Public Health

The authors of a new study reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology say they know how much smoking affects cardiac health before and after a heart attack and have determined whether cutting back instead of completely kicking the habit will have a positive effect as well. The Research found that quitting smoking after a heart attack has about the same positive effect as other major interventions such as lipid-lowering agents like statins or more invasive procedures. Even those with a history of smoking can see their risk sharply decline once they give up the habit. "We…

Proapoptotic Peptides that target blood vessels in White adipose (fat) tissue and cause them to go undergo programmed cell death could become a model for future weight-loss therapies, says a study published online in Diabetes. The study found that obese animal models treated with proapoptotic peptides experienced decreased food intake and significant fat loss. Fat tissue is vascularized, much like a tumor, and growth of fat tissue is highly dependent on the tissue's ability to build new blood vessels—a phenomenon called angiogenesis. Inhibiting adipose angiogenesis—essentially "starving" fat…

Ayurveda consist of two words ‘Ayur’ and ‘Veda’. It is a Sanskrit term and it literally means the science of life (Sharma, 1979). The scope of Ayurveda is vast. It not only deals with the prevention of disease and promotion of health and longevity but it also cures the disease. It also deals with rejuvenation. It can also be called the science of living and it is upveda of Atharva veda. It treats an individual as a whole and not only the symptoms or the affected parts, unlike modern medicines. India due to its unique variety of geographical and climatic factors had a rich and varied flora of…

A new study in Acta Paediatrica suggests that parents of four and five-year-olds may be unaware that their children are at an unhealthy weight.  Half of the mothers who took part in the new study thought that their obese four or five year-old was normal weight, as did 39 per cent of the fathers. When it came to overweight children, 75 per cent of mothers and 77 per cent of fathers thought that their child was normal weight. More than 800 parents of 439 children took part in the study, carried out by researchers from the University Medical Centre Groningen in The Netherlands. Five per…

Anti-smoking activists have made some ridiculous claims about smoking and the associated health risks. In recent years, studies have suggested that movies encourage teenagers to pick up the habit, any exposure to secondhand smoke is dangerous, and that such a thing as ‘third hand smoke’ exists. But a new study in Environmental Health may be the greatest example of exaggeration on the issue ever. The study argues that smokers may be doing additional harm to themselves with their own secondhand smoke. The prevailing assumption is that the risks secondhand smoke poses to smokers would be…

Writing in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers say that many of the health benefits of aerobic exercise are due to the most recent exercise session, and the nature of these benefits can be greatly affected by the food we eat afterwards. Specifically, the study found that exercise enhanced insulin sensitivity, particularly when meals eaten after the exercise session contained relatively low carbohydrate content. Enhanced insulin sensitivity means that it is easier for the body to take up sugar from the blood stream into tissues like muscles, where it can be stored or used as fuel.…

Researchers say they have devised a new strategy that increases the likelihood of a recipient's immune system accepting embryonic stem cell transplants. The strategy involves fusing bone marrow cells to embryonic stem cells. Once fused, the hybrid cells have DNA from both the donor and recipient, raising hopes that immune rejection of embryonic stem cell therapies can be avoided without drugs. The findings appear in the February issue of the FASEB Journal Although the study holds great promise for future embryonic stem cell therapies, the results may be even more far reaching. The team …

According to a new study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, parents who try to teach responsible drinking to their children by letting them drink at home may be setting their teens up for all kinds of alcohol related problems later in life. The study included 428 families with two children between the ages of 13 and 15. Parents and teens completed questionnaires on drinking habits at the outset and again one and two years later. The researchers found that, in general, the more teens drank at home, the more they tended to drink elsewhere; the reverse was also true, with out-of-…

Scientists from the Université de Montréal are developing a weight loss pill composed of leptin, the protein that regulates appetite in mammals. The researchers say that leptin may be a good weight loss pill because its levels decrease when we fast and rise when we eat, meaning that increasing them could reduce people's urge to continue eating. The protein has also been proven to suppress appetite when administered intravenously to pathologically obese people. "Taken orally, such a pill would provide obese people with the sensation of being full. They would eat less and in turn lose weight…

It's well known that eating too much salt can be harmful. Despite that fact, many people choose to consume more of it than they need, and that to many in the health community means that something must be done population-wide to reduce salt intake. The latest effort comes from the European Society of Cardiology, who says that a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrates the need for laws that restrict the salt content of processed foods. In the new study, researchers from from the University of California, San Francisco undertook a computer simulation showing the effects of…