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Vigorous physical activity amounting to as little as 14 minutes daily, three day per week would suffice for the protective effect to kick in, according to findings published online in the May 26 issue of PLoS ONE.

The apparent benefit reflects exercise’s effect on the length of tiny pieces of DNA known as telomeres. These telomeres operate, in effect, like molecular shoelace tips that hold everything together to keep genes and chromosomes stable.

Researchers believe that telomeres tend to shorten over time in reaction to stress, leading to a rising risk for heart disease, diabetes and even death. However, exercise, it seems, might slow down or even halt this shortening process.

“Telomere length is increasingly considered a biological marker of the accumulated wear-and-tear of living, integrating genetic influences, lifestyle behaviors and stress,” study co-author Elissa Epel, an associate professor in the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) department of psychiatry, said in a news release. “Even a moderate amount of vigorous exercise appears to provide a critical amount of protection for the telomeres.”

Appreciation for how telomeres function and how stress might affect their length stems from previous Nobel-prize winning work conducted by UCSF researchers. Prior studies have also suggested that exercise is in some way associated with longer telomere length.

The current effort, however, is the first to identify exercise as a potential “stress-buffer” that can actually stop telomeres from shortening in the first place.

To identify this link, Epel and her co-authors focused on 62 postmenopausal women, and asked them to log how many minutes of vigorous physical activity — namely activity that increased their heart rate or induced sweating — they had completed every day over three days. Perceptions of stress were also solicited, and the researchers took blood samples to determine telomere length.

The team found that those women who were experiencing high levels of stress but were deemed “active” did not have shorter telomeres, whereas similarly stressed participants deemed “inactive” did.

Going forward, the study authors said that more research incorporating larger patient samples need to be conducted to confirm the findings and arrive at definitive recommendations for how much exercise might be needed to derive such cellular protection.

SOURCE: PLoS ONE, news release.

The Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) report also found that people under age 21 who combine alcohol and illegal drugs are 27 percent more likely to visit hospital emergency rooms over the Memorial Day holiday weekend compared to an average day. On an average, there are 199 such visits per day during the holiday weekend vs. 156 visits on other days, the report said.

The DAWN report was developed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

“Underage drinking poses an enormous public health risk — approximately 5,000 people die each year from alcohol-related injuries connected to underage drinking,” SAMHSA administrator Pamela S. Hyde said in an agency news release. “Moreover, studies have shown that children who begin drinking before age 15 are six times more likely to develop alcohol problems than people who start drinking after they reach age 21.”

The SAMSHA report is based on statistics from 2008.

SOURCE: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, press release.

Earlier experiments have shown that cows on a diet of fresh grass produce milk with five times as much of an unsaturated fat called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than do cows fed processed grains. Studies in animals have suggested that CLAs can protect the heart, and help in weight loss.

Hannia Campos of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her colleagues found, in a study of 4,000 people, that people with the highest concentrations of CLAs — the top fifth among all participants — had a 36 percent lower risk of heart attack compared to those with the lowest concentrations.

Those findings held true even once the researchers took into account heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.

The new findings suggest that CLA offers heart-healthy benefits that could more than offset the harms of saturated fat in milk, Campos said.

“Because pasture grazing leads to higher CLA in milk, and it is the natural feed for cattle, it seems like more emphasis should be given to this type of feeding,” she told Reuters Health by email.

Dairy products in the U.S. come almost exclusively from feedlots, she added. And cow’s milk is the primary source of CLA. (Beef contains a small amount.)

Campos and her colleagues looked to Costa Rica for their study, where pasture grazing of dairy cows is still the norm. They identified nearly 2,000 Costa Ricans who had suffered a non-fatal heart attack, and another 2,000 who had not. Then they measured the amount of CLA in fat tissues to estimate each person’s intake.

Since CLA typically travels with a host of other fats, the researchers went a step further to tease apart its effects from those of its predominantly unhealthful companions, they report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The difference in risk attributed to CLA subsequently rose to 49 percent.

“Whole-fat milk and dairy products have gotten such a bad reputation in recent years due to their saturated fat and cholesterol contents, and now we find that CLA may be incredibly health-promoting,” Michelle McGuire, spokesperson for the journal’s publisher, the American Society for Nutrition, and associate professor at Washington State University, told Reuters Health in an email. “Whole milk is not the villain!”

Each year, approximately 1.5 million Americans will suffer a heart attack. A third will not survive.

The evidence may now be piling up: another paper out of Sweden in the same issue of the journal as the Costa Rican study also hints at heart attack protection through milk fat.

Further, the benefits of CLA may extend beyond the heart to the prevention of cancer and diabetes, suggests McGuire, pointing to results of other animal studies. “Milk is actually the only food ever ‘designed by nature’ to be fed to mammals,” she added. “We need to look to milk as the perfect food and learn everything we can from it.”

SOURCE: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajcn.2010.29524v1 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

So, should you put on the extra pounds with no worries? Not exactly, since being obese at a young age can still raise the risk of health problems later in life.

The researchers examined data on medication usage from a national survey from 1988-1994, 2003-2004 and 2005-2006. A total of 9,071 women and 8,880 men aged 25 to 70 were included.

The research team ruled out drugs used to treat mental illnesses or medications not associated with physical illnesses.

The study examined statistics about body-mass index, a number that measures whether a person’s weight and height are proportional.

“For college-age adults, this should help them realize that they don’t have to worry so much if they have a BMI of 27 or 28. Some young people with these BMIs feel like, ‘I’m going to have all these problems, I need to try 50 different diets.’ And what is all that stress and dieting doing to your body? Probably more damage than the extra 15 pounds is,” study author Brant Jarrett, a doctoral student in neuroscience at Ohio State University, said in a news release from the school.

A limitation of the study is that it determined health based only on the medications that people were taking, so some youth could have had undiagnosed medical problems or diseases.

The findings appear online in the International Journal of Obesity.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine suggests how to help prevent exercise-induced asthma:
Wear a scarf across your mouth and breathe through your nose when exercising outside in cold, dry air.
Avoid exercising when air pollution is high.
Avoid exercising near lawns that have just been mowed.
Always warm up at the beginning of your workout and cool down at the end.
Try sports that may not aggravate asthma as much as others, such as swimming or baseball.
Avoid sports that involve constant movement, such as basketball, running or soccer.

They also identified factors that control the growth of these stem cells, according to a report published online April 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Eventually, it may be possible to use these newly identified bone stromal cells to repair damaged or malformed bone, the researchers suggested. They pinpointed the new stem cells in adult mice.

“Identifying the location of bone stem cells and some of the genetic triggers that control their growth is an important step forward,” Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher, acting director of the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in an agency news release. “Now researchers can explore ways to harness these cells so that ultimately they might be used to repair damaged or malformed bone.”

Studies of the newly found stem cell population, he added, could yield insight into the formation of bone tumors. Much of the research was conducted at the institute.

SOURCE: U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, news release.

“This kind of evidence gives encouragement to go on and do additional testing, but it shouldn’t convince us that this test should be done routinely,” said Dr. Philip Greenland, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and a member of the team reporting the study in the April 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Computed tomography uses X-rays to get a detailed picture of heart structure. Its use in diagnosing existing heart disease has become controversial because X-ray exposure increases the risk of cancer. The new study of nearly 6,000 healthy Americans was done to see whether the technique could improve the predictive power of existing cardiac risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and obesity.

The study began in July 2000 and ran through May 2008. It used two models to predict the five-year risk of a heart attack, resuscitated cardiac arrest or death from coronary heart disease: the traditional risk factors; or those risk factors plus the coronary artery calcium score.

At 5.8 years, the participants had experienced 209 coronary heart disease problems and 122 “major events” — that is, heart attacks, deaths from coronary heart disease, or cardiac arrest followed by a resuscitation.

The second model, which used the regular risk factors plus the calcium scan, was able to predict an additional 23 percent of the participants who would go on to experience a harmful cardiovascular event. In addition, 13 percent the model reclassified as low-risk did not experience an adverse event.

But does that added predictive power make a difference in terms of saving lives and reducing unnecessary treatment?

“We didn’t look at that,” Greenland said. “What we can say here is that additional testing looks like it improves prediction. Whether it improves clinical outcome requires a different kind of study.”

The first steps toward such a study have been taken. “We are in discussions with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and have been encouraged to submit a proposal,” Greenland said.

Such a study might involve tens of thousands of participants and cost over $100 million, said Dr. Andrew J. Einstein, director of cardiac computed tomography research at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

The study would aim at determining whether more intensive treatment of traditional risk factors would improve survival of people classified as high-risk by the coronary artery calcium score. “No study has compared patients who had intensive preventive therapy with those who didn’t and see if it makes a difference in terms of the number of heart attacks people have,” Einstein said. “That study would be the ideal.”

Such a trial needn’t be as expensive as Einstein estimates, Greenland said. He puts the cost at “between $29 million and $50 million” and notes that the U.S. Institute of Medicine lists that kind of trial among the top 100 that should be done using funds provided for comparative effectiveness research in the newly approved health care program.

Cancer risk and cost are also parts of the equation. A well-controlled computed tomography scan gives about twice the radiation exposure as a mammogram, Greenland said. A new large-scale trial could show whether the added risk is justified by the number of lives saved, and the same is true of the cost, estimated to run between $200 and $600 per scan.

“Concern about radiation for any individual is minimal, and the cancer issue is 20 years down the line,” said Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Incidental findings of a scan, such as possible lung problems, can also help justify its widespread use, Ladapo said.

But the time for widespread use has not arrived, Greenland noted. The new study results “are not an endorsement for screening,” he said.

SOURCES: Philip Greenland, M.D., professor, preventive medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago; Andrew J. Einstein, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, clinical medicine, director, cardiac computed tomography research, Columbia University Medical Center, New York City; Joseph Ladapo, M.D., Ph.D., clinical fellow, medicine, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston;

“This diet emphasizes vegetables, fruits, fish, olive oil, lower meat consumption, and moderate wine and non-refined grain intake,” study author Dr. Christy Tangney, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said in a news release from the American Society for Nutrition.

Rather than asking people to avoid certain foods, the study found data that “adults over age 65 should look to include more olive oil, legumes, nuts, and seeds in their diet in order to improve their recall times and other cognitive skills, such as identifying symbols and numbers,” Tangney said.

The study included 4,000 adults aged 65 and older who were given a series of tests to examine their cognitive (or thinking) skills every three years over a 15-year period. Those who scored highest in following a Mediterranean diet were least likely to suffer cognitive decline, the study authors found.

“We [also] want older adults to remember that physical activity is an important part of maintaining cognitive skills,” Tangney added.

The findings were slated to be presented Monday at the Experimental Biology 2010 meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

SOURCE: American Society for Nutrition, news release.

“Our study showed there is a novel genetic mutation through which some type 2 diabetic people could be vulnerable to the gradual onset of this disease,” study senior author Vann Bennett, a professor in the departments of cell biology, biochemistry and neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center, said in a news release from the school.

He said this gradual development of diabetes “happens through what is called the parasympathetic nervous system, not directly through eating food. We think this parasympathetic response is potentially very important in type 2 diabetes.”

When people eat or smell food, their bodies begins to secrete insulin. A molecule called ankyrin B plays an important role in insulin response.

Experiments with mice lacking the molecule showed that ankyrin B deficiency impairs the parasympathetic chain of events that lead to insulin secretion. This has a measurable effect on blood sugar levels.

Further investigation revealed that one type of mutation in ankyrin B was associated with type 2 diabetes in Hispanics and whites.

The study was published online in the journal Science Signaling.