Healthcare and Alternative Medicine by MyBiologica.com: febbraio 2014

venerdì 28 febbraio 2014

12 smart tips for getting your kids heart healthy

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Learn more about Herbalife – Follow @Herbalife on Twitter- Like Herbalife on Facebook- What is Herbalife? More fitness advice – Watch ‘Fit Tips’ Videos on YouTube- Straightforward exercise advice- Get fit = be happy. Positivity advice Nutrition advice for you – Watch ‘Healthy Living’ on YouTube- Dieting advice you might like- Interesting weight loss articles Copyright © 2013 Herbalife International of America, Inc.

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Sex After a Cancer Diagnosis Is Difficult, but Not Impossible

Sex After a Cancer Diagnosis Is Difficult, but Not Impossible

Having sex is a natural and important part of every loving couple’s relationship. Most take this for granted and could not imagine being robbed of this simple pleasure.
Sadly, this is exactly what happens to many people...

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NASA scientists find evidence of water in meteorite, reviving debate over life on Mars

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A team of scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has found evidence of past water movement throughout a Martian meteorite, reviving debate in the scientific community over life on Mars.In 1996, a group of scientists at Johnson led by David McKay, Everett Gibson and Kathie Thomas-Keprta published an article in Science announcing the discovery of biogenic evidence in the Allan Hills 84001(ALH84001) meteorite. In this new study, Gibson and his colleagues focused on structures deep within a 30-pound (13.7-kilogram) Martian meteorite known as Yamato 000593 (Y000593). The team reports that newly discovered different structures and compositional features within the larger Yamato meteorite suggest biological processes might have been at work on Mars hundreds of millions of years ago.The team’s findings have been published in the February issue of the journal Astrobiology. The lead author, Lauren White, is based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Co-authors are Gibson, Thomas-Keprta, Simon Clemett and McKay, all based at Johnson. McKay, who led the team that studied the ALH84001 meteorite, died a year ago.”While robotic missions to Mars continue to shed light on the planet’s history, the only samples from Mars available for study on Earth are Martian meteorites,” said White. “On Earth, we can utilize multiple analytical techniques to take a more in-depth look into meteorites and shed light on the history of Mars. These samples offer clues to the past habitability of this planet. As more Martian meteorites are discovered, continued research focusing on these samples collectively will offer deeper insight into attributes which are indigenous to ancient Mars. Furthermore, as these meteorite studies are compared to present day robotic observations on Mars, the mysteries of the planet’s seemingly wetter past will be revealed.”Analyses found that the rock was formed about 1.3 billion years ago from a lava flow on Mars. …

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Food production in northeastern U.S. may need to change if climate does

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If significant climate change occurs in the United States it may be necessary to change where certain foods are produced in order to meet consumer demand. In a paper published online this week in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University provide an overview of current farmland use and food production in the Northeastern U.S., identifying potential vulnerabilities of the 12-state region.Led by Tim Griffin, Ph.D., associate professor and director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment program at the Friedman School, the authors evaluated the degree to which the Northeast can satisfy the food needs of its residents, a concept known as regional self-reliance. Their results are based on calculations of regional agricultural land use and production between 2001 and 2010. In that time, over 100 crops were harvested and livestock production involved all six major species. The authors’ estimates also include fish and shellfish.”Food production in the United States is concentrated in certain areas, but it is important to explore the ability of all regions to produce food. This is certainly the case in the Northeast, which has both a high population density and a declining agricultural land base,” Griffin said. “For example, most of the country’s pork products come from Iowa and North Carolina, and most of the lettuce is grown in California’s Salinas Valley. Looking ahead, there is the potential for climate change to disrupt food production in those key areas. If irrigation in the Central Valley of California was reduced due to climate change, could other regions make up for that drop in production? And what is the capacity of the Northeast region to produce more?”Griffin and colleagues noted substantial diversity in the Northeast food system, for crops in particular. …

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Retention leads to discipline problems in other kids

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When students repeat a grade, it can spell trouble for their classmates, according to a new Duke University-led study of nearly 80,000 middle-schoolers.In schools with high numbers of grade repeaters , suspensions were more likely to occur across the school community. Discipline problems were also more common among other students, including substance abuse, fighting and classroom disruption.Public debate typically focuses on how retention affects an individual student’s academic performance, said lead author Clara Muschkin. So she and her colleagues decided to take a wider view and consider how holding students back may affect the school as a whole.”The decision to retain students has consequences for the whole school community,” said Muschkin, an associate director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy. “That wider effect is an issue worth considering as we debate this policy.”The study by Muschkin, Elizabeth Glennie and Audrey Beck looked at 79,314 seventh-graders in 334 North Carolina middle schools.For information on retention and discipline problems, the authors turned to administrative data from the state’s public school system. The authors found that different schools have greatly varying numbers of older and retained students, with significant consequences.The authors took pains to account for a range of factors that might offer alternative explanations for their findings, including schools’ socioeconomic composition and parents’ educational status. Even after controlling for such factors, the presence of older and retained students was still strongly linked with more discipline problems in the entire group.For instance, if 20 percent of children in seventh grade were older than their peers, the chance that other students would commit an infraction or be suspended increased by 200 percent.”There’s a strong relationship here that we think is likely to be causal,” Muschkin said.The study focused on two groups in particular: students who repeated a grade, and students who were a year older than their classmates, on average. When there were more older and retained students present, discipline problems increased for all subgroups in the study, including black and white students and boys and girls. Two groups saw a particularly large jump in discipline problems: white students and girls of all races.”This finding took us by surprise,” Muschkin said. “These two groups appear to be a bit more affected than others by the influence of older peers.”In early adolescence, a time of major physical and psychological change, students are particularly vulnerable to peer influence, Muschkin noted. However, more research is needed to understand why some subgroups appear to respond more strongly than others to the influence of their classmates, she said.Holding students back became a popular educational option as criticism of “social promotion” mounted. …

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Education attenuates impact of TBI on cognition

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Kessler Foundation researchers have found that higher educational attainment (a proxy of intellectual enrichment) attenuates the negative impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on cognitive status. The brief report, Sumowski J, Chiaravalloti N, Krch D, Paxton J, DeLuca J. Education attenuates the negative impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on cognitive status, was published in the December issue of Archives of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Volume 94, Issue 12:2562-64.Cognitive outcomes vary post-TBI, even among individuals with comparable injuries. To examine this finding, investigators looked at whether the hypothesis of cognitive reserve helps to explain this differential cognitive impairment following TBI. Kessler Foundation investigators have previously supported the cognitive reserve hypothesis in persons with multiple sclerosis, demonstrating that lifetime intellectual enrichment protects patients from cognitive impairment, as published in Multiple Sclerosis Journal. In the current study, they sought to determine whether individuals with TBI with greater intellectual enrichment pre-injury (estimated with education), are less vulnerable to cognitive impairment.Researchers compared 44 people with moderate to severe TBI with 36 healthy controls. Their cognitive status (processing speed, working memory, episodic memory) was evaluated with neuropsychological tasks. “Although cognitive status was worse in the TBI group,” said Dr. Sumowski, senior research scientist in Neuropsychology & Neuroscience Research at Kessler Foundation, “higher education attenuated the negative effect of TBI on cognitive status, such that persons with higher education were protected against TBI-related cognitive impairment.”"These results support the hypothesis of cognitive reserve in TBI, ie, as in MS, higher intellectual enrichment benefits cognitive status,” concluded Dr. Chiaravalloti, the Foundation’s director of TBI Research. …

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Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

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Mesothelioma: What is?
The mesothelium is a tissue that lines, such as a thin film, the inner wall of the chest and abdomen and the space around the heart.
This membrane is also of most of the internal organs and protects them thanks to the production of a particular liquid lubricant that...

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#Mesothelioma, #Mesothelioma-Evolution, #Mesothelioma-Of-The-Tunica-Vaginalis, #Mesothelioma-Symptoms, #Pericardial-Mesothelioma, #Peritoneal-Mesothelioma, #Pleural-Mesothelioma

Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

Racial bias in pain perception appears among children as young as 7

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A new University of Virginia psychology study has found that a sample of mostly white American children — as young as 7, and particularly by age 10 — report that black children feel less pain than white children.The study, which builds on previous research on bias among adults involving pain perception, is published in the Feb. 28 issue of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.”Our research shows that a potentially very harmful bias in adults emerges during middle childhood, and appears to develop across childhood,” said the study’s lead investigator, Rebecca Dore, a Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology at U.Va.Dore noted that this finding is important because many kinds of explicit biases emerge in early childhood — such as children wanting to play with friends of their own race — but those types of biases often decline in later childhood.However, the racial bias in children’s perceptions of others’ pain appears to strengthen from early to late childhood. The researchers found no evidence of a racial bias among their study participants at the age of 5, but the bias began showing up among participants at the age of 7, and then became particularly prominent at the age of 10.”Our finding can’t speak to how parents or teachers, for example, might intervene and try to halt these biases at an early age, but we currently are running a study that might speak to that question,” Dore said. “However, what this study can inform is the timing of any interventions. If we want to prevent this bias from developing, it needs to be done by age 7, or age 10 at the latest.”Dore said that parents and teachers often feel uncomfortable addressing issues of race with young children, but the study suggests that, because bias is present at young ages, adults should begin addressing it early.”Talking to children about racial issues early may be important for preventing the development of biases that could have consequences in adulthood,” she said.Dore and her colleagues conducted their investigation by testing children at ages 5, 7 and 10. The children were asked to rate the severity of pain that they believed would be felt by other children of the same gender in different situations, such as bumping their head, or slamming a hand in a door. When shown pictures of black children, the 7- and 10-year-olds tended to rate the pain as being less severe than when they were shown pictures of white children.The scope of Dore’s study does not explain why children are exhibiting this bias; however, her collaborators have research showing that one reason adults perceive black people as feeling less pain is because they assume black people have experienced more hardship in their lives. The researchers currently are investigating whether such perceptions may explain this bias in children.Participants in the study were primarily white; therefore the study does not address whether similar biases occur among a sample of black children. Future studies may look into that question, Dore said.The research was done in light of similar studies conducted with adults, which have shown that white and black adults tend to perceive black people as feeling less pain than white people. …

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Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

Faster anthrax detection could speed bioterror response

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Shortly following the 9/11 terror attack in 2001, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to news outlets and government buildings killing five people and infecting 17 others. According to a 2012 report, the bioterrorism event cost $3.2 million in cleanup and decontamination. At the time, no testing system was in place that officials could use to screen the letters. Currently, first responders have tests that can provide a screen for dangerous materials in about 24-48 hours. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have worked with a private company to develop a new method for anthrax detection that can identify anthrax in only a few hours.”Normally to identify whether an organism is present, you have to extract the material, culture it, and then pick colonies to examine that might turn out to be anthrax bacteria,” said George Stewart, PhD, a medical bacteriologist at MU’s Bond Life Sciences Center and chairman of the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and McKee Endowed Professor within the MU College of Veterinary Medicine. “Then you conduct chemical testing which takes some time — a minimum of 24 to 48 hours. Using this newly-identified method, we can reduce that time to about five hours.”Using a virus known as a “bioluminescent reporter phage,” Stewart and graduate student, Krista Spreng, tested the phage at the MU Laboratory for Infectious Disease Research. The phage, developed by David Schofield at Guild BioSciences, a biotech company in Charleston, S.C., is injected in the sample causing anthrax to glow if present. The team also found that the method can detect low levels of anthrax bacteria and rule out false positives. The added benefit to this reporting system is its ability to show if anthrax is present and whether or not the spores are alive, Stewart said.The next step for the research team at MU and Guild BioSciences will be to get the bioluminescent reporter phage approved by federal regulatory agencies so a product can be produced and distributed, Stewart said.”In the years since the post 9/11 postal attacks, we haven’t had any bona fide anthrax attacks,” Stewart said. …

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Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

Link found between pollutants, certain complications of obesity

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A team of researchers at the IRCM in Montral led by Rmi Rabasa-Lhoret, in collaboration with Jrme Ruzzinfrom the University of Bergen in Norway, found a link between a type of pollutants and certain metabolic complications of obesity. Their breakthrough, published online this week by The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, could eventually help improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cardiometabolic risk associated with obesity, such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.Although obesity is strongly linked to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, a subset of obese individuals, termed “metabolically healthy but obese,” appears relatively protected from the development of such cardiometabolic complications. IRCM researchers are studying the factors that seem to protect obese individuals who remain metabolically healthy, in an attempt to find therapeutic avenues to prevent complications for others who are at risk.”Recently, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have been found to accelerate the development of prediabetes and obesity in mice, thereby mimicking the unfavourable cardiometabolic profile characteristic of certain obese individuals,” says Rmi Rabasa-Lhoret, MD, PhD, endocrinologist and Director of the Metabolic Diseases research unit at the IRCM. “As a result, the aim of our study was to test whether metabolically healthy but obese individuals have lower circulating levels of POPs than obese individuals with cardiometabolic complications.”Persistent organic pollutants are human-made chemicals used in agricultural, industrial and manufacturing processes. Due to their toxicity, POPs have been strictly and internationally regulated to ensure public health. However, because they have the ability to resist environmental degradation, POPs can still be found all around the world, even in areas where they have never been used, and remain omnipresent in our environment and food products. Thus, virtually all humans are exposed to POPs daily.”Exposure to POPs comes primarily from the environment and the consumption of food such as fatty fish, meat and milk products,” explains Jrme Ruzzin, PhD, expert in the field of research on POPs. “One important characteristic of POPs is their lipid solubility, meaning they accumulate in the body’s fatty tissues. As their name suggests, they are also persistent so the body cannot easily eliminate them. POPs can therefore have significant impacts on human health, and have been shown to affect reproduction, promote cancer, and be involved in the development of metabolic diseases.”IRCM researchers conducted a study of 76 obese women of similar age, body mass index and fat mass index, in which they analyzed the concentration of 21 POPs, as well as cardiometabolic risk factors. …

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Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

giovedì 27 febbraio 2014

New study reveals evolution at work: Analyses elucidate a part of the brain particular to primates

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New research by UC Santa Barbara’s Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor of Neuroscience, reveals some very unique evolutionary innovations in the primate brain.In a study published online today in the journal Neuron, Kosik and colleagues describe the role of microRNAs — so named because they contain only 22 nucleotides — in a portion of the brain called the outer subventricular zone (OSVZ). These microRNAs belong to a special category of noncoding genes, which prevent the formation of proteins.”It’s microRNAs that provide the wiring diagram, dictating which genes are turned on, when they’re turned on and where they’re turned on,” said Kosik, who is also the co-director of UCSB’s Neuroscience Research Institute and a professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. “There’s a core set with which all kinds of really complex things can be built, and these noncoding genes know how to put it together.”The researchers were looking for these noncoding genes, Kosik continued, because as organisms become more complex through evolution, the number of these noncoding genes has greatly expanded. “But the coding genes — the ones that make proteins — have really not changed very much,” he said. “The action has been in this noncoding area and what that part of the genome is doing is controlling the genes.”Many of the microRNAs that Kosik’s team found and subsequently sequenced are newly evolved in primates. The work showed that these tiny control elements were overrepresented in the OSVZ of the developing macaque brain tissues they analyzed. The tissue samples were provided by a lab at the Stem-cell and Brain Research Institute near Lyon, France, headed by research director and co-author Colette Dehay.Study results indicate that the appearance of the OSVZ is very much associated with the invention of new microRNAs. “There might be some relationship — although we can’t prove it — between the invention of some of these new noncoding genes, microRNAs, and the appearance of a new structure, the OSVZ,” Kosik said. “Trying to connect an anatomical, morphological invention with genes is very difficult, but our work shows a possible molecular basis for the tools that were needed to build this novel structure.”The analysis found that these new microRNAs target old genes, many involved in the cell cycle, which is responsible for cell division (mitosis). …

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Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

Understanding Medicare: An Overview of Parts A-D

Understanding Medicare: An Overview of Parts A-D

Medicare is a federal health insurance program maintained by the U.S. government that covers millions of Americans. Those over the age of 65 are generally eligible to receive Medicare coverage. Additionally, Medicare coverage should also be...

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Schoolgirl Injured in Lift Shaft Fall

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Home » No Win No Fee » Latest Personal Injury News » 2014 » 2 » Schoolgirl Injured in Lift Shaft FallSchoolgirl Injured in Lift Shaft FallCity of Edinburgh Council has been fined by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) after a school girl fell more than five metres down a lift shaft.Morgan Seaton, who was 15 years old at the time of the accident, sustained three fractured vertebrae, bruising and a sprained wrist after she and three other pupils became stuck in a lift at the Liberton High School.Ms Seaton called the school’s office from her mobile phone and teachers quickly arrived and told the children to remain calm while they awaited rescue.But instead of phoning the emergency services, teachers from the school decided to ask the janitor to fetch a lift key and attempt to free the students themselves.After managing to open the lift’s doors on the first floor, it was found that the bottom third of the cab could be seen through the opening.The doors to the lift were then opened so that teachers could calm the children down, but it was then decided by the teachers that the pupils should be squeezed out of the opening and into the corridor.One boy was helped out of the lift successfully, but when Ms Seaton attempted to follow suit she accidentally fell down the shaft and crashed to the ground five metres below.It was at this point that the emergency services were notified and when firefighters arrived they found the lift had not been isolated and could have resumed moving at any point, with catastrophic consequences.She had to take two weeks off school and spent several months in pain, disrupting her education and social life.For failing to have contingency policies in place and neglecting to train teachers in how to deal with broken lifts, the HSE took the school’s operator City of Edinburgh Council to court.It pleaded guilty to breaching Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and was fined £8,000.After the verdict was handed down, HSE inspector Hazel Dobb said, “A 15-year-old girl was seriously injured in an incident that was wholly preventable. As a result she spent several months in pain.”The teachers were well intentioned in their attempts to help, but had they received suitable information and guidance on how to deal with trapped people in lifts they would have called for help and not put pupils at such risk of injury.”By Chris StevensonOr Call freephone 0800 884 0321SHARE THIS

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Climate change: No warming hiatus for extreme hot temperatures

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Extremely hot temperatures over land have dramatically and unequivocally increased in number and area despite claims that the rise in global average temperatures has slowed over the past 10 to 20 years during what some public commentators have called a global warming hiatus period.Scientists from UNSW’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and international colleagues made the finding when they focused their research on the rise of temperatures at the extreme end of the spectrum where impacts are felt the most.”It quickly became clear, the ‘hiatus’ in global average temperatures did not stop the rise in the number, intensity and area of extremely hot days,” said one of the paper’s authors, Dr Lisa Alexander.”Our research has found a steep upward tendency in the temperatures and number of extremely hot days over land and the area they impact, despite the complete absence of a strong El Nio since 1998.”The researchers examined the extreme end of the temperature spectrum because this is where global warming impacts are expected to occur first and are most clearly felt. As Australians saw this summer and the last, extreme temperatures in inhabited areas have powerful impacts on our society.The observations also showed that extremely hot events are now affecting, on average, more than twice the area when compared to similar events 30 years ago.To get their results, which are published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, the researchers examined hot days starting from 1979. Temperatures of every day throughout the year were compared against temperatures on that exact same calendar day from 1979-2012. The hottest 10 per cent of all days over that period were classified as hot temperature extremes.Globally, on average, regions normally expect around 36.5 extremely hot days in a year. The observations showed that during the period from 1997-2012, regions that experienced 10, 30 or 50 extremely hot days above this average saw the greatest upward trends in extreme hot days over time and the area they impacted.The consistently upward trend persisted right through the “hiatus” period from 1998-2012.”Our analysis shows there has been no pause in the increase of warmest daily extremes over land and the most extreme of the extreme conditions are showing the largest change,” said Dr Markus Donat.”Another interesting aspect of our research was that those regions that normally saw 50 or more excessive hot days in a year saw the greatest increases in land area impact and the frequency of hot days. In short, the hottest extremes got hotter and the events happened more often.”While global annual average near-surface temperatures are a widely used measure of climate change, this latest research reinforces that they do not account for all aspects of the climate system.A stagnation in the increase of global annual mean temperatures, over a relatively short period of 10 to 20 years, does not imply that global warming has stopped. Other measures, such as extreme temperatures, ocean heat content and the disappearance of land-based ice all show continuous changes that are consistent with a warming world.”It is important when we take global warming into account, that we use measures that are useful in determining the impacts on our society,” said Professor Sonia Seneviratne from ETH Zurich, who led the study while on sabbatical at the ARC Centre.”Global average temperatures are a useful measurement for researchers but it is at the extremes where we will most likely find those impacts that directly affect all of our lives. Clearly, we are seeing more heat extremes over land more often as a result of enhanced greenhouse gas warming.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of New South Wales. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Cows are smarter when raised in pairs: Evidence practice of housing calves alone linked to learning difficulties

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Cows learn better when housed together, which may help them adjust faster to complex new feeding and milking technologies on the modern farm, a new University of British Columbia study finds.The research, published today in PLOS ONE, shows dairy calves become better at learning when a “buddy system” is in place. The study also provides the first evidence that the standard practice of individually housing calves is associated with certain learning difficulties.”Pairing calves seems to change the way these animals are able to process information,” said Dan Weary, corresponding author and a professor in UBC’s Animal Welfare Program. “We recommend that farmers use some form of social housing for their calves during the milk feeding period.”As farms become increasingly complex, with cattle interacting with robotic milkers, automated feeding systems and other technologies, slow adaptation can be frustrating for cows and farmers alike.”Trouble adjusting to changes in routine and environment can cause problems for farmers and animals,” Weary says, adding that the switch from an individual pen to a paired one is often as simple as removing a partition.Farmers often keep calves in individual pens, believing this helps to reduce the spread of disease. But Weary says that the concern is unwarranted if cows are housed in small groups. “The risk of one animal getting sick and affecting the others is real when you’re talking about large groups, but not with smaller groups like two or three,” he says.BackgroundThe study, conducted at UBC’s Dairy Education and Research Centre in Agassiz, B.C., involved two cognitive tests for two groups of Holstein calves housed in individual pens or in pairs.In the first test, researchers introduced a novel object (a red plastic bin) into the calf’s pen. When first exposed to the novel object all calves showed interest, as expected. But after multiple encounters with the bin, the individually housed calves continued to respond as if this was their first exposure, while the paired calves began to habituate and ignored the bin.”The test suggests that individual rearing can make calves more sensitive to novelty, and thus less able to habituate to changes in their environment,” says Prof. Dan Weary. “This could make it more difficult for a farm animal to be trained or to do something as simple as walk down a path and not be overwhelmed by a bright light or a new noise.”In the second test, the calves were taught to complete a simple task, approaching a black bottle full of milk and avoiding an empty white bottle. After the calves learned to preferentially visit the black bottle, the researchers switched the rules to determine how well the calves were able to adjust to a change in rules.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of British Columbia. …

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Prenatal Nicotine Exposure May Lead to ADHD in Future Generations

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Prenatal exposure to nicotine could manifest as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children born a generation later, according to a new study by Florida State University College of Medicine researchers.Professors Pradeep G. Bhide and Jinmin Zhu have found evidence that ADHD associated with nicotine can be passed across generations. In other words, your child’s ADHD might be an environmentally induced health condition inherited from your grandmother, who may have smoked cigarettes during pregnancy a long time ago. And the fact that you never smoked may be irrelevant for your child’s ADHD.The researchers’ findings are published in the current issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.”What our research and other people’s research is showing is that some of the changes in your genome — whether induced by drugs or by experience — may be permanent and you will transmit that to your offspring,” said Bhide, chair of developmental neuroscience and director of the Center for Brain Repair at the College of Medicine.Bhide and Zhu, assistant professor of biomedical sciences, used a mouse model to test the hypothesis that hyperactivity induced by prenatal nicotine exposure is transmitted from one generation to the next. Their data demonstrated that there is a transgenerational transmission via the maternal, but not the paternal, line of descent.”Genes are constantly changing. Some are silenced and others are expressed, and that happens not only by hereditary mechanisms, but because of something in the environment or because of what we eat or what we see or what we hear,” Bhide said. “So the genetic information that is transmitted to your offspring is qualitatively different than the information you got from your parents. This is how things change over time in the population.”Building on recent discoveries about how things like stress, fear or hormonal imbalance in one individual can be passed along to the next generation, Bhide and Zhu were curious about a proven link between prenatal nicotine exposure and hyperactivity in mice.Their work at the Center for Brain Repair has included extensive research around ADHD, a neurobehavioral disorder affecting about 10 percent of children and 5 percent of adults in the United States. Researchers have struggled to produce a definitive scientific explanation for a spike in ADHD diagnoses in the last few decades.”Some reports show up to a 40 percent increase in cases of ADHD — in one generation, basically,” Bhide said. “It cannot be because a mutation occurred; it takes several generations for that to happen.”One possible contributing factor, though unproven, is that the current spike in ADHD cases correlates in some manner to an increase in the number of women who smoked during pregnancy as cigarettes became fashionable in the United States around the time of World War II and in the decades that followed.”Other research has shown a very high correlation between heavy smoking during pregnancy and the incidence of kids with ADHD,” Bhide said.”What’s important about our study is that we are seeing that changes occurring in my grandparents’ genome because of smoking during pregnancy are being passed to my child. …

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Fossilized human feces from 14th century contain antibiotic resistance genes

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A team of French investigators has discovered viruses containing genes for antibiotic resistance in a fossilized fecal sample from 14th century Belgium, long before antibiotics were used in medicine. They publish their findings ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.”This is the first paper to analyze an ancient DNA viral metagenome,” says Rebecca Vega Thurber of Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not involved in the research.The viruses in the fecal sample are phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, rather than infecting eukaryotic organisms such as animals, plants, and fungi. Most of the viral sequences the researchers found in the ancient coprolite (fossil fecal sample) were related to viruses currently known to infect bacteria commonly found in stools (and hence, in the human gastrointestinal tract), including both bacteria that live harmlessly, and even helpfully in the human gut, and human pathogens, says corresponding author Christelle Desnues of Aix Marseille Universit.The communities of phage within the coprolite were different, taxonomically, from communities seen within modern human fecal samples, but the functions they carry out appear to be conserved, says Desnues. That reinforces the hypothesis that the viral community plays a fundamental role within the human gastrointestinal tract, and one which remains unchanged after centuries, even while the human diet and other human conditions have been changing.Over the last five years, considerable evidence has emerged that bacteria inhabiting the gut play an important role in maintaining human health, for example, as part of the human metabolic system, says Desnues. Her own research suggests that the bacteriophage infecting the gut bacteria may help maintain these bacteria. Among the genes found in the phage are antibiotic resistance genes and genes for resistance to toxic compounds. Both toxins and antibiotics are common in nature, and Desnues suggests that the resistance genes may simply be protecting the gut bacteria from them.”Our evidence demonstrates that bacteriophages represent an ancient reservoir of resistance genes and that this dates at least as far back as the Middle Ages,” says Desnues.”We were interested in viruses because these are 100 times more abundant than human cells in our bodies, but their diversity is still largely unexplored,” says Desnues. “In the present study, we thus focused on the viral fraction of the coprolite by using, for the first time, a combination of electron microscopy, high-throughput sequencing and suicide PCR approaches.”Desnues and her collaborators are currently conducting further studies on the fungi and parasites in the coprolites, which she says will be of interest not only to microbiologists, but to historians, anthropologists, and evolutionists.The genesis of the research was an urban renewal project in the city of Namur, Belgium, in which latrines dating back to the 1300s were discovered beneath a square.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by American Society for Microbiology. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Mesothelioma: What is - Types - Evolution - Symptoms

Factors affecting self-reporting among people with traumatic brain injury evaluated

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Kessler Foundation researchers have found that among individuals with TBI, depression and self-awareness affect subjective reports of memory, quality of life (QOL), and satisfaction with life. The study was published in the February 2014 issue of Brain Injury.Impairment in self-awareness (the ability to accurately recognize one’s own abilities and limitations) often occurs after TBI. Intact self-awareness would result in accurate self-reports; however, intact self-awareness can also be associated with depressive symptoms. This is the first study to examine the complex relationship between self-awareness and depression, while also accounting for the self-reporting of well being and QoL by individuals with TBI.Researchers studied 30 community-based adults with TBI of at least one-year duration. Testing included the Awareness Questionnaire, Health Status Questionnaire (SF-12), Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Memory Functioning Questionnaire (MFQ), and the Chicago Multiscale Depression Inventory (CMDI).”Our findings help answer the question: What abilities must be considered when interpreting responses on a self-report questionnaire?” explained Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, director of TBI Research at Kessler Foundation, and project director, Northern NJ TBI System. “These results showed first that higher levels of self-awareness are associated with poorer QoL, reports of poor memory performance and better strategy use; and also that symptoms of depression are significantly associated with self-reports of QoL and Satisfaction with life (greater depression associated with lower QoL and lower satisfaction),” reported Dr. Chiaravalloti. “Because of this impact of depressive symptoms, it is very important to diagnose and treat depression in rehabilitation and develop comprehensive treatment plans for individuals with TBI.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Kessler Foundation. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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