Workout music: give me the beat boys
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Rock, hip hop or R&B, if it has a pounding tempo music can really rock your cardio workout.
Fitness experts say boosted by that backbeat you might not even notice that youre working harder.
“Higher tempo certainly seems to drive the intensity of exercise performance,” said Dr. Cedric Bryant, chief science officer of the American Council on Exercise (ACE).
Cord blood transplants a viable option in leukemia
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Adult patients with leukemia fare just as well when they get stem cell transplants taken from a cord blood bank as they do from a well-suited adult donor, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said umbilical cord transplants are a viable option for adults with leukemia who urgently need a bone marrow transplant to replace cells destroyed by chemotherapy or radiation treatments, but cannot find a donor.
“What we found is when you look at the outcome of leukemia-free survival, which is the likelihood of a patient being alive without disease, it’s the same whether you are transplanting using an adult graft which is from an adult donor or a cord blood unit,” said Dr. Mary Eapen of the Medical College of Wisconsin, whose study appears in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Quitting smoking may ease stress levels
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Smokers often say they need a cigarette to calm their nerves, but a new study suggests that after a person kicks the habit, chronic stress levels may go down.
The findings, say researchers, should give smokers reassurance that quitting will not deprive them of a valuable stress reliever.
In a study of 469 smokers who tried to quit after being hospitalized for heart disease, the researchers found that those who remained abstinent for a year showed a reduction in their perceived stress levels. In contrast, stress levels were essentially unchanged among heart patients who went back to smoking.
US doctors say 1 in 5 insurance claims mishandled
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Claims-processing errors by health insurance companies create billions of dollars in unnecessary administrative costs, slow down payments to doctors and frustrate patients, the main U.S. doctor’s group said Monday.
The American Medical Association said one-fifth of all claims are mishandled by health insurers.
Begun in 2008, the association’s annual “National Health Insurer Report Card” rated the nation’s eight largest health insurers in how they handle claims, and concluded that if all problems were resolved the system would save $15.5 billion annually in administrative costs.
Brain scan study confirms role of Alzheimer’s genes
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A study of brain scans has confirmed the role of several genes linked with Alzheimer’s disease, and turned up two others that are worth exploring, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
A team at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston used magnetic resonance imaging or MRI scans to study changes in brain structures—such as the size of the hippocampus and amygdala—in 700 healthy volunteers and Alzheimer’s patients.
They used computer programs to sort through the genetic sequences of the 700 volunteers to see which gene mutations are most linked with these changes.
Russia registers first polio death in a decade
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Russia has confirmed its first death from polio in more than a decade, the country’s top public health official said on Sunday, Interfax news agency reported.
A citizen of the former-Soviet Central Asian country of Uzbekistan died of polio in the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg in early June, Gennady Onishchenko was quoted as saying. “Tests have confirmed this,” he said.
Onishchenko’s spokeswoman was unavailable to comment on the report on Sunday.
Parents Throw Tantrum over Chocolate Formula
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With childhood obesity rates soaring, a new chocolate-flavored toddler formula has sparked outrage from parents and nutritionists and has forced the manufacturer to pull it from the market.
The sugary beverage, marketed under the name Enfagrow Premium, was aimed at children as young as one year of age - especially picky or erratic eaters who need “nutritional support” after being weaned off breast milk or formula, the manufacturer, Mead Johnson, said in a prepared statement.
The company claims the beverage has “a superior nutritional profile to many other beverages typically consumed by toddlers, including apple juice, grape juice and similarly flavored dairy drinks.”
Child obesity linked to domestic violence
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Mothers who reported some form of intimate partner violence were more likely than others to have children who were obese by age 5, U.S. researchers found.
Dr. Renee Boynton-Jarrett of the Boston University School of Medicine and colleagues tracked 1,595 children born from 1998 to 2000 until the children were age 5.
The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found 49.4 percent of mothers reported some form of intimate partner violence and of these women, 16.5 percent of the children were obese at age 5.
Obesity Prevention Starts in the Womb
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Yesterday, at the Second Canadian Student Obesity meeting, currently being held in Ottawa, Kristi Adamo from the University of Ottawa and the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario presented the Keynote dinner presentation on “Balancing Work and Life on the Pathway of a Research Scientist“.
Kristi Adamo has a background in nutrition, exercise physiology and genetics of obesity. Her interests lie in the irregular metabolic function associated with childhood obesity and the role diet and exercise may play in predisposition or prevention. She has particular interest in early intervention to prevent child obesity and is focusing on intervening during the gestational period and halting the intergenerational cycle of obesity.
In fact, several of the presentations at this meeting emphasized the fascinating biology of how early fetal development and influences in the first weeks and months after birth can change the lifelong risk for obesity by changing how genes are switched on or off through mechanisms like imprinting and how maternal and environmental influences during this critical period can change how the complex circuitry of appetite and reward are “hardwired” into the brain.
Research: Answer to saliva mystery has practical impact
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Researchers at Rice University, Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have solved a long-standing mystery about why some fluids containing polymers—including saliva—form beads when they are stretched and others do not.
The findings are published online this week in the journal Nature Physics.
Study co-author Matteo Pasquali, professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, said the study answers fundamental scientific questions and could ultimately lead to improvements as diverse as ink-jet printing, nanomaterial fiber spinning and drug dispensers for “personalized medicine.”
On the ice, checking may triple preteen injuries
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Preteen hockey players are more than three times as likely to get hurt if body checking is allowed, researchers from Canada said Tuesday, and the smallest kids take the hardest hits.
While the findings might not come as a huge surprise, Canada is split on whether or not to permit 11- and 12-year-olds, the so-called Pee Wees, to use the technique, in which players use their bodies to knock over opponents.
High injury rates have been a mainstay of the arguments against body checking, but not all studies have reached the same conclusions. For instance, another Canadian study recently suggested it might be safe for kids as young as 9 years old to use body checking.
Video Study Finds Risky Food-Safety Behavior More Common Than Thought
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How safe is the food we get from restaurants, cafeterias and other food-service providers? A new study from North Carolina State University — the first study to place video cameras in commercial kitchens to see how precisely food handlers followed food-safety guidelines – discovered that risky practices can happen more often than previously thought.
“Meals prepared outside the home have been implicated in up to 70 percent of food poisoning outbreaks, making them a vital focus area for food safety professionals,” says Dr. Ben Chapman, assistant professor and food safety specialist in the department of family and consumer sciences at NC State and lead author of the paper. “We set out to see how closely food handlers were complying with food safety guidance, so that we can determine how effective training efforts are.”
In order to get firsthand data on these food-safety practices, researchers placed small video cameras in unobtrusive spots around eight food-service kitchens that volunteered to participate in the study.
Poor health? Easier for some to blame bad genes than change lifestyle
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Does knowing that genes are partly responsible for your health condition mean you are less likely to be motivated to find out about the benefits of behavioral changes? According to Dr. Suzanne O’Neill from the National Human Genome Research Institute/National Institutes of Health, and her colleagues, people on the whole are still interested in how health habits affect disease risk. However, those with the greatest need to change their behaviors are more likely to favor genetic explanations for their diseases and the more behavioral risk factors they have, the less likely they are to be interested in behavior change information. The study1 is published online in Springer’s journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.
The completion of the Human Genome Project has led to increased availability of genetic risk information linking gene variants to a number of common health conditions. There is some concern that this genetic risk information might prompt some individuals to give genetic causation undue importance while downplaying the contribution of well-known behavioral and environmental factors, leading to reduced motivation to make behavioral changes. This potential misinterpretation of genetic information may undermine public health efforts to promote the behavioral changes needed to prevent disease.
Sleep-Deprived Nurses May Struggle to Remain Vigilant During 12-Hour Shifts
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A small percentage of nurses struggle to remain vigilant during successive 12-hour shifts, according to a research abstract that will be presented Tuesday, June 8, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas, at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.
Results indicate that lapses of attention among nurses working successive 12-hour shifts ranged from zero to 48 lapses per vigilance test. Although half of nurses committed no more than one lapse, 10 percent of nurses had nine or more lapses during the testing period. Further analysis revealed that 39 percent of nurses had moderate lapses and seven percent had frequent lapses. Factors associated with lapses included sleep prior to shift, caffeine use and fatigue levels.
“There are a small percentage of nurses that appear to have impaired ability to maintain vigilance during a neurobehavioral test,” said principal investigator Jeanne Geiger-Brown, PhD, RN, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore, Md.
Innovative Technology Could Make Fat the Cure for What Ails You
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New technology developed by University of Virginia inventors involving adipose stem cells – adult stem cells found in fatty tissue – could one day be used to treat patients with severe wounds and other serious conditions.
The U.Va. Patent Foundation recently licensed a series of novel ways to identify, grow and use these cells to the GID Group, putting the U.Va. discoveries on the path to commercialization.
Over the past few years, researchers have determined that adipose stem cells have therapeutic potential in a variety of areas, including tissue engineering and treatment of chronic wounds, like those caused by diabetic ulcers; diseases characterized by poor blood flow, such as cardiac ischemia, which leads to heart attacks; and severe burns.
