New Therapeutic Target Discovered to Aid in Glaucoma Treatment: CIB2 Protein Regulating Calcium Ion Flow in the Eye

 Therapeutic Target Discovered to Aid in Glaucoma Treatment

• Glaucoma is a condition where the optic nerve is damaged leading to vision loss

• The condition is caused by high intraocular pressure (IOP) in the eye
• Researchers have discovered a therapeutic target that could aid in treating glaucoma
• The target is a protein called CIB2 which regulates the flow of calcium ions in the eye
• The researchers found that CIB2 levels were lower in the eyes of glaucoma patients compared to healthy individuals
• By increasing CIB2 levels in the eye, the researchers were able to reduce IOP in a mouse model of glaucoma
• The findings suggest that targeting CIB2 could be a potential therapeutic strategy for glaucoma treatment
• The study was conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and was published in the journal PNAS
• The study was carried out on mice, and further research is needed to determine if the findings will apply to humans as well
• Glaucoma affects more than 60 million people worldwide and is a leading cause of blindness
• Current treatments for glaucoma focus on reducing IOP, but many patients still experience vision loss despite treatment

8 Common Digestive Problems and How to End Them

There's something about digestive difficulties that makes them hard to discuss in polite company—which leaves many of us suffering one problem or another in silence. What's more, digestive disorders are placing a "growing burden" on Americans, causing an unprecedented number of clinic visits and hospitalizations, says Stephen Bickston, an American Gastroenterological Association fellow and professor of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. Yet fixes can be as simple as making informed lifestyle changes or taking over-the-counter remedies. Peppermint oil and soluble fiber, for example, can help people with irritable bowel syndrome; a 2008British Medical Journal study suggests that both should be first-line therapies for IBS.

Here's a rundown of the latest medical wisdom on eight common gastrointestinal problems.

Reflux

Symptoms of reflux, such as heartburn, are among the most common digestive ills. In a Swedish study, 6 percent of people reported experiencing reflux symptoms daily and 14 percent had them at least weekly. Such frequent symptoms may indicate a person has GERD, or gastroesophageal reflux disease. Aside from being painful, GERD can harm the esophagus over time or even lead to esophageal cancer.

Heartburn typically involves a "hot or burning feeling rising up from the center of the abdomen area and into the chest under the breastbone or sternum," says Michael Gold, agastroenterologist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. "It may be accompanied by a sour taste in the mouth, or hypersalivation, or even finding food or fluid in your mouth," particularly at night. Pregnancy, some medications, and consuming alcohol or certain foods can cause heartburn. Kids under age 12 and some adults may have GERD without heartburn, instead experiencing asthma-like symptoms, trouble swallowing, or a dry cough.

Treatment options include drugs that reduce acid levels, such as the proton pump inhibitors Aciphex, Nexium, Prevacid, Prilosec, and Protonix and the H2 blockers Axid, Pepcid, Tagamet, and Zantac. But taking medication is not without risk. In 2008, a study found that a proton pump inhibitor may weaken the heart-protective effect of the blood thinner Plavix in patients taking both medications.

In severe cases of GERD, surgeons can tighten a loose muscle between the stomach and esophagus to inhibit the upward flow of acid. Laparoscopic surgery, which involves small incisions, has been found to lessen scarring and shorten recovery time compared with open procedures.

Peptic Ulcers

If you have unexplained stomach pain, consider this before reaching for a painkiller: "The worst thing to do if ulcers are suspected is to take aspirin or other NSAID [nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug] pain reducers," Gold says. "They worsen it and don't help."

Instead, if you think you have a peptic ulcer—and 25 million living Americans will get one at some point—consider getting tested for Helicobacter pylori, experts advise. By disrupting a protective layer of mucus, that bacterium causes ulcers, which are sores in the lining of the stomach or first stretch of thesmall intestine. Other causes include smoking, which can elevate stomach acidity, and excessive NSAID use. Alcohol use may also be a factor, but it's unclear whether that alone can cause ulcers. (The old theory blaming factors like stress isn't totally wrong: Stress can aggravate symptoms of peptic ulcers and delay healing.)

Left untreated, ulcers can cause internal bleeding and may eat a hole in the small intestine or stomach wall, which can lead to serious infection. Ulcer scar tissue can also block the digestive tract. And long-term H. pylori infection has been linked to an increased risk of gastric cancer.

Ten to 14 days of antibiotic treatment, often combined with acid reduction therapy, can rid someone of H. pylori. Surgery is an option for more severe cases. A 2008 study published in theWorld Journal of Surgery concluded that laparoscopic repair should be considered for all patients with so-called perforated ulcers.

Gallstones

Only a quarter of people with gallstones typically require treatment. That's fortunate, because every year nearly 1 million Americans are diagnosed with these little pebbles, which are primarily made of cholesterol and bile salts. Getting rid of them typically requires removal of the gallbladder, one of the most common U.S. surgeries.

Now, a gel that could stop beard from growing!

Shaving could soon be a thing of the past, say scientists who claim to have developed a rub-on gel which could keep men stubble-free.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania says that early results from the experimental gel has showed it stops beard from growing -- in fact, it could also be applied to remove unwanted hair from women's legs.
The daily rub-on gel is made from a drug called cidofovir, which has been around for more than a decade and is widely used in high doses in the treatment of AIDS.
Doctors, however, found that the drug caused alopecia -- or lack of hair growth -- the faces of men who had it injected.
In their latest research, the scientists were interested to see if a gel made with different concentrations of the drug -- either one per cent or three per cent -- could stop hair growth completely, a media report said.
A group of 16 men, who grew beards that were classed as either dense or very dense, were recruited. Each was given either the one per cent strength gel or the three per cent gel to rub on a small circle on one side of the face every day.
On the other side they used an identical looking dummy gel with no drug in it.
The men were told to carry on shaving every day but to stop 48 hours before their scheduled visit to the clinic for assessment, so the effects on hair growth could be examined.

New mutation behind breast cancer identified

Washington: Scientists have discovered a new gene that may increase the risk of breast cancer.

In the study from Finland, mutations in this gene, called Abraxas, were linked to cases of hereditary breast cancer.

Researchers have now identified more than 10 genes that increase breast cancer risk; perhaps the most well-known of these are the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

But only about 20 percent of women with a family history of breast cancer have mutations in BRAC1 or BRAC2 — meaning in many cases, it’s likely other genes are at work.

The mutation does not appear to be common — it was found in 2.4 percent of families with a history of breast cancer. But importantly, the mutation was not found in anyone without breast cancer in the study.

Because the study was conducted in Finland, future studies will need to investigate how common the mutation is in other countries, said study researcher Roger Greenberg, an associate professor of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

In the future, women with a family history of breast cancer might be tested for the Abraxas mutation, Greenbergsaid.

Greenberg and colleagues found the Abraxas mutation in three of 125 breast cancer patients from families with a history of the condition.

This gene had been suspected to play a role in breast cancer risk because it interacts with BRCA1.

When the researchers looked at an additional 991 breast cancer patients, they found the Abraxas mutation in one woman, who also turned out to have breast cancer in her family.

None of the 868 healthy patients in the study had the Abraxas mutation.

The mutated Abraxas gene prevents cells from fixing damaged DNA, increasing the risk that a cell will become cancerous. The gene may increase the risk of other cancers as well.

Indeed, one patient in the study was diagnosed with both breast and endometrial cancer, and some patients with the Abraxas mutation had family members with lung cancer, lip cancer and lymphoma.

More research is needed to know exactly how much of an increase in breast cancer risk the Abraxas mutation brings. But Greenberg noted women in the study with this mutation were diagnosed around the same age as those with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations — in their mid-40s.

Women with a mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2 are about five times more likely to develop breast cancer in their lifetimes compared with women who do not have this mutation, according to the National Cancer Institute.

“Identifying more of these mutations will make it easier for patients to know their risk of developing breast cancer,” said Dr. Kristin Byrne, chief of breast imaging at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who was not involved in the study.

Such genetic information may even help doctors better diagnose breast cancer. Most patients with the Abraxas mutation in the study had a type of breast cancer called lobular carcinoma, which is harder to detect on a mammogram. Knowing that a patient has this mutation might mean doctors use additional screening methods, such as MRI, Dr Byrne added.

The study has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Do you have these symptoms of diabetes?

ndia is now termed the ‘diabetes capital of the world’ with 40 million or four crore people currently suffering from the disease. By 2025, it is estimated that one in every five Indian will be a diabetic. With these kind of statistics, it is necessary that you follow a healthy lifestyle and be on the lookout for any of the following symptoms that might indicate diabetes. We’ve tried to compile a list of questions after answering which you might be able to assess if you have any of the diabetic symptoms:

1. Have you noticed an increase in appetite lately?

This could indicate polyphagia caused by body cells starving for glucose, which isn’t able to move into the cells in the case of a diabetic.

2. Do you have to visit the loo for urination more often these days?

This indicates polyuria caused by high amount of glucose in the urine.

3. Are you thirsty most of the time?

This could be polydypsia caused by the increase in urination and loss of fluids.

4. Have you lost a considerable amount of weight lately even after having an increase in appetite? 

In diabetes, the body is unable to utilize the available glucose. For want of fuel, it then starts burning fat which leads to weight loss.

5. Have you been feeling fatigued all day long lately?

Since the glucose stores aren’t utilized, the body is unable to get its energy and hence feels more fatigued.

6. Do your feet and fingers feel a tingling or numb sensation?

The high glucose levels in the body can affect the nerves and this can cause what is called ‘diabetic neuropathy’ causing tingling and numbness in the peripheries of the body.

7. Have you been suffering from infections more frequently than earlier?

The reduced nutrition levels in the body’s cells can decrease the immunity leading to frequent infections especially in the skin, vagina and urinary bladder.

8. Is your vision appearing blurred these days?

The shape and flexibility of the lens of the eye changes due to high blood sugar, thus distorting the ability to focus. This causes blurred vision.

9. Do you have cuts or wounds that have not been healing for a long time?

Due to a weakened immune system and increased predilection for infections, wound healing is poor in diabetics.

10. Have you been highly irritable and/or depressed lately?

This can be due to the decreased glucose supply and nutrition to the brain.

If you have noticed any of the above symptoms, it’s time you visit a doctor soon. Diabetes does not mean a death sentence – it is a disease one can live with, provided proper lifestyle changes and treatment as advised by the doctor are followed.

Stress, hormones and your health

Last day of the month – its only 4 in the evening – enough time to complete the 3 pending reports and get back home on time. As you lean back in your chair, dreaming about the amazing weekend you have planned for yourself, lightning strikes. There’s a call for a team meeting! You sense a mild headache and a weird feeling swirling around in your chest. Imagining the worst for your plans, you unknowingly snap at your colleague who is trying to crack a joke at you.

All that stress!! Within minutes, you turn from being normal and happy to grumpy and irritated. Even as you talk yourself to becoming calmer, your body is helping you cope with what’s happening outside. The exhaustion that you experience after a long board meeting gives you enough time to bounce back to work. Each stressful event triggers a reaction in our physical body.

The human body is a wonderful although complicated system, built to maintain health and wellbeing and naturally protect and repair itself.Each involuntary action of ours is governed by hundreds of natural chemicals inside our body called hormones. The movers and shakers of our physical and emotional states, hormones regulate and  affect our feeling sleepy, hungry and tired and also being happy, sad or angry.

Even as the hormones work their magic inside our body, prolonged stressful situations also have a profound effect on the production of hormones. Like rides on roller coasters can cause an adrenalin rush and last minute work can create panic, constant worries and tensions can cause severe malfunction of our body due to forced adjustments. Our hormones get confused as they are thrown off guard from their regular routines and go haywire, producing irregular amounts and causing our body to fall sick.

Every time, the body senses some overload on its system, it lets out these chemical messengers into the bloodstream to set the body back into its natural balance. For example, insulin maintains the amount of the necessary sugar levels in our body. There are several hundreds of hormones affecting various organs and their functioning. Let us look at the most common ones that affect our emotions.

• Cortisol: Prolonged stress and extreme negative emotions, especially anger, increase the production of this stress hormone. It helps by channelizing glucose to the brain to fight the stressful situation. Imbalance in this hormone may cause high blood pressure, migraine headaches, chronic colds, weakness and arthritis.
• Oestrogen and Progesterone: The more the stress in your life clubbed with uncontrolled imbalanced eating habits, lack of physical work and absence of a ‘time out’ causes the PMS twins to act up more often when you don’t want them to. Active in women during menstrual cycles, pregnancy and menopause, they counteract each other and any extreme variations in them may cause symptoms like severe mood swings, anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness and weight issues.
• Testosterone: Excessive and prolonged stressful situations and random eating,  excessive alcohol or nicotine intake can cause this male counterpart of the female hormones to cause Fatigue, abdominal fat (Pot Belly), mood swings (although men will not agree to this), depression, anxiety, lack of vitality and sleep problems.
• Thyroxine: Imbalanced diet, lack of physical activity and prolonged stress can cause the growth hormone to go rampant. Variations can result in decreased energy, slow heart rate and weight gain or loss.

So much for all that information up there, if you have noticed any of those symptoms in you for some time now, it’s time to act…

Combat techniques:

• Get some air – Taking a walk every day even for 5 minutes gives your body that necessary unwinding (don’t forget to leave your phones behind!)
• Sit in silence every day, even if it is only for 5 minutes.
• Stock some dry fruit on your work desk to munch on a couple of them every day.
• Don’t forget to drink water – ask your buddies to remind you.
• Eat on time – respect your body now so it’ll cooperate with you when you turn older.
• Don’t contaminate your system with excess of anything – food, thoughts or emotions.
• Get a list of tests for your hormones from your doctor. Get them done at regular intervals as prescribed by him/her.
• Lastly, the magic mantra – Don’t forget to laugh and enjoy the small things in life!

Fasting makes your brain sharper, figure shapelier

f you want a smarter brain and a shapelier profile, fasting on alternate days might not be such a bad idea after all.

Fasting has been seen in mice experiments to help brain cells promote generation of new cells and make them more stress proof. 

In fact, it is the calorie restricted diet which improved the function of brain synapses in mice experiments. Synapses are the junctions between brain cells which promote generation of new cells and make them more stress proof. 

The calorie resdtricted diet, also tested on humans, appears to protect the heart, circulatory system and brain against age-related degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. 

US National Institutes for Ageing (NIA) researchers said results on fasting were based on giving animals the bare minimum of calories required to keep them alive, the Daily Mail reports.

“Dietery energy restriction extends lifespan and protects the brain and cardiovascular system against age-related disease,” said Mark Mattson, who heads the NIA’s neurosciences lab and is professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Scientists found that depriving healthy cells of the food they need sends them into a survival mode, making them highly resistant to stress and damage caused from chemotherapy.

7 Tips For Getting Yourself to Go to Bed on Time

The other day, I video-posted about the Pigeon of Discontent, "I can never get to bed on time." A few readers rightly pointed out that while I emphasized the importance of having a "bedtime," I didn't address the challenge of actually getting yourself to turn off the light when it's time for bed.

That's a very important question. Since I've started my Happiness Project, I've become more and more convinced that sleep is vital to happiness and energy. (Here are 14 tips on getting more sleep.)

If you want to get more sleep, but have a hard time getting yourself to turn out the light, try these strategies:

1. First things first: Give yourself a specific bedtime. Most adults need 7-9 hours of sleep every night, so take a look at your wake-up time and do the math. Even if you don't regularly go to bed at your bedtime, knowing, "Well, it's midnight, so I'm two hours past my bedtime" might help prod you to bed.

2. Don't wait until you feel sleepy to think "Hey, maybe it's about time for bed." It's all too easy to keep yourself alert and busy way past the time that you should be asleep. If you insist that you're quite wide awake at 1 a.m., test yourself: Sit in a dim room with your head back for five minutes. How does it feel? Are you still wide awake? Along those lines...

3. Stay away from the Internet for at least an hour before your bedtime. Television, too, but I think the Internet is even more apt to make me feel artificially wide awake. I used to try to go through my emails one last time before bed, to get a jump on the morning, but I realized that this stimulating activity made it much harder to go to sleep.

4. Don't drink caffeine for several hours before your bedtime.

5. Remind yourself how great it feels to wake up naturally, before the alarm goes off, without that sickening jolt into wakefulness. Then, when you're surfing the Internet at 11:30 p.m., ask yourself, "Am I making a good trade-off?" I was recently talking to a group of medical students, and one guy protested, "But if I go to bed at 11, I won't have time to watch some TV before bed." I asked, "Is watching that block of TV so fun that it outweighs the pleasure of getting enough sleep?" (I don't know what he decided.)

6. Get ready before bed well ahead of time. I realized that, perversely, I often put off going to bed because I was too tired to take out my contacts, brush my teeth, and get changed. Now I get ready earlier in the evening. Side benefit: Once I do these things, I'm less likely to head to the kitchen for a snack. On a related note...

7. Create a bedtime ritual, and do it at the same time every night. Maybe you fix yourself a cup of herbal tea, maybe you read in bed, maybe you do an evening tidy-up. By doing the same thing every night, you will cue yourself to start heading to bed.

One bit of folk wisdom that I heard when I had very young children was that "Sleep begets sleep." I found that to be true of my children, and also of myself. I sleep better when I'm well-rested than when I'm over-tired.

How about you? Have you found any effective strategies for coaxing yourself to bed on time?

* There's a lot of terrific material about fitness, health, and happiness on Greatist -- "choose better, be a greatist."

How appetite cells in brain respond to fasting

Washington, Feb 9 (ANI): There are two vital cell types in the brain that are essential for the regulation of feeding behaviours - agouti-related peptide (AgRP)-expressing neurons and proopiomelancortin (POMC)-expressing neurons.

Previous work has shown that the AgRP neurons promote feeding and weight gain, while the POMC cells have been linked with appetite suppression and weight loss.
Now a new study uncovers a neural pathway that links fasting with activation of AgRP neurons. The research provides valuable insight into the complex mechanisms that control food-seeking behaviour.
"Given their critical roles in feeding behaviors, there is great interest in understanding the factors that regulate the activity of AgRP and POMC neurons," said senior study author, Dr. Bradford B. Lowell, from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.

"However, although both types of neurons receive abundant excitatory and inhibitory inputs, the influence of these upstream signals has not received much attention."
Dr. Lowell and colleagues analysed the impact of excitatory inputs on AgRP and POMC neurons by manipulating NMDA receptors (NMDARs) in each cell type.
These receptors receive inputs from the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain. Interestingly, only mice lacking NMDARs on their AgRP neurons, and not those lacking NMDARs on their POMC neurons, exhibited altered body weight and food intake.
Thus, this type of excitatory information is only critical for the function of AgRP neurons.
Importantly, the researchers also discovered that fasting, which is known to activate AgRP neurons and promote both food seeking and energy conservation, was associated with an increase in excitatory inputs and an increase in the number of dendritic spines on the AgRP neurons.

Dendritic spines are physical protrusions on the neuron that receive incoming signals. These fasting-induced changes in AgRP neurons were also dependent on the presence of NMDARs.
Taken together, the results suggest that excitatory information received by NMDARs plays a critical role in regulating the connectivity of AgRP neurons and governing the cellular and behavioural response to fasting.
"The next step will be to identify the neurotransmitters and hormones that modulate the excitatory inputs to AgRP neurons, and the mechanisms by which this modulation occurs," Dr. Lowell said.

"This is likely to provide a better understanding of how various factors control feeding behavior," Dr. Lowell concluded.
The study has been published by Cell Press in the journal Neuron. (ANI)