Land of the Sick, Home of the Obese
Jul 29 at 6:06pm by Aileen
In the year 2030, what’s left of us ‘Baby-Boomers’ will be in our late 70s and early 80s. We will not likely be the largest demographic bump in the general population at that time, as more than half of us will have died off by then. 2030 is also the year that researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with researchers at other institutions, project that 86% of Americans could be obese if current trends continue.
Worse, projections show that 96% of non-Hispanic black women and 91% of Mexican-American men will be in those numbers. The costs of this situation amount to nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of obesity-related health care spending, or 1 in every 6 health care dollars.
The projection is based on three decades’ worth of collected data from national surveys. As the obese population ages the health care costs related to being fat will more than double every decade. In addition to hypertension, heart disease and stroke, there is also the link between being overweight and type-2 diabetes. Not to mention the fact that obese children - an increasing problem - have a shorter life expectancy than healthy children.
Surprise! Human Babies Should Drink Human Milk
May 7 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Michael Kramer, a professor of pediatrics at McGill University reported this week that breastfeeding raises children’s IQ and improves their academic performance later in childhood.
Their study evaluated children in 31 Belarusian hospitals and clinics. Half of the women were directly encouraged to breastfeed exclusively, the other half did things the ‘normal’ way (for Belorussia). Six and a half years later the children’s IQs were tested and their teachers submitted academic performance ratings. Scores on both were significantly higher for the children of women encouraged to breastfeed, though there is no indication that the researchers confirmed how many of those mothers actually did breastfeed or for how long.
“Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter,” Kramer said.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Hindu Goddess Baby
Apr 9 at 11:11pm by Aileen
For something different and profound, consider the case of a baby girl named Lali born near New Delhi, India on March 11. She has a rare birth defect called diprosopus that gave her two faces on one head. ABC News reported that the resident medical officer of the Saifi Hospital where Lali was born has thus far been unsuccessful in his attempts to convince the parents to allow CT scans or MRI to determine whether there are duplicated internal organs or invisible, life threatening deformities that might be corrected by surgery.
Most babies with this condition are stillborn or die shortly after birth, but Lali so far has shown no breathing or digestion difficulties, both mouths are being fed. She was born normally and left the hospital with her mother 8 hours after birth.
This condition is not technically a case of cojoined twinning, where a single embryo duplicates and does not completely separate. Rather, it is due to malfunctioning in the developing embryo of a single protein called Sonic hedgehog homolog [SHH]. SHH protein governs the width of the face and features, and governs proper development of the brain and spinal cord via a signaling cascade.
It’s Deja Vu All Over Again!
Jan 30 at 11:11pm by Aileen
Deep Brain Stimulation in Hypothalamus Triggers Deja Vu in Patient
A Neuroscience team in Canada tried an experimental treatment for a patient with morbid obesity a variety of treatments failed to control. They were stimulating potential appetite suppressing sites in his brain’s hypothalamus via implanted electrodes when he suddenly had a strong feeling of deja vu.
The ‘live’ memory recurred under double-blind restimulation. An arched bundle of fibers in the hypothalamus called the fornix was shown to drive temporal lobe and hippocampus activity, important parts of the brain’s memory circuitry.
This is a fascinating article, a sure eye-catcher for any of us who have ever experienced a strong sense of deja vu. Yet what it describes doesn’t sound much like deja vu to me, per my own experience and the general understanding of the phenomenon among most people I know.
Deja vu isn’t a dim memory that suddenly presents itself “as if” we’re there right now. It’s the sudden realization that what’s happening right now is something we’ve experienced before. I’ve had it so strongly that I knew what people were going to say and do before they said and did it!
So I have to wonder if perhaps the neuroscientists don’t have a clear understanding of the phenomenon, or the patient didn’t know the difference between reliving an old memory and remembering the present, or the writer of the press release didn’t know what the term refers to. I’m leaning toward the last possibility, since the actual quotations of the researchers speak of memory, not deja vu. Yet another terminology confusion in the science press, but definitely an interesting finding!
New Heart Created on Old Heart Scaffolding!
Jan 14 at 4:04pm by Aileen
The exciting science news this week leads with a real shocker - researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a beating heart in the laboratory! This landmark achievement represents a stunning advance toward the dream of growing new organs for transplant from the patient’s own marrow stem cells.
Using a process called “whole organ decellularization,” new hearts were grown from dead rat and pig hearts from which all cells are removed, leaving only the extracellular matrix - the framework between the cells that gives form to the organ. Dr. Doris A. Taylor, head of the team that created the beating rat heart, described the guiding principle for the project -
“…give nature the tools, and get out of the way.”
Eating Dirt: Research Finally Discovers A Reason!
Jan 11 at 6:06pm by Aileen
They call it “geophagy,” but we all know it as just plain dirt-eating. Dogs do it, horses do it, children do it regularly too. Now a study of chimpanzee dirt-eating by a research team from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has demonstrated actual health benefits of the practice.
Down to Earth Remedies for Chimps: Eat Mud reports that the research team collected samples of soil eaten by chimpanzees, along with samples of the plants they were eating at the same time and analyzed the material for bioactive properties. Moreover, they found that by ingesting a certain type of dirt along with the leaves of T. rubescens trees, anti-malarial properties in the leaves became active when they did not become active when ingested by themselves.
BERT and ERNI Play Important Roles in CNS Development
Jan 10 at 10:10pm by Aileen
…and you thought those silly Muppets were just silly!
With the melodic strains of Ernie’s Greatest Hit “Rubber Ducky” echoing my head, fans will be delighted to know that the dynamic duo created by Jim Henson and Frank Oz in 1969 as stars of the famous Sesame Street educational program have even more to do with brain development that originally thought!
Research published in the January 10 online issue of PLoS Biology reports A Mechanism Regulating the Onset of Sox2 Expression in the Embryonic Neural Plate has been discovered.
Big Pharma’s Big Lie Refuted
Jan 8 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Two York University researchers have published a study in the January 3rd issue of PLoS Medicine [Public Library of Science] demonstrating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend nearly twice as much money promoting their drugs to doctors and the public than on research and development of new drugs.
Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development puts the lie to the pharmaceutical industry’s self-serving mantra that the cost of drugs in the U.S. has to be higher than anywhere else in the world so that newer, better drugs - and drugs designed to treat relatively rare but deadly diseases - can be developed. High prices for prescription drugs offset this massive expenditure, they tell us, and the U.S. government has tended to accept the lie without challenge.
Human ETs, Tropical Polar Regions, and Self-Eating Cells as a Treatment for Cancer
Dec 31 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Earth scientists have managed to discover a lot of not-earth planets in the last couple of decades, though none of them look to be very much like Earth. Now Eric Ford, a University of Florida astronomer, has published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal that suggests To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out as Living Planet…
If they could measure our planet’s rotation, its atmospheric gases, the presence of abundant water, and calculate what our temperature range must be, our planet would definitely stand out as life-friendly. To intelligent life forms a lot like us, anyway. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it kind of neat to consider myself as ET. Even though I doubt we’d qualify as cute enough or friendly enough to other ETs for them to want to actually meet us.
Objectively Measuring Subjective Pain
Nov 16 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Doctors involved in treating pain have long been stifled by the subjectivity of pain - relying on patients to rate their own pain, but having no objective way to measure how intense the pain really is. The journal Nature reported on November 14 that they have discovered a signal from the brain that does objectively correlate with the amount of pain a person is experiencing.
The researchers from Oxford University in Britain believe that the signal couldbe used to refine pain relief techniques, offering better treatment for people in pain. The signal is identified as low frequency brain waves emanating from two regions deep in the brain. The more pain being experienced, the longer the waves last.
“It is an objective measure that correlates with a subjective measure,” said Morten Kringelbach, head of the research team. They hope this signal could help refiine deep-brain stimulation for chronic pain management through the development of a stimulator that only kicks in when these low frequency signals begin.
The ability to treat chronic pain directly without the use of drugs that affect consciousness or depress general physiology would be a significant advancement in medical care, alleviating the suffering of millions of people every year.
Related Links:
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