Health Scan: Pomegranate juice has beneficial medicinal qualities

Health Scan: Pomegranate juice has beneficial medicinal qualities.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
pomegranate 88 (photo credit: )
pomegranate 88
(photo credit: )
Eating pomegranate seeds is customary this time of year, but Prof. Michael Aviram, head of the lipid research laboratory in the Technion's Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa says drinking pomegranate juice is a good idea throughout the year. He says the fruit's high antioxidant potency explains its protection against heart attack and stroke, even in comparison to dietary antioxidants such as red wine, grape juice, blueberry juice, cranberry juice and green tea. The specific antioxidants present in pomegranate juice (ellagitannins such as punicalagin) are more active than those present in the other beverages, he says. Pomegranate juice consumption inhibits the oxidation of "bad cholesterol" (LDL), and attenuates the formation of harmful oxidized LDL, he says. It also inhibits the oxidation of "good cholesterol" (HDL), thus increasing HDL capability to remove excess cholesterol from the arteries. The juice also attenuates blood pressure in hypertensive patients through its action as a natural ACE inhibitor. Patients suffering from carotid artery stenosis (blockage of the arteries that supply blood to the brain) who drank pomegranate juice were found to have decreased their atherosclerotic lesion size. Pomegranate juice, says Aviram, is an antiatherosclerotic agent in diabetic patients, as its sugars are associated with its antioxidants, forming a sugar polyphenol complex that protects against complications of diabetes. The beverage is so beneficial, he concludes, that people who have borderline levels of blood cholesterol, blood sugar and high blood pressure should prefer pomegranate juice over drugs whenever possible. THANKS FOR THE MEMORY Four patients have undergone valve replacements in their aorta - the largest artery in the human body - using a stent that changes its size and form when heated up by the body. The patients, three women and two men aged 72 to 85, were treated at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem with the technique, which has been performed on about 1,000 patients abroad and now has been brought for the first time to Israel. Prof. Chaim Lotan, head of the cardiology branch of the hospital, and Dr. Haim Dannenberg, director of the catheterization unit, recently performed the minimally invasive procedure, which is becoming much more common as the population ages. "This will bring about a revolution in catheterization for cardiac valve replacement," says Lotan, who prefers this technique, called Corevalve after the US company that developed it, to another one called the Edwards technique, that was recently used on two patients in another Israeli hospital. Lotan went to Germany to learn the Corevalve technique, which involves an artificial valve shaped like a little cage. It's put in ice water, which shrinks it, before being pushed from a blood vessel in the groin to the aorta via a plastic restrainer; once it is positioned properly, the restrainer is removed, the body naturally warms the metal, and the valve returns to its original size and shape. The patients went home four days later. The Corevalve system has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the European authorities and Israel's Health Ministry. SECOND-LANGUAGE STUTTER Children who are bilingual before the age of five are significantly more likely to stutter and find it harder to lose their impediment than children who speak only one language before this age, according to a new study in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. The researchers base their findings on 317 London children who were referred for stutter between age eight and 10. The children's carers were asked if they spoke a language other than English or combined with English at home. Just over one in five spoke English and a second language at home. Fifteen of the 38 children spoke only one language - not English - before the age of five, while 23 spoke their family's native language as well as English before this age. Stuttering began at around 4.5 years, and boys outnumbered girls by four to one. Comparison with a group of children who didn't stutter showed that three-quarters of them were exclusive speakers of a language other than English at home; only a quarter spoke two languages. The recovery rate was also higher among children who exclusively spoke one language other than English at home. Over half of the children who either spoke only their native language at home up to the age of five or who spoke only English had stopped stuttering by the age of 12. This compares with only one in four of those children speaking two languages up to this age. There was no difference in school performance between children who stuttered, but the authors suggest that children whose native language is not English may benefit from deferring the time when they learn it. "This reduces the chance of starting to stutter and aids the chances of recovery later in childhood," they say. VIDEO ON THE CEILING Performing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computerized tomography (CT) on children is difficult because they are not supposed to move for up to half an hour. Now the Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petah has installed a large flat video screen on the ceiling of the nuclear medicine unit that allows kids to watch their favorite movie while undergoing the scan. Schneider says the family can either bring a DVD from home or borrow one from the DVD library in the unit. The child's attention is focused on the video, so the staff barely have to ask him not to move.