Health News

Anxiety Linked To Accelerated Aging

Date: Jul-13-2012
New research suggests middle-aged and older women who experience high levels of a common form of anxiety known phobic anxiety, such as being unreasonably fearful of crowds and heights, are more likely to carry a risk factor tied to premature aging: they have shorter telomeres. The effect is equivalent to another six years of age compared to a person with no phobic symptoms, suggest the researchers...

Cash Register Receipts, Other Paper Causing Widespread Exposure To BPA Substitute

Date: Jul-13-2012
People are being exposed to higher levels of the substitute for BPA in cash register thermal paper receipts and many of the other products that engendered concerns about the health effects of bisphenol A, according to a new study. Believed to be the first analysis of occurrence of bisphenol S (BPS) in thermal and recycled paper and paper currency, the report appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology...

Girls Who Suffered Abuse At Greater Risk For Heart Disease, Diabetes Later In Life

Date: Jul-13-2012
Middle-aged women who report having been physically abused as children are about two times more likely than other women their age to have high blood pressure, high blood sugar, a larger waistline and poor cholesterol levels, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. These women are diagnosed as having metabolic syndrome which, according to previous research, places them at an increased risk of developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes...

For HIV Prevention, Identifying Risky Behaviors Could Be Key

Date: Jul-13-2012
HIV prevention must be better targeted, according to David Holtgrave from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US, and colleagues. Health care professionals need a more detailed analysis and understanding of the interplay between HIV risk behavior, access to treatment and treatment success among those living with HIV. The authors discuss their proposed framework in a study¹ in a special issue of Springer's journal AIDS and Behavior...

Exposure To Chemical In Drinking Water In The Womb And Early Childhood May Affect Vision

Date: Jul-13-2012
Prenatal and early childhood exposure to the chemical solvent tetrachloroethylene (PCE) found in drinking water may be associated with long-term visual impairments, particularly in the area of color discrimination, a new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researchers has found. The study by epidemiologists and biostatisticians at BUSPH, working with an ophthalmologist from the BU School of Medicine, found that people exposed to higher levels of PCE from gestation through age 5 exhibited poorer color-discrimination abilities than unexposed people...

New Strategy Developed To Overcome Drug-Resistant Childhood Cancer

Date: Jul-13-2012
A new drug combination could offer hope to children with neuroblastoma - one of the deadliest forms of childhood cancer - by boosting the effectiveness of a promising new gene-targeted treatment. Researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research in London have found a way to overcome the resistance of cancer cells to a drug called crizotinib, which recently showed positive early results in its first trial in children with cancer...

Suicides Under Home Treatment In England Are Almost Double Ward Cases

Date: Jul-13-2012
Deaths by suicide among mental health patients treated at home have reached 150 to 200 a year in England, latest national figures reveal - but suicides among patients on mental health wards continue to fall. The annual report by the University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Homicide and Suicide by People with Mental Illness (NCI) examined homicide and suicide figures for all four countries of the United Kingdom among mental health patients and found in-patient suicides have shown a sustained fall across all countries...

Researchers Disprove Surmise That Eye Movement Direction Correlates To Lying

Date: Jul-13-2012
New research refutes a commonly held belief that certain eye movements are associated with lying. The idea that looking to the right indicates lying, while looking left suggests truth telling, is shown to be false in a report published in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Caroline Watt of the University of Edinburgh, completed three different studies to show that there was no correlation between the direction of eye movement and whether the subject was telling the truth or lying...

Improving Fire Department Tactics With Live Fire Tests

Date: Jul-13-2012
In the name of science, but with aim of saving lives, preventing injuries and reducing property losses, members of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) spent much of the first two weeks in July setting fire to 20 abandoned townhouses on Governors Island, about a kilometer from the southern tip of Manhattan...

Babies In The Womb Affected By Pesticides In The Home

Date: Jul-13-2012
Air samples from homes of Hispanic mothers-to-be along the Texas-Mexico border contained multiple pesticides in a majority of the houses, according to a study conducted by the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio. All the women were in the third trimester of pregnancy, when the fetal brain undergoes a growth spurt. Several studies have reported that pesticide exposure may adversely affect mental and motor development during infancy and childhood. The new report is in the summer issue of the Texas Public Health Journal sent to members this week...