Knowledge Update

​New York, Oct 5 (IANS) Researchers have crystallised and determined the 3D structure of a protein that could help them develop new treatments by understanding nicotine's molecular effects.

The protein, called alpha-4-beta-2 nicotinic receptor, sits on nerve cells in the brain. Nicotine binds to the receptor when someone smokes a cigarette or chews tobacco, causing the protein to open a path for ions to enter the cell. 

The process produces cognitive benefits such as increased memory and focus but is also highly addictive.

Until the new findings were reported in the journal Nature, scientists did not have a way to examine at atomic resolution how nicotine achieves these addictive effects.

"It's going to require a huge team of people and a pharmaceutical company to study the protein and develop the drugs, but I think this is the first major stepping stone to making that happen," said study co-author Ryan Hibbs, Assistant Professor at the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the US.

The expectation is that the 3D structures will help researchers understand how nicotine influences the activity of the receptor and lead to a medication that mimics its actions in the brain.

The finding may also have benefits in creating medications for certain types of epilepsy, mental illness, and dementia such as Alzheimer's, which are also associated with the nicotinic receptor, the researchers said. 

However, testing of any ensuing treatment would likely take many years, Hibbs cautioned.

Studies have shown smoking cessation drugs have mixed results in treating nicotine addiction, as have other methods such as nicotine patches and chewing gum.

​London, Oct 5 (IANS) A handgrip could be used for early detection of health problems that may lead to premature death, say researchers.

Handgrip strength is a simple test, measured with a hand-held device. On average, handgrip strength peaks in the 30s and 40s and then declines with age.

"When individuals' handgrip falls below some reference value for their age group, sex and body height this can be taken as an indicator for practitioners that further health checks may be warranted," said Nadia Steiber from International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria.

"The measurement of handgrip strength in clinical practice is a simple but efficient screening tool for health vulnerability. It comes at a very low cost," Steiber noted.

The study builds on research conducted as part of the Reassessing Aging from a Population Perspective (Re-Aging) project, which showed that handgrip strength could be used as an alternative measure for age, since it corresponds with other markers of age such as future mortality, disability, cognitive decline and ability to recover from hospital stays.

The new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, provides a comprehensive set of reference values for the measurement of handgrip strength that could be used in clinical practice. 

The study was based on data from the German Institute for Economic Research including over 25,000 measurements of over 11,000 people. 

​New York, Oct 5 (IANS) Does working out feels like more of pain to you? Take heart. Exercise releases a hormone that can help your body shed fat and keep it from forming again, which may also act as potential target to fight obesity, diabetes and other health issues, a study has found.

The results showed that hormone irisin helps convert calorie-storing white fat cells into brown fat cells that burn energy and may be an attractive target for fighting obesity and diabetes.

"Exercise produces more irisin, which has many beneficial effects including fat reduction, stronger bones and better cardiovascular health," said Li-Jun Yang, Professor at the University of Florida. 

The hormone works by boosting the activity of genes and UCP1 -- a protein crucial to turning white fat cells into brown cells. 

Further, irisin, which surges when the heart and other muscles are exerted, also inhibits the formation of fatty tissue.

For the study, researchers collected fat cells donated by 28 patients who had breast reduction surgery. 

After exposing the samples to irisin, they found a nearly five-fold increase in cells with protein UCP1 -- crucial to fat "burning".

"We used human fat tissue cultures to prove that irisin has a positive effect by turning white fat into brown fat and that it increases the body's fat-burning ability," Yang said.

Moreover, among the tested fat-tissue samples, the team found that irisin also reduced the number of mature fat cells by 20 to 60 per cent compared with those of a control group. 

That suggests irisin reduces fat storage in the body by hindering the process that turns undifferentiated stem cells into fat cells while also promoting the stem cells' differentiation into bone-forming cells, the researchers said.

The findings about irisin's role in regulating fat cells sheds more light on how working out helps people stay slender, Yang said.

The study was published recently in the American Journal of Physiology -- Endocrinology and Metabolism.

New York, Oct 2 (IANS) Just as persistent negative thinking is a common trait that characterises most emotional disorders, researchers have found that underlying brain abnormalities in such disorders also have a lot to share.

"This study provides important insights into mechanisms shared across multiple emotional disorders, and could provide us with biomarkers that can be used to more rapidly diagnose these disorders," said study senior author Scott Langenecker, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the US.

Those disorders, he said, can sometimes take many years to be diagnosed accurately.

The most common difference in white matter structure that Langenecker's group found -- present in every emotional disorder they looked at -- was disruption in a region of the brain that connects different parts of the "default-mode network", which is responsible for passive thoughts not focused on a particular task.

That area is the left superior longitudinal fasciculus or SLF, which also connects the default-mode network and the cognitive control network, which is important in task-based thinking and planning and tends to work in alternation with the default-mode network.

The constant negative thoughts or ruminations associated with most emotional disorders appear to be due to a hyperactive default-mode network, Langenecker said.

"If the part of the brain that helps rein in the default-mode network isn't as well-connected through the SLF, this could explain why people with emotional disorders have such a hard time modulating or gaining control of their negative thoughts," he said.

The findings were published in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical.

​London, Oct 3 (IANS) For people with Type 2 diabetes, heart failure is a common condition. According to a new study, individuals with Type 2 diabetes who had undergone coronary artery surgery prior to their heart failure diagnosis have better chances of survival in the long term.

Over 90 per cent of the patients with Type 2 diabetes have one or more other precursors of heart failure, such as high blood pressure, COPD or atrial fibrillation, diseases to which effective treatments are available that improve the chances of long-term survival, the study said.

Heart failure in people with Type 2 diabetes is often attributable to atherosclerotic coronary artery disease (CAD) -- damage or disease in the heart's major blood vessels, and such people are given either a bypass operation or catheter balloon dilation. 

"Our study indicates that revasculising coronary artery surgery can do much to improve the prognosis," said Isabelle Johansson, doctoral student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

The risk of death within eight years of heart-failure onset was much higher if the patient also had Type 2 diabetes, with those who also had CAD showing the worst prognosis. 

However, the prognosis for long-term survival was better for the patients who had undergone coronary artery surgery before developing heart failure, an observation that held even when controlling for factors such as old age or other diseases, which might have affected the decision to perform revasculising surgery, the researchers explained.

"A decision must be taken as to whether this is possible should be made without delay for all patients with combined Type 2 diabetes and heart failure," Johansson added.

For the study, published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology, the team studied data of over 35,000 heart failure patients, over a quarter of whom had Type 2 diabetes.

​New York, Oct 3 (IANS) Meditation can help tame your emotions even if you are not a mindful person, suggests a new study

Mindfulness, a moment-by-moment awareness of one's thoughts, feelings and sensations, has gained worldwide popularity as a way to promote health and well-being. 

"Our findings not only demonstrate that meditation improves emotional health, but that people can acquire these benefits regardless of their 'natural' ability to be mindful," said lead investigator Yanli Lin, a graduate student at the Michigan State University. 

For the study, the team assessed 68 participants for mindfulness using a scientifically validated survey. 

The participants were then randomly assigned to engage in an 18-minute audio-guided meditation or listen to a control presentation of how to learn a new language, before viewing negative pictures (such as a bloody corpse) while their brain activity was recorded.

The participants who meditated -- they had varying levels of natural mindfulness -- showed similar levels of "emotion regulatory" brain activity as people with high levels of natural mindfulness. 

In other words, their emotional brains recovered quickly after viewing the troubling photos, essentially keeping their negative emotions in check, the researchers said.

Further, some of the participants were instructed to look at the gruesome photos "mindfully" while others received no such instruction. 

The people who viewed the photos "mindfully" showed no better ability to keep their negative emotions in check.

According to Jason Moser, Associate Professor at Michigan State University, this suggests that for non-meditators, the emotional benefits of mindfulness might be better achieved through meditation, rather than "forcing it" as a state of mind.

"If you're a naturally mindful person, and you're walking around very aware of things, you're good to go. You shed your emotions quickly," Moser said. 

"If you're not naturally mindful, then meditating can make you look like a person who walks around with a lot of mindfulness," Moser observed. 

But for people who are not naturally mindful and have never meditated, forcing oneself to be mindful 'in the moment' doesn't work. You'd be better off meditating for 20 minutes, the researchers concluded in the paper published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 

​London, Oct 3 (IANS) In a promising step towards being able to manipulate and control the behaviour of high energy, or 'hot', electrons, scientists have, for the first time, identified a method of visualising the quantum behaviour of electrons on a surface.

Hot electrons are necessary for a number of processes and the implications of being able to manipulate their behaviour are far-reaching -- from enhancing the efficiency of solar energy, to improving the targetting of radiotherapy for cancer treatment.

"Hot electrons are essential for a number of processes -- certain technologies are entirely reliant on them. But they're notoriously difficult to observe due to their short lifespan, about a millionth of a billionth of a second," said one of the researchers Peter Sloan from University of Bath in England.

"This visualisation technique gives us a really new level of understanding," Sloan noted.

In the experiment, a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope was used to inject electrons into a silicon surface, decorated with toluene molecules. As the injected charge propagated from the tip, it induced the molecules to react and 'lift off' from the surface.

By measuring the precise atomic positions from which molecules departed on injection, the team were able to identify that electrons were governed by quantum mechanics close to the tip, and then by more classical behaviour further away.

The team found that the molecular lift-off was "suppressed" near the point of charge injection, because the classical behaviour was inhibited. 

The number of reactions close to the tip increased rapidly until reaching a radius, up to 15 nanometres away, before seeing relatively slow decay of reactions beyond that point more in keeping with classical behaviour. 

This radius, at which the behaviour changes from quantum to classical, could be altered by varying the energy of the electrons injected, said the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

"When an electron is captured by a molecule of toluene, we see the molecule lift off from the surface -- imagine the Apollo lander leaving the moon's surface. By comparing before and after images of the surface we measure the pattern of these molecular launch sites and reveal the behaviour of electrons in a manner not possible before," Professor Richard Palmer from the University of Birmingham explained.

​London, Oct 3 (IANS) It may appear counter-intuitive, but a new study suggests that you are more likely to get help from others in emergency situation than in harmless everyday condition as extreme conditions bring out the best in people, especially those who are altruistic and pro-social.

"Emergency situations seem to amplify people's natural tendency to cooperate," said one of the researchers Mehdi Moussaid from Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany.

In the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers showed that readiness to help depends heavily on personality. 

The experiments showed that pro-social and altruistic people in particular often helped others even more in an emergency situation than in a relaxed and non-threatening situation, whereas selfish participants became less cooperative.

The researchers invited 104 individuals to participate in a computer game that was developed specifically for the experiment. 

In this "help-or-escape dilemma game," participants under time and monetary pressure had to decide whether they were willing to risk taking time to help others before reaching their goal or saving themselves in two different situations ? one everyday and one emergency situation. 

After the game, the researchers measured participants' social value orientation -- that is, their concern for others -- and categorised them as having a pro-social or individualistic profile.

The researchers found that many of those categorised as pro-social were more helpful in the emergency situation -- 44 per cent of them were more ready to help in the emergency than in the everyday situation. 

The opposite was true of participants categorised as individualistic, 52 per cent of whom reduced their cooperative behaviour in the emergency situation.

​Sydney, Oct 4 (IANS) Your colleagues at work - and not your spouse or kids -- decide how healthy you will be as you age, as you are likely to spend an average of one third of your day on the job.

According to the researchers, health at work is determined to a large extent by our social relationships in workplace -- and, more particularly, the social groups we form there.

In a new meta-analysis covering 58 studies and more than 19,000 people across the globe, psychologists found out that how strongly we identify with the people or organisation where we work is associated with better health and lower burnout.

"This study is the first large-scale analysis showing that organisational identification is related to better health," said lead researcher Dr Niklas Steffens from University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

"The results show that both performance and health are enhanced to the extent that workplaces provide people with a sense of 'we' and 'us'," Steffens added.

The team reviewed 58 studies covering people in a variety of occupations, from service and health to sales and military work, in 15 countries.

"Social identification contributes to both psychological and physiological health, but the health benefits are stronger for psychological health," said Steffens.

The positive psychological benefit may stem from the support provided by the work group but also the meaning and purpose that people derive from membership in social groups.

"We are less burnt out and have greater well-being when our team and our organisation provide us with a sense of belonging and community -- when it gives us a sense of 'we-ness'," Steffens pointed out.

The authors also found that the health benefits of identifying with the workplace are strongest when there are similar levels of identification within a group -- that is, when identification is shared.

So if you identify strongly with your organisation, then you get more health benefits if everyone else identifies strongly with the organisation too.

The team was surprised to find that more the women present in a sample, the weaker the identification-health relationship grew.

"This was a finding that we had not predicted and, in the absence of any prior theorising, we can only guess what gives rise to this effect," said Steffens in a paper appeared in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

One of the reasons may relate to the fact that there are still many workplaces that have somewhat "masculine" cultures.

This mean that even when female employees identify with their team or organisation, they still feel somewhat more marginal within their team or organisation.

The team also recommends exploring the role of leadership: how leaders manage teams and groups has a strong influence on the social identification-health connection.

"Leaders play a key role in shaping a sense of group identity in the workplace," Steffens added.