Eating Healthily At Work Is Good

A new study has demonstrated that employees at a large urban hospital who purchased the least healthy food in its cafeteria were more likely to have an unhealthy diet outside of work, be overweight and/or obese, and have risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease, compared to good health. Read More

 "Employer-sponsored programs to promote healthy eating could reach millions of Americans and help to curb obesity, a worsening epidemic that too often leads to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer," 

Most Americans spend about half their waking hours at work and consume food acquired at work. 

Nearly a third of all US workers are obese, which has an impact beyond the individual's health risks.

 Previous research has shown that obesity contributes to higher absenteeism, lower productivity, and higher healthcare expenses for employers. 

This study's findings can lead to more effective strategies to encourage employees to choose healthier foods and reduce their risks for chronic conditions.

"Workplace wellness programs have the potential to promote lifestyle changes among large populations of employees, yet to date there have been challenges to developing effective programs. 

Participants were 602 Massachusetts General Hospital employees who regularly used the hospital's cafeterias and were enrolled in a health promotion study in 2016. 

As part of the hospital's "Choose Well, Eat Well" program, foods and beverages in the hospital cafeterias have "traffic light" labels to indicate their healthfulness: green is healthy, yellow is less healthy, and red is unhealthy. 

Food displays have also been modified to put healthier choices in the direct line of sight, while unhealthy foods were made less accessible to reduce impulse purchases. 

Simplified labeling strategies provide an opportunity to educate employees without restricting their freedom of choice. 

In the future, using purchase data to provide personalized nutritional feedback via email or text messaging is another option to explore to encourage healthy eating. 

The study is a cross-sectional analysis of work site food purchases from cash register data; food consumption reports from surveys; and cardio-metabolic test results, diagnoses, and medication information. 

Using cafeteria purchasing data, the investigators developed a Healthy Purchasing Score (HPS) to rate the dietary quality of employees' overall purchases. 

The investigators compared participants' HPS to the quality of their overall diet (using an online survey and tool developed by the National Cancer Institute), as well as to measures of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol (data acquired through test results and self-reporting).

The analysis showed that employees with the lowest HPS (least healthy purchases) had the lowest overall dietary quality and the highest risk for obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. 

Healthier purchases were associated with higher dietary quality and lower prevalence of obesity, hypertension, and prediabetes/diabetes.

Multiple Miscarriages are Linked to Faulty Sperm

compared to men whose partners had not experienced miscarriages, the sperm of those involved in the study had higher levels of DNA damage.

The study team hope these findings may open new avenues to finding treatments to reduce the risk of miscarriage.

Recurrent miscarriage affects around one in 50 couples in the UK, and is defined as the consecutive loss of three of more pregnancies before 20 weeks gestation.

Until recently recurrent miscarriage was thought to be caused by health issues with the mother, such as infection or immune problems.

However, doctors are now realising sperm health may also play a role, explained Dr Channa Jayasena, lead author of the research from Imperial's Department of Medicine: "Traditionally doctors have focused attention on women when looking for the causes of recurrent miscarriage. The men's health -- and the health of their sperm, wasn't analysed.

"However, this research adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests sperm health dictates the health of a pregnancy. For instance, previous research suggests sperm has an important role in the formation of the placenta, which is crucial for oxygen and nutrient supply to the fetus."

In the new research, the team analysed the sperm of 50 men who were patients at the Recurrent Miscarriage Clinic at St Mary's Hospital in London, part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

They then compared the results to the sperm health of 60 male volunteers whose partners had not suffered miscarriage.

The analysis revealed sperm from men with partners who had suffered recurrent miscarriage had twice as much DNA damage compared to the control group.

The research team suggest this DNA damage may be triggered by so-called reactive oxygen species.

There are molecules formed by cells in semen (the fluid that contains sperm cells) to protect sperm from bacteria and infection. However, in high enough concentrations the molecules can cause significant damage to sperm cells.

The results from the study revealed sperm from men whose partners had suffered miscarriage had a four-fold increase in the amount of reactive oxygen species compared to the control group.

The research team are now investigating what may trigger high levels of these reactive oxygen species.

Dr Jayasena explained: "Although none of the men in the trial had any ongoing infection such as chlamydia -- which we know can affect sperm health -- it is possible there may be other bacteria from previous infections lingering in the prostate gland, which makes semen. This may lead to permanently high levels of reactive oxygen species."

He added there is increasing evidence obesity can lower sperm health -- possibly because high levels of body fat can trigger an increase in reactive oxygen species. Therefore the team are analysing the metabolic health of the 50 men in the study, and assessing weight and cholesterol levels.

The men whose partners had suffered miscarriage were also slightly older than the control group -- with an average age of 37 compared to 30, and were slightly more overweight. The team are now investigating whether these factors may have affected the levels of reactive oxygen species.

Dr Jayasena concluded: "Although this is a small study, it gives us clues to follow. If we confirm in further work that high levels of reactive oxygen species in semen increase the risk of miscarriage, we could try to develop treatments that lower these levels and increase the chance of a healthy pregnancy.

It has taken medicine a long time to realise sperm health has a role to play in miscarriage -- and that the cause doesn't lie solely with women. 

Now we realise both partners contribute to recurrent miscarriage, we can hopefully get a clearer picture of the problem and start to look for ways of ensuring more pregnancies result in a healthy baby."

Beware of High cholesterol levels after Christmas

All that butter and cream in Christmas food may possibly boost cholesterol levels more than assumed up to now. In a new study of 25,000 Danes, researchers conclude that cholesterol levels after the Christmas holiday are 20% higher than they are in the summer.

So the study by researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital and the University of Copenhagen shows that the risk of having elevated cholesterol is six times higher after the Christmas break.

"Our study shows strong indications that cholesterol levels are influenced by the fatty food we consume when celebrating Christmas. The fact that so many people have high cholesterol readings straight after the Christmas holiday is very surprising," says Dr. Anne Langsted, M.D., who is one of the authors of the article.

Nine out of ten of the people participating in the so-called Copenhagen General Population Study had elevated cholesterol after Christmas. People who already have high cholesterol should perhaps be even more alert to their cholesterol levels during the Christmas holidays.

"For individuals, this could mean that if their cholesterol readings are high straight after Christmas, and they could consider having another test taken later on in the year," says another of the article's authors, Dr. Signe Vedel-Krogh, M.D.

"In any event, there is a greater risk of finding that you have elevated cholesterol if you go to the doctor and have your cholesterol tested straight after Christmas. It is important to be aware of this, both for doctors who treat high cholesterol and those wishing to keep their cholesterol levels down," she concludes.

The article "The Christmas holidays are followed immediately by a period of hypercholesterolemia" has just been published in the international journalAtherosclerosis.

Facts about cholesterol

If you have too much cholesterol in your blood, your arteries can get furred up and there is a greater risk of developing heart attacks and stroke.

Heart attacks and strokes are what kill most people worldwide.

Where Does Mental Disorders Begin?

Psychiatric disorders’ many complexities have stymied scientists looking for clear genetic culprits. But a new giant dataset holds clues to how, when and where these brain disorders begin.

Called PsychENCODE, the project’s first large data release has revealed intricaIt’s all connected, and now we have the tools to unravel those connections,” says geneticist Thomas Lehner of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., who oversaw the project but wasn’t involved in the research. 

Earlier studies have pinpointed certain genes and other stretches of the genome — the genetic material that makes up cells’ instruction books — as being involved in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism spectrum disorder. The new collection of work goes further, both confirming and clarifying some of these roles.the insights into the behavior of genes and the stretches of genetic material between them in both healthy brains and those from people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or autism spectrum disorder. 

Baboons survive 6 months after getting a pig heart transplant

the longest a baboon lived after such a procedure was 57 days.

Another two baboons in the study lived at least three months with pig hearts and were in good health during that time, says Bruno Reichart, a cardiac surgeon at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The baboons hopped and climbed around their enclosures. Some enjoyed eating mangoes and eggs, and watching TV programs like “Tom and Jerry” and “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” he says. 

This work brings scientists closer to the goal of successfully transplanting life-supporting pig organs into humans, says Luhan Yang, chief scientific officer of eGenesis, a Boston companydeveloping ways to transplant organs between different species in order to ease organ shortages (SN: 10/4/17, p. 26). “Of course, it’s still early, but we’re one step closer to the clinical application,” says Yang, who was not involved in the study.

The pigs were engineered to produce a human version of two proteins — CD46, which blocks an immune response that pokes holes in foreign cells, and thrombomodulin, which prevents blood from clotting after surgery. Researchers also ensured that the pigs couldn’t make alpha-gal sugars, which coat the cells of all mammals except monkeys, apes and humans. Those sugars can provoke the immune system to attack organs transplanted from pigs into humans and other primates.

Researchers fine-tuned the transplant procedure over the course of three trials involving 14 baboons, and found that two steps in the process were key to its success. First, instead of transporting the organs in a cold solution — as is standard practice in human-to-human transplants — scientists hooked the hearts up to a machine that steadily pumped an oxygenated mixture of blood and nutrients. Transporting hearts in an ice bath can cut off oxygen to the organs. Repeated infusions of blood prevented the hearts from eventually failing.

Next, the scientists aimed to prevent the pig hearts from growing too big for the baboons. After swelling from the operation subsides, a transplanted heart continues to grow and can damage nearby organs. So the researchers decreased the baboons’ blood pressure, and weaned the monkeys off anti-inflammatory cortisone steroids earlier. The team also gave the baboons a medication that limits the heart’s growth by keeping blood platelets from building up.

Of the five baboons in the final experiment, two remained healthy through the three-month trial period and one had to be euthanized early after developing a blood clot. One of the two allowed to live six months eventually developed liver damage after being weaned off medication while the other remained relatively healthy.

Find out why patients lie to their doctors

60 to 80 percent of people surveyed have not been forthcoming with their doctors about information that could be relevant to their health, according to a new study. 

Besides fibbing about diet and exercise, more than a third of respondents didn't speak up when they disagreed with their doctor's recommendation. 

Another common scenario was failing to admit they didn't understand their clinician's instructions.

When respondents explained why they weren't transparent, most said that they wanted to avoid being judged, and didn't want to be lectured about how bad certain behaviors were. 

More than half were simply too embarrassed to tell the truth.

"Most people want their doctor to think highly of them," says the study's senior author Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., chair of population health sciences at U of U Health and a research scientist with the VA Salt Lake City Health System's Informatics Decision-Enhancement and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS) Center for Innovation.

"They're worried about being pigeonholed as someone who doesn't make good decisions.

Insights into the doctor-patient relationship came from a national online survey of two populations. One survey captured responses from 2,011 participants who averaged 36 years old. 

The second was administered to 2,499 participants who were 61 on average.

Survey-takers were presented with seven common scenarios where a patient might feel inclined to conceal health behaviors from their clinician, and asked to select all that they had ever happened to them. 

Participants were then asked to recall why they made that choice. 

The survey was developed with input from physicians, psychologists, researchers and patients, and refined through pilot testing with the general public.

In both surveys, people who identified themselves as female, were younger, and self-reported as being in poor health were more likely to report having failed to disclose medically relevant information to their clinician.

"I'm surprised that such a substantial number of people chose to withhold relatively benign information, and that they would admit to it," says the study's first author Andrea Gurmankin Levy, Ph.D., MBe, an associate professor in social sciences at Middlesex Community College in Middletown, Connecticut. 

"We also have to consider the interesting limitation that survey participants might have withheld information about what they withheld, which would mean that our study has underestimated how prevalent this phenomenon is."

The trouble with a patient's dishonesty is that doctors can't offer accurate medical advice when they don't have all the facts.

"If patients are withholding information about what they're eating, or whether they are taking their medication, it can have significant implications for their health. Especially if they have a chronic illness," says Levy.

Understanding the issue more in-depth could point toward ways to fix the problem. 

Levy and Fagerlin hope to repeat the study and talk with patients immediately after clinical appointments, while the experience is still fresh in their minds. 

Person-to-person interviews could help identify other factors that influence clinician-patient interactions. 

For instance, are patients more open with doctors they've known for years?

The possibility suggests that patients may not be the only ones to blame, says Fagerlin. 

"How providers are communicating in certain situations may cause patients to be hesitant to open up," she says. 

"This raises the question, is there a way to train clinicians to help their patients feel more comfortable?" 

After all, a healthy conversation is a two-way street.

Learn How to Read Rats' Minds

Scientists can infer a rats location based on which place cell found in the brain region called hippocampus sends signals. 

However, sometimes the place cell that is active does not correspond with the rat's current location. 

"This gives us an insight into what the animal is thinking about space. 

"We used this concept to understand how rats think during tasks that test their spatial memory."

In the experiments, rats navigated through a maze with eight arms. 

The rats revisited the maze so that they formed memories of where the rewards were hidden. 

This task teases apart two different forms of spatial memory: reference and working memory. 

Reference memory is the memory that allows a rat to remember which arms contain rewards, and which arms don't. 

Working memory is the memory that keeps track of which arms the rat hasn't been to yet and which ones it has already visited, so that the rat doesn't make unnecessary trips. 

The researchers can test pure working memory by modifying the experiment so that only arms that contain rewards are open, or pure reference memory by closing off arms that have been visited already.

The researchers then asked: how do place cells fire when rats navigate a maze, and how does firing differ between reference and working memory tasks? 

At the center of the maze, before the rat enters the next arm, the sequence of place cells that fire correspond either to the route the rat took in the last arm it visited, or to the arm it is going to run down next. 

In tasks testing reference memory, the sequence corresponds to the next maze arm the rat will visit, giving the researchers a glimpse into the rat's immediate plans. 

"The animal is thinking about a different place than the one it is in. 

In fact, we can predict which arm the rat will enter next.

Not only can the researchers predict where the rat will go next, they also know when the rat will make a mistake.

"When the rat makes a mistake, it replays a random route. 

Based on the place cells, we can predict that the rat will make a mistake before it commits it.

" However, the prediction fails in working memory tasks. 

In tasks that test only working memory, the firing pattern instead replays the last arm that the animal visited.

The researchers hypothesize that the brain uses different strategies to solve reference and working memory tasks. 

"With reference memory, the brain truly navigates and remembers that 'this is a location I have to go to'. 

This uses the hippocampus, which is important for spatial tasks. 

Working memory is more abstract, each location is an item on the animal's list of places to visit. 

The hippocampus probably signals to the prefrontal cortex where the rat was, and the prefrontal cortex keeps track of which items it can tick off.

can the Universe be a giant hologram?

An international team of scientists has uncovered compelling evidence that our Universe could have started life as a hologram, a flat, two-dimensional surface that appears to have a third dimension, according to a study published inPhysical Review Letters.

For more than four years the Planck satellite collected information from the electromagnetic radiation left over from the Big Bang, known as the ‘cosmic microwave background’. Now, an international team that included physicists from The University of Southampton, has used this data to investigate the origin and structure of our early Universe.

Finding irregularities between two- and three-dimensional models of the Universe, the researchers say the data suggest that in its very early stages, the Universe could have had a holographic structure that lasted for a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.  

The study shines further light on the creation and structure of our early Universe, and could lead to a better understanding of how space and time emerged. 

find out why we shouldn't like coffee, but we like it

The more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink, reports a new study. The sensitivity is based on genetics. Bitterness is natural warning system to protect us from harmful substances, so we really shouldn't like coffee. Scientists say people with heightened ability to detect coffee's bitterness learn to associate good things with it. Why do we like the bitter taste of coffee? Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances. By evolutionary logic, we should want to spit it out. 

How does little babies laugh?

Few things can delight an adult more easily than the uninhibited, effervescent laughter of a baby. Yet baby laughter, a new study shows, differs from adult laughter in a key way: Babies laugh as they both exhale and inhale, in a manner that is remarkably similar to nonhuman primates.The research will be described by Disa Sauter, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, during a talk at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association's 2018 Acoustics Week in Canada, Nov. 5-9 at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada.

Along with her colleagues -- psychologist Mariska Kret and graduate student Dianne Venneker of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Bronwen Evans, a phonetician at University College London -- Sauter studied laughter clips taken from 44 infants and children between 3 and 18 months of age. The recordings were taken from online videos in which babies were engaged in playful interactions. The recordings were then analyzed by 102 listeners, recruited from a psychology student population, who evaluated the extent to which the laughs in each clip were produced on the exhale versus the inhale.

Sauter and her colleagues found that the youngest babies commonly laughed on both inhalation and exhalation, as do nonhuman primates like chimpanzees. In the older babies studied, however, laughter was primarily produced only on the exhale, as is the case in older children and adults.

"Adult humans sometimes laugh on the inhale but the proportion is markedly different from that of infants' and chimps' laughs. Our results so far suggest that this is a gradual, rather than a sudden, shift," said Sauter, who points out that the transition does not appear to be linked to any particular developmental milestones. She noted, however that these results were based on the judgments of nonexpert listeners. "We are currently checking those results against judgments by phoneticians, who are making detailed annotations of the laughter."

Sauter said that there is no accepted reason why humans, alone among primates, laugh only on exhalation. One possibility, she said, is that it is a result of the vocal control humans develop as they learn to speak.

The researchers currently are examining if there is a link between the amount of laughter produced upon inhalation and exhalation and the reasons why individuals laugh, which also change with age. In infants and younger babies, as in nonhuman primates, laughter occurs as the result of physical play like tickling. In older individuals, laughter can arise from physical play but also from social interactions.

"Beyond that, I'd be interested in seeing whether our findings apply to other vocalizations than laughter," said Sauter. Ultimately, the research could offer insight into vocal production of children with developmental disorders.   "If we know what normally developing babies sound like, it could be interesting to study infants at risk to see whether there are very early signs of atypical development in their nonverbal vocalizations of emotion."

Old Men Associated With Increased Birth Risks

The data even suggest that the age of the father can sway the health of the mother during pregnancy, specifically her risk for developing diabetes.

"We tend to look at maternal factors in evaluating associated birth risks, but this study shows that having a healthy baby is a team sport, and the father's age contributes to the baby's health, too," said Michael Eisenberg, MD, associate professor of urology.

Data from more than 40 million births showed that babies born to fathers of an "advanced paternal age," which roughly equates to older than 35, were at a higher risk for adverse birth outcomes, such as low birth weight, seizures and need for ventilation immediately after birth. Generally speaking, the older a father's age, the greater the risk. For example, men who were 45 or older were 14 percent more likely to have a child born prematurely, and men 50 or older were 28 percent more likely to have a child that required admission to the neonatal intensive care unit.

Still, these numbers aren't reason to drastically change any life plans, as the risks are still relatively low, Eisenberg said. He compared the increased risks to buying lottery tickets. "If you buy two lottery tickets instead of one, your chances of winning double, so it's increased by 100 percent," he said. "But that's a relative increase. Because your chance of winning the lottery started very small, it's still unlikely that you're going to win the lottery. This is a very extreme example, but the same concept can be applied to how you think about these birth risks."

Instead, Eisenberg sees the findings as informational ammunition for people planning a family and hopes that they will serve to educate the public and health officials.

A paper describing the study will be published online Nov. 1 in the The British Medical Journal. Eisenberg is the senior author. Resident physician Yash Khandwala, MD, is the lead author.

Increased risks at 35

Back in 2017, Eisenberg published a study showing that the number of older men fathering children was on the rise. Now, about 10 percent of infants are born to fathers over the age of 40, whereas four decades ago it was only 4 percent.

"We're seeing these shifts across the United States, across race strata, across education levels, geography -- everywhere you look, the same patterns are being seen," Eisenberg said. "So I do think it's becoming more relevant for us to understand the health ramifications of advanced paternal age on infant and maternal health."

Eisenberg and his colleagues used data from 40.5 million live births documented through a data-sharing program run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics. The researchers organized the information based on the fathers' age -- younger than 25; 25 to 34; 35 to 44; 45 to 55; and older than 55 -- and controlled for a variety of parameters that might skew the association between the father's age and birth outcomes, such as race, education level, marital status, smoking history, access to care and the mother's age.

The data suggested that once a dad hits age 35, there's a slight increase in birth risks overall -- with every year that a man ages, he accumulates on average two new mutations in the DNA of his sperm -- but birth risks for infants born to fathers of the subsequent age tier showed sharper increases.

Compared with fathers between the ages of 25 and 34 (the average age of paternity in the United States), infants born to men 45 or older were 14 percent more likely to be admitted to the NICU, 14 percent more likely to be born prematurely, 18 percent more likely to have seizures and 14 percent more likely to have a low birth weight. If a father was 50 or older, the likelihood that their infant would need ventilation upon birth increased by 10 percent, and the odds that they would need assistance from the neonatal intensive care unit increased by 28 percent.

"What was really surprising was that there seemed to be an association between advanced paternal age and the chance that the mother would develop diabetes during pregnancy," said Eisenberg. For men age 45 and older, their partners were 28 percent more likely to develop gestational diabetes, compared with fathers between 25 and 34. Eisenberg points out that possible biological mechanisms at play here are still a bit murky, but he suspects that the mother's placenta has a role.

Beyond correlation

Moving forward, Eisenberg wants to look into other population cohorts to confirm the associations between age and birth risks, as well as begin to decode some of the possible biological mechanisms.

"Scientists have looked at these kinds of trends before, but this is the most comprehensive study to look at the relationship between the father's age and birth outcomes at a population level," said Eisenberg. "Having a better understanding of the father's biological role will be obviously important for the offspring, but also potentially for the mother." 

Other Stanford co-authors of the study are professor of obstetrics and gynecology Valerie Baker, MD; professor of pediatrics Gary Shaw, DrPH; professor of pediatrics David Stevenson, MD; and professor of biomedical data, Ying Lu, PhD. 

Eisenberg is a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Stanford Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Cancer Institute.

Stanford's Department of Urology also supporte