Clay may be best cure for infections, say researchers

Dirt may soon be prescribed by doctors, if researchers investigating the age-old healing properties of a type of French clay have their way.

Previous research has shown that the clay fights against a “flesheating” bug (M ulcerans) on the rise in Africa and the germ called MRSA, which was blamed for the recent deaths of two children in Virginia and Mississippi. Now an interdisciplinary team of microbiologists and mineralogists is trying to determine exactly how the clay cures.

“There are very compelling reports of clay treating infections, but that’s anecdotal evidence, not science. They would mix clay with water and make a paste and put it on the horrible wounds,” said Lynda Williams, an associate research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Tempe. Williams is coordinating three teams of US researchers (at ASU, USGS, and SUNY-Buffalo) studying healing clays under a two-year, $440,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. “We’re beginning to generate the first scientific evidence of why some minerals might kill bacterial organisms and others might not,” said Williams.

In laboratory tests at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, co-PI Haydel, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences, showed that one clay killed bacteria responsible for many human illnesses, including: Staphylococcus aureus, methicillinresistant S aureus (MRSA), penicillin-resistant S aureus (PRSA), and pathogenic Escherichia coli (E coli). It also killed Mycobacterium ulcerans, a germ related to leprosy and tuberculosis that causes the flesheating disease Buruli ulcer.

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ANI

Level of testosterone impacts longevity

Older men with low levels of the testosterone hormone may die sooner than other men of their age with normal testosterone levels, a study suggests. Researchers found that among 794 generally healthy older men, those with the lowest testosterone levels were 40% more likely to die within the 1985-2004 study period. The findings do not mean, however, that older men should start taking testosterone supplements to achieve a longer life, the study authors are quick to point out. The study shows only an association between low testosterone and earlier death — not a causeand-effect relationship, lead author Dr Gail A Laughlin said.

What’s more, there was no evidence that having above-average testosterone levels gave men any longevity advantage. “We cannot recommend that any man take testosterone based on these results,” Laughlin stressed. She and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, report their findings in the ‘Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism’. In theory, low testosterone could affect older men’s longevity through metabolic effects. Some past studies have found that low testosterone can precede the development of abdominal obesity and the metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease that includes obesity, high blood pressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels.

In their study, Laughlin and her colleagues found that low testosterone was associated with abdominal obesity and aspects of the metabolic syndrome, but when these factors were excluded, low testosterone remained independently linked to earlier death. The study included 794 men between 50 and 91 year old (average age 73.6 years) who were followed for an average of 11.6 years. Overall, the one quarter with the lowest testosterone levels at study entry were 40% more likely to die over the course of the study than men with higher levels of the hormone. There is some disagreement among experts on how to define overt testosterone deficiency, with some saying it should be diagnosed when levels fall below 300 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dL) and others advocating lower cutoffs. There was no evidence in this study that raising older men’s testosterone above 300 ng/dL might boost survival.

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REUTERS

Sleep is not just for the rest

The task looks as simple as a “Sesame Street” exercise. Study pairs of Easter eggs on a computer screen and memorize how the computer has arranged them: the aqua egg over the rainbow one, the paisley over the coral one — and there are just six eggs in all. Most people can study these pairs for about 20 minutes and ace a test on them, even a day later. But they’re much less accurate in choosing between two eggs that have not been directly compared: Aqua trumped rainbow but does that mean it trumps paisley? It’s hazy. It’s hazy, that is, until you sleep on it.

In a study published in May, researchers at Harvard and McGill Universities reported that participants who slept after playing this game scored significantly higher on a retest than those who did not sleep. While asleep they apparently figured out what they didn’t while awake: the structure of the simple hierarchy that linked the pairs, paisley over aqua over rainbow, and so on. “We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” said study author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who is now at the University of California, Berkeley. He added that many such insights occurred “only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep.”

Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years. They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection. They know, too, that some people get by on as few as three hours a night, even less, and that there are hearty souls who have stayed up for more than week without significant health problems. Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage.

The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation. Yet the new research underscores a vast transformation in the way scientists have come to understand the sleeping brain. Once seen as a blank screen, a metaphor for death, it has emerged as an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play — and to work — during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms known as deep sleep. “To do science you have to have an idea, and for years no one had one; they saw sleep as nothing but an annihilation of consciousness,” said Dr J Allan Hobson, a psychiatry professor at Harvard. “Now we know different, and we’ve got some very good ideas about what’s going on.”
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NYT NEWS SERVICE

Latest News About Health & Fitness

Researchers have found a way to kill intestinal cells that may develop cancer:

Researchers in Singapore have worked out a way to kill intestinal stem cells that may develop into colorectal cancer, the second largest cause of cancer related deaths in Western countries. Writing in the latest issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, the scientists said this potential method of cancer prevention had to do with the protein Wip 1, which appears to bring down the risk of cancer when it is inactivated. In their experiment, the researchers cross bred male mice suffering from intestinal polyps with Wip 1-deficient female mice — and their offspring turned out to be relatively cancer free. Intestinal polyps can develop into colorectal cancer over time.

Mother’s smoking may harm baby’s sleep:

Babies whose mothers smoke cigarettes before breast feeding sleep less and not as well, according to a study published on Tuesday. A test involving 15 nursing mothers found smoking “altered their infants’ sleep/wake patterning. Infants spent significantly less time in active and quiet sleep and woke up from their naps sooner,” the study said. Julie Mennella and other researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia said nicotine passed to the infants through breast milk was the culprit. The researchers said about 250 million women worldwide smoke tobacco.

Most Chinese kids spent summer holidays by surfing the net:

The vast majority of Chinese schoolchildren chose to stay home and surf the Internet during the summer holidays rather than play outside, a survey has said. The poll of 103 children aged 4 to 14 found that just 4% chose to do outdoor activities during the holidays and only 9% took part in summer educational camps. School began again across China on Monday. “Five years ago, when the Internet was not so popular among students, they preferred going out during summer holidays. Nowadays they prefer to stay at home and play Internet games,” a medical official said. About 13% of China’s 20 million Net users under 18 are classed as addicts, state media has said.

Heart cures for men and women may be different – said Researchers:

In their hearts, it seems, men and women really are different. The same invasive treatments for acute heart problems that can save lives in men may actually harm women, although reasons for this are unclear, researchers told the European Society of Cardiology annual meeting on Monday. A small-scale analysis involving 184 women patients by Swedish doctors found eights deaths among those receiving aggressive treatment, compared to just one death after a year in a group given more conservative care. “We should be cautious about these results but, taken together with findings from previous studies, it suggests that results from men do not necessarily apply to women,” said lead researcher Eva Swahn of University Hospital, Linkoping, Sweden.

Overweight US children suffer iron deficiency:

Overweight US children run an alarmingly high risk of iron deficiency, a condition which can lead to learning and behaviour problems, researchers said on Tuesday. It was the first time an association had been found between obesity and iron deficiency in children as young as 1, the researchers said, and they said junk food may be to blame. “The reasons for the strong association in this age group are unclear and need to be elucidated,” Dr Jane Brotanek of the University of Texas and others cautioned in their study, published in the journal Pediatrics. “Dietary practices may play an important role since diets high in calories but poor in micronutrients may lead to both iron deficiency and overweight” children, they added. Iron deficiency anemia in infancy and early childhood can impair learning, hamper school achievement and lower scores on tests of mental and motor development, they said.

Age difference between Male and Female is the key for having maximum children

To have the most children, men should find a partner six years younger and women a mate four years older, Austrian researchers said on Wednesday. The researchers tried to use evolution to explain why men often prefer younger women and what typically drives women’s desire for older men, said their leader, Vienna University anthropologist Martin Fieder. While it is no surprise to hear that men pick younger women to bolster their reproductive fitness and that women choose older partners for security, the study is the first to quantify the age difference that results in the most children, he said. “Nobody has shown before this has consequences for the number of offspring,” Fieder said in a telephone interview. “We have shown for the first time this is the case.” The researchers wanted to find the most beneficial ages for both men and women to have the most offspring, so looked at the data with that in mind and came out with different numbers for each. Writing in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters on Wednesday, the researchers said they collected information from Swedish national registries to track the number of births and age of parents going back 55 years. The researchers looked at men and women who did not change their partners between the birth of their first and last child and found the age differences among couples that produced the most offspring. For both men and women, having a partner of the optimal age meant having an average of 2.2 children compared with 2.1 children when they picked partners of the same age — a significant number in evolutionary terms that accumulates over time, Fieder said. The findings are the result of a statistical analysis and do not mean that every man can find a woman six years younger and that every women would find a man four years older. “It was a very systemic pattern,” Fieder said. “We don’t think it is random.” The study of couples during their typical child-bearing years also showed that both men and women who changed partners usually chose a person younger than the one they had before for their second one, Fieder said.