated by the use of acupuncture though. In the end, the patient may regain his/her good state of mind and he/she can start developing better habits (including better sleeping habits) as well.

The fact that acupuncture helps with relieving stress is also helpful in the case of those who suffer from the Fibromyalgia syndrome, especially since stress is tightly connected to its development.

Acupuncture is a safe practice, as long as it is performed by well trained staff. It will not interact in a negative way with other treatments that your doctor may have prescribed you (including drugs such as pain killers, antidepressants or that have an anti-inflammatory effect). However, you should bear in mind that there is a low level of risk when it comes to this alternative therapy as well.

These risks are very rarely encountered, and as long as you call for the services of someone who is licensed to practice this method, you are safe. Most of the times, the bad effects of undergoing acupuncture are related to the bad usage of non-sterile needles. Bruises, dizziness and nausea also have a low occurrence in the case of patients with Fibromyalgia who use acupuncture as an adjutant method of relieving pain.

A licensed acupuncturist will not simply stick needles into the patient’s body without examining him/her first (according to the rules of the acupuncture, of course). The color of the tongue can be a sign for these practitioners and so can other symptoms that the patient may show.

The short-term effects of the first sessions of acupuncture may include pain and sleepiness, but according to the specialists, this is an actual sign that the treatment works and that it has been applied correctly.

As a conclusion, yes, acupuncture can help you with ameliorating the symptoms of Fibromyalgia. Make sure that the practitioner you go to is licensed and that your doctor knows about it and this alternative Chinese method can help you.

However, if you feel that needles will not help you, you can choose another alternative remedy as well (meditation, yoga, etc.) and see if it works for you.

Blood-Sugar Breathalyzer May Spare Diabetics The Pin Prick

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Soon diabetics may be able to use a pain-free breathalyzer device to easily monitor their blood-glucose levels, according to new research being presented at the 2013 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Antonio, Texas this week.

Developed by Ronny Priefer, a chemist from Western New England University, the device uses nanometer-thick films made from of two polymers that react with acetone, an organic compound that correlates to the blood-glucose level in the breath of diabetics.

When a person breathes into the device, the acetone in their breath changes the nature of the polymer films. The device is then able to sense the nature and degree of the change and quantify the patient’s blood-glucose levels.

“Breathalyzers are a growing field of study because of their potential to have a significant positive impact on patients’ quality of life and compliance with diabetes monitoring,” Priefer said. “What makes our technology different is that it only accounts for acetone and doesn’t react with other components in the breath.”

While Priefer’s prototype has produced promising results, it occasionally gives inconsistent readings due to breath humidity and high temperature requirements.

“The breathalyzer we currently have is about the size of a book, but we’re working with an engineer, Dr. Michael Rust at Western New England University, to make it smaller, more similar to the size of a breathalyzer typically used to detect blood alcohol content levels,” he said.

Priefer said he has two clinics lined up to conduct patient trials from late 2014 through early 2015. The trials are designed to compare readings across the breathalyzer, conventional finger-prick testing and blood sample testing. The chemist said he plans to test the breathalyzers in an uncontrolled setting in about two years.

The experimental breathalyzer is just one of many devices designed to make blood-glucose testing less invasive for individuals with diabetes. According to a report published last month in Review of Scientific Instruments, a team of German researchers has developed a method that uses infrared light to sense blood glucose levels.

The report described a new device that applies infrared light to the top of the skin and measures the amount of glucose in the fluid within and beneath skin cells.

“This opens the fantastic possibility that diabetes patients might be able to measure their glucose level without pricking and without test strips,” said lead researcher Dr. Werner Mäntele, a professor at the Institut für Biophysik, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. “Our goal is to devise an easier, more reliable and in the long-run, cheaper way to monitor blood glucose.”

The researchers said their method uses a process known as photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) to measure an amount sugar by its absorption of infrared light. The team’s device works by sending a painless pulse of laser light onto skin. The laser pulse is then absorbed by glucose molecules, in the process creating a sonic signature which the study authors call the “sweet melody of glucose.”

The sonic signature allowed the German scientists to detect sugar in skin fluids in just a few seconds.

Your Eyes May Tell The Tale Of Alzheimer’s Onset

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[ Watch the Video: Vision Loss Linked With Alzheimer’s Disease ]

Susan Bowen for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

In the future, your optometrist may be the first person to realize that you could have Alzheimer’s disease (AD). An international team of researchers has discovered the loss of a particular layer of retinal cells may reveal the presence of the disease.

Led by R.C. Chang from the University of Hong Kong, along with researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) made the connection by studying a layer of the eye that had not previously been investigated. They will present their findings at Neuroscience 2013, the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

“The retina is an extension of the brain so it makes sense to see if the same pathologic processes found in an Alzheimer’s brain are also found in the eye,” explains R. Scott Turner, MD, PhD, director of the Memory Disorders Program at GUMC and a member of the team. “We know there’s an association between glaucoma and Alzheimer’s in that both are characterized by loss of neurons, but the mechanisms are not clear.”

Glaucoma is a group of eye conditions resulting in damage to the optic nerve, and it may cause loss of vision. Usually the condition is caused by abnormally high pressure inside the eye, according to the Mayo Clinic. Turner says that researchers are increasingly seeing glaucoma as a neurodegenerative disease similar to AD.

The neuroscientists used genetically-engineered mice designed to develop Alzheimer’s for their research. In the eye, two cell layers transmit information, by way of the optic nerve, into the brain. These are the retinal ganglion layer and the inner nuclear layer. Most previous research has focused on the retinal ganglion layer. When the researchers measured the retinas of the Alzheimer’s mice, they found both layers had a significant loss of thickness. The inner nuclear layer had a 37 percent loss of neurons, and the retinal ganglion layer had a 49 percent loss when compared to healthy mice of the same age.

In humans, the structure and thickness of the retina can easily be measured using optical coherence tomography. This technology is increasingly finding its way into both research and clinical settings.

Turner states, “This study suggests another path forward in understanding the disease process and could lead to new ways to diagnose or predict Alzheimer’s that could be as simple as looking into the eyes.”

These findings also offer new hope for glaucoma patients who may be helped by treatments developed for Alzheimer’s, since the two conditions have parallel disease mechanisms.

Other recent research offers hope of another way to detect Alzheimer’s at an earlier stage. Researchers at Johns Hopkins gave a battery of cognitive tests to both people who showed early signs of memory loss and normal healthy older adults. While the graph of scores for healthy people displayed a symmetrical bell-shaped curve, the graphs of people with dementia shifted to a more asymmetrical curve. This asymmetry is caused by an uneven disruption of mental processes, with some subtle declines appearing before other, more obvious ones. Noting this shift could become another tool for reassuring some people they did not have Alzheimer’s, while allowing others to begin interventions earlier.

Online Class Lets Students Control 50,000-Degree Plasma

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Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Anyone who has a plasma TV in their living room likely knows those things give off a bit of heat, but few understand why. Most of us just focus on the life-like pictures on the screen. But nowadays, the scientifically curious can take part in open online courses like those offered by Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare and iTunes U to learn about the science behind how nature and technology work. And the American Physical Society reported this week that the growing trend in online physics classes that will actually enable students to interact with real physical experiments.

This was one of the key reports presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Plasma Physics (DPP), which is being held this week in Denver, Colorado.

Typically, online courses have relied on virtual labs that only simulate laboratory environments. This week the United States Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Laboratory (PPPL) announced that it has developed software for an experiment that can be observed and controlled from anywhere in the world. So while many of us might settle for trying to figure out why that plasma TV gives off more heat than a comparable LCD screen, students can take part in an online open-user experiment that could turn the heat up even more, specifically, from a 50,000-degree plasma.

The user can operate the experiment with a set up that can be observed and controlled from anywhere in the world. This particular experiment, “Remote Glow Discharge Experiment (RGDX),” allows users to operate the experiment via remote control and can watch the effect of the apparatus at PPPL via streaming web video.

The APS noted that this experiment consists of three main component that include, “A live-streaming video that constantly observes an experimental apparatus housed at PPPL; A set of online controls; and Information that explains what the user observes and controls, plus more in-depth resources that explore plasma and its uses.”

The RGDX consists of a hollow glass tube that holds air in a vacuum, and users can supply a surge of up to 2000 volts to generate a glow within it. The remote user can take complete control of the pressure inside the tube, and is guided through steps that gradually increase their level of engagement. This helps the users to understand new physical concepts,  and those who want to go even deeper into the physics behind the phenomenon can find explanations for a variety of topics, including the physics behind the voltages, pressures and magnets.

The audience for the RGDX could be wide ranging, and include someone merely interested in controlling physical apparatus from afar, to undergraduate and graduate level students who are interested in studying the effects of phenomena such as various instabilities in plasma and even the physics behind it.

RGDX has been designed as a novel experiment, but also as part of an in-class physics course. The researchers noted that the software could be adapted to an array of far reaching experiments in the field of physics as well as other sciences.

The APS is a non-profit membership organization, which works to advance knowledge of physics through research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. This group currently represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Global Warming Behind Earlier Migration Of Some Bird Species

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Scientists have been seeing some bird species migrate earlier and earlier each year and now a team of UK and Icelandic researchers has shown that warming temperatures are behind the creeping back of this instinctive behavior, according to their report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“We have known that birds are migrating earlier and earlier each year – particularly those that migrate over shorter distances,” said report author Jenny Gill, a biologist from the University of East Anglia in the UK. “But the reason why has puzzled bird experts for years. It’s a particularly important question because the species which are not migrating earlier are declining in numbers.”

The study focused on a population of Icelandic black-tailed godwits that advanced their spring arrival date by two weeks over the span of 20 years. Black-tailed godwits are large shorebirds that have a sporadic breeding range that extends from Iceland to Russia. The birds feed on grasslands in spring and some populations migrate to muddy waterways in Africa and India after breeding. Flocks from Iceland spend the winter in the UK, France and the Netherlands, with some birds heading to Spain or Portugal.

“The obvious answer would be that individual birds are simply migrating earlier each year,” Gill said. “But our tracking of individual birds shows that this is not the case. In fact individual birds do almost exactly the same thing every year – arriving punctually at the same time year-on-year.”

She added that because the team followed the same flock for so many years, they knew the precise ages of many individual birds.

“We found that birds hatched in the late 1990s arrived in May, but those hatched in more recent years are tending to arrive in April,” Gill said. “So the arrival dates are advancing because the new youngsters are migrating earlier.”

“Climate change is likely to be driving this change because godwits nest earlier in warmer years, and birds that hatch earlier will have more time to gain the body condition needed for migration and to find good places to spend the winter, which can help them to return early to Iceland when they come back to breed,” she added.

The study researchers said this would also explain why the same change in migration isn’t seen in birds that migrate over long distances, as long-distance migrants arrive so late that they have minimal opportunity to acclimate to warming conditions and nest earlier.

“This research is very important because many long-distance migrant bird populations are currently declining very rapidly, and identifying how climate change is affecting these populations is a key part of understanding the causes of these declines,” Gill said.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has black-tailed godwits listed as ‘Near Threatened’ on its Red List of endangered species.

“Although this species is widespread and has a large global population, its numbers have declined rapidly in parts of its range owing to changes in agricultural practices,” a statement on the organization’s website said. “Overall, the global population is estimated to be declining at such a rate that the species qualifies as Near Threatened.”

New Species Of Big Cat Discovered In Tibet Fills Evolutionary Gap

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editor

[ Watch the Video: Fossil Skull Of Ancient Big Cat Unearthed In Tibet ]

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

The evolution of big cats has been nearly as mysterious as the cats themselves, but a new discovery will likely lead anthropologists to a better understanding of when and where big cats originated.

During a 2010 paleontological dig in Tibet, a husband-and-wife team who were part of a larger expedition discovered the fossilized partial remains of what appeared to be a type of cat. University of Southern California (USC) graduate Z. Jack Tseng and his wife Juan Liu made the discovery in the Zanda Basin near the border of Pakistan and China.

Tseng, who now works with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, said the discovery was a surprise. In a Smithsonian Magazine blog, Tseng explained that the team had been driving trail after trail in the Tibetan “badlands” before discovering a patch of fossils protruding from the ground on one particular hillside.

“In the little concentration of fossils, there were lots of limb bones from antelopes and horses obscuring everything else,” said Tseng. “It wasn’t until we started lifting things up, one by one, that we saw the top of a skull, and we thought, from the shape, that it looked something like a cat.”

FILLING THE GAP

And after a few years of analysis, Tseng and his colleagues have published a paper today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B explaining that this cat fossil is no ordinary cat, rather a totally new species, which has been described as Panthera blytheae by the team. This discovery also represents the oldest known “big cat,” a group that includes lions, tigers, leopards, etc., ever found and by a pretty significant margin. Of all the felines, the big cats were the first to split off into their own group from a common ancestor. As such, big cats are vital in the understanding of cat evolution.

Previously, the oldest big cat fossil ever found came from Africa and placed the group at about 3.8 million years old. However, some theories, based on geographical patterns and genetic data, suggest that Asian cats originated much earlier, at least six million years ago.

Theories can now be considered fact now that Tseng and his team have made and shared their exciting discovery. This new cat species fills the massive gap that existed within the fossil record and places the evolution of the big cat to around the Late Miocene-Early Pliocene.

“This find suggests that big cats have a deeper evolutionary origin than previously suspected,” Tseng said in a USC statement.

The new DNA evidence suggests these big-cats diverged from their nearest evolutionary cousins, Felinae, which includes cougars, lynxes, domestic cats, etc., about 6.37 million years ago.

In order to date the fossil, Tseng and colleagues relied on a technique called magnetostratigraphy. This method requires analysis of the magnetic orientation of the rocks around the site of the discovery and compare it to known reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field. However, this technique can only provide a rough estimate of an item’s actual age – in this case between 4.10 and 5.95 million years old.

So even if the fossil is at the latest point of 4.10 million years old, it is still nearly a half-million years older than the previous discovery.

DIGGING DEEPER

But the researchers were not happy with just this conclusion, so they dug deeper. This discovery, said Tseng, suggests that big cats branched off from smaller cats much farther back than previously thought. The team compared the skull of P. blytheae to fossils from other extinct big cats, the anatomy of living cat species, and DNA samples taken from both living and some more recently extinct Ice Age-era species (cave lions). With this evidence in hand, the team was able to build a new evolutionary family tree for all big cats.

Using known rates of anatomical changes over time and the observed anatomy of P. blytheae, the team estimated that the earliest big cats branched off from the Felinae subfamily between 10 and 11 million years ago.

The new discovery also helps researchers answer an old question in evolutionary geology. In previous research, DNA analysis of all living big cats and fossils from various sites around the world had indicated that the most likely common ancestor of big cats originated in Asia. However, the oldest known specimens were only found in Africa, leaving some skeptical of the Asia link.

Tseng’s discovery, however, provides the first direct evidence that central Asia was indeed the ancestral home of big cats, at least as far back as the fossil record currently goes.

ANATOMY OF A KILLER

The team acknowledged that based on the fossil remains, it is difficult to describe a lot about the behavior and lifestyle of P. blytheae, but the team was able to draw some conclusions based on skull anatomy.

“It’s not a huge cat, like a lion or a tiger, but closer to a leopard,” Tseng said.

Tseng speculated that the habitat of the cat was very similar to what we see today on the Tibetan plateau. The area today is home to snow leopards, and like these cats, Tseng said it is likely P. blytheae did not hunt on the open plains, but rather on cliffs and in valleys. Evidence in tooth wear patterns suggests similarities to the snow leopard. The rear teeth, which appeared sharp, were likely used for cutting soft tissue; the front teeth were heavily worn, suggesting they were used to pry open carcasses and picking meat off the bones.

STILL NOT COMPLETE

Tseng and colleagues plan to return to Tibet to hunt for more evidence. Tseng noted that while the current fossil represents the earliest of its kind, it is not the final piece of the puzzle in the evolution of big cats. He maintains that it cannot be the oldest big-cat fossil out there.

“The gap still isn’t completely filled yet,” he said. “We need to find older big cats to put the picture together.”

“It points us to look for more ancestral big cats in the Miocene rocks of central Asia,” Tseng, a National Geographic Young Explorer grantee, told NatGeo’s Jennifer Holland in an interview.

He added that the timeline of big-cat evolution has more than just historical significance.

The more that can discovered about the successes of ancient big cats and their prey in ever-changing environments, the better equipped scientists will be in predicting how today’s big cats will respond to change, said Tseng.

Among the many coauthors of this study from several colleges and institutions, perhaps Tseng’s closest colleague is his wife Juan Liu, of the University of Alberta and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

The research was funded by National Basic Research Program of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History), and the National Geographic Society.

Banking, Mobile Malware Rose to Record Levels in Q3 2013

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Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

During the past quarter the Internet reached the highest infection rate since 2002 in terms of the volume of malware infections, according to the TrendLabs 3Q security report titled “The Invisible Web Unmasked” from internet security firm Trend Micro. Report highlights were offered on the TrendLabs Security Intelligence Blog.

Cyber-criminals made large withdrawals during the third quarter, though authorities closed a number of accounts. Following the Q2 takedown of the Liberty Reserve, cyber-criminals crawled the web for alternative currencies. Some resorted to Bitcoins, with one of the larger takedowns of this past quarter being Silk Road, which used the Deep Web to hide from authorities.

Law enforcement agencies had another big score in the third quarter, when the alleged Blackhole Exploit Kit author Paunch was arrested in early October. The Blackhole Exploit Kit used a Java vulnerability as a vector to compromise computers.

Paunch was not the only cybercriminal to use the Java vulnerability exploit. It was also one of the methods used in the Neutrino Exploit Kit. One reason Java is vulnerable is that its developer, Oracle, has stopped supporting Java 6, meaning users of Java 6 no longer receive updates. Users of older versions are also left vulnerable as they are not getting security fixes from the Oracle updates.

Banking is one area that has been hit hard by Trojans and other malicious software and the Trend Micro report observed a surge in online banking malware. While infections used to have higher concentrations in regions such as Europe and the Americas, that is no longer the case. Banking malware is now spread worldwide, and infection counts have exceeded 200,000 making Q3 2013 the highest infection rate since 2002.

“As consumers gravitate to the convenience of online banking, criminals are developing tools at an exceedingly rapid pace to exploit a general lack of awareness,” said JD Sherry, vice president of technology and solutions at Trend Micro, in a corporate statement.

Apple is one tech company that is increasingly under threat of malicious software. Users of the Apple platform saw a spike in May for phishing page volume when it reached 5,800. A lower spike was reached in July with 4,100 and in September Trend Micro tracked a volume of 2,500 phishing pages.

“Apple has been traditionally perceived as a safe-haven against threats, but our findings reveal that personal information can be jeopardized as phishing scams that target the platform continue to gain momentum. The evidence suggests a potential perfect storm looming in the holiday season as busy commercial and consumer users leverage mobile platforms,” said Sherry.

Mobile malware is another growing concern with mobile malware threats exceeding one million in September. “Among these, 80 percent were malicious in nature, topped by premium service abusers. Premium service abusers are known to send unauthorized text messages to certain numbers and often register users to premium-rate services. This type of malicious app is especially popular in Russia, most likely due to the country’s lack of ‘standard’ app stores,” the report said.

At least one cyber-criminal used the so-called “master key” vulnerability to gain access to mobile phone handsets. In one instance, an attacker used the master key vulnerability to update a legitimate app with a malicious version. That raises alarm, as even careful mobile users can be attacked if cyber-criminals gain access at the app store level.

Having Twins Nearly Five Times As Costly As A Single Delivery

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Advances in reproductive technologies such as ovulation induction and in vitro fertilization (IVF) have helped many couples to start a family, but these medical advances have also resulted in an increase in multiple birth pregnancies.

A new study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology has found US pregnancies that end in the delivery of twins cost about five-fold more than singleton pregnancies, and the delivery of triplets or more cost nearly 20 times as much as singletons.

In the study, researchers used data from the Truven Health MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters Database to examine the differences in costs among the different types of pregnancies. The researchers’ study cohort included all women between the ages of 19 and 45 years old who delivered at least one live infant between January 2005 and September 2010 – equaling nearly 440,000 delivery events. Of these, about 97 percent were singletons, about 2.8 percent were twins and 0.13 percent of the pregnancies produced triplets or more.

The research team included medical costs incurred by mothers during the 27 weeks leading up to and about 30 days after the delivery date. They also considered medical costs for infants up until their first birthday.

“By taking a broad approach, we have shown that medical expenses attributable to mothers and infants varied according to birth multiplicity,” said study author Dongmu Zhang, a research leader at Merck & Co. “For singleton pregnancy, maternal expenses accounted for about 60 percent of overall cost; whereas for twins or higher-order multiple births, expenses for infant care accounted for about 70 percent and 85 percent of total expenses, respectively.”

The adjusted total healthcare cost was around $21,000 per delivery for singletons, $105,000 for twins, and over $400,000 for triplets or more, the study found.

The research team also considered co-existing conditions, which they labeled a systemic condition such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, thyroid disease, anemia and conditions in the reproductive tract. Women with twins or more had considerably more co-existing conditions in each category than women who delivered a single baby. Mothers with twins or triplets or more also had longer hospital visits for delivery and a higher mortality rate.

“On average, combined all-cause healthcare expenses for mothers with twins or higher-order multiple births were about five and 20 times more expensive, respectively, than singleton delivery,” Zhang said. “The greater expenses were likely to have been due to increased maternal morbidities, significantly increased use of cesarean section and longer hospital stay for the deliveries in women with multiple pregnancies, and increased admission and longer stay in NICU for neonates of multiple gestations.

“We also demonstrated increased mortality for both mothers and infants associated with multiple pregnancies, although the absolute rates were small,” he added.

The research team said their study was the first to consider medical expenses for both maternal and infant care associated with IVF-assisted pregnancy. The researchers recommended that IVF strategies should be aimed at minimizing multiple embryo transfer, which would reduce the burden associated with multiple pregnancies.

Health

New Technology Combines Contraception, HIV And Herpes Simplex Virus-2 Prevention

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CONRAD

Multipurpose prevention technologies featured at AAPS Annual Meeting and International Conference on Family Planning

CONRAD Head of drug delivery, Meredith Clark, PhD, today presented preclinical data on a new intravaginal ring that provides contraception as well as HIV-1 and HSV-2 prevention at the 2013 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Antonio, Texas. This multipurpose prevention technology (MPT) can remain in the vagina for up to 90 days and releases the contraceptive levonorgestrel (LNG) and tenofovir (TFV), an antiretroviral that inhibits HIV and HSV replication in susceptible cells.

The CONRAD product development team, in collaboration with Dr. Patrick Kiser at Northwestern University, performed in vitro release testing and 3-month pharmacokinetic (PK) studies of the ring in rabbits and sheep, and compared drug levels to those seen with use of tenofovir gel. The PK studies found that levels of tenofovir in the target tissue delivered from the ring are similar or higher than those obtained after TFV 1% gel application, a product that has proven to be effective in preventing HIV and HSV infections in women. In addition, release of the contraceptive agent was also consistent with previous levels tested to be efficacious in women. Stability studies will continue and lead to Phase I clinical trials in women in 2014, which will test the combination ring, as well as a tenofovir-only ring.

Tenofovir is the first microbicide proven to be efficacious in humans, with the CAPRISA 004 clinical trial showing that women using the gel before and after sex reduced their risk of HIV infection by 39-54%. CAPRISA 004 also showed the gel to be 51% effective in reducing the transmission of HSV-2, making this combination ring potentially triple protective.

“The TFV/LNG ring is the first device to be tested in women that will offer contraception as well as HIV and herpes prevention,” said Dr. Clark. “And so far, tenofovir is the only microbicide that has been proven to be effective in reducing HIV infections when used topically. It’s important to develop a variety of delivery mechanisms for tenofovir in order to serve different women’s needs.”

CONRAD’s product development director David Friend Ph.D added, “Products only work when they are used. By having a ring that can remain in the body for up to 90 days, our hope is that this ring will offer a solution to increase adherence, and therefore provide greater protection against HIV while also preventing pregnancy.”

CONRAD’s deputy director of clinical research, Marianne Callahan, will also present information on MPTs later this week at the International Conference on Family Planning in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The CONRAD sponsored panel, “Development of Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (MPTs): Pathway from Product Development to the End Users,” will discuss how the development of MPTs are tied to the regulatory approval process, the importance of acceptability research within target populations, and the importance of taking a “systems approach” when considering feasibility of future introduction of a new technology.

In addition to the TFV/LNG intravaginal ring, CONRAD is testing the one-size-fits-most SILCS diaphragm with tenofovir gel. Used together, the diaphragm plus the gel can offer contraception plus the potential to reduce HIV and HSV-2 infections as an on-demand system providing immediate protection.

According to the World Health Organization, there are 35.3 million people living with HIV around the world and approximately 87 million unintended pregnancies occur each year. Ms. Callahan says, “An unintended pregnancy is more tangible than an invisible virus so MPTs may lead to increased product use by offering a crucial combination of protection that can have a major impact in developing countries.”

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