This is a fascinating look at a potential solution for helping burn victims. It is just fascinating to me.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI
"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
This is a fascinating look at a potential solution for helping burn victims. It is just fascinating to me.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI
This is a very interesting article about why some people handle stress better than others do. Dr. Andy Morgan of Yale Medical School conducted research to determine why some people handle stress better than others do.
His research took him to Fort Bragg which where the Army’s elite Airborne and Special Forces school is located. Let’s take a look at an excerpt from the article.
“For Morgan, POW school was the perfect place to study who survives the best under acute stress. If you think it’s just training and the soldiers know they’re not really in serious danger, consider what Morgan discovered. During mock interrogations, the prisoners’ heart rates skyrocket to more than 170 beats per minute for more than half an hour, even though they aren’t engaging in any physical activity. Meanwhile, their bodies pump more stress hormones than the amounts actually measured in aviators landing on aircraft carriers, troops awaiting ambushes in Vietnam, skydivers taking the plunge or patients awaiting major surgery. The levels of stress hormones are sufficient to turn off the immune system and to produce a catabolic state, in which the body begins to break down and feed on itself. The average weight loss in three days is 22 pounds.
Morgan’s research—the first of its kind—produced some fascinating findings about who does the best job resisting the interrogators and who stays focused and clearheaded despite the uncontrollable fear. Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially “stress hardy” or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y. NPY is an abundant amino acid in our bodies that helps regulate our blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory. It also works as a natural tranquilizer, controlling anxiety and buffering the effects of stress hormones like norepenephrine, one of the chemicals that most of us simply call adrenaline. In essence, NPY is one of the fire hoses that your brain uses to extinguish your alarm and fear responses by keeping the frontal-lobe parts of your brain working longer under stress.
Morgan found one very specific reason that Special Forces are superior survivors: they produce significantly greater levels of NPY compared with regular troops. In addition, 24 hours after completing survival training, Special Forces soldiers returned to their original levels of NPY while regular soldiers were significantly below normal.”
So if this NPY serves as a sort of natural anti-anxiety drug I have to ask the obvious question. Can we find a way to produce it? Maybe I am being naive, but from a laymen’s perspective it sounds like it could be a great resource for people. It might allow some people to stop taking their meds.
Another part of the article that I thought was interesting is the section in which they discussed heart rate variability. Take a look at this:
It turns out that the best survivors don’t have a lot of heart-rate variability. Instead, they’ve got “metronomic heartbeats”—their hearts thump steadily like metronomes—with almost no variability between beats. That is, the intervals between the beats are evenly spaced. Morgan believes that a metronomic heartbeat is an easy way to detect good survivors and high neuropeptide Y releasers. It makes sense biologically because your brainstem, which controls your heartbeat, has a high density of neuropeptide Y.
Part of what I found interesting was that the article says that metronomic heartbeat is associated with early heart disease and sudden death. So there is a question about whether this is really a benefit. It is good if you are a soldier or in some sort of very stressful profession.
But if it is tied to heart disease the negative can potentially outweigh the positive. Nice to stay calm, but not at the expense of not living past fifty.
I thought that this article on WebMD was interesting.
In the study, presented at Experimental Biology 2009, researchers fed rats bred to become obese either a high-fat or low-fat diet enriched with whole blueberry powder or carbohydrates as 2% of their total diet.
After 90 days, the rats fed blueberries had less abdominal fat, lower cholesterol, and improved glucose control and insulin sensitivity. The latter two factors are markers of how well the body processes sugar for energy and are related to diabetes risk.
These health benefits of blueberries were evident in rats fed both high- and low-fat diets enriched with the blueberry powder. But the benefits were greatest among those who ate a low-fat diet.
In addition to the other heart health benefits of blueberries, those fed the low-fat blueberry diet also lost body weight and fat mass compared to those on the high-fat diet.
Although more research is needed to confirm these results in humans, a related study presented at the same conference showed that men with risk factors for heart disease who drank wild blueberry juice for three weeks seemed to experience slight improvements in glucose and insulin control.
Take a look at this CNN story:
(CNN) — There had been no confirmed deaths in the United States related to swine flu as of Tuesday afternoon. But another virus had killed thousands of people since January and is expected to keep killing hundreds of people every week for the rest of the year.
That one? The regular flu.
An outbreak of swine flu that is suspected in more than 150 deaths in Mexico and has sickened dozens of people in the United States and elsewhere has grabbed the attention of a nervous public and of medical officials worried the strain will continue to mutate and spread.
Experts are nervous that, as a new strain, the swine flu will be harder to stop because there aren’t any vaccines to fight it.But even if there are swine-flu deaths outside Mexico — and medical experts say there very well may be — the virus would have a long way to go to match the roughly 36,000 deaths that seasonal influenza causes in the United States each year.
“That happens on an annual basis,” Dr. Brian Currie said Tuesday. Currie is vice president and medical director at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, New York.”
In my travels throughout the web I often search for interesting gadgets and inventions that will change our lives. A while back I stumbled onto MedGadget. It is an interesting site that discusses technological advances in medicine.
From MIT Tech Review:
A gripper based on the current design could respond autonomously to chemical cues in the body. For example, it might react to the biochemicals released by infected tissue by closing around the tissue, so that pieces can be removed for analysis.
Gracias [David Gracias, biomolecular and chemical-engineering professor at JHU] and his colleagues presented the microgripper at the American Chemical Society meeting earlier this month. To demonstrate the device, they used it to grasp and maneuver tiny beads and clumps of cells in a petri dish. They have also used the device in the laboratory to perform an in vitro biopsy on a cow’s bladder. “This is the first micromachine that has been shown convincingly to do very useful things,” Gracias says. “And it does not require electric power for operation.”The open gripper is 500 micrometers (0.05 centimeters) in diameter, and it is made of a film of copper and chromium covered with polymer. As long as the polymer stays rigid, the gripper remains open. But introducing a chemical trigger or lowering the temperature causes the polymer to soften, actuating the gripper’s fingers so that they curl inward to form a ball that is 190 micrometers wide. Another chemical signal can be used to reopen the gripper. All of the chemicals used as triggers in experiments are harmless to the body.
And the ReWalk Exoskeleton which helps paralyzed people walk again. It is made by an Israeli company called Argo Medical Technologies. I think this is just very cool.
ReWalkâ„¢, the first commercially viable upright walking assistance tool, enables wheelchair users with lower-limb disabilities to stand, walk, and even climb stairs. For potentially millions of wheelchair users.
I thought that that this is very cool:
LONDON, United Kingdom (CNN) — Medicine has much to learn from nature. There are literally millions of medical compounds out there that could cure diseases, help improve treatment and even protect us from some types of bacteria.cientists have been tapping into nature’s resources for inspiration on how to treat humans.
Humpback whales, sea cucumbers and Australian red algae are just a few of the species leading the way in modern medicine.
The humpback whale has a design within its heart that could help save the lives of many patients suffering from heart disease.
With a heart that can pump six bath tubs of blood around a circulation system that is 4,500 times as complex as our own, and in only three heartbeats a minute, it has fascinated scientists as to how it manages this feat.
But it was while studying how the whale’s heart is able to do this that Dr Jorge Reynolds– (who placed the first external pacemaker in the body of a priest who survived for an additional 17 years) discovered nano-sized ‘wires’. These wires allow electrical signals to stimulate the heartbeats even through masses of non-conductive blubber.
This discovery could be the key to replacing the traditional pacemaker, scientists say. Instead of having to install a battery-powered pacemaker the whale ‘wires’ could be used to stimulate heart beats.
Whale ‘wires’ could save the extra bouts of surgery, which are currently needed to replace the batteries in pacemakers.
It doesn’t end there. There’s also the added bonus of saving money. With the worldwide market for pacemakers expected to reach $3.7 billion by 2010, this technology, which costs only a few cents to make, could replace pacemakers and save billions.
At Ohio’s Cleveland West Reserve University Jeffrey Capadona has pioneered the creation of a material that could help treat Parkinson’s disease, stroke and spinal chord injuries.
This time the inspiration was the humble sea cucumber, whose skin can change from a rigid to flexible state with ease.
Capadona argues that tiny electrodes implanted into the brain are sometimes used to treat Parkinson’s disease, stroke and spinal chord injuries. But they can become less effective over time as the body creates scar tissue around the hard implant.
Using this new material, which was based on the skin of sea cucumber, could improve treatment as the material can become less rigid and prolong its effectiveness.
Even red algae in Australia have provided inspiration to scientists who now believe they could help control some diseases.
Researchers from the University of New South Wales, Australia, discovered that the red algae found just off the coast was free from biofilms– a congregation of bacteria that are the cause of 70 percent of all human infections.
Read the whole thing.