With many health benefits, lactoferrin is an important iron-binding protein. The major form of this powerful protein is secreted into human bio fluids such as milk, blood, tears, saliva, and is responsible for most of the host defense properties.

Researchers are starting to use lactoferrin as a potential therapeutic protein because of the many beneficial activities associated with it. Lactoferrin can be orally active, in contrast to many other therapeutic proteins which need to be injected into patients.

In the upcoming June issue of the journal Biochemistry and Cell Biology, lactoferrin is one the subject for study.

Special issue guest editor Dr. Hans Vogel, a professor at the University of Calgary, says, “We now know that lactoferrin is a protein that has many functions in innate immunity and that it plays a role in protecting us from bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoan infections. It can even protect us from some forms of cancer. Some people describe this therapeutic protein as the ‘Swiss army knife’ of the human host defense system. In part it does all this by binding iron, but many other properties of the protein contribute to its function.”

Twenty seven articles and review papers contributed by leading international researchers are comprised in this special issue. The role of lactoferrin on skin wound healing, impacts of lactoferrin on small intestinal growth and development during early life, use of bovine lactoferrin on the inhibition of influenza and in the prevention of preterm delivery associated with sterile inflammation are among the studies presented.

A Chinese research group, led by Professor Ning Li in Beijing has made one important contribution that has already been published online. The study shows that consumption of milk containing increased levels of the lactoferrin protein modulates the composition of the gut microflora, which promotes health, in turn.

This research relies on extensive biochemistry and molecular biology to produce the lactoferrin protein and to analyze the changes in the composition of the gut microflora. While the article describes an animal model study, the results can probably be extended to humans.

Greater sugar-sweetened and low-calorie soda consumption is associated with a higher risk of stroke. Conversely, consumption of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee was associated with a lower risk, this was found by researchers from Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute and Harvard University.

Previous research has linked sugar-sweetened beverage consumption with weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout and coronary artery disease. The study recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is the first to examine soda’s affect on stroke risk.

Adam Bernstein, MD, ScD, study author and Research Director at Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute says, “Soda remains the largest source of added sugar in the diet. What we’re beginning to understand is that regular intake of these beverages sets off a chain reaction in the body that can potentially lead to many diseases, including stroke.”

In the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study between 1986 & 2008, the research analyzed soda consumption among forty three thousand three hundred and seventy one men who participated – and eighty four thousand eighty five women who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study between 1980 & 2008.

Two thousand nine hundred and thirty eight strokes were documented in women, during that time, while one thousand four hundred and sixteen strokes were documented in men.

In sugar-sweetened sodas, the sugar load may lead to rapid increases in blood glucose and insulin which, over time, may lead to glucose intolerance, insulin resistance, and inflammation.

This risk for stroke appears higher in women than in men. These physiologic changes influence atherosclerosis, plaque stability and thrombosis, all of which are risk factors of ischemic stroke.

When compared with one serving of sugar-sweetened soda, one serving of decaffeinated coffee was associated with a ten percent lower risk of stroke.

In comparison, coffee contains chlorogenic acids, lignans and magnesium, all of which act as antioxidants and may reduce stroke risk.

In addition, study findings show that men and women who consumed more than one serving of sugar-sweetened soda per day had higher rates of high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol and lower physical activity rates.

Men and women who consumed low-calorie soda had a higher incidence of chronic disease and a higher body mass index (BMI). Those who drank soda more frequently were also more likely to eat red meat and whole-fat dairy products.

Micro-nutrient content in ready-made baby meals contained less than a fifth of the recommended daily supply of calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron and other minerals. This was revealed through new research from the University of Greenwich, School of Science.

The team investigated the micro-nutrient content, using an instrument called an Inductivity Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometer used for analysis of elements in food.

For this purpose the research took eight different sample jars produced by four popular brands from the shelves of leading supermarkets.

Specific manufacturers were not identified for the samples that included four meat and four vegetable varieties, one with pasta.

Infants given one meat jar and one vegetable jar on top of six hundred milliliters of formula milk would not be getting enough calcium, magnesium, copper and selenium, the research showed. The levels were below twenty percent of the recommended daily supply, on average.

Dr N Zand, who conducted the research, for the university’s food science and nutrition specialist in her concluding report, said it was apparent that these complementary baby feeds do not meet the recommended daily intake when added to the daily milk supply.

“This may be one of the reasons why manufacturers of complementary ‘ready to eat’ infant meals do not declare the micronutrient contents of their products. This may provide opportunities and scope for both product and process optimizations to improve the nutritive value”, she added.

“It’s so important that babies are weaned from six months onwards with a healthy balance of complementary foods and breast milk, or follow-on formula at times when breast feeding is not possible.

“Our investigations showed that there was a need to improve the nutritional value of some complementary baby feeds. In addition, the regulations governing them need to be tighter and more robust.”

Worldwide, obesity is on the increase in adults & children. It is currently viewed by many as one of the most serious threats to public health.

Changes in public policy are required to bring forth solutions to the obesity pandemic & it will require scientific insight, which will be invaluable for guiding those changes.

A major reason for the dramatic increase in obesity may be a heightened sensitivity to heavily advertised and easily accessible high-calorie food has been suggested in a new review of human brain imaging studies published by Cell Press in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Explains review author Dr. Alain D from the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, “Functional neuro-imaging of the human brain allows non-invasive mapping of brain activity in health and disease. It is now commonly used to try to understand the neural control of eating in humans, and patterns of brain activity thought to underlie obesity have emerged.

“In particular, there has been great interest in looking at the brain for the source of vulnerability to overeating in a world of cheap, abundant, high-calorie food. As a result of this research, differences between lean and obese individuals are starting to emerge.”

Neuro-imaging studies have led to the identification of a brain network for appetite control, uncovered learning and motivational signals that are linked with appetite, and helped to unravel how reward networks are linked with food intake. In the paper, Dr. Alain D discusses some of the more consistent findings of this research.

Research suggests that overeating has its origins where a person makes a food choice and that anticipatory signals play a critical role in the vulnerability to obesity. Studies have shown that brain mechanisms of obesity are very complex and are not just related to abnormalities in food-associated reward signaling.

It is important to note that obese individuals exhibit greater brain activation in response to sweet or fatty food cues, suggesting a key role for signals associated with motivation to eat.

Explains Dr. Alain D, “The emerging imaging literature supports the view that although there is not a single pathway leading to obesity, it is a neurobehavioral problem: a disease that results from a vulnerable brain in an unhealthy environment”.

Chronic psychological stress is associated with the body losing its ability to regulate the inflammatory response, a research team led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Sheldon Cohen has found.

Stress wreaks havoc on the mind and body. Psychological stress is associated with greater risk for depression, heart disease and infectious diseases. But, until now, it has not been clear exactly how stress influences disease and health.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a research that shows for the first time that the effects of psychological stress on the body’s ability to regulate inflammation can promote the development and progression of disease.

Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology within CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, says, “Inflammation is partly regulated by the hormone cortisol and when cortisol is not allowed to serve this function, inflammation can get out of control.”

To regulate the inflammatory response, prolonged intensive stress alters the effectiveness of cortisol, Cohen argued, because it decreases tissue sensitivity to the hormone. Specifically, immune cells become insensitive to cortisol’s regulatory effect. Runaway inflammation, in turn, is thought to promote the development and progression of many diseases.

An earlier groundbreaking by Cohen showed that people suffering from psychological stress are more susceptible to developing common colds. He used the common cold as the model for testing his theory.

Symptoms are not caused by the virus during common cold, but they are instead a side effect of the inflammatory response that is triggered as part of the body’s effort to fight infection.

After completing an intensive stress interview, in Cohen’s first study, two hundred and seventy six healthy adults were exposed to a virus that causes the common cold. They were monitored in quarantine for five days for signs of infection and illness.

Those with the inability to regulate the inflammatory response, in turn, were more likely to develop colds when exposed to the virus.

Seventy nine healthy participants were assessed, in the second study, for their ability to regulate the inflammatory response and then exposed to a cold virus and monitored for the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the chemical messengers that trigger inflammation.

The risk of depression, measured by people taking antidepressants, is almost eighty percent higher for those living alone compared to people living in any kind of social or family group, New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Public Health shows.

Over the last three decades the number of people living on their own has doubled, to one in three in the US & UK.

A third of this risk, for women, was attributable to socio demographic factors, such as lack of education and low income.

The biggest contributing factors for men included poor job climate, heavy drinking & lack of support at the work place or in their private lives.

Little is known about the effects of isolation on working age people, though it is known that living alone can increase the risk of mental health problems for the elderly, and for single parents.

Three thousand five hundred working-aged men and women were followed by researchers in Finland for seven years.

They compared their living arrangements with psychosocial, socio demographic, and health risk factors, including smoking, heavy drinking and low physical activity, to antidepressant use. The National Prescription Register provided information on antidepressant medication.

“Our study shows that people living alone have an increased risk of developing depression. Overall there was no difference in the increased risk of depression by living alone for either men or women. Poor housing conditions (especially for women) and a lack of social support (particularly for men) were the main contributory factors to this increased risk”, Dr Laura P, who conducted the research at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, explained.

“This kind of study usually underestimates risk because the people who are at the most risk tend to be the people who are least likely to complete the follow up. We also were not able to judge how common untreated depression was”, she continued.

Although this study clearly identifies some of the factors which increase the risk of depression for people who live alone, over half the increase in risks still remain unexplained.

This may be due to feelings of alienation from society, lack of trust, or difficulties arising from critical life events, the researchers suggest.

In order to begin understanding and reducing the incidence of depression amongst working age people, all these factors need to be addressed.

According to a study published in a medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, people with mild vascular disease that causes damage to the retina in the eye are more likely to have problems with thinking and memory skills because they may also have vascular disease in the brain.

Retinopathy causes damage to the retina. During the course of the new study, there were no significant symptoms as the damage was mild enough.

Study author Mary H, Dr PH, MPH, of the University of California, San Francisco said, “Problems with the tiny blood vessels in the eye may be a sign that there are also problems with the blood vessels in the brain that can lead to cognitive problems. This could be very useful if a simple eye screening could give us an early indication that people might be at risk of problems with their brain health and functioning.”

Five hundred and eleven women with an average age of sixty nine were involved in the study. Every year for up to ten years, the women took tests of their thinking and memory skills.

Scans were taken of their brains about eight years into the study & their eye health was tested about four years into the study.

Women affected by retinopathy totaled thirty nine. On average women with retinopathy had lower scores on the cognitive tests than the women who did not have retinopathy.

Compared to women who did not have retinopathy, the women with retinopathy had more areas of small vascular damage within the brain, with forty seven percent larger volumes of areas of damage.

The women with retinopathy had sixty eight percent larger volumes of areas of damage in the parietal lobe of the brain.

Even after adjusting for high blood pressure and diabetes, the results remained the same, which can be a factor in vascular issues in the eye and the brain.

The women with retinopathy had similar scores as the women without the disease during test of visual acuity.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the National Institute on Aging supported the study.

According to a study led by a University of Rochester Medical Center researcher, older adults who sleep poorly have an altered immune system response to stress that may increase risk for mental and physical health problems.

In the study, stress led to significantly larger increases in a marker of inflammation in poor sleepers compared to good sleepers, a marker associated with poor health outcomes and death.

K L Heffner, Ph.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry at the Medical Center, said, “This study offers more evidence that better sleep not only can improve overall well-being but also may help prevent poor physiological and psychological outcomes associated with inflammation.”

The researchers said in the study published by the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, that an association between poor sleep & a heightened inflammatory response to acute stress could not be explained by other factors linked to immune impairment, such as depression, loneliness and perceived stress.

Heffner said, “Our study suggests that, for healthy people, it all comes down to sleep and what poor sleep may be doing to our physiological stress response, our fight or flight response”.

The participants were evaluated for cognitive status using a standard assessment. The study involved forty five women and thirty eight men with an average age of sixty one years, was advertised as an investigation of stress and memory.

The participants had to be in good physical health to be in the study, but even so, about twenty seven percent of the participants were categorized as poor sleepers. Each participant completed a self-report of sleep quality, perceived stress, loneliness & medication use.

The participants were given a series of tests of verbal and working memory, a battery of questions that served as the stressor, on the day of the study.

Blood was drawn before any testing began and then immediately following the testing and at three intervals spaced out over sixty minutes.

The blood was studied for levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), a protein primarily produced at sites of inflammation.

Poor sleepers reported more depressive symptoms, more loneliness and more global perceived stress relative to good sleepers. Poor sleepers did not differ from good sleepers when IL-6 was measured before the tests began. Across the group, the participants showed increases in IL-6.

However, poor sleepers had a significantly larger increase in IL-6 in response to the stressful tests compared to good sleepers, as much as four times larger and at a level found to increase risk for illness and death in older adults. Poor sleep stood as the predictor of elevated inflammation levels.

As people age, a gradual decline in the immune system occurs along with elevated inflammation levels. Heightened inflammation increases the risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other illnesses, as well as psychiatric problems.

While relatively little is known about the pathways through which poor sleep impacts circulating levels of inflammatory proteins, the study led by Heffner provides a clinical target for preventing poor outcomes for older adults.

According to research reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, a compound in citrus fruits may reduce your risk of stroke.

Consuming higher amounts of a compound in citrus fruits, especially oranges & grapefruit, may lower ischemic stroke.

A nineteen percent lower risk of ischemic stroke was found for women who ate high amounts of the compound than women who consumed the least amount.

Researchers examine how consuming flavonoid sub classes affect the risk of stroke in this prospective study which is one of the first of its kind. A class of compounds, flavonoid is present in fruits, vegetables & dark chocolate.

A Cassidy, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and professor of nutrition at Norwich Medical School in the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom, said, “Studies have shown higher fruit, vegetable and specifically vitamin C intake is associated with reduced stroke risk.  Flavonoids are thought to provide some of that protection through several mechanisms, including improved blood vessel function and an anti-inflammatory effect.”

Fourteen years of follow-up data from the Nurse’s Health Study was used by Cassidy and colleagues which included sixty nine thousand six hundred twenty two women who reported their food intake, such as details on fruit & vegetable consumption every four years.

The six main subclasses of flavonoids commonly consumed in the U.S. diet, flavanones, anthocyanins, flavan-3-ols, flavonoid polymers, flavonols and flavones, were examined by researchers to find relationship with risk of ischemic, hemorrhagic & total stroke.

The researchers didn’t find a beneficial association between total flavonoid consumption and stroke risk, as expected, because the biological activity of the sub-classes is different.

They, however, found a nineteen percent lower risk of blood clot-related or ischemic stroke in women who ate high amounts of flavanones in citrus than women who consumed the least amounts.

Flavanones came primarily from oranges and orange juice – eighty two percent and grapefruit and grapefruit juice – fourteen percent, in the study.

Due to the high sugar content of commercial fruit juices, the researchers recommended that consumers increase their citrus fruit intake.

Not including intake of other fruits, a previous study found that citrus fruit and juice intake in specific protected against risk of ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage.

Another study linked increased consumption of white fruits like apples and pears with lower stroke risk but found no association between yellow and orange fruits and stroke risk.

The authors said that more studies are needed further to gain a better understanding about why the association occurs & confirm the association between flavanone consumption and stroke risk.

Smoking causes the body to turn against its own helpful healthy bacteria, leaving smokers more vulnerable to disease, this was revealed by a new study.

The mouth of a healthy person contains a stable ecosystem of healthy bacteria despite the daily disturbance of brushing and flossing.

New research shows that the mouth of a smoker is a much more chaotic, diverse ecosystem and is much more susceptible to invasion by harmful bacteria.

Purnima Kumar, assistant professor of periodontology at Ohio State University, says that, “The smoker’s mouth kicks out the good bacteria, and the pathogens are called in. So they’re allowed to proliferate much more quickly than they would in a non-smoking environment.”

Further, he says, “A few hours after you’re born, bacteria start forming communities called bio films in your mouth. Your body learns to live with them, because for most people, healthy bio films keep the bad bacteria away.”

Kumar’s team looked at how these bacterial ecosystems re grow after being wiped away, in a new study. The researchers took samples of oral bio films one, two, four and seven days after professional cleaning for fifteen healthy nonsmokers and fifteen healthy smokers.

The team found that bacterial communities regain a similar balance of species to the communities that were scraped away during cleaning, for healthy nonsmokers.

Low levels of cytokines show that the body is not treating the helpful healthy bio films as a threat and disease-associated bacteria are largely absent.

The body is mounting defenses against infection in smokers who have higher levels of cytokines. This immune response takes the form of red, swollen gums, clinically called as gingivitis that can lead to the irreversible bone loss of periodontitis.

The types of cytokines in smokers’ gum swabs showed the researchers that smokers’ bodies, in addition to fighting off harmful bacteria, were also treating even healthy bacteria as threatening.

Kumar and her team do not yet understand the mechanisms behind these results but suspect that smoking is confusing the normal communication that goes on between healthy bacterial communities and their human hosts.

According to Kumar, “It has to drive how we treat the smoking population. They need a more aggressive form of treatment, because even after a professional cleaning, they’re still at a very high risk for getting these pathogens back in their mouths right away.”