Multiple health benefits of eating pistachios

May 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 21 (ANI): A new study has shown that pistachio nuts, eaten as part of a healthy diet, can increase the levels of antioxidants in the blood of adults with high cholesterol.

“Our previous study showed the benefits of pistachios in lowering lipids and lipoproteins, which are a risk factor for heart disease. This new study shows an additional effect of pistachios so now there are multiple health benefits of eating pistachios.” said Penny Kris-Etherton, distinguished professor of nutrition, Penn State.

The researchers note that “pistachios are high in lutein, beta-carotene and gamma-tocopherol relative to other nuts; however, studies of the effects of pistachios on oxidative status are lacking.”

Beta-carotene is the precursor to vitamin A and gamma-tocopherol is a common form of vitamin E. Lutein is found in dark green leafy vegetables and is important in vision and healthy skin. All three compounds are oil soluble vitamins.

Antioxidants are of interest because oxidized low-density lipoproteins (LDL) are implicated in inflammation and plaque buildup inside blood vessels. Antioxidants should prevent LDLs from oxidizing, migrating into the blood vessel walls and causing inflammation.

The researchers conducted a randomized, crossover design, controlled feeding experiment to test the effects of pistachios on antioxidant levels when added to a heart healthy moderate-fat diet. Controlled feeding experiments provide all the food eaten by study subjects for the duration of the study period.

The participants began the study by eating a typical American diet consisting of 35 percent total fat and 11 percent saturated fat for two weeks.

They then tested three diets for four weeks each with about a two-week break between each diet. All three diets were variations on the Step I Diet, a cholesterol-lowering diet in general use. The diets included, as a control, a Step I Diet with no pistachios and about 25 percent total fat and 8 percent saturated fat.

The pistachio-enhanced diets were Step I Diets with 10 and 20 percent of the energy supplied by pistachio nuts, respectively. The 10 percent pistachio diet had 30 percent total fat and 8 percent saturated fat and the 20 percent pistachio diet had 34 percent total fat and 8 percent saturated fat.

The actual amounts of pistachios included in each diet were 1.5 ounces and 3 ounces for the 10 and 20 percent diets, respectively.

Both pistachio diets produced higher blood serum levels of beta-carotene, lutein and gamma-tocopherol than the typical American diet. Compared to the pistachio free Step I Diet, the pistachio-enhanced diets produced greater blood plasma levels of lutein and gamma-tocopherol. After eating both pistachio-enriched diets, the participants had lower oxidized-LDL concentrations in their blood than after the control Step I Diet.

When the researchers controlled for the change in LDL-cholesterol produced by the pistachio-enhanced diets, increases in beta-carotene and gamma-tocopherol were still associated with decreased oxidized-LDL for the 3-ounce pistachio-enhanced diet.

“Our results suggest that a heart-healthy diet including pistachios contributes to a decrease in serum oxidized-LDL levels, in part through cholesterol lowering, and also due to an added benefit of the antioxidants in the pistachios,” said Kris-Etherton.

The study has been published in the Journal of Nutrition. (ANI)

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Sugary diets linked to heart disease risk

April 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, April 21 (ANI): Diets high in added sugars increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, says a new study.

To reach the conclusion, researchers at Emory University analyzed U.S. government nutritional data and blood lipid levels in more than 6,000 adult men and women between 1999 and 2006.

The study subjects were divided into five groups according to the amount of added sugar and caloric sweeteners they consumed daily.

The results showed that people who consumed more added sugar were more likely to have higher cardiovascular disease risk factors, including higher triglyceride levels and higher ratios of triglycerides to HDL-C, or good cholesterol.

“Just like eating a high-fat diet can increase your levels of triglycerides and high cholesterol, eating sugar can also affect those same lipids,” said study co-author Miriam Vos, assistant professor of paediatrics, Emory School of Medicine.

The study has published in the April 20, 2010, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). (ANI)

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Meditation a good way to ease pain

March 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 16 (ANI): Meditation can help enhance the ability to moderate reactions to pain, according to new study.

In the study, published in The Journal of Pain, boffins from the University of North Carolina measured pain ratings in students interested in learning meditation who recruited for the study. Subjects were trained in meditation for three consecutive days and were given experimental pain stimuli.

Results of the trial showed that relaxed states promoted by the brief mindfulness meditation sessions reduced the reported pain ratings. Participants had less pain to both low and high pain intensities and showed significant reductions in anxiety after each meditation stimulation. The authors concluded that decreases in anxiety and increases in the ability to sustain personal focus can attenuate the feeling of pain.

In assessing their findings, the authors noted that the analgesic effects of meditation can be realized even after a short period of time learning the technique. Also, the results provide additional validation of the benefits of cognitive techniques for controlling pain. (ANI)

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Carrots are better than sticks when it comes to fostering cooperation

September 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Sept 4 (ANI): Rewards have been found to be much more successful in promoting public cooperation rather than punishment, suggests a new study.

According to researchers, rewards robustly build compliance and cooperation and could help in developing solutions for thorny problems requiring the cooperation of large numbers of people to achieve a greater good.

“All of us engage in public goods games, on both large and small scales,” said David G. Rand, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and lead author of the study.

“Climate change is a huge public goods game: If each person does his or her part to conserve energy and reduce CO2 emissions, it benefits us all.

“On a more local level, public goods games include volunteering on school boards, helping to maintain public facilities in your community, or cleaning up after yourself and doing your share of work at the office.

“In these types of domains, where people interact repeatedly with each other to solve a group social dilemma, our work suggests that rewards result in better outcomes than punishment,” he added.

Rand said that these rewards could change individuals’ behaviour and encourage cooperation without the destructive negative consequences that come with punishment.

During the study headed by Martin A. Nowak of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the researchers examined cooperation among 192 participants in a public goods game probing the fundamental tension between the interests of an individual and a group.

Over 50 rounds of interaction, each of four participants in a group would decide how much to contribute toward a common pool that benefited all four equally. Each participant was then able – at a cost to him or herself- to either reward or punish each of the three other subjects for their contributions to the group, or lack thereof.

As in real life, Rand said, study subjects tend to resent “free riders” who fail to contribute to a group yet reap the benefits of membership in it.

“But despite this anger at free riders, rewarding good behaviour is as effective as punishing bad behaviour for maintaining public cooperation and leads to better outcomes for the group. When both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff for the group, while punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff for the group,” Rand added.

The study appears in journal Science. (ANI)

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Regular moderate alcohol intake cuts dementia risk in older adults

July 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, July 14 (ANI): Regular moderate alcohol intake offers long-term cognitive protection and reduces the risk of dementia in older adults, according to a new study.

This is the largest, longest U.S. study to look at the effects of regular alcohol intake on dementia in seniors, both with and without memory problems.

For the study, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine examined and interviewed 3,069 individuals, 75 years or older and most without any memory or thinking problems, about their drinking habits.

Participants were asked about beer, wine, and liquor. The researchers then categorized the individuals as abstainers (non-drinkers), light drinkers (one to seven drinks per week), moderate drinkers (eight to 14 drinks per week), or heavy drinkers (more than 14 drinks per week). All types of alcohol were included.

The study subjects were then examined and interviewed every six months for six years to determine changes in their memory or thinking abilities and to monitor who developed dementia.

The researchers found that individuals, who had no cognitive impairment at the start of the study and drank eight to 14 alcoholic beverages per week, or one to two per day, experienced an average 37 percent reduction in risk of developing dementia compared to individuals who did not drink at all and were classified as abstainers.

For older adults who started the study with mild cognitive impairment, however, consumption of alcohol, at any amount, was associated with faster rates of cognitive decline.
n addition, those who were classified in the heavy drinker category, consuming more than 14 drinks per week, were almost twice as likely to develop dementia during the study compared to non-drinkers with mild cognitive impairment.

“We were excited to see that even in older adults, moderate alcohol intake decreases the risk of dementia. It is important to note, however, that our study found a significantly higher risk of dementia for heavy drinkers who started the study with mild cognitive impairment,” said Kaycee Sink, M.D., M.A.S (Masters of Advanced Studies in clinical research), a geriatrician and senior author of the study.

The study has been presented at the Alzheimer’s Association 2009 International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease (ICAD), in Vienna on July 13. (ANI)

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Aerobic activity ‘helps keep brain young’

June 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, June 30 (ANI): Aerobic activity may help keep the brain young, says a new research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

In the study published July 9 in the American Journal of Neuroradiology, physically active elderly people showed healthier cerebral blood vessels.

Researchers led by Elizabeth Bullitt, M.D., Van L. Weatherspoon Distinguished Professor of neurosurgery, used non-invasive magnetic resonance (MR) angiography to examine the number and shape of blood vessels in the brains of physically active elderly people, 7 men and 7 women, ages 60 to 80.

The study subjects were equally divided into 2 groups. The high activity group reported participating in an aerobic activity for a minimum of 180 minutes per week for the past 10 consecutive years, and the low activity group told investigators they had no history of regular exercise and currently spent less than 90 minutes a week in any physical activity.

Aerobically active subjects exhibited more small-diameter vessels with less tortuosity, or twisting, than the less active group, exhibiting a vessel pattern similar to younger adults.

The authors, who were sponsored in part by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, identified significant differences in the left and right middle cerebral artery regions confirmed by more than one statistical analysis.

The brain’s blood vessels naturally narrow and become more tortuous with advancing age, but the study showed the cerebrovascular patterns of active patients appeared “younger” than those of relatively inactive subjects.

The brains of these less active patients had increased tortuosity produced by vessel elongation and wider expansion curves. (ANI)

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Scientists studying brains at rest to gain fresh insights into mental health disorders

May 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 8 (ANI): Hoping to some day develop new tools for diagnosing mental health disorders and monitoring the progress of their treatments, scientists have now turned to uncovering new information about the mind by studying brains while they are at rest.

Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University are running one such research project in collaboration with experts at Washington University in St. Louis, the latest findings of which have been published in the journal the Public Library of Science Computational Biology.

“For years, the vast majority of scientists studying human functional brain organization have focused on how activity changes when engaged in specific tasks,” said Dr. Damien Fair, a postdoctoral research scientist in psychiatry, OHSU School of Medicine.

“However now we know there are several regions in the brain that continue to interact while a person is supposedly at rest – sort of like a car that idles at a stoplight. Our lab is studying these interactions, or spontaneous brain activity, while the brain is at rest. We think that this approach will eventually help us distinguish typical function from atypical function and therefore help more rapidly diagnose and appropriately treat mental disorders,” the researcher said.

The researchers use a form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), known as functional connectivity MRI, to study the brains of a large group of subjects while they were at rest.

The researchers said that their efforts led to the identification of brain regions that spontaneously activated together while the subjects were at rest.

According to the, these regions operate in tandem with one another, and group into regional networks.

“After observing a large group of study subjects between the ages of 7 and 31, we witnessed an interesting phenomenon. Communications between brain regions seem to be localized in children, but over time, regional communication becomes distributed across the whole brain. Despite these differences, children’s brains are still very efficient. As with the adults, the brains in the children were still organized like a ‘small world,’” added Fair.

The researchers will next compare functional connectivity MRI images taken from typically developing human subjects with images taken from human subjects with mental disorders, as they believe that doing so can help them pinpoint distinct functional differences that may one day assist physicians in diagnosing certain disorders.

“One of our key interest areas is ADHD. ADHD is one of the most widely diagnosed mental disorders in children, yet diagnosing it can be very difficult because diagnosis is based on patient and parent interviews and observational studies. Having a more tangible form of diagnosis – such as an MRI screening tool would be tremendously valuable to patients and physicians,” said Fair. (ANI)

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Probiotics may help ward off obesity in pregnant women

May 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 8 (ANI): A study suggests that giving women probiotics from the first trimester of pregnancy may be helpful in preventing them from the most dangerous kind of obesity.

Probiotics are bacteria that help maintain a healthy bacterial balance in the digestive tract by reducing the growth of harmful bacteria.

Kirsi Laitinen, a nutritionist at the University of Turku in Finland who made a presentation on this finding at the European Congress on Obesity on Thursday, said that the new research indicated that manipulating the balance of bacteria in the gut might help fight obesity.

“The results of our study, the first to demonstrate the impact of probiotics-supplemented dietary counselling on adiposity, were encouraging. The women who got the probiotics fared best. One year after childbirth, they had the lowest levels of central obesity as well as the lowest body fat percentage,” she said.

“Central obesity, where overall obesity is combined with a particularly fat belly, is considered especially unhealthy. We found it in 25% of the women who had received the probiotics along with dietary counselling, compared with 43% in the women who received diet advice alone,” she added.

During the study, Kirsi and her colleagues randomly divided 256 women into three groups during the first trimester of pregnancy. Two of the groups received dietary counselling consistent with what’s recommended during pregnancy for healthy weight gain and optimal foetal development.

The study subjects were also given food items like spreads and salad dressings with monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, as well as fibre-enriched pasta and breakfast cereal to take home.

The researchers said that one of the groups was daily given capsules containing Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, the most commonly used probiotics.

While the second group was given dummy capsules, the third received dummy capsules and no dietary counselling.

The researchers revealed that the capsules were continued until the women stopped exclusive breastfeeding, up to 6 months. They also said that the participants were weighed at the start and at the end of the study.

The team said that central obesity – a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more or a waist circumference over 80 centimetres – was found in 25 per cent of the women who had been given the probiotics as well as diet advice, compared with 43 per cent of those who got dietary counselling alone and 40 per cent of those who got neither diet advice nor probiotics.

According to them, the average body fat percentage in the probiotics group was 28 per cent as compared to 29 per cent in the diet advice only group, and 30 per cent in the third group.

Laitinen said that more studies were required to confirm the potential role of probiotics in fighting obesity.

She revealed that one of the limitations of the current study was that it did not control for the mothers’ weight before pregnancy, which might influence how fat they later become.

She said that her research team would continue following the women and their babies to see whether giving probiotics during pregnancy has any influence on health outcomes in the children.

“The advantage of studying pregnant women to investigate the potential link between probiotics and obesity is that it allows us to see the effects not only in the women, but also in their children.

Particularly during pregnancy, the impacts of obesity can be immense, with the effects seen both in the mother and the child.

Bacteria are passed from mother to child through the birth canal, as well as through breast milk and research indicates that early nutrition may influence the risk of obesity later in life.

There is growing evidence that this approach might open a new angle on the fight against obesity, either through prevention or treatment,” she said. (ANI)

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Anxiety increases pain intensity, disability

April 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 21 (ANI): People with high levels of anxiety due to chronic pain exhibit more emotional distress and disability, say researchers.

But, British researchers, writing in The Journal of Pain, say use of pain coping strategies can mediate this effect.

The purpose of the study was to examine the role of anxiety on everyday functioning of patients seeking treatment for chronic pain. It was assumed anxiety would be associated with higher levels of distress and impaired functioning.

The researchers also evaluated the role of three coping mechanisms to determine their impact as buffers nullifying the effects of anxiety.
hey are acceptance of pain, mindfulness and values-based action.

The study subjects were 125 consecutive adult patients who answered questionnaires designed to assess their anxiety about pain, measure their acceptance of it, identify the values they associated with interacting with family and friends and with working and learning, and to gauge the level of their mindfulness about pain ranging from almost always to almost never.

Results of the study showed that anxiety is associated with greater pain, emotional distress and disability in chronic pain patients. Anxiety was determined to be the strongest predictor of depression, disability and visits to physician offices.
hen the three coping strategies were used, the authors concluded that acceptance of pain, mindfulness and values-based actions reduce but do not eliminate the extent to which anxiety influences patient functioning.

The authors concluded that in conjunction with cognitive-behavioral therapies, the coping mechanisms can undermine the role of anxiety in worsening suffering and disability in chronic pain patients. (ANI)

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Nurses face physical and emotional assault

April 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

During a study by Statistics Canada, 46 per cent of male nurses and 33 per cent of female nurses reported that they have been physically abused. The study included 12,200 respondents to a national survey of nurses in 2005. 47 per cent of the study subjects reported emotional abuse.

Study co-author Kathryn Wilkins said: “Nurses who perceived that there was a shortage of personnel or a shortage of support staff, those who feel that they have a low level of support from their supervisor, or from their colleagues, are more likely to report physical violence within the past year from patients.”

56 percent study subjects believed that nurses on staff was not sufficient to provide quality patient care. 46 per cent nurses said that they were exposed to hostility or conflict from co-workers, and 28 per cent reported lack of support from their supervisor. 19 percent nurses stated that there was lack of team work between nurses and physicians.

Rachel Bard, CEO of the Canadian Nurses Association said the statistics are informative to nurses, and the factors all relate to problems with human resources and workplace environment.

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Avotermin, scar-curing drug, new hope for people with scars

April 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Avotermin, an experimental drug designed to treat scarring after surgery or injury has cleared early human trials. Further trails will be conducted in Europe.

Researchers tested drug in healthy volunteers with scars. The study subjects were followed for a year. Researchers found that scares treated with the new drug were less red, raised and visible as compared to those treated with a dummy drug.

The trails including more than 200 people proved efficiency of avotermin in treating scars. Researchers found that the scars treated with avotermin looked more like normal skin.

Professor Mark Ferguson, an expert in wound healing at the University of Manchester and co-founder and CEO of Renovo, lead researcher, said: “We’re recruiting 350 patients who are undergoing scar revision operations where the bad scar is cut out and we inject one end of the new scar with the drug and one end with placebo.”

Mr Rajiv Grover, a consultant plastic surgeon and secretary of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons said that the results were promising but patients should not get their hopes up of the treatment being available any time soon.

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Abdominal obesity increases risk of RLS

April 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Obesity has been linked to many diseases. Recent study revealed that it also increases risk of developing the neurological disorder, restless legs syndrome (RLS). Nearly one in 10 American adults is affected by RLS.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School analyzed data collected from more than 88,000 U. S. adults. Data analysis revealed that obese men and women have 42 percent higher risk of RLS as compared to normal-weight people. An association between abdominal obesity and RLS was also highlighted during the study. Study subjects with the largest waistlines had a 60 percent high risk than those with the slim waist.

Lead researcher, Xiang Gao, MD, PhD, of Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health says that in several previous studies, obesity was shown to increase the risk for developing the neurological disorder, but none of the studies was designed for the purpose of examining this link.

Gao added that our study suggests that obesity could be a risk factor for RLS. However, the findings do not prove that obesity leads to RLS, and further studies that follow people over time are needed to confirm obesity as a risk factor.

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APOE4 gene increases risk of Alzheimer’s

April 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Recent study revealed that presence of a gene known as APOE4 gene type increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s later.

Study subjects having APOE4 gene had more moment in an area of the brain of known as hippocampus. Studies have shown that hippocampus is the first area to be affected in Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers, from Oxford University and Imperial College London analyzed the data collected from a type of real-time imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI of 36 study subjects aged 20 to 35. 18 study subjects had at least one copy of APOE4.

Data analysis revealed that one copy of the ApoE4 gene raises the risk of Alzheimer’s by up to four times whereas two copies by up to 10 times.

Dr. Christian Beckmann of Imperial College London, researcher said: “We were surprised to see that even when the volunteers carrying APOE4 weren’t being asked to do anything, you could see the memory part of the brain working harder than it was in the other volunteers.”

“Not all APOE4 carriers go on to develop Alzheimer’s, but it would make sense if in some people, the memory part of the brain effectively becomes exhausted from overwork and this contributes to the disease.”

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Now, premature ejaculation spray that delays orgasm 6 times longer than normal

April 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 7 (ANI): Science is trying its level best to improve people’s sex lives -and the latest offering from scientists is a spray which helps men last six times longer in bed.

Developed by British doctors, the treatment – used five minutes before sex – can extend love-making time from seconds to almost four minutes.

The study has been published in the April issue of BJU International.

To reach the conclusion, three hundred men with clinically diagnosed lifelong premature ejaculation (PE) from 31 centres in the UK, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, were randomised into two groups.

Two hundred used the PSD502 spray, which contains 7.5mg of lidocaine and 2.5mg of prilocaine, and 100 used a placebo spray with no active ingredients.

Every time they had intercourse during the three-month study period, each couple measured the time from vaginal penetration to ejaculation with a stopwatch.

The men were asked to abstain from sexual activity or masturbation for 24 hours before each recorded encounter.

The time from penetration to ejaculation increased from an average of 0.6 minutes to 3.8 minutes in the medicated group and to just 1.1 minutes in the placebo group.

When these figures were adjusted to take account of any variations between the two groups, these showed that the treatment group were able to last 6.3 times longer after penetration when they used the spray. The placebo group lasted 1.7 times longer.

“Premature ejaculation can be a very distressing condition for men and can cause distress, frustration and make them avoid sexual intimacy” says lead researcher Professor W Wallace Dinsmore from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, UK.

The research team used the evidence-based definition of lifelong PE developed by the International Society for Sexual Medicine to select their study subjects.

This states that ejaculation occurs within about one minute of vaginal penetration in the majority of encounters.

“Because this definition was only launched in 2008, studies have yet to determine the prevalence of lifelong PE in the male population” says Professor Dinsmore.

“But previous research suggests that as many as 40 percent of men will experience premature ejaculation at some time in their lives,” the expert added.

The 300 men who took part in the phase three, multicentre, double-blind, randomised study had an average age of 35. The majority had used other treatments before, the most common being oral antidepressants.

After three months of treatment the researchers reported that 90 percent of the men in the treatment group were able to delay ejaculation for more than one minute following vaginal penetration, compared with 54 percent in the placebo group.

Seventy four percent of men in the treatment group managed to last more than two minutes before ejaculation, compared with 22 percent in the placebo group. 62 percent of men in the treatment group said their orgasms were ‘good’ or ‘very good’ after three months, compared with 20 percent before the study started.

The figures for the placebo group were slightly lower at the end than at the start. Also, a significantly higher percentage of the patients and partners in the treatment group reported improvements when it came to perceived control, personal distress, satisfaction with sexual intercourse and interpersonal difficulties.

“Our study shows that when the PSD502 spray was applied to the man’s penis five minutes before intercourse it improved both sexual performance and sexual satisfaction, which are key factors in treating premature ejaculation” says Professor Dinsmore.

“It was well tolerated by both patients and their partners, with no systemic side effects and a low incidence of localised effects and was rated favourably by the majority of users.

“We believe that this shows that PSD502 offers significant advantages over other therapies being developed for the treatment of premature ejaculation,” the researcher added. (ANI)

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Majority supports ant-smoking law in public places: study

March 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Majority supports ant-smoking law in public places: study The survey conducted by Pasumai Thayaagam, Voluntary Health Association of India and Healis Sekhasaria Institute for Public Health in December showed the public favor to the anti-smoking law imposed by the government.

1026 respondents in the age group of 15-64 in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata were interviewed between December 8 and 23 last year. Most of the study subjects were from the lower and middle income groups.

Data analysis showed that 98 per cent people favored anti-smoking law in public places, including workplaces, restaurants and bars. 92 per cent people regarded exposure to second-hand smoke as a serious health hazard. 99 per cent said that the government should enforce the anti-smoking rules.

Mumbai tops the list when it comes to “strongly favoring” the regulations with 98 percent followed by 92 per cent in Chennai and 93 per cent in Kolkata. Delhi got the last place with 90 percent in the survey.

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Money really can’t buy happiness

March 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 18 (ANI): A study of the mental state of the modern American woman has found that financial security might not be enough to ensure happiness or satisfaction with one’s life.

Women who concentrate much of their thinking on financial matters are much less likely to be happy with their lives, according to Talya Miron-Shatz, postdoctoral research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

She said that contrary to expectations, many of those with such worries had plenty of money by conventional standards, suggesting that there is more at play in obtaining peace of mind than simply having cash.

“Even if you are making a hundred grand a year, if you are constantly worried that you are going to get fired, that you are going to lose your health insurance or that you are simply not sure you are going to ‘make it,’ you are not going to be happy,” Miron-Shatz said.

She found that such concerns affected a wide variety of women at all income levels.

Conversely, those who didn’t fixate on finances like retirement savings, tuition for college or simply making ends meet, reported being the happiest of the group.

To understand how income and concerns over financial security may relate to a person’s satisfaction with life, Miron-Shatz conducted two separate studies of a representative sample of nearly 1,000 American women of various ages and incomes.

In one study, she showed that considerations of financial security were as important to the study subjects as their monetary assets.

She asked subjects in the second study to think about the future in an open-ended manner.

Miron-Shatz found that those who did so and mentioned financial concerns — retirement, college tuition, making ends meet, etc. — were less satisfied with their lives than those who did not raise such concerns.

The study was published Feb. 25 in Judgment and Decision Making. (ANI)

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Older air traffic controllers perform as well as young peers

March 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 9 (ANI): A new study from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that older air traffic controllers perform as well as their young counterparts on complex, job-related tasks.

The research, led by psychology professor Art Kramer, has shown that despite certain deficits older people’s expertise on the job enables them to function on a par with their younger peers.

“The question we were interested in was whether older controllers could continue to do the job,” said Kramer, who conducted the study with graduate student Ashley Nunes.

“If so, perhaps we could keep these people on the job for a little longer and this way provide more time for the transition and appropriate training of new controllers,” he added.

During the study, the researchers compared older and younger controllers with one another and with their age-matched peers who were not air traffic controllers.

All of the study subjects performed a battery of cognitive tasks and simulated air traffic control tasks, which varied in difficulty.

On simple cognitive tasks, the older controllers were similar to the older non-controllers.

The research team showed, compared with their younger peers aged 20 to 27, the older subjects were slower on simple memory or decision-making tasks that were not directly related to air traffic control.

But on the tests that simulated the tasks of an air traffic controller, the older and younger controllers were equally capable.

“Despite the fact that these old controllers are not superpeople in a cognitive sense, they still do really well on complex simulated air traffic control tasks that are representative of what they do every day,” Kramer said.

“They do well, one would surmise, because they’ve gained decades of knowledge in their profession that’s allowed them to offset the costs of not having quite the memory they used to have, and certainly not being able to respond as quickly as they once could, ” he added.

Kramer said that the study highlights the distinction between “fluid intelligence” and “crystallized intelligence”.

Fluid intelligence includes memory capacity and speed of recall; crystallized intelligence is the expertise that comes from years of attention and practice.

“Fluid intelligence declines with age, as it did in our controllers. But despite that, the many years of experience, the many years of building domain-relevant knowledge in their area of expertise allows them to offset or compensate for these losses in fluid intelligence and do the job really well, just as well as the younger ones,” he said.

The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. (ANI)

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Heavy marijuana use ‘damages teens’ brains’

February 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 03 (ANI): A new study has revealed that teens and young adults who are heavy users of marijuana are more likely than non-users to have disrupted brain development.

In the study, researchers found abnormalities in areas of the brain that interconnect brain regions involved in memory, attention, decision-making, language and executive functioning skills.

The findings hold significance because adolescence is a crucial period for brain development and maturation.

“Studies of normal brain development reveal critical areas of the brain that develop during late adolescence, and our study shows that heavy cannabis use is associated with damage in those brain regions,” said study leader Manzar Ashtari, Ph.D., director of the Diffusion Image Analysis and Brain Morphometry Laboratory in the Radiology Department of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

In the study, Ashtari and colleagues performed imaging studies on 14 young men from a residential drug treatment center in New York State, as well as 14 age-matched healthy controls. All the study subjects were males, with an average age of 19.

The 14 subjects from the drug treatment center all had a history of heavy cannabis use during adolescence. On average, they had smoked marijuana from age 13 till age 18 or 19, and reported smoking nearly 6 marijuana joints daily in the final year before they stopped using the drug.

The researchers performed a type of magnetic resonance imaging scan called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) that measures water movement through brain tissues.

“The abnormal patterns of water diffusion that we found among the young men with histories of marijuana use suggest damage or an arrest in development of the myelin sheath that surrounds brain cells,” said Ashtari.

Myelin provides a coating around brain cells similar to insulation covering an electrical wire. If myelin does not function properly, signaling within the brain may be slower. Myelin gives its colon to the white matter of the brain, and covers the nerve fibers that connect different brain regions.

“Our results suggest that early-onset substance use may alter the development of white matter circuits, especially those connections among the frontal, parietal and temporal regions of the brain. Abnormal white matter development could slow information transfer in the brain and affect cognitive functions,” said Ashtari.

Ashtari added that the findings are preliminary. Among other limitations of the study, such as a small sample size, five of the 14 subjects with heavy cannabis use also had a history of alcohol abuse, which may have contributed an effect.

Also, it is possible that the brain abnormalities may have predisposed the subjects to drug dependence, rather than drug usage causing the brain abnormalities.

“Further research should be done to investigate the relation between repeated marijuana use and white matter development. However, our work reinforces the idea that the adolescent brain may be especially vulnerable to risky behaviors such as substance abuse, because of crucial neural development that occurs during those years,” said Ashtari.

The study appeared early last month in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. (ANI)

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Study: Fifty percent people are unaware of their high BP problem

November 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Study: Fifty percent people are unaware of their high BP problemA recent study indicted that 50% people are not aware of the fact that they are suffering from high BP whereas more than half of people diagnosed with high blood pressure do not have it under control. Untreated High blood pressure can cause a range of problems, including atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), stroke and heart failure.

During study, 1,604 people underwent a medical examination, including blood pressure (BP) check-up and answered a lifestyle and health questionnaire. The study subjects belonged to three geographical areas – south west London in the UK, Limburg in Belgium and Abruzzo in Italy.

Data analysis showed that 24% of participants had high blood pressure and 56% of study subjects were not aware of their condition. Less than half of study subjects who were aware of the condition had it under control.

Lead researcher, Prof Franco Cappuccio of the University of Warwick said, “Our results show that high blood pressure is a looming problem for Europe.”

He added that looking at the differences between regions, researchers found the British participants had lower BP overall and better control than the Italians and Belgians.

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