Health

With over 90 per cent of Pakistan’s polio cases genetically linked to Peshawar, the World Health Organisation today described the northwestern city as the world’s “largest reservoir” of endemic poliovirus.

According to the latest genomic sequencing results of the Regional Reference Laboratory for polio, 83 of 91 polio cases in Pakistan in 2013 were genetically linked to the virus circulating in Peshawar.

Moreover, 12 of the 13 cases reported from Afghanistan last year were directly linked to Peshawar.

A new survey which was conducted in Universities has revealed that nearly 40 per cent university students are either obese or are over-weight. Almost 27 per cent of students who are rated as obese are in the age group of 17 to 20 and 11 per cent were classified as overweight.

lack of knowledge among students about risks of poor dietary practices, use of tobacco and lack of sleep,eating disorder, coupled with lack of physical activities relationship matters to heart, devoting more time to digital media were some of the reasons.

A new study has suggested that children are more likely to have weight problems if their fathers are overweight at conception.

Nuts have gotten a bad rap for being too high in fat, but the truth about them is that nuts, especially walnuts, are a powerhouse of nutrition.

A new research has revealed that immune system plays an important role in the heart’s response to injury, suggesting that embryonic macrophages in the heart promote healing after injury.

Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that two major pools of immune cells are at work in the heart. Both belong to a class of cells known as macrophages. One appears to promote healing, while the other likely drives inflammation, which is detrimental to long-term heart function.

A new study has provided important information about transmission of human leishmaniasis, which is a group of infectious diseases that kills more than 100,000 people a year.

Professor Deborah Smith of the Centre for Immunology and Infection at University of York, working with colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Charles University in Prague, has shown that Leishmania parasites reproduce sexually in the wild.

The research is a significant step forward in understanding how leishmaniasis is spread in endemic regions.

When it comes to vision, the brain can perform more than one function without sacrificing time or accuracy.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Bristol in Britain have shown that during visual sampling – the act of picking up bits of visual information through short glances – the brain can handle various visual functions simultaneously.

To support their findings, they looked at two vision processes: foveal analysis and peripheral selection.

India’s victory in eliminating polio from its soil is an “important milestone” in the global efforts to eliminate the disease and the country can play a vital role by helping other nations with their eradication initiatives, a leading American newspaper has said.

The last new case of polio in India was reported three years ago and the country can now be declared polio-free.

“India’s victory is an important milestone in the global effort to eliminate polio,” the New York Times said in editorial titled ‘Eradicating Polio Everywhere’.

Researchers have found a new enzyme, known as cIAP2, which helps the lungs fight against infection by giving them the ability to decrease flu-inflicted tissue injury.

Dr. Maya Saleh of the Department of Medicine of the McGill University Health Centre said that the new discovery offers exciting new avenues for controlling influenza, since until now attempts to target the virus itself have proven challenging, especially in the face of emerging new strains of the virus.

A new study has revealed that while people have a harder time controlling themselves when tired, it doesn’t mean they’ve exhausted all of their willpower and the key to boosting self-control is finding pleasure in the necessary activities of life.

“When people are fatigued they experience a change in motivational priorities such that they are less willing to work for the things they feel obliged to do and more willing to work for things they like to do,” Michael Inzlicht from University of Toronto Scarborough said.

Researchers have claimed that the brain seems to synchronize the activity of different brain regions to make it possible for a person to pay attention or concentrate on a task.

Senior author Maurizio Corbetta, MD, the Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology, and her team used grids of electrodes temporarily implanted onto the brains of patients with epilepsy.

A team of researchers have claimed that people decreasing their sitting time and increasing their physical activity have a lower risk of chronic disease.

The researchers – Sara Rosenkranz and Richard Rosenkranz, both assistant professors of human nutrition from Kansas State University – studied a sample of 194,545 men and women ages 45 to 106.

The data was from the 45 and Up Study, which is a large Australian study of health and aging.

A new study has found that fast food consumption may not be the major factor in the rapid increase in childhood obesity.

The study found that fast-food consumption is simply a byproduct of a much bigger problem: poor all-day-long dietary habits that originate in children’s homes.

The study was produced by researchers at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Sitting less and moving more is the key to have a lower risk of developing any chronic disease.

According to a Kansas State University research, even standing throughout the day – instead of sitting for hours at your computer – can reduce the risk for chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, breast cancer and colon cancer, among others.

It has been known for year that a fibre-rich diet protects the organism against obesity and diabetes, and not a French-Swedish team of researchers has succeeded in elucidating this mechanism, which involves the intestinal flora and the ability of the intestine to produce glucose between meals.

The study also clarified the role of the intestine and its associated microorganisms in maintaining glycaemia. They will give rise to new dietary recommendations to prevent diabetes and obesity.

Consuming nuts at least seven times a week can reduce risk of death from any cause by 20 per cent, says a new study.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), also establishes a significant association between the consumption of nuts and a lower incidence of death due to heart diseases, cancer and respiratory diseases.

The study said nutrients in nuts, such as unsaturated fatty acids, protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants may confer heart-protective, anti-carcinogenic and anti-inflammatory properties.

Fairness creams may contain toxic heavy metals like mercury while lipsticks may be tainted with carcinogenic chromium, finds a new study released today.

Centre for Science and Environment’s (CSE’s) laboratory in Delhi, which did the study, found mercury in 44 per cent of the 32 fairness creams it tested.

It also found chromium in 50 per cent and nickel in 43 per cent of the 30 lipstick samples.

The report from CSE said they found mercury in 14 fairness creams in the range of 0.10 parts per million (ppm) to 1.97 ppm.

Researchers have identified the three most significant risk factors for child obesity among preschoolers: inadequate sleep, a parental BMI that classifies the mom or dad as overweight or obese, and parental restriction of a child’s eating in order to control his weight. “We looked at 22 variables that had previously been identified as predictors of child obesity, and the three that emerged as strong predictors did so even as we took into account the influence of the other 19.

Blurred vision, scratching and burning sensation and irritation in the eye – these are not minor irritants in your daily routine but might be the pointers to a condition called the dry-eye syndrome which plagues many people during an extreme winter.

According to doctors, even though a person’s entire body might be covered up as a protection against the chilly winter winds, there is one part that is always exposed: the eyes.

Researchers have said that younger people’s memories seem better because they are able to retrieve them in higher definition.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Brandon Ally, Philip Ko of Vanderbilt University in the US, led the research team to focus on visual working memory, a person’s ability to briefly retain a limited amount of visual information in the absence of visual stimuli.

Their examination of why this function is reduced during the course of healthy aging took the multiple stages of encoding, maintenance, and the retrieval of memorized information into account.

Researchers have said that high concentrations of serum long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, derived from fish and fish oils, may help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Ongoing at the University of Eastern Finland, the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD) determined the serum omega-3 fatty acid concentrations of 2,212 men between 42 and 60 years of age at the onset of the study, in 1984-1989.

During a follow-up of 19.3 years, 422 men were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes, a chronic condition that affects all aspects of a patient’s life, can be prevented by following and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Majority of research studying the effects of smoking on health has not separately studied the results on subsets with diabetes, suggesting the identified risks are at least equivalent to those found in the general population, Diabetic Living India magazine reported.

The cardiovascular burden of diabetes, especially in combination with smoking, needs to be addressed consistently and comprehensively.

Researchers have developed a new DNA supercomputer which is promising to deliver radically cheaper genome sequencing.

The latest model by Illumina is designed to process 20,000 samples a year, with costs potentially as low as 1,000 dollars, the Verge reported.

Illumina’s test will sequence every single base pair in a person’s DNA , scanning huge quantities of genetic data that are not currently understood.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Illumina’s previous model, which was released last year, performed sequencing for 3,000 dollars. (ANI)

A researcher has explained that the different meditations have different effects, and that meditation can lead to nondual or transcendental experiences, a sense of self-awareness without content.

After a search of the scientific literature Fred Travis, PhD, Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management, reported that physiological measures and first-person descriptions of transcendental experiences and higher states have only been investigated during practice of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique.

By using a strain of mice that mimics many of the features of the human immune system and can be infected with the most common human form of the malaria parasite, a team of scientists has identified a key host defense mechanism.

Over the past several years, lead author Jianzhu Chen, the Ivan R. Cottrell Professor of Immunology, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and colleagues have developed strains of mice that have the human cells necessary for a comprehensive immune response.