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Not surprisingly, a new study finds that older women who are exposed to physical and verbal abuse have poor mental health.

But an unexpected twist did show up in the results, study author Dr. Charles P. Mouton said, in that verbal abuse alone was more damaging than physical abuse alone.

Why? “The physical abuse may be perceived as minor or something they lived with their whole life,” said Mouton, chair of community and family medicine at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The study is published in the May/June issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.

Mouton and his co-researchers analyzed data on nearly 94,000 women, aged 50 to 79, who had participated in the large Women’s Health Initiative study.

Women who had been abused either physically or verbally over a three-year period had lower scores for mental health, a greater number of depressive symptoms, more social strain and less optimism about life than did women who weren’t abused.

While the effects of abuse on younger women have been studied by many researchers, Mouton said the latest study is one of the first to look at older women.

“When I first set up the study, I anticipated the bigger effect for physical and psychological outcomes would have both been driven by exposure to physical abuse,” he said.

“But we found verbal abuse had a significant impact,” he said. “The group who had verbal abuse-only reported more depressive symptoms than the group that had physical abuse-only. The group who reported the most depressive symptoms had both physical and verbal abuse.”

This suggests that the effects of any kind of abuse are wide-ranging, affecting mental health and happiness. “They are less optimistic about their lives,” he said. “They have poorer overall mental health, and they have an increase in depressive symptoms. Their quality of life declines at a time when we like to think they are enjoying their golden years.”

The study results may surprise people, but the findings reflect what experts have seen clinically for years, said Dr. Juley Fulcher, director of policy programs for Break the Cycle, an organization devoted to addressing dating violence in youth.

The findings do add to what Fulcher said is a scarcity of research in this area. “There’s been limited research specifically on older women,” said Fulcher, an adjunct professor of women’s studies at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

While some women in Mouton’s study reported only physical or only verbal abuse, Fulcher said that’s not the typical scenario. “Most commonly, we are talking about some combination of physical, verbal and sexual abuse,” she said.

In a second study, published in the same issue of the journal, New Zealand researchers found that social contact is as effective as physical activity in lifting the mood of depressed older people. The researchers assigned 193 people, aged 75 and older, who had depressive symptoms to either engage in an individualized physical activity program or to receive social visits.

Both groups improved in measures related to mood and mental health.

SOURCES: Charles Mouton, M.D., professor, community and family medicine, Howard University, Washington, D.C.; Juley Fulcher, Ph.D., J.D., director, policy programs, Break the Cycle, and adjunct professor, women’s studies, Washington, D.C.;

People who are resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, have a gene that gives them a stronger immune system, a new study shows.

A small number of people exposed to HIV — about one in every 200 infected — develop AIDS very slowly or never develop the disease. Previous research found that a large number of these naturally HIV-immune people have a gene called HLA B57.

In this new study, U.S. researchers found that HLA B57 causes the body to produce more powerful killer T cells, which are white blood cells that attack infectious invaders. People with HLA B57 have a larger number of T cells that bind strongly to more pieces of HIV protein than people who don’t have the gene. In people with HLA B57, T cells are more likely to recognize cells that express HIV proteins, including mutated versions that arise during infection.

The findings may help scientists develop vaccines that trigger the same immune response to HIV that occurs naturally in people with HLA B57, according to the researchers from the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard.

Parents may want their girls to grow up to be astronauts and their boys to one day do their fair share of child care and housework duties, but a new study suggests certain stereotypical gender preferences take root even before most kids can crawl.

When presented with seven different toys, boys as young as 9 months old went for the car, digger and soccer ball, while ignoring the teddy bears, doll and cooking set.

And the girls? You guessed it. At the same age, they were most interested in the doll, teddy bear and miniature pot, spoon and plastic vegetables.

“The boys always preferred the toys that go or move, and the girls preferred toys that promote nurturing and facial features,” said study author Sara Amalie O’Toole Thommessen, an undergraduate at City University in London.

So does this mean that boys and girls have an innate preference for certain types of objects? Or does socialization — that is, the influence of parents and the larger culture — impact children’s choice of toys very early in life?

It’s too soon to rule either out, said Walter Gilliam, director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University.

“One of the things we’ve learned about babies over the many years we’ve been studying them is that they are amazing sponges and learn an awful lot in those nine months,” Gilliam said.

The study was to be presented Friday at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference in Stratford-upon-Avon.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was lots of interest in the “nature” versus “nurture” debate, and developmental researchers did plenty of research on gender differences in play. However, most studies were inconclusive and interest faded, Thommessen said.

At the same time, roles within the home were becoming more fluid, with fathers taking on more child care and women working more and at a greater variety of jobs outside the home, though the marketing of children’s toys remained very stereotypical.

This latest study included 83 children aged 9 months to 3 years who were observed playing for three minutes. The time they spent touching or playing with each object was noted.

Researchers chose the toys by surveying 300 adults about the first toy that came to mind when they thought of a boy or a girl. About 90 percent said “car” for boy and “doll” for girls, with the remainder mentioning the other toys.

Children were also offered both a pink teddy bear and a blue teddy bear. “We were quite interested to see if boys had a color preference, but boys didn’t show any interest in the teddy bears at all,” Thommessen said.

Gender-specific preferences became even more pronounced as the children got older. By about age 27 months to 36 months, girls spent about 50 percent of their time playing with the doll, and were no longer much interested in the teddy bear, which had interested them when they were younger, or any of the other objects. The boys spent 87 percent of their time with the car and digger, ignoring even the ball.

The finding raises the possibility of a biological basis for toy choices. A study from 2001 found even 1-day-old boys spent longer looking at moving, mechanical options than 1-day-old girls, who spent more time looking at faces.

Yet the impact of socialization should never be underestimated, Gilliam said. Studies have shown parents and others interact differently with female and male babies from almost the instant they’re born, Gilliam said.

Even when they’re infants, fathers tend to encourage more active play with boy babies, by playfully tickling or poking them, while they tend to hold girl babies closer. Parents have also been observed spending more time talking to girls than to boys.

As they get older, studies have shown boys are encouraged to more actively explore their environment, while girls are encouraged to engage in quieter play.

“Even if your boy prefers playing with a truck, make sure you talk to him and teach him about nurturing,” Gilliam said. “Even if a girl is playing with a doll, every once in a while throw her a ball or take her on a run. Expose them to all the different possibilities, and then let them choose.”

And keep in mind just how much you may be dragging your own stereotypical notions into parenting.

In the study, researchers found no association between parents’ reported views on gender-appropriate toys for children, or parental roles at home, and the toys children chose. In other words, dads who did their share of housework and moms who held high-level jobs outside the home were just as likely to have girls who picked dolls and boys who picked cars and trucks.

But Gilliam remembers one family who brought their young son in to see him. There was an assortment of toys scattered on the floor, from which the boy chose a plastic figurine. “The mom said, ‘Oh, he wants to play with dolls.’ And the father replied, ‘He’s not playing with dolls. Those are action figures.’”

SOURCES: Sara Amalie O’Toole Thommessen, student, City University, London; Walter Gilliam, Ph.D., associate professor, child psychiatry and psychology, and director, Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Women who consume high levels of trans fats have a 48 percent increased risk of endometriosis, while those who eat diets rich in omega-3 oils are 22 percent less likely to develop the condition, a new study finds.

In endometriosis, pieces of the womb lining (endometrium) are found outside of the womb. Some women experience no symptoms, but many suffer severe pain. The condition, which can lead to infertility, affects about 10 percent of women. Treatments include pain medication, hormone drugs or surgery.

In this study, researchers analyzed dietary and other data from almost 71,000 women enrolled in the U.S. Nurses Health Study. Over 12 years of follow-up, 1,199 participants were diagnosed with endometriosis. The researchers said their results suggest that diet may be an important factor in the development of the condition.

The study is published March 24 in the journal Human Reproduction.

“Millions of women worldwide suffer from endometriosis. Many women have been searching for something they can actually do for themselves, or their daughters, to reduce the risk of developing the disease, and these findings suggest that dietary changes may be something they can do,” study leader Dr. Stacey Missmer, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, said in a news release.

“The results need to be confirmed by further research, but this study gives us a strong indication that we’re on the right track in identifying food rich in omega-3 oils as protective for endometriosis and trans fats as detrimental,” she said.

Long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, which have been linked to reduced heart disease risk, are found mostly in oily fish. Trans fats, which increase heart disease risk, are used in thousands of processed foods.

SOURCE: Human Reproduction

Obesity increases the risk of developing a common and virulent form of kidney cancer, a new study finds.

Researchers looked at 1,640 patients, average age 62, with kidney tumors and found that obese patients were 48 percent more likely to develop a clear-cell renal cell cancer (RCC) than those with a body-mass index(BMI) of less than 30, the cutoff for obesity. The odds of developing RCC increased by 4 percent for every extra BMI point.

Malignant tumors with clear-cell RCC were found in 67 percent of obese patients with malignant tumors, compared with 57 percent of non-obese patients with malignant tumors. Obese and non-obese patients had similar rates for other kinds of malignant tumors, including papillary, chromophobe and collecting duct.

“We also looked at other health and lifestyle factors, like diabetes, hypertension and smoking. This showed that the only other factors that were independent predictors of clear-cell RCC were male gender and tumor size,” study author Dr. William T. Lowrance, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said in a news release.

He and his colleagues concluded that BMI is an independent predictor of clear-cell RCC and that the odds of having clear-cell RCC increase as BMI increases.

The study was published in the January issue of the journal BJUI.

“A number of studies have suggested that obesity could be a risk factor for RCC, but the exact reason is unknown. Researchers suggest it might be secondary to hormonal changes, decreased immune function, hypertension or diabetes in obese patients,” Lowrance said.

SOURCE: BJUI, news release

Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) is a common treatment for obstructive sleep apnea. This mechanical device delivers slightly pressurized air through a mask that fits over the nose. It helps keep airways open, enabling adults and children to breathe easily through the night.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine lists these potential benefits of using nasal CPAP:
Improved and more regular sleep.
Improved alertness and decreased fatigue.
Improved mood and decreased depression and anxiety.
Improved productivity at work.
Improved memory and ability to concentrate.

Miniature “nanosensors” can detect early signs of cancer in everyday blood samples taken from patients, researchers report.

The sensors hunted for and picked up biomarkers for prostate and breast cancers. Study co-author Mark Reed, associate director of the Yale Institute for Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering in New Haven, Conn., said the technology “can generally be applied to many other types of biomarkers.”

The ultimate, hoped-for outcome is quick, easy and low-cost tests that can be done in a doctor’s office to detect cancer before it becomes troublesome.

“From a personalized medicine point of view, you could take a spot of blood from a fingerprick and get results within minutes. It would be simple, stable and relatively inexpensive,” said William C. Phelps, program director of Translational and Preclinical Cancer Research at the American Cancer Society.

“There’s a crying need for things like this in lung cancer, where you would want to be able to detect biomarkers in a sputum sample, and pancreatic and ovarian cancer,” Phelps said. “You can’t really detect these early, so they’re very hard to treat,” he noted.

“You want to detect a particular protein in the blood that’s indicative of disease and you want to detect it early with high specificity and accuracy. You don’t want false-positives or false-negatives,” Phelps added.

Although the technology has yet to make it to the doctor’s office, it is revolutionary in more than one way.

Previous technologies work in much the same way, but can only detect biomarkers in purified solutions, not the real thing — meaning fluid samples from patients.

“The real achievement here was demonstrating this with blood, which was a longstanding goal,” Reed explained. “It could not be done before because blood has too much salt and other stuff in it, which prevents this type of sensing. We developed a method to filtrate out specifically what we want to detect.”

Only small amounts of blood were needed and the process took all of 20 minutes.

The study findings were published online Dec. 13 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is able to work at the sub-cellular level, said Yoed Rabin, associate professor of biothermal technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

These particular nanosensors in the new study, Reed said, “sense the absorption of molecules on its surface and give an electrical signal output.”

Much of these innovations are a direct outgrowth of the Human Genome Project, which identified and sequenced the entire human genome of about 30,000 genes, Phelps said.

Although not too many cancer biomarkers have been identified, the Human Genome Project should yield many more.

“This gives a wonderful catalogue and characterization of cells and cancer cells that could be markers, so the biological underpinnings to do this are well in hand,” Phelps said. “If you find a protein, you can go back and say this protein is connected to this gene and this gene is more often expressed in cancer.”

Gingivitis is the medical term for inflammation of the gums. A type of periodontal disease, it’s caused by the long-term build-up of bacteria, mucus and food debris on exposed portions of the teeth.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine offers this list of warning signs for gingivitis:
Gums that bleed (check your toothbrush after brushing for blood).
Gums that appear bright red or purple.
Gums that are sore or tender to the touch.
Sores inside the mouth.
Swelling of the gums.
Gums that appear shiny.

If you’ve lost a lot of weight and want to keep it off, banishing high-fat foods and getting rid of your TV sets might help, along with eating less and staying active, new research hints.

Researchers found that people who had lost weight and had maintained a normal weight for 5 years were much more physically active than obese people who hadn’t lost weight and were also being better able to control their food intake.

But people’s home environment also mattered, Dr. Suzanne Phelan of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and her colleagues found. The weight loss maintainers had fewer TVs in their homes, and were less likely to be stocking their shelves with fatty foods.

Phelan and her team looked at 167 weight-loss maintainers and two groups of 153 treatment-seeking obese individuals to investigate behaviors and environmental factors that might promote sustained weight loss. People in the control groups had been participating in two different studies of weight loss interventions, but remained obese.

People who had kept the weight off expended 2,877 calories in physical activity per week, on average, compared to 762 per week for one of the control groups and 1,003 for the other, the team found.

In addition, weight loss maintainers had fewer TVs in their homes and more exercise equipment than the control groups.

There were also marked differences in the kinds of foods people had in the pantry, with the weight loss maintainers having significantly fewer high-fat items and more low-fat foods like fruits and vegetables and low fat dairy foods.

The weight-loss maintainers clearly had stronger self-control than the persistently obese people, Phelan and her team note, but it’s not clear why.

“The home environment of the weight-loss maintainers contained fewer high-fat foods and televisions and, thus, may have demanded fewer self-control resources than the more ‘toxic’ home environments of the treatment-seeking obese,” they note in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

“You have to pay attention to your home environment if you want to succeed,” Phelan advised in a statement from the Health Behavior News Service. “Do you have TVs in every room? When you walk into your kitchen, do you see high-fat food or healthy food?”

“If you want to choose better foods, keep better foods within reach. Don’t just rely on willpower,” Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Connecticut, commented in the statement.

“If you want to be more active, create opportunities for exercise that are always within reach. Don’t just rely on motivation,” added Katz, who wasn’t involved in Phelan’s study. “We should be propagating the awareness that lasting weight control is about skill power, not just willpower.”

Laryngitis is the inflammation of the larynx, which contains the vocal cords. When those vocal cords become inflamed, your voice often turns hoarse and may all but disappear.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine lists these common causes of laryngitis:
The common cold or flu.
Bacterial or viral infection.
Bronchitis.
Pneumonia.
Allergies.
Chemical irritation.
Injury to the larynx.