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IMAGE: Exercise expert Zhen Yan, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, stands in a door decorated with numbers from races his lab members have participated in. view more
Credit: Dan Addison | UVA Communications
Exercise during pregnancy may let mothers significantly reduce their children s chances of developing diabetes and other metabolic diseases later in life, new research suggests.
A study in lab mice has found that maternal exercise during pregnancy prevented the transmission of metabolic diseases from an obese parent - either mother or father - to child. If the finding holds true in humans, it will have huge implications for helping pregnant women ensure their children live the healthiest lives possible, the researchers report in a new scientific paper.
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IMAGE: A multiyear workplace health promotion program can slow down the increase in health risks for working-age people. view more
Credit: 4event oy / Tuomas Vuorio
A multiyear workplace health promotion program can slow down the increase in health risks for working-age people. A study by the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä followed what kind of changes happened among participants during an eight-year workplace health promotion program in smoking, minor exercise, high blood pressure, musculoskeletal disorders, and overweight. The results of the study were encouraging for health promotion.
According to earlier studies, a high number of health risks are connected to an increase in occupational health care costs, lower productivity at work, and the growing number of sickness absences. Multiyear preventive actions at workplaces have not yet been studied much, and no research results have previously been available for studying
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IMAGE: Researchers at the Duke Lemur Center have been changing up their care to more closely match the seasonal fluctuations they experience in the wild. view more
Credit: Photo by David Haring, Duke Lemur Center
DURHAM, N.C. If you binged on high-calorie snacks and then spent the winter crashed on the couch in a months-long food coma, you d likely wake up worse for wear. Unless you happen to be a fat-tailed dwarf lemur.
This squirrel-sized primate lives in the forests of Madagascar, where it spends up to seven months each year mostly motionless and chilling, using the minimum energy necessary to withstand the winter. While zonked, it lives off of fat stored in its tail.
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People living with a patient undergoing an intensive weight loss treatment also benefit from this therapy. This has been demonstrated by a team of researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM-Hospital del Mar) along with doctors from Hospital del Mar and the CIBER on the Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBERObn), in collaboration with IDIAPJGol, the Pere Virgili Health Research Institute (IISPV), IDIBELL, IDIBAPS and the Sant Joan de Reus University Hospital. The study has been published in the journal
International Journal of Obesity.
The study analysed data from 148 family members of patients included in the weight loss and lifestyle programme PREDIMED-Plus (PREVencióDIetaMEDiterranea Plus) over a two-year period. The researchers analysed whether these people also indirectly benefited from the programme, as they were not enrolled in the study and did not receive any direct treatment. PREDIMED-Plus is a multicentre study in which a g
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Researchers from the HealthPartners Institute and University of Minnesota in Minneapolis conducted an observational analysis of interviews and characteristics of primary care clinics, comparing the strategies, facilitators and barriers to high performance in treating patients with diabetes. The purpose of the study was to learn what strategies and factors seem most important to leaders of primary care clinics to ensure high performance. The percentage of Minnesota diabetes patients who achieved optimal diabetes care measures increased from 12 to 45 percent between 2004 and 2017, while national measures of diabetes care outcomes did not improve significantly around the same time span.
The main difference among the strategies and factors was the degree to which top performing clinics used patient data to guide proactive and outreach methods to intensify treatment and monitor impact. The authors state that while confirmatory studies are needed, clinic leaders should consider