Lifestyle « Weekly Gravy

Kids who see their parents bicker during a separation or divorce are more likely to develop a fear of abandonment, new research warns. And even if a youngster feels close to one or both parents, that fear can still undermine his or her mental health down the road. The findings stem from interviews with roughly 560 kids between 9 and 18 years of age. Parents and teachers were also interviewed. Interviewers first asked kids how frequent and intense the conflict between their parents was. Then they asked how often kids felt like they were caught in the middle — for example, being asked by one parent to carry a message to the other. Finally, researchers wanted to know if their parents said bad things about each other. “We found that exposure to conflict predicted children’s fear that they would be abandoned by one or both parents,” said lead author Karey O’Hara, an assistant research professor of psychology at Arizona State University in Tempe. “In turn, children who reported higher fear of abandonment were more likely to report more mental health problems 11 months later,” based on interviews with both the kids and their teachers. Such problems included bottled-up feelings of distress and/or general feelings of anxiety or fear. O’Hara said this was more than expected given the participants’ mental health when the study began. And… read on > read on >

Do you you keep 6 feet apart from others to help stop coronavirus spread? New research shows that the wealthier you were at the start of the pandemic, the more likely it is you’ll maintain social distance. The new study looked at social distancing and mask wearing, and determined a link between those behaviors and income. “We need to understand these differences because we can wring our hands, and we can blame and shame, but in a way it doesn’t matter,” said study author Nick Papageorge, the Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Policymakers just need to recognize who is going to socially distance, for how long, why and under what circumstances to give us accurate predictions of how the disease will spread and help us establish policies that will be useful,” he said in a Hopkins news release. The research was part of a six-country survey. In the United States, 1,000 people from Texas, Florida, California and New York were asked questions last April about demographic information and their behavior as COVID-19 cases were spiking. People with the highest incomes made the most changes. They were 32% more likely to increase social distancing, 30% more likely to increase hand-washing and mask wearing and 13% more likely to change behaviors. The ability to work from home and having access… read on > read on >

A study that examined how people walked through doorways provides new insight into anorexia’s effect on a person’s body image. It’s long been known that people with anorexia overestimate their body size, but this study examined unconscious body awareness — formally called “body schema.” It’s the innate ability a person has to orient themselves in a room and stop from bumping into objects. Body schema usually adapts to wherever a person happens to be,. but the new study found that it might not be as adaptable in people with anorexia. The researchers, at Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany, conducted an experiment with 23 people with anorexia and a control group of 23 people without the eating disorder. The participants were asked to pass through door frames of different widths, but weren’t told that was the actual focus of the study. “The [door] opening was adapted to the shoulder width of the subjects and varied between 0.9 times and 1.45 times this width,” said study leader Martin Diers, a research professor of neuroscience. Participants with anorexia turned their shoulders to the side with much wider doors than those in the control group, according to the report published online recently in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Lead author Nina Beckmann said, “This shows us that they also unconsciously assess their proportions to be larger than they… read on > read on >

Despite being locked down during the pandemic, child care responsibilities often fell on women’s shoulders, a new study shows. “Most people have never undergone anything like this before, where all of a sudden they can’t rely on their normal child care, and most people’s work situation has changed, too,” said researcher Kristen Shockley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. “We thought this would be a chance for men to step in and partake equally in child care, but for many couples we didn’t see that happen.” In mid-March, as schools and day care centers shut down, Shockley’s team surveyed couples, both of whom worked and had at least one child under the age of 6. The team researchers first surveyed 274 couples and followed up with 133 of the same couples in May. “When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple,” Shockley said in a university news release. “It’s not just bad for the wife, it’s also bad for the husband, including in terms of job performance although his work role presumably hasn’t changed. When one person’s doing it all, there’s a lot of tension in the relationship, and it’s probably spilling over into the husband’s ability to focus at work.” Although about 37% of couples relied on the wife to provide most or… read on > read on >

An inhaled medication might make every day physical activity a bit easier for patients with serious scarring of the lungs, a new clinical trial finds. The study, published online Jan. 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved patients with high blood pressure in the lungs caused by interstitial lung disease (ILD). ILD is a broad term for progressive scarring of the tissue surrounding the lungs’ air sacs and blood vessels. It can have a range of causes, from smoking, to occupational exposure to toxins like asbestos, as well as autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Sometimes, no cause can be found. A potential, and serious, complication of that scarring is pulmonary hypertension, in which the vessels that supply blood to the lungs become hard and narrow. Once pulmonary hypertension arises, patients can become so short of breath they have difficulty walking, and often need to use more supplemental oxygen. The complication may also shorten their lives. Right now, no medication is approved specifically for pulmonary hypertension caused by ILD, said Dr. Steven Nathan, senior researcher on the new trial. He’s director of the Advanced Lung Disease and Lung Transplant Program at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. There are, however, drugs for another form of pulmonary hypertension, known as pulmonary arterial hypertension. Those medications are vasodilators, which means they help blood vessels in… read on > read on >

Mindfulness is all the rage when it comes to boosting mental health, but new research suggests that it may not help everyone equally. Practicing mindfulness meditation — which involves paying close attention to what you are feeling in the moment — may be better than doing nothing at all to improve anxiety, depression or lower stress, but it is not a cure-all and may not be any better than other practices aimed at improving mental health and well-being, such as exercise, said study author Julieta Galante. She’s a research associate in the department of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. To arrive at that conclusion, Galante and her colleagues reviewed data from 136 studies on mindfulness training for stress, anxiety, depression and overall well-being that took place in non-medical community settings (such as workplaces, universities, community centers or private studios). These trials included more than 11,600 participants, aged 18 to 73, from 29 countries. Mindfulness reduced anxiety, depression and stress, and increased well-being when compared to doing nothing, the study showed. But in more than one in 20 studies in the analysis, mindfulness meditation didn’t produce any benefits. Not all mindfulness programs are created equally, Galante noted. Differences in how they are taught, where they are taught, who teaches them, and who they are targeted to likely plays a big role… read on > read on >