MS Caused By "Blood Blockage Theory"?

Here is an excerpt from BBC.com:

Multiple sclerosis 'blood blockage theory' tested

US scientists are testing a radical new theory that multiple sclerosis (MS) is caused by blockages in the veins that drain the brain. The University of Buffalo team were intrigued by the work of Italian researcher Dr Paolo Zamboni who claims 90% of MS is caused by narrowed veins. He says the restricted drainage, visible on scans, injures the brain leading to MS. He has already widened the blockages in a handful of patients. The US team want to replicate his earlier work before treating patients.

Experts welcomed the research saying it was important to confirm the basic science before evaluating any therapy. MS is a long-term inflammatory condition of the central nervous system which affects the transfer of messages from the nervous system to the rest of the body.

Tall, dark, handsome, and happy...

Here is an excerpt from a BBC online article:

Taller people live better lives, according to US researchers.

More than 454,000 adults aged 18 and over were asked by phone for their height and evaluate their lives. Overall, taller individuals judged their lives more favourably and were more likely to report positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. Reporting to the journal Economics and Human Biology, they conclude that this is because the taller people also had higher incomes and education.

Medical News

Usually I post one article at a time, but there is so much recently that I have to use this format to spare me some time...

Primary liver cancers 'soaring' (For Full Article, click HERE)

Cases of primary liver cancer, an often preventable disease, have trebled in the last 30 years, figures suggest. While it is not uncommon for cancer to spread to the liver, Cancer Research UK statistics show incidents where it starts in the organ have risen sharply. Cases of cancer overall have increased over recent decades as people live longer and detection methods improve. But experts say hepatitis C infections, as well as alcohol and obesity, have helped fuel the spike in liver cases.

'Magnetic' stem cells for hearts (For the full article, click HERE)

Heart attacks and other vascular injuries could eventually be treated using regular injections of magnetised stem cells, experts say. In animal trials, the cutting-edge treatment delivered the healing cells to the precise site of damage where their help was needed. Although human tests are needed, a similar magnetic approach has been used to guide cancer therapies. The expert US journal Cardiovascular Interventions reports the findings.

Child leukaemia 'genes' revealed (For the full article, click HERE)

The three variants each raise the risk by between 30% and 60%, said the Institute of Cancer Research team. But they stressed that other things, such as childhood infections, may also play a role. Leukaemia Research said the clues offered by the research, in the journal Nature Genetics, may improve care. Leukaemia is the most common childhood cancer, with approximately 500 new cases each year in the UK, and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) accounts for roughly 85% of these. Scientists believe that there is likely to be no single reason why a child develops the disease, but a combination of factors, perhaps including an inherited genetic ingredient in some cases.

Perfect.

THIS is exactly what I wanted to read now that I have moved down here.

This scares me...

The following is an excerpt from a CNN.com article:

World population projected to reach 7 billion in 2011

The world's population is forecast to hit 7 billion in 2011, the vast majority of its growth coming in developing and, in many cases, the poorest nations, a report released Wednesday said.

A staggering 97 percent of global growth over the next 40 years will happen in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Population Reference Bureau's 2009 World Population Data Sheet.

"The great bulk of today's 1.2 billion youth -- nearly 90 percent -- are in developing countries," said Carl Haub, a co-author of the report. Eight in 10 of those youth live in Africa and Asia.

"During the next few decades, these young people will most likely continue the current trend of moving from rural areas to cities in search of education and training opportunities, gainful employment, and adequate health care," Haub continued, calling it one of the major social questions of the next few decades.

Epic biotechnology breakthrough!

Here is an excerpt from a BBC article:

A man who lost his sight 30 years ago says he can now see flashes of light after being fitted with a bionic eye.

Ron, 73, had the experimental surgery seven months ago at London's Moorfield's eye hospital.

He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even sort socks, using the bionic eye, known as Argus II.

It uses a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye. In turn, the receiver passes on the data via a tiny cable to an array of electrodes which sit on the retina - the layer of specialised cells that normally respond to light found at the back of the eye.

When these electrodes are stimulated they send messages along the optic nerve to the brain, which is able to perceive patterns of light and dark spots corresponding to which electrodes have been stimulated. The hope is that patients will learn to interpret the visual patterns produced into meaningful images. The bionic eye has been developed by US company Second Sight. So far 18 patients across the world, including three at Moorfields, have been fitted with the device.

It is designed to help people, like Ron, who have been made blind through retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that cause degeneration of the retina. The disease progresses over a number of years, normally after people have been diagnosed when they are children.

It is estimated between 20,000 to 25,000 are affected in the UK.

Isn't this obvious.

Here is an excerpt from a BBC.com article: 

Unhappy children 'end up unwell'

Unhappy children are more likely to grow up to become adults who are permanently sick or disabled, a UK study has suggested.

The King's College London-led research looked at over 7,100 people born between 1950 and 1955. Researchers found those described as "miserable" or "unhappy" by teachers were five times more likely to be off work through ill-health in middle age. They said these children were also likely to be more prone to depression. The study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, involved thousands of children who grew up in Aberdeen in the 1950s. Teachers were asked about their temperament and school attendance.

Researchers recently tracked down many of the participants - now in middle age - to ask them about their employment status. Some 392 reported they were unable to work because of permanent disability or ill-health - 5.5% of the total questioned. This could have included those retired through illness and those on incapacity benefit. A quarter of those whose teachers had reported them as "often appearing miserable, unhappy, tearful or distressed" were permanently sick or disabled.

A quarter of those who complained of aches and pain were also off sick through ill-health.

But those who were off school because of poor physical health were no more likely to end up as adults off work sick.

So sad, yet so interesting.

I came across this story in the Metro Newspaper. Here is an excerpt from telegraph.co.uk:

Girl Raised By Dogs

Madina, now aged three, was reportedy raised by animals like Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli character after her alcoholic mother Anna was incapable of caring for her.

Now taken into care by authorities in Ufa, in central Russia, she is recovering from her unusual upbringing. She was discovered by social workers at her mother's home on all fours and gnawing on bones with dogs.


Police said that her mother had ignored her for most of her life, allowing her to eat on the floor while she ate at the kitchen table. A social worker alleged: "The child is angelic but she has been deprived of love and care, except from the dogs."

"When her mother was angry she used to run away, but no child played with her in the playground. She hardly knew a single word, and fought with everyone. So dogs became her best friends. She played with them, and slept with them when it was cold in winter.'

When police took Madina into care, her mother is reported to have said: "I do look after my daughter." Doctors are reported to have said that the Madina is mentally and physically healthy despite her experiences, although her vocabulary is limited to "yes" and "no".

Madina's father walked out on the family shortly after she was born.

H2OH MY GOD!

Here is astonishing article from ScienceNOW Daily News called "Drink Up, Energy Hogs" By Jackie Grom. [Feb. 26th, 2009]

Talk about an energy drink. The first comprehensive and peer-reviewed energy analysis of a bottle of water confirms what many environmentalists have charged. From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water.

Bottled water consumption has skyrocketed over the past several years. In 2007, some 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold worldwide, and Americans took the biggest gulp: 33 billion liters a year, an average of 110 liters per person. That amount has grown 70% since 2001, and bottled water has now surpassed milk and beer in sales. Many environmental groups have been concerned with this surge because they suspected that making and delivering a bottle of water used much more energy than did getting water from the tap. But until now, no one really knew bottled water’s energy price tag.

Environmental scientist Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, California, and his colleague Heather Cooley have added up the energy used in each stage of bottled-water production and consumption. Their tally includes how much energy goes into making a plastic bottle; processing the water; labeling, filling, and sealing a bottle; transporting it for sale; and cooling the water prior to consumption.

The two most energy-intensive categories, the researchers reveal in the current issue of Environmental Research Letters, are manufacturing the bottle and transportation. The team estimates that the global demand for bottle production alone uses 50 million barrels of oil a year--that's 2 1/2 days of U.S. oil consumption. Determining the energy required to transport a bottle isn't as straightforward. Some bottles of water travel short distances, but others are imported from far-off countries, which increases their energy footprint. Gleick and Cooley found that drinking an imported bottle of water is about two-and-a-half to four times more energy intensive than getting it locally, often outweighing the energy required to make the bottle.

All told, Gleick estimates that U.S. bottled-water consumption in 2007 required an energy input equivalent to 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil. Global energy demand for bottled water is three times that amount. To put that energy use into perspective, Gleick says to imagine that each bottle is up to one-quarter full of oil.

"They've done a pretty good job of modeling the bottled-water side," says environmental engineer H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But he also says they didn't do enough modeling of tap water to make an adequate comparison between the two. Gleick says that, although the energy for purifying and delivering tap water varies, even in the most expensive cases it is hundreds of times less than for bottled water.

Hyung-Chul Kim, an industrial ecologist at Columbia University, noted that the analysis didn't include the energy recovered from recycling bottles. Gleick says they didn’t include that value in their calculations because almost all recycled water bottles end up as carpet, clothing, or toys, not new bottles.

Revolutionary.

Here is an excerpt from a BBC.com article:

Scientists have halted the advance of heart disease in mice - and even reversed some of its effects.

The study provides hard evidence that tiny pieces of genetic material called microRNA can play a key role in the development of heart disease. The therapy, featured in the journal Nature, targets and blocks microRNA in heart cells. A US specialist said that, with trials under way in other animals, human tests may be only a few years away.

The importance of microRNAs to heart disease - and a host of other diseases - has already been suggested by other scientists. Their job is to regulate the activity of our genes, but with many different types present in the cell, scientists are trying to establish which plays the biggest role. The US and German scientists are focusing on one type labelled microRNA-21, and their role in a type of heart cell called the cardiac fibroblast, which helps provide the structure of the organ, and plays a critical role in the progressive scarring which stops it working properly in heart disease.

Until recently, that process was thought to be an irreversible one. The researchers found that cells in a failing heart had higher levels of this microRNA, and linked it to a chemical signalling pathway which leads to the tissue damage found in the condition.

Damn "The Devil"!

Here is an excerpt from a recent BBC.com article:

Inconsiderate bosses not only make work stressful, they may also increase the risk of heart disease for their employees, experts believe.

A Swedish team found a strong link between poor leadership and the risk of serious heart disease and heart attacks among more than 3,000 employed men. And the effect may be cumulative - the risk went up the longer an employee worked for the same company. The study is published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Researchers from the Karolinska Institute and Stockholm University tracked the heart health of the male employees, aged between 19 and 70 and working in the Stockholm area, over a period of nearly a decade. During this time 74 cases of fatal and non-fatal heart attack or acute angina, or death from ischaemic heart disease, occurred.

That explains why he looks like a girl...

Get it?

Here is an excerpt from a BBC.com article:

Boys born to women exposed to hairspray in the workplace may have a higher risk of being born with a genital defect.

Imperial College London scientists talked to women who had babies with hypospadias, where the urinary tract is found away from the penis. They reported that hairspray exposure more than doubled the risk. The study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, said it was too early to say for certain that hairspray was the cause.

Stem Cells Wonder...All over the news.

Surgeons in Spain have carried out the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant - using a windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells.

The groundbreaking technology also means for the first time tissue transplants can be carried out without the need for anti-rejection drugs. Five months on the patient, 30-year-old mother-of-two Claudia Castillo, is in perfect health, The Lancet reports. She needed the transplant to save a lung after contracting tuberculosis. The Colombian woman's airways had been damaged by the disease. Scientists from Bristol helped grow the cells for the transplant and the European team believes such tailor-made organs could become the norm. To make the new airway, the doctors took a donor windpipe, or trachea, from a patient who had recently died.

Then they used strong chemicals and enzymes to wash away all of the cells from the donor trachea, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of the fibrous protein collagen. This gave them a structure to repopulate with cells from Ms Castillo herself, which could then be used in an operation to repair her damaged left bronchus - a branch of the windpipe.

Bad news for me.

Here is an excerpt from a recent BBC.com article:

Warning over MP3 volume levels: Listening to an MP3 player at its highest volume for one hour a day is enough to seriously damage people's hearing, according to a study for European politicians.

It claims being exposed to loud music could lead to people getting tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. The condition already affects more than 3 million people in the UK and it's feared a million more are at risk. Studies by charities working with deaf people estimate that two thirds of 16 to 34-year-olds listen to music at very high volumes without knowing the risks.

David Brinn is 33 and from Chippenham in Wiltshire. Until a few years ago he loved listening to music on his MP3 players and would use his for around three hours a day. He admits he would turn his up high. "In the gym when you are on the treadmill and your favourite song comes on I'd turn it up as loud as it goes," he said. David owned half a dozen MP3 players, buying new ones hoping they would be louder. Three years ago doctors diagnosed him with tinnitus. He describes his condition as a "whistle blowing" in his ear constantly, when he's eating, sleeping and working.

Crystal Rolf is an ear specialist for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID). She explains that tinnitus happens when small sensory cells in the ears get damaged after exposure to loud music over long periods of time. At first the ringing sensation may be temporary but the damage can become permanent over time.

Time to die(t).

Here is an excerpt from a recent BBC.com article:

Carrying extra fat around your middle dramatically increases your risk of early death, even if your overall weight is normal, say researchers.

A study of almost 360,000 people from nine European countries found waist size a "powerful indicator" of risk. Each extra 2ins (5cm) raised the chance of early death by between 13% and 17%.

The link between waist fat and health problems has been established for some time, but the sheer size of the study gives scientists a far more accurate picture. The researchers, including some from Imperial College London, followed the volunteers, who were an average of 51 years old at the start of the study, for the next 10 years, during which time 14,723 of them died. The standard measure of obesity, body mass index (BMI) remained a reasonable predictor of health problems, with those with a high reading more likely to die from cardiovascular disease or cancer.

However, the 'hip/waist ratio', a number produced by dividing the waist size by the hip measurement, and just the waist measurement on its own, were both good ways of sorting out those at highest risk.Some people who had a completely normal BMI score, but a larger than average waist, were at significantly higher risk of early death. At the extremes, men with waists exceeding 47ins (119cm) had a doubled rate of death compared with those with waists under 31.5ins (80cm), and a similar statistic was found when women with waists over 39ins (99cm) were compared to those under 25.5ins (64.7cm).

An increase in risk of death could be plotted every time the belt was let out by another two inches - for two people with the same BMI, every additional 2ins (5cm) on their waistband added up to a 17% increase in risk for men, and 13% for women.

I don't believe this.

Here is an excerpt from an article on BBC.com:

More evidence has emerged that babies born from frozen embryos are healthier than those that develop from fresh embryos, researchers say.

Three studies presented to a US fertility conference found frozen embryo babies were less likely to be premature and under weight.

Previous research has suggested this is down to only the strongest embryos surviving the freezing process.
Fertility experts said more work was needed on the issue.

Bionic Hand.

Here is an excerpt from a BBC.com report:

The world's first commercially available bionic hand has been recognised as one of the top inventions of 2008. The hand, developed by Livingston company Touch Bionics, was named alongside the Super Hadron Collider in Time magazine's top 50 innovations.

It came in at 14th place, beating competition from the latest Mars Rover, designed to explore the red planet. The hand took 20 years to develop and has five separately working fingers. This makes it more versatile than previous hands, which have often been hook-like and limited to simple opening and closing movements. The i-limb hand has a much wider range of capabilities. It has a credit-card grip, for taking hold of narrow objects, and a power hold for larger objects such as mugs.

I love science.

'Fart gas' link to blood pressure
Source: BBC.com

The gas best known for being used in many stink bombs may also control blood pressure, say US researchers.

Small amounts of hydrogen sulphide - a toxic gas generated by bacteria living in the human gut - are responsible for the foul odour of flatulence.

But it seems the gas is also produced by an enzyme in blood vessels where it relaxes them and lowers blood pressure.

The findings in mice may lead to new treatments for high blood pressure, the Science journal reported

Zoom Zoom.

Supersonic Rocket Car, The Bloodhound, Aims For 1,000 mph!

Source: Wired.com

The Britons who built the first car to break the sound barrier are back with plans to shatter their own record in a jet-powered land-rocket they're betting will be the first car to top 1,000 mph.Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green will make his run for the record strapped into the Bloodhound SSC, a 42-foot-long missile powered by a rocket bolted to a jet engine. With 45,000 pounds of thrust available at full throttle, Bloodhound will hit 1,050 mph in just 41 seconds and cross the salt faster than a speeding bullet.

"There has never been anything like Bloodhound SSC before," says team leader Richard Noble, who set a land speed record of his own in 1983. "It is undoubtedly the most stimulating and challenging program I've ever been involved with. The next three years are going to be tough, testing and damned exciting."

Leukemia drug may reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis!

A drug developed to treat leukaemia may be a powerful new weapon against multiple sclerosis, researchers say.

Alemtuzumab appears to stop progression of the disease in patients with early stage active relapsing-remitting MS - the most common form of the condition.The University of Cambridge study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests the drug may enable repair of previous damage.However, it can produce potentially serious side-effects, they warn.

Source: BBC.com