Archive for the ‘health’ tag
Hypertension Might Hinder Thinking – US News and World Report
Hypertension Might Hinder Thinking – US News and World Report
Looks like another reason to keep your blood pressure in check.
First 3-D Images Inside Human Arteries
First 3-D Images Inside Human Arteries | LiveScience
The walls that line human coronary arteries have been imaged for the first time in 3-D, a team of researchers says. Such images will allow cardiologists to see inside patients’ arteries more clearly and check for areas of inflammation or plaque deposits that can cause a heart attack.
Study finds obese kids have arteries like 45-year-olds
Study finds obese kids have arteries like 45-year-olds – Los Angeles Times
“It’s possible that they will have heart disease in their 20s and 30s,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Assn.”There’s a saying that ‘you’re as old as your arteries,’ meaning that the state of your arteries is more important than your actual age in the evolution of heart disease and stroke,” she said. “We found that the state of the arteries of these children is more typical of a 45-year-old than of someone their own age.”
Just plain scary.
Fructose In The Brain?
Fructose In The Brain?. In the Pipeline:
You can observe this sort of thing in lab rats – if you infuse extra glucose into their brains, they stop eating, even under conditions when they otherwise would keep going. A few years ago, an odd result was found when this experiment was tried with fructose: instead of lowering food intake, infusing fructose into the central nervous system made the animals actually eat more. That’s not what you’d expect, since in the end, fructose ends up metabolized to the same thing as glucose does (pyruvate), and used to make ATP. So why the difference in feeding signals?
A paper in PNAS (open access PDF) from a team at Johns Hopkins and Ibaraki University in Japan now has a possible explanation. Glucose metabolism is very tightly regulated, as you’d expect for the main fuel source of virtually every living cell. But fructose is a different matter. It bypasses the rate-limiting step of the glucose pathway, and is metabolized much more quickly than glucose is. It appears that this fast (and comparatively unregulated) process actually uses up ATP in the hypothalamus – you’re basically revving up the enzyme machinery early in the pathway (ketohexokinase in particular) so much that you’re burning off the local ATP supply to run it.
There are a couple of weak points in the studies that are pointed out later in the article but there is definately points that should be looked into more thoroughly. I do try to avoid fructose in my diet and the easiest thing to avoid is beverages with lots of high-fructose corn syrup(almost all pop).
A Rise in Kidney Stones Is Seen in U.S. Children
A Rise in Kidney Stones Is Seen in U.S. Children – NYTimes.com
“The older doctors would say in the ’70s and ’80s, they’d see a kid with a stone once every few months,” said Dr. Caleb P. Nelson, a urology instructor at Harvard Medical School who is co-director of the new kidney stone center at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Now we see kids once a week or less.”
Internet use ‘good for the brain’
BBC NEWS | Health | Internet use ‘good for the brain’
A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulates centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.
The researchers say this might even help to counter-act the age-related physiological changes that cause the brain to slow down.
