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

  A HEALTHY DIET LINKED TO BENEFICIAL GUT MICROBES AND DISEASE PREVENTION Diets rich in healthy and plant-based foods encourage the presence of gut microbes that are 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 has uncovered a panel of 15 gut microbes associated with lower risks of common conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. The study has been published today in  Nature Medicine  from 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. The PREDICT 1 (Personalized Responses to Dietary Composition Trial 1) analyzed detailed data on the composition of participants' gut microbiomes, dietary habits, and cardiometabolic blood biomarkers. It uncovered strong links between a person's diet, the microbes in their gut (

  Low fitness linked to higher psoriasis risk later in life In a major register-based study, scientists at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now demonstrated a connection between inferior physical fitness in young adults and elevated risk of the autoimmune disease psoriasis. For the male recruits to compulsory military training who were rated as the least fit, the risk of developing psoriasis later was 35 percent higher than for the fittest. The study was based on data on more than 1.2 million men conscripted, aged 18, into the Swedish Armed Forces between 1968 and 2005. During the enrollment process, all these young men underwent the same fitness test on an exercise bicycle. According to how to fit the men, the researchers divided the data into three levels (low, medium, and high fitness). They then merged the data with other registers, using Sweden's National Patient Register to obtain diagnostic codes for psoriasis and the joint disease psoriatic arthritis. The men who

  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. cohort studie

  T cells can mount attacks against many SARS-CoV-2 targets -- even on new virus variants. New research gives a detailed look at vulnerable sites on the novel coronavirus -- beyond the receptor-binding domain. A new study led by scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) suggests that T cells try to fight SARS-CoV-2 by targeting a broad range of sites on the virus -- beyond the key sites on the virus's spike protein. By attacking the virus from many angles, the body has the tools to potentially recognize different SARS-CoV-2 variants. The new research, published January 27, 2021, in  Cell Report Medicine , is the most detailed analysis so far that proteins on SARS-CoV-2 stimulate the strongest responses from the immune system's "helper" CD4+ T cells and "killer" CD8+ T cells. "We are now armed with the knowledge of which parts of the virus are recognized by the immune system," says LJI Professor Alessandro Sette, Dr. Biol. Sci., who co-l

  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, m

  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 large cit

  '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