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Health24.com | Faulty sperm may explain recurring miscarriages
A series of miscarriages may signal that a man’s sperm is not up to par, new British research suggests.
The findings could lead to new treatments to reduce the risk of miscarriage, said researchers at Imperial College London.
“Traditionally, doctors have focused attention on women when looking for the causes of recurrent miscarriage. The men’s health, and the health of their sperm, wasn’t analysed,” explained study author Dr Channa Jayasena, from the department of medicine at Imperial College.
“However, this research adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests sperm health dictates the health of a pregnancy,” he said in a university news release. “For instance, previous research suggests sperm has an important role in the formation of the placenta, which is crucial for oxygen and nutrient supply to the fetus.”
In the study, scientists analysed the sperm quality of 50 men whose partners had suffered three or more consecutive miscarriages and found their sperm had twice as much DNA damage as the sperm of men whose partners had not experienced miscarriages.
DNA damage in sperm may be caused by molecules called reactive oxygen species. These molecules are present in semen to protect sperm from bacteria and infection, but high concentrations of these molecules can cause significant damage to sperm, the researchers explained.
Men whose partners had suffered recurrent miscarriages had four times higher levels of reactive oxygen species than men whose partners had not had a miscarriage.
The researchers said they are now trying to determine what may cause high levels of reactive oxygen species.
“Although none of the men in the trial had any ongoing infection such as chlamydia – which we know can affect sperm health – it is possible there may be other bacteria from previous infections lingering in the prostate gland, which makes semen,” Jayasena said. “This may lead to permanently high levels of reactive oxygen species.”
The researchers only found an association between sperm quality and miscarriages, not a cause-and-effect link.
And while this was a small study, “it gives us clues to follow,” Jayasena noted.
“If we confirm in further work that high levels of reactive oxygen species in semen increase the risk of miscarriage, we could try to develop treatments that lower these levels and increase the chance of a healthy pregnancy,” he said.
The study was published recently in the journal Clinical Chemistry.
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Health24.com | 3 serious signs that you could be suffering with heat stroke
The dog days of summer are good for lazing by the pool but not so good for your long runs and weekend hikes. When temperatures and humidity levels soar, you’re at an increased risk of heat exhaustion or worse: Heat stroke.
Heat stroke is a real danger in temperatures above 40 degrees, as several South Africans have already discovered. And it’s no joke. It occurs when your body temperature rises to such a degree that it can’t regulate itself. According to the Mayo Clinic, left untreated, it can damage your brain, liver, kidneys and muscles. Scary!
Read more: 6 ways to soothe that really painful sunburn
If you spot any of these signs, find shade ASAP.
1. You stop sweating
According to Dr Theunis Potgieter, head of the Emergency Clinic at Mediclinic Stellenbosch, if you suddenly stop working up a sweat in the heat, your body’s temperature regulatory system is starting to fail and it’s a major sign that heat exhaustion is on its way. Find shade and drink fluids – wine doesn’t count, sorry.
When things escalate? Your temperature will leave you feeling like you could fry and egg on your forehead. Your skin may flush red and your heart could start racing as your body tries to cool you down. That high body temp can shut down your key organs, too.
Read more: Ever wonder why you still end up burnt – even after applying SPF?
2. Headaches and disorientation
These could be signs of heat exhaustion, which could progress to heat stroke, says Chitra Bodasing at ER24. If you feel them coming on, get out of the sun! You’ll start to feel really out out it… like really out of it. Those changes are also major indicators that you’ve moved from heat exhaustion to a life-threatening heat stroke. By this point you won’t be conversing well or thinking clearly enough to step out of the heat and get the help you need.
Read more: Everything you need to know about heat rash (and how to prevent it)
3. Nausea and vomiting
If you’re losing your lunch, things have already gone too far. Feeling queasy is one of the most common physical symptoms of heat exhaustion. But this and many other signs – like feeling fatigued and vomiting – can signal you’re on your way to having a heat stroke, too. Stop what you’re doing and seek medical assistance immediately.
The bottom line: Heat stroke is a serious threat this time of year – especially for active people who regularly push themselves while they’re out in the hot, thick air. Know the warning signs and take your workout inside when you need to. And if you spot someone who seems to be suffering from heat stroke, call a doctor, have them stop whatever activity they’re doing, and assist them in cooling off. Sit them in the shade, in front of a fan, or even spray them with a garden hose – heat stroke needs to be rapidly cooled, however you can.
This article was originally published on www.womenshealthsa.co.za
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | New non-invasive treatment for incontinence approved by FDA
A new non-invasive device to treat urinary incontinence has recently been approved by the FDA, according to reports.
This device emits impulses that safely and effectively activate the muscles of the pelvic floor via patented technology. The device is handheld and can be used by the patient in their own home without having to undergo invasive, potentially risky surgery.
As reported previously by Health24, mesh implants aren’t always ideal for those who experience urinary incontinence and often have serious side-effects, such as pain, infection, or even exacerbated incontinence. And complete removal of these implants may also be problematic as tissue grows through and around the mesh.
A promising device
Data from the clinical trials have shown that more than 87% of patients who tested the device experienced zero to mild occurrences of incontinence. And improvement was seen in 93% of the patients after only four weeks.
“The burden associated goes far beyond the cost of pads as medical and psychological morbidity in addition to quality of life are profoundly impacted,” Ruth Maher, PT, PhD, DPT, assistant professor of physical therapy at Creighton and director of the Women’s Health Residency Program, said in a recent statement.
“It has a huge impact on the quality of life for women. Women will plan outings around available restrooms, choose not to wear certain clothes for fear of ruining them from leakage and severely curtail their exercise regimens which can have a severe impact on their health across their lifespan. Additionally, this type of incontinence can impede intimacy for up to 65% of women because of leakage during sex,” she says.
Pelvic floor exercises not always enough
This new device is reported to help woman actively control urinary incontinence rather than simply living with it. While pelvic floor exercise is usually the first thing recommended and deemed effective, it’s unfortunately not a realistic step for everyone.
Maher says, “The correct use of pelvic floor exercises can be difficult to teach women since the muscles control pressure in the lumbopelvic region and in bowel and bladder regions, rather than a joint. Consequently, clinicians often struggle assessing whether the right muscles are being used by a patient without the aid of a digital pelvic floor exam or some type of imaging.”
According to Maher, up to 40% of women are unable to correctly contract their pelvic muscles in order to strengthen and stimulate it, but this is where the device bridges a gap.
“The INNOVO therapy device facilitates a pelvic floor contraction and reproduces the same contraction consistently. The benefit of this is twofold – the strength and coordination of the pelvic floor improves, but more importantly, the device improves the user’s awareness of their pelvic floor and improves their ability to perform appropriate contractions without the device,” she said.
While it’s not known when the device will be readily available and whether it will be employed in South Africa, it’s important always to speak to a doctor or urologist who can talk you through locally available treatment options that may work for your type of incontinence.
Image credit: iStock
Mental health patients missing GP appointments ‘at risk’
Those who miss two a year are eight times more likely to die in the subsequent 18 months, a study suggests.
Too many children ‘not being treated for mental health problems’
An MPs’ report found only one in three young people with a condition had NHS treatment last year.
The lifesaving food 90% aren’t eating enough of
It cuts your chances of heart attacks and keeps your weight and cholesterol down – and tastes good.
Birth of a black hole or neutron star captured for first time
A Northwestern University-led international team is getting closer to understanding the mysteriously bright object that burst in the northern sky this summer.
On June 17, the ATLAS survey’s twin telescopes in Hawaii found a spectacularly bright anomaly 200 million light years away in the Hercules constellation. Dubbed AT2018cow or “The Cow,” the object quickly flared up, then vanished almost as quickly.
After combining several imaging sources, including hard X-rays and radiowaves, the multi-institutional team now speculates that the telescopes captured the exact moment a star collapsed to form a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star. The stellar debris, approaching and swirling around the object’s event horizon, caused the remarkably bright glow.
This rare event will help astronomers better understand the physics at play within the first moments of the creation of a black hole or neutron star. “We think that ‘The Cow’ is the formation of an accreting black hole or neutron star,” said Northwestern’s Raffaella Margutti, who led the research. “We know from theory that black holes and neutron stars form when a star dies, but we’ve never seen them right after they are born. Never.”
Margutti will present her findings at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society at 2:15 p.m. PST on Jan. 10 in Seattle. (Reporters can join the session to watch, listen and ask questions via webcast.) The research will then be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Margutti is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics), an endowed research center at Northwestern focused on advancing astrophysics studies with an emphasis on interdisciplinary connections.
The curious Cow
After it was first spotted, The Cow captured immediate international interest and left astronomers scratching their heads. “We thought it must be a supernova,” Margutti said. “But what we observed challenged our current notions of stellar death.”
For one, the anomaly was unnaturally bright — 10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova. It also flared up and disappeared much faster than other known star explosions, with particles flying at 30,000 kilometers per second (or 10 percent of the speed of light). Within just 16 days, the object had already emitted most of its power. In a universe where some phenomena last for millions and billions of years, two weeks amounts to the blink of an eye.
“We knew right away that this source went from inactive to peak luminosity within just a few days,” Margutti said. “That was enough to get everybody excited because it was so unusual and, by astronomical standards, it was very close by.”
Using Northwestern’s access to observational facilities at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the MMT Observatory in Arizona, as well as remote access to the SoAR telescope in Chile, Margutti took a closer look at the object’s makeup. Margutti and her team examined The Cow’s chemical composition, finding clear evidence of hydrogen and helium, which excluded models of compact objects merging — like those that produce gravitational waves.
Comprehensive strategy
Astronomers have traditionally studied stellar deaths in the optical wavelength, which uses telescopes to capture visible light. Margutti’s team, on the other hand, uses a more comprehensive approach. Her team viewed the object with X-rays, hard X-rays (which are 10 times more powerful than normal X-rays), radio waves and gamma rays. This enabled them to continue studying the anomaly long after its initial visible brightness faded.
After ATLAS spotted the object, Margutti’s team quickly obtained follow-up observations of The Cow with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and INTEGRAL hard X-ray laboratories, soft X-rays at XMM-Newton and radio antennae at the Very Large Array toward The Cow.
Margutti attributes The Cow’s relative nakedness to potentially unraveling this intergalactic mystery. Although stars might collapse into black holes all the time, the large amount of material around newly born black holes blocks astronomers’ vision. Fortunately, about 10 times less ejecta swirled around The Cow as compared to a typical stellar explosion. The lack of material allowed astronomers to peer straight through to the object’s “central engine,” which revealed itself as a probable black hole or neutron star.
“A ‘lightbulb’ was sitting deep inside the ejecta of the explosion,” Margutti said. “It would have been hard to see this in a normal stellar explosion. But The Cow had very little ejecta mass, which allowed us to view the central engine’s radiation directly.”
Galactic neighbor
Margutti’s team also benefited from the star’s relative closeness to Earth. Even though it was nestled in the distant dwarf galaxy called CGCG 137-068, astronomers consider that to be “right around the corner.”
“Two hundred million light years is close for us, by the way,” Margutti said. “This is the closest transient object of this kind that we have ever found.”
Margutti’s team at Northwestern includes graduate student Aprajita Hajela, postdoctoral fellows Giacomo Terreran, Deanne Coppejans and Kate Alexander (who is a Hubble Fellow), and first-year undergraduate student Daniel Brethauer.
“Being given the opportunity to contribute to something as cutting edge and international as understanding AT2018cow as an undergrad is a surreal experience,” Brethauer said. “To have helped the world’s experts figure out what AT2018cow is even in the smallest way was beyond my wildest expectations at the beginning of the summer and something that I will remember for the rest of my life.”
Discovery adapts natural membrane to make hydrogen fuel from water
A chemical reaction pathway central to plant biology have been adapted to form the backbone of a new process that converts water into hydrogen fuel using energy from the sun.
In a recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have combined two membrane-bound protein complexes to perform a complete conversion of water molecules to hydrogen and oxygen.
The work builds on an earlier study that examined one of these protein complexes, called Photosystem I, a membrane protein that can use energy from light to feed electrons to an inorganic catalyst that makes hydrogen. This part of the reaction, however, represents only half of the overall process needed for hydrogen generation.
By using a second protein complex that uses energy from light to split water and take electrons from it, called Photosystem II, Argonne chemist Lisa Utschig and her colleagues were able to take electrons from water and feed them to Photosystem I.
“The beauty of this design is in its simplicity — you can self-assemble the catalyst with the natural membrane to do the chemistry you want,” said Lisa Utschig, an Argonne chemist.
In an earlier experiment, the researchers provided Photosystem I with electrons from a sacrificial electron donor. “The trick was how to get two electrons to the catalyst in fast succession,” Utschig said.
The two protein complexes are embedded in thylakoid membranes, like those found inside the oxygen-creating chloroplasts in higher plants. “The membrane, which we have taken directly from nature, is essential for pairing the two photosystems,” Utschig said. “It structurally supports both of them simultaneously and provides a direct pathway for inter-protein electron transfer, but doesn’t impede catalyst binding to Photosystem I.”
According to Utschig, the Z-scheme — which is the technical name for the light-triggered electron transport chain of natural photosynthesis that occurs in the thylakoid membrane — and the synthetic catalyst come together quite elegantly. “The beauty of this design is in its simplicity — you can self-assemble the catalyst with the natural membrane to do the chemistry you want,” she said.
One additional improvement involved the substitution of cobalt or nickel-containing catalysts for the expensive platinum catalyst that had been used in the earlier study. The new cobalt or nickel catalysts could dramatically reduce potential costs.
The next step for the research, according to Utschig, involves incorporating the membrane-bound Z-scheme into a living system. “Once we have an in vivo system — one in which the process is happening in a living organism — we will really be able to see the rubber hitting the road in terms of hydrogen production,” she said.
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Spintronics ‘miracle material’ put to the test
When German mineralogist Gustav Rose stood on the slopes of Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1839 and picked up a piece of a previously undiscovered mineral, he had never heard of transistors or diodes or had any concept of how conventional electronics would become an integral part of our daily lives. He couldn’t have anticipated that the rock he held in his hand, which he named “perovskite,” could be a key to revolutionizing electronics as we know them.
In 2017, University of Utah physicist Valy Vardeny called perovskite a “miracle material” for an emerging field of next-generation electronics, called spintronics, and he’s standing by that assertion. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, Vardeny, along with Jingying Wang, Dali Sun (now at North Carolina State University) and colleagues present two devices built using perovskite to demonstrate the material’s potential in spintronic systems. Its properties, Vardeny says, bring the dream of a spintronic transistor one step closer to reality.
Spintronics
A conventional digital electronic system conveys a binary signal (think 1s and 0s) through pulses of electrons carried through a conductive wire. Spintronics can convey additional information via another characteristic of electrons, their spin direction (think up or down). Spin is related to magnetism. So spintronics uses magnetism to align electrons of a certain spin, or “inject” spin into a system.
If you’ve ever done the old science experiment of turning a nail into a magnet by repeatedly dragging a magnet along its length, then you’ve already dabbled in spintronics. The magnet transfers information to the nail. The trick is then transporting and manipulating that information, which requires devices and materials with finely tuned properties. Researchers are working toward the milestone of a spin transistor, a spintronics version of the electronic components found in practically all modern electronics. Such a device requires a semiconductor material in which a magnetic field can easily manipulate the direction of electrons’ spin — a property called spin-orbit coupling. It’s not easy to build such a transistor, Wang says. “We keep searching for new materials to see if they’re more suitable for this purpose.”
Here’s where perovskites come into play.
Perovskites
Perovskites are a class of mineral with a particular atomic structure. Their value as a technological material has only became apparent in the past 10 years. Because of that atomic structure, researchers have been developing perovskite into a material for making solar panels. By 2018 they’d achieved an efficiency of up to 23 percent of solar energy converted to electrical energy — a big step up from 3.8 percent in 2009.
In the meantime, Vardeny and his colleagues were exploring the possibilities of spintronics and the various materials that could prove effective in transmitting spin. Because of heavy lead atoms in perovskite, physicists predicted that the mineral may possess strong spin-orbit coupling. In a 2017 paper, Vardeny and physics assistant professor Sarah Li showed that a class of perovskites called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites do indeed possess large spin-orbit coupling. Also, the lifetime of spin injected into the hybrid materials lasted a relatively long time. Both results suggested that this kind of hybrid perovskite held promise as a spintronics material.
Two spintronic devices
The next step, which Vardeny and Wang accomplished in their recent work, was to incorporate hybrid perovskite into spintronic devices. The first device is a spintronic light-emitting diode, or LED. The semiconductor in a traditional LED contains electrons and holes — places in atoms where electrons should be, but aren’t. When electrons flow through the diode, they fill the holes and emit light.
Wang says that a spintronic LED works much the same way, but with a magnetic electrode, and with electron holes polarized to accommodate electrons of a certain spin. The LED lit up with circularly polarized electroluminescence, Wang says, showing that the magnetic electrode successfully transferred spin-polarized electrons into the material.
“It’s not self-evident that if you put a semiconductor and a ferromagnet together you get a spin injection,” Vardeny adds. “You have to prove it. And they proved it.”
The second device is a spin valve. Similar devices already exist and are used in devices such as computer hard drives. In a spin valve, an external magnetic field flips the polarity of magnetic materials in the valve between an open, low-resistance state and a closed, high-resistance state.
Wang and Vardeny’s spin valve does more. With hybrid perovskite as the device material, the researchers can inject spin into the device and then cause the spin to precess, or wobble, within the device using magnetic manipulation.
That’s a big deal, the researchers say. “You can develop spintronics that are not only useful for recording information and data storage, but also calculation,” Wang says. “That was an initial goal for the people who started the field of spintronics, and that’s what we are still working on.”
Taken together, these experiments show that perovskite works as a spintronic semiconductor. The ultimate goal of a spin-based transistor is still several steps away, but this study lays important groundwork for the path ahead.
“What we’ve done is to prove that what people thought was possible with perovskite actually happens,” Vardeny says. “That’s a big step.”
This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
