Identical quadruplets delight US doctors

A 35-year-old Canadian woman has given birth to rare identical quadruplets.

Karen Jepp of Calgary, Alberta, delivered Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia by caesarean section on Sunday afternoon at Benefis Healthcare Hospital in Great Falls, Montana.

The four girls were breathing without ventilators and listed in good condition, said hospital spokeswoman Amy Astin.

"These babies are doing grand," said Dr Tom Key, the perinatologist who delivered the girls.

Born about two months early and conceived without fertility drugs, they weighed between 0.98 and 1.18kilograms.

The chances of giving birth to identical quadruplets is about one in 13 million, Key said.

The couple also have a two-year-old son, Simon.

"This is a very big medical event," he said. "Identical quadruplets are extremely rare."

The last reported set were born in April 2006 to a 26-year-old Indian woman.

World's oldest person dies in Japan at 114

TOKYO -- Yone Minagawa, who became the world's oldest person earlier this year, has died at a nursing home in southwestern Japan, an official said Tuesday.

She was 114.

Minagawa, who raised four sons and a daughter on her own by peddling flowers and vegetables, died Monday afternoon, said Toshiro Tachibana, an official at the nursing home in the former mining town Fukuchi.

The attending physician gave old age as the cause of death, he said.

"Her appetite had been declining recently and her energy fading, so the family had asked us to make her as comfortable as possible. The death was not sudden,'' Tachibana said.

Born Jan. 4, 1893, Minagawa was named the world's oldest person by the Guinness Book of World Records in January following the death of Emma Faust Tillman, also 114, in the United States.

Minagawa outlived all of her children, except one daughter and has seven grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren, the nursing home said.

The world's oldest person is now 114-year-old Edna Parker of Shelbyville, Ind., who was born April 20, 1893, the Gerontology Research Group said.

Japan has one of the world's longest average life spans -- a factor often attributed to a healthy diet rich in fish and rice.

The world's oldest man is also Japanese -- Tomoji Tanabe, 111, born Sept. 18, 1895. Tanabe lives in the southern city Miyazaki, Guinness World Records said.

In 2006, Japanese women set a new record for life expectancy at 85.81 years, while men live an average of about 79 years.

The number of Japanese living beyond 100 has almost quadrupled in the last 10 years and is soon expected to surpass 28,000, the government announced last September.

Fukuchi is about 840 kilometres southwest of Tokyo.

Western diet may lead to colon cancer relapse

CTV.ca News Staff

Colon cancer survivors who eat a so-called "Western diet" high in red meat, dairy, sugar and refined flours are more than three times as likely to have their cancer return or to die from it than those who avoid such foods, finds a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Previous studies had shown that a high-fat diet, especially one with lots of red meat, may increase a person's risk of developing colon cancer. This was the first to show how diet affects whether colon cancer returns in people previously treated for it.

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute looked at 1,009 patients with Stage 3 colon cancer that had been treated with both surgery and chemotherapy. Stage 3 colon cancer is cancer that has spread from the large bowel area to the lymph nodes but not other organs.

The researchers questioned the patients on their diets during their chemotherapy treatment period and then 6 months after. Their health was then monitored for five years.

Among the group, 324 patients saw their cancer return, while 223 patients died with cancer recurrence.

The researchers found that those who most closely followed a Western diet were three-and-a-half times more likely to have colon cancer recur than those whose diets were more "prudent" and included high intakes of fruits and vegetables, poultry, and fish.

No relationship was found between the prudent diet and colon cancer recurrence or death.

"The message is that patients in this category can improve their prospects by avoiding certain foods," commented the study's lead author, Dr. Jeffrey Meyerhardt, of Dana-Farber.

Investigators speculate that a "Western" diet leads to increased insulin levels and insulin-like growth factors, which have been linked to the formation and growth of some types of tumours.

Meyerhardt adds that more research is needed to better understand what components of the Western diet are most responsible for the study findings.

Zinc-Rich Foods

Zinc-Rich foods can enhance immunity functioning. This mineral helps increase many aspects of immunity, including production of antibodies and T-cells, as well as other white-blood-cell activity. It has been shown in experiments on animals that when they are deficient in zinc, they cannot fight off attacks by bacteria, viruses and parasites. It has also been observed that adults and children deficient in zinc, often have more cols and respiratory tract infections.

According to Dr. Novera H. Spector, a scientist at the American National Institute of Health, Zinc may even rejuvenate an aging immune system. He explains that zinc may help reverse declining immune functions that deteriorates rapidly after the age of 60 years. After the middle age, the thymus gland, which plays a key role in immune defenses, begins to decline radically. The thymus gland secretes thymulin, a harmone that stimulates production of T-cells. With the decline o thymus gland, the output of thymulin also decreases.

Vitamins No Magic Bullet for Heart Health

KEY antioxidants found in fruits, vegetables and nuts do not cut the risk of heart disease in those most vulnerable to it, according to a new study which casts doubt on previous research.

Vitamins C, E and beta carotene - which the body converts into vitamin A - have no effect on lowering the chances of heart disease or death in high-risk women, scientists said last night.

Some previous studies have linked all three to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.

The new study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, involved examining data for 8,171 women over the age of 40 who took part in the women's antioxidant cardiovascular study in the US, starting in 1995 or 1996 and ending in 2005.

The women all had a history of cardiovascular disease or had three or more risk factors for developing it, such as high blood pressure, diabetes or high cholesterol.

They were randomly split into groups and given either 500 milligrams of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) every day, 600 units of vitamin E every other day or 50 milligrams of beta carotene every other day.

The resulting analysis found that none of the antioxidants, either alone or in combination, had an effect on reducing the risk of a cardiovascular event or death.

The authors of the latest study, led by Nancy Cook, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, concluded there was no benefit in taking the antioxidants to battle heart disease but also no evidence they caused harm.

Ellen Mason, cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This study adds to the stockpile of evidence suggesting that taking antioxidant supplements in order to protect your heart does not seem to work."

Source:scotsman.com

Surprise: Diabetes clue found in bones

Well yes, another news article. But this one is really interesting .......

As medicine struggles to halt the nation's diabetes epidemic, scientists have found a potential new weapon in the most unlikely place -- the skeleton.

Bone cells, they discovered, generate a hormone that helps regulate the body's metabolism. And the lack of that hormone appears to contribute to the development of diabetes.

The work, conducted in mice, has a long way to go before it could be used to help diabetics. But a previous study showed that the substance, called osteocalcin, is found in lower quantities in people with untreated type 2 diabetes, scientists said.

"One could hope and certainly we will test if it could be a treatment for type 2 diabetes," said Dr. Gerard Karsenty, senior author of the paper in Cell magazine and chairman of the department of genetics and development at Columbia University Medical Center. "What makes osteocalcin attractive is that we all have it in our bodies and we tolerate it very well."

The study, which is the first to provide evidence for a skeletal hormone, is generating excitement among diabetes researchers. But they cautioned that it is only one of a number of substances that appear to interact to control blood sugar in the body, and scientists must learn much more before osteocalcin could be considered a medicine.

"It has opened up a new area" of research, said Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, head of obesity research at the Joslin Diabetes Center, who was not involved in the work. "But it's so unexpected, it's going to take a number of studies to figure out if this applies to humans."

In type 2 diabetes, sugar can rise to dangerous levels in the blood because the body loses sensitivity to insulin and may eventually not produce enough insulin. The body needs insulin to move digested food into cells to fuel activities. About 20 million Americans have this type of diabetes, which can lead to serious complications or death if not properly treated.

Scientists have known for years that osteocalcin is produced by osteoblasts, cells that help build bone. But the Columbia researchers are the first to show that it is also an endocrine hormone -- a substance that acts through the bloodstream to affect metabolism.

In their experiments, they inactivated mouse genes that produce osteocalcin. The osteocalcin-deficient mice grew abnormally fat and developed symptoms of diabetes, even when eating a normal diet. When the researchers gave the mice osteocalcin, the rodents' blood sugar normalized. Presence of the hormone also prevented mice from gaining weight when they overate.

Karsenty said the hormone appears to work in multiple ways to counter diabetes: it increases the body's production of the pancreatic cells that make insulin, it directly increases the secretion of insulin, it enhances the body's sensitivity to insulin, and it reduces storage of fat. No drug on the market carries that kind of punch.

Kahn called that multiple effect "particularly striking" and one of the goals for any new treatment. But another specialist, Dr. Michael A. Lazar, director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania, said two of those effects seem contradictory and raise questions that need to be explained.

Typically, he said, if the body becomes more sensitive to insulin, other mechanisms would kick in to shut off insulin production and vice versa. That makes it important to understand how osteocalcin interacts with other hormones as a next step, he said.

The diabetes specialists said that mice have proved to be a useful model for learning about human metabolism because of many similarities in genes, hormones, and functions. In this case, one of the genes that affects osteocalcin function in mice is not active in humans, but Karsenty said he believes there are other genes that serve the same purpose.

Karsenty, however, acknowledged "the possibility that osteocalcin function has been lost in evolution" and is not present in people.

The next steps, he said, are to study its effect in monkeys and then in humans over the next few years.

Karsenty's group discovered the new bone-based hormone because they were looking for the symmetry that often exists in the body. They knew that most hormones are part of a feedback loop and that a fat cell hormone called leptin helps controls bone mass. So they searched for a corresponding bone hormone that controls fat, and found osteocalcin.

"As proof of the concept that the skeleton makes molecules that act as hormones, this is the first of its kind, convincing and interesting," said Lazar. "It adds another candidate to the list . . . that could help us combat diabetes. But it's premature to be giving osteocalcin injections at this time."

Source:Boston.com

Garlic

Finally, after all those interesting news updates lets get back to where we left. Now about garlic, its anti-bacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer properties are partly due to its ability to enhance immune functioning. It particularly stimulates the power of T-lymphocytes and macro-phages, which play a dominant role in immune functions. A lob test by Benjamin H.S. Lau has found that garlic extracts impeled macrophages to generate more agents to kill microbes and tumor cells. Garlic is also called as a biological response modifier.

The blood of a garlic eater has more natural killer cells, these natural killer cells of regular garlic eaters destroyed 140%-160% more cells than non-garlic eaters.

Just 1.8 grams (about a half a clove) of garlic is all that you need to increase the natural killer cells activity.

Comming up next is about Mushrooms.