July 17, 2008, 9:14 PM CT

Bullying-suicide link explored in new study

Scientists at Yale School of Medicine have found signs of an apparent correlation between bullying, being bullied and suicide in children, as per a new review of studies from 13 countries reported in the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health

"While there is no definitive evidence that bullying makes kids more likely to kill themselves, now that we see there's a likely association, we can act on it and try to prevent it," said review lead author Young-Shin Kim, M.D., assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center.

In the review, Kim and colleague Bennett Leventhal, M.D., analyzed 37 studies that examined bullying and suicide among children and adolescents. The studies took place in the United States, Canada, several European countries (including the United Kingdom and Gera number of), South Korea, Japan and South Africa.

Almost all of the studies found connections between being bullied and suicidal thoughts among children. Five reported that bullying victims were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children were.

Not just the victims were in danger: "The perpetrators who are the bullies also have an increased risk for suicidal behaviors," Kim said.

However, the way the studies were designed made it impossible for scientists to determine conclusively whether bullying leads to suicide, Kim said. In addition, the authors report that most of the studies failed to take into account the influence of factors like gender, psychiatric problems and a history of suicide attempts......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 9:05 PM CT

Low-fat diets not best for weight loss

A two-year study led by scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) reveals that low-carbohydrate and Mediterranean diets may be just as safe and effective in achieving weight loss as the standard, medically prescribed low-fat diet, as per a new study reported in the prestigious New England Journal (NEJM)

The study was conducted by BGU and the Nuclear Research Center in Dimona, Israel, in collaboration with Harvard University, The University of Leipzig, Gera number of and the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

In the two-year study, 322 moderately obese people were intensively monitored and were randomly assigned one of three diets: a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet; a Mediterranean calorie-restricted diet with the highest level of dietary fiber and monounsaturated/saturated fat; or a low-carbohydrate diet with the least amount of carbohydrates, highest fat, protein, and dietary cholesterol. The low-carb dieters had no caloric intake restrictions.

Eventhough participants actually decreased their total daily calories consumed by a similar amount, net weight loss from the low-fat diet after two years was only 6.5 lbs. (2.9 kg) in comparison to 10 lbs. (4.4 kg) on the Mediterranean diet, and 10.3 lbs. (4.7 kg) on the low-carbohydrate diet. "These weight reduction rates are comparable to results from physician-prescribed weight loss medications," explains Dr. Iris Shai, the lead researcher......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 8:58 PM CT

Men and women may need different diets

Diet can strongly influence how long you live and your reproductive success, but now researchers have discovered that what works for males can be very different for females.

In the first study of its kind, the scientists have shown that gender plays a major role in determining which diet is better suited to promoting longer life or better reproductive success.

In the evolutionary "battle of the sexes", traits that benefit males are costly when expressed in females and vice versa. This conflict may have implications for human diet, aging and reproduction, says a team of researchers from UNSW, the University of Sydney and Massey University.

"When it comes to choosing the right diet, we need to look more closely to the individual, their sex and their reproductive stage in life," says Associate Professor Rob Brooks, Director of the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. "It may be, for example, that women in their child-bearing years need a different diet to those who are post-menopausal.

"It also underlines the important lesson that what we want to eat or, if you like, what we're programmed to eat, is not necessarily best for us." The scientists are conducting long-term studies on Australian black field crickets and have discovered that the lifespan of both males and females is maximised on high-carbohydrate, low-protein diets, they say in the latest issue of Current Biology........ Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 8:36 PM CT

Many Patients In A Fog After ER Visit

Every year, more than 115 million patients enter emergency rooms at hospitals around the nation. And more than three-quarters of them leave with an impression of what happened or what should happen next that doesn't match what their emergency care team would want.

That's the finding of a new study led by University of Michigan Health System researchers, and published early online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine The results suggest that emergency room teams need to do a better job of making sure patients go home with clear information and instructions and that patients and their loved ones shouldn't leave until they fully comprehend their situation.

The scientists carried out detailed interviews with 140 English-speaking patients who visited one of two emergency departments, and were released to go home. They compared those interviews with the patients' medical records, and found a serious mismatch between what doctors and nurses found or advised, and what patients comprehended.

What's worse, patients were pretty sure of what they "knew" 80 percent of the time even if what they knew wasn't quite right.

"It is critical that emergency patients understand their diagnosis, their care, and perhaps most important, their discharge instructions," says lead author Kirsten Engel, M.D., a former U-M emergency medicine fellow and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar who is now at Northwestern University. "It is disturbing that so a number of patients do not understand their post-emergency department care, and that they do not even recognize where the gaps in understanding are. Patients who fail to follow discharge instructions may have a greater likelihood of complications after leaving the emergency department"......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 8:33 PM CT

Magnetic Nanoparticles to Combat Cancer

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a potential new therapy against cancer that attaches magnetic nanoparticles to cancer cells, allowing them to be captured and carried out of the body. The therapy, which has been tested in the laboratory and will now be looked at in survival studies, is detailed online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"We've been able to use magnetic nanoparticles to capture free-floating cancer cells and then take them out of the body," said John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute. "This technology may be of special importance in the therapy of ovary cancer where the malignancy is typically spread by free-floating cancer cells released from the primary tumor into the abdominal cavity."

The idea came to the research team from the work of Ken Scarberry, a Ph.D. student in Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Scarberry originally conceived of the idea as a means of extracting viruses and virally infected cells when his advisor, Chemistry professor John Zhang, had another idea. He asked if the technology could be applied to cancer. Scarberry suggested it might be an effective means of preventing cancer cells from spreading.

They began by testing the treatment on mice. After giving the cancer cells in the mice a fluorescent green tag and staining the magnetic nanoparticles red, they were able to apply a magnet and move the green cancer cells to the abdominal region......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 8:10 PM CT

Ways Circadian Disruption Affects Human Health

Growing evidence indicates that exposure to irregular patterns of light and darkness can cause the human circadian system to fall out of synchrony with the 24-hour solar day, negatively affecting human health - but researchers have been unable to effectively study the relationship between circadian disruptions and human maladies.

A study by scientists in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center (LRC) provides a new framework for studying the effects of circadian disruption on breast cancer, obesity, sleep disorders, and other health problems.

Light and dark patterns are the major synchronizer of circadian rhythms - the biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours - to the solar day. Inadequate or irregular light exposure can cause circadian rhythm disruptions that are believed to manifest into a variety of health ailments. However, ecological studies to measure human light exposure are virtually nonexistent, making it difficult to determine if, in fact, light-induced circadian disruption directly affects human health.

LRC scientists have created a small, head-mounted device to measure an individual's daily rest and activity patterns, as well as exposure to circadian light - short-wavelength light, especially natural light from the blue sky, that stimulates the circadian system. The device, called the Daysimeter, was sent to 43 female nurses across the country to measure their daily exposure to circadian light, as per Mark Rea, director of the LRC and principal investigator on the project......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 7:48 PM CT

Teen smokers struggle to kick the habit

Most teenagers who smoke cigarettes make repeated attempts to quit but most are unsuccessful, as per new research from the Universit de Montral and funded by the Canadian Cancer Society.

"The study observed that teen smokers make their first serious attempt to quit after only two and a half months of smoking, and by the time they have smoked for 21 months they have lost confidence in their ability to quit," says Dr. Jennifer O'Loughlin, the study's lead author and a researcher from the Universit de Montral's department of social and preventive medicine.

Dr. O'Loughlin analyzed data from 319 Montreal teens who completed reports on their smoking habits every three months for five years. The study, published online (today) in the American Journal of Public Health, observed that teen smokers progress through stages or milestones in their attempts to stop smoking. These stages are:.

• Confidently declaring that they have stopped smoking forever, one to two months after their first puff;

• Expressing a conscious desire to quit with a growing realization that quitting requires serious effort;

• Over the next two years, as cravings and withdrawal symptoms increase, gradually losing confidence in their ability to quit;

• A year later, they are smoking daily and now realize they still smoke because it is very hard to quit;

........ Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 7:38 PM CT

Can you be born a couch potato?

The key to good health is to be physically active. The key to being active is to be born that way?

The well-documented importance of exercise in maintaining fitness has created the idea that individuals can manage their health by increasing their activity. But what if the inclination to engage in physical activity is itself significantly affected by factors that are predetermined? Two new studies suggest that the inclination to exercise may be strongly affected by genetics.

Controlled experiments into the effects of genetics on human activity have yet to be attempted, but recent studies on mice the standard test species for mammalian genetics have found genetic influences.

In a paper recently reported in the journal Physiological Genomics, a team of scientists led by University of North Carolina at Charlotte kinesiologist J. Timothy Lightfoot announced that they had found six specific chromosomal locations that significantly correlate to the inheritance of a trait of high physical activity in mice, indicating that at least six genetic locations were affecting activity. Now, in a study forthcoming in The Journal of Heredity, the same team has identified 17 other genetic locations that also appear to control the level of physical activity in mice through interaction with each other, a genetic effect known as epistasis. Together, the located genes account for approximately 84% of the behavioral differences between mice that exhibit low activity levels and mice that show high activity traits......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 16, 2008, 7:15 PM CT

Why We Overestimate Future Choices

When people make choices for future consumption, they select a wider variety than when they plan to immediately consume the products. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines the reasons behind this diversification of choices.

"Consumers' tendency to diversify their choices more for future than for present consumption has been demonstrated to be a robust phenomenon and to occur in a variety of situations," write authors Linda Court Salisbury (Boston College) and Fred M. Feinberg (University of Michigan).

Prior explanations for this diversification focused on the fact that people aren't sure how their tastes for items might change over time. The new study proposes that "stochastic noise" (unpredictability or randomness) explains the over-diversification phenomenon.

The authors performed computer simulations of decision-making processes involving snacks. They then compared the simulations to real data collected from undergraduates. "We isolate and quantify three main potential drivers of diversification: relative brand attractiveness ("how strongly some brands are preferred to others"), brand attractiveness uncertainty ("how uncertain consumers are of how much they like each available brand"), and degree of stochastic inflation ("how much more uncertain consumers are about how much they'll like each brand in the future, versus in immediate consumptive experiences")......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 15, 2008, 10:43 PM CT

Cognitive Behavior Therapy For Chronic Fatigue

Cognitive behaviour treatment is effective in treating the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, as per a recent systematic review carried out by Cochrane Researchers.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a potentially long-lasting illness that can cause considerable distress and disability. Some estimates suggest it may affect as a number of as 1 in 100 of the population globally. There is no widely accepted explanation for the disease and patients are currently offered a variety of different therapys. Cognitive behaviour treatment (CBT) uses psychological techniques to balance negative thoughts that may impair recovery with more realistic alternatives. In treating CFS, these techniques are combined with a gradual increase in activity levels.

The scientists looked at data from 15 studies involving a total of 1,043 patients with CFS. The studies compared the effects of CBT with those of usual care and other psychological therapies and suggest that in both cases CBT is more effective at reducing the severity of symptoms, provided patients persist with therapy.

Further research is mandatory to determine whether CBT is more beneficial than other forms of therapy, such as exercise and relaxation therapies. The scientists also suggest that CBT could be more effective if used as part of a combination therapy approach......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source