Researchers have long known that the “sunshine vitamin” boosts bone strength by encouraging the body to absorb calcium. But a slew of new studies published in 2007 suggests that the vitamin has a lot of other benefits:Diets high in D may ward of diabetes , gum diseases and multiple sclerosis- and may even cancer. Though some findings linking vitamin D and cancer showed questionable benefit, the news on colon cancer was promising. In one large trial , men in the Health Professionals Follow -Up Study and women in the Nurses’ Health Study with the highest blood levels of vitamin D were half as likely to develop colon cancer as their peers with less circulating vitamin D. To squeeze the most value out of vitamin D, aim for taking a supplement with 1,0000IU daily.
Dyspnoea or breathlessness can be defined as the unpleasant subjective awareness of sensation of breathing. It is the common symptom of the cardiac disease and the respiratory disease. In physiological terms, the patients usually perceive discomfort either from the increased ventilatory rate or drive, that can be provoked by the variety of factors or from a disease that causes enough reduction of ventilatory capacity. Other factors, including stimulations of J receptor leading to the amplification of ventilatory response in asthma or restrictive disorders, can also contribute.
It is obvious that diseases having dyspnoea may have a multifacteral etiology e.g., acute respiratory infections can stimulate respiratory rate as a result of fever, hypoxaemia and in serious cases, by acidoemia or hypercapnia. They can also reduce ventilatory capacity by increasing the bronchial resistance and also by restricting the ventilation because of pleural pain.
Different diagnosis in Patients with chronic Exertional Dyspnoea: -
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): -Very often there is a history of exertional dyspnoea over many years or months, with steady chronic decline exercise capacity. Chronic persistence cough and the daily production of sputum is the common rule and they can be a history of recurrent acute exacerbations of bronchitis. Wheezing on exercise can be prominent. In the late disease, especially if corpulmonale develops, orthopnoea, nocturnal breathlessness and ankle swelling many also supervene.
On Investigation, cyanosis may be at rest or on the trivial exertion, together with the expiratory wheeze, pursing of lips and intercostals indrawing, Antero-posterior diameter of chest may be increased and they may also be a reduced crico-sternal distance with ‘tracheal tug’ on inspiration. Chest radiograph shows signs of hyperinflation and bullae, arterial blood gases may expose hypoxaemia, hypercapnia and the raised plasma bicarbonate. There will often be the severe obstructive defeat on the spirometry which may or may not improve after the inhaled bronchodilators.
Heart Disease: - Sometime it is difficult to differentiate dyspnoea due to the heart disease. History of cough, wheezing and the nocturnal breathlessness may also occur in the cardiac failure as well as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. History of angina or hypertension can be useful in implicating the cardiac cause. On investigation an increase in the heart size as judged by a displaced apex beat, the raised JVP and the cardiac murmurs may implicate cardiac disease. Chest radiograph and the ECG may provide the evidence of left ventricular or the arterial enlargement. Read more…
With the immense success of Ayurveda and Yoga, India is taking a proactive lead in creating a healthcare system with the potential to bring affordable modern pharmaceutical products to every ailing person whatever financial status he/she has. The new initiative is called “Open Source Drug Discovery”. The term gained popularity with the rise of LINUX operating System and more recently, in Biology with the Human Genome Sequencing Project (HUGO initiative). Open Source is expected to providing better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost. It will bring an end to closed-door activities that substantially increase cost of drug discovery.
Open Source Drug Discovery is an initiative led by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The new method believes that drug discovery needs to move out from behind the closed doors of pharmaceutical companies to the open minds of the younger generations. It delivers the power of genomics and computational technologies into the hands of the young, the capable and motivated, enabling students, scientists, technocrats, universities, and corporations to work together. It is a de-centralized web-based global community-wide effort. The thrust is to bring down the cost of drug discovery significantly by knowledge sharing and constructive collaboration and to establish a novel open source platform for both computational and experimental technologies. By making drug discovery for infectious diseases, cost effective and affordable, OSDD could grow into a program that seeks to find cures for diseases that affect the world’s poorest of the poor.
The entire process of drug discovery is resource-extensive and the necessity of safeguarding Intellectual Property Rights, maintaining confidentially of drug development and overheads, etc substantially raises costs. Any pharmaceutical company seeking to launch a new drug therefore actively works to guarantee profitable sales. So pharmaceutical companies lend to favor the disorders and disease that state the affluent countries. Very few companies venture into the realm of diseases of the poverty stricken third world. They turn to diseases like malaria, leishmaniasis, and tuberculosis. Currently, there are only a fraction of drugs under clinical testing for TB as compared to those for cancer. Actually pharmaceutical companies hesitate in investing in diseases of the third world primarily due to the small market size represented by potential buyers. The discovery of development of a new drug costs approximately USD 250-800 million and takes about 12 years on an average. Developing economies simply don’t represent the market. These companies seek for a profitable return of their investments. For infectious diseases like TB, the market size is only about USD 300m – not a lucrative enough margin of profit. However, TB patients still await a good fast acting drug, or even a vaccine that confers long lasting protection. There are still far too few compounds that represent new chemical classes with novel mechanisms of action and a low probability of encountering drug resistance. The lack of drugs exacerbates an already desperate situation. Read more…
I have been trying for long to try and release a Word Press Theme for Free to the health blogging fraternity. Finally, I could lay my hand on one of the themes that I think is dedicated especially to the health industry and caters to health blogs.
The theme is very simple and contains most Web2 blogging characteristics such as -
* Valid XHTML and CSS
* adsense Ready
* social bookmarking ready
* Fixed width
* 3 column
* Chrome 0.3, Firefox 3.0.1, MSIE 7.0
* White and Blue
* customizable header
