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‘Magic bullet’ may help fight ‘untreatable’ cancers

May 19, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, May 19 (ANI): Scientists have offered new hope to cancer sufferers currently given no chance of survival – a ‘magic bullet’ cancer drug that blasts away tumours.

The new drug, developed from a harmless bug that can cause stomach upsets, has been hailed as a major new weapon in the fight against cancer.

Early evidence from a trial, conducted in the UK on patients with advanced, untreatable cancers who had stopped benefiting from radiotherapy has seen remarkable results.

The simple injection has stopped the spreading of the deadly disease in its tracks and has even successfully reversed its growth.

“A magic bullet depends on how you would define a magic bullet, but if you mean a treatment that can kill cancer cells and leave normal cells unscathed, then it has that property,” the Daily Express quoted study leader Dr Kevin Harrington from the Institute of Cancer Research in London as saying.

A common virus is injected into patients and boosts their immune systems, blasting away tumours.

Used in combination with radiotherapy, it creates a potent combination that makes the disease more treatable. The virus is commonly found in human respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, with no symptoms apart from mild stomach upsets.

The new drug, called Reolysin, contains the virus particles. The pilot clinical trial, conducted in the UK, shows that Reolysin has the power to combat advanced cancers. (ANI)

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Schizophrenia genes linked to brain signalling

May 11, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, May 11 (ANI): Genetics researchers analysed the genomes of patients with schizophrenia and found numerous copy number variations—deletions or duplications of DNA sequences—that increase the risk of developing the neurodegenerative disease.

Significantly, many of these variations occur in genes that affect signaling among brain cells.

“When we compared the genomes of patients with schizophrenia to those of healthy subjects, we found variations in genes that regulate brain functions, several of which are already known to be perturbed in patients with this disorder. Although much research remains to be done, detecting genes on specific pathways is a first step to identifying more specific targets for improved drug treatments,” said study leader Dr. Hakon Hakonarson, director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children”s Hospital of Philadelphia.

A devastating psychiatric disorder that affects an estimated 1.5 percent of the population, schizophrenia may include hallucinations, disorganized speech, abnormal thought processes and other symptoms.

The researchers compared DNA samples from a total of 1,735 adult patients with schizophrenia to DNA from 3,485 healthy adult subjects, using highly automated genotyping tools.

They used a whole-genome approach, covering the full set of genetic material from each individual, following their first analysis with a replication study.

The study team found copy number variations (CNVs) in or near genes that play important roles in the brain.

Among those genes were CACNA1B and DOC2A, both of which carry the codes for proteins that use calcium signals to help control how neurotransmitters are released in the brain.

Two other genes, RET and RIT2, are members of another signalling gene family known to be involved in brain development.

The researchers found that the genes and signalling systems linked to schizophrenia had some overlap with those for autism and for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. In fact, the current study found deletions in the same region of chromosome 16 as that found in a CNV study of autism spectrum disorders that Hakonarson led in 2009.

“Although different brain regions may be affected in these different neuropsychiatric disorders, these overlaps suggest that there may be common features in their underlying pathogenesis. These genes affect synaptic function, so deletions or duplications in those genes may alter how brain circuits are formed,” said Hakonarson.

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

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‘Nude’ hospital gowns could help docs better spot hard-to-see symptoms

April 30, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 30 (ANI): Changing the color of hospital gowns and bed sheets to match a patient’s skin color could greatly enhance the ability of a doctor or nurse to detect cyanosis and other health-related skin color changes, suggests a new study.

The new study from Rensselaer Professor Mark Changizi suggests that perceived color on skin crucially depends on the background color.

“If a doctor sees a patient, and then sees the patient again later, the doctor will have little or no idea whether the patient’s skin has changed color,” said neurobiologist and study leader Changizi, assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer. “Small shifts in skin color can have tremendous medical implications, and we have proposed a few simple tools – skin-colored gowns, sheets, and adhesive tabs – that could better arm physicians to make more accurate diagnoses.”

Human eyes evolved to see in color largely for the purpose of detecting skin color changes such as when other people blush, Changizi said. These emotive skin color changes are extremely apparent because humans are hard-wired to notice them, and because the background skin color remains unchanged. The contrast against the nearby “baseline” skin color is what makes blushes so noticeable, he said.

Human skin also changes color as a result of hundreds of different medical conditions.

Pale skin, yellow skin, and cyanosis – a potentially serious condition of bluish discoloration of the skin, lips, nails, and mucous membranes due to lack of oxygen in the blood – are common symptoms. These color changes often go unnoticed, however, because they often involve a fairly universal shift in skin color, Changizi said. The observer in most instances will just assume the patient’s current skin color is the baseline color. The challenge is that there is no color contrast against the baseline for the observer to pick up on, as the baseline skin color has changed altogether.

Changizi’s findings are detailed in the paper “Harnessing color vision for visual oximetry in central cyanosis,” published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. (ANI)

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New approach helps pinpoint genes behind common diseases

April 30, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 30 (ANI): Challenging the long-held view that common diseases are usually caused by common gene variants (mutations), researchers have now said that the culprits may be numerous rare variants.

And these variants are located in DNA sequences farther away from the original “hot spots” than scientists have been accustomed to look.

Using an approach that detects rare but powerful causal gene variants, the researchers say they have accounted for a significant proportion of the “missing heritability” problem.

This refers to the disappointing fact that, to date, conventional gene-hunting studies have often failed to identify, when searching for gene variants, variants that cause a large proportion of common diseases, such as heart disease, cancers and diabetes.

The new approach draws on existing data from genome-wise association studies (GWAS) that have already been performed, re-analysing the data to pinpoint causal variants that have not been identified previously.

In addition, the technique may allow researchers to identify individuals whose DNA is more likely to carry specific mutations in the causal genes.

“Our approach draws us closer to the goal of personalized medicine, in which treatment will be tailored to an individual”s genetic profile. When we can say that a specific gene mutation causes a patient”s disease, we have more meaningful diagnostic results. Identifying causal variants in disease genes provides an opportunity to develop drugs to rectify the biological consequences of these mutated genes,” said study leader Dr. Hakon Hakonarson, director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children”s Hospital of Philadelphia.

By applying their methods to real DNA samples from patients with genetic hearing loss, the researchers” approach helped them to select from GWAS data a subset of cases for sequencing analysis that were most likely to carry causative mutations.

Sequencing the DNA in this subset, the study team found that the majority of those patients carried an actual mutation known to cause hearing loss.

“Our technique suggests that when we do our resequencing follow-up studies, we can identify people who are much more likely to carry a causative gene,” said Kai Wang, who analyzed the dataset.

Hakonarson added: “We present a more efficient approach for mining GWAS data to find the actual causative gene variants that will have future utility in designing therapies.”

The study appears online in The American Journal of Human Genetics. (ANI)

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Gene site linked to food allergy identified

March 8, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

London, March 8 (ANI): Scientists have discovered the first major gene location responsible for a severe, often painful type of food allergy called eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE).

In this disease, which may cause weight loss, vomiting, heartburn and swallowing difficulties, a patient may be unable to eat a wide variety of foods.

After conducting a genome-wide association study, study leader Hakon Hakonarson, director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children”s Hospital of Philadelphia, and colleagues found that EoE was linked to a region of chromosome 5 that includes two genes.

The likely culprit is the gene TSLP, which has higher activity levels in children with EoE compared to healthy subjects.

In addition, TSLP has been previously linked to allergic inflammatory diseases, such as asthma and the skin inflammation, atopic dermatitis.

“This gene is a plausible candidate because of its biological role in allergic inflammation,” Hakonarson said.

Only recently recognized as a distinct condition, EoE, like other allergies, has been increasing over the past 20 years, and its reported incidence of one in 10,000 people may be an underestimate.

The hallmark of EoE is swelling and inflammation in the esophagus, accompanied by high levels of immune cells called eosinophils.

It can affect people of any age, but is more common among young men who have a history of other allergic diseases such as asthma and eczema. EoE is often first discovered in children with feeding difficulties and failure to thrive.

The study appears online today in Nature Genetics. (ANI)

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Regular exercise benefits older women as much as younger women

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Sep 19 (ANI): Regular vigorous exercise benefits postmenopausal women just like younger women, according to two studies.

The results were based on the studies of endurance training in 50-something women.

“There is some good news here for older women in the population, in that they respond much like younger women do to training. The results are very encouraging for exercise without weight loss as an effective means for increasing vigour and controlling risk factors for chronic diseases in older women,” said study leader and exercise physiologist George Brooks, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology.

“There have been very few studies looking at postmenopausal women, who are different because of decreased estrogen, decreased lean body mass and decreased aerobic capacity. Yet, despite changes in hormones and changes in body composition, postmenopausal women can make significant changes in their cardiovascular fitness without going on extreme diets,” said Dr. Zinta Zarins.

Although the endurance training involved cycling on an exercise bike for an hour, five days a week, at 65 percent of maximum lung capacity, the researchers noted that even less strenuous aerobic exercise would likely produce some benefit.

“Most people don’t exercise at this level, but some exercise is better than none at all,” said Zarins.

He noted that 60 minutes of jogging on a treadmill or swimming should be as effective as an hour on a stationary bike.

Brooks noted that a woman’s metabolism changes as her hormone levels change after menopause, affecting glucose clearance from the blood, for example.

The study was conducted to determine whether women achieve the same benefits from endurance training after menopause as they did before.

“We’ve done lots of studies on the effects of activity and training on metabolism in younger men and women, but this is the first in an older population,” said Brooks.

The researchers found that participants increased their body’s capacity to consume and use oxygen – their VO2 max – by an average of 16 percent and dropped their resting heart rates by an average of 4 beats per minute.

Brooks said that after the age of 30, people lose the capacity to consume and use oxygen at about 1 percent per year.

“So, in effect, the women in our study had the cardiovascular and metabolic capabilities of women 16 years younger,” he said.

At the end of the study, the women’s blood pressure during exercise had dropped by 8 millimetres of mercury, while their heart rates were 19 beats per minute less when performing at the same intensity as early in the study.

Besides, the women decreased their carbohydrate burning during exercise and increased their fat burning by about 10 percent.

Women in the study maintained their body weight as a way to balance energy input and expenditures.

A second paper showed that the women’s use of blood glucose and their insulin levels during exercise showed similarities to those of younger women.

The first study was published in the latest issue of the journal Metabolism – Clinical and Experimental, while the second study was published in an earlier issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology. (ANI)

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Archaeologists discover Bible-era vessel with mysterious script

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 10 (ANI): Archaeologists in Jerusalem have found a mystery vessel dating back to biblical times 2,000 years ago, which has ten lines of mysterious script written on it.

“These were common stone mugs that appear in all Jewish households of the time”, lead excavator Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina, told the National Geographic News.

“But this is the first time an inscription has been found on a stone vessel” of this type, he said.

Deciphering the writing could provide a window into daily life or religious ritual in Jerusalem around the time of Jesus Christ.

Working on historic Mount Zion-site of King David’s tomb and the Last Supper-the archaeologists found the cup near a ritual pool this summer.

The dig site is in what had been an elite residential area near the palace of King Herod the Great, who ruled Israel shortly before the birth of Jesus.

From the objects that surrounded it, Gibson determined that the cup dated from some time between 37 B.C. and A.D. 70, when the Romans nearly destroyed Jerusalem after a Jewish revolt.

Among the dig’s other finds are ruins spanning the time of the founding of King Solomon’s Temple, around 970 B.C., to the destruction of Jerusalem by Christian crusaders in A.D. 1099.

Aside from the inscription, the cup, which was found in three fragments, isn’t unusual, according to archaeologists. Such stone mugs were popular among Jews at the time, thanks to purity rules.

Like people who keep kosher today, Jews in Jesus’s day followed a complex code when it came to food and drink.

“Personally, I believe these were used for ritual purification of hands before a meal,” study leader Gibson said.

What sets the newfound cup apart is its inscription, which is still sharply etched but so far impossible to understand.

Similar to intentionally enigmatic writing in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the cup’s script appears to be a secret code, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, the two written languages used in Jerusalem at the time.

“They wrote it intending it to be cryptic,” Gibson said.

In hopes the script can be deciphered, Gibson’s team is sharing pictures of the cup with experts on the writing of the period.

The researchers also plan to post detailed photos of the cup and its inscriptions online soon.

“They could be instructions on how to use (the cup), could have incantations or curses. But it’s not going to be something mundane like a shopping list,” said Gibson. (ANI)

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Cities trap more CO2 than rain forests

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 9 (ANI): A surprising new study has found that cities trap more carbon dioxide (CO2) than rain forests.

According to a report in National Geographic News, compared with tropical rain forests, cities store more carbon, acre for acre, in their trees, buildings, and dirt.

“Everyone thinks about the tropical forests, but I don’t think people consider cities as a way to store carbon,” said study leader Galina Churkina of the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research in Germany.

“Although a lot of studies have focused on carbon in forests, grasslands, and other natural ecosystems, looking at cities-which now house half of the world’s population-is relatively new,” Churkina said.

Intentionally storing carbon in cities could be one approach to counter global warming, she added.

Churkina and colleagues pulled together previous evidence looking at various stores of organic carbon, which comes from living things, as well as from such as plants and animals, wood, dirt, and even garbage.

Cities, including both dense metropolises and sprawling suburbs, store about a tenth of all the carbon in U.S. ecosystems, the study estimated.

In total, U.S. cities contain about 20 billion tons of organic carbon, mostly in dirt, according to the new study.

Some of this carbon-rich topsoil is in parks and under lawns, but it’s also sealed underneath buildings and roads-a remnant of grasslands or forests that were there before development.

Of all this urban carbon, about three billion tons are locked up in human-made materials-two-thirds of it in garbage dumps, and the rest in building materials such as wood.

Many cities have already launched ambitious plans for turning gray to green, such as Los Angeles’ Million Trees LA project, which aims to plant a million trees in the Californian city over several years.

Trees take up CO2 and turn it into carbon in their trunks, branches, and leaves, so planting more trees helps counter some of the excess CO2 in the air.

Likewise trees also cool cities and reduce the need for air-conditioning, according to urban forest expert David Nowak of the U.S. Forest Service in Syracuse, New York.

By planting trees around buildings, he added, “you avoid about four times more CO2 emissions than the trees sequester.”

Study leader Churkina added, “people could (also) try to store more carbon in gardens by smart management of the land. The carbon storage in lawns is quite amazing.” (ANI)

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5 last-ditch schemes to prevent global warming disaster (Re-Issue)

September 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 6 (ANI): A new study by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society has outlined five last-ditch schemes needed to prevent a global warming disaster.

According to National Geographic News, United Kingdom’s Royal Society’s report is the first from a major scientific body devoted to ranking the various proposals for “geoengineering.”

“It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing (greenhouse gas) emissions, we are headed for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future,” said study leader John Shepherd, an earth scientist at the University of Southampton in England, in a statement.

Should that future arrive, the society reluctantly recommends seriously considering the following five global-cooling ideas.

Volcanic eruptions can quickly cool the planet by spewing tiny droplets containing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, where they reflect some of the sun’s rays back into space.

Researchers have proposed fighting global warming with their own “flying volcanoes”-jets or balloons that release similar droplets.

Millions of tons of these droplets would need to be sent into the air every year to cancel out current global warming, at a cost of tens of billions of US dollars, the report estimates.

Even so, the flying volcanoes would be one of the most cost-effective types of geoengineering.

Another idea is the use of computer-controlled ships that could ply the remote seas, pumping out seawater mist, which would encourage low, thick clouds to form. The clouds would reflect sunlight back into space.

It would cost more than a billion dollars to launch a fleet of a few hundred of these ships, according to the new study, a relatively small sum, as geoengineering costs go.

Scientists also propose to put huge mirrors or thin, reflective disks in orbit alongside Earth and block solar rays.

The approaches would be safe, with little in the way of side effects, according to the Royal Society.

The study also determined that since trees pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air, planting more forests would be one of the most cost-effective ways of getting the gas out of the air. nother proposal to prevent a global warming disaster is dissolving mountains of rock, which would speed up the natural process of rock weathering, as a way of absorbing CO2.

A big operation for artificial rock weathering would need big mines, and a lot of electricity to chemically split seawater to make an acid that would be sprayed over the rocks. (ANI)

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5 last-ditch schemes to prevent global warming disaster

September 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 5 (ANI): A new study by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society has outlined five last-ditch schemes needed to prevent a global warming disaster.