Excessive alcohol intake increases cancer risk

Excessive alcohol intake may increase the risk of cancer and even lead to premature aging, research shows.

This is due to shortening of telomeres, a region of DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome which is important for the genetic stability of cells. As people age, telomere length shortens progressively.

Excessive use of alcohol has been linked to oxidative stress and inflammation, two mechanisms that accelerate telomere shortening.

Since telomere shortening is thought to increase cancer risk, the researchers speculated that those with shorter telomeres due to heavy alcohol consumption would have an increased risk of cancer.

"Heavy alcohol users tend to look haggard, and it is commonly thought that heavy drinking leads to premature aging and earlier onset of diseases of aging. In particular, heavy alcohol drinking has been associated with cancer at multiple sites," said Andrea Baccarelli, who led the research.

"All the cells in our body have a biological clock in telomeres," noted Baccarelli, who heads the Centre of Molecular and Genetic Epidemiology, Ca' Granda Hospital Foundation, University of Milan, Italy.

The researchers measured serum DNA among 59 participants who abused alcohol (22 per cent consumed four or more alcoholic drinks per day) and 197 participants with variable alcohol consumption habits (4 per cent consumed four or more alcoholic drinks per day).

The two groups were similar in age and other factors that might affect telomere length, such as diet, physical exercise, work-related stress and environmental exposures, a Milan release said.

Results showed that telomere length was dramatically shortened in those who consumed heavy amounts of alcohol -- it was nearly half as long as that in the non-abusers (0.41 v/s 0.79 relative units).

"The decrease we found in telomere length is very sharp, and we were surprised to find such a strong effect at the cellular level," Baccarelli said.

The results were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research's 101st annual meeting.

Two females sharing Apartment are not lesbians: Tanushree Dutta

Lesbian pairing of Tanushree Dutta and Neetu Chandra. Darr meeting Girlfriend. Sex element. Cat fight amongst the leading ladies. Tiff between Tanushree and Rohit Roy. These are some of the many rumours that have been floating around for last 8-10 months ever since the shooting of Apartment kick started. Though Neetu plays the role of a schizophrenic in Apartment and Tanushree is a victim, the promotional focus (whether designed or by chance) has stayed on the aforementioned elements rather than the thriller quotient of Apartment. Naturally, Tanushree is upset. In a free wheeling conversation with Joginder Tuteja, Tanushree Dutta talks about Apartment being anything but the aforementioned angles, why she chose the role of a victim over the tormentor and her general unhappiness over the way rumours have floated around the film.


In the middle of last year, when the shooting of Apartment had started, there were speculations around the film being a story of two lesbians. In fact it was safely assumed that at least one of the two leading ladies would be having sexual orientation towards females. Is that the case here?
Please don't expect anything of that nature at all. These things have been plugged by sources who want the film to look tantalising. Just because two females are sharing an apartment here, it doesn't mean that they are lesbians. There are so many guys who share an apartment too in real life. That doesn't make them gays. Titbits around the lesbian angle have just been plugged into media. All of this is entirely fictional. This is just overactive PR machinery in motion here.


Didn't you have a conversation with the producers around this?
See, I am not here to do the blame game. Also I am not saying that the producers are spreading these rumours. Perhaps even they don't know who is doing that. May be there are forces which do not want Apartment to work. They want to malign our reputation.

So let's talk about something which is there in the film. In Apartment, are we looking at a hard hitting dramatic thriller?
Yes, absolutely. It is an absolutely hard hitting psychological thriller. There is a lot of grit element in it and it is very fast paced, edge of the seat thriller. As for my character in the film, it is not very complicated. In fact for that matter, both Neetu and I are fairly simple characters. She is playing a negative villainous role while I am playing a victim. Simple. Also, when I get victimised then there is this trauma and pain also that come in.

Talking about trauma and pain, one is reminded of your last release Rokkk where your character got possessed. Tanushree, since you were pining a lot of hope on Rokkk, weren't you overtly disappointed with it's non-performance at the box office?
On the contrary I was quite happy with the way Rokkk performed at the box office. Collections prove that it did a lot better than some other films that had come during that time. My producers were very happy and they laughed all the way to the bank. The film was made on a shoestring budget and it recovered more than what was expected. The DVD is also out now while there would be a satellite premier soon. For the kind of budget it was made in, we had many avenues from which we got quick recovery.

I guess it is all about the perception factor in that case.
That's true. The producers didn't do aggressive promotion after the film's release due to which not many know that the film actually made a lot of money in the B and C centres. Also, I was looking forward to some good appreciation coming my way and in that aspect, the film really worked for me. I don't have any complains around the promotion strategy though because I truly believe that when a film is good, it doesn't have to be promoted aggressively; especially in a negative way. It can just be done in such a clean manner; something that makes me very happy with Rokkk. There were no controversies whatsoever.

No wonder, you sound dissatisfied with the promotion of Apartment.
(Sighs) Apartment is a very good film. Now if it was bad then I wouldn't have cared about the promotion since I believed in the film right from the time it was narrated to me. I still believe in the makers. Also, I believe in the film till date because I have seen it. With the kind of budget assigned to it, it looks like it has been made on a much larger scale. Whether it is cinematography, clothes, locations, casting - everything is so appropriate. This is where Jag's expertise as a filmmaker with international experience comes in. The entire team was so carefully put together and resultantly, Apartment looks so sleek. This is why it breaks my heart to see all kind of stories floated around in the market. I don't see why this is happening.

India No. 5 in web crime list

India has risen to the fifth spot in the world's cybercrime ranking for 2009 from the 11th spot in 2008 and now only lags behind the US, China, Brazil and Germany.
The report, compiled by Internet security products firm Symantec, shows that cyber criminals are now increasingly going for Web-ased attacks using social-networking sites compared to the earlier dependence on the e-mail route used to steal information about credit cards and bank accounts.
Symantec vice-president David Freer told MAIL TODAY that social-networking sites are becoming the target for cyber attackers because these involve a set of like-minded people who trust each other. "It is the cultural trust that cyber attackers find easy to exploit," he added.
Freer explained that when a file is opened on a social-networking site it can result in a malicious ware being downloaded on to a PC, which is then used by the cybercriminals to steal the required data.
He said that cyber-criminals have also turned their attention toward enterprises, given the potential for monetary gain from compromised corporate intellectual property.
"The report found that attackers are leveraging the abundance of personal information openly available on social-networking sites to synthesise socially engineered attacks on key individuals within targeted companies," he added.
Freer said in 2009 India ranked second in Webbased attacks in the Asia Pacific region, which includes China, Australia, Japan and the ASEAN countries, with 16 per cent of the total attacks.
This is a significant rise from 2008 when India accounted for less than one per cent of Web-based attacks in the region.
Globally, in 2009, India ranked seventh with three per cent of the total webbased attacks worldwide.
According to the report, there has also been a surge of 'bot' or robotic software used for cyber attacks.
India saw an average of 788 bots per day in 2009. About 62,623 distinct bot-infected computers were observed in India during the period.
With 50 per cent, Mumbai had the highest number of bot-infected computers, followed by Delhi at 13 per cent and Hyderabad at seven per cent. "Throughout 2009, we saw botnetinfected computers being advertised in the underground economy for as little as three cents per computer," Freer pointed out.
It also turned out to be a turbulent year for spam. In 2009, spam made up 88 per cent of all e-mails observed by Symantec. Of the 107 billion spam messages distributed globally per day on average, as much as 85 per cent were from botnets.
The 10 major bot networks, including Cutwail, Rustock and Mega-D, now control at least five million computers.
As many as 71 per cent of the malicious codes were propagated through file-sharing, 35 per cent through file transfer and common Internet file system and 17 per cent through remotely exploitable vulnerability.