Scientists have found another reason for children to eat their green leafy vegetables- Vitamin K.
A study of 766 otherwise healthy adolescents showed that those who consumed the least vitamin K1- found in spinach, cabbage, iceberg lettuce and olive oil, were at 3.3 times greater risk for an unhealthy enlargement of the major pumping chamber of their heart, according to the study published in The Journal of Nutrition. Vitamin K1, or phylloquinone, is the predominant form of vitamin K in the U.S. diet.
“Those who consumed less had more risk,” says Dr. Norman Pollock, bone biologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University and the study’s corresponding author.
Overall, about 10 percent of the teens had some degree of this left ventricular hypertrophy, Pollock and his colleagues report.
Left ventricular changes are more typically associated with adults whose hearts have been working too hard, too long to get blood out to the body because of sustained, elevated blood pressure. The scientists believe theirs is the first study exploring associations between vitamin K and heart structure and function in young people. While more work is needed, their findings suggest that early interventions to ensure young people are getting adequate vitamin K1 could improve cardiovascular development and reduce future disease risk, they write.
In the 14-18 year olds who consumed the least vitamin K1, the study found the overall size and wall thickness of the left ventricle were already significantly greater and the amount of blood the heart pumped out significantly lower, Pollock says.
Only 25 percent of the teens in the study met current adequate intake levels of the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine, Pollock notes.
Vitamin K is known to be important to blood clotting and healthy bones. There is increasing evidence of its cardiovascular impact as well. For example, one direct, negative impact of low vitamin K intake on the heart may be reduced activity of matrix Gla protein, which helps prevent calcium deposits on blood vessel walls.
Further study is needed to clarify the importance of vitamin K1 intake to cardiovascular development and to better understand how vitamin K dependent proteins, like matrix Gla protein, aid cardiovascular development and health, the scientists note.
Dr. Marie Gabrielle Laguna
Medical doctor-internist
Skipping breakfast associated with hardening of the arteries
Skipping breakfast is associated with an increased risk of atherosclerosis, or the hardening and narrowing of arteries due to a build-up of plaque, according to research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Previous studies have linked skipping breakfast to coronary heart disease risk, this is the first study to evaluate the association between breakfast and the presence of subclinical atherosclerosis.
“People who regularly skip breakfast likely have an overall unhealthy lifestyle,” said study author Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, MACC director of Mount Sinai Heart and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “This study provides evidence that this is one bad habit people can proactively change to reduce their risk for heart disease.”
Researchers in Madrid examined male and female volunteers free from cardiovascular or chronic kidney disease. A computerized questionnaire was used to estimate their usual diet, and breakfast patterns were based on the percentage of total daily energy intake consumed at breakfast. Three groups were identified: those consuming less than five percent of their total energy intake in the morning (skipped breakfast and only had coffee, juice or other non-alcoholic beverages); those consuming more than 20 percent of their total energy intake in the morning (breakfast consumers); and those consuming between five and 20 percent (low-energy breakfast consumers). Of the 4,052 participants, 2.9 percent skipped breakfast, 69.4 percent were low-energy breakfast consumers and 27.7 percent were breakfast consumers.
Atherosclerosis was observed more frequency among participants who skipped breakfast and was also higher in participants who consumed low-energy breakfasts compared to breakfast consumers. Additionally, cardio-metabolic risk markers were more prevalent in those who skipped breakfast and low-energy breakfast consumers compared to breakfast consumers. Participants who skipped breakfast had the greatest waist circumference, body mass index, blood pressure, blood lipids and fasting glucose levels.
“Aside from the direct association with cardiovascular risk factors, skipping breakfast might serve as a marker for a general unhealthy diet or lifestyle which in turn is associated with the development and progression of atherosclerosis,” said Jose L. Peñalvo, PhD, assistant professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and the senior author of the study. “Our findings are important for health professionals and might be used as a simple message for lifestyle-based interventions and public health strategies, as well as informing dietary recommendations and guidelines.”
One hour of exercise a week can prevent depression
A landmark study led by the Black Dog Institute has revealed that regular exercise of any intensity can prevent future depression — and just one hour can help.
Published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the results show even small amounts of exercise can protect against depression, with mental health benefits seen regardless of age or gender.
This most extensive and largest study involved 33,908 Norwegian adults who had their levels of exercise and symptoms of depression and anxiety monitored over 11 years.
The international research team found that 12 percent of cases of depression could have been prevented if participants undertook just one hour of physical activity each week.
“We’ve known for some time that exercise has a role to play in treating symptoms of depression, but this is the first time we have been able to quantify the preventative potential of physical activity in terms of reducing future levels of depression,” said lead author Associate Professor Samuel Harvey from Black Dog Institute and UNSW.
“These results highlight the great potential to integrate exercise into individual mental health plans and broader public health campaigns. If we can find ways to increase the population’s level of physical activity even by a small amount, then this is likely to bring substantial physical and mental health benefits.”
A healthy cohort of participants was asked at baseline to report the frequency of exercise they participated in and at what intensity: without becoming breathless or sweating, becoming breathless and sweating, or exhausting themselves. At follow-up stage, they completed a self-report questionnaire (the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale) to indicate any emerging anxiety or depression.
The research team also accounted for variables which might impact the association between exercise and common mental illness. These include socio-economic and demographic factors, substance use, body mass index, new onset physical illness and perceived social support.
Results showed that people who reported doing no exercise at all at baseline had a 44% increased chance of developing depression compared to those who were exercising one to two hours a week.
However, these benefits did not carry through to protecting against anxiety, with no association identified between level and intensity of exercise and the chances of developing the disorder.
Avoiding meat during pregnancy linked with later substance misuse by children
Lower meat consumption by women during pregnancy was linked with an increased risk of substance misuse by their children during adolescence. The findings come from a study published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
In the study that included 5109 women and their offspring, less frequent consumption of red meat, poultry, and meat products during pregnancy were associated with greater risks of adverse alcohol, cannabis and cigarette use.
Lower meat consumption disproportionally increased the risks of offspring substance misuse among mothers with optimally functional variants of the gene that encodes a vitamin B12 transport protein. Because vitamin B12 insufficiencies are highly likely to have a contributing role to the study’s findings, greater meat consumption need not be advised to modify this risk. For example, fortification of foods with vegetarian sources of vitamin B12 and more widespread use of supplements may be other options.
“The U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans includes recommendations for healthy vegetarian eating patterns,” said Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, lead author of the study. “Our study points to the need to investigate potential health impacts, and solutions, for some women who choose to restrict certain food categories during pregnancy.”
A need for bananas? Dietary potassium regulates calcification of arteries
Bananas and avocados, foods rich in potassium, may help protect against pathogenic vascular calcification or hardening of the arteries.
University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have shown that reduced dietary potassium promotes elevated aortic stiffness in a mouse model, compared with normal-potassium-fed mice. Such arterial stiffness in humans is predictive of heart disease and death from heart disease, and represents an important health problem for the nation as a whole.
The UAB researchers found that increased dietary potassium levels lessened vascular calcification and aortic stiffness. Furthermore, they unravelled the molecular mechanism underlying the effects of low or high dietary potassium.
Such knowledge of how vascular smooth muscle cells in the arteries regulate vascular calcification emphasizes the need to consider dietary intake of potassium in the prevention of vascular complications of atherosclerosis. It also provides new targets for potential therapies to prevent or treat atherosclerotic vascular calcification and arterial stiffness.
A UAB team led by Yabing Chen, Ph.D., UAB professor of pathology and a Research Career Scientist at the Birmingham VA Medical Center, explored this mechanism of vascular disease three ways: living mice fed diets that varied in potassium, mouse artery cross-sections studied in culture medium with varying concentrations of potassium, and mouse vascular smooth muscle cells grown in culture medium.
The animal work was carried out in the atherosclerosis-prone mouse model, the apoliprotein E-deficient mice, a standard model that are prone to cardiovascular disease when fed a high-fat diet. Using low, normal or high levels of dietary potassium (0.3 percent, 0.7 percent and 2.1 percent weight/weight). The UAB team found that the mice fed a low-potassium diet had a significant increase in vascular calcification. In contrast, the mice fed a high-potassium diet had markedly inhibited vascular calcification. Also, the low-potassium mice had increased stiffness of their aortas, and high-potassium mice had decreased stiffness, as indicated by the arterial stiffness indicator called pulse wave velocity, which is measured by echocardiography in live animals.
The different levels of dietary potassium were mirrored by different blood levels of potassium in the three groups of mice.
“The findings have important translational potential,” said Paul Sanders, M.D., professor of nephrology in the UAB Department of Medicine and a co-author, “since they demonstrate the benefit of adequate potassium supplementation on prevention of vascular calcification in atherosclerosis-prone mice, and the adverse effect of low potassium intake.”
‘Squirtable’ elastic surgical glue seals wounds in 60 seconds
A highly elastic and adhesive surgical glue that quickly seals wounds without the need for common staples or sutures could transform how surgeries are performed.
Biomedical engineers from the University of Sydney and the United States collaborated on the development of the potentially life-saving, called MeTro.
MeTro’s high elasticity makes it ideal for sealing wounds in body tissues that continually expand and relax such as lungs, hearts and arteries, which are otherwise at risk of re-opening.
The material also works on internal wounds that are often hard-to-reach areas and have typically required staples or sutures due to surrounding body fluid hampering the effectiveness of other sealants.
MeTro sets in just 60 seconds once treated with UV light, and the technology has a built-in degrading enzyme which can be modified to determine how long the sealant lasts from hours to months, to allow adequate time for the wound to heal.
The liquid or gel-like material has quickly and successfully sealed incisions in the arteries and lungs of rodents and the lungs of pigs, without the need for sutures and staples.
The results were published in Science Translational Medicine, in a paper by the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Science; Boston’s Northeastern University, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston.
MeTro combines the natural elastic protein technologies developed in collaboration with author and University of Sydney McCaughey Chair in Biochemistry Professor Anthony Weiss, with light sensitive molecules developed in collaboration with author and Director of the Biomaterials Innovation Research Center at Harvard Medical School Professor Ali Khademhosseini.
Lead author of the study, Assistant Professor Nasim Annabi from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University, oversaw the application of MeTro in a variety of clinical settings and conditions.
“The beauty of the MeTro formulation is that, as soon as it comes in contact with tissue surfaces, it solidifies into a gel-like phase without running away,” she said.
“We then further stabilise it by curing it on-site with a short light-mediated crosslinking treatment. This allows the sealant to be accurately placed and to tightly bond and interlock with structures on the tissue surface.”
The University of Sydney’s Professor Anthony Weiss described the process as resembling that of silicone sealants used around bathroom and kitchen tiles.
New antifungal drug to treat life threatening fungal infections
University of Liverpool researchers, working with F2G Limited (Eccles, Manchester), have developed a new antifungal drug to help in the treatment of life threatening invasive fungal infections such as invasive aspergillosis.
Invasive fungal infections are common and often lethal. Despite optimal medical care mortality is 20-30% at six weeks and dramatically rises to 80-100% for drug resistant infection.
These infections occur most commonly in the context of leukemia and bone marrow transplantation and often in young patients with otherwise curable disease.
The researchers, led by Professor William Hope from the University’s Antimicrobial Pharmacodynamics and Therapeutics (APT) Group, have characterised the biochemical and physiologic effects or the pharmacodynamics of F901318, which is the lead compound of the new class of drugs termed the ‘orotomides’.
The ‘orotomides’, discovered by F2G Limited, have a novel mechanism of action which is the specific biochemical interaction through which a drug substance produces its pharmacological effect.
This is the first new class of antifungal agent to be discovered in the last three decades.
The study, which was supported by a research grant by F2G, has been published in mBio.
APT’s work provides the underpinning evidence for efficacy and dosage justification for the very first patients receiving the new drug. Such information is required by regulatory agencies such as the European Medicines Agency and the Food and Drug Administration before clinical studies can proceed.
Professor Hope, said: “Antifungal resistance represents a major global clinical challenge. This study provides the necessary information to enable F901318 to be developed for clinical use.”
A spoonful of oil helps unlock full nutritional benefits of veggies, study suggests
Iowa State University scientist has published new research suggesting a spoonful of soybean oil makes vegetables more nutritious.
A new study led by Wendy White, an associate professor of food science and human nutrition, shows that eating salad with added fat in the form of soybean oil promotes the absorption of different micronutrients that adds a range of health benefits, including cancer prevention and eyesight preservation.
The results appeared in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and the results may ease the guilt of countless dieters who fret about adding dressing to their salads.
White’s research found out that added oil aided in the absorption of seven different micronutrients in vegetable salad. Those nutrients include four carotenoids — alpha and beta carotene, lutein and lycopene — two forms of vitamins, vitamin E and K. The oil also promoted the absorption of vitamin A. The new study builds on previous research from White’s group that focused on alpha and beta-carotene and lycopene.
Researcher also found that the amount of oil added to the vegetables had a proportional relationship so, adding twice the amount of salad dressing leads to twice the nutrient absorption.
It is not advisable, however, for salad eaters to drench their greens in dressing, but consumers should be perfectly comfortable with the U.S. dietary recommendation of about two tablespoons of oil per day.
The study included 12 college-age women who consumed salads with various levels of soybean oil, a common ingredient in commercial salad dressings. The subjects then had their blood tested to measure the absorption of nutrients. Women were chosen for the trial due to differences in the speed with which men and women metabolize the nutrients.
The results showed maximum nutrient absorption occurred at around 32 grams of oil, which was the highest amount studied. However, White said she found some variability among the subjects.
Research collaborators include Yang Zhou, former ISU postdoctoral researcher; Agatha Agustiana Crane, former graduate research assistant in food science and human nutrition; Philip Dixon, a University Professor of Statistics, and Frits Quadt of Quadt Consultancy, among others.
So, a spoonful or two of salad dressing may indeed help derive the optimum nutritional benefit from the veggies.
Breath instead of a blood test
Experts advise anyone looking to shed extra kilos to eat less and exercise more. One way is with endurance training, during which the body burns not only carbohydrates such as sugar, but also fat. When exactly the body begins burning fat can now be determined by analysing, for example, biomarkers in the blood or urine. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the University Hospital Zurich have now developed a method for the highly convenient, real-time monitoring of lipolysis by testing a person’s exhalations during exercise.
“When burning fat, the body produces by-products that find their way into the blood,” explains Andreas Güntner, a postdoc in the group of ETH Professor Sotiris Pratsinis. In the pulmonary alveoli, these volatile molecules, acetone, enter the air the person exhaled. Güntner and his colleagues have developed a small gas sensor that measures the presence of this substance.
The researchers tested the functioning of the sensor in volunteers while they exercised. The test subjects completed a one-and-a-half-hour session on a bicycle ergometer with two short breaks. Researchers asked test subjects to blow into a tube that was connected to the acetone sensor at regular intervals.
“We were able to show how acetone concentration in the exhalations varies greatly from person to person,” says Güntner. The measurements taken by the researchers in Zurich showed that lipolysis in some test subjects did only start towards the end of the one-and-a-half-hour training session. In others, the measurements showed they began burning fat much sooner.
Control measurements showed that the new measurement method correlated well with the concentration of the biomarker beta-hydroxybutyrate in the blood of the test subjects. This blood analysis is one of today’s standard methods for monitoring lipolysis.
The sensor uses a chip coated with a porous film of special semiconducting nanoparticles. The particles are tungsten trioxide that researchers have implanted with single atoms of silicon.
The chip used is the size of a 1-cent euro coin, but the researchers' goal is to offer the chip in a manageably sized device.
The scientists plan to continue developing measurement method so that they can eventually market it. They already have a prototype of the instrument. The scientists are also working on developing gas sensors for other medically relevant molecules in exhalations, including ammonia to test kidney function, isoprene to test cholesterol metabolism and various aldehydes for the early detection of lung cancer.
How fever in early pregnancy causes heart, facial birth defects
Fever in early pregnancy may be harmful. Research in animals suggests some defects could be prevented with a fever reducer.
Researchers have known for decades that fever in the first trimester of pregnancy increase risk for some heart defects and facial deformities such as cleft lip or palate. Exactly how this happens is unclear. Scientists have debated whether a virus or other infection source causes the defects, or if fever alone is the underlying problem.
Recent evidence indicates that fever interferes with the development of the heart and jaw during the first three to eight weeks of pregnancy. The findings, demonstrated in animal embryos, were published last October 10, 2017 in the journal Science Signaling.
The results suggest a portion of congenital birth defects is preventable by lowering the mother’s fever with the judicious use of acetaminophen during the first trimester, said senior author Eric Benner, M.D., Ph.D., a neonatologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Duke.
“My hope is that right now, as women are planning to become pregnant and their doctors advise them to start taking prenatal vitamins and folic acid, they should also be informed if they get a fever, they should take a fever reducer, specifically acetaminophen (Tylenol), which has been studied extensively and determined to be safe during the first trimester,” Benner said.
The researchers studied zebrafish and chicken embryos to determine the impact of fever. scientists found that neural crest cells (critical building blocks for the heart, face and jaw) contain temperature-sensitive properties with ion channels found in sensory neurons.
Researchers engineered a non-invasive magnet-based technology to create fever-like conditions in two specific temperature-sensitive ion channels called TRPV1 and TRPV4 in the neural crest cells involved in developing the heart and face. When those neural crest cells were subjected to conditions mimicking a transient fever, the embryos developed craniofacial irregularities and heart defects, including double outlet right ventricle, Tetralogy of Fallot and other outflow obstructions.
The type of defect depends on what part of development (head, heart or face) the fever occurs. Researchers have yet to find out the severity and duration of fever impacts development.
Women should be educated about fever as a risk factor for birth defects and that they should ask their doctor the benefit from taking a fever-reducer such as acetaminophen if ever they develop a fever.
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