08.18.11
Posted in health at 10:02 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing the possibility of mutating HIV away.
Traditional HIV drugs attempt to keep the virus in check by preventing it from replicating. But Koronis’s KP-1461 uses a new drug mechanism–dubbed Viral Decay AccelerationT–to insert itself into the viral genome, increasing the frequency of mutations, until eventually the virus population collapses. “If you think of HIV as a house made of two by fours, and the genetic backbone of the virus as the foundation of that house, [the drug mechanism] replaces the two by fours with toothpicks, and eventually the house comes crashing down,” says Dr. Mark G. Fromhold, VP of Manufacturing and Business Development at Koronis.
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06.22.11
Posted in health, society at 9:35 pm by site admin
Check out this article stating the FDA now deems silicon breast implants reasonable safe to use. The funniest parts of this are:
“Based on the totality of the evidence, the FDA believes that silicone gel-filled breast implants have reasonable assurance of safety and effectiveness when used as labeled,” the agency said.
This is a loaded statement. The safety part I get.. But effectiveness?? And what is considered to be the effectiveness of implants?? And then, ‘when used as labeled’… I didn’t know there was a proper use of breast implants, much less a label.. Guess its not like those pesky labels on the mattress that you don’t want to cut..
The other interesting point the FDA makes is:
“Breast implants are not lifetime devices. The longer a woman has silicone gel-filled breast implants, the more likely she is to experience complications,” the FDA said.
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02.24.11
Posted in health at 9:27 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how cell phone usage elevates glucose levels in the brain (near the cell phone).
According to the study, the area of the brain closest to the cell phone’s antenna elevated its glucose metabolism – which is a form of measuring brain cell activity – due to the electromagnetic field emitted by the phone in those regions.
“Although we cannot determine the clinical significance, our results give evidence that the human brain is sensitive to the effects of radiofrequency-electromagnetic fields from acute cell phone exposures,” said Nora Volkow, MD, MD, of the National Institutes of Health and the study’s lead author.
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02.21.11
Posted in health at 10:16 am by site admin
Check out this article about how Yoga is in vogue and how its affecting the spirituality of the practice.
Do yoga, transcend your ego, and discover your inner humility—at least that’s the idea behind this ancient spiritual practice. The enlightened person is “friendly and compassionate, free from self-regard and vanity,” promises the Bhagavad-Gita. But in the recent past, around the time that $100 yoga pants became as common as designer jeans, the once inconspicuous yoga instructor has morphed into something more grandiose. Now certain teachers display all the monkishness of Keith Richards cooling his heels in the greenroom as adoring fans reach a peak of anticipation.
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02.16.11
Posted in health at 9:26 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how a rare condition known as Laron syndrome or Laron-type dwarfism may hold the secrets to Longevity.
As Dr. Guevara-Aguirre accumulated health data on his patients, he noticed a remarkable pattern: though cancer was frequent among people who did not have the Laron mutation, those who did have it almost never got cancer. And they never developed diabetes, even though many were obese, which often brings on the condition.
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12.30.10
Posted in health at 1:01 am by site admin
Check out this link about Toxicperfluoroalkyls being leached from fast food packaging into the food.
A new study shows that toxicperfluoroalkyls, which are used in surface protection treatments and coatings to keep grease from leaking through fast food wrappers, are being ingested by people through their food and showing up as contaminants in blood.
Perfluoroalkyls are a hazardous class of stable, synthetic chemicals that repel oil, grease and water.
As reported by University of Toronto researchers, the chemicals studied in human blood, urine and feces were polyfluoroalkyl phosphate esters (PAPs), which are the breakdown products of the perfluorinated carboxylic acids (PFCAs) used in coating the food wrappers. Scientists said the exposure to humans through this means “should be considered as a significant indirect source of PFCA.”
That means you now have a new reason to avoid fast foods.
PFCs are linked to infertility, thyroid disease, cancer, immune system problems, and increased LDL cholesterol level.s
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11.10.10
Posted in health, society at 7:57 pm by site admin
A 10-year-old Romanian girl has given birth in Spain, according to news accounts. The father is also a minor. Authorities don’t consider it a case of rape, and officials are deciding whether the girl and her family can keep the child.
The baby, born last week in the southern city of Jerez de la Frontera, weighed 6 pounds, 4 ounces. Micaela Navarro, the Andalusia region’s social affairs minister, said mother and child, whose gender was not revealed, are doing fine.
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09.14.10
Posted in health, society at 1:17 pm by site admin
Check out this article talking about Japan’s missing centenarians.
In August, the Justice Ministry ordered a review of records that found about 77,000 people who would be at least 120, and 884 people who would be 150 or older. The head count followed a flurry of reports about how elderly people are falling through the cracks in Japan as its population ages rapidly and family ties weaken.
In all, the survey of family registration records nationwide found that 234,354 centenarians were still listed as alive, but their whereabouts were unknown, the ministry said.
Because listings of people over 120 are almost certainly the result of lax bookkeeping, the ministry instructed local offices to attach a note to those records saying the people were unaccounted for, a ministry official said.
A ministry official said many of the missing people had probably died, lost touch with relatives or moved overseas. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing ministry policy.
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07.15.10
Posted in health at 8:23 pm by site admin
Check out this article about one man’s quest to put diabetics on auto-pilot. Although all the components are out there, there has been a gap in connecting the dots.
Manufacturers were afraid of liability, academics were bent on achieving perfection, and the Food and Drug Administration was downright jumpy at the thought of letting a computer control a mechanism with life-and-death responsibilities.
Yet most of the components for what researchers were calling an artificial pancreas — an external device the size of an iPod that would duplicate the insulin-secreting and -regulating functions of that organ — were already in place. An insulin pump had been approved back in the late 1970s, and a continuous glucose monitor that read the output of a sensor implanted under the skin was nearing approval. (The first one would hit the market in 2005.) The trick was to connect the two via software, letting the monitor’s information on blood-sugar levels — high or low, rising or falling — serve as the basis for calculating exactly how much insulin to release.
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05.24.10
Posted in health, society at 9:56 pm by site admin
Check out this article that talks about how people who work 10+ hours a day are much more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than those that don’t. The study seemed to be a bit limited and did not factor in other possibly relevant factors. In any case, bottom line, don’t work so much. Having balance is good.
The study doesn’t say how, exactly, long hours at work might affect heart health. To try to pinpoint the effect of work time, Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues took a range of health factors into account in their analysis, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diet and exercise, and whether or not the participants smoked. They also factored in the workers’ rank and salary, since socioeconomic status has been linked to heart health.
In some ways, the people who worked overtime were healthier than those who worked just seven hours a day. They were less likely to drink heavily and smoke, for instance, and they got more exercise. On the other hand, they tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress, having more demanding jobs, and having less control over their work.
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04.26.10
Posted in health, society at 8:25 pm by site admin
Check out this article questioning if there is a link between chocolate and depression. So much for chocolate just being when you are feeling unsatisfied.
When the researchers controlled for other dietary factors that could be linked to mood — such as caffeine, fat and carbohydrate intake — they found only chocolate consumption correlated with mood.
It’s not clear how the two are linked, the authors wrote. It could be that depression stimulates chocolate cravings as a form of self-treatment. Chocolate prompts the release of certain chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, that produce feelings of pleasure.
There is no evidence, however, that chocolate has a sustained benefit on improving mood. Like alcohol, chocolate may contribute a short-term boost in mood followed by a return to depression or a worsened mood. A study published in 2007 in the journal Appetite found that eating chocolate improved mood but only for about three minutes.
It’s also possible that depressed people seek chocolate to improve mood but that the trans fats in some chocolate counteract the effect of omega-3 fatty acid production in the body, the authors said in the paper. Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to improve mental health.
Another theory is that chocolate consumption contributes to depression or that some physiological mechanism, such as stress, drives both depression and chocolate cravings.
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04.18.10
Posted in health at 11:49 am by site admin
Check out this link with a brief discussion on 8 kinda weird/interesting search engines. My favorite is #4: PillBox.
While we’re on the subject of government search engines, how about Pillbox from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. What is it? It’s a search engine for identifying unknown pills. For real! The site warns that it’s still in development and not intended for clinical use, and has all the requisite disclaimers … but it’s still one of the most interesting search engine ideas around. You provide the size, shape, color, and other attributes of a pill, and it returns a list of possible matches along with links for more information about the pill.
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Posted in health at 11:39 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about how teen girls’ drinking may lead to breast cancer later in life.
Teen years are a critical time for potential cancer-producing exposures, she said, because the mammary glands are undergoing rapid growth during that period.
Berkey said she suspects the link is due to alcohol increasing total estrogen levels, raising the likelihood of benign breast disease.
“For me, this is not a surprise,” said Dr. Patricia Ganz, director of cancer prevention and control research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Regular alcohol consumption is known to increase a woman’s risk for both breast cancer and benign breast disease, she said, and “certain forms of BBD increase the risk of breast cancer.”
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04.16.10
Posted in health at 7:55 pm by site admin
Check out this link showing the huge amount of salt in processed food.
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04.15.10
Posted in health at 10:09 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how chocolate can help people with cirrhosis of the liver.
“This study shows a clear association between eating dark chocolate and (lower) portal hypertension and demonstrates the potential importance of improvements in the management of cirrhotic patients,” said Mark Thursz, a professor of hepatology at London’s Imperial College.
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04.07.10
Posted in health at 8:50 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how some discomfort/pain during exercise is a good thing.
Experience at exercise will eventually transform these early trials into feel-good experiences, but at first your systems can’t deliver what exercise demands of them. The sensations of breathlessness and burning muscles, for example, correlate with the intensity of your effort. When you’re out of shape, numerous receptors all over your body beg your brain to slow down: I can’t maintain this. As you beef up each system, however, fewer receptors holler for mercy because your systems are no longer working so close to their maximum capacity. Eventually, the number of receptors screaming at your brain will level off, and more pleasant sensations will be able to rise to a conscious level. The signal that was once an emergency siren will become just a familiar signpost: I’ve pushed this hard before. I can handle it. It’ll be OK.
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02.18.10
Posted in health, science at 12:11 pm by site admin
Check out this article about extreme breath holding.
A Swiss freediver held his breath underwater for 19 minutes and 21 seconds, according to news reports this week. The gasp-inducing feat beat the previous world record by 19 seconds, and blew away the record of 17 minutes and four seconds that magician David Blaine set on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2008.
Extreme breath holders rely on a combination of techniques and training. They train their body to slow down the heart and circulatory system. In comparison to traditional methods, this new wave of breath holders leverage modern technology and train in hyperbaric chambers.
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01.13.10
Posted in Evolution, health at 8:52 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing prions and the fact that they do mutate and evolve like viruses. Prions are degenerate proteins responsible for diseases such as “mad cow disease”, technically termed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD).
In the classic sense, prions, which are misfolded versions of the brain protein PrP, cannot mutate because they do not contain DNA or RNA. They can, however, give rise to variants with different properties, possibly due to differences in the folding, or shape, of the proteins. In the study, published December 31 in Science Express, researchers estimated the rate at which prion mutants can appear in cultured human nerve cells. In addition, the study suggests that once variants appear, they persist at low levels, giving rise to a heterogeneous prion population.
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01.06.10
Posted in health, society at 12:11 am by site admin
A friend sent me this article titled Women Who Don’t Live Alone Add More Weight. Bottom line is that if your a women in a relationship, chances are you have gained at least 4lbs. If you have a baby, the number goes up..
After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.
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12.25.09
Posted in health at 9:27 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how stress levels in a mother can cause stress-induced sex selection in children.
A recently published study, however, suggests this ain’t necessarily so. According to Ralph Catalano of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues, writing in the American Journal of Human Biology, stress-induced sex selection can take place long after conception and implantation.
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