PROTIME-FITNESS HOLISTIC HEALTH AND WELLNESS

  MIGRAINE HEADACHES: DIET MATTERS According to a new study, a diet higher in fatty fish helped frequent migraine sufferers reduce their monthly number of headaches and intensity of pain compared to participants on a diet higher in vegetable-based fats and oils.  The findings by a team of researchers from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), parts of the National Institutes of Health, and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, were published in  The BMJ . This study of 182 adults with frequent migraines expanded on the team's previous work on the impact of linoleic acid and chronic pain. Linoleic acid is a polyunsaturated fatty acid commonly derived in the American diet from corn, soybean, and other similar oils, and some nuts and seeds. The team's previous smaller studies explored whether linoleic acid inflamed migraine-related pain processing tissues and pathways in the trigeminal nerve...

  CHOCOLATE TO THE RESCUE Researchers find the time of day eating milk chocolate can impact the regulation of body weight. Eating milk chocolate every day may sound like a recipe for weight gain. Still, a new study of postmenopausal women has found that eating a concentrated amount of chocolate during a narrow window of time in the morning may help the body burn fat and decrease blood sugar levels. Researchers from Brigham collaborated with investigators at the University of Murcia in Spain to find out about the effects of eating milk chocolate at different times of the day. Together, they conducted a randomized, controlled, cross-over trial of 19 postmenopausal women who consumed either 100g of chocolate in the morning (within one hour after waking time) or at night (within one hour before bedtime). In addition, they compared weight gain and many other measures to no chocolate intake. Researchers report that among the women studied: Morning or nighttime chocolate intake did not le...

  Triple-drug  asthma therapy safely cuts serious flares. Including the third drug to commonly used dual-drug inhalers can reduce asthma exacerbations. Researchers have found that the inclusion of a third drug to commonly used dual-drug inhalers can reduce asthma exacerbations and improve control over the disease in children, adolescents, and adults with moderate-to-severe asthma. McMaster University and The Research Institute of St. Joe's Hamilton announced their findings from a systematic review and meta-analysis. Data from 20 randomized controlled trials, which included almost 12,000 patients, were analyzed in the study. Dual-drug inhalers used to treat asthma typically contain an inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) to reduce inflammation, as well as a long-acting beta-adrenoceptor agonist (LABA) that acts as a bronchodilator. High-certainty evidence showed that the inclusion of a third drug to ICS-LABA combination therapy, known as a long-acting muscarinic antagonist (LAMA), redu...

  A new study finds novel evidence that dreams reflect multiple memories, anticipate future events. Dreams focused on future events utilize memories of multiple past experiences. Dreams result from a process that often combines fragments of multiple life experiences and anticipates future events, according to novel evidence from a new study. Results show that 53.5% of dreams were traced to a memory, and nearly 50% of reports with a memory source were connected to multiple past experiences. The study also found that 25.7% of dreams were related to specific impending events, and 37.4% of dreams with a future event source were related to past experiences' specific memories. In addition, future-oriented dreams became proportionally more common later in the night. "Humans have struggled to understand the meaning of dreams for millennia," said principal investigator Erin Wamsley, who has a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience and is an associate professor in the department of ps...

  New research finds ginger counters certain autoimmune diseases in mice. Naturopathic medicine, or herbal medicine, is all the rage, especially among young people. But how much of this is supported by science? Ginger is known to have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative effects, making it a popular herbal supplement to treat inflammatory diseases. And according to a Michigan Medicine-led study published in  JCI Insight ,  the main bioactive compound of ginger root, 6-gingerol, is therapeutic in countering the mechanism that fuels certain autoimmune diseases in mice. Researchers specifically looked at lupus, a disease that attacks the body's own immune system, and its often associated condition, antiphospholipid syndrome, which causes blood clots since both cause widespread inflammation and damage organs over time. In mice with either antiphospholipid syndrome or lupus, 6-gingerol prevented neutrophil extracellular trap release triggered by the autoantibodies that these d...

  Cannabis reduces headache and migraine pain by nearly half. Inhaled cannabis reduces self-reported headache severity by 47.3% and migraine severity by 49.6%, according to a  study led by Carrie Cuttler, a Washington State University assistant professor of psychology. The study, published online recently in the  Journal of Pain , is the first to use big data from headache and migraine patients using cannabis in real-time. Previous studies have asked patients to recall the effect of cannabis use in the past. One clinical trial indicated that cannabis was better than ibuprofen in alleviating headaches, but it used nabilone, a synthetic cannabinoid drug. "We were motivated to do this study because a substantial number of people say they use cannabis for headache and migraine, but surprisingly few studies had addressed the topic," said Cuttler, the lead author on the paper. In the WSU study, researchers analyzed archival data from the Strainprint app, allowing patients to tr...

  THE REASON ANTI-CANCER DRUGS NOT ALWAYS EFFECTIVE A possible explanation for why many cancer drugs that kill tumor cells in mouse models won't work in human trials has been found by researchers with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Biomedical Informatics and McGovern Medical School. The research was published today in  Nature Communications. In the study, investigators reported the extensive presence of mouse viruses in patient-derived xenografts (PDX). PDX models are developed by implanting human tumor tissues in immune-deficient mice and are commonly used to help test and develop cancer drugs. "What we found is that when you put a human tumor in a mouse, that tumor is not the same as the tumor that was in the cancer patient," said W. Jim Zheng, Ph.D., professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics and senior author on the study. "The majority of tumors we tested were compromised by mouse viruses." Using a data-...