Stopping smoking linked to improved mental health

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The researchers say the effect sizes are equal or larger than those of antidepressant treatment for mood and anxiety disorders.It is well known that stopping smoking substantially reduces major health risks, such as the development of cancers, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. But the association between smoking and mental health is less clear cut.Many smokers want to stop but continue smoking as they believe smoking has mental health benefits. And health professionals are sometimes reluctant to deal with smoking in people with mental disorders in case stopping smoking worsens their mental health.So researchers from the universities of Birmingham, Oxford, and King’s College London set out to investigate changes in mental health after smoking cessation compared with continuing to smoke.They analysed the results of 26 studies of adults that assessed mental health before smoking cessation and at least six weeks after cessation in the general population and clinical populations (patients with chronic psychiatric and/or physical conditions).Differences in study design and quality were taken into account to minimize bias.Measures of mental health included anxiety, depression, positivity, psychological quality of life, and stress. Participants had an average age of 44, smoked around 20 cigarettes a day, and were followed up for an average of six months.The research team found consistent evidence that stopping smoking is associated with improvements in depression, anxiety, stress, psychological quality of life, and positivity compared with continuing to smoke.The strength of association was similar for both the general population and clinical populations, including those with mental health disorders. And there was no evidence that study differences could have skewed the results.Although observational data can never prove causality, “smokers can be reassured that stopping smoking is associated with mental health benefits,” say the authors.”This could overcome barriers that clinicians have toward intervening with smokers with mental health problems,” they add. “Furthermore, challenging the widely held assumption that smoking has mental health benefits could motivate smokers to stop.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by BMJ-British Medical Journal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Sochi games influenced by Lake Placid winter Olympics of 1932

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Eight crashes that sent more than a dozen competitors to the hospital marred bobsled practice runs leading up to the 1932 winter Olympic games in Lake Placid, N.Y., but as dramatic as those incidents were, they also provide insight into more ordinary factors that continue to influence the Olympics, according to a Penn State researcher.”The crashes occurred on the Mt. Van Hoevenberg slide, which was specially built for the games at Lake Placid,” said Peter Hopsicker, associate professor of kinesiology. “How that facility came to be established provides an historic precedent that has shaped the Olympics since then, including Sochi games.”The winter Olympics were first organized in 1924, and the Lake Placid games were the first to be held in the United States. The upstate New York location was chosen largely in response to the efforts of Godfrey Dewey, who held investments in Lake Placid as a recreational area and hoped to use the Olympics as a springboard for the region’s development as an international winter sports resort.”The bob-run was the centerpiece — you can’t have a winter Olympics without it, it’s expensive but essential,” said Hopsicker, who describes the bob-run’s planning and construction in the spring issue of the Journal of Sport History. “Dewey lobbied heavily to have it located proximate to the tourist villages of Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, yet the state’s environmental policies protected the public Adirondack wilderness.”Dewey ran headlong into a conservation group, the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, which took legal steps to block his efforts to develop the bob-run on public land, triggering the first battle between developers of an Olympics host city and environmental stewards.The issue became wrapped in politics when New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt balked at spending public funds to build the bob-run no matter where it was located. Dewey lost the battle with the environmentalists and built a world-class bob-run on a privately owned site christened Mt. Van Hoevenberg, but he did persuade Roosevelt to allocate state funds for the games.The completed slide provided unique challenges for the athletes. “It had pronounced drops in the curves,” Hopsicker said, “something new to the sport.”While Dewey provided bobsleds for all international teams, the Germans brought their own sleds built for a more European snow-covered surface. The Germans’ unwillingness to use Dewey’s sleds that were built with the qualities of the Lake Placid slide in mind contributed significantly to the subsequent German crashes during practice runs. …


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Making biodiverse agriculture part of a food-secure future

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Is biodiverse agriculture an anachronism? Or is it a vital part of a food-secure future?Given the need to feed an estimated 2.4 billion more people by the year 2050, the drive toward large-scale, single-crop farming around the world may seem inexorable.But there’s an important downside to this trend, argues Timothy Johns, Professor of Human Nutrition at McGill University in Montreal, in a paper to be presented Feb. 15, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.Diets for most people around the world are becoming increasingly limited in biological and nutritional diversity. “Large-scale agriculture is characteristically simplified and less diverse than small-holder agriculture,” Prof. Johns cautions. “This is true in genetic, ecological and nutritional terms.”Small farmers, by contrast, in many places continue to grow a range of species and multiple varieties that form the basis of their diet and nutrition. Use of a range of wild species of fruit, vegetables, condiments and medicines, as well as wild animal-sourced foods, increase the likelihood that subsistence farmers with access to natural ecosystems meet their nutrition and health needs.The problem is that smallholder farmers in developing countries often have low productivity and little likelihood of generating the profits needed to rise above poverty level, says Prof. Johns, who directs the McGill Canadian Field Studies in Africa program. In particular, the smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa, which account for more than 90 percent of agricultural production and the primary livelihood of 65 percent of the population, need to be more productive.When they have access to improved technology, however, smallholder farmers can be both more productive and more sustainable than large-scale, intensive agriculture. Using family members in farming reduces labor and supervision costs, while a more intimate knowledge of the local soil, plants and animals enables smallholders to maximize output. …


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#Association, #Canadian, #Ecology, #Field, #Montreal, #Pregnancy, #Profjohns, #Science, #University, #World

Early childhood education can pay big rewards to families, society

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High quality early childhood education for disadvantaged children can simultaneously reduce inequality and boost productivity in America, contends James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and one of the nation’s leading experts on early childhood education.”With the global rise in income inequality, children born into disadvantaged environments are at much greater risk of being unskilled and facing many obstacles in life — which is bad for individuals and bad for societies,” said Heckman, who delivered a talk “Giving Kids a Fair Chance Early in Life: A Strategy that Works” on Feb. 14 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual meeting in Chicago.He pointed out that economic and socially related gaps in cognitive and non-cognitive skills emerge early, and can be traced in part to adverse early environments.”With smart policies we can arrest the polarization between skilled and unskilled, focusing on early years when change is possible,” he said. Strong early childhood education programs can help overcome the gaps and help children become better prepared for success in life, he said.Heckman spoke at a seminar titled “Talking to Kids Really Matters: Early Language Experience Shapes Later Life Chances.” At the session, scholars discussed the importance of verbal engagement by caretakers in the development of children’s language and cognitive abilities.Researchers have found that the timing, quality and quantity of talking with children are crucial to the development of language and cognitive abilities. In one study, some mothers spoke many thousands of words a day to children, while another spoke only 600 words to her infant over a 10-hour day, organizers of the seminar pointed out.The gap reduces the children’s vocabularies and undermines their performance in school, scholars contend. Early childhood education programs can make up for some of the differences.Heckman has studied extensively early childhood programs, including the Perry Preschool Project and the Abecedarian Project, and found that they were especially effective in helping children from disadvantaged families succeed in school and later in life.When the oldest participants were studied (at age 40 for the Perry program and age 35 for Abecedarian), the people who received services when they were younger scored higher on achievement tests, attained higher levels of education, required less special education, earned higher wages, had better physical health, were more likely to own a home, and were less likely to go on welfare or be incarcerated than other children from similar backgrounds.Non-cognitive skills, which can be fostered at an early age, are as important in the children’s futures as are academic preparation, Heckman said. Those skills include perseverance, attentiveness, motivation, and self-confidence. Those skills help students perform better in school and later on jobs, he has found.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of Chicago. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Prostate cancer advance could improve treatment options

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Findings published today in the British Journal of Cancer, and funded by the Association for International Cancer Research (AICR), show how a genetic mutation in untreated patients is linked to aggressive cancer later in life. It was previously thought that the mutation only occurred in response to therapy.The research highlights why relapses could occur in some men following hormone therapy. And it could help identify those patients that will develop fatal prostate cancer much earlier for life-extending therapy.Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with more than 40,000 new cases diagnosed every year. Treatment options for patients diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer vary from “watchful waiting” to hormone-withdrawal therapy, radiotherapy or surgery.Additional tests for indicators of aggressive cancer are necessary to help categorise patients so that those with a low-risk of the disease spreading can avoid unnecessary treatment, and those diagnosed with a high-risk can be targeted for more aggressive first line therapy.Hormone-withdrawal therapy often results in a dramatic remission, however the disease invariably relapses with a resistant form of the cancer. A third of these are due to an increase in copy number of a particular gene called the ‘androgen receptor’. The gene is on the X-Chromosome and so there is normally only one copy of this gene present in men. Prostate cancer thrives on male hormones, and one way that they develop to grow better is to increase the number of copies of the androgen receptor gene. This also enables the cancer to resist therapy.Lead researchers Dr Jeremy Clark and Prof Colin Cooper from UEA’s school of Biological Sciences carried out the research at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and at UEA.Dr Clark said: “By the age of 60, the majority of men will have signs of prostate cancer. However, only a small proportion of men will die of the disease. The question is — which of these cancers are dangerous and which are not? …


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Association, #British, #Discovery, #Gene, #Number, #Prostate, #Research

Virtual avatars may impact real-world behavior

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How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.”Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers,” says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.As Yoon and co-author Patrick Vargas note, virtual environments afford people the opportunity to take on identities and experience circumstances that they otherwise can’t in real life, providing “a vehicle for observation, imitation, and modeling.”They wondered whether these virtual experiences — specifically, the experiences of taking on heroic or villainous avatars — might carry over into everyday behavior.The researchers recruited 194 undergraduates to participate in two supposedly unrelated studies. The participants were randomly assigned to play as Superman (a heroic avatar), Voldemort (a villainous avatar), or a circle (a neutral avatar). They played a game for 5 minutes in which they, as their avatars, were tasked with fighting enemies. Then, in a presumably unrelated study, they participated in a blind taste test. They were asked to taste and then give either chocolate or chili sauce to a future participant. They were told to pour the chosen food item into a plastic dish and that the future participant would consume all of the food provided.The results were revealing: Participants who played as Superman poured, on average, nearly twice as much chocolate as chili sauce for the “future participant.” And they poured significantly more chocolate than those who played as either of the other avatars.Participants who played as Voldemort, on the other hand, poured out nearly twice as much of the spicy chili sauce than they did chocolate, and they poured significantly more chili sauce compared to the other participants.A second experiment with 125 undergraduates confirmed these findings and showed that actually playing as an avatar yielded stronger effects on subsequent behavior than just watching someone else play as the avatar.Interestingly, the degree to which participants actually identified with their avatar didn’t seem to play a role:”These behaviors occur despite modest, equivalent levels of self-reported identification with heroic and villainous avatars, alike,” Yoon and Vargas note. “People are prone to be unaware of the influence of their virtual representations on their behavioral responses.”The researchers hypothesize that that arousal, the degree to which participants are ‘keyed into’ the game, might be an important factor driving the behavioral effects they observed.The findings, though preliminary, may have implications for social behavior, the researchers argue:”In virtual environments, people can freely choose avatars that allow them to opt into or opt out of a certain entity, group, or situation,” says Yoon. “Consumers and practitioners should remember that powerful imitative effects can occur when people put on virtual masks.”Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Association for Psychological Science. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Association, #Avatar, #Chocolate, #Health, #Participants, #Pregnancy, #Science, #University, #Video