Want Your Kids to Exercise? Skip the Guilt

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Trying to “guilt” kids into exercise may not work, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the University of Georgia found that middle school students were less likely to be physically active if they didn’t feel in control of their exercise choices or if they felt pressured by adults to get more exercise.

Kids who felt they could make their own decisions about physical activity were more likely to regard themselves as someone who exercises, which made them more likely to do so, the researchers said.

That raises the question, “Can we put these children in situations where they come to value and enjoy the act of being physically active?” lead author Rod Dishman, a professor of kinesiology, said in a university news release.

Children’s activity levels typically fall 50 percent between fifth and sixth grades, the authors noted in the September issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

Dishman and his colleagues said they are looking for ways to help more children identify themselves as someone who exercises.

“Just like there are kids who are drawn to music and art, there are kids who are drawn to physical activity. But what you want is to draw those kids who otherwise might not be drawn to an activity,” Dishman said.

Above all, parents and teachers shouldn’t make children feel guilty for not being physically active, he said.

“The best thing is to do it because it’s fun. It’s the kids who say they are intrinsically motivated who are more active than the kids who aren’t,” Dishman concluded.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about keeping children active.

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Non-Antibiotic Medicine May Fight Drug-Resistant ‘Superbug’

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A new mouse study suggests that a drug with a known safety record in humans might be a new weapon in the fight against the potentially deadly intestinal infection known as C. difficile.

The drug is called ebselen, and it was well-tolerated in humans when tested as a possible treatment in a variety of clinical trials, including for stroke and bipolar disorder. Although ebselen has never been approved as a treatment for any condition in humans, the current research team thought the drug might help prevent the spread of infection in people with C. difficile.

When the researchers gave ebselen to infected mice, the drug appeared to knock out the toxic activity of C. difficile without inflicting the collateral damage on good bacteria that’s normally associated with antibiotic treatment, the study reported.

The results were “very encouraging,” said study senior author Matthew Bogyo, a professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology in the department of pathology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. “Specifically, we find that oral [ebselen] dosing of mice infected with C. difficile resulted in nearly complete blockage of the damage to gut tissues that cause the symptoms in humans,” Bogyo said.

It’s important to remember, however, that research done in animals doesn’t always turn out the same in humans. So, right now, it’s unknown whether ebselen would be effective or safe in treating people with C. difficile.

The study, which was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was published in the Sept. 23 online issue of Science Translational Medicine.

C. difficile — or Clostridium difficile — is a bacterial infection that targets the intestine causing watery diarrhea,
fever, loss of appetite, nausea and
abdominal pain. This pathogen caused an estimated 500,000 hospitalizations and 29,000 deaths in the United States in 2011, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Currently, the infection is treated with specific antibiotics. But antibiotics kill “both the ‘bad’ pathogenic bacteria as well as the ‘good’ native gut bacteria that help to keep us healthy,” Bogyo said.

The result is a weakened gut environment that puts the general population at a higher risk for getting C. difficile in the first place, while undermining the effectiveness of antibiotic treatment once an infection takes hold, he explained.

“This is why people who get C. difficile tend to relapse and get it again and again,” Bogyo said.

Fecal transplantation, in which good bacteria is harvested from a healthy patient and placed inside a sick patient’s gut, is one non-antibiotic treatment. However, Bogyo cautioned that the long-term ramification of this process remains unclear.

So, Bogyo and his colleagues turned to ebselen, a non-antibiotic compound designed to block the toxic activity of C. difficile, without actually killing it altogether.

The study involved a number of rounds of laboratory and animal testing, with focus centering on ebselen’s impact on the activity of “Toxin B.” Toxin B is C. difficile’s main toxin.

Mice injected with ebselen-treated Toxin B molecules survived. Mice exposed to untreated molecules died within two days, according to the report.

Similarly, the researchers found that when mice with an antibiotic-resistant strain of C. difficile were treated with oral doses of ebselen, they experienced almost no cell damage.

“While we can only know how effective the strategy will be in humans once we start a clinical trial, we feel that our results strongly suggest that the drug will be effective, and should help to treat symptoms while allowing the good bacteria to return and control the infection,” Bogyo said.

Philip Tierno, a professor of microbiology and pathology with the NYU School of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, described the findings as “very important.”

“It’s not a new concept,” Tierno said. “The notion that one could attack the infectious process by focusing on a bacteria’s virulence, rather than on killing it off, dates back many decades,” he explained.

“But it’s taken us 70 or so years of antibiotic overuse and resistance for us to finally realize that the paradigm has to change. That you can achieve effective control of an infection by using blocking agents that neutralize the toxic aspect of bacteria, without actually having to kill it and all the healthy flora around it. And the use of this drug for this infection seems to do just that,” Tierno added.

“Of course this was done in a mouse model,” he cautioned. “So you have to wait until you complete trials in humans. But cells are cells and bacteria are bacteria, so if we can affect the same mechanism in our body, this should work.”

More information

There’s more on C. difficile at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Experiment Shows ‘Mind Reading’ a Real Possibility

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — The telegraph. The telephone. The Internet. All innovations in communication that have changed the world.

But the silent exchange of information using brain-to-brain communication? Surely the power to read minds remains the stuff of science fiction.

Perhaps not. A team of researchers from the University of Washington now contends that it’s possible to link up the brains of two separate individuals, in two separate spaces, so that one person can figure out what the other is thinking.

How? By digitizing the electrical nerve activity tied to a person’s thoughts, translating that activity/thought into a specific signal, and transmitting that signal over the Internet in patterns that can be understood by another person’s brain.

All without a spoken word.

“Brain-to-brain interface is a field of research that is just at the very beginning,” said study author Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology with the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences in Seattle. “The ability to easily and directly communicate very complicated concepts and images from one brain to another brain is a long way off in the future.

“But what we have been able to show is that the clear exchange of simple information between a pairing of brains is possible,” he added. “And that, I think, is a big step forward. And it establishes a very solid foundation to build on. Which is very exciting.”

Stocco and his colleagues share the details of their brain communication experiments in the Sept. 23 issue of PLOS ONE.

At its core, brain interfacing refers to the ability of two brains to “speak” to one another directly, by sending and receiving neural messages in the form of electrical signals. Those signals can then be picked up by brain wave-reading technology — such as an electroencephalogram (EEG) — and transmitted via the Internet.

In earlier work, the team had enabled the brain signals of one individual to prompt hand movement in another individual located in a separate space.

Building on that, the latest investigation involved 10 men and women, between the ages of 19 and 39, who were randomly paired and then sent to two different, darkened lab locations roughly 1 mile apart.

Although neither participant could actually see or hear one another, each was hooked up to a EEG-type machine.

Then each engaged in a question-and-answer game, in which one person thought of an object (such as “dog”) drawn from a specific category (such as “animals”), while the other sent online questions to try to guess what the object was.

The object-thinker, however, could only respond by paying attention to a “yes” or “no” flashing light, with each answer generating slightly different types of neural activity.

“Yes” or “no” answers were, in turn, digitized and sent back into the visual cortex of the questioner’s brain via the EEG pathway. Once received, “yes” signals triggered perceptions of a quick flash of light, while “no” answers did not. Questioners were then asked to interpret the answers, after having been informed that a flash of light meant “yes.”

After 20 rounds, “we found that people were really good at playing the game,” said Stocco. “On average, people were able to correctly identify the objects more than 70 percent of the time. And because each game involved a series of questions and answers before guessing the object, we found that people were actually able to correctly understand responses 93 percent of the time.”

Stocco said that the hope is to eventually facilitate true two-way communication, while cutting out the “middle man” by eliminating the need for Web-based communication entirely.

“The goal is to get to communicating only thoughts from one brain to the other and back, and to do so with complex concepts,” Stocco said. “What we’ve achieved is already very cool. But what this has the potential to lead to is a whole new form of communication.”

More information

There’s more on the brain interfacing at the ALS Association.

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ERs Often ‘Safety Net’ Care for People With Schizophrenia: CDC

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A new report finds that, too often, under-medicated Americans suffering from schizophrenia end up seeking care in the nation’s hospital emergency rooms.

The report, issued Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that between 2009 and 2011, over 382,000 visits to ERs were recorded for people aged 18 to 64 with schizophrenia.

Many of these cases involved people on Medicaid who were either homeless or living in places such as nursing homes or group homes, the researchers said.

Emergency departments “may serve as a safety net for schizophrenic patients not otherwise receiving care,” said Dr. Michael Albert and Linda McCaig, both of whom work at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Mental health expert Dr. Michael Birnbaum said the new findings were “not surprising.”

“Unfortunately many people with mental illness — and in particular individuals with schizophrenia — across the United States receive inadequate psychiatric and physical health care,” said Birnbaum, who directs the early treatment program at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.

“Given limited access to quality psychiatric care, as well as limited insurance coverage, individuals who are most at risk, such as individuals with schizophrenia, end up in the emergency room at times of crisis,” he said.

According to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), schizophrenia is a “chronic, severe and disabling” disorder affecting about 1 percent of Americans. Often, the condition involves sensations such as “hearing voices,” paranoia and other effects that “terrify people with the illness and make them withdrawn or extremely agitated,” the NIMH said.

The new study used 2009-2011 hospital visits data from medical centers across the United States. It found that, for patients aged 18 to 64, men had double the rate of visits to an ER for schizophrenia compared to women.

The rate of homelessness in this patient population was also high. According to the report, 7.5 percent of visits to emergency rooms for schizophrenia were made by homeless people, compared to less than 1 percent of visits made for other conditions.

The percentage of ER visits linked to schizophrenia that involved people living in non-private residences — places such as nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, group homes, prisons and assisted-living centers — was also much higher when compared to ER visits for conditions other than schizophrenia, the researchers said.

Also, people who suffered a schizophrenia-linked crisis who were cared for in an emergency room were much less likely to have that care paid for by private insurance, Albert and McCaig found.

For example, Medicaid was the method of payment in more than 40 percent of such cases, compared to about 23 percent of ER visits that did not involve schizophrenia, according to the report published in the September issue of the CDC’s NCHS Data Brief.

The CDC report found that a schizophrenia-linked visit to the ER often meant at least temporary institutionalization. For example, nearly one-third of such cases were admitted to the hospital, and nearly 17 percent of patients were transferred to a psychiatric hospital — rates that were much higher than ER visits for other causes.

Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein is president of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation in New York City, which supports research into illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Borenstein believes that a multipronged approach can curb the use of hospital ERs as a last-resort “safety net” for people with the illness.

First, “we need to improve our [health care] system so that people with schizophrenia have appropriate access to outpatient care on an ongoing basis,” he said. “We also need to improve the availability of housing, including supportive housing, to reduce the number of homeless people with schizophrenia who end up in the ER,” he added.

“Finally,” Borenstein said, “we need to continue working to develop new and improved forms of treatment, including medicines and other therapy to help people with schizophrenia lead productive lives.”

Birnbaum agreed.

“Mental and physical health care for individuals with schizophrenia must be easily accessed and affordable to all,” he said. “They must be integrated to ensure that individuals most at risk receive quality health care.”

More information

For more on schizophrenia, head to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

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Chrissy Teigen and Tyra Banks Get Emotional About Infertility

In our culture, women face a tremendous amount of pressure to have kids and are often considered selfish or “less than” if they choose to put their careers first. On the new talk show FabLife, Tyra Banks and Chrissy Teigen are opening up about how even when you want to start a family, it’s not always that simple.

On the episode, which aired Monday, the women expressed how hurtful questions about the topic can be, especially for those who are having difficulties with fertility issues.

RELATED: 6 Weird Things That Boost Your Fertility

In the above preview, Teigen opened up about her own fertility struggles with her husband John Legend. “Honestly, John and I were having trouble. We would’ve had kids 5 or 6 years ago if it had happened, but my gosh. It’s been a process,” she said. “We’ve seen fertility doctors.”

She then touched on how insensitive questions from others can be.

“One day you’re gonna ask that to the wrong girl who is really struggling and it’s gonna be hurtful to them. And I hate that. I hate it. Stop asking me!”

Banks also expressed her own frustrations with people asking when she will have kids.

“I am so tired of seeing on social media ‘Why don’t you have kids? Why don’t you have kids?’ You don’t know, you don’t know what I’m going through,” she said through tears.

For women struggling to get pregnant, this conversation is all too real. Kudos to Teigen and Banks for sharing something so raw.

RELATED: 5 Things to Never Say to a Woman Dealing With Infertility

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Why People in ‘Tall’ Nations Are More Likely to Be Slim

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — There may be a genetic link between being tall and being thin, a new study indicates.

Researchers from Australia looked at nearly 9,500 people in 14 European countries and found a strong connection between genes that boost height and those associated with lower amounts of body fat.

The findings, published recently in the journal Nature Genetics, could prove important in determining whether genes play a role in nations’ different rates of health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and dementia, the researchers said.

The results may also explain why people in northern European countries such as Sweden, Norway and Finland tend to be taller and slimmer than other Europeans, the researchers said.

“The research suggests that tall nations are genetically more likely to be slim,” study co-author Peter Visscher said in a University of Melbourne news release. He is professor and chair of quantitative genetics at the University of Queensland.

Only 24 percent of genetic variation in height and 8 percent of genetic variation in body mass index (BMI, an estimate of body fat based on height and weight) can be explained by regional differences, said study co-author Matthew Robinson of the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland.

“Countries’ populations differ in many ways, from the height of their people to the prevalence of certain diseases,” he said in the news release.

While genetic variation between countries could explain national differences in height, environmental factors are the main influence on a population’s BMI, Robinson said.

“This suggests that differences in diet, for example, are more important than genetics in creating differences in BMI among nations,” he concluded.

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about body weight.

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Researchers Pinpoint Brain Region That Manages Multistep Tasks

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Scientists say they have pinpointed a region of the brain that helps you complete a series of activities in the right order, such as getting dressed and carrying out typical daily routines.

The study authors say that the area, the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), is like a foreman that helps you remember what to do step by step.

“We’re interested in the errors people make in everyday sequences of behavior,” study co-author David Badre, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University, said in a university news release. “You have to internally monitor where you are and what you are doing.”

Led by postdoctoral fellow Theresa Desrochers, researchers gave volunteers four-step tasks to complete. Participants had to identify the shape or color of four images in various orders — such as shape, shape, color, color; or shape, color, color, shape — remembering the sequences as they progressed.

As volunteers completed this task, the researchers used brain imaging, known as functional MRI, to analyze patterns of brain activity.

The study found that activity in the RLPFC ramped up as volunteers completed a sequence, and dropped before a new sequence began. This could reflect participants’ increasing uncertainty about their position in a sequence as they progressed, the study authors suggested.

The researchers investigated this idea further using transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can be used to briefly trigger activity in a specific area of the brain.

“This volley of neural activity is akin to static over a phone line, noise that other neurons listening in cannot interpret,” Badre said.

The investigators used this technology to learn about participants’ accuracy at various stages when the brain’s control regions were disrupted, they explained in the news release.

Disrupting the RLPFC, in particular, led to more mistakes as the sequences progressed. The researchers suggested that the region has more uncertainty to manage as the tasks advance, correlating with increased brain activity on the fMRI. The later in the sequence the stimulation was used, the more errors participants made, according to the study published Sept. 23 in Neuron.

“When we disrupt it, we are disrupting that process of resolving the uncertainty,” Desrochers said. “We, therefore, get this increasing pattern of errors because there was more uncertainty to be dealt with.”

The findings shed new light on what facilitates healthy behavior, the study authors said.

“The health consequences are big,” Badre said in the news release. “Cognitive [mental] control of behavior is very fragile, and it is easily disrupted by neurological disease and disorder, like stroke or traumatic brain injury. Among the major complaints in everyday life among these patients is an inability to complete multistep tasks.”

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke provides more information on the human brain and how it works.

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Coffee May Not Risk Irregular Heartbeat, Study Claims

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — New research suggests that drinking coffee doesn’t seem to up the odds of a common type of irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation.

But these findings don’t necessarily mean coffee drinkers are free and clear. Coffee may trigger other types of irregular heartbeat, the researchers noted. They also suggested that more research should be done confirming that there isn’t a relationship between atrial fibrillation and coffee drinking.

The study included 75,000 people who reported their coffee consumption in 1997. Their average coffee consumption was three cups a day. The researchers followed the participants’ health for the next 12 years. The researchers also reviewed findings from four previous studies that followed nearly 250,000 people for up to 12 years. All studies were done in Sweden or the United States.

The investigators found no link between drinking coffee and atrial fibrillation in any of the studies. That was true even among those with the highest levels of coffee consumption.

The findings were published Sept. 22 in the journal BMC Medicine.

“This is the largest prospective study to date on the association between coffee consumption and risk of atrial fibrillation. We find no evidence that high consumption of coffee increases the risk of atrial fibrillation,” study author Susanna Larsson said in a journal news release.

Larsson is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

Atrial fibrillation can significantly increase the risk of stroke, heart failure and death, the researchers said.

More information

The American Heart Association has more about atrial fibrillation.

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Fidgeting Might Be Good for Your Health

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Tapping your foot, drumming your fingers, shifting in your office chair — many people fidget at some point in their day.

And now a new study suggests that fidgeting might actually be healthy for you.

The new British research looked at the issue of long hours spent sitting, which prior studies have found to be bad for people’s health.

This study involved more than 14,000 British women aged 35 to 69.

As expected, women who did a lot of sitting and were only “slightly” fidgety had a higher risk of premature death than women who were more physically active and didn’t sit as much.

However, women who did a lot of sitting but were either moderately or very fidgety had a risk of early death that was similar to that of more active women, the researchers found.

The study can’t prove that the energy burn from fidgeting was directly responsible for the benefit, and “further research is needed,” said study co-lead author Janet Cade, a professor in the School of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds.

However, co-author Gareth Hagger-Johnson, of University College London, said the findings are intriguing.

“Our results support the suggestion that it’s best to avoid sitting still for long periods of time, and even fidgeting may offer enough of a break to make a difference,” Hagger-Johnson said in a news release from the University of Leeds.

He and Cade noted that even adults who get recommended amounts of exercise can spend up to 15 hours a day sitting down.

And while prior studies have shown that taking breaks from sitting can reduce health risks, this is the first research to show that fidgeting while sitting may also have benefits, the researchers said.

More information

The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about the health dangers of too much sitting.

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Childhood Cancer Devastates Family Finances, Too

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Although money may be the last thing a parent worries about after a child is diagnosed with cancer, new research shows that a cancer diagnosis can take a significant toll on a family’s financial well-being, too.

Researchers surveyed 99 families of children being treated for cancer at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center within a month of diagnosis and again six months later.

One-quarter of the families lost more than 40 percent of household income. Nearly one-third of the families had difficulty affording food (20 percent), housing (8 percent) or energy (17 percent), the study found.

Six months after diagnosis, 56 percent of adults who supported their families had experienced work disruption. That figure included 15 percent who either quit their jobs or were laid off as a result of their child’s illness. Another 37 percent cut their hours or took leaves of absence. Only 34 percent of those who took a leave were paid during that time, the research revealed.

At diagnosis, 20 percent of families were low-income (defined as 200 percent of the federal poverty level). Six months after diagnosis, another 12 percent of families fell into the low-income category, the study found.

The researchers said they were surprised to find such high levels of need at a major center that has resource specialists to help patients’ families facing financial problems.

“What it says is that even at a well-resourced, large referral center, about a third of families are reporting food, housing or energy insecurity six months into treatment,” study lead author Dr. Kira Bona, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s, said in a center news release.

“If anything, the numbers in our study are an underestimate of what might be seen at less well-resourced institutions, which was somewhat surprising to us,” Bona added.

The findings were published Sept. 23 in the journal Pediatric Blood & Cancer.

Recent research has shown that young cancer patients in low-income families are less likely to take chemotherapy drugs as prescribed and have lower survival rates, the study authors said.

The researchers plan to conduct a further study to determine if what they call “household material hardship” has the same effect on childhood cancer patients as low-income status.

“If household material hardship is linked to poorer outcomes in pediatric oncology, just like income is, then we can design interventions to fix food, housing and energy insecurity,” Bona said. “It’s not clear what you do about income in a clinical setting.”

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about cancer in children.

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