New way 'to starve out malaria

Good morning friends. I want to share with you what I have read about the malaria. With reference to Indian Express there are new way to starve out malaria.

It has been discovered by some researchers a way to starve out malaria parasites by targeting a digestive enzyme that the disease needs to feed on blood cells, a major breakthrough in the global fight against malaria which claims the life of a child across the world "every 30 seconds".

An international team has been able to deactivate the final stage of the malaria parasite's digestive machinery, effectively starving the parasite of nutrients and disabling its survival mechanism. And, this process of starvation leads to the death of the parasite.

The results had laid the scientific groundwork to further develop a "specific class" of drugs to treat the disease that's contracted by half-a-billion people and causes around one million deaths a year worldwide.

A single bite from an infected mosquito transfers the malaria parasite into a human's blood stream. "The malaria parasite must then break down blood proteins in order to obtain nutrients. Malaria carries out the first stages of digestion inside a specialized compartment called the digestive vacuole – this can be considered to be like a stomach.

The enzyme (known as PfA-M1), which is essential for parasite viability, is located outside the digestive vacuole meaning it is easier to target from a drug perspective.
About forty per cent of the world's population are at risk of contracting malaria. It is only early days but this discovery could one day provide treatment for some of those 2.5 billion people across the globe."

Walnuts can help keep breast cancer at bay

Good morning friends. Those who were crazy eating walnuts, it has a use to the women’s body. Walnuts can help keep breast cancer. Aside from the good taste of it, women out there can enjoy breast cancer free.



Walnuts contain compounds that reduce the risk of breast cancer, claims a new study.
Elaine Hardman, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at Marshall University School of Medicine, said that while her study was done with laboratory animals rather than humans, people should heed the recommendation to eat more walnuts.

"Walnuts are better than cookies, french fries or potato chips when you need a snack," said Hardman.

"We know that a healthy diet overall prevents all manner of chronic diseases," the expert added.

To reach the conclusion, researchers studied mice that were fed a diet that they estimated was the human equivalent of two ounces of walnuts per day. A separate group of mice were fed a control diet.

Standard testing showed that walnut consumption significantly decreased breast tumor incidence, the number of glands with a tumor and tumor size.

"These laboratory mice typically have 100 percent tumor incidence at five months; walnut consumption delayed those tumors by at least three weeks," said Hardman.
Molecular analysis showed that increased consumption of omega-3 fatty acids contributed to the decline in tumor incidence, but other parts of the walnut contributed as well.

"With dietary interventions you see multiple mechanisms when working with the whole food," said Hardman.

"It is clear that walnuts contribute to a healthy diet that can reduce breast cancer," the expert added.

The study has been presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 100th Annual Meeting 2009. (ANI) - Yahoo

Laugh your way to a healthy heart!

Good evening friends. Laugh your way to a healthy heart. Someone may think how laughter can make our heart healthy. It’s tough to think but it’s not. You have the option on how you want to laugh.

As the saying goes, laughter is the best form of medicine. And, now researchers have claimed that just 30 minutes of guffaw a day is adequate to keep your heart healthy.

A new study by Loma Linda University has revealed that watching half-an-hour of comedy everyday can reduce a person's levels of stress hormones as well as compounds that are linked to heart disease.

"The best clinicians understand that there is an intrinsic physiological intervention brought about by positive emotions such as mirthful laughter, optimism and hope," the 'Daily Mail' quoted lead researcher Dr Lee Berk as saying.

The researchers came to the conclusion after analysing 20 men and women taking medication for diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. All took their tablets as usual but half were also prescribed "mirthful laughter" in the form of 30 min of comedy every day.

Stress hormone levels fell in the comedy viewers after two months. By four months, levels of compounds linked to hardening of the arteries and other cardiac problems had also dropped, while levels of "good" cholesterol – thought to protect against heart disease – rose by 26 per cent.

Patients who took the medication without any extra laughter had just a 3 per cent rise. The group watching comedy programmes also saw a drop of 66 percent in harmful C-reactive proteins, which increase the risk of heart disease.

While the control group also saw a fall in the amount of the proteins, it was much smaller at 26 per cent over the course of the year. – Indian Express

Faulty fibres linking brain areas cause muscle disorders

Good morning friends. I’m reading some articles here and also health concerns are one of my favorite article to read. With reference to The Times of India there are faulty fibers linking in our brain areas which causes muscle disorders.

Muscle disorders like writer's cramp may result from abnormalities in fibres connecting different brain areas, according to a study.

Dr Christine Delmaire, of Centre Hospitalier Regional Universitaire Roger Salengro, Lille, France, and Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale, Paris, came to this conclusion after studying 26 right-handed patients with writer's cramp and 26 right-handed control participants, who were the same sex and age.

All subjects underwent diffusion-tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) that assesses the status of white matter, coated nerve fibres that allow impulses to travel through the brain.

Christine said that the DTI scans of the writer's cramp patients revealed areas of abnormalities in the white matter of nerve pathways connecting the main sensorimotor cortex to brain areas below the cortex, such as the thalamus.

The researchers further revealed that the same abnormalities were not observed in healthy controls.

"In conclusion, this study suggests that writer's cramp is associated with microstructural changes involving fibers that carry afferents (information from senses to the brain) and efferents (motor information from the brain to the muscles) to the primary sensorimotor cortex. However, it is unknown how these changes relate to the physiopathology of the disease," the authors write.

The study has been published in the Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.