How to look younger without plastic surgery

Monday, 7 January 2013

Islamabad, Jan 7: How to look younger without plastic surgery? Psychologists of the Jena University (Germany) have a simple solution: Those who want to look younger should surround themselves with older people. That's because when viewing a 30-year-old, we estimate his age to be much younger if we have previously been perceiving faces of older people.


"People are actually quite good at guessing the age of the person next to them," Dr. Holger Wiese says. The psychologist of the Jena University is responsible for one of six research projects in the DFG-sponsored research unit "Person Perception" lead by Professor Dr. Stefan R. Schweinberger.

In the experiment the Jena psychologists were able to prove that the volunteer testers were systematically wrong at estimating other people's age after having adapted to the faces of people of a specific age group by intensely looking at them. If many faces of elderly people were shown on the computer first, followed by the test face of a middle aged person, the test candidates estimated this person as substantially younger. After studying younger faces the middle aged test face was estimated as being substantially older.

"These effects occur independently of the viewer's age and sex," Schweinberger says. When faces used for adaptation and test faces show people of the same sex the after-effects of age perception are even stronger. In other words: the perception of age and sex in faces is not a completely independent process.

These results may hardly surprise non-experts but they contradict various previous opinions of experts.

The scientists at Jena University used the most modern digital image editing techniques and a data bank of faces without any make-up and with distracting elements having been touched up. The first people partaking in the experiment were students. In a second so far unpublished study elderly people were being asked to give their estimations.

Stefan Schweinberger sums up the result of their findings: "We are able to change the subjective perception of a face." Nobody knows though how long this effect lasts. Holger Wiese adds: "The age of the person next to you is one of the most important characteristics for our perception of other people. This leads to exciting crossovers into other areas of scientists who are dealing with the interactions of social groups."

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Victims narrate horror, terror

Srinagar, Jan 7 : Writhing in pain and anger at the Bone and Joints Hospital here, 14-year-old Muhammad Younis Mir, one of the injured in Pulwama firing, accused the forces of resorting to indiscriminate firing that left many injured, including a few teenagers.

“Why did they shoot me? What was my crime? When they started firing indiscriminately, I shouted along with few of my colleagues. We are children. They did not listen to us and continued firing,”
Younis, a student of 7th standard, said.

He said, when people started moving towards the encounter site at Bubgam, the forces started chasing them and then resorted to indiscriminate firing. “They targeted everyone there, leaving many in the pool of blood,” Younis said. “I didn’t go near the encounter site, yet they shot at me.”

Medicos attending Younis advise him not to talk much. “The bullet is still stuck in his foot. He needs immediate surgery,” said a doctor.

Four members of a family—Jehangir Ahmad Mir, Ashiq Hussain, Showkat Ahmad and Gowhar Ahmad—were also injured in the incident. “The forces fired at us even after we got injured,” they said.

Jehangir was injured in the firing at Bubgam. “While we were taking him (Jehangir) to the district hospital Pulwama for treatment, the forces came out of a vehicle near the Pulwama market and started firing at us. Jehangir, who had already received at bullet, got two more bullets in the main market firing while three of us also received bullets,” said Jehangir’s cousin, Showkat Ahmad.

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Bacteria eyed for possible role in atherosclerosis

Islamabad, Jan 7 : Dr. Emil Kozarov and a team of researchers at the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine have identified specific bacteria that may have a key role in vascular pathogenesis, specifically atherosclerosis, or what is commonly referred to as "hardening of the arteries" -- the number one cause of death in the United States.

Fully understanding the role of infections in cardiovascular diseases has been challenging because researchers have previously been unable to isolate live bacteria from atherosclerotic tissue. Using tissue specimens from the Department of Surgery and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University, Dr. Kozarov and his team, however, were able to isolate plaques from a 78-year-old male who had previously suffered a heart attack. Their findings are explained in the latest Journal of Atherosclerosis and Thrombosis.

In the paper, researchers describe processing the tissue using cell cultures and genomic analysis to look for the presence of culturable bacteria. In addition, they looked at five pairs of diseased and healthy arterial tissue. The use of cell cultures aided in the isolation of the bacillus Enterobacter hormaechei from the patient's tissue. Implicated in bloodstream infections and other life-threatening conditions, the isolated bacteria were resistant to multiple antibiotics. Surprisingly, using quantitative methods, this microbe was further identified in very high numbers in diseased but not in healthy arterial tissues.

The data suggest that a chronic infection may underlie the process of atherosclerosis, an infection that can be initiated by the systemic dissemination of bacteria though different "gates" in the vascular wall -- as in the case of a septic patient, through intestinal infection. The data support Dr. Kozarov's previous studies, where his team identified periodontal bacteria in carotid artery, thus pointing to tissue-destructing periodontal infections as one possible gate to the circulation.

Bacteria can gain access to the circulation through different avenues, and then penetrate the vascular walls where they can create secondary infections that have been shown to lead to atherosclerotic plaque formation, the researchers continued. "In order to test the idea that bacteria are involved in vascular pathogenesis, we must be able not only to detect bacterial DNA, but first of all to isolate the bacterial strains from the vascular wall from the patient," Dr. Kozarov said.

One specific avenue of infection the researchers studied involved bacteria getting access to the circulatory system via internalization in white blood cells (phagocytes) designed to ingest harmful foreign particles. The model that Dr. Kozarov's team was able to demonstrate showed an intermediate step where Enterobacter hormaechei is internalized by the phagocytic cells, but a step wherein bacteria are able to avoid immediate death in phagocytes. Once in circulation, Dr. Kozarov said, bacteria using this "Trojan horse" approach can persist in the organism for extended periods of time while traveling to and colonizing distant sites. This can lead to multitude of problems for the patients and for the clinicians: failure of antibiotic treatment, vascular tissue colonization and initiation of an inflammatory process, or atherosclerosis, which ultimately can lead to heart attack or stroke.

"Our findings warrant further studies of bacterial infections as a contributing factor to cardiovascular disease, and of the concept that 'bacterial persistence' in phagocytic cells likely contributes to systemic dissemination," said Dr. Kozarov, an associate professor of oral biology at the College of Dental Medicine.


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Women with multiple sclerosis more likely to have ms-related gene than men

Islamabad, Jan 7 : Women who have multiple sclerosis (MS) are more likely to have a gene associated with multiple sclerosis than men with the disease and it is this gene region where environment interacts with the genetics, according to a study published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Research has shown that the number of people diagnosed with MS has been rising, and the rate has been rising faster for women than for men.

The cause of MS is not known, but evidence suggests that it is triggered by environmental factors in people who are genetically susceptible to the disease. The main gene associated with MS is the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class II gene, but most of the risk comes from interaction of both parental genes.

The study examined the HLA genes of 1,055 families with more than one person with MS in the family. The genes of 7,093 people were tested, which included 2,127 people with MS. The researchers looked at what the HLA genes were for the people with and without MS, whether people with MS inherited the susceptibility gene from their mother or their father, and what the relationship was between people in the same family with MS.

The researchers found that women with MS were 1.4 times more likely to have the HLA gene variant associated with MS than men with MS. A total of 919 women and 302 men had the HLA gene variant, compared to 626 women and 280 men who did not have the gene variant. This fits with other research by this research group showing that the environment interacts with this gene region to produce modification in risk associated with it. This appears to be an epigenetic mechanism.

"Our findings also show women with the HLA gene variant are more likely to transmit the gene variant to other women in their families than to men," said study author George C. Ebers, MD, FMedSCi, of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.

The researchers also determined that second-degree relatives such as aunts and their nieces or nephews were more likely to inherit the gene variant than first-degree relatives such as siblings or parents and children.

"It appears that the less the genetic sharing between individuals, the higher the interaction is between female sex and inheritance of the HLA gene variant," said Orhun Kantarci, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a member of the American Academy of Neurology, who wrote an editorial on the study. "These findings pave the way for future studies of these genes, hopefully to advance our understanding of inheritance of complex diseases such as MS."

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