Category Archives: Health

New Study Suggests Link Between Estrogen, Blood Pressure

EAST LANSING, Mich. — While recent studies have shown long-term exposure to estrogen can be a danger to women – overturning physicians’ long-held beliefs that the hormone was good for their patients’ hearts – the process by which estrogen induces high blood pressure was unclear.

In a new study, Michigan State University researchers found long-term estrogen exposure generates excessive levels of the compound superoxide, which causes stress in the body. The buildup of this compound occurs in an area of the brain that is crucial to regulating blood pressure, suggesting that the estrogen-induced buildup causes increased blood pressure. (more…)

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Couples-oriented Programs Found to Boost Healthy Behaviors Among African Americans

*Intervention focuses on couples in which one partner is HIV-positive*

Intervention programs that promote healthier eating, increased physical activity and cancer screenings may be beneficial for African American couples that are at high risk for chronic diseases and that include one partner who is HIV-positive, according to new research.

With such inverventions, each partner appears to draw encouragement from the other to monitor his or her own lifestyle and health, according to study co-author Gail Wyatt, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and an associate director of the UCLA AIDS Institute. (more…)

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Yale Researchers Identify Four Key Weapons in Immune System’s Arsenal

Yale University researchers have identified four unique host defense proteins among thousands that seem to play a crucial role in mobilizing the immune system’s response to bacterial infections, they report in the May 6 issue of the journal Science.

The findings suggest it may be possible to find new ways to assist immune-compromised patients to fight off a variety of pathogens, the authors say.

“We can start to think about how to mimic these chemical processes and deliver them in drug form,” said John D. MacMicking, associate professor of microbial pathogenesis at Yale School of Medicine and senior author the study. (more…)

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UF Researchers Find Quiet Protein Speaks Loudly in Fight Against Cancer

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — When a movie character says, “It’s too quiet,” that’s usually a sign something bad may happen.

Now, University of Florida researchers have discovered that when variations of a certain protein in our cells are too quiet, it may add to the risk that someone will develop lung cancer. When scientists restored the protein to its normal, active self, its cancer-inhibiting properties reappeared. (more…)

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Alcohol, Mood and Me (Not You)

Thanks in part to studies that follow subjects for a long time, psychologists are learning more about differences between people. In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the author describes how psychologists can use their data to learn about the different ways that people’s minds work.

Most psychology research is done by asking a big group of people the same questions at the same time. “So we might get a bunch of Psych 101 undergrads, administer a survey, ask about how much they use alcohol and what their mood is, and just look and see, is there a relationship between those two variables,” says Daniel J. Bauer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the author of the article. (more…)

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