Day: 05/28/2015

5 Ways Air Pollution Destroys Your Health .

Posted by

0


You probably already know about some of the dangers that severe air pollution exposure can cause and how places like stoplights at intersections can increase your exposure to harmful air particles up to 29 times more than the open road. While these facts are startling, you probably don’t know about the almost invisible dangers. [1] Namely the numerous diseases and cognitive issues now being linked to air pollution. Here we’ll get into five ways you’re letting air pollution destroy your health.

The Hidden Dangers of Air Pollution

Despite the slow turn to more sustainable forms of agriculture and industry, air pollution is still a big problem. Here are just some of the ways air pollution negatively affects your health.

1. Air Pollution is Linked to Suicide

It may seem crazy to think that air pollution could lead to something asserious as suicide, but studies in Taiwan, South Korea, China, and now Utah suggest a link. Not only is suicide the 10th leading cause of death in the US, it is the number 8th cause of death in Utah. [2] Obviously, there are many factors that must be considered when discussing causes of suicide; however, suicide rates increased in Utah during the spring and fall (a time when certain aspects of air pollution can be worse).

2. Air Pollution Slows Cognition in Schoolchildren

We all know that air pollution can exacerbate symptoms of asthma and other respiratory-related illnesses and diseases, but did you also know that it can affect brain development? Dr. Jordi Sunyer did a study to see just how affected schoolchildren are by air pollution (specifically traffic pollution). The study concluded that children who attended schools in polluted areas showed overall slower cognition in comparison to those who attended schools in areas with less traffic pollution.

“The associations between slower cognitive development and higher levels of air pollutants remained after the researchers took factors such as parents’ education, commuting time, smoking in the home and green spaces at school into account.” [3]

3. Significant Risks to Frequent Flyers

Those who fly frequently (especially pilots or other airline staff) could potentially be more at risk for certain issues, dubbed “aerotoxic syndrome.” Most planes have a mechanism that compresses air from the engines and uses that as air in the cabin, but sometimes, these mechanisms malfunction and allow oil particles to taint the cabin air. Many airline employees have mentioned this, but one pilot, Richard Westgate, passed away in 2012 after claiming to be a victim of poisonous and toxic cabin fumes. [4]

4. Cremations Release Mercury Into the Air

With land for burials becoming more scarce (and also more expensive), many people turn to cremation as an alternate form of honoring the body of a loved one who has passed on. The unfortunate side effect of cremation is mercury emissions. [5] Honoring a fallen loved one should not come at the price of endangering yourself and others, but there are alternatives such as alkaline hydrolysis or “liquid cremation” that are far healthier for the environment and for you.

5. Air Pollution Linked to Autism

Autism and related disorders have been on the rise for some time and research suggests air pollution may be a contributing factor. Several reports noted a link between exposure to toxic metals and other pollutants in children who were more at risk to develop autism. Other studies focused on pregnant women and how closely they lived to freeways and other sources of heavy pollution. All of the studies found similar exposures to a handful of particular pollutants that seemed to increase the risk of autism in newborns. [6]

Air Pollution: No Simple Solution

It’s difficult to remove all air pollution from your life, unfortunately, but you can monitor and limit your exposure. Keep abreast with local news about your city or even check in on a Breathe Cam. [7] Keep plants inside your home to help remove harmful pollutants. [8] [9] Consider anair purification device, they can be a great active approach for purifying the air in your home.

How’ve you dealt with air pollution? Leave a comment and share your tips below.

-Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, NP, DACBN, DCBCN, DABFM

Article References:

[1] Baggaley, Kate. Stoplights are hotspots for air pollution. Science News. 2015.

[2] Pappas, Stephanie. Utah suicides linked to air pollution. Live Science. 2015.

[3] CBC News. Traffic pollution tied to slower cognition in schoolchildren. CBC News. 2015.

[4] Campbell, Jaime. Toxic fumes in plane cabin’s pose health risks to frequent flyers, says coroner. Independent.co.uk. 2015.

[5] Lewis, Barbara. EU should curb mercury emissions from cremations, campaigners say.Reuters. 2015.

[6] Arnold, Carrie. Air pollution and ASDs: Homing in on an environmental risk factor.EHP. 2015.

[7] Keane, Jonathan. Keep an eye on your city’s pollution in real time. New Scientist. 2015.

[8] Barboza, Tony. Cleaner air is linked to stronger lungs in Southern California children.LA Times. 2015.

[9] Kinzler, Don. NASA Study: Houseplants remove harmful substances from indoors.Duluth News Tribute. 2015.

Hormone Reset Diet Prevention

Posted by

0


Your hormones could be making you gain weight. Learn how to stay slim for good.
Here’s a mind-bender: Being overweight often has nothing to do with calories or exercise. For a huge number of us, the problem is instead about misfiring hormones. Research is still catching up with this paradigm shift, which has yet to be comprehensively studied. But seeing how this revelation has helped my patients (and me) slim down and feel better gives me confidence that it’s true for most women who are trying to lose weight and can’t. You already know about some weight-affecting hormone issues, like thyroid and insulin imbalances. But other, more subtle ones could also be keeping you from the body you want. Biology class, anyone?

Too Much Leptin Swells Your Appetite

Leptin swells your appetite.

I think of leptin as the hormone that says, “Darling, put down the fork.” Under normal circumstances, it’s released from your fat cells and travels in the blood to your brain, where it signals that you’re full. But leptin’s noble cause has been impeded by our consumption of a type of sugar called fructose, found in fruit and processed foods alike. When you eat small amounts of fructose, you’re OK. But if you eat more than the recommended 5 daily servings of fruit (which in recent decades has been bred to contain more fructose than it used to) plus processed foods with added sugar, your liver can’t deal with the fructose fast enough to use it as fuel. Instead, your body starts converting it into fats, sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides and depositing them in the liver and elsewhere in your belly. As more fructose is converted to fat, your levels of leptin increase (because fat produces leptin). And when you have too much of any hormone circulating in your system, your body becomes resistant to its message. With leptin, that means your brain starts to miss the signal that you’re full. You continue to eat, and you keep gaining weight.

High BMI Boosts Survival in Metastatic Renal Cancer

Posted by

1


It is seemingly a paradox. Obesity and overweight are established risk factors for developing renal cell carcinoma (RCC) as well as for a number other cancer types. But a new validation data analysis has confirmed that excess weight in patients with RCC may be beneficial.

In a cohort of over 4000 patients, researchers found that those with a higher body mass index (BMI) were more likely to have a higher overall survival, longer time to treatment failure, and better tumor shrinkage when compared with patients with normal or lower BMI.

Within the cohort, 1829 (39%) patients were of normal weight or underweight (BMI < 25 kg/m2) and were described in the study as having lower BMI, and 2828 (61%) were overweight or obese (BMI ≥ 25 kg/m2) and were described as having a high BMI.

Overall, a high BMI was associated with significantly longer overall survival compared with those with a lower BMI (23.4 months vs 14.5 months; hazard ratio (HR), 0.830; P =.0008). This translated into a 17% decreased risk for mortality in the high-BMI group when the analysis was adjusted.

In addition, the high-BMI group had a significant 18% decreased risk for disease progression.

Some previous reports have suggested that RCC developing in an obesogenic environment may be more indolent, explained lead author Laurence Albiges, MD, PhD, a medical oncologist at the Institut Gustave Roussy, Paris, France, who presented the findings here at the 2015 Genitourinary Symposium.

An analysis from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) showed that lower-stage disease was associated with a high BMI, but there were no specific genomic features detected in obese patients. It also revealed that fatty acid synthase (FASN) gene expression was different between low- and high-BMI patients.

In addition, Dr Albiges noted that in the metastatic setting and in patients treated with targeted therapies, her group recently also reported on the favorable impact of BMI on survival in the International mRCC Database Consortium (IMDC).

External Validation

“The current work aims to externally validate this finding and characterize the underlying biology,” said Dr Albiges, who is currently a visiting scientist at Dana-Farber’s Lank Center for Genitourinary Cancer in Boston, Massachusetts.

The authors conducted an analysis of 4657 metastatic RCC patients who were treated on phase 2-3 clinical trials sponsored by Pfizer from 2003 to 2013. In this cohort, they assessed the impact of BMI on overall survival, progression-free survival (PFS), and overall response rate.

They also analyzed patients with metastatic disease from the clear cell RCC cohort of TCGA dataset to correlate the expression of FASN with BMI and overall survival.

The data was adjusted for a number of confounders including age, gender, ethnicity, prior nephrectomy, tumor histology, IMDC risk groups, and liver and bone metastases.

In addition to improved overall survival, Dr Albiges and her team found that high-BMI patients had better PFS (8.2 months vs 5.5 months; HR, 0.821; P < .0001) and overall response rate (25.3% vs 17.6%; odds ratio, 1.527; P < .001).

These results remained valid when stratified by line of therapy, but when stratified by histological subtype, the favorable outcome associated with high BMI was only observed in clear cell RCC.

Role of FASN Unclear

In the second part of their analysis, the authors found that FASN gene expression was associated with overall survival in only one of the two cohorts analyzed.

 Among the TCGA dataset (n = 61), there was a trend toward improved overall survival in the high-BMI group (P = .07).

FASN gene expression was inversely correlated with both overall survival (P = .002) and BMI (P = .034).

“There was lower FASN expression in high BMI,” said Dr Albiges, “And high FASN was associated with lower overall survival.”

In the TCGA dataset, FASN gene expression is associated with overall survival and suggests further exploration of the role of fatty acid metabolism in RCC, she said.

But in the IMDC biospecimen cohort (n = 146) that was stained for FASN, it was not found to be an independent prognosis factor for overall survival. BMI was associated with overall survival independently of FASN, even though obese patients were less likely to express FASN.

“Given that this finding was observed in clear cell RCC only, we hypothesize that lipid metabolism may be modulated by the fat laden tumors cells,” concluded Dr Albiges. “FASN staining in the IMDC cohort is ongoing to better investigate the obesity paradox in metastatic disease.”

Increased BMI correlates with a superior outcome in kidney cancer, although the reasons and pathophysiology are not quite spelled out yet, commented paper discussant Ulka N. Vaishampayan, MD, from the Karmanos Cancer Institute, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

“The FASN story is being looked at and continues on,” she said.

Attempts to predict prognosis and response to specific therapies based on factors that include BMI changes are steps in the right direction, Dr Vaishampayan continued. “The interaction of low BMI and poor risk factors should be explored.”

Additionally, the impact of medications such as steroids on BMI needs to be considered, she added. “Comparative effectiveness of each of these factors should be contemplated especially when interventions are considered.”

Breakthrough brings optical data transport closer to replacing wires

Posted by

0


Stanford electrical engineer Jelena Vuckovic wants to make computers faster and more efficient by reinventing how they send data back and forth between chips, where the work is done.

In computers today, data is pushed through wires as a stream of electrons. That takes a lot of power, which helps explain why laptops get so warm.

“Several years ago, my colleague David Miller carefully analyzed power consumption in computers, and the results were striking,” said Vuckovic, referring to electrical engineering Professor David Miller. “Up to 80 percent of the microprocessor power is consumed by sending data over the wires – so called interconnects.”

In a Nature Photonics article whose lead author is Stanford graduate student Alexander Piggott, Vuckovic, a professor of electrical engineering, and her team explain a process that could revolutionize computing by making it practical to use light instead of electricity to carry data inside computers.

Proven technology

In essence, the Stanford engineers want to miniaturize the proven technology of the Internet, which moves data by beaming photons of light through fiber optic threads.

“Optical transport uses far less energy than sending electrons through wires,” Piggott said. “For chip-scale links, light can carry more than 20 times as much data.”

Theoretically, this is doable because silicon is transparent to infrared light – the way glass is transparent to visible light. So wires could be replaced by optical interconnects: silicon structures designed to carry infrared light.

But so far, engineers have had to design optical interconnects one at a time. Given that thousands of such linkages are needed for each electronic system, optical data transport has remained impractical.

Now the Stanford engineers believe they’ve broken that bottleneck by inventing what they call an inverse design algorithm.

It works as the name suggests: the engineers specify what they want the optical circuit to do, and the software provides the details of how to fabricate a silicon structure to perform the task.

“We used the algorithm to design a working optical circuit and made several copies in our lab,” Vuckovic said.

In addition to Piggott, the research team included former graduate student Jesse Lu (now at Google,) graduate student Jan Petykiewicz and postdoctoral scholars Thomas Babinec and Konstantinos Lagoudakis. As they reported in Nature Photonics, the devices functioned flawlessly despite tiny imperfections.

“Our manufacturing processes are not nearly as precise as those at commercial fabrication plants,” Piggott said. “The fact that we could build devices this robust on our equipment tells us that this technology will be easy to mass-produce at state-of-the-art facilities.”

The researchers envision many other potential applications for their inverse design algorithm, including high bandwidth optical communications, compact microscopy systems and ultra-secure quantum communications.

Light and silicon

The Stanford work relies on the well-known fact that infrared light will pass through silicon the way sunlight shines through glass.

And just as a prism bends to reveal the rainbow, different silicon structures can bend infrared light in useful ways.

The Stanford algorithm designs silicon structures so slender that more than 20 of them could sit side-by-side inside the diameter of a human hair. These silicon interconnects can direct a specific frequency of infrared light to a specific location to replace a wire.

By loading data onto these frequencies, the Stanford algorithm can create switches or conduits or whatever else is required for the task.

The inverse design algorithm is what makes optical interconnects practical by describing how to create what amount to silicon prisms to bend .

Once the algorithm has calculated the proper shape for the task, engineers can use standard industrial processes to transfer that pattern onto a slice of silicon.

“Our structures look like Swiss cheese but they work better than anything we’ve seen before,” Vuckovic said.

She and Piggott have made several different types of optical interconnects and they see no limits on what their inverse design algorithm can do.

In their Nature photonics paper, the Stanford authors note that the automation of large-scale circuit design enabled engineers to create today’s sophisticated electronics.

By automating the process of designing , they feel that they have set the stage for the next generation of even faster and far more energy-efficient computers that use light rather than electricity for internal data transport.

Rare spinal surgery performed on 82-year-old

Posted by

0


Ankylosing Spondylitis, commonly known as Bamboo Spine, is a form of rheumatic arthritis associated with long-term inflammation of the joints in the spine.

A team of doctors at a city hospital here have performed minimal access spine surgery on an 82-year-old ‘Ankylosing Spondylitis’ (Bamboo Spine) patient by implanting 14 screws in his spinal cord, a rare medical feat.

Ankylosing Spondylitis, commonly known as Bamboo Spine, is a form of rheumatic arthritis which is associated with long-term inflammation of the joints in the spine. Symptoms include pain and stiffness from the neck down to the lower back.

“Ibrahim Mullaji had a fall in November 2014 and post the fall he was constantly complaining of an excruciating back pain. In February 2015, he became totally bed ridden and was paralysed from the legs,” said Dr Vishal Peshattiwar, Endoscopic and Minimally Invasive Spine Surgeon, who led the team of doctors in the surgery at Global Hospital.

He said Mullaji had first visited the hospital in the first week of March and upon investigations it was found that had developed 3 Andersson Leisons (AL).

“After carefully examining his case and meticulously weighing all the options, we decided that there was no option but to perform surgery on the patient. The surgery was all the more challenging as the patient had other complications as well,” he said.

The patient had fluid in both his lungs commonly known as pleural effusion and was also found to have very low protein levels which could have resulted in further complications, added Peshattiwar.

He said that there was no chance of performing the traditional open surgery as the area being operated upon had to be opened with a long incision to allow the surgeon to view and access the anatomy. This would have led to loss of blood and the chance of patient not surviving post the surgery would have escalated.

“The team then decided to conduct a minimally invasive surgery. A minimally invasive spine surgery does not involve a long incision. It avoids significant damage to the muscles surrounding the spine and results in less pain after surgery and a faster recovery,” Peshattiwar said.

“It was gratifying to see him go home walking. He has recovered well and now has started performing all his daily chores by himself. It was a huge risk as there is always a danger of life involved in the surgery, and spine is extremely sensitive area,” the doctor, who conducted the complex surgery in the last week of March, said.

Hashtag is ‘children’s word of year’

Posted by

0


 

A girl writing
Popular themes included World War One, world events in Ukraine and Syria and Ebola

Hashtag has been declared “children’s word of the year” by the Oxford University Press.

OUP analysed more than 120,421 short stories by children aged between five and 13 years old, submitted to the BBC’s 500 Words competition.

According to the OUP, new technology is increasingly at the centre of the children’s lives but how they are writing about it is changing fast.

Words including email, mobile and Facebook are in decline, it said.

They are being replaced by the likes of Instagram, Snapchat and emoji.

And the word television has now been superseded by phone.

The report also notes a sudden new arrival in children’s sentences. The use of the hashtag symbol # to add an extra meaning or comment at the end of a sentence has become commonplace. #IblameTwitter #AndInstagram.

What girls are writing about

  • 1. Fairy tales: princess, charming, unicorn
  • 2. Royalty: coronation, Queen, majesty
  • 3. Family: BFF, grandmother, aunt
  • 4. Shopping: Prada, make-up, shopaholic
Source: Oxford University Press
AP

What boys are writing about

  • 1. Dinosaurs:stegasaurus, Jurasic, raptor
  • 2. Superheroes:Batcave, Gotham, Avengers
  • 3. Football: Aguero, Neuer, Suarez
  • 4. Science fiction:teleport, continuum, tardis
Source: Oxford University Press.
Getty Images

Vineeta Gupta at the Oxford University Press said: “This has been a significant change in usage in this year, 2015.

“Children have extended its [#] use from a simple prefix or as a search term for Twitter to an editorial device to add drama or comment.”

Other words on the technological endangered list are iPod, mp3 and Blackberry. In their place are iPhone, chat app WhatsApp and messaging site ooVoo. #keepup

One of the most common plotlines in the short story competition was achieving sudden internet fame after posting a YouTube video.

Luis Suarez
Many children made a portmanteau of Suarez and a stegosaurus to create a mutant monster

Rather than writing about watching videos, stories revolved around how many hits, shares and likes they were receiving for their own videos. #makesabetterstory

Some of the most popular characters were Cinderella, footballer Lionel Messi, Snow White, Adolf Hitler and Wayne Rooney.

What surprised researchers was how many children wrote using mythological characters such as Zeus, the Minotaur and Hercules. #theyloveZeus

Chris Evans and the Duchess of Cornwall
The Duchess of Cornwall is supporting the writing contest

As a source for stories, World War One was common and world events in Ukraine and Syria were both popular but far behind the most frequent current affairs topic, Ebola.

The search for a cure was one of the most regular plots.

New words also appeared. Among the crop of new inventions were wellysaurus, gloomful and Stegasuarez, a mutant monster hybrid of a Stegosaurus and footballer Luis Suarez. #itbites

The contest winners will be revealed on Friday on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 live from St James’s Palace. The DJ has enlisted the support of the Duchess of Cornwall.

Mice in space develop thin skin

Posted by

0


 

mouse drawer system
The animals were kept in the specially built “Mouse Drawer System”

A study of three mice that spent 91 days on the International Space Station has found abnormalities in their skin.

This is a record stay for any animal in space; due to their short lifespan it equates to about seven “mouse years”.

The study is one of 20 experiments looking at various parts of the mice to measure the health effects of zero-g.

Using microscopes, scientists found the “astromice” had thinner skin than mice that had stayed on the ground, as well as changes to their muscles and hair.

The findings appear in the new journal NPJ Microgravity. Researchers say they are only preliminary, because of the very small sample size of three mice. But the observations are of interest because astronauts often report skin problems after long periods in space.

“If these were experiments on Earth, it would never have been accepted for publication because we had only three mice – but this is a unique experiment,” said Dr Betty Nusgens from the University of Liege in Belgium, one of the study’s authors.

She said it was difficult to extrapolate the findings to humans, but noted that other research had looked at human astronauts.

Nasa and other space agencies have overseen several such studies, including one called SkinCare, which looked at changes in the skin of German astronaut Thomas Reiter during his year on board the International Space Station (ISS) in 2006-7. Another, Skin-B, is currently underway.

Astronauts tend to experience increased skin irritation and find that minor wounds, such as scratches and abrasions, take longer to heal.

The mouse experiments were planned to look at these skin changes in microscopic detail.

Thinning skin

Six mice were delivered to the ISS in August 2009 by the Discovery shuttle, in a specially built “Mouse Drawer System”. This box, which held the mice in separate, secure cages, was installed on the space station for three months before returning to earth on the Atlantis shuttle in November.

astronaut with mouse box
The mice spent 91 days in the microgravity conditions of the ISS – attended by the astronauts

The mice were fed and watered automatically and watched over by the ISS astronauts.

Three of the creatures survived the trip – the others falling victim to mishap or health complaints – and after landing, their various tissues and organs were collected by scientists involved in the 20 different studies.

Dr Nusgens and her colleagues got to work on three precious, small skin samples, which they compared with samples from three mice kept in a replica drawer system back on the ground, for the same period of time.

The outer skin layer of the space mice was thinner than that of the earth-bound control mice. There were also changes to the hair follicles.

“Hair grows and then stops growing – they rest and then they fall, this is the cycle,” Dr Nusgens explained. “The cycle of the hair [in the space mice] was disturbed.”

In particular, their hairs were in the opposite stage of the cycle from where they should have been – actively growing instead of resting.

“But we don’t know how or why – we have no more experimental data to explain this problem,” Dr Nusgens told BBC News.

microscope images
The skin of the space mice, on the left, had hair follicles (dark patches) that were in an active hair-growing phase instead of resting

Furthermore, this observation is less applicable to human astronauts, because our skin is only hairy in small sections.

Similarly, there were some changes to the layer of muscle lying directly under the skin – which is absent in humans.

“The main finding is that the skin of the mice that spent three months on the ISS became thinner than the control mice remaining on the ground,” Dr Nusgens said.

Long time no ‘g’

Dr David Green is a senior lecturer in aerospace physiology at King’s College London. He told the BBC that these experiments were particularly noteworthy because of their duration: never before has a non-human animal spent this long in zero-g.

“Ninety-one days for a mouse corresponds to about seven years for a human,” Dr Green said.

And although the study is only small, it emphasises that skin health is “highly relevant” to human spaceflight, especially as we look towards longer missions such as manned flights to Mars.

“It suggests that the skin is sensitive to being in microgravity, and that over long periods of time that might create a dysregulation in the proliferation and the replacement of skin.

“One of the interesting things about skin is that we’re constantly replacing it. Of course, the top layer is dead skin cells – but actually it’s a highly active organ.”

Breast cancer ‘alters bone to spread’

Posted by

0


 

Breast cancer

Breast cancers can manipulate the structure of bone to make it easier to spread there, a study has found.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield said the tumours were effectively “fertilising” the bone to help themselves grow.

The study, in the journal Nature, said it may be possible to protect bone from a tumour’s nefarious influence and consequently stop the cancer’s spread.

Cancer charities said this opened up “a whole new avenue for research”.

Around 85% of breast cancers that spread around the body end up in bone, at which point the cancer is difficult to treat and more deadly.

Bone

The scientists discovered patients with secondary cancers had higher levels of an enzyme called LOX being produced by their tumours and released into the blood.

Bone is constantly being broken down and rebuilt. But in a series of experiments on mice, the research team showed LOX was disrupting the process and leaving lesions and holes in the bone.

Using drugs to block LOX prevented the cancer from spreading.

Dr Alison Gartland, a reader in bone and cancer biology at the university, told the BBC News website: “We think it’s a significant breakthrough in trying to prevent metastases (secondary tumours) in breast cancer.

“The cancer cells in the primary tumour are actually fertilising the soil for the future growth of itself, LOX is changing the environment in bone to make it better to grow.”

Close up of bone
The structure of the bone is changed by breast cancers

The animal tests also showed that a set of osteoporosis drugs called bisphosphonates could prevent the spread of cancer.

Bisphosphonates also interfere with the way bone is recycled in order to strengthen it.

They are already given to some cancer patients, but the Sheffield team believe they could have a much larger role.

The effect was discovered only in oestrogen-negative breast cancers. They account for around a third of cases, but are far more deadly.

Katherine Woods, from Breast Cancer Campaign and Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: “By unveiling the role that the protein LOX is playing, these results open up a whole new avenue for research and treatments that could stop breast cancer spreading to the bone.

“The research also adds weight to the growing body of evidence supporting the role of bisphosphonates in stopping secondary breast cancer in its tracks.

“The reality of living with secondary breast cancer in the bone is a stark one, which leaves many women with bone pain and fractures that need extensive surgery just when they need to be making the most of the time they have left with friends and family.”

The findings may also apply in colon cancer.