Category: 8. Health

The research, undertaken by Oxford Brookes University which has a campus in Swindon, and funded by the charity Prevent Breast Cancer, focused on women aged 40 to 65 in the UK.

It found that many women in this group were unaware of the connection between alcohol consumption and breast cancer.

The study, titled ‘Rethinking the message on alcohol and breast cancer with UK women: a Delphi study’, was published in the journal Health Promotion International.

It involved a three-stage process, which began with a survey of 260 women, followed by seven online focus groups and a collaborative workshop.

The study’s lead author, Dr Emma Davies, said: “We often think of alcohol as causing liver disease, but there’s plenty of research showing that drinking alcohol can lead to seven types of cancer, including breast cancer.

“Evidence shows that people who are aware of the link between alcohol and cancer are more supportive of stronger and more effective alcohol policy.

“This means that raising awareness isn’t just about individual behaviour change, it is about changing how we think about alcohol at all levels of society.”

The study found that several factors, including cultural norms, mistrust of official messaging, psychological defence mechanisms, and stigma, reduced the effectiveness of health warnings.

Fear-based messaging was also found to be counterproductive, as it often led to denial rather than proactive change.

Dr Davies said: “It’s clear that fear, blame and shame don’t work when it comes to raising awareness of the risks associated with drinking alcohol.

“Cutting back on alcohol can help to reduce the chance of getting cancer, but can also give us plenty of other benefits, such as better sleep and improved mood.”

The study concluded that narrative-based framing, using personal stories from peers who have experienced breast cancer, was more effective than stark statistics or scare tactics.

Messages were most accepted when framed positively, highlighting how reducing drinking can empower women and protect their health, rather than through guilt or blame.

Dr Davies added: “Importantly, we need a clear and evidence-based alcohol policy to reduce risks across the population.

“We need to understand why people drink and what the emotional and cultural barriers are to giving up or cutting down.

“We hope our study will equip policymakers, charities, clinicians, and health communicators with an evidence-based roadmap to reshape prevention campaigns and reduce alcohol-related harms, including breast cancer and other cancer cases.”

For more information and advice on alcohol and cancer, visit the World Cancer Research Fund’s Cancer Prevention Action Week page.

Also Read | Doctor says sedentary living leads to obesity, weaker bones, cancer risk; shares how to be more active: Walk after lunch

But, what if you were to quit sugar for a month? What would happen inside your body? According to Dr Saurabh Sethi, a gastroenterologist trained at AIIMS, Harvard and Stanford universities, there will be health changes that would lead to some very noticeable lowered disease risks.

What happens when you quit sugar for 30 days?

In an Instagram post shared on July 1, Dr Sethi revealed the changes your body goes through when you quit sugar for 30 days. He listed 5 health benefits based on science and explained how the change occurs. He wrote, “No fluff. No noise. Just what works. What happens when you quit sugar for one month? As a GI doctor, here is what’s backed by science.”

1. Changes in the liver

According to Dr Sethi, when you stop consuming sugar for 30 days, your liver fat starts to drop, helping heal fatty liver.

2. Kidney function improves

The gastroenterologist stressed that after quitting sugar, your kidney function improves, especially if you are insulin resistant or pre-diabetic.

3. Lower inflammation risks

Additionally, he pointed out that the inflammation in your arteries goes down, which can benefit your heart health.

4. Brain fog reduces

If you are someone who deals with brain fog, quitting sugar might help you. “You may notice clearer thinking and better focus,” Dr Sethi pointed out.

5. Immunity booster

Lastly, quitting sugar consumption for 30 days will help your immune system get stronger because sugar weakens white blood cells, and you will retain more key minerals like magnesium, calcium, and zinc.

Note to readers: This article is for informational purposes only and not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your doctor with any questions about a medical condition.

Any high school reunion is a sharp reminder that some people age more gracefully than others. Some enter their older years still physically spry and mentally sharp. Others start feeling frail or forgetful much earlier in life than expected.

The way we age as we get older is quite distinct from how many times we’ve traveled around the sun.”

Ahmad Hariri, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University

Now, scientists at Duke, Harvard and the University of Otago in New Zealand have developed a freely available tool that can tell how fast someone is aging, and while they’re still reasonably healthy — by looking at a snapshot of their brain.

From a single MRI brain scan, the tool can estimate your risk in midlife for chronic diseases that typically emerge decades later. That information could help motivate lifestyle and dietary changes that improve health.

In older people, the tool can predict whether someone will develop dementia or other age-related diseases years before symptoms appear, when they might have a better shot at slowing the course of disease.

“What’s really cool about this is that we’ve captured how fast people are aging using data collected in midlife,” Hariri said. “And it’s helping us predict diagnosis of dementia among people who are much older.”

The results were published July 1 in the journal Nature Aging.

Finding ways to slow age-related decline is key to helping people live healthier, longer lives. But first “we need to figure out how we can monitor aging in an accurate way,” Hariri said.

Several algorithms have been developed to measure how well a person is aging. But most of these “aging clocks” rely on data collected from people of different ages at a single point in time, rather than following the same individuals as they grow older, Hariri said.

“Things that look like faster aging may simply be because of differences in exposure” to things such as leaded gasoline or cigarette smoke that are specific to their generation, Hariri said.

The challenge, he added, is to come up with a measure of how fast the process is unfolding that isn’t confounded by environmental or historical factors unrelated to aging.

To do that, the researchers drew on data gathered from some 1,037 people who have been studied since birth as part of the Dunedin Study, named after the New Zealand city where they were born between 1972 and 1973.

Every few years, Dunedin Study researchers looked for changes in the participants’ blood pressure, body mass index, glucose and cholesterol levels, lung and kidney function and other measures — even gum recession and tooth decay.

They used the overall pattern of change across these health markers over nearly 20 years to generate a score for how fast each person was aging.

The new tool, named DunedinPACNI, was trained to estimate this rate of aging score using only information from a single brain MRI scan that was collected from 860 Dunedin Study participants when they were 45 years old.

Next the researchers used it to analyze brain scans in other datasets from people in the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

Faster aging and higher dementia risk

Across data sets, they found that people who were aging faster by this measure performed worse on cognitive tests and showed faster shrinkage in the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for memory.

More soberingly, they were also more likely to experience cognitive decline in later years.

In one analysis, the researchers examined brain scans from 624 individuals ranging in age from 52 to 89 from a North American study of risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

Those who the tool deemed to be aging the fastest when they joined the study were 60% more likely to develop dementia in the years that followed. They also started to have memory and thinking problems sooner than those who were aging slower.

When the team first saw the results, “our jaws just dropped to the floor,” Hariri said.

Links between body and brain

The researchers also found that people whose DunedinPACNI scores indicated they were aging faster were more likely to suffer declining health overall, not just in their brain function.

People with faster aging scores were more frail and more likely to experience age-related health problems such as heart attacks, lung disease or strokes.

The fastest agers were 18% more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic disease within the next several years compared with people with average aging rates.

Even more alarming, they were also 40% more likely to die within that timeframe than those who were aging more slowly, the researchers found.

“The link between aging of the brain and body are pretty compelling,” Hariri said.

The correlations between aging speed and dementia were just as strong in other demographic and socioeconomic groups than the ones the model was trained on, including a sample of people from Latin America, as well as United Kingdom participants who were low-income or non-White.

“It seems to be capturing something that is reflected in all brains,” Hariri said.

The work is important because people worldwide are living longer. In the coming decades, the number of people over age 65 is expected to double, reaching nearly one fourth of the world’s population by 2050.

“But because we live longer lives, more people are unfortunately going to experience chronic age-related diseases, including dementia,” Hariri said.

Dementia’s economic burden is already huge. Research suggests that the global cost of Alzheimer’s care, for example, will grow from $1.33 trillion in 2020 to $9.12 trillion in 2050 — comparable or greater than the costs of diseases like lung disease or diabetes that affect more people.

Effective treatments for Alzheimer’s have proven elusive. Most approved drugs can help manage symptoms but fail to stop or reverse the disease.

One possible explanation for why drugs haven’t worked so far is they were started too late, when the Alzheimer’s proteins that build up in and around nerve cells have already done too much damage.

“Drugs can’t resurrect a dying brain,” Hariri said.

But in the future, the new tool could make it possible to identify people who may be on the way to Alzheimer’s sooner, and evaluate interventions to stop it — before brain damage becomes extensive, and without waiting decades for follow-up.

In addition to predicting our risk of dementia over time, the new clock will also help scientists better understand why people with certain risk factors, such as poor sleep or mental health conditions, age differently, said first author Ethan Whitman, who is working toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with Hariri and study co-authors Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, also professors of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.

More research is needed to advance DunedinPACNI from a research tool to something that has practical applications in healthcare, Whitman added.

But in the meantime, the team hopes the tool will help researchers with access to brain MRI data measure aging rates in ways that aging clocks based on other biomarkers, such as blood tests, can’t.

“We really think of it as hopefully being a key new tool in forecasting and predicting risk for diseases, especially Alzheimer’s and related dementias, and also perhaps gaining a better foothold on progression of disease,” Hariri said.

The authors have filed a patent application for the work. This research was supported by the U.S. National Institute on Aging (R01AG049789, R01AG032282, R01AG073207), the UK Medical Research Council (MR/X021149/1), and the New Zealand Health Research Council (Programme Grant 16-604).

New cutting-edge software developed in Melbourne can help uncover how the most common heart tumor in children forms and changes. And the technology has the potential to further our understanding of other childhood diseases, according to a new study.

The research, led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and published in Genome Biology, found the software, VR-Omics, can identify previously undetected cell activities of cardiac rhabdomyoma, a type of benign heart tumor.

Developed by MCRI’s Professor Mirana Ramialison, VR-Omics is the first tool capable of analysing and visualising data in both 2D and 3D virtual reality environments. The innovative technology aims to analyse the spatial genetic makeup of human tissue to better understand a specific disease.

Cardiac rhabdomyoma, usually detected during pregnancy or infancy, doesn’t cause health problems in most cases. But in some babies and children the tumors can grow and block blood flow to vital organs, causing respiratory distress, irregular heartbeat, obstructions and heart failure.

When the tumors cause severe health complications, treatment options are limited and include surgically removing part of the heart, which may lead to further complications and death. Unfortunately, it’s not well understood why these tumors form.”

Professor Mirana Ramialison, MCRI

To challenge her new software, Professor Ramialison and her team, including Denis Bienroth and Natalie Charitakis, analysed heart tissue from three children in Melbourne with cardiac rhabdomyoma. In a breakthrough, the research uncovered specific underlying features of the tumor that hadn’t been identified previously.

Professor Ramialison said the VR-Omics tool would help researchers to gain a better insight into the disease.

“VR-Omics generates 3D visualisations of the cells within human tissue based on large collections of patient data,” she said. This could allow for greater analysis of human tissue compared to other methods.”

Professor Ramialison also benchmarked the software against existing state-of-the-art methods, finding it performed better in all analysis steps.

“VR-Omics has a unique capacity to analyze large datasets, which allows it to explore new biological mechanisms in rare tissue sections, like those from cardiac rhabdomyoma,” she said. The technology will enable more biological discoveries that could help better understand many childhood conditions.”

Researchers from the Melbourne Centre for Cardiovascular Genomics and Regenerative Medicine (CardioRegen), the University of Konstanz in Germany, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW), University of Melbourne and Monash University also contributed to the findings.

Young people with friends who vape are 15 times more likely to use e-cigarettes, and more adolescents are turning to illicit cannabis products, University of Queensland research has found.

In two separate UQ-led studies, researchers have uncovered vaping trends, including a significant increase in the number of young people who don’t know what they’re inhaling.

In one study, PhD candidate Jack Chung from UQ’s National Centre For Youth Substance Use Research examined the types of cannabis compounds that youth aged 11-18 years old were vaping between 2021 and 2023.

We analyzed how many teens were vaping 2 types of cannabis compounds, the first of which is commonly used for its psychoactive ‘high’ effects, and the 2^nd is usually used for medicinal purposes.

We also studied the use of lab-made synthetic cannabinoids which can be more potent and deadly.

We saw an increase in all products between 2021 and 2023, but it was concerning to see a rise in synthetic cannabinoids, where vaping doubled in young people aged between 11-15 years.

Synthetic cannabinoids are particularly dangerous as they can lead to unpredictable health consequences and even death.

It was also worrying to see more adolescents were unsure about the substances they were vaping – 1.8 per cent of teens in 2021 weren’t sure if they had vaped synthetic cannabinoids, increasing to 4.7 per cent in 2023.”

Jack Chung, PhD candidate from UQ’s National Centre For Youth Substance Use Research

Mr. Chung’s study analyzed data from 70,773 middle and high school students in the United States, which was captured in the country’s National Youth Tobacco Surveys.

In a separate UQ-led vaping study, PhD candidate Giang Vu found peer influences were a major factor in vaping trends, while disapproval of e-cigarettes from people important to teens – such as parents – reduced the likelihood of a teen vaping by about 70 per cent.

“We analyzed data from 20,800 American youth between 2015 and 2021 and found while the proportion with friends who smoked declined, having friends who vaped remained concerningly common,” Ms Vu said.

“In 2015, 31.6 per cent of young people had friends who vaped, and while this decreased to 22.3 per cent by 2021, this figure is still high.

“The outbreak of lung disease associated with vaping, and COVID-19 related disruptions to social networks and access most likely contributed to this decline.”

Associate Professor Gary Chung Kai Chan, who collaborated on both studies, said social media played a big part in vaping rates among young people.

“In many videos, vaping is portrayed as trendy and a healthier lifestyle choice when compared to cigarette smoking, but this is dangerous messaging,” Dr Chan said.

“We need more regulation on social media, along with targeted policies and campaigns to decrease vaping rates.

“Further research is also needed to help us understand the evolving trends of cannabis vaping and the physical and mental health impacts on youth.”

The first paper has been published in American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

The second paper has been published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

Key findings:

Adolescent cannabis vaping trends:

• In 2023, it was estimated:
  

  • 7.4 per cent of US adolescents were vaping a cannabinoid known as THC (which is extracted from the cannabis plant and produces a psychoactive high)
  • 2.9 per cent were vaping cannabidiol known as CBD (also extracted from a cannabis plant and is more often used for medicinal purposes)
  • 1.8 per cent were vaping synthetic cannabinoids (a dangerous lab-made drug that mimics the effects of cannabis)

  
  

• Vaping of all 3 products increased between 2021 and 2023 in teenagers aged 11-18 years old.
• Vaping rates were higher among females than males.
• The number of 11-13-year-olds vaping THC and synthetic cannabinoids doubled between 2021 and 2023.
• Consistent increase in the number of teens who weren’t sure what product they had inhaled.

Trends in social norms towards cigarette smoking and e-cigarette use:

• Teens who had friends who vaped were 15 times more likely to use e-cigarettes themselves.
• Between 2015 and 2021, the probability of having friends who smoked cigarettes decreased from 26.1 per cent to 7.9 per cent.
• Meanwhile, the probability of having friends who vaped decreased from 31.6 per cent to 22.3 per cent.
• Between 2015 and 2020, perceived public disapproval increased for both cigarettes (73.3 per cent to 84.2 per cent) and vaping (55.4 per cent to 77.5 per cent).
• Disapproval of e-cigarettes from people important to teens reduced the likelihood of a teen vaping by about 70 per cent.

Photo Credit: iStock.com/KS Kim

Research shows that small extracellular vesicles shed by donor heart cells and circulating T cells provide a precise readout of heart transplant rejection.

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Although routine endomyocardial biopsy remains the gold standard for grading acute cellular rejection (ACR) after heart transplantation, new research published in Transplantation has shown that small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) shed by donor heart cells and circulating T cells provide a precise, minimally invasive readout of rejection.

“T cells are constantly surveilling their environment, looking for infections and other things that are ‘non-self,’” explained study principal investigator Prashanth Vallabhajosyula, MD, MPH, of Yale School of Medicine, in a news release. “They see the transplanted heart as non-self, so they mount an attack.”

Distinct Molecular Shifts Signal Danger

In a longitudinal pilot study, the researchers collected 70 paired blood samples and biopsies from 12 recipients during the first 120 postoperative days. They isolated donor-derived sEVs with anti-human leukocyte antigens (HLA) I beads and probed for cardiac troponin T (cTnT) protein and messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), while anti-cluster of differentiation 3 beads captured T-cell sEVs enriched for cluster of differentiation 4, cluster of differentiation 8, T-cell receptor proteins, and microRNAs (mRNAs) let-7i, 101b, and 21a.

According to study results, eleven episodes of moderate ACR occurred in six patients (incidence 15.7%). Compared with grade 0/1 biopsies, donor-heart sEV cTnT protein and mRNA fell markedly (P<0.001), whereas T-cell sEV protein and miRNA cargoes rose (all P<0.001). These shifts were detectable as early as day 5 post-transplant; ten of the eleven episodes presented within 38 days, a timeframe in which commercial blood tests typically fail, according to the authors.

Monitoring Treatment Success

By escalating immunosuppression, the researchers reversed both clinical rejection and sEV signatures. Donor-heart cTnT mRNA and miR-21a tracked treatment response with Spearman coefficients of 0.87 and 0.85, respectively.

“Not only can we detect rejection, but our investigation also suggests that we can use our exosome platform to potentially monitor the efficacy of treatment of rejection,” Vallabhajosyula stated. The authors noted that the platform also identified one case of antibody-mediated rejection by analyzing B-cell sEVs, highlighting its versatility.

Toward Safer Transplant Care

“This is the first time that we’ve had a noninvasive method to delineate between the different types of rejection that may occur within the heart,” noted study co-author Sounok Sen, MD, of Yale School of Medicine.

According to the researchers, a larger validation study involving more than 100 patients is underway to refine diagnostic thresholds and assess long-term prognostic value. They noted that, if confirmed, sEV profiling could significantly reduce the need for repeat biopsies, lower procedural complications, and enable clinicians to adjust therapy earlier, ultimately improving outcomes for heart transplant recipients.

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