The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

What causes cataract
by Dr T.S. Sandhu
The human eye is much like a camera. Your eye has a clear lens through which light passes for you to see. Like a camera, when the lens of the eye is cloudy, not as much light can pass through the lens. Clouding of the human eye lens is called cataract. Cataracts cause a progressive, painless loss of vision.

Why is artificial blood so hard to make?
by Alok Jha
Because blood is made of many complex parts that serve specific functions. It's tough to reproduce each one properly. But Eishun Tsuchida, a biochemist at Waseda University in Tokyo, says he's solved the problem.

Aspirin can change your sexual behaviour
LONDON: Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs given to newly born rats change their sexual behaviour later in life. The drug interferes with the brain's sex-specific development, suggesting that they may also affect equivalent mechanisms in humans.

Male breast cancer on the rise
WASHINGTON: The largest study ever conducted on male breast cancer has revealed that its incidence is rising and that the disease is usually detected in men when the tumours are bigger.

Feeling sick? Your office loo might be to blame!
SYDNEY: A new survey conducted by The Food Safety Information Council indicates that the workplace with its dodgy canteens, a lack of handwashing and “tight buildings” could be a significant source of illness.

Liver transplants
WASHINGTON: According to a new research conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, the viability of transplanted livers can be improved by treatment with stored nitric oxide.

What causes cataract
by Dr T.S. Sandhu

Consult a specialist if you feel you have a cataract.
Surgery is the only way to treat it.
An annual eye examination is a must if you are over 40 years of age.

The human eye is much like a camera. Your eye has a clear lens through which light passes for you to see. Like a camera, when the lens of the eye is cloudy, not as much light can pass through the lens. Clouding of the human eye lens is called cataract. Cataracts cause a progressive, painless loss of vision.

When are you most likely to have a cataract?

The term age-related is a little misleading. You don’t have to be a senior citizen to get this type of cataract. In fact, people can have an age-related cataract in their 40s and 50s. But during the middle age, most cataracts are small and do not affect vision. It is after the age of 60 that most cataracts steal vision. Thus, one answer to the question what causes cataract would simply be: the body’s natural aging process.

What are its symptoms?

A cataract starts out small. It has little effect on vision at first. You may notice that your vision is blurred a little, like looking through a cloudy piece of glass.

A cataract may make light from the sun or a lamp seem too bright, causing glare. Or, you may notice when you drive at night that the oncoming headlights cause more glare than before. Also colours may not appear as bright to you as they once did.

As the cataract gets bigger and clouds more of the lens, you will find it harder to read and do other normal tasks. The word “cataract” means waterfall. For people with a ripe cataract, it is trying to see through a waterfall. Other symptoms include halos around lights, light sensitivity, double vision in one or temporarily improved near vision.

How is a cataract detected?

Although you might think you have a cataract, the only way to be sure is by having an eye examination. If an eye surgeon finds one, he can monitor it and advise you about future treatment.

How is a cataract treated?

It is treated with surgery. No other medical treatment has been found to either prevent or reverse senile cataract. However, tremendous advances have been made with surgical treatments.

With a success rate of over 95 per cent modern cataract surgery is the single most common treatment. The eye surgeon will remove your clouded lens and in most cases, replace it with a silicone lens. The procedure has become so routine that it is often performed as an outpatient procedure, like a visit to the dentist.

When should a cataract be treated?

When a cataract adversely affects the functional way a patient chooses to live, it is time for treatment.

What research is being done?

Research on the lens and age-related cataract is going on. It is being evaluated whether certain vitamins and minerals can prevent or slow the progress of cataract.

What can you do to protect your vision?

If you are over age 40, you should have an eye examination at least once in a year. This should include dilating your pupils. This means eye drops are put into your eyes to enlarge your pupils. Although a cataract can be detected, without dilating pupils, your eye surgeon can see the back of your eye better using this examination. Getting a good view of the retina and optic nerve is important in detecting eye diseases such as (glaucoma) and age-related changes in the retina.

— The writer is a senior eye consultant at Fortis Multi-Speciality Hospital, Mohali.

Why is artificial blood so hard to make?
by Alok Jha

Because blood is made of many complex parts that serve specific functions. It's tough to reproduce each one properly.

But Eishun Tsuchida, a biochemist at Waseda University in Tokyo, says he's solved the problem. Using yeast to artificially manufacture human blood proteins, he claims to have produced the world's first entirely synthetic red blood cells. The artificial blood — the latest hope in the long search for alternatives to donated blood — will undergo clinical trials in 18 months.

Hospitals always want as much blood as possible but there are risks that donations could be infected with CJD, hepatitis viruses or even HIV. "For a long time people have been trying to make replacements," says Sarah Middleton, chief executive of Haemostatix, a company that makes components for artificial blood.

So far, biotechnologists have looked at just one part of the puzzle. "When you need blood you need it for a particular purpose. You either need it to make a blood clot or you need it because you need more oxygen or fluid," says Middleton.

Each bit of the blood has its own problems. "The difficulty in making the red cell component is that you can't really make cells that easily," says Middleton. People have tried to make the oxygen-carrying part of blood, a molecule called haemoglobin, which is the main component of red cells.

These are made up from proteins called globins and haeme, a small molecule that actually carries the oxygen. "The reason that haemoglobin is in a red cell is because there are certain moderating influences within the red cell that make sure that that happens correctly," says Middleton. "The other thing is that haemoglobin is small: if you just have a single globin with haeme on it and you were to inject that into somebody, it would (go straight) through the kidneys and have no half life of circulation."

Producing globins on a large scale is also difficult. At the moment, they are made by inserting a gene into yeast and allowing the organism to make them slowly but surely. But it would be difficult to make globins on an industrial scale this way.

And where do you get the haeme from? The US firm Biopure has successfully made artificial blood from a polymer of artificial haemoglobin molecules and its makers claim it is more efficient than real blood because it absorbs and releases oxygen three times faster. It is also less viscous than real blood, so can flow past obstructions that could block normal red blood cells. But its haeme is extracted from cows' blood, and is unlikely to become popular in places such as Britain, where the fear of mad cow disease is still fresh. — The Guardian

Aspirin can change your sexual behaviour

LONDON: Aspirin and other anti-inflammatory drugs given to newly born rats change their sexual behaviour later in life.

The drug interferes with the brain's sex-specific development, suggesting that they may also affect equivalent mechanisms in humans.

It is believed that mothers taking so-called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) might pass on high levels to their baby through the placenta. The list of NSAIDs includes paracetamol (tylenol), aspirin and indomethacin (indocin), which prevents premature labour.

The researchers have, however, warned that until similar effects have been found in people, expectant mothers should not change their use of medication.

“I don't want to panic pregnant women,” The New Scientist quoted Margaret McCarthy, who carried out the study at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, US, with her colleague Stuart Amateau, as saying:

“I don't think we can say anything about humans based on this,” said Melissa Hines, an expert in the neural basis of sexual behaviour at City University in London.

Hines pointed out that hormonal changes associated with maternal stress in rats have been linked to changes in the sexual behaviour of their offspring but the same changes do not happen in humans.

The work is also a significant advance in the fundamental understanding of how testosterone masculinises the brain, said Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, US.

McCarthy and Amateau also identified a signalling molecule that links the testosterone signal telling the brain to “be a man” to changes in the brain. — ANI

Male breast cancer on the rise

WASHINGTON: The largest study ever conducted on male breast cancer has revealed that its incidence is rising and that the disease is usually detected in men when the tumours are bigger.

The findings suggest that breast cancer in men may have some important biological differences from the female disease, and that men are seemingly less aware than they should be about being vulnerable to breast cancer.

According to the study's lead investigator, Sharon H. Giordano, assistant professor at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the incidence of the disease has increased significantly in the last 25 years. In fact, the ratio has increased to 1.08 per 100,000 men from .86.

“Male breast cancer is rare, accounting for less than 1 per cent of all breast cancers, or about 1,600 new cases in the United States in 2004. While it's not as high of an increase in cases as that in women, men should be alert to the possibility that the disease could affect them,” said Giordano.

To assess dissimilarity between male and female breast cancer, Giordano and her colleagues used information from a National Cancer Institute database called SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results).

“It's perhaps ironic that tumours in men are easier to feel than they are in women, yet the disease is being discovered at a later stage in men than in women,” said Giordano. — ANI

Feeling sick? Your office loo might be to blame!

SYDNEY: A new survey conducted by The Food Safety Information Council indicates that the workplace with its dodgy canteens, a lack of handwashing and “tight buildings” could be a significant source of illness.

According to The Sunday Times, the survey revealed that more than 30 per cent of Australian men do not wash their hands after going to the toilet, compared with 8 per cent of women. Of those who wash their hands, 80 per cent of women and 93 per cent of men do not wash them properly.

The researchers said that due to open-plan offices and tight use of building space, what’s produced in the building stays there, the exposing workers to a range of nasty bugs.

Foodlink in the UK says that bacteria such as e-coli can exist in washrooms for up to eight days. And simply flushing the loo drives the bacteria into the air and into workers' lungs.

According to Dr Vijay Jayasena, a public health expert at Curtin University, many bugs picked up in toilets did not make people sick immediately but could take weeks or longer to affect their health. — ANI