Green tea extract useful for genital warts

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A botanical ointment containing sinecatechins, a green tea extract, is an effective and well tolerated treatment for external genital and anal warts, results of a controlled study confirm.

 

“Green tea catechins exert multiple biologic activities, involving potent antiviral and antioxidant activity,” Dr. Silvio Tatti, now at the Hospital Clinicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and colleagues note in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

 

Given that genital and anal warts are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) and that effective, well tolerated treatments are lacking, there has been interest in treatment with sinecatechins ointments.

 

In their study, Tatti’s team randomly assigned 502 adults with 2 to 30 warts to either sinecatechins ointment (15% or 10%) or inactive ointment for up to 16 weeks or until the warts cleared.

 

In both sinecatechins groups, warts cleared completely in roughly 57% of patients compared to just 34% of subjects in the control group - a significant difference.

 

Clearance rates of at least 50% were seen in roughly three-quarters of patients who applied sinecatechins ointment compared with 51% of those who applied the inactive ointment.

 

Most side effects reported with sinecatechins ointment were mild to moderate skin and application site reactions.

 

The results support the use of sinecatechins ointment for external warts, Tatti and colleagues conclude. Sinecatechins ointment, sold as Veregen, is approved for the topical treatment of genital warts and perianal warts in health people aged 18 and older.

 

SOURCE: Obstetrics and Gynecology, June 2008.

Coma victim woken by granddaughter’s scream

Devbai Patel, 56, was left unconscious after she was hit by a lorry in a crash which killed the driver.

Doctors reduced her sedatives to try to rouse her and her family talked to her, but she showed no reaction, so the medical staff suggested she might respond to her granddaughter Leela, aged 23 months.

When they brought Leela in, she screamed to see her grandmother looking so ill, and Mrs Patel immediately opened her eyes.

Her husband Kunverji, 57, said: “It’s a miracle. We had tried everything but still she did not respond.

“We brought in Leela and she was shocked to see her grandma like that, so she screamed and as soon as she did my wife opened her eyes.

“The doctors could not believe how quickly she got better once she had woken up.”

Mrs Patel, a mother of four, of Neasden, north London, was walking near her home on January 16 when a lorry mounted the pavement, hit her and smashed into a veterinary surgery, killing the lorry’s driver and leaving Mrs Patel with brain, stomach and arm injuries.

Mrs Patel , now recuperating with her family, said: “I’m glad to be home.”

Why do people smoke?

My seven-year-old son is fascinated with smoking. When he finds people doing it, he fixes his eyes on them and studies their behavior. “Look! That guy in the car is smoking,” Joey might say while observing — well, staring — and soaking up all that is unfamiliar to him.

I guess that’s the job of a little boy — to figure out the actions that surround him. Which makes it the job of his mommy to help him make sense of it all. So that’s what I do, all the while hoping I steer him into adopting a repulsion for smoking and not an affection for it. Sometimes, when he holds a twig between his fingers and then places it in his mouth, letting it dangle with perfect lip control, I worry that repulsion is a long way off. Then I remember he is only seven years old. There’s still time.

“Why do people smoke?” Joey asked me the other day in the car, just after we walked by a man smoking outside a Walgreen’s drugstore. “Yuck,” Joey declared as he walked through the man’s cloud of smoke. “Yes! He thinks it’s yucky,” were my first thoughts. Then I did my best at answering Joey’s question.

I told Joey that people might smoke because at some point in their lives, someone asked them if they wanted to try a cigarette. So they tried. And they liked it. And maybe they don’t want to quit. Or maybe they can’t quit. One way or another, it becomes a habit, I explained. “Just like you want sugar all the time,” I told Joey. Some people want to smoke all the time. Or not all the time. Maybe just once in a while. Still, it’s not good for you, I continued. Either is sugar. I told Joey that smoking — and sugar — can make people sick.

Joey knows smoking can cause coughs. He knows it can cause difficulty breathing. He also knows it can cause cancer. It won’t always cause cancer, though, I told him. But it might. And some people who never smoke — like me — can still get cancer. That’s why we have to make healthy choices for our bodies. Not smoking is one good choice.

Eating healthy and exercising are also good choices, I said. I told Joey that I’m not sure why I got cancer. But I know how I can help prevent it from coming back. So I eat well and exercise well. I sleep enough. I try not to get angry. I try to be happy.

I can only hope that Joey understands a speck of what I tried to teach him. I can only hope he sees my example and wants to mimic me. I can only hope this seven-year-old boy grows up to be what I want him to be most: A non-smoker. But he’s only seven. And for that, I am grateful.

Whiten Your Teeth the Natural Way

White teeth and strawberries may not sound like they go hand in hand, but it turns out the berries can actually lighten your smile.

The secret to this inexpensive home whitening method is malic acid, which acts as an astringent to remove surface discoloration. Combined with baking soda, strawberries become a natural tooth-cleanser, buffing away stains from coffee, red wine, and dark sodas. While it’s no replacement for a bleaching treatment at your dentist’s office, “this is a fast, cheap way to brighten your smile,” says Adina Carrel, DMD, a dentist in private practice at Manhattan Dental Arts in New York. “Be careful not to use this too often, though, as the acid could damage the enamel on your teeth.”

You need:
1 ripe strawberry
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Directions: Crush the strawberry to a pulp, then mix with the baking powder until blended. Use a soft toothbrush to spread the mixture onto your teeth. Leave on for 5 minutes, then brush thoroughly with toothpaste to remove the berry–baking powder mix. Rinse. (A little floss will help get rid of any strawberry seeds.) Carrel says you can apply once a week.

Double Your Lifespan with a Drug that Mutates Your Ribosomes

 

It’s been known for a while that restricting your diet will increase your lifespan, but now researchers have shown one reason why: Eating less causes your ribosomes (your cells’ protein factories) to mutate. And it’s looking like mutated ribosomes (pictured here) could be one key to life extension. The good news is that you may not have to starve yourself to mutate your ribosomes anymore. Biologists at the University of Washington have managed to induce the life-extending mutation in ribosomes with a drug that doubles the lifespan of yeast cells.

The key is to lower protein-production in cells, which is why eating less can cause lifespan extension. According to the University of Washington:

In this project, the UW researchers studied many different strains of yeast cells that had lower protein production. They found that mutations to the ribosome, the cell’s protein factory, sometimes led to increased life span. Ribosomes are made up of two parts — the large and small subunits — and the researchers tried to isolate the life-span-related mutation to one of those parts. 

“What we noticed right away was that the long-lived strains always had mutations in the large ribosomal subunit and never in the small subunit,” said the study’s lead author, Kristan Steffen, a graduate student in the UW Department of Biochemistry.

The researchers also tested a drug called diazaborine, which specifically interferes with synthesis of the ribosomes’ large subunits, but not small subunits, and found that treating cells with the drug made them live about 50 percent longer than untreated cells. Using a series of genetic tests, the scientists then showed that depletion of the ribosomes’ large subunits was likely to be increasing life span by a mechanism related to dietary restriction — the TOR signaling pathway.

The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Cell.

Vitamin supplements may increase risk of death

Vitamin supplements taken by millions of people do not increase life expectancy and may raise the risk of a premature death , according to a review of 67 studies with more than 230,000 subjects.

The review, by the Cochrane Collaboration which regularly pools data from trials to evaluate drugs and treatments, found supplements vitamin A, vitamin E and beta-carotene are detrimental to health. In 47 trials with 180,938 people and a low risk of bias, the “antioxidant supplements significantly increased mortality”, the authors wrote. When the antioxidants were assessed separately and low risk of bias trials were included and selenium excluded, vitamin A was linked to a 16% increased risk of dying, beta-carotene to a 7% increased risk and vitamin E to a 4% increased risk.

Evidence for vitamin C and selenium was more equivocal, suggesting there was no benefit to taking these pills compared with a placebo.

“The bottom line is current evidence does not support the use of antioxidant supplements in the general healthy population or in patients with certain diseases,” said Goran Bjelakovic, who performed the review at Copenhagen Universityhospital in Denmark. “There was no indication that vitamin C and selenium may have positive or negative effects. So regarding these we need more data from randomised trials.”

All the supplements are categorised as antioxidants; research has suggested these chemicals underlie some of the beneficial effects of eating fruit and vegetables because they soak up harmful byproducts of metabolism which can damage cells and cause aging.

While the evidence of a beneficial effect of a diet rich in fruit and veg is solid, the Cochrane data suggest antioxidant supplements are either useless or detrimental.

Bjelakovic’s team evaluated 67 randomised clinical trials with 232,550 subjects; 21 of the trials were on healthy subjects, while the rest tested patients with a range of diseases. The evidence suggests it would be safer to obtain the chemicals not as supplements but by eating plenty of fruit and vegetables.

Coffee Makes You Dehydrated: Say What?

It has long been thought that coffee and other caffeine-containing beverages are dehydrating and don’t count toward your daily fluid intake. In fact, some go as far as recommending one cup of water for every cup of Joe you consume. Most of us know that caffeine is a diuretic (it makes us have to go pee), but does it deplete our bodily fluids?

The Straight Talk
In his review, “Caffeine, Body Fluid-Electrolyte Balance, and Exercise Performance,” Lawrence E. Armstrong, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Connecticut disproves the notion that caffeinated beverages rob us of our precious fluids. By reviewing the scientific research on the subject, he concludes that although caffeine, like water, is a mild diuresis (it increases excretion of urine), moderate caffeine consumption does not produce a “fluid-electrolyte imbalance” that can affect health or exercise performance. Furthermore, we retain roughly the same amount of fluid after drinking a caffeinated beverage as we do after drinking water.

Even more encouraging for habitual coffee consumers is the finding that those with caffeine tolerance have reduced likelihood that a fluid electrolyte imbalance will occur. The more regular your caffeine habit, the more fluid your body is conditioned to retain.

Other findings support his conclusions. A small study done at the University of Nebraska tested the body weight, urine output, and blood of eighteen subjects after they consumed caffeinated and non-caffeinated beverages. They determined that there was “no significant differences in the effect of various combinations of beverages on hydration status of healthy adult males.” The Institute of Medicine expert panel on water and electrolyte intake asserts that the diuretic effects of caffeine are transient, and that coffee, tea, and colas can contribute to total water intake.

The Takeaway
Moderate caffeine consumption won’t dehydrate you and can actually help you reach your overall daily fluid intake. Make mine a double.

Washing produce doesn’t remove bacteria: report

Washing fruits and vegetables with water is not enough to remove common bacteria that can cause severe illness, a new report says.

The researchers injected food-borne bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella into vegetables and then tried various common ways to clean them, including water and a sodium hypochlorite treatment.

Both the water and the chemical solution did not significantly reduce the bacteria levels. Only irradiation killed 99.9 per cent of harmful bacteria. Irradiation is an electron beam that alters a cell’s genetic material, thereby killing harmful parasites, germs and insects.

The research, conducted by scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said that bacteria can sometimes be hard to wash away.

“When bacteria are protected — whether they’re inside a leaf or inside a biofilm — they’re not going to be as easy to kill,” Brendan A. Niemira, the study director and a microbiologist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, said in a statement.

“This is the first study to look at the use of irradiation on bacteria that reside inside the inner spaces of a leaf or buried within a biofilm.”

However, irradiation is not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and there is some concern that it compromises nutritional values.

But advocates say that using irradiation on fresh fruits and vegetables could help reduce incidence rates of food-borne illnesses. Salmonella and E. coli can cause severe vomiting and diarrhea.

Fruits and vegetables can become contaminated because they are usually grown outdoors, where they can be exposed to germs from animals, soil, manure and irrigation water.

The study was presented Thursday at an American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans.

 

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Abstract:

With the microbial safety of fresh produce of increasing concern, conventional sanitizing treatments need to be supplemented with effective new interventions to inactivate human pathogens. Our research group investigates physical and chemical treatments such as hot water pasteurization, gaseous chlorine dioxide, cold plasma and irradiation. Research in biological controls deals with the use of single or multiple isolates of antagonistic bacteria for inhibiting the outgrowth of bacterial human pathogens. Related research in microbial ecology determines how pathogen biofilm formation and interactions with native microflora may alter the efficacy of applied treatments and interventions. This presentation will summarize the advances made in these areas, as well as research results on the process of scaling up effective interventions from laboratory scale to pilot plant scale, including the critical process of evaluating the effects of the various interventions on sensory and nutritional quality attributes, yield, physiology, and shelf-life.