Girls’ weight gains linked to inactivity
Adolescent girls in the United States are putting on weight because they are doing less physical activity than they did as children, a study has found.
Research by scientists at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque showed that increasing exercise to the equivalent of two to five hours of brisk walking each week could help prevent girls from gaining nine to 20 pounds in their teens.
“Preventing the steep decline in activity during adolescence is an important method to reduce obesity,” said Sue Y.S. Kimm, the lead researcher in a study published online last week by the Lancet medical journal.
Kimm and her team studied body mass index, skin folds and changes in physical activity in more than 2,200 girls from three U.S. cities who were followed from the ages of 9 to 19. The girls also filled in a questionnaire about their physical activity and eating habits.
From Reuters
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Poor youths at risk for chlamydia
As many as one in 20 teenage girls and women, and more than 2% of the general population in America are infected with chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, U.S. researchers have reported.
Pregnant women attending publicly funded clinics and economically disadvantaged youths are especially at risk of the bacterial infection, which can cause serious problems including infertility if untreated, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.
“STDs often have no symptoms and therefore frequently go unrecognized and undiagnosed,” said Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDC’s STD prevention programs.
“Stepping up screening and prevention efforts is critical to ensuring that young people do not suffer the long-term effects of untreated chlamydia, including infertility,” Douglas said.
Federally funded efforts have prevented millions of infections and saved an estimated $5 billion in direct medical costs over the last 30 years, the CDC reported last week at a meeting of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research in Amsterdam.
For the study, CDC researchers analyzed answers to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a survey of tens of thousands of Americans taken between 1999 and 2002.
From Reuters
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Chemical in brain tied to anorexia
Women who suffer from anorexia have increased chemical activity in a part of the brain that controls reward and reinforcement, something that may explain why they are driven to lose weight but don’t get any pleasure from it, a new study has found.
Researchers used brain-imaging technology on 10 women who had recovered from anorexia and 12 healthy women. In the anorexic women, they found overactivity by dopamine receptors in a part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. Dopamine is a brain chemical that is associated with regulating pleasure.
“The take-home message is dopamine in this area may be very important in how we respond to stimuli, how we view positive and negative reinforcement,” said Dr. Walter Kaye, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of the researchers involved in the study.
Dr. Guido Frank, a child psychiatry fellow at the University of California at San Diego and a leader of the study, said the hope was that the research could lead to the development of drugs to treat anorexia.
“It’s very, very hard to treat. They recognize it’s wrong, but they still don’t eat,” Frank said.
The research was reported this month online in the journal Biological Psychiatry. About 1% of American women suffer from anorexia, a disease than can also affect men. It has the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness, Kaye said.
From Associated Press
