Knowledge Update

Toronto, July 8 (IANS) Recent public education campaigns recommending home blood pressure monitoring may have inadvertently contributed to the rise in emergency visits for hypertension, a study says.

The findings do not suggest that home blood pressure monitoring should be discouraged. What it says is that high blood pressure in itself is not necessarily an emergency.

But aggressive home monitoring of blood pressure may be driving patients to emergency departments despite the lack of other emergency conditions, such as stroke.

"We encourage patients to monitor their blood pressure at home if they have been diagnosed with hypertension, but not every high blood pressure reading is an emergency," explained lead study author Clare Atzema from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

During the study period, between 2002 and 2012, in which visits to Ontario emergency departments for hypertension increased from 15,793 to 25,950 per year, the proportion of patients admitted to the hospital as a result decreased from 9.9 per cent to 7.1 per cent. 

Among the patients whose emergency department visit ended in admission to the hospital, the most frequent hospital diagnoses were stroke, renal failure and heart failure. 

"Stroke remains a huge killer and we do appreciate patients with hypertension being so conscientious about monitoring their readings," Atzema noted. 

The study was published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine, journal for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

"Patients should be aware that unless their high blood pressure coincides with symptoms of a medical emergency, such as chest pain, severe headache, nausea or shortness of breath, they probably do not need to visit the ER emergency room),” Atzema said.

"We of course encourage them to follow up as soon as possible with their regular physician. If there is any doubt, come to the emergency department: we would rather have you come without an emergency than stay home with one," Atzema pointed out.​

Tokyo, July 8 (IANS) A dead Japanese X-ray satellite has offered astronomers, including an Indian researcher, the capability to measure detailed dynamics of extremely hot gas in a distant cluster of galaxies -- allowing them to explore how galaxies form and evolve over time.

“Hitomi has revealed the tremendous scientific potential of next generation X-ray astronomy. This is only the first peek into a universe of discoveries. For instance, Hitomi was supposed to observe all kinds of growing black holes in order to learn how these ultra-dense objects grow and evolve," said Poshak Gandhi from the University of Southampton. 

However, the satellite suffered a fatal anomaly in March just one month after its launch. But before its untimely demise, its X-ray spectrometre was able to peer into the Perseus cluster of galaxies -- a collection of thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity located about 240 million light-years away.

Measurements of unprecedented data revealed that superheated gas at the cluster’s heart flows much more calmly than expected, given the amount of astrophysical action in the region.

The astronomers discovered that the hot gas was moving in the cluster at 164 km per second - enormous by human standards but surprisingly modest on cosmic scales. 

The results were recently published in the journal Nature. 

The study also indicated that turbulence is responsible for just four per cent of the energy stored in the gas as heat.

“Of course we had a programme planned to look at more clusters, and we would have carried on for the next few years had it only lived,” said Andrew Fabian from the University of Cambridge and a member of the Hitomi team. 

“It feels like the door has been briefly opened, showing us a new and exciting landscape - and it’s been slammed in our face again,” he added.

Led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Hitomi was launched on February 17 and made the Perseus observations on February 25 and March 4, weeks before suffering a mission-ending spacecraft anomaly on March 26.

The satellite's revolutionary Soft X-ray Spectrometre (SXS) provided 30 times the detail of the best previous observation. Hitomi’s SXS could measure the turbulence in the cluster to a precision of 10 km/second, whereas previous observations could only constrain the speed to be lower than 500 km/second.​

​Washington, July 8 (IANS) NASA is set to launch a new airborne mission to map the contours of the atmosphere as carefully as explorers once traced the land and oceans below.

The Atmospheric Tomography, or ATom, is the first to survey the atmosphere over the oceans, the US space agency said in a statement.

Scientists aboard NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory will journey from the North Pole south over the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand and then across to the tip of South America and north up the Atlantic Ocean to Greenland. 

ATom will discover how much pollution survives to the most remote corners of the earth and assess how the environment has changed as a result, the statement added.

"We've had many airborne measurements of the atmosphere over land, where most pollutants are emitted, but land is only a small fraction of the planet," said Michael Prather, an atmospheric scientist and ATom's deputy project scientist at University of California Irvine.

"The oceans are where a lot of chemical reactions take place, and some of the least well understood parts are hard to get to because they are so remote. With ATom we're going to measure a wide range of chemically distinct parts of the atmosphere over the most remote areas of the ocean that have not been measured before," Prather noted.

While the majority of the flight path takes the DC-8 over the ocean, the science team expects to see influence from human pollution that originates on land.

ATom's first flight is planned for July 28, a there-and-back trip over the tropics between Palmdale, California and the equator. 

On July 31, the mission begins its around-the-world trip lasting 26 days. It's the first of four deployments that will take place over the next three years in different seasons. 

The data collected will be used to improve atmospheric computer models used to predict future climate conditions into the 21st century as well as to provide checks and calibration in otherwise unreachable areas for several major satellite systems, NASA said.

The suite of 20 instruments aboard the DC-8 will measure airborne particles called aerosols and more than 200 gases in each sampled air patch, documenting their locations and allowing scientists to determine interactions. 

The science team will use ATom's collected data on the air's chemical signatures to understand where pollutants originate, and where and how quickly these climate gases react chemically and eventually disappear from the atmosphere.​

​London, July 7 (IANS) Sending low-frequency acoustic shock waves to injured muscles could speed up the healing process in the tissues, says an interesting study.

The Extracorporeal Shock Wave Therapy (ESWT) works by mechanically stimulating the tissue, which prompts stem cells to kick-start repair work.

"Our study indicates that shock waves increase the levels of chemical signalling factors in muscle tissue. These factors wake up "satellite" progenitor cells which gradually becomes new muscle fibres," said Angela Zissler, at the University of Salzburg in Austria.

For injuries like ligament and tendon damage, applying the low-frequency shock waves in ESWT has already proved to be a promising technique.

In the study, the team tested ESWT on rats and discovered that the procedure triggered muscle tissue to kick-start the self-healing process.

ESWT has good potential as a non-invasive therapy complementing or supplementing existing recovery regimes, said the paper published in the journal Society for Experimental Biology.

"This therapy only needs sessions of around 15 minutes, so easily complements traditional practices such as physiotherapy. Another bonus is that there are no side-effects to low-energy ESWT, unlike some other methods," Zissler explained.

In an ESWT session, shock waves are applied on the patient's damaged area at a low frequency (roughly 1 pulse per second).

These waves then focus a small amount of energy (less than 0.2 mJ/mm2) on the damaged area, without the need for using local anaesthetics.

This technique could also help injured athletes to return to training and be able to compete more quickly than just with traditional methods, the researchers concluded.​

​New York, July 7 (IANS) Combined impacts of volcanic eruptions in India and an asteroid impact in Mexico brought about one of the Earth's biggest mass extinctions that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, confirms a new study.

"It's quite likely both the volcanism and the asteroid were to blame for the ultimate mass extinction,” said one of the researchers, Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida.

"The Deccan Traps weakened the ecosystems before the asteroid slammed into the Earth -- it's consistent with an idea called the press-pulse hypothesis: a 'one-two punch' that proved devastating for life on Earth," Dutton noted.

Located in India, the Deccan Traps are one of the largest volcanic provinces in the world.

Dutton and her colleagues at the University of Michigan utilised a new technique of analysis to reconstruct Antarctic Ocean temperatures that support the idea that the combined impacts of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact brought about the mass extinctions 66 million years ago.

Their research, published in the journal Nature Communications, used a recently developed technique called the carbonate clumped isotope paleothermometer to analyse the chemical composition of fossil shells in the Antarctic Ocean. 

This analysis showed that ocean temperatures rose significantly.

The researchers linked these findings to two previously documented warming events that occurred near the end of the Cretaceous Period - one related to volcanic eruptions in India, and the other, tied to the impact of an asteroid or comet on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

To create their new temperature record, which spans 3.5 million years at the end of the Cretaceous and the start of the Paleogene Period, the researchers analysed the isotopic composition of 29 remarkably well-preserved shells of clam-like bivalves collected on Antarctica's Seymour Island.

The data showed two significant temperature spikes. 

The first corresponds to the eruption of the Deccan traps flood basalts. The other lines up exactly with the asteroid impact, which, in turn, may have sparked a renewed phase of volcanism in India. 

Intriguingly, both events are associated with extinction events of nearly equal magnitude on Seymour Island, Antarctica, the study said.​

​New York, July 7 (IANS) Genetics, effects on early development and social learning are some factors that can increase the risk of chronic pain transmitting from parent to children, researchers suggest.

According to a report in the journal PAIN, the researchers identified some plausible mechanisms to explain the transmission of chronic pain from parent to child. 

Genetic is a factor, which the research suggests, may account for roughly half of the risk of chronic pain in adults.

The study, conducted by Amanda Stone of Vanderbilt University and Anna Wilson of Oregon Health & Science University in the US also revealed that having a parent with chronic pain may affect the features and functioning of the nervous system during critical periods in early development.

"The outlined mechanisms, moderators, and vulnerabilities likely interact over time to influence the development of chronic pain and related outcomes in offspring of parents with chronic pain," the researchers said.

Parents' physical activity level and adverse effects from growing up in stressful circumstances are also related to increase in transfer of chronic pain, the study said

​New York, July 7 (IANS) Those who live exceptionally long lives lead a much healthier life, suggests new research. It found the onset of illness came decades later in life for centenarians than those not blessed with longevity.

The findings in a study of nearly 3,000 people contradict the notion that the older the people get, the sicker they become and the greater the cost of taking care of them.

"Most people struggle with an ever-increasing burden of disease and disability as they age," said study leader Nir Barzilai, Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

"But we found that those who live exceptionally long lives have the additional benefit of shorter periods of illness -- sometimes just weeks or months -- before death," Barzilai said.

The study appeared in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The data for the study was collected from two studies with participants from North America, England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Analysis revealed a consistent pattern of delayed onset of illness in the centenarian groups compared to their respective comparison groups.

The findings suggest that discoveries made in one group of centenarians can be generalised to diverse populations. ​

New York, July 7 (IANS) Air pollutants interact with and break down plant-emitted scent molecules, which insect pollinators such as bees use to locate needed food, says a new study.

The pollution-modified plant odours can confuse bees and, as a result, bees' foraging time increases and pollination efficiency decreases, the study said.

This happens because the chemical interactions decrease both the scent molecules' life spans and the distances they travel.

While foraging for food, insects detect floral scent molecules in the air. Wind currents can carry these molecules up to thousands of feet from their original source to where bees have their hives.

"Many insects have nests that are up to 3,000 feet away from their food source, which means that scents need to travel long distances before insects can detect them," said Jose Fuentes, Professor at Pennsylvania State University in the US.

Plant-emitted hydrocarbons break down through chemical interactions with certain air pollutants such as ozone. 

This breakdown process results in the creation of more air pollutants, including hydroxyl and nitrate radicals, which further increase the breakdown rate of plant odours.

The researchers sought to understand how these chemical interactions, which start with the presence of air pollutants, would impact bees' ability to find food. 

The researchers ran 90,000 simulations representing various bees' foraging and movement patterns amid differing scent levels modified by air pollution and diluted by wind speeds.

The team reported in the journal Atmospheric Environment that, as air pollution increases, hydrocarbons' lifetime and travel distance decreases. 

The changes in air chemistry impacted the number of bees able to detect food sources in a given time frame. 

"We found that when we confused the bees' environment by modifying the gases present in the atmosphere, they spent more time foraging and would bring back less food, which would affect their colonies," Fuentes said. ​

​Sydney, July 6 (IANS) Children who have Type-1 diabetes can improve their cardiovascular health simply by taking an extra 1,000 steps a day, according a new research.

Keeping count of daily steps and boosting physical activity can really pay off for children with Type-1 diabetes, the findings showed. 

For the study, the researchers tracked the daily physical activity of 90 pre- to early-teenage children with Type-1 diabetes and found that those who undertook additional physical activity showed improvements in their blood vessel structure and other reductions in risk factors for heart disease.

"Children with Type-1 diabetes often report lower physical activity levels than recommended for children of the same age. We also tend to see early signs of atherosclerosis - a build up of plaque in the arteries - and other adverse cardiovascular risks at an earlier age than usual for these children," said lead author Alexia Pena from University of Adelaide in Australia.

The research team found that 55 per cent of the children took fewer than 10,000 steps per day.

The results were published online in the journal Diabetes Care.

"There were clear correlations between artery thickness and the average number of steps per day. With an increase of 1000 steps each day, we saw a measurable decrease in this arterial thickness," Pena added.

The report also suggested that in the children who had extra physical activity, saw reductions in weight, blood pressure and trigylcerides, which indicates an overall reduction in risk of heart disease.​

New York, July 7 (IANS) People with anger issues tend to misunderstand the intentions of other people and they also do not take in all the data from a social interaction, such as body language, because of decreased connectivity between regions of the brain that process a social situation, a study says.

People with intermittent explosive disorder (IED), or impulsive aggression, have a weakened connection between regions of the brain associated with sensory input, language processing and social interaction, the findings showed.

In a new study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the scientists showed that white matter in a region of the brain called the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) has less integrity and density in people with anger issues than in healthy individuals and those with other psychiatric disorders. 

The SLF connects the brain's frontal lobe--responsible for decision-making, emotion and understanding consequences of actions--with the parietal lobe, which processes language and sensory input.

"It's like an information superhighway connecting the frontal cortex to the parietal lobes," said lead author of the study Royce Lee, Associate Professor at University of Chicago in the US. 

"We think that points to social cognition as an important area to think about for people with anger problems," Lee said.

Lee and his colleagues, including senior author Emil Coccaro, MD, Ellen C. Manning Professor and Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at Chicago. 

For the study, the researchers used diffusion tensor imaging, a form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that measures the volume and density of white matter connective tissue in the brain. 

Connectivity is a critical issue because the brains of people with psychiatric disorders usually show very few physical differences from healthy individuals.

"It's not so much how the brain is structured, but the way these regions are connected to each other," Lee said.