The scientists have named the type ‘Haemoglobin Bonn’. It absorbs a bit more infrared light than normal oxygen saturated haemoglobin, even when combined with oxygen.

“That’s why, at first, we did not understand why the patients did not have any particular health problems,” Dr Zur said.

Haemoglobin transports oxygen to the body’s cells and in return picks up carbon dioxide and changes colour.

With an optical measuring instrument, known as a pulse oximeter. “You can therefore measure whether there is enough oxygen present in the blood.”

The cause of anoxia can be an inherited cardiac defect, as in the case of a four-year-old boy who was admitted to the Paediatric Clinic of the Bonn University Clinic. However, after a thorough examination, the paediatricians Dr Andreas Hornung and his colleagues did not find any cardiac defect. A low saturation of oxygen had also been previously found in the blood of the boy’s 41-year-old father, again without apparent signs of a cardiac defect.

Dr Berndt Zur from professor Birgit Stoffel-Wagner’s team at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Pharmacology
examined the boy’s and the father’s haemoglobin. He eventually realised that they were dealing with a new type of the blood pigment.

Beer ‘better’ than wine

Binge drinkers, beware! Guzzling beer is better for brain while quaffing wine is a worry, a new study has claimed.

Researchers at the University of Gottingen in Germany have found that drinking wine damages the brain more than beer or spirits — wine actually shrinks the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory.

According to them, the average size of the hippocampus — one of the first brain areas to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease — in non-alcoholics is 3.85ml while in beer drinkers it is 3.4ml, but for wine drinkers it is only 2.8ml.

“This is the first study investigating the impact of the type of preferred beverage on brain-volume shrinkage in patients with alcohol dependence,” Daily Mail quoted the researchers as saying.

They came to the conclusion after analysing the brain scans of alcoholics with those of healthy adults. They found that the hippocampus, which is located deep within the brain’s temporal lobes, was 10 per cent smaller in wine drinkers.

Reversing eye diseases

Scientists have identified a protein that reverses eye diseases, a breakthrough which they claim would soon enable them to develop a drug to tackle two of the leading causes of blindness.

In their study on mice, the researchers at University of Utah in the United States have found that the protein known as Robo4 plays an important role in the development of stable and working blood vessels.

When the proteins were activated in mice bred to mimic the effects of the two major eye diseases — age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, they found that the blood vessel damage was prevented, or in some cases, even reversed, Nature has reported.

“We are excited about taking this opening and moving the frontier forward with real hope for patients who have but few, often disappointing options,” according to Randall Olson, the Director of Utah’s John A Moran Eye Centre.

Drink 3 cups of tea daily

Scientists have come up with yet more evidence why tea is good for your health — drinking three cups a day can help prevent a heart attack or stroke... unless you’re a man.

A team of researchers in France has carried out a study and found that women who take three cups of tea daily are less likely to have plaques — dangerous build-ups of fat and cholesterol — in their arteries. However, according to them, the same is not true in case of men.

In fact, the researchers at the Institut National de la Sant Et de la Recherche Mdicale in Paris came to the conclusion after examining a group of 2,613 men and 3,984 women with an average age of 73. They measured the level of plaque in their carotid artery using ultrasound.

Carotid plaque was found in 45 per cent of women who were not tea-drinkers, in 42.5 per cent of women who drank one or two cups of tea daily and in only 33.7 per cent of those reporting drinking three or more cups a day.

Even women with high blood pressure appeared to gain protection from tea but male who’re regular tea-drinkers did not reap the same health benefits, the researchers found.