PROTIME-FITNESS HOLISTIC HEALTH AND WELLNESS

  IS IT POSSIBLE TO AVOID GESTATIONAL DIABETES WITH MORE EXERCISE? Pregnant women who exercise more during the first trimester of pregnancy may have a lower risk of developing gestational diabetes, according to a new study led by Samantha Ehrlich, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and adjunct investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. The analysis found that lower risk was associated with at least 38 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise each day -- a bit more than current recommendations of at least 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Gestational diabetes refers to diabetes diagnosed for the first time during pregnancy. It can pose serious health problems, including pregnancy and delivery complications, and an increased future risk for diabetes in both mother and child. Ehrlich said, "We know that exercise is safe and beneficial for healthy pregnant women. These results show that exercise helps...

  HEALTHY GUT LINKED TO DIET Diets rich in whole and plant-based foods, which encourage the presence of gut microbiota, which is linked to a lower risk of common illnesses, including heart disease, research has found. A large-scale international study using metagenomics and blood chemical profiling identified a panel of 15 gut microbes associated with the risk of standard conditions, including obesity and type 2 diabetes. The study, published today in  Nature  Medicine by  researchers  at King's College London, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of Trento, Italy, and health start-up company ZOE, has identified a panel of 15 gut microbes associated with the risk of standard conditions, including obesity and type 2 diabetes. The PREDICT 1 (Personalized Responses to Dietary Composition Trial 1) analyzed detailed data on the composition of participants' gut microbiomes, dietary habits, and cardiometabolic ...

  SHOCK  HIP AND SHOULDER ARTHRITIC PAIN AWAY A novel outpatient procedure offers lasting pain relief for patients suffering from moderate to severe arthritis in their hip and shoulder joints, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said the procedure could help reduce reliance on addictive opiates. People with moderate to severe pain related to osteoarthritis face limited treatment options. Common approaches like injections of anesthetic and corticosteroids into the affected joints grow less effective as arthritis progresses and worsens. "Usually, over time, patients become less responsive to these injections," said Felix M. Gonzalez, M.D., from the Radiology Department at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. "The first anesthetic-corticosteroid injection may provide six months of pain relief, the second may last three months, and the third may last only a month. Gradually,...

  Does aspirin lower colorectal cancer risk in older adults? It depends on when they start. Study finds that daily aspirin use does not reduce risk of colorectal cancer among adults who begin taking it after age 70 Regular aspirin use has clear benefits in reducing colorectal cancer incidence among middle-aged adults and comes with some risks, such as gastrointestinal bleeding. And when should adults start taking regular aspirin, and for how long? There is substantial evidence that daily aspirin can reduce the risk of colorectal cancer in adults up to age 70. But until now, there was little evidence about whether older adults should start taking aspirin. A team of scientists set out to study this question. They were led by Andrew T. Chan, MD, MPH, a gastroenterologist and chief of the Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Their report appears in  JAMA Oncology . The researchers carried out a pooled analysis of two large U.S. coho...

  NEW METHOD DETECTS ANTIBIOTICS IN FOODS Widespread use of antibiotics in human healthcare and livestock husbandry has led to trace amounts of the drugs ending up in food products. Long-term consumption could cause health problems, but it's been difficult to analyze more than a few antibiotics at a time because they have different chemical properties. Now, researchers reporting in ACS'  Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry  have developed a method to simultaneously measure 77 antibiotics in various foods. Antibiotics can be present in trace amounts in meat, eggs, and milk if the animals aren't withdrawn from the drugs for a sufficient period of time before the products are collected. Also, antibiotics can accumulate in cereals, vegetables, and fruits from manure fertilizer or treated wastewater applied to crops. Consuming these foods over a long time could lead to increased antibiotic resistance of bacterial pathogens or an imbalance in the gut microbiome. However,...

  THE COMPLEXITIES OF WEIGHT LOSS While eating less and moving more are the basics of weight control and obesity treatment, finding ways to help people adhere to a weight-loss regimen is more complicated. Understanding what features make a diet easier or more challenging to follow can help optimize and tailor dietary approaches for obesity treatment. A new paper from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) analyzed different dietary approaches and clinical trials to better understand how to optimize adherence and subsequent weight reduction. The findings have been published in the  Journal of Clinical Investigation . "There is no convincing evidence that one diet is universally easier to adhere to than another for extended periods, a feature necessary for long-term weight management," says Ariana M. Chao, Ph.D., CRNP, Assistant Professor of Nursing at Penn Nursing and lead investigator of the paper. "Progress in improving dietary adherence could r...

  Diabetes is powerfully associated with premature coronary heart disease in women. A new biomarker of insulin resistance was tied to a 600 percent increase in premature coronary heart disease risk. While deaths related to heart disease have declined among older people, studies suggest that younger patients' death rates have remained stagnant or increased slightly. To understand what factors put younger individuals at higher risk of premature coronary heart disease (CHD), researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Mayo Clinic analyzed more than 50 risk factors in 28,024 women who participated in the decades-long Women's Health Study. Notably, women under 55 with type-2 diabetes had a tenfold greater risk of having CHD over the next two decades, with lipoprotein insulin resistance (LPIR) proving to be a strong, predictive biomarker as well. Findings are published in  JAMA Cardiology . "We're going to see, unfortunately, younger and younger people having h...

  Afternoon napping linked to better mental agility Associated with better locational awareness, verbal fluency, and working memory Taking a regular afternoon nap may be linked to better mental agility, suggests research published in the online journal  General Psychiatry . The findings indicate that it seems to be associated with better locational awareness, verbal fluency, and working memory. Longer life expectancy and the associated neurodegenerative changes that accompany it raise the prospect of dementia, with around 1 in 10 people over 65 affected in the developed world. As people age, their sleep patterns change, with afternoon naps becoming more frequent. But research published to date hasn't reached any consensus on whether afternoon naps might help stave off cognitive decline and dementia in older people or whether they might be a symptom of dementia. The researchers explored this further in 2214 ostensibly healthy people aged at least 60 and resident in several larg...

  'Aging well' greatly affected by hopes and fears for later life. If you believe you can become the healthy, engaged person you want to be in old age, you are much more likely to experience that outcome, a recent Oregon State University study shows. "How we think about who we're going to be in old age is very predictive of exactly how we will be," said Shelbie Turner, a doctoral student in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences and co-author on the study. Previous studies on aging have found that how people thought about themselves at age 50 predicted a wide range of future health outcomes up to 40 years later -- cardiovascular events, memory, balance, will to live, hospitalizations, even mortality. "Previous research has shown that people who have positive views of aging at 50 live 7.5 years longer, on average, than people who don't," said Karen Hooker, co-author of the study and the Jo Anne Leonard Petersen Endowed Chair in Gerontol...

  HDL CHOLESTEROL A GOOD PREDICTOR OF HEART DISEASE IN SOME PEOPLE Still no existing measures to accurately predict heart attacks in black people For decades, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol has been dubbed "good cholesterol" because of its role in moving fats and other cholesterol molecules out of artery walls. People with higher HDL cholesterol levels tend to have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, studies have shown. Now, UT Southwestern scientists have analyzed data on more than 15,000 people to better understand the association between HDL cholesterol, heart attacks, and strokes in diverse populations. They found that the number of HDL particles, a little-used HDL measurement, is a more reliable predictor of heart attack and stroke risk than the standard HDL cholesterol metric. Moreover, they found that neither HDL measurement was significantly associated with a heart attack among black people. "Previous studies have looked at HDL levels in the popula...

  New drug form may help treat osteoporosis, calcium-related disorders. A novel form of a drug used to treat osteoporosis that comes with the potential for fewer side effects may provide a new option for patients. The work is supported by the National Institutes of Health and is published in  Biophysical Journal . Purdue University innovators developed a stabilized form of human calcitonin, a peptide drug already used for osteoporosis people. Researchers at Purdue created a prodrug form of the peptide hormone to increase its effectiveness as an osteoporosis treatment. In humans, calcitonin is the hormone responsible for normal calcium homeostasis. When prescribed to osteoporosis patients, calcitonin inhibits bone resorption, resulting in increased bone mass. Unfortunately, human calcitonin undergoes fibrillation in an aqueous solution, leading to reduced efficacy when used as a therapeutic. As a substitute, osteoporosis patients have been prescribed salmon calcitonin. It does ...

  Fatty acids may help combat multiple sclerosis, study finds According to a new Yale study, the abnormal immune system response that causes multiple sclerosis (MS) by attacking and damaging the central nervous system can be triggered by the lack of a specific fatty acid in fat tissue. The finding suggests that dietary change might help treat some people with autoimmune diseases. The study was published on Jan. 19 in  The Journal of Clinical Investigation . Fat tissue in patients diagnosed with MS lack normal levels of oleic acid, a monounsaturated fatty acid found at high levels in, for instance, cooking oils, meats (beef, chicken, and pork), cheese, nuts, sunflower seeds, eggs, pasta, milk, olives, and avocados, according to the study. This lack of oleic acids leads to a loss of the metabolic sensors that activate T cells that mediate the immune system's response to infectious disease, the Yale team found. Without the suppressing effects of these regulatory T cells, the immu...

  Potential treatment for chronic pain Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have developed a new way to treat chronic pain, which has been tested in mice. With a compound designed and developed by the researchers themselves, they can achieve complete pain relief. Between seven and ten percent of the world's population suffers from chronic pain originating from nerves that have been damaged. A disease that can be severely debilitating. Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have found a new way to treat the pain. The treatment has been tested in mice, and the new results have been published in the scientific journal  EMBO Molecular Medicine . For more than a decade, the researchers have been working on designing, developing, and testing a drug that shall provide complete pain relief. "We have developed a new way to treat chronic pain. It is a targeted treatment. That is, it does not affect the general neuronal signaling, but only affects the nerve changes t...