Parkinson which is most often known as agerelated disorder wherein the cells in the brain start degenerating is being noticed in younger people as well.

On the World Parkinson Day on Monday, the city based neurologists working in this field reported that those between the age group of 40 to 45 years are also affected with this disease and there is a need to create awareness about it among the people.

"NIMHANS receives 200250 patients every year seeking treatment for Parkinson's disease. Among these cases, 25 per cent of them are between the age group of 40 to 45 with the onset of the disease and those who have the family history of the disease," Dr Pramod Kumar Paul, additional professor of Neurology, NIMHANS, said.

He added that the lack of awareness about the disease is one of the biggest problems because of which it is ignored most of the time.

Dr Paul said shaking of hands, progressive difficulty in writing as the alphabets becoming smaller, difficulty in walking, reduction in facial expressions, slow movement, sleep disturbance are some of the symptoms of this disease.

Besides, he also emphasised on the need to carry out study to know the statistics of the Parkinson's disease prevalence among the people in the country. Emphasising on the need of Parkinson groups, Dr Ravi Kumar Verma, head of Neurology, M S Ramaiah Medical College, said that there should be formation of more and more Parkinson groups working to help the affected people.

These groups should comprise all the people affected by the disease.

Such groups can discuss the new procedures, new developments in the filed, he felt.

"The disease only affects the physically mobility but the brain remains sharp and bright. Such groups help the patients to discuss the ways to deal with it and measure to stop further progressions," he added.

Middle-aged adults with diabetes die an estimated six years before those without diabetes, says a new study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

The reason I'm so concerned about this finding is that diabetes almost inevitably follows on from obesity, and as numbers of obese people rocket, it means we're going to be seeing people living shorter lives and dying from an array of illnesses.

This research is very relevant because it examined nearly a million people. Study leaders found a link between diabetes and an increased risk of death from a frighteningly wide range of diseases.

One of the illness groups was multiple cancers, another was digestive diseases and surprisingly, the third group showed that diabetes sufferers have more injuries and self-harm more than those without it.

The study also confirmed the well known link between diabetes and heart attacks, stokes and infections.

But most shocking of all is that the diabetics mainly had type 2 diabetes - the kind that develops when we become obese. If this isn't a wake-up call for us all to pay more attention to diet, exercise, our lifestyles and the way we feed our children, I don't know what is.

Many risk factors that we traditionally associate with early death, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking and drinking, did not have nearly the same effect as diabetes.

Risk of death went up in line with blood sugar levels in people with and without diabetes.

The damage is done by persistent high levels of blood sugar, which seep into the tissues and affect the whole body's metabolism, something it can't cope with for very long.

Women are particularly vulnerable - they lost almost seven years to diabetes at the age of 40.

The message is: you can't procrastinate in correcting obesity problems. They require immediate attention because these newly discovered, devastating effects of the condition simply cannot be ignored.

If we go on at this rate our overstretched NHS will end up looking after the side effects of obesity and little else.

A new study adds to growing evidence that regular use of painkillers like aspirin or ibuprofen may reduce a person's risk of developing colon or rectal cancers - sometimes by as much as 50 percent.

This latest report also shows that people with a family history of colon cancer - who are therefore at higher risk for the disease - also benefit from the pain relievers.

"The (risk) reductions that we saw here are not inconsequential," said Dr. Elizabeth Ruder of the National Cancer Institute, the study's lead author.

"But we're not at the point that one could make a public health recommendation" based on the findings, she added.

Colon and rectal cancers are diagnosed in about 48 out of every 100,000 people in the U.S., according to the National Cancer Institute.

Together, these "colorectal" cancers are the third-leading cause of deaths from cancer.

Previous studies have found that aspirin is tied to a smaller risk of colon cancer (see Reuters Health story of October 22, 2010).

The current study expanded on earlier research by including larger numbers of people and assessing where in the colon cancers occurred.

Using questionnaire data from more than 300,000 adults, Ruder's group analyzed how often people took any of 19 non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID) pain medications, which include aspirin, ibuprofen (Advil), naproxen sodium (Aleve), sulindil (Clinoril), and others.

The observed drop in cancer risk varied depending on how often people took the painkillers and the type of cancer in question.

Overall, taking any of the NSAID drugs was associated with a 20 percent drop in the risk of colorectal cancer over 10 years.

And the more frequently people took a drug, the less likely they were to be diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer.

Daily use of an NSAID was associated with a 28 percent drop in colon cancer risk, for instance, whereas monthly use was associated with only a 14 percent reduction in risk.

A similar pattern was seen among people with immediate family members who had been diagnosed with colon cancer: Daily users of NSAIDs saw a 28 percent drop in their risk of colon or rectal cancer, and weekly users had an 11 percent decline.

When the researchers looked at the site in the colon where cancers appeared, the drugs' effects were more pronounced, but distinctly different for aspirin versus non-aspirin NSAIDs.

Those who took aspirin daily, for example, had a 62 percent drop in rectal cancer risk, but their risk of colon cancer did not change.

In contrast, non-aspirin NSAIDs, taken daily, were linked to a 56 percent drop in risk of colon cancers farthest from the rectum (a region called the proximal colon), whereas the risk of rectal cancer was unaffected.

Ruder said it's unclear why there's a difference between the type of drug and the risk of developing a particular type of colorectal cancer.

One of the limitations of the study, the authors note, is that they didn't monitor how long people took the drugs.

The researchers also caution that they did not weigh the potential benefits of the drugs against their drawbacks.

"There's an elevated risk of gastrointestinal ulcers and bleeds" from taking aspirin, said Amanda Cross, an investigator at the National Cancer Institute and another of the study's authors.

"We're certainly not advocating that people take aspirin to reduce the risk of colon cancer," she told Reuters Health.

The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Dr. Andrew Chan, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the study, said it would be premature to offer any recommendations.

"I think what remains to be addressed," Chan said, "is, 'are there specific types of colon cancer that may be most likely to benefit from aspirin use, and who are the best patients to take aspirin?'"

Fewer studies supporting the use of non-aspirin NSAIDS in reducing colon cancer risk have been done, he added.

"This is an area of a lot of controversy," Chan told Reuters Health.

But the study is useful in backing up what doctors are beginning to realize, he said. "These are compelling data, which support (the idea) that aspirin use reduces the risk of colorectal cancer."

A gene that makes bugs highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday.

The NDM 1 gene, which creates what some experts describe as "super superbugs," has spread to germs that cause cholera and dysentery, and is circulating freely in other bacteria in the Indian city capital of 14 million people, the researchers said.

"The inhabitants of New Delhi are continually being exposed to multidrug-resistant and NDM 1-positive bacteria," said Mark Toleman of Britain's Cardiff University School of Medicine, who published the findings in a study on Thursday.

A "substantial number" of them are consuming such bacteria on a daily basis, he told a briefing in London. "We believe we have discovered a very significant underlying source of NDM 1 in the capital city of India," he said.

NDM 1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1, makes bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class, called carbapenems.

It first emerged in India three years ago and has now spread across the world. It has been found in a wide variety of bugs, including familiar pathogens like Escherichia coli, or E. coli.

No new drugs are on the horizon for at least 5-6 years to tackle it and experts are concerned that only a few major drug companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, still have strong antibiotic development programmes.

Toleman's study, carried out with Cardiff University's Timothy Walsh and published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, investigated how common NDM 1-producing bacteria are in community waste seepage -- such as water pools or rivulets in streets -- and tap water in urban New Delhi.

The researchers collected 171 swabs from seepage water and 50 public tap water samples from sites within a 12 kilometer radius of central New Delhi between September and October 2010.

The NDM 1 gene was found in two of the drinking-water samples and 51 of seepage samples, the researchers said, and bacteria positive for NDM 1 were grown from two drinking-water samples and 12 seepage samples.

"We would expect that perhaps as many as half a million people are carrying NDM 1-producing bacteria as normal (gut) flora in New Dehli alone," Toleman said.

Experts say the spread of superbugs threatens whole swathes of modern medicine, which cannot be practiced if doctors have no effective antibiotics to ward off infections during surgery, intensive care or cancer treatments like chemotherapy.

In a commentary about Walsh and Toleman's findings, Mohd Shahid from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India, said global action was needed.

"The potential for wider international spread of ... NDM 1 is real and should not be ignored," he wrote.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated April 7 as World Health Day and under the slogan "No action today, no cure tomorrow" it is campaigning about the risks of life-saving antibiotics losing their healing power.

Teenagers who undergo spine fusion for scoliosis using the newest surgical techniques can expect to be doing well 10 years after surgery, according to a Hospital for Special Surgery study published online ahead of print in the TK issue of the journal Spine. Researchers had thought that the surgery would cause damage to the spine just below the fused discs, but the study showed that this was not the case.

"Fusion for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis using the newer generation spine implants appears to spare junctional disc degeneration and allows patients ten years out to have a relatively normal pain free lifestyle," said Daniel Green, M.D., a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York who led the study.

Scoliosis is a condition in which a person's spine is curved. The condition can be classified as congenital (caused by vertebral anomalies present at birth), idiopathic (arising after birth and caused by unknown factors) or neuromuscular, where it is a secondary symptom of another condition such as spina bifida. Starting in the early 1960s and up until the late 1990s, scoliosis was treated with surgery with so-called Harrington rods that were implanted along the spinal column. Starting in the late 1990s, surgeons started using newer techniques to fuse the spinal column together and these straight rods became obsolete. Spinal fusion is basically a procedure where doctors "weld" parts of the spine together, so the vertebral column heals into a single, solid rigid unit.

The modern surgery is superior to the Harrington rods surgery because it allows the spine to be corrected in a much more natural, physiologic way, but there haven't been many studies evaluating how patients who undergo the surgery fare years down the road. To remedy this, HSS investigators conducted a pre- and post-operative MRI analysis in patients undergoing the surgery with modern techniques.

The investigators reviewed all spinal fusions performed by four senior scoliosis surgeons at HSS between 1991 and 1997. Patients were included in the study if they had idiopathic scoliosis, were 21 years or younger and had surgery that had the surgeon approach the patient's spine from the patient's back versus the front or side. Patients had to have fusion of the spine in their lower back (between vertebra T12 and L3).

Thirty-three potential study participants were located and 20 agreed to participate. These patients returned for a physical examination by an orthopedic surgeon that included an MRI. Doctors recorded their medical history with special attention to level and location of pain and whether or not the patient was taking pain medication. Doctors compared the new MRIs to the ones taken ten years prior, before the surgery.

"We wanted to see how the patients were doing ten years down the road, specifically focusing on the part of the spine that didn't have surgery. The standard belief was that the area of the spine just below the surgery would wear out, because of the increased stress that the surgery or the fusion would put on that part of the spine," Dr. Green said. "That isn't what we found. We found that the area of the spine adjacent to the fusion was pretty healthy and didn't show any major degeneration ten years later. While mild degenerative changes were noted in almost every patient, the severe changes that we were concerned that we might find were not there at all."

The investigators also found that patients had good functional scores and maintenance of balance. No patients reported significant lower back pain. No patients took analgesic medications for their pain, with the exception of four patients (20%) who took occasional non-prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

The investigators say the study results are good news for patients. Dr. Green also said the results may cause worry for investigators and companies who are trying to develop surgeries for scoliosis that do not involve fusing the spine. "There is a lot of research and investment being done looking for new technologies that do not use fusion," Dr. Green said. "This study would suggest that there is a challenge for those trying to do that because the patients doing fusion are doing well."