Alcohol charity Addiction has underlined the need for support, care and counseling to help them kick the habit.

Source-Medindia

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The often fatal disease is diagnosed by testing for the specific gene mutations, using blood tests to check the levels of GAA, or with a muscle biopsy. Treatment modalities include enzyme replacement using alglucosidase alfa (Myozyme) are available.

Causes

Glycogen is a stored form of sugar. The enzyme GAA is used to breakdown glycogen into a simpler sugar, glucose. The process happens inside intracellular compartments called lysosomes. Mutations in the GAA gene (the gene that is responsible for producing GAA) lead to the reduction or complete absence of this enzyme. Up to 300 different mutations in the GAA genes have been found to be associated with Pompe disease.

The enzyme deficiency or absence leads to excessive accumulation of lysosomal glycogen everywhere in the body. The cells of the heart and skeletal muscles are affected the most.

Pompe disease is also referred to as Glycogen-storage disease type II (GSDII). It is an autosomal recessive disorder, i.e. each parent of an affected individual must pass on a copy of the mutated gene so that the child gets the disease. Pompe disease is relatively rare; it affects one in 40,000 people.

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Dr Withington said that conversational skills consequently became an “art form” that could make or break their social lives and alcohol helped loosen the tongue when indulging in witty, memorable social intercourse.

“There’s an assumption among historians that drunkenness during early modernity became inappropriate for civil behaviour and excessive consumption was the reserve of the common poor,” the Daily Mail quoted the historian as saying.

“But there’s a huge amount of evidence that you needed to be affluent to indulge in vast quantities of alcohol and the new wave of educated elite led the charge.”

“The expansion in education and literacy had an obvious effect on politics and law but the implications for English drinking habits were also significant.”Students learned not just to study but to drink, which became integral to male bonding, camaraderie and rites of passage,” he added.

Source-ANI

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Routine immunizations and supplemental immunization activities, such as immunization campaigns, are designed to provide immunization coverage to entire populations. Current measurements used to determine the success and rates of immunization can be flawed and inconsistent. According to a new study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, estimates of vaccination coverage can be significantly improved by combining administrative data with survey data. The results are featured in the October 2011 issue of PLoS Medicine.

“Reliable estimates of vaccination coverage are key to managing population immunization status,” said Justin Lessler, lead author of the study and an assistant professor with the Bloomberg School’s Department of Epidemiology. “Currently, the performance of routine and supplemental immunization activities is measured by the administrative method, which leads to coverage estimates that are often inconsistent with the proportion reporting vaccination in cross-sectional surveys. Furthermore, administrative coverage does not tell you how many people are systematically missed by vaccination activities. We estimated that the size of the population never reached by any activity was high in Sierra Leone and Madagascar, 31 percent and 21percent respectively. But it was much lower in Ghana, only 7 percent. ”

The widely used administrative method divides the number of doses distributed by the size of the target population. Lessler, along with colleagues from Johns Hopkins, University of Oxford, Epicentre, and Princeton University developed a method for estimating the effective coverage of vaccination programs using cross-sectional surveys of vaccine coverage combined with administrative data. The method was applied using demographic health survey and administrative coverage data reported to the WHO from measles vaccinations in Ghana, Madagascar and Sierra Leone. They found estimates of routine supplemental immunization activities coverage are substantially lower than administrative estimates for Madagascar and Sierra Leone, and only slightly lower for Ghana. In addition, their estimates of routine coverage are, in general, lower than WHO and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates.

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Smoking cessation at least two weeks prior to surgery, gown and glove change prior to skin closure, and using clippers over razors to shave the surgical area are some of the measures that helped reduced infection rates, according to the study published in the October 26 online issue of the Journal of Surgical Research.

In a retrospective study, Harish Lavu, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University, and colleagues analyzed clinical data from 233 consecutive Whipple procedures — also known as a pancreaticoduodenectomy, an operation to treatcancerous tumors of the pancreas. — from October 2005 to May 2008 on patients who underwent routine preoperative preparation (RPP). That preparation is less comprehensive than the 12 measure surgical care bundle. For instance, it uses a razor for hair removal and iodine skin preparation and does not include smoking cessation.

They compared those rates to 233 consecutive Whipple procedures performed from May 2008 to May 2010 following the implementation of the surgical care bundle.

The researchers found a 49 percent reduction in wound infections in the surgical care bundle group (15 percent) compared to the RPP group (7.7 percent). The difference was statistically significant.

“It is typically quite difficult to achieve a 50 percent reduction in an adverse outcome,” Dr. Lavu says. “We can make a significant impact on lowering wound infection in patients undergoing this surgery by using this set of guidelines.”

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According to the study conducted by the Schools Health Education Unit, the way teenage girls respond to anxiety about their appearance in a celebrity culture that places a premium on good looks is disturbing.

Of the 83,000 pupils who were interviewed for the study, almost a third of girls in Year 10 skipped breakfast, 24 percent also missed lunch the day before.

The proportion of young women skipping meals increased with age, as almost two-thirds of 14- to 15-year-olds wanted to lose weight, and adopted a series of methods in pursuit of a certain look.

Out of Year Six girls and boys who were questioned, 40 percent said that they consumed no protein “on most days”, but around a quarter ate crisps, sweets or chocolate regularly.

“Popular media has a large influence on young people’s body image, placing a great deal of pressure on obtaining the ‘ideal’ body shape,” the Independent quoted Dr Laura Wyness, a senior scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation as saying.

“This often leads to young girls adopting unhealthy practices. These include smoking, skipping meals, especially breakfast, severely limiting foods perceived as fattening, such as red meat and dairy produce, which are important sources of protein, iron, zinc and calcium, and adopting very low energy, and therefore nutrient, diets,” she added.

Source-ANI

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After the”electronic nose,” which detects odours, scientists have now come up with a “magnetic tongue”- a method used to “taste” food and identify ingredients that people describe as sweet, bitter, sour, etc.

Trained taste testers eliminate some of the variation, but food processors need more objective ways to measure the sensory descriptor of their products.

That’s where electronic sensing technologies, like E-noses, come into play.

However, current instruments can only analyze certain food components and require very specific sample preparation.

To overcome these shortcomings, Antonio Randazzo and Anders Malmendal’s team turned to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to test its abilities as “a magnetic tongue.”

The researchers analysed 18 canned tomato products from various markets with NMR and found that the instrument could estimate most of the tastes assessed by the human taste testers. In fact, the NMR instrument went even farther.

By determining the chemical composition, it showed which compound is related to which sensory descriptor.

The researchers say that the “magnetic tongue” has good potential as a rapid, sensitive and relatively inexpensive approach for food processing companies to use.

The report appeared in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Source-ANI

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With scientific evidence now supporting the age-old wisdom that cranberries, whether in sauce or as juice, prevent urinary tract infections, people have wondered if there was an element of the berry that, if extracted and condensed, perhaps in pill form, would be as effective as drinking the juice or eating cranberry sauce.

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute tested proanthocyanidins or PACs, a group of flavonoids found in cranberries. Because they were thought to be the ingredient that gives the juice its infection-fighting properties, PACs have been considered a hopeful target for an effective extract.

The new WPI report, however, shows that cranberry juice, itself, is far better at preventing biofilm formation, which is the precursor of infection, than PACs alone.

“What we have shown is that cranberry juice’s ability to prevent biofilms is more complex than we may have originally thought,” said Terri Camesano, professor of chemical engineering at WPI and senior author on the paper. “For a while, the field focused on these PACs, but the data shows that they aren’t the silver bullet.”

“Cranberries have been recognized for their health benefits for a number of years, especially in the prevention of UTIs,” the authors write in the new paper.

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