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#Post#: 522--------------------------------------------------
Communication Mechanisms Within the Human Body
By: AGelbert Date: December 8, 2013, 3:40 pm
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Surprising Discovery: Skin Communicates With Liver :o
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Dec. 6, 2013 — Researchers from the University of Southern
Denmark have discovered that the skin is capable of
communicating with the liver. The discovery has surprised the
scientists, and they say that it may help our understanding of
how skin diseases can affect the rest of the body.
Professor Susanne Mandrup and her research group in
collaboration with Nils Færgeman's research group at the
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the
University of Southern Denmark was actually studying something
completely different when they made the groundbreaking
discovery: That the skin, which is the body's largest organ, can
"talk" to the liver.
"We have showed that the skin affects the metabolism in the
liver, and that is quite a surprise," say Susanne Mandrup and
Ditte Neess, a former student in the Mandrup research group and
now laboratory manager in Professor Nils Færgeman's group.
The phenomenon was observed in the researcher's laboratory mice.
The Mandrup and Færgeman groups work with so-called knock-out
mice, in which a specific fat binding protein called acyl CoA
binding protein has been removed (knocked out). Some knock-out
mice produced by the researchers had a strange greasy fur, and
they had difficulties being weaned from their mother. In the
weaning period they gained less weight and showed a failure to
thrive. Analyses also showed that the mice accumulated fat in
the liver at weaning.
"At first we thought that the fat accumulation in the liver was
linked with the fact that the gene was missing in the liver of
the knock-out mice. But this was ruled out by a series of
studies, and we had to find another explanation," says Ditte
Neess.
She and her colleagues took another look at the rumpled and weak
knock-out mice. Their fur was greasy, and they had a leaky skin
from which they lost more water than normal mice.
"When they lose water, they also lose heat. We therefore asked
ourselves whether this water and heat loss could be the reason
why the mice accumulated fat in the liver and became weak when
weaned from their mother," says Ditte Neess.
To clarify this, the researchers made ​​some mice
that lacked the fat binding protein only in the skin. Similar to
the full knockouts these mice had difficulties after weaning and
accumulated fat in the liver. So this showed that the lack of
the fat-binding protein in the skin was sufficient to induce
accumulation of fat in the liver.
To get to the bottom of how a defect in the skin "talks" to the
liver, the researchers decided to cover the mice with Vaseline.
This would prevent water evaporating from the skin and thus
stopping the heat loss. As a result the fat accumulation in the
liver disappeared. But as Vaseline contains fat, that could
theoretically be absorbed by the skin or ingested by the mice,
the researchers were a little unsure if there were side effects
from the Vaseline. A student proposed to cover the mice with
liquid latex, which she found in a local sex shop.
Having covered the mice in blue latex the researchers saw that
fat accumulation in the liver again disappeared.
"We believe that the leaking of water from the skin makes the
mice feel cold, and that this leads to breaking down of fat in
their adipose (fat) tissue. The broken down fat is then moved to
the liver. The mice move energy from the tissues to the liver,"
Susanne Mandrup and Ditte Neess explain.
HTML http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131206101611.htm
#Post#: 1038--------------------------------------------------
Re: Communication Mechanisms Within the Human Body
By: AGelbert Date: May 3, 2014, 12:40 am
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HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ9soVXzesI&feature=player_embedded
Creating amazing 3-D views of living cells without killing them.
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height=40]
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/>
Originally published: May 1 2014 - 2:30pm .
By: Karin Heineman, ISTV Executive Producer
HTML http://www.insidescience.org/content/making-living-cells-easier-see/1626
#Post#: 1701--------------------------------------------------
Re: Communication Mechanisms Within the Human Body
By: AGelbert Date: August 15, 2014, 12:57 pm
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Shadow Medicine: The Placebo in Conventional and Alternative
Therapies
By John S. Haller Jr.
Columbia University Press, July 2014
In Shadow Medicine, medical historian John S. Haller Jr. calls
for a truce between evidence-based medicine (EBM) and
complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
Haller writes. “The placebo highlights the nonspecific (i.e.,
nonbiological) aspect of medicine, a condition that creates a
distracting ambiguity for the medical scientist who finds it
difficult to build a bridge between the material and the
psychosomatic and behavioral side of healing. To ignore or
otherwise discount this phenomenon is to deny the multifactorial
nature of disease
causation.”
HTML http://www.desismileys.com/smileys/desismileys_0293.gif
Devising new experimental protocols that can better tease out a
scientific footing for the placebo could be the key to bridging
the gap between EBM and CAM, Haller urges.
HTML http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/40601/title/Capsule-Reviews/
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