Swedish researchers have found tantalizing but far-from-conclusive evidence that drinking a couple of cups of tea every day might help reduce the risk of developing ovarian cancer. According to AP, the study involved 61,057 Swedish women who answered a questionnaire about their diets and then were tracked for an average of 15 years through 2004.
During that time, 301 women developed ovarian cancer. Those who reported drinking two or more cups of tea a day were 46 percent less likely to develop the disease than women who drank no tea. Drinking less than two cups also appeared to help, but not as much.
The researchers did not break out the results by tea types, but most of the tea drinkers consumed black tea. Both black and green tea contains polyphenols--substances thought to block cell damage that can lead to cancer.
Previous studies on whether tea might help prevent various kinds of cancer have yielded conflicting results.
Researchers Susanna Larsson and Alicja Wolk of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said more research is needed to sort out the inconsistencies.
Their study was published in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.
“If these findings are real, they’d be important because ovarian cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in women,“ said Marji McCullough, a nutritional epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society.

A steady supply of L-DOPA may be the key to controlling Parkinson’s.
Eye cells transplanted into the brain have mitigated the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in a preliminary trial involving six patients.
According to nature.com, the findings of the small study suggest that injections of such cells can partly reverse the motion difficulties associated with the illness.
The eye cells seem to produce a natural form of a drug that is frequently given to patients, but release it in a steady, even flow that prevents some of the nasty side-effects of the medicine.
Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating neurological disorder thought to affect brain cells’ ability to produce the powerful cell-signaling molecule dopamine. For the past three decades, patients with this disorder have typically received a medication called levodopa (L-DOPA), which replaces lost dopamine.
Doses of L-DOPA help to alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, which include tremor, muscle rigidity and slowed motion. But only for a while.
Over time, patients respond less and less to L-DOPA. But upping the dosage can lead to a side-effect known as dyskinesias: involuntary movements resulting in fragmented or jerky motions.
Some scientists believe that taking L-DOPA pills injects too much of the drug into the body in a single dose, over-exciting and damaging certain cells. So researchers have sought a way to provide the brain with a relatively low and constant supply of the compound.
Experts knew that certain cells in the back of the eye produce natural L-DOPA, so they reasoned that these cells could provide a stable supply of the compound if transferred to a patient’s body. Experiments in animals supported this idea.
Natividad Stover of the University of Alabama in Birmingham and her colleagues recruited six patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease for their preliminary study.
Each volunteer received an injection of about 325,000 of the L-DOPA-producing cells, known as human retinal pigment epithelial cells, taken from post-mortem eye tissue.
The researchers have tracked the patients for two years so far, and have found no signs of transplant rejection. Two years after the operation, patients reported that they felt their treatment was working 65% of the time, up from 44% prior to the transplant.
A similar improvement was seen in physical tests of motor control, and incidence of dyskinesias also dropped. The findings from this preliminary trial appear in the journal Archives of Neurology1.

Testosterone replacement therapy may help elderly men with mild Alzheimer’s disease, research suggests.
According to BBC News website, a University of California, Los Angeles team found hormone doses significantly improved quality of life for Alzheimer’s patients.
Carers reported improvements in energy levels, physical health and interpersonal relationships - but not in memory or other mental skills.
Lead researcher Dr. Po Lu said, “The results suggest that testosterone replacement therapy holds potential for improving quality of life of Alzheimer patients and merits further testing with a larger group of patients and with a longer treatment period.“
The UCLA team compared 16 men with mild Alzheimer’s with 22 healthy men over a 24-week study.
All the volunteers were given a daily skin patch containing a gel which either contained testosterone or no active medication.
Male ageing is associated with a gradual decline in testosterone level.
This has been linked to decreased libido, mood alterations and changes in the way we think, as well as physical changes such as decreased muscle strength and a greater risk of osteoporosis.
Previous research has also found significantly lower concentrations of testosterone in middle-aged and elderly men who developed Alzheimer’s disease.
Harriet Millward, of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said a number of studies had hinted that testosterone replacement therapy might have positive effects on mood or mental processes.
However, she said a recent review of over 40 studies concluded it had only very limited effects in men over 65.
“This research studied only a small number of people over a relatively short period, and therefore has largely inconclusive results.
“More research is needed before we can assess whether testosterone therapy could benefit men with Alzheimer’s disease.“

Researchers have managed to teach people suffering chronic pain to reduce their own discomfort simply by controlling their thoughts, according to nature.com.
It’s unclear how long the effect lasts, but the researchers hope that this approach could one day be used to treat chronic pain, which affects tens of millions of people in the United States alone and is a major reason for sick leave.
The team, led by Christopher deCharms, showed eight patients real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, of the activity in their rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a part of the brain known to be involved with pain control. They asked participants to try to increase or decrease activity in this area, by focusing on their pain or by distracting themselves from it.
After only a few training sessions, most patients could reduce the activity in their rACC on command. These patients said that their pain lessened by about 50%, the researchers report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences1.
The method also worked with healthy people involved in the study who were given painful stimuli to their hands and asked to try and control their response.
This isn’t the first time that people have been shown to be able to control their brain activity simply through thought. Last year, Rainer Goebel, a brain researcher at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, showed that people could control a table-tennis computer game simply by watching fMRI brain scans (see ’Mental ping-pong could aid paraplegics’). But Goebel thinks deCharms’s work is also important: “It’s really new that they not only let people change their own brain activity but that they use that to treat pain patients,“ he says.

Geomagnetic storms disturb EarthÕs ionosphere and result in disrupted radio communication.

Newly found method to measure Earth’s ionosphere could alert GPS users to signal failure.
According to astronomy.com, an earthbound network of Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers that studies continental movement recently made a high-altitude discovery.
Along with observations from NASA’s Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite, scientists used the GPS network to study how space weather affects radio reception, specifically GPS-receiver readings.
The results, announced at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting this week in San Francisco, may make it possible to inform GPS users--from farmers to pilots--that their receivers will display the wrong information.
By comparing time signals from different satellites, GPS receivers calculate their own positions. The ultra-precise receivers from the International GPS Service for Geodynamics (IGS) use the same method to track the slow creep of continental plates.
But Jerry Goldstein of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Anthea Coster of MIT’s Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts, and Toni Mannucci of NASA’s JPL in Pasadena, California, used the receivers to measure conditions in the ionosphere--the layer of the atmosphere where the Sun’s ultraviolet light kicks electrons away from their atoms and leaves positively charged ions behind.
The ionosphere’s electric fields delay GPS radio signals as they pass from satellites to receivers. By comparing the different delays of GPS signals with different frequencies, the researchers calculated how many charged particles the signals passed on their way to the receiver. In other words: they measured the thickness of the ionosphere.
Charged particles also play the lead role in geomagnetic storms. During these storms, the Sun spews out a part of its outer layer, which may head toward Earth. This hot cloud of electrons and ions--plasma--then collides with Earth’s doughnut-shape magnetic field.
This collision deforms the cocoon and blows away part of its plasma as a long, tapering plume.
Geomagnetic storms can have noticeable consequences on Earth. On the ground, the changing magnetic field can induce damaging voltages in long power lines. In the ionosphere it can a deteriorate of the quality of radio broadcasts.
While monitoring the state of the ionosphere all over the globe during a couple of storms in 2001 and 2003, Coster and her colleagues discovered this disruption of the ionosphere is far from chaotic.
Changes in Earth’s magnetic field, which stays connected to the plume as it is pushed away, cause powerful electric fields in the outer layers of the atmosphere. An electric “footprint“ of the plume drags over the ionosphere, much like a cold front moves through a weather system.
When such a disturbance occurs over North America, it takes the form of a southeast-to-northwest corridor, a few hundred miles wide, where radio reception suffers. Along its edges, GPS readings may be off by tens of yards instead of just a few.

The Earth’s north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and could end up in Siberia within 50 years.
According to ananova.com, scientists say the shift could mean Alaska losing its northern lights which might then be more visible in Siberia and Europe.
The magnetic poles are different from geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of Earth’s rotation.
Magnetic poles are known to migrate and, occasionally, swap places.
“This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada,“ Joseph Stoner, a palaeomagnetist at Oregon State University said.
Previous studies have shown that the strength of the Earth’s magnetic shield has decreased 10% over the past 150 years.
During the same period, the north magnetic pole wandered about 685 miles into the Arctic, according to the new analysis.
The rate of the magnetic pole’s movement has increased in the last century compared to fairly steady movement in the previous four centuries, the Oregon researchers said.