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Hair-Raising Tale

Scientists have discovered that activating a gene can trigger hair growth.
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This must be music to the ears of the millions of men and women who fret day in and day out about hair loss. The findings of a team of researchers from Sweden’s Umeå University that appeared recently in the journal PLoS Genetics offers a strand of hope for balding people in the not-so-distant future. The team found that activating a gene called Lhx2 can lead to increased hair growth.

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“I think that our study can have practical implications in the future since we know a way of inducing hair growth,” Leif Carlsson, the Umeå molecular medicine scientist who led the study,  .

Hair is formed in hair follicles — complex mini organs in the skin that specialise in the task of hair formation. The follicles normally form when the child is in the mother’s womb. To ensure the continuous generation of hair, each hair follicle goes through three cyclical phases: recession, rest and growth. The length of the growth phase determines the length of the hair. For instance, the growth phase for scalp hair lasts for a number of years, while that for eyebrows lasts for only a few months.

Hair formation ceases after the growth phase. This is the recession phase when the rate of growth of hair reduces, finally entering a period of rest. After the rest period, a new growth period begins and the old hair is ejected from the body and lost. The reason for this complex system has still not been understood, but it has also been seen that hair growth adjusts itself to seasons.

In the present study, Carlsson’s team found that protein expressed by the gene Lhx2 plays an important role in regulating hair formation. The Lhx2 gene is active only during the growth phase and is turned off during the rest period. The studies, conducted on mice, showed that when the Lhx2 gene was switched off, the hair follicles could not produce hair. They also demonstrated that once the gene was switched on, the growth phase was activated and this, in turn, triggered the formation of hair.

Another significant, and perhaps more useful, finding from the studies was that the expression of the Lhx2 gene can be manipulated even after birth, and that it is sufficient to activate the growth phase and stimulate hair growth.

To be sure, this is not the first time that scientists have busted the myth that hair follicles can be formed only during the development of an embryo. Scientists led by dermatologist George Cotsarelis, at the Pennsylvania University School of Medicine in the US, had put to rest that half-a-century-old belief by making mice, with deep cuts in the their skin, grow hair. Their study, which was reported in the journal Nature in 2007, showed that new hair follicles are formed in a mouse when it is wounded deep enough (nearly five millimetres).

But, importantly, the new follicles were slightly different from the ones that develop during the embryo stage. In embryos, follicles are produced by skin stem cells, which had very little to do with follicular development in the wounded mouse. Instead, the epidermal cells — that give rise to the outermost layer of the skin — were reprogrammed to make hair follicles. The instructions for this, they found, came from a class of proteins called “wnts”. The wnts proteins are known to play a role in hair follicle development in an embryo.

Regarding the latest study Carlsson said, “We have to find clinically acceptable ways to turn this gene on. But finding such drugs may take many years. Our next goal is to systematically screen for compounds that will do this trick.”

That trick will be a blessing for the estimated half the world population which experiences hair thinning by the age of 50.

Source: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

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Horse Riding Eases Back Pain, Boosts Confidence

Riding on horseback not only eases back pain, but also boosts the rider’s confidence and emotional well being, according to a new study.

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The findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that horseback riding and related equine assistance therapy programs for disabled and injured individuals benefit human participants.

Lead author Margareta Hakanson said that the main reason seems to be “that the movements transferred from the horse’s body to the rider are very like the body movements made by a person walking.”

“There are no excessive movements, but a continuous bilateral influence on postural balance that is enhancing balance reactions and the fine movements in the rider’s trunk,” said Hakanson, a researcher in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Goteborg University in Sweden.

For the study, Hakanson and her colleagues analyzed how horseback riding, along with other equine-related therapies, affected 24 patients suffering from back pain and other health problems. Post treatment, riders were evaluated on both their physical and mental well-being. All participants experienced benefits in both areas.

“For those suffering from back pain, a horse at walk provides relaxing movements. Apart from the movement influence, the psychological effects of managing, communicating with and steering a large animal promote self confidence,” Hakanson said. The study is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Good Germs Fight Bad Germs

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Good germs may work as well as antiseptics in protecting hospital patients from dangerous infections, Swedish researchers reported 

Patients swabbed with probiotic bacteria called Lactobacillus plantarum 299 escaped infection as well as those cleaned up using the antiseptic chlorhexidine, they reported.

Both approaches worked equally well in preventing pneumonia among 50 critically ill patients using ventilators, Bengt Klarin of University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, and colleagues found.

Ventilator-associated pneumonia is common as patients aspirate germs from the equipment — often bacteria that have formed drug-resistant mats called biofilms.

Klarin’s team tested the idea that probiotic bacteria could out-compete pathogenic bacteria. Half the patients were swabbed with chlorhexidine as usual, and half were given a final wipe with L. plantarum 299 instead.

“We hypothesized that swabbing the mouth with probiotics would be an effective (and microbiologically attractive) method of reducing pathogenic oral microorganisms in intubated, mechanically ventilated, critically ill patients,” Klarin said in a statement.

Writing in the BioMed Central journal Critical Care, they noted that L. plantarum is normally found in saliva and in pickled food such as sauerkraut.

“Based on the results of this pilot study, we conclude that the probiotic bacterium Lp299 constitutes a feasible and safe agent for oral care,” they wrote in the study.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Creams Can Make Skin Drier

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A new research has confirmed for the first time that normal skin can become drier from creams.
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The findings are based on Izabela Buraczewska’s study, in which she looked at what happens to the skin at the molecular level and also what positive and negative effects creams have on the skin. Her research has revealed that differences in the pH of creams do not seem to play any role.

She also studied different oils in a seven-week treatment period, but no difference was established between mineral oil and a vegetable oil. Both oils resulted in the skin being less able to cope with external stresses. Buraczewska and her team concluded that the contents of creams impact the effects on the skin. Buraczewska presented these findings in the dissertation she is publicly defending at Uppsala University in Sweden this month.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Exercise ‘to Cut Cancer Death Risk’

You can cut your cancer death risk with just 30 minutes of walking daily, for a new study has revealed that physically fit people are less likely to die from the disease.

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Researchers at Karolinska Institute in Sweden have found that people who do at least half-an-hour of exercise everyday have a 34 per cent lower chance of being killed by cancer than those who do not.

“The study shows, for the first time, the effect that very simple and basic daily exercise such as walking or cycling has in reducing cancer death risk in middle-aged and elderly men,” lead researcher Prof Alicja Wolk said.

They monitored the health and exercise levels of over 40,000 men, aged between 45 and 79, for seven years to reach the conclusion, the British Journal of Cancer has reported.

During that time, 3,714 of the participants developed cancer and 1,153 died from their disease. The findings showed that exercise had a significant influence on cancer survival and a smaller impact on incidence.

In fact, men who walked or cycled at least 30 minutes a day were 34 per cent less likely to die from cancer than men who exercised less or not at all. The same activities led to only a five per cent reduction in cancer rates, a result which could be due to chance.

However, a more intensive programme of walking and cycling for between an hour and an hour-and-a-half a day was associated with a 16 per cent lower cancer incidence, the study found.

“This study gives us a clear indication that men who exercise are less likely to die from cancer,” The Daily Telegraph quoted Dr Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK, which publishes the journal, as saying.

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Sources: The Times Of India

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