People with hard to control asthma could benefit from a drug which has just been licensed in the UK.
According to BBC News website, studies show Xolair (omalizumab) cuts asthma attacks among those with severe allergic asthma whose symptoms are not controlled by existing therapies.
The drug, one of a range which can be used for this group, is injected in hospital every two to four weeks.
It works by dampening down the body’s immune response, which can rage out of control in this allergic condition.
About 1,400 people die from severe asthma each year in the UK, and a further 69,000 are hospitalised, in many cases for weeks.
The European Medicines Agency (EMEA) has approved omalizumab for people in this category who have allergic asthma and who are over 12 years of age.
It specifically targets the antibody immunoglobulin E (IgE), which is involved in the allergic process in asthma.
In trials involving 4,300 patients, the medicine has been shown to reduce asthma attacks and hospitalisations, and to help improve lung function and quality of life.
A spokeswoman from Asthma UK welcomed the drug’s approval.
She said, “For 90% of people with asthma, existing treatments should be effective at controlling asthma.
“For the remaining 10%, their asthma is difficult to control and these people often experience the most severe symptoms and the highest use of emergency services.
“Omalizumab may be effective at treating people in this category who have allergic asthma and who are over 12 years of age.“
This could be just under 10,000 of the 5.2 million people with asthma in the UK, experts estimate.
“Although this treatment may only be suitable for a relatively small group of people with asthma, it will increase the treatment options for those whose asthma is difficult to control.“
She said that, as with all new medicines, it would be important to monitor closely for side-effects as the drug comes in to long-term use on a large scale.
Chairman of the British Lung Foundation Dr Mark Britton said, “It’s a major new step in the treatment of allergic asthma.“

Anger is good for you, as long as you keep it below a boil, according to new psychology research based on face reading.
According to LiveScience, people who respond to stressful situations with short-term anger or indignation have a sense of control and optimism that lacks in those who respond with fear.
“These are the most exciting data I’ve ever collected,“ Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner told a gathering of science writers here last month.
Lerner harassed 92 UCLA students by having experimenters ask subjects to count backward on camera by 13s starting with an odd number like 6,233, telling them it was an intelligence test and then telling them they weren’t counting fast enough and to speed it up as they went along.
Wrong answers meant subjects had to start all over again.
Another test involved counting backwards by sevens from 9,095.
The video cameras caught subjects’ facial expressions during the tests, ranging from deer-in-the-headlights to seriously upset. The researchers identified fear, anger and disgust using a psychologist’s coding system that considers the flexing of particular sets of small muscles in the face.
The researchers also recorded people’s blood pressure, pulse and secretion of a high-stress hormone called cortisol, which can be measured in the saliva and collected with a cotton swab.
The people whose faces showed more fear during the had higher blood pressure and higher levels of the hormone. The findings were the same for men and women.
Lerner previously studied Americans’ emotional response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks two months afterward and found that anger triggers feelings of certainty and control. People who reacted with anger were more optimistic about risk and more likely to favor an aggressive response to terrorism.
So in maddening situations in which anger or indignation are justified, anger is not a bad idea, the thinking goes. In fact, it’s adaptive, Lerner says, and it’s a healthier response than fear.
Chronic, explosive anger or a hostile outlook on the world is still bad for you, contributing to heart disease and high blood pressure, research shows.
The new research supports the idea that humans have more than one uniform response to stress and that fear and anger provoke different responses from our nervous systems and the parts of our brain, such as the pituitary, that deal with tough situations.

The millions of Americans stricken each year by debilitating depression may want to consider running away from their problem--or walking, swimming or dancing it away, HealthDay News reported.
“What the studies are showing is that exercise, at least when performed in a group setting, seems to be at least as effective as standard antidepressant medications in reducing symptoms in patients with major depression,“ said researcher James Blumenthal, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
According to Blumenthal, other studies are beginning to suggest that solitary exercise, such as workouts at the gym or a daily jog, can be just as effective as group activities in beating the blues, and that “duration of exercise didn’t seem to matter--what seemed to matter most was whether people were exercising or not.“
Blumenthal was lead author on a much-publicized study released five years ago that found that just 10 months of regular, moderate exercise outperformed a leading antidepressant (Zoloft) in easing symptoms in young adults diagnosed with moderate to severe depression.
And another study released earlier this year, by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, found that 30-minute aerobic workouts done three to five times a week cut depressive symptoms by 50 percent in young adults.
Theories abound as to how revving up the body helps uncloud the mind.
Robert E. Thayer is a professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of Calm Energy: How People Regulate Mood with Food and Exercise. He said that while workouts probably affect key brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine, physical activity may also trigger positive changes in other areas, too.
According to Thayer, moderate exercise--a brisk 10-minute walk, for example--results in a boosting of energy, although it may not be quite enough to relieve stress.
Blumenthal pointed to the more lasting psychological boost regular workouts can bring. Still, the experts acknowledged that truly depressed individuals often find it tough to jump into an exercise routine.
Loved ones can play a key role, too, urging a depressed friend or family member to join in with them as they work out. “Social support, peer pressure, family support--all of that can be helpful, certainly in getting people to maintain exercise,“ Blumenthal said.
For those patients, exercise may prove a viable, worry-free alternative--with one great fringe benefit.

Perceiving a simple touch may depend as much on memory, attention, and expectation as on the stimulus itself, according to new research from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international research scholar Ranulfo Romo and his colleague Victor de Lafuente.
According to Eurekalert, the scientists found that monkeys’ perceptions of touch match brain activity in the frontal lobe, an area that assimilates many types of neural information.
Romo and de Lafuente, both of the Institute of Cellular Physiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, report their results in the December 2005 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, published early online on November 6, 2005.
One of neuroscience’s most difficult questions concerns how the brain converts simple sensory inputs to complete perceptual experiences.
Many neuroscientists assume that perceptions arise in the sensory cortices, which are the first areas of the brain to process information coming in from sense organs, Romo said. Some recent research, however, has hinted that activity in other parts of the brain may also contribute to sensory perception.
When it comes to the sense of touch, a stimulus at the skin triggers an impulse that travels first to an area at the top of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex (S1).
The information then moves to other parts of the brain, where it can contribute to memory, decision-making, and motor outputs.
To explore what regions of the brain contribute to sensory perception, Romo and de Lafuente analyzed neural activity associated with the sense of touch in macaque monkeys. The researchers touched the monkeys’ fingertips with a painless stimulus that sometimes vibrated and sometimes did not. The intensity of the vibration varied, so sometimes it was easy for the monkeys to tell that the vibration was on, while other times the vibrations were so weak that the monkeys couldn’t always detect them. The monkeys were trained to indicate to the researchers whether the stimulus was vibrating or still, and they were rewarded with treats when they were correct.
The scientists found that activity in S1 neurons, where touch information first arrives, correlated directly with the strength of the stimulus; when the strength of the vibrations was more intense, the S1 neurons’ fired more rapidly. However, these neurons’ activity did not correlate with the monkeys’ behavioral responses. Their firing rates were directly associated with the stimulus intensity, whether the monkeys consciously felt and responded to the stimulus or not.
Romo and de Lafuente also recorded neuronal activity in the medial premotor cortex (MPC), a region of the brain’s frontal lobe that is known to be involved in making decisions about sensory information. Activity here did mirror the monkeys’ subjective responses to the vibrating probe. MPC neurons responded in an all-or-none manner; they fired when the monkey thought the vibrations were there--even if they weren’t--and they didn’t fire when the monkey thought the vibrations were absent--even if they were actually occurring.
These results indicate that the monkeys’ perceptions arise not from brain activity in the sensory cortex itself, but from activity in the frontal lobe MPC, Romo said.

The NIST goniospectrometer measures the intensity of light reflected from the surface of a sample at 332 points.

Plain old colors are passŽ. Complex visual effects, such as pearlescence, translucence, iridescence and glitter, help sell many products, including cars, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and military hardware, Science Daily reported.
A new instrument at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) makes comprehensive measurements of such appearance properties to help companies calibrate their own tools and control product quality.
Exotic surfaces and coatings may look different depending on illumination or viewing angles, subtleties that cannot be accounted for by traditional characterization methods.
Many consumers are familiar with automobile paints that appear to change color with viewing direction. The new NIST device, called a goniospectrometer, automatically measures the color of light reflected from a surface as well as its dependence on the directions of illumination and observation. The device is described in a recent publication.
NIST already offers a heavily used calibration service making less sophisticated measurements with another instrument. The new goniospectrometer will provide more complete data on the reflection of light from a color surface, and will be used for calibrating similar instruments and for research on exotic-appearing materials and coatings.
NIST scientists also hope to create a database of measurements of different materials that could be used for modeling surfaces that have complex visual effects. The work is part of a NIST effort to develop accurate measurement methods for reproduction and quality control of appearance attributes, including color matching, by determining the minimum set of illumination and viewing geometries needed to accurately characterize the perceived color.
The goniospectrometer, housed in a clean room, illuminates a sample with a range of wavelengths of visible light, every 5 nanometers (nm) from 360 nm to 780 nm, i.e. from the near ultraviolet/deep blue to red/infrared.
The sample and detector are rotated around three axes, allowing illumination and viewing in any direction within a hemisphere around the sample (see graphic). The intensity of the reflected beam is measured at several hundred locations on a sample surface.
Based on these measurements, computer software assigns a numerical value to the color of the reflected light.

About five million Germans have serious learning difficulties when it comes to reading and writing.
According to Science Daily, it is frequently the case that several members of the same family are affected. So hereditary disposition seems to play an important role in the occurrence of dyslexia.
Scientists at the universities of Marburg, Wurzburg and Bonn have been working on this question together with Swedish colleagues from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In examinations of German children with serious reading and writing difficulties they have now succeeded in demonstrating for the first time the contribution of a specific gene. Precisely how it contributes to the disorder remains unclear.
It is thought that the genes may affect the migration of nerve cells in the brain as it evolves.
For several years child and youth psychologists at the universities of Marburg and Wurzburg searched for families in which at least one child was considered dyslexic.
“We then analyzed blood samples taken from the families to identify candidate genes--and in the end we found the right one,“ explains the scientist who headed this part of the study from Marburg, Privatdozent Dr. Gerd Schulte-Kone.
The gene is located in the region of Chromosome 6, which had already been indicated by scientists from the USA and England in connection with reading and spelling disabilities. But the German-Swedish team has gone further and identified within this region a single gene which, as found among German children, is apparently an important factor in the emergence of dyslexia.
“Known as the DCDC2 gene, it appears to affect the migration of nerve cells in the developing brain,“ says Professor Dr. Markus Nothen from the Life and Brain Centre at Bonn University. Professor Nothen and his team are in charge of the molecular work within the project.
Changes in the DCDC2 gene were frequently found among dyslexics. The altered gene variant often occurred among children with reading and writing difficulties.
The gene appears to have a strong linkage with the processing of speech information when writing. The researchers now want to gain a better understanding of DCDC2 and discover in detail why children with this altered gene have a higher risk of dyslexia.