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Music helps to improve the health of premature babies
Music helps to reduce pain symptoms and improve the health of preterm infants, encouraging breast-feeding to infants, according to Canadian pediatricians University of Alberta.

Music can be used as an effective method to improve the behavioral and physiological indicators of health of babies to be born prematurely, doctors say. Experiments have determined that the soothing effects of music are to stabilize the physical condition of the child, rapid weight gain, increased pulmonary oxygen saturation and reduce hospitalization days in the hospital. Experts have come to such conclusions after analysis of nine studies between 1989 and 2006.

Doctors found a clear therapeutic benefits of music on the specific indications for preterm infants: the most frequent positive results on the influence of music affect heart rate, respiration, oxygen saturation and painful symptoms. It was also found benefits for behavioral signs of newborns.

Doctors believe that music can serve as a simple way to control physiological parameters, behavioral states and the reduction of pain during medical procedures for prematurely born children.

Stem cells – the key to treatment of lung cancer
Stem cells in the damaged lungs are activated and help restore the violation of their functions, doctors found the University of Cambridge. Conclusions reached by the British medical profession, provide new understanding of the functioning of the lungs at the cellular level and will continue to develop an effective test to detect early tumors in people at high risk of disease.

The main role of stem cells lies in tissue repair, but compared to normal cells, they are quite rare. Oncologists have used a unique method of display light to study and identify the location of stem cells in the lung tissue in the body of laboratory mice and determine their impact on the healthy and damaged lungs. It was found that stem cells are inactive during the replacement of dead cells when the lungs are working properly, or disease is stable. It was observed that these cells play an important role only in the treatment of serious damage to the respiratory tract. It is assumed that the injury of the lung tissue serve as a catalyst for the activation of stem cells. Clinicians have hoped that the results will lead to improved methods of early diagnosis of lung cancer.

Lung tumor – the second most common form of malignant tumors and cause of death from cancer in England. Each year, this diagnosis is 38 thousand Brits and 22% of all deaths from cancer. The earlier the disease is diagnosed, the better the chances for successful recovery, but over two-thirds of cases detected at later stages, when the condition is treated much more difficult.

Vasculopathy may induce lacunar stroke
Patients with stroke lacunary wider retinal venules, and arteriovenous ratio is less than in patients with cortical stroke.

Fergus Doubal (University of Edinburgh, UK) and colleagues analyzed 105 patients with lacunary stroke and 107 with cortical stroke. All patients complied with digital photographs of the retina. It was found that patients with stroke lacunary venules wider arteriovenous ratio was less than in patients with cortical infarctions.

Almonds beneficial for immunity
According to laboratory experiments, almonds can improve the immune system and reduce inflammation.

Report on this subject made at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, scientists from the Institute of Food Research (Norfolk, UK).

Giuseppina Mandalari, principal author of the study, said that the substances contained in almonds “can be used in the treatment of infectious and chronic diseases, and substance of the skin of almonds have immunomodulating and antiviral effect.
Mandalari and her colleagues assessed the effect of components of the skin of almonds on the immune response in cultures of cells infected and uninfected genital herpes virus HHV-2.

Blanched almond extract added to cultured cells, suppressed viral replication, whereas other extracts did not have a significant impact on it.

Source material Reuters Health.

To combat the flu, scientists have proposed a hybrid approach
New antiviral drug developed by scientists from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA). Researchers say that based on it can be a universal cure for influenza.

Proposed by researchers substance differs from the currently used that are able to communicate directly with two proteins of influenza virus, blocking its activity and preventing contamination of cells. Existing antivirals today are able to communicate only with one of the proteins and therefore may not be effective against new types of virus.

While influenza H1N1, also known as “pork” or “Mexican”, World Health Organization recommends that treated with the drug oseltamivir. All other antiviral agents, including commonly used in the treatment of the common strains of influenza amantandin, proved ineffective against the new disease.

The virus is squeezed in a pincer

As a target for a drug, scientists have chosen two proteins, which is present in every influenza virus: hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. These proteins provide a fusion of the virus with the cell and transfer it to the viral genome. Viral genes, hitting in a cage built into the DNA, after which the infected cells begins to produce copies of the virus. No infected cells the virus can not reproduce. If the merger process of the virus with the cell damage, the disease can be stopped.

The presence of neuraminidase (denoted by the letter N) and hemagglutinin (H) also explains the name of influenza viruses: for example, H1N1 ( «pork”) or H5N1 ( «bird”). The numbers after the letters refer to types of protein, and because the structure of proteins in the virus is constantly changing due to mutations that create a drug that would be equally effective in touch with all the possible proteins, scientists still can not.

However, biochemists from Rensselaer expect that their development will be more universal: they suggested the virus attacks the substance “on two fronts. According to one of the study’s authors, Robert Linards aimed at blocking the hemagglutinin preparations have not yet issued.
However, the resulting substance tested so far only on the ability to communicate with a pure viral protein. Then scientists to conduct tests on cell cultures and then on animals. Researchers hope to go through these stages quickly and turn a promising substance in the finished drug.

Stability virus

Currently applied against ordinary flu (but ineffective against H1N1) amantadine use as a target of another viral protein, protein M2. Released back in 1966 the drug by 2005, partially lost its effectiveness: American physicians found that the majority of strains of influenza virus evolved a resistance to amantadine.

Even a year later there were reports that had all the strains in some countries in Asia are resistant to amantadine antiviral therapy. Physicians are faced with the need to find replacement drug.

Linards asserts that used by him and his colleagues synthesis method can solve the problem of adaptation of the virus. The technology allows you to quickly rebuild derived molecule drug.

Resistant strains appear because the selection of mutant forms with other protein structures, and to counteract this, scientists can change the substance is synthesized so that it interacted with new viral proteins.

Americans created a computer model of brain cancer
American scientists from Brown University (Brown University) have developed a computer model that describes the development of a cancerous brain tumor.

The model is based on equations that take into account the absorption of oxygen by cancer cells, their growth and intensity of metabolism. The model was carefully coordinated with the experimental data obtained by analyzing 40 different samples of the tumor. It suggests that this experimental data coincide exactly with the calculated. According to Professor Elayn Bearer (Elaine Bearer), the main purpose of modeling is to assess the effectiveness of treatment, since, given the effects of various procedures and drugs on the state of cancer cells, it is possible to predict what will develop the disease. This will avoid knowingly ineffective treatments.

Against infection with AIDS virus to help other
American scientists have developed a prototype vaccine against AIDS. The new drug will be embedded into the cells a gene that protects against the virus.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Columbus (Ohio), worked to its vaccine for about ten years. They warned that if their method would be effective enough (so far he has successfully tested on monkeys), before clinical use will be several more years.

The virus has antivirus

Nevertheless, initial results are encouraging, and the use of medical approach may be theoretically available not only on AIDS but also for other diseases, particularly malaria. Instead of having to type in the body material, which should lead to the formation of immunity, scientists took a different path.

Their approach may seem paradoxical: to combat the virus doctors used another virus. They used the main feature of viruses – their inability to reproduce outside the cell and instead integrate their genes into the DNA of the cell, turning it into a “factory” for producing copies of the virus. Taken scientists adenovirus also infects the body and splices its genes into cells, but does not cause any disease. Gen. specially designed medical virus encodes molecules that bind to the HIV virus and ensure its destruction.

The cells that were exposed to a viral vaccine, starting along with their own proteins to produce another protein: a protein that antibodies to the AIDS virus. And, most importantly, these antibodies do not only produce special immune system cells, and cells of other types – until the muscle tissue. If after the injection of a new type of vaccine into the body gets HIV, then it is ready to meet with antibodies and then the virus will be destroyed by conventional means the immune system.

Antibodies and HIV

As the scientists write in the journal Nature Medicine, the novelty of their method is to use methods developed by genetic engineering of the virus. Sami antibodies, which produce the modified virus vaccine cells are part of the natural mechanism of the immune system. They selectively bind to certain substances (including proteins of the virus) and further ensure the launch of biochemical reactions that cause the destruction of “flagging” their object: for each new virus organism must synthesize their own antibodies.

It is this necessity and the lack of pre-prepared stock of antibodies leads to vulnerability to many diseases: still special cells of the immune system (B-lymphocytes) produce antibodies, the virus manages to infect other cells. And besides the AIDS virus infects the very immune system – which leads eventually to death from so-called opportunistic (from the Latin opportunus – «comfortable,” that is received by the possibility of immunosuppression) infections.

Previously, other scientists have repeatedly tried to use direct injection of antibodies – but this method was too expensive even for the containment of infection, not to mention the mass prophylaxis. Therefore, doctors have tried to enter or already producing antibodies lymphocytes, or create some combination of substances capable of “push” the immune system to synthesize antibodies: While none of these methods was not sufficiently effective for clinical (and often laboratory) applications.

Possible universal vaccination

Researchers have developed a new approach, showed that he, at least, works in monkeys. They also tested it for resistance with time: a high concentration of antibodies that provide protection against AIDS as well (and its simian counterpart) maintained for one year after the injection.

As one of the researchers, Philip Johnson, for the absolute success of the method should be refined by expanding the range of produced antibodies. But, if this can be done and the vaccine will be clinical trials – were immunized against AIDS may become as real as the mandatory vaccination against measles and other diseases.