The theme for year 2012 is Healthy lifestyle -healthy blood pressure.

Excercise on regular basis, a reduced intake of salt and controlled sugar level keep the blood pressure normal, says an expert Dr Naeem Mian while talking to PTV on Thursday.

He said with continued efforts at the national, regional and local levels to increase public awareness about healthy lifestyle, healthy blood pressure and adherence to therapy will make a huge difference.

He said the word hyper means much and pressure means increase , normally it remains controlled in our body but when its level increases, problem of high blood pressure occurs.

He said almost everybody including male and female who are above 60 become patient of it naturally.

“Unfortunately now a days due to social and financial constraints people are having complaints of high blood pressure even at very young age but its controllable”, he said.

Replying to a question he said hypertension can be caused due to obesity, smoking, physical inactivity, and alcohol. So every body should visit the doctor for check ups after every six months.

He suggested some best preventive measures in this regard:

1. Modifying lifestyle; balanced diet; less use of salt, sugar and fat to keep control the weight ; use of green vegetables should be frequent.

2. He added whoever is patient of high blood pressure, his fatmetabolism system get disturbed and when fat increases than blood pressure also increases which can damage kidneys and can cause brain hemorrhage to the patient so sugar should be controlled at first, rest of the problems will be automatically controlled.

3. Blood pressure itself has no symptoms but if a personcomplains of eye sight weakness, headache ,lack of appetite, less activity than he is suffereing from hypertension (blood pressure), he maintained. (APP)

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Now the first experiment of its kind documents exactly what “the invisible injury” – at least the kind caused by blast waves or repeated physical impacts – does to the brain: Crumpled axons, which carry signals between neurons; gummed-up neurons like those in Alzheimer’s disease; strangled blood vessels.

An injured brain is so littered with the chewed-up remains of neurons and other cells that “it looks like autophagy – the brain eating itself alive,” said Lee Goldstein, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the Boston University School of Medicine and co-leader of the study.

The discovery promises to help such injuries be taken more seriously, and might lead to preventives or treatments. It comes at a time when both the Pentagon and the National Football League are struggling with the legacy of head injuries.

Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have sustained such injuries and some have committed suicide or other acts of violence. In one horrific case, an Army staff sergeant who had sustained head trauma is accused of murdering 17 Afghan civilians in March.

The invisibility of many head injuries “is a huge problem,” said retired U.S. Army General Peter Chiarelli, chief executive officer of One Mind, a non-profit group promoting brain research. “The ER doc will say, ‘why am I wasting my time with this guy when I have people with visible injuries?’”

Adding to the urgency: the recent suicides of former pro football players who sustained head injuries during their playing days. The most recent, former San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau, fatally shot himself earlier this month.

MAKING ‘THE INVISIBLE INJURY’ VISIBLE

For the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists compared three groups of brains. Four came from military veterans who had suffered the blast of an improvised explosive device (IED) or a concussion. Four belonged to young athletes who had concussions. And scores were from mice that had been exposed to a blast akin to that from an IED 17 feet (five meters) away packed with 12 pounds (5.4 kilograms) of TNT, comparable to an IED made from a 120-mm artillery round.

None of the brains had obvious injury. “If you hold them in your hand you don’t see any damage,” said neuropathologist Ann McKee of the Boston University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs New England Healthcare System, co-leader of the new study. “CT and MRI don’t see it. It takes a microscope, even an electron microscope.”

With that scrutiny the damage was clear. Specialized cells called astrocytes extended what BU’s Goldstein called “little feet” that wrapped themselves around blood vessels. Axons crumbled and wound up in cellular garbage cans. Long strings of proteins called tau formed, as seen in Alzheimer’s disease.

The damage was strikingly similar to what scientists have seen in the brains of ex-football players who had sustained head injuries and, after death, were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the condition once known as boxer’s dementia.

CTE can cause depression, aggression, impulsivity and memory loss and has been linked to suicide. “Men become very aggressive, develop a hair-trigger temper, and their judgment is off,” said Goldstein. “These are all part and parcel of damage to the brain.”

Age offered no protection. In the new study, the athletes ranged in age from 17 to 27 when they died. They are the youngest head-injury victims ever found with CTE.

Until this study, scientists could not be sure that head injuries, from an IED or a linebacker, caused the brain or behavioral changes. That’s where the lab mice came in. While anesthetized and in a special tube, they were exposed to blasts akin to those suffered by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even though a shock wave barreled through the animals’ skulls at 336 miles per hour, “there was no bleeding, no contusions, no rips in the tissue,” said Goldstein, who led the mouse part of the study. “They looked for all the world like what we see in human cases of traumatic brain injury – the invisible injury that people have been talking about since World War One.”

The mice’s behavior changed, too: they could not remember or learn as well after the blast as before it. “This matches what veterans (exposed to IEDs) say: ‘I’m thinking slow and I can’t remember,’” said Goldstein.

The three lines of evidence – from veterans, athletes and lab mice – suggest a common mechanism by which head injury causes CTE and CTE impairs mental function.

Blasts in a war zone and head trauma on a gridiron both break axons and stretch neurons, said McKee, a football fan who has four bobble-head dolls of retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre in her office. That stretching makes their membranes more porous, allowing calcium ions to flood into the neuron and activating enzymes that alter tau proteins just as they are altered in Alzheimer’s. As a result, said McKee, “the neuron is no longer functional.”

TREATING AND PREVENTING

There are no approved treatments for traumatic brain injury. One experimental drug from BHR Pharma, a subsidiary of Besins Healthcare SA, is in the last stage of human testing.

But the study suggests the military should re-examine soldiers’ protective gear. Heavy helmets that protect against impacts and even bullets “are like putting a bowling ball on top of a match stick,” said Goldstein, exacerbating the destructive acceleration and deceleration from a blast wave.

When the mice’s heads were immobilized, though, an identical blast produced no brain damage. That finding “has invaluable implications for future safety measures,” said psychologist Jennifer Wilde of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. Namely: “special helmets to help keep soldiers heads still during a blast.”

The results also suggest that head trauma should be treated immediately instead of waiting for symptoms. The BU scientists “are working on field-deployable treatments,” Goldstein said, including anti-inflammatory drugs and agents that target leaky blood vessels.

The U.S. military tries “to identify TBI as soon as possible and provide effective treatment,” said Pentagon spokesperson Cynthia Smith. That policy pertains “regardless of whether the injury is obvious and severe, or subtle and hidden.” All service members in a vehicle collision or rollover or within 150 feet of a blast undergo a mandatory medical evaluation.

The new study also confirms the physical reality of psychological illnesses that the military and others have sometimes dismissed. “Post-traumatic stress disorder has been regarded as a purely psychological illness, because we’ve been looking at brains with CT and MRI,” said neuropathologist Bennet Omalu, chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County in California and co-founder of the Brain Injury Research Institute. BIRI hopes to examine Seau’s brain, which the BU lab is also in the running for.

“CT and MRI don’t have the resolution to show the cellular and sub-cellular changes you can get from a concussion or sub-concussive injury,” said Omalu. “Now we can see that PTSD is likely to be a manifestation of traumatic brain damage.” (Reuters)

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The baby with two heads was born at a private hospital in the Joharabad area two days before.

The doctors at a local hospital removed the extra head of the baby after two hours efforts. According to doctors the condition of baby is out of danger now.

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Canada and the United States have the fewest patients, at less than 20 percent of adults, but in poorer countries like Niger the estimated figure is closer to 50 percent, the UN body said.

While wealthier countries have seen their cases drop thanks to effective, low-cost treatment, in Africa many remain people undiagnosed and are not getting help, according to the WHO.

Its World Health Statistics report includes figures on raised blood pressure, and also on blood glucose levels, for the first time this year.

One in 10 people are estimated to have diabetes, rising to up to one third in Pacific Island countries.

“This report is further evidence of the dramatic increase in the conditions that trigger heart disease and other chronic illnesses, particularly in low and middle-income countries,” said WHO director general Margaret Chan.

“In some African countries, as much as half the adult population has high blood pressure.”

In Niger 50.3 percent of men suffer from the condition, with Malawi and Mozambique not far behind at 44.5 and 46.3 percent respectively.

The report also said obesity levels doubled across the world between 1980 and 2008 and half a billion people or 12 percent of the world’s populations are now considered obese.

The Americas have the highest instance, at 26 percent of adults, and south-east Asia the lowest obesity levels at three percent.

The WHO said deaths in children aged under five years dropped from almost 10 million in 2000 to 7.6 million a decade later, with the decline in deaths from measles and diarrhoea-related disease “particularly striking.”

The World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, will meet in Geneva from May 21-26 where members will discuss new targets on cutting the cases of heart and lung disease, diabetes and cancer. (AFP)

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While existing prevention measures such as mosquito nets treated with insecticide and indoor spraying are still effective, experts said tight surveillance and rapid response strategies were needed to prevent more resistance developing.

Despite decades of efforts to beat it with insecticides, bednets and combination drugs, malaria still kills more than 650,000 people a year, most of them babies and young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Because the disease is spread by Anopheles mosquitoes, insecticides are a vital part of controlling it.

Publishing a plan to help countries tackle the threat, the World Health Organization’s global malaria program said resistance had been detected in 64 countries.

“We think we’re ahead of the curve. The tools we have today work extremely well in almost all settings, so we don’t want people throwing their hands up in the air and saying this is a catastrophe,” Robert Newman, the program’s director, told Reuters.

“But we have identified resistance, it is a problem out there, and we need to take urgent and concerted action to make sure we maintain the effectiveness of the tools.”

The WHO recommends four main classes of insecticides, the most common of which are pyrethroids. But resistance to at least one of these classes has now been detected in all regions where the disease is endemic.

RESISTANCE SPREADS

A study published last year found that mosquitoes in one region of Senegal swiftly developed resistance to bednets treated with deltamethrin, a pyrethroid.

WHO director general Margaret Chan said the levels of resistance found in Africa and India were of greatest concern.

“These countries are characterized by high levels of malaria transmission and widespread reports of resistance,” she said in a statement. In some places there was resistance to all four classes of insecticide.

The WHO plan says each country at risk must analyze the extent of resistance and design a pre-emptive management strategy as part of its national malaria control effort, rather than waiting for resistance to increase.

Experts estimate the cost of the global plan at more than $200 million a year, including research into insecticide resistance, research and development of new insecticides, and putting in place management strategies.

“We need to think of this as a long-term investment and look at what the costs would be if we did nothing,” said Newman.

WHO estimates that malaria costs the African economy alone $12 billion every year, a multiple of the annual $1.5 billion spent globally on the fight against malaria.

“If, for example, we were to lose pyrethroids and not be able to use them any more, then malaria control could become very expensive very quickly,” Newman said.

“But if we buy ourselves many more years of being able to use them – by responding quickly when we find resistance and proactively putting in strategies to stop the emergence of resistance – then the overall price tag for malaria control … is likely to be lower.” (Reuters)

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In a study involving genetic information from thousands of schizophrenia patients as well as healthy controls, the researchers said they identified hundreds of genes that can show who is most at risk.

“We broke the genetic code for schizophrenia, identifying many of the genes involved and how they work together to produce the illness,” study author Alexander Niculescu of the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis told.

“By better understanding the genetic and biological basis of the illness, we can develop better tests for it as well as better treatments.”

Such tests could be used to determine whether children in families with schizophrenia were at risk of developing the illness, said Niculescu.

“If they are determined to be at higher risk, then they would be followed more closely by doctors, told the avoid stress, alcohol and drugs, treated with counselling, nutritional supplements (like Omega-3 fish oil capsules) and even anti-psychotic medications early on to prevent the development of full-blown illness.”

The findings are published in the Nature journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia patients typically hear voices that are not real, tend toward paranoia and suffer from disorganised speech and thinking. The condition is thought to affect about one in every hundred people.

Niculescu said that after pinpointing the genes involved in schizophrenia, the research team tested their findings in other patients outside the study group “to show that the results were reproducible and have predictive ability”.

Genetic studies in psychiatry often tended to produce initial excitement, he said, “but are then not reproduced in independent populations, which is the most important proof that a finding is solid and real.”

The team also used brain data from mice put on drugs to mimic schizophrenia.

“Some of the genes and biological mechanisms we identified can be used for new drug development,” said Niculescu.

It could also be used to redirect drugs currently used to treat other disorders.

Niculescu stressed that “genes are not destiny”.

“The environment plays a role as well. The genes we identified play a role in brain connectivity, so can lead to more creativity in certain individuals or clinical illness in others, depending if you have too many of these genetic mutations, in the wrong combination and in a stressful environment.” (AFP)

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The study, published Monday, found that for 30 MS patients with muscle “spasticity,” a few days of marijuana smoking brought some relief.

But the big caveat, researchers say, is that it’s not clear that the downsides of pot smoking are worth it.

Some people with MS are already using medical marijuana to treat certain symptoms, including spasticity — when the muscles in the legs or arms contract painfully, in something akin to a “charley horse.”

There is some science behind the idea: The body naturally produces cannabinoids, the group of chemicals found in marijuana. And studies have suggested the cannabinoid receptors on our cells help regulate muscle spasticity.

But the evidence that pot smoking actually helps with spasticity has been anecdotal.

“We’ve heard from patients that marijuana helps their spasticity, but I think a lot us thought, ‘Well, it’s probably just making you feel good,’” said Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, the lead researcher on the new study.

“I think this study shows that yes, (marijuana) may help with spasticity, but at a cost,” said Corey-Bloom, of the University of California, San Diego.

The cost, her team found, is that smoking caused fatigue and dizziness in some users, and generally slowed down people’s mental skills soon after they used marijuana.

But it’s not clear if that would have any long-term consequences, Corey-Bloom said.

About 400,000 people in the United States have MS, a chronic disease in which the protective coating around nerve fibers starts breaking down.

The new study, reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, included 30 MS patients with muscle spasticity that had failed to get better with standard medication.

Corey-Bloom’s team had each patient smoke marijuana or “placebo” joints — which looked, smelled and tasted like the real thing, but lacked the active ingredient in marijuana, known as THC.

Each patient smoked marijuana once a day for three days and used the placebo cigarette once a day on three separate days. Before and after each treatment, an independent rater assessed the patients’ muscle spasticity.

Overall, the study found, measures of spasticity dropped an average of three points –about 30 percent — on a 24-point scale when patients smoked marijuana, but didn’t change after they smoked the placebo.

The issue of treating spasticity is “certainly an important one,” said Nicholas LaRocca, vice president of healthcare delivery and policy research at the National MS Society.

“Spasticity is a big problem for many people with MS, and the current medications don’t necessarily work for everyone,” said LaRocca, who was not involved in the new study.

“But smoking marijuana does not appear to be a long-term solution, because of the cognitive effects,” he told Reuters Health.

People with MS are already at some risk of “cognitive changes,” LaRocca pointed out, so the potential for lasting effects from long-term marijuana smoking is a concern.

However, LaRocca said, researchers are developing cannabinoid-based medications for MS. That includes a cannabinoid mouth spray called Sativex that has been approved in the UK, Canada, Spain and New Zealand to treat MS-related spasticity.

Research into cannabinoids and spasticity should continue, LaRocca said, because medications may be able to harness the benefits of specific cannabis compounds, without the side effects linked to smoking pot.

Both LaRocca and Corey-Bloom said there were limitations to the current study.

“Blinding” people as to whether they are on marijuana or a placebo is tough since the drug creates a “high” feeling.

In this study, 17 of 30 patients were able to correctly guess whether they were using marijuana or a placebo at each of their six visits with the researchers. And the rest often guessed correctly.

“It’s pretty clear that the patients were not really blinded,” LaRocca said. “What effects that might have had on the results is unclear.”

Corey-Bloom said that should not have influenced the spasticity findings, since an independent researcher (who didn’t know whether patients were smoking marijuana or the placebo) rated spasticity using a standard scale.

But another limitation, she pointed out, is that the study looked at the effects, and side effects, of marijuana over only a few days. “We can’t say anything about long-term effects,” Corey-Bloom told Reuters Health.

For now, LaRocca recommended that people with spasticity see a doctor experienced in treating MS. And if you’re on an anti-spasticity medication and it’s not working well enough, or the side effects are too much, tell your doctor, he said.

For some people, a change in the medication dose might help. (Reuters)

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In a paper published Monday in the “Journal of the American College of Cardiology,” two professors at the University of California-San Francisco show incidents of “sudden cardiac death” to be four times higher for HIV/AIDS patients, a result the researchers found surprising, according to a university press release.

“The fact that the vast majority of cardiac deaths were sudden is surprising and implies that we as clinicians need to be aware of this potential health issue among patients with HIV,” said Priscilla Hsue, an associate professor at UCSF who was one of the study’s lead researchers.

Hsue and her fellow researcher, Zian Tseng, an electrophysiologist, began their study in 2010 after Tseng noticed an alarming trend in separate research analyzing sudden deaths in San Francisco.

“I noticed that many of these cases involved individuals with HIV infection who were dying suddenly,” Tseng said in the press release. “I wondered if there was some sort of connection there.”

Hsue and Tseng’s research focused on 2,860 HIV patients, whose deaths over 10 years were meticulously recorded by San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86. Ward 86 was the first clinic specializing in HIV/AIDS to comprehensively characterize all deaths, according to the press release.

The study showed that from 2000 to 2009, 15 percent of patients died of cardiac-related illnesses. Of that group, 86 percent died of sudden cardiac death, four times the rate of San Francisco’s general population. The study controlled for age, race and other demographic factors.

The study’s findings may be particularly important at a time when improved drug treatments have allowed more HIV/AIDS infected people to live longer.

“Now that HIV-infected individuals are living longer with the benefit of antiretroviral therapy, non-AIDS conditions are becoming increasingly important and at the top of this list is cardiovascular disease,” Hsue said. (AFP)

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The findings, from a study of nearly 2,500 U.S. kids, add to evidence that prenatal smoking may affect children’s future lung health.

There are already plenty of reasons for women to quit smoking during, and ideally before, pregnancy, said lead researcher Sam Oh, of the University of California San Francisco.

This study offers more motivation for women, and for doctors to ask moms and expectant moms about smoking, Oh said in an interview.

“Pregnancy is a great opportunity for smoking cessation,” he said.

Smoking during pregnancy is linked to increased risks of miscarriage, low birth weight, certain birth defects and other pregnancy complications.

As for asthma, many studies have found that secondhand smoke may worsen children’s asthma symptoms, or possibly raise their risk of developing the lung disease in the first place. The same risks have been linked to moms’ prenatal smoking.

But, Oh’s team says, it has not been clear how much of an impact prenatal smoking might have on kids’ asthma symptoms later in life, independent of any current exposure to secondhand smoke.

HIGHER RISK AMONG POOR MINORITIES

For their study, the researchers focused on 2,481 black and Hispanic kids between the ages of 8 and 17 who all had asthma and were mostly from low-income families.

In the U.S., poor, minority children are at particular risk of asthma. About 16 percent of low-income black children have asthma, versus the national prevalence of 9 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In this study, almost 19 percent of African-American moms smoked at some point during pregnancy, as did 5.5 percent of Hispanic moms.

Overall, their kids were at greater risk of poor asthma control later in life, even when childhood secondhand-smoke exposure was taken into account — as well as other factors like a child’s age and asthma medication use.

About 30 percent of Hispanic kids and 38 percent of black kids had poorly controlled asthma symptoms — and the risk was 50 percent for those exposed to smoking in the womb, versus unexposed kids.

“There are measurable effects even years down the road,” Oh said.

The findings do not, however, prove that prenatal smoking, itself, causes more-severe asthma symptoms later in life. They can only point to a correlation.

But there is lab research, in animals and human cells, suggesting there could be a direct effect, Oh pointed out.

Fetal exposure to tobacco smoke may, for example, impair early lung development, or have lasting effects on the activity of certain genes.

The bottom line, according to Oh, is that there is already a host of reasons for pregnant women to quit smoking for good, and this may be one more.

“This study provides more impetus for healthcare providers to ask about smoking at each visit,” he said.

Some pregnant women may be able to quit with behavioral counseling. In some cases, a doctor may prescribe nicotine replacement therapy or other medication. (Reuters)

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A total 7.6 million children died in the first five years of their life that year, the authors said, and warned the world was not on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

Two in every five deaths occurred within the first 28 days of life.

“Preterm birth is now the second leading cause of child death after pneumonia, and is likely to become the top cause of death by 2015 unless rapid scale-up of available interventions occurs,” said the report.

Five countries — India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, and China — contributed to almost half the deaths of children younger than five.

While child deaths have declined by about two million or 26 percent since 2000, when the goal was set, this was not enough, the authors said.

The attainment of the goal “is possible only if life-saving maternal, newborn, and child health interventions are rapidly scaled up in high-burden regions and countries and across major causes in the next few years.” (AFP)

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