Daily Soda Consumption Increases Type 2 Diabetes Risk

Scientists have raised the alarm over the negative impact of sugary soda on health, saying drinking a can of sugary soda can dramatically heighten a person’s risk of developing prediabetes.
The new findings is published in the ‘Journal of Nutrition’. Prediabetes is a ‘warning sign’ condition that precedes full-blown type 2 diabetes, a long term metabolic disorder that is characterised by high blood sugar, insulin resistance, and relative lack of insulin.
Senior Researcher, Nicola McKeown, who is a scientist with the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Centre on Agieng at Tufts University in Boston, said: “A person who drinks a daily can of sugar-sweetened beverage has a 46 per cent increased risk of developing pre-diabetes. However, a can of diet soda every day does not boost pre-diabetes risk, the researchers found. The results show how regular sugar intake can batter a person’s body on a cellular level,” McKeown said.
The ‘NewsmaxHealth’ reported that cells require the hormone insulin to break down sugar into energy. But too much sugar in the diet can overexpose the cells to insulin. McKeown said:
“This constant spike in blood glucose over time leads to the cells not becoming able to properly respond, and that’s the beginning of insulin resistance.”
Once insulin resistance starts, blood sugar levels rise to levels that are damaging to every major system in the body. Pre-diabetes is an important landmark on the way to type 2 diabetes, McKeown said. It means a person has elevated blood sugar — a sign of increasing insulin resistance — but has not entered fullblown type 2 diabetes.
However, she asserted that prediabetes is reversible if a person cuts back on sugar. Sugar-sweetened beverages are the leading source of added sugar in the American diet as well as diets of most countries around the world including Nigeria.
These results show cutting back on sugary drinks is “a modifiable dietary factor that could have an impact on that progression from pre-diabetes to diabetes,” McKeown said.
For this study, McKeown and her colleagues analysed 14 years of data on nearly 1,700 middleaged adults. The information was obtained from the Framingham Heart Study, a federally funded program that has monitored multiple generations for lifestyle and clinical characteristics that contribute to heart disease.
Participants did not have diabetes or prediabetes when they entered the study. They self-reported their consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and diet sodas.
The research team found those who drank the highest amounts of sugarsweetened beverages — six 12-ounce servings a week, on average — had a 46 per cent higher risk of prediabetes, if researchers didn’t weigh other factors.
However, the American Beverage Association counters that sugar in beverages isn’t the sole risk factor for prediabetes.

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5000 Daily HIV Screening For Calabar Carnival

The United Nations Population Fund, UNPF, has put plans in place to screen 5,000 persons daily for HIV/AIDS, during the Calabar Carnival. The Programme Officer of UNPF in Nigeria, Mr. Araoyinbo Idowu, disclosed this to newsmen at the  weekend. Idowu said that UNPF will conduct the tests in collaboration with an NGO, Excellence Community Education Welfare Scheme, ECEWS. He said the fund will organise an awareness campaign tagged Wise Up Cross River, on a daily basis throughout the one month carnival. 
According to Idowu, “there are going to be some demonstrations by youths and various stakeholders during the HIV/AIDS awareness campaign. In the course of the campaign, there will be various activities including one-on-one counselling, music, graphic designs, tattoo inscription and games. Also, many young volunteers and other stakeholders will be on stage to entertain people each day at the condom zone.” 
The Programme Officer said that the campaign was aimed at sensitizing youths on the dangers of HIV/AIDS and the need for safe sex. He said the programme will also bring together commercial sex workers, student organisations and those already living with the virus, to exchange knowledge on the disease. According to him, the organisation would mobilise youths from the 18 local government areas in the state to participate in the programme. 
Idowu also said that condoms would be distributed free during the month-long campaign. He added that UNPF decided to bring the campaign to the carnival because of its popularity and mass participation.

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Electric implant could end agony of Arthritis

A tiny electronic implant could end the agony of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for hundreds of thousands of sufferers. According to findings of a new study which was published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’, the pacemaker-like micro-regulator device, which is fitted under the skin near the collarbone, sends electrical pulses to a key nerve that helps block the pain of inflamed joints. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system – which normally protects its health by attacking foreign substances like bacteria and viruses – mistakenly attacks the joints.
That inflammation from RA causes redness, warmth, swelling, and pain within the joint and affects joints on both sides of the body, such as both hands, both wrists, or both knees. The mailonline reported that the development of this device, lends hope to millions globally who suffer from RA.
The debilitating disease is caused by the body’s own immune system attacking joint tissue, causing inflammation, stiffness, and fatigue. If left untreated, joints can lose shape and alignment and nearby cartilage and bone can be damaged, leading to permanent disability. Currently, patients typically take a cocktail of powerful drugs to dampen the immune system.
People who use them are more likely to become ill from infections such as pneumonia. But experts have found that using electrical pulses to stimulate the vagus nerve can have a similar effect without the side effects. The vagus sends signals from the brain to key organs such as the spleen, triggering a decrease in the production of proteins called cytokines that help control the immune system and can cause inflammation. Scientists said that resulted in reduced swelling in joints and a decrease in joint pain and damage in people with rheumatoid arthritis.
Scientists behind the device, now being tested in the Netherlands, hope it would be available in the United Kingdom (UK) by 2020. One patient who took part in a pilot study said it was so successful it felt as if she did not have the disease any more. She said: “I have my life back, like before I got arthritis.”

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Immunotherapy Can Help HIV Patients

Immunotherapy has been considered potentially promising for many different kinds of cancers, and now there is fresh hope that the same method could be used to treat or functionally cure HIV.
These are the findings of a study published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’. Immunotherapy, also called biologic therapy, is a type of cancer treatment designed to boost the body’s natural defences to fight cancer. It uses substances either made by the body or in a laboratory to improve or restore immune system function.
They said during the clinical, The United States, U.S., researchers said they examined a total of 24 chronically HIVinfected participants in clinical trials conducted at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Reacting to the development, Senior Author, Pablo Tebas, who is director of the AIDS Clinical Trials Unit at Penn, said they found injections of one broadly neutralising HIV antibody (bNAb), known as VRC01, were safe.
He said it generated high levels of the antibody and modestly delayed the time of HIV viral rebound, but suppression did not surpass eight weeks in the majority of participants. Tebas said the study only looked at one antibody and they believe combinations of more potent bNAbs may help successfully control the AIDS virus.
“As a result, this method marks a first step toward the ultimate goal of durable suppression of HIV in the absence of antiretroviral therapy. For the near future, it is unlikely that we will be able to fully eradicate HIV once a person has been infected. But a functional cure is a reasonable intermediate goal,” he said.
Tebas said a functional HIV cure means that while the virus would still exist in a person’s body in extremely small amounts, virus replication would be durably suppressed, disease progression drastically slowed, and symptoms of infection stopped all without the need for daily medications.
He stressed that the goal of immunotherapy is to eliminate the need to take a pill every single day while simultaneously chipping away at the latent reservoir of virusinfected cells.
He, however, stressed that scientists are still years away from that goal. “If a person is able to be functionally cured of HIV, long-term follow-up will be essential to ensure that the virus doesn’t return to high levels.’’ Tebas said it was noted that many participants were also found to have

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"We Live With Rats and Snakes" - Nigerian IDPs

The internally displaced persons, IDPs, in Taraba State have raised alarm that they are living and sleeping with dangerous snakes, rats and other animals in the camp located at Mutum-Biu, headquarters of Gasol Local Government Area of the state. They disclosed this when an NGO, Marry&Prolific Entertainment, visited the camp to donate food items to them.
The NGO visited the camp with food items, including bags of rice, tubers of yams, cartons of noodles, assorted soft drinks and cash to aid the people. Briefing the visitors on their challenges in the camp, those who spoke claimed they had been finding it very difficult to cope with the situations, lamenting that many of them had lost their loved ones to lack of food and medical facilities in the three years they had lived in the camp. 
Malliam Watki, a 78-year-old woman, who was displaced by the Wukari crisis, told the media: “Recently, we have been living with dangerous snakes in our rooms here. We also live in the same rooms with rats and other animals. The recent snake we found in my room was a big python. We struggled to kill the snake for nine days. It would run and hide in places where we could not find it. It was very difficult before outsiders came and helped us to kill it.”
The coordinator of the IDPs camp, Mallam Inusa Bala, while receiving the items, lamented that the displaced persons in the camp were going through hardship due to various sicknesses, hunger and starvation. He said: “At the time we came to the camp, we were up to 9,000. Some of us particularly children, died from different deceases, hunger and starvation. Some left to seek for means of survival, while others were fortunate to get back to their homes. We are now about 4,000 persons.”

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Sleep Deprivation Could Affect Your Waistline

In order to increase awareness on the negative impact of poor sleep on health, scientists have alerted the global community that too little sleep may contribute to a larger waistline.
These findings are published in the ‘European Journal of Clinical Nutrition’ on November 2. According to the researchers, sleep deprivation didn’t have a significant effect on how many calories people burned.
That means those with sleep deprivation had a net gain of 385 calories a day, the researchers said. However, people with too little sleep had higher fat and lower protein intake than those who got enough sleep, but both groups had similar carbohydrate intake.
Sleep plays an important role in the physical health of humans. For example, sleep is involved in healing and repair of the heart and blood vessels. Ongoing sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.
Similarly, studies show that a good night’s sleep improves learning. Whether one is learning mathematics, how to play the piano, how to perfect golf swing, or how to drive a car, sleep helps enhance learning and problem-solving skills.
Sleep also helps individuals to pay attention, make decisions, and be creative. The new research included 11 studies with a total of 172 participants. Compared to those who got enough sleep, those who were sleep-deprived consumed an average of 385 more calories a day.
That’s equal to the calories in about four and a half slices of bread. Reacting to the development, Senior Study Author, Gerda Pot, who is with the Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences Division at King’s College London and Vrije University in Amsterdam, said:
“The main cause of obesity is an imbalance between calorie intake and expenditure and this study adds to accumulating evidence that sleep deprivation could contribute to this imbalance. So, there may be some truth in the saying ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy and wise.”

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