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.

Drinking hot tea 'raises the risk of throat cancer'

Good morning friends. I love to drink tea. My day is not complete when I don’t have a cup of tea. I prefer to drink warm tea, because with that I taste the aroma of it. But with some, they want to drink the tea hot. It’s also good to drink hot tea but with reference to Indian Express there is a disadvantage of it. Let me share that to all of you

Relish your tea, researchers claimed that sipping scalding tea could raise the risk of developing throat cancer.

The British Medical Journal, has revealed that drinking steaming hot tea is actually linked with an eightfold increased risk of cancer of the food tube or the oesophagus.

The lead researcher Reza Malekzadeh of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, "Informing the population about the hazards of drinking hot tea may be helpful in reducing the incidence of oesophageal cancer..." In fact, the researchers came to the conclusion after analyzing tea drinking habits of 300 people with throat cancer and 571 people without the disease.

Compared with drinking tea at 65 degrees or less, drinking tea between 65 degrees and 69 degrees was associated with a doubling in the risk of cancer and drinking even hotter tea was linked to an eight fold risk, the study found. People who drank their tea less than two minutes after it was poured had a five times higher risk of the cancer than those who drank it four or more minutes after pouring.

In order to minimize the risk that tea drinkers misjudged how hot their drink was, the researchers tested the temperatures of tea drunk by almost 50,000 people in the area, the British media reported.

David Whiteman of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research wrote: "These findings are not cause for alarm, however, and they should not reduce public enthusiasm for the time honoured ritual of drinking tea.

"Rather, we should follow the advice of Mrs Beeton, who prescribes a five to 10 minute interval between making and pouring tea, by which time the tea will be sufficiently flavoursome and unlikely to cause thermal injury." However, the study found no association between the amount of tea consumed and the risk of cancer.

Exercise cuts risk of breast cancer death

Good morning friends. Women should be aware with their body. As I have published an article about Jade Goody who has a cervical cancer, women should be aware of every thing. With reference to Yahoo News, Women who are physically fit are less likely to die from breast cancer. We have to take precautions.

It was found that those women with moderate or high aerobic fitness levels were much less likely to die from breast cancer "Women in the lowest fitness category were nearly three times more likely to die from breast cancer than women in the most fit group." "This is the first study to evaluate the association of objectively measured fitness and risk of dying from breast cancer."

"The results suggest a stronger protective effect than has been seen in most studies on self-reported physical activity and breast cancer, probably because the objective laboratory test of fitness is more accurate that self-reports of activity."

Women who do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity, like walking, per week will escape the low fitness category. Even better for some women, this activity can be accumulated in 10-minute bouts."

It has also found that women with high aerobic fitness had lower body mass index, better cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and fewer chronic conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Smoking in pregnancy cuts blood flow to fetus

Good morning friends. All pregnant mothers out there, in case you are not aware, smoking is not good to your child when you are pregnant. Maybe you don’t know what will be the circumstances of it, but at least you should be aware. Don’t let the life of your child be at stake.

Smoking during pregnancy reduces blood flow to the developing fetus and, in turn, retards growth, new research suggests.

Infants born to mothers who smoke during pregnancy have lower birth weights." "But this study provides a possible explanation of why there is restricted blood flow to the fetus."

According to a report in the medical journal Circulation, compared with newborns of non-smokers and ex-smokers, those of smokers weighed less, had smaller head sizes, and were shorter.

Smoking was associated with a 47 per cent drop in the fetus in levels of a key protein that helps blood vessels to relax and blood flow to increase called endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). "The study is one of the first to show a biochemical measurement of what is going on to cause the lower birth weight."

Smoking was also associated with an 18 per cent reduction in plasma levels of "good" HDL cholesterol in the fetus.

In terms of future research, hopes were expected to determine whether compromised blood vessel function in fetuses of smokers translates into atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) later in life.

Laser therapy combo effectively clears acne, reduces oil production (2)

As it penetrates, ALA binds to the oil glands and sensitizes the cells to light.

The researchers treated 14 patients with ALA PDT, who received one to six treatments depending on the severity of their acne and continued to use topical medications during and after the study.

The control group consisted of four patients who were either treated with conventional therapy (such as systemic or topical medications) or with laser energy but without ALA PDT.

After the analysis, Alexiades-Armenakas found that all (100 %) of the 14 patients in the ALA PDT treatment group experienced complete clearance of their acne.

She reported that an average of 2.9 ALA PDT treatments was administered to this patient group and improvement in the acne lesions was visible within one to two weeks after the first treatment.

She said: "The first-of-a-kind study found this particular form of photodynamic therapy used in conjunction with topical therapy to be the first such treatment to achieve complete clearance of acne up to 13 months post treatment and a 77 % clearance rate per treatment. Four subsequent studies conducted by other investigators involving an additional 75 patients demonstrated similar results.

"Patients also experienced an added benefit of significant improvement in their acne scars, as the pulsed dye laser offers superior penetration to the deeper layers of the skin where scars form."
Side effects were limited to mild redness that lasted for 48 hours, and the treatment was found to be safe even for patients of colour with no complications, such as hyperpigmentation.

For patients with intermittent acne flares and pronounced oily skin with large pores, ALA PDT treatment with a 1450nm diode laser that heats the deep layer of skin where the oil glands are located has been shown to help these patients in as little as one to three treatments. -The Times of India

Laser therapy combo effectively clears acne, reduces oil production (1)

Good morning friends. They say that our face is the first thing to see if we were looked by many. Have your children trying to talk with you about his problem with his/her pimples. Some don’t mind any, but some are very conscious of it. You can tell them now that they should not worry anymore. There’s a good way for you to have an acne free.

A combination of laser therapy has been found to safely and effectively treat one of the most common skin conditions that plagues teenagers and adults alike-acne.

Dermatologist Macrene Alexiades-Armenakas, MD, PhD, FAAD, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., demonstrated how photodynamic therapy combined with a long-pulse, pulsed-dye laser and topical 5-aminolevulinic acid provides long-lasting clearance of acne lesions.

"Laser technology has made great inroads in the treatment of acne, which until recently has been treated almost exclusively - and with varying degrees of success - with topical, systemic and hormonal medications," said Alexiades-Armenakas.

She added: "Now, we have solid evidence-based medicine supporting the effectiveness of certain laser therapies as a long-term solution for treating active acne. The key is to distinguish the benefits and limitations of these available technologies and select the most effective treatments for each acne patient."

In a preliminary study, Alexiades-Armenakas examined whether a combination of photodynamic therapy (PDT) with a photosensitizer known as topical 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) and activated by long-pulse, pulsed dye laser could safely and effectively clear mild to severe cases of acne.

PDT works by using laser or light energy - in this case a pulsed dye laser was used - to activate the ALA, which is a solution that penetrates into the oil glands and is applied to the skin one hour prior to treatment. -The Times of India