Items submitted February 1, 2007

Gratitude Fights Stress

The attitude of gratitude is proving to be a holistic health food. Research has already shown that thinking of something that makes you feel grateful activates the para-sympathetic nervous system, which calms the body’s response to stress. The effect also works at the behavioral level.

People who keep a daily gratitude journal, in comparison to a control group who recorded daily hassles, exercised more, felt better and were more optimistic. This research, conducted by Robert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, also showed that those who practiced a daily “gratitude intervention” to counteract feelings of frustration evidenced more alertness, enthusiasm, energ and determination compared to control groups who either focused on hassles or on feeling how they were better off than others.

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The Effects of Joy and Gratitude

Publication Date:  
Author:  BLAIR JUSTICE, MD, and RITA JUSTICE, MD
Source:  University of Texas Health Center
 It seems fitting to reflect on some of what science has to say about gratitude, which has been called the 'forgotten factor' in happiness research.

Psychologists Rob

ert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, are foremost researchers in field of gratitude. What they have learned so far is that gratitude is good for you, really good for you.

In an experimental comparison, people who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003). It doesn't end there.

Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based). And there's more. Young adults who practice a daily gratitude intervention (self-guided exercises) had higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy compared to the group that focused on hassles or thinking of how they were better off than others. The researchers keep adding to the list benefits that come from practicing gratitude.

Researchers have found that when we think about someone or something we really appreciate and experience the feeling that goes with the thought, the parasympathetic-calming-branch of the autonomic nervous system- is triggered. This pattern when repeated bestows a protective effect on the heart. The electromagnetic heart patterns of volunteers tested become more coherent and ordered when they activate feelings of appreciation.

There is evidence that when we practice bringing attention to what we appreciate in our lives, more positive emotions emerge, leading to beneficial alterations in heart rate variability. This may not only relieve hypertension but reduce the risk of sudden death from coronary artery disease.

The more we pause to appreciate and show caring and compassion, the more order and coherence we experience internally. When our hearts are in an "internal coherence state," studies suggest that we enjoy the capacity to be peaceful and calm yet retain the ability to respond appropriately to stressful circumstances. (A Different Kind of Health: Finding Well-Being Despite Illness, by Blair Justice, pp. 100-101.)

Neurobiologically, gratitude is nested within the social emotions, along with awe, wonder, "elevation" and pride. It can be both practiced and experienced.

Soul and serotonin

An example of practicing gratitude is volunteering to help others in return for having been helped. As an experience, it is felt in the same frontal regions of the brain that are activated by awe, wonder and transcendence. From these cortical and limbic structures come dopamine and serotonin, the chemicals for feeling good inside.

Gratitude, then, can be a total body experience and beyond - meaning the deepest and widest gratitude comes from the soul and that part of the brain - the amygdala - that registers "soul" experiences.

So when we look at snow-capped peaks or golden swatches of changing aspen or the Milky Way at night from high in the Rockies, our souls sing and our bodies are suffused with streams of dopamine and serotonin, the gifts of gratitude. In short, feeling gratitude and appreciation on a regular basis helps heal us at every level of our being.

Link:  http://www.healthleader.uthouston.edu/archive/MIND_BODY_SOUL/2003/givingthanks-1124.html

 

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Chocolate is Heart Healthy

Chocolate lovers probably have already absorbed all the good news about the health benefits of their favorite treat. Researchers at the Harvard University School of Public Health recently published their survey of 136 studies of the health effects of eating chocolate. They conclude that the evidence supports the notion that chocolate is a heart healthy food. According to their report published in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism eating dark chocolate is associated with increased blood flow, less platelet stickiness and clotting, and improved bad cholesterol. It is the flavonoids which are responsible. White chocolate, lacking in these critical ingredients, shows no health benefit.

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Link: Link:  http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/20/health.chocolate/index.html

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Is Religion Harmful?

It almost sounds like heresy, or something running counter to studies of its benefits in a healthy lifestyle, but more and more people are concluding that religion is harmful. In a recent survey conducted in Britain, more people responded that religion causes harm than responded that religion does good. The major complaint was that it is divisive in society. A spokesman for the Church of England commented that the results are misleading about religion itself. The spokesman said the problem is that many people misuse religion for their own personal agendas.

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People Smell like a Dog

Past research has confirmed Cayce’s assertion that aromas have a powerful effect upon the human body, even when undetectable. New research has shown that people’s sense of smell is good enough that they can follow a scent much like a dog.

In a research study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, blindfolded participants crawled on their knees with their noses pressed to the ground and attempted to follow the scent of chocolate syrup dripped upon the grass. Not only were they able to do so, they exhibited sniffing behavior seen in dogs. With training, the participants became even better at the task, exhibiting even more dog-like sniffing strategies, such as rapid sniffing and alternating nostrlls.

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Human Sense of Smell Nothing to Sniff At

Publication Date:  12.18.06, 12:00 AM ET
Author:  
Source:  Forbes

 

Lost in the dark, without sight, sound, or clue? Follow your nose.

New olfactory research suggests that when it comes to tracking scent at ground-level on open terrain, the average human's sense of smell is stronger than most people believe.

"There's this general assumption that people have a bad sense of smell," said study lead author Jess Porter, a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley. "But we found that people can certainly sniff their way accurately around a spatial context -- although less successfully and slower if they have only one nostril to work with."

The new American-Israeli study, published online Dec. 17 in Nature Neuroscience, reports that people can, in fact, be trained to rely exclusively on ground-level smelling to successfully navigate unknown territory. In fact, they instinctively mimic certain animal behaviors, including enlisting each nostril to independently identify distinct smells and "triangulate" a path.

Porter joined Berkeley psychology professor Noam Sobel and a team of colleagues. Together, they conducted five experiments aimed at assessing people's ability to track scents.

Enlisting anywhere from four to 32 male and female participants for the various tests, the researchers worked in an open field.

The subjects were first blindfolded and ear-plugged before being asked to follow a 10-meter trail scented with "chocolate essential oil." They followed the trial by moving close to the ground on their hands and knees and wearing thick gloves, with only their noses to guide them.

Two-thirds of the participants were able to do so. However, when their noses were plugged to cut off the ability to smell, none of them could follow the path.

To test if "practice makes perfect," two men and two women were subsequently trained to complete the same task three times a day for three days, stretched over a two-week period.

Porter and her team found that this type of training allowed subjects to track scent trails faster and with greater accuracy. In fact, their speed of execution doubled within a few days. The researchers believe more training might boost efficiency even higher.

Porter's group also found that as the speed of trained scent tracking increased, so did sniffing frequency. In this regard, they noted that dogs sniff much faster than humans, perhaps accounting for their superior tracking abilities.

A third experiment revealed that each of a person's two nostrils inhales distinct smells, pulled from non-overlapping regions in the air. The researchers pointed out that prior studies have shown that scent "plumes" in the open are often confined to such small areas that only one nostril will pick it up, while the other will not.

The fourth test followed up on this finding by asking 14 subjects to complete the field-tracking experiment, but with one nostril taped shut.

Single-nostril tracking was much less accurate (36 percent versus 66 percent) and 26 percent slower compared to using both nostrils.

Finally, the authors conducted a final test using a special mask that allowed both nostrils to inhale, but forced incoming air to join together into a single air stream inside the middle of the nose.

Porter and her associates found that this "unified nostril" method was 24 percent slower and much less accurate than tracking completed normally.

This shows that optimal human tracking requires the individual use of each nostril to better distinguish smells as people home in on an appropriate route.

The team concluded that, just as happens with animals, people's capacity to smell can be harnessed to great effect.

Still, for most people, eyes remain the key window on the world.

"I think it's fair to say that humans are very, very visual, whereas an animal that lives in the dark is primarily olfactory," noted Porter. "And people do have this idea that as our sense of vision and hearing has become so prominent, we've lost some of our olfactory capability."

That might not be the full story, however. "We think it's maybe that we don't place an emphasis on our sense of smell," Porter suggested. "Because the underlying mechanisms are still there -- to a greater extent than we maybe notice them. And if we place demands on them and train ourselves, our ability to follow a spatial path can improve a lot."

George Preti, a member of Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, a research institute devoted the science of taste and smell, agreed that humans' olfactory talents can be honed with practice.

"Our sense of smell may not be as good as dogs or rodents, but it's still pretty acute when we use it correctly," he said. "I'm an expert in the chemistry of human odors, and I can tell you that folks that use it for a living, like perfumers, do improve their use of it and make themselves more consciously sensitive to that kind of input."

"Smell is important in our everyday life," Preti added. "And we use it a lot. Not just for evaluating food, but also for how we're perceived by the rest of the world. So, I'd say that humans certainly do have very sensitive noses -- regardless of what people might think."

Link:  http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/12/18/hscout600212.html

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Senior Citizens Benefit from Mind Training

Elderly persons who practice and develop mental skills show less of a mental decline with age than those who don’t exercise their mind, but that advantage doesn’t necessarily rub off to daily tasks, according to a study conducted at Pennsylvania State University with close to three thousand elders averaging seventy two years old.

In this long-term study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The participants received training in three mental tasks, involving reasoning, pattern recognition and verbal memory, for a period of five weeks. The training produced increased skill level in these tasks when compared to a control group who received no training.

Five years later, the researchers re-tested all participants who were still alive. The results showed that the experimental group continued to show better performance at these tasks than the control group.

The researchers were surprised that the effects of some brief training would last so long. On the other hand, they were disappointed that this mental superiority didn’t evidence itself in a more practical way. There was no effect of the training on how well the experimental group performed their daily tasks. The researchers speculated that their participants were already fairly high functioning, so that perhaps the effects of the training on daily tasks could not be observed.

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Cognitive Training Helps Seniors Keep Mental Snap and Crackle

Publication Date:  December 19, 2006
Author:  JUDITH GROCH
Source:  MedPage Today
 
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Use it or lose it applies to the brain, according to a study of more than 2,000 persons of Medicare-age living independently in the community.

Mental exercise for high-functioning seniors slowed the expected decline in their thinking ability even five years after a brief intervention, researchers here reported.

However, the effect of cognitive training on functional skills -- the ability to handle everyday tasks -- was less clear and less compelling, according to a report in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Compared with an untreated control group, cognitive training resulted in improved cognitive abilities specific to the abilities trained that continued five years after the initiation, said Sherry Willis, Ph.D., of Pennsylvania State University here, and colleagues.

But when it came to the failure of cognitive training to transfer to activities of daily living, it is possible, Dr. Willis said, that the full extent of cognitive training on everyday activities would take longer than five years in a population that was highly functioning at enrollment.

The controlled single-blind trial recruited 2,832 adults in six U.S. cities (mean age, 73.6; 26% black) who lived independently and had normal cognitive and functional status at the start of the study. Participants were randomly assigned to three intervention groups and to a control group.

The Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study was conducted from April 1998 to December 2004, including a five-year follow-up for 67% of the sample.

The interventions over five to six weeks comprised 10 training sessions (60 to 75 minutes each) for memory (verbal episodic memory), reasoning (inductive reasoning), or speed of processing (visual search and identification). This was followed by four-sessions of booster training at 11 and 35 months in a random sample of those who completed training.

For example, the reasoning group learned ways to remember word lists and sequences of items ideas. The reasoning group practiced pattern recognition, while the processing-speed group learned way to identify an object on a computer screen at increasingly brief exposures.

Immediately after the initial training, 87% of the speed-training group, 74% of the reasoning group, and 26% of the memory group showed improvement in their skills. After five years, the groups performed better on their tests than did those in the control group. The reasoning-training and speed-training groups given booster training benefited the most, the researchers found.

Each intervention maintained the improvement on its specific cognitive ability through five years (memory: effect size, 0.23 [99% CI, 0.11-0.35]; reasoning: effect size, 0.26 [99% CI, 0.17-0.35]; speed of processing: effect size, 0.76 [99% CI, 0.62-0.90]).

Booster training produced additional improvement for reasoning performance (effect size, 0.28; 99% CI, 0.12-0.43) and speed of processing performance (effect size, 0.85; 99% CI, 0.61-1.09).

These improvements, Dr. Willis said, roughly counteract the decline in cognitive performance that would be expected over a seven-to-14 year period in individuals without dementia.

On the other hand, the five-year results of the ACTIVE study provided only limited evidence that cognitive interventions can reduce age-related decline in the activities of daily living. The loss of the ability to perform daily household tasks, manage money, and read medicine-dosing instructions is associated with increased use of hospital, nursing home, and home health services, the researchers said.

Although after five years the intervention participants reported less difficulty than members of the control group in these daily activities, the statistics said otherwise.

At five years, self-reported and performance-based measures of daily function and cognitive abilities were as follows:

* The reasoning group reported significantly less difficulty in the instrumental activities of daily living than the control group (effect size, 0.29; 99% confidence interval, 0.03-0.55).
* Speed of processing training (effect size, 0.26; 99% CI, －0.002 to 0.51) had no significant effect on daily living function.
* Memory training (effect size, 0.20; 99% CI, －0.06 to 0.46) had no significant effect on activities of daily living.

The booster training for the speed of processing group, but not for the two other groups, showed a significant effect on the performance-based functional measure of everyday speed of processing (effect size, 0.30; 99% CI, 0.08-0.52). This may reflect, a need for larger doses of training before effects can be observed in this more cognitively demanding outcome, the researchers said.

Across all the outcomes, evidence for transfer of cognitive training to function was modest and transfer was not observed until the five-year follow-up, the researchers said.

Prior research, they said, has suggested a temporal lag between the onset of cognitive decline and its subsequent impact on daily function, perhaps because of resulting differences in adapting to emerging physical limitations affecting tasks of daily living.

Another possibility is that these delayed effects on function may be attributed to the advantaged nature of the ACTIVE sample, inasmuch as adults with suspected cognitive issues were excluded from the study. Only after the onset of decline in the control groups could the effect of training on function be observed in the intervention group.

"We consider these results promising and support future research to examine if these and other cognitive interventions can prevent or delay functional disability in an aging population," the researchers concluded.

In an accompanying editorial, Sally Shumaker, Ph.D., of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and coauthors said that the lack of supporting evidence for this "well-designed" study is disappointing and discussed why the effect on the subjects' everyday function was not supported by the data.

It is possible, they said, that the original selection of individuals with relatively high cognitive and physical function might have contributed to this failure. They further suggested that the domain-specific categories used in the study may have had limited the potential for determining an effect on functional status.

Results from the ACTIVE study have several clinical implications, they wrote. If cognitive training could be extended to individuals with Alzheimer's disease, individuals who cannot tolerate existing pharmacological agents would have additional treatment options.

If these programs were standardized and developed for mass market application, they might be made available to seniors through nonhealth-care facilities (schools, churches) as well as through health-care facilities. This would give individuals a greater sense of control over the disturbing prospect of cognitive decline.

Summing up, the editorial writers said, "addressing the growing threat of an aging population with limited options for maintaining cognitive function is a major challenge, and multiple promising avenues merit exploration."

Link:  http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/Geriatrics/tb/4735
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Vegetarians are more Intelligent

Vegetarians don’t become more intelligent by eating more veggies than other folks. It seems they are born that way. In a study involving eight thousand volunteers and spanning tweny years, researchers found that adults who had chosen to become vegetarians had scored as children an IQ five points higher than did people who ate fish, poultry or meat. Vegans, who eat no animal products at all, evidenced as children an IQ ten points higher than children who grew up to become non-vegetarians. The only explanation researchers have for this effect, which was published in the British Medical Journal, is the possibility that the more intelligent the person, the more likely the person is to consider the plight of animals and the health effects of consuming animal products.

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Vegetarians Are More Intelligent: Study

 

Frequently dismissed as cranks, their fussy eating habits tend to make them unpopular with dinner party hosts and guests alike.

But now it seems they may have the last laugh, with research showing vegetarians are more intelligent than their meat-eating friends.

A study of thousands of men and women revealed that those who stick to a vegetarian diet have IQs that are around five points higher than those who regularly eat meat.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, the researchers say it isn't clear why veggies are brainier - but admit the fruit and veg-rich vegetarian diet could somehow boost brain power.

The researchers, from the University of Southampton, tracked the fortunes of more than 8,000 volunteers for 20 years.

At the age of ten, the boys and girls sat a series of tests designed to determine their IQ.

When they reached the age of 30, they were asked whether they were vegetarian and their answers compared to their childhood IQ score.

Around four and a half per cent of the adults were vegetarian - a figure that is broadly in line with that found in the general population.

However, further analysis of the results showed those who were brainiest as children were more likely to have become vegetarian as adults, shunning both meat and fish.

The typical adult veggie had a childhood IQ of around 105 - around five points higher than those who continued to eat meat as they grew up.

The vegetarians were also more likely to have gained degrees and hold down high-powered jobs.

There was no difference in IQ between strict vegetarians and those who classed themselves as veggie but still ate fish or chicken.

However, vegans - vegetarians who also avoid dairy products - scored significantly lower, averaging an IQ score of 95 at the age of 10.

Researcher Dr Catharine Gale said there could be several explanations for the findings, including intelligent people being more likely to consider both animal welfare issues and the possible health benefits of a vegetarian diet.

Previous work has shown that vegetarians tend to have lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol, cutting their risk of heart attacks. They are also less likely to be obese.

Alternatively, a diet which is rich in fruit, vegetables and wholegrains may somehow boost brain power.

Dr Gale said: 'Although our results suggest that children who are more intelligent may be more likely to become vegetarian as adolescents or young adults, it does not rule out the possibility that such a diet might have some beneficial effect on subsequent cognitive performance.

'Might the nature of the vegetarians' diet have enhanced their apparently superior brain power? Was this the mechanism that helped them achieve the disproportionate nature of degrees?'

High-profile vegetarians include singers Paul McCartney and Morrissey and actress Jenny Seagrove.

Past exponents of a meat-free lifestyle include George Bernard Shaw and Benjamin Franklin.

Promoting the cause, Shaw said, 'A mind of the calibre of mine cannot drive its nutriment from cows', while Franklin stated that a vegetarian diet resulted in 'greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension'.

Liz O'Neill, of the Vegetarian Society, said: 'We've always known that vegetarianism is an intelligent, compassionate choice benefiting animals, people and the environment. Now, we've got the scientific evidence to prove it.

'Maybe that explains why many meat-reducers are keen to call themselves vegetarians when even they must know that vegetarians don't eat chicken, turkey or fish!'

Link: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23378331-details/Vegetarians+are+more+intelligent%2C+says+study/article.do

 

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Source of Craving Found in Brain

There is a silver dollar size area in your brain, the insula, that generates feelings of cravings that can’t be denied, suggests a study reported in a recent issue of the journal Science. When Dr. Antoine Bechara of the University of Southern California investigated the histories of patients with stroke-induced brain damage, he discovered that when the damage was to one particular area of the brain, patients who were smokers seem to “forget” to smoke anymore. He later determined and confirmed that it is the insula that is responsible for this effect. Addiction researchers claim this finding will help to find a cure for this widespread problem.

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Spot in brain may control smoking urge

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer

WASHINGTON - Damage to a silver dollar-sized spot deep in the brain seems to wipe out the urge to smoke, a surprising discovery that may shed important new light on addiction. The research was inspired by a stroke survivor who claimed he simply forgot his two-pack-a-day addiction _ no cravings, no nicotine patches, not even a conscious desire to quit.

"The quitting is like a light switch that went off," said Dr. Antoine Bechara of the University of Southern California, who scanned the brains of 69 smokers and ex-smokers to pinpoint the region involved. "This is very striking."

Clearly brain damage isn't a treatment option for people struggling to kick the habit.

But the finding, reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science, does point scientists toward new ways to develop anti-smoking aids by targeting this little-known brain region called the insula. And it sparked excitement among addiction specialists who expect the insula to play a key role in other addictions, too.

"It's a fantastic paper, it's a fantastic finding," said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a longtime investigator of the brain's addiction pathways.

"What this study shows unequivocally is the insula is a key structure in the brain for perceiving the urges to take the drug," urges that are "the backbone of the addiction," Volkow added.

Why? The insula appears to be where the brain turns physical reactions into feelings, such as feeling anxious when your heart speeds up. When those reactions are caused by a particular substance, the insula may act like sort of a headquarters for cravings.

Some 44 million Americans smoke, and the government says more than 400,000 a year die of smoking-related illnesses. Declines in smoking have slowed in recent years, making it unlikely that the nation will reach a public health goal of reducing the rate to 12 percent by 2010.

Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known, and it's common for smokers to suffer repeated relapses when they try to quit.

So imagine Bechara's surprise at hearing a patient he code-named "Nathan" note nonchalantly that "my body forgot the urge to smoke" right after his stroke.

At the time, Bechara was at the University of Iowa studying the effects of certain types of brain damage after strokes or other injury. While Nathan was hospitalized, stroke specialists sent his information to that brain registry. He was 38, had smoked since 14, said he enjoyed it and had had no intention to quit. But his last puff was the night before his stroke. His surprised wife said he never even asked for a smoke while in the hospital.

It's not unusual for a health scare to prompt an attempt at quitting. "That's the quitting that's not as interesting," Bechara said.

Instead, Nathan experienced what Bechara calls a "disruption of smoking addiction," and he wanted to know why.

Bechara and colleagues culled their brain-damage registry for 69 patients who had smoked regularly before their injuries. Nineteen, including Nathan, had damage to the insula. Thirteen of the insula-damaged patients had quit smoking, 12 of them super-easily: They quit within a day of the brain injury, and reported neither smoking nor even feeling the urge since then.

Of the remaining 50 patients with damage in other brain regions, 19 quit smoking but only four met the broken-addiction criteria.

If Bechara's findings are validated, they suggest that developing drugs that target the insula might help smokers quit. There are nicotine receptors in the insula, meaning it should be possible to create a nicotine-specific drug, Bechara said _ albeit years from now.

More immediately, NIDA's Volkow wants to try a different experiment: Scientists can temporarily alter function of certain brain regions with pulses of magnetic energy, called "transcranial magnetic stimulation." She wants to see if it's possible to focus such magnetic pulses on the insula, and thus verify its role.

Other neurologic functions are known to be involved with addiction, too, such as the brain's "reward" or pleasure pathways. The insula discovery doesn't contradict that work, but adds another layer to how addiction grips the brain, Bechara said.

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070125/ap_on_he_me/smoking_brain_damage_4

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Dogs Are Good for your Health

A pet dog benefits the owner by providing more regular exercise. Dog owners also have lower blood pressure than people who don’t own dogs, according to a study reported in Health Psychology Journal. The study also showed that after a person goes to the animal shelter and adopts either a cat or a dog, the person experiences a decrease in minor ailments, such as headaches. Ten months later this salutatory effect has disappeared for cat owners, but not for those adopting dogs.

Source:

Improve your health, become a dog owner

By Lynne Wallis

Owning a dog is good for your mental and physical health, more so even than cats, researchers claim today.

Dr Deborah Wells, a senior lecturer at the Canine Behaviour Centre of Queens University, Belfast, found that dog owners have lower cholesterol and blood pressure, fewer minor physical ailments, and are less likely to develop serious medical problems.

In a paper published today by the British Psychological Society, she said "It is possible that dogs can directly promote our well being by buffering us from stress, one of the major risk factors associated with ill health. The ownership of a dog can also lead to increases in physical activity and facilitate the development of social contact, which may enhance both physiological and psychological human health in a more indirect manner."

She found that people who took cats and dogs from animal rescue shelters noticed a decrease in minor ailments such as headaches, colds and dizziness a month after the rescue visit. But only dog owners maintained the improvements ten months later - cat owners did not.

The research, published in the Health Psychology Journal, found that dogs could also act as 'early-warning systems' for more serious illnesses including cancer and epilepsy.

Link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/22/ndog22.xml

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Why Do Good? Brain Study Offers Clues

MONDAY, Jan. 22 (HealthDay News) -- People may not perform selfless acts just for an emotional reward, a new brain study suggests.

Instead, they may do good because they're acutely tuned into the needs and actions of others.

Scientists say a piece of the brain linked to perceiving others' intentions shows more activity in unselfish vs. selfish types.

"Perhaps altruism did not grow out of a warm-glow feeling of doing good for others, but out of the simple recognition that that thing over there is a person that has intentions and goals. And therefore, I might want to treat them like I might want them to treat myself," explained study author Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychology at Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C.

He and lead researcher Dharol Tankersley, a graduate student at Duke, published their findings in the Jan. 21 online issue of Nature Neuroscience.

For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have puzzled over the tendency of humans to engage in altruistic acts -- defined by Huettel's group as acts "that intentionally benefit another organism, incur no direct personal benefit, and sometimes bear a personal cost."

Experts note that altruism doesn't seem to provide individuals with any survival edge, so how and why did it evolve?

To help solve that puzzle, Heuttel's team had a group of healthy young adults either engage in a computer game or watch as the computer played the game itself. In some sessions, the computer and participants played for personal gain, while in other sessions, they played for charity.

The researchers used high-tech functional MRI (fMRI) to observe "hot spots" of activity in the participants' brains as they engaged in these tasks.

Participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire aimed at assessing their personal levels of selfishness or altruism.

Huettel said he was surprised by the study results.

"We went into this experiment with the idea that altruism was really a function of the brain's reward systems -- altruistic people would simply find it more rewarding," he said.

But instead, a whole other brain region, called the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC), kicked into high gear as altruism levels rose.

The pSTC is located near the back of the brain and is not focused on reward. Instead, it focuses on perceiving others' intentions and actions, Huettel said.

"The general function of this region is that it seems to be associated with perceiving, usually visually, stimuli that seems meaningful to us -- for example, something in the environment that might move an object from place to place," he explained.

This type of perception would have allowed humans' more primitive ancestors to quickly pick out a potential threat -- a crouching lion, for example -- from amid a mass of less important stimuli.

It's much less clear why pSTC activity gets ramped up in the brains of altruistic people, however. "That was really surprising to us," Huettel said.

The researchers found that pSTC activity was highest when study participants were observing the computer play the game on its own -- not when they were playing themselves. "That gets to this idea of agency -- watching somebody else play the game," Huettel said. "You are thinking, 'Oh, the computer pressed the button -- somebody else did that.' "

The bottom line, he said, is that altruism may rely on a basic understanding that others have motivations and actions that may be similar to our own.

"It's not exactly empathy," he said, but something more primitive. "We think that altruism may have grown out of -- at least in part -- such a system."

Another expert said the Duke study raises even more questions than it answers.

"It's a really interesting study," said Paul Sanberg, director of the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa. "It would be really interesting, now though, to see if people who had damage to that [brain] area were much less altruistic."

Huettel said he's pondered that possibility. "For example, we don't know if people who are sociopaths, or people who are autistic, might show differences in this region," he said. "It's a good question, but we don't have data that shows anything one way or another. This is just a jumping-off point."

Sanberg said the study also showed only an association between heightened pSTC activity and altruism, not a direct cause-and-effect relationship. "That needs further study," he said.

But the Florida neuroscientist said this type of work is helping unravel the mysteries of human consciousness and behavior.

"These functional studies with high-level human behaviors are shedding important light on the contribution of different brain areas," Sanberg said.

Link:
http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2007/01/22/hscout601147.html

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MacBeth Lives in Our Guilty Feelings

There may be a connection between morality and cleanliness, such that when we’ve done something bad we may feel a need to get clean. That’s the conclusion from a study of what the researchers have dubbed “The MacBeth Effect,” named after the Shakespearean play in which Lady MacBeth keeps trying to wash the blood off her hands.

In this study, conducted at the University of Toronto and published in New Scientist, researchers asked some participants to recollect and think about some past unethical or immoral behavior, while others were asked to merely recollect random past memories. Afterwards, as the researchers dismissed the participants, they mentioned the availability of the restroom for cleaning up. The participants who had been contemplating past sins were significantly more likely than that participants in the control group to take advantage of the opportunity to wash their hands.

Was handwashing effective in removing guilt feelings. To investigate the atonement effects of handwashing, the researchers mentioned to the “guilty” participants the availability of some volunteer work to help those in need. Those participants who had not washed their hands were more than twice as likely to sign up for the volunteer work than were those who had washed their hands. The researchers concluded that hand washing had effectively cleansed those participants of their guilty feelings.

Source:

Physical washing may help clean your conscience

It appears that an element of Lady Macbeth may reside in most of us. The metaphorical desire to wash away one’s sins is not just wishful thinking but evidence of an innate psychological association between moral and physical cleanliness, according to a new study.

Shakespeare’s notorious murderess – who famously shouts “Out damn spot!” as she tries to scrub away imagined bloodstains – may represent an extreme case. Nevertheless, researchers found that study participants who focused on unethical behaviours such as lying, stealing, or betraying friends were more likely to follow up with activities that indicated they felt physically dirty.

Those who were given an opportunity to wash their hands after recalling incidents of immoral behaviour showed signs of a clearer conscious than those who had not washed.

“After we feel morally threatened, we have this deep psychological urge to cleanse ourselves,” says Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto, Canada, who led the study.

Shower time

Zhong and colleagues, who dubbed this urge to cleanse “the Macbeth effect”, came up with the experiment after noticing similar behaviour in contemporary popular culture.

In nearly every movie involving homicide the actor or actress will jump into the shower to try to wash off, whether they have blood on their hands or not, Zhong says. “It made me wonder if it wasn’t physical cleanliness they were after but a psychological link between physical and moral cleanliness.”

To test his hypothesis, the team asked volunteers to focus on ethical or unethical deeds from their past before participating in various exercises. Those who focused on immoral actions were more likely to select activities or products that involved cleaning, such as selecting an antiseptic wipe over a pencil as a freebie for taking part in the study.

Slimy and rotten

In the final experiment, participants were asked to focus on an example of unethical behaviour from their past and were then given the option to wash their hands. Participants were then asked whether they would volunteer without pay to help a desperate graduate student out of a tight spot.

Seventy-four percent of those who had not washed their hands offered to help, while only 41% of those who had washed volunteered.

This final experiment establishes a link between moral and physical cleanliness, says Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, US, who was not involved in the study.

“When you have been associated with something immoral, there are two ways you can cleanse yourself – engaging in moral behaviour or physically cleaning yourself,” Tetlock says. “We talk about things being dirty, slimy, or rotten. A lot of people would say those are just metaphors, but this study shows that there is a connection on a visceral level.”

Link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10022

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Images of God Make a Difference

How do you imagine God? The qualities you attribute to God make a difference in how you respond to other areas of life, according to a large scale study conducted at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, in Waco, Texas. In collaboration with the Gallup Poll agency, this research delved deeply into the opinions of close to two thousand Americans. They found that religious denomination is less important than the person’s view of God in determining the person’s religious opinions on other matters.

Thirty-one percent of those polled saw God as an authoritarian being who was involved with daily life, who is angry at sin, and who punishes sinners. The majority of these people saw God as a “he.” The majority of African Americans hold this view. This group is most likely to believe that abortion is always wrong and that prayer should be allowed in school. They are least likely to believe the government should do more to protect the environment. They are more than twice as likely as the average American to believe that the government should advocate Christian values.

Tweny four per cent saw God as a distant being who does not interact with the world or have feelings, but is mainly a cosmic force that set the laws of nature into motion. This group is the least likely to believe that abortion is wrong and most likely to believe that the government should protect the environment.

Twenty-three per cent saw God as a benevolent being, involved in world events as a positive force. The vast majority of people holding this view are under thirty years of age. This group is the most likely to say that being a good person means taking care of the sick and needy.

Sixteen per cent saw God as a critical being who does not interact with the world, but is unhappy with it and will impose some divine justice. On the other hand, this group is least likely to attend church or other religious activities and least likely to say that gay marriage is wrong.

Source:

View of God can reveal your values and politics

Baylor survey of religion maps four images of God that shape how Americans see the world

By Cathy Lynn Grossman
USA TODAY 

The United States calls itself one nation under God, but Americans don't all have the same image of the Almighty in mind.

A new survey of religion in the USA finds four very different images of God — from a wrathful deity thundering at sinful humanity to a distant power uninvolved in mankind's affairs.

Forget denominational brands or doctrines or even once-salient terms like “Religious Right.” Even the oft-used “Evangelical” appears to be losing ground.

Believers just don't see themselves the way the media and politicians — or even their pastors — do, according to the national survey of 1,721 Americans, by far the most comprehensive national religion survey to date.

Written and analyzed by sociologists from Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, in Waco, Texas, and conducted by Gallup, the survey asked 77 questions with nearly 400 answer choices that burrowed deeply into beliefs, practices and religious ties and turned up some surprising findings:

•Though 91.8% say they believe in God, a higher power or a cosmic force, they had four distinct views of God's personality and engagement in human affairs. These Four Gods — dubbed by researchers Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical or Distant — tell more about people's social, moral and political views and personal piety than the familiar categories of Protestant/Catholic/Jew or even red state/blue state.

For example: 45.6% of all Americans say the federal government “should advocate Christian values,” but 74.5% of believers in an authoritarian God do.

Sociologist Paul Froese says the survey finds the stereotype that conservatives are religious and liberals are secular is “simply not true. Political liberals and conservatives are both religious. They just have different religious views.”

•About one in nine (10.8%) respondents have no religious ties at all; previous national surveys found 14%. The Baylor survey, unlike others, asked people to write in the names and addresses of where they worship, and many who said “none” or “don't know” when asked about their religious identity named a church they occasionally attend.

•The paranormal — beliefs outside conventional organized religion — is immensely popular. Most people said they believe in prophetic dreams; four in 10 say there were once “ancient advanced civilizations” such as Atlantis.

•“Evangelical” may be losing favor as a way Americans describe themselves. About one in three Americans say they belong to denominations that theologians consider evangelical, but only 14% of all respondents in the survey say this is one way they would describe themselves. Only 2.2% called it the single best term. Top choices overall: “Bible-believing” (20.5%) or “born-again” (18.6%).

“Any politician who really wants to connect with Christians should be looking at those terms, not vague abstractions like evangelical. … They need to tap into labels that have salience,” Baylor sociologist Kevin Dougherty says.

•Most Americans think their nearest and dearest are going to heaven. The pearly gates open widest for family (75.3% say they'll get in) and personal friends (69.3%). The survey did not ask whether people expect to go to heaven themselves.

•Religion-themed movies and books have a vast reach: 44.3% of those polled saw Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. More than one in 10 of all surveyed say they spent $50 or more in the past month on items such as religious books, music and jewelry.

A closer look at what people read finds that 28.5% of Americans say they've read The Da Vinci Code. Baylor also found 19%, including 25% of all U.S. women, have read the Rev. Rick Warren's Christian handbook The Purpose-Driven Life, and 19% overall have read at least one of the novels in the Left Behind apocalyptic fiction series.

These are part of the first wave of results from the random survey of Americans who completed and mailed in a 16-page questionnaire. Conducted in the fall of 2005, the survey is a statistically representative sampling of the USA by age, gender and race.

The Baylor team will spend two years digging through the findings and releasing reports on subtopics such as civic involvement and volunteerism, then repeat the core questions in fall 2007 to track trends. The research is funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, calls the analysis “intriguing. Baylor was able to ask many more probing questions than the usual surveys.”

Others agree.

The Four Gods breakdown is helpful “if you are trying to understand religion's impact on society by how people see themselves from the inside, not by observations from outsiders,” says John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Baylor researchers determined the Four Gods breakdown by analyzing questions about God's personality and engagement.

The survey asked respondents to agree or disagree with any of 10 descriptions of their “personal understanding of what God is like,” including phrases such as “angered by my sins” or “removed from worldly affairs.” They could check off 16 adjectives they believe describe God, including words such as “absolute,” “wrathful,” “forgiving,” “friendly” or “distant.”

When USA TODAY asked people similar questions, it found views as varied as those of self-described fundamentalist Brian Snider of Madison, Ala., and Marilyn McGuire, who says she sees God in every sunrise and sunset, flower and kitten at her home on Orcas Island near Seattle.

Snider, 46, says God is “involved in the affairs of men at all times and he does judge us. … We still believe he is angry at sin.”

McGuire, in her late 60s and once an active Episcopalian, now rejects all dogma. “I have my own system of what I think is true and sacred. I try to keep myself peaceful and keep myself in a loving state.”

The four visions of God outlined in the Baylor research aren't mutually exclusive. And they don't include 5.2% of Americans who say they are atheists. (Although 91.8% said they believe in God, some didn't answer or weren't sure.)

Still, says Baylor's Christopher Bader, “you learn more about people's moral and political behavior if you know their image of God than almost any other measure. It turns out to be more powerful a predictor of social and political views than the usual markers of church attendance or belief in the Bible.”

Though 12.2% overall say abortion is wrong in all circumstances, the number nearly doubles to 23.4% for those who see an authoritarian God and slides to 1.5% for followers of a distant God.

Highlights of Baylor's analysis:

•The Authoritarian God (31.4% of Americans overall, 43.3% in the South) is angry at humanity's sins and engaged in every creature's life and world affairs. He is ready to throw the thunderbolt of judgment down on “the unfaithful or ungodly,” Bader says.

Those who envision God this way “are religiously and politically conservative people, more often black Protestants and white evangelicals,” Bader says. “(They) want an active, Christian-values-based government with federal funding for faith-based social services and prayer in the schools.”

They're also the most inclined to say God favors the USA in world affairs (32.1% vs. 18.6% overall).

•The Benevolent God (23% overall, 28.8% in the Midwest) still sets absolute standards for mankind in the Bible. More than half (54.8%) want the government to advocate Christian values.

But this group, which draws more from mainline Protestants, Catholics and Jews, sees primarily a forgiving God, more like the father who embraces his repentant prodigal son in the Bible, Froese says.

They're inclined (68.1%) to say caring for the sick and needy ranks highest on the list of what it means to be a good person.

This is the group in which the Rev. Jeremy Johnston, executive pastor and communications director for his father's 5,000-member Southern Baptist congregation in Overland Park, Kan., places himself.

“God is in control of everything. He's grieved by the sin of the world, by any created person who doesn't follow him. But I see (a) God … who loves us, who sees us for who we really are. We serve a God of the second, third, fourth and fifth chance,” Johnston says.

•The Critical God (16% overall, 21.2% in the East) has his judgmental eye on the world, but he's not going to intervene, either to punish or to comfort.

“This group is more paradoxical,” Bader says. “They have very traditional beliefs, picturing God as the classic bearded old man on high. Yet they're less inclined to go to church or affiliate seriously with religious groups. They are less inclined to see God as active in the world. Their politics are definitely not liberal, but they're not quite conservative, either.”

Those who picture a critical God are significantly less likely to draw absolute moral lines on hot-button issues such as abortion, gay marriage or embryonic stem cell research.

For example, 57% overall say gay marriage is always wrong compared with 80.6% for those who see an authoritarian God, and 65.8% for those who see God as benevolent. For those who believe in a critical God, it was 54.7%.

•The Distant God (24.4% overall, 30.3% in the West) is “no bearded old man in the sky raining down his opinions on us,” Bader says. Followers of this God see a cosmic force that launched the world, then left it spinning on its own.

This has strongest appeal for Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews. It's also strong among “moral relativists,” those least likely to say any moral choice is always wrong, and among those who don't attend church, Bader says.

Only 3.8% of this group say embryonic stem cell research is always wrong, compared with 38.5% of those who see an authoritarian God, 22.7% for those who see God as benevolent and 13.2% who see God as critical but disengaged.

“I still believe in God,” says Joanne Meehl, 56, of Barre, Mass., who wrote a book in the mid-'90s called Recovering Catholics. “But to me God is the universe, not as small as a ‘He' or a ‘She' but bigger than all of that.” Humanity is on its own, she says. “People who do wrong are punished in this world, not in the next. This world is it.”

Some might question whether a survey by Baptist-affiliated Baylor has a conservative Protestant tilt. For example, there's no mention of communion or saints — central to Catholic believers. Also, questions often used “church,” with no mention of synagogues or mosques. But Baylor researchers say their testing finds people view the word as generic for “house of worship.”

“This work was done by well-respected sociologists of religion,” the Pew Forum's Green says. “Baylor is becoming a leading evangelical university in the same way Notre Dame is a leading Catholic university, by doing first-rate objective social science.”

Rodney Stark, former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and part of the Baylor team, says: “We wanted to break from the past 30 years of narrow questions. “ ‘Do you believe in God?' Everyone says yes.

“If you ask ‘Are you a Protestant, Catholic or Jew?' people don't even know what denomination they are today or what the label means.”

Link:

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060912/1a_cover12.art.htm

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Americans Have Weird Beliefs

“How weird is that?” asked Time magazine when it presented the results of a Gallup poll that questioned some seventeen hundred Americans about their beliefs.

Forty one per cent reported believing in the existence of advanced ancient civilizations, like Atlantis.

Thirty seven per cent reported believing that some places are haunted.

Twenty eight per cent believe that mind power can influence the physical world.

Twenty five per cent believe that some UFOs come from other worlds

Eighteen per cent believe the one day Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster will be found.

Source: Time Magazine

An In-Depth View of America by the Numbers

Some places on earth are simply too big to photograph: the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall, Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Those monuments don't fit in any frame; they were made--by God or man--to overwhelm. You can visit them, snap some shots, but something is missing when you get back home. So how do you capture a country with 300 million independently minded and moving pieces? Who would even try?

We hunt the larger truths because we can't help it, especially within sight of a critical election, when pundits and pollsters have to reach general conclusions about countless specific doubts and hopes. But America won't sit still to have her portrait painted. Our politics especially resist reduction. One reason lawmakers have to draw such twisted districts to save their seats is that we are so much more purple than they'd like, a tangle of red suburbs of blue cities and blue counties in red states. That mischievous map of a huge central red sea cupped by blue parentheses on the coasts makes us look like a very different country than we really are.

Our Spirit too does not lend itself to summary. To say that America is a very religious country is both true and unhelpful without a concordance. Researchers at Baylor University identified the different Gods we envision and the worldviews they invite. Whether you see an attentive Father or a distant one, a critical deity or a forgiving one, goes a long way toward explaining your views on military spending, the Iraq war, environmental responsibility and wealth redistribution.

The very idea of redistributing wealth can feel un-American in the land of Horatio Alger, until you look closely at how it's spread now. Half of us earn less than $30,000 a year, 90% less than $100,000. To get an idea of how we value our values, Howard Stern earns every 24 seconds what takes a cop or a teacher about a week. Parents hoping to persuade their children to buckle down in school might try this: as an adult, the more you know the less you'll have to work. Those with a high school degree or less spend far more of their time on the job than those with a college degree or beyond.

If Time is the new Money, then we learn something about who we are by how we spend it. Although they've cut back, most mothers still spend more time doing housework than taking care of their children--and twice as much time doing it as fathers do. But that is still a mark of progress. The total hours worked by men and women are roughly equal--about 65 hours a week--when you count paid and unpaid work. For all the headlines about the time crunch and the lost generation of latchkey kids, today's parents actually spend more time with their children than parents did in 1965. In the case of fathers, they spend twice as much.

Our families are getting smaller--with one vital exception. Compared with those of Europe and Japan, the U.S. population is younger and more colorful because of the continued arrival of immigrants and their higher-than-average birthrates. Of the 100 million Americans who will join us in the next 37 years, half will be immigrants or their children. In the next few decades, 97% of the world's population growth will occur in the developing world; the U.S. is the largest developed country in the world that is still growing at a healthy clip. That matters, strategically, economically and politically, as developed countries try to maintain their services, their militaries, their economic strength. If there is already a gap in energy and optimism between the U.S. and Europe, it looks likely only to widen in the next generation.

America has always been a nation of pilgrims--people who come here and those born here who like to move around. But if you are feeling restless and want to explore the country, don't go by the names or you'll get lost. Loving County, Texas, needs to sound so friendly because it is the least populated county in the lower 48. New Jersey is the Garden State, but it's more like a planter, since it's the most densely populated in the country. Sundance, Wyo., sounds like a merry place, but it was named for a Lakota Indian festival in which young warriors cut off pieces of their flesh and then danced in a test of strength. You wonder who moves to Helltown, Devil's Den, Weedpatch (all in California); Boring, Ore.; Elephant Butte, N.M.; West Thumb, Wyo.; Trickem, Ala.; Possum Trot, Ky.; or Lonelyville, N.Y. But they are all probably close to someone's idea of paradise.

With reporting by Reported by Kathleen Adams, Jeremy Caplan, Kristina Dell, Coco Masters, Project directed by Jackson Dykman, Graphics by Ed Gabel, Joe Lertola, Lon Tweeten

Link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1549322,00.html

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Teenagers’ Health Practices Affected by Parents

Eighty per cent of teenagers evidence health risks and the degree of risk seems to echo that of their parents, according to a recent study published The American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, interviewed nine hundred teenagers to get information about diet, exercise, and television viewing habits. More than half failed to meet daily exercise standards or dietary standards concerning maximum fat intake and minimal ingestion of fruits and vegetables. A third watched more than two hours of TV daily. While eighty per cent failed on at least one criterion, more than fifty per cent failed on three of the four criteria.

When parents’ health related behaviors were taken into account, there was a positive correlation between how many criteria the parents failed and how many their children failed.

Source:

Kids at risk: Assessing diet and exercise behaviors in adolescents

Do adolescents get enough exercise and eat the right foods? Is there too much fat in their diets? In a study published in the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers analyzed the behavior of almost 900 11-to-15 year-olds and found that nearly 80% had multiple physical activity and dietary risk behaviors, almost half had at least three risk behaviors, and only 2% met all four of the health guidelines in the study.

Using both physical measurements and surveying techniques, four behaviors were assessed: physical activity, television viewing time, percent calories from fat, and daily servings of fruits and vegetables. In addition, parental health behaviors were sampled.

Fifty-five percent of adolescents did not meet the physical activity guideline, although significantly more boys (59%) than girls (33.6%) did meet the standard. About 30% exceeded 2 hours of television viewing time and the majority of the sample did not meet dietary standards. Only 32% and 11.9% of the sample met the recommendations for fat consumption and servings of fruits and vegetables, respectively.

There was some evidence that parents' health behaviors were associated with adolescents' health behaviors. For the girls, two parent health behaviors—never smoking and meeting fruit and vegetable guidelines—were associated with fewer adolescent risk behaviors. Parents' number of risk behaviors was weakly but positively associated with a higher number of risk behaviors in boys.

Writing in the article, Alvaro Sanchez, PhD, states, "These findings contribute to the body of evidence that most adolescents fail to meet multiple diet and physical activity guidelines and continue to be in need of interventions that target multiple behaviors. Although health promotion programs frequently target multiple behaviors, little is known about the best approaches to stimulating multiple behavior change…Further research is needed to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of different strategies for promoting multiple behavior change in adolescence."

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The article is "Patterns and Correlates of Physical Activity and Nutrition Behaviors in Adolescents" by Alvaro Sanchez, PhD (Basque Health Department Fellow at University of California, San Diego), Gregory J. Norman, PhD (University of California, San Diego), James F. Sallis, PhD (San Diego State University), Karen J. Calfas, PhD (San Diego State University), John Cella, MD (Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, San Diego) and Kevin Patrick, MD, MS (University of California, San Diego). It appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 32, Issue 2 (February 2007) published by Elsevier.

Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/ehs-kar012307.php

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Exercise in the eldery creates new brain growth

Not only does exercise help slow down the effects of aging, it can also provide for new brain growth, according to a research study published in The Journal of Gerontology.

Researchers at the University of Illinois used treadmill tests and brain scans of volunteers over fifty five years of age to assess the effect of exercise on the brain. Age-related brain shrinkage was found to correlate positively with declines in mental ability and correlate negatively with physical fitness. They also found evidence that regular exericise reversed both the brain shrinkage, showing new brain tissue growth, and an improvement in mental functioning.

Source:

Study is first to confirm link between exercise and changes in brain

Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor
(217) 333-5802; b-james3@uiuc.edu

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Three key areas of the brain adversely affected by aging show the greatest benefit when a person stays physically fit. The proof, scientists say, is visible in the brain scans of 55 volunteers over age 55.

The idea that fitness improves cognition in the aging is not new. Animal studies have found that aerobic exercise boosts cellular and molecular components of the brain, and exercise has improved problem-solving and other cognitive abilities in older people. A new study in the February issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, however, is the first to show – using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging – anatomical differences in gray and white matter between physically fit and less fit aging humans.

Gray matter consists of thin layers of tissue of cell bodies such as neurons and support cells that are critically involved in learning and memory. White matter is the myelin sheath containing the nerve fibers that transmit signals throughout the brain.

As people age, especially after age 30, these tissues shrink in a pattern closely matched by declines in cognitive performance, said Arthur F. Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The authors, led by Kramer, say that the findings "provide the first empirical confirmation of the relationship between cardiovascular fitness and neural degeneration as predicted" in various academic studies on aging and cognition in both animal and human populations.

"We found differences in three areas of the brain, the frontal, temporal and parietal cortexes," Kramer said. "There were very distinct differences particularly in two types of tissue, the gray matter and white matter. Nobody has reported this before."

A second Kramer-led study – a meta-analysis (comprehensive data review) of 18 previous studies – that will be published in March in Psychological Science, suggests that older women, especially those on hormone-replacement therapy, benefit more cognitively than do men from increased physical activity as they age.

The Journal of Gerontology study involved well-educated men and women aged 55 to 79. Their fitness ranged from sedentary to very fit, competitive-ready athletes. Fitness was measured by results of one-mile-walking and treadmill stress tests. Three-dimensional scans of the participants’ brains were done using MRI equipment at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana. Applying voxel-based morphometry, researchers estimated tissue atrophy in a point-by-point fashion in the targeted regions of the brain.

"Interestingly, we found that fitness per se didn’t have any influence on brain density," said Kramer, a professor of psychology and member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois. "It is fitness as it interacts with age that has the positive effects. Older adults show a real decline in brain density in white and gray areas, but fitness actually slows that decline."

In the study, most other potential negative attributes – smoking, diabetes, drinking, dieting, etc. – were factored out of the data equation, Kramer said.

"This, to our knowledge, is the first human data providing a potential anatomical account of the cognitive effects that we and others have found over the years," Kramer said. "Our data also suggest that more research is clearly needed to actually do a thorough examination of brain structure and functioning, and the impact of interventions such as fitness and cognitive training."

In 1999, Kramer and colleagues reported in the journal Nature that previously sedentary people over age 60 who walked rapidly for 45 minutes three days a week can significantly improve mental-processing abilities that decline with age, and particularly tasks that rely heavily on the frontal lobes of the brain.

For their meta-analysis paper, researchers reviewed 18 intervention studies done between 1966 and 2001 and involving hundreds of participants ages 55 and older. Fitness training was found to show "robust but selective benefits for cognition, with the largest fitness-induced benefits occurring for executive-control processes."

Few studies done in the early part of the time included women, but as data were analyzed from later studies, Kramer said, "We found that gender had a large effect; men simply don’t benefit as much, so we went back through our own data and asked why."

In previous studies of mice whose ovaries had been removed, they noted a decline in exercise and a drop in production of brain-derived neurotropin. When mice were put back on estrogen, production of the brain molecule increased and so did exercise activity.
In women, Kramer said, the data showed a similar trend: Women on estrogen replacement therapy benefited more than women not on it.

Other main conclusions from the meta-analysis:

Exercise programs involving both aerobic exercise and strength training produced better results on cognitive abilities than either one alone.

Older adults benefit more than younger adults do, possibly, Kramer said, because older adults have more to gain as age-related declines become more prevalent.

More than 30 minutes of exercise per session produce the greatest benefit, a finding consistent with many existing guidelines for adults.

The studies were funded by the National Institute on Aging (National Institutes of Health) and the New York-based Institute for the Study of Aging.

"These intriguing data suggest there may be one more possible benefit from regular exercise," said Molly V. Wagster, program director for the Neuropsychology of Aging, Neuroscience and Neuropsychology of Aging Program of the NIA, which supported the work. "The study emphasizes the importance of continued research on the potential role that exercise might play in reducing cognitive decline with age."

Link: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/scitips/03/0127exercise.html

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Center Created for Spirituality and the Mind

To study the interaction between mind, body and spirituality, a new research organization has been established at the University of Pennsylvania. Named the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, it will specialize in the use of modern brain scan techniques to study religious beliefs and spiritual experiences.

As an example of one such exploration, researchers examined the brain activity of persons engaged in glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, and compared it to the brain activity seen when these same people were singing gospel songs. The results showed that when singing, the language area of the brain was highly active, but not at all during glossolalia, supporting the practitioners’ claim that they have no control over their voices when speaking in tongues.

Source:

Link: Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16842848/

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Milk Eliminates Health Benefits of Tea

Edgar Cayce called coffee a food, but not if taken with milk. Recent research on the health benefits of drinking tea supported this assertion.

German researchers seeking to understand the possible role of tea drinking in promoting a healthy heart found that within tea is a chemical that induces the arteries to relax. They found that it was the catechins in the tea that produced this effect. They went on to discover that when milk is added to the tea, the catechins were neutralized so that they no longer had the same relaxing effect on the arteries. They found that it was the caseins, a type of protein, in milk that neutralized the tea’s important catechins.

Commentators from Britain, where it is customary to have milk with tea, noted that to improve one’s heart health it was much more important to exercise regularly than to eliminate milk from tea.

Source:

Milk in tea 'blocks health gains'

Adding milk to a cup of tea can destroy its ability to protect against heart disease, according to research.

A small German study found drinking black tea significantly improved the ability of arteries to relax and expand to keep blood pressure healthy.

But the European Heart Journal paper also found proteins in milk, called caseins, blocked this effect.

It is estimated as many as 98% of UK tea-drinkers prefer milk in their favourite cuppa.

The researchers tested the effects of tea in 16 humans and on rat tissue.

They showed molecules in the tea called catechins helped dilate the blood vessels by producing a chemical called nitric oxide. The caseins in milk prevented this effect by reducing the concentration of catechins in the tea.

Senior researcher Dr Verena Stangl, professor of cardiology at the Charite Hospital, in Berlin, said: "Our results thus provide a possible explanation for the lack of beneficial effects of tea on the risk of heart disease in the UK, a country where milk is usually added."

However, June Davison, cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation (BHF), said: "It is difficult to say from this small study the impact of adding a drop of milk to your tea can make.

"The tea break is a great British tradition which provides time to relax with a cuppa in hand.

"Leaving milk out of your tea is far less likely to help protect your heart health than other measures, such as taking regular exercise, avoiding smoking and eating a healthy balanced diet."

Tea benefits

But Ms Davison also said the study highlighted the importance of not just thinking about one food in isolation but the effect of the actual interaction between different foods.

Prof Stangl said the study was very complex and so could only be performed on a small number of people.

Professor Andrew Steptoe of UCL's department of epidemiology and public health, who has previously carried out research into the effects of tea on recovery from stress, said that as such studies were very difficult to carry out he was not surprised that this study had been very small.

On the results of the study, he added: "We would be interested to know if that sort of effect persists long-term or if it is just an acute effect of tea."

Prof Steptoe also said that as there were about 200 bioactive compounds in tea the apparent effect of milk of vasodilation "does not necessarily mean milk negates the other effects of tea".

Catherine Collins, a dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Society, agreed that tea was a "very healthy drink" and pointed out that drinking it with milk in would boost calcium intake.

She said: "There are benefits for tea, with or without milk, so keep on drinking."

Bill Gorman, chairman of the Tea Council, also said the study was "another very positive piece of research for tea as it's clear that the researchers recognise that tea has significant health effects".

Link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6241139.stm