Posts Tagged ‘Tehran Doctors Directory News’

BBC Health News

Botox has been approved as a preventive treatment for chronic migraine by UK drug regulators.

It comes after a trial of more than 1,300 patients showed success in reducing the frequency of headaches.

But only patients who suffer headaches for at least 15 days a month, half of which come with migraine symptoms, are eligible, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said.

Chronic migraines can dramatically

impair quality of life

It is thought around 700,000 people in the UK get chronic migraines.

Migraine charities said many of those would not have been properly diagnosed and that some patients can really struggle to find a treatment that works.

Injections of botox, or botulinum toxin, are more commonly associated with smoothing out wrinkles.

It is not exactly clear why it may work in chronic migraines but it is thought that, as well as being a muscle relaxant, it may work to block pain signals.

In clinical trials, patients were given up to five courses of injections of botox into specific head and neck muscles every 12 weeks.

After 24 weeks, those treated with Botox had fewer days with a migraine than those who received a placebo injection.

By one year, nearly 70% of those treated with Botox had a 50% reduction in the number of migraines compared with before the trial.

The final results were published in Headache in May this year.

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Yahoo Health

A new study suggests there may be more likely dangers lurking in the bathroom.

Scientists in the US used an ultra sensitive method to detect bacteria in shower-heads in bathrooms across the country.

Results showed that around 30 per cent of shower-heads had “significant amounts” of Mycobacterium avium, a bacterium linked to breathing illnesses that most often infects people in poor health but can also cause illness in healthy individuals.

These bacteria are often found in water. However, in shower-heads the bacteria tend to clump together to form a slimy “biofilm”, at a concentration more than 100 times greater than is found in ordinary water.

Professor Norman Pace, who led the study, said: “If you are getting a face full of water when you first turn your shower on, that means you are probably getting a particularly high load of Mycobacterium avium, which may not be too healthy.”

These results may also provide an explanation for the rise in Mycobacterium avium infections in recent years, coinciding with people preferring showers over baths.

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Charles Q. Choi

for National Geographic News

Published June 16, 2010

Networks of brain cells in a petri dish can be trained to keep time like hourglasses, a new study says.

The discovery may help scientists reveal how our brains track time, an ability fundamental to how humans interact with each other and the world. It’s also key to how we recognize speech patterns and song rhythms.cn

(See “Making Music Boosts Brain’s Language Skills.”)

“One issue that’s been long debated regarding timing is whether there’s a central clock in the brain or whether timing is a general ability in many different circuits of the brain,” said study leader Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at University of California, Los Angeles.

Brain’s Electric Memories

Buonomano and colleagues kept networks of rat brain cells alive in petri dishes and stimulated them with two electrical pulses separated by intervals ranging from a twentieth of a second to a half-second in length.

(Related: “Rat Made Supersmart — Similar Boost Unsafe in Humans?”)

After the cell networks received two hours of “training,” a single electrical pulse was given to them to see how the cells would react.

In networks trained with short intervals, the communication between cells lasted for only a short while—say, 50 to 100 milliseconds in networks trained on 50-millisecond intervals.

However, in networks trained with long intervals, network activity lasted for much longer, according to the study, published June 13 in Nature Neuroscience.

When networks trained on half-second intervals were probed, the networks essentially talked to each other for 500 to 600 milliseconds.

The research is the first time scientists have found that brain cells can learn to generate simple timed intervals.

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