From 2011 to 2018, Slovenia enacted a nationwide program named Healthy Lifestyle that added two to three additional physical education classes per week for students in more than 200 schools in the country. The researchers found that students who participated in the additional classes had a larger reduction in BMI than nonparticipants, and the BMI decrease grew as students participated in the intervention for a longer time.

“There are two important messages,” Gregor Starc, PhD, assistant professor in the faculty of sport at University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, told Healio. “The first one is that school-based interventions to increase physical activity can be effective in reducing obesity prevalence, but such interventions should be longer than two years. The second — in our regard the more important message — is that introducing one hour of high-quality school physical education every day could reverse the childhood obesity epidemic.”

Researchers analyzed findings from Healthy Lifestyle, a program that allocated two additional physical education classes per week for students in grades one to six and three additional classes for students in grades seven to nine. The additional classes meant that participants attended a physical education class during every school day. There were 216 schools in Slovenia that opted to participate in the program. All students at participating schools were invited to take part in the intervention as an elective course. Height, weight and triceps skinfold measurements were obtained from the Slovenian national fitness surveillance system. Children in the 85th to 94th percentile for age- and sex-specific BMI were considered to have overweight, and those in the 95th percentile or higher were defined as having obesity. Researchers compared data from intervention participants with a control group of children who attended participating schools but did not take part in the intervention.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.23695

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC found that exposure to a mixture of synthetic chemicals found widely in the environment alters several critical biological processes, including the metabolism of fats and amino acids, in both children and young adults. The disruption of these biological processes is connected to an increased risk of a very broad range of diseases, including developmental disorders, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and many types of cancer.

Known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, these man-made chemicals are used in a wide range of consumer and industrial products. PFAS are sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they break down very slowly and accumulate in the environment and human tissue.

Although individual PFAS are known to increase the risk of several types of disease, this study, published February 22 in Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to evaluate which biological processes are altered by exposure to a combination of multiple PFAS, which is important because most people carry a mixture of the chemicals in their blood.

“Our findings were surprising and have broad implications for policy makers trying to mitigate risk,” said Jesse A. Goodrich, PhD, assistant professor of population and public health sciences and lead author of the study. “We found that exposure to a combination of PFAS not only disrupted lipid and amino acid metabolism but also altered thyroid hormone function.”

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP11372

The amount of plastic waste produced globally has doubled over the past two decades — and plastic production is expected to triple by 2050 — with most of it ending up in landfills, incinerated or otherwise mismanaged, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Some estimates suggest only 5% is actually being recycled.

“Waste plastic is rarely recycled because it costs a lot of money to do all the washing, sorting and melting down of the plastics to turn it into a material that can be used by a factory,” said Kevin Wyss, a Rice graduate student and lead author on a study published in Advanced Materials that describes how he and colleagues inthe lab of chemist James Tour used their flash Joule heating technique to turn plastic into valuable carbon nanotubes and hybrid nanomaterials.

“We were able to make a hybrid carbon nanomaterial that outperformed both graphene and commercially available carbon nanotubes,” Wyss said.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202209621

In many patients, depression is associated with memory dysfunction. Now the results of a large study involving brain scans show that patients with moderate to severe depression have 7-10 per cent fewer serotonin 4 receptors in the brain than healthy test subjects.

The researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Psychiatry in the Capital Region and Rigshospitalet performed PET scans of 90 patients with depression who still had not received treatment and just as many healthy test subject of the same age. A PET scan will reveal the amount of serotonin 4 receptors in the brain.

“You cannot tell from a scan whether a person is depressed or not. But we could tell that there was a difference between the patients and the test subjects. The former had fewer serotonin 4 receptors,” says Clinical Professor Gitte Moos Knudsen from the Department of Clinical Medicine and the Neurobiological Research Unit at Rigshospitalet.

Largest PET brain scan study of its kind Previous studies have shown that the serotonin 4 receptor affects the risk of depression, while others have shown that it is associated with human memory. The new results, which have just been published in the scientific journal JAMA Psychiatry, are based on the largest PET brain scan study ever to have been conducted on patients suffering from depression. The aim of the study was to describe the connection between depression, memory dysfunction and low receptor levels.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2801424

The rare and unusual life of an anchoress, a woman who devoted her life to prayer while living in seclusion, has been unearthed by the University of Sheffield and Oxford Archaeology, thanks to a skeletal collection now held at the University.

Analysis of the collection, which includes a staggering 667 complete skeletons dated to the Roman, Medieval, and Civil War era, has revealed one in particular that is likely Lady Isabel German, an important anchoress - or type of religious hermit - who is documented to have lived at All Saints Church in Fishergate, York during the 15th century.

As an anchoress, Lady German would have chosen to live a life of seclusion. Living inside a single room of the church without direct human contact, she would have devoted herself to prayer and accepted charity to survive.

Skeleton SK3870 was discovered in 2007 during excavations at what was once All Saints Church on the site of the famous York Barbican. Not found in the cemetery alongside the others skeletons in the collection, this medieval woman was buried in a tightly crouched position within the apse of the church foundations, a small room located behind the altar.

Only clergy, or the very rich were buried inside churches at this time, so the new study suggests the location of this highly unusual burial makes SK3870 a prime candidate to be that of the All Saints’ anchoress, Lady German.

Dr Lauren McIntyre, University of Sheffield Alumna and Osteoarchaeologist at Oxford Archaeology Limited, conducted the analysis of the historical and osteoarchaeological evidence, which included using radiocarbon dating and isotopic investigation to examine skeleton SK3870.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00766097.2022.2129682?forwardService=showFullText&journalCode=ymed20&tokenAccess=VKG3PM4WXMT95DSUCPKE&tokenDomain=eprints&target=10.1080%2F00766097.2022.2129682

The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure deep in the brain, located on the medial surface of the temporal lobe, which processes both positive and negative emotions. Brain scanning studies show that the amygdala is activated in response to fearful faces, even when they are not consciously perceived.

Previous studies did not measure brain activity in real-time, however, and so direct evidence for rapid fear processing in the amygdala was lacking.

A rare opportunity
Yingying Wang of Zhejiang University and her colleagues had the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity directly from the brains of 18 patients undergoing presurgical evaluation for drug-resistant epilepsy.

While neurosurgeons monitored their brain activity to identify the source of debilitating seizures, the researchers implanted microelectrodes into their amygdalae, visual cortices, and various other brain regions, and recorded the responses of individual cells to images of happy, fearful, and neutral facial expressions.

The researchers used low- and high-resolution images of the faces of 96 actors that were rendered invisible by a process called backward masking, in which each image is shown briefly, and then quickly followed by another image of the same color that does not contain a face.

Low-resolution images of fearful faces, but not of happy or neutral ones, evoked rapid cellular responses in the amygdala, but not in the visual cortex or other regions. The earliest responses of amygdala neurons occurred within one-tenth of a second, even though the patients were not consciously aware of having seen the images.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/brain-fear-unconscious-awareness/

COVID-19 booster shots appear to benefit folks 50 and older but less so for younger people, a new study suggests.

For the study, researchers ran a statistical analysis using death rates from COVID, and looked at the vaccines' effectiveness in protecting people from dying of the disease. While they were found to be very effective among older people, the study noted that boosters made little difference in younger folks because they're least likely to die from the infection anyway.

Senior researcher Bernard Black is a law professor at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law in Chicago who specializes in health policy. He pointed out that the study only looked at deaths from COVID and did not consider infections the vaccine may have prevented or made less severe.

Still, for younger people the booster may be of less benefit, he suggested.

"There isn't evidence of a [death] benefit in younger people," Black said.

Although millions of Americans have gotten the initial doses of a COVID vaccine, only about 16% of those eligible for booster shots have gotten them, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC recommends that everyone 6 months and older get the COVID vaccine and keep up with boosters.

With the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration poised to recommend yearly COVID shots, Black believes the message should be focused on folks in their 60s and older, for whom the protection against dying is greatest.

"We don't know enough to know whether to recommend an annual COVID shot below age 60," he said. "From everything I know, above a 60, sure; in your 50s, probably. Below that, I'd say we just don't know."

Maybe, Black said, if public health messaging said, "You are someone who really needs it," more people who really need the booster would get it.

https://www.newsmax.com/health/health-news/covid-boosters-benefit/2023/02/13/id/1108399/

Drinking one or two cocktails a day may protect against dementia, while having three or more could increase risk, new research suggests. Investigators assessed the risk of dementia using changes in alcohol consumption in nearly four million people in Korea and found that after about 7 years, dementia was 21% less likely in mild drinkers and 17% less likely in moderate drinkers. Heavy drinking was linked to an 8% increased risk of getting the disease.

The findings were published in JAMA Network Open on February 6. According to CNN, lead author Dr. Keun Hye Jeon, assistant professor at CHA Gumi Medical Center in Gumi, South Korea, said in an email:

“We found that maintaining mild to moderate alcohol consumption as well as reducing alcohol consumption from a heavy to a moderate level were associated with a decreased risk of dementia.”

The new study examined the health records of people covered by the Korean National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) who get free medical examinations twice a year if they are 40 years or older. The current study looked at data collected between 2009 and 2011 and categorized people by their self-reported drinking levels. If a person said they drank about 0.5 ounces daily, they were considered “mild” drinkers. If they consumed the equivalent of two standard drinks in the U.S. (a standard drink is 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits), they were considered to be “moderate” drinkers. If the participants said they drank more than that, researchers considered them “heavy” drinkers

https://www.newsmax.com/health/health-news/alcohol-consumption-drinking/2023/02/09/id/1108060/

Chinese researchers have reported what they claim is the world’s youngest person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, which may overturn the conventional perception that cognitive impairment rarely occurs in young people. A 19-year-old male was diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s disease after his memory declined gradually over two years, according to researchers from Capital Medical University’s Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing. The authors said the patient had characteristics typical of Alzheimer’s disease, including memory loss and hippocampal atrophy, a shrinkage that is an early marker of the disease.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36565128/

A recent study that examined the impact of information sources on Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in sub-Saharan Africa discovered a strong link between people’s use of various media sources and vaccination resistance.

In 2020, when the pandemic’s impact in Africa was still underestimated, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that nearly 6000 people were hospitalized worldwide as a result of misinformation about coronavirus.

By then, the organization was working to combat false coronavirus information on social media platforms through the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance.,

According to the study, the prevalence of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in the region was 73 percent among social media users, 72 percent among TV viewers, and 42 percent among newspaper readers.

The study was conducted by African researchers from Western Sydney University in Australia; Cape Town and Kwazulu-Natal universities in South Africa and Jos, Benin, and Calabar universities in Nigeria.

It was the first of its kind to demonstrate the impact of information sources on vaccine uptake in sub-Saharan Africa.

It involved 2572 respondents and found that resistance to the Covid-19 vaccines was most common (87 percent) among social media and least common (37 percent) among newspaper readers.

Potential negative effects

Vaccination resistance was also documented in individuals, especially females, who got information about the vaccine from friends and relatives.

In many ways, the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa was accompanied by unprecedented and recurring waves of misinformation and disinformation.

This raised serious concerns about safety and potential negative effects, as well as what scientists called an Infodemic, or too much information, including false or misleading information in physical and digital environments.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-14972-2