Health & WellnessS


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More evidence pre-term birth tied to autism

Will Dunham
Reuters
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:25 UTC
A U.S. study looking at children born more than three months prematurely provided fresh evidence on Thursday linking pre-term birth and autism.

These children were about two to three times as likely to show signs of autism at age 2 as measured in a standard screening tool compared to other children, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Pediatrics.
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Sherlock

Too Much TV Linked to Future Fast-Food Intake


PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:42 UTC
High-school kids who watch too much TV are likely to have bad eating habits five years in the future. Research published in BioMed Central's open access International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity followed almost 2000 high- and middle-school children and found that TV viewing times predict a poor diet in the future.

Dr Daheia Barr-Anderson worked with a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota to investigate the relationship between television and diet. She said, "To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the association between television viewing and diet over the transition from adolescence into young adulthood. We've shown that TV viewing during adolescence predicts poorer dietary intake patterns five years later".
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Frog

Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You

Jane E. Brody
The New York Times
Mon, 26 Jan 2009 06:48 UTC
Ask mothers why babies are constantly picking things up from the floor or ground and putting them in their mouths, and chances are they'll say that it's instinctive - that that's how babies explore the world. But why the mouth, when sight, hearing, touch and even scent are far better at identifying things?

When my young sons were exploring the streets of Brooklyn, I couldn't help but wonder how good crushed rock or dried dog droppings could taste when delicious mashed potatoes were routinely rejected.

Since all instinctive behaviors have an evolutionary advantage or they would not have been retained for millions of years, chances are that this one too has helped us survive as a species. And, indeed, accumulating evidence strongly suggests that eating dirt is good for you.
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Scientists See the Light: How Vision Sends its Message to the Brain


PhysOrg
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:27 UTC
Scientists have known for more than 200 years that vision begins with a series of chemical reactions when light strikes the retina, but the specific chemical processes have largely been a mystery. A team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland, have she new light on this process by "capturing" this chemical communication for future study. This research, published in the February 2009 issue of The FASEB Journal , may lead to the development of new treatments for some forms of blindness and vision disorders.

At the center of the discovery is the signaling of rhodopsin to transducin. Rhodopsin is a pigment in the eye that helps detect light. Transducin is a protein (sometimes called "GPCR") which ultimately signals the brain that light is present. The researchers were able to "freeze frame" the chemical communication between rhodopsin and transducin to study how this takes place and what goes wrong at the molecular level in certain disorders.
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Alarm Clock

How Your Body Clock Avoids Hitting the Snooze Button


PhysOrg
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:43 UTC
Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London have discovered a new part of the mechanism which allows our body clocks to reset themselves on a molecular level.

Circadian clocks regulate the daily fluctuations of many physiological and behavioral aspects in life, and are synchronized with our surrounding environment via light or temperature cycles. Natural changes in the length of the day mean that an animal's circadian clock often has to reset itself on a molecular level, to avoid getting out of sync with the changing calendar.

Professor Ralf Stanewsky and his team from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences study the circadian clocks of Drosophila, a type of fruit fly. Writing in the journal Current Biology, they report that the resetting process is governed by three factors, called Cryptochrome, Jetlag and Timeless.
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Health

Video game conditioning spills over into real life

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:03 UTC
Image
© Paul FletcherThe rival team's logo in a cycling video game has been found to be off-putting to players days later.

Whether it's World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero or Mario Kart, lessons learned in video games may transcend computers, PlayStations and Wiis. New research suggests that virtual worlds sway real-life choices.

Volunteers who played a simple cycling game learned to favour one team's jersey and avoid another's. Days later, most subjects subconsciously avoided the same jersey in a real-world test.

As video games become more immersive and realistic, all involved ought to realise the potential, says Paul Fletcher, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University, UK, who led the study

"I don't think this is evidence that video games are bad," says Fletcher, a former gamer. "We just need to be aware that associations formed within the game transfer to the real world - for good or bad."
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Sherlock

Language Performance and Differences in Brain Activity Possibly Affected by Sex


PhysOrg
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:00 UTC
In a new fMRI study conducted in the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Clinical Research Laboratory (Montpellier I University, France) and published by Elsevier in the February 2009 issue of Cortex, researchers found differences among male and female groups on activation strength linked to verbal fluency (words generation).

Results from previous fMRI studies identifying the neural basis of sex differences in language production are still in debate. Particularly, the question of group differences in verbal abilities which might account for neurocognitive differences elicited between men and women, still remain unresolved. Although the cerebral regions involved are identical for both men and women, men show greater activation than women, irrespective of performance levels in classical language regions (frontal, temporal and occipital lobes, and cerebellum).

From a representative sample of 331 French speakers, students showing a sex difference for a verbal fluency task, with women scoring higher than men as reported in the literature, four groups of 11 healthy right handed subjects were selected a priori. Selection was based on sex and contrasted scores in a fluency task i.e. high versus low verbal fluency scores. The 44 subjects were submitted to a covert verbal fluency fMRI protocol.
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Health

Start your Detox Yet? Chemicals May Reduce Fertility....


Ananova
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:29 UTC
Chemicals widely used in food packaging, pesticides and clothing may reduce a woman's fertility, experts have said.

Exposure to perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) could influence how long it takes for a woman to fall pregnant, they said.

Comment: This is a major health issue we love to discuss. The conservative take by the authors helps them retain their funding. If you want a really interesting look at how chemicals in our food, water and environment affect our health, Detoxify or Die by Sherry Rogers is available here.

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Health

Concussion's Effects May Linger for Decades


HealthDay News
Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:26 UTC
Athletes who suffer a concussion can experience a decline in their mental and physical processes more than 30 years later, according to a Canadian study that's the first to identify these kinds of long-term effects.

The researchers examined 40 healthy, former university-level athletes between the ages of 50 and 60. Of those, 19 had suffered a concussion more than 30 years ago, and 21 had no history of concussion.

Compared to those who were concussion-free, the participants who'd been concussed only once or twice in their early adulthood showed declines in attention and memory, as well as a slowing of some types of movement.
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Arrow Up

Gene therapy cures form of 'bubble boy disease'

Malcolm Ritter
Associated Press
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:40 UTC
Gene therapy seems to have cured eight of 10 children who had potentially fatal "bubble boy disease," according to a study that followed their progress for about four years after treatment. The eight patients were no longer on medication for the rare disease, which cripples the body's defenses against infection. The successful treatment is reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and offers hope for treating other diseases with a gene therapy approach.
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