The daily use of sunscreen significantly shows the ageing of skin, and also helps prevent skin cancer, a new study has suggested.

The world-first study of 900 young and middle-aged men and women showed that after four and a half years, those who applied sunscreen most days had no detectable ageing of the skin.

They also had 24 percent less skin ageing than people who used sunscreen only some of the time, if at all.

The study was led by Queensland Australian of the Year, Queensland Institute of Medical Research`s Professor Adele Green, in collaboration with investigators at the University of Queensland`s School of Population Health.

"This has been one of those beauty tips you often hear quoted, but for the first time we can back it with science: protecting yourself from skin cancer by using sunscreen regularly has the added bonus of keeping you looking younger," Professor Green said.

"And the study has shown that up to middle age, it`s not too late to make a difference."

The research - part of QIMR`s long-running Nambour Skin Cancer Prevention Trial - involved half of the participants regularly using SPF15+ sunscreen on their face, arms and hands and the other half using sunscreen in their usual way, if at all.

Silicone impressions, or moulds, were taken from the backs of all participants` hands at the start and end of the trial to grade the damage over the four and a half years of the study.

The participants were all aged under 55, to ensure that photo-ageing, rather than chronological ageing, was the major factor in skin changes.

"And of course, along with seeking shade and wearing clothing cover, sunscreen is a mainstay of sun protection. It prevents sunburn in the short-term and skin cancer in the long-term,` Professor Green said.

The study also tested the theory that beta-carotene supplements can prevent skin ageing.

"Our findings suggest that beta-carotene supplements do not influence skin ageing, although we can`t rule out the possibility of a small difference for better or worse. There would need to be further study into beta-carotene to rule out benefit or harm," Professor Green said.

The study was recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers have identified a key brain protein involved in cocaine addiction.

A new study conducted by a team of Indiana University neuroscientists demonstrates that GLT1, a protein that clears glutamate from the brain, plays a critical role in the craving for cocaine that develops after only several days of cocaine use.

The study showed that when rats taking large doses of cocaine are withdrawn from the drug, the production of GLT1 in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain implicated in motivation, begins to decrease. But if the rats receive ceftriaxone, an antibiotic used to treat meningitis, GLT1 production increases during the withdrawal period and decreases cocaine craving.

Ceftriaxone appears to block craving by reversing the decrease in GLT1 caused by repeated exposure to cocaine. In fact, ceftriaxone increases GLT1, which allows glutamate to be cleared quickly from the brain. The Rebec research group localized this effect to the nucleus accumbens by showing that if GLT1 was blocked in this brain region even after ceftriaxone treatment, the rats would relapse.

While an earlier paper of George Rebec, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, showed the effects of ceftriaxone on cocaine craving, the new paper was the first to localize the effects of ceftriaxone to the nucleus accumbens and was the first to show that ceftriaxone works after long withdrawal periods.

"The idea is that increasing GLT1 will prevent relapse. If we block GLT1, the ceftriaxone should not work," Rebec said. "We now have good evidence that ceftriaxone is acting on GLT1 and that the nucleus accumbens is the critical site."
Ceftriaxone is now in clinical trials on people with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig`s disease, which has many mechanisms in common with other neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington`s disease and Alzheimer`s.

The study has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

A new study has shown that the pattern of brain responses to words in 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder predicted the youngsters` linguistic, cognitive and adaptive skills at ages 4 and 6.

The findings are among the first to demonstrate that a brain marker can predict future abilities in children with autism.

"We`ve shown that the brain`s indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds already diagnosed with autism predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviors," said lead author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington`s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

"This is true four years after the initial test, and regardless of the type of autism treatment the children received," she said.

In the study, 2-year-olds - 24 with autism and 20 without - listened to a mix of familiar and unfamiliar words while wearing an elastic cap that held sensors in place. The sensors measured brain responses to hearing words, known as event-related potentials.

The research team then divided the children with autism into two groups based on the severity of their social impairments and took a closer look at the brain responses. Youngsters with less severe symptoms had brain responses that were similar to the typically developing children, in that both groups exhibited a strong response to known words in a language area located in the temporal parietal region on the left side of the brain.

This suggests that the brains of children with less severe symptoms can process words in ways that are similar to children without the disorder. In contrast, children with more severe social impairments showed brain responses more broadly over the right hemisphere, which is not seen in typically developing children of any age.
"We think this measure signals that the 2-year-old`s brain has reorganized itself to process words. This reorganization depends on the child`s ability to learn from social experiences," Kuhl said.

She cautioned that identifying a neural marker that predicts future autism diagnoses with assurance is still a ways off.

The researchers also tested the children`s language skills, cognitive abilities, and social and emotional development, beginning at age 2, then again at ages 4 and 6.

The children with autism received intensive treatment and, as a group, they improved on the behavioral tests over time. But the outcome for individual children varied widely and the more their brain responses to words at age 2 were like those of typically developing children, the more improvement in skills they showed by age 6.

In other studies, Kuhl has found that social interactions accelerate language learning in babies. Infants use social cues, such as tracking adults` eye movements to learn the names of things, and must be interested in people to learn in this way. Paying attention to people is a way for babies to sort through all that is happening around them and serves as a gate to know what is important.

But with autism, social impairments impede children`s interest in, and ability to pick up on, social cues. They find themselves paying attention to many other things, especially objects as opposed to people.

Kuhl hopes that the new findings, published in PLOS ONE, will lead to brain measures that can be used much earlier in development - at 12 months or younger - to help identify children at risk for autism.

A group of most commonly used drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) can increase long-term users` heart-attack risk by more than a third, a study has shown.

In the study, the researchers analysed 639 random drug trials and assembled information on more than 350,000 patients, and found that for every 1,000 arthritis sufferers, the rate of people who suffered a "major vascular event" like heart attack, stroke or death increased from 8 per 1,000 to 11 per 1,000 with long-term, high-dose use of common NSAIDs, the Independent reported.

These drugs have also been linked to illnesses like stomach ulcers.

A new generation of NSAID painkillers known as coxibs were introduced, which had a lesser risk of stomach pains, but they were widely linked to an increase in heart attacks, leading to public concern and withdrawal of the popular drug Vioxx from shelves in 2004.

The study`s authors believe that high-dose treatments with older NSAIDs could be as big a risk factor for heart attacks like Vioxx.

They said that all NSAIDs double the risk of heart-failure and produce a two- to four-times increased risk of gastrointestinal complications.

The study has been published in The Lancet medical journal.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified a new virus, similar to the dreaded Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, and has termed it as a `threat to the entire world`.

The SARS-like virus termed as MERS has killed 24 people so far, with more than half of 44 people diagnosed with the disease, the New York Daily News reports.
Terming the virus as a threat, WHO Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan, said that her greatest and immediate concern is that the new coronavirus is emerging faster than people`s understanding of its magnitude, adding that the virus cannot be managed or kept to itself by any single affected country.

Stating that WHO does not have necessary information about the virus like its origin and its mode of infection, Chan said that until the organization is capable of answering these questions, they cannot prevent the ever-spreading virus.

The report said that while the coronavirus causes the common cold, the new coronavirus, or MERS, has killed more than half of those who have been diagnosed with it.

Meanwhile, the report said that Dutch scientists have taken the unusual step of patenting the killer virus in an unusual move that might complicate finding a vaccine,.

However, the move has angered the WHO, according to Chan, who said that doing so is impeding the search for treatment, adding that WHO cannot allow making deals between scientists because of their personal wishes to take out intellectual property and publish in scientific journals.

But, the Dutch researchers said that they patented the virus in order to spark drug companies` interest in developing a vaccine and denied that they had kept the virus from anyone.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the symptoms of the virus includes fever, cough and shortness of breath.

Cases have so far been confirmed in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Tunisia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.