News by Subject Medicine & Health

Adolescents who see themselves as puny and who exercise to gain weight may be at risk of so-called muscularity-oriented disordered eating behaviors, say researchers led by UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals.

A new study, published in Pediatrics, indicates that the initiative yielded positive results on improving rates of prenatal human milk education, early milk expression and skin to skin care among mothers of very low birth weight infants during initial hospitalization, but did not lead to sustained improvement in mother's milk provision at hospital discharge.

An international research consortium mapped the global distribution of tree-root symbioses with fungi and bacteria that are vital to forest ecosystems. The study was featured on the cover of Nature.

While previous research has suggested a link between low levels of vitamin D in the blood and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, a new Michigan State University study has found that taking vitamin D supplements did not reduce that risk.

If the fatty fish we eat were free of environmental pollutants, it would reduce our risk of developing type 2 diabetes. However, the pollutants in the fish have the opposite effect and appears to eliminate the protective effect from fatty fish intake. This has been shown by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, using innovative methods that could be used to address several questions about food and health in future studies.

In a paper published in Environmental Research Letters, Columbia Researcher Kyle Davis found that the yields from grains such as millet, sorghum, and maize are more resilient to extreme weather in India; their yields vary significantly less due to year-to-year changes in climate and generally experience smaller declines during droughts. But yields from rice, India's main crop, experience larger declines during extreme weather conditions.

New research may explain why an antioxidant that protects the brain is also associated with deterioration in areas susceptible to Alzheimer's disease. The antioxidant, superoxide dismutase or SOD1, improves cognition, but an Iowa State University research team found SOD1's protective benefits dramatically weaken when levels of tau proteins -- a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease -- increase.