Doctor Tiger Health News.

Researchers from University College, London have concluded from  a 15 year study of over 11000 adults in a Report  published in the British Medical Journal, that failure to brush one’s teeth twice a day will result in poor oral hygiene, which could lead to a 70% risk  of  cardiovascular (heart) disease.

The conclusion of the researchers was also that tooth brushing is associated with heart disease.

The Dentist Abroad.com has the full story.

Doctor Tiger.

Anti-depressants are widely used to help relieve suffering.  But after reviewing previous studies, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania may have hit on something that could change the way anti-depressants are prescribed.  

The researchers looked at data from earlier studies on two antidepressants. The studies included patients with severe, moderate and mild forms of depression. Some were given antidepressants.  Others received a placebo.  Jay Fournier, the study’s lead author, said, “What we found was that patients who are on the lower end of the severity, the medications weren’t doing much more than the placebo was. For patients at the higher end of the severity, the medications had a very potent effect.”

Doctors have been sharply divided on how to treat patients with less serious symptoms of depression. The study does not make treatment recommendations, but it has implications for treatment. 

Psychiatrist Stuart Sotsky conducted one of the studies included in the review. “I hope that what a study like this will do would be to help alert clinicians, residents in training, and medical students that severity is an important factor to consider in planning treatment,” he said.

Dr. Sotsky says some moderately depressed patients could still benefit from antidepressants, but his study showed that many others could do just as well with exercise, talk therapy, support groups or self help. “While they may not respond to antidepressants, the good news is that there are other, effective treatments that can be employed to help,” he said.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

voanews.gov

Doctor Tiger.

Africa’s top football, or soccer, teams (other than the team from Togo) are in Angola for the  African Nations Cup. A partnership of football stars, civic groups, corporations and public donors is taking advantage of the sport’s popularity to launch a campaign against malaria which is a major killer in Africa. 

The United Against Malaria Partnership has launched a major media campaign to fight the disease 

A spokesman for the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, Herve Verhoosel, said the 30-second public service announcements feature football stars from African nations who urge viewers to use treated mosquito nets. “We will use the power of football to communicate on malaria prevention. When a player speaks on TV or on the radio or in the press, when the player says to the young children, ‘Sleep under a bed net,’ people are listening,” he said.

Angola’s national football association this week joined similar associations from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Uganda, Zambia and the United States in the anti-malaria group. Other members include the national teams of Mali and Tanzania and European Champions Barcelona of Spain.

Malaria is caused by a parasite that is transmitted through a certain type of mosquito. It kills some 850,000 people in Africa ever year. The illness also causes extensive loss of productivity because of its debilitating symptoms.

But Verhoosel says malaria can be prevented. “We have everything to prevent and to cure malaria and we still have a child dying from malaria every 30 seconds. What we need today is political leadership,” he said.

He says football stars can also influence African leaders to focus greater resources on malaria.

The group wants to provide universal access to mosquito nets and anti-malaria medicine to people living in malaria zones by the end of this year. It says this is a first step toward the target of reducing deaths from malaria by 80 percent in five years.

The partnership, which is supported by international donors and corporate sponsors, plans to extend its campaign to South Africa in time for the football World Cup which kicks off in June.

voanews.gov

Doctor Tiger.

Scientists in the United States have developed a powerful new method to help calm the abnormal brain activity associated with diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s.  The technique involves the use of laser light stimulation of special proteins implanted in key areas of the brain. 

So-called neural “super silencers,” were developed by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from two genes found in fungi and bacteria.  The genes, called Arch (ARK) and Mac, are responsible for making light-sensitive proteins that help the organisms convert light into energy.

But when those genes are inserted into the brain, neurons can be engineered to express the proteins, making it possible to manipulate them with a laser beam and calm irritated nerve cells that are responsible for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and chronic pain syndromes.

Ed Boyden is a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.  He is the lead author of a study that showed how neurons containing the genes could be turned on and off with pulses of laser-beam light. “If you could turn off those neurons that are behaving inappropriately just for the right amount of time, that allows you to cancel out the aberrant neural dynamics with fewer side effects than if you were to bathe the entire brain in a pharmacological agent,” he said.

Boyden says the laser light activates the genetically modified brain cells, lowering the voltage in the neurons and stopping them from firing inappropriately.  

“We’ve shown in the current paper that we could express these molecules from fungus and archi-bacteria and so on and they would express just fine for months in mice.  And we also showed we could get safe and effective optical silencing of these neurons.  When we turned the light off, the neurons just go back to their normal activity,” he said.

Scientists are now trying to develop a neural feedback system that would become active when brain cells start to become over-stimulated, as in the case of epilepsy. “So, for example, one of the things we are working on is can we detect a certain brain state using electrodes the same way that it’s been done for almost a hundred years and use it to monitor the brain and then deliver a pulse of light just at the right time to shut down a pathological state in the brain,” Boyden said.

With the new tools, Boyden says researchers may someday be able to identify and correct complex neural networks that lead to disease by engineering different neurons to respond to different colors of light.
For example, in the study, researchers found that brain cells implanted with the Arch gene were silenced by yellow light, while neurons modified by the Mac gene were silenced by blue light.

“We’re screening even more species now to try to broaden our ecological biodiversity screen.  But we’re also starting to do longer and longer measurements of the safety and efficacy in more clinically interesting scenarios,” he said.

Boyden’s team has begun experimenting with light-sensing proteins to calm the brains of non-human primates. 

While the use of light tools to treat human brain diseases is still a long way off, Boyden says other researchers are starting to use the technology to develop new and improved drugs.

Ed Boyden and colleagues describe their work programming brain activity with light-sensing genes this week in the journal Nature.

voanews.gov

Doctor Tiger.

Ginkgo biloba is often recommended to prevent memory loss associated with aging. However, an eight year study shows that long-term use of the supplement does not slow the rate of mental decline in older adults.

Practitioners of alternative medicine have recommended ginkgo biloba as a means of maintaining and even improving memory among older adults. But until now, strong clinical evidence about its effectiveness has not been forthcoming.

For eight years, researchers at six universities across the U.S. studied more than three thousand adults, aged 72 to 96, with normal mental functioning or with mild cognitive impairment. Participants received either a 120-mg dose of gingko extract twice a day, or a sugar pill. Researchers found that gingko had no specific effect on memory or attention.

“What we can say is that we find no evidence that ginkgo, over this long period of time made a difference in whether someone’s slow change in memory function, as a function of normal aging, was affected at all by the medication,” said Dr. Steven Dekosky, at the University Of Virginia.

Earlier research showed that gingko did nothing for people with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, nor did it help reduce other forms of dementia.

Researchers say this latest study is notable because it was conducted with the largest number of participants, and it rules out the herbal supplement as a useful treatment for memory loss. 

“We found that there was no effect of the ginkgo biloba on these very slow but, clearly detectable changes in thinking function in late life,” added Dr. Steven Dekosky. 

But the researchers added one caveat: While gingko biloba is not effective in slowing down the mental changes of aging, they say it is safe and has no side effects.

Doctor Tiger.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is said to be the fastest growing neurobiological condition in the world. Autistic children and adults often have trouble interacting with others, are slow to learn language, and are frequently more interested in objects than people.  It is hard to know how prevalent autism is in many countries because statistics are hard to come by. But we are told by the Autism Society that it affects more than one million people in China,  with slightly more than a million in the United States, and as many as two million in India.  But what about those in Africa?

In Africa, a lack of awareness and resources prevents many children with autism from getting help. They are stigmatized by their families and communities. 

Brigitte Kobenan is the mother of an autistic child. During her reign as Miss Ivory Coast and Miss Congeniality World in recent years, she decided to make autism a central part of her platform, creating the Autism Community of Africa. She recently came to the Ivorian embassy in Washington, D.C. to talk about her own son. She says he often sat in a corner at home, lost in his own world.

“He was spinning objects, he would just look at a fan spinning and he would go around and around, he would line up toys, you know, instead of playing with them,” Kobenan explained.

Kobenan decided she wouldn’t hide him away from society, regardless of his condition. Instead, she led by example. Soon people noticed.

“I had a woman who…came to my mom and said because of your daughter I can take my child out. I am not ashamed anymore,” she said. “We look at this woman with a worldwide crown and she is not afraid of showing her son, so why should I hide mine?”

Dawn Cooper Barnes is the wife of the Liberian ambassador in Washington. She is also the mother of a 19-year-old autistic boy. She says she finds many Africans are superstitious when it comes to autism.

“Children in Africa living with autism may be thought to being possessed by the evil spirit or bad omens,” she said.

She says people just need to be better informed.

“What we need is more information. What is autism? How does it affect children? What can we do to help children with autism? We need to dispel some of the myths that are surrounding mental illness and mental conditions in Africa,”  Barnes said.

For Jeff Sell, the vice president of the World Autism Organization, recent data on the prevalence of autism is alarming.

“When my boys were born, it was one in a 1,000, now it’s one in a 100. We have a worldwide epidemic, we have a worldwide problem,” he noted. 

There is growing awareness about autism in Africa and the need for treatment facilities.  In Cameroon, for example, centers now provide specialized care for this developmental disorder. 

But Brigitte Kobenan says many more facilities are needed. She hopes to build a new treatment center in her own country, Ivory Coast, with money raised during her event in Washington.

voanews.gov

Doctor Tiger

The IMPACT registry stands for ‘Improving Pediatric and Adult Congenital Treatment’ and includes information about patients who do not undergo open heart surgery. Often they undergo catheterization, a procedure which uses a catheter, or narrow tube, that is threaded into the heart through a blood vessel.

A five-month-old baby born with a congenital heart defect undergoes a catheterization. The child is one of 36,000 babies born with a heart defect in the U.S. each year. Doctors are working on the infant’s heart without performing open heart surgery. Cardiologists, such as Dr. Gerard Martin, say that within the last four years, doctors have learned how to perform more complex heart surgeries using catheters.

“…you can fix the heart without cuts, without invading the body, without pain,” says Dr. Gerard Martin at Chlidnen’s National Medical Center

But Dr. Martin says the long-term effectiveness of certain heart catheterization procedures is unclear.

So working with the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Martin is establishing a new database, known as the IMPACT registry. It records the progress of thousands of catheterization patients over the long-term.

Dr. Martin says, by monitoring the progress of multiple patients from infancy through adulthood, doctors can gather crucial evidence about the effectiveness of the procedures.

“…so we will know how we are really doing when we treat this condition,” he adds.  “Not in 20 children in one hospital, but in 2,000 children in a hundred hospitals.”

Doctors use such databases to monitor the long-term well-being of patients undergoing many kinds of treatments.

EJ Davis, 4, was only three-months-old when he underwent open heart surgery.

His physician, Dr. Richard Jonas, still gets regular progress reports on EJ and thousands of other patients from a surgical registry.

“It’s not just about surviving an operation and doing well for a few days or a few weeks. It’s about decades and decades,” says Dr. Jonas.

EJ’s mother, Hope Davis, says she believes registries will help to improve the lives of children born with heart defects in the future.

“They’ll have access to even better care and even more knowledge in science that will really help,” she says.  “One day maybe they’ll only have to go through a few things that EJ had to go through.”

Dr. Gerard Martin says the IMPACT registry for catheterization patients will help doctors to make decisions based on long-term evidence gathered from many hospitals. He says it will help future generations of patients live healthier lives.

voa.gov

Doctor Tiger News

A new study by the Measles Initiative, a coalition of U.N. and international organizations finds measles deaths worldwide fell by 78 percent between 2000 and 2008.

But, the agencies warn of a resurgence in measles deaths if vaccination efforts are not sustained.  

The study finds measles deaths dropped from an estimated 733,000 in 2000 to 164,000 in 2008.  It says all regions, with the exception of South-East Asia, have achieved the United Nations goal of cutting measles deaths two years ahead of target.

One of the biggest success stories is found in Africa, where measles-related deaths have declined by 92 percent since 2000.  

Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele is Director of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals at the World Health Organization.  He says the measles vaccine has saved about 4.3 million children’s lives in less than a decade.

Despite this rapid progress, he warns the momentum in the worldwide vaccination drive appears to be stalling, putting children’s lives at risks.  He notes global measles deaths leveled off in 2007.  

“And, if this trend is not reversed, our projection shows that the combined effects of decreasing political and financial commitment from national governments and donors could result in an estimated 1.7 million measles-related deaths between 2010 and 2013, with more than half a million deaths in 2013 alone,” he said.   

Measles is among the world’s most contagious diseases and one of the leading causes of death among children worldwide.  The Measles Initiative notes even healthy and well-nourished children, if unvaccinated, are at risk of the disease and its severe health complications.  These include pneumonia, diarrhea, and encephalitis.

Executive-Director of the U.N. Children’s Fund, Ann Veneman, says of the estimated 164,000 measles related deaths in 2008, 90 percent were among children under five.

“Much remains to be done.  Measles still kills more than 400 children every day,” she said. “This is an unacceptable reality when a safe, effective and inexpensive vaccine to prevent the disease exists and the poorest children continue to pay the highest price in terms of lives and opportunities lost.”  

Walter Orenstein is Deputy Director for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  He applauds the success, which has been achieved and says it is important not to slip back.

“Each day children are born and if they are not immunized as recommended, they accumulate in the population to the point that they can fuel a major resurgence of disease,” he said. “That would certainly be a tragedy for children and families and for all those countries that have come so far.”  

The Measles Initiative says countries must continue follow-up vaccination campaigns every two to four years to eliminate the risk of resurgence.  It says this must be done until their healthcare systems can provide two doses of measles vaccination to all children and provide treatment for the disease.  The agencies say they need $59 million to achieve this goal.

(voanews.com)

Doctor Tiger

Read the conclusions to a University of Miami 10 year study on this subject in The Fitness Tiger

(whitehouse.gov)

Doctor Tiger

In this update just posted on the web, The White House compares the Obama Healthcare Reform proposals with the 2003 Medicare Part D. Read the statistics here now.

Also read the News around the World in The Daily Tiger.

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