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Mum”s voice ”can spur recovery from a coma”

May 11, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, May 11 (ANI): Mother”s voice can spur recovery from a coma, suggests a new American study.

In January 2009, Ryan, 21, a college student from Huntley, Ill., was in a coma after he had been flung from his snowmobile into a tree during an ice storm.

He had a traumatic brain injury; the fibres of his brain had been twisted and stretched from the impact.

Recordings from Ryan”s mother, father or sister were played through headphones for him four times a day.

Ryan”s mother Karen Schroeder”s voice, recorded on a CD, reminded him of his 4-H project when he was 10 and decided to raise pigs.

She said: “You bid on three beautiful squealing black and white piglets at the auction.

“We took them home in the trunk of our Lincoln Town Car, because we didn”t have a truck.”

All the recordings were part of a new clinical trial investigating whether repeated stimulation with familiar voices can help repair a coma victim”s injured brain networks and spur his recovery.

Ryan regained consciousness after nearly one month in the trial and has made steady progress during the past year.

Researchers, however, won”t know for certain if the therapy helped his recovery until the study is over.

Theresa Pape, a research assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a research health scientist at Hines VA Hospital, is leading the study.

The research may be useful to young people like Ryan as well as soldiers injured in combat, who have a high rate of traumatic brain injuries from roadside bombs.

Pape said: “Traumatic brain injury is a huge issue in our society.

“Every 21 seconds, we have a new head injury and about one-third of those will be severe.”

Pape hopes the study will provide an answer to the question that families are desperate to know when a loved one is in a coma: ”Can he hear me?”

She is especially eager to know if these family voices can facilitate repair of the brain to improve the subject”s ability to function and process and understand information.

Pape”s hypothesis is that repeated exposure to familiar voices could help repair the brain”s neural networks, some of which become sheared in traumatic brain injury.

In a previous small pilot study, Pape observed that subjects in a vegetative state responded more to the voices of people who are familiar to them compared with non-familiar voices.

When those subjects heard voices of their family members, an MRI scan showed that parts of their brain were activated, appearing as bright yellow and red blobs of light scattered in an unorganised pattern.

With unfamiliar voices, there was little activation.

Pape said: “The question became are the familiar voices therapeutic in some way?

“Will they spur an improvement in behavior?”

She added: “I was weaned on language processing, how the brain responds to different linguistic stimuli as well as familiar or non-familiar voices, different sounds.

“This is a very speech pathology-based study.” (ANI)

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Common house ants prosper in urban settings

March 31, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, March 31 (ANI): A new research has shown that the most common house ant species, built for living in some of the smallest spaces in a forest, prosper in urban areas.

The study revealed that odorous house ant colonies become larger and more complex as they move from forest to city and act somewhat like an invasive species.

The ants live about 50 to a colony with one queen in forest settings but explode into supercolonies with more than 6 million workers and 50,000 queens in urban areas.

“This is a native species that”s doing this. Native ants are not supposed to become invasive. We don”t know of any other native ants that are outcompeting other species of native ants like these,” Grzegorz Buczkowski, a Purdue University research assistant professor of entomology, said.

Odorous house ants live in hollow acorn shells in the forest. They”re called odorous because they have a coconut- or rum-like smell when crushed. They”re considered one of the most common house ants.

In semi-natural areas that are a cross of forest and urban areas, such as a park, Buczkowski said he observed colonies of about 500 workers with a single queen.

He said it”s possible that as the ants get closer to urban areas they have easier access to food, shelter and other resources.

“In the forest, they have to compete for food and nesting sites. In the cities, they don”t have that competition. People give them a place to nest, a place to eat,” Buczkowski said.

The study has been published in the early online version of the journal Biological Invasions. (ANI)

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New method to monitor early sign of oxidative stress that triggers cancer

September 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Sept 12 (ANI): Scientists from University of Michigan have developed a new method to monitor early sign of oxidative stress that triggers cancer spread.

Lead researcher Kate Carroll suggests that being able to monitor a marker of oxidative stress that is associated with the activation of tumor cell growth pathways, particularly at an early stage, and then tailor treatments accordingly would allow for more targeted studies and might improve the odds of success with antioxidants and pro-oxidants.

The new method detects sulfenic acid in proteins-a tip off to early oxidative stress and to a specific protein modification associated with cell growth pathways.

Sulfenic acid is produced when a particular oxidant, hydrogen peroxide, reacts with the protein building block cysteine. But because the chemical modification involved is so small and transient, it has been difficult to detect.

To get around that problem, Carroll and Seo used a chemical probe that “traps” sulfenic acid and tags it for recognition by an antibody.

The antibody is labeled with a fluorescent dye that glows when observed with a fluorescence microscope.

The researchers then used the method to assess sulfenic acid levels as a marker of oxidative stress in several systems, including a panel of breast cancer cell lines.

“For each line, we saw a very distinct pattern of sulfenic acid modifications,” indicating different oxidative stress levels and hinting at differences in the underlying molecular events associated with tumor growth,” said Carroll, assistant professor of chemistry and a research assistant professor in the Life Sciences Institute.

“Whether the patterns we see will correlate with response to antioxidant treatment or other therapies that modulate oxidative stress level remains to be seen, but now we at least have a way to investigate that question,” the expert added.

The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

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Cholesterol ‘increases breast cancer drug’s resistance’

April 21, 2009 By admin 1 Comment

Washington, April 21 (ANI): A new study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) has found that breast cancer cells that don’t respond to tamoxifen may be producing high amounts of cholesterol in order to provide a kind of shield against the drug.

The findings suggest that widely available statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol levels, may be useful for patients with tamoxifen-resistant breast cancer.

Alternatively new agents could be designed to inhibit the excess production of cholesterol by breast cancer cells, say the researchers.

“We have shown that if you inhibit the activity of either of two molecules that we identified in these resistant breast cancer cells, cholesterol production is reduced,” said the study’s lead author, Rebecca Riggins, PhD, a research assistant professor of oncology at GUMC’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington.

“We are now looking at whether these cells become re-sensitized once more to tamoxifen when cholesterol production is blocked, and our bet is that they do,” she added.

During the study, the researchers were trying to understand why some women with estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) invasive lobular breast cancer do not benefit as much from hormonal therapy such as tamoxifen when compared to women with other forms of ER+ breast cancer.

They have concluded that cholesterol production inside these cancer cells is one culprit.

Riggins said that cholesterol causes a number of important actions within a cell and there are two potential explanations as to why high levels of cholesterol might be related to tamoxifen resistance.

“One is that cholesterol is an essential part of the plasma membrane that surrounds all eukaryotic cells. A high level of cholesterol can make this membrane more rigid, impairing the ability of drugs to enter cells and thus altering how sensitive a cancer cell is to this type of drug treatment,” she said.

“A second possibility is that our tamoxifen-resistant breast cancer cells have increased amounts of cholesterol specifically in the mitochondria. Mitochondria supply a cell with energy, but they also are responsible for determining how a cell responds to a death signal.

“High levels of mitochondrial cholesterol can delay or block cell death. This is important because many cancer drugs, including tamoxifen, have been shown to induce breast cancer cell death through the mitochondria,” she added.

The study has been presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). (ANI)

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Health habits predict cancer survival

April 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 2 (ANI): A new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center has found that head and neck cancer patients who smoke, drink, don’t exercise or don’t eat enough fruit have worse survival outcomes than those with better health habits.

“While there has been a recent emphasis on biomarkers and genes that might be linked to cancer survival, the health habits a person has at diagnosis play a major role in his or her survival,” said study author Sonia Duffy, Ph.D., R.N., associate professor of nursing at the U-M School of Nursing, research assistant professor of otolaryngology at the U-M Medical School, and research scientist at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.

Each of the factors was independently associated with survival.

For the study, the researchers surveyed 504 head and neck cancer patients about five health behaviours: smoking, alcohol use, diet, exercise and sleep. Patients were surveyed every three months for two years then yearly after that.

They found that smoking was the biggest predictor of survival, with current smokers having the shortest survival.

Problem drinking and low fruit intake were also linked to worse survival, although vegetable intake was not. Lack of exercise also appears to decrease survival.

“Health behaviours are only sporadically addressed in busy oncology clinics where the major focus is on surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. Addressing health behaviours may enhance the survival advantage offered by these treatments,” said Duffy.

Complicating matters is that many of these health behaviours are inter-related. For example, smokers might also be heavy drinkers, making it more difficult to quit. Duffy points out that it’s not enough to refer someone to a smoking cessation program if alcohol is a major underlying problem.

Also, previous research has linked many of these health behaviours with preventing cancer.

In the current study, a third of the patients reported eating fewer than four servings of fruit per month. Nutrition experts recommend two servings of fruit per day.

“Eating fruits and vegetables, not smoking and drinking in moderation can have a big impact on a person’s risk of getting cancer in the first place. Now it appears that these factors also impact survival after diagnosis,” Duffy said.

Results of the study appear online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. (ANI)

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‘Short-sleepers’ at ‘five-fold diabetes risk’

March 12, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 12 (ANI): People who sleep less than six hours a night are nearly five times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, suggests a new study.

The study showed that people who slept less than six hours a night during the work week were nearly five times more likely to develop abnormal fasting blood sugar levels, an important precursor for diabetes.

“This study supports growing evidence of the association of inadequate sleep with adverse health issues. Sleep should be assessed in the clinical setting as part of well-care visits throughout the life cycle,” said Lisa Rafalson, Ph.D., lead author of the study and National Research Service Award fellow and research assistant professor at the University at Buffalo in New York.

“While previous studies have suggested that there may be many genes that each have a very small effect on the risk of diabetes, there is no known genetic predisposition to sleep disturbances that could explain our study’s results, especially in this limited sample size,” Rafalson said.

“It is more likely that pathways involving hormones and the nervous system are involved in the impaired-sleep/fasting glucose association,” she said.

In the study involving 1,455 participants, the researchers found that people who slept less than six hours a night were 4.56 times more likely to become diabetics over six year period.

“Our findings will hopefully spur additional research into this very complex area of sleep and illness,” said Rafalson.

The study was presented at American Heart Association’s 49th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention. (ANI)

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Depression ups heart disease risk more than genetics

March 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 5 (ANI): A new study suggests that depression increases the risk of heart disease more than genetics.

Led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the VA, the study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society this week in Chicago this week.

Describing the study, the researchers revealed that they analysed data gathered from more than 1,200 male twins, who had served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

The researchers said that the men were surveyed on a variety of health issues in 1992, including depression, and were assessed again in 2005.

During the course of study, the researchers focused on the onset of heart disease in depressed study participants between 1993 and 2005.

According to them, men with depression in 1992 were twice as likely to develop heart disease in the ensuing years, compared to those without history of depression.

“Based on our findings, we can say that after adjusting for other risk factors, depression remains a significant predictor of heart disease,” says first author Dr. Jeffrey F. Scherrer, research assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine and the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

“In this study, we have demonstrated that exposure to depression is contributing to heart disease only in twins who have high genetic risk and who actually develop clinical depression. In twins with high genetic risk common to depression and heart disease, but who never develop depression itself, there was no increased risk for heart disease. The findings strongly suggest that depression itself independently contributes to risk for heart disease,” he added.

The researchers said that they were searching for evidence of what they call incident heart disease, an event like a heart attack, heart surgery, stent placement or medical treatment for angina.

Those who had evidence of heart disease prior to the original survey in 1992 were excluded from this study, they added.

Given that twins were studied, the researchers said that it was possible to divided the participants into risk groups: twins with high genetic and environmental risk for depression, those with moderate risk and those with a low risk.

The risk groups then were compared for incident heart disease adjusting for other influences on heart disease, such as smoking, obesity, hypertension and diabetes.

“By separating the twins into these groups based on their genetic and environmental risks, we are able differentiate the genetic risks common to depression and heart disease and the risks for heart disease from exposure to depression,” says co-investigator Dr. Hong Xian, associate professor of mathematics in medicine at Washington University and health science specialist at the VA.

Twins automatically are matched by age, normally grow up in the same family environment, and in the case of identical twins, they share identical DNA.

“If one twin has depression, but his twin brother does not, both twins will share genetic vulnerability for depression, but it turns out the twin who was not depressed has less risk for heart disease. In sum, depression itself remains a significant contributor to incident heart disease after controlling for genes, environment and mental and physical risk factors,” says Scherrer.

The researchers are planning to follow these twins as they age, and to study the effects of successful depression treatment on heart disease risk. (ANI)

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Self-assembly of molecules may offer new therapeutic treatments

February 15, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, February 15 (ANI): Northwestern University researchers have come up with an approach to deal with some of the major health problems-gather raw materials and then let them self-assemble into structures that can address a multitude of medical needs.

Samuel I. Stupp, whose laboratory has devised the novel approach, says that at the core of the research are peptide amphiphiles (PA), small synthetic molecules that Stupp first developed seven years ago, which have been essential in his work on regenerative medicine.

The researcher says that tailoring these molecules and combining them with others can help make a wide variety of structures that may provide new treatments for medical issues including spinal cord injuries, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.

Ramille M. Capito, a research assistant professor in Stupp’s lab, recently discovered that combining the PA molecules with hyaluronic acid (HA), a biopolymer readily found in the human body in places like joints and cartilage, resulted in an instant membrane structure in the form of self-assembling sacs.

During a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Chicago on Saturday, the researchers revealed that they had found the sac membrane to have hierarchical order from the nanoscale to microscale giving it unique physical properties.

Writing as to how they created a sac in the journal Science, the researchers revealed that they took advantage of the fact that HA molecules are larger and heavier than the smaller PA molecules.

In a deep vial, Capito pipetted the PA solution and onto that injected the HA solution.

She revealed that, as the heavier molecules sank, the lighter molecules engulfed them and created a closed sac with the HA solution trapped inside the membrane.

After creating the sacs, Capito studied human stem cells engulfed by the self-assembly process inside sacs that she placed in culture, and found that the cells remained viable for up to four weeks, that a large protein-a growth factor important in the signalling of stem cells-could cross the membrane, and that the stem cells were able to differentiate.

Making a clever demonstration of self-repair, if the sac’s membrane had a hole, Capito simply placed a drop of the PA solution on the tear, which interacted with the HA inside, resulting in self-assembly and a sealed hole.

While the underlying, highly ordered structures of the sacs and membranes have dimensions on the nanoscale, the sacs and membranes themselves can be of any dimension and are visible to the naked eye.

The researchers say that such sacs can be tailored to include bioactive regions, which would allow them to incorporate a variety of designs into one sac structure.

According to them, this capability opens the door to the creation of new methods for stem cell delivery. Stem cells can be loaded in the sac, which can be tailored to release the cells at the point of injury, they add. (ANI)

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“Green” plastics could help reduce carbon footprint

February 12, 2009 By admin 1 Comment

Washington, Feb 12 (ANI): A new study by researchers from the University of Missouri (MU) has suggested that some of the largely petroleum-based plastic may soon be replaced by a nonpolluting, renewable plastic made from plants, which would significantly reduce the carbon footprint.

Reducing the carbon footprint and the dependence on foreign oil, this new ‘green’ alternative may also provide an additional cash crop for farmers.

“Making plastics from plants is not a new idea,” said Brian Mooney, research assistant professor of biochemistry with the MU Interdisciplinary Plant Group.

“Plastics made from plant starch and soy protein have been used as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics for a while. What is relatively new – and exciting – is the idea of using plants to actually grow plastics,” he added.

By employing a number of modern molecular techniques, scientists are able to introduce three bacterial enzymes into the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

When combined with two enzymes from the plant, an organic polymer is produced.

The polymer, known as polyhdroxybutyrate-co-polyhydroxyvalerate, or PHBV, is a flexible and moldable plastic that can be used to produce a wide range of products, such as grocery bags, soda bottles, disposable razors and flatware.

When discarded, the plastic is naturally degraded into water and carbon dioxide by bacteria in the soil.

“Of the two plant enzymes that supply the chemical precursors for PHBV, one is produced in the mitochondria. Recently, we’ve successfully modified plants so that this enzyme is diverted to the chloroplast, which has been defined as the best place in the plant to produce PHBV,” said Mooney.

“We also confirmed that a stable, functional complex is formed,” he added.

These recent advances potentially remove two of the remaining technological hurdles limiting the ability of companies from turning acres of weeds into plastic factories.

The next step, according to Mooney, is to see if the technique works in ‘real’ plants, such as switchgrass. (ANI)

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