Natural therapy: Blood

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Sunday, August 18, 2013

Walking Reduces Risk of Diabetes and High Blood Pressure

by Bidita Debnath on? August 07, 2013 at 10:01 PM Research News A new study suggests that people who walk to work are around 40 per cent less likely to have diabetes as those who drive. Walking Reduces Risk of Diabetes and High Blood Pressure
Researchers at Imperial College London and University College London examined how various health indicators related to how people get to work, using data from a survey of 20,000 people across the UK.

They found that cycling, walking, and using public transport were all associated with lower risk of being overweight than driving or taking a taxi. People who walk to work were also 17% less likely than people who drive to have high blood pressure. Cyclists were around half as likely to have diabetes as drivers.

The findings are published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.High blood pressure, diabetes, and being overweight are all major risk factors for heart and circulatory disease, the UK's biggest killer.

The researchers said people could reduce their risks of serious health problems such as heart attacks by avoiding using a car.

"This study highlights that building physical activity into the daily routine by walking, cycling or using public transport to get to work is good for personal health ," said Anthony Laverty, from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London.

Nineteen per cent of working age adults who use private transport - such as cars, motorbikes or taxis - to get to work were obese, compared to 15 per cent of those who walked and 13 per cent of those who cycled to work.The study found wide variations in the modes of transport used in different parts of the UK. Public transport was used most in London, at 52 per cent, compared with just five per cent in Northern Ireland.

"The variations between regions suggest that infrastructure and investment in public transport, walking and cycling can play a large role in encouraging healthy lives, and that encouraging people out of the car can be good for them as well as the environment," said Laverty.

Source-Eurekalert

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Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Scientists: Sleeping Stem Cells Could Hold Key to Treatment of Aggressive Blood Cancer

by Rukmani Krishna on? August 02, 2013 at 12:02 AM Cancer News Rather than displacing healthy stem cells in the bone marrow as previously believed, the cancer is putting them to sleep to prevent them forming new blood cells, discovers scientists studying an aggressive form of leukaemia. Scientists: Sleeping Stem Cells Could Hold Key to Treatment of Aggressive Blood Cancer
The finding offers the potential that these stem cells could somehow be turned back on, offering a new form of treatment for the condition, called Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). The work was led by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London with the support of Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute.

Around 2,500* people are diagnosed with AML in the UK each year, both young and old. Although AML is curable in some the majority die from this disease.

Normally, the bone marrow produces haematopoietic stem cells which mature into "adult" blood cells. In people with AML the bone marrow is invaded by leukaemic myeloid cells which aren't able to develop into normal functioning blood cells.

The result is that the body does not have enough red blood cells or platelet cells, which can cause symptoms of anaemia, such as tiredness, and increase the risk of excessive bleeding. Patients are also more vulnerable to infection as the white blood cells, which fight bacteria and viruses, are not properly formed.

Dr David Taussig, from the Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary, University of London, who led the research, said: "The widely accepted explanation has held that AML causes bone marrow failure by depleting the bone marrow of normal haematopoietic stem cells by killing or displacing them.

"However, we have found that samples of bone marrow in both mice models and patients with AML contain the same, or more, of these normal stem cells than usual. So the cancer isn't getting rid of them, instead it appears to be turning them off so they aren't going on to form healthy blood cells.

"If we can find out how the cancer cells are doing this, we can look at exploiting it to find ways to wake these stem cells up. This is very important as, while the cure rate for younger patients can be around 40 per cent, in older patients it is much lower. The treatments we have, such as chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants, just aren't very successful in this older patient group."

The scientists studied the levels of haematopoietic stem cells (HSC) in the bone marrow of mice transplanted with human AML. They found the numbers of normal mouse HSCs stayed the same, however what did change was that the HSCs were no longer going through the stages of development which finally results in the formation of new blood cells.

The findings were confirmed by the analysis of bone marrow from 16 patients with AML.

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "Although major progress has been made in treating AML over the years, there's still an urgent need for more effective treatments to improve long-term survival. This study takes us an important step forwards in our understanding of what's going on in the bone marrow of people with AML, an area that we have not known enough about previously, and the challenge now is to turn this understanding into new treatments for patients."

Dr Taussig added: "Usually when the body is stressed, the stem cells become very active. For example, if you have a haemorrhage, they will jump into action to produce more new blood cells. The cancer cells are somehow over-riding this and our next phase of work will concentrate on how they are doing this."

Source-Eurekalert

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Monday, August 5, 2013

Scientists: Sleeping Stem Cells Could Hold Key to Treatment of Aggressive Blood Cancer

Around 2,500* people are diagnosed with AML in the UK each year, both young and old. Although AML is curable in some the majority die from this disease.

The findings were confirmed by the analysis of bone marrow from 16 patients with AML.

Source-Eurekalert

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Saturday, July 27, 2013

Shashi Tharoor Launches Blood Directory Portal

Launched by private financial business house Muthoot Pappachan Group (MPG), the Life Blood Directory portal and helpdesk is billed to be the biggest directory of blood donors in the country.

MPG chairman and managing director Thomas John said it was the first time that such a facility would be available in India.

"Over 3,600 branches across will be equipped to support the donor management process. More than 30,000 people consented to donate blood. Requests for blood will be processed at a centrally coordinated helpdesk, which will coordinate blood donation," John said.

Besides banking, MPG has interests in automotive dealerships, hospitality, real estate, entertainment, health services and alternate energy, with a turnover of Rs.20,000 crore.

Source-IANS

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Saturday, July 13, 2013

Keeping Blood Pressure and Cholesterol in Check Could Cut Heart Disease Risk by Half: Study

by Rukmani Krishna on? July 04, 2013 at 1:11 PM Heart Disease News A new research has claimed that controlling your high blood pressure and high cholesterol simultaneously could decrease your risk of attaining heart disease by half or more. Keeping Blood Pressure and Cholesterol in Check Could Cut Heart Disease Risk by Half: Study
Brent M. Egan, M.D., lead study author and a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C, said that undertreated high blood pressure and cholesterol affect millions of Americans - posing a major public health threat.

He said that the reality is that they know more than enough to prevent 75 percent of heart disease and strokes, but people not doing everything that they can do or even do it at a reasonable level.

Egan asserted that some gradual improvements have been made over the years, but there is still a lot of progress to be made.

The findings are based on data of more than 17,000 American adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys during in 1988-94, 1999-2004 and 2005-10.

In addition to reviewing patients' blood pressure and cholesterol levels, researchers considered race, age, insurance status, whether patients smoked, had diabetes, had diagnosed heart disease and/or chronic kidney disease, and if they visited a doctor every year.

Egan also said that if patients' cholesterol tests show a good high-density lipoprotein (HDL) level, which is the healthy, protective cholesterol, then the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) number might get overlooked.

He explained that not all HDL is equally protective and some people with a normal HDL are at high risk and in those patients, there might be a false sense of assurance that cholesterol really isn't a problem.

He added that LDL and non-HDL readings are the ones to really watch and patients seeing their doctors for BP treatment should ask about their LDL and non-HDL levels and make sure both are under control at the same time.

The research has been published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

Source-ANI

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Sunday, July 7, 2013

Fusion of Cancer Cell and White Blood Cell Gives Rise to Metastatic Tumor

by Kathy Jones on? July 05, 2013 at 10:30 PM Cancer News The fusion of a leukocyte, or white blood cell, and a cancer cell that leads to the formation of a genetic hybrid, was found to increase the risk of human metastatic tumor, a joint study conducted by researchers at Yale Cancer Center, Denver Police Crime Lab and the University of Colorado reveals. Fusion of Cancer Cell and White Blood Cell Gives Rise to Metastatic Tumor
Their study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, may answer the question of how cancer cells travel from the primary tumor's site of origin to distant organs and tissues of the body ? the deadly process of metastasis.

Such a theory was first proposed as an explanation for metastasis more than a century ago. But until now, the theory was unproven in human cancer because genomic differences between cells from the same patient cannot be distinguished. To get around this problem, the researchers analyzed genomic DNA in the secondary malignancies of a patient who had a melanoma brain metastasis and had received a bone marrow transplant from his brother.

They found signature genes from both the patient and donor together in the tumor cells, providing the first evidence that leukocytes (in this case from the donor) can fuse with cancer cells and initiate a tumor.

"Our results provide the first proof in humans of a theory, proposed in 1911 by a German pathologist, that metastasis can occur when a leukocyte and cancer cell fuse and form a genetic hybrid," said corresponding author John Pawelek, research faculty in the dermatology department of the Yale School of Medicine. "This could open the way to new therapy targets, but much work needs to be done to determine how fusion occurs, the frequency of such hybrids in human cancers, and the potential role of hybrids in metastasis," he added.

Source-Eurekalert

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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Sensor Chip That Detects Disease in Blood Drop Developed

A new study describes how Reginald Farrow and Alokik Kanwal, researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and their team have created a carbon nanotube-based device to noninvasively and quickly detect mobile single cells with the potential to maintain a high degree of spatial resolution, reports Science Daily.

"Using sensors, we created a device that will allow medical personnel to put a tiny drop of liquid on the active area of the device and measure the cells' electrical properties," said Farrow, the recipient of NJIT's highest research honour, the NJIT Board of Overseers Excellence in Research Prize and Medal.

"Although we are not the only people by any means doing this kind of work, what we think is unique is how we measure the electrical properties or patterns of cells and how those properties differ between cell types."

Source-IANS

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Friday, June 7, 2013

Economic Incentives Increase Blood Donation

Pointing to a large body of recent research that supports their argument, the three economists write in the May 24, 2013, issue of Science that the World Health Organization and national blood collection agencies should reconsider their opposition to economic incentives for much-needed blood donations.

Macis and his co-authors - Nicola Lacetera of the University of Toronto and Robert Slonim of the University of Sydney - state that such opposition has been based in part on evidence from uncontrolled studies using non-random samples, and on surveys and artificial scenarios using hypothetical questions. These and other tests typically have suggested that economic incentives can decrease intrinsic motivations to donate and may also attract blood donations with greater risks such as viruses and infectious diseases.

But now field-based evidence from large, representative samples is available on actual donations, the authors write, and the results clearly refute the previous findings. Economic rewards do have a positive effect on donations, without negative consequences on the safety of the blood.

They cite the work of other researchers, as well as their own extensive work in this area, which examined incentives for actual blood donors in the United States, Argentina, Switzerland, and Italy. In one of their studies, the three authors examined individual data from nearly 100,000 donors at 72 American Red Cross blood drives in northern Ohio from September 2009 through August 2010. Gift cards were offered at half of the blood-drive sites; no incentives were provided at the other sites, which served as controls for the study.

They found that an advertised offer of a $5 gift card increased the likelihood of giving among people with a history of donating by 26 percent; and a $10 gift card produced a 52 percent rise.

The offer of gift cards even caused people to motivate others, including people who previously had never given blood, to donate. The incentives also induced regular donors to switch from their usual donation sites to locations where rewards would be available.

"There are several differences between the earlier studies and the new field evidence," Macis explained, noting that in the field studies "donors do not feel scrutinized by the researcher and thus might be less concerned about their image and more excited about the rewards."

Moreover, in the new studies the incentives were not framed as "payment" and thus may have been perceived as tokens of appreciation, which can reinforce rather than undermine donors'' intrinsic motivation.

Meantime, added Macis, advances in screening technology since the World Health Organization guidelines were established have greatly reduced the risk of tainted or otherwise unusable blood being used later in transfusions. Also, the rewards are typically provided for presenting at the blood drives, not for donating blood, which should reduce the risk that an ineligible donor would misrepresent health or other information.

Macis additionally noted that incentives could be strategically employed to attract blood donations at times when blood supplies are particularly low, such as holidays and summer months. Although many individuals are eligible to donate blood, only a small percentage of them, less than 10 percent, give blood in the United States, and even fewer donate in low-income countries, where shortages have very serious consequences.

"This raises the question of whether pure altruism is sufficient to guarantee a sufficient, steady supply of blood," Macis said.

The research has implications beyond blood reserves, he added. Although more research is needed and multiple strategies should be pursued simultaneously to encourage donations, some form of economic compensation could bring a much-needed boost to the supplies of bone marrow, organs, and body parts for transplants.

Selling organs and body parts is illegal in the United States. Donors of blood plasma, however, can be paid. A federal appellate court ruled Dec. 1, 2011, that most donors of bone marrow can receive compensation, overturning a law that had made such arrangements punishable by up to five years in prison.

The three authors conclude in their Science article, which appears in the magazine''s "Policy Forum" section: "Debates on ethical issues around giving rewards for donations are inevitable and should be encouraged. But there should be little debate that the most relevant empirical evidence shows positive effects of offering economic rewards on donations."

Source-Newswise

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Sunday, August 18, 2013

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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Friday, June 7, 2013