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News on Health & Science

Venom may treat cancer

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NEW YORK: Scientists in the US have claimed that scorpion venom may help in the treatment of a wide range of cancers.

Scorpions occur naturally in parts of Africa, America, India and the Caribbean. The majority of scorpions are harmless to human beings although the sting is extremely painful and requires treatment.

Researchers have found that when applied to tumours, the chemical chlorotoxin found in scorpion venom can distinguish cancer from healthy tissue, even when it affects only a few hundred cells and could improve the treatment of a wide range of cancers, reported the online edition of the Daily Mail .

Scientists believe it will help guide surgeons and result in more successful treatment. “By allowing surgeons to see cancer that would be undetectable by other means, we can give our patients better outcomes,” said James Olson, a doctor who led the US research team.

By joining the chemical chlorotoxin to a fluorescent marker, Olson and his team created a molecular beacon that lights up tumours. Painting a suspect area with the compound makes it easier for surgeons to remove every bit of cancer without damaging the surrounding healthy tissue.

This is especially important in the brain, where 80 percent of recurring malignant tumours appear at the edges of the surgical site. The paint marks out tumours with at least 500 times more sensitivity than a magnetic resonance imaging scan, the researchers found.

The scientists said that in tests on mice, it highlighted brain tumours as small as one millimetre in diameter. They are now preparing for human clinical trials. The researchers said the technique could be used in operating theatres in the US in as little as 18 months.

Source: The Times Of India

Categories
Ailmemts & Remedies

Amnesia

Amnesia is a term used to cover the partial or complete loss of memory. It is most often a temporary condition and covers only a part of a person’s experience, such as immediate memory. The causes of amnesia range from psychological trauma to brain damage caused by a blow to the head or conditions such as a brain tumour, a stroke or swelling of the brain. There are many definitions covering the different types of amnesia.

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There are several types of Amnesia, some of the main types are:
Anterograde amnesia: People who find it hard to remember ongoing events after suffering damage to the head. They do not tend to forget their childhood or who they are, but have trouble remembering day-to-day events.

Retrograde amnesia: People who find it hard to retrieve memories prior to an incident in which they suffer damage to the head. Sometimes people never remember the seconds leading up to the incident.

Korsakoff’s psychosis: Memory loss caused by alcohol abuse. The person’s short-term memory may be normal, but they will have severe problems recalling a simple story, lists of unrelated words, faces and complex patterns.

This tends to be a progressive disorder and is usually accompanied by neurological problems, such as uncoordinated movements and loss of feeling in the fingers and toes. If these symptoms occur, it may be too late to stop drinking.

Traumatic amnesia: This follows brain damage caused by a severe non-penetrative blow to the head, such as in a road accident. It can lead to anything from a loss of consciousness for a few seconds to coma.

Infantile/childhood amnesia: This refers to a person’s inability to recall events from early childhood. There are many theories on this, for example, Freud put it down to sexual repression. Others say it could be linked to language development or the fact that some areas of the brain linked to memory are not fully mature.

Hysterical amnesia (also known as fugue amnesia): This covers episodes of amnesia linked to psychological trauma. It is usually temporary and can be triggered by a traumatic event with which the mind finds it difficult to deal. Usually, the memory slowly or suddenly comes back a few days later, although memory of the trauma may remain incomplete.
The Most Comon Causes:
Amnesia is most commonly associated with either brain damage through injury or degeneration of brain cells in dementia. In both cases, brain cells are lost, and due to the complex network connecting cells within the human brain, they cannot be replaced. Most significant brain damage occurs when the brain is injured, such as in a car accident or as the result of a fall or blow. These traumas tend to cause a state of confusion, and some memory is often lost.

Infections that affect the brain, such as herpes or encephalitis may also cause memory loss. Severe alcohol or drug abuse, and malnutrition, act to deprive the brain of nutrients causing the death of brain cells. This can also cause significant loss of memories. Memory loss may sometimes result from stroke, if it affects the area of the brain concerned with memory functions.

Diagonises and Treatment:
The process of diagnosing the cause of amnesia involves conducting a series of tests. Anyone experiencing unexplained memory loss should consult their GP. If you suffer an accident that involves a blow to the brain, you should go to hospital immediately.

A mental health professional will want to take a careful personal history.

Causes of amnesia can include:

External trauma, such as a blow to the head
Internal trauma, such as stroke
Exposure to a toxic substances such as carbon monoxide
Inadequate diet
Brain tumors
Seizures
There are no laboratory tests that are necessary to confirm amnesia nor are there any physical conditions that must be met. However, it is very important not to overlook a physical illness that might mimic or contribute to amnesia. If there is any doubt about a medical problem, the mental health professional should refer to a physician, who will perform a complete physical examination and request any necessary laboratory tests.

Very sophisticated psychological testing, called neuropsychological testing, can be very helpful in determining the presence of amnesia. Sometimes the diagnosis of amnesia can be aided by the use of brain scans such as the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Treatment varies according to the type of amnesia and the suspected cause.

Once brain cells die, they cannot be replaced. Depending on the cause of the amnesia, the brain may be able to recover many of its previous faculties, or may simply get worse. Those who have suffered brain loss as a result of an injury may see some improvement over time, as the brain attempts to heal itself. However, those whose amnesia is a symptom of a degenerative illness, such as Alzheimer’s disease, are unlikely to see an improvement.

Some forms of therapy have proven useful to amnesiacs in helping them to cope with their loss. Cognitive therapies in particular can help people regain skills that they have lost through amnesia.

Psychotherapy can be helpful for people whose amnesia is caused by emotional trauma. For instance, hypnosis may help some patients/clients recall forgotten memories.

Sometimes it is appropriate to administer a drug called Amytal (sodium amobarbital) to people suffering from amnesia. The medicine helps some people recall their lost memories. The use of hypnosis or Amytal has become controversial when it is used to help a patient recall repressed memories, especially repressed memories associated with sexual abuse. After recalling memories of abuse, some patients have filed suit against the alleged perpetrator of the sexual abuse. The validity of memories recalled under these treatment situations is being questioned and tested in the courts.

Hospitalization is usually not necessary to treat amnesia unless the person is at risk for harming himself/herself.

Ayurvedic & Herbal Remedy for Amnisia

Prognosis :
The course of the amnesia is variable depending upon the cause of the memory problem. By removing the toxic substance, for instance alcohol, the person’s memory will recover within hours. However, if the brain has been severely injured, it may take weeks, months, or years for recovery to occur. In some instances, the amnesia never goes away.

Therefore, the prognosis depends upon the extent of the brain trauma. If an ingested substance caused the memory loss and the body can rid itself of the offending substance without causing permanent brain injury, the prognosis is quite good. However, once the brain is damaged it may be very slow to heal, and therefore, the prognosis can be quite poor.

Anyone suffering from or having any symptoms of amnesia should seek immediate medical attention.

Disclaimer: This information is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advise or help. It is always best to consult with a Physician about serious health concerns. This information is in no way intended to diagnose or prescribe remedies.

References:

http://www.athealth.com/Consumer/disorders/Amnesia.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=9673
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/medical_notes/167771.stm

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Yoga

Yogamudra (Yoga Exercise)

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Yogamudra occupies a place of significant importance in Yoga Exercise.It is one of the best exercise for women who want to retain their charm and youth.

Benefits……………….CLICK & SEE
1.Tones up the spinal nerves and is of great benefit to the proper functioning of the digestive system.

2.Helps to normalize movement of the faeces in the intestines.

3.Also effective for depression , sciatica etc.

4.Cures the loss of appetite and whets the gastric burning.

5. It cures constipation and makes the spinal column ,waist, vains and muscles flexable.

6. It removes diabetes and reduces obesity as the whole body gets exercise through this.

How to do the exercise:

1.Sit on a blanket . Form a foot lock by placing the right foot over the left thigh and left foot over the right thigh as in Lotus (padmasan) posture.
2.Slowly bend forward and touch the ground with the forehead. Take your hands to the back and catch hold of the left wrist with the right hand. Exhale slowly as your bend down.

3.Remain in this position for 10 seconds. Resume the original sitting posture and inhale slowly.

4.Repeat the posture three to four times .

In the beginning do not be in a hurry to touch the ground with forehead. Do it very slowly and in the begining keep for few seconds only.After staying for sometime in this positure rise up and come to the position of Lotus(padmasan).

Source:Allayurveda.com

Categories
News on Health & Science

Sleep well to remember well

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Grey regions of the brain    talk to each other during deep sleep to produce great memory. T.V. Jayan on some recent findings:……....CLICK & SEE

Staying up all night studying does more harm than good  it leads to fuzzy memories the next day. In other words, our mental scrapbook’s ability to register fresh memories is seriously compromised if a good night’s sleep is denied, scientists say.

Neuroscientists have known for a while that sleep deprivation does hamper the consolidation of long-term memory    the exact mechanism of which  was unraveled recently by an India-born scientist and his colleagues in the US and Germany. But now a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, Boston, has shown that lack of sleep not only fetters memory retention but also its very formation.

Matthew Walker and co-workers at the Harvard centre reported on February 11 in the online version of Nature Neuroscience that sleep before learning is crucial to preparing the brain for the next day’s memory formation. The findings, they say, are  worrying   considering society’s increasing erosion of sleep time.

The Harvard scientists scanned the brain’s hippocampus region   where everyday events are minted into fresh memories    using sophisticated functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)‘ technique. The study involved 28 volunteers in the age group of 18-30 years. The individuals were divided into two groups, with one made to stay awake for nearly 35 hours (two days and one night), and the other permitted to have a normal night’s sleep. The group that kept up was allowed to read books, take short walks, surf or chat on the Internet or play board games.

Towards the end of the second day, all participants were shown a slideshow of 150 pictures of landscapes, objects and non-celebrities. As they watched, their brains were mapped using fMRI. The scientists found that the mean recognition levels of the sleep-deprived group were about 20 per cent less than that of the other. The participants were then recalled after a full day’s break and asked to identify the slides they had earlier seen as a set of 75 fresh slides were added to the lot.  The volunteers who lacked sleep on the first day performed poorly, despite having had two nights to recover the lost sleep, the scientists said.

Your ability to learn is 20-40 per cent worse, that is, the difference between acing the exam and failing it miserably,  Walker told Know How.

While the work done by Walker and his associates conclusively proved that sleep before learning is vital, scientists had little clue about the brain mechanisms that help sleep to move and consolidate newly learnt things into long-term memory. All they knew was that for long-term storage, memories move from the hippocampus, one of the oldest regions of the brain, to the neocortex, the grey matter covering the hippocampus. This, they knew, occurred during deep, dreamless sleep.

All along, nearly for a generation, scientists thought that the hippocampus pushes the memory meant for long-term storage, or consolidation, to the neocortex. But Brown University scientist Mayank Mehta (who completed his doctoral studies from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and worked for a few years in quantum physics before moving to the US and neuroscience) and his colleagues recently proved this wrong. Their work, published in the November 2006 issue of Nature Neuroscience, showed that it is not the hippocampus that uploads information to the neocortex in a burst of brain cell communication but the neocortex that drives the dialogue.

To strike up a conversation between the hippocampus and the neocortex, the neurons from both the brain regions should be in sync. In other words, if the neocortical neurons display any activity, there should be corresponding firing among the hippocampal neurons. The previous studies failed to exhibit any such synchronous firing   which neuroscientists call phase locking  in the two regions. While neocortical neurons showed rhythmic activity during deep sleep, excitatory neurons in the hippocampus showed erratic activity.

What set Mehta thinking was that if these two parts of the brain talk during deep sleep, why didn’t they appear to be speaking the same language?

There were many reasons why scientists were unable to establish this link. One reason is that they were looking at the excitatory neurons in the hippocampus. Second, they were looking at the activity using extracellular electrodes where they can only measure the spiking activity (the rush of neurons),   Mehta told.

Mehta and his colleagues demonstrated that neurons from the neocortex work in tandem not with excitatory hippocampal neurons but what they call interneurons    inhibitory brain cells in the hippocampus. The study conducted in rats hence showed that the timing of activity or talk was the same in both the brain regions, with a small delay in the hippocampus    as if the inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus were echoing the speech in the neocortex.

What really helped Mehta to crack the mystery was his association with Nobel prize-winning German scientist Bert Sakmann. Mehta’s team used a ground breaking single-cell recording technique developed at Sakman’s laboratory at the Max Plank Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg for recording electrical activity in rats   brains.   This technique has helped us in simultaneous measurement of electrical potential in single neurons from the hippocampus and the neocortex, Sakmann, who was in Delhi earlier this month for an Indo-EU science conference, told KnowHow.   This is by far the best technique available to accurately record electric activity of individual neurons,   Sakmann claims.

“The technique of looking inside a neuron and identifying the neural type was very important for the study. If you don’t differentiate which neuron you are recording from, it all seems like a mess,  says Mehta.

Sumantra Chattarji at the Bangalore-based National Centre for Biological Sciences admits that scientists knew the hippocampus records episodic memory whereas the neocortex plays a critical role in long-term memory storage. But they haven’t been able to get the correlation correct.   The new technique made all the difference,  says Chattarji.

This method of experimentally seeing how the two brain regions “talk” to each other may help them study other aspects of brain function such as perception and emotion, hopes Mehta.

Source:The Telegraph (Kolkata,India)

Categories
News on Health & Science

New Chemical Is Said to Provide Early Sign of Alzheimer’s Disease

A chemical designed by doctors in Los Angeles could give earlier signals of Alzheimer’s disease and provide a new way to test treatments, a study has shown.

Currently, the only way to diagnose the disease is to remove brain tissue or to perform an autopsy.

The new study, to be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, is by doctors at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is part of a larger quest to find a better method to diagnose the condition using tracers that can be detected with a positron emission tomography, or PET, scan.

The new chemical, called FDDNP, attaches to abnormal clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques and nerve cell tangles that develop in Alzheimer’s sufferers and inhibit messages being processed by the brain.

In the study, Dr. Gary Small and his colleagues discovered that the chemical allowed doctors to pick out which of 83 volunteers had Alzheimer’s, which had mild memory problems and which were functioning normally for their age.

It was 98 percent accurate in determining the difference between Alzheimer’s and mild cognitive impairment, which surpassed the 87 percent success rate for a PET scan test that measured sugar metabolism in the brain, and the 62 percent accuracy rate when doctors used a magnetic resonance imaging.

The FDDNP signal can be seen in people years before they develop Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Small said.

Finding an easier way to track brain deterioration would also make it easier to assess experimental treatments, as researchers try to prevent or reduce the accumulation of plaques and tangles.

Dr. Small and 4 of the other 15 authors named in the research paper have a financial interest in FDDNP, which has been licensed to the German conglomerate Siemens AG. He said he hoped to see it on the market in three years.

About 4.5 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s, a number that is expected to grow as the population ages. About 15 million to 20 million more have the mild cognitive impairment that often leads to the disease.

Source:The New York Times

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