olive oil Healthy fat may repair failing hearts

Oleate, a common dietary fat found in olive oil, may help restore proper metabolism of fuel that gets disturbed in case of heart failure, a study suggests.

“This gives more proof to the idea that consuming healthy fats like oleate can have a significantly positive effect on cardiac health even after the disease has begun,” said senior study author E. Douglas Lewandowski from the University of Illinois – Chicago, US.

Failing hearts are unable to properly process or store the fats they use for fuel, which are contained within tiny droplets called lipid bodies in heart muscle cells.

The inability to use fats, the heart’s primary fuel source, causes the muscle to become starved of energy.

Fats, not metabolised by the heart, break down into toxic intermediary by-products that further contribute to heart disease.

In addition to balancing fat metabolism and reducing toxic by-products in hyper-trophic hearts, oleate also restored the activation of several genes for enzymes that metabolise fat, the findings of the study showed.

“These genes are often suppressed in hyper-trophic hearts,” Lewandowski added.

“The fact that we can restore beneficial gene expression, as well as more balanced fat metabolism, plus reduce toxic fat metabolites, just by supplying hearts with oleate – a common dietary fat – is a very exciting finding,” Lewandowski pointed out.

For the study, the researchers looked at how healthy and failing rat hearts reacted to being supplied with either oleate or palmitate, a fat associated with the Western diet and found in dairy products, animal fats and palm oil.

When the researchers perfused failing rat hearts with oleate they saw an immediate improvement in how the hearts contracted and pumped blood.

The findings were reported in the journal Circulation.

Kids living in megacities likelier to risk brain damage from air pollution

A new study has recently revealed that kids living in megacities are more prone to brain damage from air pollution.

Researchers from University of Montana revealed that children living in megacities are at increased risk for brain inflammation and neurodegenerative changes, including Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.

The study found when air particulate matter and their components such as metals are inhaled or swallowed, they pass through damaged barriers, including respiratory, gastrointestinal and the blood-brain barriers and can result in long-lasting harmful effects.

Researchers compared 58 serum and cerebrospinal fluid samples from a control group living in a low-pollution city and matched them by age, gender, socioeconomic status, education and education levels achieved by their parents to 81 children living in Mexico City.

The results found that the children living in Mexico City had significantly higher serum and cerebrospinal fluid levels of autoantibodies against key tight-junction and neural proteins, as well as combustion-related metals.

The breakdown of the blood-brain barrier and the presence of autoantibodies to important brain proteins would contribute to the neuroinflammation observed in urban children and raises the question of what role air pollution plays in a 400 percent increase of MS cases in Mexico City, making it one of the main diagnoses for neurology referrals.

Once there's a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier, not only would particulate matter enter the body but it also opens the door to harmful neurotoxins, bacteria and viruses.

While the study focused on children living in Mexico City, others living in cities where there are alarming levels of air pollution such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia-Wilmington, New York City, Salt Lake City, hicago, Tokyo, Mumbai, New Delhi or Shanghai, among others, also face major health risks. In the U.S. alone, 200 million people live in areas where pollutants such as ozone and fine particulate matter exceed the standards. (ANI)

According to Study Dietary Supplements May Cause Liver Damage

Dietary supplements have grown remarkably popular in the last few years. They may help with weight-management but their side effects remain highly debatable. According to a new study published in the journal Hepatology, liver damage caused by herbals and dietary supplements have increased from 7 percent to almost 20 percent in the United States in the last 10 years.

Dr. Victor Navarro from Einstein Medical Centre in Philadelphia said, "While many Americans believe supplements to be safe, government require less safety evidence to market products than what is required for conventional pharmaceuticals. With less stringent oversight for herbals and dietary supplements, there is greater potential for harmful consequences including life-threatening conditions."

The new study examined 839 patients in the federally supported Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network who had liver damage between 2004 and 2013. Forty-five cases were caused by bodybuilding supplements, 85 by non- body-building supplements and 709 by medications.
Liver injury due to non-bodybuilding supplements is most severe when compared with injury due to body-building supplements or conventional medications. It may even require the need for transplantation and can also be fatal.

The team concluded that bodybuilding supplements caused prolonged jaundice in young men but no fatalities or liver trans-plantations occurred. However, the team also noted that they couldn't say that the results applied to the whole of the U.S. population. More research is needed, but the public needs to be cautious before taking any dietary supplements.

Smoking e-cigarettes may lead to addiction marijuana and cocaine

A new study has observed that smoking e-cigarettes may encourage the addiction to other substances, such as marijuana and cocaine.

The study presented at Massachusetts Medical Society examined that the e-cigarettes may act as a "gateway drug" to addiction to drugs.

Co-author Denise B. Kandel, PhD, professor of sociomedical sciences (in psychiatry), Department of Psychiatry and Mailman School of Public Health, at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), said that while e-cigarettes eliminated some of the health effects associated with combustible tobacco, they were pure nicotine-delivery devices.

Dr. Eric Kandel said that their findings provided a biologic basis for the sequence of drug use observed in people and one drug altered the brain's circuitry in a way that enhanced the effects of a subsequent drug.

Kandel continued that e-cigarettes had the same physiological effects on the brain and may pose the same risk of addiction to other drugs as regular cigarettes, especially in adolescence during a critical period of brain development and nicotine clearly acted as a gateway drug on the brain, and this effect was likely to occur whether the exposure comes from smoking cigarettes, passive tobacco smoke, or e-cigarettes.

The study is published in the online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.