12 May 2012
Yogurt diet leads to ‘swaggering’ mice with larger testicles
Researchers who recently undertook a study with mice in hopes of confirming earlier reports that eating yogurt can help prevent age-related weight gain have discovered a number of unexpected side-effects in their rodent subjects.
First, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists realized that the yogurt-eating mice had shinier, silkier, and thicker coats than the non-yogurt-eating control mice. Then they noticed that the male mice were walking with a “mouse swagger,” which turned out to be due to testicles that were 5% heavier than those of mice fed a standard mouse diet and a full 15% heavier than those of mice forced to live on high-fat, low-nutrient junk food.
And finally they conducted mating experiments and found that yogurt-eating males “inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring,” while yogurt-eating females gave birth to larger litters and were more successful in raising them to the age of weaning.
Researchers Susan Erdman and Eric Alm have not yet determined the source of yogurt’s ability to enhance rodent sexuality, but they toldScientific American that they “think that the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier, which indirectly improves sexual machismo.”
A team of Harvard researchers has already begun investigating whether yogurt can also improve semen quality in human males and reports that “so far our preliminary findings are consistent with what they see in the mice.”
Photo by Steve Beger (originally posted to Flickr as Albino Mouse) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Exercise Keeps Muscles Young, Even in Elderly Heart Patients
A new study shows that contrary to previous belief, even elderly heart patients can benefit from regular exercise.
Dr. Stephan Gielen, deputy director of cardiology at the University Halle/Wittenberg in Germany, and his colleagues say that physical activity can help protect heart patients over age 70 from muscle wasting, a condition that in many cases can worsen these patients’ health and impede their recovery.
Over the course of a lifetime, muscle is constantly made and degraded, and with age, the deterioration becomes dominant, leading to weakness and difficulty in maintaining cardiac and respiratory health. In previous studies, Gielen and his colleagues showed that inflammation, which can occur after heart failure, can accelerate the wasting of muscle, so in the current study, they wanted to document what effect, if any, exercise might have on this process.
Gielen and his team recruited 60 patients with heart failure and 60 healthy controls, each in two age groups: people 55 years old and younger, and those 65 and older. Half the participants in each age group were assigned to a four-week aerobic exercise program of stationary cycling; each participant cycled for 20 minutes, four times a day on weekdays, and also had a 60-minute group exercise session involving walking and calisthenics. The other half received the usual clinical care by their physicians.
To study changes in muscle physiology, the researchers took biopsies of muscle from each participant’s leg and analyzed them for certain enzymes related to muscle maintenance. After the four weeks, as the researchers report in the journal Circulation, those in the exercise group showed marked improvement in their muscle enzymes; they showed lower levels of a muscle breakdown protein than those who didn’t exercise, even though the heart patients had higher levels of this protein to start.
The exercise participants also showed lower levels of inflammation in the muscle, and increased muscle strength. This translated to physiological benefits as well; the heart failure patients under age 55 increased their peak oxygen intake by 25%, while those over age 65 increased this measure by 27%. The key is an enzyme system that monitors the balance between muscle strengthening and degradation, and exercise can tip the balance in favor of muscle strengthening.
“What surprised us was the speed of onset of these effects,” says Gielen. “We believed that with a short term program of four weeks, the effects would be much more limited. But it was surprising for us that we got nearly all the effects of exercise training after just four weeks. So this is a very rapid system, and even at advanced ages, there is a high plasticity of the muscle system.”
That means that regardless of age, says Gielen, heart patients can benefit from exercise, and rather than worsening their condition, as doctors intuitively thought for decades, physical activity actually improves their health and may even speed their recovery. Gielen and his team studied the benefits only of aerobic exercise on muscle mass, but other studies have also hinted that weight-bearing or resistance training can also help elderly patients maintain their muscular strength.
Having a potential regulatory pathway also makes it possible to develop drug targets that may boost muscle conditioning, says Gielen, if additional studies confirm these results. “This plasticity of the muscle system is underused in medicine at the moment,” he says. But perhaps not for much longer.
Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/08/exercise-keeps-muscles-young-even-in-elderly-heart-patients/?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Ftopstories+%28TIME%3A+Top+Stories%29#ixzz1ucAInoy2
'One in six cancers worldwide are caused by infection'
One in six cancers - two million a year globally - are caused by largely treatable or preventable infections, new estimates suggest.
The Lancet Oncology review, which looked at incidence rates for 27 cancers in 184 countries, found four main infections are responsible.
These four - human papillomaviruses, Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis B and C viruses - account for 1.9m cases of cervical, gut and liver cancers.
Most cases are in the developing world.
The team from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France, part of the World Health Organization, says more efforts are needed to tackle these avoidable cases and recognise cancer as a communicable disease.
'Preventable'
The proportion of cancers related to infection is about three times higher in parts of the developing world, such as east Asia, than in developed countries like the UK - 22.9% versus 7.4%, respectively.
Nearly a third of cases occur in people younger than 50 years.
Among women, cancer of the cervix accounted for about half of the infection-related cancers. In men, more than 80% were liver and gastric cancers.
Drs Catherine de Martel and Martyn Plummer, who led the research, said: "Infections with certain viruses, bacteria, and parasites are some of the biggest and preventable causes of cancer worldwide
"Application of existing public-health methods for infection prevention, such as vaccination, safer injection practice, or antimicrobial treatments, could have a substantial effect on the future burden of cancer worldwide."
Vaccines are available to protect against human papillomavirus (HPV) - which is linked to cancer of the cervix - and hepatitis B virus - an established cause of liver cancer.
And experts know that stomach cancer can be avoided by clearing the bacterial infection H. pylori from the gut using a course of antibiotics.
Commenting on the work, Dr Goodarz Danaei from Harvard School of Public Medicine in Boston, the US, said: "Since effective and relatively low-cost vaccines for HPV and HBV are available, increasing coverage should be a priority for health systems in high-burden countries."
Jessica Harris of Cancer Research UK said: "It's important that authorities worldwide make every effort to reduce the number of infection-related cancers, especially when many of these infections can be prevented. In the UK, infections are thought to be responsible for 3% of cancers, or around 9,700 cases each year.
"Vaccination against HPV, which causes cervical cancer, should go a long way towards reducing rates of this disease in the UK. But it's important that uptake of the vaccination remains high. At a global level, if the vaccine were available in more countries, many thousands more cases could be prevented."
8 May 2012
Scoliosis Treatment - New Exercise Solution!
About Dr Kevin Lau
Dr Kevin Lau DC is the founder of Health In Your Hands, a series of tools for Scoliosis prevention and treatment. The set includes his book Your Plan for Natural Scoliosis Prevention and Treatment, a companion Scoliosis Exercises for Prevention and Correction DVD and the innovative new iPhone application ScolioTrack. Dr Kevin Lau is a graduate in Doctor of Chiropractic from RMIT University in Melbourne Australia and Masters in Holistic Nutrition. He is a member of International Society On Scoliosis Orthopaedic and Rehabilitation Treatment (SOSORT), the leading international society on conservative treatment of spinal deformities. In 2006 I was awarded the "Best Health-care Provider Awards" by the largest Newspaper publication in Singapore on October 18 2006 as well as being interviewed on Primetime Channel News Asia as well as other TV and Radio. For more information on Dr Kevin Lau, watch his interviews or get a free sneak peek of his book, go to: http://www.hiyh.info.
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