A mollusk with teeth that can grind down rock may hold the key to making next generation abrasion-resistant materials and nanoscale materials for energy.

A change to an “opt-out” system for organ donation is back by MSPs on Holyrood’s health committee.

Patients taking 10 or more medicines should have regular reviews of their prescriptions with a pharmacist or GP.

Scientists who assembled the genome of a salamander renowned for its ability to regenerate body parts say the achievement could be an important step toward finding ways to regrow human body parts.

The axolotl is a salamander whose only native habitat is a lake near Mexico City.

Genetic puzzle

“It’s hard to find a body part they can’t regenerate: the limbs, the tail, the spinal cord, the eye, and in some species, the lens, even half of their brain has been shown to regenerate,” said study co-lead author Randal Voss. He’s a professor at the University of Kentucky Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Center.

While humans and the axolotl share many genes, the salamander’s genome is 10 times larger, posing a major hurdle for genetic study.

While recent research revealed much of the genetic data for the axolotl, that information was like a pile of puzzle pieces, said co-lead author Jeramiah Smith, an associate professor of biology at the university.

That genetic puzzle had to be assembled in the right order for scientists to begin learning what gives the axolotl its remarkable powers of regeneration.

By adapting an approach called linkage mapping, Voss and Smith were able to assemble the axolotl genome quickly and efficiently, according to the study. It’s the first genome this large to be assembled.

Many potential applications

To test their concept, researchers then used the newly assembled genetic data to identify a gene that causes a heart defect in axolotls, providing a new model of human disease.

“Biomedical research is increasingly becoming a genetically driven enterprise,” Voss said in a university news release. He added that researchers need to be able to study gene functions in other organisms in order to understand human disease.

“Now that we have access to genomic information, we can really start to probe axolotl gene functions and learn how they are able to regenerate body parts,” Voss said.

“Hopefully someday we can translate this information to human therapy, with potential applications for spinal cord injury, stroke, joint repair … the sky’s the limit, really,” he said.

The findings were published in the February issue of the journal Genome.

^{Image credit: iStock}

For those who want to kick their smoking habit, switching to electronic cigarettes may offer better odds of success than nicotine patches, lozenges or gum, new research suggests.

The finding follows a small year-long study that tracked about 120 British smokers enrolled in a National Health Service smoking cessation program.

“E-cigarettes provide nicotine, which is important when someone is trying to quit smoking,” said study author Dunja Przulj. “Going ‘cold turkey’ with no nicotine can make it difficult to deal with nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Having some kind of nicotine replacement improves your chances of quitting,” she explained.

“In our study, smokers used e-cigarettes much like other nicotine replacement treatments. They were asked to set a ‘quit day,’ and advised to use their e-cigarette regularly throughout the day, and whenever they felt they needed it,” Przulj added. “Everyone was encouraged to try and avoid smoking any normal cigarettes.”

In the end, study results suggested that “e-cigarettes would almost double your chances of quitting at one year compared to nicotine replacement [products],” she reported.

Przulj is a research health psychologist with the Health and Lifestyles Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London.

Swapping one for another

For the roughly 15% of Americans who smoke, the US Food and Drug Administration has not approved e-cigs as a means for quitting.

But as a practical matter, the investigators noted that more American smokers chose e-cigs as a cessation tool than FDA-approved treatments.

In the British study group, a total of 79 smokers were enrolled in an “e-cig group” and given a refillable e-cigarette to use. The remaining 44 smokers were given a three-month supply of any approved nicotine replacement product they wanted.

In the end, the investigators found that while nearly 10% of the nicotine replacement group were not smoking traditional cigarettes a year later, that figure nearly doubled, to 18%, among those using e-cigs to quit.

The study team acknowledged, however, that prior research has demonstrated that when nicotine replacement products are paired with prescription medications – such as the nicotine receptor blocker Chantix (varenicline) and/or bupropion  one year abstinence rates are the same or higher as the e-cig results.

What’s more, 80% of those in the study’s e-cig group were still using e-cigs at the one-year mark. This compared with just 9% of those in the nicotine replacement products group by that point.

So, might encouraging smokers to rely on e-cigarettes to help kick their habit raise the risk that quitters just end up swapping out one form of nicotine addiction for another? Przulj thinks that’s a risk definitely worth taking.

“E-cigarettes are at least 95% less risky than cigarettes,” she said, “and so even if someone is still using an e-cigarette, the benefits outweigh any cons.”

In fact, “doctors should encourage any smokers to try e-cigarettes,” Przulj suggested, “especially if they have tried other methods before and these have not been helpful.”

Not enough evidence

The report was published online January 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Belinda Borrelli is co-author of an accompanying editorial and director of the Center for Behavioral Science Research at Boston University. She interpreted the results more cautiously.

Borrelli noted, for example, that whether the findings might apply to all smokers is limited by the fact that all the participants were British and all were smokers trying to quit. She further stressed that very few studies have actually explored the pros and cons of using e-cigs to assist with quitting.

“It is a step in the right direction, but it is only one study,” said Borelli.

“We do not have the evidence to say that e-cigarettes meet the standards for evidenced-based practice recommendations,” she continued. “There is substantial evidence that they are less harmful than traditional cigarettes, but that doesn’t mean they are not harmful.”

For now, Borelli added, “the best way to quit smoking right now is to use FDA-approved evidence-based treatment as a first-line choice. And then if that fails, consider short-term use of e-cigs to quit smoking.”

The study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Cancer Research UK.

Ponder this scenario: You’ve just received a treasured job offer – a dream situation for your career, in fact – but it comes with a few unusual requirements. You have to go shirtless on the job, millions of people will watch you work that way and, oh yeah, you need to achieve and maintain 10% body fat or they’ll fire your ass.

However, because you’re so busy doing this job, you have only 45 minutes, three days a week to exercise. Assuming you take the position, what would you do with that time? Go for a run? Hit the elliptical machine? Search the job boards? Hire a body double?

Read more: Why you need to try Crossfit according to a sports physio

This was precisely the predicament faced by Andy Whitfield, who played the lead in the American television drama Spartacus: Blood and Sand (think Gladiator meets 300). He was filmed virtually naked in his Roman skivvies. As you can imagine, he was driven by both vanity and fear every time he looked in the mirror.

You can probably relate. It’s natural to assume that an actor has far more time for exercise than the average guy does. But Whitfield’s schedule probably wasn’t much different from your own. After all, he has a wife and two young children and spent most days on set from 7am to 7pm.

“For Spartacus, we committed 100% of our production time to creating great scenes,” says Whitfield. “So all the training I did was on my own time. And that’s pretty limited.” Sound familiar?

Now consider that job offer again. If you were Andy Whitfield, what kind of exercises would you do to stay lean on the job? Warning: Most people have the answer all wrong.

The great aerobic hoax

For decades, we’ve been told that the best activity for burning kilojoules and fat is aerobic exercise. In fact, you can practically pinpoint the year this idea started to take hold: 1977. That’s when Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running was published. This best-seller popularised the notion of running to improve health and lose weight, and it’s widely credited with kicking off the jogging boom of the ’80s. Hundreds of studies since then have reported that aerobic exercise offers many benefits, from improving markers of heart-disease risk and coping with mental stress to enhancing cognitive function.

That’s all good. But if you’re looking to shed fat, the newest weight-loss research will tell you to look elsewhere for your exercise routine. “It’s sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says exercise and nutrition scientist Dr Jeff Volek. “Any type of exercise burns kilojoules. So if you’re told that running is ideal and you start dropping kilos once you take it up, then you have no reason to believe otherwise.” But Dr Volek’s research gives him good reason to doubt the conventional wisdom about the superiority of aerobic exercise for fat loss.

In one study, Dr Volek and his team put overweight people on a reduced-kilojoule diet and divided them into three groups. One group didn’t exercise, another performed aerobic exercise three days a week and a third did both aerobic exercise and weight training three days a week. The results: Each group lost nearly the same amount of weight – about 10kg per person in 12 weeks. But the lifters shed 2.5 more kilograms of fat than those who didn’t pump iron.

The weight they lost was almost pure fat, while the other two groups shed 7kg of lard, but also gave up 2.5-plus kilograms of muscle. “Think about that,” says Dr Volek. “For the same amount of exercise time, with diets being equal, the participants who lifted lost almost 40% more fat.”

This isn’t a one-time finding, either. Research on low-kilojoule dieters who don’t lift shows that, on average, 75% of their weight loss is from fat and 25% of it is muscle. That 25% may reduce your scale weight – hooray! – but it doesn’t do a lot for your reflection in the mirror. (Can you say “skinny-fat”?) However, if you weight train as you diet, you protect your hard-earned muscle and burn extra fat instead.

Picture it in terms of liposuction: The whole point is simply to remove unattractive flab, right? That’s exactly what you should demand from your workouts.

Read more: 21 ways to melt your gut

The new science of kilojoule burning

There’s one argument for aerobic exercise that has always been rock solid. It’s well documented that an activity like moderate jogging burns more kilojoules than weight training, an activity that is highly anaerobic. In fact, if you go by the numbers you find that even golfing beats out a light circuit workout. But recent research shows a new perspective.

When exercise physiologist Dr Christopher Scott began using an advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, his data indicated that weight training burns more kilojoules than originally thought – up to 71% more. Based on these findings, it’s estimated that performing just one circuit of eight exercises – which takes about eight minutes – can expend 665 to 965kJ. That’s about the same as running at 1.6km per minute pace for the same duration.

Read more: This is how breakthrough player of the year, Aphiwe Dyantyi trains

“Exercise physiologists often use the techniques for estimating the energy expenditure of walking and jogging, and apply them to weightlifting,” says Dr Scott. “But clearly, aerobic and anaerobic activities differ, and so too should the way we estimate their energy expenditures.”

Dr Scott’s revelation is most certainly a relief to gym rats everywhere, who no doubt wondered why an intense, energy-sapping weight workout supposedly burnt so few kilojoules.

1. The T push-up starts with a dumbbell push-up and then extends to a T, working your abs extra hard.

2. Dumbbell rows can harden your core, back and arms.

3. For this “swing” exercise, you can use either a dumbbell or a kettlebell, and either one or both arms. Your glutes, hamstrings and core benefit.

Read more: 4 super easy hacks to reduce post-workout pain

Real-world results

The unfortunate reality is that science is slow. “If we waited around for studies to tell us what works best for fat loss, we’d go out of business,” says certified strength and conditioning specialist Rachel Cosgrove, who co-owns a fitness club with her husband, Alwyn. Over the past 10 years, the Cosgroves have risen to the top of the fitness industry because of their clients’ successes. From the beginning, their programmes were scientifically based.

“Starting out, we knew that weight training was necessary to avoid muscle loss, and that it appears to boost your metabolism for hours after you work out,” Cosgrove says. “We also knew that according to studies, higher intensity exercises such as interval training and weight training resulted in greater fat loss than lower-intensity exercise did.”

But from there, the Cosgroves started their own experiments. “As time went by, we began to drop aerobic exercise from our fat-loss programmes altogether. And guess what? Our clients achieved even faster results,” says Cosgrove. Keep in mind that the Cosgroves’ clients aren’t like Biggest Loser contestants. In other words, they don’t have four to six hours a day to work out.

“Our average client has to be in and out of the gym in 45 to 60 minutes and has only two to four days a week to exercise,” she says. “We design workouts to optimise that time.” That’s why the Cosgroves rely on what they call “metabolic circuits”. These are fast-paced weight-training routines in which you alternate between upper-and lower-body exercises. You might compare this type of activity to running repeated bouts of 30- to 60-second sprints. While sprinting has been shown to burn kilojoules at a high rate, it can’t be sustained for long because the muscles in your lower body become fatigued – and that’s even if you’re resting between sprints.

Read more: Pack on beach muscle in just 4 weeks with this summer workout programme

“But with metabolic circuits, you’re emphasising different muscles in each exercise,” says Cosgrove. “So you can maintain a high-intensity effort for a much longer duration, and with almost no rest.” The result: The muscle saving, kilojoule-burning benefits of intense resistance training and sprints, combined with the non-stop movement of long, steady state aerobic exercise.

It could be the greatest fat-loss workout known to man. Of course, if you try to find evidence of this workout’s effectiveness in the scientific journals, you’ll be disappointed: No one has studied it yet. But researchers like Dr Volek and Dr Scott are beginning to put the pieces together. Just as important, trainers like the Cosgroves are already using this kind of routine to help their real-world clients achieve faster results than ever. And not surprisingly, Andy Whitfield used this approach, too. If you were Whitfield, wouldn’t you?

^{This article was originally published on www.mh.co.za}

^{Image credit: iStock} 

While South Africa has increased HIV spending at district level with stellar results, access to condoms has plummeted, according to the latest District Health Barometer (DHB). 

District health expenditure on HIV has more than doubled in the last decade, which is an indicator of “significant progress” in moving towards a primary health care-oriented system, according to the Health Systems Trust’s (HST) Candy Day, who was commenting on the 13th edition of the DHB. 

Published on Thursday evening by the HST, the report revealed that, as a percentage of total spending on HIV, district health service expenditure has jumped from 7.3% to over 20% over the past 14 years. 

But, consistent condom use “continues to be low” and can be linked the number of condoms distributed by government, which fell sharply over the past year. Between 2016/17 and 2017/18, the condom distribution rate dropped from an average of 48 to 36 condoms distributed per adult male per year

However, the researchers suggested that the rate may have been historically lower than reported and that this might be the most accurate estimate for condom distribution South Africa has ever had. They noted that this was because the data source for these statistics has recently changed and is now “more accurate than the recording done by facilities in the past”.

Day, who is a technical specialist for the HST, told Health-e News that the increase of district-level spending has been largely driven the country’s continuously expanding HIV treatment programme which remains the largest in the world. 

Over four million people access antiretroviral medication through the state – mostly at primary level – which has driven this positive shift in expenditure. 

“Primary health care is the level of care that is the closest to the community and therefore has an important role in responding to the immediate healthcare needs of the community and preventing further ill health,” according to the report. 

At a time when the feasibility of the government’s National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme is being routinely questioned, the report authors noted that this shift in spending is essential because primary health care is the “fundamental building block” and “heartbeat” of the NHI. 

“There is overwhelming international evidence that increased health expenditure is associated with better health outcomes – and [primary health care] plays a pivotal role in improving the health of communities.”

– Health-e News.

Amy Green

Thousands of lives could be saved each year if more took the cholesterol-lowering drugs, researchers say.

Cervical screening saw delays in sending out results, affecting half of women, a report says.

Climate change is bad news for coral reefs around the world, with high ocean temperatures causing widespread bleaching events that weaken and kill corals. However, new research from The University of Texas at Austin has found that corals with a solitary streak — preferring to live alone instead of in reef communities — could fare better than their group-dwelling relatives.