The Brain's Healing Power

Controlling hospital infection, practical way to prevent AD

DIRTY HANDS? DON'T USE SOAP

SAN DIEGO, California

Hospitals in the United States, following a trend that began in Europe, have begun replacing hand soap dispensers with alcohol-based gel products that have proved more effective in fighting germs and saving lives.

    The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to officially announce the changeover this month, said Elaine Larson, associate dean for research at the Columbia University School of Nursing.

    "This will be a revolution in hand hygiene ... Washing your hands is no longer the best way to clean them. This is news and it's very exciting," she said, noting that hospitals in Germany, Switzerland, and France have used these alcohol-based solutions for years. "The US has been very, very slow on this."

    Infections contracted from germs in hospitals can cause complications in hospitalized patients, and are responsible for some 90,000 deaths in the US each year.

    "Infections acquired in the hospital occur in approximately eight to 10 percent of all hospital admissions," said Sandra Swoboda of Johns Hopkins University.

    Research presented at the 42nd Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in September showed the effectiveness of the alcohol-based gels in reducing the transmission of germs to patients from doctors, nurses, or surgeons. One of the largest studies on the subject presented by Didier Pittet of the University Hospitals of Geneva showed a 50-percent cut in infection after using the alcohol-based gel solution for four years.

    Although more expensive, Pittet argued that the switch to gels was well worth it. He estimated a hospital's cost per patient of the new solutions was US$1.62, an $82,000 expense for his hospital. But he noted the hospital saved some US$12 million from 1999 to 2001 by not having to treat infections that would have been contracted had patients used hand soap instead of the gels.

    Another two-year study conducted at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Washington also yielded encouraging results. The rate of two of the worst infections contracted in hospitals-Staphylococcus aureus and enterococcal-fell by 21 percent and 43 percent.

OUT-OF-BODY COMES OUT OF THE MIND

PARIS

Out-of-body experiences, which in the 1970s became popularly attributed to intervention by God or by space aliens, are likely to emanate from a more mundane source: our own minds.

    Swiss neurologists believe the sensation of floating above one's body or feeling being disconnected from it-an experience sometimes recounted by people who have had surgery-is triggered by the angular gyrus, in the right cortex of the brain.

    A team led by Olaf Blanke at Geneva University Hospital used electrodes to stimulate the brain of a 43-year-old woman who had suffered chronic epileptic seizures for 11 years. They found that when they sent a weak signal to the angular gyrus, she repeatedly reported that she was "sinking into the bed" or "falling from a height."

    And the sensation intensified when the signal strength was increased, the team reported in Nature. Two other stimulations at this higher strength induced the same sensation, as well as an instantaneous feeling of "lightness" and "floating" two meters (6.5 feet) above the bed, close to the ceiling.

    Blanke suggests that the angular gyrus plays a key role in coordinating data. It matches visual information about the body, which comes from the eye, and information about touch and balance, which come from the skin and inner ear. If those information packages are mismatched, an out-of-body experience could follow, he believes.

    "We do not fully understand the neurological mechanism... [but] it is possible that the experience of dissociation of self from the body is a result of failure to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information," he said.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY

PARIS

Dilbert, beware. Stuck in a dead-end job with a crazed, dictatorial boss, the cult cartoon character has the very profile of someone at risk from a killer heart attack.

    A study in the British Medical Journal says people who suffer from stressful demands at work, poor rewards, and scant career opportunities are twice as likely to die from heart disease.

    Researchers led by psychologist Mika Kivimaki at Helsinki University, monitored the health for an average of 25 years of more than 800 employees at the Valmet machine tool company in central Finland. The team regularly recorded the volunteers' blood pressure, cholesterol, and body fat levels, and asked them to fill out questionnaires about their stress and sense of reward in their job.

    After the figures were adjusted for age and sex, employees with high job strain, a combination of high demands at work and low levels of control over their jobs had 2.2 times more risk of dying of cardiovascular disease compared with counterparts with low job stress. Highly-stressed employees notably had higher levels of blood cholesterol and put on weight as years went by.

BRAIN HEALING

BRISBANE, Australia

A world-first discovery about the way the human brain heals itself was announced by University of Queensland Professor Perry Bartlett, who said his team had found a mechanism that may stimulate the production of new nerve cells in the brain.

    "We isolated for the first time the stem cell in the brain that is responsible for the production of new nerve cells," Bartlett wrote on the Nature Neuroscience web site. "This has allowed us to start to identify how this stem cell can be regulated to produce new nerve cells in our brains. We have identified the first major mechanism that may regulate this process."

    Bartlett said the breakthrough had a range of potential practical applications. "By stimulating the production of new nerve cells in the brain, normal brain function-such as memory formation-could be enhanced," he said. "It could also allow for the replacement of nerve cells lost because of a stroke, trauma, or neurodegenerative ailments such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, or motor neurone disease."

GENE THERAPY FOR PARKINSON'S

WASHINGTON

A team of researchers has reported encouraging results of a gene therapy treatment on rats with Parkinson's disease. In a study published October in Science Magazine, researchers first removed the gene in rats that produces amino acids to provoke Parkinson's disease. The team, under the direction of Jia Luo of the University of Auckland in New Zealand then isolated the affected area of the brain that controlled movement and focused the therapy there.

    They found that by injecting a gene that protected certain nervous cells in the brain it blocked the development of the disease, and the rats showed an improvement in symptoms.

    This technique "holds potential for treatment of Parkinson's disease and other neurological conditions associated with excessive excitation," the authors wrote, while underlining that further studies would be necessary before knowing whether if could be applied to humans.

    Parkinson's disease is the deterioration of certain nerve cells in the brain that produce dopamine. If less of this amino acid is produced, nerve control begins to fail causing trembling, stiffness, and other symptoms. In this study the gene injected-glutamic acid decarboxylase-produced gamma-aminobutyric acids, which reestablished nerve control in the effected areas.

FISH FOR ALZHEIMER'S

PARIS

Elderly people who frequently eat fish and seafood run a much lower risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.

    French researchers led by Pascale Barberger-Gateau of Victor Segalen University in Bordeaux trawled through a detailed database of the health, education and habits of more than 1,600 elderly people living in southwestern France. Over a seven-year monitoring period, those who ate fish or seafood at least once a week were more than 30 percent less likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer's compared with the group average.

    The findings published in the British Medical Journal support lab evidence that fish oils contain fatty acids that may reduce inflammation in the brain and help nerve cells to regenerate, they argue. "Healthy dietary habits acquired in infancy could be associated with achievement of higher education. Highly educated people might also adhere more closely to dietary recommendations on fish consumption," they add.

CELL REPAIR

JERUSALEM

Israeli changes that could eventually lead to life-threatening diseases, the institute said.

    The theory of a repair mechanism was first put forward in the 1960s but was not proved until now, the institute said. When a cell chromosome is damaged, a sister chromosome can take over the defective one's function inside the cell.

     Scientists at the Weizmann Institute have discovered a cell repair system that guards against genetic mutations and disease. The repair mechanism permits human cells to correct structural