Health

Hair dyes, which include home hair colouring kits and those used at pricey salons, are linked to deadly cancer-causing chemicals, warn scientists.

Hair dye has previously been tied to tumours of the breast, bladder, ovaries, brain and leukaemia. Increasing numbers of users are becoming allergic to their contents, sometimes with fatal results.

Chemicals in permanent hair dyes can react with tobacco smoke and other pollutants to create one of the most powerful cancer-causing compounds, the journal Materials reports.

Mouthrinse beats toothbrush in clearing plaque and gingivitis (inflamed gums), more so than brushing alone, suggests a US research.

“It’s simple – mouthrinses can reach nearly 100 percent of the mouth’s surfaces, while brushing focuses on the teeth, which make up only 25 percent of the mouth,” says Christine A. Charles, who led the study.

“Even with regular brushing and flossing, bacteria often are left behind,” adds Charles, director of Scientific and Professional Affairs, Global Consumer Healthcare Research and Development, the journal General Dentistry reports.

London, February 19 (ANI): Pregnant women should avoid drinking coffee because even a single cup of it a day could harm their unborn babies, researchers have warned.

They reported in the journal BMC Medicine that caffeine content is linked to low birth weight and prolonged pregnancies, according to the Daily Express.

The researchers used information about almost 60,000 pregnancies over 10 years.

They found that caffeine reduced birth weight by 21g to 28g per 100mg consumed a day by mothers.

Washington, February 19 (ANI): An Indian origin scientist and his team have taken a new approach to bladder regeneration by harvesting cells from a patient”s healthy bone marrow.

The Northwestern Medicine research, by lead author Arun K. Sharma, research assistant professor in urology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and colleagues, is an alternative to contemporary tissue-engineering strategies.

The bone marrow cells are being used to recreate the organ”s smooth muscle, vasculature, and nerve tissue.

Sydney, Feb 19 (ANI): One third of British men aged between 35 and 60 years are unable to see their genitals due to a protruding midriff, also known as a beer belly, a recent survey has revealed.As a result of the survey of 1,000 British men, funded by the medical group We Love Our Health, an online men’s health awareness initiative has been launched.The Big Check aims to encourage men to make a potentially lifesaving health check.

As people move more often and become more urbanized, skin color-an adaptation that took hundreds of thousands of years to develop in humans-may lose some of its evolutionary advantage, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

About 2 million years ago, permanent dark skin color imparted by the pigment-melanin-began to evolve in humans to regulate the body`s reaction to ultraviolet rays from the sun, said Nina Jablonski, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology.

Organic foods may make you less likely to show kindness to others, a new study has revealed.

Using organic products makes people feel more secure about themselves, which reduces their desire to be altruistic, assistant professor of psychology at Loyola University Dr Kendall Eskine said.

“Organic foods, like other green products, seem to help people affirm their moral identities, thus generating counterintuitive behaviours,” Eskine said.
Eskine`s research is the first to demonstrate that exposure to organic foods can influence moral thinking and doing.

Caffeine, the primary constituent of coffee has been found to be associated with low birth weight babies and may also prolong pregnancy, says a Swedish study.

A research team from the Norwegian Institute for Public Health, investigated the impact of maternal caffeine during pregnancy on babies, relying on information about mother’s diet and birth details collected over 10 years.

London, February 18 (ANI): Women behave differently to men because their brains are wired completely uniquely, according to a new book.

Neuroscientist Daniel G. Amen explained in his new book, Unleash The Power Of The Female Brain, that men and women are equally smart, but each sex uses different parts of the brain to solve problems or achieve goals, according to the Daily Mail.

Women are better at packing carefully for a family holiday because they have more brain cells in the pre-frontal cortex, the area which controls judgement, planning, and conscientiousness, he said.

London, February 18 (ANI): Short cooking classes can encourage healthy eating for a long period of time, a study suggests.

Questioning of parents who took part in government-funded courses in Scotland showed they ate more fruit and vegetables and fewer ready meals a year later, the BBC reported.

The University of Glasgow researchers said refresher courses would boost the effects further.

The study looked at courses lasting between four and eight weeks for parents of pre-school children.

Classes included information on budgeting, nutrition and cooking simple meals.

A doctor from California has claimed that it’s a myth that high cholesterol is one of the factors, which makes the heart diseases deadly.

Dr. Jonny Bowden, author of ‘The Great Cholesterol Myth,’ said that lowering your cholesterol may not necessarily prevent heart disease.

He said that cholesterol is not even a good predictor of heart disease.

He asserted that 50 percent of people who are admitted to hospitals in the US with cardiovascular disease have normal cholesterol – and half the people with elevated cholesterol have normal hearts, Fox News reported.

Using the internet for long periods of time can cause withdrawal symptoms similar to the ‘comedown’ experienced by drug users, scientists have warned.

Researchers found that spending excessive periods of time surfing the internet left people in ‘negative moods’ and, like drug addicts, when heavy internet users go back on the web their negative moods lift, the Daily Mail reported.

Formula milk should carry larger ‘cigarette-style’ statutory warnings that “breast feeding is the best” for the new-born child, according to a leading British charity.

A report, Superfood for Babies, released by ‘Save the Children’ Monday, said the lives of 95 babies could be saved every hour worldwide, 830,000 a year, if mothers breastfed immediately after giving birth.

The proposal would apply to the UK, European and the developing world world as well.

Air pollution and ozone levels may also play a role in precipitating heart attacks, warns fresh research from the US.

Rice University (Houston) statisticians Katherine Ensor and Loren Raun analysed eight years worth of data drawn from Houston’s extensive network of air-quality monitors and more than 11,000 concurrent out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) logged by Houston Emergency Medical Services (EMS).

It took the family of seven-year-old Lipi Mandal, daughter of a rickshaw-puller, three months to detect that her high fever, loss of appetite and stomach ache was due to blood cancer.

Till then she and her father, a native of Malda in West Bengal now living in Noida near Delhi, were being made to run around by private doctors who thought that the girl was suffering from anaemia.

The ordeal of the lower kindergarten student, say oncologists and volunteers, is a reflection of the common problem in India — the late diagnosis of childhood cancer.

Washington, Feb 17 (ANI): Doctors struggle to determine whether a breast tumor is likely to shift into an aggressive, life-threatening mode.

Now a group from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has identified a mechanism through which mitochondria, the powerhouses of a cell, control tumor aggressiveness.

Based on their findings, the team developed a simple treatment that inhibits cancer progression and prolongs life when tested in mice.
The research team hopes to proceed quickly to human clinical trials to test this new approach using drugs already in use for other conditions.

Parkinson`s disease may not be only responsible for the condition`s distinctive movement problems but may also affect vision, a new study has revealed.

Parkinson`s, the second most common form of neurodegenerative disease, principally affects people aged over 60.

Its most common symptom is tremor and slowness of movement (bradykinesia), but some people with Parkinson`s also experience changes in vision.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a “bionic retina”, called Argus II, the nation`s first implanted device for the blind which allows some patients to see well enough to read large letters and detect large images and movement.

“This is truly an exciting and historic moment in the drive to restore vision in people with advanced retinal degenerative diseases,” said Stephen Rose, chief research officer of the Fighting Blindness Foundation.

Having diabetes doubles a person’s risk of dying after a heart attack, but the reason for the increased risk has never been clear.

Now, a new study from the University of Iowa suggests that the link may lie in the over-activation of an important heart enzyme, which leads to death of pacemaker cells in the heart, abnormal heart rhythm, and increased risk of sudden death in diabetic mice following a heart attack.

London, Feb. 15 (ANI): Adidas will soon be launching a new shoe, which has an added bounce built into its soles.

The sportswear giant said that the 110-pound Energy Boost contains a new material – dubbed “energy capsules” which are melted and built into the sole, the Daily Mail reported.

The new material returns more energy to the runner – meaning that the wearer can run much more efficiently on the roads and go for longer without spending as much energy.

Scientists have identified a pivotal protein in a cellular transformation that makes a cancer cell more resistant to treatment and more capable of growing and spreading, making it an inviting new target for drug development.

Additionally, the international team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found the cancer drug sunitinib potentially has a new role in treating triple-negative, claudin-low breast cancer, a particularly resistant version of a type of cancer that is already difficult to treat.

Americans living at higher altitudes were more likely to be slimmer than those in low-lying areas, says a new research.

Jameson Voss, from Uniformed Services University in Maryland, who led the research, said: “I was surprised by the magnitude of the effect…I wasn`t expecting such a consistent pattern as what was emerging.”

The study was based on data from 400,000 people living in Colorado. The figures showed a person`s obesity risk dropped with every 660 feet increase in elevation.

“It provides some evidence that these associations persist over the long term,” Voss said.

A natural probiotic supplement can help treat people with osteoporosis and produce healthy bones, according to a new study. Probiotics are bugs that can help balance the immune system.

“We know that inflammation in the gut can cause bone loss, though it`s unclear exactly why,” said Laura McCabe, professor of physiology and radiology, Michigan State University (MSU).

“The neat thing we found is that a probiotic can enhance bone density.”

Lazy eye – a condition in which one eye has weaker vision than the other – could be quickly cured by a spell in total darkness, a new study has found.

Common in young children, a visual impairment known as amblyopia, causes blurry vision in the `lazy eye`.

It happens when the part of the brain responsible for deciphering signals from one eye does not work hard enough.

Measurable signs of accelerated biological ageing were seen in healthy menopausal women carrying a well-known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer`s disease, according to a new study.

However, in carriers who started hormone therapy at menopause and remained on that therapy, this acceleration was absent, the researchers said.

Hormone therapy for non-carriers of the risk factor, a gene variant called ApoE4, had no protective effect on their biological ageing.