Popcorn ingredient causes lung disease - U.S. study

A chemical used to give butter flavor to popcorn can damage the lungs and airways of mice, U.S. government experts reported on Thursday.

Tests on mice show that diacetyl, a component of artificial butter flavoring, can cause a condition known as lymphocytic bronchiolitis, said the team at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health.

A popcorn seller stocks up in Barnes, southwest London July 5, 2007. A chemical used to give butter flavor to popcorn can damage the lungs and airways of mice, U.S. government experts reported on Thursday. (REUTERS/James Boardman)

The condition can lead to obliterative bronchiolitis -- or "popcorn lung" -- a rare and debilitating disease seen in workers at microwave popcorn packaging plants and at least one consumer.

At least two microwave popcorn makers -- ConAgra Foods Inc and Weaver Popcorn Co Inc -- have said recently they would stop using diacetyl.

Laboratory mice made to inhale diacetyl vapors for three months developed lymphocytic bronchiolitis, the NIEHS team said.

"This is one of the first studies to evaluate the respiratory toxicity of diacetyl at levels relevant to human health," Daniel Morgan at NIEHS, whose team led the study, said in a statement.

Writing in the journal Toxicological Sciences, the researchers said findings suggest that workplace exposure to diacetyl contributes to the development of obliterative bronchiolitis.

The hard-to-treat condition causes vague symptoms such as cough and shortness of breath, and steadily worsens, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congress has been working on a bill to order quick action by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to limit exposure to diacetyl. The House of Representatives passed a bill last year but the Senate has not acted.

The Food and Drug Administration said last September it was investigating a report of a man who came down with the life-threatening disease after eating several bags of butter-flavored microwave popcorn each day.

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DEET works by masking body odor from bugs

The bug repellent DEET works by making mosquitoes and their brethren unable to smell the sweet aroma of human sweat that alerts them that a meal of blood is nearby, scientists said on Thursday.

This knowledge may help guide the creation of new repellents based on the same principle but without possible health worries, they said.

The chemical was first produced by government scientists in 1946 after the jungle warfare of World War II hammered home the need to prevent mosquito and other insect bites. It has been available to the public since 1957.

It is the world's most widely-used topical agent against mosquitoes and other blood-eating insects. It repels mosquitoes which spread malaria, a leading killer in parts of the developing world, as well as ticks which spread Lyme disease. But it does not kill them.

Until now scientists had not grasped exactly how it works.

Mosquitoes are crazy for two human scents: sweaty body odor and the carbon dioxide in breath. They use different receptors in their olfactory system -- the sensing system for smell -- to detect these odors to locate their prey.

"Humans are very smelly, so there's a large number of compounds that attract mosquitoes," Leslie Vosshall, head of Rockefeller University's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, said in a telephone interview.

In experiments on mosquitoes and fruit flies, her team determined that DEET serves sort of a chemical cloak, masking certain human odors.

"You become invisible to them," Vosshall said.

The scientists tracked the electrical activity of cells in the mosquito olfactory system while exposing them to DEET. They found that it blocked bugs from smelling body odor but not the carbon dioxide in breath.

Without the scent of body odor, the bugs cannot figure out that a succulent person is nearby, the scientists said.

"Lots of things out in nature will release carbon dioxide -- swamps, for example -- and that's not a good thing to go after if you're a mosquito," said Vosshall, whose findings were published in the journal Science.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said about a third of the U.S. population is expected to use DEET annually. The agency said about 140 products containing DEET are registered with the EPA by about 39 different companies.

A safety review concluded in 1998 that insect repellents containing DEET are not a health threat, but DEET should not be used on children under two months old, the EPA said.

"There are problems with DEET," Vosshall said. "It's oily, it melts plastic, you can't use it on babies, you have to reapply it on every piece of exposed skin frequently. It does actually penetrate your skin and enter your blood stream."

She said there have been rare cases in which people had seizures after putting on too large a dose.

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Streamlined meteorite hit Peru fast and hard - study

A meteorite that struck Peru in September, digging out a deep hole and startling nearby residents, traveled faster and hit harder than would have been expected, researchers reported on Tuesday.

A view of the crater caused by a meteorite crash in the southern Peruvian town of Carangas, near the border with Bolivia in this September 16, 2007 file photo. (REUTERS/Miguel Carrasco/La Razon)

The object, which left a 49-foot-wide (15 meter) crater, was made of rock and, in theory, should have disintegrated in the atmosphere long before reaching the Earth's surface, said Peter Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island.

And it may have. But the pieces stayed together and were speeding at 15,000 mph (24,000 kph) when they hit, Schultz told the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in League City, Texas.

Usually only meteorites made of metal make it to the surface intact enough to scoop out a crater.

"They come into the atmosphere, they slow down, and they plop," Schultz said in a telephone interview.

"It would make a hole in the ground, like a pit, but not a crater. But this meteorite kept on going at a speed about 40 to 50 times faster than it should have been going."

It landed in an arroyo, or dry stream, and the pit quickly filled with water from underneath the surface.

Schultz said his team's observations suggest that scientists may need to change theories about the different ways objects can hit planets. "We have to go back to the drawing board and think again," he said.

Dozens of people who visited the crater, near Lake Titicaca and the border with Bolivia, reported vomiting and headaches afterward. Some questioned whether the noise and hole were actually caused by a meteorite.

"That is one of the reasons we went down. We wanted to distinguish fact from fiction," Schultz said. "These reports of all these people being sick were grossly exaggerated. They didn't get sick. They were surprised."

FASTBALL FROM SPACE

A team from Johnson Space Center in Houston analyzed two chunks of dark gray rock from the meteorite and told the meeting they look nothing like meteorites from known sources such as Mars.

Schultz, whose team inspected the crater 800 miles (1,300 km) south of Lima, said its unusually loud and messy impact happened because it was spinning and going so quickly.

"This just isn't what we expected," Schultz said. "It was to the point that many thought this was fake. It was completely inconsistent with our understanding how stony meteorites act."

At such high velocity, fragments may not escape past the "shock-wave" barrier accompanying the meteorite, he said.

"It became very streamlined and so it penetrated the Earth's atmosphere more efficiently," Schultz said. He compared it to a flock of geese drafting behind one another in V-shaped flight.

He said this could challenge conventional wisdom that all small, stony meteorites disintegrate before striking Earth.

"You just wonder how many other lakes and ponds were created by a stony meteorite, but we just don't know about them because when these things hit the surface they just completely pulverize and then they weather," said Schultz.

The findings may also help explain what caused various craters on Mars, he said.

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Factors behind head and neck cancer revealed

There are two distinct culprits behind head and neck cancer -- the long-recognized heavy tobacco and alcohol use as well as a common sexually transmitted virus, researchers said on Tuesday.

The risk factors are so dramatically different in head and neck cancer in people infected with the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that it should be considered a separate disease from cases in which patients are not infected, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.

Head and neck cancer includes tumors in the mouth, tongue, nose, sinuses, throat and lymph nodes in the neck.

"These are completely different cancers and we need to view them as such. They just happen to occur in the same place. The risk factors didn't appear to overlap at all, and there didn't appear to be any interaction between them," Dr. Maura Gillison, a professor of oncology and epidemiology, said in a telephone interview.

More than 35,000 people are diagnosed with head and neck cancer annually in the United States alone. If found early, such cancer may respond well to treatment with surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy.

Not only are the patient populations different in HPV-positive and HPV-negative head and neck cancer, but the tumors look different under a microscope, Gillison said. People with the viral-linked cancer also tend to respond better to treatment than those not HPV-infected, she added.

HPV is a common sexually transmitted virus. It is well known for causing cervical cancer and genital warts.

Since 2000, researchers have also known that HPV infection was linked to some cases of head and neck cancer, particularly in the upper throat and back of the tongue.

The new study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, focused on 240 people diagnosed with head and neck cancer between 2000 and 2006.

Nearly 40 percent of them had an HPV infection. Those patients did not have the well-known risk factors for head and neck cancer -- tobacco smoking, alcohol use and poor oral hygiene, the researchers found.

The people with viral-linked cancer cases had a completely different set of risk factors, including certain sexual behaviors and marijuana use, the researchers found.

Sexual behaviors linked to these patients included increasing numbers of lifetime sex partners including oral sex, and the presence of a sexually transmitted disease, they said.

Gillison said it is possible other behaviors linked with marijuana use could be responsible, but said chemicals in marijuana called cannabinoids could affect the immune system's ability to clear a viral infection.

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Limit patient screening for infection, study says

Screening all incoming hospital patients for a dangerous drug-resistant staph infection and isolating those infected did not curtail its spread, and proved costly, Swiss researchers said on Tuesday.

Some hospitals and a few U.S. states have called for the controversial approach of testing every incoming patient for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA, which was blamed for an estimated 19,000 U.S. deaths in 2005.

But a 1-1/2-year study at the University of Geneva Hospitals and Medical School, where MRSA has occasionally been a problem, found screening did not reduce the number of patients who caught the infection during their hospital stays.

Roughly 85 percent of MRSA cases, which is treatable only with a few antibiotics, occur in hospitals, where infection can kill weakened patients.

Hospitals undertake several approaches to combat outbreaks such as strict hand-washing by staff, frequent equipment changes, and extensive cleaning of operating rooms. MRSA outbreaks struck roughly one-quarter of U.S. hospitals in 2003.

As many as 1.5 percent of Americans carry the highly contagious infection and may spread it to others without developing a serious infection themselves.

In the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 515 of the 21,754 surgical patients tested positive for MRSA. Of those, 337 might not have been caught because they had not been previously identified as MRSA carriers.

Infected patients received five days of treatment and special precautions such as isolated hospital rooms that strained hospital resources and raised costs considerably.

During the initial nine-month period when the screening was done in selected hospital wards, 93 patients contracted MRSA infections while in the hospital. That compared to 76 infected in the wards where standard prevention efforts were in place.

"Overall, our real-life trial did not show an added benefit for widespread rapid screening on admission compared with standard MRSA control alone in preventing (hospital) MRSA infections in a large surgical department," study leader Dr. Stephan Harbarth wrote.

The report recommended targeting the screening to patients undergoing elective surgery with a high risk of MRSA infection.

Two U.S. researchers agreed in an accompanying commentary that a multifaceted approach, and not universal patient screening, was likely to be more effective in combating MRSA and other types of hospital germs that infect a total of 1.7 million Americans and kill 100,000 each year.

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Study sheds light on paralysing nerve condition

British researchers have discovered a genetic mutation that causes a paralysing illness called ALS in some people, a finding they said on Thursday may lead to treatments for the degenerative nerve condition.

Their study showed how this genetic variation produced proteins that were toxic and killed motor neuron cells in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, also commonly known as motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig's disease.

"We discovered that the mutation was appearing only in people who were affected," said Chris Shaw, a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London who led the study published in the journal Science. "This suggested it is disease-causing."

The finding is important, he said, because the disease kills quickly -- usually between two and five years after symptoms start -- and has no effective treatments. Physicist Stephen Hawking is a rare example of a person who has survived for years with the condition.

ALS leaves people unable to walk, talk or feed themselves but does not usually affect their intellect and other senses. Doctors diagnose about 120,000 new cases each year, according to the International Alliance of ALS.

Shaw and colleagues isolated a mutation in a gene called TARDBP in people with a rare, inherited form of ALS. They found that people with this variation produced a mutant and toxic protein called TDP-43.

Previous research had suggested the protein might have existed as sort of cellular junk generated as a harmless by-product of the disease. But by injecting these mutated proteins into the spines of chicks in eggs, Shaw's team showed they actually killed motor neurons.

While only about 1 percent of people have this form of ALS, the findings have wider implications because most people with the disease have these proteins accumulating in the wrong place within the cell, Shaw said.

"It also means we develop new and better disease models, which will bring us close to developing more effective therapies," he said.

In 1993 a group of U.S. researches identified a gene called SOD1 that caused a form of ALS affecting about 5 percent of people with the disease -- the only people with the condition who do not accumulate TDP-43 proteins, Shaw said.

That finding triggered a flood of new research into the disease, and the discovery of a second gene could draw even more people into the field, said Brian Dickie, director of Research Development at Britain's Motor Neuron Disease Association.

"The discovery of a new cause of the disease is of international importance, allowing researchers around the world to rapidly generate more pieces of the complex puzzle that is motor neuron disease," he said.

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Four in Forbes Asia list

Four Malaysians made it to the Forbes Asia list of the region’s most generous and interesting philanthropists.

Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, Hishamudin Ubaidulla, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim and Datuk Amar Leonard Linggi Tun Jugah were featured in the inaugural Forbes Asia Heroes of Philanthropy list in its March 10 issue.

Syed Mokhtar, 56, is founder and sole donor of a Muslim charity, Albukhary Foundation that assists the needy.

Established in 1996, the foundation funds remedial classes in English, science and math for 20,000 underachieving students each year and runs a college scholarship programme for 300 students from more than 40 countries.

Syed Mokhtar controls Malaysia Mining Corp and holds big stakes in Johor Port and other businesses.

Hishamudin, 52, oversees Yayasan Ubaidi, a foundation funded entirely with profits from commercial buildings and the sale of land bought by his father years ago.

The foundation helps families who cannot make ends meet, pays medical expenses, helps single mothers pay for tertiary education, assists hospitals that cannot afford equipment.

Hishamudin, who helps run the family travel agency, is also chairman of Deir Yassin Remembered Malaysia, a movement committed to ending the war between Israel and Palestine.

Former MP for Kota Baru, Zaid, 57, who owns the country’s largest law firm, Zaid Ibrahim & Co, set up the Kelantan Foundation for the Disabled in 1998.

The foundation serves 2,400 people suffering from Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy and other disabilities.

Linggi, 67, a prominent Iban businessman has varied dealings, including real estate, plantation, shipping, hotel and other companies.

Tun Jugah Foundation gets virtually all of its contributions from him. It focuses on preserving the culture of the Ibans in Sarawak. In 2003, it began compiling the first Iban dictionary.

This year Forbes put together a list of 48 philanthropists.

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Being overweight can damage your career - study

Being overweight or obese is not only bad for your health but can also be bad for your career, according to a U.S. study.

As obesity rates in the United States rise, researchers at Detroit's Wayne State University looked at over 25 years of research on weight-based bias in the workplace to see whether being overweight hindered the chance of getting a job or moving up the work ladder.

A woman walks along the boardwalk while leaving the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York in this September 4, 2007 file photo. Being overweight or obese is not only bad for your health but can also be bad for your career, according to a U.S. study. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

After examining the results of 25 separate studies, they concluded that obesity does have a denigrating effect in the workplace, with the weight-based bias stronger for sales positions than for managerial positions.

"There are a whole set of stereotypes that go along with being overweight, and a lot of them transfer into the workplace in terms of people's judgment about others' abilities and appearance in relation to job performance," researcher Cort Rudolph said in a statement.

The researchers found the results of all the studies examined were consistent in finding that people who are overweight are viewed more negatively in the workplace than those who are of average weight.

The bias was felt most when overweight people applied for a job and went through the initial selection process with body weight found to be less of a factor at the performance evaluation stage, and with stereotypes having a minimum influence when it comes to promotions.

Rudolph said this was not surprising based on what was known about weight-based stereotypes.

"Some of the basic stereotypes associated with being overweight include laziness, sloppiness, untidiness and lack of self-discipline and control," he said.

"Overweight people are also regularly labeled as having increased health problems, which is an issue often considered cumbersome by organizations."

But Rudolph, who will present the study's findings at a conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in San Francisco in April, said there was good news for overweight employees.

"The bias effect tends to decrease as people's tenure with an organization increases," he said.

Rudolph said this was an issue that could become more a problem as Americans became heavier.

"Considering this growth, stigmas associated with body weight can become more and more of an issue," he said.

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Gene studies confirm "out of Africa" theories

Two big genetic studies confirm theories that modern humans evolved in Africa and then migrated through Europe and Asia to reach the Pacific and Americas.

The two studies also show that Africans have the most diverse DNA, and the fewest potentially harmful genetic mutations.

One of the studies shows European-Americans have more small mutations, while the others show Native Americans, Polynesians and others who populated Australia and Oceania have more big genetic changes.

The studies, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, paint a picture of a population of humans migrating off the African continent, and then shrinking at some point because of unknown adversity.

Later populations grew and spread from this smaller genetic pool of founder ancestors -- a phenomenon known as a bottleneck.

Populations that remained in Africa kept their genetic diversity -- something seen in many other studies.

"The one thing that I think we cannot say from this study is that any one person's genome is any healthier or evolutionarily fit than another person's genome," said Carlos Bustamante of Cornell University in New York, who worked on one study.

"You have to think of this at the population level," Bustamante said in a telephone interview.

Bustamante's team has been looking at the DNA sequences of 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans, examining tiny one-letter changes in the DNA code called single-nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs (pronounced "snips").

FIT OR EXTINCT

They tested these changes to qualify them as benign, or potentially affecting genes, amino acids and eventually proteins in a way that could damage health or make people less "fit" -- in evolutionary terms, less likely to survive and reproduce.

"Like every other study ... the African-American panel as a whole showed more variation than the European-American panel," Bustamante said.

Then his team did a computer simulation of a bottleneck, and found it predicted this pattern.

Bustamante said it is possible some of the SNPs are beneficial, and he said his team and others should compare the genetic changes they found to known genetic changes linked with diseases.

"I wish we had done that (already)," he admitted.

In the other study, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues at the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Aging analyzed DNA from 485 people around the world.

They looked for three types of genetic variation, including SNPs and larger changes that involve duplications, deletions and repetitions of large segments of DNA.

The patterns they found produced what they call the highest-resolution map yet of human genetic variation.

They also reinforce the idea that humans originated in Africa, then spread into the Middle East, followed by Europe and Asia, the Pacific Islands and finally to the Americas.

"Diversity has been eroded through the migration process," Rosenberg said in a statement.

People of African descent are the most genetically diverse, followed by people from the Middle East, and then Asians and Europeans. Native Americans resemble one another the most on a DNA level.

The study also found it is sometimes possible to trace a person's ancestry to a small group within a geographic region.

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Memory loss declining among U.S. seniors

Older Americans are having less trouble with their memories, and it may be because they spent more time in school, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

They found the rate of cognitive impairment -- which includes a range of ills from significant memory loss to Alzheimer's disease -- fell 3.5 percentage points among people 70 and over between 1993 and 2002.

"We found a clear relationship. The more education people had, the better they performed on cognitive tests," said Dr. Ken Langa of the University of Michigan, whose study appears in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia.

Langa said the research reinforces other studies that suggest people who do mentally challenging tasks early on build up a reserve of brain power that helps them withstand later injuries to the brain, such as a mini-stroke.

"Your brain is wired up differently. You can sustain more insults over your lifetime," Langa said in a telephone interview.

To test this, Langa and colleagues looked to see if there was a relationship between education and mental agility in older Americans.

They used data on 11,000 people from the Health and Retirement Study, a national survey of U.S. adults. The researchers compared data gathered in 1993 with data from 2002.

They found that in in 2002, 8.7 percent of those aged 70 or older had cognitive impairment, down from 12.2 percent in 1993. "We think education is part of the story here," Langa said.

In 1993, people who were 70 or older on average had 11 years of education. By 2002, those 70 and older had 12 years of education. "That is a relatively significant increase in the level of education," he said.

They also found that older adults with more education who did develop cognitive problems were more likely to die within two years.

Langa said the thinking is that people who have more education have developed different brain circuits that have allowed them to continue functioning at a high level.

"Once you put it off as long as you can, you are more likely to have a quicker decline and death," he said.

Langa said the results may also reflect better cardiovascular health, which can reduce strokes or other injuries that affect brain function. He said rising rates of obesity and diabetes could offset those gains.

"Cardiovascular risks have a close link to brain health," he said.

Langa said people should exercise their bodies to protect their cardiovascular health, and exercise their brains with puzzles and books.

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Stem cells help rats recover function after stroke

Transplanting brain cells produced from human embryonic stem cells helped fix stroke damage in the brains of rats, according to scientists who hope to test the same thing in people whithin about five years.
A scientist works near a lab mouse in Rome in this February 7, 2001 file photograph. Transplanting brain cells produced from human embryonic stem cells helped fix stroke damage in the brains of rats, according to scientists who hope to test the same thing in people whithin about five years. (REUTERS/Alessia Pierdomenico/Files)

Researchers have been looking for ways to repair the brain damage from a stroke, which can cause permanent disability. In a study published on Tuesday, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in California reported that treatment involving human embryonic stem cells may be a solution.

Embryonic stem cells are the master cells that give rise to every cell and tissue in the body.

The Stanford team reported they restored lost limb function in rats that had stroke-related brain damage. They induced human embryonic stem cells to develop into neural stem cells that, once transplanted in the rats, developed into neurons and two other important types of brain cells.

The researchers hope to use this approach within about five years in studies involving people who have had strokes.

"We have a lot of evidence that we'll be able to use this kind of stem cell regenerative therapy in patients, including stroke patients," Stanford's Dr. Gary Steinberg, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview.

Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, Steinberg's team described how they caused strokes in 10 rats and then transplanted neural stem cells into their brains.

The cells made their way to the damaged brain region and incorporated themselves into surrounding brain tissue.

The cells never grew uncontrollably into tumors in lab dishes or inside the rats, the scientists said. The transplanted cells helped repair the stroke damage and enabled the rats to recover lost function in front legs weakened as a result of the stroke, they added.

"It was not quite back to normal but, at least in the rat, it looks like it's going to be close to normal -- very impressive," Steinberg said.

"Now remember, this is a rat, not a human. We still have to make that step. But if we could achieve that kind of recovery in humans, we would have a great therapy," Steinberg added.

In a stroke, the blood supply to any part of the brain is blocked. This can occur when a blood vessel bringing blood to the brain is blocked by a blood clot, or when a blood vessel bursts, causing blood to leak into the brain.

If blood flow is halted for more than a few seconds, the brain is deprived of blood and oxygen, brain cells die and permanent damage can result.

Some people oppose the use of human embryonic stem cells on ethical grounds because creating the reservoirs of these cells for use in research involves the destruction of human embryos.

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Music matters for stroke patients, study finds

A little Beethoven is good for the brain, according to a Finnish study published on Wednesday showing that music helps people recover more quickly from strokes.

Jazz performer Rob Christian plays the flute on Queen Street during the 16th Annual Beaches International Jazz Festival in Toronto July 24, 2004. (REUTERS/Andy Clark/Files)

And patients who listened to a few hours of music each day soon after a stroke also improved their verbal memory and were in a better mood compared to patients who did not listen to music or used audio books, the researchers said.

Music therapy has long been used in a range of treatments but the study published in the journal Brain is the first to show the effect in people, they added.

"These findings demonstrate for the first time that music listening during the early post-stroke stage can enhance cognitive recovery and prevent negative mood," the researchers wrote.

Strokes, which occur when blood flow to the brain is blocked, can kill brain tissue and are one of the worldwide leading causes of death and permanent disability. Treatments include blood thinning drugs and attempts to lower cholesterol.

The study involved 60 people who recently had a stroke of the middle cerebral artery in the left or right side of the brain. This is the most common stroke and can affect motor control, speech and a range of other cognitive functions.

One group listened to their favourite music every day or used audio books while another did not listen to any music. All volunteers received standard rehabilitation treatment.

Three months after stroke music listeners showed a 60 percent better improvement in verbal memory compared to an 18 percent benefit for those using audio books and 29 percent for people who did not listen to either.

The ability to focus attention also improved by 17 percent in music listeners, said Teppo Sarkamo, a psychologist at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit at the University of Helsinki, who led the study.

"We can't say what is happening in the brain but based on previous research and theory it may be music listening could actually activate the brain areas that are recovering," he said in a telephone interview.

Music might also in some way activate more general mechanisms that repair and renew the brain's neural networks after stroke, Sarkamo said.

Larger studies are needed to better understand exactly what is going on but these findings show that music may offer a cheap, easy additional treatment for stroke patients, he said.

"This could be considered a pilot study," Sarkamo said. "It is a promising start.

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Cardiac arrest: avoid nights, weekend - U.S. study

CHICAGO - People who have a cardiac arrest in the hospital at night or on the weekend are far less likely to survive than those who suffer one during the day, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Empty beds are seen in the emergency room of Tulane University Hospital in New Orleans February 14, 2006. People who have a cardiac arrest in hospital at night or on the weekend are far less likely to survive than those who suffer one during the day, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. (REUTERS/Lee Celano REUTERS)

Studies suggest this may be at least partly because of inadequate staffing at off-peak hours.

The researchers found only 14.7 percent of people whose hearts stop pumping during the night survive, compared with nearly 20 percent of people during the day.

Those who had a cardiac arrest at around 3 p.m. had the survival rate, Dr. Mary Ann Peberdy of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and colleagues reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The only part of the hospital with difference in survival day or night was the emergency department. "That survival difference by time of day was there regardless of where we looked, except in the emergency department," Peberdy said.

She said emergency departments are the one place in hospitals constantly staffed by senior-level physicians.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart stops circulating blood. Without cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR and often a shock from a defibrillator, patients can die within minutes.

"Doing the right thing and doing it quickly is very important," Peberdy said.

She said studies at individual hospitals suggested staffing played a role in whether a patient survived a cardiac arrest.

Other studies have shown that doctors make more mistakes at night, hospitals have fewer nurses per patient working at night and that fewer experienced supervisors work the night shift.

TIME TRUMPS OTHER FACTORS

Peberdy wanted to see how this affected survival of cardiac arrest. Her team scoured the National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, which included survival data for more than 86,000 adults who had heart attacks in more than 500 U.S. hospitals between January 2000 and February 2007.

They split up the data by time of day, with the day/evening defined as 7 a.m.-10:59 p.m., night as 11 p.m.-6.59 a.m. and weekends starting at 11 p.m. Friday and running through 6.59 a.m. Monday.

"We factored in how sick people were, what their initial rhythms were. None of that overshadowed the time of day," Peberdy said in a telephone interview.

"Weekend nights were pretty much the same as week nights. Weekend days were kind of in between week days and nights," she said.

She said the difference by time of day held regardless of whether a patient was in a bed with a heart monitor or even in the intensive care unit.

"I think the study confirms what some of us have suspected for a while: That how we staff the hospital determines how well patients do," said Dr. Graham Nichol who helps oversee the NRCPR registry for the American Heart Association.

Peberdy said the study suggests hospitals need to focus on improving their resuscitation systems in off-hours

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Scientists prove Napoleon not poisoned by British

ROME - Italian scientists say they have proved Napoleon was not poisoned, scotching the legend the French emperor was murdered by his British jailors.

File photo of an oil on canvas portrait "Napoleon at Fontainbleau" from the workshop of Paul Delaroche. Italian scientists say they have proved Napoleon was not poisoned, scotching the legend the French emperor was murdered by his British jailors. (REUTERS/Handout)

Napoleon's post-mortem said he died of stomach cancer aged 51, but the theory he was assassinated to prevent any return to power has gained credence in recent decades as some studies indicated his body contained a high level of the poison arsenic.

"It was not arsenic poisoning that killed Napoleon at Saint Helena," said researchers at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the University of Pavia who tested the theory the British killed him while he was in exile on the South Atlantic island in 1821.

The Italian research -- which studied hair samples from various moments in his life which are kept in museums in Italy and France -- showed Napoleon's body did have a high level of arsenic, but that he was already heavily contaminated as a boy.

The scientists used a nuclear reactor to irradiate the hairs to get an accurate measure of the levels of arsenic.

Looking at hairs from several of Napoleon's contemporaries, including his wife and son, they found arsenic levels were generally much higher than is common today.

"The result? There was no poisoning in our opinion because Napoleon's hairs contain the same amount of arsenic as his contemporaries," the researchers said in a statement published on the university's website.

The study found the samples taken from people living in the early 1800s contained 100 times as much arsenic than the current average. Glues and dyes commonly used at the time are blamed for high environmental levels of the toxic element.

"The environment in which people lived in the early 1800s evidently caused the intake of quantities of arsenic that today we would consider dangerous," the scientists said.

One theory was that Napoleon was poisoned accidentally by arsenic vapour from dyes in his wallpaper at Saint Helena, but the study showed there was no massive increase in arsenic levels in his latter years.

"It is clear that one cannot talk about a case of poisoning, but of a constant absorption of arsenic," the researchers said.

Napoleon had been exiled once before -- on the Italian island of Elba after his failed invasion of Russia. But he returned to France and was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815 after which he was sent to the much more remote Saint Helena.

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Airport noise instantly boosts blood pressure - study

LONDON - Living near an airport isn't just irritating, it is also unhealthy, researchers said on Wednesday, in a study that showed loud noise instantly boosts a sleeping person's blood pressure.

The louder the noise, the higher a person's blood pressure went, a finding that suggests people who live near airports may have a greater risk of health problems, said Lars Jarup, who led the European Commission-funded study.

"Living near airports where you have exposure to night time aircraft noise is a major issue," Jarup, an environmental health researcher at the University of Glasgow, told Reuters.

"The reason we did airports is because there was no study that has looked at particular problems of aircraft noise."

High blood pressure can lead to stroke, heart failure, heart attack and kidney failure. It affects more than a billion adults worldwide.

The research team showed that people living for at least five years near a busy airport and under a flight path have a greater risk of developing chronic high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, than those who live in quieter areas.

That study of nearly 5,000 people found that an increase in night time airplane noise of 10 decibels increased the risk of high blood pressure by 14 percent in both men and women.

"We know that noise from air traffic can be a source of irritation, but our research shows that it can also be damaging for people's health, which is particularly significant in light of plans to expand international airports," Jarup said.

In the four-year study, published in the European Heart Journal, the researchers remotely measured the blood pressure of 140 volunteers every 15 minutes while they slept in their homes near London's Heathrow airport -- one of the busiest in the world -- and three other major European airports.

They used digital recorders to determine what noises had the biggest impact on blood pressure, ranging from road traffic to a partner's snoring to an airplane taking off or landing.

The Decibel level, not a sound's origin, was the key factor, but airplanes had the most significant impact, Jarup said.

"Most of the time you will find road traffic noise is not too bad during the night," he said. "If you live near an airport where there are night flights, that is quite another story."

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Migrating people had 20,000-year campout - study

WASHINGTON - People who migrated from Asia to the New World camped out for 20,000 years on land now submerged under the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, according to a genetic analysis published on Tuesday.

A team at the University of Florida combined studies of DNA, archeological evidence, climate data and geological data to come up with their new theory, which describes a much longer migration than most other researchers have proposed.

"We sort of went out onto a limb, incorporating all this nongenetic data," molecular anthropologist Connie Mulligan said in a telephone interview.

Mulligan's team proposes that the people who left Central Asia to eventually populate the Americas passed quickly through Siberia, and then got stuck in Beringia -- a former land mass that now lies under the frigid Bering Sea.

There they stayed for 20,000 years, until glaciers melted about 15,000 years ago, opening a route to the Americas.

"The reason there is no archeological evidence for that occupation is that the area is under water," Mulligan said.

The researchers used sequences of mitochondrial DNA taken from Asians and Native Americans for their analysis. This type of DNA is passed along virtually unchanged from mother to child.

The small mutations that occur can be used as a genetic clock to track the descent and the sizes of ancient populations.

"After a long period of little change in population size in greater Beringia, Amerinds (American Indians or native Americans) rapidly expanded into the Americas less than 15,000 years ago either through an interior ice-free corridor or along the coast," they wrote in their report.

"This rapid colonization of the New World was achieved by a founder group with an effective population size of 1,000 to 5,400 individuals."

WAITING AND MUTATING

The University of Florida's Michael Miyamoto said the DNA suggests a 20,000-year "waiting period" during which generations passed and genetic changes accumulated.

"By looking at the kinds and frequencies of these mutations in modern populations, we can get an idea of when the mutations arose and how many people were around to carry them," he said.

Other theories have suggested one single expansion of people from the Old World to the New around 15,000 years ago.

"If you think about it, these people didn't know they were going to a new world. They were moving out of Asia and finally reached a landmass that was exposed because of lower sea levels during the last glacial maximum, but two major glaciers blocked their progress into the New World," Mulligan said in a statement.

"So they basically stayed put for about 20,000 years. It wasn't paradise, but they survived. When the North American ice sheets started to melt and a passage into the New World opened, we think they left Beringia to go to a better place."

Anthropologist and genetics expert Henry Harpending of the University of Utah, who did not work on the study, said it made sense.

"The idea that people were stuck in Beringia for a long time is obvious in retrospect, but it has never been promulgated," he said. "It's very plausible that a bunch of them were stuck there for thousands of years."

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Whites to become minority in U.S. by 2050: report

WASHINGTON - Non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the United States by 2050, with immigrants and their children driving 82 percent of U.S. population growth in coming years, a new study said on Monday.

The U.S. population will grow to 438 million in 2050 from 296 million in 2005 if current population trends continue, the Pew Research Center study found.

Non-Hispanic whites would account for 47 percent of the total in 2050, it concluded.

By that time, one in every five Americans will be a foreign-born immigrant, compared to one in eight in 2005.

"Of the 117 million people added to the population in this period due to the effect of new immigration, 67 million will be the immigrants themselves and 50 million will be their U.S.-born children or grandchildren," the study said.

While the white population, with its lower fertility rate, ages, the Latino population, the nation's largest minority, will triple in size. Latinos will be responsible for 60 percent of the population growth until 2050.

They will account for 29 percent of the population, or 128 million in 2050, up from 14 percent now, the study said.

"The number of whites will increase, but only by 4 percent," said D'Vera Cohn, one of the report's authors.

The Asian population will almost double in percentage terms, from 5 to 9 percent, while blacks will remain around 13 percent of the total, the report said.

At the same time, the elderly population will more than double as the baby boom generation retires. The number of children and working-age people will grow more slowly.

Almost half of the new immigrants arriving the country will be from Latin American countries, said the other author of the study, Jeffrey S. Passel from the Pew Hispanic Center.

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Healthy elderly lifestyle key to longer life - study

WASHINGTON - You're never too old to reap the benefits of a healthful lifestyle, according to researchers who found that doing things like exercising and not smoking at age 70 greatly raises one's chances of living to age 90.

The researchers focused on what people can do in their early elderly years to live longer while maintaining good health and physical function -- a vital issue as the population ages in the United States and many other countries.

For 25 years, they tracked about 2,400 male doctors whose average age was 72 when they entered the study in the early 1980s.

Those who exercised two to four times per week, did not smoke, maintained normal body weight and blood pressure, and avoided diabetes had a 54 percent chance of living to 90.

Doing any one or combination of them also were beneficial. But men who did none of them had only a 4 percent chance of reaching age 90, the researchers reported on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"This isn't surprising so much as it's reassuring," said Dr. Laurel Yates of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the study.

"All of these factors are considered common sense -- good medical management -- in terms of emphasizing: don't smoke, let's do blood pressure control and weight management, and do exercise," Yates said in a telephone interview.

'DON'T SMOKE, DO EXERCISE'

Yates said the lifestyle message commonly has been aimed at middle-aged people, so it is helpful to see that such lifestyle factors can also help the elderly add healthy years.

"Lifestyle changes are the hardest ones to make. It's a lot easier to take a pill. So the onus is on an individual," Yates said. "If you're going to ask what's the one thing that I could do, I would say do two things: don't smoke and do exercise."

The researchers also found that the men who lived to at least 90 enjoyed better physical function and mental well-being late in their lives than men who died at a younger age.

Yates said research has shown that genetics counts for only about 25 to 30 percent in determining how long people live, with other factors playing a bigger role.

"Most people would say they don't want to have extra years added to their life if those years are going to be ones of disability and disease. And I think it is reassuring that there is something a person can do to help increase the probability of having extra years that are good ones," Yates said.

Another study in the same journal, led by Dr. Dellara Terry of Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center, looked at 523 women and 216 men age 97 or older.

Terry's team found that about a third of these people got to this advanced age despite having developed age-associated disease before age 85 such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, dementia, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, Parkinson's disease or stroke.

Other recent research has quantified how certain behaviors affect longevity. British researchers who tracked 20,000 people said last month those who exercised, avoided smoking, drank moderately and ate lots of fruit and vegetables lived 14 years longer on average than people who did none of these things.

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Autopsies forecast surge in U.S. heart disease

CHICAGO - Autopsies of adults who died young of unnatural causes show many already had clogged arteries, U.S. and Canadian researchers said on Monday in a study that suggests heart disease may be on the upswing.

The researchers said their findings suggest a four-decade-long trend of declines in heart disease may be about to come to a screeching halt.

They studied autopsy reports from younger people in one Minnesota county who died from accidents, suicide and murder and found most had clogged arteries and more than 8 percent had significant disease.

"What they observed was a bit shocking," said S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who wrote an editorial on the research, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"It is the most definitive evidence I've seen suggesting that today's younger and middle-aged generations may be heading for an increase in their risks of heart disease," he said.

The researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver looked at autopsy data from residents of Olmsted County, Minnesota, who died between 1981 and 2004 from unnatural causes.

During that time, 8.2 percent of 425 people aged 16 to 64 had high-grade disease and 83 percent had the beginnings of coronary artery disease.

Mayo's Cynthia Leibson and colleagues found declines in the grade of coronary artery disease ended after 1995 and began to climb after 2000.

"Declines in coronary artery disease appear to have ended and there is some suggestion that they might be increasing," Leibson said in a telephone interview.

She said it is not yet clear to what extent obesity and diabetes contributed to this, but the researchers plan to study this in the same group of patients.

'PERFECT STORM'

Olshansky, in a telephone interview, said rates of heart disease in the United States climbed steadily in the 20th century until the 1960s, and then began falling, helped by changes in lifestyle and declines in smoking. But then, a confluence of changes occurred.

"It was more or less a perfect storm," he said, citing the introduction of computers and a more sedentary lifestyle, the growth of fast-food chains and larger portion sizes, reduced physical education in schools and increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

"It led to this explosion of obesity," Olshansky said.

A second study in the same journal confirms the trends.

Dr. Philip Mellen of the Hattiesburg Clinic in Mississippi analyzed national diet and nutrition data from a large federal study to see if patients with high blood pressure were adhering to a diet known to help control high blood pressure, a known cause of heart attacks and strokes.

They looked at data collected from 1988-1994, a period before a study in 1997 showed a diet high in fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products could significantly lower blood pressure. They compared this to data from 1999 to 2004.

What they found was people with hypertension were eating worse, not better. "The dietary quality has deteriorated over the last 15 years," Mellen said in a telephone interview.

"In our study, the youngest age group was the age group with the worse disease," he said. "This age group will have major problems as they continue to age."

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Heart attacks drop after Italy's smoking ban - study

LONDON - Italy's 2005 smoking ban has led to a sharp fall in heart attacks, researchers reported on Monday in a finding they said shows that such laws really do improve public health.

Following the ban the number of heart attacks in men and women aged 35-64 -- people most likely to be exposed to smoke in cafes, bars and restaurants -- fell 11 percent, the researchers said.

The findings showed the health benefits of European smoking bans in public places, said Francesco Forastiere, an epidemiologist at the Rome Health Authority who led the study.

"Most of this change is due to the decreased impact of passive smoke," he said in a telephone interview. "This is ... important because it shows the impact of a health intervention that can be achieved in other countries."

Italy, Britain, Ireland and a number of other European countries have outlawed smoking in public places, and many health experts are urging the European Union to adopt an even wider ban.

The ban in Italy, where the researchers said about 30 percent of men and 20 percent of women smoke, prohibited smoking cigarettes in all indoor public places such as offices, retail shops, restaurants, pubs and discos.

STRONGLY ENFORCED

"Smoking bans should be extended to all possible countries and smoking bans in the workplace should be strongly enforced," the researchers wrote.

Writing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, the researchers compared the rate of heart attacks from 2000 to 2004 to those occurring in the year after the ban was enforced.

The team analyzed hospital records and adjusted for heat waves, flu epidemics, air pollution and other factors that could have contributed to heart attacks. The researchers also took daily measurements on air quality in 40 public places.

"The smoking ban in Italy is working and having a real protective effect on population health," Forastiere said.

After the ban, cigarette sales also fell 5.5 percent but the researchers attributed the health benefits seen in the study to reduced exposure to passive smoke.

They said young men and women living in poorer areas appeared to have the greatest health benefit after the ban.

Smoking kills about four million people each year while about a quarter of deaths related to heart disease are due to cigarettes, according to the World Health Organisation.

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