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The benefits of staying active as we age are striking. In addition to keeping the body strong, regular exercise can reduce the risk of heart disease, blood pressure, stroke, and some cancers, experts say. It can even improve cognitive function.

But if keeping the body moving is so good for us, why do so many adults who played sports when they were young stop doing so? The reasons, according to a new study, include a lack of time, interest, or access, in addition to health issues. The study also found a clear gender and income gap.

A panel of experts gathered at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) on Thursday to discuss the findings and explore ways to keep adults in the game.

The new poll, conducted by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard Chan School, interviewed 2,506 adults over the age of 18. It found that the majority of those who had played sports when they were younger no longer did, with a significant drop-off coming after age 26. (The poll did find that about half of those surveyed said they exercised regularly, including by walking or weightlifting.)

The study revealed that while 40 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds, and 41 percent of 22- to 25-year-olds, play sports, only 26 percent of 26- to 49-year-olds do so, and just 20 percent of adults 50 and over.

Somewhat surprisingly, their own lack of participation did little to quell parents’ enthusiasm for their children’s engagement with sports. In the poll, 89 percent of parents with a middle or high school-aged child said their child benefitted greatly from playing sports, which improves mental and physical health, discipline, dedication, and social skills.

“The poll sums up the question: Is there some way to bridge a gap between the enthusiasm of the power of [sports] for health and other reasons for children, [and getting adults] to carry on after age 26?” said Robert Blendon, the Richard L. Menschel Professor at HSPH and a lead author on the report.

Blendon said about half of the adults surveyed indicated they no longer play sports because of a health problem, a lack of interest, or inconvenience. “So we’ve switched from all the advantages [for] kids,” said Blendon, “to all the disadvantages for me.”

Source: Harvard Gazette

Fish and chips are seen in a sea front cafe in Blackpool, northern England September 8, 2013. REUTERS/Phil Noble

Home cooking is still the best way to control the calories, fat, sugar and other nutrients that families consume, a new U.S. study suggests.

Researchers found that eating food from restaurants – whether from fast food places, or better establishments – led to increases in calories, fat and sodium compared to meals made at home.

Public health interventions targeting dining-out behavior in general, rather than just fast food, may be warranted to improve the way Americans’ eat, says the study’s author.

Ruopeng An, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, noted that people have previously equated fast food with junk food.

“But, people don’t know much about the food provided by full-service restaurants and if it is better or healthier compared to fast food or compared to food prepared and consumed at home,” An told Reuters Health.

For his study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, An used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which regularly gathers health and dietary information from a representative sample of the U.S. population.

More than 18,000 adults answered survey questions about what they’d eaten over a two-day period. About a third of participants reported eating fast food on one or both days, and one quarter reported eating full-service restaurant food on at least one day.

Compared to participants who ate food prepared at home, those who visited fast food restaurants consumed an average of 190 more calories per day, 11 grams more fat, 3.5 g more saturated fat, 10 mg extra cholesterol and 300 mg additional sodium.

Source: Reuters

There is huge confusion over the labels on sun creams, and manufacturers should all use the same rating system, says the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

A survey of 2,000 UK adults found one in five was unaware that the SPF rating does not mean protection against all sun damage – only that from UVB rays.

Protection against UVA rays has its own separate rating system.

Ultraviolet A rays cause skin-ageing and wrinkles. Both UVB and UVA rays from the sun can cause skin cancer.

The protection provided by sun creams and lotions against UVB rays, which cause sunburn, is denoted by the SPF or factor on the bottle.

But there are also ultraviolet A rays (UVA) to consider too, which penetrate the skin more deeply, causing it to age – but only one in three checked the UVA star rating when buying sunscreen, the survey found.

When buying a sunscreen, you should look for the level of UVA protection (denoted by a UVA star rating or the letters UVA inside a circle) and UVB protection (denoted by the SPF).

The UVA star rating ranges from zero to five and indicates the percentage of UVA radiation absorbed by the sunscreen in comparison to UVB.

Prof Jayne Lawrence, chief scientist for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, said: “Clearly many consumers do not realize the SPF rating applies only to the amount of protection offered against UVB rays, not UVA rays – both of which can damage the skin and cause skin cancer.

“People should not have to pick their way through complicated dual ratings information to understand how sunscreen works and the amount of protection it potentially provides.”

Source: BBC

Food expiration dates are generally guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules.

Obviously, a container of milk won’t sour at precisely 12:01 a.m. on the stamped date. But the dates on labels can be tricky.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t regulate expiration dates except on baby formula. Many dates are there for the benefit of the store, not the consumer.

Kristin Kirkpatrick, the manager of nutrition services at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute, offers a quick guide to label language:

– A “sell by” date indicates how long a store should display a product on its shelves. Foods can still be tasty and are safe for several days longer if stored properly.

– A “use by” or “best if used by” date comes from the manufacturer and refers to taste and texture, not safety.

– An “expiration” date is the only packaging date related to food safety. If this date has passed, throw the food out.

Unfortunately, 30 percent to 40 percent of all harvested food in this country ends up wasted, much of it by consumers who waited too long to eat it, or worried it had gone bad, according to a report last month in PLOS One.

Adding to the confusion: Foods spoil at different rates, depending on their type and growing conditions, as well as how they were harvested, transported and distributed, and how they have been stored after being purchased, said Robert B. Gravani, a professor of food science at Cornell University.

Looking closely at food isn’t a good way to check for spoilage, Dr. Gravani said, because bacteria are largely invisible.

Source: New York Times

With summer sun shining brightly across the United States (at least on most days), there is no better time to review the latest sobering findings on the damage that ultraviolet radiation can inflict on one’s skin and then take steps to prevent it.

A British research team reported in May in the journal Science that a quarter or more of cells in the skin of middle-aged people have suffered sun-induced DNA damage. Although the cells were outwardly normal, the mutations that occurred could be the first stages of cancer.

The researchers, led by Dr. Peter J. Campbell, a cancer geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England, examined the eyelid skin of four middle-aged adults — three were Western European and one was of South Asian descent — and found that hundreds of ostensibly normal cells had mutations linked to cancer, a number “way higher than we’d expect,” Dr. Campbell said. Clusters of these mutant cells, called clones, appeared in every 0.1 square inch of skin, with thousands of DNA mutations in each cell.

Although it is not known if the same rate of mutations occurs in sun-exposed skin elsewhere on the body, or in people of different ethnic backgrounds, or even how many of the mutations would progress to cancer, it is not a finding to dismiss lightly.

Douglas E. Brash, a biophysicist at Yale University School of Medicine who has studied ultraviolet damage to cells for more than 40 years and wrote a commentary on the British study, described the new findings as “a canary in a coal mine” and a warning to take the effects of ultraviolet radiation, whether from sunlight or tanning beds, more seriously.

Source: New York Times

A growing stack of medical research—including Gottesman’s recent study—suggests that high blood pressure raises risk for thinking problems, early brain aging, and even Alzheimer’s disease. These three steps may help reduce risk:

Know your number. “Have your blood pressure checked regularly,” Gottesman says. “People tend to ignore high blood pressure, particularly when they are younger, because it has no symptoms that you can feel or see. But it’s important to pay attention to it.”

Take care of higher-than-normal blood pressure right away. Talk with your doctor about what blood pressure is appropriate for you. If yours is higher than recommended, your doctor will advise you take lifestyle steps such as weight loss, regular exercise, and a lower-sodium diet that features plenty of fruits and vegetables to bring it down to a healthier level. Your doctor may also prescribe drugs that lower blood pressure.

If your doctor prescribes medications for your blood pressure, take as directed. Nearly half of all people with high blood pressure don’t have it under control, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One big reason: skipping medication or not taking it as directed.

It’s long been known that keeping your blood pressure within a healthy range helps protect against heart attack and stroke. Now a recent study from Johns Hopkins University has uncovered a new risk worth sidestepping: People with high blood pressure at midlife had greater decline in key thinking skills late in life than those with normal blood pressure readings.

Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine

New research shows that 50 chemicals people are exposed to daily, all of which are considered non-carcinogenic, may cause cancer when combined.

The series of studies which comprise the research, worked on by 174 scientists in 28 countries, considered links between 85 common chemicals thought not to cause cancer. Fifty were found to interact at ordinary environmental exposure levels to support cancer-related mechanisms. 

“This research backs up the idea that chemicals not considered harmful by themselves are combining and accumulating in our bodies to trigger cancer and might lie behind the global cancer epidemic we are witnessing,” said Dr. Hemad Yasaei, a cancer biologist at Brunel University London, in a press release. “We urgently need to focus more resources to research the effect of low dose exposure to mixtures of chemicals in the food we eat, air we breathe and water we drink.”

The Nova Scotia-based Getting To Know Cancer put together the task force of scientists for the first-of-its-kind look at the effects of combinations of common chemicals thought not to cause cancer. The organization gathered scientists two years ago as part of the Halifax Project, which created task forces of scientists researching the complexities of cancer and its causes.

William Goodson III, a senior scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center, said the results of the studies show not only that chemicals safe on their own are combining in the air to form mixtures that can cause cancer, but that the way chemicals are tested for safety needs to be changed.

“The way we’ve been testing chemicals — one at a time — is really quite out of date,” Goodson said. “Every day we are exposed to an environmental ‘chemical soup,’ so we need testing that evaluates the effects of our ongoing exposure to these chemical mixtures.”

Source: UPI

Men who slept badly were twice as likely to suffer a heart attack and up to four times as likely to have a stroke compared with those who slept well, according to a Russian study presented at EuroHeartCare.

“Sleep disorders are very closely related to the presence of cardiovascular diseases. However, until now there has not been a population based cohort study examining the impact of sleep disorders on the development of a heart attack or stroke,” lead investigator Valery Gafarov, MD, PhD, professor of cardiology at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in Novosibirsk, said in a press release.

The study included 657 men ages 25 to 64 with no history of cardiovascular disease or diabetes. They were enrolled in 1994 as part of the World Health Organization’s MONICA (multinational monitoring of trends and determinants in cardiovascular disease) project.

Sleep quality was assessed at baseline with the MONICA-psychosocial interview sleep disturbances scale. Incidence of new cases of myocardial infarction (MI) and stroke were determined at 5 years, 10 years, and 14 years of follow-up. The investigators used Cox proportional regression models to estimate hazard ratios.

Compared with men who rated their sleep as “good,” those who rated it “poor” or “very bad” had more than twice the risk of experiencing MI at 5 years.

This increased risk for MI was also seen at 10 years and at 14 years of follow-up.

Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the men experiencing their first MI described their sleep as “poor” or “very bad.”

Compared with men who rated their sleep as “good,” those who rated it “poor” or “very bad” had nearly quadruple the risk of stroke at 5 years.

Source: Medpage Today

Running marathons or completing other ultra-endurance events is not necessarily bad for the heart, although it could be. But first, a clarification: By standard definitions of exercise intensity, running or jogging is moderate or even vigorous exercise. During such exertion, the heart works hard to supply blood to working muscles and over time becomes stronger and somewhat larger.

Research has been unclear on whether these changes can become harmful. Multiple studies have shown that immediately after running a marathon, most racers show increased levels of a protein associated with cardiac damage. But those levels soon return to normal, with no lingering damage.

Years of prolonged and repeated endurance training and racing, however, might have more pronounced, lasting and worrisome effects. A 2011 study of aging former Olympic runners and rowers from Britain, for instance, found that compared with healthy but unathletic men of the same age, the retired Olympians were disproportionately more likely to have scarring within their heart muscles. Similarly, in a 2013 study, people who had competed multiple times in a grueling, 56-mile cross-country ski race in Sweden had a much-higher-than-normal risk of developing heart arrhythmia within five years.

But these studies, although disquieting, “do not mean that it has suddenly become dangerous to exercise,” said Kasper Andersen, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who led the study of skiers. In fact, an earlier study from his lab found that, over all, participants in the ski race had a below-average risk of premature death.

Even the Olympians with heart scarring seemed largely unaffected. They were running and competing well into their 60s and 70s, that study found. Conceivably, the researchers wrote, the Olympians’ cardiac changes, which would be undesirable in most people, were normal in lifelong endurance athletes.

At this point, scientists just do not know precisely how years of endurance training might affect the heart.

So the best advice for those who enjoy endurance training is “carry on as usual,” Dr. Andersen said. “But remember to listen to your body and seek a doctor if you experience any symptoms from the heart.”

Source: New York Times

The Presidential Healthcare Center uses cardiac imaging to screen for “Athletic Heart Syndrome”

Statin use is associated with a significant reduction in cancer mortality, conclude two separate studies, one in women, and the other in men. Both were presented here at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2015 Annual Meeting.

Specifically, statin use was associated with a 22% reduction in deaths from various cancer types in women and a 55% reduction in deaths from bone/connective tissue cancers. The study in men looked at statin use together with the antidiabetes medication metformin and found a 40% reduction in prostate cancer mortality, with the effect more pronounced in men with obesity/metabolic syndrome.

As for how such an effect is achieved, the researchers speculate that statins interfere with cell growth and metastasis by blocking cholesterol production, thereby affecting molecular pathways and the inflammatory response.

The results in women were presented by Ange Wang, BSE, from Stanford University School of Medicine, in California.

Dr. Wang and colleagues examined data from the Women’s Health Initiative, a 15-year research program involving postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years who were enrolled between 1993 and 1998 at 40 centers in the United States.

They determined the association between patients’ never having used statins, current statin use, and past statin use, as well as the incidence and number of deaths from cancer among 146,326 women. The median follow-up period was 14.6 years.

The researchers took into account a number of potential confounding factors, including age, race/ethnicity, education, smoking, body mass index, physical activity, family history of cancer, and current healthcare provider.

Among the participants, there were 23,067 cases of incident cancer for which complete follow-up data were available. There were 7,411 all-cause deaths, including 5,837 deaths from cancer, 613 cardiovascular deaths, and 961 deaths from other causes. In all, 3,152 cancer deaths were included in the analysis, of which 708 were among current statin users and 2443 among patients who had never used statins.

Source: Medscape