A worldwide study has found that many people don`t know they have hypertension, and even if they do, very few are receiving adequate drug therapy for their condition.

This is true in high income countries, like Canada, as well as middle and low income countries, according to an international team of researchers led by the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences.

"Our study indicates over half of people with hypertension are unaware of their condition and, amongst those identified, very few are taking enough treatment to control their blood pressure," Dr. Clara Chow, lead author, a member of PHRI and an associate professor of medicine of Sydney University and the George Institute for Global Health in Australia, said.


Dr. Salim Yusuf, senior author and professor of medicine of McMaster University`s Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, added that drug treatments that work to control hypertension are well known, however this study found only about a third of patients who are aware of their condition were achieving target blood pressure control.

"Blood pressure lowering drugs are generally inexpensive and commonly available treatments," Yusuf said.

"However only a third of patients commenced on treatment are on enough treatment to control their blood pressure. This is worst in low income countries, but significant in high and middle income countries too," he added.

The study is published by JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.

Germ-free mice, who received gut bacteria from obese humans, gained more weight and accumulated more fat than mice, who received bacteria from the guts of lean humans, according to a new study.

This finding, which demonstrates the transmission of physical and metabolic traits via communities of microbes in the gut, depends on the rodents` diet.

The researchers responsible suggest that it may represent an important step toward developing new personalized probiotic and food-based therapies for the treatment or prevention of obesity.

The new study shows directly that microbial communities from the gut can transmit lean or obese traits; it also begins to name specific players involved, along with their designated roles and how these roles are tied to the foods we consume.

Vanessa Ridaura, a graduate student at Washington University`s School of Medicine, and colleagues took samples of the microbes that were living in the guts of human fraternal and identical twins.

For each pair of twins in the study, one sibling was lean while the other was obese. The researchers then transplanted the discordant twins` gut microbiota into the guts of germ-free mice that had been raised under sterile conditions, without any microbes of their own.

According to the researchers` results, something about the microbes in the guts of Ln mice prevented the Ob mice from accumulating much fat. So, Ridaura used a combination of algorithms-some that were tried-and-true and others that she cooked up herself-to figure out which bacterial species in particular were able to invade the Ob mice.

They found that specific members of the Bacteroidetes phylum were able to enter the guts of Ob mice, settling into otherwise unoccupied niches. These bacteria then triggered changes in metabolism, among other metabolic effects, but none of the bacteria from Ob mice could invade the Ln mice to make them accumulate fat.

The study has been published in the journal Science.

It`s the leading contributor to deaths worldwide yet most people with high blood pressure don`t know they have the condition and even for those who do, treatment is mostly ineffective, according to a large new study.

Researchers examined more than 140,000 adults in 17 countries and found that about 41 percent had consistently high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, but fewer than half of those people knew it.

"We found that surprisingly many people didn`t realize their blood pressure was high," lead author Clara Chow, from The George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia, said.

Less than a third of those aware of their condition and getting treatment had their blood pressure under control, with poor and rural populations faring the worst.

"Whereas in high-income countries a larger proportion of people knew they had hypertension and were on treatment than people in low-income countries, the control problem was significant wherever you were," Chow said.

Normal blood pressure is defined as a systolic reading (the top number) of 120 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) or less and a diastolic reading (the bottom number) of 80 mm Hg or less.

The National Institutes of Health estimates that one in three U.S. adults has high blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease, heart failure, stroke and kidney failure.

High blood pressure is the leading cause of heart disease and strokes, which are the top two causes of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

Globally, hypertension is tied to "at least" 7.6 million deaths each year, Chow`s team writes in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Despite the condition`s worldwide impact, Chow told Reuters Health, there hasn`t been much research on how it should be targeted to bring down the incidence of cardiovascular disease.

For the new study, she and her colleagues from several research centers around the world recruited 142,042 adults in 17 countries of varying income levels to be examined between January 2003 and December 2009.

They defined the condition either by a participant`s self report of having been diagnosed with hypertension, or by two blood pressure readings of at least 140/90 mm Hg.

Overall, 57,840 of the participants had high blood pressure, but only 26,877 were aware of their condition.

The vast majority of those who were aware were taking some sort of medication - often two medications - to treat high blood pressure, but only about one third were successfully controlling the disease.

"People who knew they had hypertension, about 88 percent were initiated on some sort of treatment. However the control of their blood pressure was poor," Chow said.

When researchers looked at the results by country, they found that in high-income and upper-middle-income countries, around 50 percent of people with high blood pressure were aware of their condition and around 47 percent were getting treatment.

In comparison, in lower-income and lower-middle-income countries around 42 percent of people with hypertension were aware of it and about 34 percent were treated.

In poorer countries, awareness, treatment and control of high blood pressure were better in urban areas compared to rural ones, and among better educated people, the researchers note.

Dr. Jorge Plutzky, director of the Vascular Disease Prevention Program at Brigham and Women`s Hospital in Boston, said the new study confirms previous findings on blood pressure around the world and adds to what is known by showing the differences between urban and rural areas.

"I think it`s another stimulant to get a variety of groups to look at and think about this issue," Plutzky, who was not involved in the new study, said.

For example, he said, international groups have been effective in combating a variety of infectious diseases throughout the world.

"We need those same kinds of groups to also start thinking about chronic diseases," he said, adding that techniques developed overseas can also be brought back to rural areas in the U.S.

Chow said the focus should be on finding ways to detect high blood pressure in people in different places around the world, and removing barriers to treatment, including costs and transportation to and from doctors` offices.

Did you know that while you sleep, there are genes in the brain that are actually turned on? Scientists now say that these genes are vital for the repair and growth of brain cells.

Scientists in the US have now established that adequate sleep boosts the production of specific brain cells, called oligodendrocytes that produce the protective layer around the organ.

Oligodendrocytes make myelin (the protective layer) in the healthy brain and in response to injury. Much like the insulation around an electrical wire, myelin allows electrical impulses to move rapidly from one cell to the next.

According to an animal study published in the Sep 4 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, these findings could one day lead scientists to new insights about the role sleep plays in brain repair and growth, reports Science Daily.

Scientists have known for years that many genes are turned on during sleep and off during periods of wakefulness.

In the current study, Chiara Cirelli, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, measured gene activity in oligodendrocytes from mice that slept or were forced to stay awake.

The group found that genes promoting myelin formation were turned on during sleep. In contrast, the genes implicated in cell death and cellular stress response were turned on when the animals stayed awake.

"These findings hint at how sleep or lack of sleep might repair or damage the brain," said Mehdi Tafti, PhD, who studies sleep at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Tafti, however, was not involved in the study reported in the Sep 4 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

With drug resistance threatening the battle against kala azar, which afflicts 350 million in 88 countries, a group of Indian scientists has taken a giant step to develop a potential therapy by using tiny molecules present in the body.

Around 65 percent patients in India have stopped responding to sodium stibogluconate - the drug of choice for the life-threatening visceral leishmaniasis or kala azar, says Neeloo Singh, senior principal scientist, Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow.

"Sodium stibogluconate is safe, effective and inexpensive. Kala azar is a poor man`s disease and therefore the drug was essential, but now the parasite has become resistant to it. Other drugs which are effective like amphotericin and miltefosine are expensive and toxic," Neeloo Singh told IANS.

Provisional figures by the union health ministry show that kala azar claimed 11 lives and afflicted 7,776 people this year till July.

Upping the ante against drug resistance, researchers at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) here have pioneered a new strategy to increase the cholesterol level in blood, that in turn significantly slashes the parasite`s numbers. It involves channelising some small molecules that are the direct products of genes.

"When we administered the micro RNA (micro Ribonucleic Acid - the small molecules) in excess it increased the cholesterol and at the same time induced clearance of the parasite. It emerged as the potential molecule in combination with other drugs," Suvendra Nath Bhattacharyya of the Molecular and Human Genetics Division of the IICB here, told IANS.

These micro RNAs (or miRNA) are important for regulating key metabolic processes, including cholesterol metabolism in the liver, and are composed of 22 units of organic molecules called nucleotides.

In the body, these mini machines regulate expression of genes and help control production of functional products like proteins.

For their experiments, the scientists used the micro RNA specific to the liver that modulates fat metabolism in the organ.

What was of interest to scientists was that the Leishmania parasite (that infects the liver and multiplies in the spleen) brings down the miRNA levels by "targeting an enzyme called dicer that is responsible for the production of these micro regulators".

When the parasite brings down the microRNA, this in turn lowers cholesterol - a condition that is favourable for the parasite to thrive"

"It will reduce the microRNA and it will reduce the cholesterol in the blood and this is important for the parasite because previously it has been shown by IICB scientists that cholesterol is one of the main modulators of this infection process," Bhattacharyya said.

Using the cholesterol-microRNA correlation to their advantage, the team administered microRNAs in excess that resulted in increased cholesterol and the subsequent resistance to the infection."

"It is of paramount importance that scientists find out new therapy methods. The afflicted are helpless due to drug resistance," stressed Singh, who also doubles as one of the founding members of the Leishmaniasis Research Society (India).

Termed by the World Health Organisation as a neglected disease, the disease puts an estimated 165.4 million people at risk in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.