Restless legs could trigger imminent orgasms in women

London: Restless legs and overactive bladder could trigger imminent orgasms in women, according to a study.
Neuropsychiatrist Marcel Waldinger and his colleagues of Utrecht University and The Hague's HagaHospital studied 18 Dutch women with Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS).
Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Women affected by this rare and mysterious syndrome experience persistent genital sensations as if they are continuously on the verge of an orgasm.
All participants received in depth interviews and various medical examinations such as MRI-scans of the brain and pelvis. The study showed that most women in this research also had restless legs, symptoms of an overactive bladder and pelvic varicosis.
"These results are a very important breakthrough in the research of this syndrome and show that this is a real physical disorder," Waldinger emphasised.
In 2001, PSAS was mentioned for the first time in medical literature. Only 22 case reports have been described so far. A key feature of the syndrome is that sexual contact does not lead to diminishment but to aggravation of the symptoms. The complaints may lead to desperate and depressive feelings.
The majority of women in the study, the largest on PSAS so far, reported that their complaints were accompanied by restless legs and frequent urge to void.
Some of them reported to have restless legs symptoms long before their genital complaints. MRI-scan and ECHO-Doppler investigations of the pelvis and genitals also demonstrated a high prevalence of pelvic varicosis.
Notably, varicosis and restless legs are associated. The researchers are currently continuing their research on restless legs and bladder functioning in women with PSAS, said a Utrecht University release.
According to Waldinger, PSAS is a genital form of restless legs. Based on scientific observations, he postulated the view that the weird genital sensations are equivalent to the sensations belonging to the Restless Legs Syndrome.
"In order to emphasise this equivalence, we decided to change PSAS into Restless Genital Syndrome (RGS)", Waldinger explained

A walk in a park a day can help keep mental fatigue at bay

Washington: A simple walk in the park a day can help improve your memory and attentiveness, according to a new study.
The new study led by Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan from the University of Michigan have found that spending time in nature may be more beneficial for mental processes than being in urban environments.
For the study, the researchers conducted two experiments to test how interactions with nature and urban environments would affect attention and memory processes.
First, a group of volunteers completed a task designed to challenge memory and attention. The volunteers then took a walk in either a park or in downtown Ann Arbor. After the walk, volunteers returned to the lab and were retested on the task.
In the second experiment, after volunteers completed the task, instead of going out for a walk, they simply viewed either nature photographs or photographs of urban environments and then repeated the task.
The results showed that performance on the memory and attention task greatly improved following the walk in the park, but did not improve for volunteers who walked downtown
Moreover, the group who viewed the nature photographs performed much better on the retest than the group who looked at city scenes.
The authors suggest that urban environments provide a relatively complex and often confusing pattern of stimulation, which requires effort to sort out and interpret.
Natural environments, by contrast, offer a more coherent (and often more aesthetic) pattern of stimulation that, far from requiring effort, are often experienced as restful.
The study appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Scientists studying how asbestos fibres cause Cancer

Washington: Ohio State University scientists claim that they are for the first time studying how an asbestos fibre triggers cancer in human cells.
The researchers believe that their work may aid in drug development efforts, aimed towards finding potential cures for illnesses caused by excessive exposure to asbestos, including the deadly cancer called mesothelioma.
With a view to observing how a single asbestos fibre binds with a specific receptor protein on cell surfaces, the research team uses atomic force microscopy.
Study's co-author Eric Taylor, a doctoral candidate in earth sciences at Ohio State, described atomic force microscopy as "Braille on a molecular level", which allows the team to feel what was happening on molecular surfaces.
"We're looking at what molecules are involved in the chain of events when the fibre touches the cell. Does the binding occur over minutes, or hours? And what processes are triggered?" said Taylor, who presented the research at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
So far, the study has been focused to blue asbestos (Crocidolite), a part of the amphibole group of asbestos minerals that were used in such products as ceiling tiles and thermal insulation, before being banned in most of the Western world by the mid-Eighties.
However, the researchers eventually hope to study how all six forms of asbestos interact with certain proteins on cell surfaces.
According to them, some forms of asbestos can dissolve in the lungs if they are inhaled, but others are believed to essentially "stick" to cells, especially at high concentrations, and eventually cause lung diseases.
"For the first time, this will give us data on biological activity that should help policymakers determine which forms of asbestos are the most dangerous," said Steven Lower, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and a co-author on the study.
"The hypothesis we're testing is that binding of cell surface receptors to asbestos fibers triggers a signal event, which initiates the cancer.
"There seems to be something intrinsic about certain types of asbestos, blue asbestos in particular, that elicits a unique signal, and it triggers inflammation, the formation of pre-malignant cells and, ultimately, cancer," added Lower, also a faculty member in the School of Environment and Natural Resources.
The researchers have revealed that the first protein to be studied is epidermal growth factor receptor, which is present on the surface of every human cell.
Lower said that understanding the intricacies of the binding process between the mineral and one or more proteins might provide an index of the biological activity of a particular type of asbestos, and lead the researchers to figure out how to prevent or undo that interaction.
Taylor said that the driving motivation behind the research was the potential to find a way to intervene and prevent illness even after someone was exposed to asbestos.

Protein expression predicts breast cancer survival in an unexpected way

Washington: A new research led by The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has revealed that the expression of the microtubule-binding protein Tau is not a reliable means of selecting breast cancer patients for adjuvant paclitaxel chemotherapy.
In the study, the researchers found that Tau expression does predict survival, yet in an unexpected way.

In previous neoadjuvant studies, researchers from M. D. Anderson found that low levels of Tau predicted a good response to pre-operative chemotherapy.

In vitro studies had shown that down-regulation of Tau expression increased the sensitivity of breast cancer cell lines to paclitaxel.

Other studies suggested that high levels of Tau partially protect microtubules from paclitaxel binding and that low levels of the protein leave microtubules more accessible and vulnerable to the drug.

'If you treat patients who have a low level of Tau protein expression with pre-operative chemotherapy in neo-adjuvant studies, they are very likely to have a good response to the chemotherapy. We wanted to see if this correlation would hold up in predicting survival in adjuvant studies,' said Lajos Pusztai, M.D., D. Phil, associate professor of medicine in the Department of Breast Medical Oncology at M. D. Anderson and the study's first author.

In collaboration with researchers at the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP), the investigators assessed Tau protein expression in primary breast cancer specimens from 1,942 patients in the NSABP-B28 clinical trial.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the prognostic value of Tau in these patients, who were treated with four courses of doxorubicin/cyclophosphamide (AC) or AC followed by four courses of paclitaxel. All hormone receptor-positive patients in the trial also received adjuvant endocrine therapy.

The hypothesis was that patients whose tumours expressed low levels of Tau would preferentially benefit from the addition of paclitaxel to their adjuvant regimen, Pusztai explained.

Univariate and multivariate analyses found that both Tau-positive status (high Tau expression) and estrogen receptor (ER) -positive status were associated with better disease-free and overall survival.

However, the researchers found no significant correlation between Tau expression and benefit from paclitaxel in the total population or among estrogen receptor (ER) -positive or ER-negative patients.

'We eventually found that Tau is very predictive of survival but in the opposite manner than we initially thought,' 'Low Tau expression was actually associated with a relatively poor survival despite a higher sensitivity to chemotherapy,' Pusztai said.

'On the other hand, patients with high levels of Tau-and we knew these patients were not particularly sensitive to chemotherapy-actually did very well. They had a significantly better survival in this large randomized study,' he added.

The study has been presented at the CRTC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Contraceptive Methods affect Women's Sexual Pleasure & Satisfaction

Washington: A new study has shown that contraceptive methods can have a significant impact on women's sexual pleasure and satisfaction.
The researchers from The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University have found that many women think condoms decrease sexual pleasure.
On the other hand, those who use both hormonal contraception and condoms report higher overall sexual satisfaction.
"The public health community has paid little attention to women's sexual experiences with contraceptive methods, especially condoms," said Stephaine Sanders, associate director of The Kinsey Institute and a co-author of the study.
"If women think condoms detract from sexual pleasure, they may be less inclined to use them consistently," she added.
During the study, women admitted condoms make sex less pleasurable, while those who used only hormonal methods-such as the birth control pill-were unlikely to associate their method with decreased sexual pleasure.
When asked about the effect of contraceptives on sexual enjoyment, women who used condoms either alone or with hormonal methods reported decreased sexual pleasure.
However, while considering overall sexual satisfaction, which goes beyond the immediate sexual moment and includes factors such as sexual self-esteem and relationship satisfaction, women who used both condoms and hormonal methods reported the highest levels of sexual satisfaction.
The findings revealed that only 4 percent of women who relied on hormonal methods of contraception reported decreased pleasure, but hormonal users reported the lowest overall sexual satisfaction scores.
While 23 percent of women who used both condoms and hormonal methods reported decreased pleasure, they had the highest sexual satisfaction scores.
Women who used condoms alone or along with a hormonal method were six to seven times more likely to report decreased sexual enjoyment compared to those who used hormonal methods only. [From Internet]

Women likely to miscarry if exposed to cigarette smoke

Washington, Dec 6: Women exposed to cigarette smoke, either as adults or children, are more likely to face fertility problems and suffer miscarriages.
An analysis of more than 4,800 non-smoking women showed those who were exposed to cigarette smoke six or more hours a day as children and adults, faced a 68 percent greater chance of facing difficulties in getting pregnant and suffering one or more miscarriages. "These statistics are breathtaking and certainly point to yet another danger of second hand smoke exposure," said Luke J. Peppone, assistant professor at Rochester University's James P. Wilmot Cancer Centre. In the study, four out of five women reported exposure to second hand smoke during their lifetime. Half of the women grew up in a home with parents who smoked and nearly two-thirds of them were exposed to some second hand smoking at the time of the survey.

More than 40 percent of these women had difficulty getting pregnant (infertility lasting more than a year) or suffered miscarriages, some repeatedly, according to a Rochester release.

"We all know that cigarettes and second hand smoke are dangerous. Breathing the smoke has lasting effects, especially for women when they're ready for children," said Peppone, who analysed information in the Patient Epidemiology Data System, a well-studied resource that has yielded information on a variety of cancers.

Peppone analysed surveys collected from 4,804 women who visited Roswell Park Cancer Institute for health screenings or cancer care from 1982-1998. Each participant in this study reported that they had never smoked, and had been pregnant at least once or tried to become pregnant. Participants reported whether one or both of their parents smoked and if they lived with or worked with smokers as adults.

They also estimated the amount of time they were exposed to second hand smoke.Many of the women in the study grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, long before the surgeon general issued the first warning about the dangers of cigarette smoking in 1964. The study was published online in Tobacco Control.

Using cosmetics during pregnancy 'increase birth defect risk'

Melbourne: Pregnant woman have been warned against the use of cosmetics, for they could lead to birth defects.
The warning follows a study, which found that women exposed to high levels of hair spray during pregnancy were twice as likely to have babies born with a urinary tract defect.
It encouraged calls for a new European cosmetics labelling system that would mark out some products as off-limits to mothers-to-be.
The French Government declared last week considering such a labelling system for cosmetics.
"Women who are planning to conceive or who are in the first three months of pregnancy should look at what they are using," the Australian quoted Prof Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, as saying.
"The cosmetics industry needs to look at this and clearly label their products.
"Anything like this raises concerns, but I don't think people should panic," he added.