http://www.naturalnews.com/045344_omega-3_type_2_diabetes_insulin_resistance.html
From the desk of Zedie.
Day: 05/30/2014
The Military Is Building Brain Chips to Treat PTSD » David Icke
http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/the-military-is-building-brain-chips-to-treat-ptsd/
From the desk of Zedie.
Antidepressant Eases Menopause-Related Symptoms, Study Finds .
Estrogen therapy and the non-hormonal drug venlafaxine (Effexor) are nearly equally effective in reducing menopause-related hot flashes and night sweats, according to a new study.
“Our new findings provide critical data for physicians and women making treatment decisions for hot flashes/night sweats. Our data show that first-line hormonal and non-hormonal pharmacological treatments are well-tolerated and effective options for alleviating symptoms,” the study’s lead author Dr. Hadine Joffe, director of the Women’s Hormone and Aging Research Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said in a hospital news release.
“Hot flashes and night sweats … affect up to 80 percent of women in midlife and are the primary menopause-related symptoms leading menopausal women to seek medical attention,” Joffe noted.
Estrogen therapy is considered the “gold standard” treatment for hot flashes and night sweats, but is used at the lowest possible doses due to potential risks associated with the treatment, according to the researchers. These risks include blood clots and an increased risk of certain cancers.
Venlafaxine, also known by the brand name Effexor, is more commonly prescribed to treat depression or anxiety, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
The study included almost 350 women who were either entering menopause or had been through menopause. All of the women had hot flashes and night sweats. They were randomly assigned to receive either low-dose oral estrogen estradiol, low-dose venlafaxine hydrochloride extended release, or an inactive placebo.
After eight weeks, hot flashes and night sweats decreased by nearly 53 percent among women on estrogen therapy. In women taking venlafaxine, those symptoms dropped by nearly 48 percent. Almost 29 percent of those taking a placebo also had improvement in their symptoms.
Compared to the placebo, estradiol reduced the number of hot flashes or night sweats by an average of 2.3 more per day. Venlafaxine reduced the number of these symptoms by 1.8 more per day, according to the study published online May 26 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is the first to compare estrogen therapy and a non-hormonal treatment, and shows that venlafaxine offers an effective alternative to hormone therapy.
Scientists identify metabolic link between aging, Parkinson’s
University of Alabama researchers identified within animal models an enzyme that links genetic pathways that control aging with the death of dopamine neurons – a clinical hallmark of Parkinson’s disease.
Further study is needed, but the enzyme could later prove a target, the scientists said, for boosting efforts to prevent or reduce problems associated with the malfunction of dopamine-producing neurons in the brains of diseased patients.
“Discerning metabolic factors that maintain the health of cells from those that make an animal live longer has remained an elusive goal,” said Dr. Guy Caldwell, UA professor of biological sciences and the paper’s principal author. “This is a step in that direction.”
The research shows the “molecular intersection” where aging-associated degeneration and neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson’s, meet, said Caldwell.
Scheduled for publication in the July 1 issue of Cell Metabolism, the findings show that a gene the scientists discovered to be “neuroprotective” also codes for a basic enzyme in the breakdown of glucose, in the pathway of glycolysis. Glycolysis is the primary cellular pathway by which cells break down sugar to generate energy.
Fourteen of the paper’s 17 co-authors, including Drs. Janis O’Donnell and Kim Caldwell, professors of biological sciences, are, or were at the time of the study, affiliated with UA, including multiple undergraduate students.
Adam Knight, a two-time UA graduate now pursuing a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, is the lead author. Dr. Xioahui Yan, a UA post-doctoral scientist, and current UA doctoral students, Siyuan Zhang and Rami Ajjuri, were also key contributors.
Research results were drawn from UA lab animal models including nematodes, worms known as C. elegans, as well as fruit flies, known as Drosophila melanogaster. Additional tests were conducted by collaborators at Harvard University who used neurons isolated from the brains of mice to corroborate the UA findings.
The six-year study began, Caldwell said, by accumulating a list of 625 genes that previous research had shown were involved in both aging and molecular problems associated with Parkinson’s.
Through a multi-tiered screening process, researchers in the Caldwell lab identified several genetic factors that exhibited a functional effect in the worms, but then homed in on what would become the targeted enzyme, known as GPI-1, or glucose-6-phosphate isomerase. This enzyme has a well established role in the process of glycolysis.
When researchers in O’Donnell’s lab used genetic and biochemical techniques to make this enzyme inoperable in fruit flies, the flies’ abilities to move were hampered and their neurons in their brains were more easily damaged.
“Nematodes and fruit flies are very different,” O’Donnell said, “so the discovery of this connection between neuron health and this enzyme in both organisms, as well as in mouse neurons, is very exciting because it tells us that we’ve detected is likely to be important in our brains as well.”
As average life spans, and the percentage of elderly, both increase, it becomes increasingly important, Caldwell said, to seek measures that could potentially help those extended years become healthier ones.
“Research can help us distinguish between things that keep our neurons healthy versus things that simply keep us alive,” he said. “That distinction between life span and health span is becoming increasingly important as our population ages.”
The project also further validated the use of animal model systems to more quickly focus on potential therapeutic targets.
“It shows how we can narrow down those growing lists of genetic modifiers that are being found in patient populations and find the ones that functionally matter to neuron survival,” Caldwell said.
The research, funded by National Institutes of Health grants to both Caldwell and O’Donnell, also provided UA students an opportunity to positively impact their professional futures.
“It highlights how undergraduate researchers can play a substantial role in major biomedical research,” Caldwell said. Undergraduate co-authors were funded through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and via donations from Parkinson’s patient support groups in Huntsville and Birmingham.
Artificial photosynthesis gets a boost.
A new thin-film coating made from titanium dioxide could convert sunlight to a zero-emission fuel more efficiently.
The findings, from a paper in this week’s issue of Science, bring the dream of artificial photosynthesis one step closer, says author Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor, specialising in solar fuels at Caltech.
Solar panels convert sunlight into usable energy, but a major aim of sustainable energy researchers is to convert sunlight into storable chemical fuels such as hydrogen.
Plants already convert solar into chemical energy using the process of photosynthesis, but this natural process is very inefficient, says Lewis.
“Less than 1 per cent of the energy in the sunlight that strikes the plant is stored in the biomass of the plant,” he says.
“So we’re trying to build systems that are 10 times more efficient, but that are also robust, last a long time and are cost effective.”
The aim would be to have solar fuel generators on rooftops and in fields producing liquid or gas fuels for cars, buildings and industry.
However, artificial photosynthesis has so far met with “limited success”, says Lewis.
Weak point
A typical solar fuel generator not only reduces water to produce hydrogen fuel but it also oxidises water to produce oxygen, which can be used to burn the fuel, producing more water.
A semiconductor called a photoanode is required to make the oxygen but this has tended to be the weak point in creating a solar fuel generator, says Lewis.
“Oxidising water to oxygen has been very problematic because almost all common semiconductor materials rust, so instead of oxidising water they oxidise themselves,” he says.
Lewis says there have been various attempts to coat the photoanode to protect it from rusting, but so far these have either not been successful at stopping corrosion or have stopped electricity flowing through the photoanode altogether.
“We’ve figured a way around that, at least on a laboratory timescale,” says Lewis.
Thin-film coating
In research funded by the US Department of Energy, he and colleagues have created a special thin-film coating of amorphous titanium dioxide that ensures the photoanode selectively oxidises water.
The titanium dioxide coating is an electrically-conductive version of a chemical used in white paint or sunscreen.
“It is deposited layer by layer using a process called atomic layer deposition,” says Lewis.
The coating allows electricity to flow through the photoanode, and at the same time protects it from corrosion.
Previous attempts to coat photoanodes have only produced hydrogen and oxygen safely for a matter of seconds, says Lewis.
By contrast, he and colleagues have run their artificial photosynthesis system for 100 hours of continuous simulated sunlight, with just a 10 percent decrease in the production of oxygen and hydrogen over that time.
Lewis says further research is required into, for example, how the system can fail.
But, he says, it is promising that the coating works not only on silicon but other common semiconductors including gallium arsenide and gallium phosphide.
“The nice thing is it’s not material specific,” says Lewis.
He says this means many materials that have previously been rejected for development because they were unstable can now be reconsidered for solar fuel generators.
Chemo Decreases Brain Activity During Multitasking.
The “brain fog” many patients experience after chemotherapy might be related to chemotherapy-induced damage to the brain or reduced connectivity between brain regions, according to new research.
In a prospective longitudinal study, women with breast cancer who received chemotherapy were found to have significantly less brain activity than women with breast cancer who did not receive chemotherapy and than healthy women.
This longitudinal study — the first to provide evidence of a relation between brain activity changes and cognitive complaints after chemotherapy — was published online May 27 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“We believe that this is an important step in our understanding of the neurobiologic basis of the cognitive adverse effects of chemotherapy experienced by patients,” write Sabine Deprez, MD, and colleagues from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
In their study, the researchers used functional MRI to examine whether cognitive complaints after treatment for breast cancer are linked to detectable changes in brain activity during multitasking.
“Cognitive dysfunction is a well-known adverse effect of cancer and its treatment, and although the degree of complaints may differ among patients, such cognitive deficits often have a negative impact on their quality of life,” they write.
Patients have been told that their symptoms are psychological; however, recent research has demonstrated that objective and subjective cognitive symptoms can be linked to cancer treatment, they note.
Advanced neuroimaging techniques could be more sensitive than neuropsychological examination for uncovering actual brain changes associated with cognitive complaints, the researchers reasoned. They note that the small number of imaging studies that have been done have reported both structural and functional brain changes after cancer treatment.
The researchers evaluated 18 women with breast cancer before they started chemotherapy and then 4 to 6 months after the completion of treatment, 16 breast cancer patients who did not receive chemotherapy, and 17 matched healthy women.
To assess the relation between the performance of tasks and brain activation, all the women were scanned with a 3 Tesla MRI scanner while they performed a visual task, an auditory task, a combination of the visual and auditory tasks, and the combination plus an independent short-term visual memory task (the multitask condition).
The researchers adjusted the difficulty of the tasks for individual participants so that 70% to 80% of responses would be correct.
At baseline, there were no differences in brain activation during the multitasking performance between the 3 groups.
However, in the chemotherapy group, activation in task-related brain circuitry decreased after treatment, compared with the pretreatment level (P < .05), specifically in the left anterior cingulate gyrus and intraparietal sulcus. No such changes were seen in the other 2 groups.
The women treated with chemotherapy also had significantly more cognitive complaints than the other women (P < .05). This increase was correlated with decreased brain activation in multitasking circuitry, specifically in the left anterior cingulate and inferior frontal sulcus, in the chemotherapy-treated women only.
Such changes in brain activity might underlie the cognitive impairments patients report after chemotherapy, the researchers suggest.
In an accompanying podcast, Brenna McDonald, MD, from the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, notes that the findings “demonstrate treatment effects on a putative neurocircuit underlying cognitive complaints after cancer chemotherapy with activation changes particularly evident in brain regions thought to be important for attention and working or short-term memory.”
Dr. McDonald agrees that the study results “offer additional validation of the concerns often reported by patients.”
Longer-term follow-up studies will be needed to monitor the course of these symptoms and functional brain changes over time, she adds.
“It will also be helpful for future work to further examine the relationship between task difficulty, performance accuracy, objective and subjective cognitive functioning, and brain structure and function,” she explains. “In addition, larger cohorts, perhaps via multicenter studies, will be needed to determine which patients are most vulnerable to such difficulties, and why, through study of demographic, genetic, and treatment variables.”
The breast cancer link to bras.
Novel troponin test may rule out heart attack risk.
A single measurement of the new high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T (hs-cTnT) and a normal electrocardiogram (ECG) might help doctors predict which patients with chest pain are at low risk of heart attack and can be sent home from the emergency department (ED), a study has shown.
Researchers in Sweden sought to determine the negative predictive value of undetectable hs-cTnT (<5 ng/L) and an ECG without significant ST elevation or depression for the primary endpoint of myocardial infarction (MI) within 30 days among 14,636 patients (age >25 years) with chest pain who presented at the ED of a hospital in Sweden over a 2-year period. [Abstract 403-14-LB-13200; J Am Coll Cardiol 2014; doi:10.1016/j.jacc.2014.03.017]
Nearly 9,000 patients (61 percent) who had undetectable hs-cTnT (<5 ng/L) on initial testing (as measured with Elecsys® 2010, Roche Diagnostics) were included in the study. They were younger and less likely to have diabetes, chronic kidney disease, prior MI or stroke compared with patients who had increased hs-cTnT levels (5-14 and >14 ng/L).
Hospitalization rates were lower among patients with undetectable hs-cTnT (21 percent vs 44 and 82 percent for 5-14 and >14 ng/L, respectively). Diagnosis of MI increased with increasing levels of hs-cTnT (2 percent for <5 ng/L, 3.1 percent for 5-14 ng/L, 4.1 percent for >14 ng/L).
Within 30 days, 39 patients with undetectable hs-cTnT had MI (24 had significant ECG changes, 15 had normal ECG). The negative predictive value of the tests for MI was 99.8 percent (95% CI, 99.7-99.9) and 100 percent for death (95% CI, 99.9-100). After adjusting for age, sex, diabetes, prior MI and eGFR, there was no significant difference in the risk of death between patients discharged from the ED and those hospitalized within 365 days (hazard ratio [HR], 0.73; 955 CI, 0.48-1.12).
“Patients with chest pain who have an initial hs-cTnT of <5 ng/L and no signs of ischemia on ECG, independent of duration of chest pain and other risk factors, have a minimal risk of MI within 30 days, and no risk of death,” said lead investigator Dr. Nadia Bandstein from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “These patients can be safely discharged from the ED.”
The study has some clinical implications – it can reduce overcrowding of the ED, prevent unnecessary admissions, and save doctor-patient time. If MI can be ruled out more quickly, 20 to 25 percent of all hospital admissions for chest pain can be prevented, Bandstein said.
Panelist Dr. Allan Jaffe from Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesotta, US, however, cautioned that the assay is likely to be effective only in low-risk groups. “We have to be careful in defining how we rule people in and out. In the long run, we will be able to validate the strategy… we need to do it a little bit more rigorously.”
TAVR associated with lower 12-month mortality rates than open-heart surgery.
Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) was associated with lower mortality rates than conventional open-heart surgery in high-risk patients with aortic stenosis 1 year following surgery in a US trial.
All-cause mortality at 1 year was 14.2 percent in the TAVR arm using Medtronic’s transcatheter bioprosthesis CoreValve compared with 19.1 percent in patients who underwent surgery (p<0.001 for non-inferiority, p=0.04 for superiority). [N Engl J Med 2014; doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1400590]
The rate of heart attack, stroke, or related death at 1 year also improved in the TAVR arm at 20.4 percent compared with 27.3 percent in the surgery arm (p=0.03).
Previous studies have shown TAVR procedures can improve outcomes for patients with aortic stenosis who also have an increased risk of death during surgery compared with medical management. TAVR is an alternative for those who cannot tolerate surgery – about one-third of about 300,000 people with aortic stenosis globally.
In a national US cohort of aortic stenosis patients, of average age 83, patients were randomized to TAVR with CoreValve (n=390) or surgery (n=357). Patients were included if they had at least a 15 percent risk of dying within 30 days of surgery. An extreme risk sub-cohort included patients whose risk of dying or irreversible complications within 30 days of surgery was greater than 50 percent. Both groups proceeded to the comparison portion of the trial after the TAVR arm met initial non-inferiority requirements.
The trial did not meet its secondary endpoint to reduce cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events at 30 days, and the event rate was 8.2 in the TAVR group and 10.9 in the surgery group (p=0.10).
The death rate at 30 days was 3.3 percent in the TAVR group and 4.5 in the surgery group, which was not statistically significant and which were lower than estimated in the surgery arm.
Lead investigator Dr. David Adams, professor and chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, New York, US, suggested that this may have been because the trial population was actually at lower risk than intended. More patients also refused surgical treatment than refused TAVR treatment.
However, more TAVR patients (22 percent) required pacemaker implants 1 year after treatment than those who were randomized to surgery did (11 percent, p<0.001).
Still, the possibility of alleviating aortic stenosis in inoperable patients led the FDA to approve Medtronic’s CoreValve early, even though the benefits for lower-risk populations remain to be seen, noted Dr. Valentin Fuster, a cardiologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital and editor-in-chief elect of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, during a discussion of the research. Fuster was not involved in the study.
“To be able to change the valve without opening the chest, I think, is a great accomplishment,” he said.
Regular aerobic exercise may slow down dementia.
Regular aerobic exercise may help delay the progression of dementia in older women whose cognitive function has been affected by age, as indicated by a recent study.
A randomized controlled study tested the impact of different types of exercise on the hippocampal volume of 86 elderly women who were living independently at home but reported mild memory problems (or mild cognitive impairment [MCI]), a common risk factor for dementia. [Br J Sports Med 2013; doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2013-093184]
The women (aged 70-80) were randomized to one of three groups: the first group was assigned to a twice-weekly and hour-long exercise regime comprising aerobic training (brisk walking), the second group underwent resistance training involving lunges, squats and weights, while the third group was assigned to a balance and muscle toning exercise.
Participants were required to adhere to their respective exercise regimens over a period of 6 months. Hippocampus size was assessed at the start and the end of the 6-month period using an MRI scan, and participants’ verbal memory and learning capacity were assessed before and after using a validated test (RAVLT).
Out of the 86 women, 29 took the before and after MRI scans. The results revealed that the total volume of the hippocampus for the aerobic training group was significantly larger than the balance and muscle toning exercise group (p=0.03). There was no difference in hippocampal volume between the resistance training group and the balance and muscle toning group.
“Our study showed that aerobic training has significantly increased hippocampal volume in older women with probable MCI,” said co-author, Dr. Teresa Liu-Ambrose, Department of Physical Therapy, UBC, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The findings suggested that aerobic exercise seemed to be able to slow down the shrinkage of the hippocampus and maintain the volume in the group of women at risk of dementia at the minimum. The researchers also recommend regular aerobic exercise to stave off mild cognitive decline.
“However, more research is needed to ascertain the relevance of exercise-induced changes in hippocampal volume on memory performance in older adults with MCI,” elaborated Liu-Ambrose.
This finding is especially important as the researchers pointed out the rising toll of dementia worldwide – one new case is diagnosed every 4 seconds – and the number of those afflicted is set to rise to more than 115 million by 2050.
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