Washington, Oct 3 (ANI): While conducting a study on mice, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered a messaging system in the brain that directly affects food intake and body weight.

A protein called NF-kappaB and its associated gene IKKbeta are known to be involved in metabolism in liver, fat and skeletal muscle tissues.

When Dongsheng Cai, an assistant professor of physiology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and colleagues looked for this same pathway in the hypothalamus - the part of the brain that regulates appetite and energy balance - they found it also influenced how much mice eat.

More specifically, they found overfeeding the mice spurred the pathway into action. When they suppressed the pathway's activity, the animals were significantly protected from overeating and obesity.

The researchers also examined a cell component called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), shown recently to be involved in metabolic diseases involving over-nutrition, to see if it might play a role in linking over-nutrition to activate IKKbeta/NF-kappaB in the hypothalamus.

"At the intracellular level, when the ER is challenged with over-nutrition, this leads to ER stress, which can push the IKKbeta/NF-kappaB pathway to an active state, although the involved reactions could be quite complicated," Cai said.

In several experiments, the researchers found that ER stress caused by over-nutrition activated IKKbeta/NF-kappaB in the hypothalamus.

Suppressing ER stress in the central nervous system significantly preserved normal regulation of food intake and prevented obesity.

Cai said that he hopes the discovery will eventually to a better understanding of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases - which are both fuelled by overeating.

He also hopes it will lead to new treatments and prevention strategies for those diseases.

The study is published in the Oct. 3, 2008 issue of Cell. (ANI)

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London, Oct 3 (ANI): It may sound like the ultimate poison, but radioactive scorpion venom is being tested as a treatment for malignant brain cancer.

The sting of the Middle Eastern scorpion Leiurus quinquestriatus unleashes a cocktail of neurotoxins containing a peptide that is non-toxic to humans but binds to tumour cells.

In tests, the peptide has invaded tumours in breast, skin, brain and lung tissue while leaving healthy cells untouched.

"It's as if the tumours collect it," New Scientist quoted Michael Egan of the company TransMolecular in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as saying.

To determine if the peptide could deliver lethal doses of radioactivity to cancer cells, researchers have now attached radioactive iodine isotopes to it.

In a trial last year, the researchers injected this agent directly into the tumours of 59 people suffering from inoperable brain cancer.

All the patients have now died, but those receiving a higher dose lived for three months longer, on average.

In recent weeks, researchers at the University of Chicago in Illinois have begun injecting TM601 into the bloodstream of people with different types of malignant brain cancer.

This latest trial will allow the company to test whether it can seek out and kill secondary tumours throughout the body, as well as known primary ones. (ANI)

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Washington, Oct 3 (ANI): Stress makes people believe more in conspiracy theories and superstitions, a new research has found.

Scientists reckon that people who lack control over their life have a bigger urge to impose order and structure on the world through rituals and conspiracy theories.

The research finds that a quest for structure or understanding leads people to trick themselves into seeing and believing connections that simply don't exist.

The research was done by Adam Galinsky, the Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., in collaboration with lead author Jennifer Whitson, an assistant professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

Through a series of six experiments, the researchers showed that individuals who lacked control were more likely to see images that did not exist, perceive conspiracies, and develop superstitions.

"The less control people have over their lives, the more likely they are to try and regain control through mental gymnastics. Feelings of control are so important to people that a lack of control is inherently threatening. While some misperceptions can be bad or lead one astray, they're extremely common and most likely satisfy a deep and enduring psychological need," said Galinsky.

According to Whitson, that psychological need is for control, and the ability to minimize uncertainty and predict beneficial courses of action. In situations where one has little control, the researchers proposed that an individual may believe that mysterious, unseen mechanisms are secretly at work.

To test their theory, the researchers asked half of a group of volunteers to remember a situation when they felt a lack of control, such as a car crash, when a close family member had been ill or when they had felt under threat.

They then conducted a series of experiments, including asking the participants if they saw images in "snowy" pictures made up of dots.

Half of the pictures contained dots arranged randomly, while the other half made up faintly recognizable pictures, such as a chair, a boat or a planet.

While the volunteers saw 95 percent of the hidden images, the group under pressure also "saw" images in 43 percent in the random dots.

They were also more likely to believe in superstitions like having "lucky" socks, the scientists found.

More sinisterly, they also saw more conspiracy theories behind imagined scenarios, such as why an employee had been passed over for promotion.

The scientists believe that the findings show that people trick themselves into seeing or believing things that are not real because of a search for structure to their lives.

"People see false patterns in all types of data, imagining trends in stock markets, seeing faces in static, and detecting conspiracies between acquaintances. This suggests that lacking control leads to a visceral need for order - even imaginary order," said Whitson.

Volunteers who were made to feel more secure about their lives were less likely to fall back on superstition and conspiracy, the study found.

"It's exciting - restoring people's sense of control normalized their perceptions and behavior," said Galinsky.

The study has been published in the journal Science. (ANI)

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THURSDAY, October 2, (News Locale) - Patients suffering from heart disease as well as from depression are at an increased risk of suffering from another adverse heart event. Hence the American Heart Association (AHA) has called for depression screening in heart patients. 

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