Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

All the parents who force their children to play an instrument because it has been touted as a way to boost overall intelligence, take note. New research now suggests that it may not help develop memory, math, reading and writing skills after all. Earlier studies trying to pinpoint the value of music training on cognitive and academic performance have been conflicting, the researchers said. So, Giovanni Sala, from Fujita Health University in Japan, and Fernand Gobet, from the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, analyzed data on nearly 7,000 children from 54 previously published studies. The investigators found that music training seemed to have no effect on building mental or academic skills in other areas, regardless of age or how long kids were trained. The report was published July 28 in the journal Memory and Cognition. “Our study shows that the common idea that ‘music makes children smarter’ is incorrect,” Sala said. “On the practical side, this means that teaching music with the sole intent of enhancing a child’s cognitive or academic skills may be pointless,” Sala said in a journal news release. “While the brain can be trained in such a way that if you play music, you get better at music, these benefits do not generalize in such a way that if you learn music, you also get… read on >

If you’re getting back to a fitness program or gym after spending months in lockdown, be careful not to hurt yourself, a sports medicine expert urges. “One of the most common reasons people get injured is because they overexert themselves when their level of fitness is not where they want it to be,” said Dr. Irvin Sulapas, a primary care sports medicine physician and assistant professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Here are some tips on how to prevent exercise injury: Warm up and cool down. Warming up and cooling down muscles can help reduce the risk of injury, Sulapas said. Use correct form. Many injuries happen because of poor form — make sure you are doing the exercise correctly. Start slowly. Ease into your workout. Reduce the distance for cardio and decrease weight for weight training until you get back to your normal pace or weight. Exercise outdoors. If you are not comfortable returning to the gym or exercise classes, stay outside with your workout. Keep hydrated, especially when temperatures are high. Work out in the early morning or evening, when temperatures are lower. Wear breathable fabric to help prevent overheating. If an injury occurs, slow down, stop and assess the injury. Depending on the injury, use an ice pack compress and elevate the limb, Sulapas advised.… read on >

For most people, wearing a face mask is a harmless inconvenience, but wearing the coverings may cause skin problems for some, one dermatologist explains. It’s been called mask-acne, or “maskne.” Dermatologist Dr. Allison Truong, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Group in Los Angeles, said that she is seeing many patients with this problem. Patients are complaining of three types of skin issues: Acne from clogged pores inside the mask area. Skin irritation from the mask. Allergic reactions to detergent used to wash a fabric mask or dyes or other substances in surgical masks. If your skin is red, burning or itchy, it may be an irritation or allergy. If there are little pustules or blackheads or whiteheads, it’s most likely maskne, Truong said. Truong advises using a gentle cleanser when you wash your face and using sunscreen to create a barrier between your skin and the mask. When you take off your mask, wash your face and use moisturizer, she suggested. It is important to wash fabric masks every day. Laundry detergents can be a common cause of allergic reactions, Truong said, so she suggests using fragrance-free detergents. Irritated, red, itchy or burning skin should be treated with an over-the-counter hydrocortisone cream once or twice a day, Truong said. She also suggests not wearing makeup under a mask, but if you do, be sure it’s noncomedogenic (specially… read on >

Some people in their 90s stay sharp whether their brain harbors amyloid protein plaques — a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — or not, but why? That’s the question researchers sought answers for among 100 people without dementia, average age 92, who were followed for up to 14 years. Their answer? A combination of genetic luck and a healthy, fulfilling lifestyle. “The vast majority of research studies on aging and Alzheimer’s disease try to understand what factors predict disease and memory impairment. We turned these questions upside-down, asking ‘What seems to protect us from disease and impairment in our 90s?’” said lead researcher Beth Snitz, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. “Understanding this kind of resilience may well help identify ways to prevent dementia,” Snitz added. The study reinforces some things scientists already knew, such as the importance of good cardiovascular health and building up a “cognitive [mental] reserve. These likely can help buffer against the effects of brain disease or injury later in life,” she said. Her team also found that people whose scores were normal on thinking and memory tests when the study began were less likely to have problems with their thinking skills, even if they had amyloid protein plaques in their brains (which have been linked to Alzheimer’s disease). The researchers also found that those with the APOE2… read on >

Hopes for robust, long-term antibody protection after a bout of COVID-19 have been dampened by a new study that finds the protection may only last a few months. Still, experts noted that the body’s immune system has more than one way to defend against viruses it has already encountered, so the findings don’t dash hopes for a vaccine. “Infection with this coronavirus does not necessarily generate lifetime immunity,” Dr. Buddy Creech, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, told the Associated Press. But antibodies are only part of the immune system’s armamentarium, added Creech, who wasn’t part of the new research. The study was published July 21 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers led by Dr. Otto Yang, of the University of California, Los Angeles, sought to determine the “half-life” of antibodies generated by contact with the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. Half-life means the time it takes for half of the antibodies to disappear. Yang’s group took blood samples from 34 people who had all recovered from a mild case of COVID-19. Twenty were women and 14 were men, and they averaged 43 years of age. Based on blood tests collected up to 119 days after the onset of symptoms, the researchers said the half-life of antibodies linked with SARS-CoV-2 infection was just 36 days — just over a month. At that… read on >

Most American parents know that sunscreen is important for their children, but there are gaps in their knowledge of its proper use, a new survey finds. The majority of the more than 1,100 parents of children aged 5 to 12 said they’ve at least sometimes used sunscreen on their kids, and that sunscreen is very important in preventing sunburns and skin cancer. However, the survey found that 11% of parents don’t have a specific minimum sun-protection factor (SPF) they use and 3% said they don’t use sunscreen for their child. Parents said they consider several factors in deciding whether to use sunscreen, including how long their child will be outside, what their child is wearing, their child’s complexion and skin tone, whether their child will be around water and how hot it is. Nearly half of parents take into account whether it is a sunny or cloudy day, according to the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, from Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan. “Parents should be aware that UV rays from the sun can reach their children on cloudy and hazy days, not just on bright and sunny days. Children need protection, regardless of the amount of sunshine,” poll co-director and pediatrician Dr. Gary Freed said in a university news release. The survey also found that parents decide whether to… read on >

People with a history of concussion may face increased risks of certain psychological and neurological conditions, a large new study suggests. The study of more than 186,000 Canadians found that those who suffered a concussion were more likely to develop any of several conditions, including: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); depression or anxiety; Parkinson’s disease; or dementia. Their risks were roughly 40% to 70% higher, compared to people who did not sustain a concussion during the 25-year study period. The researchers stressed that the vast majority of people in the study — concussed or not — did not develop Parkinson’s, dementia or ADHD. Depression and anxiety disorders were more common across the board, with a higher prevalence in the concussion group. “We’re not trying to scare people or have parents keep their kids out of sports,” said lead researcher Marc Morissette of the Pan Am Clinic Foundation in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Beyond that, the findings do not necessarily mean that concussions, per se, were to blame, said Dr. Sean Rose. Rose, who is co-director of the Complex Concussion Clinic at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, was not involved in the study. He said research like this can point to a correlation between concussion and later disease risks — but cannot prove cause and effect. It’s difficult, Rose said, to account for all the other variables that could… read on >

Smoking significantly increases a woman’s risk of potentially deadly brain aneurysms, a new study warns. An aneurysm is a weakened, bulging section of an artery. If an aneurysm ruptures, it can cause fatal bleeding. The study included 545 women, aged 30 to 60, who had brain scans at five large teaching and research hospitals in the United States and Canada between 2016 and 2018. The scans showed that 152 of the women had brain aneurysms that hadn’t ruptured. Compared to nonsmokers, the risk of aneurysm was four times higher in women who smoked, and seven times higher in those who smoked and had high blood pressure. The most common reason for a brain scan among the women was persistent headache, which occurred in 62.5% of those with an aneurysm, compared with 44% of those without an aneurysm, the study authors said. Most of the aneurysms were located in the carotid artery, which is the main blood vessel that leads to the brain. Women with brain aneurysms were heavier smokers than those with normal brain scans (average of 20 versus 12 cigarettes a day) and had smoked for longer (29 years versus 20 years, on average). One-third of the women with brain aneurysms had surgery or other invasive procedures, while two-thirds were placed on monitoring, according to the study published online July 27 in the Journal… read on >

With several potential COVID-19 vaccines now in clinical trials, U.S. policymakers need to plan for the next hurdle: Ensuring Americans actually get vaccinated. That’s according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It lays out recommendations for winning the public’s trust of any future vaccine, and helping them access it as easily as possible. The U.S. government’s so-called Operation Warp Speed has laid its goal out: Deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine by January 2021. As of July 11, 22 vaccines were in some stage of human clinical trials, according to The New York Times coronavirus vaccine tracker. The race to develop a safe, effective vaccine against the new coronavirus has been record-setting. Normally, vaccines take years to move from initial research to approval. In this case, scientists got a boost from having the genetic makeup of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) in hand early in the pandemic. Some of the leading vaccine candidates, including the Moderna Inc. vaccine now in clinical trials, are based on that genetic information. “But it’s one thing to make a clinically successful vaccine,” said Monica Schoch-Spana, a senior scientist with the Hopkins center. “It’s another to make it socially acceptable.” Exactly how Americans will greet a COVID-19 vaccine is unknown, but polls have suggested many will be wary. In… read on >

Is male bisexuality real? According to a new review, the answer is a definitive “yes.” “The current study found very strong and consistent evidence that bisexual men do in fact tend to have bisexual arousal patterns,” noted study author J. Michael Bailey. “There is no longer reasonable doubt.” Bailey is a psychology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He and his colleagues came to their conclusion after poring over the findings of eight sexual orientation studies conducted between 2000 and 2019 at four different American, Canadian and British sites. “There has long been a controversy whether men who identify as bisexual are actually bisexual. The bisexual men and many others believe that they are,” Bailey explained. “However, some others — including some scientists and lay persons — have doubted this,” he noted. The reason: a belief that men who claim to be bisexual “are actually either heterosexual or homosexual, and that their claim to be bisexual is based on self-misunderstanding, perhaps due to social pressure not to admit exclusive homosexuality.” Skepticism of female bisexuality — though not the focus of the latest investigation — has largely been more muted, Bailey noted. But Caitlin Ryan, director of the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, suggests that the controversy surrounding male bisexuality has proved problematic for those who identify as such. (A 2016 study… read on >