Are you a secretor?

My Dear Sexy Readers,

As you know, here at Science is So Sexy, I asked my Sexy Readers what they want to read about! It's all very well to write about Science but if no one reads your articles, it's just internet clogging isn't it? So as part of Science is So Sexy Request Time, I'm focusing on a question that fellow blogger, Chelle, has been asking herself:

"What does it mean when you are a secretor in your blood?"

Blood Type

Our blood is composed of, among other things, of White cells and Red cells

Composition of our blood

Cells can have elements stuck on their surface, it can be proteins, sugars or any variation of these.

In the case of red blood cells, the elements that determine your blood type are called antigens and are formed by linking 4 types of sugar:

The ABO blood type system - Specific sugars on red blood cells

The most common blood type systems are the ABO and the Rhesus (+- for Antigen D) systems and are the most important when it comes to blood transfusion.

ABO System

A person with Blood group A has the antigen A on their red blood cell surface, and antibodies against B antigen in their serum so can only receive blood from people with blood type A or O and can donate to A and AB.

Each person possesses a type of red blood cell with antigens, and antibodies in plasma

For example:

A person with Blood group O doesn't have antigens A or B and has both  antibodies against them in their serum so can only receive from O but donate to all types (A, B, AB, O).

For these reasons, we can say:

Universal Donor is O-

Universal Recipient is AB +

What more?

There are actually 30 blood-group systems recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion, meaning there are many more other antigens stuck on the surface of your red blood cells than A, B and D.

This is something you inherit from both your parents.

Secretor Status

A secretor is defined as a person who secretes their blood type antigens into body fluids and secretions like saliva in your mouth, the mucus in your digestive track and respiratory cavities, etc.

A person can be either a Secretor or Non-secretor, and has nothing to do with your blood type A, B, AB or O. In the US, about 80% of the population are Secretors.

Another blood group system is the Lewis Blood group (a or b) and relates to salivary Secretor status.

By testing his saliva, a Secretor person usually is Lea- Leb+, a non Secretor being Lea+ Leb-.

It can happen that a person be a partial or weak secretor meaning it has reduced quantity of its Antigens in his saliva.

A few studies have shown that being a Secretor might be beneficial, protecting at least partially to certain malignancies or allowing to have less aggressive disease

Blood type Diet

This diet is a nutritional diet advocated by Peter D'Adamo, a naturopathic physician. He claims that ABO blood type is the most important factor determining a healthy diet. However, the consensus among dieteticians, physicians and scientist is that the theory is unsupported by scientific evidence.

For example, one if his book Lectin: The diet connection, says that lectins which interact with the different ABO antigens are described as incompatible and harmful therefore different foods for A, B, AB and O are chosen to minimize those interactions with lectins.

But not only a search on Pubmed (a website where ALL scientific articles are published once they have been approved by experts in the respective field) doesn't yield any article but actually lectins are not ABO specific.

 If you are interested in more information about this blood type diet, click HERE

See you Soon for more Sexy Science,

Effect of Cannabis on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

This is my review on an article published in a journal distributed freely on the London Metro. See HERE

The original scientific paper is HERE 

Background

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop (sometimes after months) after exposure to any event, physical and/or psychological, that results in psychological trauma, overwhelming the individual's ability to cope.

Traumatic events that may cause PTSD include violent assault, kidnapping, sexual assault, torture, being hostage, prisoner of war, experiencing a disaster, violent automobile accident, being diagnosed with life-threatening illness, bullying, mobbing, etc...

Blood Pressure medicine May help Skin Cancer patients

I found this article and thought I would share it with my followers as I think it is quite exciting!

Beta-blocker drugs are commonly used to treat high blood pressure. The way they work is by blocking the action of two hormones, called Adrenaline and Noradrenaline, when these normally bind to their receptors.

Note: Most of what happens in your body cells are a result of a specific key (= hormone, or other protein called ligand) linking to a specific key hole (=receptor), resulting in a door being opened to a new path (= a signal being created, leading to secondary messenger)

Key-keyhole system

It was discovered that certain cancer cells had receptors on their surface specific for adrenaline and noradrenaline. When those two hormones were binding to these receptors, the signal created was to produce more compounds that are known to stimulate blood flow to them, enhancing their growth and therefore spreading cancer to other parts of the body.

Thus, by treating a patient with Beta-blockers, you can lower the amount of those compounds that induce the cancer progression.

The Beta-blockers won't kill the the cancer cells but they may slow the disease progression, and in addition to normal chemotherapy, could contribute to increased survival time.

The Research group from Ohio who analysed results based on Skin Cancer patients from Denmark (They have a large database with complete information on their patients) and found this link are hoping to start a clinical trial very soon to confirm those findings.

Other groups working with Ovarian Cancer patients found similar results.

Work has also been done and more under way for Breast Cancer patients.

The advantage and exciting part of this research and discovery is that beta-blockers are inexpensive and won't add - hopefully, we'll have to wait for clinical trials results - any more side effects than chemotherapy already does such as hair loss and sickness.

But please remember self medication is never a good idea, if you are interested in the contents of this post and are affected by cancer, please talk to your doctor.

Source

Original Scientific article

Article discussing advances on Beta-Blockers help to Breast Cancer Patients

Why do we cry when chopping onions?

This was a question submitted to me by a dear friend.

Who never cried when chopping onions? Unless you're 20 and never cooked/helped your mum and you've only been eating them (find out why it's good for your health), everyone has had a good cry over damn onions!!

Well I'm happy to report it's all about chemicals and chemical reactions.

1. The onion point of view

You see, the poor onion only wants to protect itself from bacterial or other attacks when rooted in the soil. In order to do this, its cells (=building blocks, from latin meaning "small room") contain amino acid sulfoxides that we'll call Sulfur Boxes.

When you're cutting an onion, you're breaking those cells = small rooms, releasing Warriors (enzymes) whose roles is to break those Sulfur Boxes to transform the amino acid sulfoxides into sulphenic acids.

Another Warrior then comes into action helping this sulphenic acid to reach more easily its victim by making it volatile. Sulphenic acid becomes then a gas, with a very uncool complicated name.

When this gas, that we call lachrymatoric factor LF (litterally something that makes you cry), reaches the water from your eyes, it transforms itself again into sulfuric acid, a more known irritant, burning your eyes.

(I think you'll never look at an onion the same way now you know it evolved so well to produce such a combat army!)

2. On our side:

When this sensation is felt by your sensory cells in your eyes (whose role is to sense things in your environment and send messages to your brain), they are telling your brain that it needs to evacuate this irritant.

The brain then in turns sends signals to your lacrimal glands (behind your eyes) to start making up tears, = producing more water, therefore diluting away the amount of sulfuric acid in your eyes and eventually evacuate it outside your body.

It's by following this logic, that the best way to come over rapidly from this situation is - after stepping well away from the onion - keep your eyes wide opened to make yourself cry more. The worse is to close them or rub them with your hands full of this gas that landed on them!

I found that if you put your onions in the frigde, I don't cry so much. Must be because all those reactions will be slowed down at lower temperature - the warriors are not very efficient when cold!!

Or by cutting your onions under water, the gas can't swim, it drowns - although I agree it's not practical!!

Also those sulphur boxes are mostly contained in the root so technically if you cut the root first or last, you shouldn't cry so much!

What about you? What's your trick for not crying?

Press article: Effect of Cannabis on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

This morning, I opened the Metro (free journal distributed in the tube) and found my first subject for this new blog (for which I am so excited!!!)

Title reads:

"Cannabis may be the cure to traumatic stress, say scientists"

If you'd like to read the full article, click HERE (it's a short text)

So I looked for the real article published in the scientific journal:

"Cannabinoids prevent the development of Behavioral and Endocrine Alterations in a rat model of Intense Stress", by Eti Ganon-Elazar and Irit Akirav from the department of Psychology, University of Haifa in Israel, published in the journal called Neuropsychopharmacology.

As you can see the title from the metro paper and the real article are somewhat different.

This happens oftens and could lead to serious public misinformation!!

So my aim is to translate the sciencey bits from the real one and give you the real information behind it... Stay tuned...

NB: This review has now been written,  you can find it HERE

Introduction

Hello everyone, and Welcome on my new venture Science is So Sexy, an informative blog made for you!

What I'm suggesting here is trying to explain Unsexy Uncool Boring Specialized Science to Normal Cool Interesting people like YOU!!

All you have to do is tell me what you wanna know in the chat box on the right hand side of this page, or in the comment box here below!

Don't be afraid to ask ANY subject.

They can be as serious as explaining WHAT IS CANCER to shameful knowledge hole such as WHY THE HELL DO WE PUT SALT ON ICY ROADS?