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Too much white brade can increase kidney cancer risk

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Eating a lot of white bread may increase the risk of renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the most common type of kidney cancer, while vegetarian food lowers it, a case-control study has revealed...CLICK & SEE

Previous studies on RCC had shown that diet plays an important role in monitoring the risk of the disease, but they did not tell which foods could be harmful or beneficial.

With a view to discern the relationship between specific foods and RCC risk, researchers led by Fancesca Bravi of the Institute of Pharmacological Research “Mario Negri” in Milan, conducted a large case-control study of 2,301 Italians.

They found that there is a significant association between high bread consumption and RCC risk.For their study, the researchers enrolled 767 adults diagnosed with RCC and 1,534 controlled subjects who did not have the disease between 1992 and 2004.

They matched two controlled subjects to each case by gender, age range, and location, and collected sociodemographic information, anthropomorphic measures, lifestyle habits, and personal and family medical history from each participant.

They also administered a 78-item food frequency questionnaire which comprised of questions about the average weekly consumption for each item over the previous two years, and analysed the information gathered. They found that those who consumed more bread had a higher RCC risk.

They also saw a modest non-significant risk increase amongst those who ate a lot of pasta and rice. By contrast, decreasing risk was associated with increasing intake of poultry, processed meat, and vegetables.
(as published in The Times Of India)

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Heavy workouts may make men infertile

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Men who exercise to exhaustion experience    changes in their hormone levels and sperm counts, a new study shows……………..CLICK & SEE

While these changes aren’t permanent, Diana Vaamonde of the University of Cordoba in Spain and colleagues note, the findings suggest that exercise could impair fertility in men with poor sperm counts and low hormone levels.

Women who exercise intensely frequently show obvious changes in hormonal patterns, Vaamonde and colleagues point out in the International Journal of Sports Medicine. For example, they may stop menstruating. But the effects of exercise on men’s fertility are not so clear.

The researchers set out to investigate how recreational exercise might influence male reproductive factors by assigning 16 healthy young men to either pedal to exhaustion on a special exercise bike four times a week for two weeks, or to avoid intense physical activity.

The exercisers showed a drop in their sperm concentration, ejaculate volume, and the number of sperm per ejaculate, as well as other changes in sperm quality.

(From the news published in The Times Of India)

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2-Drug process to heal the heart

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The damaging effects of a heart attack may be reversible, say researchers who have successfully used drugs to boost new heart tissue and blood vessel growth.

Treating the hearts of rats that had experienced simulated heart attacks, the team found the repaired hearts beat as well as undamaged hearts even after several months.

This is a dramatic recovery,”says Felix Engel, paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital in Boston who led the study. “A human with this kind of heart muscle damage would be dead.”

Under normal conditions, when blood flow is prevented from reaching the heart during a heart attack, the tissue dies, forming irreparable scar tissue. To re-grow the damaged areas in rats, Engel and colleagues used two drugs: one that overcomes a natural inhibitor of cell division within the heart; and one that encourages blood vessel growth.

The researchers studied 120 rats, some with heart attacks simulated by permanently closing off one of the coronary arteries that feed the heart muscle. Rats that received both drugs showed the greatest improvements.

Yibin Wang, a physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, who collaborated with Engel on a preliminary study, praised the new work but questioned some of its claims.

“The bottom line of this study is great,”Wang said, “they found a way to break the barrier of cardiac regeneration. But it’s very challenging to claim all of the benefits they observe are truly due to regeneration.”

Wang noted that heart function began increasing just one day after the heart attack   too soon, in his opinion, to be attributed to regeneration.

He suspects the damaged cells never died, but were protected by the drugs, which were applied at the same time as the simulated attack.

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Agents that regulates appetite identified

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Scientists in Japan have identified a molecule responsible for making mammals feel full, a discovery that could lead to new ways to treat obesity in humans.

Scientists believe appetite is controlled in a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, and the group of researchers claims to be the first to pinpoint an agent that triggers an increase or decrease in appetite.

In an article published on Sunday in the online version of the journal Nature, the scientists identified the molecule as nesfatin-1, which is produced naturally in the brain.

After injecting the molecule into the brains of rats, the scientists observed that the rodents began to eat less and lose weight.

The researchers also were able to induce the rats to eat more, by blocking nesfatin-1

After we injected anti-nesfatin-1 antibody, these rats showed increased appetite and finally showed a progressive increase in body weight,” Masatomo Mori of the medicine and molecular science department at Gunma University Graduate School of Medicine told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Mori said the finding could pave the way for treating obesity, which has become a major health problem in the developing world as well as in economically advanced countries.

There are at least a billion overweight adults across the world, 300 million of them considered obese, according to the World Health Organization.

Obesity has been linked to chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and some forms of cancer.

In a separate study, it has been found that the hormone leptin could help keep the body from producing too much insulin, according to a study in mice with type 2 diabetes.

People with type 2 diabetes often become resistant to the effects of insulin, causing to much of it to build up in the body.

Reporting in the September issue of the journal Peptides, researchers from the University of Florida injected a gene into the brains of diabetic mice, hoping to increase the production of the appetite-controlling hormone leptin in the hypothalamus.

Insulin levels in mice that received gene therapy returned to normal — even when they were fed a high-fat diet, the
researchers found. High-fat diets typically help trigger or worsen type 2 diabetes.

Mice that ate a high-fat diet but did not receive gene therapy, however, continued to overproduce insulin and have high blood-sugar levels.

“This was totally unexpected. Until now, there way no evidence that leptin action in the hypothalamus had control on insulin secretion.

With leptin gene therapy, we can re-impose that control,” senior author Satya Kalra, a University of Florida, Gainesville, professor of neuroscience, said.

(As published in the Times Of India)

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Lung cancer runs in the family

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LONDON: While smoking is far and away the biggest risk factor for lung cancer, having a close relative who has been diagnosed with the disease nearly doubles your risk of developing the deadly disease…..CLICK & SEE

A new study in Chest found that people with a first-degree relative   that means mother, father or sibling’s  ”who had lung cancer had a 95% higher risk of developing the disease.

“Our long-term follow-up of a largescale, population-based cohort identified a significant increase in the risk of lung cancer associated with a family history of lung cancer in a first-degree relative in a Japanese population,”the study authors wrote.

Jay Brooks, chairman of hematology and oncology at the Ochsner Clinic Health System said this study confirms what’s already known about family history and the risk of lung cancer, and that “it’s an important thing for physicians to realise”.

“As a clinician, when I have someone with lung cancer, I ask the family members, ‘Who smokes cigarettes?’ Then I explain that they have a two- to three-fold higher risk of lung cancer because of their family history, and this is just another reason to quit smoking because they have a genetic susceptibility to the carcinogens in tobacco,”explained Brooks.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 180,000 new cases of lung cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and nearly 170,000 Americans die from the disease annually.

It’s the second leading cause of death for men and the third leading cause of death for women, according to the CDC. Cigarette smoking is the most common cause of the disease, according to the National Institutes of Health, though not everyone who gets lung cancer is a smoker or former smoker.

The study followed more than 102,000 middle-aged and older Japanese adults for as long as 13 years; there were more women (53,421) than men (48,834).

During the study period, 791 cases of lung cancer were diagnosed. The researchers found that having a first-degree relative with lung cancer nearly doubled the odds of developing lung cancer.

The association was even stronger for women. Women who had a first-degree relative with lung cancer almost had triple the risk of lung cancer, while men with a first-degree relative with lung cancer had about a 70% higher risk.

Additionally, people who had never smoked had a higher risk of developing lung cancer themselves if they had a first-degree relative with the disease than did smokers with close family members with lung cancer. Family history was also more strongly associated with a particular type of lung cancer — squamous cell carcinoma..

Brooks and Ann G. Schwartz, who wrote an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal, both said it wasn’t clear why family history would confer a greater risk for women than for men.

Schwartz said one possibility is that women are more familiar with their family histories and may just be reporting family history more accurately.

Brooks also pointed out that this finding might only apply to Japanese women and not other populations.

(As published in The Times Of India)

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