D’Zhana Simmons felt like a living corpse, without heart in her body for four months.

“But I know that I really was here,” the 14-year-old said, and she did survive without a heart.” She looked scared of what she had suffered while being released from Miami hospital.

Since July, she had underdone two heart transplant surgeries and survived with artificial heart pumps, without heart for 118 days between the transplants.

Last spring D’Zhana’s parents came to know that she had cardiac hypertrophy (enlarged heart) that was too weak to perform function. They took her to Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami for heart transplantation. But unfortunately her new heart didn’t perform well and could have chances to rupture, so surgeons decide to replace it.

They surgeons performed unusual act and replaced her heart with artificial pumping devices that kept the process of circulation running, till her second transplant.

Gleevac, which is considered a wonder drug to treat leukemia and other cancers, may also prove helpful to reverse type1 diabetes, researchers from University of California San Francisco find.

While noticing effects on mice, the researchers also found that Gleevec and another similar cancer drug Sutent helped to avoid the development of type1 diabetes. Type1 diabetes occurs because of the body’s inability to produce insulin and more often it is diagnosed in children and young adults.

Jeffrey Bluestone, who led the study, says: “ Gleevec seems to affect related kinases even platelet-derived growth factor that are possibly involved in different cell types  grave to the progression and development of autoimmune disease like type1 diabetes”.

If you have tried every diet and exercise to get rid of your excessive lard and couldn’t get the desired results, restrictive surgery like adjustable gastric banding or lapband system may serve as the right option for you. Many people want to know how adjustable gastric banding works and the answer is simple that the surgeons reduce the size of the stomach by utilizing a variety of techniques. Following restrictive surgery, a person eats less, feels faster and thus loses weight.

Laparoscopic Adjustable Gastric Banding and vertical banded gastroplasty are two common kinds of restrictive surgery.

Laparoscopic gastric banding is also known as gastric banding or lap banding and it is considered the second most common weight loss surgery following gastric bypass.

Anyone of us can see online videos showing people while using the hallucinogenic drug. In such videos you may notice that after the use of such drugs like salvia people may unable to talk and extremely disoriented within few seconds.

Videos like this can’t be an advertisement for the drug, which can be legally bought online. But some people who use salvia said the drug awake something inside them that is greater than them.

Healing property

It is this potential for good that have caught the interest of researchers, and salvia divinorum, whose side effects are still unknown, is one of hallucinogenic drugs, about which some scientists believe that it may have healing properties that overlap with the spiritual experiences.

In a study participants were given proscribed doses of “psilocybin”, the unique ingredient of magic mushrooms. Some volunteers experienced anxiety, initially, but after two months of regular use, most experience significant personal meaning and spiritual significance and positive changes in attitudes also clearly observed by the community.

After FDA approval psychiatric researchers use ecstasy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and noticed that many patients were able to diffuse fears that had left them almost disable.

“Philosophical experiences of unity with the cosmos…sometimes lead to some lasting benefits. Use of certain plants, herbs and chemicals may provide a legitimate and potentially safe way to reach such states.

A historic survey of salvia shows that, the herb was originally used by Mazatec shamans in Oaxaca, Mexico. In Western culture hallucinogenic a plant are associated with illegal drugs, but in many other cultures these plants are sacred and regarded as the key to another mystical world.

Dutch researchers, who conducted a long-term study including almost 121,000 people, say that drinking and smoking have links with three esophageal and stomach cancer subtypes.

Researchers found that among the participants, there were 120 ESCC cases, 168EAC cases and 187 GCA cases after 16 years. A dose relationship between alcohol and ESCC was identified by the researchers, as they found that a person who consumed four glasses of alcohol everyday has five times higher risk of developing ESCC than a person who didn’t drink.

Similarly, current and former smoking was also related to a higher risk of developing all three types of cancers. There was an intermediate risk in former smokers, while current smokers had the highest risk if compared with people who didn’t smoke.

The findings are expected to be presented at the American Academy of Cancer Research’s annual cancer prevention meeting, in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

Women who live in a rural area may have higher chances of developing preeclampsia and pregnancy-related hypertension, a new study finds.

In this six-year study, the researchers also found that women with some college education were 19 percent more likely to have preeclampsia and pregnancy-induced hypertension than women with a high school education. Women who gave birth in Colorado during six-year were included in the study.

The study has been presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology in Philadelphia.

There are some known risk factors for preeclampsia and PIH and that include older age, excessive weight and giving birth to multiple babies. The researchers validated these factors in this new study. One researcher suggests that the link between rural living and preeclampsia, PIH risk may be due to maternal poverty and social deprivation.

Bisphenol A, a chemical which is used to harden plastic packaging for differentfoods and beverages, may cause fertility problems, a study suggests.

The study has been presented at the annual meeting of American Society for Reproductive Medicine and it concludes that Bisphenol A (BPA) can hurt the ability of embryos to attach to the uterus.

Dr. Richard J. Paulson, who is chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University Of Southern California Keck School Of Medicine, says: “It’s a real serious issue; we definitely need to find out the effects of environmental toxicants on human reproduction.”  It is worth mentioning that Dr. Richard wasn’t involved in the study.

To become a vegetarian is, indeed, a life changing decision, as it’s not just a matter of deciding which dress you will wear today. It’s a decision that has immediate as well as long term effects in your lifestyle. Do you like to make other changing decisions in your life without serious consideration?

If you don’t eat meat, it’s good for you but if you, there is nothing wrong with it. However, the thing you must keep in mind that excess of any thing is bad and if you make meat your only diet and don’t include vegetables or fruits in your daily diet, you may put your health in a serious threat. A good diet is one that is balance and has all the ingredients in a right proportion. So far advantages and disadvantages of being a vegetarian are concerned; let’s talk about the advantages first.

Scientists have found a key reason for the failure of drug tamoxifen in some women with breast cancer.

Scientists, from the Cancer Research UK, identify a molecular imbalance that doesn’t allow the drug to work.

The researchers believe that this detailed understanding will help to develop some more effective treatments for women with breast cancer. Similarly, they added that the finding would also help to explain other examples of drug resistance.

In UK, almost 45,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed every year and around two-thirds are prescribed the drug. Women often take it for five year after diagnosis.

Almost 25 to 30% women develop resistance to the treatment after some time and it shows that their cancer is more likely to return.

Scientists have been trying to develop ways to identify these women so their treatment may be better tailored without wasting time.

In the study that included 100 breast cancer patients, the researchers found that tamoxifen can work by switching of the breast cancer gene HER2 through a protein known as PAX2.

A report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute says that calcium or vitamin D supplements don’t seem to decrease the risk of invasive breast cancer in postmenopausal women.

Dr. Rowan T. Chlevbowski (from the University of California, Los Angeles) and colleagues note that the results of observational studies associate higher calcium and vitamin D levels with a lower risk of breast cancer, but yet this topic has not been addressed in a different type of trial.

In this study, 36282 women participants randomly received calcium 1000 mg plus vitamin D 400 IU per day or placebo for 7 years to find the effect of these supplements on hip fractures. A secondary endpoint of the study was the supplements’ effect on invasive breast cancer.

The researchers found that there wasn’t any significant difference in the number of patients who developed invasive breast cancer in the supplement group and the placebo group, as it was 528 versus 546.