Study: Downside of digital multitasking. Western Style Diet Makes You Die Young: Study : Health & Medicine. First Posted: Apr 16, 2013 07:12 AM EDT Adhering to a western style diet lowers a person’s chances of achieving older ages in good health and with higher functionality. (Photo : Reuters) Adhering to a western style diet lowers a person's chances of achieving older age in good health and with higher functionality, according to a news release. Like Us on Facebook The latest study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, states that a western style diet, which includes fried and sweet food, processed and red meat, high fat dairy products and refined grains leads to a greater risk of premature death.
"The impact of diet on specific age-related diseases has been studied extensively, but few investigations have adopted a more holistic approach to determine the association of diet with overall health at older ages," says lead investigator Tasnime Akbaraly, PhD, Inserm, Montpellier, France. For the study, researchers examined the findings from the British Whitehall II cohort study. Tiny computer inside the body could treat disease. Get that tune out of your head - scientists find how to get rid of earworms. Pill to live to 150. Teen pot smoking lowers adult IQ? A second look says maybe not. In late August, baby boomers (and others whose teen years were spent in a haze of marijuana smoke) seemed to get the comeuppance they had long feared: A study suggested that early and frequent pot smoking resulted in depressed intelligence scores well into adulthood.
But a new analysis suggests that in assigning blame for the lower IQ scores they found, the authors of that study may themselves have gotten caught in a haze of confusion. Social and economic disadvantage in youth -- a factor that predisposes kids to early marijuana use as well as to adult lives that suppress intelligence scores -- may explain the earlier findings, asserts a Norwegian economist writing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The original study, led by Duke University researcher Madeline Meier, is described here in a Booster Shots blog post (and here's the abstract). Waking Up to Pee. Let’s face it, nothing is more annoying than being woken up mid-slumber because you have to go to the bathroom.
While you may chastise yourself for drinking too much wine with dinner and vow never to do that again, your urgency to pee may have more to do with your genes than how much you drank before bed. MORE: Four Ways to Prevent a UTI A team of Japanese researchers looked at the urination patterns of mice. What they found was that bladder muscle cells are often regulated by circadian rhythms, which is our internal sleep/wake cycle that can be influenced by our genes.
A person with a normal circadian rhythm pees less at night so their body has time to rest and restore without being disturbed. But mice with an abnormal circadian rhythm peed just as much during the day as they did at night, according to the research published in Nature Communications. And while our bladder strength and capacity does change as we age, it’s important to find out what is causing those midnight disruptions. There Are A Thousand Ways To Do An Experiment Wrong. Video: Men Take No Chances With New Birth Control Gel. We see it all the time in television dramas like “Desperate Housewives” or movies like “Knocked Up.” Not taking birth control seriously leads to one thing: surprise pregnancies. And while things end up working out great in the world of fiction and comedy, it’s certainly no laughing matter when a birth control flub happens in real life. That’s where this new experimental treatment comes in. Scientists in California have developed a new birth control gel that’s showing promising results.
But unlike most forms of contraceptive, this product is made for men. Essentially, the gel consists of a combination of two hormones: testosterone, which inhibits a man’s ability to produce sperm; and Nestorone, which boosts testosterone’s effects. Researchers tested the gel on 99 men over a six-month period. “The study, in effect, showed two things. Talk about mass-market appeal. Now, since this is being developed in a lab at UCLA, there’s no way to invest at this time.
Schizophrenic brains try to repair. Most neurons are found in tissue near the surface of the brain, but people with schizophrenia have a high density of neurons in deeper areas. The researchers suggest this is because the neurons are migrating towards the surface, where they are lacking, in response to the disease. Image: Sashkinw/iStockphoto New NeuRA research shows that the brains of people with schizophrenia may attempt to repair damage caused by the disease, in another example of the adult brain’s capacity to change and grow.
Prof Cyndi Shannon Weickert, Dr Dipesh Joshi and colleagues from Neuroscience Research Australia studied the brains of people with schizophrenia and focussed on one of the hardest-hit regions, the orbitofrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain involved in regulating emotional and social behaviour. Most neurons – brain cells that transmit information – are found in tissue near the surface of the brain. This paper is published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. How was this study done? Spanking linked to mental illness in new study. Wednesday Waste: Research Edition. In a recent study conducted by Emory University, the college found that “single mother” prairie voles raised less loving children than those with fathers in the vole family.
The study was designed to define the long-term behavior differences in families with only one parent versus two. It was funded by four separate National Institute of Health grants, a T32 institutional training grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and two other NIMH grants. The above study is one of many in a recently compiled list of research funded by taxpayers. Though a few of the studies on the list were pieces of an ongoing research program, most were not.
There was another piece of interesting research, conducted by Yerkes National Primate Research Center at the same university as above, which tested if Chimpanzees’ yawning was based upon empathetic behavior.