Czech Republic

New Study Shows Evidence That Vitamin K2 Positively Impacts Inflammation.

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Story at-a-glance

  • A specific type of vitamin K2 (MK-7) may help prevent inflammation, according to new research
  • Vitamin K2, particularly menaquinone-7 (MK-7), has been the subject of extensive research because it stays active in your body longer enabling your body to benefit from much lower levels
  • Vitamin K2 works synergistically with a number of other nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D; one of its biological roles is to help move calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth
  • MK-7 is found in high levels in the fermented soybean-based food called natto, certain cheeses such as Edam and Brie, and can also be taken in supplement form.

Chronic Pain

 

Chronic inflammation is low-grade and systemic, often silently damaging your tissues over an extended period of time. This process can go on for decadeswithout you noticing, until disease symptoms suddenly occur long after irreversible damage is done.

Chronic inflammation is the source of many diseases, including cancer, obesity, and heart disease, which essentially makes it the leading cause of death in the U.S.

Knowing how to keep chronic inflammation at bay is also invaluable in protecting your health, which brings us to a new study on vitamin K2 presented at the 13th International Nutrition and Diagnostics Conference (INDC 2013) in the Czech Republic.1

The study revealed that a specific type of vitamin K2 (MK-7) may help prevent inflammation. But before I get into the details, it’s important to understand the different forms that vitamin K comes in.

The Two Basic Types of Vitamin K – K1 and K2

Vitamin K can be classified as either K1 or K2:

    1. Vitamin K1: Found in green vegetables, K1 goes directly to your liver and helps you maintain a healthy blood clotting system. (This is the kind of K that infants need to help prevent a serious bleeding disorder.)

It is also vitamin K1 that keeps your own blood vessels from calcifying, and helps your bones retain calcium and develop the right crystalline structure.

    1. Vitamin K2: Bacteria produce this type of vitamin K. It is present in high quantities in your gut, but unfortunately most is passed out in your stool. K2 goes straight to vessel walls, bones and tissues other than your liver.

It is present in fermented foods, particularly cheese and the Japanese food natto, which is by far the richest source of K2.

Vitamin K1 can convert to K2 in your body, but there are some problems with this; the amount of K2 produced by this process alone is typically insufficient. Making matters even more complex, there are several different forms of vitamin K2. MK-8 and MK-9 come primarily from dairy products. MK-4 and MK-7 are the two most significant forms of K2 and act very differently in your body:

    • MK-4 is a synthetic product, very similar to vitamin K1, and your body is capable of converting K1 into MK-4. However, MK-4 has a very short biological half-life of about one hour, making it a poor candidate as a dietary supplement.

After reaching your intestines, it remains mostly in your liver, where it is useful in synthesizing blood-clotting factors.

    • MK-7 is a newer agent with more practical applications because it stays in your body longer; its half-life is three days, meaning you have a much better chance of building up a consistent blood level, compared to MK-4 or K1. MK-7 is extracted from the Japanese fermented soy product called natto.

You could actually get loads of MK-7 from consuming natto, as it is relatively inexpensive and is available in most Asian food markets. Few Americans, however, tolerate its smell and slimy texture.

Vitamin K2 as MK-7 Helps Prevent Inflammation in Your Body

Vitamin K2, particularly menaquinone-7 (MK-7), has been the subject of much research because it stays active in your body longer so you are able to benefit from much lower levels. The study from the Czech Republic evaluated the role of MK-7 in inflammation and found that it prevents inflammation by inhibiting pro-inflammatory markers produced by white blood cells called monocytes.

NattoPharma reported:2

“The novel finding in our study supplements our three-year clinical study showing MK-7’s ability to slow down cardiovascular aging and osteoporosis, and it should further serve as the catalyst to create the urgency of daily consumption of MK-7… We know that in Western populations, most people do not obtain enough due to modern diet.

Our food is increasingly deficient in vitamin K2 in particular, and up to 98% of the general healthy population may be vitamin K2 insufficient with long-term detrimental impact on bone and cardiovascular health.”

It’s important to realize that dietary components can either trigger or preventinflammation from taking root in your body. For example, whereas synthetic trans fats and sugar, particularly fructose, will increase inflammation, eating healthy fats such as animal-based omega-3 fats found in krill oil or the essential fatty acid gamma linolenic acid (GLA) will help to reduce them.

MK-7 appears to be one more healthful natural substance that can be added to the anti-inflammatory list, and I’ll discuss the best food sources of this shortly.

As for inflammation in general, if you have not already addressed your diet, this would be the best place to start, regardless of whether you’re experiencing symptoms of chronic inflammation or not. To help you get started, I suggest following my free Optimized Nutrition Plan, which starts at the beginner phase and systematically guides you step-by-step to the advanced level.

What Else Is Vitamin K2 Good For?

The health benefits of vitamin K2 go far beyond blood clotting, which is done by vitamin K1, and vitamin K2 also works synergistically with a number of other nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D. Its biological role is to helpmove calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth. It also plays a role in removing calcium from areas where it shouldn’t be, such as in your arteries and soft tissues.

Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue, a naturopathic physician, estimates that about 80 percent of Americans do not get enough vitamin K2 in their diet to activate their K2 proteins to shuttle the calcium where it needs to be and remove it from the places where it shouldn’t be. Vitamin K2 deficiency leaves you vulnerable to a number of chronic diseases, including:

Osteoporosis Heart disease Heart attack and stroke
Inappropriate calcification, from heel spurs to kidney stones Brain disease Cancer

 

“I talked about vitamin K2 moving calcium around the body. Its other main role is to activate proteins that control cell growth. That means K2 has a very important role to play in cancer protection,” Rheaume-Bleue says. “When we’re lacking K2, we’re at much greater risk for osteoporosis, heart disease, and cancer. And these are three concerns that used to be relatively rare. Over the last 100 years, as we’ve changed the way we produced our food and the way we eat, they have become very common.”

Researchers are also looking into other health benefits, as well. For example, one study published in the journal Modern Rheumatology found that vitamin K2 has the potential to improve disease activity besides osteoporosis in those with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).3 Another, published in the journal Science found that vitamin K2 serves as a mitochondrial electron carrier, thereby helping maintain normal adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production in mitochondrial dysfunction, such as that found in Parkinson’s disease.4 Further, according to a 2009 Dutch study, subtypes MK-7, MK-8 and MK-9 in particular are associated with reduced vascular calcification even at small dietary intakes (as low as 1 to 2 mcg per day).5

What Are the Best Food Sources of Vitamin K2, Including MK-7?

You can obtain all the K2 you’ll need (about 200 micrograms) by eating 15 grams of natto daily, which is half an ounce. However, natto is generally not appealing to a Westerner’s palate, so you can also find vitamin K2, including MK-7, in other fermented foods. Fermented vegetables, which are one of my new passions, primarily for supplying beneficial bacteria back into your gut, can be a great source of vitamin K if you ferment your own using the proper starter culture.

We had samples of high-quality fermented organic vegetables made with our specific starter culture tested, and were shocked to discover that not only does a typical serving of about two to three ounces contain about 10 trillion beneficial bacteria, but it also contained 500 mcg of vitamin K2.

Note that not every strain of bacteria makes K2. For example, most yogurts have almost no vitamin K2. Certain types of cheeses are very high in K2, and others are not. It really depends on the specific bacteria. You can’t assume that any fermented food will be high in K2, but some fermented foods are very high in K2, such as natto. Others, such as miso and tempeh, are not high in K2. In my interview with Dr. Rheamue-Bleue, she identified the cheeses highest in K2 are Gouda and Brie, which contain about 75 mcg per ounce. Additionally, scientists have found high levels of MK-7 in a type ofcheese called Edam.

How Much Vitamin K2 Do You Need?

Although the exact dosing is yet to be determined, Dr. Cees Vermeer, one of the world’s top researchers in the field of vitamin K, recommends between 45 mcg and 185 mcg daily for adults. You must use caution on the higher doses if you take anticoagulants, but if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150 mcg daily. Fortunately, you don’t need to worry about overdosing on K2—people have been given a thousand-fold “overdose” over the course of three years, showing no adverse reactions (i.e., no increased clotting tendencies). If you have any of the following health conditions, you’re likely deficient in vitamin K2 as they are all connected to K2:

  • Do you have osteoporosis?
  • Do you have heart disease?
  • Do you have diabetes?

Please note also that if you opt for oral vitamin D, you also need to consume vitamin K2 in your food or take supplemental vitamin K2, as they work synergistically together and an imbalance may actually be harmful. If you do not have any of those health conditions, but do NOT regularly eat high amounts of the following foods, then your likelihood of being vitamin K2 deficient is still very high:

  • Grass-fed organic animal products (i.e. eggs, butter, dairy)
  • Certain fermented foods such as natto, or vegetables fermented using a starter culture of vitamin K2-producing bacteria
  • Certain cheeses such as Brie and Gouda (as mentioned, these two are particularly high in K2, containing about 75 mcg per ounce)

If You’re Considering a Vitamin K2 Supplement …

There’s no way to test for vitamin K2 deficiency. But by assessing your diet and lifestyle as mentioned above you can get an idea of whether or not you may be lacking in this critical nutrient.  The next best thing to dietary vitamin K2 is a vitamin K2 supplement. MK-7 is the form you’ll want to look for in supplements, because in a supplement form the MK-4 products are actually synthetic. They are not derived from natural food products containing MK-4. The MK-7– long-chain, natural bacterial-derived vitamin K2– is from a fermentation process, which offers a number of health advantages:

  • It stays in your body longer
  • It has a longer half-life, which means you can just take it once a day in very convenient dosing

Finally, remember to always take your vitamin K supplement with fat since it is fat-soluble and won’t be absorbed without it.

The living dead: new embalming method aids surgical training

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An embalming technique pioneered in Austria that produces near life-like cadavers for medical use is set to improve surgical skills and accelerate the adoption of new surgical techniques and technology.

skull

Using a process developed over several decades, the so-called Thiel soft-fix embalming method retains the body’s natural look and feel.

Skin and muscles remain flexible, allowing the limbs to be moved, while the body’s internal organs are clearly identifiable and respond to the surgeon’s scalpel as if alive.

Conventional methods of preservation using formaldehyde leave the body stiff and fragile, and complicate the understanding of how the body will respond to a particular surgical procedure.

Like any practical skill, practice is crucial to learning surgery.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

The benefits for surgeons are absolutely massive”

Professor Sue BlackForensic anthropolgist, Dundee University

Enabling surgeons to try out a technique on a dead body before operating on a live patient allows surgeons to understand anatomy, minimise potential damage and rehearse the procedure before trying it for real.

“The benefits for surgeons are absolutely massive,” says Sue Black, head of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at Dundee University, which recently brought the Thiel technique to the UK.

“There is no doubt surgical skill-sets are incredibly enhanced, while it also allows for innovation,” she says.

Prof Black says patients will benefit from the more rapid adoption of new surgical products and methods.

Until 2006 it was illegal in the UK to practise surgery on cadavers. This meant that surgeons had to practise their skills on synthetic models or the carcasses of animals such as cats, dogs, rabbits and pigs.

Frozen body parts were also used, but they carry a high risk of infection and disintegrate in a day or two.

Prior to 2006, cadavers could be used for dissection but not practising surgery, out of respect for the deceased.

Using animals is never ideal as their anatomy is not always a good match for the human body. Similarly, bodies preserved using formaldehyde, a toxic solution, are never as good as the real thing.

“A formaldehyde-preserved body is not like a real body,” says Dr Lena Vogt, a foot surgeon from Germany.

“It starts with the skin. You just touch it lightly with the scalpel and it falls apart.”

She says that the bodies lack colour and the layers of tissue stick together making it “difficult to decide if [it] is a nerve, an artery or a vein.”

Eureka moment at the butcher’s

Typically, a break is needed every 20 minutes to escape the fumes.

The ones from the Austrian institute which pioneered the technique are far superior, she says.

“They look more like in the operating room. It is close to reality. You have the opportunity to understand the body much better; that helps you do surgery much better. Surgery is all about practice.”

Up until the late 19th century, bodies had been preserved using arsenic, a very toxic poison.

This was replaced with formaldehyde after its discovery in 1867 by German chemist August Wilhem von Hofman.

However, it too is highly toxic and carcinogenic. Its use is restricted in many countries and discouraged by a 2007 EU ruling.

In the early 1960s, an anatomist called Walter Thiel, who was head of the Graz Anatomy Institute in southern Austria, began to look for an alternative.

His starting point was his local butcher’s shop where he noticed that local “wet cured” ham preserved in a solution of salts had a superior texture to the formaldehyde-preserved flesh in his lab.

It took 30 years to perfect, starting with prime cuts of beef, more similar to human flesh than pork according to Thiel, before progressing to whole human bodies.

In all it took at least 1,000 donated bodies to get it right, says Friedrich Anderhuber, the late Prof Thiel’s protégé and successor as head of the institute.

It was a lengthy matter of trial and error. A body would be injected with a preserving fluid and then soaked in the liquid for two years.

It was a matter of finding the right compromise between preserving of one part of the body and another, says Anderhuber.

“If you feel a muscle or a liver of a cadaver, it must feel like a muscle or a liver,” says Anderhuber. The joints and tendons must also move like those of a living body he says, so surgeons can understand how they work.

Thiel eventually settled on a colourless and almost odourless solution of salts, antiseptic boric acid, ethylene glycol, an antifreeze, and a very low level of formaldehyde.

It is so effective in killing bacteria and fungi that it is safe to dissect the body without gloves and the cadavers can be kept at room temperature.

Preservation room

In the basement of the Graz anatomy institute a dozen bodies lying like sardines on a metal rack hauled up from a preservation tank in the cellar are noticeably limp.

Numbered plastic tags are attached to their thumbs, toes and earlobes, so they can be brought together for burial.

These have been in their tanks for a year. Once the soaking process is complete, they are transferred into plastic bags, the subsequent loss of fluid making the flesh more elastic and lifelike.

Altogether the basement houses around 250 bodies at any one time; around a year’s supply for the institute.

In the next room, six newly arrived corpses lie on stainless steel tables. An assistant is shaving one because the hair would turn to slime in the preservation fluid.

The bodies of two elderly men and one woman are mid-preparation, heads propped on sections of blue plastic tubing.

These are jaundiced and slightly swollen from the fluid being fed into blood vessels in the neck and skull.

Each needs around 20 litres (five gallons) of preserving fluid, says Dr Anderhuber. Later, red dye is injected to give the blood vessels and flesh a realistic colour.

Fifty years since Dr Thiel’s first experiments with pieces of steak his method is slowly catching on elsewhere.

According to Dr Anderhuber there is also interest in learning the method from Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Spain, Switzerland and West India.

Prof Black’s centre in Dundee, the first place to adopt Thiel embalming in the UK, recently used its last formaldehyde-preserved cadaver and will use only Thiel bodies from now on.

It has 11 tanks which can submerge 44 bodies at any one time and rack space for around 100.

The apparently ghoulish art of preserving the dead can help transform surgery to improve and prolong life.

Source: BBC

 

Predicted strain coverage of a meningococcal multicomponent vaccine (4CMenB) in Europe: a qualitative and quantitative assessment.

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Background

A novel multicomponent vaccine against meningococcal capsular group B (MenB) disease contains four major components: factor-H-binding protein, neisserial heparin binding antigen, neisserial adhesin A, and outer-membrane vesicles derived from the strain NZ98/254. Because the public health effect of the vaccine, 4CMenB (Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Siena, Italy), is unclear, we assessed the predicted strain coverage in Europe.

Methods

We assessed invasive MenB strains isolated mainly in the most recent full epidemiological year in England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway. Meningococcal antigen typing system (MATS) results were linked to multilocus sequence typing and antigen sequence data. To investigate whether generalisation of coverage applied to the rest of Europe, we also assessed isolates from the Czech Republic and Spain.

Findings

1052 strains collected from July, 2007, to June, 2008, were assessed from England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway. All MenB strains contained at least one gene encoding a major antigen in the vaccine. MATS predicted that 78% of all MenB strains would be killed by postvaccination sera (95% CI 63—90, range of point estimates 73—87% in individual country panels). Half of all strains and 64% of covered strains could be targeted by bactericidal antibodies against more than one vaccine antigen. Results for the 108 isolates from the Czech Republic and 300 from Spain were consistent with those for the other countries.

Interpretation

MATS analysis showed that a multicomponent vaccine could protect against a substantial proportion of invasive MenB strains isolated in Europe. Monitoring of antigen expression, however, will be needed in the future.

Source: Lancet

Predicted strain coverage of a meningococcal multicomponent vaccine (4CMenB) in Europe: a qualitative and quantitative assessment.

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Summary

Background

A novel multicomponent vaccine against meningococcal capsular group B (MenB) disease contains four major components: factor-H-binding protein, neisserial heparin binding antigen, neisserial adhesin A, and outer-membrane vesicles derived from the strain NZ98/254. Because the public health effect of the vaccine, 4CMenB (Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Siena, Italy), is unclear, we assessed the predicted strain coverage in Europe.

Methods

We assessed invasive MenB strains isolated mainly in the most recent full epidemiological year in England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway. Meningococcal antigen typing system (MATS) results were linked to multilocus sequence typing and antigen sequence data. To investigate whether generalisation of coverage applied to the rest of Europe, we also assessed isolates from the Czech Republic and Spain.

Findings

1052 strains collected from July, 2007, to June, 2008, were assessed from England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway. All MenB strains contained at least one gene encoding a major antigen in the vaccine. MATS predicted that 78% of all MenB strains would be killed by postvaccination sera (95% CI 63—90, range of point estimates 73—87% in individual country panels). Half of all strains and 64% of covered strains could be targeted by bactericidal antibodies against more than one vaccine antigen. Results for the 108 isolates from the Czech Republic and 300 from Spain were consistent with those for the other countries.

Interpretation

MATS analysis showed that a multicomponent vaccine could protect against a substantial proportion of invasive MenB strains isolated in Europe. Monitoring of antigen expression, however, will be needed in the future.

Source: Lancet

 

‘Star Trek’ Prototype Tractor Beam Developed By Scientists.

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r-STARTREKTRACTORBEAM-large570

It may still be a few years away from practical use, but scientists have created a real tractor beam, like the ones featured in the “Star Trek” TV series and movies.

Simply put, this technology utilizes a beam of light to attract objects, according to theUniversity of St. Andrews in Scotland. In “Star Trek,” tractor beams were often used to pull spaceships and other objects closer to the focal point of the light source attached to another ship.

Researchers at St. Andrews and the Institute of Scientific Instruments, or ISI, in the Czech Republic have figured out a way of generating an optical field that can reverse the radiation pressure of light.

German astronomer Johannes Kepler noticed in 1619 that comet tails point away from the sun, a radiation force that the St. Andrews and ISI team hoped to reverse.

According to the BBC, Pavel Zemanek of ISI said, “The whole team have spent a number of years investigating various configurations of particles delivery by light. I am proud our results were recognised in this very competitive environment and I am looking forward to new experiments and applications. It is a very exciting time.”

So far, based on their research findings published in Nature Photonics, the team is able to move tiny particles, on a microscopic level.

Team leader Tomas Cizmar, of the St. Andrews School of Medicine, said the new technology has great potential.

“The practical applications could be very great, very exciting,” Cizmar told the BBC. “The tractor beam is very selective in the properties of the particles it acts on, so you could pick up specific particles in a mixture. Eventually, this could be used to separate white blood cells, for example.”

While the researchers hope this tractor beam technology will be useful in the medical field, they don’t anticipate it can ever be used to capture and haul large objects like spaceships.

“Unfortunately, there is a transfer of energy. On a microscopic scale, that is OK, but on a macro scale, it would cause huge problems,” said Cizmar.

“It would result in a massive amount of heating of an object, like a space shuttle. So trapping a spaceship is out of the question.”

Tractor beam concepts have been experimented with before.

In 2011, a NASA-funded study examined how special laser beams might be used to capture and gather sample materials on unmanned, robotic space missions,Space.com reported.

“Though a mainstay in science fiction, and ‘Star Trek’ in particular, laser-based trapping isn’t fanciful or beyond current technological know-how,” Paul Stysley of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said at the time.

And in 2012, New York University physicists David Ruffner and David Grier developed a way to use special lasers, called Bessel beams, to direct light in concentric circles at an object — albeit a 1.5-micrometer silica sphere — and the beams could then reconstruct themselves on opposite sides of the sphere, making it possible to pull the object back to the source of the beams.

The only problem with this theory is that, like the current tests by the scientists at St. Andrews and ISI, applying these techniques to move very large objects isn’t practical yet — the huge energy requirements to make it work would destroy the objects trying to be pulled.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

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