Why acupuncture aids spinal recovery

Rats with damaged spines can walk again thanks to acupuncture. But it’s not due to improvements in their energy flow or “chi”. Instead, the ancient treatment seems to stop nerve cell death by reducing inflammation.

Acupuncture’s scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens

The first continuous monitoring system for glaucoma hits the European market.

Glaucoma is the second most common cause of blindness, and without constant vigilance it can prove a very difficult disease to manage. But a Swiss biotech company has developed a monitoring system that allows physicians to keep track of their patients’ symptoms over 24 hours. Sensimed’s “Triggerfish” system consists of a contact lens with embedded sensors that can pick up subtle physical changes in a patient’s eye, and then wirelessly transmit that data to a receiver worn around his neck. Read the rest of this entry »

Prostate Cancer Results in 15 minutes

In an office park in Woburn, MA, a volunteer presents his fingertip for a quick finger stick. A phlebotomist wicks up the small drop of blood with a specially made square of plastic, then snaps the plastic into a credit-card sized microfluidics cartridge and feeds it into a special reader. Fifteen minutes later, the device spits out the volunteer’s prostate specific antigen (PSA) level, a protein used to monitor the return of prostate cancer after treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

Giving the ‘unconscious’ a voice

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

“They can now have some involvement in their destiny,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Build Strong Bones

Don’t wait for that dreaded bone-weakening disease to strike. The good news: you can reverse bone losses with diet, exercise and medication

I woke up one morning with a nagging pain in my upper back. When a few weeks of rubbing balm didn’t help, I consulted an orthopaedic doctor.

He learnt after asking me a few questions—and so did I—that I had all along been getting too little calcium in my diet. A bone mineral density test soon afterwards shocked me: I had osteopenia, or early-stage osteoporosis that can lead to full blown osteoporosis if left untreated. I’d always believed osteoporosis—a disease where bones weaken and become porous and brittle—afflicted only the elderly. Read the rest of this entry »

Timeline: The secret history of swine flu

Six months ago, swine flu emerged as a massive threat to global health. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but our timeline explains how the origins of the H1N1 pandemic go back more than a century

1889

Prior to 1889, the main flu virus circulating in humans has been from the H1 family. But this year, a new strain of H2 flu emerges in Russia and spreads around the world, killing about 1 million people. Afterwards, H2 replaces H1 in humans. Such replacements seem to be a regular feature of flu pandemics. Read the rest of this entry »

Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic

The decline was rapid. I got my first pair of glasses aged 9, and by my mid-teens could no longer read the title on the cover of New Scientist at arm’s length. With my mum’s eyes just as bad, I always assumed that I’d inherited my short-sightedness from her and that I could do little to stop my vision from becoming a little blurrier each year.

Around the same time, however, rates of short-sightedness, or myopia, were rising to epidemic proportions around the world. Today, in some of the worst-affected countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, around 80 per cent of young adults are myopic, compared to only 25 per cent a few decades back. Read the rest of this entry »

Instant Expert: Mental Health

When the heart breaks down, it beats erratically or not at all. A bone can chip or snap. But when the complex network of neurons in our brain malfunctions, the result can be a near-endless variety and combinations of mental illnesses.

It’s normal to sometimes be sad, happy, anxious, confused, forgetful or fearful, but when a person’s emotions, thoughts or behaviour frequently trouble them, or disrupt their lives, they may be suffering from mental illness. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 450 million people worldwide are affected by mental, neurological or behavioural problems at any time. Read the rest of this entry »

Blood Test Offers More Accurate Picture of Health

A Seattle company is developing rapid tests for thousands of proteins.

With $30 million in recent financing, a Seattle-based company has launched operations to develop and market inexpensive tests for thousands of blood proteins, offering a comprehensive picture of the health of all the body’s organs. The Seattle startup, called Integrated Diagnostics, is developing cheap diagnostics that work in minutes and could be used to detect diseases at early, more treatable stages. The company’s technology has been in development for the past nine years in labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. The company hopes to provide tests for early diagnosis of neurological disorders and other diseases. Read the rest of this entry »

Catching Fake Meds in a Snapshot

Two-dimensional bar codes could reduce drug counterfeiting in the developing world.

Researchers from New York University have proposed a system for authenticating and tracking drugs distributed in the developing world. The system, called Epothecary, would use cell phone cameras to read two-dimensional bar codes affixed to packages and assigned to distributors and pharmacists. The researchers hope the system can be used to prevent the distribution of counterfeit drugs through legitimate channels.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 10 percent of drugs in the developing world are counterfeit. Some counterfeit meds contain the right ingredients in the right quantities, but others are substandard or even poisonous. Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep Analysis at Home

If you’ve ever wondered how much sleep you actually got during a restless night, a new home-use device may have the answer. Users sleep wearing a headband fitted with a sensor that monitors electrical activity in the brain. Physicians use similar data gathered from EEGs to diagnose sleep disorders, but EEG studies are usually conducted in dedicated sleep clinics. In the home device, the headband sends data wirelessly to a bedside unit resembling an alarm clock, which records and displays the user’s sleep patterns. The data can be uploaded to a website that allows users to track sleep statistics and gives suggestions for how to improve sleep.

Product: Zeo Personal Sleep Coach
Cost: $400
Source: MyZeo.com

Lies, half truths and media hype of swine flu

Practical medical devices for use in poor countries

José Gómez-Márquez’s lab at MIT seems to be part toy store, part machine shop, and part medical cente­r. Plastic toys are scattered across the bench tops, along with a disassembled drugstore pregnancy test, all manner of syringes, and a slew of fake body parts. Coffee filters have been transformed into paper-based diagnostics; a dime-store helicopter provides the design for a new asthma inhaler; even a toilet plunger has been put to use, rigged with tubes and glue to form a makeshift centrifuge.

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Indian natural herb Tulsi to fight back swine flu

Ayurveda, the traditional ‘science of life’, has a remedy for diseases when every other stream of medicine fails. Now, at a time when swine flu is spreading like wildfire across the world, Ayurveda has the remedy in the form of the miraculous herb, the basil leaves commonly known as Tulsi.

Tulsi, the purest and most sublime plant, has been known and worshipped in India for more than five millennia for its remarkable healing properties. Considered as an ‘Elixir of Life’, this wonder herb has now been claimed to keep the deadly swine flu at bay and help fast recovery in afflicted persons.

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10 Life-Saving Technologies

Aging baby boomers want more cutting-edge health treatments these days to address a range of woes–and Silicon Valley investors are responding. There’s been an explosion of funding for medical gadgets in the last five years, including plenty that could save your life: A handheld device nurses can consult to make sure they’re giving you the right dose of medicine, and new cancer-detection technology that can essentially do biopsies inside the body, so there’s no need for surgery. Let’s just hope Obama’s new health insurance plan pays for all this.

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How Television Affects Your Brain

Swine Flu:Political Lies and Media Disinformation

What is the flu? Influenza (the flu) is a serious contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza viruses. Millions of people in the United States get the flu each year. Most people are sick for about a week. Some people (especially young children, pregnant women, older people, and people with chronic health problems) can get very sick and may die from the flu. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

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Why we have virus outbreaks & how we can prevent them.

SARS, avian flu, swine flu … each virus outbreak raises the question: What can be done? A compelling answer from virus hunter Nathan Wolfe, who’s outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge — passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa — and stopping them before they claim millions of lives.

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An Implantable Heart-Attack Monitor

A pacemaker-like device aims to get victims to the hospital faster.

An implantable device that alerts high-risk patients when they show signs of a heart attack could shorten the time it takes for the wearer to seek medical attention. The device, being developed by AngelMed, a medical-devices company in Shrewsbury, NJ, is already approved for use in Brazil and is now undergoing clinical testing in the United States. While early tests show that it can detect heart attacks, the impact on a patient’s long-term outcome is not yet clear: tests of other cardiac devices have found that detecting problems earlier doesn’t always translate into better health for patients.

Heart alert: An implantable device, shown left, measures a heart’s electrical activity. The device transmits information to an external device (the black box with cable), which tells the patient if he needs to visit the emergency room. This device transmits data to the physician’s workstation (the white box with screen), which tells the doctor what happened during the attack.
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ChangeMaker: Dr Ting Choon Meng, BPro Watch Inventor

HealthStats Revolutionises with  its Innovations

In 2005, Singapore medical device company HealthSTATS International made the world sit up.

That year, HealthSTATS International introduced EVBP, a proprietary technology that featuring a sensor that picks up pulsations from the artery in the wrist and translates them into blood pressure readings in the shape of waveforms. These waveforms provide the most accurate and complete reading of blood pressure currently available. HealthSTATS International has deployed this technology in several devices, including one called BPro.

BPro is a watch-like device that captures blood pressure fluctuations and pulse variations over a 24-hour period. BPro’s novel capability is that it enables medical professionals to predict possible blood pressure-related diseases such as stroke, hypertension and heart attack. It also allows doctors to more accurately diagnose and manage hypertension, as well as better evaluate the effectiveness of blood pressure medications.

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Watch to monitor Blood Pressure launched

Better way to take blood pressure

Officially launched yesterday, the A-Pulse Casp has been validated in 3 clinical studies

Healthstats International’s adviser Bryan Williams with chairman and chief executive Ting Choon Meng. They are seen with the BPro gadget, a blood pressure monitor the size of a watch, and the A-Pulse Casp software. — PHOTO: STEPHANIE YEOW

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Monitor blood pressure with a watch 2

A Relentless Watch on Your Pulse

Trans fat: Avoid this cholesterol double whammy

When it comes to fat, trans fat is considered by some doctors to be the worst of them all because of its double-barreled impact on your cholesterol levels. Unlike other fats, trans fat — also called trans fatty acids — both raises your “bad” (LDL) cholesterol and lowers your “good” (HDL) cholesterol.

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Vaccine for Instant Immunity to Cancer, HIV and other diseases

A new approach primes antibodies to instantly attack cancers, HIV, and other diseases.

The body’s immune system is often likened to an army, and vaccines to training exercises that build up defenses against pathogens. By exposing the immune system to inactive forms of a virus or bacteria, a vaccine trains antibodies to fight off a real pathogen in the event of an invasion. However, while vaccines prepare antibodies to identify an attacker, they often don’t give specific instructions on exactly how to bring it down. Some antibodies may successfully hit a pathogen’s weak spot, while others may miss the mark entirely. That’s part of the reason why it normally takes several weeks or months for some vaccines to build up an effective immune response.

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Your Cookware Could be Causing You a Lasting Injury.

8 Out of 10 Professional Chef’s Suffer Wrist Strain at some point during their Careers.The results are indisputable…the proof is endless…

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What’s your ideal weight?

What’s your happy weight? Eighty-seven percent of normal-weight women wish they weighed less. Stop aiming for an unrealistic goal and use this formula to get a healthy number that’s easy for you to maintain without obsessing.

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Monitor blood pressure with a watch

The BPro “watch” from HealthSTATS International measures blood pressure and heart rate over 24 hours.

Ting Choon Meng, founder and executive director of HealthSTATS International, believes his innovative solution will have a significant international impact.

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