Wednesday 19 December 2012

NO KIDDING: Squeezing Boobs Can Stop Breast Cancer




medical science
Dec 19, 2012 11:00 PM     2,267 14


Squeezing Boobs Can Stop Breast Cancer

 GIZMODO: Casey Chan
If you need another excuse to show some love to the mammaries, scientists have found that squeezing breasts can actually prevent malignant breast cells from triggering cancer. Yes, squeezing. Guys and gals, do your part in stopping cancer, please.

Gautham Venugopalan, a lead member on the research team from the University of California in Berkeley, says that experiments have shown that applying physical pressure to the cells can guide them back to a normal growth pattern, as opposed to just letting it follow cancerous growth. Specifically:

"People have known for centuries that physical force can influence our bodies... When we lift weights our muscles get bigger. The force of gravity is essential to keeping our bones strong. Here we show that physical force can play a role in the growth—and reversion—of cancer cells."
The experiment involved growing malignant cells within silicone and squeezing the silicone during the first stages of cell growth. Over time, those malignant cells started to grow normally. Venugopalan says that, those malignant cells just need "the right cues to guide them back to a healthy growth pattern". Squeezing them are those right cues. So, folks. Let's squeeze more. [Karramba Production/Shutterstock]

Saturday 8 December 2012

Warning for all re Ibuprofen use

December 5, 2012, 12:01 am  from NY TIMES

For Athletes, Risks From Ibuprofen Use

Many active people use the painkiller ibuprofen on an almost daily basis. In surveys, up to 70 percent of distance runners and other endurance athletes report that they down the pills before every workout or competition, viewing the drug as a preemptive strike against muscle soreness.
But a valuable new study joins growing evidence that ibuprofen and similar anti-inflammatory painkillers taken before a workout don't offer any benefit and may be causing disagreeable physical damage instead, particularly to the intestines.
Studies have already shown that strenuous exercise alone commonly results in a small amount of intestinal trauma. A representative experiment published last year found that cyclists who rode hard for an hour immediately developed elevated blood levels of a marker that indicates slight gastrointestinal leakage.
Physiologically, it makes sense that exercise would affect the intestines as it does, since, during prolonged exertion, digestion becomes a luxury, said Dr. Kim van Wijck, currently a surgical resident at Orbis Medical Center in the Netherlands, who led the small study. So the blood that normally would flow to the small intestine is instead diverted to laboring muscles. Starved of blood, some of the cells lining the intestines are traumatized and start to leak.
Thankfully, the damage seems to be short-lived, Dr. van Wijck said. Her research has shown that within an hour after a cyclist finished riding, the stressed intestines returned to normal.
But the most common side-effect of ibuprofen is gastrointestinal damage. And since many athletes take the drug for pain before and after a workout, Dr. van Wijck set out to determine the combined effect of exercise and ibuprofen.
For the new study, published in the December issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands recruited nine healthy, active men and had them visit the university's human performance lab four times.
During two of the visits, the men rested languorously for an hour, although before one of the visits, they swallowed 400 milligrams of ibuprofen the night before and also the morning of their trip to the lab. (Four hundred milligrams is the recommended non-prescription dosage for adults using the drug to treat headaches or other minor pain.)
During the remaining visits, the men briskly rode stationary bicycles for that same hour. Before one of those rides, though, they again took 400 milligrams of ibuprofen the night before and the morning of their workout.
At the end of each rest or ride, researchers drew blood to check whether the men's small intestines were leaking. Dr. van Wijck found that blood levels of a protein indicating intestinal leakage were, in fact, much higher when the men combined bike riding with ibuprofen than during the other experimental conditions when they rode or took ibuprofen alone. Notably, the protein levels remained elevated several hours after exercise and ibuprofen.
The health implications of this finding are not yet clear, although they are worrying, Dr. van Wijck said. It may be that if someone uses ibuprofen before every exercise session for a year or more, she said, "intestinal integrity might be compromised." In that case, small amounts of bacteria and digestive enzymes could leak regularly into the bloodstream.
More immediately, if less graphically, the absorption of nutrients could be compromised, especially after exercise, Dr. van Wijck said, which could affect the ability of tired muscles to resupply themselves with fuel and regenerate.
The research looks specifically at prophylactic use of ibuprofen and does not address the risks and benefits of ibuprofen after an injury occurs. Short-term use of Ibuprofen for injury is generally considered appropriate.
Meanwhile, the Dutch study is not the first to find damage from combining exercise and ibuprofen. Earlier work has shown that frequent use of the drug before and during workouts also can lead to colonic seepage. In a famous study from a few years ago, researchers found that runners at the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run who were regular ibuprofen users had small amounts of colonic bacteria in their bloodstream.
Ironically, this bacterial incursion resulted in "higher levels of systemic inflammation," said David C. Nieman, a professor of health and exercise science at Appalachian State University who conducted the study and is himself an ultramarathoner. In other words, the ultramarathon racers who frequently used ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory, wound up with higher overall levels of bodily inflammation. They also reported being just as sore after the race as runners who had not taken ibuprofen.
Animal studies have also shown that ibuprofen hampers the ability of muscles to rebuild themselves after exercise. So why do so many athletes continue enthusiastically to swallow large and frequent doses of ibuprofen and related anti-inflammatory painkillers, including aspirin, before and during exercise?
"The idea is just entrenched in the athletic community that ibuprofen will help you to train better and harder," Dr. Nieman said. "But that belief is simply not true. There is no scientifically valid reason to use ibuprofen before exercise and many reasons to avoid it."
Dr. van Wijck agrees. "We do not yet know what the long-term consequences are" of regularly mixing exercise and ibuprofen, she said. But it is clear that "ibuprofen consumption by athletes is not harmless and should be strongly discouraged."

Wednesday 7 November 2012

An Uplifting Experience As Told In A Blog


I’ve been quiet for some months but feel I MUST post this so that you can read the blog:

It was sent to me by a  friend who told me about this lady, Seok Han - a niece of his wife. So it’s not a fairy tale but a real life account.

In the past few years we have lived through Lin’s and friends’ bouts with cancer and, with much sadness,  friends’ deaths from this disease.

Thankfully we have also come upon hope and success -  and a handful of miracles. How else could I describe instances when the cancers disappeared without medical intervention?

Yes, gone today but we all still live with the knowledge and fear that it may announce its ugly presence again.

I won’t go into details of the other cancer patients who are now cancer free, but include Seok Hean’s blog here because she wants others to share her experience. 

While she credits the drastic change in her eating habits for being cancer free, I cannot help thinking about Steve Jobs who was fussy about his food and a vegetarian (also a ‘fruitatarian’ at one stage of his life) who eventually succumbed to cancer. So it’s ‘horses for courses’ as the saying goes.

All I can say is to live life to the full and try to avoid stress. If only it were that easy to not worry and just be happy!

Sunday 29 July 2012


Recently I have read about noise in cities (New York Times, July) and now WSJ has run an article which our planners in Singapore should read and try to understand!


For Creative Cities, the Sky Has Its Limit

By RICHARD FLORIDA

image
Aurora PhotosShanghai's skyscraper district is ultradense, but New York, London and Milan are better at promoting innovation.
Ours is the century of the city. For the first time in history, more than half of the people in the world, 3.3 billion of us, live in cities. By 2050, according to the best projections, urbanites will account for as much as 70% of the global population.
Over the next 50 years we will spend trillions of dollars on city building. The question is: How should we build? For many economists, urbanists and developers, the answer is simple: We should build up. But the answer is more complex than that.
Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have been able to demonstrate that bigger, denser cities literally speed up the metabolism of daily life. Larger beasts may have slower metabolisms in the animal kingdom, but the opposite occurs in cities, which get faster as they grow. Doubling a city's population, the Santa Fe researchers found, more than doubles its creative and economic output, a phenomenon known as "superlinear scaling."
Still, density is only part of the solution. In the hyper-crowded skyscraper districts of Shanghai, densities can approach 125,000 people per square mile. Giant buildings often function as vertical suburbs, muting the spontaneous encounters that provide cities with so much of their social, intellectual and commercial energy. People live their lives indoors in such places, wearing paths between their offices and the food courts, always seeing the same people.
In terms of innovation and creative impetus, Shanghai pales in comparison to New York, London, Paris and Milan, not to mention high-tech hubs like Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin and North Carolina's research triangle, all of which have much lower densities.
It turns out that what matters most for a city's metabolism—and, ultimately, for its economic growth—isn't density itself but how much people mix with each other. And there isn't just one formula for that. It can happen in the pedestrian-oriented sidewalk culture of New York and London but also—to the chagrin of many urbanists—in the car-dependent sprawl of a suburban nerdistan like Silicon Valley. That region, as Jonah Lehrer has pointed out, manages to emulate the functions of bigger, denser cities by encouraging the clustering of talent and enterprise and fostering a high level of information-sharing.
In fact, there are two types of density, according to a recent study by Peter Gordon of the University of Southern California and Sanford Ikeda of the State University of New York, Purchase. "Crude" density is achieved by districts packed with taller and taller buildings but doesn't, on its own, generate innovation or economic development.
By contrast, what the authors call "Jacobs density" sparks street-level interaction and maximizes the "potential informal contact of the average person in a given public space at any given time." It makes networking and informal encounters more likely and also creates a demand for local products and diversity—not just of populations and ethnic groups but of tastes and preferences.
The authors dub it "Jacobs density" in tribute to Jane Jacobs, the renowned urbanist and author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She famously said, "In the absence of a pedestrian scale, density can be big trouble."
Look at New York City. Its hubs of innovation aren't the great skyscraper districts that house established corporate and financial headquarters, media empires and wealthy people (an increasing number of whom are part-time residents who hail from the ranks of the global super-rich). The city's recent high-tech boom—500 start-ups in the last half decade, among them Kickstarter and Tumblr—is anchored in mid-rise, mixed-use neighborhoods like the Flatiron District, Midtown South, Chelsea and TriBeCa.
Google's New York office, second in size only to its headquarters in Silicon Valley, is in the old Port Authority terminal building across from the Chelsea Market, for which it paid $1.8 billion in 2010. These neighborhoods are filled with the sort of old buildings that, in Jacobs's famous phrase, new ideas "must use."
None of this is to say that New York should be preserved in amber. The move to increase density in Midtown East, for example, raising height restrictions to as high as 80 stories, will generate much-needed development in an area that's set up for it.
But balance is key. A great city needs a mix of neighborhoods and districts of varied heights and densities. And great care must be taken not to muck up those critical areas that spur true innovation and creativity. "Densities," Jacobs cautioned, "can get too high if they reach a point at which, for any reason, they begin to repress diversity instead of to stimulate it." It's a crucial lesson to absorb as our world grows ever more urban.
—Mr. Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and global research professor at New York University, is author of "The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited," published this month by Basic Books.
A version of this article appeared July 28, 2012, on page C3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: For Creative Cities, the Sky Has Its Limit.