Many of us struggle to go more than a few minutes without checking our email inboxes.

But new research suggests ignoring messages altogether can reduce stress by having a positive effect on the heart.

Scientists who attached heart rate monitors to office workers found they remained in a state of 'high alert' throughout the day if they had constant access to email.

But those told they had their manager's permission to not check their messages for up to five days at a time had much healthier heart rates.
Now researchers who carried out the study, at the University of California Irvine, are calling for employers to consider implementing email 'holidays' to preserve workers' health.

According to some estimates, more than 200 billion e-mails are sent across the internet every day.

But while they may have improved communication speeds, there have been concerns that electronic messaging is detrimental to both physical and mental health.
To assess the effects, scientists recruited 13 men and women who used computers in the workplace, ranging from chemical engineers to psychologists.

At the same time, software was added to their computers to measure how often they switched from what they were working on to their email inbox.

The results, presented at a recent computing conference in Austin, Texas, showed those who stayed logged on to email had 'high alert' heart rates.

This is where the heart remains at a steady, relatively fast beat because of constant underlying stress.

In stress-free conditions, the heart rate is more variable, slowing down as the body becomes more relaxed.

A constantly raised heart beat is known to lead to higher levels of a potentially damaging stress hormone, called cortisol.

The study also found limiting email access might boost workers' concentration levels.

Volunteers with access to email switched screen an average of 37 times an hour - twice as much as those denied it.

Professor Gloria Mark, who led the study, said she was surprised by the results, since not having access to email could lead to a loss of control - a major factor in workplace stress.

But she said: 'Email vacations on the job may be a good idea. Participants loved being without email, especially if their manager said it was okay.

'In general, they we much happier to interact in person.

'We were surprised by the results. We didn't expect that people would become significantly less stressed.'

A common facilitation and wellness centre for cultivation of medicinal herbs with in-house ayurveda medicine practitioners and tribal healers will be set up in six months' time at the Araku valley by the Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation (TRIFED) of India Limited. TRIFED managing director Jiji Thomson said procurement of 20 acres for setting up the facility had begun and the estimated cost for completion is Rs 10-20 crore.

The centre will house greenhouse for sustainable cultivation of medicinal plants and processing facilities for manufacturing finished medicines. "We will test the efficacy of the medicines in collaboration with research and development facilities of Indian Council of Medical Research and other national institutes," said Thomson at a two-day national dissemination workshop on findings of National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau's (NNMB) tribal surveys.

The second repeat survey conducted in ITDA areas in 2007-09 was released by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) secretary Dr. M.K Bhan at the workshop held on the premises of National Institute of Nutrition.

The survey revealed prevalence of Marasmus, a protein-energy malnutrition disease in infants, was the highest in tribal areas in Andhra Pradesh at 0.8 percent while the general prevalence in the country was recorded at 0.2 percent.

NIN director Dr. B Sesikeran, director general of ICMR, Dr. V.M Katoch, tribal welfare officials were present.

Even a moderate amount of weight loss can considerably reduce levels of circulating estrogens, which are linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, according to a new study.

Research showed that overweight women who shed 5 per cent of their body weight are up to 50 per cent less likely to have the disease

Anne McTiernan, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center conducted the first randomized, controlled clinical trial to test the effects of weight loss on sex hormones in overweight and obese postmenopausal women, a group at elevated risk for breast cancer

"Based on previous research, our results suggest that losing just 5 percent or more of one's weight could cut by a quarter to a half the risk for the most common, estrogen-sensitive breast cancers," said McTiernan, director of the Hutchinson Center's Prevention Center and a member of its Public Health Sciences Division.

However, McTiernan insists that these findings only apply to overweight or obese women who are not taking hormone-replacement therapy

Epidemiologists have long noted an association between obesity and increased risk of postmenopausal breast cancer.

A relationship between body fat and estrogen formation is thought to contribute to this risk

The study was based on data from 439 overweight-to-obese, sedentary, Seattle-area women, aging botween 50 to 75, who were randomly assigned to one of four groups

These groups were, exercise only (mainly brisk walking), diet only, exercise plus diet and no intervention.

By the end of the study, participants on the diet-only and diet-plus-exercise regimen lost an average of 10 percent of their starting weight, which was the goal of the intervention

The study measured the effects of diet- and exercise-related weight loss on blood levels of several types of sex hormones, including three forms of estrogen (estrone, estradiol and free estradiol); two types of testosterone (total testosterone and free testosterone); a steroid necessary for the production of sex hormones (androstenedione) and sex hormone binding globulin, or SHBG, a protein that binds to sex hormones and therefore makes them biologically less active

High levels of SHBG are associated with reduced breast cancer risk. Free estradiol and free testosterone are forms of the hormones that are not bound to SHBG and therefore are more biologically active

At the end of the study, the researchers discovered significant reductions in hormone levels among the women who received the dietary weight loss intervention, with the most striking results among those who both dieted and exercised

The study found that Estrone levels decreased 9.6 percent with diet and 11.1 percent with diet plus exercise

Estradiol levels reduced 16.2 percent with diet and 20.3 percent with diet plus exercise

Besides this, free-estradiol levels decreased 21.4 percent with diet and 26 percent with diet plus exercise

SHBG levels increased 22.4 percent with diet and 25.8 percent with diet plus exercise

While free-testosterone levels decreased 10 percent with diet and 15.6 percent with diet plus exercise

The researchers found that losing as little as 5 percent of one's total body weight had a advantageous impact on hormone levels, and the effect increased with the amount of weight lost

"The amount of weight lost was key to changes in hormone levels," McTiernan said.

"The biggest effect was through diet plus exercise; exercise by itself didn't produce much of a change in weight or estrogen," she said

She also revealed that exercise has many important profits for those on a weight-loss program. Exercise prevents loss of muscle and bone, and it helps keep off the weight long term.

"I recommend women both diet and exercise, because in the long run that should help keep weight down and therefore keep estrogens down," she said

McTiernan claimed that this is the first study to show that losing weight through a healthy diet that included reducing calories, reducing fat and increasing vegetables, fruits and fiber significantly lowers blood estrogen levels in postemenopausal women.

"This shows that it's never too late to make lifestyle changes to reduce your risk for breast cancer," she added

The results of the research could also be relevant to overweight women, who take breast cancer prevention drugs such as tamoxifen, raloxifene and exemestane, which either block the action of estrogen or stop its production.

A study says more than a third of malaria-fighting drugs tested over the past decade in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa were either fake or bad quality.

The study published Tuesday says bogus and badly made drugs are threatening to upend a decade of progress fighting the mosquito-transmitted disease.

Fake drugs can lead to deaths because they contain no malaria-fighting agents. Pills without enough of the active ingredient to kill all malaria parasites are problematic because they increase drug resistance. That means malaria eventually will outsmart medicines and render them useless.

A cheap drug, which is already prescribed for arthritis, could fight amoebic dysentery, according to researchers in the US.

They were testing old drugs to see if any killed the dysentery bug.

Tests on animals, published in Nature Medicine, showed that auranofin was 10 times more effective than the best drug currently available.

Further studies will be needed in humans, but researchers say it holds great promise.

Amoebic dysentery is caused by Entamoeba histolytica, which infects the bowels. It results in severe diarrhoea including bloody stools. More than 70,000 people are thought to die from the disease each year - most are in developing countries.

US researchers tested 910 drugs, some of which had already been shown to be safe for human use, on amoebas in the laboratory.

It showed that auranofin was much better than the current treatment, metronidazole, at killing Entamoeba histolytica.

Follow-up experiments showed that it was also more effective at treating mice and hamsters which had been infected with the ameoba.
In use

It has been prescribed to patients with rheumatoid arthritis since 1985.

One of the researchers, Prof James McKerrow, from the Sandler Center for Drug Discovery at the University of California, San Francisco, said: "When we're looking for new treatments for the developing world, we start with drugs that have already been approved.

"If we can find an approved drug that happens to kill these organisms, we've leapfrogged the development process that goes into assessing whether they are safe, which also makes them affordable throughout the world."

Prof Sharon Reed, from the University of California, San Diego, said: "Because auranofin has already been approved for use in humans, we can save years of expensive development.

"This new use of an old drug represents a promising therapy for a major health threat."

Dr Graham Clark, a reader in molecular parasitology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said metronidazole was very effective, but it did have side effects and was not always successful.

He said: "The work presented in this paper is particularly useful as it identifies an existing drug, auranofin, that has already been tested and approved for use in humans, which seems to be at least as effective as metronidazole.

"Although auranofin has to date only been tested in animal models of amoebic disease, this means that there is now a potential alternative treatment for individual cases where metronidazole fails to cure the infection or in the event resistance to metronidazole emerge as a clinical problem in the future."