Mothers who smoke during pregnancy may be making it harder for their children who smoke to quit smoking decades later.
"Smoking during pregnancy can harm the baby in ways that extend far beyond preterm delivery or low birth weight," said lead study investigator Edward Levin, a professor of biological psychiatry at the Duke University Medical Center. "It causes changes in the brain development of the baby that can last a lifetime."
Scientists at the Duke Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research suggest that pregnant women should quit smoking to avoid exposing their unborn children to nicotine, and that they should do so without the use of nicotine products such as patches or gums that also present a risk to the baby.
While the rates of smoking in the United States are declining, approximately one-quarter of Americans have mothers who smoked during pregnancy, according to the study published in the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior.
U.S. and African researchers say they found a significantly increased risk of HIV infection among women with a sexually transmitted disease.
The common STD trichomoniasis, caused by the parasite Trichomonas vaginalis, infects more than 170 million people worldwide each year. On its own, it usually does not cause serious complications.
Dr. R. Scott McClelland and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Nairobi and the Coast Provincial General Hospital in Kenya followed 1,335 HIV-seronegative women over the span of 11 years. The results showed a 1.5-fold increased risk of HIV infection among women with trichomoniasis, according to the study published online in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
"What this means is that a woman with trichomoniasis is at about 50 percent greater risk for acquiring HIV than a woman without trichomoniasis, after adjusting for other differences between the women such as differences in the rates of condom use, number of sex partners, etc.," said McClelland.
The findings are published online in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
British researchers have found that one-quarter of patients with advanced cancer have depression that had previously not been diagnosed.
"The effects of depression can be as difficult to cope with as the physical symptoms of a terminal illness such as cancer," said lead researcher Mari Lloyd-Williams of the University of Liverpool. "Patients often feel useless, that they are to blame, and even experience suicidal thoughts during cancer -- these are all signs of depression but rarely elicited."
The researchers developed a tool to detect depression in cancer patients using a screening system originally developed for sufferers of post-natal depression. The tool -- known as the Brief Edinburgh Depression Scale -- includes a six-step scale that assesses a cancer patient's mental condition. The test includes questions on worthlessness, guilt and suicidal thoughts.
The research has been published in the Journal of Affective Disorders
Surgical inhaled anesthetics are more likely to cause the Alzheimer's disease-related plaques in the brain than intravenous anesthetics.
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers in a journal article, published in Biochemistry, say it is the first report using state-of-the-art nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic technique to explain the detailed molecular mechanism behind the aggregation of amyloid peptide due to various anesthetics.
"Many people know of or have heard of an elderly person who went into surgery where they received anesthesia and when they woke up they had noticeable memory loss or cognitive dysfunction," said lead author Pravat K. Mandal of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Self-affirmation or having close relationships helps people cope with insecurities regarding their appearance, found a University of Buffalo study.
In a series of studies, Lora Park, an assistant professor in the department of psychology, found people anxiously expect that they will be rejected by others because of their physical appearance, and that this sensitivity, if not mitigated, has serious implications for their mental and physical health.
Park found that a reminder of one's strengths or close relationships was enough to reduce the damaging effects of thinking about negative aspects of one's appearance.
The studies are scheduled to be published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
