'My job involves giving children a sense of control over their environment'

Rob Beadel is employed by Buckinghamshire county council to develop policies and train school staff in dealing with vulnerable children. Photograph: Alamy

Name: Dr Rob Beadel

Age: 53

Job: Senior educational psychologist

Council: Buckinghamshire county council

What is an educational psychologist? Educational psychologists advise local authorities in developing policies around education, carry out psychological assessments on children and train school staff in dealing with vulnerable children. We also have a role supporting families throughout Buckinghamshire..

Describe a typical day in your job: What I do is very interesting because it is so varied. It can involve seeing children, or working with local authority policy and practice at quite a senior level.

What kind of children do you work with? Children with no school place, or those with complex behavioural difficulties or significant mental health conditions. We also work with schools to produce materials for children who move home a lot, such as those whose parents are in the military. Military children who have lost a parent because of war or injury would be a priority group for us.

How do you help them? People have to adapt to new environments and psychology can help us understand what that means and how best to do that. That's why we developed "my passport" – a booklet that children take with them when they move schools. They can fill out information in it about themselves and their family, giving staff a better understanding of their background and history. The idea is to increase the child's sense of control over their environment so they settle in quicker.

What other interesting projects have you worked on? I've been talking to health professionals about the possible impact of returning veterans who have experienced trauma or post traumatic stress disorder and the possible impact that will have on their children.

What are the biggest challenges you face in your job? I work with some extremely vulnerable children and families, which makes demands on you personally. I think the variety of the job is an advantage – it makes it interesting – but it requires a very wide skill set. It's also keeping up to date with psychological literature; we are expected to do that. I have just finished a four year doctorate that I was doing concurrently with my job.

How do cuts and the changes to education the government is bringing in affect you? One of the ways we have reacted is to develop our services to make money. Schools that have been turned into academies have more control over their budgets and they can buy additional services from us now, such as training. So we've actually recruited additional psychologists who work in a different way.

How do you lead your team? We have 35 psychologists, some part-time some full-time, and it's very much a collaborative approach. The psychology of interaction is a crucial part of what I do, and giving advice to people isn't always the right thing to do. It is about working as part of a team as opposed to telling people what you think they ought to do.

What made you decide to be a psychologist? I was a teacher originally. I spent over 10 years working in a school with children with challenging behaviour and I became curious as to why they behaved the way they did and the best ways to help them. I decided to do a degree in psychology, and that led me to where I am now.

What made you decide to work in local government? The core of it for me is around public service ethos. Where I'm more comfortable is working with children and families who have the highest needs and who are the most vulnerable. And working for a local authority allows me to work in policy development as well at various levels.

What advice would you give to aspiring educational psychologists? Do a properly recognised psychology degree and get some experience working with children and young people and their families in whatever context. I think that's quite a good career route.

Who inspires you? Aneurin Bevan with the National Health Service – that ethos of helping other people but having organisations and structures that can do that.

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Seeking ways to effectively control bacteria in the water supply

Main Category: Water - Air Quality / Agriculture
Also Included In: Public Health;  Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 15 Aug 2013 - 1:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Seeking ways to effectively control bacteria in the water supply

Research at the University of Sheffield, published in the latest issue of Water Science and Technology: Water Supply, points the way to more sophisticated and targeted methods of ensuring our drinking water remains safe to drink, while still reducing the need for chemical treatments and identifying potential hazards more quickly.

The research team, from the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering, studied four bacteria found in the city's drinking water to see which combinations were more likely to produce a 'biofilm'. Biofilms are layers of bacteria which form on the inner surfaces of water pipes.

"Biofilms can form on all water pipes and as these are usually non-harmful bacteria, they don't present a problem," explains lead researcher, Professor Catherine Biggs. "However, biofilms can also be a safe place for harmful bacteria such as Escherichia coli or Legionella to hide. If the bacterial growth is too heavy, it can break off into the water flow, which at best can make water discoloured or taste unpleasant and at worst can release more dangerous bacteria. Our research looks at what conditions enable biofilms to grow, so we can find ways to control the bacteria in our water supply more effectively."

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the research isolated four bacteria from water taken from a domestic tap: two were widely found in drinking water everywhere, one was less common and one was unique to Sheffield. The researchers mixed the bacteria in different combinations and found that, in isolation, none of them produced a biofilm. However, when any of the bacteria were combined with one of the common forms, called Methylobacterium, they formed a biofilm within 72 hours.

"Our findings show that this bacterium is acting as a bridge, enabling other bacteria to attach to surfaces and produce a biofilm and it's likely that it's not the only one that plays this role," says Professor Biggs. "This means it should be possible to control or even prevent the creation of biofilms in the water supply by targeting these particular bacteria, potentially reducing the need for high dosage chemical treatments."

Domestic water supplies in the UK are regularly tested for levels of bacteria and, if these are too high, water is treated with greater concentrations of chlorine or pipe networks are flushed through to clear the problem. However, the standard tests look for indicator organisms rather than the individual types which are present. Testing methods being developed by the Sheffield team - as used in this research - involve DNA analysis to identify the specific types of bacteria present.

"The way we currently maintain clean water supplies is a little like using antibiotics without knowing what infection we're treating," says Professor Biggs. "Although it's effective, it requires extensive use of chemicals or can put water supplies out of use to consumers for a period of time. Current testing methods also take time to produce results, while the bacteria are cultured from the samples taken.

"The DNA testing we're developing will provide a fast and more sophisticated alternative, allowing water companies to fine tune their responses to the exact bacteria they find in the water system."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our water - air quality / agriculture section for the latest news on this subject.

Bacteriological water quality compliance and root cause analysis: an industry case study

Kate Ellis, Bernadette Ryan, Michael R. Templeton and Catherine A. Biggs; Water Science & Technology: Water Supply Vol 13 No 4 pp 1034-1045 © IWA Publishing 2013 doi:10.2166/ws.2013.092

University of Sheffield

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Characterizing stem cells in larval schistosomes may help control the prolific human parasite

Main Category: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 14 Aug 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Characterizing stem cells in larval schistosomes may help control the prolific human parasite

Ancient Egyptian mummies revealed that humans have been hosting parasitic flatworms called schistosomes for more than 5,000 years. Today the parasites continue to plague millions of people across the world, causing roughly 250,000 deaths each year.

The schistosome reproductive cycle results in exponentially more schistosomes each generation. Not only do the adults lay hundreds to thousands of eggs each day but the larval schistosomes are able to clone themselves thousands of times, with each clone capable of developing into an egg-producing adult.

Researchers at the University of Illinois quickly realized that one key to controlling schistosomes is being able to control their incredibly prolific life cycle. In a recent study published in the journal eLife, Illinois researchers have come one step closer to understanding the unique mechanisms that allow schistosomes' germinal cells, stem cells that multiply into other types of cells, to create thousands of clonal larvae that can then infect humans.

The Disease

This work adds to our understanding of the basic biology of schistosomiasis, a chronic disease caused by schistosome parasites, that robbed at least 243 million people of their productivity in 2011.

"People don't feel well, and so they are not productive in their work," said James Collins III, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology (CDB) at Illinois. "This disease keeps them from being able to realize their full potential, and in turn, they remain poor and are exposed to more diseases like schistosomiasis, which are ultimately diseases of sanitation. It's a disease of poverty that also perpetuates poverty."

Schistosomiasis can result in abdominal pain, diarrhea, and blood in urine or feces. The parasite's eggs, and not the parasite itself, cause these symptoms and others. The bloodstream carries many of the eggs to the liver and other areas of the body where they can trigger a massive immune response.

"When you look at people who have a high level of infection, you see many holes in their liver," said Phillip Newmark, a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at Illinois, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an affiliate of the Regenerative Biology and Tissue Engineering research theme at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB). "Where there was an egg, a hole is formed where the tissue has been destroyed by the host immune system's inflammatory response."

The Life Cycle

Every day for decades, adult schistosomes can lay hundreds to thousands of eggs. Their life cycle starts over when the eggs are excreted from the human host through urine or feces. When the eggs contact water, they hatch out "miracidia" that seek out the snail intermediate hosts.

Inside the correct species of snail, the miracidia become sporocysts, essentially sacs filled with germinal cells, that undergo clonal expansion, making tens to hundreds of thousands of copies of themselves in the form of "cercariae." The fast-swimming cercariae are shed from the snail, and search for human hosts who find themselves in cercariae-infested fresh water.

"They are attracted by the fatty acids in your skin," said Collins. "In the lab, you can leave your thumbprint on a plastic petri dish, and all the cercariae will swarm to your thumbprint and try to penetrate the plastic."

Once they find a host, they are able to burrow through the skin and enter the bloodstream. Inside the body, they migrate to specific sites in the human host, mature into male or female worms, and find mates with whom they will live, paired together "in copula." If left undetected, they will continue mass producing eggs for decades.

The Research

Illinois researchers are approaching this important problem from a unique perspective, using developmental biology (the study of how organisms grow and develop) and applying the lessons they have learned from studying planarians, non-parasitic relatives of schistosomes.

"When researchers are just focused on targeting diseases and developing drugs, they may wind up limiting their opportunities by not really understanding the biology of the system," Newmark said. "I think fundamental, curiosity-driven research is still vital for developing long-lasting solutions. If anything comes of this, it will be because we were asking very fundamental questions about these parasites, based upon our knowledge of their free-living cousins, the planarians."

The team's research was motivated by the idea that stem cells seem to be key to schistosomes' ability to live within humans, but also to their ability to live and clone themselves within their snail hosts.

They discovered that germinal cells possess a molecular signature - a collection of expressed genes - that is similar to that of neoblasts (adult stem cells) that allow planarians to regrow missing body parts. Among these genes, they identified some that are required for maintaining the germinal cell population.

This evidence suggests that schistosome larvae may have evolved by adapting a developmental program used by non-parasitic flatworms in order to rapidly increase their population - essentially giving them the opportunity to reproduce twice within their life cycle, once asexually inside snail hosts and once sexually inside human hosts.

Illinois researchers believe they can apply this newfound developmental knowledge to future studies that may lead to ways to control, or even eradicate, schistosomes. They have already discovered that they can make the reproductive system of a planarian disappear by removing the function of a neuropeptide; eventually, they hope to do the same in schistosomes.

Still, there's much to still be learned, says Collins. "We have really only scratched the surface of understanding the basic biology of these organisms. In order to be able to treat this disease, we need to know more about the organisms that cause it. That's one of our main motivations for this work."

First author Bo Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at the IGB, said the obvious next step will be to further characterize these schistosome cells on a genomic level. "We really need to improve our understanding of schistosome stem cells," Wang said. "We still don't understand all the mechanisms that really make them unique, that really make them have this tremendous capacity to proliferate, or reproduce."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our infectious diseases / bacteria / viruses section for the latest news on this subject.

The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded this study. Wang was also supported by the IGB, who sponsored his fellowship. The work was reported in the July 30, 2013 issue of eLife (doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00768).

Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Scientists emphasize urgent need for improved disease surveillance and control in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Main Category: Tropical Diseases
Article Date: 01 Aug 2013 - 14:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Scientists emphasize urgent need for improved disease surveillance and control in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Following the most deadly conflict since World War II, and nearly two decades of population displacement, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) now may represent one of the world's highest burdens of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). A lack of surveillance activities and epidemiologic data is a key factor in delaying progress in disease control and elimination programs, scientists report in an editorial publishing Thursday, August 1 in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Based on the limited information available, the researchers found that DR Congo may have some of the highest levels of intestinal helminth infections, lymphatic filariasis and schistosomiasis on the African continent. DR Congo also bears the greatest number of cases of leprosy in Africa and human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) globally. A number of important human viral infections including HIV/AIDS, Chikungunya, Ebola and monkeypox may have also first emerged from DR Congo.

Despite the likelihood of widespread NTDs, there are only minimal reported surveillance activities in DR Congo, a nation that is nearly the size of Western Europe. To strengthen DR Congo's health infrastructure and ultimately its economic output, the authors propose a comprehensive NTD mapping, control and research program.

"Identifying the reach and severity of NTDs is an essential first step to providing targeted treatments to millions of people in DR Congo," said co-author Dr. Anne Rimoin, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health. "Increasing surveillance activity of NTDs and studying the emergence of key viral infections should be one of the top health priorities for the country."

As the authors recognize, the Ministry of Public Health of DR Congo has demonstrated willingness to expand NTD disease surveillance and control activities in the years ahead. With the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), DR Congo is planning an ambitious program of NTD mapping and integrated diseases control focused on mass drug administration, while the World Health Organization, its Regional Office for Africa (AFRO) and the Belgium Development Agency have offered additional support.

"We have a responsibility to better understand the true burden of NTDs in DR Congo," said Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute. "Future findings from enhanced disease surveillance and research will help shape and achieve important global development milestones in a country that has missed out on much of the economic and social progress spreading throughout many other parts of Africa."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our tropical diseases section for the latest news on this subject.

Rimoin AW, Hotez PJ (2013) NTDs in the Heart of Darkness: The Democratic Republic of Congo’s Unknown Burden of Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLoS Negl Trop Dis 7(7): e2118. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0002118

PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published weekly by the Public Library of Science (PLOS).

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Lunch with company reduces cognitive control, may increase social harmony

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Also Included In: Public Health;  Nutrition / Diet
Article Date: 31 Jul 2013 - 14:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Lunch with company reduces cognitive control, may increase social harmony

Lunch at a restaurant with friends reduces cognitive control more than lunch eaten alone at a desk does, according to research published July 31 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Werner Sommer from the Humboldt University at Berlin, Germany, and colleagues from other institutions.

Participants in the study either ate a solitary meal alone at their desk in a restricted amount of time, or took a short walk to a restaurant for an hour-long lunch with a friend. All meals were identical in the kind and amounts of food consumed. After the meal, people who had a restaurant lunch were calmer and less wakeful than those who ate at their desks. They also fared more poorly on performance tests of cognitive control, and neurophysiological measurements indicated decreased cognitive control of performance and error monitoring processes. Since the meals differed in many ways including the presence of a friend, environment and lack of time restrictions, the authors explain "It is impossible to specify at this point, which of the variables above are crucial for the effects observed in our study."

They add, "Reduced cognitive control is a disadvantage when close self-monitoring of performance and detailed attention to errors is required, such as in numerical processing. In other situations, an attenuation of cognitive control may be advantageous, such as when social harmony or creativity is desired."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our psychology / psychiatry section for the latest news on this subject.

How about Lunch? Consequences of the Meal Context on Cognition and Emotion.. PLoS ONE 8(7): e70314. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0070314

Authors: Sommer W, Stürmer B, Shmuilovich O, Martin-Loeches M, Schacht A

This research was supported by the Wolfgang-Köhler-Zentrum zur Erforschung von Konflikten in Intelligenten Systemen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

PLOS ONE

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From gold, a new way to control blood clotting

Main Category: Blood / Hematology
Article Date: 29 Jul 2013 - 1:00 PDT Current ratings for:
From gold, a new way to control blood clotting

Using gold nanoparticles, MIT researchers have devised a new way to turn blood clotting on and off. The particles, which are controlled by infrared laser light, could help doctors control blood clotting in patients undergoing surgery, or promote wound healing.

Currently, the only way doctors can manage blood clotting is by administering blood thinners such as heparin. This reduces clotting, but there is no way to counteract the effects of heparin and other blood thinners.

"It's like you have a light bulb, and you can turn it on with the switch just fine, but you can't turn it off. You have to wait for it to burn out," says Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and senior author of a paper describing the new particles, which can turn blood clotting off and then restore it when necessary.

Lead author of the paper, which is appearing in the July 24 issue of the journal PLoS One, is Helena de Puig, an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering. Other authors are Anna Cifuentes Rius, a visiting student from Ramon Llull University in Spain, and MIT senior Dorma Flemister.

Blood clotting is produced by a long cascade of protein interactions, culminating in the formation of fibrin, a fibrous protein that seals wounds. Heparin and other blood thinners interfere with this process by targeting several of the reactions that occur during the blood-clotting cascade. A better solution, Hamad-Schifferli says, would be an agent that targets only the last step - the conversion of fibrinogen to fibrin, a reaction mediated by an enzyme called thrombin.

Several years ago, scientists discovered that DNA with a specific sequence inhibits thrombin by blocking the site where it would typically bind fibrinogen. The complementary DNA sequence can shut off the inhibition by binding to the original DNA strand and preventing it from attaching to thrombin.

Hamad-Schifferli and her colleagues had previously demonstrated that gold nanorods can be designed to release drugs or other compounds when activated with infrared light. The size of the nanorod determines the wavelength of light that will activate it, so two rods of different lengths can carry different payloads and be controlled separately.

To manipulate the blood-clotting cascade, Hamad-Schifferli decided to load a smaller gold nanorod (35 nanometers long) with the DNA thrombin inhibitor and a larger particle (60 nanometers long) with the complementary DNA strand. At first, they tried to get the DNA to chemically bond to the gold nanoparticles. However, they found they couldn't load enough DNA onto each particle to make this process effective.

Then, Hamad-Schifferli says, "We realized we could use a bad side effect of nanoparticle biology to our advantage." That is, the particles tend to attract a halo of proteins that bind to gold, making them sticky. In previous studies, she has shown that this large cloud of proteins can be used to hold a drug payload.

"If you do that, you can get way more drug on the nanorod than you normally would if you had to chemically link them together," Hamad-Schifferli says. By soaking the nanorods in a solution of human serum protein and the DNA molecules, the researchers were able to attach six times more DNA than through chemical bonding.

When the gold nanorods are exposed to the correct wavelength of infrared light, the electrons within the gold become very excited and generate so much heat that they melt slightly, taking on a more spherical shape and releasing their DNA payload.

The researchers tested the nanoparticles using blood donated to hospitals, and found that the particles successfully turned blood clotting on and off in all of the samples tested.

"It's really a fascinating idea that you can control blood clotting not just one way but by having two different optical antennae to create two-way control," says Luke Lee, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley who was not part of the research team. "It's an innovative and creative way to interface with biological systems."

For the particles to be practical for use in patients, they would need to be targeted to the site of injury, which the researchers are now working on doing. Once they reached the site, they would need to be within a few millimeters of the skin surface for the infrared light shone on the skin to reach them.

The researchers are also working on modifying the system so the particles can be activated using a continuous wave laser, which is smaller and less powerful than the pulsed femtosecond laser they are currently using.

Written by Anne Trafton

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our blood / hematology section for the latest news on this subject.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Signal uncovered that prevents the immune system from spinning out of control

Main Category: Immune System / Vaccines
Also Included In: Allergy
Article Date: 25 Jul 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Signal uncovered that prevents the immune system from spinning out of control

A team led by a University of Arizona researcher has discovered a previously unknown mechanism that prevents the immune system from going into overdrive, shedding light not only on how our body controls its response to pathogens but on conditions such as autoimmune diseases, allergies and chronic inflammation as well.

The group found a protein previously believed to only play a role in blood clotting acts as a negative feedback signal, telling defense cells to calm down, thereby preventing an immune reaction from spiraling out of control. The results, which could lead to new therapeutics for a variety of disorders caused by a faulty immune response, are published in the scientific journal Immunity.

When pathogens such as viruses or bacteria invade our body, the immune system reacts by producing a flurry of chemical signals, known as chemokines that act as a bugle call recruiting specialized defender cells to the scene, such as macrophages, which devour the intruders. This first line of defense is known as inflammation.

"Inflammation is a necessary defense mechanism - you can't live without it," said Sourav Ghosh, assistant professor in the department of cellular and molecular medicine at the UA College of Medicine and lead author of the study. "On the flip side, if you can't regulate the inflammation, it can damage the body."

To be effective against pathogens, yet prevent collateral damage from the body's own defenses, the immune system has to maintain just the right level of inflammation, explained Ghosh, who is also a member of the University of Arizona Cancer Center and theUA's BIO5 Institute.

"It needs to be not too high and not too low," he said. "The question had always been, how does the immune system maintain that balance? Our discovery explains this."

All organisms, even plants, have some kind of immune system at their disposal that acts as an army fighting against the onslaught of microbes, viruses, parasites and other pathogens in the environment. Vertebrates have evolved the most sophisticated arsenal of "soldiers" and "weapons," relying on two powerful lines of defense: a non-specific, or innate, immune response and the specific, or adaptive, immune response.

In the non-specific response, the immune system throws a first wave of countermeasures at the intruders, consisting of - among other things - aggressive chemicals, destructive enzymes and kamikaze-like neutrophils, specialized white blood cells that destroy the attackers by devouring them, killing themselves in the process.

"First you don't know who the enemy is, so you fire everywhere with your eyes closed," Ghosh explained. "But once you know the enemy, you need to shut off this first response firing and bring in the special ops so to speak."

The special ops come in the form of the specific immunity, capable of targeting pathogens very precisely, taking out the enemy in a sniper-like fashion, while sparing friendly microbes and cells belonging to the body. Most importantly, this portion of the immune system contains cells that remember every attacker trying to conquer an organism throughout its lifetime, allowing the immune system to summon the most effective, specialized task force to counter a pathogen it recognizes from a previous battle.

"The innate immune response is necessary to activate the adaptive response," Ghosh said. "But once activated, there has to be a mechanism that prevents the adaptive response from going into overdrive. From previous studies, we knew there had to be some kind of signal that does this, but we didn't know the nature of that signal. Now we do."

Two kinds of immune cells turned out to be the key players in mediating the immune response: the dendritic cells, so called because of the tree-like branches they grow during their development ("dendron" means "tree" in Greek), which belong to the first wave of defense; and the T-cells, so named because they mature in the thymus gland of the second, which are part of the second wave, the specific immune response.

"The dendritic cells activate the T-cells," Ghosh explained. "Only when they're activated, not when they're resting, do the T-cells produce this protein that we knew only from the blood clotting process, called Protein S."

The T-cells display Protein S on their surface, where it makes contact with a receptor the dendritic cells carry on their surface. This triggers a signal telling the dendritic cell to stop switching on T-cells, causing the immune response to slow down.

"We thought about which cells could be the source of that signal," said Carla Rothlin of the School of Medicine at Yale University, who led the study together with Ghosh. "You don't want to put the brakes on from the very beginning, or otherwise the immune response would never amount to anything. But you want to slow it down once it starts going too fast."

"We figured that once the specific response is underway, you don't really need the unspecific response anymore, so the T-cells appeared to be the best candidates for the source of this signal."

To test their hypothesis, the researchers studied the immune response in mice in which the gene coding for Protein S had been deactivated selectively in their T-cells, rendering them unable to communicate with the dendritic cells.

As expected, these mice were unable to regulate their immune response, resulting in higher levels of inflammation compared to their normal counterparts.

To assess the relevance of their findings to humans, Ghosh and his co-workers then studied blood from patients with inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Consistent with their previous results, patients suffering from increased inflammation had lower levels of Protein S in their blood stream compared to healthy volunteers.

The findings could help scientists and clinicians develop better treatments for inflammatory diseases, for example by designing drugs that substitute for insufficient Protein S. According to Ghosh, patients with inflammatory bowel disease are 20 times more likely to develop colon cancer, further underlining the significance of this study.

Study co-author Dr. Jonathan Leighton reported anecdotal evidence from the clinical practice that is in line with the dual roles Protein S is believed to play.

"Patients with inflammatory bowel disease can develop blood clots if they have active disease," said Leighton, a UA alumnus who holds the Chair of the Division of Gastroenterology at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. "From a clinical standpoint, we think that three factors predispose to inflammation in inflammatory bowel disease - genetic, environmental and the immune system. This research is exciting because it focuses on the immune system. No one has found a consistent inflammatory pathway that explains all the clinical manifestations, and it may be that different pathways are affected in different patients. We don't understand how it all relates quite yet, but this study is a step toward a better understanding that will ultimately help us treat patients more effectively."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our immune system / vaccines section for the latest news on this subject.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants R01 AI077058, R01 AI089824, CA95060 and T32 AI007019); the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation; the American Heart Association; the American Asthma Foundation; the Lupus Research Institute; a CONICET Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Gershon-Trudeau Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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Health Tips & Info : 5 Hints for Taking Control of Your Acne Beginning Now

Here are 5 hints for taking control of your acne beginning now.Keeping in shape may help fight acne by driving back negative stress levels that may come from negative self-regard and depression. But, a few safeguards need to be in place to ward off acne that may result from your physical exertion routines. Watch what you put on your body with reference to clothing, sports gear and equipment.For instance, tight lycra and nylon exercise outfits may look great in the movies and on magazine models, but if you're susceptible to acne issues, avoid these synthetic fabrics that tend to trap in body moisture and heat resulting in a bacterium frenzy. Rather, choose loose clothing made of cotton or natural blends to let more air progress to your skin.And when you're done with your workout, get out of clothing wet from perspiration or water sports. Shower and change into dry, clean apparel. And keep your sports gear and equipment clean, too. Dirty headgear, for example, may irritate forehead areas prone to acne issues. So toss headbands into the washer after physical exercise sessions.To avoid pore-clogging and skin annoyances that are similar to acne and that may lend to acne, utilize products labeled noncomedogenic or oil-free. Shimmering facial colors may contain a flaky mineral called mica that may cause skin irritations and choke off pores. Other additives in coloring that may induce similar reactions are coal tar derivatives, carmine and heavy cream in blushes.More preventative measures include utilizing a lip gloss that promotes a matte finish rather than a high gloss for less pore-clogging; note the more the shine, the more then comedogenic material and the more the pores may choke off. Beware that eye creams may bear heavier concentrations of moisturizers than regular creams and lotions, meaning they've greater potential to choke off pores in the surrounding facial areas.fields of study demonstrate that diet doesn't play a role in either the cause or the treatment of acne. But, what is recommended for acne preventative care is this: what is best for your body is better for your skin, particularly since your skin is the largest organ of your body. So remember to watch your diet and eat healthy vitamins, minerals and additional supplements. This will help to prevent and help subdue acne breakout.A healthy skin regimen ought to include no harsh scrubbing or over-washing, as this may cause possible skin irritation or potential over production of oil to replace what has washed off, choking off pores in the process. Products with gentle exfoliation components are OK to utilize; i.e. not scratchy nut or fruit shell pieces that may tear skin. And skip alcohol products if possible; these may take off the top layer of your skin and cause your glands to produce more oil, choking off pores in the process.If you do spot acne-troubled areas, don't mess with them. Remember that these are already weeks in the making, and squeezing or picking blemishes may force the tainted area to regress back inside, further afflicting the region and possibly leave a scar. If essential, seek help from a dermatologist for alternate treatments.Shaving for both genders is really an excellent way of exfoliating or removing dead skin to help with the prevention and spreading of acne rather than leaving the remains to choke off pores. And for some light acne cases already in process, shaving may help rid whiteheads and blackheads from the face.A word of care: for areas with infection or high inflammatory activity (redness, sensitive, open acne, sores, etc.), don’t shave. Or at the very least, utilize a shaving soap for sensitive skin!

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