Young, women more likely to suffer from multiple sclerosis: Experts

New Delhi, (IANS) Young adults and women are more likely to suffer from multiple sclerosis, said experts on Saturday.Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a complex, chronic, autoimmune, and neurological disease that primarily affects the central nervous system, leading to a range of symptoms and health issues.Data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that over 1.8 million people worldwide live with MS.The prevalence of MS in India ranges from 7 to 30 per 100,000 people, according to various studies.“MS can strike anyone at any age, however, persons between the ages of 20 and 40 are the ones who are diagnosed with it most frequently. Women are disproportionately affected since they are two to three times more likely than men to have the condition,” Dr. Himanshu Champaneri Senior Consultant- Department of Neurosciences and Neurosurgery, Marengo Asia Hospitals, Gurugram, told IANS.Common symptoms include numbness or sensory loss, paraesthesia in limbs or face, vision loss, weakness in one or more limbs, double vision, imbalance while walking, and bladder problems such as difficulty holding or passing urine.In addition, some patients experience a current-like sensation running down the spine with neck movements.These symptoms typically develop over a few days to weeks, differentiating them from stroke symptoms, which have a rapid...

Read More........→July 08, 2024

“Mozart effect”, or can music make you smarter?

Much has been written on the “Mozart effect” - the theory that classical music can stimulate the listener's brain and make them cleverer. Further studies however have refuted the finding and have allegedly proved that the only real benefit to be gained from listening to music is pleasure. It now seems that this enjoyment could be of particular importance where health is concerned. The “Mozart effect” has long been used as a marketing ploy to sell educational toys or child development materials such as CDs and DVDs. The basic idea was that children who listened to Mozart's music received a "brain boost" to improve their IQ. However, this theory is little more than a medical fairytale. According to Dr. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive scientist at Western University in London, Ontario: “The Mozart effect is a media-driven myth. One study in 1992 showed that undergraduate students who listened to Mozart before a test did better than students who sat in silence or listened to a relaxation tape.” Despite its appeal, the effect has never been confirmed by further studies. As Jessica Grahn said in an interview with the ‘Voice of Russia’: “Later studies showed that this improvement probably had nothing to do with Mozart at all, but instead happens anytime we do something that boosts mood and arousal.” In fact a beneficial effect might indeed...

Read More........→December 23, 2013

Energy drinks start to destroy teenagers' teeth after 5 days: Study

Teenagers, the next time you down an energy drink, do give a second thought, for an Indian-origin researcher-led study claims these beverages start to destroy teeth after only five days of continuous consumption. In their study, Dr Poonam Jain at Southern Illinois University and colleagues charted an alarming increase in the consumption of both energy and sports drinks among young adults in the US. They said the habit is causing irreversible damage to teeth as the high acidity levels in the drinks erode tooth enamel, the glossy outer layer of the tooth, the 'Daily Mail' online reported. "Young adults consume these drinks assuming that they will improve their sports performance and energy levels and that they are 'better' for them than soda. Most of these patients are shocked to learn that these drinks are essentially bathing their teeth with acid," said Dr Jain. In fact, researchers examined the acidity levels in 13 sports drinks and nine energy drinks. They found that the acidity levels can vary between brands of beverages and flavors of the same brand. To test the effect of the acidity levels, the researchers immersed samples of human tooth enamel in each beverage for 15 minutes, followed by immersion in artificial saliva for two hours. This cycle was repeated four times a day for five days, and samples...

Read More........→March 13, 2013

Bonobos comfort friends in distress

The consolation behavior of young bonobos are a sign of sensitivity to the emotions of others and the ability to take the perspective of another. Photo courtesy of Zanna Clay. By Lisa Newbern, Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Comforting a friend or relative in distress may be a more hard-wired behavior than previously thought, according to a new study of bonobos, which are great apes known for their empathy and close relation to humans and chimpanzees. The study provides key evolutionary insight into how critical social skills may develop in humans. The results were published by the journal PLOS , One. Researchers from Emory's Yerkes National Primate Research Center observed juvenile bonobos at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo engaging in consolation behavior more than their adult counterparts. Juvenile bonobos (three-to-seven years old) are equivalent in age to preschool or elementary school-aged children. Emory psychologists Zanna Clay and Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes, led the study. "Our findings suggest that for bonobos, sensitivity to the emotions of others emerges early and does not require advanced thought processes that develop only in adults," Clay says. Starting at around age two, human children usually display consolation behavior, a sign of sensitivity...

Read More........→February 06, 2013

Young Designer Dreams Up a Futuristic Mercedes-Benz Sports Car Concept

Ever wonder what cars of the future will look like? Sure you have, but the difference between us and transportation designers is that the latter can put their thoughts down on paper and even on actual materials. This concept for a Mercedes-Benz sports car is the work of aspiring automobile designer Oliver Elst from Germany, who has completed internships at Opel and Mercedes-Benz. It's worth mentioning that with this design thesis, Elst recently won the Lucky Strike Junior Design Award. Elst says he wanted to reduce both the visual and structural weight of the car with his design that utilizes “sandwiched” materials in three layers, two for the interior and the other of the exterior. Below you will find Elst's description of the Mercedes concept along with a set of photos. Mercedes-Benz Concept by Oliver Elst: My project aims at finding a common denominator out of simplicity and lightness and put it into a creative approach, which as a result does not only include a new way visual appearance, but furthermore charts a sophisticated path forward technologically. The common denominator is reducing, it appears in the aesthetics of the surface, plus in the  implied light-weight structure. In current discussions about consumption economization reduction is regarded as one of the most...

Read More........→December 30, 2012

Young whales can speak

Young whales can imitate the voices of humans, according to a new paper that highlights the vocal mimicry skills of one whale in particular. Dr Sam Ridgway, of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, studied the possibility of the marine mammal to copy the sound of people. It first happened to a young white whale, also known as a beluga, named NOC. It could make a sound similar to the human word “out”. Then it copied human words so well, that at first researchers thought they were hearing humans conversing in the distance. This study revealed an amplitude rhythm in NOC's vocalizations that was comparable to human speech. Fundamental frequencies in the whale's vocalizations were also in the same range of human speech and were several octaves lower than the whale's usual sounds. The whale NOC also went to a lot of trouble to make the sounds. The researchers explain that the whale had to vary the pressure in his nasal tract while making other muscular adjustments and inflating the vestibular sac in his blowhole. But when the whale turned 4 years he stopped his human vocal mimicry. Researchers say that there might be two reasons for this. The first is that hormonal changes related to sexual maturity may diminish a whale's urges to mimic. Another possible reason is that the novelty might have simply worn off...

Read More........→November 10, 2012

Higher-math skills entwined with lower-order magnitude sense

While many animals understand the concept of less and more, only humans can learn formal math. By Carol Clark: The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system,” says lead authorStella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. “We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated with variations in our intuitive sense of magnitude.” Babies as young as six months can roughly distinguish between less and more, whether it’s for a number of objects, the size of objects, or the length of time they see the objects. This intuitive, non-verbal sense of magnitude, which may be innate, has also been demonstrated in non-human animals. When given a choice between a group of five bananas or two bananas, for example, monkeys will tend to take the bigger bunch. “It’s obviously of adaptive value for all animals to be able to discriminate between less and more,” Lourenco says. “The ability is widespread across the animal...

Read More........→October 31, 2012

The Human Body is Designed to Move

The old saying is "Use it or lose it." In truth, it should be "Use it to keep it" or perhaps even ..."Use it right or lose it".  There is no one single right way to move, but if you let muscles and joints stop moving, over time the overall body loses the ability to move. If you want to move well when you are old, you must keep your body moving well as you age. Life is motion. When we stop moving, we stop living, which is why staying active is the number one desire of people as they age. When you talk to healthy people over 80, they will almost unanimously say their secret is"keeping active."  Motion is vital for health and aging well. Watch a normal child move. Youth is moving freely and with control. Watch someone who's sick move: they are stiff and consequently may be described as "looking old."  Our bodies and our muscles work best when.. they are worked, and then allowed to rest. When muscles are not rested they become tight, resulting in the chronic “tension” which plagues people who don’t move their body. Your body has a need to move. If you are typing at a computer for an hour, when you stand up your first instinct is to stretch. When people undergo surgery, they are now required to get up and move around as soon as possible (even though they don’t wa...

Read More........→July 08, 2012

How our earliest memories gel

Perri Klass, M.D. wrote about babies and memories in the New York Times Well blog. An excerpt: "Several decades ago it was thought that very young infants did not have the capacity for forming memories, said Patricia Bauer, a professor of psychology at Emory University. As techniques have been developed for testing infants and very young children, it has been found that 'the neural structures creating those representations in infancy are qualitatively the same as in older children and adults,' she said. "The crucial structure for episodic memory, the memory of autobiographical events, is the hippocampus, that little curved ridge in the middle of the brain whose shape reminded a 16th-century anatomist of a sea horse. Dr. Bauer compared memory forming to making gelatin: 'The experience is the liquid gelatin; you pour it into a mold. The mold is the hippocampus, and it has to go through a process of refrigeration known as consolidation.' "So memories can form in even very young children, it seems. But it is not clear that they can be retrieved. "Recent research suggests that some of those very early memories may actually be held into childhood, but then lost as children grow into adolescence. And research has also shown a strong cultural component to the question of how far back children remember." Source:...

Read More........→June 13, 2012

Are hugs the new drugs?

Research is showing that compassion meditation -- focused, warm thoughts about yourself and others -- may have positive effects on both your mental and physical well-being. Credit: iStockphoto.com eScienceCommons: By Carol Clark : Basic empathy is a biological given. “If you talk with a sad person, you are going to adopt a sad posture, and if you talk to a happy person, by the end you will probably be laughing,” said Emory primatologist Frans de Waal. He explained that evolution has programmed us to mirror both the physical and emotional states of others. De Waal gave the opening remarks at a conference bringing together the Dalai Lama and scientists studying effects of compassion meditation on the brain, physical health and behavior. “Empathy is biased – it’s stronger for those that are close to you than those that are distant,” De Waal said. “Nature has built in rewards for the things that we need to do, and being pro-social is  something that we need when we live in groups.” In order to get from empathy to compassion and altruism, you need to identify others as distinct from you. While it used to be assumed that altruistic tendencies were only possible in humans, de Waal said that targeted helping of others has recently been observed among apes and elephants. Photo by Frans de Waal shows...

Read More........→May 31, 2012

An Inconvenient Lawsuit: Teenagers Take Global Warming to the Courts

Industry giants say their case is misguided. But that isn't stopping a group of high school students from using the legal system to make environmental demands. Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month. While finishing high school and playing Ultimate Frisbee on weekends, he's also suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The Ventura, California, teen and four other juvenile plaintiffs want government officials to do more to prevent the risks of climate change -- the dangerous storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, and food-supply disruptions that scientists warn will threaten their generation absent a major turnabout in global energy policy. Specifically, the students are demanding that the U.S. government start reducing national emissions of carbon dioxide by at least six percent per year beginning in 2013. Source: The Coming Crisi...

Read More........→May 27, 2012

Music helps keep brain young

Credit: iStockphoto/LindaYolandaeScienceCommons: Senior citizens who took music lessons as children for at least 10 years score higher on tests of memory and decision-making ability than non-musicians. In the video below, NBC Chicago reports on the findings by Emory neuropsychologist Brenda Hanna-Pladdy and the University of Kansas. “It’s...

Read More........→April 23, 2012