Hum bhi toh World No 1 hain

While the entire nation went gaga over the Indian cricket team winning the World Cup last weekend,

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5 Ways to healthy living

If you think having a perfect state of health is a Herculean task, think twice. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

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10 things every woman should know

We list 10 things every woman should know

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Women feel pain more than men

Women have more intense responses to pain than men, say scientists.

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Car pollution can damage brain: Study

Washington: Being exposed to highway pollution can cause brain damage in mice akin to memory loss and Alzheimer's

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Brain scans help predict Alzheimer's

Brain scans may help predict which adults with mild cognitive impairment are likelier to develop Alzheimer's

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Home » Health Parkinson's disease linked to cancer

University of Utah School of Medicine researchers has found strong evidence that Parkinson's

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Antidepressants could help with stroke recovery

Washington: Patients treated with a short course of antidepressants after a stroke have significantly greater improvement in physical recovery than patients treated with a placebo, a University of Iowa study has found.

It is the first to demonstrate that this physical recovery continues to improve for at least nine months after the antidepressant medication is stopped.

"The idea that antidepressants might benefit early recovery from stroke has been around for a couple of years," said Robert Robinson, UI professor and senior study author.

"But one major question left unanswered by previous studies was ''does the effect last after the medication stops?''

"What our study demonstrates is that not only does the beneficial effect last, but the improvement in physical recovery continues to increase even after the patients stop taking the medication,” added Robinson.

The study found that both depressed and non-depressed stroke patients who received antidepressant medication had greater physical recovery after stroke than patients who received placebo.

In addition, the effect compared to placebo was observed even after controlling for patients' age, total hours of rehabilitation therapy and initial severity of stroke.

In the study, 83 patients who had recently had a stroke were randomly assigned to receive antidepressants (54 patients) or placebo (29 patients) for three months.

The patients' physical, cognitive and psychiatric symptoms were assessed every three months for one year. Thirty-six of the patients who received antidepressants and 25 of the patients on placebo completed the one-year study.

Using a global measure of overall physical and motor disability, the researchers showed that antidepressants significantly reduced physical disability over the one-year period compared to placebo.

The study is detailed in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry Feb. 24.

ANI

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New world record: Heart surgery on 100-year-old man

Rome: Italy has set a new world record in the field of medical science with an open-heart surgery on a 100-year-old man, a media report said.

Medical experts from Florence city's Careggi Hospital carried out the surgery using the implantation of an artery-widening balloon and three stents or expandable tubes.

The unnamed patient - a former doctor - was saved with a procedure never used before on a person of his age, Xinhua reported citing the country's ANSA news agency.

The patient, an ex-urologist born in February 1911, was said to be "doing well".

IANS

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Genetic change helps lung tumour spread

Scientists have identified a genetic change that makes lung tumours more likely to spread to other parts of the body.

The findings offer new insight into how lung cancers metastasize and could help identify drug targets to combat metastatic tumors, which account for 90 per cent of cancer deaths.

The researchers, led by Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found the alteration while studying a mouse model of lung cancer.

They then compared their mouse data to genetic profiles of human lung tumors and found that reduced activity of the same gene, NKX2-1, is associated with higher death rates for lung-cancer patients.

Lead author Monte Winslow and his colleagues at the Koch Institute studied mice that are genetically programmed to develop lung tumors.

The mice's lung cells can be induced to express an activated form of the cancer-causing gene Kras, and the tumour suppressor gene p53 is deleted.

While all of those mice develop lung tumours, only a subset of those tumors metastasizes, suggesting that additional changes are required for the cancer to spread.

The researchers analyzed the genomes of metastatic and non-metastatic tumors in hopes of finding some genetic differences that would account for the discrepancy. "The absence of NKX2-1 activity in metastatic tumours was the most striking difference," said Winslow.

The NKX2-1 gene codes for a transcription factor — a protein that controls expression of other genes. Its normal function is to control development of the lung, as well as the thyroid and some parts of the brain.

When cancerous cells turn down the expression of the gene, they appear to revert to an immature state and gain the ability to detach from the lungs and spread through the body, seeding new tumours.

Once the researchers identified NKX2-1 as a gene important to metastasis, they started to look into the effects of the genes that it regulates.

They zeroed in on a gene called HMGA2, which had been previously implicated in other types of cancer. It appears that NKX2-1 represses HMGA2 in adult tissues. When NKX2-1 is shut off in cancer cells, HMGA2 turns back on and helps the tumor to become more aggressive.

They also found that human tumors with NKX2-1 missing and HMGA turned on tended to be metastatic, though not all metastatic tumors fit that profile.

The study is to be published in the April 6 online issue of Nature.

ANI

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Moms-to-be who exercise help strengthen child’s heart health after birth

Washington: A study on the benefits of exercising while pregnant has found that moms-to-be, who do so, help their children to have healthy hearts after birth.

When it was reported a couple of years back that exercising strengthens a fetus’ heart control, many pregnant women took heed and hit the ground running, literally.

Some signed up for prenatal yoga classes, while others found new ways to incorporate low-impact aerobic activities into their daily lives.

Linda E. May, an exercise physiologist and anatomist at Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, has been heading up a series of studies on fetal heart development for the past four years.

“It is my hope that these findings will show that efforts focused on improving health need to start during pregnancy rather than in childhood,” she said.

“Most of the focus today is on school-age children, but interventions should be focused long before that,” she stated.

A 2008 pilot study conducted by May and her collaborators at KCUMB and the Kansas City University of Medicine found that pregnant women who exercised at least 30 minutes three times a week had fetuses with lower heart rates – a sign of heart health – during the final weeks of development.

Now the team has revealed that the fetuses’ improved cardiovascular heart control is maintained one month after pregnancy, which indicates that mothers’ efforts to stay active have lasting effects.

May’s research team’s latest investigation involved 61 moms-to-be and monitored maternal-fetal and infant heart function four times over the course of the study.

“The system that controls heart function is known to improve with regular aerobic exercise, and improved heart control function is evidence of a healthy cardiovascular system and overall health,” May said. “Not only did the mothers’ exercise help maintain and improve their own health, but it set their babies up for a healthier start,” she added.

The study results are to be presented this week at the Experimental Biology 2011 annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

ANI

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