Sport Makes Middle-Aged People Smarter

High-intensity interval training makes middle-aged people not only healthier but smarter, showed a Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) study led by Dr. Anil Nigam of the MHI and University of Montreal, in collaboration with the Montreal Geriatric University Institute.

“We worked with six adults who all followed a four-month program of twice weekly interval training on stationary bicycles and twice weekly resistance training. Cognitive function, VO2max and brain oxygenation during exercise testing revealed that the participants’ cognitive functions had greatly improved thanks to the exercise,” Dr. Nigam said. VO2max is the maximum capacity of an individual’s body to transport and use oxygen during exercise. It impacts on the body’s ability to oxygenate the brain and is related to cognitive function.

“Our participants underwent a battery of cognitive, biological and physiological tests before the program began in order to determine their cognitive functions, body composition, cardiovascular risk, brain oxygenation during exercise and maximal aerobic capacity,” Dr. Nigam explained.

“After the program was finished, we discovered that their waist circumference and particularly their trunk fat mass had decreased. We also found that their VO2max, insulin sensitivity had increased significantly, in tandem with their score on the cognitive tests and the oxygenation signals in the brain during exercise,” Dr Nigam said. Insulin sensitivity is the ability of sugar to enter body tissue (mainly liver and muscle.)

Findings reveal brain mechanisms at work during sleep

One in five American adults show signs of chronic sleep deprivation, making the condition a widespread public health problem. Sleeplessness is related to health issues such as obesity, cardiovascular problems, and memory problems.

Today’s findings show that:

• Sleepiness disrupts the coordinated activity of an important network of brain regions; the impaired function of this network is also implicated in Alzheimer’s disease (Andrew Ward, abstract 909.05).
• Sleeplessness plays havoc with communication between the hippocampus, which is vital for memory, and the brain’s “default mode network;” the changes may weaken event recollection (Hengyi Rao, PhD, abstract 626.08).
• In a mouse model, fearful memories can be intentionally weakened during sleep, indicating new possibilities for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (Asya Rolls, abstract 807.06).
• Loss of less than half a night’s sleep can impair memory and alter the normal behavior of brain cells (Ted Abel, PhD, abstract 807.13).

Other recent findings discussed show:
• How sleep enables the remodeling of memories — including the weakening of irrelevant memories — and the coherent integration of old and new information (Gina Poe, PhD).
• The common logic behind seemingly contradictory theories of how sleep remodels synapses, aiding cognition and memory consolidation (Giulio Tononi, MD, PhD).

Sleep loss links to illness studied

Insomniacs know the pattern all too well. You toss and turn at night, kept awake by the rave down the street, stress from work, the snores of a significant other.

After a stretch of restless evenings, you wake up with a sore throat or a fever. You’re no longer just tired - you’re also sick.

Physicians know this pattern, too. Constant lack of sleep has long been linked with a laundry list of unpleasant conditions: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weight gain, infectious illnesses and even death.

While it’s common knowledge that a full night of rest helps ward off ailments, what largely remains a mystery is exactly how sleep loss triggers the biological mechanisms that in turn bring about illness - like the common cold.

A 2009 study of 153 men and women, for example, showed that those who slept fewer than seven hours on average per night were about three times more likely to develop a cold than those with at least eight hours of sleep daily.

Even a small difference in sleep quality made a big difference in health, the Carnegie Mellon University study showed. Participants who actually slept less than 92 percent of the time between the time they laid down to sleep and when they woke up were 5.5 times more likely to develop a cold than those who stayed asleep 98 percent or more of the time, according to the researchers.

Read more

Penn Researchers Connect Baboon Personalities to Social Success and Health Benefits

Whether human or baboon, it helps to have friends. For both species, studies have shown that robust social networks lead to better health and longer lives. Now, a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has helped show that baboon personality plays a role in these outcomes, and, like people, some baboons’ personalities are better suited to making and keeping friends than others.

The research was conducted by psychology professor Robert Seyfarth and biology professor Dorothy Cheney, both of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. They collaborated with the Arizona State University’s Joan Silk.  

Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Pill for healthy ageing ‘available within a generation’

Dame Linda Partridge, a geneticist at University College London, claimed drugs will soon be available which can lower the risk of diseases like cancer and dementia by tackling the root cause – age itself.

Rather than promising immortality, taking the drugs from middle age or earlier could dramatically shorten the period of illness and frailty that we typically experience before we die.

Speaking at the EMBO life sciences meeting in Nice, France this week Dame Linda said several existing drugs have already been shown to have unexpected and welcome side effects, such as aspirin which reduces the risk of cancer.

Other therapies will be produced that mimic the effects of a severely restricted diet, which animal studies suggest can protect against a host of age-related conditions including heart disease and diabetes, she said.

Speaking after her keynote lecture, she told The Daily Telegraph: “One obvious approach in trying to deal with the very rapidly increasing incidence of age related diseases is to tackle the underlying aging process itself, because it is the major risk factor.

Epilepsy in poor regions of the world

Epilepsy is a common disorder, particularly in poor areas of the world, and can have a devastating effect on people with the disorder and their families. The burden of epilepsy in low-income countries is more than twice that found in high-income countries, probably because the incidence of risk factors is higher. Many of these risk factors can be prevented with inexpensive interventions, but there are only a few studies that have assessed the effect of reducing risk factors on the burden of epilepsy. The mortality associated with epilepsy in low-income countries is substantially higher than in less impoverished countries and most deaths seem to be related to untreated epilepsy (eg, as a result of falls or status epilepticus), but the risk factors for death have not been adequately examined. Epilepsy is associated with substantial stigma in low-income countries, which acts as a barrier to patients accessing biomedical treatment and becoming integrated within society. Seizures can be controlled by inexpensive antiepileptic drugs, but the supply and quality of these drugs can be erratic in poor areas. The treatment gap for epilepsy is high (>60%) in deprived areas, but this could be reduced with low-cost interventions. The substantial burden of epilepsy in poor regions of the world can be reduced by preventing the risk factors, reducing stigma, improving access to biomedical diagnosis and treatment, and ensuring that there is a continuous supply of good quality antiepileptic drugs.

A ‘can do’ attitude is the key to a healthy lifestyle, University of Melbourne economists have determined.

Researchers from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research analysed data on the diet, exercise and personality type of more than 7,000 people. The study found those who believe their life can be changed by their own actions ate healthier food, exercised more, smoked less and avoided binge drinking.

Professor Deborah Cobb-Clark, Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, said those who have a greater faith in ‘luck’ or ‘fate’ are more likely to live an unhealthy life. “Our research shows a direct link between the type of personality a person has and a healthy lifestyle,“ she said.

Professor Cobb-Clark hoped the study would help inform public health policies on conditions such as obesity. “The main policy response to the obesity epidemic has been the provision of better information, but information alone is insufficient to change people’s eating habits,” she said.

“Understanding the psychological underpinning of a person’s eating patterns and exercise habits is central to understanding obesity.” The study also found men and women hold different views on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

Men wanted physical results from their healthy choices, while women were more receptive to the everyday enjoyment of leading a healthy lifestyle. Professor Cobb-Clarke said the research demonstrated the need for more targeted policy responses. “What works well for women may not work well for men,” she said. “Gender specific policy initiatives which respond to these objectives may be particularly helpful in promoting healthy lifestyles.”

Kids who get migraine headaches are much more likely than other children to also have behavioral difficulties, including social and attention issues, and anxiety and depression. The more frequent the headaches, the greater the effect, according to research out now in the journal Cephalagia, published by SAGE.

Marco Arruda, director of the Glia Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, together with Marcelo Bigal of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York studied 1,856 Brazilian children aged 5 to 11. The authors say that this is the first large, community based study of its kind to look at how children’s behavioural and emotional symptoms correlate with migraine and tension-type headaches (TTH), and to incorporate data on headache frequency.

Using ultrasound waves, MIT engineers have found a way to enhance the permeability of skin to drugs, making transdermal drug delivery more efficient. This technology could pave the way for noninvasive drug delivery or needle-free vaccinations, according to the researchers.

“This could be used for topical drugs such as steroids — cortisol, for example — systemic drugs and proteins such as insulin, as well as antigens for vaccination, among many other things,” says Carl Schoellhammer, an MIT graduate student in chemical engineering and one of the lead authors of a recent paper on the new system.

Ultrasound — sound waves with frequencies greater than the upper limit of human hearing — can increase skin permeability by lightly wearing away the top layer of the skin, an effect that is transient and pain-free.

In a paper appearing in the Journal of Controlled Release, the research team found that applying two separate beams of ultrasound waves — one of low frequency and one of high frequency — can uniformly boost permeability across a region of skin more rapidly than using a single beam of ultrasound waves.