Geneva, Sept 2 (ANI): WHO (World Health Organisation) researchers have found that African health workers needed better tools and more training to circumcise men and boys safely for HIV prevention and other ailments.

The research found that due to the traditional ways of circumcision, as many as 35 percent of males developed "shocking" complications like bleeding, infection, excessive pain and erectile dysfunction from the procedure, reported The News.

Six percent of the patients had life-long problems after faulty circumcision, said the study findings and added that "Other common adverse effects reported were pain upon urination, incomplete circumcision requiring re-circumcision, and laceration."

Although male circumcision is universally practised in Bungoma, the study said many clinicians there lacked sharp and clean instruments and few were formally trained. Even in public clinics, the complication rate was 18 per cent.

The findings, published on Monday in the WHO Bulletin, raised questions about whether the availability of male circumcision should be extended quickly as part of a strategy to fight HIV backed by the WHO and its sister UN agency UNAIDS.

In their report prepared after the study, the researchers said: "Extensive training and resources will be necessary to build the capacity of health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa before safe circumcision services can be aggressively promoted for HIV prevention." (ANI)

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TUESDAY, September 2, (News Locale) - Vitamin B supplements, which are thought to help prevent progression of coronary artery disease, may not be helpful and may in fact cause harm. These are the findings of a Norwegian study involving over 3,000 participants.

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Washington, Sept 2 (ANI): Children born to older fathers are more likely to develop bipolar disorder, common condition sometimes known as manic depression, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Other than a family history of psychotic disorders, few risk factors for bipolar disorder have been identified.

Older paternal age has previously been associated with a higher risk of complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including schizophrenia and autism.

In the latest study, Emma M. Frans, M.Med.Sc., of the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues identified 13,428 patients in Swedish registers with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

For each one, they randomly selected from the registers five controls who were the same sex and born the same year but did not have bipolar disorder.

When comparing the two groups, the older an individual's father, the more likely he or she was to have bipolar disorder. After adjusting for the age of the mother, participants with fathers older than 29 years had an increased risk.

"After controlling for parity [number of children], maternal age, socioeconomic status and family history of psychotic disorders, the offspring of men 55 years and older were 1.37 times more likely to be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder than the offspring of men aged 20 to 24 years," the researchers stated.

The offspring of older mothers also had an increased risk, but it was less pronounced than the paternal effect, the authors note. For early-onset bipolar disorder (diagnosed before age 20), the effect of the father's age was much stronger and there was no association with the mother's age.

"Personality of older fathers has been suggested to explain the association between mental disorders and advancing paternal age," the researchers stated.

"However, the mental disorders associated with increasing paternal age are under considerable genetic influence," they added.

Therefore, there may be a genetic link between advancing age of the father and bipolar and other disorders in offspring.

The experts said: "As men age, successive germ cell replications occur, and de novo [new, not passed from parent to offspring] mutations accumulate monotonously as a result of DNA copy errors. Women are born with their full supply of eggs that have gone through only 23 replications, a number that does not change as they age.

Therefore, DNA copy errors should not increase in number with maternal age. Consistent with this notion, we found smaller effects of increased maternal age on the risk of bipolar disorder in the offspring." (ANI)

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London, September 2 (ANI): Amid rising concerns that the current number of about 170 million diabetics across the world may double up by 2030, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have developed a reliable test to spot the disease in the early stage so that its progression can be prevented.

Lead researcher Gerald Hart says that early stages of the disease, scientifically known as "pre-diabetes", are characterised by increased reaction rates between sugars called hexosamines and proteins in the body.

According to him, the results can be seen in the blood as raised levels of a particular sugar, known as O-linked ß-N-acetylglucosamine.

Hart says that the new test can help measure levels of this compound and, thereby, diagnose pre-diabetes.

The researchers hope that people with pre-diabetes can be made aware of their condition in this way, and recommended necessary dietary changes to prevent the development of full-blown diabetes, reports New Scientist magazine. (ANI)

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