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Mamma Mia! Listening to Mozart Lowers Blood Pressure…But ABBA Has No Impact
Relaxing to a soothing Mozart symphony can lower the blood pressure as much as cutting salt from the diet or exercising, a new study has shown.
But for people concerned about their heart, it might be wise to stay clear of ABBA, which has no impact at all.
Scientists in Germany played Mozart’s Symphony No 40 in g minor, dances by Johann Strauss and songs by ABBA to 60 volunteers, monitoring their blood pressure before and after the experiment.
They found that Mozart lowered systolic blood pressure (the pressure in blood vessels when the heart beats) by 4.7 mm Hg, Strauss 3.7 mm Hg but the Swedish pop group made no significant difference.
Diastolic blood pressure (when the heart rests between beats) also fell by 2.1 mm Hg for Mozart and 2.9 mm Hg for Strauss.
Previous studies have found that aerobic exercise such as cycling, running or brisk walking had a similar impact on lowering blood pressure. Reducing salt by 6 grams per day brings systolic blood pressure down by between 7 and 4 mm Hg… Read More>>
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Antidepressants Plus Blood Thinners Cause Brain Cancer Cells to Eat Themselves in Mice
June 29, 2016
Missing Link Found Between Brain, Immune System
In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.
“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?’ now we can approach this mechanistically. Because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, professor in the UVA Department of Neuroscience and director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG). “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”
“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said. “Hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”
New Discovery in Human Body
Kevin Lee, PhD, chairman of the UVA Department of Neuroscience, described his reaction to the discovery by Kipnis’ lab: “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation – and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding – that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.”
Even Kipnis was skeptical initially. “I really did not believe there are structures in the body that we are not aware of. I thought the body was mapped,” he said. “I thought that these discoveries ended somewhere around the middle of the last century. But apparently they have not.”
‘Very Well Hidden’
The discovery was made possible by the work of Antoine Louveau, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Kipnis’ lab. The vessels were detected after Louveau developed a method to mount a mouse’s meninges – the membranes covering the brain – on a single slide so that they could be examined as a whole. “It was fairly easy, actually,” he said. “There was one trick: We fixed the meninges within the skullcap, so that the tissue is secured in its physiological condition, and then we dissected it. If we had done it the other way around, it wouldn’t have worked.” …Read More>>
Source: Medical Xpress
‘Deep Learning’ Reveals Unexpected Genetic Roots of Cancers, Autism and Other Disorders
In the decade since the genome was sequenced in 2003, scientists and doctors have struggled to answer an all-consuming question: Which DNA mutations cause disease?
A new computational technique developed at the University of Toronto may now be able to tell us.
A Canadian research team led by professor Brendan Frey has developed the first method for ‘ranking’ genetic mutations based on how living cells ‘read’ DNA, revealing how likely any given alteration is to cause disease. They used their method to discover unexpected genetic determinants of autism, hereditary cancers and spinal muscular atrophy, a leading genetic cause of infant mortality.
Their findings appear in today’s issue of the leading journal Science.
Think of the human genome as a mysterious text, made up of three billion letters. “Over the past decade, a huge amount of effort has been invested into searching for mutations in the genome that cause disease, without a rational approach to understanding why they cause disease,” says Frey, also a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. “This is because scientists didn’t have the means to understand the text of the genome and how mutations in it can change the meaning of that text.” Biologist Eric Lander of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured this puzzle in his famous quote: “Genome. Bought the book. Hard to read.” …Read More>>
Source: Medical Xpress
Blink if your Brain Needs a Rest
Why do we spend roughly 10 percent of our waking hours with our eyes closed – blinking far more often than is actually necessary to keep our eyeballs lubricated? Scientists have pried open the answer to this mystery, finding that the human brain uses that tiny moment of shut-eye to power down.
The mental break can last anywhere from a split second to a few seconds before attention is fully restored, researchers from Japan’s Osaka University found. During that time, scans that track the ebb and flow of blood within the brain revealed that regions associated with paying close attention momentarily go offline. And in the brief break in attention, brain regions collectively identified as the “Default Mode Network” power up.
Discovered less than a decade ago, the default mode network is the brain’s “idle” setting. In times when our attention is not required by a cognitive task such as reading or speaking, this far-flung cluster of brain regions comes alive, and our thoughts wander freely. In idle mode, however, our thoughts seldom stray far from home: We contemplate our feelings; we wonder what a friend meant by a recent comment; we consider something we did last week, or imagine what we’ll do tomorrow.
Most of us take between 15 and 20 such moments of downtime per minute, and scientists have observed that most blinking takes place near or at the point of an “implicit stop”: While reading or listening to another person, that generally comes at the end of a sentence; while watching a movie, for instance, we’re most likely to blink when an actor turns to leave the scene or when the camera shifts to follow the dialogue… Read More>>
Source: Medical Xpress
Zika Virus: Scientists Hail Vaccine Success, Human Trials to Start Soon
A safe and effective vaccine against the Zika virus is an important step closer, with the results of a major study published in the journal Nature.
The researchers said, based on their findings, a Zika vaccine for humans “will likely be readily achievable”.
Researchers tested two trial vaccines, a DNA vaccine and an inactivated virus vaccine, in mice.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of Zika virus vaccine protection in an animal model,” Dr Dan Barouch from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School said.
“We need to be cautious about extrapolating the results from mice to humans,” he said.
“But based on the robustness of the protection, the demonstration that antibodies protect and the similarity with other related viruses… these findings certainly raise optimism that the development of a safe and effective vaccine against Zika virus against humans may be successful.”
Dr Barouch said human clinical trials of the vaccine should start as soon as possible.
The vaccinated animals showed no evidence of active virus after being infected with the Zika virus and both vaccines were safe as well as effective… Read More>>
Source: ABC
4 Ways Dogs Might Be Able to Sniff Out Disease
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? With 40 times as many receptors in their noses as humans have, dogs are being trained to detect a myriad of diseases. We’re not anywhere close to drafting canines as medical assistants, but they are showing promise in some arenas. Here are some examples.
Urinary tract infections
Dogs are used to sniffing pee — and that habit may actually have medical benefits. Researchers spent eight weeks training five Labrador and golden retriever dogs to identify infected urine, and then let them loose on hundreds of mostly female samples. The dogs were able to detect samples contaminated with four different bacteria with at least 90 percent accuracy.
Parkinson’s disease
Nearly two dozen people claim to be able to identify Parkinson’s by smell,Scientific American has reported, and that’s led some to speculate that dogs could be trained to do the same. This is very preliminary — scientists don’t even know yet exactly what the humans are smelling, but research into that very question is ongoing.
Blood sugar
Anecdotally, dogs have been known to detect low blood sugar, but it’s unclear how they do so, or whether they may be able to offer systematic help to diabetics. Still, various groups are trying. Dogs4Diabetics, a nonprofit based in California, has for years been training dogs to detect subtle changes in a person’s smell associated with low blood sugar, according to WebMD, and Lions Foundation of Canada is trying to do the same thing. Still, file this in the highly experimental category.
Cancer
This is the big one. It’s been shown repeatedly that dogs can smell cancers — including bladder cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, and skin cancer. And they might be able to do it more accurately than conventional tests. Italian researchers trained two German Shepherd explosive detection dogs — named Zoe and Liu — to detect cancerous urine. Once trained, they got it right 95 percent of the time, making them more accurate than the prostate-specific antigen test used to screen for prostate cancer. A Labrador retriever trained in scent detection was able to identify colon cancer in both breath samples and stool samples with high accuracy. But much more work is needed, as dogs haven’t done as well on more rigorous tests in some cases… Read More>>
Source: STAT
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