Friday, April 24, 2015

Articles clean-up almost done - for 2009 posts

24-April-2015


I think that it was about 2 weeks now, and so far, most of my 2009 health blog articles has been cleaned.

Below are the articles that got a lot of page views, out of the almost 700 articles posted in 2009. Some articles fetched so many views, perhaps they were ideas that were at the right place at the right time.

Danger down under
HOAX: Vitamin C (AA) + Shrimp/Prawn = Arsenic Poisoning
Facts about Leptospirosis
ASK THE DOC: Birthmark Removal
Don’t touch your eyes with dirty hands
How do I keep my thyroid problem in check?
1,000 more confirmed H1N1 flu cases added in one day
Addressing concerns on your child’s immunity
Health warning on "Air Ikan Haruan"
Varicose veins not just cosmetic Prevent varicose veins
Life, health insurers invest big in tobacco
The right moves
Substances in 2 illegal health products cause adverse side effects
Wash the hand that breeds
After the trips come the tests
Nightclub operators put in place H1N1 precautionary measures
A sign of heart attack?
When mum has an eating disorder
Start small
When nature calls ... a little too often
Beware of premature cornea ageing
Say goodbye to Botox


It was the long watch on the H1N1 pandemic, until it finally was contained.
And some others.

On to the rest of the articles, 2010 and later!

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Currently doing spring cleaning

22-April-2015


Hello everyone!

Please allow me some time to do a bit of spring cleaning on my health blog. It is almost 7 years now since the day I started this blog, and during the SARS, H1N1 and dengue pandemics, and many others, there were a lot of articles that I posted, copying from online news sources.

This resulted in paragraphs improperly formatted, aside from small, small things, which warrants cosmetic alteration. Especially now that the medium we use is no longer just the desktop or laptop PCs. We now have hand held devices so the re-formatting is important.

Hope to still be posting health articles every now and then. Honestly, it is not only my health blog that will need the same attention and care - all of my blogs do. That will definitely take time, as I will do the same spring cleaning, at the least.

In the mean time, I have also become a distributor of a suite of products by Jeunesse Global, that is why I am learning quite a lot, and revisiting multi-level marketing, or network marketing, whatever you would like to call it, and I am putting in a lot of time attending seminars externally, aside from what my team is having.

I'm learning a lot!

Okay then, we'll be back to circulation in no time, and thank you for reading.

Till then!


Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Studies Cast Doubt on Fish Oil Benefits

Kalaöljy kapseleita Fish oil capsules
Kalaöljy kapseleita Fish oil capsules (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I thought that there is so much promise that the fish oil holds... all sinking in the ocean now?
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By ANAHAD O’ CONNOR


While sales of fish oil have been doubling worldwide, trials have shown it has no effect on health.

Fish oil is now the third most widely used dietary supplement in the United States, after vitamins and minerals, according to a recent report from the National Institutes of Health. Consumers believe the omega-3 fatty acids in the supplements will protect their cardiovascular health.

But the vast majority of clinical trials have found no evidence that fish lowers heart attack and stroke rates. From 2005 to 2012, at least two dozen studies of fish oil were published, most of which looked at whether fish oil could prevent heart disease in high-risk groups. All but two of the studies found that compared with a placebo, fish oil showed no benefit.

Most fish oil supplements are rich in two omega-3 fatty acids that can have a blood-thinning effect, much like aspirin, that may reduce the likelihood of clots. Omega-3s can also reduce inflammation, which plays a role in atherosclerosis. And the United States Food and Drug administration has approved at least three prescription types of fish oil – Vascepa, Lovaza and a generic form – for the treatment of very high triglycerides, a risk factor for heart disease.

Some of the earliest enthusiasm for fish oil goes back to research carried out in the 1970s by the Danish scientists Dr. Hans Olaf Bang and Dr. Jorn Dyerberg. They determined that Inuits living in northern Greenland had remarkably low rates of cardiovascular disease, which they attributed to an omega-3 rich diet consisting mainly of fish, seal and whale blubber. Dr. George Fodor, a cardiologist at the University of Ottawa, outlined flaws in much of this early research, and he concluded that the rate of heart disease among the Inuit was vastly underestimated. But the halo effect around fish oils persists. Several studies from the 1990s, including an Italian study that found that heart attack survivors who were treated with a gram of fish oil daily had a drop in mortality, bolstered the case for fish oil.

Dr. James Stein, the director of preventive cardiology at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, said the early fish oil studies took place in an era when cardiovascular disease was treated very differently than it is today, with far less use of statins, beta blockers, blood thinners and other intensive therapies. So the effect of fish oil, even if it had been minor, he said, would have been more noticeable.

Dr. Stein also cautions that fish oil can be hazardous when combined with aspirin or other blood thinners.

But some experts say the case for fish oil remains open. Dr. JoAnn Manson, the chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said the clinical trials had focused on people who already had heart disease or were at very high risk. Fish oil has also been promoted for the prevention of a variety of other conditions, including cancer and Alzheimer’s and depression.

“But I do think people should realize that the jury is still out,” she said, “and that they may be spending a lot of money on these supplements without getting any benefit.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, April 11, 2015





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Looking for all-natural, organic alternative?




Saturday, April 11, 2015

Mysteries of the Brain Are Hard to Unravel

English: Main regions of the vertebrate brain,...
English: Main regions of the vertebrate brain, shown for a shark and a human brain (the human brain is sliced along the midline). The two brains are not on the same scale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I find this one very interesting...
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By JAMES GORMAN


The United States and the European Union have launched new brain research programs, part of a recent surge in studies. Scientists are mapping parts of mouse, fly and human brains at different levels of magnification. They have a greater understanding of how the brain works, such as the way mammalian brain navigates and remembers places, work that won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Yet the growing body of data – maps, atlases and connectomes that show linkages between cells and regions of the brain – represents a paradox of progress, with the advances also highlighting great gaps in understanding.

So many large and small questions remain. How is information encoded and transferred from cell to cell or from network to network of cells? Science found a genetic code but there is no brain-wide neutral code; no electrical or chemical alphabet exists that can be recombined to say “red” or “fear.” And no one knows whether information is encoded differently in various parts of the brain.

Larry Abbott, 64, a former theoretical physicist who is now at Columbia University in New York, is one of the field’s most prominent theorists. He switched from physics to neuroscience in the late 1980s, after stopping by the lab of Eve Marder, a colleague of his at Brandeis University Massachusetts. Her lab was studying neurons that control a muscle in crabs. One of her students showed him equipment recording the electrical activity of neurons and translating it into clicks that could be heard over speakers each time a cell fired, or spiked. “It was the sound of those spikes that entranced me,” Dr. Abbott said.

Dr. Marder and Dr. Abbott invented the dynamic clamp technique, a way to link brain cells to a computer to manipulate their activity and test ideas about how cells and networks of cells work.

A decade ago, he moved from Brandeis to Columbia, where he and other scientists are trying to build computer models of how the brain might work. Single neurons, he said, are fairly well understood. The question now is how larger groups, thousands of neurons, work together – whether to produce an action, like reaching for a cup, or to perceive a flower.


There are ways to record the electrical activity of neurons in a brain, and those methods are improving fast. But, he said, “If I give you a picture of a thousand neurons firing, it’s not going to tell you anything.” Computer analysis helps to reduce and simplify such a picture but, he said, the goal is to discover the physiological mechanism in the data.

He recently worked with Nate Sawtell, a fellow Columbia researcher, and Ann Kennedy, a graduate student in Dr. Sawtell’s lab, on the weakly electric fish. Unlike electric eels and other fish that use shocks to stun prey, this fish generates a weak electric field to help it locate prey. Researchers have designed experiments to understand, up to a point, how its brain and electric-sensing organs work.

Dr. Abbott joined with others in the lab to take this understanding a step further. The fish has two sensing systems. One is passive, picking up electric fields of other fish or prey. Another is active, sending out a pulse, for communication or as an electrical version of sonar. They knew the fish was able to cancel out its own pulse of electricity by creating what Dr. Abbott called a negative image.”

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Could this be the cure for Alzheimer and Parkinson's disease?
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They wired the brain of a weakly electric fish and found that a surprising group of neurons, called unipolar brush cells, were sending out a delayed copy of the command that another part of the brain was sending to its electric organ. The delayed signal went straight to the passive sensing system to cancel out the information from the electric pulse.

“The brain has to compute what’s self-generated versus what’s external,” Dr. Sawtell said.

This may not sound like a grand advance, but it is the beginning of how a brain sorts a flood of data coming in from the outside world, and gives it meaning.

That is part of the brain’s job, after all – to build an image of the world from photons and electrons, light and dark, molecules and motion, and to connect it with what the fish, or the person, remembers, needs and wants.

“We’ve looked at the nervous system from the two ends in,” Dr. Abbott said, meaning sensations that flow into the brain and actions that are initiated there. “Somewhere in the middle is really intelligence, right? That’s where the action is."


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, 22 November, 2014

Ageless Youth

English: Embryonic Stem Cells. (A) shows hESCs...
English: Embryonic Stem Cells. (A) shows hESCs. (B) shows neurons derived from hESCs. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
11-April-2015


I have been watching on the development of stem cell researches, and while the promise of healing and becoming young (again), and keeping young seems within reach, results seem elusive.

Then there was adult stem cell, where stem cells are taken from an adult person's fat extracts, and this gave almost everybody the instant hope of being healthy and youthful once again. Like it isn't long ago that umbilical cords were frozen in time, to be taken out for use when needed, but that the majority of the population in the world doesn't even have their umbilical cords in store.

So adult stem cell becomes the most viable solution.

Now, that dream may already be a reality. I attended a seminar that showed videos of the said beauty products and supplements, and even saw it with my own eyes when 3 volunteers were called up front, and Instantly Ageless was put to use!

Unbelievable?

Similar videos are found in YouTube. You gotta see it to believe it.

And if you want to try it, and any other products, you can get it here.

Can we hear from you? I'm excited, and I'll be waiting.

Till then!