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Showing posts from August, 2020

Who could benefit from exercise and behavioral treatment?

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  Who could benefit from exercise and behavioral treatment? Depression study suggests it may be possible to predict who would benefit. Aerobic exercise benefits young adults with major depression, and a study suggests it may be possible to predict those who would benefit from behavioral therapy with practice. Unique to this precision medicine study is assessing cognitive control and reward-related brain activity, two facets of brain function that are impaired in people with depression. Aerobic exercise benefits young adults with major depression, and a Rutgers-led study suggests it may be possible to predict those who would benefit from behavioral therapy with practice. "Our study needs to be replicated, but the precision medicine approach of predicting who may or may not benefit from exercise as an antidepressant is provocative," said senior author Brandon L. Alderman, an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health in the School of Arts and Sciences at Ru

Aging memories may not be 'worse,' just 'different.'

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  Aging memories may not be 'worse,' just 'different.' A study adds nuance to the idea that a fading memory is a poor one and finds a potential correlation between the way people process the boundaries of events and episodic memory.      FULL STORY "Memory is the first thing to go." Everyone has heard it, and decades of research studies seem to confirm it: While it may not always be the first sign of aging, some faculties, including memory, worsen as people age. It may not be that straightforward. Zachariah Reagh, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at older people's brain activity not by requiring them to recite a group of words or remember a string of numbers. Instead, Reagh looked at a "naturalistic approach," one that more closely resembled real-world activities. He found that brain activity in older adults isn't necessarily quieter when it comes to m

TV-watching snackers beware: You won't notice you're full if your attention is elsewhere.

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  TV-watching snackers beware: You won't notice you're full if your attention is elsewhere. Eating while doing something perceptually demanding makes it more difficult to notice when you feel full, according to new research.      FULL STORY Eating while doing something perceptually-demanding makes it more difficult to notice when you feel full, shows new research from the University of Sussex. Professor Martin Yeomans, Dr. Sophie Forster, and colleagues found that when an engaging task takes up your senses, you are less likely to adjust how much extra food or drink you consume. The team tested 120 participants, giving them lower and higher calorie drinks and giving them tasks that demanded low and high amounts of their attention. The paper "Ingested but not perceived: response to satiety cues disrupted by perceptual load" is published today, 12 August 2020, in the journal  Appetite . The team found that participants who were fully engaged in a perceptually-demanding t

Lipoic acid supplements help some obese, but otherwise healthy people lose weight.

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  Lipoic acid supplements help some obese, but otherwise healthy people lose weight . A compound is given as a dietary supplement to overweight, but otherwise healthy people in a clinical trial caused many of the patients to slim down.      A compound is given as a dietary supplement to overweight. Still, otherwise healthy people in a clinical trial caused many of the patients to slim down, research by Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Science University showed. The research, published in the  Journal of Nutrition , analyzed the effects of 24 weeks of daily, 600-milligram doses of lipoic acid supplements on 31 people, with a similarly sized control group receiving a placebo. "The data clearly showed a loss in body weight and body fat in people taking lipoic acid supplements," said Balz Frei, director emeritus of OSU's Linus Pauling Institute and one of the scientists on the study. "Particularly in women and in the heaviest participants." Produced b