Archive for August, 2008
August 27th, 2008 -- Posted in Uncategorized |
A program to groom leaders for southern African nations is also producing South Dakota State University research that could add value to dairy products.
Researcher Rosemary Nyoka of Zimbabwe is finding that supplementing the diets of grazing dairy cows with dried distillers grains or fishmeal could increase the level of healthful fatty acids in milk and milk products such as cheese.
“With this potential to improve the healthful fatty acids, we are finding additional uses for distillers grains,” Nyoka said. “We are also trying to improve profitability for dairy farmers. We are hoping they will be able to sell these products at a premium.”
Nyoka, is working towards a Ph.D. in dairy science at SDSU and is also a Fellow of the Kellogg Southern Africa Leadership, or KSAL, Program.
Viwe Mtshontshi, senior program officer from AED, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that administers the KSAL program, said the organization is very pleased with level of support given by the faculty in the SDSU Dairy Science Department.
“Nyoka’s chosen area of research meets one of the Kellogg Foundation, Africa Program goals — addressing the challenge of food security in southern Africa,” Mtshontshi said.
Nyoka’s research is evaluating the extent to which dietary manipulations can improve the levels of healthful fatty acids in milk.
“I’m supplementing cows on pasture with fishmeal and distillers grains to see how much these high-fat diets will improve the concentrations of the healthful fatty acids in the milk and dairy products,” Nyoka said. “I will analyze to see how much fatty acid has been added to the milk through the diet, and then I’ll process the milk and analyze to see how much fatty acid has been added and retained in the cheese.”
Nyoka is monitoring healthful fatty acids called conjugated linoleic acids, or CLAs.
“These CLAs are known now to have anti-carcinogenic properties, as well as anti-arthritis and anti-obesity properties. They’ve also been known to improve bone formation,” Nyoka said. “In general, in an average American diet we are eating maybe 1 gram per day of these fatty acids, while the effective levels known so far are like 3.5 grams of the fatty acids. So we see that in general, people are not getting enough.”
CLAs are found mainly in products from ruminant animals such as milk and meat. Milk typically contains between 0.3 grams and 0.6 grams of CLAs per 100 grams of fat, Nyoka said. But on her trial diets, Nyoka’s SDSU cows produced milk with total CLAs ranging from 2.5 to 5 grams.
“I’m grazing the cows on an alfalfa pasture, and then they get half their daily requirements from a supplement which is either soybean-based, distillers grains-based or fishmeal-based,” Nyoka said.
The soybean-based supplement is the control, since dairy producers commonly use it. The fishmeal- and distillers grains-based diets are Nyoka’s areas of interest.
“Now with the ethanol plants we have a lot of distillers grains, and it has high fat content. Most of the fat in the distillers grains are the unsaturated fatty acids, which are the major precursors for the CLAs,” Nyoka said. “So we want to see how the distillers grains will compare to the fishmeal, as well as to the control diet.”
Nyoka is including cheese in her research because one of her interests is in finding alternative, high-value products that farmers in Zimbabwe can more easily transport to market from remote locations.
As a government dairy officer in Zimbabwe, Nyoka not only helps dairy farmers troubleshoot production issues, she also works with dairy manufacturers. That’s one reason she is studying at SDSU, one of the few dairy science departments in the United States that includes both dairy production and dairy manufacturing under one roof.
Professor Arnold Hippen, Nyoka’s adviser, said one advantage of the SDSU program is that it gives international students a more holistic view of the dairy industry — from the care of the animal to the finished dairy product — while emphasizing animal nutrition.
Vikram Mistry, head of the SDSU Dairy Science Department, said Nyoka is the second Ph.D. student to come through SDSU as a Kellogg Foundation scholar from Africa. SDSU graduate Gaolebale Mpapho has already returned to Botswana after earning her Ph.D.
“We have always talked about how important we are in the dairy education world in the United States,” Mistry said. “This program gives us the opportunity to have an impact beyond our borders.”
Source: South Dakota State University (”http://www3.sdstate.edu/SDSU/NewsDetail45702.cfm?ID=46,6612“)
August 26th, 2008 -- Posted in Uncategorized |
Research demonstrates the benefits of human interaction, while isolation is detrimental
As students’ summer classes and work schedules fill their days to the brim, many may feel that the time crunch requires them to neglect their social life.
But not spending enough time with family and friends can compromise human health, UCLA researchers have found.
“(Social contact with others) has effects on the body that are more powerful than cigarette smoking and your cholesterol level,” said Shelley Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology. “The magnitude is very strong.”
These responses are uncovered by studying cortisol, a hormone that restores the body from the mobilized and tense feelings of stress back down to a normal state, Taylor said.
Understanding when and how often cortisol, which increases blood pressure and destabilizes the immune system, is released can provide information on stress levels and their harm to health.
“By the time you get to your late 20s and early 30s, you’re going to have some damage if there’s been enormous wear and tear on these systems,” Taylor said. “What social support does is it keeps those responses low so the cumulative damage is less.”
Other scientists have charted the effects of positive and negative social contact.
“People that report small social networks are much more likely to die compared to people that have broader, more diverse social networks,” said Ted Robles, an assistant professor of psychology, whose research focuses on the immunological effects of negative relationships.
When couples discuss problems in their relationship in a hostile way, their immune system is weakened so much that wounds on their skin can heal slower than those in couples with more positive relations, Robles said.
Brain chemistry also has a role in how socializing proves healthful.
The nucleus accumbens, a major reward circuit in the brain, is stimulated when one hears positive feedback from their friends, said Naomi Eisenberger, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA.
“(This is) the same region that’s activated when a rat ingests cocaine or another addictive drug, the same region activated when you receive a lot of money,” Eisenberger said. “Rewarding events (with friends seem to) activate pretty primitive reward regions in the brain.”
Researchers said that these health effects might be linked to an evolutionary need to socialize in order to survive.
“Human beings’ subsistence over hundreds of thousands of years has been organized socially,” said Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at UCLA. “None of us could live very long by ourselves.”
But perhaps the easiest way to view the health effects of social contact is to look at those with limited social engagement or failed relationships, the researchers said.
“Social isolation is extremely toxic for mental and physical health,” Taylor said.
A similar, but more frequently experienced pain, is that of a broken connection, Fiske noted.
“Some of the most painful things are relationships that don’t work, or when you feel you’ve done something awful to someone,” he said. “People commit suicide because they’ve let down a group. Guilt (and) shame are (some of) the worst feelings.”
While some might struggle to equate being socially cut off to the flu or worse, a growing number of researchers are uncovering that the two are not as unlike as originally thought.
“It is ironic because other people carry the germs that make us sick,” Taylor said. “But it’s the socially isolated that often have the most difficulty health-wise.”
Source: UCLA Daily Bruin (http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/2008/aug/25/socializing-boosts-health-happiness/)
August 25th, 2008 -- Posted in Alzheimers, Mental Health |
Work could lead to new drugs for the common disease
MIT engineers report a new approach to identifying protein structures key to Alzheimer’s disease, an important step toward the development of new drugs that could prevent such structures from forming.
In the Aug. 22 issue of PLoS (Public Library of Science) Computational Biology, the researchers describe one such structure uncovered using a new computer-based technique.
Collin M. Stultz, the leader of the work and the W.M. Keck Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, noted that the same general approach could also be applied to certain proteins associated with cancer.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting some five million Americans, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. And due to the growing elderly population, that number “is expected to reach a staggering 13.2 million by 2050,” said Stultz, who is also affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.
Existing therapies, he continued, “do not adequately slow the rate of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. As such, there is an urgent need to develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s dementia.”
Stultz’s approach to the problem combines his background in engineering and medicine (he holds a PhD and MD, and is a practicing cardiologist with appointments at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the West Roxbury Veterans Administration Hospital). In his work, biochemical experiments inform a novel computer modeling technique aimed at better understanding one type of protein associated with the disease.
Alzheimer’s is characterized by two kinds of proteins — amyloid and tau — that aggregate in the brain. Stultz and co-author Austin Huang, an HST graduate student, have focused on determining the structure of tau.
But there’s a problem. “Tau is ‘natively unfolded,’ or floppy, so in solution it moves around a lot and can adopt many different structures,” Stultz said, much like the individual strands in a bowl of cooked spaghetti. Contrast that to the vast majority of other proteins, whose individual strands have similar structures, like the individual strands of uncooked spaghetti.
“With a ‘normal’ protein,” Stultz said, “you can measure the lengths of individual molecules and the average will be a pretty good description of any one.” Tau molecules, however, “are all over the place — they’re so diverse that it’s difficult to get one measurement that describes all of the possible structures.”
That complicates the hunt for specific tau structures associated with Alzheimer’s (not all tau is bad).
Stultz and Huang approached the problem as engineers, breaking it down into steps. Using a method they developed called Energy-minima Mapping and Weighting (EMW), they asked a computer to come up with all possible structures of tau that are consistent with an average set of experimental data.
“We generated lots and lots of structures for both normal tau and a mutant form” associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s, Stultz said. By comparing the two sets, the researchers found one structure that was more common in the mutant form — and therefore likely to “play a role in the pathologic process.” That structure, in turn, could then become the target for a new drug.
Stultz notes that the current work focused on one tau mutant associated with Alzheimer’s, but there are several others. So eventually he hopes to use EMW to create “a list of all types of suspect conformations for known tau mutants. Then, from that list, we can design drugs for each.”
This work was sponsored by a Jonathan Allen Junior Faculty Award.
Source: MIT News, Elizabeth A. Thomson (”http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/alzheimers-protein-0821.html“)
August 20th, 2008 -- Posted in Life Extension, Physical Health |
Number of uninsured, rising costs, long term care and an aging population could force a major system overhaul, says leading health economist
Aug. 20, 2008 — “We are headed into a time when a confluence of changes are going to lead to a perfect storm, making us finally realize that our health care system needs a major overhaul,” says Timothy D. McBride, Ph.D., leading health economist and professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.
“As the elderly population doubles between now and about 2030, projections are that we will see at least a doubling of the costs of the federal and state health and retirement programs,” he says. “That will likely be when the perfect storm hits. But if we miss it then, we will likely have missed all the storm clouds for the foreseeable future.”
McBride is available to discuss the current state of health care in the U.S. as well as the presidential candidates’ health care plans. Washington University in St. Louis is the site of this year’s vice presidential debate.
Familiar trends associated with the current health care crisis are the high rate of uninsured Americans and rising health care costs. The number of ever-rising uninsured is 47 million or about 16% of the U.S. population. National health expenditures exceed $2 trillion, accounting for 16% of the U.S. economy — more than three times the share health care took in 1960.
“While attention focuses on these two major trends, other storm clouds are brewing,” McBride says. “A long term care crisis looms, grows, and receives little attention, despite problems with the affordability, quality and access to long term care. These problems will only become much worse as the aging population doubles by 2030.
“Much attention also has been paid to the problems of financing Social Security, but the financial problems of the Social Security program pale in comparison to the burden of the Medicare and Medicaid programs on our economy.”
According to McBride, the growth of the elderly population will heighten concerns about the workforce needs in health care. “There are already shortages of nurses, and open nursing positions are sometimes filled by the expensive practice of recruiting migrant nurses into communities,” he says. “Added to this problem now are reports of shortages of other health professionals, including therapists, social workers, health aides and even some categories of physicians.
“Overall, we continue to worry about the general quality of health care as well as the problems of health disparities, as the inequities of our economy and culture flow into the health care system.”
Source: Washington University in St. Louis, Jessica Martin (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/12183.html)
August 18th, 2008 -- Posted in Brain Food, Life Extension, Osteoporosis / Bone Health, Physical Health |
Researchers at Johns Hopkins are reporting what is believed to be the most conclusive evidence to date that inadequate levels of vitamin D, obtained from milk, fortified cereals and exposure to sunlight, lead to substantially increased risk of death.
In a study appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine online Aug. 11, the Johns Hopkins team analyzed a diverse sample of 13,000 initially healthy men and women participating in an ongoing national health survey and compared the risk of death between those with the lowest blood levels of vitamin D to those with higher amounts. An unhealthy deficiency, experts say, is considered blood levels of 17.8 nanograms per milliliter or lower.
Of the 1,800 study participants known to have died by Dec. 31, 2000, nearly 700 died from some form of heart disease, with 400 of these being deficient in vitamin D. This translates overall to an estimated 26 percent increased risk of any death, though the number of deaths from heart disease alone was not large enough to meet scientific criteria to resolve that it was due to low vitamin D levels.
Yet researchers say the finding does highlight a trend, with other studies linking shortages of vitamin D to increased rates of breast cancer and depression in the elderly. And earlier published findings by the team, from the same national study, have established a possible tie-in, showing an 80 percent increased risk of peripheral artery disease from vitamin D deficits.
Researchers note that other studies in the last year or so in animals and humans have identified a connection between low levels of vitamin D and heart disease. But these studies, they say, were weakened by small sample numbers, lack of diversity in the population studied and other factors that limited scientists’ ability to generalize the findings to the public at large.
“Our results make it much more clear that all men and women concerned about their overall health should more closely monitor their blood levels of vitamin D, and make sure they have enough,” said study co-lead investigator Erin Michos.
“We think we have additional evidence to consider adding vitamin D deficiency as a distinct and separate risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease, putting it alongside much better known and understood risk factors such as age, gender, family history, smoking, high blood cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity and diabetes,” she said.
Vitamin D is well-known to play an essential role in cell growth, in boosting the body’s immune system and in strengthening bones.
“Now that we know vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor, we can better assess how aggressively to treat people at risk of heart disease or those who are already ill and undergoing treatment,” said Michos, who added that test screening for nutrient levels is relatively simple. It can, she said, be made part of routine blood work and be done while monitoring other known risk factors, including blood pressure, glucose and lipid levels.
Heart disease remains the nation’s leading cause of death, killing more than a million Americans each year. Nearly 10 percent of those with the condition have not one identifiable, traditional risk factor, which the experts say is why a considerable extent of the disease goes unexplained.
Michos, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Heart and Vascular Institute, recommends that people boost their vitamin D levels by eating diets rich in such fish as sardines and mackerel, consuming fortified dairy products, taking cod-liver oil and vitamin supplements and in warmer weather briefly exposing skin to the sun’s vitamin D — producing ultraviolet light.
Aware of the cancer risks linked to too much time spent in the sun, Michos says that as little as 10 to 15 minutes of daily exposure to the sun can produce sufficient amounts of vitamin D to sustain health. The hormonelike nutrient controls blood levels of calcium and phosphorus, essential chemicals in the body.
Michos says that if vitamin supplements are used, there is no evidence that more than 2,000 international units per day do any good. Study results show that heart disease death rates flattened out in participants with the highest vitamin D levels (above 50 nanograms per milliliter of blood), signaling a possible loss of the vitamin’s protective effects at too-high doses.
The U.S. Institute of Medicine suggests that an adequate daily intake of vitamin D is between 200 and 400 international units (or blood levels nearing 30 nanograms per milliliter). Previous results from the same nationwide survey showed that 41 percent of men and 53 percent of women are technically deficient in the nutrient, with vitamin D levels below 28 nanograms per milliliter.
Michal Melamed, study co-lead investigator, who started the research as a clinical fellow at Johns Hopkins, says that no one knows yet why or how vitamin D’s hormonelike properties may protect the heart, but she adds that there are plenty of leads in the better known links the vitamin has to problems with muscle overgrowth and high blood pressure, in addition to its control of inflammation, which scientists are showing plays a stronger role in all kinds of heart disease. But more research is needed to determine the nutrient’s precise biological action.
Researchers say their next steps are to test various high doses of vitamin D to find out if the nutritional supplementation results in fewer deaths and lower incidence of heart disease, including heart attack or moments of prolonged and severe chest pain.
The team also plans to investigate what biological triggers, such as obesity or hypertension, might offset or worsen the action of vitamin D on heart muscle, or whether vitamin D sets off some other reaction in the heart.
Melamed says that because vitamin D levels are known to fluctuate in direct proportion with daily physical activity, the growing epidemic of obesity and indoor sedentary lifestyles lend more urgency to act on the vitamin D factor.
Funding for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, P.J. Schafer Cardiovascular Research Fund and Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholars in Aging Program. Michos has received previous consulting fees from vitamin D therapeutics manufacturer Abbott Pharmaceuticals. The terms of these arrangements are being managed by The Johns Hopkins University in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.
Other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in this study, conducted solely at Johns Hopkins, were Wendy Post and Brad Astor. Melamed is now an assistant professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.
Source: John Hopkins Medicine, David March (http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2008/18aug08/18vitamind.html)
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