Tag: Health A-Z

Here’s another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

Here's another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

Here's another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

Free radicals, the sometimes-toxic molecules produced by our bodies as we process oxygen, have received a lot of bad press claiming that they are they are the culprits behind aging. Yet a number of studies have found evidence that the opposite may be true. Most recently, researchers at McGill University in Montreal have shown that free radicals promote longevity in the roundworm C. elegans. Surprisingly, the team discovered that free radicals – also known as oxidants – act on a molecular mechanism that, in other circumstances, tells a cell to kill itself.

A study of concussion patients at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that males took longer to recover after concussion than females did. The study, which shows that using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) as a bias-free way to predict concussion outcome, was published online May 6^th 2104 in the journal Radiology.

A device that monitors people when they take their meds and then give feedback has advantages over “automated nagging” according to a release from Carnegie Mellon University about a study done there and presented on April 30^th 2014 at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Toronto.

Laboratory mice are stressed by male experimenters but not by women and the reaction of the rodents may skew research findings. The reason is that the mice pick up on the human male pheromone scent but not that of human females. This may turn out to be the reason that scientists typically have trouble replicating research findings using mice and rats, a fact that has contributed to mounting concern over the reliability of such studies. These are the findings of an international team of pain researchers led by scientists at McGill University in Montreal

Here's another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

Freshen Up Your Home the Natural, Non-Toxic Way

By Robert Nickell

Happy Monday! We’re glad you’re here on ThirdAge today to learn the latest about health. As it happens, you’ve probably got a lot of company. A study published on April 18^th 2014 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that on average, searches for health topics were 30 percent more frequent at the beginning of the week than later in the week, with the lowest average number of searches on Saturday. This pattern was consistent week after week and year after year. 

Improved circulation and relief of muscle soreness are common claims made for massage therapy but no studies had ever been done to substantiate these assertions even though massage therapy is increasingly used as an adjunct to traditional medical interventions. Now researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago have shown that massage therapy not only improves general blood flow and alleviates muscle soreness after exercise but also helps people who have not worked out such as those who are bedridden.

Researchers from North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and other institutions have taken the first steps toward creating a roadmap that may help scientists narrow down the genetic cause of numerous diseases. Their work also sheds new light on how heredity and environment can affect gene expression. The study was published online April 13th 2014 in Nature Genetics.

Here's another addition to our ThirdAge Video Collection. Press play to start learning!

Could a component of Silly Putty, the childhood classic from the 1950s that your grandkids probably play with today, help embryonic stem cells turn into working spinal cord cells? Yes, say researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann who published their study online at Nature Materials on April 13^th 2014.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies in Japan, in collaboration with Osaka City University and Kansai University of Welfare Sciences, have used functional PET imaging to show that levels of neuroinflammation, or inflammation of the nervous system, are higher in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome than in healthy people.

Here’s another reason to get your shingles vaccination: Patients' risk of stroke is significantly increased following the first signs of the telltale rash. However, antiviral drugs appear to offer some protection, according to a study published online in April 2014 in Clinical Infectious Diseases. As you probably already know the painful rash that is typical of shingles is caused by the same virus, herpes zoster, that gave you your childhood bout of chicken pox. The virus stays with you for a lifetime and is sometimes reactivated as shingles.