Chocolate may protect brain from stroke

Chocolate might not be the healthiest thing for your waistline - but research suggests it may protect against stroke.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins made a research that a compound in dark chocolate may protect the brain after a stroke by increasing cellular signals already known to shield nerve cells from damage.

Ninety minutes after feeding mice a single modest dose of epicatechin, a compound found in dark chocolate, the scientists induced an ischemic stroke by essentially cutting off blood supply to the animals’ brains. They found that the animals that had preventively ingested the epicatechin suffered significantly less brain damage than the ones that had not been given the compound.

While most treatments against stroke in humans have to be given within a two- to three-hour time window to be effective, epicatechin appeared to limit further neuronal damage when given to mice 3.5 hours after a stroke. Given six hours after a stroke, however, the compound offered no protection to brain cells.

Sylvain Doré, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and pharmacology and molecular sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says his study suggests that epicatechin stimulates two previously well-established pathways known to shield nerve cells in the brain from damage. When the stroke hits, the brain is ready to protect itself because these pathways — Nrf2 and heme oxygenase 1 — are activated. In mice that selectively lacked activity in those pathways, the study found, epicatechin had no significant protective effect and their brain cells died after a stroke.

The study now appears online in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.

Eventually, Doré says, he hopes his research into these pathways could lead to insights into limiting acute stroke damage and possibly protecting against chronic neurological degenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related cognitive disorders.

The amount of dark chocolate people would need to consume to benefit from its protective effects remains unclear, since Doré has not studied it in clinical trials. People shouldn’t take this research as a free pass to go out and consume large amounts of chocolate, which is high in calories and fat. In fact, people should be reminded to eat a healthy diet with a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Scientists have been intrigued by the potential health benefits of epicatechin by studying the Kuna Indians, a remote population living on islands off the coast of Panama. The islands’ residents had a low incidence of cardiovascular disease. Scientists who studied them found nothing striking in the genes and realized that when they moved away from Kuna, they were no longer protected from heart problems. Researchers soon discovered the reason was likely environmental: The residents of Kuna regularly drank a very bitter cocoa drink, with a consistency like molasses, instead of coffee or soda. The drink was high in the compound epicatechin, which is a flavanol, a flavanoid-related compound.

But Doré says his research suggests the amount needed could end up being quite small because the suspected beneficial mechanism is indirect. "Epicatechin itself may not be shielding brain cells from free radical damage directly, but instead, epicatechin, and its metabolites, may be prompting the cells to defend themselves," he suggests.

The epicatechin is needed to jump-start the protective pathway that is already present within the cells. "Even a small amount may be sufficient," Doré says.

Not all dark chocolates are created equally, he cautions. Some have more bioactive epicatechin than others.

"The epicatechin found in dark chocolate is extremely sensitive to changes in heat and light" he says. "In the process of making chocolate, you have to make sure you don’t destroy it. Only few chocolates have the active ingredient. The fact that it says ‘dark chocolate’ is not sufficient."

Flavonoids

One of the researchers, Prof Susanna Larsson, from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said: "The beneficial effect of chocolate consumption on stroke may be related to the flavonoids in chocolate.

"Flavonoids appear to be protective against cardiovascular disease through antioxidant, anti-clotting and anti-inflammatory properties.

"It's also possible that flavonoids in chocolate may decrease blood concentrations of bad cholesterol and reduce blood pressure."

The study also noted that while dark chocolate had been linked to benefits for the heart in the past, milk chocolate was the preferred option in Sweden and in the study.

Dr Clare Walton, from the Stroke Association, said: "Past research has shown that eating dark chocolate might go some way to reducing your stroke risk if it is eaten as part of a healthy, balanced diet.

"This study suggests that eating a moderate amount of other types of chocolate could also be beneficial in men.

"However, a lot more research is needed and these results should not be used as an excuse for men to eat chocolate as an alternative to regular exercise or eating a healthy diet to reduce their risk of stroke."

The authors of the study warned of the high sugar and fat content of chocolate.

"It should be consumed in moderation," they said.

Hip flexor muscles can help you stand up to pain

When you stand up from your chair at work and your lower back starts grumbling. And then you decide to take a walk down the hall and before you know it, your knees ache, too. What gives?

The answer is little to do with your back or knees. The pain could be connected to your hips, a group of muscles called the hip flexors that are in use when we climb stairs, run, dance and play soccer and even do resistance training. Also known as the iliopsoas, they help the in leg movement and stabilize the spine cord. They are located in your abdomen and upper thigh and are among the strongest in the body.

"When we sit all day, the hip flexors get shorten," says Jim Thornton, president of the National Athletic Trainers' Association and head athletic trainer at Clarion University in Clarion, Pa. "When they're shortened it impacts how we perform and can cause all kinds of problems from our lower backs down to our feet."

The older you are the more they shorten, and it's not just sitting that leads to problems. Lie in a fetal position at night or when napping? That also shortens them.

Unfortunately, Thornton says, many training programs overlook the hip flexors and focus on the hamstrings and quadriceps. But tight flexors will prevent the rest of the kinetic flow from working properly, he adds. Here's one example of what can misfire:

"Let's say you're going for a walk or jog and your hips are tight," he says. "When you strike your heel on the ground, the muscles that control the arch of the foot are going to be inhibited because the hips are tight. As your foot rolls forward, it will pronate (roll inward). That can cause shin splints and plantar fasciitis (inflammation in the arch). If you get that, you feel like and walk like a 99-year-old person."

Chances are many of us probably have tight hip flexors. Government statistics suggest that almost half of us report sitting more than six hours a day; 65% say they spend more than two hours a day watching TV.

Sitting is taking a toll on our health in other ways. A recent study showed that if people spent less than three hours a day sitting, it would add two years to the average life expectancy. And research has linked sitting too much to increased risks of diabetes and death from cancer, heart disease and stroke.

"The most important thing is you actually get up off the couch and do something," says Thornton. "There's all kind of exercises people can do to get a workout in, but most important thing is to get up and do it."

But warm up first. "Don't go right into a class," he says, or start a program on a DVD cold. "One of the biggest problems is people will go and get injured in the first couple visits and get discouraged."

When it comes to warming up the hips, he recommends gentle stretches such as lunges with one knee bent in front and the other leg straightened behind you. In yoga, this stretch is called the warrior pose. As you push forward with the back leg you'll feel the hip flexors starting to relax in the back leg. Keep your back straight and toes pointing forward. Hold for 15 to 30 seconds and repeat three times. Switch sides.

He also suggests using a foam roller, which sells for about $15 and offers the same benefits as sports massage. They come in different sizes, but a good one for the legs and hips need only be 24 inches long by 6 inches in diameter. In addition to stretching muscles and tendons, they also break down soft tissue and scar tissue.

"Our players use them all the time," he says. "People can either do it and not get injured or not do it and get injured. Proper warmup is as much a part of workout as workout is itself."

In The Athlete's Book of Home Remedies, author and sports medicine physician Jordan Metzl recommends warming up the hip flexors by lying face down on the floor with the foam roller positioned above your knees and your elbows on the floor for support. Roll back and forth toward your hips. When you're comfortable with that move, cross one leg over your other leg and rest it behind the ankle. Roll back and forth on the straight leg. You might have to tilt inward onto the flexor. Then switch sides.

"They're seriously underrated muscles," Metzl says. "But they're very important in everyday movement as well as explosive athletic movements."

Hayfever vaccine study raises hopes for new allergy treatment

Researchers are developing a new vaccine for hayfever which could be more effective, less invasive for patients and less expensive than vaccines already available to patients on the NHS.

Scientists at Imperial College London and King's College London have carried out a study that showed a significant reduction in skin sensitivity to grass pollen that was associated with an increase in "blocking antibodies" in the bloodstream. The results are so encouraging that King's has today launched a clinical trial in collaboration with Guy's Hospital, working together as part of King's Health Partners. The trial is funded by the Medical Research Council and National Institute for Health Research via the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation programme, and will further investigate the vaccine as a potential new hayfever treatment.

The researchers say the approach defines a completely new concept in treating allergies and in the future could have an impact on treating other conditions such as asthma and food allergies.

Hayfever affects one in four people in the UK. An allergic reaction to grass pollen triggers a blocked or runny nose, sneezing, itchy eyes and in some cases asthma symptoms. For many individuals this can interfere with work or school performance, sleep and social activities. Tablets and sprays may temporarily relieve symptoms, but for severe cases one option is a vaccine to "switch off" the allergy, called immunotherapy.

The vaccines currently used involve high doses of allergen given by injection underneath the skin (subcutaneously) or sometimes as a daily tablet or drops under the tongue. In most cases this involves large numbers of injections in an NHS allergy clinic or daily tablets or drops taken continuously, which can be inconvenient for patients and expensive for the NHS.

Published today in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, this new study shows that a series of low dose allergen injections (less than a thousandth of the usual dose) into a higher layer of the skin (intradermally), rather than subcutaneously, led to a 90 per cent reduction in skin reactivity to grass pollen.

Researchers administered the vaccine intradermally to volunteer hayfever sufferers from Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. One group of subjects received six injections of grass pollen extract at two-week intervals over 10 weeks. The participants' allergic responses in the skin were then measured. The initial injection provoked an allergic reaction on the arm visible as a lump around 10 cm in diameter lasting 1-2 days. Over time a dramatic 90 per cent reduction was seen in the size of the lump suggesting that the allergic reaction was gradually being switched off with each injection. The size of the lump did not decrease in another group of subjects who received only two injections separated by 10 weeks.

During the study none of the participants reported unwanted side effects and the injections did not trigger hayfever symptoms.

The researchers believe that the method of injecting the vaccine intradermally is a major factor in its success, as the skin is a highly active immunological area - more so than underneath the skin where allergy vaccines are traditionally administered.

Professor Stephen Durham, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, said: "There is great interest in giving immunotherapy by novel alternative routes to improve uptake by the immune system. The results of this study provide an excellent foundation for going on to test the intradermal vaccine route in clinical trials."

Dr Stephen Till, Senior Lecturer at King's College London said: "The results of our study are hugely exciting. We now want to find out if this process can also switch off grass allergy in the nose and improve hayfever symptoms, so we are today launching the PollenLITE clinical trial to further test our new approach."

Maureen Jenkins, the director of clinical services at the charity Allergy UK, said this was a "very exciting development" which "offers hope for sufferers".

She added: "The proposed vaccine, if successful, is much quicker and more straightforward than current immunotherapy treatment for hay fever, which takes years. It also has the potential to offer cost savings.

"If this series of injections proves effective in combating hay fever, it will be a wonderful step forward in tackling this common, but often underestimated allergy."

A separate vaccine would have to be developed to help people with allergies to tree pollen.

9/11 cancer victims to have treatment funded

(CBS News) Monday's announcement that the government would add about 50 types of cancer to the list of 9/11-related illnesses that's health care costs would be covered has provided relief for what many are calling an overdue decision. But, the announcement also raised concerns over the amount of available funds for suffers and families.

Government to cover cancer health care costs for 9/11 responders and victims
Government will fund care for 50 types of cancers linked to 9/11 under Zadroga Act
60 Minutes: The Dust At Ground Zero

On the eve of the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the National Institute for Occupational Safety (NIOSH) announced it would cover the cancer care for responders and other victims exposed to the toxic dust at ground zero who developed cancers including lung, breast colon, and leukemia and lymphoma. The program had previously only covered lung diseases, asthma and chronic cough along with mental health illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.

"The publication of this final rule marks an important step in the effort to provide needed treatment and care to 9/11 responders and survivors through the WTC Health Program," NIOSH director Dr. John Howard said in a statement to the Associated Press.

In June, officials at NIOSH had said in a filing that it favored a major expansion of the program, known as the Zadroga Act, to include people with the different cancer types that span 14 broad categories of the disease. The decision followed a March recommendation by an advisory committee made up of doctors, union officials and community health advocates, who recommended that cancer be added to the program. While a definitive link between the toxic exposure causing these cancers hasn't been definitely shown, the NIOSH committee said the dust contained about 70 known and possible carcinogens.

Firefighter Ray Pfeiffer, who had been saying for years that the hundreds of hours he worked at ground zero had something to do with his advanced kidney cancer, told the CBS Evening News that he welcomed the announcement.

"It's like a vindication saying 'hey listen, you know, we're recognized that we were down there that we did get sick from down there,'" Pfeiffer explained. "It's a little bit of a relief."

The compensation has been held up by a dispute over whether there was evidence of a direct link between the World Trade Center tragedy and cancer.

'Stem cell hope' for deaf people

Stem cell therapy may one day enable deaf people to hear again.

In a new test by UK scientists found that deaf gerbils recover their hearing after human stem cells were injected into their ears.

Hearing partially improved when nerves in the ear, which pass sounds into the brain, were rebuilt in gerbils - a UK study in the journal Nature reports.

Getting the same improvement in people would be a shift from being unable to hear traffic to hearing a conversation.

However, treating humans is still a distant prospect.

The aim of researchers at the University of Sheffield was to replace those baton-dropping nerve cells, called spiral ganglion neurons, with new ones. They used stem cells from a human embryo, which are capable of becoming any other type of cell in the human body from nerve to skin, muscle to kidney.

A chemical soup was added to the stem cells that converted them into cells similar to the spiral ganglion neurons. These were then delicately injected into the inner ears of 18 deaf gerbils.

Over 10 weeks the gerbils' hearing improved. On average 45% of their hearing range was restored by the end of the study.

When these neurons get damaged or die they can't be replaced. This results in a form of deafness called auditory neuropathy, which affects about a tenth of deaf people, according to Rivolta.

Cochlear implants can correct the main form of deafness, which occurs when the cochlea loses hair cells that register sound by bending. But neurons can't be substituted except through an expensive, risky and invasive procedure to implant an electrode directly into the brain.

Now, Rivolta and his colleagues hope to develop much simpler treatments based on the so-called otic neural progenitor stem cells developed in the lab from human embryonic stem cells, the cells in embryos that can turn into all types of bodily tissues.

They injected about 50,000 of the otic neural progenitor cells into single ears of 18 gerbils. The animals' spiral ganglion neurons had been deliberately destroyed with a drug called ouabain, leaving them completely deaf. The stem cells were injected into the cochlea through a tiny, drilled hole.

Post mortems showed that the stem cells turned into specialised spiral ganglion neurons in the ear.

Within 10 weeks, about two-thirds of the animals had recovered some hearing. On average, the animals recovered about 46 per cent of their hearing, as measured by their ability to respond to sounds of varying volume.

"In people, this would mean going from only being able to hear a loud truck on the street to being able to hold a conversation," said Rivolta.

But it will be years before it can be tested in people as Rivolta has said that more work in animals is needed to refine the procedure.

Prof Dave Moore, the director of the Medical Research Council's Institute of Hearing Research in Nottingham, told the BBC: "It is a big moment, it really is a major development."

However, he cautioned that there will still be difficulties repeating the feat in people.

"The biggest issue is actually getting into the part of the inner ear where they'll do some good. It's extremely tiny and very difficult to get to and that will be a really formidable undertaking," he said.

Dr Ralph Holme, head of biomedical research for the charity Action on Hearing Loss, said: "The research is tremendously encouraging and gives us real hope that it will be possible to fix the actual cause of some types of hearing loss in the future.

"For the millions of people for whom hearing loss is eroding their quality of life, this can't come soon enough."

Eating Less Red Meat Could Benefit Health And Environment

reducing down the amount of red meat we eat not only affects our health, but also the health of the environment, study from the United Kingdom suggests.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge found that cutting back on red meat consumption could decrease the number of cases of chronic disease by 3 to 12 percent, and make the carbon footprint nearly 28 million tons smaller per year by decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The BMJ Open study included data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey of British Adults in 2000-2001. Researchers looked at the amount of meat the people in the study consumed, as well as how many green gas emissions were emitted that are linked to 45 different kinds of food.

After adjusting for proportions, the researchers found that people who regularly ate red or processed meat in the study also just generally consumed more food than people who didn't regularly eat red or processed meat. So, they calculated that if people who ate the most red and processed meat in the study change their eating habits so they ate like the people who consumed the least red and processed meat in the study, that would decrease health risks (such as risk of diabetes, colorectal cancer and heart disease) anywhere from 3 to 12 percent.

Specifically, the Telegraph reported that if men with an average meat consumption of 91 grams per day cut it down to 53 grams per day, it would translate to a 12 percent decrease in colorectal cancer and Type 2 diabetes risks.

Plus, the decreased greenhouse gas emissions linked with food and beverages would decrease each year by about 0.45 tons per person, the researchers calculated.

Even though the data is from 2000 and 2001, the researchers noted that red meat consumption hasn't changed significantly over the last 10 years.

"This indicates that our estimates remain relevant and may even be conservative and highlights the need for action to prevent further increases in intake in the UK population," the researchers wrote in the study.

Previous research has shown a possible link between processed meat consumption and cancer risk, with an extra 50 grams a day of processed meat being linked with a 19 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer, according to a British Journal of Cancer study.

And even more recently, a group of water scientists has predicted that the whole world is going to be vegetarian anyhow by 2050, in order to accommodate growing population growth.

"There will not be enough water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected 9 billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards diets common in western nations," according to the report by Malik Falkenmark and other scientists at the Stockholm International Water Institute noted, as reported by The Guardian.