As the cool showers of monsoon bring relief after the torrid summers, the warm humid weather also brings numerous skin problems in trail. Some common skin problems which may cause trouble in this season are:

• Heat rash: Heat rash is a red pimply eruption caused by sweating that leads to choking or blockage of skin pores.
• Eczema: It is aterm applied to variety of skin conditions that result from inflammation of the skindue to external and genetic factors.
• Acne:It is a common skin problem during the rainy season, mainly for youngsters. Itresults from bacterial overgrowth on the face, especially due to exposure to a lot of rainwater.
• Ringworm and folliculitis: These are bacterial or fungal infections that result from excessive sweating, dehydration, photo-toxic effects of the sun, and humidity.
• Nail infection: Infections can occur due to long nailsthat attract muck, and can make nailsdiscolored, brittle and dull.
• Athlete’s foot:It is an itchy painful infection on the feet with well defined, scaly patches caused by common fungi called Candida. The toe nails may get discolored or brittle.

Tips to Keep Your Skin Healthy

Some easy skin-care tipscan protect your skin from having bacterial and fungal itches during the rainy season:

• Control sweat: The ideal way to avoid skin problems is to keep it clean and avoid excessive perspiration. Take regular and more frequent baths. Use anti-bacterial soaps, talcum powder and face wash to keep yourself clean.
• Quick-wash after rain-wash: Children are highly prone to fungal infections during the monsoons. An immediate bath after playing in the rain and application of an anti-bacterial soap is important. Avoid using public toilets, where due to lower hygiene you are exposed to infections.
• Natural skin-care: Use anti-fungal cream or powder for nail-itches. Calamine lotion is a good option to ease skin-itching. Natural and home-made remedies such as aloe-vera, rosewater and milk can keep your skin fresh.Apply moisturizers to keep your skin hydrated.
• Check what you wear: Wearcomfortablyloose cotton and linen clothing. Wear slippers and flip-flops as they allow your feet to breathe. Avoid wearing plastic shoes, leather or canvas ones. Wash your feet regularly, and apply anti-fungal powder in shoes and socks.Wear washed cotton socks daily and keep feet clean and dry. One must never stay in wet socks for long hours.
• Watch your diet: Since the chances of infection increases during the rainy seasons, increase vitamin Cintake as it is an effective immunity-booster.Keep yourself well-hydrated with at least 6 to 8 glasses of water daily. Add the juice of a lemon to a glass of warm water and have it first in the morning. Fresh fruits, salads, sprouts, whole grains and curd must be included in daily diet.
• Skin care for diabetics: People with diabetic diseases are more prone to skin infections. They must go for a check-up when symptoms like skin rashes or redness appear lest they leave scars and turn untreatable.

Several skin ailments are the result of our ignorance and a care-free attitude towards monsoon—borne microbial infections. These infections may grow into serious problems, if not nipped in the bud. Turacoz Healthcare Solutions wants to share some basic skin-care tips this season. So stay healthy, keep your skin monsoon-proof and enjoy the rains.

Disturbed sleep and strained red eyes seem to take a back seat as we stand face-to-face with a much more alarming side-effect of the endless smartphone usage, scientifically termed as ‘transient smartphone blindness’. Cradling your smartphone and gazing at it late at night or early in the morning, while lying in bed, leads to this unusual phenomenon of temporary vision loss.

The problem: A recent report published in the New England Journal of Medicine¹ outlined the case studies of two women who suffered from impaired vision for months after regularly using their smartphones in the dark.

• The first case was of a 22-year-old woman with right eye vision loss at night.
• The second case was of a 40-year-old woman with recurrent monocular visual impairment on waking, lasting up to 15 minutes.

Investigation of both the cases revealed that these patients used smartphone for quite some time in the dark with just one eye while lying in bed and that the symptoms were always in the eye opposite to the side on which the patient was lying.

The Cause: Lying on one’s side while using the smartphone in the dark leads to differential bleaching of the retinal pigments, making the viewer eye light adapted while the other eye, being closed or covered by a pillow, becomes adapted to dark.² The eye staring at the bright screen is always the one to be temporarily blind when the smartphone is put down because it takes time for the phone eye to catch up with the dark adapted eye.

The Fix: Till now the long-term effect of this strange condition is not documented but viewing screens binocularly i.e. with both eyes, is a quick and simple solution recommended by ophthalmologists.

The global smartphone user-base is exponentially increasing each day with more people going to bed with their phones which puts them at a higher risk of transient smartphone blindness. Luckily enough, the condition is temporary and probably more distracting than dangerous.

Turacoz Healthcare Solutions is a medical writing organization which provides assistance in publication of research articles and clinical research documents. We consider it our corporate social responsibility to raise awareness about transient smartphone blindness. The best vision is insight!

References:

1. Alim-Marvasti A, Bi W, Mahroo OA, Barbur JL, Plant GT. Transient Smartphone “Blindness”. N Engl J Med. 2016;374(25):2502-4.
2. BEC CREW. Science alert. 2016. Available at: http://www.sciencealert.com/smartphone-users-experience-temporary-blindnss-after-looking-at-their-screens-in-bed. Accessed on: 2^nd Aug 2016.

Humans were designed to move around and stay physically active. However, over the period of time, we evolved technologically and the levels of our physical activity steeply declined. Our environment at work, schools, homes, and public places were gradually engineered in such a way which restricted our daily physical activity and compelled us to assume a non-exercising behaviour. Steadily, we adapted the non-exercising behaviour in our lifestyle and became sedentary or negligibly active.Parallel with this major change in our lifestyle, several pieces of evidence emerged which identified sedentary behaviour as a novel risk factor for cardiometabolic diseases and all-cause mortality. Studies showed that the mediocrity begins the precise moment when we swap activity with sedentary behaviour. Therefore, it is important to understand the health risks associated with sedentary lifestyle and take timely action.

What is a sedentary lifestyle?

A sedentary lifestyle can be defined as sitting, lying down, and expending very little energy (approximately 1.0-1.5 metabolic equivalents [METs]) in a day. Due to limited physical activity and associated health risks, asedentary lifestyle is also termed as a “sitting disease”.

Who is expected to have a sedentary lifestyle?

With changing nature of our work and leisure activities, an average adult is likely to spend more than 70% of the waking time in a day being sedentary or minimally active. The levels of inactivity tend to increase with growing age, and women are more prone to inactive lifestyle as compared to men. However, recent trends have shown a surge in sedentary behaviour among children.

Health risks associated with sedentary lifestyle

Lack of physical activity has clearly been shown to be a risk factor for several physical, mental and psychological disorders. Individuals having a sedentary lifestyle are at greater risk of having cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, pulmonary embolism, diabetes, and obesity. Increased adiposity (excessive weight gain) due to sedentary lifestyle also increases the risk of certain cancers like endometrial cancer, colon cancer and breast cancer. Additionally, non-exercising behaviour also results in several bone and muscle disorders like osteoporosis, back or neck pain, and muscle degeneration. An overall poor health of a sedentary individual is later accountable for developing psychological stress, depression and anxiety disorders. Worrisome is the fact that lack of physical activity and its associated conditions account for about 3.2 million deaths a year across the globe.

Tips to overcome sedentary lifestyle

Sedentary lifestyle can be easily avoided by making few smart choices at work and leisure, such as:

• Go NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), i.e. set an alarm after each couple of hours which reminds you to stand up and go on your feet. This can include simple stretching, taking a walk around the office, or a 10-minute brisk walk. It is an ideal option for those who can’t manage to go to the gym after work.
• Walk n Work:Schedule walking meetings with your team, walk while having a telephonic conversation, pick up your lunch instead of ordering delivery, walk to the market for picking up daily grocery, and take stairs instead of elevator whenever permissible.
• Rearrange the workplace: Install treadmills or stationary cycles to encourage physical activity at work, schedule regular exercise sessions at workplace for your team, and relocate water coolers and trash cans so that people have to move from their workplace to use them.
• Commute differently:If possible, try to commute with public transport or use cycle instead of personal vehicles.
• Exercise:Try to engage yourself in a physical activity, exercise or sport of your choice. Make sure you spend at least a day each week exercising.

Being physically active is necessary for having a physical and mental well-being. A sedentary lifestyle is a root cause for most of the modern day diseases and it can be easily avoided by making healthy choices for you and your family. Turacoz Healthcare Solutions always tries to encourage its employees and everyone to exercise daily and lead a physically active, healthy life.

Physical activity should be adopted as a behaviour in daily life, and one should remember to ‘get up and move’!

Diabetes mellitus (DM) has become one of the most challenging health problems in the 21st century. It is a serious public health problem globally, but the good news is that various advances are being made in prevention, detection, and treatment of diabetes. Though prevention is always better than cure, yet sometimes prevention is not possible and the cure seems to take ages. The interest to find a possible cure for diabetes has eventually led to exploration of various new scientific areas of research.

Volanesorsen

Volanesorsen (formerly ISIS-APOCIIIRx)is an antisense drug in development intended to treat patients with severely high triglycerides either as a single agent or in combination with other triglyceride-lowering agents.Elevation in triglycerides has always increased the risk of cardiovascular disorders as well as type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have found the therapeutic effect of lipid-lowering medication sin improving insulin sensitivity in people with T2DM. Volanesorsen is an oral medication that can help to control the blood sugar levels. Itis believed to improve the insulin sensitivity and significantly decrease the patients’ overall glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c). After taking the medication for 12 weeks, researchers found that adult T2DM patients receiving volanesorsen experienced 69% reduction in triglycerides, and 57% improvement in whole-body insulin sensitivity.Researchers concluded that decrease in triglycerides was strongly related to improved insulin sensitivity and improved HbA1c.

PEGylated Lispro

PEGylated lispro (LY2605541) has been developed by the addition of polyethylene glycol (PEG) to insulin lispro, leading to its extended half-life. Early phase evaluations of PEGyalted lispro confirm its non-inferiority to glargine with a potential weight advantage when used in T2DM. Since insulin therapy is anabolic and its initiation is commonly associated with weight gain, an insulin preparation associated with a beneficial weight profile would represent a particularly valuable therapeutic entity.

Pre-clinical studies indicate that LY2605541 has low mitogenic potency, exerting a preferential hepatic effect on glucose homeostasis. However, LY2605541 appears to cause elevated transaminases and derangement of lipid profiles. On the basis of these initial observations, LY2605541 requires further extensive clinical evaluation to fully assess its risk/benefit profile in the management ofdiabetes.

Islet Transplantation

A novel technology has been developed to help treat type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and potentially negate the need for insulin injections. Islets are organoids that produce multiple hormones, including insulin, and donated islets are already treating severe cases of T1DMeffectively. Islet transplantation can transform the lives of T1DM patients, and may result in long-term freedom from insulin injections with excellent glucose control.

Natural Products

Plants possessing antidiabetic properties may be suitable as an adjunct to the existing therapies or as a prospective source of new hypoglycemic compounds. Many new bioactive drugs isolated from plants demonstrate antidiabetic activity equal to known oral hypoglycemic agents such as tolbutamide and chlorpropamide. Several plant species with terpenoids, flavonoids, phenols, coumarins, and other bioactive constituents have shown their potency in reducing blood glucose levels. Plants likeAllium sativum(Liliaceae),Gymnema sylvestre(Asclepiadaceae),Murraya koenigii(Rutaceae),Allium cepa(Liliaceae),Withania somnifera (Solanaceae), andFerula foetida (Umbelliferae) have exhibited antidiabetic properties when assessed in experimental models of diabetes. These traditional approaches might prove to bebeneficial in treatment of diabetic complications.

Great strides have been made clinically in the management of diabetes. Extensive research may lead to discovery of newer and better options for diabetes. With new technologies revolutionizing the treatment possibilities, the search for an effective medication is not far ahead.

Turacoz Healthcare Solutions aims to create awareness for such healthcare issues like diabetes mellitus which pose a serious threat to people, irrespective of race, gender, or age. We consider it our corporate responsibility to share the knowledge related to therapeutic research and development, and keep you updated with the recent medical advancements in the healthcare industry.“Being aware of a disease and its deleterious consequences”is the first-step towards its prevention. So stay healthy and stay long.

It’s again Ramadan time. Millions of Muslims fast during this period and abstain from eating and drinking. However, two main meals are taken during Ramadan: ‘Suhur’ which is served before dawn and ‘Iftar’ which is taken after sunset. It is very important that Suhur comprises of a healthy meal to provide you energy for the whole day, and Iftar is a light meal to avoid weight gain.One should take foods that are rich in complex carbohydrates and protein, fruits or vegetables, and plenty of water to maintain a healthy fasting. Here are the few tips:

• Incorporate brown rice, wholemeal bread or wholegrain noodles in diet which take longer more time to digest, and help in sustaining energy levels longer
• When preparing rice, noodles and other grains, season with herbs, spices and broths
• Include high-calcium low-fat dairy products in your diet to maintain strong bones
• Lactose intolerant persons can choose lactose-free milk or calcium-fortified soybean milk
• Eat fish as it contains the healthy fat- omega-3fatty acid
• Prefer white meat over red meat and choose from low fat meat options (like veal, chicken and fish)
• Add herbs, sliced lemon or lemon juice to white meats and fishinstead of spices and salt
• Add favorite fruits, dates, and honey to the desserts to include more fiber and make the food vitamin-rich
• Replace sweets with stuffed dates, which are rich in fibre and are healthy
• Use home-made cream for the qatayef stuffing, which cuts down almost three-quarters of the calories

When deciding what to eat during Ramadan, one must remember that consuming the right food is very important. Turacoz Healthcare Solutions is passionate to spread the awareness on such social or healthcare related issues as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity. We consider it our responsibility to share the healthy way of fasting.