07.15.10
Posted in health at 8:23 pm by site admin
Check out this article about one man’s quest to put diabetics on auto-pilot. Although all the components are out there, there has been a gap in connecting the dots.
Manufacturers were afraid of liability, academics were bent on achieving perfection, and the Food and Drug Administration was downright jumpy at the thought of letting a computer control a mechanism with life-and-death responsibilities.
Yet most of the components for what researchers were calling an artificial pancreas — an external device the size of an iPod that would duplicate the insulin-secreting and -regulating functions of that organ — were already in place. An insulin pump had been approved back in the late 1970s, and a continuous glucose monitor that read the output of a sensor implanted under the skin was nearing approval. (The first one would hit the market in 2005.) The trick was to connect the two via software, letting the monitor’s information on blood-sugar levels — high or low, rising or falling — serve as the basis for calculating exactly how much insulin to release.
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05.24.10
Posted in health, society at 9:56 pm by site admin
Check out this article that talks about how people who work 10+ hours a day are much more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than those that don’t. The study seemed to be a bit limited and did not factor in other possibly relevant factors. In any case, bottom line, don’t work so much. Having balance is good.
The study doesn’t say how, exactly, long hours at work might affect heart health. To try to pinpoint the effect of work time, Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues took a range of health factors into account in their analysis, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diet and exercise, and whether or not the participants smoked. They also factored in the workers’ rank and salary, since socioeconomic status has been linked to heart health.
In some ways, the people who worked overtime were healthier than those who worked just seven hours a day. They were less likely to drink heavily and smoke, for instance, and they got more exercise. On the other hand, they tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress, having more demanding jobs, and having less control over their work.
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04.26.10
Posted in health, society at 8:25 pm by site admin
Check out this article questioning if there is a link between chocolate and depression. So much for chocolate just being when you are feeling unsatisfied.
When the researchers controlled for other dietary factors that could be linked to mood — such as caffeine, fat and carbohydrate intake — they found only chocolate consumption correlated with mood.
It’s not clear how the two are linked, the authors wrote. It could be that depression stimulates chocolate cravings as a form of self-treatment. Chocolate prompts the release of certain chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, that produce feelings of pleasure.
There is no evidence, however, that chocolate has a sustained benefit on improving mood. Like alcohol, chocolate may contribute a short-term boost in mood followed by a return to depression or a worsened mood. A study published in 2007 in the journal Appetite found that eating chocolate improved mood but only for about three minutes.
It’s also possible that depressed people seek chocolate to improve mood but that the trans fats in some chocolate counteract the effect of omega-3 fatty acid production in the body, the authors said in the paper. Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to improve mental health.
Another theory is that chocolate consumption contributes to depression or that some physiological mechanism, such as stress, drives both depression and chocolate cravings.
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04.18.10
Posted in health at 11:49 am by site admin
Check out this link with a brief discussion on 8 kinda weird/interesting search engines. My favorite is #4: PillBox.
While we’re on the subject of government search engines, how about Pillbox from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. What is it? It’s a search engine for identifying unknown pills. For real! The site warns that it’s still in development and not intended for clinical use, and has all the requisite disclaimers … but it’s still one of the most interesting search engine ideas around. You provide the size, shape, color, and other attributes of a pill, and it returns a list of possible matches along with links for more information about the pill.
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Posted in health at 11:39 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about how teen girls’ drinking may lead to breast cancer later in life.
Teen years are a critical time for potential cancer-producing exposures, she said, because the mammary glands are undergoing rapid growth during that period.
Berkey said she suspects the link is due to alcohol increasing total estrogen levels, raising the likelihood of benign breast disease.
“For me, this is not a surprise,” said Dr. Patricia Ganz, director of cancer prevention and control research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Regular alcohol consumption is known to increase a woman’s risk for both breast cancer and benign breast disease, she said, and “certain forms of BBD increase the risk of breast cancer.”
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04.16.10
Posted in health at 7:55 pm by site admin
Check out this link showing the huge amount of salt in processed food.
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04.15.10
Posted in health at 10:09 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how chocolate can help people with cirrhosis of the liver.
“This study shows a clear association between eating dark chocolate and (lower) portal hypertension and demonstrates the potential importance of improvements in the management of cirrhotic patients,” said Mark Thursz, a professor of hepatology at London’s Imperial College.
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04.07.10
Posted in health at 8:50 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how some discomfort/pain during exercise is a good thing.
Experience at exercise will eventually transform these early trials into feel-good experiences, but at first your systems can’t deliver what exercise demands of them. The sensations of breathlessness and burning muscles, for example, correlate with the intensity of your effort. When you’re out of shape, numerous receptors all over your body beg your brain to slow down: I can’t maintain this. As you beef up each system, however, fewer receptors holler for mercy because your systems are no longer working so close to their maximum capacity. Eventually, the number of receptors screaming at your brain will level off, and more pleasant sensations will be able to rise to a conscious level. The signal that was once an emergency siren will become just a familiar signpost: I’ve pushed this hard before. I can handle it. It’ll be OK.
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02.18.10
Posted in health, science at 12:11 pm by site admin
Check out this article about extreme breath holding.
A Swiss freediver held his breath underwater for 19 minutes and 21 seconds, according to news reports this week. The gasp-inducing feat beat the previous world record by 19 seconds, and blew away the record of 17 minutes and four seconds that magician David Blaine set on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2008.
Extreme breath holders rely on a combination of techniques and training. They train their body to slow down the heart and circulatory system. In comparison to traditional methods, this new wave of breath holders leverage modern technology and train in hyperbaric chambers.
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01.13.10
Posted in Evolution, health at 8:52 pm by site admin
Check out this article discussing prions and the fact that they do mutate and evolve like viruses. Prions are degenerate proteins responsible for diseases such as “mad cow disease”, technically termed bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (CJD).
In the classic sense, prions, which are misfolded versions of the brain protein PrP, cannot mutate because they do not contain DNA or RNA. They can, however, give rise to variants with different properties, possibly due to differences in the folding, or shape, of the proteins. In the study, published December 31 in Science Express, researchers estimated the rate at which prion mutants can appear in cultured human nerve cells. In addition, the study suggests that once variants appear, they persist at low levels, giving rise to a heterogeneous prion population.
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01.06.10
Posted in health, society at 12:11 am by site admin
A friend sent me this article titled Women Who Don’t Live Alone Add More Weight. Bottom line is that if your a women in a relationship, chances are you have gained at least 4lbs. If you have a baby, the number goes up..
After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.
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12.25.09
Posted in health at 9:27 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how stress levels in a mother can cause stress-induced sex selection in children.
A recently published study, however, suggests this ain’t necessarily so. According to Ralph Catalano of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues, writing in the American Journal of Human Biology, stress-induced sex selection can take place long after conception and implantation.
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11.30.09
Posted in health at 1:11 pm by site admin
This article on USA Today talks about how routing cancer screenings do more harm then good. Sometimes its not that simple to know what is going on with the body.
There’s growing evidence that cancer screenings aren’t always helpful — and can sometimes be harmful, say Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin of the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt.
•Last year, the task force said men over age 75 shouldn’t be screened for prostate cancer, noting that men this age are more likely to die of something else before a prostate tumor could harm them. In March, two long-running and highly anticipated studies found that prostate cancer screening saves few, if any, lives but may hurt countless men by leading them to undergo therapies that can cause impotence, incontinence and even death.
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06.15.09
Posted in health at 7:39 pm by site admin
Check out this article talking about how napping is good for your health.
Research on napping is constantly showing positive effects. The results suggest that napping can make you more alert, reduce stress and improve cognitive functioning compared to working all day without rest. A mid-afternoon sleep means that productivity can last long into the night. Researchers at NASA showed that a 30-minute power nap increased cognitive functioning by 40%. The volunteers on the tests found that their memory improved as well as experiencing an increase in concentration. Those who didn’t nap would score lower on IQ test than those that did (after a day of work).
There is also a kinda cool concept midway through called caffeine naps.
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Posted in health at 2:28 pm by site admin
Check out this article on breast feeding and good academics.
“The results of our study suggest that the cognitive and health benefits of breastfeeding may lead to important long-run educational benefits for children,” Sabia, a professor of public policy who focuses on health economics, said in a statement.
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10.15.08
Posted in health at 4:38 pm by site admin
This article talks about how drinking shrinks the brain.
They decrease in size by about 2 percent per decade, and the brains of drinkers may shrink more quickly, according to a study published Monday in the Archives of Neurology, a publication of the American Medical Association. Those who drank most saw the most shrinkage. Women’s brains suffered more than men’s, perhaps because women tend to be smaller than men and may metabolize alcohol differently.
However, the study was not able to show what effect this had on cognitive abilitity.
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09.08.08
Posted in Unfiled, health at 11:40 am by site admin
Found a couple articles about aging and longevity.
First, this article proposes that aging is affected by brake and accelerator genes.
It suggests instead that a combination of factors is at play—that in addition to rusting, there are also certain genes that may carry instructions to start the aging process.
Also, this article talks about how polygamy may extend the lives of men.
If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they’re fertile well into their grey years.
Finally, this article talks about how a more active lifestyle can increase your lifespan.
“A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related disease and premature death,” researchers at King’s College London report today in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. “Inactivity may diminish life expectancy not only by predisposing to aging-related diseases but also because it may influence the aging process itself.”
Their findings: the telomeres of subjects who exercised the most (an average of 199 minutes weekly) were longer than those of volunteers who worked out the least (a mere 16 minutes or less a week). The discrepancy was enough, researchers wrote, to suggest that the exercise mavens were on average as much as a decade biologically younger than the slackers.
The scientists speculate that stress, inflammation and oxidative stress (cell damage caused by oxygen exposure) may be responsible for shortened telomeres in physically inactive people. Exercise is among the factors found to help alleviate stress. Previous research has linked regular workouts to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, obesity and osteoporosis.
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08.07.08
Posted in health at 8:03 am by site admin
Check out this article on sexsomnia aka sleepsex.
“Any basic instinct can come out in the context of sleep,” Schenck told LiveScience. “All sorts of things can happen.”
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07.02.08
Posted in health at 11:04 am by site admin
This article talks about how relaxation techniques like yoga, tai chi, etc can change the patterns of gene activity that affect how the body responds to stress.
“It’s not all in your head,” said Dr. Herbert Benson, president emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “What we have found is that when you evoke the relaxation response, the very genes that are turned on or off by stress are turned the other way. The mind can actively turn on and turn off genes. The mind is not separated from the body.”
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06.06.08
Posted in health at 10:29 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing the health problems with prolonged use of flip flops. The gist is that, when walking with flip flops, modify their gait and walking to (1) keep their flip flop on and (2) prevent stubbing their toes.
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