Newborn skin peeling

Newborn skin peeling

It is common for newborn babies to have peeling skin for a week or two after birth.
In the womb, amniotic fluid surrounds the fetus, and the skin does not exfoliate as it does outside the womb. In the early days after birth, a newborn's skin might appear dry and may peel.

In the womb, a waxy coating of vernix covers the fetus's skin, which protects it from the amniotic fluid. Leaving the vernix on the baby's skin for a while immediately after birth may help the baby's skin to adapt to the environment outside the womb.

Preterm babies often have less vernix and less skin peeling than babies born at term. Overdue babies often have less vernix, but more skin peeling than babies born at term.

Skin peeling is a natural process, and most babies do not need treatment. Dry skin will go away on its own, though people can use gentle home remedies to speed up this process. Using warm baths and humidifiers can help.

More than 15 years after scientists first mapped the human genome, most diseases still cannot be predicted based on one's genes, leading researchers to explore epigenetic causes of disease. But the study of epigenetics cannot be approached the same way as genetics, so progress has been slow. Now, researchers at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have determined a unique fraction of the genome that scientists should focus on. Their report, which provides a "treasure map" to accelerate research in epigenetics and human disease, was published in Genome Biology.

More than 15 years after scientists first mapped the human genome, most diseases still cannot be predicted based on one's genes, leading researchers to explore epigenetic causes of disease. But the study of epigenetics cannot be approached the same way as genetics, so progress has been slow. Now, researchers at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have determined a unique fraction of the genome that scientists should focus on. Their report, which provides a "treasure map" to accelerate research in epigenetics and human disease, was published in Genome Biology.

Epigenetics is a system for molecular marking of DNA -- it tells the different cells in the body which genes to turn on or off in that cell type. But the cell-specific nature of epigenetics makes it challenging to study. Whereas a blood sample can be used to 'genotype' an individual, most epigenetic marks in blood DNA provide no clues about epigenetic dysregulation in other parts of the body, such as the brain or heart.

Dr. Robert A. Waterland, professor of pediatrics -- nutrition and of molecular and human genetics at Baylor, and his team identified special regions of the genome where a blood sample can be used to infer epigenetic regulation throughout the body, allowing scientists to test for epigenetic causes of disease.

To do this, they focused on the most stable form of epigenetic regulation -- DNA methylation. This addition of methyl groups to the DNA molecule occurs in the embryonic state and can impact health for your entire life.

No, Blue Light From Your Smartphone Is Not Blinding You

No, Blue Light From Your Smartphone Is Not Blinding You

Blue light from electronic screens is not making you blind. A recently released study has been creating both concern in the public and alarmist headlines from news outlets worldwide. But experts are cautioning that the news reports are leaping to unfounded conclusions about the potential effects of blue light on the eye.

Retinal is toxic to some cells whether or not it’s exposed to blue light. Live retina cells have proteins that can protect them from these possibly toxic effects.

Other cells that were also exposed to retinal and blue light by the investigators would not be exposed to blue light in the body. Blue light only reaches the skin and the eyes. It cannot have any effect deeper in the body.

Spending too much time looking at a screen can keep people from blinking as often as they should and from focusing on things at different locations. This can make the eyes feel dry, gritty, tired or strained. The simple solution is to look at least 20 feet away, for 20 seconds, every 20 minutes.

Children’s brains reorganize after epilepsy surgery to retain visual perception

Children’s brains reorganize after epilepsy surgery to retain visual perception

Children can keep full visual perception — the ability to process and understand visual information — after brain surgery for severe epilepsy, according to a study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. While brain surgery can halt seizures, it carries significant risks, including an impairment in visual perception. However, a new report by Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, researchers from a study of children who had undergone epilepsy surgery suggests that the lasting effects on visual perception can be minimal, even among children who lost tissue in the brain’s visual centers.

Normal visual function requires not just information sent from the eye (sight), but also processing in the brain that allows us to understand and act on that information (perception). Signals from the eye are first processed in the early visual cortex, a region at the back of the brain that is necessary for sight. They then travel through other parts of the cerebral cortex, enabling recognition of patterns, faces, objects, scenes, and written words. In adults, even if their sight is still present, injury or removal of even a small area of the brain’s vision processing centers can lead to dramatic, permanent loss of perception, making them unable to recognize faces, locations, or to read, for example. But in children, who are still developing, this part of the brain appears able to rewire itself, a process known as plasticity.

“Although there are studies of the memory and language function of children who have parts of the brain removed surgically for the treatment of epilepsy, there have been rather few studies that examine the impact of the surgery on the visual system of the brain and the resulting perceptual behavior,” said Marlene Behrmann, Ph.D., senior author of the study. “We aimed to close this gap.”

Behrmann and colleagues recruited 10 children who had undergone surgery for severe epilepsy – caused in most cases by an injury such as stroke in infancy, or by a tumor – and 10 matched healthy children as a control group. Of the children with surgery, three had lost parts of the visual cortex on the right side, three on the left side, and the remaining four had lost other parts of the brain not involved in perception, serving as a second kind of control group. Of the six children who had areas of the visual cortex removed, four had permanent reductions in peripheral vision on one side due to loss of the early visual cortex. The epilepsy was resolved or significantly improved in all children after surgery. The children ranged in age from 6 to 17 years at the time of surgery, and most joined the study a few years later.

The researchers tested the children’s perception abilities, including facial recognition, the ability to classify objects, reading, and pattern recognition. Despite in some cases completely lacking one side of the visual cortex, nearly all the children were able to successfully complete these behavioral tasks, falling within the normal range even for complex perception and memory activities.

To better understand how the children were able to compensate after surgery, the team imaged the children’s brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the children engaged in perceptual tasks. fMRI allows researchers to visualize which regions of the brain are activated during specific activities. The team was able to map specific locations in the brain required for individual perception tasks both in the control children and in the children who had undergone surgery. These regions included the early visual cortex, the fusiform face area (required for facial recognition), the parahippocampal place area (required for processing scenes and locations), the lateral occipital complex (required for object recognition), and the visual word form area (necessary for reading).

Most of the regions for visual perception exist bilaterally – that is, both sides of the brain are involved in these tasks. The exceptions, however, are for facial recognition (fusiform face area), which tends to be more dominant in the right hemisphere, and for the visual word form area.

“We think there’s some competition between face representation and word representation,” explained Erez Freud, Ph.D., a lead author of the study, now an assistant professor at York University, Toronto. “When we learn to read, a reading-specific area arises on the left, and that pushes face recognition to the right hemisphere.”

Curiously, for one participant whose surgery had removed most of the visual cortex in the left hemisphere, this reading-specific visual word form area region remapped to the right hemisphere, sharing space next to the facial recognition region on that side. But even for those participants who did not show such clear remapping, the remaining hemisphere was still able to compensate for missing regions in a way not usually seen in adults.

It isn’t clear exactly when this compensation took place, but the researchers believe that it may begin well before surgery, in response to the damage that caused the epilepsy in the first place.

“It’s possible that early surgical treatment for children with epilepsy might be what allows this remapping,” although more research is needed to understand what drives this type of brain plasticity,” said Freud.

“It turns out that the residual cortex actually can support most of the visual functions we were looking at,” said Tina Liu, Ph.D., a lead author on the study. “Those visual functions – recognizing patterns, facial recognition, and object recognition – are really important to support daily interactions.”

NEI leads the federal government’s research on the visual system and eye diseases. NEI supports basic and clinical science programs to develop sight-saving treatments and address special needs of people with vision loss.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases.

Researchers at the Donnelly Centre in Toronto have found that dozens of genes, previously thought to have similar roles across different organisms, are in fact unique to humans and could help explain how our species came to exist.

Researchers at the Donnelly Centre in Toronto have found that dozens of genes, previously thought to have similar roles across different organisms, are in fact unique to humans and could help explain how our species came to exist.

These genes code for a class of proteins known as transcription factors, or TFs, which control gene activity. TFs recognize specific snippets of the DNA code called motifs, and use them as landing sites to bind the DNA and turn genes on or off.

Previous research had suggested that TFs which look similar across different organisms also bind similar motifs, even in species as diverse as fruit flies and humans. But a new study from Professor Timothy Hughes' lab, at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, shows that this is not always the case.

Writing in the journal Nature Genetics, the researchers describe a new computational method which allowed them to more accurately predict motif sequences each TF binds in many different species. The findings reveal that some sub-classes of TFs are much more functionally diverse than previously thought.

"Even between closely related species there's a non-negligible portion of TFs that are likely to bind new sequences," says Sam Lambert, former graduate student in Hughes' lab who did most of the work on the paper and has since moved to the University of Cambridge for a postdoctoral stint.

"This means they are likely to have novel functions by regulating different genes, which may be important for species differences," he says.

Even between chimps and humans, whose genomes are 99 per cent identical, there are dozens of TFs which recognize diverse motifs between the two species in a way that would affect expression of hundreds of different genes

Green Leafy Vegetables May Keep Liver Diseases At Bay

Green Leafy Vegetables May Keep Liver Diseases At Bay

According to a recent study, published in the journal PNAS, higher consumption of green leafy vegetables may reduce the risk of developing liver diseases. About 25 percent of the global population suffers from liver steatosis or fatty liver, which is mostly caused by high alcohol consumption and excess body weight. Liver happens to be one of the most important organs of the human body. Not only does it help in secreting bile juice, which aids digestion of lipid fats in small intestine, but also helps in detoxifying chemicals from the body. In order to ensure its smooth functioning, it is imperative to make healthy food choice.

The researchers from Karolinska Institute conducted the study to access how greater intake of inorganic nitrate helps in reducing and preventing fat accumulation in the liver. Inorganic nitrate is present naturally in various types of vegetables.

Study Shows Intrathecal Bupivacaine Effective for Long-Term Cancer Pain Treatment

Study Shows Intrathecal Bupivacaine Effective for Long-Term Cancer Pain Treatment

Boston-Patients suffering from cancer pain refractory to systemic opioids may find relief in an unlikely source, according to a pilot study by Swedish researchers: intrathecal bupivacaine. They concluded that the therapy can be effectively used for long-term pain management in these individuals with little increase in dose and few of the side effects that often accompany opioid-related treatment.

“Treating cancer pain with morphine is often effective, but it’s not without its problems,” said Anders Wincent, MD, a senior consultant at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm. “Previously we found there was no analgesic benefit to adding morphine to intrathecal bupivacaine in severe cancer-related pain [Int J Clin Pharmacol Ther 2017;55(6):525-532]. So in this study we wanted to see if we could address this pain only with intrathecal bupivacaine.”

Putting It to the Test

To help answer this question, Dr. Wincent and his co-investigator Karl-Fredrik Sjolund, MD, PhD, enrolled 30 adult patients (17 women; median age, 55 years) with cancer-related pain, who presented to the institution between November 2013 and June 2017, into the longitudinal case series; each was receiving systemic opioid therapy. All patients were started on an intrathecal bupivacaine infusion of 2 mg/mL; flow rates and subsequent bolus doses were titrated as necessary. The catheter tip was positioned cranially to the individual’s most painful dermatome; catheter tip position was verified with fluoroscopy. After subcutaneous tunneling, the catheter was attached to a subcutaneous port and connected to an external pump.

Before intrathecal bupivacaine therapy, the participants completed a pain-related questionnaire. Follow-up was performed by nurses via a structured telephone interview with the patients, their families or staff at a palliative care facility or hospital. Pain intensity at rest and during activity was measured using the numerical rating scale (NRS); other tools included the short form of the Brief Pain Inventory, the revised Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale and ECOG Performance Status.

Motor function was graded with the modified Bromage scale (0-3); daily systemic opioid data were extracted from electronic health records. Patient data were collected on the day before and day of catheter insertion; one day after catheter insertion; on days 3, 7, 14, 21 and 28; and once monthly thereafter.