Health Care Blog

Long-time mobile phone users who talk more than an hour a day on the devices may be may be more likely to have high-frequency hearing loss, researchers say. “Our intention is not to scare the public,” says Naresh K. Panda, MS, DNB, chairman of the department of ear, nose, and throat at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India, and researcher for the study. The study, he tells WebMD, is preliminary and small. “We need to study a larger number of patients.” His team found that people who had talked on cell phones for more than four years and those who talked more than an hour daily were more likely to have these high-frequency losses. These losses can make it difficult to hear consonants such as s, f, t and z, making it hard to understand words. But another hearing expert familiar with the study says there is as yet no cause for alarm. Panda and his colleagues evaluated 100 people, aged 18 to 45, who had used mobile phones for at least a year, d...

In the journal Cell, researchers report that when a worm gene called elt-3 becomes less active, lots of other genes do the same, and worms age. So what, you ask? The scientists want to find out if a similar process happens in other animals, including humans. If so, keeping key genes active may keep aging at bay. Stanford University’s Yelena Budovskaya and colleagues basically showed that aging is written into worms’ genetic script — at least, in a lab where worms lived out their days without becoming some other animal’s supper. The elt-3 gene was one of the worms’ important aging genes. When the elt-3 slowed down, aging picked up its pace. Budovskaya’s team notes that in humans and other mammals, aging has been shown to result from DNA damage, stress, and inflammation. The worm findings don’t change that, but scientists write that it will be “interesting” to see if changes in gene activity are also part of the aging process. If so, that could lead to a search for ways to edit the gen...

There you are, sitting on the couch, remote in hand, thinking, “I should be exercising. If only I weren’t too tired to get off the couch!” Indeed, fatigue is among the most common complaints doctors hear. But you might be surprised to learn that experts say one of the best antidotes to beating fatigue and boosting energy is to exercise more, not less. “It’s now been shown in many studies that once you actually start moving around — even just getting up off the couch and walking around the room — the more you will want to move, and, ultimately, the more energy you will feel,” says Robert E. Thayer, PhD, a psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, and author of the book Calm Energy: How People Regulate Mood With Food. And, experts say, when it comes to fighting fatigue, not all exercise is created equal. Read on to find out what kind of exercise and how much you should be doing for optimum energy-boosting results. In a study published in the journal Psychotherapy ...

The researchers recorded activity in the hippocampus a brain region involved in learning and memory in 11 young and 11 old rats as they navigated mazes for food rewards. The rats’ hippocampal activity was recorded again when they slept. In the young rats, the sequence of neural activity recorded while they navigated the mazes was repeated while they slept. This was not the case in most of the older rats. The researchers also found that among both young and old rats, those with the best sleep replay performed the best in their age groups on spatial memory tasks. “This is the first study to suggest that an animal’s ability to perform a spatial memory task may be related to the brain’s ability to perform memory consolidation during sleep,” study author Carol Barnes said in a Society for Neuroscience news release. “These findings suggest that some of the memory impairment experienced during aging could involve a reduction in the automatic process of experience replay,” Michael Hasselmo, ...

The possible link was uncovered in an analysis of mold and health conditions in several cities in eastern and western Europe. And it could one day lead to the addition of emotional problems to the list of health woes caused by mold, the study authors said. But, the researchers cautioned, it’s still too soon to tell if exposure to mold is directly related to depression, or whether an already depressed person might simply relinquish control of their surroundings to the degree that mold may develop. “There is some preliminary evidence which suggests that high levels of exposure to mold may lead to depression,” said study lead author Edmond D. Shenassa, an assistant professor of community health at Brown University School of Medicine. “But it’s not a certainty,” he stressed. “We have found an association between mold and risk of depression, but we have more work to do to see if this is causal situation.” Molds are ubiquitous and toxic microscopic organisms called fungi that come in a varie...