>Scientists turn ‘bad fat’ into ‘good fat’
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The US Johns Hopkins team made the breakthrough in rats but believe the same could be done in humans, offering the hope of a new way to treat obesity.
Modifying the expression of a protein linked to appetite not only reduced the animals’ calorie intake and weight, but also transformed their fat composition.
“Bad” white fat became “good” brown fat, Cell Metabolism journal reports.
Brown fat is abundant in babies, which they use as a power source to generate body heat, expending calories at the same time.
But as we age our brown fat largely disappears and gets replaced by “bad” white fat, which typically sits as a spare tyre around the waist.
Experts have reasoned that stimulating the body to make more brown fat rather than white fat could be a helpful way to control weight and prevent obesity and its related health problems like type 2 diabetes.
Novel approach
Various teams have been searching for a way to do this, and Dr Sheng Bi and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine believe they may have cracked it.
They designed an experiment to see if suppressing an appetite-stimulating protein called NPY would decrease body weight in rats.
When they silenced NPY in the brains of the rodents they found their appetite and food intake decreased.
Even when the rats were fed a very rich, high-fat diet they still managed to keep more weight off than rats who had fully functioning NPY.
The scientists then checked the fat composition of the rats and found an interesting change had occurred.
In the rats with silenced NPY expression, some of the bad white fat had been replaced with good brown fat.
The researchers are hopeful that it may be possible to achieve the same effect in people by injecting brown fat stem cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weight loss.
Dr Bi said: “If we could get the human body to turn bad fat into good fat that burns calories instead of storing them, we could add a serious new tool to tackle the obesity epidemic.
“Only future research will tell us if that is possible.”
Dr Jeremy Tomlinson, an expert at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Obesity Research, said: “This is exciting, novel and interesting.
“We will need a lot more work to tease this out, but it could offer a feasible way to develop new treatments for obesity.”
Source: BBC
>Nasal spray vaccine could prevent type 1 diabetes
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>Cool Your Brain For Better Sleep
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You can’t sleep. You’ve tried counting sheep, drinking warm milk, maybe even taking medications like Benadryl or sleeping pills.
Maybe next you should try cooling your brain.
According to research presented Monday at Sleep 2011, the annual meeting of the Associated Profession Sleep Societies, cooling the brain and can reduce the amount of time it takes people with insomnia to fall asleep — and increase the length of time they stay that way.
To achieve “frontal cerebral thermal transfer,” as the cooling is called, researchers Dr. Eric Nofzinger and Dr. Daniel Buysse of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine outfitted 24 people — 12 with insomnia, and 12 without — with soft plastic caps. The caps had tubes for circulating water at neutral, moderate or maximum “cooling intensity.”
The team observed how well participants slept with and without the caps, and at the different temperature levels. Patients with insomnia who were treated at maximum cooling intensity for the whole night took about 13 minutes to fall asleep and slept 89% of the time that they were in bed, the researchers said. That’s similar to the sleep enjoyed by healthy study subjects who didn’t have insomnia (who took 16 minutes to fall asleep and also slept 89% of the time).
The method is effective because it slows metabolism in the frontal cortex, according to the presenters. Insomnia is associated with increased metabolism in that part of the brain; reduced metabolism, apparently, has the opposite effect.
In a press release, Nofzinger noted that only 25 percent of patients on sleeping pills said they were satisfied with the drugs, which can cause side effects and dependence. The cooling caps may provide an effective, safe and natural alternative. “We believe this has far-reaching implications for how insomnia can be managed in the future,” he said.
Source: LA Times
>Researchers Build the First Living Laser, Using Human Cells and Jellyfish Protein
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The cell’s spherical shape acted as a lens, refocusing the light and therefore requiring less energy for lasing than was necessary in the cylinder experiment. Best of all, the cells survived the lasing process, and were able to produce hundreds of pulses of laser light.
>Preventing Heart Attack Using Magnetic fields
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>Detecting and controlling seizures with brain implants
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>Nanofiber patch could regenerate dead areas of heart
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>Paralyzed man regains voluntary leg movement with electrode array implant
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In a move that gives cautious hope to the millions of people suffering some form of paralysis, a team of researchers from UCLA, Caltech and the University of Louisville has given a man rendered paralyzed from the chest down after a hit-and-run accident in 2006 the ability to stand and take his first tentative steps in four years. The team used a stimulating electrode array implanted into the man’s body to provide continual direct electrical stimulation to the lower part of the spinal cord that controls movement of the hips, knees, ankles and toes, to mimic the signals the brain usually sends to initiate movement.
Instead of bypassing the nervous system to directly stimulate the leg muscles, the electrical signals provided by the array stimulate the spinal cord’s own neural network so it can use the sensory input derived from the legs to direct muscle and joint movements. The stimulation therefore doesn’t induce movement, but taps into a network of spinal cord nerves that are capable of initiating movement on their own without the help of the brain, which then work together with cues from the legs to direct muscle movement.
The research team’s work builds on previous research at UCLA that showed animals with spinal-cord injuries could stand, balance, bear weight and take coordinated steps while the outermost part of the spinal canal – or epidural space – is stimulated.
>Surprisingly Simple Cure for Multiple Sclerosis By an Italian Doctor
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Left: diagram from a medical text showing how MS affects the myelin sheathing of nerves. Right: MS lesions under a microscope. |
An Italian doctor has been getting dramatic results with a new type of treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, which affects up to 2.5 million people worldwide. In an initial study, Dr. Paolo Zamboni took 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS, performed a simple operation to unblock restricted bloodflow out of the brain – and two years after the surgery, 73% of the patients had no symptoms. Dr. Zamboni’s thinking could turn the current understanding of MS on its head, and offer many sufferers a complete cure.
Multiple sclerosis, or MS, has long been regarded as a life sentence of debilitating nerve degeneration. More common in females, the disease affects an estimated 2.5 million people around the world, causing physical and mental disabilities that can gradually destroy a patient’s quality of life.
It’s generally accepted that there’s no cure for MS, only treatments that mitigate the symptoms – but a new way of looking at the disease has opened the door to a simple treatment that is causing radical improvements in a small sample of sufferers.
Italian Dr. Paolo Zamboni has put forward the idea that many types of MS are actually caused by a blockage of the pathways that remove excess iron from the brain – and by simply clearing out a couple of major veins to reopen the blood flow, the root cause of the disease can be eliminated.
Dr. Zamboni’s revelations came as part of a very personal mission – to cure his wife as she began a downward spiral after diagnosis. Reading everything he could on the subject, Dr. Zamboni found a number of century-old sources citing excess iron as a possible cause of MS. It happened to dovetail with some research he had been doing previously on how a buildup of iron can damage blood vessels in the legs – could it be that a buildup of iron was somehow damaging blood vessels in the brain?
He immediately took to the ultrasound machine to see if the idea had any merit – and made a staggering discovery. More than 90% of people with MS have some sort of malformation or blockage in the veins that drain blood from the brain. Including, as it turned out, his wife.
He formed a hypothesis on how this could lead to MS: iron builds up in the brain, blocking and damaging these crucial blood vessels. As the vessels rupture, they allow both the iron itself, and immune cells from the bloodstream, to cross the blood-brain barrier into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Once the immune cells have direct access to the immune system, they begin to attack the myelin sheathing of the cerebral nerves – Multiple Sclerosis develops.
He named the problem Chronic Cerebro-Spinal Venous Insufficiency, or CCSVI.
Zamboni immediately scheduled his wife for a simple operation to unblock the veins – a catheter was threaded up through blood vessels in the groin area, all the way up to the effected area, and then a small balloon was inflated to clear out the blockage. It’s a standard and relatively risk-free operation – and the results were immediate. In the three years since the surgery, Dr. Zamboni’s wife has not had an attack.
Widening out his study, Dr. Zamboni then tried the same operation on a group of 65 MS-sufferers, identifying blood drainage blockages in the brain and unblocking them – and more than 73% of the patients are completely free of the symptoms of MS, two years after the operation.
In some cases, a balloon is not enough to fully open the vein channel, which collapses either as soon as the balloon is removed, or sometime later. In these cases, a metal stent can easily be used, which remains in place holding the vein open permanently.
Dr. Zamboni’s lucky find is yet to be accepted by the medical community, which is traditionally slow to accept revolutionary ideas. Still, most agree that while further study needs to be undertaken before this is looked upon as a cure for MS, the results thus far have been very positive.
Naturally, support groups for MS sufferers are buzzing with the news that a simple operation could free patients from what they have always been told would be a lifelong affliction, and further studies are being undertaken by researchers around the world hoping to confirm the link between CCSVI and MS, and open the door for the treatment to become available for sufferers worldwide.
It’s certainly a very exciting find for MS sufferers, as it represents a possible complete cure, as opposed to an ongoing treatment of symptoms. We wish Dr. Zamboni and the various teams looking further into this issue the best of luck.
Source: Gizmag Via The Globe and Mail.