Kapalbhati Pranayama (cleansing breath exercise) is good for all problems below the belly. It cleanses the lungs, strenghtens abdominal muscles and is also highly effective in controlling obesity, diabetes, kidney and prostate diseases, heart, brain and lung problems.
Yoga: Kapalbhati Pranayama
A washingtonpost.com article by Rob Stein reports,
The Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved the first birth control pill that eliminates a woman's monthly period.
Taken daily, the contraceptive, called Lybrel, continuously administers slightly lower doses of the same hormones in many standard birth control pills to suppress menstruation. It is designed for women who find their periods too painful, unpleasant or inconvenient and want to be free of them.
"This will be the first and only oral contraceptive designed to be taken 365 days a year, allowing women to put their periods on hold," said Amy Marren of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which expects Lybrel to be available with a prescription by July. "There are a lot of women who think that's a great option to have."
...............Advocates of birth control welcomed Lybrel, saying it provides women with another option.
"Every woman's birth control needs are different, and the best methods are those that fit a woman's lifestyle and meet her needs," said Vanessa Cullins, vice president for medical affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
But others questioned whether enough research had been done to be sure that Lybrel is safe to suppress menstruation in the long term.
"There may be important health consequences that we don't know about," said Christine L. Hitchcock, an endocrinology researcher at the University of British Columbia. "I don't think we understand everything that the menstrual cycle does well enough to say with confidence that you can abolish it and not have any consequences."
Some criticized Lybrel for fueling biases and misconceptions about menstruation.
"I think it sends the wrong message about menstruation in women's lives, especially for young women," said Ingrid Johnston-Robledo, an associate professor of psychology and women's studies at the State University of New York at Fredonia.
"It perpetuates a lot of negative attitudes and taboos about menstruation -- that it's something that's bothersome and dirty and debilitating and shameful."
Wyeth and the FDA said that there is no evidence of any long-term risks and that suppressing the menstrual cycle can have many benefits, especially for women who experience cramps, bloating and mood swings. There is no reason to think it would pose any additional health hazards, they said.
"The risks of using Lybrel are similar to other conventional oral contraceptives," said Daniel Shames, deputy director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "We don't suspect there are going to be any surprises in terms of long-term use of this product."
Rosa Nolasco, 38, of New York said Lybrel liberated her from the monthly torment of her period when she took it as part of a clinical trial.
"I get really severe cramps, bloating, chocolate cravings, mood swings. I would literally be in bed for a few days each month," said Nolasco, a single mother of four. "It was really nice not to have to worry about any of that."
"We weren't supposed to have 13 natural periods year after year after year," said Linda Miller, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "We as a society have already changed what nature intended for us."
But she said that women can accomplish the same goal more inexpensively by using generic versions of some birth control pills that have long been available.
"You don't need a brand," said Miller, who counsels women about suppressing their periods through her Web site, NoPeriod.com.
Standard oral contraceptives consist of 21 pills containing the hormones estrogen and progestin, which prevent ovulation, followed by seven dummy pills that allow menstruation. The birth control pill was originally developed to mimic a normal cycle in the belief that women would find it more acceptable, not because it would be safer or more effective at preventing pregnancy.
The FDA approved a birth control pill formulation known as Seasonale in 2003, and a similar regimen called Seasonique in 2006, both of which reduce the number of periods to four times a year.
Amy Alina of the National Women's Health Network, a Washington advocacy group, said Lybrel could offer an attractive alternative for some women. But she said she is concerned that the company is playing down the number of women who still experience bleeding while taking Lybrel.
"You still have bleeding, but you just don't know when it's going to happen," she said.
In the company's research, Lybrel eliminated bleeding in the 59 percent of women who took it for a full year. But many women stopped early, in part because they continued to experience bleeding and spotting.
Because women taking Lybrel may not know whether they are pregnant, the FDA said that they should undergo pregnancy tests if they suspect they could be. Ovulation can begin within days of discontinuing the pills.
Wyeth has not yet set a price for Lybrel.
"SIX BLIND patients have had their sight partially restored by a “bionic eye” surgically implanted onto their retina. Although it restores only very rudimentary vision, the device has proved so successful that its developers are about to begin a study of a more sophisticated version on between 50 and 75 patients.
If this trial goes to plan, the device could be available to patients in two years, and one day it could be used to digitally enhance human sight."
The bionic eye works by converting images from a tiny camera mounted on a pair of glasses into a grid of 16 electrical signals that transmit directly to the nerve endings in the subject's retina.
“It’s amazing that even with 16 pixels how much our subjects have been able to do,” said Professor Mark Humayun at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California who has pioneered the device.
“We were completely wrong...We thought from simulations that 16 would only give you distinction between light and dark and maybe some grey scale.” In fact, subjects can tell the difference between objects like a cup, a plate and a knife. They can also tell which direction objects are moving in front of them. “The brain is able to fill in a lot of the information,” he added.
One of Prof Humayun's patients is Terry Byland, 58, from Corona, near Los Angeles. He used to sell power tools before going blind from a condition called retinitis pigmentosa in 1993.
"At the beginning, it was like seeing assembled dots - now it's much more than that," he said. His field of view is about 30-cmwide, but it allows him to cross a busy street and see white lines on the road. "When I am walking along the street, I can avoid lowhanging branches, I can see the edges of the branches, so I can avoid them," he added.
And it has had a profound impact on his life. "I was with my son, walking, the first time — it was the first time I had seen him since he was five years old. I don't mind saying there were a few tears wept that day."
The camera in the glasses sends a wireless signal to a pocket device the size of a Blackberry, which processes the images in real time into a four-by-four grid of electrical signals. This grid is then transmitted wirelessly to the eye implant, which converts these into signals sent directly to nerve endings in the retina.
In the current devices, the receiver for the signal is implanted under the skin behind the ear with a wire connection to the eye implant, but the team has shrunk the electronics so the improved version fits under the skin, around the eye.
More significantly, it now has 60 pixels instead of 16 and because it is smaller, the operation to implant it is much less traumatic, taking just 90 minutes instead of eight hours. Prof Humayun predicts it will cost around $30,000 (around Rs 13.8 lakh).
All of the image processing happens instantaneously. "It has to be real time because if it isn't and you move your head and the screen is delayed... you start to feel sick and dizzy. I'm sure you've experienced that in movie theatres," said Prof Humayun.
Developing the first device took 16 years of research, but the 60-pixel version has taken just four. The implant is not suitable for every form of blindness. If the optic nerve or vision-processing centres in the brain are damaged, it cannot help; but there are many conditions in which patients lose the function of the receptor cells in the retina and go blind, even though the neural circuitry behind is intact.
Age-related macular degeneration, for example, is a common condition in which patients gradually lose sight in the centre of their field of vision. It affects 15 per cent of people aged 75 or over.
Prof Humayun believes his implants will be most successful in patients who were once fully sighted rather than people who were blind from birth. However, he wants to try the device out in those people too. "I think the jury's still out," he said, "I don't think it will be as effective as somebody who had vision into their 20s, 30s and 40s, but it is definitely a population we would like to try."
Stevie Wonder is one of his patients who has expressed an interest in the technology, but as someone who lost his sight very early in life, he will not be one of the initial trial patients. "He is very much for raising awareness of the technology, so that people can get to hear about it and really understand it."
Prof Humayun predicts that future versions of the bionic eye will need at least 1,000 pixels for patients to recognise faces. And even further off is the possibility of manipulating the images the patients sees; for example, allowing them to pause or enhance it by zooming in. ‘I see faces as shadows’ "The last thing you want to hear is that you are going blind and that there's nothing they can do." That was the nightmare that faced Terry Byland in 1985.
By 1993, a rare condition called retinitis pimentosa, that affects around one in 3,500 people, had robbed him of his sight. But 13 years later, Prof Humayun accepted him as the sixth patient to trial his experimental bionic eye.
After the eight-hour operation to put it in place, the first he saw was a sequence of specks of light as the experimenters tested the device. "It was amazing to see something. We were told before it would be a very slow and tedious process. Well, we've gone far beyond that.” The device has helped Byland regain his independence. "My visual cortex, which was dormant, is learning to work again. When I'm at home, I can go into any room and switch the light on, or see the light coming in through the window," he said. "It is going from a good guess to knowing what I see. I can't recognise faces but I can see them like a dark shadow. I can cross a busy street.”=The Gaurdian=
Retinal prosthesis:
A tiny electrical implant that attaches itself to the retina may some day restore partial sight to millions of patients blinded by age related macular degeneration, US researchers said on Thursday.
1. A video processor, mounted in eyeglasses, converts images captured on a camera into electronic signals and sends it to the transmitter.
2. An implant wirelessly receives this data and sends the signals through a tiny cable to an electrode array.
3. The electrode array is stimulated to emit electrical pulses which induce responses in the retina that travel through the optic nerve to the brain How electrodes signal the brain When the ganglion cells at the surface of the retina are stimulated by the implant’s electrodes, they send a signal to the brain which perceives patterns of light and dark spots corresponding to the electrodes stimulated A pager-sized wireless microprocessor and battery pack worn on the belt powers the entire device.
Source: Second Sight Medical Products REUTERS.
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"First results encouraging, US experts are working on improving device.", reports Hindustan Times in it's Delhi edition today titled, Robotic retina offers hope for sight .
Enjoy reading this inventional article.
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