Iavante English Training Programme

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If you go blind in one eye you only lose about one fifth of your vision but all your sense of depth.

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The brain doesn’t feel pain: Even though the brain processes pain signals, the brain itself does not actually feel pain.

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By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Damage caused by a heart attack has been healed using stem cells gathered from the patient’s own heart, according to doctors in the US.
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The amount of scar tissue was halved in the small safety trial reported in the Lancet medical journal.
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The authors said there was also an “unprecedented” increase in new heart muscle.
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The British Heart Foundation said it was “early days”, but could “be great news for heart attack patients”.
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A heart attack happens when the organ is starved of oxygen, such as a clot blocking the flow of blood to the heart.
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As the heart heals, the dead muscle is replaced with scar tissue, but because this does not beat like heart muscle the ability to pump blood around the body is reduced.
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Doctors around the world are looking at ways of “regenerating” the heart to replace the scar tissue with beating muscle. Stem cells, which can transform into any other type of specialised cell, figure prominently in their plans.
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Heart to heart

This trial, at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, was designed to test the safety of using stem cells taken from a heart attack patient’s own heart.
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Within a month of a heart attack, a tube was inserted into a vein in the patient’s neck and was pushed down towards the heart. A sample of heart tissue, about “half the size of a raisin”, was taken.
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This was taken to the laboratory where the stem cells were isolated and grown. Up to 25 million of these stem cells were then put into the arteries surrounding the heart.
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Twenty five patients took part in the trial. Before the treatment, scar tissue accounted for an average of 24% of their left ventricle, a major chamber of the heart. It went down to 16% after six months and 12% after a year.
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Healthy heart muscle appeared to take its place. The study said the cells “have an unprecedented ability to reduce scar and simultaneously stimulate the regrowth of healthy [heart] tissue”.
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One of the researchers Dr Eduardo Marban said: “While the primary goal of our study was to verify safety, we also looked for evidence that the treatment might dissolve scar and regrow lost heart muscle.
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“This has never been accomplished before, despite a decade of cell therapy trials for patients with heart attacks. Now we have done it.
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“The effects are substantial, and surprisingly larger in humans than they were in animal tests.”
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However, there was no increase in a significant measure of the heart’s ability to pump - the left ventricle ejection fraction: the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle.
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Prof Anthony Mathur, who is co-ordinating a stem cell trial involving 3,000 heart attack patients, said that even if the study found an increase in ejection fraction then it would be the source of much debate.
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He argued that as it was a proof-of-concept study, with a small group of patients, “proving it is safe and feasible is all you can ask”.
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“The findings would be very interesting, but obviously they need further clarification and evidence,” he added.
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Prof Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “It’s the first time these scientists’ potentially exciting work has been carried out in humans, and the results are very encouraging.
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“These cells have been proven to form heart muscle in a petri dish but now they seem to be doing the same thing when injected back into the heart as part of an apparently safe procedure.
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“It’s early days, and this research will certainly need following up, but it could be great news for heart attack patients who face the debilitating symptoms of heart failure.”
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By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Skin cells have been converted directly into cells which develop into the main components of the brain, by researchers studying mice in California.
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The experiment, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, skipped the middle “stem cell” stage in the process.
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The researchers said they were “thrilled” at the potential medical uses.
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Far more tests are needed before the technique could be used on human skin. Stem cells, which can become any other specialist type of cell from brain to bone, are thought to have huge promise in a range of treatments. Many trials are taking place, such as in stroke patients or specific forms of blindness.
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One of the big questions for the field is where to get the cells from. There are ethical concerns around embryonic stem cells and patients would need to take immunosuppressant drugs as any stem cell tissue would not match their own.
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An alternative method has been to take skin cells and reprogram them into “induced” stem cells. These could be made from a patient’s own cells and then turned into the cell type required, however, the process results in cancer-causing genes being activated.
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Direct approach
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The research group, at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, is looking at another option - converting a person’s own skin cells into specialist cells, without creating “induced” stem cells. It has already transformed skin cells directly into neurons.
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This study created “neural precursor” cells, which can develop into three types of brain cell: neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.
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These precursor cells have the advantage that, once created, they can be grown in a laboratory into very large numbers. This could be critical if the cells were to be used in any therapy.
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Brain cells and skin cells contain the same genetic information, however, the genetic code is interpreted differently in each. This is controlled by “transcription factors”.
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The scientists used a virus to infect skin cells with three transcription factors known to be at high levels in neural precursor cells.
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After three weeks about one in 10 of the cells became neural precursor cells. Lead researcher Prof Marius Wernig said: “We are thrilled about the prospects for potential medical use of these cells.
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“We’ve shown the cells can integrate into a mouse brain and produce a missing protein important for the conduction of electrical signal by the neurons.
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“More work needs to be done to generate similar cells from human skin cells and assess their safety and efficacy.”
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Dr Deepak Srivastava, who has researched converting cells into heart muscle, said the study: “Opens the door to consider new ways to regenerate damaged neurons using cells surrounding the area of injury”.
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“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),[2] the latter often called “the Great American Novel.”

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The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
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Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic. Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall…

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Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
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Erica Jong (née Mann; born March 26, 1942) is an American author and teacher best known for her fiction and poetry…

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It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.

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People who keep their brains active throughout life - performing brain-stimulating activities like reading, writing, and playing games - appear to have lower levels of the protein that forms brain clogging amyloid plaque. Amyloid plaque is used by doctors and researchers to characterize Alzheimer’s disease.
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While numerous studies have found associations between being physically and mentally active and having lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers in a study published in the JAMA Archives of Neurology produced brain scan images to show that lifelong mental activities are associated with lower levels of amyloid deposits in the brain. The study was supported by grants from the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institutes of Health.
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Lead author Susan Landau of U.C. Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, explained that previous studies have shown more cognitive activity associated with a smaller likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease, but that they didn’t use amyloid PET imaging. She noted that previous studies looked at amyloid in the subjects’ brains and “targeted a biological process,” showing an association between life long cognitive activity and decreased amyloid deposits in the brain.
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The researchers studied a small group that included 65 healthy adults, ages 50 and older, 10 adults with Alzheimer’s disease (recruited from the Memory and Aging Centre at UCSF), and 11 younger control subjects, ages 20 to 30. Participants completed mental tests and were interviewed about how often they engaged in mentally challenging activities throughout their lifetimes.
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Subjects’ brains were imaged using PET scans and Pittsburgh Compound B, a radioactive compound that allows the imaging of amyloid plaques in the brain. While using this type of imaging was useful for this study, professor Landau explained that it’s not feasible for use in a typical medical office or hospital setting because the substance must be mixed by a chemist and injected into patients immediately to prevent deterioration of the substance. So while the researchers could use the compound in their carefully controlled study, it’s not something that is readily available.
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When the researchers ran the data for lifetime cognitive activity, lifetime physical activity with brain imaging results, the most significant association was between past cognitive activity and lower amyloid deposits. They did not find a significant association between physical activity and brain deposits, but Landau concedes that their method of assessing physical activity - using the past two weeks, may have had an effect on their results.
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“The key thing is that this isn’t a study of Alzheimer’s patients. It’s important for a bunch of reasons,” Landau explained, “Once you have Alzheimer’s with an accumulation of amyloid, it’s too late to reverse, so trying to figure out what you can do at the earliest stages is important.”
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“In completely healthy older people about a third of them have amyloid, healthy, no memory problems,” she said, “and the thinking is that they’re probably at much higher risk than normal people without [amyloid deposits]” Landau says that understanding why some healthy people don’t seem to be impaired, even with deposits, is “the million dollar question”.
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While other Alzheimer’s research has looked at brain volume and genetic factors, unravelling the findings on brain activity and deposits is something that Landau says she hopes will spur more research that will reveal how to prevent or eliminate brain deposits. She also said that research is being done to devise brain imaging methods that could allow doctors and researchers to more easily see what is going on inside our brains.
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