GEN-ERIC News

Breastfed babies are less likely to have certain cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in adulthood than their bottle-fed counterparts, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2007. “Having been breastfed in infancy is associated with a lower average body mass index (BMI) and a higher average HDL (high-density lipoprotein or “good” cholesterol) level in adulthood, even after accounting for personal and maternal demographic and CVD risk factors that could influence the results,” said Nisha I. Parikh, M.D., M.P.H., author of the study and a cardiovascular fellow at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Mass. A lower BMI and high HDL both protect against CVD. The study, which used data from two generations of participants in the Framingham Heart Study, showed that middle-aged adults who were breastfed as infants were 55 percent more likely to have high HDL cholesterol than to have low HDL cholesterol. Low HDL was defined as levels of less than 50 mg/dL for women and less than 40 mg/dL for men. HDL is known as “good” cholesterol because high levels help protect against heart disease and stroke.

Our increasingly interconnected world has made it easier for information and disease to spread. However a new study from Harvard University and Cornell University shows that fewer “degrees of separation” can make social networks too weak to disseminate behavioral change. The finding that “small world” networks are limited in their power to shape individual behavior could have implications for health care policy and the treatment of epidemics. Published in the November American Journal of Sociology, the study was led by Damon Centola, a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with Michael Macy of Cornell. The work was done while Centola was a doctoral candidate at Cornell. “Our research shows that the difference between contagions that spread through simple contact, such as diseases and information, and the spread of behavior, which requires multiple contacts, has important consequences,” says Centola. “We find that while making the world smaller increases the speed at which diseases and information can spread, it can actually slow down, and even prevent, the spread of health behaviors.”

Don’t slack off on exercise if you want to avoid packing on the pounds as you age. A consistently high level of physical activity from young adulthood into middle age increases the odds of maintaining a stable weight and lessens the amount of weight gained over time, according to a new analysis from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. People who reported at least 30 minutes of vigorous activity a day such as jogging, bicycling or swimming were more than twice as likely to maintain a stable Body Mass Index (BMI) over 20 years. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. But even highly active people who gained weight, gained 14 pounds less over 20 years than those with consistently low activity. Although activity is often recommended as a way to prevent weight gain, this is one of the first studies to examine the relationship between activity and weight by looking at patterns of exercise over a long period of time.

Newly created neurons in adults rely on signals from distant brain regions to regulate their maturation and survival before they can communicate with existing neighboring cells–a finding that has important implications for the use of adult neural stem cells to replace brain cells lost by trauma or neurodegeneration, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in The Journal of Neuroscience. In fact, certain important synaptic connections–the circuitry that allows the brain cells to talk to each other–do not appear until 21 days after the birth of the new cells, according to Charles Greer, professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology, and senior author of the study, In the meantime, other areas of the brain provide information to the new cells, preventing them from disturbing ongoing functions until the cells are mature.

Missing something? The vents on the space shuttle and International Space Station serve as the lost and found, sucking up anything that’s floating about unsecured. The shuttle commode requires that astronauts align themselves precisely in the dead center of the seat. A mock-up of the shuttle toilet, complete with built-in camera, is used to train them how to position themselves, and more…

After clocks are turned back this weekend, pedestrians walking during the evening rush hour are nearly three times more likely to be struck and killed by cars than before the time change, two U.S. scientists calculate. Ending daylight saving time translates into about 37 more U.S. pedestrian deaths around 6 p.m. in November compared to October, the researchers report. Their study of risk to pedestrians is preliminary but confirms previous findings of higher deaths after clocks are set back in fall. It’s not the darkness itself, but the adjustment to earlier night time that’s the killer, said professors Paul Fischbeck and David Gerard, both of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.