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Exercise Cuts Negative Effects Of Belly Fat

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Moderate exercise can reduce the negative effects of belly fat, which is linked to metabolic syndrome, says a new study. Metabolic  syndrome increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.

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“The benefits of exercise were apparent, even without a change in diet. We saw improvements in insulin sensitivity, less fat in the liver, and less inflammation in belly fat,” said Jeffrey Woods, a professor at the University of Illinois (U-I) who led the study.

Inflammation is the response of body tissues to injury or irritation; characterized by pain, swelling, redness and heat. Kinesiology is the science of human movement and it focuses on how the body functions and moves.

Belly fat is particularly dangerous because it produces inflammatory molecules that enter the bloodstream and increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes, he said.

Woods and his colleagues examined the effects of diet and exercise on the inflammation of visceral or belly fat tissue in mice. A high-fat diet was first used to induce obesity in the animals.

After six weeks, mice were assigned to either a sedentary group, an exercise group, a low-fat diet group, or a group that combined a low-fat diet with exercise for six or twelve weeks so the scientists could compare the effects in both the short and long term, said an Illinois release.

“The surprise was that the combination of diet and exercise didn’t yield dramatically different and better results than diet or exercise alone,” said Vicki Vieira, study co-author.

Woods said that it is a promising finding. “The benefits of exercise were apparent even if the animals were still eating a high-fat diet. That tells me that exercise could decrease or prevent these life-threatening diseases by reducing inflammation even when obesity is still present.”

“The good news is that this was a very modest exercise programme. The mice ran on a treadmill only about one-fourth of a mile five days a week. For humans, that would probably translate into walking 30 to 45 minutes a day five days a week,” he noted.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Worm ‘May Help Treat Arthritis’

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A substance secreted by parasitic nematode worms may help provide a more effective treatment for inflammatory types of arthritis.
Nematode worms can cause serious disease
The molecule, ES-62, already circulates in the blood of millions of people infected with the worms in the Tropics.

It prevents the massive inflammatory response that the worms are otherwise capable of producing in conditions such as elephantiasis.

The Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde will carry out the project.

Auto-immune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, tend to be rare in countries where parasitic worm infections are endemic, and the researchers believe ES-62 may be key.

They aim to produce a synthetic derivative of ES-62 which could be used to develop new drugs to combat rheumatoid arthritis.

They also hope the same approach could ultimately be fine-tuned to treat other types of auto-immune diseases, using cocktails of several ES-62 derived drugs.

ES-62 has no known adverse effect on general health, nor does it inhibit the ability of infected people to fight other infections.

 

Thermostat

Researcher Professor William Harnett said: “We will be focusing on mechanisms of combating hyper-inflammation that have developed naturally and with apparent acceptance by humans during their co-evolution with parasites.”

Professor Iain McInnes, who will also be working on the project, said: “ES-62 appears to act like a thermostat to effectively turn down disease-causing inflammation which leaves essential defence mechanisms intact to fight infection and cancer.

“This property also makes ES-62 a unique tool for scientists to identify how such disease-causing inflammation occurs.”

A spokeswoman for the Arthritis Research Campaign, which is funding the work, said new treatments to tackle the painful inflammatory effects of conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis were much-needed.

She said: “Despite the advent of new classes of drugs such as anti-TNF therapy, there are many people whose arthritis is not under control, and this is an exciting, and novel piece of research which may lead to new, more effective treatments.”

Rheumatoid arthritis is a potentially crippling joint disease, caused by the body’s immune system attacking itself, leading to inflammation in the joints and internal organs such as the heart and lungs.

It affects around 400,000 people in the UK. Women sufferers outnumber men by three to one.

You may click to see:->Alcohol ‘cuts risk of arthritis’

Sources: BBC NEWS:September 16. ’08

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Sleepless Night Can Trigger Disorders

Just one sleepless night can trigger the key cellular pathway that produces tissue-damaging inflammation, a new study has found.

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During the study, the researchers measured the levels of nuclear factor (NF)-?B, a transcription factor that serves a vital role in the body’s inflammatory signalling, in adults.

These measurements were repeatedly assessed, including in the morning after baseline (or normal) sleep, after partial sleep deprivation (where the volunteers were awake from 11 pm to 3:00 am), and after recovery sleep.

The assessment showed that in the morning after sleep loss, activation of NF-?B signalling was significantly greater than after baseline or recovery sleep, although they found this increase in inflammatory response in only the female subjects.

The researchers said that the new findings suggest a good night’s sleep can ease the risk of both heart disease and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis.

“The closer that we look at sleep, the more that we learn about the benefits of sleeping. In this case, Irwin and colleagues provide evidence that sleep deprivation is associated with enhancement of pro-inflammatory processes in the body,” said John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with both Yale University School of Medicine and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System.

“Our findings suggest even modest sleep loss may play a role in common disorders that affect sweeping segments of the population.” In other words, sleep is vitally important to maintaining a healthy body,” said Dr. Irwin, lead author and director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Semel Institute.

“These findings provide a potential mechanistic avenue through which addressing sleep disturbance might improve health,” Krystal added.

A report appears in the September 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Sources: The Times Of India

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