SportsGeezer

Manly Stuff: Four Ways to Treat Enlarged Prostates

If you are male and do not have an enlarged prostate, just wait. Chance are: you will. As this four-part series on treatments for enlarged prostates reports, two out of three men over sixty have some symptoms of the unpleasant condition. Happily, scientists are all over this problem, which afflicts men at a time in  their life when they have the most money to spend on treatments. This piece, is the L.A Times reports on four ways to go:
Drugs 
Diet and exercise
Saw palmetto
Surgery

Testing the Body Fat Tests

Washington Post reporter Howard Schneider was never a big believer in body fat as a measure of fitness, or, for that matter, of body fat measure as a measure --of anything. In this piece, which includes a less-than-information-packed video, Schneider introduces innocent readers to a technology called bioelectrical impedance, which passes a small current through conductive foot pads or handheld electrodes (and, in some cases, both). The current can pass easily through water-rich muscle fiber, but it bogs down in fat. Based on a measure of impedance (how much of the current gets through from one electrode to the other), the machines use mathematical models to estimate the amount of fat that got in the way en route. Wait, there's more about other ways to measure body fat, but it's unclear why, because, as Schneider tells us, it doesn't work.
Read more in the Washington Post.

Can You Catch Up on Lost Sleep?

Can you catch up on lost sleep? To solve this mystery, Geezer turns to The Scientific American, wondering, of course, why anyone would name a magazine "The Scientific American." Does anyone publish a journal called "The Romantic Argentinian" or "The Musically Inclined Norwegian"? Probably not, but wait, Geezer struggles to get back on track. OK. Better now. The Scientific American reports that, in a word, "Yes" you can catch up on lost sleep, but the catching up must be done gradually. An hour of extra sleep a night for several nights is a good way to go. Trying to catch up on a week's worth of lost sleep with one long slumber is, Sciam suggests, a waste of sleep.
Read more in The Scientific  American.

Researchers Say Fat Cell Count Is Forever

We can lose fat, but we can't lose fat cells. So indicates research coming out of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where, the journal Nature reports, scientists have been busily counting fat-holding cells. Nature reports that researchers at the institute took biopsies of belly fat from 687 people, both lean and obese, and recorded the number and size of fat cells, as well as the subjects' age, sex and body mass index. Combined with previous similar data from children, they showed that the average number of fat cells rises until the age of about 20, and then remains relatively constant, and is closely linked with body mass index. Nature reports that old fat cells do die, but they are soon replaced by new fat cells, ready to carry around any number of extra pounds.
What to do? Whatever you've always done to keep the weight off. If you're reading this, chances are you're already too old to change the number of fats cells in your body.
Read more in Nature.

Pumping Up Your Brain Is Easier Than You Think

First, readers should know that "fluid intelligence" is not knowing which kind of beer tastes best with a particular meal. It's the ability to reason and solve problems, such as figuring out which kind of beer tastes best with a particular meal. The good news is that researchers now think that fluid intelligence, once considered a constant, like height, can be improved. CBS News reports that experiments conducted at the University of Michigan suggest that a demanding memory task might kick your intelligence up a notch or two, and the more you engage your brain this way, the smarter you might become. Psychologists asked healthy adult volunteers (average age: 26) to take a standard test for fluid intelligence, and then perform a series of training exercises designed to improve their working memory. The researchers divided the volunteers into four groups; each group repeated the exercises over a different number of days. CBS News reports that when scientists retested the volunteers' fluid intelligence after the training and compared the scores to those who did not receive training they noted a significant improvement in fluid intelligence scores among those who participated in the demanding memory tasks. There were greater improvements seen in those who spent the most time training.
Read more from CBS News.

In Game of Life, Status Trumps Money

If you had to choose between status or cash, which way would you go? That was the question that researchers in Japan and at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Maryland hoped to answer with experiments that used an MRI to watch their subjects brains as they made decisions that would reward them with either money or status. The answer: It's close, but status has the lead.
In the Japanese study, researchers observing 19 participants found that the brain was activated in response to high and low appraisals by others (but did not perk up to more neutral comments); it also responded to monetary wins and losses but was quiet if a player broke even.
At NIMH, researchers scanned the brains of 72 volunteers as they attempted to earn money in a computer game. During play, the researchers occasionally revealed how supposed competitors (who, unbeknownst to them, were fake) were faring. The scientists created an arbitrary ranking system of the real and faux players in which some of the bogus gamers appeared to perform better—and others worse—than the real ones. The participants were told that their status in the game had no effect on how much money they could win, but that earning more money could boost their rank.
Lead researcher Caroline Zink told the Scientific American that the brains of players reacted very strongly to the other players and specifically the status of the other players. The journal reports that, according to Zink, the striatum became just as animated when players were given a shot at improving their social standing as it did when they won a buck. And that wasn't the only indicator that they cared about how others perceived them. She says another brain region (the medial prefrontal cortex) involved in sizing up others went wild when players were shown photos of competitors who outperformed them.
Read more in the Scientific American.

 

Drinking Linked to Breast Cancer

Despite what Geezer has reported about the health benefits of wine, the Scientific American now delivers some bad news about booze. The magazine reports on a National Cancer Institute study whose results indicate that women who have one to two small drinks a day were 32 percent more likely to develop a hormone-sensitive breast cancer tumor. Wait, it gets worse: Three or more drinks a day raised the risk by 51 per cent.   Those conclusions come from an analysis of data from more than 184,000 women--the biggest study yet to link alcohol consumption to an increased risk of the most common type of breast cancer in postmenopausal women. Read more of this distressing report in the Scientific American.

Ibuprofen Appears to Help Build Muscle

First, a study that measured muscle protein synthesis suggested to researchers in the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana that ibuprofen and acetaminophen had a negative impact on muscle by blocking the COX enzyme. So when the same researchers decided to measure the changes in muscle mass in a group of healthy older adults lifting weights regularly, for 3 months, who were taking recommended daily doses of ibuprofen (like that in Advil) or acetaminophen (like that in Tylenol) they expected to see less muscle growth in the drug takers than in the control group. They were wrong.
The Scientific American reports on the surprising results of the Ball State study, which found that  taking recommended daily doses of ibuprofen (like that in Advil) or acetaminophen (like that in Tylenol) led to substantially greater increases over inactive placebo in quadriceps muscle mass and strength. In fact, Sciam reports that the muscles of the ibuprofen and acetaminophen users got 40 to 60 percent bigger than the placebo group and their muscle strength also increased more than the placebo group.Muscle volume increased 11 percent in the ibuprofen group and 13 percent in the acetaminophen group, compared with 9 percent in the placebo group. Muscle strength increased 30 percent in the ibuprofen group and 28 percent in the acetaminophen group, compared with 23 percent in the placebo group.                                
Read more in the Scientific American.

Performance Enhancing Drugs Keep Academia Sharp

When Nature, the scientific journal much enjoyed by the egghead set, decided to do some research of its own, it didn't expect to reveal a pharmaceutical secret of the academy. But it did. Nature asked its readers if they used performance enhancing drugs, meaning, in this crowd, cognition enhancing drugs that promise a rock solid and longer lasting memory. One in five said they did, with the ADHD treatment Ritalin topping the list, followed by the stimulant Provigil (modafinil), and blood-pressure drugs called beta blockers, which can also help to reduce anxiety. The Washington Post, which reports on the surprising survey results, tells us that other drugs of choice included adderall, an amphetamine similar to Ritalin; centrophenoxine, which is used to treat dementia; and dexedrine, an amphetamine. Geezer, who has done some time in the academy, is not shocked. Read more in the Washington Post.

Does Core Stability Reduce Back Pain?

Does pumping up core strength help to reduce back pain? The short answer, as revealed in this piece in the L.A. Times, is no one really knows.  The newspaper turns for help to Dr. Christopher Standaert, a clinical associate professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, who describes core stability training as the standard of care for back pain. "But,"he adds, "There's never even been a uniform agreement on the definition." The Times reports that among those who think that core training works, there are two schools of thought on exactly how it works. Some experts think that local muscles such as the multifidi and the transverse abdominis are critically important. Others think it's more about training movement patterns and broader motions and coordination of multiple muscles through your trunk to help your spine move more effectively.
Standaert tells the paper that whether one is talking about local or global core stabilization, the rush to embrace core training has gotten ahead of the science. "People need to know that the scientific clinical foundation, the research, doesn't match the extent of emphasis that trainers and therapists and all sorts of people put on it."
Read more in the Los Angeles Times.