If you happen to be an overweight expectant mother, the chances are that you could be jeopardising the unborn baby's health for a lifetime, a new research has warned.



Women who were very fat during their pregnancy were 65 percent more likely to give birth to an extra large baby. The risk rose by more than two-and-a-half times for those who were considered to be obese, Daily Express reported.



The latest research was conducted to highlight the dangers to both mother and baby of a woman being overweight when she becomes pregnant.



The study of almost 10,000 mothers, who did not develop gestational diabetes, revealed that those who were overweight while expecting were 65 percent more likely to give birth to a large child.



Earlier studies had shown heavier women were more likely to miscarry healthy babies, develop blood clots and have a child more prone to obesity and a raft of health problems such as diabetes and heart problems.

A diet enriched with olive oil can help preserve bone strength, a new study has claimed.

Researchers from Hospital Dr Josep Trueta in Girona, Spain found that consumption of a Mediterranean diet enriched with olive oil for two years is associated with increased bone formation markers, suggesting a protective effect on bone.

"The intake of olive oil has been related to the prevention of osteoporosis in experimental and in vitro models," Jose Manuel Fernandez-Real, lead author of the study said.

"This is the first randomised study which demonstrates that olive oil preserves bone, at least as inferred by circulating bone markers, in humans," Jose said in a statement.

The participants in this study were 127 community-dwelling men aged 55 to 80 years randomly selected from one of the Prevencion con Dieta Mediterranea (PREDIMED) study centres who had at least two years of follow-up.

Participants were randomly assigned to three intervention groups: Mediterranean diet with mixed nuts, Mediterranean diet with virgin olive oil, and a low-fat diet.

Biochemical measurements of osteocalcin, glucose, total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol and triglycerides were performed at baseline and after two year follow-up on fasting blood samples.

Researchers found that only consumption of the Mediterranean diet with olive oil was associated with a significant increase in the concentrations of total osteocalcin and other bone formation markers.

There were also no significant changes in serum calcium in subjects taking olive oil whereas serum calcium decreased significantly in the other two groups.

The study will be published in the Endocrine Society`s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM).

India Tuesday announced that the country had witnessed a sharp decline in the number of new HIV cases -- a 56 percent drop -- in the past 10 years.

"HIV infections have declined by 56 percent during the last decade from 2.7 lakh in 2000 to 1.2 lakh in 2009 in our country," Indian Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the national capital.

"This has been possible due to political support at the highest levels to the various interventions under National AIDS Control Programme, including Parliamentarians and elected leaders at the state and local levels and cooperation received from NGOs, civil society, etc." the minister said while addressing an international HIV vaccine symposium.

Expressing similar sentiments, Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Ashwani Kumar said that the government believes that the new HIV infections could be significantly reduced if effective prevention programs are expanded and reach those at greatest risk of HIV infection.

In fact, HIV -- which causes AIDS -- was detected in India nearly 25 years back.

Though more than 2 million people are affected by the virus, India is said to be one of the few countries which has actually made significant reductions in HIV infections. The country's HIV- AIDS prevention model has been even lauded by United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon.

Scientists have developed a new technique to detect tuberculosis bacteria which survive the treatment, paving the way for effectively treating TB bacilli resistant to antibodies.

Researchers from the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine have created a simple technique of Fluorescein diacetate staining, which only stains living tuberculosis bacilli (and not dead ones) which can immediately tell if resistant bacilli survived after treatment.

Tuberculosis bacilli have become resistant against major antibiotics. According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, only 11 per cent of multiresistant cases were discovered in 2009.

Checking smears under the microscope still is the recommended technique for TB screening, but it cannot differentiate between living and dead bacilli.

It is therefore not clear whether you are looking at the cadavers of a successful treatment, or at resistant survivors. Only if the numbers after a long wait still don't fall, you know you are dealing with a resistant strain. But all that time the patient has remained contagious, the researchers said in a statement.

Armand Van Deun and colleagues in Bangladesh gave a new application to a forgotten technique: vital staining with fluorescein diacetate (FDA). It only stains living TB bacilli, so one immediately sees those bacilli escaping treatment.

The scientists improved the detection of the luminous bacilli by replacing the classical fluorescence microscope with its LED counterpart.

This simple test allows, also in resource-limited labs, to detect a high number of resistant TB bacilli that otherwise would have been discovered too late or not at all.

The study was published in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

Scientists claim high levels of iron may be one reason why eating red meat raises the risk of bowel cancer.

Iron may switch on the disease process via a faulty gene in the gut which would normally resist the disease.

Red meat contains large amounts of iron and is also known to increase the likelihood of bowel cancer.

The discovery could lead to new treatments that can 'mop up' iron in the bowel in people who develop cells affected by the defective gene.

In studies of mice, researchers found that susceptibility to bowel cancer was strongly influenced both by iron and a gene called APC.

When the APC gene was faulty, mice with a high iron intake were two to three times more likely to develop the disease.

Mice fed a low iron diet remained cancer free even if the gene was defective, but when it functioned normally, high iron levels did no harm.

Lead scientist Professor Owen Sansom, deputy director of the Cancer Research UK Institute in Glasgow, said 'We've made a huge step in understanding how bowel cancer develops.

'The APC gene is faulty in around eight out of 10 bowel cancers but until now we haven't known how this causes the disease.

'It's clear that iron is playing a critical role in controlling the development of bowel cancer in people with a faulty APC gene.

'And, intriguingly, our study shows that even very high levels of iron in the diet don't cause cancer by itself, but rely on the APC gene.'

Each year, more than 41,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with bowel cancer and around 16,000 die from the disease.

Previously, researchers have estimated that red meat contributes to around 17,000 cases of bowel cancer a year.

But this estimate was based on two different dietary factors thought to play a part in promoting bowel cancer because a substance called haem, which gives red meat its colour, can damage the lining of the colon, while burning meat produces cancer-causing compounds.

The latest laboratory study proposes another mechanism that, if confirmed in people, might help explain why people's risk of bowel cancer increases with age.

Over time, cells in the bowel would be increasingly likely to develop APC gene faults and thus react to iron in the diet.

Researchers say that when the APC gene doesn't work, iron is allowed to build up in the cells lining the gut.

This activates a genetic cancer 'switch' called wnt that causes cells to multiply out of control.

But consumption of iron also aids the growth of cells with defective APC over time, says the study published in the journal Cell reports.

In mice fed a diet with no iron, cells with a faulty APC gene were killed off and bowel cancer did not develop.

Mice with a fully functioning APC gene did not grow tumours even when fed high amounts of iron in their diet. In these animals, the wnt signalling pathway remained switched 'off'.

Co-author Dr Chris Tselepis, a Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Birmingham, said 'Our results also suggest that iron could be raising the risk of bowel cancer by increasing the number of cells in the bowel with APC faults.

'The more of these cells in the bowel, the greater the chance that one of these will become a starting point for cancer.

'We're now planning to develop treatments that reduce the amount of iron in the bowel and so could lower the risk of developing bowel cancer.

'We hope to start using these in trials in the next few years in people who are at a greater risk.'

Dr Julie Sharp, senior science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said 'Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK.

'These findings suggest a potentially effective way of reducing the chances of bowel cancer developing in people who are at high risk.

'Finding ways of 'mopping up' the iron that is in the bowel could have a real impact on the number of people who develop the disease.'