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If you need a body image boost, go outdoors. Whether you’re in green space, a blue space near a river or the ocean or even a snowy environment, it can make a difference. “A body of evidence now exists showing that nature exposure — living close to, frequenting or engaging with environments such as forests and parks — is associated with a range of physical and psychological well-being benefits,” said study author Dr. Kamila Czepczor-Bernat, an assistant professor at the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. “However, in contrast to previous studies which have focused on the impact of blue and green natural environments on body image outcomes, ours is the first to show the positive impact on body appreciation from spending time in snow-covered environments,” Czepczor-Bernat explained. Last winter, researchers from the Medical University of Silesia and Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in the United Kingdom studied 87 women who walked in a snowy woodland in the Silesia region of Poland in small groups. The women, with an average age of 24, completed a measure of their body appreciation before and after their walk. They also completed measures of connectedness to nature and self-compassion before the walk. Spending this short time (about 40 minutes) in nature resulted in greater body appreciation, the researchers said. The women who had high scores in self-compassion had a… read on > read on >

A simulator may make driving safer for teens with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder by training them to take shorter glances away from the roadway. Focused Concentration and Attention Learning (FOCAL) is a computer-based program that teaches teens to keep their eyes on the road. For this study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, a driving simulator was added to give students immediate feedback. The researchers, led by Jeffery Epstein of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, called the combined training FOCAL+. The 76 teens who participated in FOCAL+ had a nearly 40% lower risk for a crash or near crash compared to those in a control group who did not do the training, the study found. For the training, those in the FOCAL+ group were shown a split screen. The top half of the screen displayed a driver’s perspective of a roadway. The bottom half displayed a map. Participants were shown a street name and told to touch the space bar to identify the street on the map, causing the roadway to disappear. Pressing the key a second time restored the map. Toggling between the two represented multitasking while driving. When the map-only screen was displayed for more than three seconds, an alarm sounded. In a subsequent trial, the alarm sounded after two seconds. In the simulator training that followed, participants sat at a… read on > read on >

Toss out your salt shaker if you want to lower your risk of heart disease, a new study suggests. Even if you already follow a low-salt diet, sprinkling salt on your food can raise your risk for heart disease, heart failure and plaque in cardiac arteries, researchers report. “Compared with people who always added salt to foods — usually at the table — those who sometimes, rarely or never added salt to foods had up to 37% reduction in the risk for cardiovascular disease,” said lead researcher Dr. Lu Qi, a professor in the department of epidemiology at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. “Our findings suggest the potential to prevent cardiovascular disease through behavioral changes — reduction of adding salt to foods,” he said. This study, published Nov. 28 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, cannot prove that adding salt to your food causes heart disease, only that the two are related. For the study, Qi and his colleagues collected data on the use of salt among more than 176,000 adults. They also looked at the association among adding salt to foods, the DASH diet and the risk for heart disease. The DASH diet was designed to lower blood pressure and is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy foods. It includes meat,… read on > read on >

Corticosteroid injections to relieve pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis could actually be setting them back. Two new studies have discovered that, despite the temporary relief of symptoms, the injections were associated with continued progression of the disease. On the other hand, patients injected with another symptom reliever, hyaluronic acid, saw decreased progression of their knee osteoarthritis. The findings were presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), in Chicago. Research presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. “While both corticosteroid and hyaluronic acid injections are reported to help with symptomatic pain relief for knee osteoarthritis, our results conclusively show that corticosteroids are associated with significant progression of knee osteoarthritis up to two years post-injection and must be administered with caution,” said Dr. Upasana Upadhyay Bharadwaj, a research fellow in the department of radiology at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “Hyaluronic acid, on the other hand, may slow down progression of knee osteoarthritis and alleviate long-term effects while offering symptomatic relief,” she added in an RSNA news release. The UCSF study included 210 people enrolled in the Osteoarthritis Initiative, a study that has been observing 5,000 participants with knee osteoarthritis for 14 years. Among those included in the UCSF study, 140 received no injections, 44 were injected with corticosteroids and 26… read on > read on >

Americans are eating more whole grains than ever before — but it’s still not enough. Moreover, not everyone agrees on what whole grains actually are, according to a new study that found competing definitions. The increase in whole grain intake over the past two decades is either 39.5% or 61.5%, according to researchers from the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston. But by any definition, Americans are not getting the recommended amount of at least 3 ounces daily. Researchers studied overlapping definitions from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the American Heart Association, the American Association of Cereal Chemists International and the Whole Grains Council. They noted a need to standardize how consumers, researchers and policymakers talk about whole grain foods. Using these varying definitions, the research team analyzed the dietary intakes of more than 39,700 adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 2003 and 2018. “We found that each definition captured very different types of grain- or flour-containing foods as whole grain foods, resulting in differences in the average consumption of whole grain foods and the associated trends,” study lead author Mengxi Du said in a Tufts news release. She is a PhD candidate in nutrition epidemiology and data science. Whole grain bread consumption increased under all definitions.… read on > read on >

Olympic athletes aren’t like the rest of the population — but this time it’s in a far less positive way. Two new studies show that athletes who performed at the top of their sport have a higher risk of developing arthritis and joint pain in later life. The linked studies found that 1 in 4 former Olympians dealt with these issues. Those who’d been injured during their sporting career had a higher chance of knee and hip osteoarthritis when compared with the general population. These athletes also had an increased risk of lower back pain overall. “High performance sport is associated with an increased risk of sport-related injury and there is emerging evidence suggesting retired elite athletes have high rates of post-traumatic osteoarthritis,” said lead author Debbie Palmer, from the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport in Scotland. “This study provides new evidence for specific factors associated with pain and osteoarthritis in retired elite athletes across the knee, hip, ankle, lumbar and cervical spine, and shoulder, and identifies differences in their occurrence that are specific to Olympians,” Palmer said in a university news release. The international research included almost 3,400 retired Olympians, averaging about 45 years of age, who’d participated in a total of 57 different sports. Researchers asked about the health of their bones, joints, muscles and spine, as well… read on > read on >

Once a year, giant motorcycle rallies ride into places like Daytona Beach, Fla., and Sturgis, S.D., bringing hundreds of thousands of people, an economic boost — and a wave of crash-related deaths. That means more organs available for donation and the need to be prepared, according to a new study that examined the issue. Researchers looked at seven major U.S. rallies between 2005 and 2021 that each drew between 200,000 and 500,000 people. During these events, there were 21% more organ donors per day and 26% more transplant recipients on average in the regions near the rallies compared to the weeks before and after the events. “That highlights a clear need to improve the safety of the public and the attendees around these events,” said co-author Dr. David Cron, a general surgery resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “That being said, so long as there continues to be increased risk associated with these events, we should at least recognize the potential for there to be an increased number of organ donors arising during these events.” Ahead of rallies, health care systems should prepare for increased demand for trauma care, and those involved in organ transplantation should also be prepared, researchers said. Cron said the study was an outgrowth of a get-together where medical colleagues chatted about ideas that could make a difference on public… read on > read on >

Kids who are overweight or obese often struggle with school work, and now new research provides clues on how excess weight may harm the developing brain. “The main takeaway is to raise awareness about brain health consequences of obesity besides physical health consequences, especially since obesity rates are very high and continue to rise,” said study author Simone Kaltenhauser, a post-graduate research fellow in radiology and biomedical imaging at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. About one in every five American kids is now obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For the study, researchers looked at several types of brain scans in more than 5,100 kids aged 9 to 10 who took part in the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Of these, 21% were overweight and 17.6% were obese. What did they find? There were structural and functional brain impairments in kids who were overweight or obese when compared to kids who weren’t, and these changes could contribute to poor academic performance. Specifically, kids who were overweight or obese showed a thinning of the outermost layer of their brain (the cortex), and this has been linked with impaired executive functioning skills, such as planning and juggling multiple tasks. What’s more, the integrity of the brain’s white matter was impaired in the corpus callosum (which connects… read on > read on >

People with long COVID deal with months or years of punishing fatigue, mind-numbing brain fog or a frightening fight to take each and every breath. But they can also face the skepticism of others, a new study finds — employers and doctors questioning whether they’re really sick, friends avoiding them, family losing patience. About 95% of people living with long COVID say they’ve experienced at least one type of stigma, and three out of four say they are stigmatized “often” or “always” by their condition, researchers report. “Our findings suggest that long COVD is currently more stigmatized than many other long-term conditions, such as HIV and depression,” said lead researcher Marija Pantelic, a lecturer in public health at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the United Kingdom. “Nearly all of the people living with long COVID who took part in this study experienced some form of stigma related to this illness.” Long COVID affects more than 30% of patients who are hospitalized with COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The symptoms of long COVID can be demoralizing but also confoundingly vague, which can promote some skepticism, said Dr. Aaron Glatt, chair of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau. “People might say, ‘Well, I had COVID and I’m not sick. So how come you had COVID… read on > read on >

Persistent asthma may take a toll on the heart, not just the lungs, a new study suggests. When the respiratory condition is relentless, it appears tied to plaque in the carotid arteries, increasing the risk for heart attack and stroke, researchers say. The carotid arteries — large arteries on the sides of the neck — carry blood to the brain. In a study of more than 5,000 men and women, researchers found that people with persistent asthma had nearly double the odds of having plaque buildup in the carotid arteries, compared with those without asthma. Persistent asthma was defined as using daily controller medications to control asthma symptoms, such as wheezing or shortness of breath. The plaque may be a response to inflammation caused by asthma, the researchers noted. “Inflammation also plays a big role in cardiovascular disease,” said lead researcher Dr. Matthew Tattersall, an assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Tattersall cautioned, however, that this study cannot prove that asthma causes plaque buildup in the carotid arteries, only that the two may be connected. People with persistent asthma — but not intermittent asthma — also had higher levels of markers of inflammation, compared with those without asthma. But that might not entirely explain the increased plaque, Tattersall said. “There are other things, too, that could cause people… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

Green Spaces Give Mental Boost, Even When White With Snow

‘Virtual’ Driver Program Could Make Driving Safer for Teens With ADHD

Put Away That Salt Shaker to Shield Your Heart

Do Steroid Injections Worsen Arthritic Knees?

Most Americans Still Aren’t Eating Enough Whole Grains

Retired Olympians Face Higher Odds for Arthritis

Need for Organ Transplants Surges at Big Motorcycle Rallies: Study

As Kids’ Obesity Rises, Brain Health Declines: Study

Long COVID Often Brings Another Issue: Stigma

How Persistent Asthma Might Harm the Heart