Can Cooling Affect Exercise for Those with MS?
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Aerobic exercise is thought to help persons with multiple sclerosis fight fatigue, the most common symptom of the disease. Yet MS also appears to cause the body to heat up more quickly, compromising the ability to exercise.
New research at UB will investigate if cooling the body before or during exercise allows persons with MS to exercise longer, and which method is most effective. The study also will determine the effects of a 12-week aerobic exercise program on fitness, core and skin temperature, and heat flux in MS patients.
http://tinyurl.com/76u42
Cheap, rapid hand-held check for HIV
Political pressure has finally seen the price of antiretroviral therapy for HIV slashed in poorer countries. But a lack of cheap, simple diagnostics to enable doctors to use these complex treatments remains a stumbling block.
Now scientists from two New York universities believe they have the solution: a hand-held sensor that checks the health of a patient's immune system in seconds. At the moment it can take a week to get the same results back from the lab, "and that's if they don't get lost", says Glenda Gray, a consultant physician and head of perinatal HIV research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The sensor measures the quantity of key immune cells called CD4+ cells in the blood. A gradual depletion of CD4+ cells, which orchestrate the immune response to tumours and infections, is a sure sign that HIV is damaging a person's health: some clinical definitions of AIDS say that once a person's CD4+ count falls below 200 cells per microlitre of blood, he or she has developed the condition.
Doctors rely on CD4+ measurements to decide when to start drug treatments and to gauge whether a patient is responding to them.
To make the device, researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca and the University at Albany coated electrodes with antibodies specific to CD4+ cells. When a small sample of blood is put onto a chip bearing these electrodes, the antibodies grab hold of the CD4+ cells. The captured cells then impede the flow of current across the electrodes, allowing the density of CD4+ cells to be calculated.
To check that only CD4+ cells were sticking to the electrodes the team added a label to blood samples consisting of a fluorescent dye tagged to a further set of antibodies specific for CD4+ cells. They then used an electron microscope to check which cells had been captured. By counting the captured cells, the researchers devised a scale linking electrical resistance with the density of cells in the blood (Biosensors & Bioelectronics, vol 21, p 696).
"It is the first step towards a hand-held, simple, inexpensive device that will measure the number of CD4+ cells in human blood without the need for extensive infrastructure," says James Turner, a biophysicist at the University at Albany, who led the research.
Proteins take on new roles in malaria parasite
While searching for new targets for malaria drugs and vaccines, a team including a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) medical student fellow reached a fundamental insight about evolution: different species make use of similar sets of proteins in different ways.
"We've observed that organisms may share many similar proteins and yet retain very little parallel function among them," said Taylor Sittler, a medical student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. "For instance, Plasmodium falciparum--the parasite that causes malaria--shares with its human host many proteins involved in forming chromosomes during cell division, but those proteins may interact in different ways, creating different cellular pathways and even entirely different functions. This contradicts the currently accepted paradigm that shared proteins interact simply because their genes are conserved. It was quite unexpected," he added.
Malaria is the third leading cause of infectious disease death in the world, after tuberculosis and AIDS. The World Health Organization estimates the parasite causes acute illness in some 300 million people each year, resulting in about 2.7 million deaths.
Parental Fears Snarl Efforts Against Polio
Polio came so close to being eradicated two years ago that, in an effort to save money, some poor countries had cut back on vaccination. The disease made a comeback. Last March, Indonesia had its first new case in 10 years. Now, 300 Indonesian children have been crippled and 60,000 have been infected.
One of the major hurdles to getting rid of polio is parents who do not allow their children to be vaccinated. It's true with other diseases as well -- measles, for example.
http://tinyurl.com/dpxet
No comments:
Post a Comment