Category Archives: Transhuman News

Everyone has bad days. But usually online, we only see peoples good ones.

However, we all know thats not reality and thats precisely the inspiring message from Carys Gray, a fitness blogger whos being praised after sharing an honest makeup-free photo of herself during an eczema flareup.

MODEL'S AMAZING JOURNEY FROM PREGNANT TO 6-PACK

Gray, who has more than 148,000 followers on the social media platform, shows two photos of herself in the viral image: one with her eczema under control and makeup on her face, and another with her eczema flared up and her face makeup-free.

Social media/Instagram will show the good days, Gray wrote in part in the now viral post, which had garnered over 80,000 likes as of Tueday afternoon. But here's a reminder that next time you see something on social media that you think is 'goals' that it's not the full story, it's not how that person will look or be alllllll the time!

Eczema, or atopic dermatitis, is a chronic skin condition that causes redness and itchiness, according to the Mayo Clinic. It can occur at any age, and it does not have a cure.

THIS FIT MOM DROPPED 6 DRESS SIZES BY LOSING ONLY 2 POUNDS

In the caption of the post, Gray goes on to encourage her followers to have body confidence despite their imperfections.

I'm still struggling to accept myself on the right, it's a big insecurity of mine and that's fine, she wrote. I'm learning to accept myself knowing that everyone has their own struggles and insecurities and that's what makes us unique and special.

More:
Fitness blogger praised for sharing makeup-free photo after eczema flareup - Fox News

February 28, 2017 Womens stress levels before pregnancy could influence risk of eczema in child. Credit: University of Southampton

Infants whose mothers who felt stressed before they fell pregnant had a higher risk of eczema at age 12 months, new Southampton research has shown.

The study from the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton, is the first to link preconception maternal stress to the risk of atopic eczema in the child.

The researchers believe the findings support the concept that eczema partly originates as a baby develops in the womb and could reveal ways of reducing the risk of the skin condition.

The research, published in Clinical and Experimental Allergy, assessed the stress levels of women recruited to the Southampton Women's Survey before they were pregnant. They were asked to report how stressed they were in their daily lives. A sub-group were asked about their psychological wellbeing.

Around 3,000 babies born into the Survey were then assessed for eczema at ages six and 12 months.

Dr Sarah El-Heis, the study's lead researcher from the University of Southampton, comments: "We know that maternal stress can release certain hormones that can have an effect on the baby's immune response, leading to an increased risk in conditions like eczema.

"More than one in six women of the mothers in the Southampton Women's Survey reported that stress affected their health 'quite a lot' or 'extremely' our analyses showed that their infants had a 20% higher likelihood of developing atopic eczema at age 12 months when compared with the remainder of the study cohort. The findings also showed that stress and low mood experienced closer to the time of conception may have a greater impact on the risk offspring atopic eczema."

The research showed similar findings of an increased risk of infant eczema for the women who reported psychological distress before they became pregnant. The associations were robust to adjustment for other influences, including a history of eczema in the mother, smoking during pregnancy and infant gestational age, sex and breastfeeding duration.

Professor Keith Godfrey, Director of the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre in Nutrition, added: "Previous research has linked low maternal mood after delivery with an increased risk of eczema in the infant, but the new research showed no association between postnatal mood and eczema after taking account of preconception stress. More research is needed to investigate this interesting association, but the findings are further evidence of the influence preconception maternal health and wellbeing has on infants."

Explore further: Vitamin B levels during pregnancy linked to eczema risk in child

Infants whose mothers had a higher level of a particular type of vitamin B during pregnancy have a lower risk of eczema at age 12 months, new Southampton research has shown.

(HealthDay)People dealing with the itchy skin condition known as eczema may have other medical conditions to cope with as well, including heart disease, a dermatologist says.

(HealthDay)Atopic dermatitis (AD) is most commonly referred to as AD in the literature, according to a review published online July 8 in Allergy.

A*STAR researchers have shown that eczema has different risk factors depending on its age of onset, after evaluating more than 1,000 Asian newborns over in an 18-month study.

(HealthDay)Self- and caregiver-reported history of eczema is valid for identifying atopic dermatitis (AD), according to a study published online July 17 in the British Journal of Dermatology.

Children with eczema have a more diverse set of bacteria in their guts than non affected children, finds a new study in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Microbiology. The types of bacteria present were also more typical ...

Researchers at Cardiff University have discovered that genetic variation is the reason why some immune systems overreact to viruses.

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) have identified a new regulator of the innate immune responsethe immediate, natural immune response to foreign invaders. The study, published recently ...

A new discovery by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle makes an important step in identifying which specific T cells within the diverse army of a person's immune system are best suited to ...

As much as we try to avoid it, we are constantly sharing germs with those around us. But even when two people have the same infection, the resulting illnesses can be dramatically differentmild for one person, severe or ...

Scientists propose in Nature blocking a molecule that drives inflammation and organ damage in Gaucher and maybe other lysosomal storage diseases as a possible treatment with fewer risks and lower costs than current therapies.

If you've ever wondered how a vaccine given decades ago can still protect against infection, you have your plasma cells to thank. Plasma cells are long-lived B cells that reside in the bone marrow and churn out antibodies ...

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Women's stress levels before pregnancy could influence risk of ... - Medical Xpress

Cultivating 'friendly' bacteria from people's skin makes it possible to develop personalised lotions to treat skin conditions like eczema, a new study shows.

It's the latest evidence that beneficial bacteria in our microbiome can be used to treat infections spurred by harmful microbes, and could provide a new direction in antibiotics research: something we desperately need, in light of rising antimicrobial resistance.

While everybody's skin is populated with a mixture of healthy and harmful bacteria, the ratio of good to bad isn't always the same. This imbalance could help to explain why some people have conditions like atopic dermatitis (AD) the most common form of eczema, which produces inflamed and irritated skin, and affects almost 18 million Americans.

"People with this type of eczema, for some reason that's not quite known yet, have a lot of bacteria on the skin, but it's the wrong type of bacteria," dermatologist Richard Gallo from UC San Diego told the Associated Press.

"They're not producing the antimicrobials they need."

To find out about the makeup of these bacteria populations, Gallo and his team examined skin culture swabs taken from 30 healthy people and 49 subjects with AD.

After screening thousands of colonies of bacteria, they found that the skin of healthy people is rich in two bacterial species Staphylococcus hominis and Staphylococcus epidermis. Both of these are known to defend against a harmful kind of bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus aka Golden Staph, the precursor to the deadly superbug MRSA.

Dermatologists don't know if Staph actually causes AD, but it's been shown that the bacteria can help promote AD symptoms with studies going back as far as the 1990s demonstrating that the density ofS. aureus colonies corrolates with the inflammation and severity of eczema.

In Gallo's research, the team found that people with AD don't exhibit large populations of S. hominis and S. epidermis, while S. aureus was found to abundant.

To see if it would be possible to give people with low levels of these beneficial bacteria a boost, the researchers ran another experiment, isolating S. hominis and S. epidermis cultures from five participants with AD.

After isolating strains that counter S. aureus thanks to the production of proteins called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), the team grew more of these bacteria in the lab.

Once they'd boosted the population counts of these healthy bacteria, the researchers mixed them into a moisturiser, giving each participant a personalised skin lotion sourced from their own microbiome.

Applying the lotion to participants' arms to give them about the same amount of beneficial bacteria as the healthy participants about 100,000 colony-forming units per square centimetre of skin saw S. aureus disappear completely in two patients within just 24 hours, while dropping significantly in the three others.

The researchers haven't announced if the physical symptoms of AD eased up in addition to the S. aureus count being reduced, but they are confident that they've found the basis of a working treatment here.

"We now have a rational therapeutic approach for atopic dermatitis by using bacterial transplant technology," Gallo said in a press release.

"It appears that people with this disorder will need to have it reapplied because their body does not naturally promote the growth of these organisms. The good thing is this is easy to do because it's just a cream."

Better still, compared with broad-spectrum antibiotics that kill a wide range of bacteria both good and bad the researchers' technique enables them to cultivate strains that only target harmful bugs.

"[Antibiotics] not only target S. aureus, but also kill beneficial bacteria," Gallo told Ed Yong at The Atlantic. "Our approach identified antimicrobials that have evolved to kill S. aureus while leaving the good bacteria alone."

We should keep in mind that this is a very small study so far, with the lotion just having been tested on five participants for a short period of time the participants only applied the cream once, with the results being checked 24 hours later.

But there are reasons to be optimistic, with the team now conducting a much larger clinical study, involving 60 patients using personalised lotions for longer periods up to weeks and months in duration to see how treatments pan out in the long term.

Until we hear those findings, we shouldn't get too carried away about the results of this study, but hopefully there's more good news to report on this in the future.

"It's a big step towards using microbial therapies to treat skin disease," immunologist Shruti Naik from Rockerfeller University, who wasn't involved with the study, told The Atlantic.

"It will be interesting to take it a step further, and test if the beneficial microbes can dampen or cure eczema."

The findings are reported in Science Translational Medicine.

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Scientists Are Making Personalised Eczema Treatments From People's Own Microbes - ScienceAlert