Exercise

Science 20 January 2012: 
Vol. 335 no. 6066 p. 281 
DOI: 10.1126/science.335.6066.281

• NEWS FOCUS

AUTOPHAGY

Explaining Exercise

1. Ken Garber*

Exercise has many benefits, but the mechanisms behind them remain murky. Because autophagy’s recycling of cellular contents helps cells meet energy demands, researchers wondered whether exercise triggers autophagy and if that could somehow account for exercise’s benefits. In the December issue of Autophagy, an Italian research team reported the first evidence that exercise induces autophagy in the skeletal muscles of mice. This week in Nature, other researchers confirm that observation and extend it much further, documenting that autophagy is required for exercise’s beneficial metabolic effects./.../

Exercise-induced BCL2-regulated autophagy is required for muscle glucose homeostasis

• Congcong He,
• Michael C. Bassik,
• Viviana Moresi,
• Kai Sun,
• Yongjie Wei,
• Zhongju Zou,
• Zhenyi An,
• Joy Loh,
• Jill Fisher,
• Qihua Sun,
• Stanley Korsmeyer,
• Milton Packer,
• Herman I. May,
• Joseph A. Hill,
• Herbert W. Virgin,
• Christopher Gilpin,
• Guanghua Xiao,
• Rhonda Bassel-Duby,
• Philipp E. Scherer
• &Beth Levine

Nature
 
(2012)
 
doi:10.1038/nature10758

Received

 

22 September 2010 

Accepted

 

06 December 2011 

Published online

 

18 January 2012

Article tools

• 
  

Exercise has beneficial effects on human health, including protection against metabolic disorders such as diabetes¹. However, the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects are incompletely understood. The lysosomal degradation pathway, autophagy, is an intracellular recycling system that functions during basal conditions in organelle and protein quality control². During stress, increased levels of autophagy permit cells to adapt to changing nutritional and energy demands through protein catabolism³. Moreover, in animal models, autophagy protects against diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, infections, inflammatory diseases, ageing and insulin resistance^4, 5, 6. Here we show that acute exercise induces autophagy in skeletal and cardiac muscle of fed mice. To investigate the role of exercise-mediated autophagy in vivo, we generated mutant mice that show normal levels of basal autophagy but are deficient in stimulus (exercise- or starvation)-induced autophagy. These mice (termed BCL2 AAA mice) contain knock-in mutations in BCL2 phosphorylation sites (Thr69Ala, Ser70Ala and Ser84Ala) that prevent stimulus-induced disruption of the BCL2–beclin-1 complex and autophagy activation. BCL2 AAA mice show decreased endurance and altered glucose metabolism during acute exercise, as well as impaired chronic exercise-mediated protection against high-fat-diet-induced glucose intolerance. Thus, exercise induces autophagy, BCL2 is a crucial regulator of exercise- (and starvation)-induced autophagy in vivo, and autophagy induction may contribute to the beneficial metabolic effects of exercise./.../

Sexual Activity and Cardiovascular Disease

AHA Scientific Statement
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Sexual Activity and Cardiovascular Disease: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association
Glenn N. Levine, Elaine E. Steinke, Faisal G. Bakaeen, Biykem Bozkurt, Melvin D. Cheitlin, Jamie Beth Conti, Elyse Foster, Tiny Jaarsma, Robert A. Kloner, Richard A. Lange, Stacy Tessler Lindau, Barry J. Maron, Debra K. Moser, E. Magnus Ohman, Allen D. Seftel, William J. Stewart  on behalf of the American Heart Association Council on Clinical Cardiology, Council on Cardiovascular Nursing, Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesia,
and Council on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Circulation published 19 January 2012, 10.1161/CIR.0b013e3182447787


Sexual activity is an important component of patient and partner quality of life for men and women with cardiovascular disease (CVD), including many elderly patients.
Decreased sexual activity and function are common in patients with CVD and are often interrelated to anxiety and depression.
The intent of this American Heart Association Scientific Statement is to synthesize and summarize data
relevant to sexual activity and heart disease in order to provide recommendations and foster physician and other
healthcare professional communication with patients about sexual activity. Recommendations in this document are based on published studies, the Princeton Consensus Panel, the 36th Bethesda Conference, European Society of Cardiology recommendations on physical activity and sports participation for patients with CVD, practice guidelines from the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association and other organizations, and the multidisciplinary expertise of the writing group. The classification of recommendations in this document are based on established ACCF/AHA criteria (Table)
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/reprint/CIR.0b013e3182447787v1?papetoc

Twitter

Nine Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

By PAUL BOUTIN

Published: January 18, 2012

Enlarge This ImageTwitter, the minimalist-format social network that claims to have 100 million users, has built its reputation around its simplicity. Members can post to the service only in text messages of 140 characters or less. They can include a link to another site, or to a photo or video. They can repost other users’ messages on their own pages. They can send each other equally spartan private messages. That’s about it — or so it seems.

Dongyun Lee

Look more closely, and you’ll find that Twitter has been augmented, by the company and by other Internet toolmakers, with a virtual appliance store of simple, utilitarian features, widgets and services that let users find interesting posts, create photo albums or search Twitter more efficiently. Yet unlike, say, Facebook or Microsoft Office, Twitter’s power tools are easy to find and easy to figure out./.../

Alzheimer

Rules Updated for Postmortem Dx of Alzheimer's

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today Published: January 18, 2012 Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston. A new guideline for the National Institute on Aging and the Alzeimer's Association recommends the "ABC" system for standardizing neuropathologic staging of Alzheimer's brain pathology on autopsy. Note that the "ABC" system scores beta-amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and neuritic plaques for an assessment of neuropathologic changes of Alzheimer's independent of premortem cognitive impairment. Individuals who were cognitively normal at the time of death can nevertheless be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease on the basis of autopsy findings alone, according to new guidelines endorsed by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Alzheimer's Association. The guidelines for postmortem assessment of Alzheimer's disease, which replace criteria issued in 1997, also call on pathologists to base diagnoses on an "ABC" risk score that combines assessments of beta-amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and neuritic plaques. Also new to the guidelines are specific protocols for evaluating other pathologies related to cognitive impairment and dementia, such as Lewy body disease, vascular brain injury, and hippocampal sclerosis. The new guidelines were developed by a team led by Thomas Montine, MD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and Bradley Hyman, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. They were published in two papers: one in the January issue of Acta Neuropathologica describing the practical assessment, and another online in Alzheimer's & Dementiathat reviewed the evidence base for the update./.../

Milky Way

Do Invisible Galaxies Swirl Around the Milky Way?

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012

NASA / MCT / Getty Images

in

Unless you're some kind of space nut, you're probably entirely unaware that the Milky Way, our home galaxy, isn't traveling through the cosmos alone. It's being shadowed by a litter of nearly a dozen dwarf galaxies that are far smaller and dimmer — a pack of cubs, you might say, yapping around the edges of the Mama Grizzly. If you widen your gaze to include a much larger swath of space, you'll find what's called the Local Group — a half-dozen full-size galaxies and about 30 dwarfs./.../

160 billion planets in the Milky Way?!

M. Kornmesser / ESO

A cartoon view of the Milky Way shows stars bristling with planets. The planets, their orbits and the sizes of their host stars are all vastly magnified in the cartoon.

 Alan Boyle

A statistical analysis based on a survey of millions of stars suggests that there's at least one planet for every star in the sky, and probably more. That would add up to 160 billion planets or so in the Milky Way.

"We conclude that stars are orbited by planets as a rule, rather than the exception," an international research team reports today in the journalNature./.../

conflicts of interest

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"Patients want to know they are getting treatment based on medical evidence, not a lunch or a financial relationship."

ALLAN J. COUKELL, a consumer advocate at the Pew Charitable Trusts, on a rule that would require drug companies to disclose payments they make to doctors.

U.S. to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: January 16, 2012

WASHINGTON — To head off medical conflicts of interest, the Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment.

Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices.

Consumer advocates and members of Congress say patients may benefit from the new standards, being issued by the government under the new health care law. Officials said the disclosures increased the likelihood that doctors would make decisions in the best interests of patients, without regard to the doctors’ financial interests/.../
.

About Dying

What Doctors Know — and We Can Learn — About Dying

Physicians are more likely to sign advance directives and avoid rescue measures at the end of their lives

By SHANNON BROWNLEE | @ShannonBrownlee | January 16, 2012 | 

GETTY IMAGES

Brownlee's latest book isOvertreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

Last month, an essay posted by retired physician Ken Murray called “How Doctors Die” got a huge amount of attention, some negative but mostly positive. Murray tells the story of an orthopedic surgeon who, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, chose not to undergo treatment. The surgeon died some months later at home, never having set foot inside a hospital again.

Critics said that the essay was a biased opinion of how one should die, not an actual analysis of how doctors actually do die. And indeed, much of Murray’s essay was anecdotal. Murray writes that his physician friends wear medallions with DNR, or Do Not Resuscitate, orders. They instruct their colleagues to not take any heroic measures and to keep them out of the ICU at the end of life. He’s even seen a colleague with a DNR tattoo, something I’ve been threatening to get for a long time.

"O futuro das cidades", por Jean-Pierre Garnier

"O futuro das cidades", por Jean-Pierre Garnier

Indicado pela Dra. Maria Inês Reinert Azambuja

Le Monde Diplomatique

A luta por espaço 

A chegada, aos bairros operários, de grupos sociais pertencentes às classes de maior poder aquisitivo é vista, com frequência, como uma invasão. Para a maior parte dos moradores afetados, essa mudança significa especulação financeira e imobiliária, o que acelera sua expulsão e substituição por cidadãos mais abastados 

                                                        por Jean-Pierre Garnier

leucemia linfoide aguda

Causa revelada: leucemia linfoide aguda

Pesquisadores descobrem mutação que provoca leucemia infantil e já estudam novos medicamentos para tratar a doença. A pesquisa é tema da seção ‘Em dia’ da edição atual da revista CH.

Por: Sofia Moutinho

Publicado em 12/01/2012 | Atualizado em 12/01/2012

Um aspirado de medula óssea de um paciente com leucemia. A doença é o tipo de câncer mais comum entre crianças e adolescentes e faz cerca de 2 mil novas vítimas por ano no Brasil. (imagem: Mary Ann Thompson)

Uma equipe de pesquisadores do Brasil e de Portugal, em colaboração com outros dos Estados Unidos e da Holanda, descobriu nos linfócitos T, células de defesa do organismo, uma mutação que provoca a leucemia linfoide aguda, caracterizada pela proliferação anormal dessas células.

A doença é o tipo de câncer mais comum entre crianças e adolescentes e faz cerca de 2 mil novas vítimas por ano no país, de acordo com o Ministério da Saúde./.../