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Genes that protect against atherosclerosis identified.

Public release date: 14-Mar-2008

One way of combating atherosclerosis is to reduce levels of “bad cholesterol” in the blood. Scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now identified the genes that bring about this beneficial effect.

In a new study on mice, which is presented in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, the research group has shown that the accumulation of the plaque that causes myocardial infarction and stroke can be prevented if levels of the “bad” LDL cholesterol are reduced before atherosclerotic plaque has progressed beyond a particular point. The group has also identified a network of 37 genes that lowers levels of blood cholesterol and brings about the beneficial effect.

“Previously, much atherosclerosis research was focused on identifying ways to stabilise the most dangerous plaques in order to prevent them rupturing and causing myocardial infarction or stroke,” says Associate Professor Johan Björkegren, who has led the study. “Our discovery means that we can now target the actual development of dangerous plaques.”

Rather than covering individual vessel wall genes, their discovery encompasses a network of genes, and one that explains their mutual interaction. It is on account of years of network algorithm development under Jesper Tegnér, professor of computational biology, that the discovery of gene networks has been made possible.

“The time when individual genes or gene pathways were thought to explain the development of complex common diseases, such as atherosclerosis, is past,” says Dr Björkegren. “We now have enough tools and knowledge of system biology to take on the total complexity of these diseases.”

Atherosclerosis is the main cause of myocardial infarction and stroke, which cause almost half of all deaths in Sweden and other countries in the West.
================================================================================ "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - German philosopher (1788 - 1860)
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Scientists have revealed what may well be the first pervasive ‘rule’ of evolution.

Press Release - 17 March 2008
First ‘rule’ of evolution suggests that life is destined to become more complex

Scientists have revealed what may well be the first pervasive ‘rule’ of evolution.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers have found evidence which suggests that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex.

Looking back through the last 550 million years of the fossil catalogue to the present day, the team investigated the different evolutionary branches of the crustacean family tree.

They were seeking examples along the tree where animals evolved that were simpler than their ancestors.

Instead they found organisms with increasingly more complex structures and features, suggesting that there is some mechanism driving change in this direction.
I'm not a vegan, but clearly adults can benefit from a diet with more fresh veggies, fruits and less gluten and processed foods....

An anti-inflammatory response to the vegan diet.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients who eat a gluten-free vegan diet could be better protected against heart attacks and stroke. RA is a major risk factor for these cardiovascular diseases, but a gluten-free vegan diet was shown to lower cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and oxidizedLDL (OxLDL), as well as raising the levels of natural antibodies against the damaging compounds in the body that cause symptoms of the chronic inflammatory disease rheumatoid arthritis, such as phosphorylcholine. These findings are reported today in the open access journal Arthritis Research & Therapy.

The idea that we can influence our health by changing our eating habits has become a fashionable idea among lifestyle and consumer magazines. There is evidence that dietary changes can bring about health benefits but specific results are not widespread.

Now, Johan Frostegard of the Rheumatology Unit at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and colleagues divided sixty-six RA patients randomly into two groups. They randomly assigned 38 of the volunteers to eat a gluten-free vegan diet, and the other 28 a well-balanced but non-vegan diet for one year. They analysed the levels of fatty, lipid molecules in blood samples using routine analytical methods at regular periods. They also measured oxLDL and anti-phosphorylcholine (antiPC) factor at the beginning of the experiment, at 3 months and again at 12 months.

The researchers found that the gluten-free vegan diet not only reduced LDL and oxLDL levels and raised antiPC antibodies but lowered the body-mass index (BMI) of the volunteers in that group. Levels of other fatty molecules, including triglycerides and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) stayed the same. In contrast, none of the indicators differed significantly for the control groups on the conventional healthy diet.

AntiPC antibodies are studied within CVDIMMUNE, an European consortium led by Dr Frostegard with the hypothesis that such antibodies can protect against cardiovascular disease and can be used as diagnostic and therapeutic factors.

Frostegard and colleagues have now shown that diet could be used to improve the long-term health of people with rheumatoid arthritis. They concede that a bigger study group will be needed to discern which particular aspects of the diet help the most.
quote:
Originally posted by CrustyMac:
I read an article about what the "ideal" human diet is. They summed up the answer this way: "Food, mostly vegetables".


As usual, there is an evolution-based answer as well. The best diet appears to be what our ancestors lived on for millions of years: Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the occasional protein-rich fresh meat hunted and gathered from the neighborhood.
quote:
Originally posted by GoFish:
quote:
Originally posted by CrustyMac:
I read an article about what the "ideal" human diet is. They summed up the answer this way: "Food, mostly vegetables".


As usual, there is an evolution-based answer as well. The best diet appears to be what our ancestors lived on for millions of years: Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the occasional protein-rich fresh meat hunted and gathered from the neighborhood.


Yes, studying human history/evolution can definitely benefit modern man.

I'm not a vegetarian, I eat lean animal protein with about 40% my meals. I also tend to eat a less acidic more alkaline type diet.

Heart disease = acidic diet + animal cholesterol (stress and other lifestyle factors contribute as well).

If you are acidic, your blood that is, and most people are, your body will pull cholesterol from your blood and attach it to the walls of arteries to help prevent and protect from the acidic "burn". In short lining your arteries with a protective coating. Your body will snag animal cholesterol before your own. This bodily response over time will lead to heart disease.

Balancing your body's PH is the first step, and cleaning up your diet and exercise are next.

You can google this and get tons of info, medical studies and abstracts, etc.

An observation/question: Why do we think it perfectly acceptable for man to eat a diet high in processed food and animal fats (think fast food or home cooking with pork fat, lard, comfort food, etc.) and then when his body/heart shuts down, we'll perform open heart surgery to try and correct this, and when someone eats a vegetarian type diet, clearly much healthier, we ridicule them?

Moderation, education and common sense are key. Think of food as medication. Are you cleansing and nourishing, or are you clogging?
Coming soon: Cell therapies for diabetes, cancer?

Tampa, Fla. (March 19 , 2008) – Therapies using stem cell transplants are advancing promising treatments for such conditions as Alzheimer’s Disease, neurological diseases and spinal cord injury, and heart disease. Now, scientists think that stem cell transplants may ultimately benefit those who suffer from diabetes or cancer. However, important questions need answers: Given the shortage of human pancreatic islet tissue, can stem cells be used to provide insulin cells that can be stored and secreted from a bioartifical pancreas? Can islet cells be frozen for long periods of time, retain their integrity and be transplanted? If tumors contain cancer stem cells, how can the stem cells be targeted and destroyed to provide improved therapies?

To raise and help answer some of these questions, the current double issue of CELL TRANSPLANTATION (Vol.17, Nos. 1&2) is devoted to research presented at the Japan Society of Organ Preservation and Medical Biology (JSOPMB) meeting in Tokyo in November, 2006. The research within the pages of this special issue demonstrates how stem cell research in Japan is pushing towards therapies for diabetes and cancer and beyond.

According to Naoya Kobayashi, MD, PhD, of the Department of Surgery, Okayama University Graduate School of medicine and Dentistry and Special Editor of the Japanese issue of CELL TRANSPLANTATION, the shortage of donor organs for transplantation is a “big challenge,” but research on stem cells and artificial cells for transplantation are “encouraging” and may provide valuable therapeutics for a host of diseases, including diabetes and cancer.
quote:
Originally posted by miamizsun:


An observation/question: Why do we think it perfectly acceptable for man to eat a diet high in processed food and animal fats (think fast food or home cooking with pork fat, lard, comfort food, etc.) and then when his body/heart shuts down, we'll perform open heart surgery to try and correct this, and when someone eats a vegetarian type diet, clearly much healthier, we ridicule them?



Really? It's been my experience that the vegetarians and the vegans are quite outspoken and judgmental toward people who eat meat and dairy products. I've never heard anyone say, "ewwwww.... broccoli, how can you eat that, do you know where that comes from?!" Ever hear of anyone trying to save the poor, mistreated cauliflower?
quote:
Originally posted by CrustyMac:
quote:
Originally posted by miamizsun:


An observation/question: Why do we think it perfectly acceptable for man to eat a diet high in processed food and animal fats (think fast food or home cooking with pork fat, lard, comfort food, etc.) and then when his body/heart shuts down, we'll perform open heart surgery to try and correct this, and when someone eats a vegetarian type diet, clearly much healthier, we ridicule them?



Really? It's been my experience that the vegetarians and the vegans are quite outspoken and judgmental toward people who eat meat and dairy products. I've never heard anyone say, "ewwwww.... broccoli, how can you eat that, do you know where that comes from?!" Ever hear of anyone trying to save the poor, mistreated cauliflower?



Hey, some vegheads could be hardcore and/or radical....

I'll always eat some meat, darker green, red and yellow stuff, but try and stay away from white flour, white rice and processed carbs. Insulin resistance and glycation is bad.
Oldest Prehistoric Aquatic Reptile in North America Found.

Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
Mon Mar 24, 11:02 AM ET

One of the oldest and most complete skeletons of a prehistoric aquatic reptile in North America has been uncovered, representing an entirely new group of these plesiosaurs, paleontologists say.

Plesiosaurs are not classified as dinosaurs, but these reptiles swam in the seas at the same time that dinosaurs roamed the land throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods (about 205 million to 65 million years ago).

The new specimen is an 8.5-foot (2.6-meter)-long plesiosaur named Nichollsia borealis in memory of the late renowned paleontologist Elizabeth (Betsy) Nicholls. Nicholls was credited with transforming the understanding of prehistoric ocean life by describing the largest-ever marine reptile, a 76-foot (23-meter)-long ichthyosaur, discovered in northern British Columbia in 1999.

Plesiosaurs were a diverse group of aquatic carnivores that reached lengths of over 39 feet (12 meters). Nichollsia lived about 112 million years ago, and the specimen fills in a 40-million-year gap in the plesiosaur fossil record.

The fossil was discovered by machine operators in a Syncrude Canada Ltd. mine in the northeastern part of Alberta, Canada, in 1994. The description of the fossil was not published until now because fossils take a long time to prepare; the rock they were embedded in must be removed before they can be properly studied.
Umbilical cord blood cells may improve the pathology associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Tampa, FL (March 26, 2008) — Targeted immune suppression using human umbilical cord blood cells significantly improved Alzheimer's-like brain damage in a mouse model of the neurodegenerative disease, a new study reports.

The study, led by researchers at the University of South Florida, is published online in the peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells and Development (www.liebertpub.com/scd).

Following a series of low-dose infusions of human umbilical cord blood cells into mice with Alzheimer’s-like disease, the amount of amyloid-ß and ß-amyloid plaques — hallmarks of Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain — was reduced 62 percent. Amyloid-ß induces an inflammatory response in the brain associated with the interaction of CD40 and CD40L, two pro-inflammatory molecules. Researchers also reported an astonishing 86-percent improvement in cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), another hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. CAA compromises the integrity of the blood-brain barrier, disrupting normal trafficking of various molecules and cells from and to the brain and is believed to be the main culprit for the brain inflammation observed in Alzheimer’s.

Human umbilical cord blood cell therapy appeared to suppress CD40-CD40L activity, suggesting that this therapeutic approach offers the potential to target the pathogenic inflammatory response that contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative conditions.
Scientists uncover the source of an almost 2 billion year delay in animal evolution.

Chemicals in ancient deep oceans provide clues to speed of evolution
A deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly two billion years.

Dr Simon Poulton, Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University, was part of an international team of biogeochemists who took part in the University of California-led study.

The study’s results are published in today’s edition of Nature (27th March).

‘For decades it was assumed that the ocean became oxygenated shortly after an initial rise in atmospheric oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago,’ said Dr Poulton. ‘This study provides independent confirmation that there was a major delay in the oxygenation of the ocean, and furthermore, it now appears that the availability of molybdenum may have played a crucial role in animal evolution.

‘At last, a coherent picture of the environmental conditions that led to the evolution of animal life is emerging.’

The researchers arrived at their conclusion after tracking molybdenum in black shales, a kind of sedimentary rock rich in organic matter found in the ocean. Molybdenum is a key micronutrient for the life-forms that control the production of oceanic and atmospheric oxygen.

Following the initial rise of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, oxygen was transferred to the surface ocean to support oxygen-demanding micro-organisms. However, the diversity of these single-celled life forms remained low, and their multi-cellular ancestors (animals) did not appear until about 600 million years ago.

Suspecting that deficiencies in oxygen and molybdenum might explain this evolutionary lag, the team measured the abundance of molybdenum in ancient marine sediments over time to estimate how much of the metal had been dissolved in the seawater in which the sediments formed.

The researchers found significant, firsthand evidence for a molybdenum-depleted ocean compared to the high levels measured in today’s oxygen-rich seawater.

‘These molybdenum depletions may have retarded the development of complex life such as animals for almost two billion years of Earth’s history,’ said project leader Professor Timothy Lyons, at the University of California’s Department of Earth Sciences. ‘The amount of molybdenum in the ocean probably played a major role in the development of early life.

‘As in the case of iron today, molybdenum can be thought of as a life-affirming micro-nutrient that regulates the biological cycling of nitrogen in the ocean.

‘At the same time, molybdenum’s low abundance in the early ocean highlights the global extent of oxygen-poor seawater and implies that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was still low.

‘Knowing the amount of oxygen in the early ocean is important for many reasons, including a refined understanding of how and when appreciable oxygen first began to accumulate in the atmosphere.

‘These steps in oxygenation are what ultimately gave rise to the first animals almost 600 million years ago – just the last tenth or so of Earth’s history.’

For animal life to commence, survive and eventually expand on Earth, a threshold amount of oxygen – estimated to be on the order of 1 to 10 percent of present atmospheric levels of oxygen – was needed.

Past research has shown that Earth’s oxygenation occurred in two major steps: The first step, around 2.4 billion years ago, took place as the ocean transformed to a state where only the surface ocean was oxygenated by photosynthesizing bacteria, while the deep ocean was relatively oxygen-free.

The second step, around 600 million years ago, marked the point when the entire ocean became fully oxygenated through a process not yet fully understood. The purpose of this research was to find out the state of the ocean between the two steps.

By tracking molybdenum in shales rich in organic matter, researchers found the deep ocean remained oxygen and molybdenum-deficient after the first step. This condition may have had a negative impact on the evolution of early eukaryotes, our single-celled ancestors. The molybdenum record also shows that the deep ocean only became fully oxygenated by around 550 million years ago.

According to this research, the timing of the oxygenation steps suggests that significant events in Earth’s history are related. Scientists have long speculated that the evolution of the first animals was somehow linked to the so-called Snowball Earth hypothesis, where the Earth was covered from pole to pole in a thick sheet of ice for millions of years. Oxygenation of the oceans and the evolution of animal life occurred shortly after the last of Earth’s global glaciations.
This is awesome...

Earliest known human remains found in Europe.

March 27, 2008 05:20am

ANTHROPOLOGISTS delving into a cave in northeastern Spain announced today they had uncovered the earliest known remains of a human in Europe, a find that they dated to as much as 1.2 million years old.

The exceptional fossil strengthens the theory that humans, after emerging from their African home, struck out towards western Europe far earlier than thought, they said.

The find comprises teeth and part of a lower jawbone about four centimetres across, found in the Atapuerca hills east of the city of Burgos, the team reported in the science journal Nature.
Scientists: New technique identifies molecular 'biomarkers' for disease.

Public release date: 31-Mar-2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida chemists are the first to use a new tool to identify the molecular signatures of serious diseases -- without any previous knowledge of what these microscopic signatures or “biomarkers” should look like.

Reported this month in the online edition of the Journal of Proteome Research, the advance could one day lead to earlier detection and improved treatment of some types of cancer as well as other diseases.

“With many diseases, the problem has been that we really don’t know what to look for,” said Weihong Tan, a professor of chemistry and the lead author of the paper. “What we’ve done is create a technique to identify the biomarkers despite that limitation.”
Study questions 'cost of complexity' in evolution.

New Haven, Conn. — Higher organisms do not have a “cost of complexity” — or slowdown in the evolution of complex traits — according to a report by researchers at Yale and Washington University in Nature.

Biologists have long puzzled over the relationship between evolution of complex traits and the randomness of mutations in genes. Some have proposed that a “cost of complexity” makes it more difficult to evolve a complicated trait by random mutations, because effects of beneficial mutations are diluted.

“While a mutation in a single gene can have effects on multiple traits, even as diverse as the structures of brain, kneecap and genitalia, we wondered how often random mutation would affect many traits” said lead author Gunter Wagner, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. The phenomenon wherein mutation in a single gene can have effects on multiple traits is known as pleiotropy.

This study showed that most mutations only do affect few traits. Further, the effect of an individual mutation is not dampened because of its effects on other traits.

Observing 70 skeletal characteristics in the mouse, the researchers identified total of 102 genomic regions that affect the skeleton. They concluded that substitution in each genome segment affected a relatively small subset of characteristics and that the effect on each characteristic increased with the total number of traits affected.

“You wouldn’t expect to make a lot of random adjustments — at the same time — to tune up a car,” said Wagner. “Similarly, it appears that tuning up a complex trait in a living organism is well coordinated and the effects of pleiotropy are more focused than we thought.”

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