A newly developed blood test can identify those at risk of Alzheimer’s disease up to six years before symptoms would become apparent, researchers say. The test identifies changes in a handful of proteins that cells use to convey messages to one another.
According to BBC, the US researchers found it could indicate who had Alzheimer’s, as well as who was likely to develop the condition, with 90 percent accuracy.
The work, led by Stanford University, features in Nature Medicine.
One of the most distressing aspects of Alzheimer’s disease is the difficulty in determining whether mild memory problems are the beginning of an inevitable mental decline.
Currently, Alzheimer’s is effectively diagnosed by ruling out other causes of mental decline.
Even then it can only be categorically confirmed by carrying out a post-mortem.
The latest study pinpointed a connection between changes in the brain accompanying Alzheimer’s, and changes in the way cells communicate with each other. Lead researcher Dr Tony Wyss-Coray said: “Just as a psychiatrist can conclude a lot of things by listening to the words of a patient, so by ’listening’ to different proteins we are measuring whether something is going wrong in the cells.“
The researchers measured levels of 120 proteins used by cells to communicate to see if any could give a clue about Alzheimer’s.
Samples from five people with Alzheimer’s were compared with samples from five people clear of the disease.
Levels of a number of proteins were strikingly different between the two groups.
Next, the researchers further refined their search by examining blood samples from 129 people with symptoms ranging from mild mental impairment to severe Alzheimer’s.
They found that Alzheimer’s was associated with specific levels of 18 key proteins.
They used this tell-tale pattern to assess a further 92 patients who had already been clinically assessed for Alzheimer’s - and the diagnoses matched in nine out of 10 cases.
The test produced a similar level of success when it was used to analyze blood samples which had been taken two to six years earlier from patients, who were then followed up to find out whether their mild mental decline had progressed to something more severe.
The 18 proteins that indicate Alzheimer’s are also involved in the production of new blood cells, immune processes and the death of cells at the end of their natural life cycle.
Dr Wyss-Coray said: “Our hypothesis is that there is something wrong with the production of certain blood cells, which may be needed to clear that stuff that accumulates in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.“

Researchers found statins had long term benefits.

The cholesterol-lowering drugs statins can provide protection against heart disease years after patients stop taking them, a study has found.
The drugs can reduce the risk of heart attacks by a quarter in men, according to the report’s lead author.
The University of Glasgow study found long-term benefits in taking statins, BBC said.
People taking the drug for five years were still experiencing the benefits 10 years after they stopped taking them, with a reduced risk of heart disease.
Professor Stuart Cobbe, the leading cardiologist on the study, said: “We were very surprised to find patients who had been treated for five years with a statin continued to have significantly fewer heart attacks and other coronary events compared to those treated with a placebo treatment.
“This benefit appeared to extend at least 10 years after the original trial.
“These results are very reassuring for patients who might be concerned about safety when taking a drug for a very long period of time.“
The 15 year-West of Scotland Coronary Prevention study involved 6,595 men from the region, with an average age of 55, who had high cholesterol.
They were recruited between 1989 and 1991 and split in half, with one group given a placebo and the other half given pravastatin.
Their health was followed for five years, until 1995, with the results showing that the statin users had a lower risk of strokes and heart disease.
The latest research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined the group 10 and 15 years later.
It found that there was a “significant“ reduction in coronary problems for people who had taken statins for five years.
Professor Ian Ford, lead author of the study, said: “In fact, remarkably, five years of treatment with a statin resulted in 27 percent fewer non-fatal heart attacks or deaths due to heart disease over the period of 15 years.
“There was a significant 12 percent reduction in deaths over the entire period, with deaths due to heart disease reduced by 22 percent.
“This suggests that statin treatment has a long-term beneficial effect in slowing the development of coronary artery disease.“
Professor Peter Weissberg of the British Heart Foundation said: “This research provides yet more evidence that statins help prevent heart attacks, and therefore save lives.“

Researchers in the United Kingdom have found that the time just before you fall asleep is where beneficial cardiovascular changes take place.
This finding is part of a study entitled Acute Changes in Cardiovascular Function During the Onset Period of Daytime Sleep. The study was conducted by Mohammad Zaregarizi, Ben Edwards and Keith George of the Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK.
While earlier studies on siestas have found that this practice may slightly increase the risk of heart attack, newer and more controlled studies have shown an inverse relationship between siesta taking and fatal heart attacks, Physorg.com reported.
Why do afternoon naps affect cardiovascular function? One reason could be changes in blood pressure. At night, our blood pressure and heart rate decreases as we sleep. Some researchers hypothesize that the lower blood pressure reduces strain on the heart and decreases the risk of a fatal heart attack. Most studies have focused on cardiovascular behavior in nighttime sleeping. This study provides a detailed description of changes in cardiovascular function of daytime sleep in healthy individuals, comparing napping with other daytime activities such as standing and lying down without going to sleep.
The researchers tested nine healthy volunteers (eight men, one woman) who did not routinely take afternoon naps. The volunteers attended the university laboratory on three separate afternoons after sleeping four hours the night before. The volunteers wore equipment that checked blood pressure, heart rate, and forearm cutaneous vascular conductance (which determines dilation of blood vessels).
During one afternoon session, the volunteer spent an hour resting, lying face-up in bed. During another session, the volunteer spent an hour relaxed, but standing. And in one session, the volunteer was allowed an hour to sleep, lying face-up. During the sleep stage, the researchers measured the volunteer’s different stages of sleep.
The session in which the volunteer was allowed to fall asleep was delineated into three phases, a five-minute period of relaxed wakefulness before lights were turned off, the period between “lights out“ and the onset of Stage 1 sleep (loss of some conscious awareness of the external environment), the period between the Stage 1 and the onset of Stage 2 sleep (conscious awareness of the external environment disappears).
Researchers found a significant drop in blood pressure during the sleep trial, but not during the resting or standing trials. What’s more, this drop in blood pressure occurred mostly after lights out, just before the volunteer fell asleep.
This reduction in blood pressure may be one explanation for the lower cardiovascular mortality that some studies have found among people who habitually take siestas. On the other hand, some studies of nocturnal sleep have shown that blood pressure rises when we awake and that more cardiac deaths occur in the mornings.

Moon formed when a Mars-sized object crashed into a spinning proto-Earth, creating a debris disk that eventually coalesced into our only natural satellite.

Once Apollo astronauts brought back lunar samples and scientists analyzed them some 35 years ago, astronomers realized the Moon formed from a debris disk created when a Mars-sized object smashed into the proto-Earth. Figuring out precisely how the collision occurred, however, has proved elusive.
Until now, all computer simulations simplified the physics by assuming neither the impactor nor the proto-Earth rotated. Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute has taken the next step by including rotation in impact scenarios covering a range of speeds, masses, and angles, Astronomy.com reported.
Surprisingly, the types of impacts that lead to realistic Moon-forming debris disks--ones with enough mass but not a lot of iron--are pretty close to the ones that worked best without including rotation. Either way, the collision requires a relatively low velocity (less than about 2.5 miles per second [4 kilometers per second]) and an impact angle of around 45¡. These, in turn, must lead to a debris disk holding about two times the Moon’s mass and composed mostly of material from the impactor.
The new simulations do improve some outcomes, however. Canup found the best results came from collisions in which the proto-Earth rotated retrograde--in the opposite direction from normal solar system motion. The old simulations always left the final system with at least 20 percent more angular momentum than the real Earth-Moon system possesses. The best new ones basically agree with reality. And that’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Smiles may take a while, but a horrified expression is a sure-fire attention getter, U.S. researchers said on Sunday, based on a study of how fast people process facial expressions.
They believe fearful facial expressions make a beeline to the alarm center of the brain known as the amygdala, cuing humans to potential threats, Reuters reported.
“We think what is happening with fear is that this is a critical threat signal for us,“ said David Zald, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
“Fear tells you something is wrong and you need to pay attention,“ Zald said in a telephone interview.
To find out which images get the brain’s attention first, Zald, graduate student Eunice Yang and colleagues used a technique called visual flash suppression that slows down the brain’s responses to facial expressions--which typically register in less than 40 milliseconds.
The researchers had people look into a special viewer that allowed each eye to see different images at the same time. “If you present different images to the two eyes, usually you will only perceive one of them at a time,“ Zald explained.
The image that registers with the brain typically depends on which eye is dominant for that person.
“But if one of the eyes is presented by a dynamic, changing stimulus, it will basically suppress perception from the other eye,“ he said.
Using this approach, they showed people a static image of a face in one eye and a series of rapidly presented, random images in another, creating a type of visual noise. People then were asked to indicate when they first registered the static face in the first eye.
The team found people became aware of fearful expressions much faster than neutral or happy faces. “We were seeing it pretty much universally,“ Zald said.
He thinks it has something to do with the eyes.
“If you compare the amounts of the whites showing with a fearful face versus a neutral face, the difference is really quite striking,“ he said.
People who were shown images only of eyes consistently picked out the fearful ones first.
Zald said fear appears to be such important information that these images shortcut the normal pathway for processing visual images through the visual cortex.
“The happy expressions were slower to be detected than even the neutral expressions,“ he said, suggesting things that signal a lack of threat need decreased attention.
Zald said facial expressions represent a crucial way for people to convey social information.

Today's ocean salt has ancient origins. As the earth formed, gases spewing from its interior released salt ions that reached the ocean via rainfall or land runoff.

The saltiness of the sea comes from dissolved minerals, especially sodium, chlorine, sulfur, calcium, magnesium, and potassium, says Galen McKinley, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.
According to Science Daily, today’s ocean salt has ancient origins. As the earth formed, gases spewing from its interior released salt ions that reached the ocean via rainfall or land runoff.
Now, the ocean’s salinity is basically constant. “Ions aren’t being removed or supplied in an appreciable amount,“ McKinley says. “The removal and sources that do exist are so small and the reservoir is so large that those ions just stay in the water.“ For example, she says, “Each year, runoff from the land adds only 0.00005 percent of total ocean salts.“
In lakes, relatively rapid turnover of water and its dissolved salts keeps the water fresh--a water droplet and its ions will stay in Lake Superior for about 200 years, compared to roughly 100 to 200 million years in the ocean. “Even if you did have any accumulation of an ion in a lake, it would be washed out quickly,“ McKinley explains.
Ocean salts, however, have no place to go. “The ions that were put there long ago have managed to stick around,“ McKinley says. “There is geologic evidence that the saltiness of the water has been the way that it is for at least a billion years.“

Scientists report that adding long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids--typically found in fish oil--to baby formula may help infants better regulate their blood sugar and make more proteins in their muscle cells. These results may help make better decisions when dealing with pre-term birth, low-birth weight, and feeding of infants in intensive care.
Although infant formula is now considered nutritionally acceptable for infants under the age of one year, its composition is not a perfect match with breast milk, so the nutritional content of infant formula is regularly refined. Recent improvements include the addition of long-chain n-3 fatty acids, which can improve brain and visual development, Science Daily reported.
To better understand the role of these n-3 fatty acids in the early development of babies, M. Carole Thivierge and colleagues investigated how these fatty acids affect protein metabolism in neonatal pigs. The scientists weaned 28 piglets at two days of age and raised them for a month on either a control formula that didn’t contain the fatty acid or a “test“ formula that contained 3.5 percent of the fatty acid from fish oil.
The researchers noticed that in the piglets that were fed the control formula, fewer proteins were produced in their body over time and, at the same time, their insulin became less effective at lowering blood sugar levels. But piglets that drunk the test formula showed increased protein production and their insulin was as
effective at using the proteins in the test formula for their growth as when they were born.
The scientists also noticed that most of the long-chain n-3 fatty acids were absorbed by muscle cell membranes and replaced another type of fatty acid known to promote inflammation. The long-chain n-3 fatty acids were also added to fats called triglycerides, but they did not replace at a similar extent the pro-inflammatory fatty acids there.
These results show that the long-chain n-3 fatty acids are preferably taken up by cell membranes and favor cellular activities that make new proteins which otherwise quickly decline after birth. This preferential incorporation of long-chain n-3 fatty acids in membranes and their impact on cellular activities could help understand better the role of these fatty acids in the development and future health of piglets--and presumably infants too.
The scientists conclude that elevated amounts of long-chain n-3 fatty acids in muscle membranes have beneficial effects on the early development of piglets and may help babies in regulating muscle growth that affect early development and future metabolic health.