Daytime Nap May Boost Memory - Feb 1, 2008

http://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20080201/daytime-nap-may-boost-memory  WebMD Medical News — Take a daytime nap, and you might wake up with a sharper memory. That’s what happened in a new napping study that involved 33 undergraduate students. First, the students took three different tests of their short-term memory. In one test, they had to learn and remember pairs of unrelated words, such as “alligator” and “cigar.” In another test, they had to navigate and remember a maze shown on a computer screen. And in the last test, the students had to copy a complex drawing onto a sheet of paper, and then sketch the drawing from memory. Next, half of the students napped for about 45 minutes, while other students watched TV. Finally, all of the students repeated the three memory tests Napping boosted scores on the word-pair test, but not the other two tests. A closer look at the test scores shows that on all three tests, people with the highest scores before napping were the ones with the biggest gains in their post-nap test scores. So if they didn’t really absorb information before their nap, naps didn’t magically make the information sink in. Matthew Tucker, PhD, and William Fishbein, PhD, report their findings in today’s edition of Sleep. Tucker and Fishbein work in the psychology department of the City College of the City University of New York. SOURCES:Tucker, M. Sleep, Feb. 1, 2008.News release, American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

 

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AP-Licking the Flu

Drop under the tongue could replace needles for flu vaccination

    WASHINGTON (AP) _ Relief may be on the way for kids who tremble at the thought of another needle jab. One day the flu vaccine may simply be placed under the tongue.
    Korean researchers say two doses of influenza vaccine under the tongue of mice primed the animals’ immune system to fight off what would otherwise have been a deadly dose of flu.
    Researchers say placing a couple of drops of liquid under the tongue gets the vaccine directly to mucus membranes and prompts a response both in mucus tissues throughout the body as well as in the immune system itself.
    Next, they are turning their attention to people to see if the under-the-tongue vaccine also prompts a strong immune response in humans.
    The findings appeared in today’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

AP-Cold Medicines

Government: Cold meds send about 7,000 children yearly to hospital ERs

    ATLANTA (AP) _ The government says children taking cough and cold medicines without supervision is the biggest reason the medicines send about 7,000 children to the emergency room each year.
    A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about two-thirds of the cases were children who took the medicines unsupervised. About one-quarter involved cases in which parents gave the proper dosage and an allergic reaction or some other problem developed.
    The study included both over-the-counter and prescription medicines. It also comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned parents that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines are too dangerous for children younger than 2.
    About 1,600 of the estimated 7,100 children sent to emergency rooms each year are under the age of 2.

 

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Walking an hour a week cuts colon cancer risk

Mon Jan 21, 2008 3:09pm ESThttp://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL17245820080121  NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A large new study confirms that physical activity reduces colon cancer risk. While just an hour of walking a week seemed to protect against the disease, the more strenuously women exercised, the lower their risk, Dr. Kathleen Y. Wolin of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and colleagues found. “Our findings suggest that participation in lower intensity activities may be sufficient to reduce risk though more vigorous activity provides comparable or perhaps additional risk reduction,” they write in the International Journal of Cancer. Research showing that exercise reduces colon cancer risk has been “consistent and convincing,” Wolin and her team say, but questions remain about the intensity of exercise necessary to reduce risk. To investigate, they followed at 79,295 women, aged 40 to 65 years old, for 16 years, during which time 547 developed colon cancer. All were participating in the Nurse’s Health Study. Women who walked for 1 to 1.9 hours each week were 31 percent less likely to develop colon cancer than those who didn’t walk at all, the researchers found. And women who exercised at moderate or vigorous intensity for more than 4 hours weekly were at 44 percent lower risk of colon cancer than those who exercised for less than an hour a week. There was no link between exercising over the long term and colon cancer risk, but the researchers note that the number of long-term exercisers may have been too small to detect a relationship. They conclude: “Leisure-time physical activity should be encouraged for all adults for health benefits, including colon cancer prevention.” SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer, December 15, 2007.

 

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Here are your Family Name Game names for today:

7:20 AM - Andrew

4:20 PM - Brooke

 

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