Researchers at Johns Hopkins say they have found a genetic reason some people may attempt suicide.

The link was found in a small region on chromosome 2 that contains four genes, including the ACP1 gene. Those people with more than normal levels of ACP1 protein in the brain were more likely to attempt suicide, the researchers said.

The findings, reported in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, may lead to a new kind of treatment.
"We have long believed that genes play a role in what makes the difference between thinking about suicide and actually doing it," Virginia L. Willour, study leaders and an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement.

She and other researchers studied the DNA of thousands of people with bipolar disorder. More extra protein meant a higher likelihood the people would attempt suicide. The protein is thought to influence the same biological pathway as lithium, which is used to reduce suicidal behavior but has side effects that mean not everyone can take it.

An estimated 1.4 percent of Americans die from suicide and about 4.6 percent of people have tried to kill themselves at least once, the researchers said. For those with bipolar disorder, the percentage who think about suicide is 47 percent, with a quarter actually trying.

Negating myths that pregnant women should avoid exercising, a new study has claimed that light exercise during pregnancy can work wonders in having a safe and normal delivery.

The researchers recommend supervised weight training for expectant mothers and propose that it is beneficial to prevent adverse side effects during the final days before delivery.

Patrick O'Connor, a researcher in the department of kinesiology at the University of Georgia College Of Education, and his colleagues, initiated the present study that aimed to establish the benefits of physical activity in pregnant women.

"Doctors often have been unwilling to prescribe weightlifting, in part, because there was little evidence that it is safe and effective," said O'Connor.

"I think that the appropriate conclusion of this study is that the adoption of a supervised, low-to-moderate intensity weight-lifting exercise program can be safe for women with a low-risk pregnancy," the lead investigator informed.

Study details
For the study, the researchers enrolled 32 pregnant women, who were asked to undergo 618 exercise sessions for a period of nearly 12 weeks.

The type of exercise, the weight used while exercising, fluctuations in the blood pressure, and side effects were all taken into account during the study period.

The researchers found that, none of the study participants reported musculoskeletal injuries after following the low-to-moderate exercise routine.

Amount of weight lifted was increased from time to time and women seemed to experience no negative effect from it.

"The data shows women can increase their strength even though they are pregnant and have never done weight-training before. And their body is changing over the 12-week period as the baby grows," O'Connor said.

Though weight training is beneficial and has no effect on the blood pressure, the researchers warn that during initial period of exercising, women may experience dizziness, but this decreases after sometime.

Why weight training was not recommended in past?
According to the researchers, doctors are aware of the benefits of exercising in pregnant women, but they don't recommend it as weight training leads to production of relaxin hormone which makes body the ready to give birth by making the connective tissue more lax.

"Increased laxity could be associated with orthopedic injury. The research focused on low-to-moderate exercise so as to avoid injury associated with increased relaxin in the body, said O'Connor.

The researchers aim at further studying weight training in pregnant women and find whether it can decrease back pain experienced during pregnancy, or not.

Findings of the present study have been published in the online edition of the 'Journal of Physical Activity and Health.'

Both traditional acupuncture and a sham procedure performed with blunt needles that don't penetrate the skin, are equally effective in alleviating the nausea of cancer [abnormal cells that divide without control, which can invade nearby tissues or spread through the bloodstream and lymphatic system to other parts of the body. ] patients undergoing chemotherapy, claims a new study.

This evidence suggests that it may not be the acupuncture itself, whether real or fake, but something about patients' expectations and their interactions with acupuncturists, that helps the treatment work.

Acupuncture involves stimulating specific points on the body, usually by inserting thin needles through the skin.

The procedure involves regulating the flow of qi (vital energy) along pathways known as meridians. Studies have established that acupuncture can alleviate certain ailments more effectively than standard medical care.

Lead author of the new study, Anna Enblom, a physiotherapist and researcher at the Osher Centre for Integrative Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden stated, "The beneficial effects seem not to come from the traditional acupuncture method, but probably from the patients' positive expectations and the extra care that the treatment entails."

Traditional and fake acupuncture compared
In order to compare the impact of traditional acupuncture and a sham procedure in relieving nausea in cancer [abnormal cells that divide without control, which can invade nearby tissues or spread through the bloodstream and lymphatic system to other parts of the body. ] patients, the researchers conducted a study.

They enrolled 277 patients who were undergoing radiotherapy for abdomen [between the chest and the hips that contains the stomach, small intestine, large intestine, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and spleen.] and pelvic cancer at Linkoping and Lund university hospitals and Karolinska University Hospital in Solna.

The study subjects were split into three groups. For the purpose of the study, 109 patients received traditional acupuncture that involved insertion of needles into their skin to stimulate certain points.

The second group comprising 106 patients were assigned to blunt telescopic placebo needles that just pressed against the skin. The remaining patients were provided standard medications for an upset stomach.

Outcome of the study
The researchers found that the both the authentic acupuncture and sham procedures were equally effective in lessening nausea in patients compared to standard care.

The study found 37 percent of the patients receiving genuine or simulated acupuncture felt nausea after treatment and seven percent vomited, while 63 percent and 15 percent of those assigned to medicines experienced these conditions respectively.

Richard Deyo, a clinical physician and professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University stated, "I think that acupuncture and its effects may be placebo effects.

"But if this form of therapy offers patients relief--and, indeed, studies show that simulated and real acupuncture both worked better than the care patients were getting from their primary care physicians--then we shouldn't argue too much about it."

World Tuberculosis (TB) Day, which falls on March 24 every year, aims to raise public awareness about tuberculosis, a preventable disease. Tuberculosis is still an epidemic in many regions of the world, annihilating the lives of many millions of people each year. Each year, over nine million people around the world get infected with TB and almost two million TB related deaths are recorded worldwide. The actual figures must be far larger than this.

For World TB Day 2011, we enter the second year of a two-year campaign - "On the move against tuberculosis". The campaign aims to inspire innovation in TB research and care. The 2011 World TB Day campaign is focused on individuals around the world who have found new ways to stop TB and can serve as an inspiration to others. The basic idea is to recognise people who have introduced a variety of innovations in a variety of settings. The objectives of TB day are listed below:-

* Research aimed at developing new diagnostics, drugs or vaccines
* Operational research, aimed at making TB care more effective and efficient
* New approaches to helping people gain access to TB diagnosis and treatment
* Novel partnerships between actors in the fight against TB
* Advances in integrating TB care into health systems
* New approaches to providing support from members of the community to people affected by TB
* Innovative ways of raising awareness about TB.


According to World Health Organization (WHO), here are some interesting facts about tuberculosis.

Fact 1 - Tuberculosis is contagious and spreads through air. If not treated, each person with active TB can infect on average 10 to 15 people a year.

Fact 2 - More than two billion people, equal to one third of the world's total population, are infected with TB bacilli, the microbes that cause TB. One in every 10 of those people will become sick with active TB in his or her lifetime. People living with HIV are at a much higher risk.

Fact 3 - A total of 1.7 million people died from TB in 2009 (including 3, 80,000 people with HIV), equal to about 4,700 deaths a day. TB is a disease of poverty, affecting mostly young adults in their most productive years. The vast majority of TB deaths are in the developing world, with more than half occurring in Asia.

Fact 4 - TB is a leading killer among people living with HIV, who have weakened immune systems.

Fact 5 - There were 9.4 million new TB cases in 2009, of which 80% were in just 22 countries. Per capita, the global TB incidence rate is falling, but the rate of decline is very slow - less than 1%.

Fact 6 - TB is a worldwide pandemic. Among the 15 countries with the highest estimated TB incidence rates, 13 are in Africa, while a third of all new cases are in India and China.

Fact 7 - Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) is a form of TB that does not respond to the standard treatments using first-line drugs. MDR-TB is present in virtually all countries surveyed by WHO and its partners.

Fact 8 - There were an estimated 4, 40,000 new MDR-TB cases in 2008 with three countries accounting for over 50% of all cases globally - China, India and the Russian Federation. Extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) occurs when resistance to second-line drugs develops. It is extremely difficult to treat and cases have been confirmed in more than 58 countries.

Fact 9 - The world is on track to achieve two TB targets set for 2015:

* Millennium Development Goal, which aims to halt and reverse global incidence (in comparison with 1990); and
* Stop TB Partnership target of halving deaths from TB (also in comparison with 1990).


Fact 10 - Forty one million TB patients have been successfully treated in DOTS programmes and up to 6 million lives saved since 1995, 5 million more lives could be saved between now and 2015 by fully funding and implementing The Global Plan to Stop TB 2011-2015.

Counting the number of cancer cells circulating in a patient's blood could help determine how aggressive a cancer is and predict the best treatment to use, say British scientists.

Researchers working with the charity Cancer Research UK report their latest findings in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy can slow the growth and spread of lung tumours, but in most patients the cancer returns and is also generally more resistant to treatment.

Dr Fiona Blackhall, of The Christie cancer hospital in Manchester, and colleagues note there are no tests available that provide early warning about resistance, but they hope their findings might change that.

The team looked at the number of circulating tumour cells, or CTCs, in blood samples of 101 patients with a type of the disease called non small-cell lung cancer before and after they had undergone one cycle of chemotherapy.

They found lung cancer patients with five or more CTCs per 7.5 millilitres of blood had significantly worse survival rates - on average they survived 4.3 months compared to 8.1 months in the case of patients with a lower level of the CTCs.

The findings suggest that counting CTCs could be a simple way to monitor how well a patient is responding to treatment within a few weeks of starting it, say the researchers.

And being able to detect when CTC numbers are rising could give doctors the option to move patients on to new potentially more effective treatments more promptly.

"We now need to test our findings in more patients but, if our results are confirmed, there is now the potential to tailor treatments to individual patients and find new ways to treat the disease," says Dr Fiona Blackhall, a doctor from The Christie cancer hospital in Manchester who worked on the study.
Broader relevance

An Australian expert in cancer control and prevention, Professor Rodney Scott, welcomes the study.

"It's certainly a step in the right direction," says Scott, Head of Medical Genetics at the University of Newcastle.

He says apart from non small-cell lung cancer, which is one of the more common forms of lung cancer, the findings have relevance to other cancers, including breast, bowel and prostate cancers, which represent the majority of diagnosed malignancies.

Scott says researchers commonly believe that the failure of cancer drugs, and the development of metastatic disease, is caused by CTCs, specifically, circulating stem cell tumour cells.

He says that Blackhall and colleagues measured CTCs in general as a surrogate for circulating stem cell tumour cells.

"These are the ones that you really want to get rid of because these are the ones that can lodge in sites and start propagating in those distant sites," says Scott.

Researchers also hope to use gene sequencing tools to study CTCs before and after treatment to learn more about the process that leads to drug resistance, and ultimately to develop new drugs.

Scott says ideally it would be possible to analyse CTCs before the first line of treatment is even given.

"Because you want to give [the patients] the right treatment first time and not put them through something that is going to be less than optimal," he says. "So that's the holy grail."

Lung cancer kills 1.2 million people a year around the world and is one of the lowest survival rates of any cancer because over two-thirds of patients are diagnosed at a late stage when curative treatment is not possible.

More than 80 per cent of lung cancers are caused by smoking, and less than 15 per cent of people diagnosed with the disease survive longer than five years, according to the World Health Organization.