Madam Lichtenstein's Cosmic World: Science

Can Vitamin D Or Tumeric Spice Help Fight Alzheimers?

Sometimes the solution to our health ills can be found in the use of everyday products. Our ancestors knew this. Now it is time for us to revisit these useful applications.

It is now thought that vitamin D can help remove the protein Amyloid Beta from the Brain. This protein is one of the causes of alzheimers.

A team of academic researchers has identified the intracellular mechanisms regulated by vitamin D3 that may help the body clear the brain of amyloid beta, the main component of plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Published in the March 6 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, the early findings show that vitamin D3 may activate key genes and cellular signaling networks to help stimulate the immune system to clear the amyloid-beta protein.

Previous laboratory work by the team demonstrated that specific types of immune cells in Alzheimer's patients may respond to therapy with vitamin D3 and curcumin, a chemical found in turmeric spice, by stimulating the innate immune system to clear amyloid beta. But the researchers didn't know how it worked.

"This new study helped clarify the key mechanisms involved, which will help us better understand the usefulness of vitamin D3 and curcumin as possible therapies for Alzheimer's disease," said study author Dr. Milan Fiala, a researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System.

If you need a technical reason to take vitamin D here it is:

Researchers found that in both Type I and Type II macrophages, the added 1a,25–dihydroxyvitamin D3 played a key role in opening a specific chloride channel called "chloride channel 3 (CLC3)," which is important in supporting the uptake of amyloid beta through the process known as phagocytosis. Curcuminoids activated this chloride channel only in Type I macrophages.

The scientists also found that 1a,25–dihydroxyvitamin D3 strongly helped trigger the genetic transcription of the chloride channel and the receptor for 1a,25–dihydroxyvitamin D3 in Type II macrophages. Transcription is the first step leading to gene expression.

Immune system rejuvenation could cut death from flu and pneumonia in the aged. Also, the potential to cut the incidence of cancer with better immune systems is very real. Rare people have exceptional immune systems for fighting cancer and aged immune systems with shorter telomeres are associated with higher cancer risk.

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The Value of Vitamins

There appears to be a few vitamins that one might take that can improve the brain of older adults.

First reported in the New York Times, a recent study found that higher blood levels of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D and vitamin E are associated with better mental functioning in the elderly.

After controlling for age, sex, blood pressure, body mass index and other factors, the researchers found that people with the highest blood levels of the four vitamins scored higher on the cognitive tests and had larger brain volume than those with the lowest levels.

Omega-3 levels were linked to better cognitive functioning and to healthier blood vessels in the brain, but not to higher brain volume, which suggests that these beneficial fats may improve cognition by a different means. Higher blood levels of trans fats, on the other hand, were significantly associated with impaired mental ability and smaller brain volume.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/health/research/vitamins-b-c-d-and-e-and-omega-3-strengthen-older-brains.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

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Baby's Birth Month Might Determine Diseases

This fascinating medical study on babies might in fact help forward the cause of astrology. Scientists have determined that a baby's birth month can determine their immune system development and their ability to fight of disease. That some baby's have stronger immune systems based on their brith month is something more akin to astrology than anything medical. True? Read on....

The full article can be found here.

Newborn babies’ immune systems and vitamin D levels differ – depending on which month of the year they were born, Medical News Today reported.

Several studies have indicated that the month in which you were born can influence your risk of developing MS – a phenomenon known as the “birth month effect.” The risk of MS appears to be highest for people born in May, and lower in those born in November, particularly for people living in England.

For the study, blood samples were taken from the umbilical cords of 50 babies born in November and 50 babies born in May. Researchers looked at levels of vitamin D and levels of autoreactive T-cells in the babies’ blood. T-cells are the white blood cells that help the body’s immune system attack infectious agents like viruses. However, when T-cells are autoreactive, they attack the body’s healthy cells, causing autoimmune diseases.The blood tests indicated that babies born in May had significantly lower levels of vitamin D and higher levels of autoreactive T-cells, compared to babies born in November, Medical News Today said.

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Brain Scans Can Decode Your Dream Content

Do you ever wake in the middle of the night from an amazing dream but then forget it by the morning? And what did that dream mean anyway? Dream analysis has always relied on memory but now scientists in Japan have found a way to use brain scanning technology to read the content of people’s dreams.

Here is the methodology: Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of three people as they slept, while simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG).

The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the brain wave patterns associated with the earliest stages of sleep, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then let them go back to sleep. This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between 7 and 10 times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up 10 times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams 6 or 7 times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports from each of them.

Most of the dreams reflected everyday experiences. “I had a dream [that I was at] a bakery. I took a roll … then went out on the street, and saw a person taking a photograph,” reported one participant. “I saw a big bronze statue … on a small hill [and] below the hill there were houses, streets, and trees,” said another. Some contained slightly more unusual content, such as meeting a film star or being in a recording studio.

Kamitani and his colleagues used a lexical database called WordNet to extract key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories — such as “car”, “male”, “female”, and “computer” — that appeared most frequently in their dream reports. They then selected photos representing each category, scanned the participants’ brains again while they viewed the images, and compared brain activity patterns with those recorded just before the participants were woken up.

The researchers analysed activity in brain areas V1, V2 and V3, which are involved in the earliest stages of visual processing and encode basic features of visual scenes, such as contrast and the orientation of edges. They also looked at several other regions that are involved in higher order visual functions, such as object recognition.

In 2008, Kamitani and his colleagues reported that they could decode and reconstruct visual images from the activity in these brain areas. Now, they have found that activity in the higher order brain regions could accurately predict the content of the participants’ dreams.

“We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” says Kamitani. “By analysing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75–80%.”

He adds that the experiments did not examine the visual structure of the participants’ dreams. “It’s about their meaning, but I still think it’s possible to extract structural characteristics like shape and contrast, as we did in 2008.”

This article titled “Brain scans decode dream content” was written by Mo Costandi, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 5th April 2013 09.40 UTC

Once you remember your dreams, check this dream analysis dictionary to see what they mean and try some of these interesting dream analysis books on the subject.

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Smile to Reduce Stress

It is amazing what scientists are finding about the power of positive thinking... or at least a good smile.

According to Cool News, there are researchers who say that "wearing a smile" can slow down the heart and reduce stress. But to some, it has to be a full and genuine smile which can impact the body in positive ways. However other studies indicate that even a polite smile may be beneficial.

A study recently published in Psychological Science "involved 170 participants," and induced them to "smile unknowingly by making them hold a pair of chopsticks in three different ways in their mouth. One way forced people to maintain a neutral expression, another prompted a polite smile, and a third resulted in a full smile that uses the muscles around the mouth and the eyes." The smilers had slower heart rates and "faster physiological stress recovery," and the full smilers "performed better than the polite-smile group," although "the difference wasn't statistically significant."

Sarah Pressman, co-author of the study, explains: "We smile because we feel not threatened," and this signals safety to the brain. And research from UCLA's Brain Mapping Center find that simply seeing someone who is smiling triggers "mirror neurons" in the brain that "evoke a similar response as if they were smiling themselves."