Health, Mind, Beauty and Relations

Potentially harmful pharmaceuticals not listed on labels were found in more than 700 over-the-counter dietary supplements, researchers report.

The pharmaceuticals, which were found in so-called natural products, were most likely to appear in supplements marketed as weight loss aids, muscle builders and male libido enhancers, according to the report published in JAMA Network Open.

Data for the study came from the Food and Drug Administration’s Tainted Products Marketed as Dietary Supplements, Centre for Drug Evaluation and Research database. The researchers, led by Madhur Kumar of the California Department of Public Health in Sacramento, identified 776 tainted supplements in the database, from 2007 to 2016.


To put the problem in perspective, the authors point to a study published in 2015 in The New England Journal of Medicine. That study found dietary supplement use was associated with 23,000 emergency department visits and 2,000 hospitalisations a year.

Of the tainted products in the current study, 45.5 per cent were marketed as aids for sexual enhancement, 40.9 per cent for weight loss, and 11.9 per cent for muscle building. They contained pharmaceuticals such as sildenafil, which is the active ingredient in Viagra; sibutramine, which is the active ingredient in Meridia, a weight loss drug removed from the market because of links to stroke and other cardiovascular events; and anabolic steroids or steroid-like substances.

Dr Louis Aronne wasn’t at all surprised by the study’s findings. “This is something we’ve seen again and again and again,” said Aronne, a professor of metabolic research and director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.

A new study has found how cognitive performance can improve during aerobic exercise.

During the study, conducted at the University Munich, electroencephalography readings were taken as 24 participants performed a visual working memory task while at rest and during the exercise involving different postures: seated on or pedalling a stationary bicycle, as well as standing or walking on a treadmill.


The findings are published in the British Journal of Psychology.

“Our findings hold implications, not only for the field of cognitive psychology, wherein our knowledge has been primarily derived from seated, resting participants, but also for our understanding of cognitive performance at large. Although modern society has evolved to become more and more sedentary, our brains may nevertheless perform best while our bodies are active,” said lead author Thomas Tllner.

The investigators found that both aerobic exercise and upright posture improved visual working memory compared with passive and seated conditions. Their analyses also suggest where the neural origins of these observed effects take place. 

According to a recent study, women who are overweight or obese have up to twice the risk of developing colorectal cancer before age 50 in contrast to women who have what is considered a normal body mass index.

The study is among the first epidemiologic analyses of the potential contributors to early, onset colorectal cancer, cases diagnosed under age 50. The researchers found that higher current BMI, BMI at 18 years of age, and weight gain since early adulthood are associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer under age 50. It included data from 85,256 women aged 25 to 44 in the Nurses’ Health Study II, which began in 1989. It’s true even among women with no family history of the disease.


“Our findings really highlight the importance of maintaining a healthy weight, beginning in early adulthood for the prevention of early-onset colorectal cancer,” said co-senior author and cancer epidemiologist Yin Cao.

“We hypothesised that the obesity epidemic may partially contribute to this national and global concern in early-onset colorectal cancer rates, but we were surprised by the strength of the link and the contribution of obesity and weight change since early adulthood,” Cao added.

“There are few known risk factors for early-onset colorectal cancer,” said Edward Giovannucci, MD, ScD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

A new programme in Australia is helping new parents understand their infant’s sleep patterns — and get better sleep themselves, too.

Following the Possums Infant Sleep Programme, parents reported less stress, less concern about sleep problems such as night-waking and day-time naps, and better quality of life, the study authors report in the journal Sleep Health.


“Most of us struggle with sleep disruption when our babies’ sleep patterns aren’t aligned with our own, and parents can become quite anxious and have a low mood,” said lead study author Helen Ball of Durham University’s Parent-Infant Sleep Lab in the United Kingdom.

The Possums Infant Sleep Programme educates parents about expectations around normal infant sleep and encourages them to experiment with strategies. In particular, it explains sleep regulators such as the circadian clock and sleep pressure and encourages parents to respond to babies’ “cues” for eating and sleeping.

The mothers appreciated that the program encouraged flexibility in their parenting, respected their choices, and helped them to relate better to their baby.

A new study has utilised a novel method to estimate long-term ozone exposure to quantify the health burden from long-term ozone exposure in three major regions of the world.

The research, conducted at the Duke University estimated that 266,000 (confidence interval: 186,000-338,000) premature mortalities across Europe, the USA, and China in 2015 were attributable to long-term exposure to ozone (O3). The findings are published in the Journal of Environmental Research Letters.

Karl Seltzer, study’s lead author said, “Then there is strong epidemiological and toxicological evidence linking ambient ozone exposure to adverse health effects.

“Historically, much of the previous research focused on the short-term impacts. We utilised results from the growing body of evidence that links long-term O3 exposure and increased cause-specific premature mortalities, particularly from respiratory diseases, Seltzer added.


For the study, the researchers used 2015 data from ground-based monitoring networks in the USA, Europe, and China to estimate long-term O3 exposure. They then calculated premature mortalities using exposure-response relationships from two American Cancer Society (ACS) cancer prevention studies.

Seltzer added, “Global estimates of O3 exposure are often made using state-of-the-art chemical transport models (CTMs). However, we based our study on observed air quality data, because it has several advantages over CTM modelling approaches.”

Interestingly, the team’s observationally-derived data shows smaller human-health impacts when compared to prior modelling results.

Explaining this, Seltzer explained that this difference is due to small biases in modeled results. These small biases are subsequently amplified by non-linear exposure-response curves.

This highlights the importance of accurately estimating long-term O3 exposure in health impact assessments. The overall findings from this study have important implications for policy makers and the public, for several reasons.”

According to a recent research, abnormal vision in childhood can affect the functioning of the brain.

The researchers from the University of Waterloo, University of British Columbia, and the University of Auckland uncovered differences in how the brain processes visual information in patients with various types of lazy eye. In doing so, they became the first to demonstrate that the brain can divert attention away from a lazy eye when both eyes are open.

“Current treatments for lazy eye primarily target the early stages of visual processing within the brain,” said Ben Thompson, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Optometry and Vision Science.” The results from this study show us that new treatments should also target higher-level processes such as attention.”


Lazy eye, known as amblyopia, is a loss of vision that originates in the brain, typically when a child develops an eye turn (strabismic type) or a substantial difference in refractive error between the eyes (anisometropic type). The unequal input causes the brain to ignore information from the weaker eye during brain development. Conventionally, eye care practitioners treated the different types of lazy eye similarly, primarily because the visual impairments experienced appeared to be the same.

In this stud, lead researcher Amy Chow, and her colleagues asked patients to pay attention to a specific set of dots among a group of distracting dots, all moving on a computer screen. However, the tracked dots were only visible in one eye (the weaker eye) while the distracting dots were visible only to the other eye (the stronger eye).

For people with normal vision as well as those with anisometropic amblyopia, showing different images between the two eyes didn’t matter. Both groups were able to overcome the distracting interference and track the dots successfully. Patients with strabismic amblyopia, on the other hand, were unable to direct their attention to the target dots when they were visible to only the weaker eye.

“One of the underlying reasons why some people with lazy eye have poor vision comes down to how the brain suppresses an eye,” said Chow, a PhD student at the School of Optometry and Vision Science at Waterloo. “The poorer-seeing eye is open, the retina is healthy and sending information through to the brain, yet that information does not reach conscious awareness as the brain chooses not to use it.”

Turns out, people living with diabetes are more likely to die from alcohol-related factors, accidents or suicide.

The study, conducted at the University of Helsinki, suggested that the increased risk of death from these causes may be related to the mental health of patients, which may be adversely affected by the psychological burden of living with and self-treating this debilitating disease, with potentially serious complications. The findings appeared in the European Journal of Endocrinology.

Type-1 and type-2 diabetes are highly prevalent global diseases, causing millions of deaths every year. It is well known that patients with diabetic have a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and kidney disorders, which can lead to earlier death. However, more recently, diabetes has been linked to an increased risk of depression but how poor mental health may affect patients with diabetes has not been fully investigated.


In this study, researchers assessed the alcohol-related, suicides or accidental causes of death of over 400,000 people with or without diabetes. The study reported that people with diabetes were much more likely to die from alcohol-related factors, accidents or suicide, especially patients that required regular, self-injections of insulin.

Researcher Leo Niskanen, said, “We know that living with diabetes can lead to a mental-health strain. Having to monitor their glucose levels and inject themselves daily with insulin has a huge impact on daily life; simply eating, moving and sleeping all affect blood glucose levels. This strain combined with the anxiety of developing serious complications like heart or kidney disease may also take their toll on psychological well-being.”

The study has highlighted that there is a need for effective psychological support for people with diabetes. If they feel like they are under a heavy mental burden or consider that their use of alcohol is excessive, they should not hesitate to discuss these issues with their primary care physician. There are many ways that these problems can be managed, provided they are communicated.