Category: Health

{It’s important we drink enough water daily and if your urine isn’t clear, it’s a sign you aren’t drinking enough water.}

{{Here are 13 benefits of drinking water}}

1. If you are looking to lose weight, increasing your water intake will help according to various studies.

2. Drinking water helps the digestion of food and prevents constipation.

3. Studies have shown that mild dehydration can negatively impact our mood. Drinking water has been found to improve our mood.

4. Drinking water helps flush out toxins from our body through sweat and urine.

5. Drinking water helps ease the effect of a hangover. Alcohol causes dehydration which can lead to a hangover and drinking water while taking alcohol will help reduce dehydration.

6. Drinking water is good for the brain as it helps us think more clearly. The brain struggles to function properly when we are dehydrated.

7. Drinking water helps relieve and prevent headaches. Taking a glass of water when you feel a slight headache can help.

8. Our memory and attention is impaired when dehydrated. Drinking water helps us stay focused and alert.

9. Drinking water keeps us energised. Tiredness is one of the signs of dehydration.

10. Drinking enough water is important to keep our kidney running smoothly.

11. You save money when you drink water as it’s less expensive than buying a soda drink or a bottle of beer.

12. Water is the best anti-aging treatment available. Adequate water consumption helps keep the skin glowing, soft and fresh.

13. Adequate water consumption boosts our immunity. People who drink enough water are less likely to fall sick when compared to people who don’t drink enough water.

Source:Elcrema

{Hormone could save lives of particularly vulnerable patients}

Researchers have found that a hormone responsible for controlling iron metabolism helps fight off a severe form of bacterial pneumonia, and that discovery may offer a simple way to help vulnerable patients.

The researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have identified a key hormone critical for preventing pneumonia bacteria from spreading throughout the body. The hormone, hepcidin, is produced in the liver and limits the spread of the bacteria by hiding the iron in the blood that the bacteria need to survive and grow.

Stimulating hepcidin production in patients who do not produce it well, such as people with iron overload or liver disease, may help their bodies effectively starve the bacteria to death. That finding could be lifesaving for these vulnerable patients, especially as pneumonia bacteria grow increasingly antibiotic antibiotic-resistant.

“The rate at which these organisms become resistant to antibiotics is far faster than the rate at which we come up with new antibiotics. It’s a race, and they’re winning it,” said researcher Borna Mehrad, MBBS, of UVA’s Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. “Increasingly, the choice of antibiotics to treat these infections is more and more limited, and there are occasions where there just isn’t an antibiotic to treat with, which is a very scary and dangerous situation.”

{{Helpful Hormone}}

Mehrad and his team, including colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that mice that had been genetically modified to lack hepcidin were particularly susceptible to bacterial pneumonia. Nearly all of the mice had the pneumonia bacteria spread from the lungs into their bloodstream, ultimately killing them. “It’s the exact same thing that happens in people,” Mehrad said. “The mice that lacked the hormone weren’t able to hide iron away from the bacteria, and we think that’s why the bacteria did so well in the blood.”

Researcher Kathryn Michels, a graduate student in Mehrad’s lab and the first author of a manuscript outlining the findings, noted that many people lack the hormone because of genetic illnesses or liver disease. “It’s quite common,” she said. “We think this line of research is very relevant to the many people who can’t make this hormone very well and are, clinically, very susceptible to these infections.”

She noted that there is already a drug in development that mimics the function of hepcidin and could be used to decrease the iron levels in the blood of pneumonia patients who lack hepcidin. That drug has been developed primarily to treat chronic iron overload, such as is seen in people with hereditary hemochromatosis, but the new research may give it another, lifesaving application.

“We think that short-term treatment with this drug should be an effective way of treating these [pneumonia] infections,” Mehrad said. “At least in mice, it seems to work extremely well.”

Source:Science Daily

{A natural signaling molecule that activates cannabinoid receptors in the brain plays a critical role in stress-resilience — the ability to adapt to repeated and acute exposures to traumatic stress, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.}

The findings in a mouse model could have broad implications for the potential treatment and prevention of mood and anxiety disorders, including major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they reported in the journal Nature Communications.

“The study suggests that deficiencies in natural cannabinoids could result in a predisposition to developing PTSD and depression,” said Sachin Patel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the paper’s corresponding author.

“Boosting this signaling system could represent a new treatment approach for these stress-linked disorders,” he said.

Patel, the James G. Blakemore Professor of Psychiatry, received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers last year for his pioneering studies of the endocannabinoid family of signaling molecules that activate the CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors in the brain.

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active compound in marijuana, binds the CB1 receptor, which may explain why relief of tension and anxiety is the most common reason cited by people who use marijuana chronically.

Patel and his colleagues previously have found CB1 receptors in the amygdala, a key emotional hub in the brain involved in regulating anxiety and the fight-or-flight response. They also showed in animal models that anxiety increases when the CB1 receptor is blocked by a drug or its gene is deleted.

More recently they reported anxiety-like and depressive behaviors in genetically modified mice that had an impaired ability to produce 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), the most abundant endocannabinoid. When the supply of 2-AG was increased by blocking an enzyme that normally breaks it down, the behaviors were reversed.

In the current study, the researchers tested the effects of increasing or depleting the supply of 2-AG in the amygdala in two populations of mice: one previously determined to be susceptible to the adverse consequences of acute stress, and the other which exhibited stress-resilience.

Augmenting the 2-AG supply increased the proportion of stress-resilient mice overall and promoted resilience in mice that were previously susceptible to stress, whereas depleting 2-AG rendered previously stress-resilient mice susceptible to developing anxiety-like behaviors after exposure to acute stress.

Taken together, these results suggest that 2-AG signaling through the CB1 receptor in the amygdala promotes resilience to the adverse effects of acute traumatic stress exposure, and support previous findings in animal models and humans suggesting that 2-AG deficiency could contribute to development of stress-related psychiatric disorders.

Marijuana use is highly cited by patients with PTSD as a way to control symptoms. Similarly, the Vanderbilt researchers found that THC promoted stress-resilience in previously susceptible mice.

However, marijuana use in psychiatric disorders has obvious drawbacks including possible addiction and cognitive side effects, among others. The Vanderbilt study suggests that increasing production of natural cannabinoids may be an alternative strategy to harness the therapeutic potential of this signaling system.

If further research finds that some people with stress-related mood and anxiety disorders have low levels of 2-AG, replenishing the supply of this endocannabinoid could represent a novel treatment approach and might enable some of them to stop using marijuana, the researchers concluded.

Source:Science Daily

{While it has long been known that maltreatment can affect a child’s psychological development, new Penn State research indicates that the stress of abuse can impact the physical growth and maturation of adolescents as well.}

Jennie Noll, director of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network and professor of human development and family studies, and Idan Shalev, assistant professor of biobehavioral health, found that young girls who are exposed to childhood sexual abuse are likely to physically mature and hit puberty at rates 8 to twelve months earlier than their non-abused peers. Their results were published recently in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“Though a year’s difference may seem trivial in the grand scheme of a life, this accelerated maturation has been linked to concerning consequences, including behavioral and mental health problems and reproductive cancers,” said Noll.

The body is timed so that physical and developmental changes occur in tandem, assuring that as a child physically changes, they have adequate psychological growth to cope with mature contexts. “High-stress situations, such as childhood sexual abuse, can lead to increased stress hormones that jump-start puberty ahead of its standard biological timeline,” Noll explained. “When physical maturation surpasses psychosocial growth in this way, the mismatch in timing is known as maladaptation.”

In the past, there have been studies loosely linking sexual abuse to maladaptation and accelerated maturation, but the longitudinal work completed by Noll and her team has been the most conclusive and in-depth to date, beginning in 1987 and following subjects throughout each stage of puberty.

Controlling for race, ethnicity, family makeup, obesity, socioeconomic status and nonsexual traumatic experiences, the researchers compared the pubescent trajectories of 84 females with a sexual abuse history and 89 of their non-abused counterparts. Working closely with nurses and Child Protective Services, the subjects were tracked from pre-puberty to full maturity based on a system known as Tanner staging.

Tanner staging is a numeric index of ratings that corresponds with the physical progression of puberty. The study’s researchers focused on breast and pubic hair development as two separate mile markers for pubescent change. Subjects were placed somewhere from one (prepubescent) to five (full maturity) on the Tanner index and their Tanner number and age were mapped out and recorded over time.

“We found that young women with sexual abuse histories were far more likely to transition into higher puberty stages an entire year before their non-abused counterparts when it came to pubic hair growth, and a full 8 months earlier in regards to breast development,” Noll stated. “Due to increased exposure to estrogens over a longer period of time, premature physical development such as this has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers. Additionally, early puberty is seen as a potential contributor to increased rates of depression, substance abuse, sexual risk taking and teenage pregnancy.”

The researchers believe they were able to accurately rule out other variables that may have aided in accelerated puberty, pinpointing child sexual abuse and the stress hormones associated with it as a cause for early maturation in young girls. Their findings add to the body of work highlighting the role of stress in puberty, and it is the hope that the research will lead to increased preventative care and psychosocial aid to young women facing the effects of early maturation.

Source:Science Daily

{Despite greater awareness of the dangers of prenatal exposure to alcohol, the rates of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders remain alarmingly high. This study evaluated academic achievement among children known to be prenatally exposed to maternal heavy alcohol consumption as compared to their peers without such exposure, and explored the brain regions that may underlie academic performance.}

Researchers assessed two groups of children, eight to 16 years of age: 67 children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure (44 boys, 23 girls) and 61 children who were not prenatally exposed to alcohol (33 boys, 28 girls). Scores on standardized tests of academic areas such as reading, spelling, and math were analyzed. In addition, a subsample of 42 children (29 boys, 13 girls) had brain imaging, which allowed the authors to examine the relations between the cortical structure (thickness and surface area) of their brains and academic performance.

The alcohol-exposed children performed significantly worse than their peers in all academic areas, with particular weaknesses found in math performance. Brain imaging revealed several brain surface area clusters linked to math and spelling performance. The children without prenatal alcohol exposure demonstrated the expected developmental pattern of better scores associated with smaller brain surface areas, which may be related to a typical developmental process known as pruning. However, alcohol-exposed children did not show this pattern, possibly due to atypical or delayed brain development, which has been observed in other research studies. These results support previous findings of lower academic performance among children prenatally exposed to alcohol compared to their peers, which appear to be associated with differences in brain development, and highlight the need for additional attention and support for these children.

Source:Science Daily

{The need to pee at night (nocturia) — which affects most people over the age of 60 — is related to the amount of salt in your diet, according to new research presented at the European Society of Urology congress in London.}

Most people over the age of 60 (and a substantial minority under 60) wake up one or more times during the night to go to the bathroom. This is nightime peeing, or nocturia. Although it seems a simple problem, the lack of sleep can lead to other problems such as stress, irritability or tiredness, and so can have a significant negative impact on quality of life. There are several possible causes of nocturia. Now a group of Japanese scientists have discovered that reducing the amount of salt in one’s diet can significantly reduce excessive peeing — both during the day and when asleep.

A group of researchers from Nagasaki University, led by Dr Matsuo Tomohiro, has studied salt intake in a group of 321 men and women who had a high salt intake and had problems sleeping — Japanese people tend to have a higher than average salt intake. The patients were given guidance and support to reduce salt consumption. They were followed for 12 weeks, and salt consumption measured biochemically.

223 members of the group were able to reduce their salt intake from 10.7 gm per day to 8.0 gm/day. In this group, the average night-time frequency of urination dropped from 2.3 times/night to 1.4 times. In contrast, 98 subjects increased their average salt intake from 9.6 gm/night to 11.0 gm/night, and they found that the need to urinate increased from 2.3 times/night to 2.7 times/night. The researchers also found that daytime urination was reduced when salt in the diet was reduced.

This reduction in the need to go to the bathroom at night caused a marked improvement in the quality of life of the participants, as measured by the standard CLSS-QoL questionnaire.

Dr Tomohiro said, “This is the first study to measure how salt intake affects the frequency of going to the bathroom, so we need to confirm the work with larger studies. Night- time urination is a real problem for many people, especially as they get older. This work holds out the possibility that a simply dietary modification might significantly improve the quality of life for many people.”

Commenting, Dr Marcus Drake (Bristol, UK), Working Group Lead for the EAU Guidelines Office Initiative on Nocturia, said: “This is an important aspect of how patients potentially can help themselves to reduce the impact of frequent urination. Research generally focusses on reducing the amount of water a patient drinks, and the salt intake is generally not considered. Here we have a useful study showing how we need to consider all influences to get the best chance of improving the symptom.”

Source:Science Daily

{Small children with low levels of vitamin B12 had more difficulties solving cognitive tests, such as the ability to do puzzles, recognize letters and interpret other children’s feelings.}

Poor B12 status as a baby was associated with a decrease in test scores at 5 years of age, reports researcher Ingrid Kvestad at Uni Research in Bergen, Norway and colleagues in a new study.

Kvestad is first author on the work, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“Our results clearly demonstrate associations between early vitamin B12 status and various measures on development and cognitive functioning, as for example the ability to interpret complex geometrical figures, and the ability to recognize other children`s emotions,” says Kvestad.

Accordingly, the study suggests that vitamin B12 deficiency impair, or possibly delays, brain development in small children.

“The number of children in low-income countries that do not develop according to their potential is large. Our results indicate that correcting children`s vitamin B12 status early may be one measure to secure a healthy development for these vulnerable children. We are currently in the process of confirming our results in randomized controlled trials,” says Kvestad

Kvestad’s colleauge Mari Hysing at Uni Research is among the study co-authors.

The other study contributors have their affiliation at Innlandet Hospital Trust, the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Nepal, Center for Intervention Studies in Maternal and Child Health (CISMAC) at the University of Bergen, Oslo and Akershus University College, Haukeland University Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In low income countries, and in particular in South Asia where many eat limited amounts of meat and other animal products, poor vitamin B12 status is prevalent. Previous findings indicate that vitamin B12 is important for the developing brain.

The researchers collected blood from 500 infants in Bhaktapur, Nepal, and measured their B12 status.

Approximately 5 years later they contacted 320 of these children and conducted various developmental and cognitive tests.

“Most of the Nepalese children participating in the study did not have severely low levels of vitamin B12, but their levels were suboptimal, below the recommendations for best possible growth and development,” says Kvestad.

“It’s like a hidden deficiency of the vitamin in these children’s bodies, making their cells work rigorously to signalize imminent danger. Our study is one contribution in the big puzzle to understand the implications low B12 levels might have on small children’s cognitive development,” says Kvestad.

Source:Science Daily

{Adults who don’t flip on the TV during dinner and those who eat home-cooked meals are less likely to be obese, a new study has found.}

But the frequency of family meals doesn’t appear to make much of a difference, according to research from The Ohio State University.

The study found that adults who reported never watching TV or videos during family meals had significantly lower odds of obesity compared with peers who always watched something during mealtimes. Those whose family meals were all home-cooked also had lower odds of obesity than other adults who ate some or no home-cooked meals. The study appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

“How often you are eating family meals may not be the most important thing. It could be that what you are doing during these meals matters more,” said lead author Rachel Tumin, survey and population health analyst manager at the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center.

“This highlights the importance of thinking critically about what is going on during those meals, and whether there might be opportunities to turn the TV off or do more of your own food preparation,” said Tumin, who conducted the study as part of her PhD dissertation with senior author Sarah Anderson, associate professor of epidemiology in Ohio State’s College of Public Health.

The new study suggests that the structure of family meals may be as or more important than their frequency, Anderson said.

“Obesity was as common in adults who ate family meals one or two days a week as it was in those who ate family meals every day. Regardless of family meal frequency, obesity was less common when meals were eaten with the television off and when meals were cooked at home,” she said.

Tumin and Anderson’s analysis found the lowest odds of obesity for those adults who engaged in both healthy practices — eating home-cooked food and doing it without a TV or video on — every time they ate a family meal.

But that doesn’t mean it’s an all-or-nothing proposition, Tumin said.

“Families have a lot of demands and they can feel pressured to do things ‘right’ all the time. This study showed potential benefits regardless of how often you eat a family meal at home,” she said.

Though family-meal frequency did not emerge as a possible contributor to obesity, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry other perks for families, including social and emotional health, Tumin said.

Research in children and adolescents has found frequent family meals lead to better dietary outcomes and lower chances the children will become overweight or obese. And other studies have shown that adolescents who watch TV during family meals consume less-healthful meals.

Prior to this, though, few studies had examined possible connections between mealtime practices or family meal frequency and health outcomes in a large, population-based group of adults.

The data come from the 2012 Ohio Medicaid Assessment Survey, a telephone survey of Ohioans. Included in the study were 12,842 survey participants who said that they ate at least one family meal in the week prior to their interview. Obesity was defined as a body mass index at or above 30, calculated from self-reported height and weight measures collected in the survey.

More than half of participants reported eating family meals on most days, 35 percent on some days and 13 percent on few days per week. One third of the study participants were obese. About a third watched TV or videos most of the time during family meals and 36 percent said they never did.

The results held up after the researchers took into account other differences in the study population, including employment status, whether they were married, race, education and age. Because it was based on a survey of current behavior and weight, the study does not offer evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between meal habits and weight.

Source: Sience Daily