More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
The war on fat is back, thanks to an aggressive campaign by food pundits related to sugar, GMOs and corporations.
For a while, it looked like all thin people were going to be placed into mandatory body image counseling, the Kardashians had made plump the new natural, but doctors have overruled activists like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle and their beliefs about nutrition and affirmed that it's calories that matter, not the scary story of the week.
According to a Delta Dental survey out today, American adults overwhelmingly want a little pumpkin at Thanksgiving, it has 36 percent favorability, more than double that of American's next favorite Thanksgiving pie, pecan, which ekes out only 15 percent. The Delta Dental Plans Association Fall 2016 Survey was conducted between October 18 and October 25, 2016 among a nationally representative sample of 1,009 Americans 18+. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percent. Pumpkin pie is most popular in the West (46 percent) but that drops to 30 percent for people in the South. Additionally, 39 percent of Midwesterners prefer it, and 33 percent of Northeasterners.
Cancer cells are so deadly because of their ability to quickly invade and a new study contends that part of the blame rests with mitochondria, the energy factories of the cell. Mitochondria are organelles inside most of our cells that generate energy and so play a crucial role in a tumor's ability to generate the energy needed to invade healthy tissue.
Once again this year, consumers say they are weighing their options for making healthier choices. And 81 percent say they wish they had made healthier choices before - but 70 percent have no plans to make their holiday meals healthier this year even though 37 percent realize they can eat healthier with simple meal substitutions.Welcome to the world of Internet surveys.The survey of 1,022 adults was conducted by ORC International on behalf of Ready Pac Foods. This online omnibus was live on November 3-6, 2016.Key findings from the holiday survey include:
Taking music lessons increases brain fiber connections in children, according to a recent small study. The researchers studied 23 healthy children between the ages of five and six years old. All of the children were right handed and had no history of sensory, perception or neurological disorders.
None of the children had been trained in any artistic discipline in the past.
The study participants underwent pre- and post-musical-training evaluation with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the brain. DTI is an advanced MRI technique, which identifies microstructural changes in the brain's white matter.
Thanks to savvy marketing by food corporations who are looking for health halos to put over their food, consumer demand for food products formulated without synthetic additives has increased. There is a big drawback, demonstrated by Chipotle and others who are hoping to make themselves look healthier when selling junk food - it still has to be safe to eat. Additives, synthetic or not, are needed for food safety reasons, so food product developers are faced with the challenge of developing more "natural" additives that can produce comparable in safety results with synthetic versions.
We've all felt sleepy after a big Thanksgiving meal and tryptophan usually gets the bad rap - but there simply isn't enough of it to make a difference. Yet clearly something is making many of us take longer naps after binging on supper.A recent study examined 'food comas' using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and explained some of the causes behind this phenomenon. They created a system that can measure both the sleep and feeding behaviors of individual fruit flies and discovered that, in much the same way as humans, the animals sleep for longer periods following larger meals. Further studies also revealed that certain types of food can promote post-meal sleep.
It's no secret that smoking causes lung cancer, but lost in the more recent smoke and mirrors about the new war on tobacco is the fact cigarettes are also linked to many other diseases, and the risk is compounded in diabetics who smoke. Diabetes, the kind occurring naturally and the lifestyle type 2 version, is a chronic illness in which there are high levels of glucose in the blood. More than 29 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, up from the previous estimate of 26 million in 2010, according to a report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One in four people with diabetes doesn't know he or she has it. Like smoking, having diabetes can also put people at risk for numerous other health complications.
People may soon be able to watch their unborn babies grow in realistic 3-D immersive visualizations, thanks to new technology that transforms MRI and ultrasound data into a 3-D virtual reality model of a fetus. MRI provides high-resolution fetal and placental imaging with excellent contrast. It is generally used in fetal evaluation when ultrasound cannot provide sufficiently high-quality images.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity has more than quadrupled in adolescents over the past 30 years and it is estimated that more than one-third of kids and adolescents in the U.S. are at least overweight. Obesity in childhood and adolescence is associated with a number of later health risks, such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
In what will send cheers throughout the parenting community, a new paper suggest that helping care for grandchildren might affect the well-being of older adults. Caregivers' feelings partly depend on their perception of the experience, as well as on how they are treated by their family and by the community. The researchers looked at information from the "Population Study of Chinese Elderly (PINE)," which examined more than 3,000 Chicago-area Chinese-Americans aged 60 and older between 2011 and 2013. The participants answered questions to screen for depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, and other factors affecting their health and well-being.
At ASN Kidney Week 2016 in Chicago, investigators showed progress toward creating a functional bioartificial kidney that could replace the need for dialysis or transplantation in the millions of patients with kidney failure. A key requirement for such a device is the formation of a "living membrane" that consists of a tight kidney cell layer on artificial membrane surfaces and can transport molecules from one side to the other. In their presentation, Dimitrios Stamatialis, PhD from University of Twente in The Netherlands, Roos Masereeuw, PhD from University of Utrecht in The Netherlands discussed achieving this using conditionally immortalized human renal proximal tubular epithelial cells (ciPTECs) on polyethersulfone-based hollow fiber membranes.
