PROTIME-FITNESS HOLISTIC HEALTH AND WELLNESS

   PAIN TOLERANCE AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY          In 2023, researchers from UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, the University Hospital of North Norway (UNN), and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found that among more than 10,000 adults, those who were physically active had a higher pain tolerance than those who were sedentary; and the higher the activity level, the higher the pain tolerance. Following this finding, the researchers sought to understand how physical activity might influence the likelihood of experiencing chronic pain several years later. And they wondered if this was related to how physical activity affects our ability to tolerate pain. "We found that people who were more active in their free time had a lower chance of having various types of chronic pain 7-8 years later. For example, being just a little more active, such as going from light to moderate activity, was associated with a 5% lower risk of reporting some form of chr...

  Survey finds loneliness epidemic runs deep among parents The majority of respondents feel isolation, loneliness, and burnout from the demands of parenthood         A new national survey conducted by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center finds that most parents experience isolation, loneliness, and burnout from the demands of parenthood, with many feeling a lack of support in fulfilling that role. The survey of parents conducted this month found: About two-thirds (66%) felt the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently feel isolating and lonely. About 62% feel burned out by their responsibilities as a parent. Nearly 2 in 5 (38%) feel no one to support them in their parenting role. Nearly 4 in 5 (79%) would value connecting with other parents outside of work and home. "I work from home full time, and I actually have a job where I'm on camera a lot, and I'm Zoom calling people very often," said Anne Helms, a mother of two young children in Columbus,...

  MIGRAINES IN WOMEN: CAUSES AND TREATMENTS         A third of the nearly 20 million women who participated in a national health survey reported migraines during menstruation, and of them, 11.8 million, or 52.5%, were premenopausal. The analysis was conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center and Pfizer, Inc., a company that manufactures a migraine medication. Because of the underuse of medications to help treat or prevent menstrual migraines, investigators wanted to understand how common menstrual migraines were and which groups of women could most benefit from potential therapies. The study will be presented on April 16 at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Denver. "The first step in helping a woman with menstrual migraine is making a diagnosis; the second part is prescribing a treatment; and the third part is finding treatments patients are satisfied with and remain on to reduce disability and improve quality ...

  EXERCISE HELPS TO RELIEVE STRESS AND PROTECT THE CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM         New research indicates that physical activity partially lowers cardiovascular disease risk by reducing stress-related signaling in the brain. In a study led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and published in the  Journal of the American College of Cardiology , people with stress-related conditions such as depression experienced the most cardiovascular benefits from physical activity. To assess the mechanisms underlying the psychological and cardiovascular disease benefits of physical activity, Ahmed Tawakol, MD, an investigator and cardiologist in the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues analyzed medical records and other information of 50,359 participants from the Mass General Brigham Biobank who completed a physical activity survey. ...

  A new study helps explain why childhood maltreatment continues to impact mental and physical health into adulthood.         Childhood maltreatment can continue to have an impact long into adulthood because of how it affects an individual's risk of poor physical health and traumatic experiences many years later, a new study has found. Individuals who experienced maltreatment in childhood -- such as emotional, physical, and sexual abuse or emotional and physical neglect -- are more likely to develop mental illness throughout their entire life. Still, it is not yet well understood why this risk persists many decades after maltreatment first took place. In a study published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , scientists from the University of Cambridge and Leiden University found that adult brains continue to be affected by childhood maltreatment in adulthood because these experiences make individuals more likely to experience obesity, infla...

   TEEN BRAIN FUNCTION: JUNK FOOD A FACTOR A new USC-led study on rats that feasted on a high-fat, sugary diet raises the possibility that a junk food-filled diet in teens may disrupt their brains' memory ability for a long time. "What we see not just in this paper but in some of our other recent work is that if these rats grew up on this junk food diet, then they have these memory impairments that don't go away," said Scott Kanoski, a professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. If you put them on a healthy diet, these effects unfortunately last well into adulthood." The study appears in the May issue of the journal  Brain, Behavior, and Immunity . In developing the study, Kanoski, the lead author and postdoctoral research fellow Anna Hayes, considered that prior research has shown a link between poor diet and Alzheimer's disease. People who suffer from Alzheimer's disease tend to have lower levels of a neu...

  A KETOGENIC DIET AND KETONE SUPPLEMENTS HELP PREVENT PROSTATE CANCER         Adding a pre-ketone supplement -- a component of a high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet -- to a type of cancer therapy in a laboratory setting was highly effective for treating prostate cancer, researchers from the University of Notre Dame found. Recently published online in the journal  Cancer Research , the study from Xin Lu, the John M. and Mary Jo Boler Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and collaborators tackled a problem oncologists have battled: Prostate cancer is resistant to a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy. ICB therapy blocks specific proteins from binding with other proteins and paves the way for our body's fighter cells, T cells, to kill cancer. "Prostate cancer is the most common cancer for American men, and immunotherapy has been really influential in some other cancers, like melanoma or lung ...