A ‘miracle’ gas that occurs naturally in air could help reduce incidence of brain damage in newborns.

Xenon is already offered as anesthetic. But doctors are now using it in an effort to protect babies starved of oxygen at birth.

Britain Medical Research Council (MRC) is funding the world’s first trial of it’s kind into benefits of xenon on at-risk infants.

Treatment being offered at three London hospitals-University College Hospital, Evelina Children’s hospital and Queen Chariotte’s – as well as Liverpool Women’s hospital.

More than 1,000 otherwise healthy infants every year are born deprived of oxygen. Those who survive risk moderate to severe conditions ranging from learning difficulties to cerebral palsy.

Numerous factors can be to blame, including the placenta- which provides the foetus with nutrients in the womb- coming apart, the umbilical cord getting wrapped around a baby’s neck and infection.

Until now, doctors have used a technique to cool the body temperature of babies by a few degrees. This is successful in lowering the risk of brain injury in about half of cases. But experts believe adding xenon treatment to cooling could double success rates.

Brain cells are extremely sensitive to oxygen deprivation and being to die rapidly. Inhaled xenon gas treatment is understood to stop areas of the brain ‘dying’ by penetrating the cells and reviving them.

The trail is led by Professor Denis Azzopardi, a pediatric specialist at London’s Imperial College. His colleague Dr. Andrew Kapetanakis, Guy’s and St. Thomas says: ‘Birth asphyxia occurs in one or two out of 1,000 deliveries in developed countries and may have lifelong implications for the children and their families. ‘We are trying to discover if new treatment can be added to cooling to improve outcomes.’

The aim to study at least 70 babies as part of 18 month trial.

Dheeraj Dubey

(S.Y.D.Pharm.)

The future of medicine is deeply rooted in the very thing that underpins its success: science. Just imagine this, Kidney disease was once considered as the consequence of evil spirits, wicked deeds, a malicious deity or some other such influence, it is now viewed as a material problem; the failure in a biological organ that should be filtering, cleaning and adjusting the body fluids. Doctors are now trained, not as a priest nor a shaman but as technicians skilled at diagnosing and fixing failing body mechanisms.

Doctors need sophisticated equipment such as brain scanners, fetal monitors, endoscopes, lasers, radioactive chemicals and computers to pursue this job. Not only will have the doctors take their time in learning to handle these machines, the safety problem involved in the operation also draws much attention. Although patients may be grateful to receive this form of improved treatment, most people do not find it sufficient. They need someone prepared to relate to them on a spiritual and human level and is able to share their distress.

Medicine thus faces a great challenge, to make full use of technology without losing human contact that has to be part of any satisfactory system of healthcare. Teaching medical students how to communicate with their patients has become a priority among the possible remedies. Some medical schools even make use of role playing sessions to train their students to focus on their patients during consultation rather than the illness.

Other doctors are turning to complementary medicine, seeking to retain their scientific approach to disease while recognizing that science by itself does not solve all problems. These include ways such as reconsidering the architecture of hospitals, to bring art into wards and also to fashion new relationships in which the wishes and feelings of patients are taken into serious consideration. The success of these and other moves will decide whether the public sees medicine as in broad sympathy with their needs, or as an enterprise from which it feels evermore alienated.

The doctors\\' dilemma is made no easier by a widespread of science and technology in general. In spite of their impact on the way we live, ignorance about them is commonly found. Medical science suffers by false associations and by tragedies and misapplications, such as the misuse of life supporting systems and the exploitation of unwitting patients as experimental subjects, and so on.

Some people consider seeking alternative forms of health care as the appropriate solution to this. To the extent that this is a rejection of what is wrong with orthodox medicine it is sensible and desirable. Some of the bewildering variety of complementary therapies now available -- radionics, for example, or the alleged benefits of wearing a crystal

-- can appeal only to the credulous.

The sheer ingenuity of scientific medicine has also created a raft of new ethical dilemmas.

Chirag Jain

(F.Y.D.Pharm.)

Women should take vitamin D supplements to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research two new studies show that women who don’t have enough vitamin D as they hit middle age are at greater risk of going into mental decline and developing Alzheimer’s.

The first of the studies found that women who developed Alzheimer’s disease had lower vitamin D intake than those who did not developed the illness.

Dr. Cedric Annweiler, of Angers University Hospital in France, looked at data from nearly 500 women who participated in the Toulouse Cohort of Epidemiology of osteoporosis study. He found that women who developed Alzheimer’s had an average vitamin D intake of 50.3 mg a week, whereas those who developed other forms of dementia had an average of 63.6mg per week and those who didn’t develop dementia at all averaged 59 mg.

The study highlights the role vitamin D plays in Alzheimer’s, a severe form of dementia which causes the sufferer to become disorientated, aggressive, forgetful and find even quite basic tasks difficult to carry out. There is no cure for illness, which affects around 400,000 in England- a figure which steadily rising as people live for longer.

Meanwhile, investigators led by Yelena slinin at the VA Medical centre in the United States found that women with a low vitamin D intake were more likely to encounter cognitive decline. Ms. Slinin analyzed the vitamin levels of 6,257 older women who also under went mental ability test known as the mini-mental state examination.

Low levels of vitamin D of less than 20 nanograms per milliliters of blood serum were associated with higher odds of mental decline.

Scientists say both studies, which were published in the Journal of Gerontology, underline the importance of getting enough vitamin D, either through exposure to the sun, food or supplements.

Dheeraj Dubey

(S.Y.D.Pharm.)

Despite rumors, the singularity, or point at which artificial intelligence can overtake human smarts, still isn\\'t quite here. One of the world\\'s most powerful supercomputers is still no match for the humble human brain, taking 40 minutes to replicate a single second of brain activity.

Researchers in Germany and Japan used K, the fourth-most powerful supercomputer in the world, to simulate brain activity. With more than 700,000 processor cores and 1.4 million gigabytes of RAM, K simulated the interplay of 1.73 billion nerve cells and more than 10 trillion synapses, or junctions between brain cells. Though that may sound like a lot of brain cells and connections, it represents just 1 percent of the human brain\\'s network.

The long-term goal is to make computing so fast that it can simulate the mind— brain cell by brain cell— in real-time. That may be feasible by the end of the decade.

Mohsin Shaikh

(S.Y.D.Pharm.)