Apes were first to use medicine

Humans learnt the medicinal properties of soil and plants from fellow primates. When we look back at the history of medicine, we think of the  clever people who have, over thousands of years, devised ingenious ways of allaying human suffering.

Consuming a particular kind of soil, as Sabrina Krief and her colleagues at the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris reported recently in the journal Naturwissenschaften, increases the potency of ingested plants, such as the leaves of trichilia rubescens, which have anti-malarial properties.

Her team collected earth eaten by chimpanzees, as well as leaves from young T rubescens trees in the same area. All the soil was rich in the clay mineral kaolinite, the principal component of many anti-diarrhoea medicines.
Clays can bind mycotoxins, endotoxins, man-made toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses. They also act as an antacid and absorb excess fluids.

The scientists replicated the effects of mastication, gastric and intestinal digestion in the laboratory and were surprised. Before being mixed with the soil, the digested leaves had no significant effects.

“This overlapping use by humans and apes is interesting from both evolutionary and conservation perspectives,” says Krief.

Fasting to fight side effects

Just 48 hours of fasting was enough to protect mice from the side effects of an intensive chemotherapy treatment which wiped out much of the cancer in their bodies, according to a study.

Should the same results be found in humans, it could protect cancer patients from the ravages of chemotherapy drugs and also potentially allow for significantly more aggressive treatment.

“We were able to treat with a very high dose of chemo and the animals were running around like we didn’t give them anything,” said Valter Longo, an Italian researcher at the University of Southern California.

Longo’s team has already applied for approval to run a small clinical trial on cancer patients in California.

The latest is nomophobia

Anxiety is the affliction of life in the modern world. Now add to the stress list: “nomophobia”, the fear of being out of mobile phone contact.

Researchers in Britain have carried out a study and found that nomophobia is plaguing our 24/7 life — running out of battery or credit, losing one’s handset and not having network coverage “affects 53 per cent of mobile users”.

“We’re all familiar with the stressful situations of everyday life such as moving house, break-ups and organising a family Christmas, but it seems being out of mobile contact may be the 21st century’s contribution to our already manic lives.

According to the survey, men suffer more than women, with 48 per cent of females and 58 per cent of males admitting to feelings of anxiety.

Surf net during tea break

For many people, taking a break from work means getting away from the computer screen. However, a new study by a leading human-response research group has shown that working at your comp and surfing the internet for a few minutes each working day can actually boost concentration and allow a person to be more productive.

According to many people, using computer during a break from work could prove more stressful. But the new study has shown that using the web is as good as the office tea break.

“Many people think that using a computer just means stress and more work, but what we found was the converse,” Mind Lab scientist Duncan Smith said.

Use iPods without worry

Here is relief for gizmo-lovers with a heart condition — no, “electronic noise” from iPods does not cause cardiac pacemakers to trip, a new study says.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston, US, were intrigued by a widely reported study last May that concluded errant electronic noise from iPods could cause implantable cardiac pacemakers to malfunction.

This just did not sound right to the hospital’s cardiac electro-physiologists who have seen hundreds of children, teens and young adults with heart conditions requiring pacemakers.

“Many of our pacemaker patients have iPods and other digital music players, and we’ve never seen any problem,” said Charles Berul.

“But kids and parents bring up this concern all the time, prompting us to do our own study.”

While last year’s study was done in patients averaging 77 years, the average age in the new study was 22. All patients had active pacemakers or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), which were tested against four digital music players — two kinds of iPods (Apple Nano and Apple Video), SanDisk Sansa and Microsoft Zune.