Study finds bacteria may reduce risk for kidney stones
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Researchers from Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center have found that the bacteria Oxalobacter formigenes (O. formigenes), a naturally occurring bacterium that has no known side effects, is associated with a 70 percent reduction in the risk of recurrent kidney stones. These findings appear online in the March issue Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Kidney stones are an important health problem in many countries. In the United States, the lifetime risk for developing a stone is five to 15 percent, and a five-year risk for recurrence is 30 to 50 percent. The economic impact of hospital admissions for this condition is $2 billion per year.
According to the researchers, up to 80 percent of kidney stones are predominately composed on calcium oxalate (CaOx) and urinary oxalate is a major risk factor for CaOx stone formation. O. formigenes metabolizes oxalate in the intestinal tract and is present in a large proportion of the normal adult population.
Ayurvedic Medicine: Ancient Approach to Balance Life, Health
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Ayurvedic (i-yur-VA-dik) medicine, thought to be one of the world’s oldest systems of natural medicine, is said to be about balance in one’s life. It encompasses yoga, massage, meditation and much more.
The March issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter provides an overview of ayurvedic medicine, which originated in India more than 5,000 years ago and is still practiced there side by side with conventional Western medicine.
According to ayurvedic medicine, balance in life starts at birth. Every newborn possesses innate qualities that help to frame their physical and mental patterns. This state is called prakriti. At the other end of the spectrum is vikruti, a person’s present state.
Drinking and aggression among university students often depends on the context
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* Aggression and violence among university students often involve alcohol consumption.
* A new study has found that both drinking levels and drinking contexts are important.
* Aggression is more likely when students drink at a fraternity, sorority or campus residence, and when a partner is present.
* Attending parties also increases the risk of aggression, especially for women.
A significant proportion of university students experience violence, under circumstances that often involve alcohol. A new study has found that drinking at a fraternity, sorority or campus residence increases the likelihood of aggression, and that attending parties can especially increase aggression for women.
Results are published in the March issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
More than meets the ear in successful cocktail party conversations
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Just picture the scene: you’re at a cocktail party, talking to someone you would like to get to know better but the background noise is making it hard to concentrate. Luckily, humans are very gifted at listening to someone speaking while many other people are talking loudly at the same time. This so-called cocktail-party-phenomenon is based on the ability of the human auditory system to decompose the acoustic world into discrete objects of perception.
It was originally believed that the major acoustic cue used by the auditory system to solve this task was directional information of the sound source, but even though localisation of different sound sources with two ears improves the performance, it can be achieved monaurally, for example in telephone conversations, where no directional information is available.
Scientists led by Holger Schulze at the Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, and the Universities of Ulm, Newcastle and Erlangen have now found a neuronal mechanism in the auditory system that is able to solve the task based on the analysis of the temporal fine structure of the acoustic scene.
Depression, Anxiety Are Linked to Obesity, Unhealthy Habits
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People who suffer from depression or anxiety are much more likely to be obese and to smoke — both major risk factors for chronic disease — according to a large nationwide study.
“The relationship between obesity and depression is plausible for several reasons,” said lead author Tara Strine, of the Division of Adult and Community Health in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “First, some patients who are overweight may be prone to depression because of societal attitudes towards obesity. Also, while depression can lead to decreased appetite and weight loss in some individuals, others eat more and gain weight.”
The study, in the March/April issue of the journal General Hospital Psychiatry, compiled data from more than 200,000 adults in 38 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. All participated in the 2006 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a large telephone survey that monitors the prevalence of key health behaviors.
British study links radiation to heart disease
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Nuclear power plant workers exposed to chronic radiation may face a higher risk of heart disease, according to a large British study published on Tuesday.
Other research has shown that high exposure over a short period of time may cause heart disease but the new findings link exposure to long-term exposure at relatively lower levels, the researchers said in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
“Our results provide more evidence of a link,” said Steve Jones, a researcher at Westlakes Scientific Consulting, who led the study. “This adds to the evidence of similar associations from other studies.
Women are Treated Less Frequently than Men with Statins, Aspirin and Beta- Blockers
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Women and men experience a similar prevalence of adverse drug reactions in the treatment of coronary artery disease; however, women are significantly less likely than their male counterparts to be treated with statins, aspirin, and beta-blockers according to a new study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center. The study is published in the March issue of the journal Gender Medicine.
“Developments in disease recognition and novel treatment strategies have led to a significant decline in overall cardiovascular death rate among men, but these dramatic improvements have not been observed in women,” said Dr. Jonathan R. Enriquez, lead author of the study and resident internal medicine physician at Rush. “This may be related to underutilization of medical therapies such as aspirin, ß-blockers, ACE inhibitors or statins.”
Mental distress may up stroke risk
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Increased psychological distress, as measured on a standardized scale, is linked to an elevated risk of having a stroke, according to a large study. By contrast, major depression, either recent or lifetime, does not increase the risk.
The results “showed that those people who reported the most psychological distress at baseline had a 40 percent increased risk of ... stroke compared to those who were least psychologically distressed,” Dr. Paul G. Surtees told Reuters Health.
Pregnant woman uses train toilet, baby slips out
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A newborn baby girl survived an ignoble birth after slipping down the toilet bowl of a moving Indian train onto the tracks when a pregnant woman unexpectedly gave birth while relieving herself on Tuesday.
“My delivery was so sudden,” said the Bhuri Kalbi, the mother of the infant, born two months prematurely. “I did not even realize that my child had slipped from the hole in the toilet.”
Parents urged to go beyond ‘big talk’ about sex
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Parents should consider having repeated discussions with their children about many aspects of sex instead of one “big talk” on impersonal topics linked to sexuality such as puberty, researchers said on Monday.
“Parents who take a checklist approach to broadening their sexual discussion with their children are unlikely to have as great an influence ... as parents who introduce new sexual topics and then develop them through repeated discussions,” said their report published in the journal Pediatrics.
Breakfast keeps teens lean
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Teenagers who regularly eat breakfast tend to weigh less, exercise more and eat a more healthful diet than their breakfast-skipping peers, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The study involved 2,216 adolescents in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota whose eating patterns, weight and other lifestyle issues were tracked for five years. They were just under 15 years old when they entered the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics.
The more regularly the teens ate breakfast, the lower their body mass index was, according to the study. BMI is a measure of body weight relative to height. Those who always skipped breakfast on average weighed about 5 pounds (2.3 kg) more than their peers who ate the meal every day.
Severely milk-allergic kids can be desensitized
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Children who have a potentially life-threatening allergy to cow’s milk can often “learn” to tolerate milk through a carefully orchestrated, supervised program in which they sample milk in progressively higher doses, research suggests.
After one year, more than one-third of cow’s milk allergic children who completed the program had become completely tolerant to cow’s milk and more than half could tolerate limited amounts of milk, the research team reports in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
“Desensitization, or ‘specific oral tolerance induction,’ can be achieved in a significant percentage of children with very severe allergic reactions,” Dr. Egidio Barbi from ‘Burlo Garofolo’ University of Trieste told Reuters Health.
Researchers Describe Mechanisms by Which Capon Gene Causes Heart Rhythm Disturbances
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A research team from the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, Johns Hopkins University and China Medical University and Hospital in Taiwan have described for the first time the mechanisms by which variants of a specific gene, CAPON or NOS1AP, can disrupt normal heart rhythm. Until recently, CAPON was not even suspected of existing in heart tissue or playing a role in heart function.
The study, conducted in guinea pigs, confirms that CAPON naturally exists in the ventricles (pumping chambers) of the heart. The researchers show that CAPON interacts with a signaling molecule (NOS1) in heart muscle to influence signaling pathways and modify cell-to-cell interactions (calcium ion and potassium ion channels) that control electrical currents.
Eduardo Marbán, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, is senior author of an article, published online March 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition), that fully describes these events.
Misdiagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis
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In an article recommended by Annelies Boonen of Faculty of 1000 Medicine, researchers look at the way rheumatoid arthritis is diagnosed by analysing the administrative databases used by physicians in Quebec.
The authors of the paper, published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, report that general practitioners diagnosed 79% of the 10,001 rheumatoid arthritis cases but only 27% of patients then saw a rheumatologist. Half of these patients were seen in the first three months and of these it emerges that only 17% received confirmation they were actually suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.
New target for cancer therapy may improve treatment for solid tumors
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Targeting and killing the non-malignant cells that surround and support a cancer can stop tumor growth in mice, reports a research team based at the University of Chicago Medical Center in the March 1, 2008, issue of the journal Cancer Research. The discovery offers a new approach to treating cancers that are resistant to standard therapy.
Many solid tumors develop elaborate mechanisms to prevent recognition and elimination by the immune system. Due to their genetic instability they often discard the tumor antigen-presenting cell-surface structures that alert the immune system that these cells are harmful. Without these “flags,” the white blood cells fail to recognize and kill infected or cancerous cells. These tumors then often grow rapidly and resist treatment with chemotherapy or efforts to boost the immune system’s response to the tumor.
