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The achievement marks a pharmacologic milestone as the first highly specific targeting of a member of an important class of enzymes called kinases to increase rather than to inhibit their activity, according to UCSF chemist Kevan Shokat, PhD, the senior scientist on the study. The research raises hope that similar pharmaceutical strategies might be used for combatting other diseases, including diabetes and cancer, he said. Mutations that cause malfunction of the targeted enzyme, PINK1, are directly responsible for some cases of early-onset Parkinson's disease. Loss of PINK1 activity is harmful to the cell's power plants, called mitochondria, best known for converting food energy into another form of chemical energy used by cells, the molecule ATP.
In Parkinson's disease, poorly performing mitochondria have been associated with the death of dopamine-producing nerve cells in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra, which plays a major role in control of movement. Loss of these cells is a hallmark of Parkinson's disease and the cause of prominent symptoms including rigidity and tremor.
A UCSF team led by Shokat, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, used the chemical, called kinetin, to increase mutant PINK1 enzyme activity in nerve cells to near normal levels.
"In light of the fact that mutations in PINK1 produce Parkinson's disease in humans, the finding that kinetin can speed mutated PINK1 activity to near normal levels raises the possibility that kinetin may be used to treat these patients," Shokat said.
The researchers also found that, in nerve cells with normal PINK1, kinetin boosted enzyme activity beyond typical levels. This finding may be relevant for the most common forms of Parkinson's disease, in which PINK1 is not mutated, because a previous study showed that similar overactivity of PINK1 can slow the development of abnormal movement in a fruit-fly model of Parkinson's disease caused by another defect. This defect is elevated production of the protein alpha-synuclein, also a cause of some inherited cases of Parkinson's disease.
The demonstration in the new study that PINK1 can be boosted in human nerve cells that lack PINK1 mutations therefore suggests that kinetin might also have therapeutic potential in common cases of Parkinson's disease in which PINK1 is not mutated, Shokat said.
Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's disease, and the 14th leading cause of death in the United States, according to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Current treatments primarily aim to boost availability of dopamine to brain regions where dopamine-producing nerve cells have been lost.
Although many drugs that inhibit the activity of kinases have been developed over the past decade, including 15 currently approved to treat cancer, Shokat said none has yet been marketed to directly boost activity of a kinase.
The breakthrough in revving up PINK1 activity pharmacologically stemmed from Shokat's unconventional approach. He targeted the enzyme's "substrate," a molecule that binds to an enzyme and undergoes a quick chemical transformation as a result. PINK1 uses ATP as a substrate, and the chemical reaction helps PINK1 in turn drive the activation of another enzyme, called Parkin.
Both of these enzymes are among a small number that previously have been strongly linked to Parkinson's disease. PINK1 and Parkin act together to monitor the health of mitochondria, and help trigger repair or disposal of damaged mitochondria within the cells, thereby promoting cell survival.
"Therapeutic approaches for enhancing the activity of PINK1 had not been considered, because scientists had not conceived of the idea of developing a new substrate for the enzyme," Shokat said.
"We found that a small molecule, called KTP, speeds chemical reactions catalyzed by PINK1 better than ATP, the natural substrate. That kind of better-than-natural response is essentially unheard of."
KTP is too big to fit into other kinases, Shokat said, but PINK1 has a larger ATP "pocket" to hold KTP.
After discovering the potential of KTP, the researchers then determined that kinetin is converted to KTP within cells. Experimentally, kinetin, which can cross blood vessels to get into the brain, has been given by mouth to treat a rare, genetic, neurological disease called familial dysautonomia.
Source-Eurekalert

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by Rukmani Krishna on  July 27, 2013 at 11:49 PM Lifestyle News Hair becomes frizzy due to humidity and the hear. To ensure sleek tresses, avoid hair styling products, apply oil only on required areas of hair, and take more tips.

Asgar, stylist to the stars, will tell you how to get rid of frizzy hair, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

- Avoid styling products like hair spray and gels. They can stick to the scalp and cause dandruff.

- Use mild shampoos and conditioners.

- Avoid tying up wet hair, otherwise it will lead to dandruff.

- Apply coconut or olive oil to lengths and ends, but not the scalp. Humidity makes the scalp naturally oily.

- Choose a hairstyle that is more manageable. Don't opt for those that require styling irons.

- Swimming in cool water might be tempting, but don't do it frequently as the chlorine present in swimming pool can make hair rough and unhealthy.

- Eat protein rich foods such as fish, nuts, spinach and many more to keep your hair voluminous and healthy.

Source-IANS

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Nine months on, hospitals up and down the coasts of New York and New Jersey are reporting a spike in the number of babies being born.

And local media is awash with "Sandy baby" features, playing up the silver lining to a natural catastrophe that left more than 100 people dead, forced tens of thousands to flee their homes and caused an estimated $80 billion of damage.

Surgeons at the Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, New Jersey are expecting to deliver around 500 babies this month, up from 371 in July 2012.

Some of the increase can be attributed to an expansion of maternity facilities at the clinic, but medics there say anecdotal evidence suggests Sandy also played a role.

A similar trend has been noted at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, New Jersey, where the number of July newborns is on track to reach 200, a 25 percent increase on the total of 160 last year.

Statisticians are skeptical about whether such big surges can be attributed to a single weather event.

They suggest that the narrative involved -- "the heavens are moving so shouldn't we make the earth move as well" -- is simply too good for the media to let facts get in the way.

But Richard Evans, an economist at Brigham Young University in Utah, suggests it is likely that Sandy did indeed result in a spike in conception in some of the affected areas, even if it was probably largely accounted for by couples who had always planned to have kids acting earlier than they otherwise would have done.

Evans is a co-author of a study on trends in US post-hurricane births that was published in 2010 in the Journal of Population Economics.

"Our study looked at what happened over a seven year period and over a bunch of large geographical areas, so the results are pretty compelling," he told AFP.

Evans and his fellow researchers found that each 24 hours of storm warnings on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States produces a two percent increase in births nine months later.

"Two percent was the average, so you could have higher increases in individual counties and when you multiply that by several days you could have a very significant spike, but obviously the increases of up to 30 percent that are being reported in New Jersey go beyond that."

Evans said that without further research it was difficult to say exactly why couples embark on a life-changing path to the bedroom at such times, but pointed to other studies which suggest emotions may play a role alongside the "nothing else to do" factor.

"It does seem that when the lights go out and the TV goes off, fertility goes up," he said.

"There is also evidence, for example after the Oklahoma bombing, that an event that causes communities to come together may also cause couples to come together."

Another, more mundane, theory is that the disruption to normal routine that comes with a natural disaster results in couples forgetting to use or running out of contraception.

In the case of Tara and Brian Salzman, whose fourth son, Brody, was born on Long Island on Wednesday, the key factor was simply time.

Brody's big brothers had all been dispatched to their grandparents in anticipation of the storm arriving, leaving the couple on their own.

"Thank God for Hurricane Sandy, I got alone time with my husband," the happy mother told the New York Post.

"We had just started trying that month, but with my husband's work schedule and the kids, you don't get much time at all."

Source-AFP

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by Kathy Jones on  August 17, 2013 at 8:59 PM Mental Health News A new study conducted by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that participation in smoking-cessation programs by patients who are hospitalized for mental illness not only helps them to quit smoking but also makes it less likely that they will be rehospitalized for their psychiatric conditions.
The findings counter a longstanding assumption, held by many mental-health experts, that smoking serves as a useful tool in treating some psychiatric patients.

Smoking among such patients has been embedded in the culture for decades, with cigarettes used as part of a reward system. Indeed, clinicians sometimes smoke alongside patients as a way of creating a rapport with them, said Judith Prochaska, PhD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and lead author of the study.

The result is that psychiatric patients are among the country's most prolific smokers and among those most likely to die of smoking-related ailments, Prochaska said. Nearly half of the cigarettes sold in the United States are to people with psychiatric or addictive disorders, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The average life expectancy for people with severe mental illness is 25 years less than that of the general population, and their leading cause of death is chronic illness, mostly tobacco-related.

Prochaska said it has long been thought that if these patients quit smoking, it would be detrimental to their recovery ? that they would lose a critical crutch for coping with stress. However, she pointed out that the daily cycle of nicotine withdrawal a smoker experiences creates a great deal of stress, and that mental-health providers are well-equipped to assist patients with developing healthier forms of coping.

The new study showed that a simple intervention that included periodic contact with a counselor, written and computerized materials, and the use of nicotine patches could support, rather than harm, the patients' mental health, she said.

"This is a very low-cost, brief intervention that helped patients quit smoking and offers evidence that it may have helped their mental health recovery," said Prochaska, who focuses on developing interventions to treat tobacco dependence in people with mental illness or addictive disorders.

She said the study, done in collaboration with researchers at UC-San Francisco, is the first to examine the impact of a stop-smoking intervention in adult psychiatric patients. It will be published online Aug. 15 in the American Journal of Public Health.

Michael Fiore, MD, MPH, director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention and a leader in national policy for tobacco treatment who was not involved in the study, said the paper "provides powerful evidence that evidence-based tobacco dependence treatments can substantially increase quit rates among psychiatric inpatients. We know that psychiatric patients smoke at very high rates and are at tremendous risk from their smoking. Thus, the findings hold promise to make an important, real-world contribution to the health of these patients."

Since 1993, tobacco use in U.S. hospitals has been banned, with the exception of inpatient psychiatry units, which can and often do permit smoking, and where staff may smoke with patients. Prochaska regularly gives talks in which she documents the long history of tobacco in psychiatry, sharing excerpts from a 1951 psychotherapy handbook that encourages practitioners to smoke during treatment sessions. Her work also has highlighted how the tobacco industry has sponsored research to promote the self-medication hypothesis ? that patients with psychiatric disorders need to smoke to function ? and marketed their products to patients with psychiatric disorders.

Tobacco use has been thought to help calm patients and enable them to focus in therapy, she said. Certainly, a cigarette will calm someone who is in a state of nicotine withdrawal, and in hospitals that structure smoking breaks every four hours, the patients are being thrown into repeated withdrawal states that are uncomfortable and stressful. When hospitals adopt smoke-free policies, along with using nicotine-replacement products, the therapeutic environment is more balanced, she said. The challenges mental health clinicians have feared when banning smoking have not been borne out by studies.

Smoking also can interfere with treatment, affecting the metabolism of some psychiatric medications, Prochaska said. For instance, it increases the body's elimination of olanzepine, a drug used for psychosis or psychotic depression, by more than 90 percent, and of Haldol, a common schizophrenia drug, by 44 percent. Some patients may appear more alert and attentive simply because the tobacco smoke is reducing the sedating side effects of their psychiatric medications, she said.

To test the effects of treating tobacco use among hospitalized psychiatric patients, the researchers initiated an intervention among 224 patients at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, a smoke-free, locked mental hospital for acute care at UCSF. All patients who smoked at least five cigarettes daily prior to hospitalization were invited to participate. Few were ready to quit smoking, yet 79 percent agreed to participate. The patients had a range of psychiatric diagnoses, including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia; three in four were actively suicidal. Half were randomly assigned to a treatment group, and the other half received the usual care.

All patients were offered nicotine patches or gum during their smoke-free hospitalization. Patients in the control group received a pamphlet about the hazards of smoking, with information on how to quit.

Participants in the treatment group completed a computer-assisted program with tailored feedback, received a print manual, met for 15-30 minutes with a counselor, and were offered a 10-week supply of nicotine patches, available when the participant became ready to quit. All of the materials were tailored to patients' readiness to quit, and the computer-assisted intervention was repeated at three and six months post-hospitalization to support participants through the process of quitting smoking. A copy of the computer printout was mailed to patients' outpatient providers.

"A key aspect of the intervention is that we did not assume all patients were ready to quit," Prochaska said. "We met them where they were at and worked with them over time. When they became ready to quit, we were there for them, and they could get the patches to help with withdrawals."

Only a small number of patients ? 16 percent ? initially said they were prepared to quit when they enrolled in the study, though over time they became progressively more committed to the process, which is typical in these types of interventions, Prochaska said.

The participants all were contacted following hospital discharge at one week and at three-, six-, 12- and 18-month follow-ups. Quit rates were confirmed with breath samples or by a third party who knew the participant.

At the end of the 18 months, 20 percent of those in the treatment group had quit smoking, compared to just 7.7 percent in the control group, the researchers found. Moreover, there were fewer hospital readmissions among those in the treatment group ? 44 percent, compared to 56 percent in the control group.

This is the first finding of its kind, and Prochaska said it needs to be replicated. But at a minimum, she added, treating patients' smoking did not harm their mental health recovery and may have even enhanced it.

"I think some of the therapeutic contact that addressed participants' tobacco dependence, and supported them with this major health goal, may have generalized to them feeling better about their mental health condition," she said.

The patients' diagnoses and the severity of their symptoms had no impact on intervention outcomes, the researchers found. "Assumptions we have made in the field ? that these patients don't want to quit, are too ill to quit or that quitting will hurt their mental health recovery ? none of that held up," she said.

What did influence outcomes were patients' perceptions at the study start of how successful they would be with quitting and how difficult it would be to not relapse, as well as their level of nicotine dependence ? the same factors that affect smoking-cessation results in the general population.

Prochaska said reaction from the psychiatric community thus far has been positive. "I received a call from a clinician asking to make a referral ? saying this is a great program. She then asked, 'Should we stop giving out cigarettes at our clinic?' I thanked her for the call and encouraged, 'Yes, please do.' The work is raising consciousness and has the potential to change practices. If we wonder in our field why our patients smoke at such high rates, we have to start by looking at how we've addressed tobacco. This is the one group that has been encouraged to smoke and discouraged from quitting by their providers. The tide is changing, and this is a very exciting time for the field."

Prochaska and her colleagues are now following up with a larger trial involving more than 900 patients at Stanford Hospital & Clinics, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, and UCSF's Langley Porter.

Source-Eurekalert

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by Kathy Jones on  August 17, 2013 at 9:12 PM Women Health News A new study has found that the sexual health in postmenopausal women suffering from moderate to severe hot flashes can be improved thanks to hypnotic relaxation therapies.
Gary Elkins, Ph.D., director of Baylor's Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory and a professor of psychology and neuroscience in Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences, said that the study, which examined sexual comfort, sexual satisfaction and sexual pleasure, is a first step toward a safe and effective alternative toward hormone replacement therapy, which carries associated risks of cancer and heart disease.

The conclusion was based on a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

lead researcher Aimee Johnson, a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, said that for the study, 187 women were randomly assigned to receive either five weekly sessions of hypnotic relaxation therapy or supportive counselling.

Led by researchers at Baylor's Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory, all study sessions were conducted by master's-level therapists trained in clinical hypnosis.

Participants in the hypnotic relaxation therapy group received a hypnotic induction followed by suggestions for relaxation, coolness and mental imagery. Participants who received sessions of supportive counseling discussed their symptoms with a trained therapist but did not receive any hypnosis.

Women completed questionnaires at the beginning of the study, at the end of treatment and at a 12-week follow-up. They also were asked to complete a self-report questionnaire assessing the extent to which hot flashes interfered with sexual intimacy.

The decrease in estrogen that accompanies menopause is associated with hot flashes, night sweats, weight gain and vaginal dryness, discomfort or pain.

Elkins said that the most common complaints are being too tired, anxiety, depression, hot flashes and the fear of close contact, as warmth coming from closeness can trigger hot flash, some women grow to fear intimacy.

At treatment's end, women who received hypnotic relaxation therapy reported significantly higher sexual satisfaction and pleasure, as well as less discomfort.

Source-ANI

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The famous Palio race on the spectacular Piazza del Campo is held twice a year in July and August and pits traditionally rival neighbourhoods against each other.

In Friday's race, the horse riding for the Onda quarter, or contrada, came first in an exhilarating spectacle lasting just over a minute.

There were scenes of jubilation and even tears in the square from hundreds of supporters of Onda dressed in the team's turquoise-and-blue colours.

The contest is filled with mediaeval pageantry and ancient traditions but it is no tourist spectacle.

"The Palio is our life," said Francesco, a local coming to see a pre-race selection of the horses.

"When you get into it, it really gets under your skin. People who are not into it can't understand," he said.

"It's a mixture of faith, religion and paganism."

Siena is a well-heeled Italian city that has been shaken to the core by a wide-ranging investigation into its local bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world's oldest lender and Italy's third largest bank.

The troubled bank has traditionally bankrolled many traditional city celebrations but has been forced to cut back because of a huge hole in its finances that has even put Italy's banking system on edge.

The financial woes have hit closer to home for proud Siena residents after the bank earlier this year said it would be forced to cut back on Palio sponsorship.

But there was little sign of concern at preparations for the race this week, as thousands of people from rival quarters chanted and sang their support.

Local pride is so strong in Siena that there are even christenings before the race for newborn babies -- a type of initiation into membership of the contrada.

Baptisms are carried out by the neighbourhood "prior" and attendants wear the colours of their quarter.

The race -- three laps of the square -- only lasts just over a minute but contrada allegiance is for life.

It also attracts huge numbers of tourists every year.

The parade before Friday's race included the "alfieri", flag-wavers parading in mediaeval costumes, as well as a show put on by mounted police units.

The square is readied for the race with a covering of tons of soil to create a track, surrounded by stands for the thousands of spectators who come every year.

The race is between 10 horses -- chosen at random from the 17 neighbourhoods of the city -- and the contest is dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

The contrade prepare all year: making costumes, holding dress rehearsals and training the horses.

The winner is always the horse that comes first -- whether or not its jockey has fallen off or not.

One rider in the bareback race was thrown off in Friday's race but was uninjured.

The horses are chosen at random to give an equal chance to all the contrade in a ceremony that takes place in the same week as the race.

A Turkish tourist in Siena, Huseyfe, said: "People go crazy when they find out which horse will be running for their neighbourhood."

"This is something that is really important for the people of Siena."

Source-AFP

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