BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Author: aminoalix

Don’t Wish for your Baby to Come too Soon!

Premature birth is simply now known as the second leading cause of death in children under the age of 5. Premature birth, according to biologynews.net, is when a child is born prior to 37 weeks.India has a record 3,519,100 premature births, and the United States has 517,400 record births. That is a very scary thought, and it is even scarier that it is our reality. That is even the current storyline on Grey’s Anatomy!

Factually speaking, 15 million babies are born too soon, and 1.1 million of those die very quickly afterward. Those that live, can seriously suffer from “serious infections, cerebral palsy, brain injury, and respiratory, vision, hearing, learning, and developmental problems.”

The Global Alliance to Prevent Prematurity and Stillbirth (GAPPS) has partnered with Born Too Soon to try to stop premature births. Unfortunately, it is harder than it seems. Craig Rubes, MD, PhD and executive director of GAPPS even said,

“Even if every known intervention was implemented around the world, we would still see 13.8 million preterm births each year; we could only prevent 8 percent.

As a society, we cannot just stop premature births, so global research is being performed daily by NGOs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

 

This is a picture of a premature baby. As you can see, the baby is hooked up to a ventilator to help with breathing.

Do You Really Want that Third Piece of Bacon?

This is a picture of a hamburger, which is a form of red meat often consumed by individuals everywhere. Found on Wikimedia Commons.

How many  people do you know that eat bacon every day?

What about a hamburger?

Did you know that the Harvard School of Public Health has recently discovered that red meat consumption can strongly contribute to cardiovascular disease and cancer, ending one’s life prematurely? These days, it is much healthier to eat “poultry, nuts, fish and legumes.” We need alternative sources of protein.

According to Nutrition researcher and author An Pan, who works at the Harvard School of Public Health,

“…eating high amounts of red meat has been associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and certain cancers in other studies.”

It is scary to think that every time someone consumes red meat daily, there is a 13% increased chance of death. Eating processed meat is even worse because if eaten daily, there is a 20% increased chance of death. Every time someone consumes heme iron, carcinogens that are released from the meat during cooking, saturated fat, sodium and nitrates from his or her steak, these risk percentages rise. It has been researched that these risks can be weighted more heavily depending on “age, body mass index, family history of heart disease or major cancers.”

Now, we know that the protein replacements of fish (7%), poultry (14%), nuts (19%), legumes (10%), low-fat dairy products (10%) and whole grain (14%) have great percentages for lower risks of premature death. If people “eat less than 0.5 serving per day of red meat, 9.3% of deaths in men and 7.6% of deaths in women can be prevented.”

Mortality is an important factor for every individual to consider. Why waste life away to eat a slice of bacon each morning?

 

 

Could it be more than a Simple Physical Attraction?

Ever wonder why there are so many cougars around these days, or so many older men dating younger women?

It’s not just because of a physical attraction. In fact, attraction in humans and in fruit flies relates to pheromones, or “the chemicals of love.” In the recent Biology News article “Fruit Flies Drawn to the Sweet Smell of Youth,” I learned that cuticular hydrocarbons,which are the pheromones of fruit flies, change with age. In an experiment run by Tsung-Han Kuo, a ” a graduate student in the department of molecular and human genetics and the Huffington Center on Aging at BCM,” it was obvious that the male fruit fly was attracted much more to the young female fruit fly than the older female fruit fly. This was even true when the male fruit fly could not see the flies because the scientist had made the room dark. Interestingly enough, all it took for the male fruit fly to be confused about which woman to choose was to wipe the pheromones, or rather the cuticular hydrocarbons, off the bodies of the female fruit flies. When this occurred, the male fruit fly was rather ambivalent and flummoxed with the decision over which fly to choose to mate with. This tells us that pheromonesmake all the difference, an

most significantly to this article, they spark fly attraction. I believe that this pheromone attraction could be the true reason why  many individuals stray from their significant others to find “hotter” and “sexier” partners.

 

A Dead Fruit Fly.

To sum all this up, based on our experiments in class, we know that fruit flies produce massive numbers of children, and as these female fruit flies age, the male fruit flies that they have mated with in the past are vastly less interested and attracted to the aging female pheromone.

Wait, Babies can be Born Without Eyes?

This picture displays a baby with healthy eyes!

This photo was found on blogs.smarter.com through Google Advanced Search

I always knew individuals could lose eyes if a terrible accident occurs, but I never knew that babies can be born without eyes! Did you?

Recently, a condition called anophthalmia has been discovered. It is when there are complications with the development
of both copies of the STRA6 gene, one that is “responsible for transporting vitamin A into the cells.” In fact, vitamin A is needed for the development of every inch of our retina, a tissue lining the inside of the eye. In less scientific terms, anopthalmia is when an individual is born with the loss of one or both eyes. Microphthalmia, a condition where an individual has small eyes, and coloboma, which is a deformed eye, are two other eye conditions that develop in a baby while he or she is still in the womb. These three diseases make up eleven percent of all eye deformations. However, the Micro & Anophthalmic Children’s Society UK reported that microphthalmia and coloboma are much more common than anopthalmia.

Doctors like Dr. Sean Ennis from the UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science, University College Dublin, and the National Centre for Medical Research started researching the perplexing idea that babies can be born without eyes with “nine individuals from across several generations of an Irish ethnic minority family of nomadic descent who suffer with one or more of the three eye defects to varying degrees of severity.”
Dr. Ennis says,

 

“Using advanced gene sequencing technologies, we firstly scanned for regions of DNA shared by all patients before analysing a single common region for the disease gene. From this we pinpointed STRA6, a gene responsible for transporting vitamin A into cells.

 

In the past, doctors have found that alterations and complications of the STRA6 gene in DNA can cause Matthew-Wood syndrome. This is a disease that can cause irregular eye formation and hardships for development in general.
Scientists of the University College Dublin, Ireland, in addition to doctors such as Dr. Hui Sun and Dr. Riki Kawaguchi of the University of California, actually made this fascinating discovery recently. Now, they are attempting to make genetic testing to determine whether a baby in a mother’s womb will have anopthalmia early on. They would really like to develop a clinical practice, which would take place at the National Centre for Medical Genetics (NCMG) in Dublin. Professor Andrew Green of University College Dublin says,

“Accurate carrier testing and genetic counselling can be offered to those individuals planning to have children. And ultimately, this work may be used to develop preventive measures or possible treatments in the future,”

As of right now, babies born with small eyes, deformed eyes, or no eyes must get prosthetic eyes to help them see and help the development of other parts of their bodies, including the face and skull. Eye defects can also be associated with birth defects and deformations in the heart, lungs, and diaphragm. We must hope for progress in the research and clinical trials for anophthalmia, so that the malformation and lack of eye disorder disappears forever one day!

Is Type 1 Diabetes Curable?

Right now, on Grey’s Anatomy, one of the plot lines involves Type 1 diabetes and mice. Dr. Miranda Bailey is performing a trial, attempting to create a device with a molecule that can be placed in humans to cure diabetes. She is using mice as the trial guinea pigs. This sounds crazy! However, this same trial is being done in real life!

“Type 1 diabetes is characterized by the body’s inability to manufacture insulin because its own immune system is attacking it.”

Diabetes has doubled in our population in the last ten years. In fact, doctors have found themselves able to predict if someone has or will have Type 1 diabetes ninety percent of the time. The experiment that physicians are now doing on mice started two and a half years a go. Testing different molecules on mice, the doctors have tried to find which molecules will stop the production of Type 1 diabetes. The doctors look for particular structural pockets in the mouse’s body that are lining areas of proteins, and they then place the molecules in those particular pockets. It seems that doctors have tried this experiment on mice with hundreds of molecules in the past, but the one that works is glyphosphine. When the glyphosphine is entered into the mouse’s body, it “enhances insulin presentation”

Mice at the Louisville Zoo, Taken by: Ltshears

and kills the chances of early signs of diabetes in mice becoming Type 1 diabetes. However, if the mouse already has Type 1 diabetes, the treatment is not as effective in getting rid of it, for it has already found a home in the body. In reality, this molecule called glyphosphine is only a preventative molecule, one that can save people who have had diabetes in their family history, or are just unlucky with symptoms of a future diagnosis. This trial has been published in the Journal of Immunology and gives hope to doctors working to fight Type 1 Diabetes.  The clinical trial is to be performed on humans throughout the next five years.

Can timing change everything?

A Map of Cambodia: Cambodia Map from CIA World Factbook

Amongst individuals living with HIV, twenty to thirty percent die because of an additional tuberculosis infection. This co-infection is extremely common in Cambodia, a nation with 63,000 out of 13.2-million individuals living with just the HIV diagnosis, which eventually leads to AIDS. The HIV/Tuberculosis co-infection makes up 6.4% of Cambodia’s 5% HIV diagnosed population.

Dr. Anne Goldfeld, who has done studies on this trial as a Harvard Medical School employee and as President of the co- founder of the Cambodian Health Committee, says,


“Tuberculosis claims the lives of more than half a million people with HIV worldwide every year…”

 

She also says,


“This is a tragedy, because TB is completely curable when diagnosed and treated properly even in a patient with advanced HIV, especially if the patient also receives anti-retroviral therapy.”

 

In the past, the treatment for the co-infection has been very consistent. The treatment for Tuberculosis has been given to a patient immediately upon diagnosis. Two months later, anti-retroviral (ART) therapy for HIV would be given. However, recently, a trial entitled CAMELIA , >Cambodian Early versus Late Introduction of Antiretroviral Drugs, has helped give hope to HIV patients. The trial, which was created by Cambodian, French, and

 

American doctors, began in 2006 and lasted until 2010, encouraged five Cambodian hospitals to give HIV treatment to co-infected diagnosed patients only two short weeks following anti-tuberculosis treatment. The five hospitals are Calmette Hospital, Khmero-Soviet Friendship Hospital, and three provincial hospitals in the Siem Reap, Svay Rieng, and Takeo regions. This trial cut down the waiting time for HIV treatment by six weeks and overtime, the trial increased the survival rate of co-infected individuals by 33%.  Could six weeks really change the chance of survival for tuberculosis and HIV co-infected patients by such a great percentage? The answer is: absolutely! Did all medical physicians involved in this field of medicine agree with these techniques used to aid co-infected individuals? The answer is: definitely not.

 

Many of those who were opposed to the trial’s process said that the two treatments of Tuberculosis and the HIV  would wear the body down if done at similar times. Additional difficulties could be created for the body, which could already face toxicity with the required seven pills a day. The treatment was not risk-free either. It was possible that the immune system could become increasingly inflamed as it “rebound[ed] from HIV’s suppressive influence.” This trial was also available to patients who had an extremely strong immune system (given their diagnosis) at the time of treatment. Nevertheless, the benefits of the treatment have been much greater and more substantial than those doctors’ fears holding co-infected individuals from getting treated.

Doctors are still learning how the CAMELIA treatment can be improved and altered for the future. However, there has been enormous success with moving the treatments of co – infected Tuberculosis and HIV patients closer by six weeks. In just Cambodia, 661 patients participated in the CAMELIA trial, and less than one percent of the population participating, missed an appointment of the 8,955 scheduled for the population at the five separate hospitals. Many doctors, Cambodian citizens, and observers wanted this trial to work, and it was happening! The World Health Organization (WHO) should be encouraging this treatment more! Thirty three more percent of the initially co-infected patients of Cambodia are living! So where will the trial go next to help co – infected Tuberculosis and HIV patients? Ethiopia.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

Skip to toolbar