A study released Tuesday in the September issue of the Journal of Periodontology found that smokers had less desirable long term results following periodontal plastic surgery than non-smokers.    The study followed 10 smokers and 10 non-smokers for two years to evaluate the effects of cigarette smoke on the long term outcomes of a treatment to help soft tissue reattach to the root surface of the teeth.

    After two years, residual gum recession around the area which received the surgery was greater in smokers as compared to non-smokers.

    Studies have shown that smoking can impair the body’s ability to heal itself immediately after surgery. But this most recent study also showed that when a patient has periodontal plastic surgery, smoking can damage the ability of that procedure to stay intact over a long period of time.

    ”People who smoke and have had some sort of periodontal plastic surgery should be aware of the negative side effects of smoking. It can be costly to have to repeat a surgery because the desirable outcomes might have been undone by smoking,” said Preston Miller, President of the American Academy of Periodontology.

    ”Therefore, it is important patients and doctors agree to a smoking cessation program prior to any periodontal surgery. This will help a patient’s chance of achieving optimal results,” said Miller.

Bangalore: Dr Indrani Sarkar has has every reason to be excited. Her PhD thesis, which started in 2002 at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany, has thrown open the doors for developing enzymes that can destroy the dreaded Human Immuno-deficiency Virus or HIV within infected cells permanently.

Indrani and a team of scientists have developed an enzyme called Tre. Tre is a custom enzyme capable of detecting, recognising and destroying HIV, much like a pair of molecular scissors.

“In laymans terms, it’s an engineered enzyme which recognises sequences in the HIV genome that is duplicated, integrated virus and by the process of recombination, it cuts out the virus from the genome,” says she.

The biggest challenge with treating HIV today is that the virus becomes dormant and often develops resistance to HIV drugs.

The only way then to cure HIV is to get rid of the virus completely and Tre, the enzyme that Indrani constructed after a year and its 126 “cycles of mutation” totally deplete HIV in the human genome in three months in laboratory conditions.

“It’s a beautiful approach, but like any other drug, this one too will take a few years to reach clinics — anywhere between five and 20 years actually. A lot of research has to be done because since one is working with a novel enzyme, one has to engineer the enzyme,” says she.

According to the latest statistics given out by UNAIDS and WHO, there are close to 39.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the world and though it will be a while before an imminent cure is likely, Dr Indrani Sarkar’s findings certainly hold out hope for the millions who are battling the disease across the globe.

More than one in 10 pregnant American women smoke and many of them may also suffer from depression, which makes kicking the habit even more difficult, new research suggests.

    The new evidence suggests that decades-old “quit for your baby” messages are too simplistic an approach for many women — and that perhaps prenatal checkups should include screening pregnant smokers for mental health disorders that require care.

    ”These ladies all know, I promise you, about the health risks. That’s not what it is,” says Dr. Jan Blalock of the University of Texas M.D Anderson Cancer Center, which has begun a first-of-a-kind study, Project Baby Steps, to test whether non-drug depression therapy helps pregnant smokers quit.

    ”We should at least understand more about why these ladies don’t quit. We should be looking more carefully instead of just saying, ‘Whoop, got this group of hard-core smokers.’”

    Certainly learning how dangerous smoking is to their developing baby can urge women to try to quit. It increases the risk of miscarriage, premature birth, low birthweight, death from SIDS, and learning and behavior disorders.

    Dr. Renee Goodwin, a Columbia University epidemiologist, tracked more than 1,500 pregnant women who took part in a larger study of Americans’ health. A surprising 22 percent smoked at some point during pregnancy, and about 12 percent were classified as nicotine-dependent.

    Pregnant smokers were typically poor, less educated and had less access to health care.

    But strikingly, 30 percent of the smokers had a mental health disorder, as did more than half who were nicotine-addicted — and the vast majority suffered depression. The smokers were about three times as likely to have a disorder as pregnant nonsmokers, Goodwin recently reported in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

    Nicotine and other chemicals in cigarette smoke can act in the brain like weak antidepressants, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

    ”They are not just smoking to get the habit-forming aspects,” Volkow explains. “On top of that, they are seeking the therapeutic effect. It comes at a very, very high cost.”