Butterbur is used normally to treat migraines, but it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids ingredient, which studies have shown to cause serious liver damage and organ failure. The MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) has urged British herbal shops to remove products from their shelves that containing butterbur, also known as Petasites hybridus.

At present products, which contain no ingredient of butterbur have been sanctioned for use in Britain under the Traditional Herbal Registration Scheme. A number of other European countries have also prohibited its use. But, the MHRA revealed that many products containing butterbur are presently being marketed in the UK.

Several cases of liver toxicity have been reported in other places in Europe. Therefore the MHRA advised people those using herbal remedies to check products for THR number on the label, which demonstrates that they have been licensed for use in UK.

Richard Woodfield head of herbal policy at stated they advised anyone taking these products to stop doing so. If you have any concerns, speak to your GP or pharmacist. If you think you have suffered a side effect from these products, can tell through the reporting system known as the Yellow Card Scheme.

When looking for herbal medicines, you should look for herbal products that have a traditional herbal registration or a product license so that you can be confident the product has been assessed as meeting appropriate safety standards, and has the necessary patient information. Some unlicensed herbal medicines can pose a serious risk to your health, concluded Woodfield.

For their study researchers from the Department of Pediatrics and Medicine at McMaster University in Canada, carried out a genetic analysis of samples of muscle tissue taken from study participants, who had worn-out themselves on exercise bikes. Researchers arbitrarily chose one of study participants’ legs to be massaged.

Then they took biopsy samples from both the legs prior to exercise, immediately after a ten minute of massage and after two and half hours of recovery. The results of the study showed that massage diminished the effect of cytokines, which are immune system’s signaling molecules contribute to inflammation.

Simultaneously, massage promoted the biogenesis of mitochondria. Researchers believe that reduction in pain linked with massage may involve the same mechanism which was employed by anti-inflammatory drugs. The study findings were published in an online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Study author Dr Mark Tarnopolsky stated the potential benefits of massage could be useful to a wide-ranging of people including the elderly, those suffering from musculoskeletal injuries and patients suffering chronic inflammatory disease. This study gives substantiation that manipulative therapies, such as massage, may be acceptable in medical practice.

The Royal Marsden NHS Trust is using massage therapy for cancer patients who are suffering problems such as relaxing or getting to sleep. A spokesman from the Trust sated massage therapy can help cope with pain, muscle stiffness, breathlessness, anxiety and fatigue.

Nearly ten percent of American will develop the problem of atrial fibrillation by the time they reach their eighties. The abnormality of heart beat can lead to stroke and heart failure. Few treatments are available to treat the condition and such treatments mainly focus on blood-thinning drugs.

A few earlier studies have recommended those individuals who eat plenty of fish have lower risk of developing atrial fibrillation. In latest study, a team led by Prof Dariush Mozaffarian, senior author from the Harvard School of Public Health, measured different type of omega-3 fatty acids such as EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), DPA (docosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid).

These fatty acids are found in oily fish and some enriched foods like eggs and fish oil supplements. To get more precise measurement of how much fish oil people should actually ingest, researchers taken blood samples of more than thirty-three hundred adult aged above sixty-five. For the next fourteen years, researchers tracked health of study participants.

They found that nearly eight hundred people developed atrial fibrillation. People with the top twenty-five percent omega-3 levels in their bloodstreams at the start of the study were about thirty percent less likely to end up with the arrhythmia compared to those with the bottom twenty-five percent omega-3 levels in their bloodstreams.

A diminution in risk by thirty percent would mean that instead of twenty-five out of every one hundred people developing a condition. Among the three omega-3 fatty acids, high DHA levels were associated with a twenty-three percent lower risk for atrial fibrillation, while EPA and DPA were not linked to any reduced risk.

The study was published in the journal Circulation. Prof Alvaro Alonso from the University Of Minnesota School Of Public Health, who was not occupied in the study, stated these are meaningful reductions in risk. The study does not prove eating fish is responsible for the lower rate of atrial fibrillation.

However, there is some idea that the fatty acids found in fish could work by stabilizing the excitability of heart muscle cells. The results seem promising enough to warrant further studies that experiment with how fish oil might be used as a potential preventive measure against the arrhythmia, concluded Prof Alonso.

The robot has a pincer to clutch cancerous tissues and a hook which shear them off and clots blood to stop bleeding. A tiny camera attached to an endoscope helps the surgeon to see what is inside the gut and controls the robotic arms remotely while sitting in front of a monitor screen.

The second leading cause of cancer deaths all over the world is stomach or gastric cancer, particularly common in East Asia. Diagnosis of gastric cancer usually happens at a late stage of the disease when treatment becomes difficult and often unsuccessful. The robot helped remove early-stage stomach cancers in five patients in India and Hong Kong.

Prof Lawrence Ho, an enterologist at Singapore’s National University Hospital, who helped design the robot stated, our movements are very huge and if you want to make very fine movements, your hands will tremble. But robots can execute very fine movements without trembling.

The removed an early-stage stomach cancers with the robot, using a fraction of the time normally taken in open and keyhole surgeries that put patients at higher risk of infection and leave behind scars. An associate professor Louis Phee helped design the robot with Ho. They developed the robot after a seafood dinner in Singapore.

Top Hong Kong surgeon Sydney Chung, suggested them to fashion their device after the crab as the crab can pick up sand and its pincers are very strong. Many things are a definite technique because they have evolved and adapted to certain functions. They created something that followed the human anatomy and borrowed ideas from nature and incorporated the two, concluded Prof Ho.

Now obesity is a bigger problem than starvation all over the world. Sugar not only makes people fat but also alters the metabolism of your body, increases blood pressure, harms liver and throws hormones off balance. Researchers indicate that the damage done by distilling sugar mirrors the damaging effect of drinking too much alcohol.

New strategies such as taxes are required to control soaring consumption of sugar and sweeteners, explained research team from the University of California. An article The Toxic Truth About Sugar stated a little is not a problem but a lot kills slowly. The article also reveals that consumption of sugar has tripled in the past fifty years.

According to lead author Robert Lustig, a childhood obesity expert, like alcohol, sugar is extensively available, toxic, easily abused and harmful to society. Governments need to consider major shifts in policy, such as taxes, limiting sales of sweet food and drinks during school hours, or even stopping children from buying them below a certain age.

The article published the journal Nature ends, these simple measures are taken for granted as tools for our public health and well-being. It is time to turn your attention to sugar. However, other researchers have portrayed the essay as puritanical, saying sugar is only toxic when eaten in impractical amounts.

While urgent action was needed to beat heart and other diseases, it was wrong to focus on sugar alone, explained Barbara Gallani, director of food safety and science at the UK Food and Drink Federation. The causes of these diseases are multi-factorial and demonizing food components does not help consumers to build a realistic approach to their diet.

The key to good health is a balanced and varied diet in a lifestyle that includes plenty of physical activity. Dr Laura Schmidt from California University stated they are not talking about prohibition and not advocating a major imposition of government into people’s life. They want is actually increase people’s choice by making foods that are not loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.

For their study, child psychiatrists and neuroscientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, conducted brain scans on ninety-two of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. They found school-aged children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus.

Hippocampus is a key structure significant to learning, memory and response to stress. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured, had a hippocampus almost ten percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. The study findings published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

According to study author Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry, the study emphasizes how important nurturing parents are to a child’s development. Public health implications suggest that people should pay more attention to nurturing. Parents should do what they can as a society to promote these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.

It is the first study that shows an anatomical change in the brain and is tangible evidence of powerful effect nurturing. Eelier studies had underlined the significance of an early nurturing environment for healthy outcomes for children, but majority of those studies have investigated psychosocial factors or school performance, believes Prof Luby.

Though ninety-five percent of the parents, whose nurturing skills were accessed during the previous study, were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same for any primary caregiver, whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents.

The fact that they found a larger hippocampus in the healthy children who were nurtured is striking. Parents should be taught how to nurture and support their children, which are very significant elements in healthy development, concluded Prof Luby.

In novel study neuroscientists from the University of California Berkeley put electrodes inside the skull of brain surgery patients to monitor information from their temporal lobe. Temporal lobe is occupied in the processing of speech and images. When patient listened to speaking then a computer program analyzed how the brain processed and regenerated the words it had heard.

Researchers believe that new technique could also be used to interpret and describe what they were thinking of saying next. The new technique was tested in fifteen people who were already undergoing brain surgery to treat epilepsy or brain tumours. About two hundred and fifty-six electrodes were put on to the brain surface.

When they listened to men and women saying individual words including nouns, verbs and names, then a computer programme analyzed the activity from the electrodes, and reproduced the word they had heard or something very similar to it at the first attempt. There is already growing substantiation that perception and imagery may be pretty similar in the brain, stated study co-author Brian Pasley.

Consequently with more research brain recordings could allow researchers to synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device. Their study also shows in sharp relief how the auditory system breaks down sound into its individual frequencies, added Pasley.

This study mainly focused on lower-level acoustic characteristics of speech. The study was reported in the journal PLoS Biology. Robert Knight, professor of psychology and neuroscience, added this is huge for patients who have damage to their speech mechanisms because of a stroke or Lou Gehrig’s disease and they cannot speak. If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands could benefit.

Researchers claim that the new gadget could help tens of thousands of patients to control hypertension devoid of taking endless medicines which have several unpleasant side effects. The RESPeRATE works by first checking breathing of a patient via strap tied around the chest. Then it generates a tune and patient takes breath in and out with certain notes.

Then, the music gradually slows down as does the patients’ breathing. Maker of the RESPeRATE claims that it has helped patients come off their medication. They advised hypertension patients to use the RESPeRATE for at least forty minutes a week with four sessions of ten minutes.

The normal person takes eighteen breaths in one minute, but to lower pressure you have to take ten or fewer, which is helped by the RESPeRATE. Millions of people worldwide have hypertension, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes. Many people are able to control it through diet and exercise.

However, others are forced to take a combination of drugs including ACE inhibitors, alpha blockers and beta blockers. In addition to that such medications have unpleasant side effects including swollen ankles, dizziness and tiredness. The new device will be available for GPs to prescribe to patients at a cost of £7.40 a time.

According to a spokesman from Blood Pressure Association, as with any adjunct therapy, it must not be used as a replacement for any treatments prescribed by a GP.

PPIs are used to cure ulcer, heartburn and reflux. For their analysis, researchers tracked about eighty thousand US nurses aged between thirty and fifty-five. The study included smoker or ex-smokers and were followed up in their later life to make out how many had developed hip fractures after the menopause.

They found that smoker or ex-smokers those taking PPIs (proton pump inhibitors) had an increased risk of hip fracture by fifty percent in comparison to women not taking PPIs. According to team of experts from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, unrelieved use of PPIs is linked to an increased risk of hip fracture, particularly among women who have a history of smoking.

It had been alleged for some years that use of PPIs the risk of hip fracture. But this large study corroborates that suspicion, explained Dr John Stevenson who sits on the medical advisory council of the British Menopause Society. Women should not be put off using PPIs if they are needed, but these results give yet another reason not to smoke.

However, the overall risk is small, because the use of proton pump inhibitors causing an additional five hip fractures per ten thousand women per year. The study findings were published in the British Medical Journal. The study had considered other aspects which could affect hip fractures, such as smoking, calcium intake and obesity, stated Dan Greer spokesman on gastroenterology medicines from Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

This study reinforces the existing recommendations for PPI use, in the majority of patients with symptoms of indigestion. PPIs should only be used for short courses say one to two months, with repeat courses offered at the lowest dose that controls symptoms, added Greer.

The new tablet is premeditated to re-tune the immune system so that it does not over-react when comes into mite droppings. This type of treatment is called as immune-therapy and works by repeatedly exposing the immune system to minute amounts of the protein. More than five million people in Britain suffer from asthma.

The new pill re-tunes the immune system so that it no longer interprets the proteins as a threat and does not trigger the histamine rush, which causes asthma attacks. The leading causes of wheezing and asthma attacks are house dust mites. They are small creates, related to spider family are of size less than half a millimeter and whitish in colour.

They flourish in dark and humid places. Because these mites fed on dead human skin, they can congregate in carpets, mattresses, pillows, clothing, upholstered seats and even in soft toys. Their droppings contain proteins which are touched or inhaled by someone who is allergic to them, triggers the immune system to produce antibodies that cause the large-scale discharge of chemical called histamine.

This rush of histamine leads to swelling and irritation of the airways, causing difficulty in breathing and asthma attacks. People, sensitive to dust mite droppings are advised to take preventative measures such as washing walls and floors using wet cloths and freeze even cloddy toys once a month to destroy any mites that might harbor.

In an initial trail involving more than six hundred asthma patients those allergic to house dust mites, were given new tablet. About one in three on the pill was able to stop using their inhaled steroids. Leanne Metcalf from Asthma UK stated, ninety percent of people suffering asthma often complain that dust triggers their symptoms, so this study is encouraging.

They know some people find inhalers difficult to use, and asthma medicines can have side-effects if taken in high doses or for a long time, so they look forward to when this research can be translated into an alternative treatment, concluded Metcalf.