What's Next In Health

The risk of developing Parkinson’s disease may be reduced with moderate to vigorous exercise or other recreational activities, according to research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 28 – May 5, 2007.

The study followed more than 143,000 people with an average age of 63 over 10 years. In that time, 413 people developed Parkinson’s disease. Researchers found that those with moderate to vigorous activity levels were 40 percent less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those with no or light activity levels. Those with moderate to vigorous activity were exercising an average of a half hour per day or more.

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Scientists have identified the most clear genetic link yet to obesity in the general population as part of a major study of diseases funded by the Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest medical research charity. People with two copies of a particular gene variant have a 70% higher risk of being obese than those with no copies.

Obesity is a major cause of disease, associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It is typically measured using body mass index (BMI). As a result of reduced physical activity and increased food consumption, the prevalence of obesity is increasing worldwide. According to the 2001 Health Survey for England, over a fifth of males and a similar proportion of females aged 16 and over in England were classified as obese. Half of men and a third of women were classified as overweight.

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Got milk? Weightlifters will want to raise a glass after a new study found that milk protein is significantly better than soy at building muscle mass.

The study, conducted by a team of researchers at McMaster University’s Department of Kinesiology, was recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It compared how much muscle protein young men gained after completing a heavy weight workout followed by consumption of equivalent amounts of protein as either fluid skim milk or a soy drink.

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Tai Chi, a traditional Chinese form of exercise, may help older adults avoid getting shingles by increasing immunity to varicella-zoster virus (VZV) and boosting the immune response to varicella vaccine in older adults, according to a new study publishsed in print this week in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. This National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded study is the first rigorous clinical trial to suggest that a behavioral intervention, alone or in combination with a vaccine, can help protect older adults from VZV, which causes both chickenpox and shingles.

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Will you lose weight and keep it off if you diet? No, probably not, UCLA researchers report in the April issue of American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association.

"You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back," said Traci Mann, UCLA associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people."

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A new "platform" with a crucial role in the body's ability to process and take up fat from the diet has been found, according to a report in the April issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, published by Cell Press.

Researchers discovered a protein that sits on the inner surfaces of capillaries, where it delivers "packages" of dietary fat from the bloodstream to enzymes that prepare them for entry into cells of the body. Once inside cells, the fats are either burned as a rich source of energy or stored for later use.

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Much research has shown that reduced calorie intake can increase health and longevity. Professor Stephen Spindler (University of California) and his collaborators have discovered that reducing calorie intake later in life can still induce many of the health and longevity benefits of life-long calorie reduction. Importantly, this also includes anti-cancer effects. They are using this knowledge to establish a novel screening technique to find drugs which mimic this longevity effect. “Right now, there are no authentic “anti-ageing drugs” capable of extending the lifespan of healthy people. The technique we have developed allows us to screen a relatively large number of drugs in months rather than years. The hope is that these drugs will be able to extend the lifespan of healthy animals, and possibly, after further testing, healthy humans”, says Professor Spindler who will present his results at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Main Meeting in Glasgow on Monday 2nd April.

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Researchers at The University of Manchester have discovered that arthritis pain, unlike that induced as part of an experiment, is processed in the parts of the brain concerned with emotions and fear.

A team led by Dr Bhavna Kulkarni has captured the first images of how the brain processes arthritis pain, using positron emission tomography (PET) scanners based at the Christie Hospital.

In a study funded by the Arthritis Research Campaign and published in "Arthritis and Rheumatism" this week, they compare the brain areas involved in processing arthritic and experimental pain in a group of patients with osteoarthritis.

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Tai chi chih, the Westernized version of the 2,000-year-old Chinese martial art characterized by slow movement and meditation, significantly boosts the immune systems of older adults against the virus that leads to the painful, blistery rash known as shingles, according to a new UCLA study.

The 25-week study, which involved a group of 112 adults ranging in age from 59 to 86, showed that practicing tai chi chih alone boosted immunity to a level comparable to having received the standard vaccine against the shingles-causing varicella zoster virus. When tai chi chih was combined with the vaccine, immunity reached a level normally seen in middle age. The report appears in the April issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, currently online.

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At age 32, Maggie Fermental suffered a stroke that left her right side paralyzed. After a year and a half of conventional therapy with minimal results, she tried a new kind of robotic therapy developed by MIT engineers. A study to appear in the April 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation shows that the device, which helped Fermental, also had positive results for five other severe stroke patients in a pilot clinical trial.

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The success of long term hip replacement surgery may lie in the genes, suggests research published ahead of print in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

The researchers analysed genetic variations in 312 people, just over half of whom (162) had problems after hip replacement in the 10 years following surgery.

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Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center had a mystery on their hands. A 51-year-old physician colleague who looked the picture of health—no cardiovascular risks, a marathon runner who had exercised vigorously each day for 30 years—had just flunked a calcium screening scan of his heart.

The patient had expected a score indicating a healthy cardiovascular system. Instead, the images indicated a high score: a build-up of calcium in his coronary arteries put him at high risk for blocked blood vessels and a possible heart attack.

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A Chicago-area study of 50 individuals with a misaligned Atlas vertebra (located high in the neck) and high blood pressure showed that after a one-time specialized chiropractic adjustment, blood pressure decreased significantly. The decrease was equal to taking two blood-pressure drugs at once. The results are published in the online March 2 issue of the Journal of Human Hypertension.

According to lead author George Bakris, MD, director of the hypertension center at the University of Chicago Medical Center, unlike other vertebrae, which interlock one to the next, the Atlas (also known as C-1) relies solely upon soft tissue (muscles and ligaments) to maintain alignment; therefore is uniquely vulnerable to displacement. Displacement of C-1 can occur without pain and thus, often goes undetected and untreated.

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Weight loss surgery, such as gastric bypass surgery, can lead to a vitamin deficiency that can cause memory loss and confusion, inability to coordinate movement, and other problems, according to a study published in the March 13, 2007, issue of Neurology®, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The syndrome, called Wernicke encephalopathy, affects the brain and nervous system when the body doesn’t get enough vitamin B1, or thiamine. It can also cause vision problems, such as rapid eye movements.

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Have your neurons been shouting at your muscles again? It happens, you know.

As we grow older, neurons--the nerve cells that deliver commands from our brains--have to “speak” more loudly to get the attention of our muscles to move, according to University of Delaware researcher Christopher Knight, an assistant professor in UD's College of Health Sciences.

“As a result of age-related changes in muscle and neurons, elderly people are often frustrated by poor control during precision tasks, and slowed physical responses contribute to more falls as people grow older,” Knight said.

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