Can good sleep patterns offset genetic susceptibility to heart disease and stroke?

December 18, 2019

Science Daily/Tulane University

Getting a good night's sleep could be beneficial for long-term health. A pioneering new study led by Dr. Lu Qi, director of the Tulane University Obesity Research Center, found that even if people had a high genetic risk of heart disease or stroke, healthy sleep patterns could help offset that risk. The study is published in the European Heart Journal.

The researchers looked at genetic variations known as SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that were already known to be linked to the development of heart disease and stroke. They analysed the SNPs from blood samples taken from more than 385,000 healthy participants in the UK Biobank project and used them to create a genetic risk score to determine whether the participants were at high, intermediate or low risk of cardiovascular problems.

The researchers followed the participants for an average of 8.5 years, during which time there were 7,280 cases of heart disease or stroke.

"We found that compared to those with an unhealthy sleep pattern, participants with good sleeping habits had a 35% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and a 34% reduced risk of both heart disease and stroke," Qi says. Researchers say those with the healthiest sleep patterns slept 7 to 8 hours a night, without insomnia, snoring or daytime drowsiness.

When the researchers looked at the combined effect of sleep habits and genetic susceptibility on cardiovascular disease, they found that participants with both a high genetic risk and a poor sleep pattern had a more than 2.5-fold greater risk of heart disease and a 1.5-fold greater risk of stroke compared to those with a low genetic risk and a healthy sleep pattern. This meant that there were 11 more cases of heart disease and five more cases of stroke per 1000 people a year among poor sleepers with a high genetic risk compared to good sleepers with a low genetic risk. However, a healthy sleep pattern compensated slightly for a high genetic risk, with just over a two-fold increased risk for these people.

A person with a high genetic risk but a healthy sleep pattern had a 2.1-fold greater risk of heart disease and a 1.3-fold greater risk of stroke compared to someone with a low genetic risk and a good sleep pattern. While someone with a low genetic risk, but an unhealthy sleep pattern had 1.7-fold greater risk of heart disease and a 1.6-fold greater risk of stroke.

"As with other findings from observational studies, our results indicate an association, not a causal relation," Qi says. "However, these findings may motivate other investigations and, at least, suggest that it is essential to consider overall sleep behaviors when considering a person's risk of heart disease or stroke."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191218153412.htm

Extreme weather events linked to poor mental health

September 5, 2019

Science Daily/University of York

People whose homes are damaged by storms or flooding are significantly more likely to experience mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, according to new research.

The study, led by the University of York and the National Centre for Social Research, found that the risk to mental health associated with experiencing weather-damage to your home is similar to the risk to mental health associated with living in a disadvantaged area.

People with weather-damaged homes are more likely to experience poor mental health even when the damage is relatively minor and does not force them to leave their homes, the study suggests.

With scientists saying climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of storms and floods in the UK, emergency planning for extreme weather needs to include mental health support for people affected, the researchers conclude.

The researchers analysed data from a large national mental health survey called the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS). The APMS is the primary source of information on the mental health of people living in England and assesses mental disorders using diagnostic criteria.

Survey fieldwork took place throughout 2014 and included a question which asked participants if their home had been damaged by wind, rain, snow or flood in the six months prior to interview -- this period included December 2013 to March 2014, which saw severe winter storms and extensive flooding in the UK.

Over 4.2 million flood warnings were issued and over 10,000 residential properties were flooded over these months.

Taking other factors known to increase the risk of poor mental health into account -- such as social disadvantage, debt and poor physical health -- the researchers found that people who had experienced storm and flood damage to their homes were about 50% more likely to experience poorer mental health.

Lead author of the study, Professor Hilary Graham, from the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, said: "This study shows that exposure to extreme or even moderate weather events may result in 'psychological casualties' with significant impacts on mental health.

"This is reflective of the huge impact storms and flooding have on people's lives as alongside the physical damage to homes and businesses, there is the emotional damage to the sense of security that many people derive from their home."

The number of properties in the UK exposed to at least a 1 in 75-year flood risk is predicted to increase by 41% under a 2°C temperature rise and by 98% under 4°C temperature rise.

Professor Graham added: "With extreme weather events on the rise due to climate change, environmental and health policies need to be brought much more closely together. This means recognising that flood protection policies are also health protection policies and that better protecting communities from floods is also an investment in protecting their mental health."

Julie Foley, Director of Flood Risk Strategy & National Adaptation at the Environment Agency, said: "The impact of flooding on people is devastating, and can last long after the flood waters have gone away. People can be out of their homes for months or even years, and the impacts are even wider if businesses, schools and transport routes are affected. This research highlights the how the consequences of flooding can have a significant impact on mental health wellbeing.

"Our flood defences increase protection to thousands of homes around the country but we can never entirely eliminate the risk of flooding, which is why it's crucial to know how to protect yourself when it hits."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190905080114.htm

Brain circuit connects feeding and mood in response to stress

September 4, 2019

Science Daily/Baylor College of Medicine

An international team has looked into the possibility of crosstalk between eating and mood and discovered a brain circuit in mouse models that connects the feeding and the mood centers of the brain.

Many people have experienced stressful situations that trigger a particular mood and also change certain feelings toward food. An international team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine looked into the possibility of crosstalk between eating and mood and discovered a brain circuit in mouse models that connects the feeding and the mood centers of the brain. Published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, these findings may help explain some of the observations between changes in mood and metabolism and provide insights into future solutions to these problems by targeting this circuit.

"This study was initiated by first author Dr. Na Qu, a psychiatrist of Wuhan Mental Health Center, China, when she was visiting my lab," said corresponding author Dr. Yong Xu, associate professor of pediatrics and of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine.

Qu, a practicing psychiatrist who also conducts basic brain research, was interested in investigating whether there was a neurological basis for the association between depression and other psychiatric disorders and alterations in metabolism, such as obesity or lack of appetite, she had observed in a number of her patients.

Xu, Qu and their colleagues worked with a mouse model of depression induced by chronic stress and observed that depressed animals ate less and lost weight. Then, they applied a number of experimental techniques to identify the neuronal circuits that changed activity when the animals were depressed.

"We found that POMC neurons in the hypothalamus, which are essential for regulating body weight and feeding behavior, extend physical connections into another region of the brain that has numerous dopamine neurons that are implicated in the regulation of mood," said Xu, who also is a researcher at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor and Texas Children's Hospital. "We know that a decrease in dopamine may trigger depression."

In addition to the physical connection between the feeding and the mood centers of the brain, the researchers also discovered that when they triggered depression in mice, the POMC neurons were activated and this led to inhibition of the dopamine neurons. Interestingly, when the researchers inhibited the neuronal circuit connecting the feeding and the mood centers, the animals ate more, gained weight and looked less depressed.

"We have discovered that a form of chronic stress triggered a neuronal circuit that starts in a population of cells that are known to regulate metabolism and feeding behavior and ends in a group of neurons that are famous for their regulation of mood," Xu said. "Stress-triggered activation of the feeding center led to inhibition of dopamine-producing neurons in the mood center."

Although more research is needed, Xu, Qu and their colleagues propose that their findings provide a new biological basis that may explain some of the connections between mood alterations and changes in metabolism observed in people, and may provide solutions in the future.

"Our findings only explain one scenario, when depression is associated with poor appetite. But in other cases depression has been linked to overeating. We are interested in investigating this second association between mood and eating behavior to identify the neuronal circuits that may explain that response," Xu said.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190904213722.htm

Gene linked to needing less sleep identified

August 28, 2019

Science Daily/Cell Press

The genetics of circadian rhythms have been well studied in recent years, but much less is known about other types of genes that play a role in sleep, specifically those that regulate how much sleep our bodies require. Now, by studying a family with several members who require significantly less sleep than average, a team of researchers has identified a new gene that they believe has a direct impact on how much someone sleeps. They report their findings on August 28 in the journal Neuron.

"It's remarkable that we know so little about sleep, given that the average person spends a third of their lives doing it," says Louis Ptáček, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and one of the paper's two senior authors. "This research is an exciting new frontier that allows us to dissect the complexity of circuits in the brain and the different types of neurons that contribute to sleep and wakefulness."

The family whose DNA led to the identification of this gene is one of several that Ptáček and UCSF geneticist Ying-Hui Fu, the paper's other senior author, are studying and includes several members who function normally on only six hours of sleep. The gene, ADRB1, was identified using genetic linkage studies and whole-exome sequencing, which revealed a novel and very rare variant.

The first step in deciphering the role of the gene variant involved studying its protein in the test tube. "We wanted to determine if these mutations caused any functional alterations compared with the wild type," Fu says. "We found that this gene codes for ß1-adrenergic receptor, and that the mutant version of the protein is much less stable, altering the receptor's function. This suggested it was likely to have functional consequences in the brain."

The researchers then conducted a number of experiments in mice carrying a mutated version of the gene. They found that these mice slept on average 55 minutes less than regular mice. (Humans with the gene sleep two hours less than average.) Further analysis showed that the gene was expressed at high levels in the dorsal pons, a part of the brain stem involved in subconscious activities such as respiration and eye movement as well as sleep.

Additionally, they discovered that normal ADRB1 neurons in this region were more active not only during wakefulness, but also during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. However, they were quiet during non-REM sleep. Furthermore, they found that the mutant neurons were more active than normal neurons, likely contributing to the short sleep behavior.

"Another way we confirmed the role of the protein was using optogenetics," Fu explains. "When we used light to activate the ADRB1 neurons, the mice immediately woke up from sleep."

Ptáček acknowledges some limitations of using mice to study sleep. One of these is that mice exhibit different sleep patterns than humans, including, for example, sleeping in a fragmented pattern, rather than in a single continuous period. "But it's challenging to study sleep in humans, too, because sleep is a behavior as well as a function of biology," he says. "We drink coffee and stay up late and do other things that go against our natural biological tendencies."

The investigators plan to study the function of the ADRB1 protein in other parts of the brain. They also are looking at other families for additional genes that are likely to be important. "Sleep is complicated," Ptáček notes. "We don't think there's one gene or one region of the brain that's telling our bodies to sleep or wake. This is only one of many parts."

Fu adds that the work may eventually have applications for developing new types of drugs to control sleep and wakefulness. "Sleep is one of the most important things we do," she says. "Not getting enough sleep is linked to an increase in the incidence of many conditions, including cancer, autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer's."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190828111247.htm

New evidence that optimists live longer

After decades of research, a new study links optimism and prolonged life

August 26, 2019

Science Daily/Boston University School of Medicine

After decades of research, a new study links optimism and prolonged life.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, have found that individuals with greater optimism are more likely to live longer and to achieve "exceptional longevity," that is, living to age 85 or older.

Optimism refers to a general expectation that good things will happen, or believing that the future will be favorable because we can control important outcomes. Whereas research has identified many risk factors that increase the likelihood of diseases and premature death, much less is known about positive psychosocial factors that can promote healthy aging.

The study was based on 69,744 women and 1,429 men. Both groups completed survey measures to assess their level of optimism, as well as their overall health and health habits such as diet, smoking and alcohol use. Women were followed for 10 years, while the men were followed for 30 years. When individuals were compared based on their initial levels of optimism, the researchers found that the most optimistic men and women demonstrated, on average, an 11 to 15 percent longer lifespan, and had 50-70 percent greater odds of reaching 85 years old compared to the least optimistic groups. The results were maintained after accounting for age, demographic factors such as educational attainment, chronic diseases, depression and also health behaviors, such as alcohol use, exercise, diet and primary care visits.

"While research has identified many risk factors for diseases and premature death, we know relatively less about positive psychosocial factors that can promote healthy aging," explained corresponding author Lewina Lee, PhD, clinical research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston and assistant professor of psychiatry at BUSM. "This study has strong public health relevance because it suggests that optimism is one such psychosocial asset that has the potential to extend the human lifespan. Interestingly, optimism may be modifiable using relatively simple techniques or therapies."

It is unclear how exactly optimism helps people attain longer life. "Other research suggests that more optimistic people may be able to regulate emotions and behavior as well as bounce back from stressors and difficulties more effectively," said senior author Laura Kubzansky, PhD, MPH, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and co-director, Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers also consider that more optimistic people tend to have healthier habits, such as being more likely to engage in more exercise and less likely to smoke, which could extend lifespan. "Research on the reason why optimism matters so much remains to be done, but the link between optimism and health is becoming more evident," noted senior author Fran Grodstein, ScD, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"Our study contributes to scientific knowledge on health assets that may protect against mortality risk and promote resilient aging. We hope that our findings will inspire further research on interventions to enhance positive health assets that may improve the public's health with aging," added Lee.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190826150700.htm

Anxiety, depression linked to more opioid use after surgery

August 22, 2019

Science Daily/Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan

Surgeons wielding their life-saving scalpels, laparoscopic tools, or other implements to repair or remove what ails their patients understand all too well that pain is an unavoidable part of the healing process. Yet the current opioid crisis has made the standard prescribing practices for these highly effective analgesics fraught with risk.

New research from Michigan Medicine could help clinicians mitigate that risk by identifying which patients are more likely to continue to use opioids after their immediate recovery period.

"There is not much research on which surgical patients require more or less opioids, despite a push in the field for personalized medicine," says first author Daniel Larach, M.D., M.T.R., M.A., a resident at U-M at the time of the study and now assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology at the University of Southern California.

"Often with postoperative opioid prescribing, personalization falls by the wayside, with surgeons using the same amounts for every person receiving a certain procedure."

He and the study team looked at data for more than 1,000 people undergoing an elective hysterectomy, thoracic surgery, or a total knee or hip replacement. Before their procedures, each patient provided demographic information and filled out several screening questionnaires. They were given scores measuring their degree of depression, anxiety, fatigue, sleep disturbance, physical function, as well as the severity of their overall and surgical site pain. The research team also measured how many pills were prescribed per patient. Each patient was then contacted one month following surgery to assess how many opioid pills they had consumed.

"We found that anxiety is linked with more opioid use, which is disheartening to see but also heartening in the sense that this is something we could potentially target," says Larach.

Other patient factors linked to increased opioid use included younger age, non-white race, no college degree, alcohol and tobacco use, and sleep disturbance.

Chad Brummett, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology and director of anesthesia clinical research and pain research, says people may be knowingly or unknowingly medicating for other conditions.

"The only thing we're giving them is opioids and we're not giving them alternatives or other options," he says. For example, patients with high anxiety around the time of surgery could be offered behavioral care or other non-opioid medications for anxiety and resulting pain.

Brummett, senior author on the Annals of Surgery paper, also notes that this study found overprescription of opioids for all surgical procedures and a correlation between the prescription size and use.

"I think it is striking that you see once again that the more you prescribe, the more patients take, even after adjusting for all of these other risk factors," explains Brummett.

Larach and Brummett note that right-sizing prescriptions through initiatives such as the Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (OPEN), which provides recommendations for prescription amounts for various medical procedures, is a critical first step. But, they say, this step should be followed by more research into specific patient factors that can be addressed in other ways.

Says Brummett, "We are asking surgeons to learn about and think about pain and behavioral health in ways that we have not previously done. It will require an open mind."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190822113307.htm

Lower back pain? Self-administered acupressure could help

August 21, 2019

Science Daily/Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan

A recent study finds that acupressure, a traditional Chinese medicine technique, can improve chronic pain symptoms in the lower back.

"Acupressure is similar to acupuncture, but instead of needles, pressure is applied with a finger, thumb or device to specific points on the body," says Susan Murphy, ScD, OTR, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Michigan Medicine and lead author of the study.

Murphy says that while acupressure has been previously studied -- and found to be beneficial -- in people with cancer-related or osteoarthritis pain, there are few studies that have examined acupressure in people with back pain.

In the study, published in Pain Medicine, the research team randomly assigned 67 participants with chronic low back pain into three groups: relaxing acupressure, stimulating acupressure or usual care.

"Relaxing acupressure is thought to be effective in reducing insomnia, while stimulating acupressure is thought to be effective in fatigue reduction," Murphy says.

Participants in the acupressure groups were trained to administer acupressure on certain points of the body, and spent between 27 and 30 minutes daily, over the course of six weeks, performing the technique.

Participants in the usual care group were asked to continue whatever treatments they were currently receiving from their care providers to manage their back pain and fatigue.

"Compared to the usual care group, we found that people who performed stimulating acupressure experienced pain and fatigue improvement and those that performed relaxing acupressure felt their pain had improved after six weeks," Murphy says.

"We found no differences among the groups in terms of sleep quality or disability after the six weeks."

Potential treatment option

Murphy notes that chronic pain is difficult to manage and people with the condition tend to have additional symptoms such as fatigue, sleep disturbance and depression.

"Better treatments are needed for chronic pain," Murphy says. "Most treatments offered are medications, which have side effects, and in some cases, may increase the risk of abuse and addiction."

She says this study highlights the benefits of a non-pharmacological treatment option that patients could perform easily on their own and see positive results.

"Although larger studies are needed, acupressure may be a useful pain management strategy given that it is low risk, low cost and easy to administer," Murphy says.

"We also recommend additional studies into the different types of acupressure and how they could more specifically be targeted to patients based on their symptoms."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190821163805.htm

Is pollution linked to psychiatric disorders?

August 20, 2019

Science Daily/PLOS

Researchers are increasingly studying the effects of environmental insults on psychiatric and neurological conditions, motivated by emerging evidence from environmental events like the record-breaking smog that choked New Delhi two years ago. The results of a new study publishing August 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by an international group of researchers using large data sets from the US and Denmark suggests a possible link between exposure to environmental pollution and an increase in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders.

The team found that poor air quality was associated with higher rates of bipolar disorder and major depression in both US and Danish populations. The trend appeared even stronger in Denmark, where exposure to polluted air during the first ten years of a person's life also predicted a more than two-fold increase in schizophrenia and personality disorders.

"Our study shows that living in polluted areas, especially early on in life, is predictive of mental disorders in both the United States and Denmark," said computational biologist Atif Khan, the first author of the new study. "The physical environment -- in particular air quality -- warrants more research to better understand how our environment is contributing to neurological and psychiatric disorders."

Although mental illnesses like schizophrenia develop due to a complex interplay of genetic predispositions and life experiences or exposures, genetics alone do not account entirely for variations in mental health and disease. Researchers have long suspected that genetic, neurochemical and environmental factors interact at different levels to affect the onset, severity and progression of these illnesses.

Growing evidence is beginning to provide insight into how components of air pollution can be toxic to the brain: Recent studies on rodents suggest that environmental agents like ambient small particulate matter (fine dust) travel to the brain through the nose and lungs, while animals exposed to pollution have also shown signs of cognitive impairment and depression-like behavioral symptoms. "We hypothesized that pollutants might affect our brains through neuroinflammatory pathways that have also been shown to cause depression-like signs in animal studies," said Andrey Rzhetsky, who led the new study.

To quantify air pollution exposure among individuals in the United States, the University of Chicago team relied on the US Environmental Protection Agency's measurements of 87 air quality measurements. For individuals in Denmark, they used a national pollution register that tracked a smaller number of pollutants with much higher spatial resolution.

The researchers then examined two population data sets, the first being a U.S. health insurance claims database that included 11 years of claims for 151 million individuals. The second dataset consisted of all 1.4 million individuals born in Denmark from 1979 through 2002 who were alive and residing in Denmark at their tenth birthday. Because Danes are assigned unique identification numbers that can link information from various national registries, the researchers were able to estimate exposure to air pollution at the individual level during the first ten years of their life. In the US study, exposure measurements were limited to the county level. "We strived to provide validation of association results in independent large datasets," said Rzhetsky.

The findings have not been without controversy. "This study on psychiatric disorders is counterintuitive and generated considerable resistance from reviewers," said Rzhetsky. Indeed, the divided opinions of the expert reviewers prompted PLOS Biology to commission a special companion article from Prof. John Ioannidis of Stanford University (Ioannidis is unconnected with the study, but assisted the journal with the editorial process).

"A causal association of air pollution with mental diseases is an intriguing possibility. Despite analyses involving large datasets, the available evidence has substantial shortcomings and a long series of potential biases may invalidate the observed associations," says Ioannidis in his commentary. "More analyses by multiple investigators, including contrarians, are necessary."

Rzhetsky also cautioned that the significant associations between air pollution and psychiatric disorders discovered in the study do not necessarily mean causation, and said that further research is needed to assess whether any neuroinflammatory impacts of air pollution share common pathways with other stress-induced conditions.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190820141604.htm

Multi-tasking protein at the root of neuropathic pain

August 20, 2019

Science Daily/Osaka University

Neuropathic pain is a chronic condition resulting from nerve injury and is characterized by increased pain sensitivity. Although known to be associated with overly excitable neurons in the spinal cord, the mechanisms leading to chronic pain are poorly understood. Researchers have now shown that expression of a protein called FLRT3 in the spinal dorsal root ganglion causes pain sensitization, which can be alleviated by treatment with FLRT3-blocking antibodies.

Researchers from Japan's Osaka University have made an important leap in our understanding of how chronic pain conditions develop. In a study published on July 25 in Journal of Neuroscience, the team explains how a protein previously implicated in neuron growth and cell adhesion is also critical for the development of pain sensitization.

Neuropathic pain is a chronic condition arising from previous nerve injury or certain diseases, including diabetes, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. Affected patients often display hypersensitivity to normally non-painful stimuli such as touch or repetitive movement, with pain commonly manifesting as shooting burning sensations, numbness, or pins and needles. In many cases, the pain cannot be relieved with analgesics.

In humans, the spinal cord dorsal horn acts as a sorting station for pain stimuli. Signals coming in from peripheral areas of the body are processed and then transmitted via secondary neurons to the brain. Importantly, this is a key region in the development of neuropathic pain; studies have linked the condition to abnormal neuronal excitability in the spinal cord dorsal horn. However, what causes these neurons to become overly excited remains a mystery.

FLRT3, or fibronectin leucine-rich transmembrane protein-3, is a protein commonly found in both embryonic and adult nervous systems. And while researchers don't know exactly what role it plays in adult tissues, FLRT3 has been implicated in synapse formation and cell adhesion in the developing brain.

But it was reports of FLRT3 expression in the dorsal horn following nerve injury that led the researchers from Osaka University to investigate the possibility that FLRT3 could be involved in neuropathic pain.

"We examined FLRT3 expression in the dorsal horns of adult rats after peripheral nerve injury," explains lead author of the study Moe Yamada. "Interestingly, even though Flrt3 gene expression was only observed in the dorsal root ganglion, high levels of FLRT3 protein were found in the dorsal horn.

"When we then injected purified FLRT3 into the subarachnoid space so that it reaches the cerebrospinal fluid or overexpressed the protein in the dorsal root ganglion using a viral vector, the treated rats developed touch sensitivity, called mechanical allodynia," adds Yamada.

Encouragingly, if they then blocked the activity of FLRT3 using antibodies or by gene silencing, the mechanical allodynia symptoms arising after nerve damage all but disappeared.

Explains senior author Toshihide Yamashita, "Our results suggest that FLRT3 is produced by injured neurons in the dorsal root ganglion, causing neuronal excitability in the entire dorsal horn and subsequent pain sensitization. This is a novel role for FLRT3, and provides new avenues to explore in the search for effective treatments for neuropathic pain."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190820101620.htm

City parks lift mood as much as Christmas

The greener the greenspace, the happier and less self-absorbed people are

August 20, 2019

Science Daily/University of Vermont

New research shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than before their visit -- and that their elevated mood lasts for up to four hours. The effect is so strong that it's equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, the happiest day each year on Twitter. With increasing urbanization and mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health and urban planning.

Feeling unhappy and cranky? The treatment: take a walk under some trees in the park.

That may not be the exact prescription of your doctor, but a first-of-its-kind study shows that visitors to urban parks use happier words and express less negativity on Twitter than they did before their visit -- and that their elevated mood lasts, like a glow, for up to four hours afterwards.

The effect is so strong -- a team of scientists from the University of Vermont discovered -- that the increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost of urban nature is equivalent to the mood spike on Christmas, by far the happiest day each year on Twitter.

With more people living in cities, and growing rates of mood disorders, this research may have powerful implications for public health and urban planning.

The new study was published August 20 in People and Nature, an open-access journal of the British Ecological Society.

GREEN MATTERS

For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont studied hundreds of tweets per day that people posted from 160 parks in San Francisco. "We found that, yes, across all the tweets, people are happier in parks," says Aaron Schwartz, a UVM graduate student who led the new research, "but the effect was stronger in large regional parks with extensive tree cover and vegetation." Smaller neighborhood parks showed a smaller spike in positive mood and mostly-paved civic plazas and squares showed the least mood elevation.

In other words, it's not just getting out of work or being outside that brings a positive boost: the study shows that greener areas with more vegetation have the biggest impact. It's notable that one of the words that shows the biggest uptick in use in tweets from parks is "flowers."

"In cities, big green spaces are very important for people's sense of well-being," says Schwartz; meaning that efforts to protect and expand urban natural areas extend far beyond luxury and second-tier concerns -- "we're seeing more and more evidence that it's central to promoting mental health," says Taylor Ricketts, a co-author on the new study and director of the Gund Institute for Environment at UVM.

In recent years, "a big focus in conservation has been on monetary benefits -- like: how many dollars of flood damage did we avoid by restoring a wetland?" Ricketts says. "But this study is part of a new wave of research that expands beyond monetary benefits to quantify the direct health benefits of nature. What's even more innovative here is our focus on mental health benefits -- which have been really underappreciated and understudied."

MEASURING HAPPINESS

The new study relied on the hedonometer. This online instrument -- invented by a team of scientists at UVM and The MITRE Corporation, including Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds, professors at UVM's Complex Systems Center and co-authors on the new study -- has been gathering and analyzing billions of tweets for more than a decade, resulting in numerous scientific papers and extensive global media coverage. The instrument uses a body of about 10,000 common words that have been scored by a large pool of volunteers for what the scientists call their "psychological valence," a kind of measure of each word's emotional temperature.

The volunteers ranked words they perceived as the happiest near the top of a 1-9 scale; sad words near the bottom. Averaging the volunteers' responses, each word received a score: "happy" itself ranked 8.30, "hahaha" 7.94, and "parks" 7.14. Truly neutral words, "and" and "the" scored 5.22 and 4.98. At the bottom, "trapped" 3.08, "crash" 2.60, and "jail" 1.76. "Flowers" scored a pleasant 7.56.

Using these scores, the team collects some fifty million tweets from around the world each day -- "then we basically toss all the words into a huge bucket," says Dodds -- and calculate the bucket's average happiness score.

PARK POSITION

To make the new study, the UVM team fished tweets out of this huge stream -- from 4,688 users who publically identify their location -- that were geotagged with latitude and longitude in the city of San Francisco. This allowed the team to know which tweets were coming from which parks. "Then, working with the U.S. Forest Service, we developed some new techniques for mapping vegetation of urban areas -- at a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods," says Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne, director of UVM's Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a co-author on the new study. "That's what really enabled us to get an accurate understanding of how the greenness and vegetation of these urban areas relates to people's sentiment there."

"This is the first study that uses Twitter to examine how user sentiment changes before, during, and after visits to different types of parks," says Schwartz, a doctoral student in the Rubenstein School and Gund Institute graduate fellow. "The greener parks show a bigger boost."

Overall, the tweets posted from these urban parks in San Francisco were happier by a dramatic 0.23 points on the hedonometer scale over the baseline. "This increase in sentiment is equivalent to that of Christmas Day for Twitter as a whole in the same year," the scientists write.

THE CAUSE OF AFFECT

"Being in nature offers restorative benefits on dimensions not available for purchase in a store, or downloadable on a screen," says UVM's Chris Danforth, a professor of mathematics and fellow in the Gund Institute. He notes that a growing body of research shows an association between time in nature and improved mood, "but the specific causal links are hard to nail down."

The team of UVM scientists consider several possible mechanisms through which urban nature may improve mental health, including Green Mind Theory that suggests that the negativity bias of the brain, "which may have been evolutionarily advantageous -- is constantly activated by the stressors of modern life," the team writes.

"While we don't address causality in our study, we do find that negative language -- like 'not,' 'no,' 'don't,' 'can't,' -- decreased in the period immediately after visits to urban parks," says Danforth, "offering specific linguistic markers of the mood boost available outside." Conversely, the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns -- "I" and "me" -- drops off dramatically in parks, perhaps indicating "a shift from individual to collective mental frame," the scientists write.

Of course, Twitter users are not a representative sample of all people -- just who are the "twitter-afflicted" (as Adam Gopnik wrote in a recent issue of the New Yorker) who pick up their phone to tweet from a park? Still, Twitter users are a broad demographic, earlier research shows, and this approach to near-real-time remote sensing via Twitter posts -- not based on self-reporting -- gives a new window for scientists onto the shifting moods of very large groups.

The nature of happiness has been pondered by philosophers for centuries and studied by psychologists for decades, but this new study suggests it might be as clear as that: in nature, people tend to be more happy -- and that's a finding "that may help public health officials and governments make plans and investments," says UVM's Aaron Schwartz.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190820081859.htm

Brain takes a beating as arteries age

August 20, 2019

Science Daily/Umea University

Researchers in Umeå, Sweden, have presented a model that explains why memory deteriorates as the body ages. With age, the brain receives an increased load from the heart's beating as the body's large arteries stiffen over the years, causing damage to the smallest blood vessels in the brain.

The fact that human memory is deteriorating with increasing age is something that most people experience sooner or later, even among those who avoid diseases such as Alzheimer's. Similarly, a connection between the ageing of the brain and the body is well known. However, the exact nature of this association is not known.

"We suggest a chain of events on how the ageing of the brain and vessels are related," says Lars Nyberg, professor at Umeå University.

What Umeå researchers Lars Nyberg and Anders Wåhlin have created is an explanatory model that starts with the heartbeat, and carries through the largest arteries in the body all the way to the finest vessels in the brain. An important feature of the model is that it provides a rationale why some cognitive processes may be particularly at risk for the proposed mechanism.

As the human body ages, large arteries, such as the aorta, stiffen and lose a large portion of their ability to absorb the pressure increase generated as the heart ejects blood into the arteries. Such pressure pulsatility is instead transmitted to smaller blood vessels, for example those in the brain. The smallest blood vessels in the brain, the capillaries, are subjected to an increased stress that causes damage to cells within and surrounding the capillary walls. These cells are important in the regulation of the capillary blood flow. If the smallest blood vessels are damaged, this is detrimental to the ability to increase the blood supply to the brain when coping with demanding cognitive processes.

According to the researchers' model, the hippocampus in the brain is particularly vulnerable. The structure in that part of the brain is important for the episodic memory, that is, the ability to remember events from the past. The vulnerability of the hippocampus relates to the fact that it is located close to the large vessels and thus is exposed to the increased load early in the chain. In a young and healthy person, the pulsations are soft, but in an ageing person the pulsations can be so powerful that they affect the brain tissue and can damage the blood supply to memory processes.

The Umeå researchers' model is based on a number of previous studies from the last five years.

"We have laid the puzzle of current and verified research in different fields to a broader and more detailed picture of the course of events. It will form a starting point for future research to gain a better understanding and, in the long term, researchers may also find solutions to slow down the process," says Anders Wåhlin.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190820081855.htm

Need a mental break? Avoid your cellphone

Using a cellphone during breaks led to mental depletion, poorer performance in a recent study

August 19, 2019

https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2019/08/190819132130_1_540x360.jpg

Science Daily/Rutgers University

Using a cellphone to take a break during mentally challenging tasks does not allow the brain to recharge effectively and may result in poorer performance, Rutgers researchers found.

The experiment, published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, assigned college undergraduates to solve challenging sets of word puzzles. Halfway through, some were allowed to take breaks using their cellphones. Others took breaks using paper or a computer while some took no break at all.

The participants who took phone breaks experienced the highest levels of mental depletion and were among the least capable of solving the puzzles afterwards. Their post-break efficiency and quickness was comparable to those with no break. Their number of word problems solved after the break was slightly better than those who took no break, but worse than all other participants.

Participants who took a break on their cell phone took 19% longer to do the rest of the task, and solved 22% fewer problems than did those in the other break conditions combined.

"The act of reaching for your phone between tasks, or mid-task, is becoming more commonplace. It is important to know the costs associated with reaching for this device during every spare minute. We assume it's no different from any other break -- but the phone may carry increasing levels of distraction that make it difficult to return focused attention to work tasks," said Terri Kurtzberg, co-author and associate professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School.

"Cellphones may have this affect because even just seeing your phone activates thoughts of checking messages, connecting with people, access to ever-refilling information and more, in ways that are different than how we use other screens like computers, and laptops," she continued.

The 414 participants were given sets of 20 word puzzles. Some were given a break halfway through, during which they were told to choose three items to buy within a specific budget, using either their cellphone, a paper circular or a computer. They were told to type or write the reasons for their selections.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190819132130.htm

Insomnia tied to higher risk of heart disease and stroke

August 19, 2019

Science Daily/American Heart Association

Data from more than a million people found that genetic liability to insomnia may increase the risk of coronary artery disease, heart failure and stroke. Among types of ischemic stroke, genetic liability to insomnia was primarily associated with an increased risk of large artery stroke.

People suffering from insomnia may have an increased risk of coronary artery disease, heart failure and stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

Previous observational studies have found an association between insomnia, which affects up to 30% of the general population, and an increased risk of developing heart disease and stroke. These observational studies were unable to determine whether insomnia is a cause, or if it is just associated with them, explained Susanna Larsson, Ph.D., lead study author and associate professor of cardiovascular and nutritional epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

In this first-of-its-kind study on insomnia, Larsson and a colleague applied Mendelian randomization, a technique that uses genetic variants known to be connected with a potential risk factor, such as insomnia, to reduce bias in the results. The 1.3 million participants with or without heart disease and stroke were drawn from four major public studies and groups.

Researchers found genetic variants for insomnia were associated with significantly higher odds of coronary artery disease, heart failure and ischemic stroke -- particularly large artery stroke, but not atrial fibrillation.

"It's important to identify the underlying reason for insomnia and treat it," Larsson said. "Sleep is a behavior that can be changed by new habits and stress management."

A limitation to this study is that the results represent a genetic variant link to insomnia rather than insomnia itself. According to Larsson, it was not possible to determine whether or not the individuals with cardiovascular disease had insomnia.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190819082451.htm

Researchers identify glial cells as critical players in brain's response to social stress

August 13, 2019

Science Daily/Advanced Science Research Center, GC/CUNY

Exposure to violence, social conflict, and other stressors increase risk for psychiatric conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Not everyone who experiences significant stress will develop such a response, however, and the cellular and molecular basis for an individual's underlying resilience or susceptibility to stressful events has remained poorly understood. Now, a newly published paper in the journal eLife from researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY suggests that the behavior of oligodendrocytes -- the glial cells that produce the myelin sheath that protects nerve fibers -- plays a critical role in determining whether we succumb to or tolerate stress.

"Through our study, we were able to identify brain-region-specific differences in the number of mature oligodendrocytes and in the content of myelin between two groups of mice who were categorized based on their resilience or susceptibility to an identical social-defeat stressor," said the paper's corresponding author Jia Liu, a research associate professor with the ASRC's Neuroscience Initiative. "After repeated exposure to an aggressive mouse, some animals, called "susceptible," avoided any sort of social interaction with their peers, while others remained resilient and continued to be socially engaged."

In follow-up brain tissue analysis, the research team detected fewer mature oligodendrocytes and irregular myelin coverage in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a brain region that plays a critical role in emotional and cognitive processing -- in the susceptible mice. In contrast, healthy numbers of oligodendrocytes and myelin were detected in resilient mice.

Methodology

For the study, researchers exposed test mice to an aggressor for five minutes daily over 10 days. Following this period, the mice were placed in the presense of unfamiliar mouse and categorized either as susceptible if they showed signs of social withdrawal or resilient if they still showed interest in socializing with the new mouse -- a social behavior that is typically detected in normal mice.

Reseachers next sought to determine if there were myelination differences between susceptible and resilient mice. They looked at two areas of the brain that are known to play a critical role in determining the individual's response to stress. In one of those areas -- the medial prefrontal cortex -- they found that the myelinated segments of nerve fiber in susceptible mice were shorter in length and thinner than typical. They did not find this condition in the resilient or control mice groups. They also investigated the state of each mouse group's glial cells, and discovered that in susceptible mice fewer of these cells had differentiated into myelin-producing oligodendrocytes.

In a final experiment, researchers found that induced damage to the myelin in the medial prefrontal cortex caused altered social behavior in mice, but the behavior returned to normal when new myelin was formed.

"Dr. Liu's research has highlighted the importance of stressful social events in changing the epigenetic code of oligodendrocyte progenitors, which may account for the increased susceptibility to developing chronic psychiatric disorders in some individuals," said Patrizia Casaccia, founding director of the ASRC Neuroscience Initiative. "Her data suggest that oligodendrocyte progenitor differentiation can be affected by emotional and psychological events, and this provides a new concept for preventing and treating depression. Current treatments target neuronal function, but Dr. Liu's work identifies potential new therapy targets as it suggests glial cell dysfunction could be a cause of stress-related mental disorders."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190813080212.htm

Treat insomnia before sleep apnea

August 13, 2019

Science Daily/Flinders University

The 'double whammy' of co-occurring insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a complex problem best managed with non-drug targeted psych interventions, a new Australian study has found.

By following simple new guidelines, people with the concurrent conditions reported great improvement to both their sleep, and their health -- with about 50% improvement in global insomnia severity and night-time insomnia after six months.

'Co-Morbid Insomnia and Sleep Apnoea' (COMISA) is a little studied and debilitating disorder which can improve by identifying and treating insomnia separately.

The new Australian study of 145 patients aimed to work out better treatments for 'COMISA' patients who, in the past, have shown poor results from using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy, compared to patients who do not report symptoms of insomnia.

As a result, the sleep experts are advising people living with both conditions to be treated first with a targeted, 4-10 week program of cognitive and behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBTi) -- before using CPAP machines to reduce the effects of sleep apnoea.

"We found that treating COMISA patients with non-drug CBTi before commencing CPAP significantly improved insomnia symptoms," says lead researcher Dr Alexander Sweetman, from the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health at Flinders University.

"Importantly, we also found increased use of CPAP therapy by about one hour per night in patients treated with CBTi and CPAP therapy, compared to a group receiving treatment with CPAP alone."

OSA patients -- who comprise around 10% of the general population -- suffer from frequent airway narrowing events during sleep which leads to a poor quality of sleep and reduced daytime functioning.

About one-third of OSA patients also report clinically significant insomnia symptoms, including long-term difficulties falling asleep at the start of the night, or long awakenings during the night.

The study found the new routine resulted in CBTi patients increasing acceptance of CPAP devices by 87% and increased long-term CPAP use by one hour each night over the first four months.

At six months, combined CBTi and CPAP therapy led to significant improvements of:

·      52% in global insomnia severity, compared to 35% in the control group,

·      48% in night-time insomnia complaints, compared to 34%

·      30% in dysfunctional sleep-related cognitions (compared to 10%).

Heart disease, obesity and depression have been connected to insomnia and sleep apnea, so getting the best therapies are important to health and wellbeing for millions of people around the world, says co-author Professor Doug McEvoy.

"Long-term cardio-metabolic benefits for patients with COMISA is an important consideration, independent of those debilitating symptoms which can be relieved with the right treatment," Professor McEvoy says.

"This latest study suggests that sleep physicians and clinics should screen for insomnia symptoms and, if present, treat the insomnia with CBTi to improve subsequent acceptance and use of CPAP therapy. This will improve outcomes for both disorders."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190813101936.htm

More than just jaundice: Mouse study shows bilirubin may protect the brain

Researchers have found bilirubin plays a unique role in protecting the brain

August 12, 2019

Science Daily/Johns Hopkins Medicine

In studies in mice, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers report they have found that bilirubin, a bile pigment most commonly known for yellowing the skin of people with jaundice, may play an unexpected role in protecting brain cells from damage from oxidative stress.

Bilirubin is commonly measured in lab tests as a marker for liver or blood health, and high levels may indicate disease. However, whether it has a role in healthy people has remained unclear.

The Johns Hopkins Medicine team says its interest in the compound's function in the brain arose from testing which tissues in the mouse body produced bilirubin. Surprisingly, the researchers found "exceptional levels" of the stuff in mouse brains -- five to 10 times higher production than in rodents' livers.

"Bilirubin is normally considered a waste product, but this level of production takes a lot of metabolic energy, and it seemed bizarre for bilirubin to not have a function," says Bindu Paul, Ph.D., faculty research instructor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, and a member of the research team.

The new study, described in a report published July 25 in Cell Chemical Biology, set out to find the purpose for harboring so much bilirubin in the brain. The team noted that past studies proposed that bilirubin might be an important antioxidant. Since the brain is so metabolically active and vulnerable to oxidative damage, the research group considered the possibility that bilirubin might be particularly important to protecting the brain against oxidative stress.

For their experiments, the team used mouse neurons grown in the laboratory that were genetically engineered to not produce bilirubin. As the cells grew, the researchers exposed them to various sources of oxidative stress by introducing reactive molecules to their environment.

When compared with normal mouse brain cells, the researchers found that the genetically modified mouse neurons were far more vulnerable to these stressors -- particularly at the hand of a harmful form of oxygen called superoxide.

Chirag Vasavda, an M.D./Ph.D. student in Solomon Snyder's laboratory and first author on the study, notes that superoxide is an important chemical cell messenger linked to learning, memory and development in the brain.

However, excessive brain cell activity can lead to uncontrolled superoxide levels, which can trigger oxidative stress and initiate a series of harmful reactions that cause damage to the brain. "Our initial experiments hinted to us that bilirubin might play an important role in controlling the levels of superoxide in the brain," says Vasavda.

The research team suspected that bilirubin's ability to regulate superoxide originated in its chemical structure, which allows it to grab on to and neutralize the harmful molecule in a way that other antioxidants, such as glutathione and cysteine, cannot.

To test this, the researchers stimulated excessive brain cell activity in normal brains and brains engineered to lack bilirubin. They found that brains lacking the bilirubin-production gene accumulated excessive superoxide. Then they stimulated brain activity in normal mice and mice lacking bilirubin to test whether removing bilirubin worsens brain damage or cell death.

The researchers found that mice that lacked bilirubin had about two to three times more brain damage as their normal counterparts, suggesting that bilirubin protected normal brains against harmful superoxide reactions.

This discovery, the investigators say, advances scientific understanding of bilirubin's role in the brain and elsewhere and could lead to novel treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's and Parkinson's that are marked by excessive superoxide levels and oxidative stress.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190812094502.htm

Susceptibility to disease develops during childhood

April 29, 2019

Science Daily/University of Zurich

Traumatized children and children who develop multiple allergies tend to suffer in adulthood from chronic inflammatory diseases and psychiatric disorders. Researchers at the Universities of Zurich and Lausanne have demonstrated this in a study in which they identified five classes of early immune-system programming.

The human immune system forms during childhood: The "hygiene hypothesis" provides a widely regarded perspective on this. It postulates that improved hygiene, changes in agriculture and urbanization have caused our immune systems to come in contact with certain microbes less often or later in life than before. It is presumed that these developments have adversely resulted in an increased incidence of chronic inflammatory diseases, allergies and mental disorders such as depression.

Taking the hygiene hypothesis as a starting point, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the Universities of Zurich and Lausanne analyzed epidemiological data from a cohort of almost 5,000 people who were born in the mid-20th century. They concentrated on the co-incidence of allergies, viral and bacterial diseases, and psychosocial stress in childhood. On the basis of early morbidity patterns, the scientists identified five different groups of people that they characterized by biomarkers (white blood cell counts, inflammatory markers) and, in a further step, by their association patterns with chronic inflammatory diseases and psychiatric disorders during adulthood.

One in five people have a very resistant immune system

 The main group, which comprised almost 60% of the total cohort analyzed, possessed an ordinary, "neutral" immune system. Their disease burden during childhood was comparatively low. Childhood disease burden was even lower for the second-largest group comprising more than 20% of the total cohort: that group exhibited an especially resistant, "resilient" immune system. Even symptoms of common childhood diseases like measles, mumps or rubella, which were not preventable in the mid-20th century, appeared far less frequently in this group than in the "neutral" group.

The "resilient" group is juxtaposed by three smaller groups. The "atopic" group (7% of total cohort) exhibited incidents of multiple allergic diseases. The roughly same-sized "mixed" group (approximately 9%) was characterized by single allergic disorders such as drug allergies, for example, and by bacterial and rash-inducing childhood diseases like scarlet fever, pertussis or rubella. The smallest of the five groups (approximately 5%) comprised people who were traumatized in childhood. They were more susceptible to allergic diseases, but responded comparatively resiliently to common childhood viral diseases.

Hygiene hypothesis taken a step further

Comparative analyses revealed that the "neutral" and "resilient" groups were larger among people with earlier birth years than they were among individuals with later birth years. The exact opposite was true for the "atopic" group, which increased the later the birth year. "Our study thus corroborates the hygiene hypothesis," lead author Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross from the University of Zurich says, "but at the same time goes beyond it."

Differences between the groups also manifested themselves in later health. People belonging to the "resilient" group were better protected in adulthood not just against chronic inflammatory diseases, but also against mental disorders. Members of the "atopic" and "mixed" groups, on the other hand, were susceptible to elevated somatic and psychiatric health risks in later age. The "traumatized" group likewise exhibited a greater predisposition to psychiatric illness in adulthood as well as a higher risk of suffering from chronic inflammatory diseases, the latter only among women, however. "The findings of the study indicate that the human immune system acts like a switchboard between somatic and psychic processes," Ajdacic-Gross explains. "They help us understand why many people who do not have a history of psychosocial trauma get afflicted by mental disorders and, conversely, why traumatized people show a predisposition to chronic inflammatory diseases."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190429134130.htm

People fail to recognize male postnatal depression

New research shows significant gender differences

May 13, 2019

Science Daily/Anglia Ruskin University

A new study shows that people are almost twice as likely to correctly identify signs of postnatal depression in women than in men.

The research, published in the Journal of Mental Health and led by Professor Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University, involved 406 British adults aged between 18 and 70.

The participants were presented with case studies of a man and a woman both displaying symptoms of postnatal depression, a mental health issue which affects as many as 13% of new parents.

This new study found that participants of both sexes were less likely to say that there was something wrong with the male (76%) compared to the female (97%).

Of the participants who did identify a problem, they were significantly more likely to diagnose postnatal depression in the female case study than the male case study. The study found that 90% of participants correctly described the female case study as suffering from postnatal depression but only 46% said the male had postnatal depression.

The participants commonly believed that the man was suffering from stress or tiredness. In fact, stress was chosen 21% of the time for the man compared to only 0.5% for the woman, despite identical symptoms.

Overall the study found that attitudes were significantly more negative towards the male case study compared to the female. It found that participants reported lower perceived distress towards the male case study's condition, believed that the male's condition would be easier to treat, expressed less sympathy for the male and were less likely to suggest that the male seek help.

Lead author Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, said: "Our findings suggest that the British public are significantly more likely to believe that something is 'wrong' when seeing a woman displaying the symptoms of postnatal depression, and they are also far more likely to correctly label the condition as postnatal depression.

"There may be a number of reasons for this gender difference. It is possible that general awareness of paternal postnatal depression still remains relatively low and there might be a perception among the British public that postnatal depression is a 'women's issue' due to gender-specific factors such as pregnancy-induced hormonal changes and delivery complications.

"What is clear is that much more can be done to promote better understanding of paternal postnatal depression, so people don't brush it off as simply tiredness or stress. This is particularly important as many men who experience symptoms of depression following the birth of their child may not be confident about asking for help and may be missed by healthcare professionals in the routine assessments of new parents."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190513104502.htm

1-2 caffeinated drinks not linked with higher risk of migraines; 3+ may trigger them

August 8, 2019

Science Daily/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Afflicting more than one billion adults worldwide, migraine is the third most prevalent illness in the world. In addition to severe headache, symptoms of migraine can include nausea, changes in mood, sensitivity to light and sound, as well as visual and auditory hallucinations. People who suffer from migraine report that weather patterns, sleep disturbances, hormonal changes, stress, medications and certain foods or beverages can bring on migraine attacks. However, few studies have evaluated the immediate effects of these suspected triggers.

In a study published today in the American Journal of Medicine, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) evaluated the role of caffeinated beverages as a potential trigger of migraine. Led by Elizabeth Mostofsky, ScD, an investigator in BIDMC's Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit and a member of the Department of Epidemiology at HSPH, researchers found that, among patients who experience episodic migraine, one to two servings of caffeinated beverages were not associated with headaches on that day, but three or more servings of caffeinated beverages may be associated with higher odds of migraine headache occurrence on that day or the following day.

"While some potential triggers -- such as lack of sleep -- may only increase migraine risk, the role of caffeine is particularly complex, because it may trigger an attack but also helps control symptoms," said Mostofsky. "Caffeine's impact depends both on dose and on frequency, but because there have been few prospective studies on the immediate risk of migraine headaches following caffeinated beverage intake, there is limited evidence to formulate dietary recommendations for people with migraines."

In their prospective cohort study, Mostofsky and colleagues -- including Principal Investigator Suzanne M. Bertisch, MD, MPH, of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School -- 98 adults with frequent episodic migraine completed electronic diaries every morning and every evening for at least six weeks. Every day, participants reported the total servings of caffeinated coffee, tea, soda and energy drinks they consumed, as well as filled out twice daily headache reports detailing the onset, duration, intensity, and medications used for migraines since the previous diary entry. Participants also provided detailed information about other common migraine triggers, including medication use, alcoholic beverage intake, activity levels, depressive symptoms, psychological stress, sleep patterns and menstrual cycles.

To evaluate the link between caffeinated beverage intake and migraine headache on the same day or on the following day, Mostofsky, Bertisch and colleagues used a self-matched analysis, comparing an individual participant's incidence of migraines on days with caffeinated beverage intake to that same participant's incidence of migraines on days with no caffeinated beverage intake. This self-matching eliminated the potential for factors such as sex, age, and other individual demographic, behavioral and environmental factors to confound the data. The researchers further matched headache incidence by day of the week, eliminating weekend versus week day habits that may also impact migraine occurrence.

Self-matching also allowed for the variations in caffeine dose across different types of beverages and preparations.

"One serving of caffeine is typically defined as eight ounces or one cup of caffeinated coffee, six ounces of tea, a 12-ounce can of soda and a 2-ounce can of an energy drink," said Mostofsky. "Those servings contain anywhere from 25 to 150 milligrams of caffeine, so we cannot quantify the amount of caffeine that is associated with heightened risk of migraine. However, in this self-matched analysis over only six weeks, each participant's choice and preparation of caffeinated beverages should be fairly consistent."

Overall, the researchers saw no association between one to two servings of caffeinated beverages and the odds of headaches on the same day, but they did see higher odds of same-day headaches on days with three or more servings of caffeinated beverages. However, among people who rarely consumed caffeinated beverages, even one to two servings increased the odds of having a headache that day.

"Despite the high prevalence of migraine and often debilitating symptoms, effective migraine prevention remains elusive for many patients," said Bertisch. "This study was a novel opportunity to examine the short-term effects of daily caffeinated beverage intake on the risk of migraine headaches. Interestingly, despite some patients with episodic migraine thinking they need to avoid caffeine, we found that drinking one to two servings/day was not associated with higher risk of headache. More work is needed to confirm these findings, but it is an important first step."

This work was conducted with support from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders And Stroke (R21-NS091627), the American Sleep Medicine Foundation, Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center (National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health Award UL 1TR002541), and financial contributions from Harvard University and its affiliated academic healthcare centers.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190808091422.htm

Why intense light can protect cardiovascular health

The light boosts a critical gene that strengthens blood vessels

August 8, 2019

Science Daily/University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that intense light amplifies a specific gene that bolsters blood vessels and offers protection against heart attacks.

"We already knew that intense light can protect against heart attacks, but now we have found the mechanism behind it," said the study's senior author Tobias Eckle, MD, PhD, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The study was published recently in the journal Cell Reports.

The scientists discovered that housing mice under intense light conditions for one week `robustly enhances cardio protection', which resulted in a dramatic reduction of cardiac tissue damage after a heart attack. They also found that humans could potentially benefit from a similar light exposure strategy.

In an effort to find out why, they developed a strategy to protect the heart using intense light to target and manipulate the function of the PER2 gene which is expressed in a circadian pattern in the part of the brain that controls circadian rhythms.

By amplifying this gene through light, they found that it protected cardiovascular tissues against low oxygen conditions like myocardial ischemia, caused by reduced oxygen flow to the heart.

They also discovered that the light increased cardiac adenosine, a chemical that plays a role in blood flow regulation.

Mice that were blind, however, enjoyed no cardio protection indicating a need for visual light perception.

Next, they investigated whether intense light had similar effects on healthy human volunteers. The subjects were exposed to 30 minutes of intense light measured in lumens. In this case, volunteers were exposed to 10,000 LUX, or lumens, on five consecutive days. Researchers also did serial blood draws.

The light therapy increased PER2 levels as it did in mice. Plasma triglycerides, a surrogate for insulin sensitivity and carbohydrate metabolism, significantly decreased. Overall, the therapy improved metabolism.

Eckle has long known that light plays a critical role in cardiovascular health and regulating biological processes. He pointed out that past studies have shown an increase in myocardial infarctions during darker winter months in all U.S. states, including sunnier places like Arizona, Hawaii and California. The duration of the light isn't as important as the intensity, he said.

"The most dramatic event in the history of earth was the arrival of sunlight," Eckle said. "Sunlight caused the great oxygen event. With sunlight, trillions of algae could now make oxygen, transforming the entire planet."

Eckle said the study shows, on a molecular level, that intensive light therapy offers a promising strategy in treating or preventing low oxygen conditions like myocardial ischemia.

He said if the therapy is given before high risk cardiac and non-cardiac surgery it could offer protection against injury to the heart muscle which can be fatal.

"Giving patients light therapy for a week before surgery could increase cardio protection," he said. "Drugs could also be developed that offer similar protections based on these findings. However, future studies in humans will be necessary to understand the impact of intense light therapy and its potential for cardio protection."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190808115052.htm