Brush teeth to cut heart disease risk

LONDON: Brushing does more than just protecting your teeth from cavity it can also cut the risk of a heart disease, says a new study. Previous studies showed a link between gum disease and an increased likelihood of suffering from heart disease or a stroke. But, scientists were not able to explain the connection.

 

Now, an international team has found that the body’s own defenses could overreact to the threat of gum disease and destroy its own protective cells, which lead to a build up of arteries called atherosclerosis, a cause of heart attacks.

 

“This (study) is a significant step towards a more complete understanding of heart disease and improving treatment and preventive therapies.

 

“An understanding of all the possible risk factors could help lower the risk of developing heart disease and lead to a significant change in disease burden,” lead researcher Greg Seymour was quoted by ‘The Daily Telegraph’ as saying.

 

Seymour of the University of Otago in New Zealand and colleagues came to the conclusion after analyzing the effects of brushing on a group of people with cardiovascular disease which can cause heart attacks and restrict or blocks the flow of blood to the vital organ.

 

Even dentists recommend regular brushing and flossing as the main ways to prevent gum disease, caused when plaque builds up because the teeth are not cleaned properly, and the most common reason behind tooth loss in adults.

 

The findings of the study have been presented at the Society for General Microbiology’s autumn meeting at Trinity College in Dublin.

 

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Web surfing could keep dementia at bay

Dementia is the progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the body beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Although dementia is far more common in the geriatric population, it may occur in any stage of adulthood. For middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet could be a boost to the brain, a new study suggests.

 

In recent years, several studies have showed a link between pursuing activities that keep the mind engaged, such as crossword puzzles and memory games, and a lowered risk of cognitive decline later in life.

 

As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, reductions in cell activity, and increases in deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles (both associated with Alzheimer’s disease ), all of which can affect cognitive function.

 

Keeping your brain active could drive some of these brain chemistry signals in the opposite direction compared to where they go as dementia sets in, and now it looks like surfing the Web could be another way to do that.

 

The new study, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, looked at the brain activity of 24 neurologically normal volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76 as they searched the Internet. Half of the participants had experience surfing the Web, while the others did not.

 

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to record subtle brain-circuitry changes in the patients as they performed Web searches and read book passages. fMRI scans track the intensity of cell responses in the brain by measuring the level of blood flow through the brain.

 

All the study participants showed significant brain activity during the book-reading task, specifically in the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes of the brain, which are involved in controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.

 

But Internet searches revealed differences between the two groups. While all the participants showed the same activity as during the book-reading, the Web-savvy group also registered activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of the brain, whereas those new to the net did not. influence the aging brain.

 

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Therapy helps hard-to-transplant get a new kidney

Therapy is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a diagnosis. In the medical field, it is synonymous with the word “treatment”. Nearly one in three patients who need a kidney transplant may never get one because their bodies are abnormally primed to attack a donated organ.

 

Now doctors are trying new ways to outwit the immune system and save more of those so-called “highly sensitized” patients — often with kidneys donated by living donors, considered the optimal kind. “I feel very lucky. Our son saved my life,” said Cynthia Preloh of Arlington, Va., after an unusual combination of blood cleansing and a cancer drug allowed her to receive a kidney from her son that her body otherwise would have destroyed.

 

It’s promising work that comes as the nation’s kidney distribution system is beginning a major overhaul. Together, the two efforts aim to make a long-needed dent in the years of waiting it can take to get a kidney transplant.

 

That’s crucial, because “your chance of getting successfully transplanted decreases with time,” says Dr. Keith Melancon of Georgetown University Hospital, Preloh’s surgeon and a leader in the small but growing field of incompatible kidney transplants.

 

More than 77,000 people are on the national waiting list to receive a kidney from a deceased donor. Yet fewer than 17,000 transplants a year are performed, about 10,500 of them from deceased donors and just over 6,000 from living donors, relatives or friends who offer to help a specific patient. The wait can stretch four to five years, and more than 4,000 patients die on the waiting list each year.

 

The United Network for Organ Sharing is considering some big changes to the system. There’s no formal proposal yet, but there are options under discussion: Wait times might be defined by kidney function deterioration rather than how early someone gets on the transplant list, to level the field for patients who don’t see a specialist right away.

 

Back at Georgetown, Cynthia Preloh, 50, had been told to expect a seven-year wait for a donated kidney when diabetes destroyed her own. Diabetics have particularly poor survival on dialysis and her son offered a faster living donation, but Preloh had too many antibodies that would attack his tissue.

 

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Intelligent men have healthier sperm, study claims

Intelligence (also called intellect) is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom.

 

It’s often been said that men don’t think with their brains and now scientists have proved what women thought all along – that a man’s sperm quality turns out to be an indicator of his brain power.  

 

Researchers have discovered that men who scored highly in a variety of intelligence tests also had high counts of healthy sperm. But low scores in intelligence tests showed that men had fewer sperm and that they weren’t so healthy.

 

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, from the University of New Mexico, said: ‘It’s not necessarily that the same genes are influencing sperm quality and intelligence.

 

‘Rather, the two traits could be linked through a tangled web of biological and environmental interactions that has evolved to help women pick a mate.’

 

He uncovered the apparent sperm-intelligence connection after re-analysing data gathered in 1985 to assess the after-effects of the Vietnam War, particularly exposures to Agent Orange. Of the 4,402 veterans who participated in three days of physical and mental testing, 425 provided sperm samples.

 

After accounting for factors that could skew the results, such as age, drug use, and abstinence before providing a sample, Miller’s team looked for a statistical link between men’s sperm counts and motility and their scores on several tests of verbal and arithmetic intelligence. Though the connections between brains and sperm were ‘not awesome, they’re there and highly significant,’ Miller said.

 

He added: ‘I’m thinking of intelligence as being quite closely related to individual fitness.’ About half of our genes are switched on in the brain, so intelligence might provide women with a rough but handy read-out of mutations in our genomes, Miller argued.

 

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YouTube links to online stores in money-making move

SAN FRANCISCO – YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos.

 

YouTube on Tuesday added links to online stores in a move crafted to pump more money from the hot video-sharing website Google bought nearly two years ago in a 1.65 billion dollar stock deal.

 

“They spent a ton of money on this thing and it is natural they want to make a return,” analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley told AFP. “The trick is how to do it without scaring users to another property. It is going to be a delicate dance.”

 

Google has bided its time working on ways to “monetize” YouTube without alienating notoriously transient Internet users that could easily switch to Hulu, Daily Motion or other rivals in the online video-sharing arena.

 

“Click-to-buy” links are being discretely placed in control panels below YouTube videos to invite people to visit online shops iTunes or Amazon.com to buy music, books, films or other material related to snippets watched.

 

“This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube,” said a message on the website.

 

“Our vision is to help partners across all industries offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos.”

 

Links to online stores are making a US debut on videos of EMI Music artists and of the Spore computer game recently released by Electronic Arts. Such “retail links” will be gradually added to YouTube’s library of music videos, according to the northern California firm.

 

“Our goal is to slowly but surely expand the program to add additional content and product partners, as well as our international users,” YouTube said. “We’re just getting started, so stay tuned.”

 

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Scientists find key protein helps people hear

LONDON – Proteins are large organic compounds made of amino acids arranged in a linear chain and joined together by peptide bonds between the carboxyl and amino groups of adjacent amino acid residues. A protein in the inner ear helps people differentiate between sounds and understand speech, French researchers reported on Wednesday in a finding that could help treat the hard of hearing.

 

The study also helps explain why some people have difficulty hearing in crowded restaurants or other noisy places, said Paul Avan, a researcher at the University of Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand, France.

 

“This won’t help cure deafness but will help diagnose why some people have hearing problems, especially in noisy places,” Avan, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

 

The study, which used genetically engineered mice, looked at the part of the inner ear called the cochlea, which contains two types of sensory cells to detect sounds. Scientists often study mice because of the biological similarities between the animals and humans.

 

Until now people had thought that structures called ion channels found in the cells — which work like a microphone to transform sound into electrical messages to the brain — were mainly responsible for distorting sound in the inner ear.

 

Distortion is important because it allows people to pick out the correct sounds from a mixture of noises whether it be competing conversations at a cocktail party or other kinds of background noise, Avan said.

 

But the researchers showed how a protein called stereocilin — not the ion channels — was keeping sensory cells intact and allowing the inner ear to properly distort sounds, Avan said. Mice without stereocilin did not hear properly even when their ion channels worked, Avan and colleagues reported in the journal Nature.

 

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How to live till a 100

MELBOURNE: Want to live till 100 years of age? Well, do regular exercises, be married, wash hands and brush your teeth everyday. That’s what a new book, ‘The Long Life Equation’, by Dr Trisha Macnair suggests. In the book, the author has listed activities that add years to your life.

Macnair said washing your hands adds two years, and good dental hygiene can add six more years in your life. But smoking, fast food, no exercise and a stressful life can strip away 20 years.

“There’s no doubt younger people take life and health for granted – more than any generation before, they idle time away watching TV or playing computer games, ignoring the activities that keep them healthy or develop meaning in their lives,” Courier Mail quoted Macnair, as saying. “As we get older and start to feel the years slipping away, we suddenly realise how precious it is.

“But by then we may have already established habits (smoking, drinking, obesity, lack of exercise, stressful occupations) which take their toll and are difficult to reverse.” Still, it’s never too late to change. Also, our attitudes to older age are changing so there is more freedom now to do things later in life if we are healthy and able,”

A 2006 study from University of California in Los Angeles showed that men and women live healthier, wealthier, happier and longer lives when they are in a stable partnership.

The study confirmed that married couples were more likely to live to an old age than their divorced, widowed or unmarried counterparts.

A stable partnership can actually add on seven years to life. Regular exercise also adds as much as two or more years to your life. A Harvard Alumni Study, which took into account more than 71,000 men who had graduated from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania between 1916 and 1954, found that those men who regularly burned 8400kJ a week while exercising lived, on average, two years longer than sedentary types.

But cigarette smoking can actually reduce 8 years from your life. Tobacco smoke contains more than 4000 chemicals, many of which are highly toxic. A divorce can also strip away 3 years from your life, as it takes longer-lasting, emotional and physical toll on former spouses than virtually any other life stress. Recent studies indicate that divorced adults have higher rates of emotional disturbance, accidental death and death from heart disease.

The divorced also have higher rates of admission to psychiatric facilities and make more visits to doctors than people who are married, single or widowed.

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RIM launches first BlackBerry flip phone

TORONTO – Research In Motion Ltd is launching a flip version of its popular BlackBerry Pearl smartphone, a move that reasserts its push into the retail consumer market. The BlackBerry is a wireless handheld device introduced in 1997 as a two-way pager. The more commonly known smartphone BlackBerry, which supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services.

Like RIM’s original Pearl model, the first-ever flip BlackBerry comes loaded with multimedia features such as a video and music player and a 2-megapixel camera with flash, as well as a Web browser and an abridged keyboard.

“Seventy percent of the mobile phone users in the United States use a flip,” RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in an interview. “There’s never been a smartphone or a BlackBerry option for that.” He added the new device is “extremely important” to capturing more retail users.

The new clamshell flip BlackBerry will be available around the world starting this autumn. In the United States, T-Mobile will be the exclusive launch carrier. No pricing details were immediately available. RIM’s volatile shares jumped early on Wednesday, rising $3.37, or 3.4 percent, to $102.67 on the Nasdaq market. In Toronto, they raised C$4.20 to C$110.23.

The first, candy-bar-shaped version of the Pearl was launched in September 2006 to rave reviews and strong sales. Its success was a key factor behind the Waterloo, Ontario-based company’s ability to deliver banner results throughout the rest of that year and in 2007.

The Pearl also allowed RIM to broaden its market beyond its mainstay of executives, lawyers, politicians and other professionals who use the BlackBerry to send work e-mail securely.

RIM has more than 16 million subscribers. It says that “non-enterprise” customers — the company’s term for small and medium businesses and consumers — now represent more than 40 percent of that total.

Most analysts continue to recommend RIM’s shares to investors, according to Reuters Knowledge. Some cite a strong slate of upcoming product launches including the recently unveiled BlackBerry Bold, as well as continuing strong demand for smartphones.

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Yahoo to open music site to other services

SUNNYVALE, California – Yahoo! Inc. is a United States public corporation with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and social media websites and services.

Yahoo Inc plans to open its online music site to feature information about songs and artists from outside services such as Apple Inc iTunes or Amazon.com, an executive said on Thursday.

“We are going to completely open up Yahoo Music in the next few weeks,” Scott Moore, the executive in charge of Yahoo’s media businesses, told reporters at a briefing at the company’s Sunnyvale, California, headquarters.

At the meeting, Yahoo executives discussed the range of ways that the company is seeking to open up the world’s largest Internet destination to feature content from across the Web instead of just information located on Yahoo’s own sites.

Moore showed prototypes of how Yahoo planned to open other media properties within Yahoo’s network — which overall attracts more than 500 million users worldwide each month. Beyond music, the company is working to allow partners to deliver content on the main page of Yahoo News, the company’s second most-visited Web page after its home page, he said.

Other Yahoo executives described progress the company is making in opening up its e-mail system, which counts upward of 275 million users worldwide and is the world’s largest consumer e-mail service.

Ash Patel, the company’s products chief, showed how Yahoo was incorporating applications from outside services such as video-rental company Netflix inside Yahoo Mail. Other executives highlighted recent announcements to feature Yahoo and other Web content on Yahoo services aimed at mobile phones and televisions.

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Broccoli ‘may help protect lungs’

Broccoli is a plant of the Cabbage family. It is classified as the Italica Cultivar Group of the species Brassica oleracea. Broccoli possesses abundant fleshy flower heads, usually green in color, arranged in a tree-like fashion on branches sprouting from a thick, edible stalk. The large mass of flower heads is surrounded by leaves. Broccoli most closely resembles cauliflower. A substance found in broccoli may limit the damage which leads to serious lung disease, research suggests.

The lung is the essential respiration organ in air-breathing animals, including most tetrapods, a few fish and a few snails. The most primitive animals with a lung are the lungfish and the pulmonate snails. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is often caused by smoking and kills about 30,000 UK residents a year.  

US scientists found that sulforapane increases the activity of the NRF2 gene in human lung cells which protects cells from damage caused by toxins. The same broccoli compound was recently found to be protective against damage to blood vessels caused by diabetes. Brassica vegetables such as broccoli have also been linked to a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes.

In the latest study, a team from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found significantly lower activity of the NRF2 gene in smokers with advanced COPD.

Writing in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, they said the gene is responsible for turning on several mechanisms for removing toxins and pollutants which can damage cells.

In the study, they showed that sulforapane was able to restore reduced levels of NRF2 in cells exposed to cigarette smoke. “Future studies should target NRF2 as a novel strategy to increase antioxidant protection in the lungs and test its ability to improve lung function in people with COPD,” said study leader Dr Shyam Biswal.

A spokeswoman for the British Lung Foundation said: “This is an important study for the 3 million people in the UK with COPD because of its findings about the imbalance of oxidants and antioxidants in the lungs.  

“We know broccoli naturally contains important compounds but studies so far have taken place in the test tube and further research is needed to find if you can produce the same effect in humans.”

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