Researchers at Johns Hopkins are investigating (with success) using stem cells immediately after heart attacks to prevent damage to heart muscle.
The first studies were with cells from pigs. Further testing from human donors will hope to inject stem cells not directly into the heart but into the blood stream with the hope that the cells will find the way to the heart. Promising research with results years away.
The Sydney Australia Morning Herald released a study showing that even two cups of coffee with caffeine reduced blood flow to the heart during exercise. Damn, but I love my morning expresso! The effects were even more pronounced at higher altitudes. My heart’s hatred for any altitude is one reason we live at a few feet above sea level.
The report
is not good news but should be noted. Sadly caffeine, like tobacco, is a hard substance to leave behind.
Dr. Philipp A. Kaufmann and colleagues from University Hospital Zurich, examined the immediate effects of caffeine on blood flow to the heart at rest and after exercise in healthy young adult volunteers exercising at normal oxygen levels or simulated low-oxygen levels that occurs at high altitudes.
There have been a lot of recent studies of depression, stress and workplace tensions and their effect on health. They did not make a pretty picture. These things can kill you.
Finally there is a movement to study positive feelings and happy thoughts and, yes, laughter which was once labeled “The Best Medicine”, and their effects. It is a happier picture. Perhaps even a comedy.
After my heart attack I noticed that movies affected me more. I might, in private, cry over a melodrama that I would have turned off before . The good, funny movies really did make me feel better as does a good joke or an amusing book. It does help to laugh. Not as a clown who laughs with tears but the good laugh that is convivial and enervating.
The study from Reuters is from the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. Dr. Michael Miller chief author of the study warned not to give up exercise. “Instead, an ‘optimal scenario’ might be to watch a funny movie while jogging on a treadmill.”
Exactly why laughing might give a jolt to the circulation isn’t clear. It’s possible that it counters the effects that stress hormones can have on blood vessel function, Miller and his colleagues speculate. In addition, laughter may spur the body’s production of nitric oxide, a chemical that helps dilate blood vessels
Had a really good laugh recently? Just do it. Laughter is good for you. Researchers have begun to examine not just those negative feelings — depression — and how it negatively influences health. They are also beginning to study positive feelings and how they impact your health and aging.
The research used 20 young adults who “watched a movie that made them laugh”. The tests showed that their blood pressure showed a similar drop as had been noted after aerobic exercise. The study is being published in the February journal Heart.
The chief researcher, Dr. Michael Miller, warned that giving up aerobic exercise is not indicated. He suggested, instead, that perhaps people could watch funny movies while working on exercise machines like a treadmill.
The testers had their subjects watch a comedy, Something About Mary which I didn’t find funny but that is neither here nor there. Either the subjects or the researchers did. They were tested with non-invasive blood flow measurements after that film and after a “distressing film”, like Saving Private Ryan. The results showed a 50% improvement in blood flow after the comedy over the heavier flick.
There have been a number of quantifying studies recently that proved the hypothesis that depression is bad for the health, shortens life and increases illness. There have also been some which showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that being middle class or affluent was good for you. Wow! Ain’t science grand?
The thing to do now is to laugh a lot, develop a sense of humor and watch happy films. The last can be hard since I would find it more pleasurable to watch Saving Private Ryan which is a better film. I also hate sappy films. But Animal Crackers or Bringing Up Baby. You could even add, for additional good health, Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety, some of Woody Allen’s funny films, a bit of Chevy Chase and a dollop of Frank Capra. Don’t forget It Happened One Night and you may live to be 100.
In the modern world of medicine the number of drugs (by which we mean medications) has skyrocketed as has the number of brand names and uses for the medications. It has been an explosion of information that has been reflected in print journals, professional and popular books and websites.
For people with serious illnesses and for the general public some knowledge of medications available or drugs they are using is a very necessary need. Physicians are busy and have been know to make mistakes or merely to forget that a drug has a conflict with another. Pharmacies in the First World have computers that are supposed to check your prescription for any conflicts. It is your life. If you want to trust the drug store computer, go right ahead.
A more efficient idea is to stay abreast of current research and to know exactly what you are putting in your body. It could be life or death.
There are a number of popular medication guides listed below this post and, undoubtedly more. There are books for both prescription and over-the-counter drugs. They stick to the uses of the drug and a synopsis in lay language as to how it works. Then there are sections on dosage, side effects and serious conflicts, the size and quantities in which it is sold, brand and generic names as well as instructions in case of over-dosage. These are valuable books to have in the house. Often they are available in reasonably priced paperbacks from reputable publishers.
There are also the professional books, notably PDR, The Physicians’ Desk Reference. These are huge compilations of everything that is on the market, updated annually, with pictures of the medication (they are, you knew, color coded), scientific descriptions with molecular diagrams as well as dosage, indications, contra-indications, etc. These are large and expensive and useful if you are a professional or really need a lot of information.
Now there are also helpful websites like The Mayo Clinic and those of various hospitals and link sites that include information from drug databases.
Finally we get to the subject of this post. The University of Alberta, Canada recently opened the world’s largest
drug database on the internet.
Dr. David Wishart, from the departments of Computing Science and Biological Sciences and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, first began working on an online, interactive database as a teaching tool to help his pharmacy students learn more about the molecular details of different drugs. Wanting to develop one source that offers a broad scope of information, Wishart and his team created DrugBank, the world’s largest and most complete resource on drugs and drug targets. DrugBank contains detailed chemical, pharmaceutical, medical and molecular biological information on more than 3000 drug targets and 4100 approved or experimental drugs products.
This site which was originally for pharmacy students and researchers is very complete and has something for everyone. It is accessible to the general public and is also highly useful to the entire community of medical professionals. It is said to be the “first database …(to bring)…
… the latest data from the Human Genome Project together with detailed chemical information about drugs and drug products,” said Wishart. The diversity of the data types combined with the fact that the data were mostly paper-bound made the assembly of DrugBank both difficult and time-consuming. More than a dozen textbooks, several hundred journal articles, nearly 30 different electronic databases and at least 20 in-house or web-based programs were individually searched, accessed, compared, written or run over the course of four years.
It is also involved in the Human Metabolome Project which is to map the “metabolites in bodily fluids”.
(The research is published in the Jan. 1, 2006 edition of the journal Nucleic Acids Research and has been supported by Genome Alberta, through the Genome Canada project: Building the Metabolomics Toolbox.) This post was based on an original report by Phoebe Dey U. of Alberta.
Russell Croman is a backyard astro-photographer in Texas. What sets him apart is the wonder of his pictures astronomically and because he sees well. He has new pictures up on his site and it would give any one who has wondered about stars, galaxies, nebuli a treat to see his work.
Perseus Cluster. The fuzzy objects are galaxies. Astounding.
There are so many hot spots in this beginning of the 21st century. Can we “guide” so many countries to “democracy”? Can we build enough walls. Will the barbarians breach the gates?
See my article at Blogcritics, Rome Falls: Destruction or Renewal?.
Art therapy as an adjunct to pain management does not surprise me. It is also a partial cure for depression since it is very difficult to be ensconced in a separate world of images, words or music and to feel sorry for yourself at the same time. Many years ago when I was a psychiatric social worker at a big, state hospital in New York, I began a series of group therapy sessions using a lot of images and music and even sold the Polaroid Corp. into sending us a box of cameras and film. It worked. It helped. It increased self-esteem and the relationship to reality and it was fun. All those things helped get it put down by the administration who were interested only in the credit for it.
Science Daily reports that,
A study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management found that art therapy can reduce a broad spectrum of symptoms related to pain and anxiety in cancer patients. In the study done at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, cancer patients reported significant reductions in eight of nine symptoms measured by the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) after spending an hour working on art projects of their choice.
The study which was done at Northwestern Memorial Hospital under a grant from their foundation goes on to say,
Nancy Nainis, MA, ATR, an art therapist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, who is the lead author on the study (said) “We were especially surprised to find the reduction in ‘tiredness’,” says Ms. Nainis. “Several subjects made anecdotal comments that the art therapy had energized them. This is the first study to document a reduction in tiredness as a result of art therapy.”
Two articles caught my attention today. Both relate to lifestyle dangers and the possiblities of change. In the first a new study published in the journal, Psychophysiology reinflorces the notion we have all had that mental and emotional stress will impact cardiac health — your health in general.
The article by Jill Yablonsky includes the latest findings to prove a link between stress and heart disease.
Most people believe that stress plays a role in heart disease. A study published in the latest issue of Psychophysiology finds that large rises in blood pressure during mental stress are associated with higher levels of activity in the regions of the brain associated with experiencing negative emotions and generating physiological responses in the rest of the body. The research suggests that exaggerated activity in the cingulate cortex during mental stress may generate excessive rises in blood pressure that may place some individuals at a greater risk for heart disease.
Another related article on how quickly “lifestyle changes” can affect your health is of great interest. It is not a process where you will not see the results for decades nor useless. Changes in diet, exercise and stress levels can soon be monitored.
Changes can be seen in “less than a month” says this test,
WEDNESDAY, Jan. 11 (HealthDay News) — In less than a month, individuals can reverse serious heart disease risk factors by making significant lifestyle changes, researchers are reporting.
In an encouraging study conducted on overweight men, researchers found that after three weeks on a high-fiber, low-fat diet and adding up to 60 minutes of daily walking, about half of the study participants reversed type 2 diabetes or a constellation of unhealthy risk factors called the “metabolic syndrome.”
It goes on to end with the cheery note,
People have the power within themselves to make a difference. Weight loss and exercise consistently improve heart disease risk, and this is something you have control over. You have the ability to dramatically improve whatever level you’re at,” said Nori.
Roman civilization fell in the fifth century A.D. following the devastation of Rome by Vandals in 410. The fall took some time and now, more than 1500 years later archaeologists are arguing whether it was a collapse or a transformation of society.
The academic battle over what happened then could be transported into the future. If America falls to the terrorist crazies, will it be the collapse of a great civilization and the Pax Americana or a natural transformation into another kind of society?
Into this great story of past and future, jump the British archaeologists, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Brown as leading proponents of each side of the story. Ward-Perkins garnered my non-archaeologist’s attention with an article in the fine, British magazine, History Today. His article in the June, 2005 issue, “The End of The Roman Empire: Did It Collapse or Was it Transformed?” describes the work of recreating the everyday life of the Roman city of Luna. Luna fell on hard times after the fall of Rome and, finally, died so thoroughly that its fine buildings, temples and villas of stone and marble, its roads and aqueduct were covered and lost. Much of those prosperous times has been studied and excavated. Ward-Perkins is studying the civilization that came afterwards which was housed in wooden houses with far more primitive utensils and tools and, due to the nature of the materials, has been even harder to reconstruct.
Ward=Perkins writes of working with a team of scientists in the 1970’s on the “site of Luna, a Roman city in northern Italy, on the coast about halfway between Pisa and Genoa.” Luna was part of the Empire and had “the full range of Roman urban amenities…”. Which is to say, bath houses with water piped in, paved roads with drainage and a system of sewage removal underneath, fine villas decorated with frescos and marble, public buildings, temples and a theater. The people used sophisticated ceramics in which there was a complex, successful trading system in the Mediterranean which was “a peaceful commercial lake for five centuries…” of the Pax Romana. Luna was affluent from the production of Carrara marble but, in the 4th or 5th centuries, the quarries were abandoned and were not used for the next 700 years. The great buildings not only fell but were torn apart for building materials (much as some Mayan cities became parts of newer, less civilized dwellings).
Ward-Perkins tells a fine story of the city as it was, its fall, and the efforts to resurrect the civilization that followed. Now comes the battle of the scientists. Ward-Perkins defends the long-accepted theory that Rome was destroyed by savage tribes and civilization fell not to be resurrected for centuries.
I have recently decided not to reprint all my Blogcritics posts in their entirety. This article can be found under Civilization Falls… in the Blogcritics archives.
Some books pop out and grab the reader all at once. Others take longer and then sneak up on you. This is one of the those.
I read it a year or so ago not expecting much from a woman’s book of short stories about India and Indians. But it had been a gift to my wife from her mother. She brought it back from New York to our jungle outpost in Mexico where books in English can be rare. So I tried it. Tentatively at first and slowly. Its’ pace and its surprises made themselves felt.
It is definitely not at jump-in-your-face collection. It is a group of slice of life stories and characterizations of both Indians in India and Indians in America. The stories take place in that traditional culture and in New England. There is a clash of culures. These are people who both are and are not comfortable in their place or culture and are feeling their way through life with doubts and fears.
Each story of a place and person flows along with the pace of life and then ends quietly. Only later does the epiphany (when they are successful) strike. Suddenly a piece of the puzzle of what life is like for all of us and for these people lost in and between cultures becomes more real and more illuminated. This is the moment of pleasure which short stories aim to give and often don’t.
The writer, herself of Indian descent but born in London, raised in Rhode Island is living in New York City. We feel her most in those stories like “Sexy” where the protagonist is someone more American than Indian who is confronted with the specter of the India of her ancestors, the alien nature of its’ gods and foods and thinking.
Note my reference to food. These stories abound with the tastes and textures of Indian cookery They are the nature of the culture itself . Miranda, the “other woman” who narrates “Sexy” stops in an Indian grocery in Central Square, Boston.
“Can I help you?” the man standing at the cash register asked. He was eating a samosa, dipping it into some dark brown sauce on a paper plate. Below the glass counter at his waist were trays of more plump samosas, and what looked like pale, diamond-shaped pieces of fudge covered with foil, and some bright orange pastries floating in syrup.
Miranda is having an affair with a man who knows his Indian culture and, suddenly she wants to know something about it, too.
Apart from Laxmi and Dev, the only Indians whom Miranda had known were a family in the neighborhood where she’ grown up… One year, all the neighborhood children were invited to the birthday party of the Dixit girl. Miranda remembered a heavy aroma of incense and onions in the house, and a pile of shoes heaped by the front door. But most of all she remembered a piece of fabric, about the size of a pillowcase, which hung from a wooden dowel at the bottom of the stairs. It was a painting of a naked woman with a red face shaped like a knight’s shield. She had enormous white eyes that tilted toward her temples, and mere dots for pupils. Two circles, with the same dots at their centers, indicated her breasts. In one hand she brandished a dagger. With one foot she crushed a struggling man on the ground… She stuck her tongue out at Miranda…
She was told that this was “the goddess Kali” and was invited to cake. Miranda at 9 years old is terrified to eat the cake and to “walk on the same side of the street as the Dixit’s house…” In the “now” of the story she is shamed by her recollection of the alien qualities of other Indians who are not so totally American as is she. She, too, feels like a foreigner in her own country. It is a common thread in the stories. People feel themselves as foreign. It is a feeling I know living as an American expatriate in Mexico. I felt it growing up in Florida when Florida was the South with a capital “S”. I was a cracker, born and bred there; but, still, I was an alien.
In “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” we smell more foods and meet Mr. Pirzada who is more foreign than the family of the narrator. He comes to her parents’ home for dinners in 1971 to watch the TV as his home (where his family remained while he studied) in Dacca is under siege during the partitioning of Pakistan. She is intrigued by him because he is foreign to her American eyes. Her family straddle the fence of cultures. They complain that “The supermarket did not carry mustard oil, doctors did not make house calls, neighbors never dropped by without an invitation…”
She is confused by the distinctions and clashes of Partition.
It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands… Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before entering a room, chewed fennel sees after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for dessert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea.
In the end he returns to Dacca. Nothing has happened and everything has happened — war and meals and friendships, beginnings and endings. The little girl who treasured his little gifts of candies learns the feelings of loss. Perhaps we do, too. It is not an exciting story and then that epiphany comes and you are lifted and taught and learn and that is a pleasure like, perhaps, pickled mangoes.
In the title story, “Interpreter of Maladies” we are confronted with the life of an Indian man in India looking at the family of Americans of Indian descent who come to see the sights and visit the parents who retired to India. “‘Mina and I were both born in America,’ Mr. Das announced with an air of sudden confidence. ‘Born and raised.’” Our “interpreter” is their driver and guide, Mr. Kapasi. After a time we learn that he also works for a doctor who does not speak Gujarati and has a lot of Gujarati patients. Mr. Kapasi translates their medical or emotional complaints. Mrs. Das and we are thrown into this mirrored reality of translations on translations of words and of feelings that make our lives so complex and the lives of immigrants so difficult. Mr. Kapasi is entranced by Mrs. Das and the future of having a real American with whom to correspond. She is entranced by what she sees as his ability to translate the signs of illness or unhappiness into words that heal. We are set up for both a clash of cultures and of realities. When it is over we are left with a little epiphany, a snapshot held in his eye of the reality of people from another place and another life.
Jumpha Lahiri is the teller of tales and the interpreter of maladies. She writes of the feelings, the fears, the confusions of the immigrant experience. Today, with Blogcritics and the nation embroiled in a clash of isolationist desires, border skirmishes, and increased intolerance in the country; Lahiri is a witness to the feelings of the immigrant and of the assimilated strangers in our midst. The forces of intolerance, racism and prejudice are crying for walls from sea to shining sea and for an end to immigration because the country is “full” and so many immigrants don’t speak English. The current climate is conducive to more than the normal amount of xenophobia and violence. This is the time to think of the traditions of immigration and the contributions made by those whose lives became part of the American tradition.
Note also that Google Cooking was given Blogcritics “Pick of the Week” for this week. It is the third post so honored and pleases me. Take a look at the Blogcritics version.