Mid Week Mastery Annual Soft Tissue Conference Melbourne 2010

We are very pleased to give you advanced knowledge of our first ASCTT Mid Week Mastery Annual Soft Tissue Conference to be held at Melbourne University Hawthorn Campus on November 24th 2010.

We have a fantastic program which includes:

Associate Professor Jill Cook (one of the worlds leading authors and researchers on tendinopathy)

Anatomist Priscilla Barker PhD (Co-author and medical illustrator of the An@tomedia multimedia program. She was awarded the 2005 Spine Young Investigator of the Year

Stuart Buzza (Myotherapist) and Paula Baird-Colt (Dance Conditioning Specialist) two of the Full time medical support staff of the Australian Ballet Company and

Mark Finch, Vancouver Canada. Mark is a true expert in the field of Myofascial Therapy from a theoretical and clinical perspective he will be speaking on 4 Ideas from the world of fascia to change the way you think in your practice.

The wonderful thing about this program of maximal information is that attending it will have minimal impact on your Clinical practice as it is being held on a Wednesday evening from 6.00 – 9.30 pm.

To ensure that as many hear about this unique opportunity we would be grateful if you would circular this information to anyone you may think will benefit.

Cost for the evening is $80 full registration or $70 for students. To register your interest please email us at info@softtissuetherapyonline.com.au

Full information will be released as soon as the final program is completed.

Down the Advanced Conference Notification here: ConfBrochure

Biochemist proposes worldwide policy change to step up daily vitamin D intake

Vitamin D is effective in reducing frequency of many diseases and cost of medical care, stresses University of California Riverside’s Anthony Norman

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Anthony Norman, a leading international expert in vitamin D, proposes worldwide policy changes regarding people’s vitamin D daily intake amount in order to maximize the vitamin’s contribution to reducing the frequency of many diseases, including childhood rickets, adult osteomalacia, cancer, autoimmune type-1 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity and muscle weakness.

“A reduction in the frequency of these diseases would increase the quality and longevity of life and significantly reduce the cost of medical care worldwide,” said Norman, a distinguished professor emeritus of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside. “It is high time that worldwide vitamin D nutritional policy, now at a crossroads, reflects current scientific knowledge about the vitamin’s many benefits and develops a sound vision for the future.”

Currently, the recommended daily intake of vitamin D in the United States is 200 international units (IU) for people up to 50 years old; 400 IU for people 51 to 70 years old; and 600 IU for people over 70 years old. Today there is a wide consensus among scientists that the relative daily intake of vitamin D should be increased to 2,000 to 4,000 IU for most adults.

“Worldwide public health is best served by a recommendation of higher daily intakes of vitamin D,” Norman said. “Currently, more than half the world’s population gets insufficient amounts of this vitamin. At present about half of elderly North Americans and Western Europeans and probably also of the rest of the world are not receiving enough vitamin D to maintain healthy bone.”

Reporting in a review paper in the July 28, 2010, issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, Norman and Roger Bouillon of the Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and Endocrinology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, warn that if the current nutritional guidelines for vitamin D remain unchanged, rickets and osteomalacia, which could be easily prevented, will continue to occur.

They add that if the present guidelines for vitamin D intake are strictly implemented and applied worldwide to pregnant or lactating women, newborns and children, the occurrence of rickets in infants could be effectively eradicated.

Norman, the first author of the review paper, and Bouillon note that if the daily dietary intake of vitamin D is increased by 600-1000 IU in all adults above their present supply, it would bring beneficial effects on bone health in the elderly and on all major human diseases (e.g., cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic and immune diseases).

The researchers add, however, that if the vitamin D dietary intake were increased to 2000 IU per day and even more for subgroups of the world population with the poorest vitamin D status, it could favorably impact multiple sclerosis, type-1 diabetes, tuberculosis, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular risk factors and most cancers.

About vitamin D:

Also known as the “sunshine vitamin,” vitamin D was discovered 90 years ago as a dietary agent that prevented the bone disease rickets.

Exposure to the sun is the body’s natural way of producing the vitamin. Skin exposed to solar UVB radiation can produce significant quantities of vitamin D. But this vitamin D synthesis is reliably available year-round only at latitudes between 40 degrees north and 40 degrees south. A combination of sunshine, food, supplements, and possibly even limited tanning exposure can raise the daily intake of the vitamin to 2000 IU.

Vitamin D is itself biologically inert. Its biological effects result only after it is metabolized first in the liver and then in the kidney – a process that converts the vitamin into a steroid hormone.

The best sources of unfortified foods naturally containing vitamin D are animal products and fatty fish and liver extracts like salmon or sardines and cod liver oil. Vitamin D-fortified food sources in the United States (the fortification levels aim at about 400 IU per day) include milk and milk products, orange juice, breakfast cereals and bars, grain products, pastas, infant formulas and margarines.

Vitamin D excess can cause health problems such as hypercalcemia, vomiting, thirst and tissue damage. The precise upper limit for daily vitamin D intake is not well defined.

Information supplied by the University of California – Riverside

New Study shows Building muscle doesn’t require lifting heavy weights

HAMILTON, ONTARIO CANADA. August 10, 2010 – Current gym dogma holds that to build muscle size you need to lift heavy weights. However, a new study conducted at McMaster University has shown that a similar degree of muscle building can be achieved by using lighter weights. The secret is to pump iron until you reach muscle fatigue.

The findings are published in PLoS ONE . Click the link below to read the full article

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0012033

“Rather than grunting and straining to lift heavy weights, you can grab something much lighter but you have to lift it until you can’t lift it anymore,” says Stuart Phillips, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University. “We’re convinced that growing muscle means stimulating your muscle to make new muscle proteins, a process in the body that over time accumulates into bigger muscles.”

Phillips praised lead author and senior Ph.D. student Nicholas Burd for masterminding the project that showed it’s really not the weight that you lift but the fact that you get muscular fatigue that’s the critical point in building muscle. The study used light weights that represented a percentage of what the subjects could lift. The heavier weights were set to 90% of a person’s best lift and the light weights at a mere 30% of what people could lift. “It’s a very light weight,” says Phillips noting that the 90-80% range is usually something people can lift from 5-10 times before fatigue sets in. At 30%, Burd reported that subjects could lift that weight at least 24 times before they felt fatigue.

The study reported for the first time that low-load high volume resistance exercise is more effective at increasing muscle protein synthesis than high-load low volume resistance exercise.

“We’re excited to see where this new paradigm will lead,” says Phillips, adding that these new data have practical significance for gym enthusiasts but more importantly for people with compromised skeletal muscle mass, such as the elderly, patients with cancer, or those who are recovering from trauma, surgery or even stroke.

Muscle Stem Cells as Seen on Time Lapse Photography

When muscle tissue experiences trauma or disease, such as muscular dystrophy, stem cells in the muscle known as “satellite cells” respond to repair and regenerate the muscle.

These cells are particularly important in neuromuscular diseases, such as muscular dystrophy, which affect muscle stability and repair.

Now, University of Missouri researchers have used time-lapse photography to document satellite cell movements and behaviors when they interact with their ‘host’ myofiber.

Scientists hope that if they can understand more about what satellite cells do in healthy muscle, obstacles to cell or gene therapies for muscular dystrophy might be overcome.

Satellite cells are small and rare, and only become active in specific conditions associated with damage or disease. Once activated, they multiply, establishing a large population of replacement cells in the muscle tissue, then differentiate to replace or repair damaged muscle.

Patients with Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy have muscle fibers so fragile that simply moving or breathing causes them to tear.While the satellite cells do a good job repairing this damage in early childhood, the cells eventually fall behind. Because this is a genetic disease, the new muscle made from the satellite cells has the same defect, so even the repaired muscle doesn’t last long. Without repair, the muscles in these patients eventually stop working. In the severest form, this disease is fatal by early adulthood.

Since 1989, scientists and physicians have tried to use transplanted satellite cells from healthy donors as a therapy for muscular dystrophy, but have had very little success. One major problem with therapies being tried now is that the transplanted cells never move away from the site where they are injected, so patients require a large number of injections over a very small area, up to 4,000 injections in a single individual.

“Previous studies had little data about how satellite cells moved, and many scientists thought that satellite cells didn’t move,” Cornelison said. “The time-lapse videomicroscopy showed that they can and do move. Some cells travel a few centimeters in a day. Now, we can ask things like ‘is it important for them to be able to move?’, ‘where are they going?’, ‘what factors do they need to tell them where and how to move?’ and ‘what are the cells saying to each other?’ Hopefully, the answers to these questions will help us think of ways to improve satellite cell therapies. For example, it would be wonderful if we could just tell all the cells in a transplant to move away from where they were injected, so they wouldn’t be overcrowded and die.”

Video and all information is from the University of Missouri-Columbia and the research group of Ass Professor Dawn Cornelison

Details on the 7th Interdisciplinary World Congress on Low Back & Pelvic Pain

7th Interdisciplinary World Congress on Low Back & Pelvic Pain

Los Angeles USA November 9 – 12 2010

The Preliminary Program for the World Congress has been released on their website

http://www.worldcongresslbp.com/

It looks really good so if you want to immerse yourself in the world of Low Back & Pelvic Pain this is a great place to be.

Look at the available post-conference workshops as well, featuring some great presenters from a wide range of disciplines.

http://www.worldcongresslbp.com/workshops.html


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