>Dogs Detecting Cancer? It’s in the Breath, Experts Say

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Carol Witcher says she knows it sounds crazy, but she swears that her dog, Floyd Henry, discovered the cancer in her breast in 2008. “When he sniffed me, he kind of turned back and really pushed into my right breast, real hard,” she said. “He started sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing.”

It took four days of nudging and nipping by the 8-year-old boxer before Witcher went to a doctor. “He pushed real hard for one shot. … Then he looked at me straight in the face, took his right foot and began to paw my right breast. And I thought, ‘This is not good,'” she said. “I knew instantly that there was an issue.”

Witcher’s stage-three cancer required surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.” Her type of cancer was rather large in her breast,” said Dr. Sheryl Gabram-Mendola, a breast surgical oncologist at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University.  “I absolutely believe that the dog saved Miss Witcher’s life.

“Gabram-Mendola has been studying the breath of cancer patients. She said cancer causes the body to release certain organic compounds that dogs can smell but people cannot. Gabram-Mendola and her team have developed a test in which they look for more than 300 molecules in the breath.

“Our model predicted in over 75 percent of the time correctly which patients did have breast cancer and which ones did not,” Gabram-Mendola said. When Witcher breathed into the tube, the test confirmed that she was sick.

“You could potentially go to a physician’s office, blow in the bottle and ultimately have a direct read system where we would know in the office …

It’s estimated that a dog’s sense of smell is up to a million times better than that of a human, depending on the breed. Dogs have also reportedly sniffed out skin, bladder, lung and ovarian cancers.

“Dogs smell different things and they understand different things,” said Charlene Bayer, a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute. “They don’t necessarily know what’s wrong, but they know that there’s something that’s not normal, that you don’t smell the way you normally do.” …

via Dogs Detect Cancer? Experts Say Compounds in Breath Can Signal Breast Cancer – ABC News.

>How meditation might ward off the effects of ageing

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… Visitors here to the Shambhala Mountain Centre meditate in silence for up to 10 hours every day, emulating the lifestyle that monks have chosen for centuries in mountain refuges from India to Japan. But is it doing them any good? For two three-month retreats held in 2007, this haven for the eastern spiritual tradition opened its doors to western science. As attendees pondered the “four immeasurables” of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, a laboratory squeezed into the basement bristled with scientific equipment from brain and heart monitors to video cameras and centrifuges. The aim: to find out exactly what happens to people who meditate.

After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising psychological and cognitive changes – improvements in perception and wellbeing, for example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the process of ageing. …

Scientists from a range of fields are starting to compile evidence that rather than simply being a transient mental or spiritual experience, meditation may have long-term implications for physical health.

There are many kinds of meditation, including transcendental meditation, in which you focus on a repetitive mantra, and compassion meditation, which involves extending feelings of love and kindness to fellow living beings. One of the most studied practices is based on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, or being aware of your own thoughts and surroundings. Buddhists believe it alleviates suffering by making you less caught up in everyday stresses – helping you to appreciate the present instead of continually worrying about the past or planning for the future.

“You pay attention to your own breath,” explains Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of meditation at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston. “If your mind wanders, you don’t get discouraged, you notice the thought and think, ‘OK’.”

Small trials have suggested that such meditation creates more than spiritual calm. Reported physical effects include lowering blood pressure, helping psoriasis to heal, and boosting the immune response in vaccine recipients and cancer patients. In a pilot study in 2008, Willem Kuyken, head of the Mood Disorders Centre at Exeter University, showed that mindfulness meditation was more effective than drug treatment in preventing relapse in patients with recurrent depression. And in 2009, David Creswell of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found that it slowed disease progression in patients with HIV.

Most of these trials have involved short courses of meditation aimed at treating specific conditions. The Shamatha project, by contrast, is an attempt to see what a longer, more intensive course of meditation might do for healthy people. The project was co-ordinated by neuroscientist Clifford Saron of the Centre for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. His team advertised in Buddhist publications for people willing to spend three months in an intensive meditation retreat, and chose 60 participants. Half of them attended in the spring of 2007, while the other half acted as a control group before heading off for their own retreat in the autumn. …

They found that at the end of the retreat, meditators had significantly higher telomerase activity than the control group, suggesting that their telomeres were better protected.  The researchers are cautious, but say that in theory this might slow or even reverse cellular ageing. “If the increase in telomerase is sustained long enough,” says Epel, “it’s logical to infer that this group would develop more stable and possibly longer telomeres over time.” …

via How meditation might ward off the effects of ageing | Life and style | The Observer.

>Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study + Xeno’s meditation technique

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In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.

But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world’s more mysterious diseases?

Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise.

Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The scanner tracks blood flow within the monks’ heads as they meditate inside its clunky walls, which echoes a musical rhythm when the machine is operating.

Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find how some meditators achieve a state of “nonduality” or “oneness” with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.

“One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it cultivates attentional skills,” Dr Josipovic says, adding that those harnessed skills can help lead to a more tranquil and happier way of being.

“Meditation research, particularly in the last 10 years or so, has shown to be very promising because it points to an ability of the brain to change and optimise in a way we didn’t know previously was possible.”

When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves and their environments, Dr Josipovic says.

And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings.

Shifting attention

Dr Josipovic’s research is part of a larger effort better to understand what scientists have dubbed the default network in the brain.

He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic network and the intrinsic, or default, network.

The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee.

The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve themselves and their emotions.

But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw, when one rises, the other one dips down.

This neural set-up allows individuals to concentrate more easily on one task at any given time, without being consumed by distractions like daydreaming.

“What we’re trying to do is basically track the changes in the networks in the brain as the person shifts between these modes of attention,” Dr Josipovic says.

Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same time during meditation – that is to say, they have found a way to lift both sides of the seesaw simultaneously.

And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment. …

via BBC News – Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study.

Wow! I got shivers down my spine when I read this. I think because in my first and only day long meditation class, I discovered and explained to the group that rather than focusing only on the breath as was being prescribed, what works for me is to develop a dual perception of the breath along with your thoughts, the external along with the internal.

This is the only realistic way to not let your mind wander. No one understood what I was saying. I was told by the person leading the class that, “well, no, the practice is to focus on the breath. ” Yes, but the only way to be able to focus for long periods of time without getting distracted is to split and balance the perception.

For the record, I’m told my ability to focus is very unusual. I can and on most days do work on one single complicated task for 5 hours at a time, stopping only to eat, then back at it for another 3 to 5 hours.

The way I see it, this study validates my discovery. Perhaps the best way to get to the balanced “Buddha mind” for most people is the rather long path that has been laid out, but my understanding of Buddhism is that you are supposed to try, not follow. Find what really works, for you.  I hope my insight can help a few people with their basic meditation instruction.

Try it:

1. Test 1 (Standard meditation): Sit for 5 minutes focusing only on your breath. Bring your mind back gently if it wanders.
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2. Test 2 (Xenoic meditation): Sit for 5 minutes and focus on your breath continuously allowing  the breath to be simultaneous with anything else, external or internal, that comes to your awareness. Focus mostly on the breath, but never let your attention completely off of it.

Results?

Although I’ve only heard of him from Professor Charlie Tart, my impression of George Gurdjieff’s “Waking up” is that it seeks this state.

Gurdjieff argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception. As a result humans were failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis such as the 1914-18 war. At best, the various surviving sects and schools could only provide a one-sided development which did not result in a fully integrated human being. According to Gurdjieff, only one dimension of the three dimensions of the person – namely, either the emotions, or the physical body or the mind – tends to develop in such schools and sects, and generally at the expense of the other faculties or centers as Gurdjieff called them. As a result these paths fail to produce a proper balanced human being. Furthermore, anyone wishing to undertake any of the traditional paths to spiritual knowledge (which Gurdjieff reduced to three – namely the path of the fakir, the path of the monk, and the path of the yogi) were required to renounce life in the world. Gurdjieff thus developed a “Fourth Way”^[18] which would be amenable to the requirements of modern people living modern lives in Europe and America. Instead of developing body, mind, or emotions separately, Gurdjieff’s discipline worked on all three to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development. – wiki

I don’t see emotions as separate from the body and mind. It just seems that way. Emotions are the activity of certain parts of your brain, experienced as the interpretation by the mind of the state of your body and mind.

>Mostly fat diet ‘can reverse kidney failure’ in mice with diabetes

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A controlled diet high in fat and low in carbohydrate can repair kidney damage in diabetic mice, according to US scientists.

The study, published in journal PLoS ONE, showed a “ketogenic diet” could reverse damage caused to tubes in the kidneys by too much sugar in the blood.

In the UK around a third of the 2.8m people with either type 1 or 2 diabetes go on to develop kidney damage.

Diabetes UK said it was “questionable” whether humans could sustain the diet.

Damage reversed

The researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York used mice with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

Once kidney damage had developed, half the mice were put onto the ketogenic diet for eight weeks.

The highly controlled diet, which is 87% fat, mimics the effect of starvation and should not be used without medical advice.

After eight weeks the researchers noted that kidney damage was reversed.

Professor Charles Mobbs, who led the research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said: “Our study is the first to show that a dietary intervention alone is enough to reverse this serious complication of diabetes.

“I certainly think it has promise, but I can’t recommend it until we have done clinical trials.”

The researchers also need to figure out the exact process that leads to repair.

via BBC News – Diet ‘can reverse kidney failure’ in mice with diabetes.

>Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report

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In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by bacteria. Each human being is host to thousands of different species of microbes. Yet a group of scientists now report just three distinct ecosystems in the guts of people they have studied.

Blood type, meet bug type.

“It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.”

The researchers, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that the guts, or intestines, of infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of microbes.

The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.

Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make. …

Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine).

The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.

Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said.  …

via Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report – NYTimes.com.

I don’t think you can change your blood type, but couldn’t you change your bug type just by taking probiotic bacteria?

>CDC predicts smoking bans in every state by 2020

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US health officials predict that by 2020, the entire nation could be covered by smoking bans in workplaces, bars and restaurants.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that’s a possibility, if state and local bans continue to be enacted at the rate they have been. A CDC report released Thursday said the number of states with comprehensive indoor smoking bans went from zero in 2000 to 26 in 2010.Another 10 states have laws than ban smoking in workplaces, bars or restaurants, but not in all three.Gary Nolan, director of a smokers’ rights group, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the prediction came true. He said public health officials and others are putting tremendous pressure on bars and businesses to stamp out smoking.

via CDC predicts smoking bans in every state by 2020 – USATODAY.com.

Except of course for Las Vegas.

>Clarksville police report intoxicated 4-year-old

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A 4-year-old had a bad day, as the youngster’s unusual intoxication resulted in an investigation by a Clarksville police dispatch.

At about 9:20 p.m, the girl was carried to the hospital by her parents who told police they heard her crying upstairs after playing on the bed and falling off.

The mother came to notice her daughter’s hazy eyes and unsteadiness, according to the police report.

Police returned to the family’s home on Vanessa Drive to figure out what the child had ingested to vanquish her equilibrium.

In the upstairs bathroom, a momentous clue stuck: A bottle of prescription oral rinse was found on the counter with an unsecured lid. The content of alcohol read out at 10 percent.

The little girl came up short of sober with a BAC of .14 in her first blood test and a .12 reading on her second blood test, the report said.

A nurse at Gateway did not balk and contacted the Department of Children Services

via Clarksville police report intoxicated 4-year-old | The Leaf Chronicle – Clarksville, Tenn., and Fort Campbell | theleafchronicle.com.

>Brazilian scientists investigate Beethoven’s cancer-fighting properties

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Research underway at the Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is investigating whether music might be able to fight cancer.

Dr. Márcia Alves Marques Capella and colleagues performed a series of tests in 2010, exposing dish-cultures of both healthy and cancerous cells to audio playbacks of various music genres. In repeated tests, Dr. Capella found that recordings of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor destroyed around 20% of cancerous cells within a few days – yet the healthy cells were unharmed. A similar result was obtained with ‘Atmosphères’ composed by György Ligeti in 1961. But, curiously perhaps, no measurable changes in cell growth were found for Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major. Possible mechanisms which might have produced the results are as yet entirely unknown – though it’s speculated that they could be related to the rhythm, frequency or intensity of the music. The team plans further tests beginning in April 2011 …

via Brazilian scientists investigate Beethoven’s cancer-fighting properties.

I wondered about this ten years ago in my article about Raymond Royal Rife’s supposed cancer cure:

Does our Western Musical Scale Encode Lost Healing Arts?

What if … the major scale was picked by the ancients because they knew the curative powers of certain frequencies in that scale? What if we have drifted off of the correct frequencies in all of these years? Look at the musical scale above, compare it to the frequencies that Rife claimed would vibrate cancer germs to death, and decide for yourself. Can these audio frequencies open some sort of secret door?

Here it is… in the right key…  Some versions on youtube are wrongly pitch shifted so they are no longer in C minor.) I haven’t checked it with a tuner,  but this one just feels right and the person who uploaded it says … ” the video was wrong pichted because of it’s age or what ever when it was downloaded on youtube.I just re-pitched the sound track into the true C minor!”

Beethoven symphony 5 in the real tune : C minor

Ah, but there is one lingering question… did Dr. Capella use the true C minor or the C# minor recording to kill the cancer? Hmmm…

Well, the true C just feels right.  Here’s the other composition that worked:

>Virus and low sunlight ‘raises multiple sclerosis risk’

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Low levels of sunlight coupled with glandular fever could increase the risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), say researchers.

There are many suspected risk factors for MS and the disease is known to be more common away from the equator.

The study, in Neurology, suggested that low levels of sunlight could affect how the body responds to infection.

The MS Society said the study, based on hospital admissions data in England, added weight to existing evidence.

MS affects about 100,000 people in the UK and is more common in the north of England than in the south.

There are also high levels of both vitamin D deficiency and MS in Scotland, where the MS Society is considering carrying out separate research on a possible link between the two. Around 10,500 people have MS in the country, the highest prevalence of the condition in the world.

With MS the protective layer around nerves, known as the myelin sheath, becomes damaged. Messages from the brain to the rest of the body are disrupted, resulting in difficulty moving, muscle weakness and blurred vision.

The researchers at the University of Oxford looked at all hospital admissions in England between 1998 and 2005.

They found 56,681 MS cases and 14,621 cases of glandular fever, which is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus.

The study also used data from Nasa on sunlight intensity.

The researchers found that by just analysing sunlight, they could explain 61% of the variation in the number of MS cases across England.

However when they combined the effect of sunlight and glandular fever, 72% of the variation in MS cases could be explained….

via BBC News – Virus and low sunlight ‘raises multiple sclerosis risk’.

>Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

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DR. LEVINE’S MAGIC UNDERWEAR resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. …

His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.

“We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,” explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. “The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t. …

for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.

Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives. …

via Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? – NYTimes.com.

I exercise 20 to 30 minutes a day, but I still sit for about 10 hours average a day. Today I worked 14 stressful seated hours.  Not sure how to change that… we need computers that allow us to roam around… and I need some workaholics anonymous sessions.