WASHINGTON: A study conducted by scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center has shown that people who consume low-carbohydrate diets depend more
on the oxidation of fat in the liver for energy than those on a low-calorie diet.

The researchers say that their findings may have implications for treating obesity and related diseases like diabetes, insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

\"Instead of looking at drugs to combat obesity and the diseases that stem from it, maybe optimizing diet can not only manage and treat these diseases, but also prevent them,\" said lead author of the study Dr. Jeffrey Browning, assistant professor in the UT Southwestern Advanced Imaging Research Center and of internal medicine at the medical centre.

Even though the aim of the study was not to determine which diet was more effective for losing weight, the researchers observed that the average weight loss for the low-calorie dieters was about five pounds after two weeks, while the low-carbohydrate dieters lost about nine-and-a-half pounds.

Glucose, a form of sugar, and fat are both sources of energy that are metabolised in the liver, and used as energy in the body. Glucose can be formed from lactate, amino acids or glycerol.

With an eye on finding out how diet affects glucose production and utilization in the liver, the researchers randomly assigned 14 obese or overweight adults to either a low-carbohydrate or low-calorie diet, and monitored seven lean subjects on a regular diet.

Advanced imaging techniques were used two weeks later to analyse the different methods, or biochemical pathways, the subjects used to make glucose.

\"We saw a dramatic change in where and how the liver was producing glucose, depending on diet,\" said Dr. Browning.

The researchers observed that participants on a low-carbohydrate diet produced more glucose from lactate or amino acids than those on a low-calorie diet.

\"Understanding how the liver makes glucose under different dietary conditions may help us better regulate metabolic disorders with diet,\" Dr. Browning said.

The team also observed that the different diets produced other differences in glucose metabolism, with people on a low-calorie diet getting about 40 percent of their glucose from glycogen, which is comes from ingested carbohydrates and is stored in the liver until the body needs it.

The low-carbohydrate dieters, on the other hand, were found to get only 20 percent of their glucose from glycogen. Instead of dipping into their reserve of glycogen, such subjects burnt liver fat for energy.

The significance of the findings lies in the fact that the accumulation of excess fat in the liver can result in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) -- a liver disease which is associated with metabolic disorders like insulin resistance, diabetes and obesity, and can lead to liver inflammation, cirrhosis and liver cancer.

\"Energy production is expensive for the liver. It appears that for the people on a low-carbohydrate diet, in order to meet that expense, their livers have to burn excess fat,\" Dr. Browning said.

Based on their observations, the researchers came to the conclusion that patients on the low-carbohydrate diet increased fat burning throughout the entire body.

Dr. Browning\'s team will next study whether the changes that occur in liver metabolism as a result of carbohydrate restriction could help people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

The current study has been published in the journal Hepatology.

WASHINGTON: A mild electrical stimulation of a specific brain area help people learn and perform a complex motor task better than those in control
groups, a new study has found.
Motor skills, which are used for activities from typing and driving to sports, require practice and learning over a prolonged period of time.

The findings could improve prospects of rehabilitation for people with traumatic brain injury, stroke and other conditions.

The study was conducted by researchers of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and Columbia University, New York City and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

During practice, the brain encodes information about how to perform the task, but even during periods of rest, the brain is still at work strengthening the memory of doing the task. This process is known as consolidation.

Participants were presented with a novel and challenging motor task, which involved squeezing a \"joy stick\" to play a targeting game on a computer monitor, which they practised over five consecutive days.

During practice, one group received 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and the other group received only a 30 second \"sham\" stimulation; tDCS involves mild electrical stimulation applied through surface electrodes on the head, and works by modulating the excitability, or activity, of cells in the brain\'s outermost layers.

In this study, NINDS\' Leonardo Cohen and his team directed tDCS to the primary motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement.

Over the five-day training period, the skill of the tDCS group improved significantly more that that of the control (sham) group, apparently through an effect on consolidation, said a NINDS release.

During the three month follow-up period, the two groups forgot the skill at about the same rate, but the tDCS group continued to perform better because they had learned the skill better by the end of training.

By IANS, New Delhi, Jan 9 - With only three percent cancer patients receiving pain management care in India, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences - has launched a no-pain policy to provide immediate relief to such patients.

The institute has adopted new pain relief guidelines with interventional therapies that are likely to provide relief to cancer patients from the chronic pain.

Through interventional therapies, the medication is surgically placed under the skin of the abdomen to deliver it directly to the fluid-filled area surrounding the spinal cord that carries pain signals to the brain.

\'About 75-85 percent cancer patients with chronic pain can be treated with oral morphine. However, some 10-15 percent patients react to morphine treatment and these interventional therapies can be boon for them,\' said Sushma Bhatnagar, professor for pain and palliative care at the Cancer Hospital of AIIMS.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 25 percent of cancer patients in the world die due to unrelieved pain and new guidelines are likely to acknowledge and manage chronic pain.

According to Bhatnagar, when a patient gets excessive side effects with oral morphine it is reasonable to directly target the spinal cord that carries pain signals to brain, thus providing an immediate relief.

\'The interventional therapies provide sustained pain control, less drug-related toxicity and possibly better survival for cancer patients,\' said G.K Rath, head of Cancer Hospital.

To make the medical fraternity across country aware about cancer pain management, the AIIMS is organising a three-day seminar \'Freedom from Pain\' starting Feb 13.

\'The seminar will provide opportunities to doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to have a good overview of pain management,\' Rath added.

By NIH/National Eye Institute, A compact fiber-optic probe developed for the space program has now proven valuable for patients in the clinic as the first non-invasive early detection device for cataracts, the leading cause of vision loss worldwide.

Researchers from the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) collaborated to develop a simple, safe eye test for measuring a protein related to cataract formation. If subtle protein changes can be detected before a cataract develops, people may be able to reduce their cataract risk by making simple lifestyle changes, such as decreasing sun exposure, quitting smoking, stopping certain medications and controlling diabetes.

By the time the eye\'s lens appears cloudy from a cataract, it is too late to reverse or medically treat this process, said Manuel B. Datiles III, M.D., NEI medical officer and lead author of the clinical study. This technology can detect the earliest damage to lens proteins, triggering an early warning for cataract formation and blindness.

The new device is based on a laser light technique called dynamic light scattering (DLS). It was initially developed to analyze the growth of protein crystals in a zero-gravity space environment. NASA\'s Rafat R. Ansari, Ph.D., senior scientist at the John H. Glenn Research Center and co-author of the study, brought the technology\'s possible clinical applications to the attention of NEI vision researchers when he learned that his father\'s cataracts were caused by changes in lens proteins.

Several proteins are involved in cataract formation, but one known as alpha-crystallin serves as the eye\'s own anti-cataract molecule. Alpha-crystallin binds to other proteins when they become damaged, thus preventing them from bunching together to form a cataract. However, humans are born with a fixed amount of alpha-crystallin, so if the supply becomes depleted due to radiation exposure, smoking, diabetes or other causes, a cataract can result.

We have shown that this non-invasive technology that was developed for the space program can now be used to look at the early signs of protein damage due to oxidative stress, a key process involved in many medical conditions, including age-related cataract and diabetes, as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer\'s and Parkinson\'s, said NASA\'s Dr. Ansari. By understanding the role of protein changes in cataract formation, we can use the lens not just to look at eye disease, but also as a window into the whole body.

The recent NEI-NASA clinical trial, reported in the December 2008

By University of California - Los Angeles, It is well known that moderate drinking can have positive health benefits — for instance, a couple of glasses of red wine a day can be good for the heart. But if you\'re a senior in good health, light to moderate consumption of alcohol may also help prevent the development of physical disability.

That\'s the conclusion of a new UCLA study, available in the online edition of the American Journal of Epidemiology, which found that light to moderate drinking among these seniors reduced their odds of developing physical problems that would prevent them from performing common tasks such as walking, dressing and grooming.

\"If you start out in good health, alcohol consumption at light to moderate levels can be beneficial,\" said lead study author Dr. Arun Karlamangla, an associate professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. \"But if you don\'t start out healthy, alcohol will not give you a benefit.\"

The researchers based their study on data from three waves of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey\'s Epidemiologic Follow-up Study (1982��, 1987 and 1992). The sample, which included 4,276 people split evenly between male and female, was about 92 percent white, with a mean age of 60.4 years.

Drinkers were classified as light to moderate if they consumed less than 15 drinks per week and less than five drinks per drinking day (less than four per day for women). Heavy drinkers were those who consumed 15 or more drinks per week or five or more per drinking day (four or more for women). Abstainers were those who drank fewer than 12 alcoholic beverages the previous year.

Having a physical disability means having trouble performing, or being unable to perform, routine tasks such as dressing and grooming, personal hygiene, arising, eating, walking, gripping, reaching, and doing daily errands and chores. Participants were asked if they experienced no difficulty, some difficulty, much difficulty or were unable to do these activities at all when alone and without the use of aids.

At the start of the survey, 32 percent of men and 51 percent of women abstained from drinking, 51 percent of men and 45 percent of women were light to moderate drinkers, and 17 percent of men and 4 percent women were heavy drinkers.

No one had any disabilities at the outset, but 7 percent died and 15 percent became disabled over five years.

The researchers found that light to moderate drinkers in good health had a lower risk for developing new disabilities, compared with both abstainers and heavy drinkers.

In unadjusted analyses, light to moderate drinkers had a 17.7 percent chance of becoming disabled or dying in five years, compared with 26.7 percent for abstainers and 21.4 percent for heavy drinkers. Among survivors, the risk for new disability was 12.5 percent for light to moderate drinkers, compared with 20 percent for abstainers and 15.6 percent for heavy drinkers.

However, after controlling for confounding variables such as age, smoking, exercise, heart attacks and strokes, the benefits of alcohol consumption were seen only in seniors who rated their health as good or better: There was a 3 to 8 percent reduction in the odds of developing disability with each additional drink per week in older men and women in good or better health who were not heavy drinkers, but there was no such benefit seen in those who rated their health as fair or poor.

\"Light to moderate alcohol consumption appears to have disability prevention benefits only in men and women in relatively good health,\" the researchers wrote. \"It is possible that those who report poor health have progressed too far on the pathway to disability to accrue benefits from alcohol consumption and that alcohol consumption may even be deleterious for them.\"