Breast-fed children top the class: By age of five they show better academic development than those given formula, claim researchers

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2527408/Breast-fed-children-class-age-five.html
By JENNY HOPE

Breastfeeding can boost a child’s educational performance within a few months of them starting school, researchers have claimed.

According to a study, children who were breast-fed showed better academic development by the time they were five than classmates who were given formula.

The research looked at assessments carried out by teachers at the end of year one – which revealed that children who were breast-fed for the longest reached the highest overall levels of achievement.

Importantly, the teachers making the assessments were not aware whether the children had been given mainly breast milk or formula milk.

A team led by the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford said the study proved that breastfeeding children for longer periods could improve their performance at primary school.

Breastfeeding was linked to better achievement in all areas – but the gains were strongest in communication, language and literacy, knowledge and understanding of the world and physical development.

Breast-fed children also tended to get higher scores for personal, social and emotional development, problem solving, reasoning and numeracy and creative development.

The researchers said essential fatty acids in breast milk can help cognitive development, while babies not getting breast milk are more prone to infections – which could slow down their development.

The study, published in the journal Maternal and Child Nutrition, involved 5,489 children in England.

When their child was nine months old, mothers were interviewed about their breastfeeding habits.

Two thirds of the children had been breast-fed at some stage, 32 per cent had been breast-fed for at least four months and 16 per cent had been exclusively breast-fed for at least four months.

Educational achievement was measured using the Foundation Stage Profile – an assessment made by teachers at the end of the first year of school, before the child reaches their fifth birthday.

Teachers rated children on 13 scales covering six areas of development, with ratings based on continuous assessment throughout the year.

Half of all children in the study reached the expected standard of achievement for their age – but the figure was only 37 per cent for children who had never been breast-fed.

It was 49 per cent for those breast-fed for under two months, 56 per cent for those breast-fed for between two and four months and 60 per cent for those who were breast-fed for four months or more.

The results were adjusted to take into account factors such as the mother’s educational level, their socioeconomic status and their childcare arrangements.

Children breast-fed for up to two months were 9 per cent more likely to have reached a good level of overall achievement than children who had never been breast-fed.

Those breast-fed for between two and four months were 17 per cent more likely to have a good level of overall achievement and the effect was similar in children breast-fed for more than four months.

The study comes after the introduction of a controversial scheme, which gives women shop vouchers in return for breastfeeding. Currently one in four women in the UK does not attempt to breastfeed – one of the worst rates in the world.

A report on the research said: ‘The longer the children had been breast-fed, the more likely they were to have reached a good level of educational achievement at age 5 – an important predictor of later life academic and employment outcomes.’

11 EFFECTIVE HOME REMEDIES FOR HIGH CHOLESTEROL

http://greenyatrablog.com/11-effective-home-remedies-for-high-cholesterol-2/

High cholesterol or hypercholesterolemia is a disorder consisting in excess or surplus cholesterol in blood stream. Cholesterol is a wax like substance present in the cell walls or membranes all over the body. Our heart, brain, liver, skin, muscles, and intestines naturally bear cholesterol that produce certain hormones, bile acids and vitamin D needed to digest fat. However the requirement of cholesterol for the purpose is quite low. If the blood contains excess cholesterol, it may get deposited in major arteries like coronary arteries, carotid arteries to the brain or arteries that carry blood to legs, resulting in narrowing down or blockage of the passage way and decreased blood supply.

Blockage of coronary arteries leads to angina or chest pain and heart attack. This happens due to the accumulation of cholesterol on artery walls and deprivation of heart muscles of oxygen. Blockage of carotid artery by cholesterol deposits leads to brain stroke and blockage of arteries supplying blood to legs leads to claudication or pain with walking. Women after menopause and men below 55 are at the risk of developing hypercholesterolemia. LDL or bad cholesterol, HDL or good cholesterol and triglycerides make up for the total measure of cholesterol in the body. High cholesterol can be very dangerous, for it produces no symptoms. However some people with high cholesterol may have breathlessness, general fatigue, excessive sweating, heaviness in chest region, yellowish patches around eyelids, cholesterol deposits around cornea and whitish edges of cornea.

Factors Causing HDL

1. Aging
2. Heredity
3. Obesity
4. Sedentary life style
5. Intake of fat rich diet
6. Mental stress
7. Alcoholism
8. Smoking
9. Underlying diseases like thyroid, high blood pressure, diabetes, that of kidney, liver etc.

Home Remedies

1. Onion juice can lower cholesterol to a large extent.

2. Simply drinking 8-10 glasses of water can bring down cholesterol by enabling proper excretion.

3. Soy products, rich in isoflavones can effectively regulate cholesterol levels.

4. An infusion may be prepared by boiling 2 tablespoon coriander seeds in a glass of water. It has to be drunk thrice a day and can greatly lower cholesterol.

5. Sunflower seeds also regulate cholesterol levels to a large extent.

6. One may boil 10 cinnamon sticks in 6 cups water, add one tablespoon honey and drink while the solution is hot. This is a beneficial home remedy for lowering cholesterol.

7. Drinking a glass of water every morning by mixing one teaspoon lime juice and one teaspoon honey is an effective cholesterol lowering remedy.

8. Consuming fenugreek seeds would help to control high serum cholesterol.

9. Indian bedellium extracts have cholesterol lowering agents.

10. Almonds and walnuts can help to bring down cholesterol levels.

11. Fiber rich diet can keep cholesterol within check.

Killing cancer like the common cold

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/07/health/cohen-cancer-study/index.html?sr=fb120713cancer12p
By Elizabeth Cohen

(CNN) -- Nick Wilkins was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 4 years old, and when the cancer kept bouncing back, impervious to all the different treatments the doctors tried, his father sat him down for a talk.

John Wilkins explained to Nick, who was by then 14, that doctors had tried chemotherapy, radiation, even a bone marrow transplant from his sister.

"I explained to him that we're running out of options," Wilkins remembers telling his son.

There was one possible treatment they could try: an experimental therapy at the University of Pennsylvania.

He asked his son if he understood what it would mean if this treatment didn't work.

"He understood he could die," Wilkins says. "He was very stoic."

A few months later, Nick traveled from his home in Virginia to Philadelphia to become a part of the experiment.

This new therapy was decidedly different from the treatments he'd received before: Instead of attacking his cancer with poisons like chemotherapy and radiation, the Philadelphia doctors taught Nick's own immune cells to become more adept at killing the cancer.

Two months later, he emerged cancer-free. It's been six months since Nick, now 15, received the personalized cell therapy, and doctors still can find no trace of leukemia in his system.

Trusting her intuition led to two cancer diagnoses

Twenty-one other young people received the same treatment at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and 18 of them, like Nick, went into complete remission -- one of them has been disease-free for 20 months. The Penn doctors released their findings this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

"It gives us hope that this is a cure," Nick's father says. "They're really close. I think they're really onto something."

'A whole new realm of medicine '

At the conference, two other cancer centers -- Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and the National Cancer Institute -- will be announcing results with immunotherapies like the one Nick received. The results are promising, especially considering that the patients had no success with practically every other therapy.

"This is absolutely one of the more exciting advances I've seen in cancer therapy in the last 20 years," said Dr. David Porter, a hematologist and oncologist at Penn. "We've entered into a whole new realm of medicine."

In the therapy, doctors first remove the patient's T-cells, which play a crucial role in the immune system. They then reprogram the cells by transferring in new genes. Once infused back into the body, each modified cell multiplies to 10,000 cells. These "hunter" cells then track down and kill the cancer in a patient's body.

Essentially, researchers are trying to train Nick's body to fight off cancer in much the same way our bodies fight off the common cold.

Tumor Paint: Changing the way surgeons fight cancer

In addition to the pediatric patients, Penn scientists tried the therapy out in 37 adults with leukemia, and 12 went into complete remission. Eight more patients went into partial remission and saw some improvements in their disease.

The treatment does make patients have flulike symptoms for a short period of time -- Nick got so sick he ended up in the intensive care unit for a day -- but patients are spared some of the more severe and long-lasting side effects of extensive chemotherapy.

Penn will now work with other medical centers to test the therapy in more patients, and they plan to try the therapy out in other types of blood cancers and later in solid tumors.

A university press release says it has a licensing relationship with the pharmaceutical company Novartis and "received significant financial benefit" from the trial, and Porter and other inventors of the technology "have benefited financially and/or may benefit financially in the future."

Searching for one-in-a-million cancer cells

The big question is whether Nick's leukemia will come back.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. The studies have only been going on since 2010, but so far relapse rates have been relatively low: of the 18 other pediatric patients who went into complete remission, only five have relapsed and of the 12 adults who went into complete remission, only one relapsed. Some of the adult patients have been cancer-free and without a relapse for more than three years and counting.

Relapses after this personalized cell therapy may be more promising than relapses after chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant, Porter explained.

First, doctors have been delighted to find the reengineered T-cells -- the ones that know how to hunt down and attack cancer -- are still alive in the patients' bodies after more than three years.

Stigma lingers for deadliest cancer

"The genetically modified T-cells have survived," Porter said. "They're still present and functional and have the ability to protect against recurrence."

Second, before declaring patients in remission, Penn doctors scoured especially hard for errant leukemia cells.

Traditionally, for the kind of leukemia Nick has, doctors can find one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 cancer cells. But Penn's technology could find one in 100,000 to one in a million cancer cells, and didn't find any in Nick or any of the patients who went into complete remission.

'It's not a fluke'

One of the best aspects of this new treatment is that it won't be terribly difficult to reproduce at other medical centers, Porter said, and one day, instead of being used only experimentally, it could be available to anyone who needed it.

"Our hope is that this can progress really quite quickly," he said. "It won't be available to everyone next year, but I don't think it would take a decade, either."

Right now patients can only get this therapy if they're in a study, but Dr. Renier Brentjens, director for cellular therapeutics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, says he thinks it could become available to all patients in just three to five years.

"When you have three centers all with a substantial number of patients seeing the same thing -- that these cells work in this disease - you know it's not a fluke," he said.

Two days ago, Brentjens became the co-founder of Juno Therapeutics, a for-profit biotech start-up company that's working on immunotherapies.

"Fifteen years ago I was in the lab looking at these cells kill tumor cells in a petri dish and then I saw them kill tumor cells in mice, and then finally in humans," Brentjens said.

He says he'll never forget the first patient he treated, who initially had an enormous amount of cancer cells in his bone marrow. Then after the therapy, Brentjens looked under the microscope and, in awe, realized he couldn't find a single cancer cell.

"I can't describe what that's like," he said. "It's fantastic."

CNN's John Bonifield contributed to this report.

How sperm reveals if a man suspects INFIDELITY: Men produce extra ‘kamikaze fighters' to kill off competing sperm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2518022/How-sperm-reveals-man-suspects-CHEATING.html
By VICTORIA WOOLLASTON

If you think your partner is cheating on you, your sperm may give you and your suspicions away.

According to clinical sexologist Dr. Lindsey Doe, up to 40 per cent of male ejaculate is made up of so-called ‘kamikaze’ or ‘fighter sperm’ designed to prevent another man’s sperm from fertilising the egg.

When a man suspects their partner is being unfaithful, the number of these aggressive sperm increase to tackle this perceived threat.

Speaking to Hank Green on SciShow, Dr. Doe said: ‘Researchers have looked into the microscope and seen that maybe we have what are called kamikaze sperm; killer sperm; fighter sperm. 

‘40 per cent of sperm that is in an ejaculate are actually designed to fight off another man’s sperm.’

 

This means the fighter sperm isn’t designed to inseminate the egg. Instead its included purely to prevent another male’s sperm from doing so.

Dr. Doe describes this method of preventing other sperm from reaching the egg as ‘blocking’.

The fighter sperm use their tails as coils to set up traps by weaving them together to create walls and barricades.

Previous experiments believed these sperm were rigid because they had died or were weak.

Dr. Doe, who regularly presents the Sexplanations YouTube series, additionally said that some fighter sperm will go and attack any it sees as a threat in order to kill them. These particular fighter sperm are referred to as ‘kamikaze sperm’. 

When males suspect their partners are not being monogamous, Dr. Doe continued that their body will produce more ‘fighter sperm’ as the threat is perceived to be greater.

This does the job of increasing the level of protection against sperm from other males, however, it can significantly reduce the number of sperm whose job it is to inseminate the egg and therefore reduce the chances of the female getting pregnant at all.

Elsewhere, during ovulation, a woman’s ‘cervical plug’ transforms into channels that are approximately a sperm’s head wide. These then act as channels or 'ladders' for the sperm to climb closer to the egg. 

Studying sperm competition is difficult in lab conditions. By genetically engineering sperm of fruit flies to glow in the dark, pictured, researchers have at least been able to confirm the phenomenon takes place in certain species

Dr. Doe said that some of the older, fighter sperm additionally block these channels to stop another man’s sperm from entering.

Or they wait until a number of their own sperm enter the channel before blocking it off, giving those sperms a greater chance.

However, Dr. Doe did explain that this theory, known as sperm competition, is under debate and some deny happens at all.

Earlier this year, Professor John Belote from Syracuse University studied the mating habits of fruit flies by engineering glow-in-the-dark sperm.

In many species, including humans, when a female is promiscuous ejaculates from multiple males may be inside her reproductive tract at the same time, meaning they are competing to fertilise the egg.

This is called postcopulatory sexual selection and is a series of changes that take place in the sperm, and the female body.

However such changes are difficult to study in lab conditions.

By genetically altering the flies, Professor Belote created some with sperm heads that glow red, and others where the heads glow green.

He was then able to closely observe how sperms competed inside the female and times when the female tract rejected or discarded certain sperms to discover that the process does take place.

What does your pee say about your health? New diagram shows when to be alarmed - and what you might be suffering from

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2518197/What-does-pee-say-health-New-diagram-shows-alarmed--suffering-from.html
By EMMA INNES

From healthy 'pale straw' to potentially dangerous 'brown ale', urine comes in a wide range of colours.

Now doctors at a U.S. medical centre have drawn up a diagram to illustrate what is normal and what is not.

The chart, developed at the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio, says urine usually ranges from a deep amber or honey colour to a light straw colour, with many shades in between.

It says the colour of a person's urine says a lot about what is going on inside their body, and that people should take heed of its warnings.

The diagram shows that if a person's urine has no colour, it suggests they are drinking too much water and should consider cutting back.

If it is a pale straw colour, the person's water consumption is at a healthy level and they are well-hydrated.The same applies if their urine is transparent yellow.

However, if it is dark yellow, this suggests they should drink some water soon.

As a person becomes more dehydrated, their urine will turn an amber or honey colour.

This suggests they are not getting enough water and that they should drink some immediately.

The colour of a person's urine can also be influenced by factors other than hydration.

The diagram shows that if it is the colour of brown ale, this could be a sign of severe dehydration, but it could also be a sign of liver disease.

Experts recommend that if a person notices their urine is this colour, they should drink some water and visit their doctor if it persists.

Most people would, rightly, be concerned if their urine turned red.

The diagram shows that if a person has not just eaten beetroot, blueberries or rhubarb their urine should not be pink or red. If it is, they should visit a doctor as it could be a sign of blood.

This can be caused by kidney disease, tumours, prostate problems or a urinary tract infection.

It could even be a sign of mercury poisoning.

Having orange urine can also be suggestive of a problem.

The diagram shows it can be a sign of dehydrations but it could also be a symptom of a liver or bile duct condition.

In very rare cases, urine can turn blue or green.

This can be caused by food dye or medication, but it could also be indicative of a rare genetic disease or of bacteria in the urinary tract.

As a result, if a person's urine turns green, and stays that way, they are advised to visit a doctor.

Finally, some people notice their urine has turned 'fizzy'.

This can be caused by a harmless hydraulic effect, however, it can also be a sign of excessive protein in the diet, or of a kidney problem.

The picture that reveals why men and women's brains really ARE different: The connections that mean girls are made for multi-tasking

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2516990/Sorry-chaps-brains-arent-multi-tasking-But-women-hard-wired-juggle-jobs.html
By BEN SPENCER

• Scientists used MRI imaging to scan the brains of young men and women
• Male brains are designed to make them better at carrying out single tasks
• While female brains are designed to carry out many tasks simultaneously
• Women are also better at socialising in busy situations, claims the study
• Younger brains have fewer gender differences compared to older brains

Scientists found women are better at multi-tasking but men are better at concentrating on a single task after they scanned the brains of 949 people (men's brains, top, and women's brains, bottom). Undated handout photo issued by National Academy of Sciences of brain networks showing significantly increased within hemispheres in males (upper) and between hemispheres in females (lower)

Women have known it for generations – and the proof has finally arrived.

Scientists have found that the female brain is ‘hard-wired’ to be better at multitasking.

Men’s brains, in comparison, are better at concentrating on single complex tasks – whether it be reading a map or cooking a meal.

Scientists scanned the brains of 949 young men and women in the biggest investigation of its kind to date. Using hi-tech diffusion MRI imaging, they mapped the connections between the different parts of the brains.

The researchers discovered that women have far better connections between the left and right sides of the brain, while men display more intense activity within the brain’s individual parts, especially in the cerebellum, which controls motor skills.

Men also have better connections between the front and back of the brain, giving them a better ability to quickly perceive information and use it immediately to carry out complex tasks.

This means they are better at things such as learning to swim or, as the old bone of contention has it, parking a car. Women are better at, for example, remembering a face, which means making connections between different parts of the brain.

The results are likely to be seen as  supporting the theory behind best-selling pop psychology book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus – that the sexes are as different as alien races.

Dr Ragini Verma, who carried out the study with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, said: ‘Of course individuals will differ, always.

‘But we said, if you take 1,000 people and analyse the data statistically, what would the male brain look like and what would the female brain look like?’

She explained: ‘The research shows that if women and men are given a task that involves both logical thinking and intuitive thinking, women will do it better – they are better at connecting the left and the right sides of the brain.

‘If you have an instant action to be performed and you need to do it now, male brains are more attuned to it because the front-back action is more intensely connected.’

Speaking about men’s aptitude for motor skills, she said: ‘The intense activity in the cerebellum means men would be better at learning to ride a bike, learning to swim, reading maps.’

The study, involving 428 males and 521 females aged between eight and 22, found that female brains were better at bringing varied pieces of information together.

Dr Verma said: ‘If you had to do a task like remembering a face, picking somebody out in a party, that would require you to connect several parts of the brain. Where did I see that face last, what do I see in this person, do I remember this person from somewhere?

‘That requires the connection of various sub-networks in the brain – something women are better able to do.’

She said that although it has been known for some time that abilities differ by gender, the study showed that these differences are ‘hard-wired’.

‘These are connections that exist in your brain no matter what,’ she said.

‘Of course, individually, this will have variability. The next step would be to quantify this variability.’

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also revealed that the difference between genders became pronounced only after puberty.

The participants were split into three age groups, aged eight to 13, 13 and four months to 16, and 17 to 22. The youngest group’s brains showed far less difference than those of the older two.

The report said: ‘The results showed fundamental sex differences in the architecture of the human brain.

‘Male brains facilitate connectivity between perception and co-ordinated action, whereas female brains facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.'