Ceremonial PTSD therapies favored by Native American veterans

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Native American veterans battling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder find relief and healing through an alternative treatment called the Sweat Lodge ceremony offered at the Spokane Veterans Administration Hospital.In the Arizona desert, wounded warriors from the Hopi Nation can join in a ceremony called Wiping Away the Tears. The traditional cleansing ritual helps dispel a chronic “ghost sickness” that can haunt survivors of battle.These and other traditional healing therapies are the treatment of choice for many Native American veterans, — half of whom say usual PTSD treatments don’t work — according to a recent survey conducted at Washington State University. The findings will be presented at the American Psychological Association conference in Washington D.C. this August.The study is available online at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/nativeveterans.Led by Greg Urquhart and Matthew Hale, both Native veterans and graduate students in the College of Education, the ongoing study examines the attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs of Native American veterans concerning PTSD and its various treatment options. Their goal is to give Native veterans a voice in shaping the types of therapies available in future programs.”Across the board, Native vets don’t feel represented. Their voices have been silenced and ignored for so long that they were happy to provide feedback on our survey,” said Hale.Historically, Native Americans have served in the military at higher rates than all other U.S. populations. Veterans are traditionally honored as warriors and esteemed in the tribal community.A 2012 report by the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that the percentage of Native veterans under age 65 outnumbers similar percentages for veterans of all other racial groups combined.The WSU survey provides a first-hand look at the veterans’ needs, but more importantly, reveals the unique preferences they have as Native American veterans, said Phyllis Erdman, executive associate dean for academic affairs at the college and mentor for the study.Cultural worldviewUrquhart said many Native veterans are reluctant to seek treatment for PTSD because typical western therapy options don’t represent the Native cultural worldview.”The traditional Native view of health and spirituality is intertwined,” he explained. “Spirit, mind, and body are all one — you can’t parcel one out from the other — so spirituality is a huge component of healing and one not often included in western medicine, although there have been a few studies on the positive effects of prayer.”For many years, the U.S. government banned Native religious ceremonies, which subsequently limited their use in PTSD programs, said Urquhart. …


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Slow walking speed, memory complaints can predict dementia

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A study involving nearly 27,000 older adults on five continents found that nearly 1 in 10 met criteria for pre-dementia based on a simple test that measures how fast people walk and whether they have cognitive complaints. People who tested positive for pre-dementia were twice as likely as others to develop dementia within 12 years. The study, led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center, was published online on July 16, 2014 in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.The new test diagnoses motoric cognitive risk syndrome (MCR). Testing for the newly described syndrome relies on measuring gait speed (our manner of walking) and asking a few simple questions about a patient’s cognitive abilities, both of which take just seconds. The test is not reliant on the latest medical technology and can be done in a clinical setting, diagnosing people in the early stages of the dementia process. Early diagnosis is critical because it allows time to identify and possibly treat the underlying causes of the disease, which may delay or even prevent the onset of dementia in some cases.”In many clinical and community settings, people don’t have access to the sophisticated tests — biomarker assays, cognitive tests or neuroimaging studies — used to diagnose people at risk for developing dementia,” said Joe Verghese, M.B.B.S., professor in the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and of medicine at Einstein, chief of geriatrics at Einstein and Montefiore, and senior author of the Neurology paper. “Our assessment method could enable many more people to learn if they’re at risk for dementia, since it avoids the need for complex testing and doesn’t require that the test be administered by a neurologist. The potential payoff could be tremendous — not only for individuals and their families, but also in terms of healthcare savings for society. All that’s needed to assess MCR is a stopwatch and a few questions, so primary care physicians could easily incorporate it into examinations of their older patients.”The U.S. …


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Schizophrenics at greater risk of getting diseases

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Researchers have long known that people with autoimmune diseases, such as hepatitis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and psoriasis, are at greater risk of developing schizophrenia.But new research based on data sets covering the majority of the Danish population shows that the development goes both ways: People suffering from schizophrenia also have an increased risk of contracting autoimmune diseases, especially if they have suffered from a severe infection.Head of the new study is Michael Eriksen Benrs, MD and PhD, who is senior researcher at the National Centre for Register-Based Research at Aarhus University and the Psychiatric Centre Copenhagen. He has done the study in collaboration with researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen as well as Johns Hopkins University in the USA.This month the results will be published in an article in the American journal The American Journal of Psychiatry.Three times higher riskDrawing on data from the Danish Civil Registration, Danish hospitals and the nation-wide Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register, the researchers behind the project have had the unique opportunity to examine an extraordinarily large group of people consisting of 3.83 million Danes. The registry data showed that from 1987 to 2010 39,364 people were diagnosed with schizophrenia, while 142,328 people were diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.By linking the data sets, the researchers found that a person suffering from schizophrenia has a 53 per cent higher risk of contracting an autoimmune disease compared to people who are not suffering from schizophrenia. Moreover, if you have schizophrenia and have been hospitalised or received treatment for a severe infection, you have a 2.7 times higher risk of getting an autoimmune disease.According to Michael E. Benrs, this is very useful knowledge for psychiatrists working with schizophrenics:”Six per cent of the schizophrenic patients have an autoimmune disease that requires treatment in a hospital. But the actual occurrence is significantly higher, seeing as our study does not incorporate all the people who are being treated by general physicians or have not been diagnosed yet. This means that psychiatrists should be on the lookout for signs of physical illness among their patients with schizophrenia, including autoimmune diseases,” explains Michael E. Benrs.Infections play a determining roleWith the aid of these large data sets, the researchers have been able to show certain correlations with great statistical certainty, but the study does not provide a definitive explanation for why schizophrenics have such an increased risk of contracting these diseases.According to Michael E. Benrs, a lot seems to suggest that infections are a determining factor.”It could be that people with schizophrenia er genetically vulnerable to infections, which increases the risk of getting schizophrenia but also autoimmune diseases,” he says and proceeds to explain that the human immune system can react to an infection by producing antibodies that do not merely react to the infection; the antibodies also start breaking down the body’s own tissue. This is how autoimmune diseases develop.Another possible explanation could be that neuropsychiatric symptoms diagnosed as schizophrenia are the first signs that an autoimmune disease has developed but has not yet been detected.Other explanations are related to lifestyle and genetics. …


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Zebrafish discovery may shed light on human kidney function

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Researchers say the discovery of how sodium ions pass through the gill of a zebrafish may be a clue to understanding a key function in the human kidney. The findings from a collaboration between Mayo Clinic and the Tokyo Institute of Technology appear in the online issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.The researchers discovered a protein responsible for gas exchanges in the fish gill structure. Specifically they studied and characterized the Na+/H+ (sodium/hydrogen) exchanger named NHE3, responsible for controlling sodium and hydrogen ions across the gill. The researchers also directly demonstrated that NHE3 can function as a Na+/NH4+ (sodium/ammonium) exchanger.”This is significant because the fish tends to mimic the process in humans,” says Michael Romero, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic physiologist who works in nephrology. “This is the true beauty of comparative physiology– a lot of the organs function by very similar processes, down to ionic transfer.”In this case the protein allows the sodium ions to be absorbed from the forming urine while at the same time discarding waste from normally functioning cells, thus keeping the body in balance and serving as an energy saving system. The researchers say the same NHE3 protein performs a similar function in the intestine, pancreas, liver, lungs and reproductive system.The gill is used in the fish as a transport system: sodium ions are nutrients and ammonium carries away waste. It’s a key process allowing zebrafish to extract sodium ions from fresh water. In humans, NHE3 is involved in the acid-waste control system in the kidney, but there hasn’t been a good analysis of that process in humans. Part of this acid-control process in the human kidney is “ammoniagenesis” which requires the initial part of the kidney tubule (proximal tubule) to export ammonia/ammonium. Physiologically, it has been assumed that NHE3 can perform a Na+/NH4+ exchange, but this has never been experimentally demonstrated.Ammoniagenesis and increased renal sodium bicarbonate absorption are partly under the control of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS), which means that this work enhances understanding of human hypertension. …


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Managing chronic bone, joint pain

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Musculoskeletal pain of the bone, joint and muscles is one of the most common reasons for primary care visits in the United States. According to a literature review appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS), chronic pain, or pain that persists beyond an expected period of healing, is estimated to affect 100 million Americans.The majority of chronic pain complaints concern the musculoskeletal system, but they also include headaches and abdominal pain. “As orthopaedic surgeons, we are experts in the management of acute injuries to the extremities and spine. As a specialty, however, we are admittedly less adept in the management of chronic musculoskeletal pain,” says lead study author Richard L. Uhl, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon at Albany Medical Center in Albany, N.Y. “Given its prevalence, and the profound economic implications of chronic pain on both healthcare costs and lost productivity, we have a duty to be proficient in its diagnosis and care.”The Bare FactsLow back pain affects up to 80 percent of Americans at some point in life, and consistently ranks among the top five most common reasons for all healthcare visits in the U.S. Chronic knee, hip, and shoulder pain from degenerative processes also is common, as are chronic neuropathic pains from advanced diabetes. Orthopaedic surgeons and primary care physicians encounter patients who suffer from chronic pain almost daily.A Surprising Study Finding Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) — easily the most commonly recommended or prescribed medication by orthopaedic surgeons — are not especially effective in many chronic pain scenarios. “While far from the everyday ‘arsenal’ of orthopaedic surgeons, antidepressants and anticonvulsants (medications to prevent seizures) can have remarkable effects on many forms of chronic bone and joint pain. There are many readily-accessible, economic, safe and effective treatments for chronic pain,” says Dr. …


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Organic agriculture can pollute groundwater, research shows

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Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), using specialized monitoring technology, have determined that intensive organic agriculture can cause significant pollution from nitrate leaching into groundwater.Public demand has led to the rapid development of organic farming in recent years to provide healthy food products that are free of chemical additives and to reduce industrial and groundwater pollution worldwide.But, according to the paper published in the Hydrology and Earth System Sciences journal, intensive organic matter using composted manure prior to planting resulted in significantly higher groundwater pollution rates compared with liquid fertilization techniques through drip irrigation.The study used Vadose Zone Monitoring System technology developed at BGU and commercialized by Sensoil Innovations Ltd. to compare the water quality across the entire unsaturated zone under organic and conventional greenhouses in Israel.The system is designed to monitor liquid, gas and soil hydraulic properties and allows real time continuous tracking of water in deep sections of the vadose zone, from land surface to groundwater. It is currently being used in more than 25 commercial and research sites in the United States, Israel, Spain, Namibia, and South Africa.While groundwater pollution is usually attributed to a large array of chemicals, high nitrate concentration in aquifer water is the main cause for drinking-water well shutdowns.The down leaching of nitrates under intensive organic farming is due to nutrient release from the compost to the soil during the early stages of the growing season. In this stage, nutrient uptake capacity of the young plants is very low and down leaching of nitrates to the deeper parts of the vadose zone and groundwater is unavoidable.The study, funded by the Israel Water Authority, was conducted in commercial greenhouses on the Southern part of the coastal aquifer in Israel.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Does more stress equal more headaches?

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A new study provides evidence for what many people who experience headache have long suspected — having more stress in your life leads to more headaches. The study released today will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 66th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014.For the study, 5,159 people age 21 to 71 in the general population were surveyed about their stress levels and headaches four times a year for two years. Participants stated how many headaches they had per month and rated their stress level on a scale of zero to 100.A total of 31 percent of the participants had tension-type headache, 14 percent had migraine, 11 percent had migraine combined with tension-type headache and for 17 percent the headache type was not classified. Those with tension-type headache rated their stress at an average of 52 out of 100. For migraine, it was 62 out of 100 and 59 for those with migraine and tension-type headache.For each type of headache, an increase in stress was associated with an increase in the number of headaches per month. For those with tension headache, an increase of 10 points on the stress scale was associated with a 6.3-percent increase in the number of headache days per month. For migraine, the number of headache days per month went up by 4.3 percent, and 4 percent for those with migraine and tension headache. The results were adjusted to account for factors that could affect the number of headaches, such as drinking, smoking and frequent use of headache drugs.”These results show that this is a problem for everyone who suffers from headaches and emphasize the importance of stress management approaches for people with migraine and those who treat them,” said study author Sara H. Schramm, MD, of University Hospital of University Duisburg-Essen in Germany. “The results add weight to the concept that stress can be a factor contributing to the onset of headache disorders, that it accelerates the progression to chronic headache, exacerbates headache episodes, and that the headache experience itself can serve as a stressor.”The study was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by American Academy of Neurology (AAN). …


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Beauty, not disease, motivates teens to wear sunscreen

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After offering information about UV light and sun-protective behaviors, the two health-ed videos diverge: one describes the increased skin cancer risk of UV exposure and the other describes effects on appearance including wrinkles and premature aging. Which of these two videos do you think caused teenagers to use more sunscreen six weeks after it was shown?A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology shows that while teens who watched both videos learned and retained the same amount of knowledge about UV light and sun-protective behaviors, only the teens who watched the appearance-based video (and not the health-based video) actually changed these behaviors.”We see this anecdotally in the clinic. The teens who come in, often it’s because their parents are dragging them. A lot have undergone tanning or never wear sunscreen. You can tell that when we talk about the skin cancer risk, it doesn’t faze them. But when you talk about premature wrinkling and aging, they listen a little more closely,” says April W. Armstrong, MD MPH, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and vice chair of Clinical Research at the CU School of Medicine Department of Dermatology.The current study aimed to quantify this observation. First, Armstrong and colleagues went to local high schools to recruit 50 subjects. All subjects completed questionnaires demonstrating their baseline knowledge about UV light and use of sun-protective behaviors. Then subjects were randomized into two groups, one of which viewed the health-based video that emphasized skin cancer risk, and the other of which viewed the appearance-based video that emphasized cosmetic changes due to UV exposure. …


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In-hospital formula use deters breastfeeding

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When mothers feed their newborns formula in the hospital, they are less likely to fully breastfeed their babies in the second month of life and more likely to quit breastfeeding early, even if they had hoped to breastfeed longer, UC Davis researchers have found.”We are a step closer to showing that giving formula in the hospital can cause problems by reducing how much women breastfeed later,” says Caroline Chantry, lead author and professor of clinical pediatrics at UC Davis Medical Center. “Despite being highly motivated to breastfeed their babies, in-hospital formula use limits this important practice. Given the benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and baby, this is a public health issue.”"In-Hospital Formula Use Shortens Breastfeeding Duration” was published online in The Journal of Pediatrics today. The study only included women who intended to exclusively breastfeed their babies for at least a week, meaning they did not plan to use formula in the hospital.While previous studies have examined the relationship between formula use and breastfeeding, some have questioned the results, wondering if mothers using formula were simply less committed to breastfeeding. To examine this objection, the UC Davis team surveyed expectant mothers to determine their intentions toward breastfeeding and then followed them closely after delivery to see how they fared.In the study, 210 babies were exclusively breastfed in the hospital (UC Davis Medical Center), while 183 received at least some formula. Over the next two months, breastfeeding dropped dramatically in the formula group. Between the first and second month, 68 percent of the babies receiving in-hospital formula were not fully breastfed, compared to 37 percent of babies who were exclusively breastfed in the hospital. After two months, 33 percent of the formula babies were not being breastfed at all. By contrast, only 10 percent of the hospital breastfed group had stopped breastfeeding.Perhaps most significant, in-hospital formula feeding dramatically reduced the likelihood of later fully breastfeeding as well as any breastfeeding, even after adjusting for the strength of the mothers’ intention to continue these practices. Early formula use nearly doubled the risk of formula use from the first to the second month and nearly tripled the risk of ending all breastfeeding by the end of the second month.The study also found that breastfeeding deterrence was dose dependent. …


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Bats inspire "micro air vehicle" designs: Small flying vehicles, complete with flapping wings, may now be designed

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By exploring how creatures in nature are able to fly by flapping their wings, Virginia Tech researchers hope to apply that knowledge toward designing small flying vehicles known as “micro air vehicles” with flapping wings.More than 1,000 species of bats have hand membrane wings, meaning that their fingers are essentially “webbed” and connected by a flexible membrane. But understanding how bats use their wings to manipulate the air around them is extremely challenging — primarily because both experimental measurements on live creatures and the related computer analysis are quite complex.In Virginia Tech’s study of fruit bat wings, the researchers used experimental measurements of the movements of the bats’ wings in real flight, and then used analysis software to see the direct relationship between wing motion and airflow around the bat wing. They report their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.”Bats have different wing shapes and sizes, depending on their evolutionary function. Typically, bats are very agile and can change their flight path very quickly — showing high maneuverability for midflight prey capture, so it’s of interest to know how they do this,” explained Danesh Tafti, the William S. Cross professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the High Performance Computational Fluid Thermal Science and Engineering Lab at Virginia Tech.To give you an idea of the size of a fruit bat, it weighs roughly 30 grams and a single fully extended wing is about 17 x 9 cm in length, according to Tafti.Among the biggest surprises in store for the researchers was how bat wings manipulated the wing motion with correct timing to maximize the forces generated by the wing. “It distorts its wing shape and size continuously during flapping,” Tafti noted.For example, it increases the area of the wing by about 30 percent to maximize favorable forces during the downward movement of the wing, and it decreases the area by a similar amount on the way up to minimize unfavorable forces. The force coefficients generated by the wing are “about two to three times greater than a static airfoil wing used for large airplanes,” said Kamal Viswanath, a co-author who was a graduate research assistant working with Tafti when the work was performed and is now a research engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Lab’s Laboratories for Computational Physics and Fluid Dynamics.This study was just an initial step in the researchers’ work. “Next, we’d like to explore deconstructing the seemingly complex motion of the bat wing into simpler motions, which is necessary to make a bat-inspired flying robot,” said Viswanath. The researchers also want to keep the wing motion as simple as possible, but with the same force production as that of a real bat.”We’d also like to explore other bat wing motions, such as a bat in level flight or a bat trying to maneuver quickly to answer questions, including: What are the differences in wing motion and how do they translate to air movement and forces that the bat generates? …


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Massachusetts" fire-safe cigarette law appears to decrease likelihood of residential fires

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A six-year-old Massachusetts law requiring that only “fire-safe” cigarettes (FSCs) be sold in the state appears to decrease the likelihood of unintentional residential fires caused by cigarettes by 28%, according to a new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers.The study will appear online February 13, 2014 in the American Journal of Public Health.”This study is the first rigorous population-based study to evaluate the effectiveness of the fire-safe cigarette standards, and shows that science-based tobacco product regulation can protect the public health,” said lead author Hillel Alpert, research scientist at the Center for Global Tobacco Control at HSPH.Burning cigarettes left smoldering on a bed, furniture, or other flammable material are a leading cause of residential fires in the United States, generating hundreds of millions of dollars each year in property damage, health care costs, lost productivity, death, and injuries. Young children, seniors, African Americans, Native Americans, the poor, people living in rural areas or in substandard housing, and firefighters are especially at risk.To evaluate the effectiveness of Massachusetts’ Fire Safe Cigarette Law, the researchers analyzed seven years of data from 2004 to 2010 on accidental residential fires, including 1,629 caused by cigarettes. The information was reported to the Massachusetts Fire Incident Reporting System, a system maintained by the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services.The results appear to show that the likelihood of unintentional residential fires caused by cigarettes decreased by 28% after the Massachusetts law was enacted in 2008. The largest reductions were among cigarette fires in which human factors, such as falling asleep while smoking, were involved, and among fires that were ignited on materials, which are the scenarios for which the standard was developed.”This study confirms that the fire standard compliant (FSC) cigarette law has reduced the number of fires from cigarettes started by igniting furniture and bedding as it was designed to do,” said Massachusetts Fire Marshal Stephen Coan.”We now have the science to support that all tobacco companies throughout the world should voluntarily make their cigarettes less likely to ignite fires,” said Gregory Connolly, professor of the practice of public health and director of the HSPH Center for Global Tobacco Control.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Harvard School of Public Health. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Beauty and bacteria: Slim, attractive men have less nasal bacteria than heavy men

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Do attractive traits tell us anything about a person’s reproductive health? New research in the American Journal of Human Biology reveals a link between Body Mass Index (BMI) and the amount of bacteria colonizing noses. The results show that heavier men harbor more potentially pathogenic species of bacteria in their nose, compared with slimmer, more traditionally attractive men.”According to an evolutionary point of view, traits related to attractiveness are supposed to be honest signals of biological quality,” said Dr. Boguslaw Pawlowski. “We analyzed whether nasal and throat colonization with potentially pathogenic bacteria is related to body height and BMI in both sexes.”103 healthy females and 90 healthy males participated in the study. Heights and weights were self-reported, while waist and hip circumferences were measured. Six potentially pathogenic bacteria were isolated and identified from nasal and throat swabs. The results showed that ‘colonized’ men were found to have a higher BMI than non-colonized males, although no differences were found in females.”To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study body morphology traits related to physical attractiveness in relation to bacterial colonization in young people,” said Pawlowski. “The results confirmed our hypothesis, but only for BMI in males.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Wiley. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Loneliness is a major health risk for older adults

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Feeling extreme loneliness can increase an older person’s chances of premature death by 14 percent, according to research by John Cacioppo, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.Cacioppo and his colleagues’ work shows that the impact of loneliness on premature death is nearly as strong as the impact of disadvantaged socioeconomic status, which they found increases the chances of dying early by 19 percent. A 2010 meta-analysis showed that loneliness has twice the impact on early death as does obesity, he said.Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University, joined other scholars at a seminar on “The Science of Resilient Aging” Feb. 16 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual meeting in Chicago.The researchers looked at dramatic differences in the rate of decline in physical and mental health as people age. Cacioppo and colleagues have examined the role of satisfying relationships on older people to develop their resilience, the ability to bounce back after adversity and grow from stresses in life.The consequences to health are dramatic, as feeling isolated from others can disrupt sleep, elevate blood pressure, increase morning rises in the stress hormone cortisol, alter gene expression in immune cells, and increase depression and lower overall subjective well-being, Cacioppo pointed out in a talk, “Rewarding Social Connections Promote Successful Aging.”Cacioppo, one of the nation’s leading experts on loneliness, said older people can avoid the consequences of loneliness by staying in touch with former co-workers, taking part in family traditions, and sharing good times with family and friends — all of which gives older adults a chance to connect others about whom they care and who care about them.”Retiring to Florida to live in a warmer climate among strangers isn’t necessarily a good idea if it means you are disconnected from the people who mean the most to you,” said Cacioppo. Population changes make understanding the role of loneliness and health all the more important, he explained.”We are experiencing a silver tsunami demographically. The baby boomers are reaching retirement age. Each day between 2011 and 2030, an average of 10,000 people will turn 65,” he said. “People have to think about how to protect themselves from depression, low subjective well-being and early mortality.”Although some people are happy to be alone, most people thrive from social situations in which they provide mutual support and develop strong rapport. Evolution encouraged people to work together to survive and accordingly most people enjoy companionship over being alone.Research by Cacioppo and his colleagues has identified three core dimensions to healthy relationships — intimate connectedness, which comes from having someone in your life you feel affirms who you are; relational connectedness, which comes from having face-to-face contacts that are mutually rewarding; and collective connectedness, which comes from feeling that you’re part of a group or collective beyond individual existence.It is not solitude or physical isolation itself, but rather the subjective sense of isolation that Cacioppo’s work shows to be so profoundly disruptive. Older people living alone are not necessary lonely if they remain socially engaged and enjoy the company of those around them. …


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Need for individual clinical judgements for wider use of statins: Experts

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Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.P.H., the first Sir Richard Doll professor and senior academic advisor to the dean, and Ira J. Gelb, M.D., emeritus professor of cardiology and senior advisor to the dean for pre-baccalaureate programs at FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, have published an invited editorial in the current issue of Cardiology about the clinical and public health challenges to increase utilization of statins in the treatment and prevention of heart attacks and strokes.In November 2013, at its national meeting, the American Heart Association, in collaboration with the American College of Cardiology and the United States National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, presented and published its new guidelines for the use of statins in the treatment and prevention of heart attacks and strokes.In their invited editorial, Hennekens and Gelb state that any such guidelines are a necessary, but not sufficient basis for the astute clinical judgment of a clinician for each of his or her patients. They provide guiding principles to aid clinicians to make the best judgment about whether to prescribe a statin after consideration of the totality of evidence, which includes the entire risk profile of the patient as well as the benefits and risks of the drug. They re-emphasize that the totality of randomized evidence indicates that there is no threshold for low density lipoprotein cholesterol below which there are no net benefits of statins. These issues in the treatment and prevention of heart attacks and strokes present new and emerging clinical challenges to healthcare providers to more widely prescribe statins in the treatment and prevention of heart attacks and strokes.”The evidence indicates clearly that the more widespread and appropriate utilization of statins, as adjuncts, not alternatives to therapeutic lifestyle changes, will yield net benefits in the treatment and prevention of heart attacks and strokes, including among high, medium and low risk patients unwilling or unable to adopt therapeutic lifestyle changes,” said Hennekens.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Florida Atlantic University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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What do women want? It depends on time of month

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If she loves you and then she loves you not, don’t blame the petals of that daisy. Blame evolution.UCLA researchers analyzed dozens of published and unpublished studies on how women’s preferences for mates change throughout the menstrual cycle. Their findings suggest that ovulating women have evolved to prefer mates who display sexy traits — such as a masculine body type and facial features, dominant behavior and certain scents — but not traits typically desired in long-term mates.So, desires for those masculine characteristics, which are thought to have been markers of high genetic quality in our male ancestors, don’t last all month — just the few days in a woman’s cycle when she is most likely to pass on genes that, eons ago, might have increased the odds of her offspring surviving and reproducing.”Women sometimes get a bad rap for being fickle, but the changes they experience are not arbitrary,” said Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA and the paper’s senior author. “Women experience intricately patterned preference shifts even though they might not serve any function in the present.”The findings will appear online this month in Psychological Bulletin, which is published by the American Psychological Association.Whether women’s mate preferences shift at high fertility has been a source of debate since the late 1990s, when the first scholarly studies to hint at such a change appeared. Since then, several papers have failed to replicate the early studies’ results, casting doubt on the hypothesis.Haselton and Kelly Gildersleeve, a UCLA doctoral candidate in psychology and the study’s lead author, spent three years attempting to resolve the controversy. They solicited raw data from dozens of scholars who have conducted research on the topic and then translated the data from 50 studies into the same mathematical format so that the findings could be statistically analyzed together.The strength of women’s preference shift proved to be statistically significant, although “small” to “medium” in size, relative to most findings in the field. As a point of comparison, the size of the shift was statistically comparable to the difference researchers have found between men’s and women’s self-reported number of heterosexual sex partners (with men reporting more sex partners).The findings are less clear, however, about which male characteristics are most alluring to ovulating women. But women’s responses to male body scents could be capable of producing the strongest effects, Haselton said.In the few scent studies conducted so far, researchers asked women to smell T-shirts that had been worn by men with varying degrees of body and facial symmetry. (Across a large body of research on many different animals, body and facial symmetry are associated with larger body size, more pronounced sexual “ornaments” such as the attractive plumage on male birds, and better health, suggesting that symmetry could be an indicator of genetic quality.) Women preferred the odors of more symmetrical men when in the fertile portions of their cycles. The UCLA meta-analysis likewise showed a large shift in women’s preference for the body odor of symmetrical men, although more studies are needed to determine whether this effect is robust.Haselton, who is based in UCLA’s College of Letters and Science, is one of a handful of pioneers in research on behavioral changes at ovulation. …


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Pearl Harbor Anniversary Attracts Support for WW II Veterans at Mesothelioma Center

Pearl Harbor Anniversary Attracts Support for WW II Veterans at Mesothelioma Center



The number of living American veterans who were at Pearl Harbor 70 years ago when the United States was attacked and drawn into World War II is dwindling to a precious few.
Yet the historic significance of...

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#American, #Application, #Benefits, #Cancer, #Generation, #Memorials, #Pearl, #Process, #Psyche

Cat parasite found in western Arctic Beluga deemed infectious

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University of British Columbia scientists have found for the first time an infectious form of the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii in western Arctic Beluga, prompting a health advisory to the Inuit people who eat whale meat.The same team also discovered a new strain of the parasite, previously sequestered in the icy north, that is responsible for killing 406 grey seals in the north Atlantic in 2012.Presenting their findings today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Michael Grigg and Stephen Raverty from UBC’s Marine Mammal Research Unit say that the “big thaw” occurring in the Arctic is allowing never-before-seen movement of pathogens between the Arctic and the lower latitudes.”Ice is a major eco-barrier for pathogens,” says Michael Grigg, a molecular parasitologist with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an adjunct professor at UBC. “What we’re seeing with the big thaw is the liberation of pathogens gaining access to vulnerable new hosts and wreaking havoc.”Toxoplasmosis, also known as kitty litter disease, is the leading cause of infectious blindness in humans and can be fatal to fetuses and to people and animals with compromised immune systems.”Belugas are not only an integral part of Inuit culture and folklore, but also a major staple of the traditional diet. Hunters and community members are very concerned about food safety and security,” says Raverty, a veterinary pathologist with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Lands’ Animal Health Centre and an adjunct professor at UBC. Raverty has led the systematic sampling and screening of hunter-harvested Beluga for 14 years.Grigg has also identified the culprit of the 2012 grey seal die-off as a new strain of Sarcocystis. While not harmful to humans, the Arctic parasite, which was named Sarcocystis pinnipedi at the AAAS meeting today, has now killed an endangered Steller sea lion, seals, Hawaiian monk seals, walruses, polar and grizzly bears in Alaska and as far south as British Columbia.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of British Columbia. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alaska, #American, #Arctic, #Gondii, #Inuit, #Meat, #Scientists, #University

With their amazing necks, ants don"t need "high hopes" to do heavy lifting

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High hopes may help move a rubber tree plant (as the old song goes), but the real secret to the ant’s legendary strength may lie in its tiny neck joint.In the Journal of Biomechanics, researchers report that the neck joint of a common American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times the ant’s weight.”Ants are impressive mechanical systems — astounding, really,” said Carlos Castro, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University. “Before we started, we made a somewhat conservative estimate that they might withstand 1,000 times their weight, and it turned out to be much more.”The engineers are studying whether similar joints might enable future robots to mimic the ant’s weight-lifting ability on earth and in space.Other researchers have long observed ants in the field and guessed that they could hoist a hundred times their body weight or more, judging by the payload of leaves or prey that they carried. Castro and his colleagues took a different approach.They took the ants apart.”As you would in any engineering system, if you want to understand how something works, you take it apart,” he said. “That may sound kind of cruel in this case, but we did anesthetize them first.”The engineers examined the Allegheny mound ant (Formica exsectoides) as if it were a device that they wanted to reverse-engineer: they tested its moving parts and the materials it is made of.They chose this particular species because it’s common in the eastern United States and could easily be obtained from the university insectary. It’s an average field ant that is not particularly known for it’s lifting ability.They imaged ants with electron microscopy and X-rayed them with micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) machines. They placed the ants in a refrigerator to anesthetize them, then glued them face-down in a specially designed centrifuge to measure the force necessary to deform the neck and eventually rupture the head from the body.The centrifuge worked on the same principle as a common carnival ride called “the rotor.” In the rotor, a circular room spins until centrifugal force pins people to the wall and the floor drops out. In the case of the ants, their heads were glued in place on the floor of the centrifuge, so that as it spun, the ants’ bodies would be pulled outward until their necks ruptured.The centrifuge spun up to hundreds of rotations per second, each increase in speed exerting more outward force on the ant. At forces corresponding to 350 times the ants’ body weight, the neck joint began to stretch and the body lengthened. The ants’ necks ruptured at forces of 3,400-5,000 times their average body weight.Micro-CT scans revealed the soft tissue structure of the neck and its connection to the hard exoskeleton of the head and body. Electron microscopy images revealed that each part of the head-neck-chest joint was covered in a different texture, with structures that looked like bumps or hairs extending from different locations.”Other insects have similar micro-scale structures, and we think that they might play some kind of mechanical role,” Castro said. …


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