Health news from Italian researchers has revealed that a new medicated eye drop could possibly cure the symptoms of glaucoma. Glaucoma is the build up of pressure, called intraocular pressure – inside the eye which causes damage to the optic nerve cells. In this article from the BBC website, the findings discuss this newly developed eyedrop and its potential.

“The study of rats and human patients found drops containing a nerve growth factor may stop these cells dying, and actually improve vision. It is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It is estimated that 77m people have glaucoma around the world.  The build up of intraocular pressure can sometimes be controlled through other techniques. But once pressure has started to damage optic nerve cells, called retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), it has proved impossible to recover that lost function.

And often people with glaucoma do not seek expert help until the condition is already relatively advanced. The researchers, from the University of Rome, treated rats with symptoms of glaucoma with eye drops containing nerve growth factor. The animals who were given the eye drops showed decreased levels of RGC death compared with those who did not receive the treatment.

The researchers went on to test the drops in three human patients whose intraocular pressure had started to be controlled, but who still showed signs of progressive deterioration in their vision.  In two of the patients vision improved, while in the other it was stabilised. The improvements lasted up to 18 months after the eye drops were applied.

Nerve growth factor appears to trigger chemical changes within cells that prevent them from dying in response to damage.  It might also enable cells whose function had begun to be damaged to bounce back. And it might boost the capacity of healthy RGCs to form new connections within the optic nerve, to compensate for any damage that had already taken place.

However, nerve growth factor cannot rescue RGCs that have already died – in common with brain tissue, the optic nerve cannot regenerate. Lead researcher Dr Stefano Bonini said: “Although neuroprotection in glaucoma has already been attempted with several compounds, this is the first time that an improvement in visual function is observed in patients with advanced optic nerve damage.”

David Wright, chief executive of the International Glaucoma Association, warned against drawing firm conclusions from such a small study – but said the results were encouraging.  He said: “There have been many false dawns in the search for neuro-protective agents for the treatment of glaucoma and it is a feature of research on other compounds that early promise does not always translate into clinical effectiveness when larger studies are undertaken.”

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Want to live longer, look better as you age? Research has found that eating less and therefore consuming less calories seems to help as far as anti-aging goes. Read the following health news article from the BBC news on how a reduction of calories will benefit you as you age and this is true for both men and women.

“Cutting calories may delay the aging process and reduce the risk of disease, a long-term study of monkeys suggests.

The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period. Over 20 years, monkeys whose diets were not restricted were nearly three times more likely to have died than those whose calories were counted. Writing in Science, the US researchers hailed the “major effect” of the diet.

It involved reducing calorie intake by 30% while maintaining nutrition and appeared to impact upon many forms of age-related disease seen in monkeys, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy. Whether the same effects would be seen in humans is unclear, although anecdotal evidence so far suggests people on a long-term calorie-restricted diet have better cardiovascular health.

The precise mechanism is yet to be established: theories involve changes in the body’s metabolism or a reduction in the production of “free radical” chemicals which can cause damage. Seventy-six rhesus monkeys were involved in the trial, which began in 1989 and was expanded in 1994. Half had their diets restricted, half were given free rein at feeding time.

The rate of cancers and cardiovascular disease in dieting animals was less than half of those permitted to eat freely.

While diabetes and problems with glucose regulation were common in monkeys who ate what they wanted, there were no cases in the calorie controlled group. In addition, while most brains shrink with age, the restricted diet appeared to maintain the volume of the brain at least in some regions. In particular, the areas associated with movement and memory seemed to be better preserved. “Both motor speed and mental speed slow down with ageing,” said Sterling Johnson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine.

“Those are the areas which we found to be better preserved. We can’t yet make the claim that a difference in diet is associated with functional change because those studies are still ongoing.”

It seems to hold true that reducing caloric consumption is a major factor for age management for men and women.
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In this Health News article from the BBC news site, it is reported that experts are close to discovering what makes your hair turn gray. Although graying hair is the easiest stage of ageing to solve (with hair dyeing) it is often inconvenient because you have to color your hair so frequently to keep the gray roots from constantly showing up. However, coloring your hair is easy, easier and cheaper than let’s say Botox or plastic surgery.

The grey hairs that develop with age really are signs of stress, at least of the cellular kind, say scientists.
Genotoxic stress, namely anything that damages the genetic code of life DNA, causes a malfunction of the cells ultimately responsible for hair colour.

The stress sets off a chain of reactions involving specialised cells called melanocyte stem cells, their work on mice in Cell journal reveals.

Similar mechanisms appear to be at work in humans too, they say.
The findings could help explain why people with Ataxia telangiectasia, a rare, neurodegenerative syndrome caused by a mutation in a gene called ATM, go grey prematurely.

In their study, Dr Emi Nishimura and colleagues found the ATM “caretaker” gene serves as a checks and measures system to stop melanocyte stem cells going awry.

It is the job of these cells within the hair follicles to make the mature pigment-producing melanocytes that give hair its youthful colour.

Damaged DNA

Researchers have already traced greying to the gradual dying off of the stem cells.

But this is not the only way the stem cells are depleted. They also progressively make errors, turning or differentiating into fully committed pigment cells in the wrong place within the hair follicle, where they are useless for colouring hair. And the latest work on mice shows irreparable DNA damage, as caused by ultraviolet light and ionising radiation, is responsible.

Dr Nishimura of Kanazawa University said: “Once stem cells are damaged irreversibly, the damaged stem cells need to be eliminated to maintain the quality of the stem cell pool. “We found that excessive genotoxic stress triggers differentiation of melanocyte stem cells.”

But others believe going grey is caused by a massive build up of hydrogen peroxide due to wear and tear of our hair follicles. The hydrogen peroxide ends up blocking the normal production of melanin, an team of European scientists recently reported in the FASEB scientific journal, published by the Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Finding the cure to gray hair would be a miracle come true for most people.  Read more at the BBC Health Site by clicking here.