Until the server access and speed problems are fixed it seems I’m forced to temporarily (?) switch back to my old blogger blog.

By Alison McCook Thu Apr 21, 2:34 PM ET

During times of stress, we’re less able to hold ourselves back from unhealthy temptations, new study findings indicate.

Australian researchers found that during exam periods, students smoked more cigarettes, drank more high-caffeine drinks, ate less healthy foods, kept up with fewer household chores, neglected commitments, and monitored spending less.

“The results tell us that during periods of high stress - such as examination periods for students - we may see a relapse in behaviors that we had successfully controlled in the past, such as smoking,” lead author Megan Oaten of Macquarie University in Sydney told Reuters Health.

“These findings have practical importance because they illustrate that at times of stress we are particularly vulnerable to breakdowns in self-control,” she added. “Therefore, we should not ask too much of ourselves during such a period.”

Oaten pointed out that handling stress itself takes self-control. “So, the work required to cope with stress consumes a lot of our self-control strength, and leaves us less able to control our behavior,” Oaten said.

During the study, Oaten and her co-author, Ken Cheng, asked 57 students about their typical self-control, then re-interviewed them 4 weeks later, when half were coping with a high-stress exam period.

The researchers found that, during exams, students were less likely to control their behaviors, reporting that they ate more junk food, exercised less, and left more dishes in the sink. They also neglected to shave, brush and floss their teeth, wash their hair, change their clothes and do laundry.

Stressed out students also smoked an average of 7 additional cigarettes each day, and drank 7 extra cups of caffeinated drinks each week.

In contrast, students not coping with exams had no increase in self-indulgent behaviors, suggesting their self-control was as strong as ever, the authors report in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

These findings suggest that people should be extra careful during times of stress, Oaten noted. “It appears that people can only control so many behaviors at any one time, and should therefore avoid taking on too much at once, particularly during periods of stress.”

Developing stress management skills may also ward off lapses, by leaving more self-control reserves available to fend off the urge to overeat and smoke, she said.

SOURCE: Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, March 2005.

Studies Also Tout Vitamin D for Lung Cancer, Calcium for Colon Cancer

By Charlene Laino
WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Michael Smith, MD
on Monday, April 18, 2005

April 18, 2005 (Anaheim, Calif.) — Certain cholesterol-lowering drugs may help prevent prostate cancer, according to evidence presented at a meeting of cancer experts, while other studies showed the benefits of nutrients to fight lung and colon cancers.

Statins Cut Prostate Cancer Risk

In the latest research to show that the popular cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins are good for more than the heart,statins are good for more than the heart, a 10-year study of more than 30,000 men shows that statins may slash the risk of advanced prostate cancer in half.

“The results are promising,” says Elizabeth Platz, ScD, MPH, a cancer epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “The longer the men took the statins, the lower the risk of advanced prostate cancer.”

Statin use did not appear to lower the chance a man would develop early cancer that was still confined to the prostate itself, she tells WebMD.

Statins used to treat high cholesterol include Crestor, Lipitor, Pravachol, and Zocor.

Advanced Prostate Cancer Falls 50%

The new study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, included more than 34,000 men who were free of prostate cancer in 1990.

Every two years, the men were asked whether they took cholesterol-lowering drugs — statins or other drugs — and if they had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “If they said they had cancer, we confirmed the diagnosis,” Platz says.

By 2000, 2,074 men had developed prostate cancer. Of these, 283 cases were advanced prostate cancer, with many of them having already spread outside the prostate.

Compared with men who didn’t take cholesterol-lowering drugs, those who did take them had nearly one-half the risk of developing advanced prostate cancer. Risk decreased with increasing duration of use, Platz notes.

So how did she know that statins — not other cholesterol-lowering drugs — were responsible for the protective effects?

“We can’t rule anything out,” Platz says. “But on the 2000 questionnaire, we specifically asked about statins and found that 90% of men on a cholesterol-lowering drug were on a statin.”

Plus, some laboratory and animal studies hint of a biological rationale for using the drugs, she says. For example, statins may promote cancer cell death.

Statins Ready for Prime Time?

Smaller studies have shown that statin use is associated with a reduced risk of a variety of cancers, including that of the prostate, but this is the first time the researchers tracked medication use before the study participants developed cancer, Platz says.

The better design of the study is what makes the observation so exciting, says Andrew J. Dannenberg, MD, director of cancer prevention at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell in New York City.

“This study stands apart from previous work that suggested a protective effect,” he tells WebMD. “It was really well done. It appears that statin use is associated with a better prognosis.”

But until the findings are confirmed in other large, well-designed studies, both Platz and Dannenberg caution that it’s too soon to recommend that men at high risk for prostate cancerhigh risk for prostate cancer start taking statins for their antitumor properties.

Vitamin D for Lung Cancer

Another study revealed that patients diagnosed with early lung cancer may want to reach for vitamin D supplements and get out in the sun. The body produces vitamin D when the skin is exposed to the sun.

The preliminary study looked at 450 men and women with early stage non-small-cell lung cancer. Researchers were looking at the potential effects of vitamin D in the diet and supplements, as well as from sun exposure. They compared people with high vitamin D intake who had surgery in the summer months to those with low vitamin D intake who had wintertime operations.

The high-vitamin D group was more than twice as likely to be alive five years later.

While milk and fish are rich in vitamin D, it’s nearly impossible to get the high amounts needed for the protective effects just from food — the equivalent of about 600 IU a day, says researcher Wei Zhou, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Calcium for Colon Cancer

Calcium supplements have been linked to a lower risk of colon cancer.lower risk of colon cancer. Now researchers have found that long-term use of calcium supplements protects against the development of potentially precancerous colon polyps for years after you stop taking them.

Dartmouth researchers followed people at high risk for colon polyps who had been randomly assigned to take either 1,200 milligrams of calcium supplements for four years or a placebo.

During the first five years after they stopped taking the supplements, those who had taken calcium during the study were still about one-third less likely to develop colon polyps than those on a placebo.

But after five years, the beneficial effects started to taper off and nearly disappeared by 10 years later, says John Baron, MD.

SOURCES: 96th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, Anaheim, Calif., April 16-20, 2005. Elizabeth Platz, ScD, MPH, professor of epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore. Andrew J. Dannenberg, MD, director, cancer prevention, New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell, New York City. Wei Zhou, PhD, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston. John Baron, MD, professor of medicine, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, N.H.

21 Apr 2005

After a year’s oral administration of green tea catechins (GTCs), only one man in a group of 32 at high risk for prostate cancer developed the disease, compared to nine out of 30 in a control, according to a team of Italian researchers from the University of Parma and University of Modena and Reggio Emilia led by Saverio Bettuzzi, Ph.D.

Their results were reported here today at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

“Numerous earlier studies, including ours, have demonstrated that green tea catechins, or pure EGCG (a major component of GTCs), inhibited cancer cell growth in laboratory models,” Bettuzzi explained. “We wanted to conduct a clinical trial to find out whether catechins could prevent cancer in men. The answer clearly is yes.”

Earlier research demonstrated primarily that green tea catechins were safe for use in humans. Bettuzzi and his colleagues had found that EGCG targets prostate cancer cells specifically for death, without damaging the benign controls. They identified Clusterin, the most important gene involved in apoptosis, or programmed cell death in the prostate, as a possible mediator of catechins action. “EGCG induced death in cancer cells, not normal cells, inducing Clusterin expression” said Bettuzzi.

To gauge susceptibility for prostate cancer among their research subjects, the team of Italian scientists recruited men with high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia - premalignant lesions that presage invasive prostate cancer within one year in nearly a third of cases and for which no treatment was given.

Eligible men were between 45 and 75 years of age. Vegetarians and men consuming green tea or derived products, or those taking anti-oxidants or following anti-androgenic therapy were excluded.

Of the 62 volunteers, 32 received three tablets per day of 200 mg each GTCs; the remainder were given a placebo. Follow-up biopsies were administered after six months and again at one year. Only one case of prostate cancer was diagnosed among those receiving 600 mg daily of GTCs, while nine cases were found in the untreated group. The 30 percent incidence rate among controls is consistent with previous findings, as was the absence of significant side effects or adverse reactions.

The interest in green tea catechins and other polyphenols - antioxidants found in many plants that give some flowers, fruits and vegetables their coloring - derives from traditional Chinese medicine, and the observation of lower cancer rates among Asian populations.

Bettuzzi observed that the Mediterranean diet is rich in vegetables, and lower rates of prostate cancer are found in that region, as well.

The 600 mg-per-day dosage of caffeine-free, total catechins (50 percent of which is EGCG) given to participants in the Italian study is one or two times the amount of green tea consumed daily in China, where ten to 20 cups a day is normal.

“We still don’t know enough about the biological processes leading to prostate cancer,” Bettuzzi noted. “The only thing we know for sure is that prostate cancer is diffuse, related to age and more prevalent in the West. Thus, prevention could be the best way to fight it. Although our follow-up will continue for up to five years, a larger, confirmatory study is needed.”

Even so, Bettuzzi hints at the exciting prospect of using green tea catechins as a prophylactic against prostate cancer in men believed to be at higher risk, such as the elderly, African-Americans, and those with a family history of prostate cancer.

Broccoli and red chili peppers may help fight cancer by slowing the growth of cancerous tumor cells, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

They may be especially helpful in hard-to-treat cancers such as pancreatic and ovarian cancer, the team at the University of Pittsburgh said.

“In our studies, we decided to look at two particular cancers — ovarian and pancreatic — with low survival rates, to ascertain the contribution of diet and nutrition to the development of these cancers,” said Sanjay Srivastava, who led the study.

“We discovered that red chili pepper and broccoli appear to be effective inhibitors of the cancer process.”

Speaking to a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Anaheim, California, Srivastava said he and colleagues tested capsaicin, which makes peppers hot, against pancreatic cancer cells in a lab dish.

The compound caused the cancer cells to self-destruct in a process called apoptosis, while not affecting normal pancreatic cells.

“Our results demonstrate that capsaicin is a potent anticancer agent, induces apoptosis in cancer cells and produces no significant damage to normal pancreatic cells, indicating its potential use as a novel chemotherapeutic agent for pancreatic cancer,” Srivastava said.

His team also examined phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC), a constituent of cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, on ovarian cancer cells.

PEITC interfered with a protein called epidermal growth factor receptor, which is involved in the growth of ovarian and other cancerous tumors.

The studies may help explain why people who eat large amounts of fruits and vegetables have a lower risk of cancer, Srivastava said.

19 Apr 2005

Scientists have identified good bacteria already living in some humans that target and trap HIV and may protect against infection. They report their findings today at the 2005 American Society for Microbiology Beneficial Microbes Conference.

“I believe every life form has its natural enemy, and HIV should not be the exception,” says Dr. Lin Tao, Associate Professor of the Department of Oral Biology, College of Dentistry, University of Illinois at Chicago. “If we can find its natural enemy, we can control the spread of HIV naturally and cost-effectively, just as we use cats to control mice.”

The bacteria are strains of lactobacillus, commonly found colonizing the oral and vaginal cavities of humans. They do not cause disease. They target HIV because the virus is coated with the sugar mannose, which they use as a food source.

“Different bacteria have different sugar preferences,” says Tao. “To block HIV, however, we needed to find bacteria that prefer the unusual sugar mannose and thus can capture it.”

To identify bacteria that target mannose, Tao and his colleagues isolated oral and vaginal lactobacilli from healthy humans and tested the ability of different strains to bind to baker’s yeast, another microorganism coated with mannose-rich sugars. They found a small group of lactobacilli that bound to mannose and further testing against HIV revealed two strains that specifically trapped the virus and blocked infection.

Due to high rates of mutation, repeated attempts at developing a vaccine to protect against HIV have failed. Inoculating the major mucosal surfaces where HIV transmission occurs with the HIV-capturing lactobacilli may provide a safe and cost-efficient method for preventing the spread of HIV, says Tao.

“This method can protect infants against HIV in breast milk and women against HIV upon sexual contact unobtrusively and inconspicuously via fermented foods or feminine products,” says Tao. “If the method can be successfully developed and applied, the global spread of HIV can be controlled rapidly, effectively and safely.”

“The major roadblock in the development of this technology is the lack of financial support. Drug companies and venture capitalists are not interested because the beneficiary populations are infants and women in poor countries,” says Tao. He is currently seeking sponsorship from charities or philanthropists to develop this technology.

Tao’s colleagues include Sylvia Pavlova, Sarah Carlson, Michael Caffrey, and Amy Jacobs at UIC as well as Gregory Spear and Joshua Anzinger at Rush University, Chicago. The research was supported in part by AmFAR/Concerned Parents for AIDS Research, the National Institutes of Health (NIAID, NIDCR), and the International Association for Dental Research/GlaxoSmithKline Innovation in Oral Care Award.

The American Society for Microbiology, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is the largest single life science association, with 42,000 members worldwide. Its members work in educational, research, industrial, and government settings on issues such as the environment, the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, laboratory and diagnostic medicine, and food and water safety. The ASM’s mission is to gain a better understanding of basic life processes and to promote the application of this knowledge for improved health and economic and environmental well-being.

Contact: Carrie Patterson
American Society for Microbiology
http://www.asm.org

19 Apr 2005

Add another line to the list of benefits from drinking tea: New research in animals suggests that tea may be a simple, inexpensive means of preventing diabetes and its ensuing complications, including cataracts. The report, scheduled to appear in the May 4 print issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, was published March 31 on the journal’s Web site. ACS is the world’s largest scientific society.

Researchers fed green and black tea to diabetic rats for three months and then monitored the chemical composition of the rats’ blood and eye lenses. At levels that would be equivalent to less than five cups of tea per day for a human, both teas significantly inhibited cataract formation relative to a control group which did not get tea, they say. The researchers found that both teas decreased glucose levels, which in turn affects other biochemical pathways that accelerate diabetic complications such as cataracts.

“Most people, scientists included, believe that green tea has more health benefits than black tea,” says Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a chemist at the University of Scranton (Penn.) and lead author of the paper. In combination with Vinson’s earlier research showing that green tea and black tea equally inhibit atherosclerosis - a major risk factor for heart disease - the findings suggest that both drinks could play a part in curbing two of the most widespread maladies in the United States today.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization, chartered by the U.S. Congress, with a multidisciplinary membership of more than 158,000 chemists and chemical engineers. It publishes numerous scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

Contact: Michael Bernstein
American Chemical Society
http://www.acs.org

By Karen Collins, MS, RD, CDN - Recent research shows that chocolate can provide natural health-promoting substances called flavonoids.

HealthAmerican Institute for Cancer Research - infoZine - Since flavonoids seem to help prevent heart disease and cancer, the idea of eating chocolate sounds like a tempting and delicious way to better your health. The complete message is, however, that although chocolate might be preferable to other treats, it is no substitute for vegetables and fruits, which also contain flavonoids.

The flavonoids in chocolate that laboratory studies demonstrate to have powerful antioxidant effects are called flavanols and procyanidins. These two compounds come from the flavonoid “family” that includes resveratrol, found in grape juice, and EGCG, found in green tea. When people consume these substances in chocolate and cocoa, the antioxidant status of their blood increases. This rise in antioxidant levels helps protect us from damage to the heart and blood vessels, while it also guards our DNA from damage that can lead to cancer. In addition, the flavanols and procyanidins in chocolate improve the function and flow of blood vessels and help control inflammation.

The antioxidants in chocolate have generated a lot of interest because studies show that these compounds are more powerful antioxidants than EGCG in tea, which is a strong antioxidant. One study that compared the total antioxidant activity in single servings of cocoa, green tea, black tea and red wine scored cocoa markedly higher than the rest.

Yet the flavonoid content of cocoa and chocolate is highly variable. The more cocoa in a chocolate product, the higher the antioxidant flavonoid content is. Because dark chocolate is more concentrated in cocoa content, it is higher in flavonoids than milk chocolate. For this reason, dark chocolate is used in research studies. White chocolate has no cocoa content.

A cup of hot or cold cocoa may sound like a health drink loaded with antioxidants, but almost all cocoa drink mixes contain cocoa treated with alkali (also called Dutch cocoa) to produce a darker, richer taste. Unfortunately, this process drastically reduces flavonoid content. Unless you find a chocolate mix made with untreated cocoa, start with plain cocoa (not Dutch) and add your own sweetener and milk to make a flavonoid-rich cup.

Surprisingly, the fat content of chocolate is not a reason to avoid it. Technically, chocolate contains saturated fat, but the particular type of saturated fat - stearic acid - is unique because it does not raise blood cholesterol. Studies show that neither dark or milk chocolate is a cholesterol concern in moderate amounts. But keep in mind that other ingredients added to some chocolate candies can change their nutrition impact.

But one of the reasons you shouldn’t rely on chocolate for antioxidants, in the place of vegetables and fruits, is the calorie load. A small piece of dark chocolate has only 50 calories, but most candy bars contain at least 200. In comparison, a serving of vegetables and fruits contains a generous amount of health-promoting phytochemicals and only 25 to 80 calories. An antioxidant-rich serving of green tea has no calories at all.

Besides, vegetables and fruits have more than flavonoids. They provide vitamins, minerals like magnesium and potassium, and phytochemicals that protect our health in other ways. Some, for example, block the activation of carcinogens, while others interfere with the life cycle of cancer cells and promote their destruction.

Recent research on the flavonoids in chocolate implies that we can enjoy limited amounts of this sweet treat without guilt. But this news shouldn’t discourage us from eating a mostly plant-based diet loaded with vegetables and fruits.

By LIBBY QUAID, Associated Press Writer 58 minutes ago

Concerned about steadily expanding waistlines, the government flipped the food pyramid on its side, adding a staircase for exercise and giving consumers 12 individually-tailored models for improving their eating habits.

Inside the pyramid released Tuesday, rainbow-colored bands representing different food groups run vertically from the tip to the base. The old single, triangle-shaped pyramid had a horizontal presentation of food categories that many found confusing.

Exercise is key to the new system. Fitness expert Denise Austin delivered a pep talk about the recommended 30 minutes of physical activity, represented on the new pyramids by the figure of a person climbing steps toward the tip. Also in store are new Internet tools to help follow the guidelines.

The new guide, dubbed “MyPyramid,” encourages Americans to customize their diet and exercise regime along 12 models geared to specific calorie needs and levels of physical activity.

Food groups are represented by six different colors: Orange for grains, green for vegetables, red for fruits, yellow for oils, blue for milk products and purple for meats and beans. The bands are wider for grains, vegetables, milk products and fruits, because people should eat more of them.

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns called the new guide “a system of information to help consumers understand how to put nutrition recommendations into action.”

People have steadily grown fatter since the food pyramid debuted in 1992. A report last month in The
New England Journal of Medicine contended that obesity, particularly in children, was shaving four to nine months off the average life expectancy.

Johanns said the 1992 pyramid had “become quite familiar, but few Americans follow the recommendations.” He said that knowledge about nutrition and food consumption patterns has grown significantly in the past dozen years and is reflected in the new food guidance symbols.

“If we don’t change these trends, our children may be the first generation that cannot look forward to a longer life span than their parents,” said Eric Bost, the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for food, nutrition and consumer services.

Food companies announced Tuesday they will distribute posters and guides for teachers and parents next fall aimed at reaching 4 million students. Materials for students to take home will be in both English and Spanish and will include math, nutrition and science activities.

One big change is intended to help people control their portion sizes. The old pyramid explained its advice in “serving” sizes, but now, to make its advice more understandable, the government will switch to cups, ounces and other household measures.

The switch was recommended in a 70-page booklet, “Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005,” that was developed by a panel of scientists and doctors and released in January. As the basis for revising the pyramid, the guidelines emphasize choosing good carbohydrates over bad ones; for example, choosing bread made from whole-grain flour instead of white flour.

They also recommend eating 3 ounces of whole-grain foods a day; eating 2 cups of fruit and 2 1/2 cups of vegetables a day; and drinking 3 cups of fat-free or lowfat milk a day.

Besides the suggested 30 minutes of daily exercise to reduce the risk of chronic disease, the government also advises even more exercise to prevent weight gain or maintain weight loss.

In all, there were 23 general recommendations and 18 suggestions for older people, children and other special populations.

That’s too much to cram into a symbol that is supposed to be clipped out and stuck to the refrigerator, said Eric Hentges, director of the Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.

The Agriculture Department will offer Web pages that let people appraise their diet and exercise habits. Such a tool has already been available through the agency’s Web site; the Interactive Healthy Eating Index has a notice on its home page that it will soon be updated.

Even if the symbol and online tools don’t motivate people to change their habits, they’ll still have some healthier choices. Food companies have been removing trans fats from their products and adding whole grains because of the government guidance.

“If you get the industry involved and make them feel that they’re doing a good thing and that they’re getting credit for doing a good thing, they’ll do it. They’ll change their product,” said K. Dun Gifford, president of Oldways Preservation Trust, a Boston-based think tank that specializes in food issues.

Critics have raised questions about the public relations agency hired to help create the new version of the pyramid. The firm, Porter Novelli, has food companies as clients, but both Agriculture Department and Porter Novelli officials have said the firm’s industry work is handled separately and there would be no conflict of interest.

Hentges said his staff of scientists, economists and nutritionists isn’t equipped to promote its new approach. If it’s not marketed effectively, he said, “then we’re not going to be able to get this behavior change or improve anything for Americans.”

___

On the Net:

Agriculture Department: http://www.usda.gov

By PETER D. KRAMER

Shortly after the publication of my book ‘’Listening to Prozac,'’ 12 years ago, I became immersed in depression. Not my own. I was contented enough in the slog through midlife. But mood disorder surrounded me, in my contacts with patients and readers. To my mind, my book was never really about depression. Taking the new antidepressants, some of my patients said they found themselves more confident and decisive. I used these claims as a jumping-off point for speculation: what if future medications had the potential to modify personality traits in people who had never experienced mood disorder? If doctors were given access to such drugs, how should they prescribe them? The inquiry moved from medical ethics to social criticism: what does our culture demand of us, in the way of assertiveness?

It was the medications’ extra effects — on personality, not on the symptoms of depression — that provoked this line of thought. For centuries, doctors have treated depressed patients, using medication and psychological strategies. Those efforts seemed uncontroversial. But authors do not determine the fate of their work. ‘’Listening to Prozac'’ became a ‘’best-selling book about depression.'’ I found myself speaking — sometimes about ethics, more often about mood disorders — with many audiences, in bookstores, at gatherings of the mentally ill and their families and at professional meetings. Invariably, as soon as I had finished my remarks, a hand would shoot up. A hearty, jovial man would rise and ask — always the same question — ‘’What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh’s time?'’

I understood what was intended, a joke about a pill that makes people blandly chipper. The New Yorker had run cartoons along these lines — Edgar Allan Poe, on Prozac, making nice to a raven. Below the surface humor were issues I had raised in my own writing. Might a widened use of medication deprive us of insight about our condition? But with repetition, the van Gogh question came to sound strange. Facing a man in great pain, headed for self-mutilation and death, who would withhold a potentially helpful treatment?

It may be that my response was grounded less in the intent of the question than in my own experience. For 20 years, I’d spent my afternoons working with psychiatric outpatients in Providence, R.I. As I wrote more, I let my clinical hours dwindle. One result was that more of my time was filled with especially challenging cases, with patients who were not yet better. The popularity of ‘’Listening to Prozac'’ meant that the most insistent new inquiries were from families with depressed members who had done poorly elsewhere. In my life as a doctor, unremitting depression became an intimate. It is poor company. Depression destroys families. It ruins careers. It ages patients prematurely.

Recent research has made the fight against depression especially compelling. Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive — the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder. To work with depression is to combat a disease that harms patients’ nerve pathways day by day.

Nor is the damage merely to mind and brain. Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endocrine glands, to bones. Depressives die young — not only of suicide, but also of heart attacks and strokes. Depression is a multisystem disease, one we would consider dangerous to health even if we lacked the concept ‘’mental illness.'’

As a clinician, I found the what if challenge ever less amusing. And so I began to ask audience members what they had in mind. Most understood van Gogh to have suffered severe depression. His illness, they thought, conferred special vision. In a short story, Poe likens ‘’an utter depression of soul'’ to ‘’the hideous dropping off of the veil.'’ The questioners maintained this 19th-century belief, that depression reveals essence to those brave enough to face it. By this account, depression is more than a disease — it has a sacred aspect.

Other questioners set aside that van Gogh was actually ill. They took mood disorder to be a heavy dose of the artistic temperament, so that any application of antidepressants is finally cosmetic, remolding personality into a more socially acceptable form. For them, depression was less than a disease.

These attributions stood in contrast to my own belief, that depression is neither more nor less than a disease, but disease simply and altogether.

Audiences seemed to be aware of the medical perspective, even to endorse it — but not to have adopted it as a habit of mind. To underscore this inconsistency, I began to pose a test question: We say that depression is a disease. Does that mean that we want to eradicate it as we have eradicated smallpox, so that no human being need ever suffer depression again? I made it clear that mere sadness was not at issue. Take major depression, however you define it. Are you content to be rid of that condition?

Always, the response was hedged: aren’t we meant to be depressed? Are we talking about changing human nature?

I took those protective worries as expressions of what depression is to us. Asked whether we are content to eradicate arthritis, no one says, ‘’Well, the end-stage deformation, yes, but let’s hang on to tennis elbow, housemaid’s knee and the early stages of rheumatoid disease.'’ Multiple sclerosis, acne, schizophrenia, psoriasis, bulimia, malaria — there is no other disease we consider preserving. But eradicating depression calls out the caveats.

To this way of thinking, to oppose depression too completely is to be coarse and reductionist — to miss the inherent tragedy of the human condition. To be depressed, even gravely, is to be in touch with what matters most in life, its finitude and brevity, its absurdity and arbitrariness. To be depressed is to occupy the role of rebel and social critic. Depression, in our culture, is what tuberculosis was 100 years ago: illness that signifies refinement.

Having raised the thought experiment, I should emphasize that in reality, the possibility of eradicating depression is not at hand. If clinicians are better at ameliorating depression than we were 10 years ago — and I think we may be — that is because we are more persistent in our efforts, combining treatments and (when they succeed) sticking with them until they have a marked effect. But in terms of the tools available, progress in the campaign against depression has been plodding.

Still, it is possible to envisage general medical progress that lowers the rate of depression substantially — and then to think of a society that enjoys that result. What is lost, what gained? Which is also to ask: What stands in the way of our embracing the notion that depression is disease, nothing more?

This question has any number of answers. We idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues. Like tuberculosis in its day, depression is a form of vulnerability that even contains a measure of erotic appeal. But the aspect of the romanticization of depression that seems to me to call for special attention is the notion that depression spawns creativity.

Objective evidence for that effect is weak. Older inquiries, the first attempts to examine the overlap of madness and genius, made positive claims for schizophrenia. Recent research has looked at mood disorders. These studies suggest that bipolar disorder may be overrepresented in the arts. (Bipolarity, or manic-depression, is another diagnosis proposed for van Gogh.) But then mania and its lesser cousin hypomania may drive productivity in many fields. One classic study hints at a link between alcoholism and literary work. But the benefits of major depression, taken as a single disease, have been hard to demonstrate. If anything, traits eroded by depression — like energy and mental flexibility — show up in contemporary studies of creativity.

How, then, did this link between creativity and depression arise? The belief that mental illness is a form of inspiration extends back beyond written history. Hippocrates was answering some such claim, when, around 400 B.C., he tried to define melancholy — an excess of ‘’black bile'’ — as a disease. To Hippocrates, melancholy was a disorder of the humors that caused epileptic seizures when it affected the body and caused dejection when it affected the mind. Melancholy was blamed for hemorrhoids, ulcers, dysentery, skin rashes and diseases of the lungs.

The most influential expression of the contrasting position — that melancholy confers special virtues — appears in the ‘’Problemata Physica,'’ or ‘’Problems,'’ a discussion, in question-and-answer form, of scientific conundrums. It was long attributed to Aristotle, but the surviving version, from the second century B.C., is now believed to have been written by his followers. In the 30th book of the ‘’Problems,'’ the author asks why it is that outstanding men — philosophers, statesmen, poets, artists, educators and heroes — are so often melancholic. Among the ancients, the strongmen Herakles and Ajax were melancholic; more contemporaneous examples cited in the ‘’Problems'’ include Socrates, Plato and the Spartan general Lysander. The answer given is that too much black bile leads to insanity, while a moderate amount creates men ‘’superior to the rest of the world in many ways. ‘’

The Greeks, and the cultures that succeeded them, faced depression poorly armed. Treatment has always been difficult. Depression is common and spans the life cycle. When you add in (as the Greeks did) mania, schizophrenia and epilepsy, not to mention hemorrhoids, you encompass a good deal of what humankind suffers altogether. Such an impasse calls for the elaboration of myth. Over time, ‘’melancholy ‘’ became a universal metaphor, standing in for sin and innocent suffering, self-indulgence and sacrifice, inferiority and perspicacity.

The great flowering of melancholy occurred during the Renaissance, as humanists rediscovered the ‘’Problems.'’ In the late 15th century, a cult of melancholy flourished in Florence and then was taken back to England by foppish aristocratic travelers who styled themselves artists and scholars and affected the melancholic attitude and dress. Most fashionable of all were ‘’melancholic malcontents,'’ irritable depressives given to political intrigue. One historian, Lawrence Babb, describes them as ‘’black-suited and disheveled . . . morosely meditative, taciturn yet prone to occasional railing.'’

In dozens of stage dramas from the period, the principal character is a discontented melancholic. ‘’Hamlet'’ is the great example. As soon as Hamlet takes the stage, an Elizabethan audience would understand that it is watching a tragedy whose hero’s characteristic flaw will be a melancholic trait, in this case, paralysis of action. By the same token, the audience would quickly accept Hamlet’s spiritual superiority, his suicidal impulses, his hostility to the established order, his protracted grief, solitary wanderings, erudition, impaired reason, murderousness, role-playing, passivity, rashness, antic disposition, ‘’dejected haviour of the visage'’ and truck with graveyards and visions.

‘’Hamlet'’ is arguably the seminal text of our culture, one that cements our admiration for doubt, paralysis and alienation. But seeing ‘’Hamlet'’ in its social setting, in an era rife with melancholy as an affected posture, might make us wonder how much of the historical association between melancholy and its attractive attributes is artistic conceit.

In literature, the cultural effects of depression may be particularly marked. Writing, more than most callings, can coexist with a relapsing and recurring illness. Composition does not require fixed hours; poems or essays can be set aside and returned to on better days. And depression is an attractive subject. Superficially, mental pain resembles passion, strong emotion that stands in opposition to the corrupt world. Depression can have a picaresque quality — think of the journey through the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s ‘’Pilgrim’s Progress.'’ Over the centuries, narrative structures were built around the descent into depression and the recovery from it. Lyric poetry, religious memoir, the novel of youthful self-development — depression is an affliction that inspires not just art but art forms. And art colors values. Where the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are depressives, dark views of the human condition will be accorded special worth.

Through the ‘’anxiety of influence,'’ heroic melancholy cast its shadow far forward, onto romanticism and existentialism. At a certain point, the transformation begun in the Renaissance reaches completion. It is no longer that melancholy leads to heroism. Melancholy is heroism. The challenge is not battle but inner strife. The rumination of the depressive, however solipsistic, is deemed admirable. Repeatedly, melancholy returns to fashion.

As I spoke with audiences about mood disorders, I came to believe that part of what stood between depression and its full status as disease was the tradition of heroic melancholy. Surely, I would be asked when I spoke with college students, surely I saw the value in alienation. One medical philosopher asked what it would mean to prescribe Prozac to Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up the hill.

That variant of the what if question sent me to Albert Camus’s essay on Sisyphus, where I confirmed what I thought I had remembered — that in Camus’s reading, Sisyphus, the existential hero, remains upbeat despite the futility of his task. The gods intend for Sisyphus to suffer. His rebellion, his fidelity to self, rests on the refusal to be worn down. Sisyphus exemplifies resilience, in the face of full knowledge of his predicament. Camus says that joy opens our eyes to the absurd — and to our freedom. It is not only in the downhill steps that Sisyphus triumphs over his punishment: ‘’The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'’

I came to suspect that it was the automatic pairing of depth and depression that made the medical philosopher propose Sisyphus as a candidate for mood enhancement. We forget that alienation can be paired with elation, that optimism is a form of awareness. I wanted to reclaim Sisyphus, to set his image on the poster for the campaign against depression.

Once we take seriously the notion that depression is a disease like any other, we will want to begin our discussion of alienation by asking diagnostic questions. Perhaps this sense of dislocation signals an apt response to circumstance, but that one points to an episode of an illness. Aware of the extent and effects of mood disorder, we may still value alienation — and ambivalence and anomie and the other uncomfortable traits that sometimes express perspective and sometimes attach to mental illness. But we are likely to assess them warily, concerned that they may be precursors or residual symptoms of major depression.

How far does our jaundiced view reach? Surely the label ‘’disease'’ does not apply to the melancholic or depressive temperament? And of course, it does not. People can be pessimistic and lethargic, brooding and cautious, without ever falling ill in any way. But still, it seemed to me in my years of immersion that depression casts a long shadow. Though I had never viewed it as pathology, even Woody Allen-style neurosis had now been stripped of some of its charm — of any implicit claim, say, of superiority. The cachet attaching to tuberculosis diminished as science clarified the cause of the illness, and as treatment became first possible and then routine. Depression may follow the same path. As it does, we may find that heroic melancholy is no more.

In time, I came to think of the van Gogh question in a different light, merging it with the eradication question. What sort of art would be meaningful or moving in a society free of depression? Boldness and humor — broad or sly — might gain in status. Or not. A society that could guarantee the resilience of mind and brain might favor operatic art and literature. Freedom from depression would make the world safe for high neurotics, virtuosi of empathy, emotional bungee-jumpers. It would make the world safe for van Gogh.

Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease. Resisting that claim, we may ask: Seeing cruelty, suffering and death — shouldn’t a person be depressed? There are circumstances, like the Holocaust, in which depression might seem justified for every victim or observer. Awareness of the ubiquity of horror is the modern condition, our condition.

But then, depression is not universal, even in terrible times. Though prone to mood disorder, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was not depressed in his months at Auschwitz. I have treated a handful of patients who survived horrors arising from war or political repression. They came to depression years after enduring extreme privation. Typically, such a person will say: ‘’I don’t understand it. I went through — ‘’ and here he will name one of the shameful events of our time. ‘’I lived through that, and in all those months, I never felt this.'’ This refers to the relentless bleakness of depression, the self as hollow shell. To see the worst things a person can see is one experience; to suffer mood disorder is another. It is depression — and not resistance to it or recovery from it — that diminishes the self.

Beset by great evil, a person can be wise, observant and disillusioned and yet not depressed. Resilience confers its own measure of insight. We should have no trouble admiring what we do admire — depth, complexity, aesthetic brilliance — and standing foursquare against depression.

Peter D. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and the author of ‘’Listening to Prozac.'’ This essay is adapted from his book ‘’Against Depression,'’ which Viking will publish next month.

By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY Mon Apr 18, 6:27 AM ET

Last month’s school shooting in Minnesota has stirred interest in organized “snitch” programs that pay students for telling on classmates who carry guns or drugs or violate school rules.

Last week in central Georgia, the Houston County school board became the state’s first school district to enroll in the national Student CrimeStoppers program, started in 1983. Students can earn up to $500 for alerting school officials about firearms. They can get up to $100 for fingering classmates involved in vandalism, theft or drugs.

Another Georgia school, Model High School in Rome, said last week it implemented a program that pays students up to $100 for information about thefts, drugs or guns on school property. “It’s not a reaction to anything that’s happening on campus,” says Tim Hensley, spokesman for the Floyd County schools. “It’s a proactive attempt from the principal’s standpoint.”

“There’s a balance here between creating a society of snitches and creating a sense of community responsibility,” says Russ Skiba, professor of educational psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Skiba, who co-chaired a U.S. Education Department project on violence prevention in 11 schools, says he worries reward programs are a “knee-jerk reaction” to the school shooting in Red Lake, Minn. Student Jeff Weise, 16, of Red Lake, killed nine people and wounded 14 before killing himself March 21.

The Model High program began before the Red Lake shootings, Hensley says. At the 650-student school, money from candy and soda sales will be used to pay $10 for valid information about campus thefts, $25 or $50 for tips on drugs, and $100 for leads on gun possession or other felonies.

A similar program at Cherryville High School in rural Gaston County, N.C., “has really worked well,” principal Stephen Huffstetler says. He implemented the program two years ago. “This year, we’ve given out $1,100,” he says. “For $100, they’ll turn their mothers in.”

He says the money was paid for tips on drug possession or sales, mainly marijuana and prescription pills. The rewards are funded partly by student-run programs, he says.

A wave of student reward programs sprang up after a rash of school shootings in the mid-1990s. Some were in place before then.

In Texas, the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District started a Student CrimeStoppers program in its three middle schools and four high schools in 1994, says Melanie Magee, supervisor of student services.

This year, the district has paid $2,144. Magee says tips have led to students getting busted for attempting to sell prescription drugs, smoking on campus and other offenses. During the 2003-04 school year, tips led to the seizures of 11 weapons.

Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003.

The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.

The patient died after the surgery but that was due to heart failure and not the fire, said Dr. Robert Caplan, medical quality director of Virginia Mason.

Caplan said fires are known to occur in operating rooms although they were extremely rare.

The two-year-old incident became publicly known after an anonymous letter sent to the media mentioned it as a sign of unsafe health care at the hospital, and said the patient burned to death.

Caplan strongly disputed its contents. “That letter is factually incorrect,” he said.

Kanotix (en)

What is Kanotix?

* Kanotix was assembled by Kano.
* Kanotix is a Linux distribution, which runs completely from CD (see Live-CD).
This means an existing operating system (like Windows XP© or Mac OS X©) on your hard drive won’t be overwritten or changed
* Kanotix is based on the development of Klaus Knopper, the Knoppix-CDext. link.
* Kanotix is a complete Linux operating system with graphical user interface, which uses Debianext. link as base.
* Kanotix is able to access almost every device without installing new drivers.
Perfect for recovering hard disk data, to test hardware, to scan for viruses, …
* Kanotix may be installed on to a hard disk in parallel to an already existing operating system (if there’s enough free disc space),
or as a replacement of an already existing operating system (that’s what we prefer )

Why Kanotix and not Knoppix ?

There were different reasons why Kano decided to develop Kanotix.
Many deficiencies which were discussed on the old Knoppix-Board
are fixed in Kanotix and other things like the hdd-installation are improved
Certainly a special ambition might have driven Kano to do this.
Now we’ve got a Live-CD, which is easily able to compete with Knoppix

They found a significant decrease in daily surface solar radiation and less sunshine per month compared with 1961 — especially over the eastern part of the country where most people live and most factories are located.

The best explanation is a rise in aerosols — little particles that include soot, dust and even smaller bits produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil, Huizheng Che and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xian reported in this week’s issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

They measured several components of sunniness, including daily global radiation, annually averaged solar direct radiation and daily diffuse radiation, as well as the annually averaged daily clearness index.

“Almost all stations in China showed decreasing trends in the clearness index,” they wrote in their report.

“From these results, we conclude that the increasing emissions of anthropogenic (human-made) aerosols have likely affected the magnitude and variability of solar radiation and sunshine duration over much of China, especially the eastern part of the country.”

Pessimistic, anxious and depressed people may have a higher risk of dementia, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

A study of a group of 3,500 people showed that those who scored high for pessimism on a standardized personality test had a 30 percent increased risk of developing dementia 30 to 40 years later.

Those scoring very high on both anxiety and pessimism scales had a 40 percent higher risk, the study showed.

“There appears to be a dose-response pattern, i.e., the higher the scores, the higher the risk of dementia,” Dr. Yonas Geda, a neuropsychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota who led the study, said in a statement.

Geda and colleagues looked at the medical records of 3,500 men and women who lived near the clinic between 1962 and 1965.

They all took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a standard personality and life experience test, Geda’s team told a meeting of the
American Academy of Neurology in Miami.

In 2004 the team interviewed the participants or family members.

Those who scored higher for anxiety and pessimism on the test were more likely, as a group, to have developed dementia by 2004, including
Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.

This did not mean a person who is pessimistic could assume he or she has a higher risk of developing dementia.

“One has to be cautious in interpreting a study like this,” Geda said.

“One cannot make a leap from group level data to the individual. Certainly the last thing you want to do is to say, ‘Well, I am a pessimist; thus, I am doomed to develop dementia 20 or 30 years later,’ because this may end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

And there is not any specific way to prevent dementia, although many studies have shown that a healthy diet, exercise, keeping active in other ways, doing puzzles and other activities lower the risk.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the last significant simplification of the tax code. Since then, succeeding presidents and Congresses have messed it up again with layers of complexity.

Anyone who saw this coming could have made killing. A $5,000 investment in the stock of tax-return preparer H&R Block in the fall of 1986 would (with dividends reinvested) be worth more than $170,000 today.

But for those not inclined to put their money where their cynicism is, the increasing complexity of the tax code has made for nothing but misery. The code has become so complicated that it is best seen as a tax in itself. Call it the complexity tax.

On top of the tax paid on income and capital gains, we pay a cost - in dollars or in hours - because lawmakers like to accommodate lobbyists seeking deductions, exemptions and credits. Some of the ways the public pays:

• Help! Help! Sixty-one percent of taxpayers have been driven into the clutches of tax-preparation services, according to the National Taxpayers Union. That’s up from 38% in 1980 and 46% in 1986.

•Are we done yet? Taxpayers and their accountants will spend an average of 13 hours on their Form 1040s this year, up from nine hours 15 years ago. They will spend almost four hours on 1040EZs, up from one hour in 1990.

• The cost of compliance. Individuals and companies spend about 6.5 billion hours filing their taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office. Estimates of the cost to the economy run from $125 billion to $140 billion.

What makes all of this anguish and expense more remarkable is that it comes despite the arrival of user-friendly tax preparation software such as Turbo Tax. Even these tools are no match for a monster code.

Now comes a new reform plan. President Bush has appointed former senators Connie Mack, R-Fla., and John Breaux, D-La., to chair a commission on simplifying the tax code. It’s set to hold its seventh hearing on Monday.

Taxpayers would be well served if the commission could persuade Congress to fix the code. But given the track record of tax reform, they might want to hedge their enthusiasm. In fact, perhaps they should go out and buy shares of H&R Block.

Great-Great-Grandmother Shoots Robber

By RON WORD, Associated Press Writer

A man accused of bursting into a convenience store demanding money was in the hospital Friday — shot, authorities said, by the great-great-grandmother working behind the counter.

Janet Grammer was filling in for the regular clerk Thursday afternoon when a man entered the store waving a gun and fired two shot at the back wall.

“I think he thought I was an old woman and would just give him the money,” Grammer, 64, said Friday. “My life was at stake. I thought he was going to kill me.”

So she pulled a pistol out from under the cash register and fired once, hitting the man in the chest. He fell to the ground, dropped his gun and then fled, leaving a trail of blood. Grammer fired two more shots as he was running away.

The sheriff’s report said a man fitting the suspect’s description and injury went to a hospital a short time later. He told doctors he shot himself.

The man, whose name has not been released, was being treated at Shands Jacksonville hospital Friday for a wound to the chest. Police spokesman Ken Jefferson said the man faces robbery charges.

Grammer, who has 10 children, 32 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren, said she worried she had killed the man. “All I could think about was his poor parents,” Grammer said.

Grammer said she never had to shoot anyone during her 10 years of working as a security guard. “I’m sick over it. It was very upsetting. I’m not feeling real perky.”

WASHINGTON - People scurrying to meet tonight’s tax deadline might consider this: It’s taking you and your fellow Americans 6.6 billion hours to do all that paperwork. The basic tax return — the Form 1040 filed by most people every year — accounts for 1.6 billion hours.

The Internal Revenue Service furnished those statistics to the White House budget office, which keeps tabs on the government’s bureaucratic demands. The budget office notes that tax work “towers over the entire paperwork burden for the rest of the federal government” and accounts for some 80 percent.

“If anything, those numbers are probably understated,” said David Keating, president of the National Taxpayers Union, which reports annually on the increasing complexity and demands of tax returns.

“A lot more of the cost is just planning to do the tax-smart thing. That can actually take a lot more time than reporting what you’ve done,” he said.

Tax returns must be postmarked by midnight tonight.

Sensitive to the demands that tax laws put on weary taxpayers, the IRS has seven people working full time to reduce the anguish for filers. The IRS Office of Taxpayer Burden Reduction looks for requirements that can be streamlined, reduced or eliminated under the law.

“We’re trying to reduce unnecessary burden,” said Michael Chesman, the office director.

Some of the burden cannot be avoided because it is a requirement of the tax laws. By attacking unnecessary burden, the office has shaved more than 200 million hours from tax paperwork since the office was created in 2001.

Chesman said the office plans next year to simplify the process for requesting an extension. The idea is to replace the current four-month, and subsequent two-month, deadline extensions with one simpler and automatic six-month extension.

Small changes can make a big difference. Letting more people use the simpler 1040 forms trimmed 5 million hours off the paperwork, for example. But the improvements are often swamped by the burdens associated with new tax laws. President Bush has enacted tax changes every year he has been in office.

For individuals wondering how long they will spend on tax forms, the taxpayers’ group said it takes an estimated 26 hours and 48 minutes to prepare the Form 1040 and its most common supporting schedules. That includes keeping records, learning the law, preparing forms, copying and mailing.

That actually is less than last year, when taxpayers could have expected to spend 28 hours and 30 minutes on the same forms.

Tax preparation software has made the task more manageable for many. Where the IRS estimates it takes 13 hours to fill out the Form 1040 by hand, Julie Miller, spokeswoman for Intuit, said its TurboTax software can do the same work in two hours to four hours.

Kathy Burlison, director of tax implementation at H&R Block, said software makes individuals and paid preparers more confident they have not missed something. It also makes mistakes much easier to fix.

Nevertheless, the forms are not just a drain on people’s free time, but on the productivity of the country, Keating said.

“That’s a huge, dead weight burden, trying to discern the tax code, what it rewards most,” he said. “If we turn the nation into a paper-shuffling, law-figuring-out country, no one actually gets anything done.”
___

On the Net:

Internal Revenue Service: http://www.irs.gov/

National Taxpayers Union: http://www.ntu.org/main/

Apr 14, 2005 — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A variety of activities like exercise, household chores and even dancing, can help people avoid Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

They found that variety was more important for preventing dementia than total calories burned in exercise and other physical activities.

“We don’t yet know why this association exists or what causes it,” said Dr. Constantine Lyketsos, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

“It could well be that maintaining a variety of activities keeps more parts of the brain active, or that this variety reflects better engagement in both physical and social activities,” he added in a statement.

The study included 3,375 men and women over the age of 64 who did not have dementia when the program began.

Writing in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Lyketsos and colleagues said each volunteer answered questions about the frequency and duration of physical activities such as walking, household chores, gardening, dancing, bowling or swimming.

Researchers then created an activity index, and considered other factors such as age, gender, education level, ethnicity, smoking and alcohol use.

Over the next 5 years, 480 people developed dementia. Of those, only 84 who listed four or more activities developed dementia, as opposed to 130 who listed one activity or none.

The association held true for all types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.

The study also took into consideration what type of APOE gene people had. APOE, or apolipoprotein-E, is related to cholesterol metabolism and people with one particular variant of this gene called APOE-4 have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.

And in the study, exercise and other activities did not protect people with APOE-4.

An estimated 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, and this number is projected to reach 16 million by 2050, as the population ages, unless ways are found to prevent it.

RV nomads put little South Dakota County on the map
Carson Walker, Associated Press
April 14, 2005

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — South Dakota — situated squarely in a part of the country where the population is graying and small towns are dying a long, slow death — managed to have two of the nation’s 10 fast-growing counties in the Census Bureau’s latest ranking.

In one of those counties, Lincoln, the 2003-04 rise in population was real. In the other, Hanson, it was a phantom increase.

It turns out that hundreds of recreational-vehicle owners from all over the country list their place of residence as Hanson County, even though many of them do not actually have homes there, and visit only to pick up their mail or renew their driver’s licenses.

The reason: Hanson County is home to a husband-and-wife business that caters to people who live in RVs and just need a permanent address to receive their mail.

In Lincoln County, population 31,437, the increase is a spillover from a boom under way in adjacent Sioux Falls, which was dominated by the meatpacking industry until the state Legislature in 1980 lifted the ceiling on credit card interest rates, bringing in Citibank and other companies that have made South Dakota a major financial center.

Since the 1990s, developers have been turning Lincoln County’s rich farmland into bedroom communities for people working in Sioux Falls. Tracts of rolling land that just a few years ago were planted with corn and soybeans are now home to families raising children.

Lincoln County’s population shot up more than 40 percent during the 1990s, and climbed 7.5 percent from 2003 to 2004, the nation’s fifth-largest rise, according to the Census.

Hanson County, population 3,786, lies in flat farm country about 50 miles west of Sioux Falls. It posted the nation’s fourth-biggest percentage population increase from 2003 to 2004, 7.9 percent, according to the Census.

Most of those 278 additional residents officially call one place home: My Home Address Inc. in Emery. They use the business’ street address as their own.

Ron Triebwasser and his wife, Judy, run the company that collects and forwards mail and medicines, registers vehicles and handles other chores for nearly 1,200 people who live on the road. Most are retirees in recreational vehicles.

Triebwasser said he is promoting Hanson County to his customers as a good place to buy property.

“We’d love to have some people move in with kids,'’ he said.

And turn some of those Census numbers into actual residents.

Thursday April 14, 9:52 am ET

PORTLAND, Maine, April 14 /PRNewswire/ — New research findings concluded that Wild Blueberry compounds have the potential to attack all stages of cancer — initiation, promotion and proliferation. (Source: Journal of Food Science, 70(3):S159-S166, 2005.) According to the study, different types of Wild Blueberry phenolic compounds are active during different stages of cancer, resulting in a broad spectrum of potential cancer-fighting benefits.

“Wild Blueberry compounds offer a multi-pronged attack against cancer,” said Dr. Mary Ann Lila, Ph.D., lead researcher from the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Other collaborators include John Pezzuto, Ph.D., from the School of Pharmacy, Purdue University, and Muriel Cuendet and Young-Hwa Kang from the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, University of Illinois at Chicago.

According to Dr. Lila, cancer begins as a result of an assault on cells by free radicals leading to oxidative stress or inflammation. “We’re investigating the potential of natural antioxidants like those found in Wild Blueberries to combat the free radical attack in the body,” said Dr. Lila. “What makes it so intriguing is that in addition to free radical scavenging, Wild Blueberries contain other natural components that are simultaneously inhibiting cancer-promoting enzymes and blocking the growth of tumor cells. How these compounds get into the body and the mechanics of how they work is the next frontier.”

According to Dr. Lila, these results build on previous work done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which demonstrated the positive effect of Wild Blueberry proanthocyanidins or condensed tannins on the promotion stage of cancer. (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 52:6433-6442, 2004.)

Nature’s #1 Antioxidant Fruit(TM)

According to Susan Davis, MS, RD, Nutrition Advisor to the Wild Blueberry Association of North America, Dr. Lila’s work expands on the importance of Wild Blueberries in helping fend off diseases of aging, like cancer. “Dr. Lila’s investigation of specific phytochemicals indicates that different compounds are attacking cancer cells at different stages,” said Davis. “This underscores the complexity of whole foods and the importance of eating fruits like Wild Blueberries more regularly.”

Davis noted that recent USDA research findings using the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) measure ranked Wild Blueberries highest in antioxidant capacity per serving, compared with more than 20 other fruits. The study showed that a one-cup serving of Wild Blueberries had more antioxidant capacity than a serving of cranberries, strawberries, raspberries, apples, and even cultivated blueberries. (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 52:4026-4037, 2004.)

Antioxidants are important in terms of their ability to protect against oxidative cell damage that can lead to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and heart disease — conditions also linked with chronic inflammation. The antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of blue-purple foods like Wild Blueberries may have the potential to help prevent these diseases.

WBANA

WBANA is a trade association of growers and processors of Wild Blueberries from Maine, dedicated to bringing the Wild Blueberry health story and unique Wild Advantages to consumers worldwide.

Source: Wild Blueberry Association of North America

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, April 14 (Reuters) - The United Nations on Thursday censured North Korea for “widespread and grave violations” — including torture, executions and forced abortions — drawing a sharp rebuke from the secretive communist state.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, whose 53 member states are holding an annual session, urged Pyongyang to cooperate with its special investigator on the Democratic Republic of Korea.

The resolution, brought by the European Union (EU) and Japan, was adopted by a vote of 30 countries in favour, nine against and 14 abstentions, including South Korea.

It expressed deep concern at torture, public executions, arbitrary detention, “infanticide”, imposition of the death penalty for “political reasons”, the existence of a “large number of prison camps” and extensive use of forced labour.

The United States delegation denounced North Korea’s “deplorable human rights record”.

U.S. delegate Sasha Mehra took the floor to say that in North Korea, “150,000 to 200,000 people were believed to be held at detention camps in remote areas for political reasons”.

“Defectors report people dying of torture, starvation, disease and exposure or a combination of causes,” she added. “We stand with the victims of the brutal regime.”

But North Korea’s delegation reacted angrily, accusing the forum of “politicisation, selectivity and double standards”.

“The fundamental purpose of this resolution is to overthrow the state system of the DPRK,” said member Choe Myong Nam.

RNGLEADERS

Most targets of the “naming and shaming” at the Commission were “developing countries pursuing independent policies with ideals different from those of the West,” he added.

Choe singled out Britain and Japan as “ringleaders” of the text, saying Britain appeared “hell-bent on overthrowing the state system of the DPRK hand-in-hand with the United States”.

China’s ambassador Sha Zukang, who voted against the resolution, said: “The effective way to promote human rights does not lie in confrontation and shaming, but rather enlightened dialogue and cooperation.”

“We are against the practice of using human rights issues to exert political pressure on developing countries,” Sha added.

North Korea has refused requests by the U.N. special rapporteur or investigator, Vitit Muntarbhorn, to visit.

Muntarbhorn, a Thai law professor serving in the independent post established a year ago, has reported widespread abuses and urged North Korea to end capital punishment and forced labour.

South Korea’s ambassador Choi Hyuck said that his country shared other countries’ deep concerns about the state of human rights in North Korea but questioned the value of rebukes alone.

“We believe as important as it is for the international community to continuously express its concern over the situation…it is equally important to create an environment that encourages the DPRK to change voluntarily…,” Choi said.

By Nick Perry
Seattle Times staff reporter

Robert Miskimon’s list of treatments for depression reads like a clinician’s almanac.

During his first descent into darkness at age 17, doctors repeatedly injected him with enough insulin to induce a coma, then revived him with glucose, a once-popular treatment called insulin shock therapy. Later came psychotherapy. In the 1990s he tried new wonder drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft.

Each new treatment helped for a while, but then the benefits waned, said Miskimon, 61. The Vashon Island writer remains most enthusiastic about an experimental treatment he first tried two years ago: transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. He said it immediately helped him sleep, eat and feel better.

“It’s the difference between feeling life is hopeless, pointless and futile to, for example, experiencing joy at the sight of an eagle outside my home or the thrill of my daughter doing very well at nursing school,” he said. “To be free from the pervasive gloom and darkness is a wonderful thing. It’s the freedom to have gradations of feelings.”

Transcranial magnetic stimulation uses powerful electromagnets to stimulate electricity inside the brain. What may sound like science fiction has gained respect in the scientific community, with several small studies showing beneficial results.
Now the National Institute of Mental Health has launched the most extensive study yet: a $7 million, four-year federally funded program to track 240 patients. The University of Washington is one of four sites tracking the patients, with the first of 60 due to begin treatment at Harborview Medical Center this month.

Although TMS has not been approved for use in the United States, it is being used in Canada. Should it eventually get the nod of the federal Food and Drug Administration, it would offer hope for thousands of patients who can’t tolerate antidepressant drugs or who don’t respond to them.

The roots of TMS can be traced to the 1930s, when a Hungarian psychiatrist first used electricity to jolt a patient’s brain into a seizure, a controversial procedure that became known as electric shock treatment. Now called electroconvulsive therapy, it remains an effective last resort for many severely depressed patients.

But the problem with inducing a seizure is that it often causes short-term memory loss and confusion. Proponents of TMS believe many patients could benefit from a gentler approach.

TMS typically involves a patient sitting in a chair for 30 to 40 minutes. A doctor rests a coil on the patient’s head, then turns on a powerful electromagnet.

The machinery sends 10 strong, short magnetic pulses every second to a particular point in the brain, stimulating electrical currents. Regular magnets, like those on your fridge, create a constant magnetic pull and won’t stimulate electricity in the same way.

One potential advantage of magnetism is that it effortlessly penetrates the skull, unlike the electrical approach which forces a current through skin and bone. During TMS treatments, patients typically feel little.

“You sit in a nice easy chair with a pad on your scalp and there is a little click and a little buzz and that’s it,” said Jim Kjeldsen, a 56-year-old journalist from near La Conner, Skagit County, who has tried experimental TMS. “It’s a bit of a problem sitting there for half an hour and staying awake.”

The magnet is usually focused on the left prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain thought to play a key role in controlling mood, and which studies show is often less active in people suffering depression.

What happens next is less clear.

According to Dr. Mark George, a pioneer of the treatment, the magnet stimulates or “tickles” the cortex, which in turn sends electric signals to the central limbic system, a more ancient part of the brain also associated with mood control.

George believes this increased electrical activity changes the brain’s chemistry, probably by increasing levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine. That helps elevate mood.

Other people theorize that the mental discord of depression may manifest in a physical way that is comparable to arrhythmia. That theory has TMS acting as a kind of pacemaker to better balance electrical activity, especially between the left and right sides of the brain.

But nobody really knows how TMS may work because scientists have yet to figure out all the intricacies of the brain.

A TMS patient typically gets one treatment per day, five days a week, for three to six weeks. Many proponents believe that an initial course of treatment can lift patients from a depressive episode and that later “maintenance” treatments can keep them from slipping back. That theory will be put to the test in the new study.

George, a psychiatry and neurology professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, began experimenting with TMS in the mid-1990s after finding inspiration while riding an elevator in a London research building. A bubbly man told him that a scientist just made his thumb jerk by putting a magnet against his head.

Noting the man’s animation, George wondered if magnets could be used to directly influence mood control. But the idea wasn’t embraced by the medical community, which had long accepted seizures as a vital part of any direct physical intervention in depression.

“When I began this a decade ago, these ideas were heretical,” George said. “Heretical and anathema.”

Years of failed therapies
Miskimon said he was at boarding school in 1961 when his first bout of depression struck. A good student, he became increasingly agitated and felt he was losing touch with his own body and the world around him. He all but stopped eating, losing 30 pounds and becoming emaciated. He was hospitalized for three months, regularly receiving the insulin-shock treatments.

In the years since, Miskimon tried different therapies and also turned to alcohol, which he hasn’t touched now for 20 years. Nothing worked long term. Miskimon learned to struggle through life with recurring bouts of depression, which seemed, he said, to arrive without warning and in no particular pattern.

Kjeldsen has also lived with depression since he was a teen. Particularly bad bouts seem to strike once every eight or nine years, he said.

“Not knowing if you will ever come out of this black hole is the worst thing about it,” Kjeldsen said. “It’s like a huge weight pressing down on you. You don’t get joy out of anything, and you have to map out every move all day long, because the automatic reflexes that keep you motivated are not there.”

Both Kjeldsen and Miskimon became patients in early TMS clinical trials overseen by Dr. David Avery, a UW professor and the director of inpatient psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center. Avery, another of the treatment’s pioneers, is overseeing the UW part of the new trial.

Kjeldsen said he was skeptical about TMS before the early trials but soon became a believer.

“At the end of the second treatment, I walked out of the building and everything looked a lot brighter, even the sky looked brighter,” he said.

He added that he’s not interested in trying electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which he believes may cause some brain damage.

“It’s nothing I would like to do. I really like my brain cells, even though they play up,” he joked.

The new TMS trial is not only bigger, it is more nuanced than previous trials, which have administered a single, standard treatment. This time, patients will have their brain structure mapped so doctors can more accurately focus the magnetic pulses in the correct location. And the number of sessions a subject receives will depend on the response to each treatment.

Half the participants will be part of a control group receiving sham treatments — though later they will have the option of getting the real treatment.

Offered in Vancouver, B.C.
While transcranial magnetic stimulation is not approved in the U.S., one TMS device has been approved in Canada since 2002. A group called Mindcare Centres offers the treatment at clinics in Vancouver, B.C., and Toronto.

Iain Glass, Mindcare president and CEO, said the clinics have treated about 170 people. That includes about 60 from the Seattle area who make up a large slice of the Vancouver business.

A course at Mindcare typically involves 20 treatments spread over two weeks at a cost of $4,000 (U.S.). The treatment is not covered by most U.S. health insurers.

“We tend to treat really, really tough cases,” Glass said.

He said the average patient age is 48, and most have lived with depression since they were teenagers. Many have tried medication for years without much success, he said. People who try TMS tend to either respond “profoundly” or not at all, he added.

“It’s wildly exciting,” Glass said. “There are a lot of people for whom the system has failed, and we are giving them their lives back.”

Glass has big ambitions for the U.S. He said he wants to open 50 to 55 clinics here — if and when the FDA gives approval.

Until then, sufferers here will need to find other options. Miskimon said he will continue trying antidepressant drugs along with prayer and meditation.

“I think it would be a tremendous thing to be available,” Miskimon said of TMS. “I think of it as having the benefits of ECT without any of the drawbacks.”

“It’s a kinder, gentler approach to sanity.”

Mangalorean.Com- Serving Mangaloreans Around The World!

Madurai: 80 held for bizarre burials of infants alive

Madurai, April 14: The Tamil Nadu police has booked cases against 80 persons for participating in the bizarre ritual of burying infants alive as a means of fulfilling their vows, near Rajapalayam in Virudhunagar district.

The age-old ritual Kuzhimattru, which literally means changing pits, was performed on Monday as part of the annual festival at the Muthumariamman temple at Chatrapatti Ayyanapuram near Rajapalayam. The Keelarajakularaman police registered cases against 80 persons on Tuesday for participating in it.

The ritual is performed in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu, particularly in the Mariamman temples, by people from different communities. It is done by couples who take a vow to bury alive their firstborn if they are blessed with a child.

To fulfil the vow they bury children who may be less than a year old in two-foot-deep pits which are then covered with neem leaves and a sprinkling of earth in the courtyard of temples.

The priest performs certain ceremonies and steps across the pits. It is only then that the children are taken out and laid prostrate before the deities.

As reports filtered in that a similar ritual would take place at M. Pudupatti village in Virudhunagar, the police proceeded to the village and warned the people against performing it. The ritual was consequently abandoned. The police suggested to the villagers that if the parents wanted to fulfill their vows, they could lay the infants on the floor and walk across them.

About three years ago, a minister for local administration in the Tami Nadu government, Mr C. Dorairaj, was dismissed by chief minister Jayalalithaa for participating in such a ritual at Perayur in Madurai district. The government also brought in an ordinance banning the bizarre ritual.

A law, called the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ritual and Practice of Burying Alive of a Person Act, 2002, came into force on November 18, 2002. The punishment under the legislation includes imprisonment up to three years with or without a fine of Rs 5,000.

Advocate T. Lajapathi Roy, who was part of a team from the Soco Trust Madurai, which investigated the Perayur incident, said that the team had discovered that there are no doctors or other medical facilities available at the venue when the ritual is performed. Though casualties have not been reported in this ritual, he said that chances of the infants dying of suffocation could not be ruled out.

When contacted, Virudhunagar district collector Mohamed Aslam said those who had been booked had earlier been warned against going ahead with the ritual but had not listened. “These people contend that no harm will come to the children during the ritual, which has been performed for many decades. We are trying to create awareness and prevent it from taking place. But it is only in some villages like M. Pudupatti that we are able to persuade the people listen to us,” he said.

-The Asian Age

Some Say Advertising Tactics Misleading

CHICAGO — It’s a sign of the times — and a booming business.

It is estimated that there are more than 800 online dating Web sites, up from more than 200 from last year alone. It’s a highly competitive landscape where companies fight for consumers’ business, Target 5’s Lisa Parker reported. Those companies fight for business using tactics that some say may not always be fair.

Beyond the smiling faces of those happily-wedded couples seen advertised on many online dating Web sites, there is some sobering information recently revealed in one new study that paints a much different picture.

Deana Mason, 35, said she went online and found equally big promises.

“I’ve seen all these commercials, you know, they’re like, ‘It’s scientifically proven, find the love of your life. You will find your husband on our site,’” Mason said. “You know, ‘The most marriages of any site online. And I think, ‘Well you know, why am I not finding this Mr. Right online?’”

Chase Demoss also said he surfed the Internet hoping to meet a match.

“It seems like all the sites that I’ve been to are all geared towards marriage, get married,” Demoss said.

In the fiercely competitive realm of online dating, companies are struggling to stand out, Parker reported. Some now offer high-tech extras like instant messaging and video. Many feature pictures of promise — clients who found wedded bliss through cyberspace.

“Well, there are a lot of things that online dating does well,” said Mark Thompson of WeAttract.com ” Arranging marriages is not one of them. You see lots of happy couples. But what they’re not going to tell you is that out of about 2,000 people they match up, only one couple is actually going to get married.”

Once recent industry report accuses the sites of using advertising that is misleading, unsubstantiated — or at least exaggerated. Advertisements, some say, are in need of regulation.

“These companies should be following the FTC guidelines for advertising,” said Glenn Hutchinson, also of WeAttract.com. “If they’re really prominently showing couples that have gotten married through their site, then they need to be very candid about how frequently that occurs and how many users actually find those happy marriages.”

Some key research many Web sites do not share with their future clients are their success rate — just how many of their clients do end up married or in long-term relationships. Observers said the skyrocketing growth seen in online dating this year is showing the first signs of slowing down.

Remi Bergeron lugs laundry to his RV at Hillwood Camping Park in Gainesville, Va. The computer systems support engineer pays about $500 a month to park his RV.

Some RVs are home sweet home

When housing prices get out of reach, many make the move into residential motorhomes.

By Michele Clock / Washington Post

Bergeron works on his computer at a work station he created to fit over the steering wheel of his RV in Gainesville, Va. Rents for a spot in a RV park can cost as much as $1,400 a month.

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, Remi Bergeron set out in search of a home in the Washington region, alone and with a $150,000 budget.

Good thing he had a Plan B.

“Around here, you have to go so far for a $150,000 house, forget it,” he said. “I don’t even think there are any.”

Bergeron, 49, a computer systems support engineer, refused to “burn” his money renting, either.

So he drove his 36-foot RV from Winter Springs, Fla., to Hillwood Camping Park and made the rugged spot in suburban Prince William County, Va., his residence.

Bergeron chose the park for its proximity to work, the comforts of suburbia and, most important, its price: $513 a month. Here, he lives in his RV among other workers who also were drawn by the region’s booming job market but were unable or unwilling to pay for its pricey housing.

The Washington area holds the distinction of producing the steepest job growth of any metropolitan area in the nation in the past five years, said Stephen Fuller, a public policy professor at George Mason University in suburban Fairfax, Va. Job seekers are flocking in to take advantage of that work, much of it on contract and temporary.

Of the estimated 70,800 jobs created in the region last year, the largest chunk, 35 percent, fell into the professional and business services category, which includes government contracting, according to Fuller. Thirty-four percent was in retail and construction.

“They’re building houses as fast as they can, and they need workers to build them,” Fuller said.

And workers need a home. Short-term rentals — whether apartments or residential hotel rooms — are expensive, as are houses. For many, an RV is the answer.

Long-term RV living grows

Although no organization tracks the number of people living in RVs, the four Washington-area campgrounds that allow long-term RV camping — as opposed to limiting stays to a couple of weeks — report a marked increase in demand. RVs, once symbols of footloose wanderers, have become long-term abodes.

“There are some families, but mostly it’s just singles and working guys,” said Pat Gardner, who manages Hillwood Camping Park. Long-term RV dwellers started filling up the park’s 150 campsites about five years ago. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Gardner said she’s noticed “more IT, more government-related, more security-related” workers among her RV dwellers. “I’ve had FBI, U.S. marshals, bomb-sniffing dogs … instead of just your regular blue collar.”

At Aquia Pines Camp Resort in Stafford, Va., demand is so high that owner Everett Lovell said he’s considering ripping out tent sites and adding to the 20 spaces for long-term RV dwellers.

Cherry Hill Park in suburban Prince George’s County, Md., has taken a surge of calls since 2002, when the fear of terrorism began to subside and workers felt comfortable taking jobs here again, said Janice Stabinsky, the park’s office manager.

When callers hear the monthly rate, about $1,400 per RV, many believe they can find a place to live for less, Stabinsky said. “Then they try, and they can’t,” she said. “And they call back and ask for a space.”

Trend started in Silicon Valley

The RV phenomenon first appeared in Silicon Valley during the mid-to-late 1990s, when some dot-com workers turned to RVs for relief from long commutes and steep mortgages and rents.

“The economy was so hot in that area at that time, some companies were letting (workers) park RVs in their parking lots,” said R.B. Brinton, marketing director for Escapees RV Club, a Livingston, Texas-based organization catering to RV users. “Most all of the parks in the area were full with waiting lists.

And “it’s not what people 40 years ago used to think of as an RV or RVing.” Brinton said. “Most RVs now have at least two TVs,” one in the living area and one in the sleeping area. “As you get into higher-end models, worth $200,000 and $300,000, you have plasma TVs that swing down from the ceiling. You have your complete theater surround system.”

Brian and Jo Lynn Forney’s 36-foot-long RV, parked at Cherry Hill, comfortably holds a medium-size couch, matching La-Z-Boy chairs, a dining area for four, a queen-size bed and Smokey the cat.

It’s as wired as almost any home, with a 27-inch television, DirecTV with TiVo, satellite cable, a built-in stereo system and a DSL hookup. Brian, 42, and Jo Lynn, 41, both master sergeants in the Army National Guard, even ride the Metro to work every day.

Asked how they could possibly live in an RV, they reply as unabashed fans. “Does your house have oak cabinets all the way through?” Brian asks.

All the Forneys had to do upon moving into Cherry Hill was hook into the campground’s electrical and water lines and call the telephone company to set up a landline. The campground office handles customers’ day-to-day needs as an apartment building would, accepting mail and offering laundry rooms, for example. Cherry Hill also provides a heated pool, a sauna and game and exercise rooms. Metrobus provides service to two Metro stations.

There are some sacrifices. “The thing I miss most is a dishwasher,” said Vicki Jackson, 52, a Pentagon budget analyst living year-round at Hillwood in her 35-foot Winnebago Sightseer with her husband. “That and a washer and dryer.”

Then there’s the loneliness that Kathy Justice, 48, must combat on quiet days when her husband, Darrel, 48, is at work at a Federal Aviation Administration facility. The couple live in a 38-foot RV at Hillwood four nights a week and return to their permanent home in Williamsburg on his days off.

“The first time (I drove home), I cried all the way,” she said. “‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this,’ I thought. But there’s no other choice.”

Now Justice fills the hours making runs to the new Super Target store a stone’s throw from her campground, working on scrapbooks and quilts, and talking to friends and family on her cell phone.

Justice keeps tabs on who is living around her: Male or female? Married? Occupation?

“It took awhile to get that feeling of security,” she said. “But then you realize everyone is doing the same thing as we are.”

Still, she counts the days until Darrel retires and this all ends.

“It’s gotten old,” she said, standing beside her RV one chilly evening. “It’s not how we expected to spend our life at this age.”

But it’s the practical thing to do.

News Releases - April 12, 2005

Antioxidant-rich diets reduce brain damage from stroke, new preclinical study suggests

Tampa, FL (April 12, 2005) — Your mother was right. Eat your fruits and veggies — they’re good for you!

And if that’s not reason enough, a new study suggests antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables may limit brain damage from stroke and other neurological disorders. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is posted online in the May 2005 issue of the journal Experimental Neurology.

USF/VA neuroscientist Paula Bickford, PhD, and colleagues found that rats fed diets preventatively enriched with blueberries, spinach or an algae known as spirulina experienced less brain cell loss and improved recovery of movement following a stroke.

“This study is how USF is advancing the field of brain health at the national level,” said Stephen Klasko, MD, MBA, dean of the USF College of Medicine and vice president for Health Sciences.

The study builds upon previous USF/VA research showing that diets enriched with blueberries, spinach or spirulina reversed normal age-related declines in memory and learning in old rats.

“I was amazed at the extent of neuroprotection these antioxidant-rich diets provided,” said Dr. Bickford, a researcher at the USF Center for Aging and Brain Repair and James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital. “The size of the stroke was 50 to 75 percent less in rats treated with diets supplemented with blueberries, spinach or spirulina before the stroke.”

Antioxidant and anti-inflammatory substances in these fruits and vegetables may somehow reduce the nerve cell injury and death triggered by a stroke, the researchers suggest. “The clinical implication is that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption may make a difference in the severity of a stroke,” Dr. Bickford said. “It could be a readily available, inexpensive and relatively safe way to benefit stroke patients.”

The researchers studied four groups of rats, all fed equal amounts of food for one month. One group was fed rat chow supplemented with blueberries, a second group chow with spinach, and the third chow with spirulina. The control (untreated) group ate chow only.

After four weeks, an ischemic stroke with reperfusion was induced in the rats. An ischemic stroke occurs when a blood clot cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain like the kink in a hose cuts off water flow. Then, later, the clot is released and blood flow returns, which is known as reperfusion.

The size of the stroke in the rats fed blueberry or spinach supplements was half that seen in the brains of untreated rats. Rats fed spirulina-enriched diets had stroke lesions 75 percent smaller than their untreated counterparts. In addition, rats pretreated with the blueberry, spinach or spirulina diets showed greater increases in poststroke movement than the control group.

All the supplemented diets were rich in antioxidants, which scientists say may counteract the burst of free radicals involved in the cascade of brain cell death triggered by an ischemic stroke. An excess of free radicals can damage cellular lipids, proteins and DNA.

The supplemented diets also contained anti-inflammatory substances that may help reduce inflammation-induced injury following a stroke, Dr. Bickford said. When a stroke occurs, immune cells in the brain mount an inflammatory response – rushing to the site of injury to clear away the dead and dying cells. As a result, nearby healthy nerve cells may suffer collateral damage much the same way firefighters breaking into an apartment to put out a fire in one room may inadvertently cause damage to other rooms.

Teasing out just which beneficial chemicals contained in the blueberries and leafy greens might be reproduced therapeutically in pill form is difficult, Dr. Bickford said. “Whole foods contain multiple nutrients, so there are many different ways these diets could be protecting the brain. From a scientific perspective, it’s a package deal.”

Dr. Bickford’s team is investigating whether rats treated with antioxidant-rich diets following strokes will experience improved recovery. The researchers also plan to study whether combinations of the diets might provide even greater protection against stroke damage than one diet alone.

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Veterans Administration.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In elderly people, omega-3 fatty acids contained in fish and soy oil increase a measure of heart-healthiness called heart rate variability, a small study indicates.

Taking a daily fish or soy oil supplement may therefore reduce the risk of developing irregular heart rhythm or succumbing to sudden cardiac death.

Lead investigator Dr. Fernando Holguin, at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and colleagues followed 52 people aged 60 or older who were randomly assigned to take one of the oil supplements, given as 1-gram capsules twice daily for 6 months.

The heart rate variability of the participants was measured every other day.

As the team reports in the medical journal Chest, fish oil supplementation increased average total variability from 3.26 units prior to supplementation to 3.54 afterwards. Soy oil increased the measure from 3.16 to 3.28.

“Our study group showed improvements in heart function in as little as 2 weeks,” Holguin comments in a press release.

Some participants reported discomfort with the supplements. Belching was reported by 41 percent in the fish oil group and 16 percent in the soy oil group. Corresponding rates for nausea were 12.5 percent and 8 percent.

Holguin’s group recommends omega-3 fatty acids supplements derived from either soy oil or fish oil “in conjunction with other factors known to increase heart rate variability such as exercise, weight loss, stress reduction, and restoration of normal sleep” to improve heart health.

SOURCE: Chest, April 2005.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Potassium citrate has similar blood pressure-lowering effects as the best-studied potassium compound, potassium chloride, according to a UK study

In comments to Reuters Health, Dr. Graham A. MacGregor said the important role of potassium in regulating blood pressure has been demonstrated in carefully controlled studies using potassium chloride and inactive “placebo” tablets. But it has not been clear, until now, how far other potassium salts lowered blood pressure.

“These results support other evidence for an increase in potassium intake and indicate that potassium does not need to be given in the form of chloride to lower blood pressure,” MacGregor and colleagues from St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London write in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension.

“Increasing the consumption of foods high in potassium is likely to have the same effect on blood pressure as potassium chloride,” the researches say.

They compared the effects on blood pressure of potassium chloride or potassium citrate in 14 adults with hypertension — that is, with blood pressure readings above 140/90. The participants took one compound for 1 week, waited a week, and then took the other for a week.

Average blood pressure at the start of the study was 151/93. It fell significantly to 140/88 with potassium chloride and to 138/88 mm Hg with potassium citrate.

“Our short-term study shows that potassium citrate is as effective as potassium chloride, and this supports the evidence that the main effect of increasing fruit and vegetable intake on blood pressure is due to the increase in potassium intake,” MacGregor said.

SOURCE: Hypertension, April 2005.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A 16-year-old disabled girl was punched and forced to engage in videotaped sexual acts with several boys in a high school auditorium as dozens of students watched, according to witnesses.

Authorities are investigating and no charges have been filed in the alleged attack last month at Mifflin High School. Four boys suspected of involvement were sent home and have not returned to class.

Also, the principal, Regina Crenshaw, was suspended and will be fired for not calling police, school officials said. And three assistant principals were suspended and will be reassigned to other schools. Crenshaw had no comment Tuesday.

The girl was forced to perform oral sex on at least two boys, according to statements from school officials, obtained by The Columbus Dispatch. Part of the alleged assault was videotaped by a student who had a camera for a school project.

School officials found the girl bleeding from the mouth. An assistant principal cautioned the girl’s father against calling 911 to avoid media attention, the statements said. The girl’s father called police.

Her father said the girl is developmentally disabled. A special education teacher said the teen has a severe speech impediment.