Health & Wellness
© iStockphoto/Elena Elisseeva
Salad and tomatoes.
A difference in brain activity patterns may explain why some people are able to maintain a significant weight loss while others regain the weight, according to a new study by researchers with The Miriam Hospital.
The investigators report that when individuals who have kept the weight off for several years were shown pictures of food, they were more likely to engage the areas of the brain associated with behavioral control and visual attention, compared to obese and normal weight participants.
Findings from this brain imaging study, published by the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that successful weight loss maintainers may learn to respond differently to food cues.
Resveratrol Lowers Blood Sugar Levels in Mouse Study
The much touted compound resveratrol shows some promise as a future treatment for type 2 diabetes, but drinking wine or taking resveratrol supplements isn't likely to do diabetic people much good, researchers say.
Resveratrol, found in red wine, was found to lower blood sugar levels and improve insulin levels when injected directly into the brains of mice fed very high-calorie diets in a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW).
The finding suggests that the brain plays a key role in resveratrol's beneficial effect on diabetes and that the benefits may occur independently of diet and body weight.
If this is true, new type 2 diabetes treatments targeting the brain may be possible, lead researcher Roberto Coppari, PhD, tells WebMD.
Finding might yield insights into diseases like Parkinson's, experts say
People with a specific genetic mutation seem to be "smarter," in the sense of being able to adapt to changing situations and continue to make correct decisions quickly, a new German study suggests.
And people graced with this genotype showed more activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, activity that is probably linked to metabolism of the brain chemical dopamine.
"Dopamine is related to reward so perhaps some individuals can make quicker decisions because they have more dopamine in the prefrontal cortex," said Paul Sanberg, a professor of neurosurgery and director of the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa.
The findings, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raise the hope of one day helping people with disorders such as Parkinson's disease that involve dopamine irregularities.
About 3,400 years ago, a mysterious plague is believed to have spread across Europe, killing vast numbers of people.
No written records of the unknown disease survive today.
But scientists at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute have helped to uncover another piece of evidence in the genes of modern Caucasians.
A small cluster of genes protected part of early Europe's population against a disease that must have been horrific, perhaps on the scale of the Black Death.
But there was a cost: those genes, still carried by many today, raise the risks of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension.
© Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
Researchers have found that in groups with diasporas, behavior is not necessarily genetically handed down, but rather it is something culturally absorbed.
Socially learned behavior and belief are much better candidates than genetics to explain the self-sacrificing behavior we see among strangers in societies, from soldiers to blood donors to those who contribute to food banks. This is the conclusion of a study by Adrian V. Bell and colleagues from the University of California Davis in the Oct. 12 edition of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Altruism has long been a subject of interest to evolutionary social scientists. Altruism presents them with a difficult line to argue: behaviors that help unrelated people while being costly to the individual and creating a risk for genetic descendants could not likely be favored by evolution, at least by common evolutionary arguments.
The researchers used a mathematical equation, called the Price equation, that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups. Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey (whose questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries) as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups. When compared they found that the role of culture had a much greater scope for explaining our pro-social behavior than genetics.
Women abused by intimate partners suffer higher rates of a wide variety of doctor-diagnosed medical maladies compared to women who were never abused, according to a new study of more than 3,000 women.
Many of these health problems are not commonly understood as being associated with violence, such as abdominal pain, chest pain, headaches, acid reflux, urinary tract infections, and menstrual disorders.
"Roughly half of the diagnoses we examined were more common in abused women than in other women," said Amy Bonomi, lead author of the study and associate professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.
"Abuse is associated with much more than cuts and bruises."
Compared with never-abused women, victims had an almost six-fold increase in clinically identified substance abuse, a more than three-fold increase in receiving a depression diagnosis, a three-fold increase in sexually transmitted diseases and a two-fold increase in lacerations.
Bonomi led the study, co-authored with researchers from the Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, and published in the Oct. 12, 2009 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
© Corbis
A nurse took a patient's pulse in the influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital in 1918.
The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the deadliest plague in human history, killing more than 50 million people worldwide. Now it appears that a small number of the deaths may have been caused not by the virus, but by a drug used to treat it: aspirin.
Dr. Karen M. Starko, author of one of the earliest papers connecting aspirin use with Reye's syndrome, has published an article suggesting that overdoses of the relatively new "wonder drug" could have been deadly.
What raised Dr. Starko's suspicions is that high doses of aspirin, amounts considered unsafe today, were commonly used to treat the illness, and the symptoms of aspirin overdose may have been difficult to distinguish from those of the flu, especially among those who died soon after they became ill.
After Janice Van Wagner's mother died of breast cancer two years ago, her sense of loss was overwhelming.
"I was devastated," said Van Wagner, 34, of Los Angeles. "I felt like a piece of me had gone missing. It was like I was split in two."
While most people grieve when someone close to them dies, the emotional intensity tends to recede with time. But for some, like Van Wagner, their pain persists, sometimes for months or even years, often making it impossible to resume a normal life.
"I was kind of stuck in a repetitive thinking about the suffering that she went through in the last month of her life and the last few weeks," Van Wagner said. "I just kept reliving that over and over again in my mind."
This unrelenting form of mourning, which affects an estimated 10 percent to 20 percent of people who have lost someone close, is gaining recognition as a distinct psychological syndrome known as "complicated grief."
Type 2 diabetes may not be contagious, but it certainly appears to be spreading. In 1958, the prevalence was 0.9%. By 2000 it had climbed to 4.4%, and it's projected to hit 7.2% in 2050.
What accounts for this? Perhaps it's the way residential neighborhoods have evolved to accommodate car rides to fast-food restaurants instead of walks to corner grocery stands.
A study being published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine calculates that people who live in neighborhoods that are conducive to physical activity and healthy eating have a 38% reduced risk of developing diabetes compared with people who don't.
A majority of Americans base their beliefs and moral decisions on feelings, and reject the idea of absolute truth, according to the results of a study released last month. The Barna Research survey shows that 64 percent of adults and 83 percent of teenagers interviewed for the study believe that truth is always relative to the person and their situation.
Adult respondents who classed themselves as "born-again Christians" were more likely to reject moral relativism, with 32 percent affirming their belief in moral absolutes. But there was little difference in the responses of Christian and non-Christian teenagers: only one in 10 "born-again" teenagers accepted the idea of absolute moral truth, almost the same rate as their non-Christian peers.
"The study indicates that humans left to themselves are not able to find absolutes; they become their own standard of truth," says Seventh-day Adventist theologian Dr. Angel Rodriguez. "Yet social life is not harmonious unless there are absolutes acknowledged by those who are a part of it. Otherwise chaos will reign through selfishness.
