The 5 Kinds of Headaches

It's critical to identify which type of headache you suffer from—tension, cluster, sinus, rebound, or migraine—so that the correct treatment can be prescribed. In one 2004 study, 80% of patients with a recent history of self-described or doctor-diagnosed sinus headache—but none of the signs of sinus infection—actually met the criteria for migraine. And two-thirds of those patients expressed dissatisfaction with the medications they were using to treat their headaches. Here's a cheat sheet to help you put a name to your pain.

Tension headaches

Tension headaches, the most common type, feel like a constant ache or pressure around the head, especially at the temples or back of the head and neck. Not as severe as migraines, they are not usually accompanied by nausea and vomiting, and they rarely stop someone from continuing their regular activities. Over-the-counter treatments, such as aspirin, ibuprofen, or acetaminophen (Tylenol), are usually sufficient to treat tension headaches, which experts believe may be caused by contraction of neck and scalp muscles (including in response to stress), and possibly changes in brain chemicals.

Cluster headaches

Cluster headaches, which affect men more often than women, are recurring headaches that occur in groups or cycles. The headaches appear suddenly and are characterized by severe, debilitating pain on one side of the head often accompanied by a watery eye and nasal congestion or a runny nose on the same side of the face. During an attack, sufferers are often restless and unable to get comfortable and not likely to lay down the way someone with a migraine usually does. The cause of cluster headaches is unknown, but they may have some genetic component. There is no cure, but medications can reduce the frequency and duration of attacks.

Sinus headaches

When a sinus becomes inflamed, usually through an infection, it can cause pain. It usually comes with a fever, and can—if necessary—be diagnosed by MRI or CT scan (which can both detect changes in fluid levels), or by the presence of pus viewed through a fiber-optic scope. Headaches due to sinus infection can be treated with antibiotics, as well as antihistamines or decongestants.

Rebound headaches

Overuse of painkillers for headaches can, ironically, lead to rebound headaches. Culprits include over-the-counter medications like aspirin, acetaminophen (Tylenol), or ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil), as well as prescription drugs.

"Most of the patients we see in a headache center with daily headache have medication-overuse, or rebound, headaches," says Stewart Tepper, MD, director of research at the Center for Headache and Pain at the Cleveland Clinic Neurological Institute.

"They are on a merry-go-round and they can't get off," says Dr. Tepper. "They keep taking more medicine, they keep having more headaches, and so the patient becomes more and more desperate. That's when they end up coming to headache specialists to kind of reset the whole system."

One theory is that too much medication can cause the brain to shift into an excited state, triggering more headaches. Another is that the headaches are a symptom of withdrawal as the level of medicine drops in the bloodstream.

Migraine headaches

Migraine headaches come from a neurological disorder that can run in families and are defined by certain criteria.

* At least five previous episodes of headaches
* Lasting between four hours and 72 hours
* Having at least two out of four of these features: one-sided pain, throbbing pain, moderate-to-severe pain, and pain that interferes with, is worsened by, or prohibits routine activity
* Having at least one associated feature: nausea and/or vomiting, or, if those are not present, then sensitivity to light and sound

An oncoming migraine attack may, for some, be foreshadowed by an aura, which can include visual distortions (such as wavy lines or blind spots) or numbness of a hand. It's estimated, though, that only 15% to 20% of migraineurs experience this.

Via : health.msn.com

Egyptian Mummies Prove Cancer is 'Man-Made'

Cancer is the bane of the modern world. It kills millions of people annually. Yet the strange fact is, that there is almost no trace of the insidious killer among the remains of ancient peoples.

This incredible epiphany rocked researchers on their heels. Ancient people simply didn't die from any cancer-related disease.

During an interview with a UK paper, Professor Michael Zimmerman stated, "In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases."

Yet the evidence gleaned from mummies and investigations into the causes of individual’s deaths revealed case after case where no cancer could be found.

"The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies," Zimmerman emphasized, "must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization."

For some years many cancer experts have contended that the modern-day malady must have its roots in the modern-day lifestyle, particularly that of the Western culture. The mute mummies have actually communicated a lot: their bodies' lack of cancers and tumors underscore many researcher's suspicions and tends to support their theories.

Not content to let physical evidence alone prove the case that cancer is man-made, Zimmerman and an associate, Rosalie David, poured through ancient literature, classical medical writings and investigated fossil records likely to contain the tell-tale signs of encroaching carcinoma.

More @ salem-news

Cancer is a Man-Made Disease, Say Researchers

According to a study conducted by the researchers from the University of Manchester, England, only a handful of Egyptian mummies were found to have cancer and there is limited reference to cancer in ancient Greek or Egyptian literature.

The researchers also noticed that cancer among children and young adults is not related to longevity; rather it is a man-made disease.

The investigators of the study claim that cancer at that time was extremely rare, as cancer was detected in only one mummy after examining hundreds of mummies.

The researchers also stated that rise in cancer, particularly childhood cancer, happened after the Industrial Revolution.

For their study, the scientists looked into the literary evidence from ancient Greece and Egypt. They also conducted the medical examinations of the remains of the animal and human from the period when dinosaurs existed.

According to Professor Rosalie David, “In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. In ancient times, it was extremely rare”.

The researchers also mentioned that people in the ancient times didn’t live for a longer period to develop cancer.

But it was found that some Egyptian and Greek people survived for longer time to get affected with diseases like atherosclerosis and osteoporosis.

Via : topnews

Study says cancer is manmade

Researchers at Manchester's KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology Cancer studied mummified remains and literary evidence from ancient Egypt, literary evidence from ancient Greece and medical studies of human and animal remains from earlier periods, going back to the age of the dinosaurs.

According to the study published in Nature Reviews Cancer, caner is the result of diet and pollution in the modern age. Only one case of cancer was found among hundreds of Egyptian mummies, with only few references to the disease in literary evidence.

The unnamed mummy was diagnosed with rectal cancer by Professor Michael Zimmerman, a visiting Professor at the KNH Centre, PhysOrg reported.

The rate of cancer, especially childhood cancer, has greatly risen since the Industrial Revolution, showing that old age is not the main reason behind cancer, scientists say.

“In industrialized societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare,” said Professor Rosalie David of the Faculty of Life Sciences.

“There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a manmade disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”

Scientists also believe that the short life span of the ancients precluded the development of cancer, but people of ancient Egypt and Greece did live long enough to develop diseases such as atherosclerosis, Paget's bone disease and osteoporosis.

The team found first descriptions of cancer operations in the 17th century and the first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumors in the past 200 years.

Via : presstv

Cancer 'is purely man-made' say scientists after finding almost no trace of disease in Egyptian mummies

Cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of modern life, a study of ancient remains has found.

Tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found.

A greater understanding of its origins could lead to treatments for the disease, which claims more than 150,000 lives a year in the UK.

Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: 'In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.

'The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.'

To trace cancer's roots, Professor Zimmerman and colleague Rosalie David analysed possible references to the disease in classical literature and scrutinised signs in the fossil record and in mummified bodies.

Despite slivers of tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies being rehydrated and placed under the microscope, only one case of cancer has been confirmed.

This is despite experiments showing that tumours should be even better preserved by mummification than healthy tissues.

Dismissing the argument that the ancient Egyptians didn't live long enough to develop cancer, the researchers pointed out that other age-related disease such as hardening of the arteries and brittle bones died occur.

Fossil evidence of cancer is also sparse, with scientific literature providing a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossil, the journal Nature Reviews Cancer reports.

Even the study of thousands of Neanderthal bones has provided only one example of a possible cancer.

More @ dailymail

Osteoporosis Drug Could Also Treat Breast Cancer, says a Study

As per a new study that appeared in the journal Nature, the drug used to treat the bone disease osteoporosis could also prove effective for women suffering with breast cancer.

The study was carried out by a crew of international researches, including those from University College London. The findings include that the drug denosumab taken by the osteoporosis patients also dampens the risk of tumors in women, who either take hormone replacement therapy or the contraceptive Pill.

Even in the previous studies, it has been shown that sex hormones known as progestins found in hormone replacement therapy and contraceptives can pose a threat to breast cancer. In the latest study, the researchers have tried to find out how these hormones affect mammary cells.

The researchers discovered that progestins triggers a protein called RANKL in breast tissue that leads to the multiplication of cancer cells and thus developing tumors. This is the protein which is also responsible for dysfunctioning the bone tissue. In the scenario of high formation of RANKL, the disease osteoporosis erupts.

Another study conducted by researchers at the Californian biotechnology Company Amgen and published in Nature examined the denosumab’s effect in jamming RANKL on mice. They identified that the drug checked the growth of cancer cells in them.

“The RANKL system is an important molecular link between a synthetic sex hormone and breast tumors, one day women may be able to reduce their risk by taking blocking medicines in advance to prevent breast cancer”, said Prof. Josef Penninger, study’s lead author.

Via : topnews

Researchers develop method for detailed imaging of fragile bone structures

Scientists working in Germany and Switzerland have developed a novel nano-tomography method, which uses X-rays to allow doctors to produce three-dimensional (3D) detailed imaging of fragile bone structures. This method could lead to the development of better therapeutic approaches to tackle the brittle bone disease osteoporosis, one of the most common disorders among older people. The new method was recently presented in the journal Nature.

The researchers from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) in Germany, the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich) said osteoporosis is currently diagnosed almost exclusively by establishing an overall reduction in bone density. This new method will give much greater information about the associated local structure and bone density changes. Until now doctors have been hampered by their lack of ability to look in detail at changes to bone density.

TUM's Professor Franz Pfeiffer said this is all about to change. 'With our newly developed nano-CT [computed tomorgraphy] method it is now possible to visualise the bone structure and density changes at high resolutions and in 3D,' explained Professor Pfeiffer, who led the research. This will 'enable us to do research on structural changes related to osteoporosis on a nanoscale and thus develop better therapeutic approaches'.

Professor Pfeiffer's team used X-ray CT to develop its method. CT scanners are used every day in hospitals and medical practices for the diagnostic screening of the human body - the body is X-rayed while a detector records from different angles how much radiation is being absorbed.

'In principle it is nothing more than taking multiple X-ray pictures from various directions,' the authors said. 'A number of such pictures are then used to generate digital 3D images of the body's interior using image processing.'

The new method measures both the overall beam intensity absorbed by the object under examination at each angle and the parts of the X-ray beam that are deflected in different directions or 'diffracted'. A diffraction pattern is generated for every point in the sample and this supplies additional information about the exact nanostructure, as X-ray radiation is particularly sensitive to the tiniest of structural changes, according to the researchers.

'Because we have to take and process so many individual pictures with extreme precision, it was particularly important during the implementation of the method to use high-brilliance X-ray radiation and fast, low-noise pixel detectors,' said Oliver Bunk, who was responsible for the experimental setup at the PSI synchrotron facilities in Switzerland.

The diffraction patterns were then processed using an algorithm developed by the team, TUM researcher Martin Dierolf stated. 'We developed an image reconstruction algorithm that generates a high-resolution, 3D image of the sample using over 100,000 diffraction patterns,' he said. 'This algorithm takes into account not only classical X-ray absorption, but also the significantly more sensitive phase shift of the X-rays.'

Roger Wepf, Director of the Electron Microscopy Centre at ETH Zurich (EMEZ), acknowledged that while 'the new nano-CT procedure does not achieve the spatial resolution currently available in electron microscopy', 'it can - because of the high penetration of X-rays - generate 3D tomography images of bone samples'.

He said, 'The new nano-CT procedure also stands out with its high precision bone density measurement capacity, which is particularly important in bone research.' The researchers noted that the method will open the door to more precise studies on the early phase of osteoporosis and to the evaluation of the therapeutic outcomes of various treatments in clinical studies.

Via : cordis.europa.eu