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02 March 2012
La gripe obliga a reabrir 800 camas hospitalarias cerradas en Catalunya
La incidencia gripal empieza a disminuir gracias a la recuperación de las temperaturas
La gripe ha obliga al departamento de Salud a reaccionar y abrir un total de 800 camas que se habían cerrado de las plantas hospitalarias para poder hacer frente a los pacientes afectados. La incidencia gripal empieza a disminuir gracias a la recuperación de las temperaturas, tras alcanzar el pico del invierno la semana pasada, aunque la actividad del virus continua siendo alta y afecta especialmente a los niños.
El director del CatSalut, Joseph Maria Pedrosa, ha explicado que se trata de un tema "puntual" y que la incidencia llegó a su punto máximo la semana pasada.
"Durante la semana pasada se registraron un total de 460 casos por cada 100.000 ciudadanos y se atendieron hasta 68.000 urgencias; pero esta semana ya ha bajado hasta los 350", ha indicado. Según ha expuesto el director del CatSalut, estas cifras son "comparables con las registradas con la Gripe A durante el 2009. Pedrosa, que ha expuesto estas cifras durante la presentación del Plan de Salud de Cataluña 2011-2015 en la Región Sanitaria de Girona, ha indicado que la gripe ha tenido una influencia mayor en la provincia de Girona, concretamente en la zona de Figueres y en la la costa de Blanes.
**AGENCIAS
Vitamin D Shrinks Fibroid Tumors in Rats
Treatment with vitamin D reduced the size of uterine fibroids in laboratory rats predisposed to developing the benign tumors, reported researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Uterine fibroids are the most common noncancerous tumors in women of childbearing age. Fibroids grow within and around the wall of the uterus. Thirty percent of women 25 to 44 years of age report fibroid-related symptoms, such as lower back pain, heavy vaginal bleeding or painful menstrual periods. Uterine fibroids also are associated with infertility and such pregnancy complications as miscarriage or preterm labor. Other than surgical removal of the uterus, there are few treatment options for women experiencing severe fibroid-related symptoms and about 200,000 U.S. women undergo the procedure each year. A recent analysis by NIH scientists estimated that the economic cost of fibroids to the United States, in terms of health care expenses and lost productivity, may exceed $34 billion a year.
Fibroids are three to four times more common in African-American women than in white women. Moreover, African-American women are roughly 10 times more likely to be deficient in vitamin D than are white women. In previous research, the study authors found that vitamin D inhibited the growth of human fibroid cells in laboratory cultures.
"The study results provide a promising new lead in the search for a non-surgical treatment for fibroids that doesn't affect fertility," said Louis De Paolo, Ph.D., chief of the Reproductive Sciences Branch of the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the study.
First author Sunil K. Halder, Ph.D., of Meharry Medical College in Nashville conducted the research with Meharry colleagues Chakradhari Sharan, Ph.D., and Ayman Al-Hendy, M.D., Ph.D., and with Kevin G. Osteen, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also in Nashville. The findings appeared online in the journal Biology of Reproduction.
For the current study, the researchers tested the vitamin D treatment on a strain of rats genetically predisposed to developing fibroid tumors. After examining the animals and confirming the presence of fibroids in 12 of them, the researchers divided the rats into two groups of six each: those that would receive vitamin D and those that would not.
In the first group, small pumps implanted under the skin delivered a continuous dose of vitamin D for three weeks. The researchers then examined the animals in both groups. Fibroids increased in size in the untreated rats, but, in the rats receiving vitamin D, the tumors had shrunk dramatically. On average, uterine fibroids in the group receiving vitamin D were 75 percent smaller than those in the untreated group.
The amount of vitamin D the rats received each day was equivalent to a human dose of roughly 1,400 international units. The recommended amount of vitamin D for teens and adults age 70 and under is 600 units daily, although up to 4,000 units is considered safe for children over age 9, adults, and for pregnant and breastfeeding females.
"Additional research is needed to confirm vitamin D as a potential treatment for women with uterine fibroids," said Dr. Al-Hendy. "But it is also an essential nutrient for the health of muscle, bone and the immune system, and it is important for everyone to receive an adequate amount of the vitamin."
Fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel and tuna are the best natural sources of the vitamin. Very few foods naturally contain vitamin D. Fortified milk and other fortified foods provide an additional source of the vitamin. Vitamin D is also produced when ultraviolet rays from sunlight strike the skin.
**Published in "SCIENCE DAILY"
Vitamin D Shrinks Fibroid Tumors in Rats
Treatment with vitamin D reduced the size of uterine fibroids in laboratory rats predisposed to developing the benign tumors, reported researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Uterine fibroids are the most common noncancerous tumors in women of childbearing age. Fibroids grow within and around the wall of the uterus. Thirty percent of women 25 to 44 years of age report fibroid-related symptoms, such as lower back pain, heavy vaginal bleeding or painful menstrual periods. Uterine fibroids also are associated with infertility and such pregnancy complications as miscarriage or preterm labor. Other than surgical removal of the uterus, there are few treatment options for women experiencing severe fibroid-related symptoms and about 200,000 U.S. women undergo the procedure each year. A recent analysis by NIH scientists estimated that the economic cost of fibroids to the United States, in terms of health care expenses and lost productivity, may exceed $34 billion a year.
Fibroids are three to four times more common in African-American women than in white women. Moreover, African-American women are roughly 10 times more likely to be deficient in vitamin D than are white women. In previous research, the study authors found that vitamin D inhibited the growth of human fibroid cells in laboratory cultures.
"The study results provide a promising new lead in the search for a non-surgical treatment for fibroids that doesn't affect fertility," said Louis De Paolo, Ph.D., chief of the Reproductive Sciences Branch of the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which funded the study.
First author Sunil K. Halder, Ph.D., of Meharry Medical College in Nashville conducted the research with Meharry colleagues Chakradhari Sharan, Ph.D., and Ayman Al-Hendy, M.D., Ph.D., and with Kevin G. Osteen, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also in Nashville. The findings appeared online in the journal Biology of Reproduction.
For the current study, the researchers tested the vitamin D treatment on a strain of rats genetically predisposed to developing fibroid tumors. After examining the animals and confirming the presence of fibroids in 12 of them, the researchers divided the rats into two groups of six each: those that would receive vitamin D and those that would not.
In the first group, small pumps implanted under the skin delivered a continuous dose of vitamin D for three weeks. The researchers then examined the animals in both groups. Fibroids increased in size in the untreated rats, but, in the rats receiving vitamin D, the tumors had shrunk dramatically. On average, uterine fibroids in the group receiving vitamin D were 75 percent smaller than those in the untreated group.
The amount of vitamin D the rats received each day was equivalent to a human dose of roughly 1,400 international units. The recommended amount of vitamin D for teens and adults age 70 and under is 600 units daily, although up to 4,000 units is considered safe for children over age 9, adults, and for pregnant and breastfeeding females.
"Additional research is needed to confirm vitamin D as a potential treatment for women with uterine fibroids," said Dr. Al-Hendy. "But it is also an essential nutrient for the health of muscle, bone and the immune system, and it is important for everyone to receive an adequate amount of the vitamin."
Fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel and tuna are the best natural sources of the vitamin. Very few foods naturally contain vitamin D. Fortified milk and other fortified foods provide an additional source of the vitamin. Vitamin D is also produced when ultraviolet rays from sunlight strike the skin.
**Published in "SCIENCE DAILY"
How Marijuana Impairs Memory

The findings offer important new insight into the brain and raise the possibility that marijuana's benefits for the treatment of pain, seizures and other ailments might some day be attained without hurting memory, the researchers say.
With these experiments in mice, "we have found that the starting point for this phenomenon -- the effect of marijuana on working memory -- is the astroglial cells," said Giovanni Marsicano of INSERM in France.
"This is the first direct evidence that astrocytes modulate working memory," added Xia Zhang of the University of Ottawa in Canada.
The new findings aren't the first to suggest astroglia had been given short shrift. Astroglial cells (also known as astrocytes) have been viewed as cells that support, protect and feed neurons for the last 100 to 150 years, Marsicano explained. Over the last decade, evidence has accumulated that these cells play a more active role in forging the connections from one neuron to another.
The researchers didn't set out to discover how marijuana causes its cognitive side effects. Rather, they wanted to learn why receptors that respond to both THC and signals naturally produced in the brain are found on astroglial cells. These cannabinoid type-1 (CB1R) receptors are very abundant in the brain, primarily on neurons of various types.
Zhang and Marsicano now show that mice lacking CB1Rs only on astroglial cells of the brain are protected from the impairments to spatial working memory that usually follow a dose of THC. In contrast, animals lacking CB1Rs in neurons still suffer the usual lapses. Given that different cell types express different variants of CB1Rs, there might be a way to therapeutically activate the receptors on neurons while leaving the astroglial cells out, Marsicano said.
"The study shows that one of the most common effects of cannabinoid intoxication is due to activation of astroglial CB1Rs," the researchers wrote.
The findings further suggest that astrocytes might be playing unexpected roles in other forms of memory in addition to spatial working memory, Zhang said.
The researchers hope to explore the activities of endogenous endocannabinoids, which naturally trigger CB1Rs, on astroglial and other cells. The endocannabinoid system is involved in appetite, pain, mood, memory and many other functions. "Just about any physiological function you can think of in the body, it's likely at some point endocannabinoids are involved," Marsicano said.
And that means an understanding of how those natural signaling molecules act on astroglial and other cells could have a real impact. For instance, Zhang said, "we may find a way to deal with working memory problems in Alzheimer's."
Clearer Picture of How Protein Machine Systems Tweak Gene Expression

The new findings on the synthesis and function of different RNA polymerases (Pols), including two RNA polymerases that lead author Craig Pikaard discovered over a decade ago -- the plant-specific enzymes Pol IV and Pol V -- indicate that subunit composition of the polymerases plays a role in selecting how some genes are silenced while others are not.
All eukaryotes -- a group that includes plants, animals, fungi and all other organisms with nuclei -- contain life-essential Pols I, II and III that are each built from different combinations of 12 to 17 protein subunits, with each of the three enzymes assigned specific, unique tasks in the cell. In 1999 while analyzing the newly sequenced genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family considered a model organism for experimentation in plant biology, Pikaard identified Pol IV and Pol V.
Pikaard's work has since shown that while the Pol IV and Pol V enzymes are not essential to life and are actually specialized forms of Pol II (the RNA polymerase responsible for generating RNAs that encode proteins), they play important roles in RNA-directed DNA methylation, a process that silences mobile genetic elements known as retrotransposons that can cause trouble if allowed to spread.
"In fact, most of the 12 protein subunits present in Pols II, IV and V are encoded by the same genes," Pikaard said. "Interestingly, among these common subunits are alternative forms of the ninth subunit, and the two forms of the ninth subunit (9a and 9b) are extremely similar, differing in only 8 of their 114 amino acids."
This high degree of similarity suggested 9a and 9b proteins might be redundant, but the Pikaard lab's new research found this to be only partially true.
"When you remove both proteins, the plants die as embryos; but if they lack just one of the proteins, they still survive, which is evidence that the two alternative forms of the protein are redundant for survival," he said. "But despite this, plants missing either 9a or 9b have different physical characteristics, such as leaf shape, suggesting that Pol II built using 9a does not function exactly the same as Pol II assembled using 9b."
Another unique feature found between the two protein subunits involves the functionality of Pol V and its ability to conduct RNA-directed DNA methylation: The Pol V polymerase built using 9b facilitates methylation, while the 9a-built Pol V does not.
"This is the first evidence showing that different functional subtypes of nuclear RNA polymerases are generated using alternative subunits, and there are multiple subunits for which more than one variant is produced," Pikaard said. "The results also show for the first time that the ninth subunit has a role in RNA-directed DNA methylation."
With new evidence from other research that RNA-directed DNA methylation and transposon silencing also takes place in the sperm-forming cell lineage in mammals, and not just in plants, Pol II transcription is implicated in methylation in both plants and animals.
"Alterations in DNA methylation and gene silencing are involved in multiple genetic disorders and diseases, including cancer," Pikaard said. "Our studies of RNA Pol IV and Pol V may tell us important things about their cousin, Pol II, that may not be possible to know otherwise, including how RNA synthesis can help specify sites of DNA methylation."
Pikaard is the Carlos O. Miller Professor of Plant Growth and Development in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology and Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry. Last year he was also named as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation along with 14 other scientists as part of a $75 million plant science initiative.
El Senado de EE UU rechaza limitar la cobertura de anticonceptivos
La votación, resuelta por un margen de tres votos -51 en contra y 48 a favor, más estrecho del esperado-, implica un apoyo por parte de la Cámara Alta a la política sanitaria en materia anticonceptiva del presidente Barack Obama. Como estaba previsto, todos los representantes republicanos, salvo una senadora que ya anunció que no apoyaría la enmienda, y tres demócratas, han votado a favor.
El verano pasado Obama presentó su política anticonceptiva que incluía, tal y como establecía la reforma sanitaria de 2010, la cobertura gratuita de los anticonceptivos por parte de los empresarios y las compañías aseguradoras. Durante la sesión de hoy, los defensores de la enmienda han esgrimido argumentos a favor de la libertad religiosa. Los republicanos consideran que la norma de Obama obliga a las instituciones religiosas a ir en contra de sus principios para garantizar a sus empleadas el acceso gratuito a métodos anticonceptivos. “El presidente está pisoteando la libertad religiosa” ha declarado el senador republicano por Nebraska Mike Johanns.
-Los republicanos creen que la norma de Obama obliga a las instituciones religiosas a ir en contra de sus principios
Los demócratas, por su parte, han criticado el riesgo que la enmienda Blunt suponía para los derechos de la mujer y de las minorías, y sostienen que la propuesta solo trataba de minar la reforma sanitaria. La senadora por el Estado de Maryland Barbara A. Mikulski se ha felicitado por el resultado de la votación y ha subrayado que la propuesta forma parte de la “guerra sistemática de los republicanos contra las mujeres”.
Aunque el presidente ya recalcó en verano que todos los empresarios y las compañías de seguros debían cubrir los gastos de los métodos anticonceptivos a sus empleados, fueron las explicaciones de la secretaria de Salud, Kathleen Sebelius, el 20 de enero -recordando que esa obligación incluía a las instituciones católicas-, las que provocaron una dura oposición por parte de la jerarquía católica. Para paliar el malestar de un grupo que tradicionalmente apoya a los demócratas, en pleno año electoral, en febrero Obama modificó la norma para que las empresas religiosas no tuvieran que hacerse cargo del abono de los anticonceptivos cuyo coste correría a cargo de las aseguradoras.
La polémica en torno a la enmienda Blunt no ha enfrentado únicamente a republicanos y demócratas. También se ha colado en la lucha por las primarias de los conservadores. Las posturas de cada uno de los candidatos sobre política anticonceptiva han centrado buena parte de los debates y del contenido de sus comparecencias. Ayer Mitt Romney, durante una entrevista en una televisión de Ohio, dijo estar en contra de la enmienda Blunt. Horas después tuvo que rectificar en un programa de radio excusándose en que había entendido mal la pregunta del periodista. Un desliz al que ha aludido su principal oponente en la lucha por la candidatura republicana a la Casa Blanca, Rick Santorum, durante una comparecencia en Fargo para destacar sus valores republicanos frente a los de Romney: “Si a mí me hubieran hecho esa pregunta, mi reacción inmediata hubiera sido: ‘Hay que defender la Primera Enmienda; hay que defender la libertad religiosa”.
**Publicado en "EL PAIS"
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