Key facts about brain cancer

Key facts about brain cancer

Brain cancer occurs when a mass of cancer tissue, also known as brain tumor, interferes with the functioning of the brain.

According to a recent estimate by WHO even though brain cancer occurs quite infrequently, it develops in about 22,000 new people every year along with 13,000 estimated deaths. Thus, understanding the facts about this disease becomes crucial. Today, we have with us Dr. Rakesh K Dua, Ms. Mch. Neurosurgery, Associate consultant at Neurosurgery Department of Rockland hospital, New Delhi who will tell us the top 10 facts about brain cancer.

1. The most common type of brain cancer is Secondary brain cancer (i.e. cancer from other part of body has reached the brain). The second most common brain cancer is Gliobalastoma, which is the most common primary brain cancer.

2. The survival rate for primary brain cancer (Gliobalastoma) is usually 10 - 12 months with all treatment including surgery + chemotherapy + radiotherapy. The survival rate for secondary brain cancer varies depending upon the status and type of primary (usually 6 - 12 months) cancer.

3. Common symptoms of brain cancer are a progressively increasing headache, seizure, focal neurological deficits like weakness of hands/legs, speech problems, walking difficulty, visual disturbances, behavior changes etc.

4. Treatment options depend upon the type of cancer. For primary brain cancer, surgery is the first treatment option followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. For secondary brain cancer, surgery+/- radiotherapy-chemotherapy and Gamma knife surgery are the options depending upon the size and number of the tumors.

5. The brain tumors can also occur in children under 20 years. The tumors common in 5 - 10 yrs of age are usually cancerous.

6. Exposure to radiation is supposed to be one of the lead causes of brain cancer.

7. There are varieties of brain tumors. No two tumors are alike. Not all brain tumors are cancerous also.

8. Family history also plays a dominant role in brain cancer.

9. Headache is one of the commonest symptoms, but the most important is the progressive increase in intensity and frequency of headache. Early morning headache is one of the characteristic symptoms.

10. If it is primary brain cancer, then organ donation is not an issue, but in secondary brain cancer the patient may not be a candidate for donation.

source: TOI

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Baseball: Beanballs and the psychology of revenge

ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2012) ? In a new study, baseball fans exhibit a high moral tolerance for a form of revenge not otherwise practiced in most of contemporary society: avenging a teammate who has been hit by a pitch by aiming a pitch at an opposing batter who was not previously involved. The research suggests that such systems of vicarious retribution, found throughout history, may not depend on an underlying assignment of moral responsibility.

This week, as tens of millions of Americans awaited the baseball season's first pitches, Brown University psychologist Fiery Cushman was watching more warily for the first beanballs. As someone who studies moral judgment, Cushman recognizes that the intentional targeting of an innocent player to avenge a hit batsman could be a telling exception within American culture, even if the rest of the game is a national institution.

Cushman and collaborators A.J. Durwin of Hofstra University and Chaz Lively of Boston University put the question to scores of baseball fans mingling outside Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park last season: A pitcher on the Chicago Cubs intentionally throws at and hits a batter on the St. Louis Cardinals. An inning later, the Cardinals' pitcher retaliates by throwing at and hitting a previously uninvolved batter for the Cubs.

In their new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the researchers report that 44 percent of the fans they surveyed granted moral approval for the Cardinal pitcher's beanball.

The researchers call this system of exacting revenge by targeting a teammate "vicarious punishment," and note that it has emerged in many cultures throughout human history. In such "honor cultures" it has been acceptable to kill someone's brother to avenge one's own brother -- as in, for example, the American blood feud between the Hatfields and McCoys.

"No one should conclude from this that ... vicarious punishment is considered acceptable widely in American culture," Cushman said. "Quite to the contrary, what makes this striking is that it's an exception. We're trying to explain this exception."

The new study examines what the revenge culture of baseball may reveal about the cultural practice of "blood feud" more broadly.

The beanball exception

In their survey questions, Cushman, Durwin, and Lively peeled back the layers of the fans' thinking and found data that suggest vicarious punishment is more of a social norm than a product of different moral reasoning.

In the first survey of 145 fans at both ballparks, they asked half about the revenge scenario between the Cubs and Cardinals (of which 44 percent approved), and asked the other half to judge a situation where the Cardinals exacted their revenge not on the Cubs, but an entirely different team the next night. Far fewer fans (although still 19 percent) approved of that.

In a second experiment they asked 78 fans outside Yankee Stadium to judge either the original situation or the beaning of the pitcher who himself threw the malicious pitch the inning before. In that case 39 percent of fans still approved of the original vicarious method, but 70 percent approved of beaning the offending pitcher himself.

The third experiment, played out among 79 fans at Fenway Park, put the question in the context of the hometown favorite Red Sox. In one case a Red Sox pitcher was described avenging a previously beaned teammate. In the other case, a Sox batter was described as bearing the brunt of his teammates' pitching transgression. In these cases, 43 percent of Red Sox fans acknowledged the morality of their own player being beaned out of revenge, but 67 percent approved of their pitcher exacting revenge against the other team.

In a final experiment, conducted among 131 baseball fans in an online discussion group, Cushman, Durwin, and Lively sought to assess fans' understanding of moral responsibility, as well as their opinions about the overall morality of vengeful beaning. In this sample, 61 percent approved of beaning, such as in the Cubs and Cardinals case (the more highly they rated their affinity for baseball, the more likely they were to approve). Despite the high approval for vicarious punishment, only 18 percent of the surveyed fans held the recipient of the retaliatory beaning to be morally responsible for the original beaning. Meanwhile, 92 percent of fans held the pitcher who threw the first beanball morally responsible.

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it"

If the vast majority of fans recognize the individual responsibility of the situation as accruing to the first pitcher who beans and not the last batter to be beaned, why do as many as two-thirds (in the hometown experiment) approve of that second batter being hit? It's a similar question to ask why such systems of justice emerged in Iceland around the 10th century A.D. or in Montenegro more than a century ago, Cushman said. Vicarious punishment also characterizes some cases of gang- and mob-related violence. Previous researchers have seen a correlation between such systems and weak state oversight.

The cultural exception that Americans make for baseball, even as they acknowledge who is and is not really at fault, the researchers suggest, may indicate cultures that practice vicarious retribution can be understood more as driven by either contextual necessity or tradition, rather than by a fundamentally different way of assigning moral responsibility. Motivations might instead be honor or deterrence.

"It's really beautifully captured by this quote from the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven: 'Deserve's got nothing to do with it,'" Cushman said. "The idea is we have to protect ourselves, we have to do something to respond to this act. The person we're targeting isn't morally responsible but the practical demands of the situation are such that we've got to do something and this is it."

In that sense baseball is a game of athleticism, strategy, community, and collective punishment without an underlying theory of moral responsibility

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Brown University.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Fiery Cushman, A.J. Durwin, Chaz Lively. Revenge without responsibility? Judgments about collective punishment in baseball. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.011

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Children: Better protection from influenza with improved vaccine

ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2012) ? An intranasal vaccine that includes four weakened strains of influenza could do a better job in protecting children from the flu than current vaccines, Saint Louis University research shows.

Before each influenza season, scientists predict which strains of flu will be circulating and make a trivalent vaccine that includes three strains of influenza -- two of influenza A and one of influenza B.

The ability to add another strain of influenza B without compromising the vaccine's ability to protect against the other three strains will allow scientists make a better vaccine, said Robert Belshe, M.D., professor of infectious diseases at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and the corresponding author of the research article.

"The bottom line is adding another strain to make a quadrivalent vaccine improves our ability to protect against flu and doesn't reduce the body's immune response to the other strains," said Belshe, who also directs Saint Louis University's Center for Vaccine Development.

"It should bring us better protection because there's less guess work than in the standard trivalent vaccine."

Children are more susceptible than adults to influenza from one of the B strains, which change less often than A strain viruses. Some winters, influenza B viruses -- Victoria or Yamagata -- cause most of the flu in children and significant infection in adults, Belshe said.

Preventing flu in children is key to protecting the entire population. "We think the most important way for flu to spread is through school-aged children," Belshe said.

In the 1980s, influenza B split into the two circulating lineages of virus, which have evolved into viruses that are quite different. Some years both B viruses or the B strain that doesn't match the vaccine circulate, which means the vaccine doesn't protect people from getting the flu.

"There are these two very different strains of influenza B that don't cross protect. Vaccinating against one strain of influenza B does little to protect against the other," Belshe said.

"It has not been possible to predict which strain has circulated. In the last 10 years, we predicted right five times. So you can flip a coin and do as well."

Previously, manufacturers had not had the capacity to produce a vaccine that protects against four strains of flu, but that is no longer the case, Belshe said.

The researchers tested versions of the FluMist vaccine, which is sprayed in the nose and contains live flu viruses that have been attenuated or weakened so they don't cause infection. The intranasal vaccine is made by MedImmune.

The nasal spray vaccine was tested in about 2,300 children between 2 and 19 years of age. The children were randomized to receive one of three vaccines: a vaccine containing four strains of influenza -- two of influenza A and two of influenza B, or one of two vaccines that contained both influenza A strains and one of each of the influenza B strains. Researchers looked at the safety and antibody response to both influenza A and B viruses in children of different age groups who were vaccinated.

Those children who receive vaccine containing four strains of flu had as robust of an immune response as those who received the vaccine that contained three strains. In addition, Belshe noted no clinically significant difference the safety of the vaccines, which were well tolerated.

"We saw stuffy noses, which we know is associated with FluMist, and an occasional low grade fever, which is similar to other childhood vaccines," Belshe said.

On Feb. 28, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved MedImmune's quadrivalent flu vaccine for use in people between the ages of 2 and 49. The vaccine could be ready for use during the 2013-2014 influenza season, pending a recommendation from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about vaccination issues.

An injected flu vaccine designed to protect against four strains of flu -- instead of the current three -- also is in the works, Belshe said.

Findings were published electronically ahead of print in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. Belshe has been a member of a speaker's bureau and received research grants and consulting fees from MedImmune, which sponsored the study.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Saint Louis University Medical Center, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Stan L. Block, Judith Falloon, Jeffrey A. Hirschfield, Leonard R. Krilov, Filip Dubovsky, Tingting Yi, Robert B. Belshe. The Immunogenicity and Safety of a Quadrivalent Live Attenuated Influenza Vaccine in Children. The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, 2012; : 1 DOI: 10.1097/INF.0b013e31825687b0

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Web privacy rules turn poachers into gamekeepers

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - When you 'like' something on Facebook or read an online newspaper, perhaps a dozen or more companies are squirreling away data on your tastes, your habits, whether you're male or female, old or young, gay or straight.

They mean no harm. They just want to give you, the customer, exactly what you want - it's the grandfather of all business slogans. Their dilemma, now regulators' noses are twitching, is how to serve you, and serve themselves, when what you want is to be left alone.

There are thousands of analytics companies, audience targeters, ad brokers, ad exchanges and the like that can collect and sell data-based services on internet users for 5,000 euros a time to big brands, which then buy ad space where their potential customers might be lurking.

You only know these trackers are at work if you read the fine print. The New York Times has a disclaimer saying it hires WebTrends and Audience Science to interpret its readers' interests, and Britain's Guardian newspaper says it pays Criteo and Quantcast, among others, to do the same.

Sometimes a website can sell ad space to, for example, a luxury hotel, within three seconds of knowing a person with a penchant for spa breaks is on their site. The website running the ad earns money when people click on it. It is their lifeblood.

"There is no way websites will survive without targeting," said Kimon Zorbas from the Internet Advertising Bureau, an online ad lobby in Brussels.

Analysts estimate that targeting has almost tripled what brands pay websites to run their ads. In the United States, online ad revenue was just shy of $15 billion in the first half of 2011, 23 percent higher than the previous year. Figures for the European Union are harder to come by.

In Europe, outfits like Nugg.ad, which serve big brands such as L'Oreal and Eastman Kodak Co, place small parcels of code, or "cookies", on a site visitor's computer so they can see what kind of content a person clicks on. Then they write algorithms that make assumptions about what people might buy online.

L'Oreal thus increased its ability to reach their ideal buyer by 168 percent, according to figures from Nugg.ad.

Now regulators want to put the brakes on tracking.

CONSUMER CHOICE

The United States and the European Union both say they want people to choose whether ad firms can collect their data or not, but disagree over how much choice readers should have.

European regulators want companies to seek explicit consent for tracking, while the United States is happy to leave the initiative with the web user.

The EU agreed new rules on internet privacy in May last year, putting the onus on member states to ensure that companies store user data only if the user is provided with "clear and comprehensive information" about the purposes of and access to that data and has given their consent.

The ePrivacy Directive does not give any guidelines as to what constitutes user consent, but says that cookies, unless "strictly necessary for the delivery of a service requested by the user", cannot be placed without it.

Many countries are struggling to put the rules into effect. In Britain, the regulations allow for consent to be signified by future browser settings that have yet to be introduced, and companies have been given until May 28 this year to comply. In Germany, regulators are not that far along. They are trying to please the EU without turning the Internet into a jungle of pop-ups.

"We have a big problem matching regulatory demands with technical practicalities," said Ninja Marnau, a lawyer from the data protection commissioner's office in Schleswig-Holstein.

"This is operationally and technically a nightmare," said Phil Lee, a lawyer from Field Fisher Waterhouse.

Based in London, Lee is advising companies in the United States and EU on how to walk the tightrope of satisfying EU requirements without going much further than the U.S. standard.

Given the choice, nearly half of web users in the United States and Britain want some distance between their data and ad companies, surveys by analytics firms show.

And the job of developing a tool to give users cover from prying ad firms has fallen to the companies that benefit from the services of the ad firms. The poachers are now guarding the grouse.

Up to 50 blue-chip companies from Facebook to Walt Disney Co are holding weekly conference calls with a handful of data privacy experts on how users can turn off targeting and how companies can get the regulators off their backs.

Collectively, they are part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and European regulators have given them until June to deliver something called Do Not Track, a tool first developed by Mozilla's Firefox, one of the world's leading web browsers.

Aleecia McDonald from Mozilla, who co-chairs the W3C's tracking group, said she does not know if they will have the application nailed down by June.

The group is trying to invent a tool that covers all kinds of tracking "to end the arms race" between tracking developers and regulators.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

In the meantime, companies who depend on the Web for a significant portion of their business are left wondering how painful Do Not Track will be.

Nugg.ad said it was impossible to say how much revenue would be lost if some regulators get their way and people are forced to choose whether a website can track them or not, "but it could definitely hurt our business".

European regulators' insistence on explicit consent to tracking could mean that those who simply forget to switch it on are out of companies' targeting reach for good, McDonald said.

Until now retailers have enjoyed almost unfettered access to the 75 percent of European consumers that have Internet access, and they fear an effective shrinking of the market.

In 2012, online sales in Europe are forecast by the British-based Centre for Retail Research to grow by 16.1 percent to 233 billion euros.

McDonald said it was likely that the overall rate of using Do Not Track would be higher in the European Union than in the United States.

There are already products to shield consumers from trackers, some as standalone software or as add-ons to browsers, and Nugg.ad's Chief Executive Stephan Noller said the firm had already noticed a slightly higher likelihood among European users to switch some tracking off.

Ironically, there is one form of tracking, geolocation - perhaps the most invasive of all, since it knows where you live, work, eat and play - that could come through the tighter regulation relatively unscathed.

"Because where someone is located may affect how they are treated under law," said Mozilla's McDonald.

(Editing by Will Waterman)

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Backed By Time, Next Issue Launches A Tablet Newsstand With Netflix-Style Pricing

Many magazine publishers see the iPad as their salvation. Five of the big ones (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc.) banded together to create a joint venture called Next Issue Media, and today the company is launching its Android app. CEO Morgan Guenther (formerly president of Tivo) says that despite all the excitement about bringing magazines to tablets, the current system is lacking ? specifically, the need to download a new app for every magazine. Gone is the "newsstand" feeling of walking into a store and browsing a rack of titles. Instead, it's like you're ushered into a windowless room where you can read a copy of Wired. Want to read The New Yorker? You'll have to leave for another room.

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International: Business Start-Up Checklist

Below are some of the tasks involved in starting a home-based business.

You will need to take additional steps if you have employees, will incorporate, or will have a business partner. Refer to this checklist often when starting your business to check what steps you need to take next.

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