HEALTH CAPSULES

Exercise good for chemotherapy patients

Exercise has multiple benefits and researchers suggest that exercise may have an added benefit for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Their work, performed on a melanoma mouse model, found that combining exercise with chemotherapy shrunk tumours more than chemotherapy alone. "The immediate concern for patients is the cancer but then when you get over that hump, you have to deal with the long-term elevated risk of cardio-vascular disease," said Joseph Libonati, associate professor, University of Pennsylvania. Exercise has long been recommended to cancer patients for its physical and psychological benefits. Libonati and colleagues were interested in testing whether exercise could protect against the negative cardiac-related side-effects of the common cancer drug Doxorubicin. Though effective at treating, Doxorubicin has is known to damage heart cells in the long-term. In lab settings, mice were given an injection of melanoma cells in the scruffs of their necks. Mice in the treated group and the placebo groups were put on exercise regimens while the rest of the mice remained sedentary. The results found that the mice that both received chemotherapy and exercised had significantly smaller tumours after two weeks than mice that only received Doxorubicin. The paper appeared in the American Journal of Physiology.

Why stress makes people grumpy

Why is it that when people are too stressed they are often grouchy, grumpy, nasty, distracted or forgetful? Researchers have now discovered the mechanism that explains the relationship between chronic stress and the loss of social skills and cognitive impairment. When triggered by stress, an enzyme attacks a synaptic regulatory molecule in the brain, leading to behavioural problems, the findings showed. "The identification of this mechanism is important because it suggests potential treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders related to chronic stress, particularly depression," said Carmen Sandi from Brain Mind Institute (BMI) at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. The study appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

Kids eat better if parents went to college

A child's diet is likely to be decided by the education of the young one's parents, says a new study. Researchers from University of British Columbia have found that Vancouver schoolchildren, whose parents completed some post-secondary education, were 85 percent more likely to eat vegetables during the school week than those with parents who completed high school or less. Children whose parents graduated from college or university were 67 per cent less likely to consume sugary drinks. "We can only speculate on the reasons for the disparities. Higher priced products, like vegetables, may not be the food that gets packed first for vulnerable families that need to make tough choices about school lunches," said Jennifer Black, a food, nutrition and health professor at University of British Columbia. The study revealed that majority of children, regardless of socioeconomic status, do not consume enough low-fat milk or whole grains on school days, opting instead for packaged snacks like potato chips or fast-food items like French fries — high in sodium and saturated fat. The study surveyed nearly 1,000 students in grades five to eight — asking them to report their daily food consumption at school or while travelling to and from school. Less than half of the kids reported consuming fruit, vegetables, whole grains or low-fat milk. Seventeen per cent reported eating fast food, 20 per cent reported eating packaged snacks and 31 per cent reported drinking sugary drinks daily. Fifteen per cent of the students reported going hungry.

Babies learn words differently

Toddlers learn words differently as they age, and a limit exists as to how many words they can learn each day, according to a new study. Research has shown that most 18-month-olds learn an average of two to five new words a day; however, little is known about how children process information to learn new words as they move through the pre-school years. The new findings by a University of Missouri researcher could help parents enhance their children's vocabularies and assist speech-language professionals in developing and refining interventions to help children with language delays. "We found that babies' abilities to accurately guess the meaning of new words increases between 18 and 30 months of age, and by 24 to 36 months, toddlers are able to accurately guess the meanings of new words at a significantly higher level," said Judith Goodman, associate professor, chair of the Department of Communication Science and Disorders. "Interestingly, we observed that even from the time children mature from 18 to 30 months of age, the cues toddlers use to learn new words change," said Goodman. In the study, researchers taught six new words to children, who ranged in age from 18 to 36 months, using three types of cues. The cues were presented alone or in pairs, and the researchers recorded the children's ability to accurately guess what the words meant. "When children were presented with a new word and asked to choose between an item for which they already had a name and an unfamiliar object, they appropriately assigned the new word to the unfamiliar object, and this ability improved as children aged," Goodman said. "However, using social cues, such as eye gaze, became less effective as the children matured. By 36 months of age, children were less likely to assume a word referred to the particular object a speaker was looking at than younger children were," Goodman said. Goodman also found that a limit exists as to how many words toddlers can retain. A day after the children learned the six words, the researchers tested whether the children remembered the words. The children better remembered the first three words they had learned the first day. The study was published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. — Agencies