Researchers found that around one in three people actually feel physical discomfort when they see someone else in agony.

The findings could explain why some people are more empathetic to other people's misery.

Dr Stuart Derbyshire, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham, made the discovery after inviting 123 university students to watch video clips and photographs of patients and sports stars in painful situations.

The videos included a footballer breaking his leg, a tennis player turning over his left ankle and a patient getting an injection in the hand

All the students said that, for at least one of the images or videos, they had an "emotional reaction" - such as feeling sad, disgusted or fearful.

But a third, also claimed to feel real pain in the same part of the body as the victim they were watching.

Some experienced tingling or aching, others felt a heavy or stabbing pain. For some the pain was fleeting - others complained that it lasted for several seconds.

A picture of an athlete running on a racetrack with a clearly broken leg generated the most physical pain in the students, the researchers reported in the journal Pain.

The scientists then asked 10 of these 'hypersensitive' students to repeat the experiment while their brains were being scanned with fMRI - the functional magnetic resonance imaging used in hospitals.

The results were compared with the scans from 10 people who said they felt nothing while looking at the upsetting images.

The scientists found that while viewing the painful pictures, both groups showed activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotions.

However, those who said they felt physical pain showed greater activity in the parts of the brain that handle pain - suggesting that they sensations were genuine.

Women who take high-dose vitamin C supplements have a higher risk of developing age-related cataracts.

To look into the association of vitamin C supplements and incidence of age-related cataract, researchers examined 24,593 Swedish women, aged between 50 and 80 years. Overall, 59 percent of the 49 to 83 years old otherwise healthy women said they used a dietary supplement. Of these 5 percent only took vitamin C supplements and 9 percent took only multivitamins that contained about 60 milligrams of vitamin C. Of the 1,225 women who took only vitamin C supplements, 143 (nearly 13 percent) had cataracts removed during the study period.

By comparison, cataracts were removed in 878 of 9,974 women who did not use any supplements (roughly 9 percent) and in 252 of 2,259 multivitamin-only users (about 11 percent). Those who reported regular or occasional vitamin C supplementation of about 1000 milligrams per serving were about 25 percent more likely than those who did not take supplements to have age-related cataracts removed. Women who took extra vitamin C for 10 years or longer; or in combination with being 65 years and older, or taking hormone replacement or corticosteroid medications had even higher risk.

The higher cataract risk among the supplement users versus non-users remained evident in analyses that allowed for age by 5-year increments, waist size, education, smoking, alcohol drinking habits, and use of medications such as hormone replacement therapy.

However, the apparent link between vitamin C and cataract risk did not involve vitamin C obtained from fruits and vegetables. The results support cautious use of vitamin C supplements in healthy adults, especially women.

Public health experts suggest that for a country like India, where most of the rural population is illiterate, the pictorial warnings on the tobacco products should have bigger display area for more visibility and impact to discourage tobacco use.

The World Health Organisation has estimated that India has the second largest number of smokers in the world, after China, and nearly 17 per cent of the world's smokers.

According to Article 11 of WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the package health warning should cover at least 50 per cent of the cigarette pack. In India, the size of the warning was reduced from 50 per cent of the principal display area on both sides of the pack to 40 per cent on the front only.

"India has seen repeated setbacks in implementing improved package health warning. Pictorial warnings and images are meant to help users visualise the nature of tobacco - related diseases. The pictorial warning should be strong to be effective and should repel the user. But the government has often diluted the package health warnings," said Dr PC Gupta, director, Healis-Sekhsaria Institute of Public Health.

A new antibody-drug has shown promise in shrinking or halting the growth of breast tumours, say researchers.

The metastatic HER2-positive cancer had become resistant to standard therapies.

Lead researcher Dr Ian Krop from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that hybrid agent, called T-DM1, shrank tumours by 30 percent or more in 40 percent of women with confirmed HER2-positive cancers.

Another 13 percent had stable disease for at least six months, for a total clinical benefit rate of approximately 53 percent.

T-DM1 is comprised of the cell-killing drug DM1 and is chemically linked to the monoclonal antibody trastuzumab, which selectively binds to the HER2 growth signal receptor, which is highly overexpressed in HER2-positive breast tumours.

"The antibody binds to the HER2 protein on tumor cells and delivers the drug (DM1) selectively to them - but not to normal cells," Krop said.

"This allows us to deliver high doses of the chemotherapy directly to tumour cells. And at the same time, the antibody continues to block the HER2 growth signals," Krop added.

He said although patients experienced side effects that included nausea, fatigue and lowered platelet counts, these effects were typically mild and the drug in general was well tolerated.

The findings were presented at the 32nd annual CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. (ANI)

Although seen as a potential heart disease therapy, raising high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels by inhibiting activity of a transfer protein may not be effective, a new study suggests. Scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University and Boston University School of Medicine found an association between low plasma cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) activity and increased risk of heart disease in the Framingham Heart Study population.

CETP is a protein that shuttles cholesterol throughout the body, thus controlling the levels of HDL, low-density lipoprotein (LDL), and very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) in the blood. "Our findings differ from studies suggesting that inhibiting CETP activity would bring a cardiovascular benefit by raising HDL, the so-called good cholesterol credited with lowering the risk of heart disease," says senior author Jose Ordovas, PhD, director of the Nutritional Genomics Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA. "In a clinical trial testing that hypothesis, heart disease unexpectedly advanced in a surprising number of participants."

Based on those results, Ordovas and colleagues examined CETP activity in 1,978 Caucasian men and women with a mean age of 51 years and no history of heart disease. They analyzed 15 to 18 years of study visits looking for first cardiac events including heart failure, heart attack, angina, stroke and peripheral vascular disease.

"By the end of the follow-up period, 320 men and women had experienced their first cardiac event," says Ordovas who is also a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. "Participants with low CETP activity were 18 percent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than people with CETP activity above the median."

A more in-depth investigation of models eliminated the possibility that age, sex and common risk factors such as smoking, weight, diabetes, and cholesterol levels interfered with the findings. The results are published in the December 15 issue of Circulation.

The authors stress the preliminary nature of their data. "The relationship between CETP activity and HDL levels carries many unknowns, including the influence of genetics," Ordovas says, pointing to studies of some Japanese families. "Despite very low levels of CETP activities, they still have high heart disease risk. Other genetic studies question the inhibition of CETP, but there is not enough research to discount the possibility that raising HDL levels through CETP inhibitors may reduce the risk of heart disease," he adds.