HEALTH

Psychological risks of cosmetic surgery ignored

Magazine stories about beauty enhancing implants, nose jobs and liposuction too often downplay the psychological risks, including suicide, of invasive cosmetic surgery, reports a Canadian study.

Surgery is portrayed as part of a `normal` beauty regime in best-selling North American women`s magazines, in stories alongside clothing and diet advice, researcher Andrea Polonijo told.

While the physical risks of surgery were sometimes reported, emotional risks were mentioned in only 18 per cent of stories, said Polonijo. Her research at the University of British Columbia, and co-authored by her sociology professor Richard Carpiano, was published in the December issue of Women`s Health Issues journal.

Research is ongoing into “whether cosmetic surgery has positive or negative effects on emotional well-being,” said Polonijo, and consensus is lacking about whether surgery causes psychological distress, or “women undergoing cosmetic surgery might be predisposed to that already.” But Polonijo said some studies suggest “anxiety and depression can be emphasised and general body dissatisfaction can actually increase after cosmetic surgery.”
The researchers examined 35 articles about invasive cosmetic surgery - not including surgical procedures such as Botox injections - published over a five-year period in Canadian and US magazines Chatelaine, Cosmopolitan, O The Oprah Magazine, Flare and Prevention.

“These magazines are promising an emotional health boost and that`s not necessarily going to be the outcome,” said Polonijo. “They might want to consider presenting a more balanced view.” People undergo surgery to increase self-esteem or attract a partner, she warned, and “when these expectations don`t live up to the reality it can take its toll on emotional health.” In the United States, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported an increase of eight per cent in cosmetic surgeries in 2007, to nearly 1.5 procedures. Liposuction was the most popular.   — AFP

Eggs safe for the heart

If you are really fond of eggs, then you need not worry about relishing one too many. An egg a day`s contribution to the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) in healthy adults is just one per cent, according to a new study funded by an industry body.

Poor diet, smoking, obesity and physical inactivity contribute a whopping 30-40 per cent to heart disease risk, depending on gender.

The study, funded by the Egg Nutrition Centre and published online in Risk Analysis, substantiates decades of research challenging the myth that the cholesterol in eggs is linked to increased heart disease risk.

This study adds to more than 30 years of research showing that healthy adults can eat eggs without having any significant risk of heart disease. Moreover, the study authors noted that their analysis did not adjust for the health promoting benefits of eggs which may, in fact, decrease heart disease risk.

For example, research has found that overweight men who eat eggs while on a carbohydrate-restricted diet have a significant increase in their HDL levels (“good” cholesterol) compared to men who do not eat eggs.

The authors used data from the 1999-2000 and 2001-2001 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) to categorise the US adult population into various groups based on modifiable lifestyle risks.
According to the authors, the data show that very few Americans are leading lifestyles that may reduce the risk of heart disease only three per cent males and six per cent of females have none of the modifiable lifestyle risk factors that were investigated.

In addition, the study found no significant differences between the HDL and LDL cholesterol levels of the egg and bagel eaters.

Eggs are an excellent source of choline. A 2008 study concluded that a diet rich in choline and betaine, a nutrient related to choline, is associated with lower concentrations of homocysteine in the blood. High blood levels of homocysteine are indicative of chronic inflammation, which has been associated with cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer`s and dementia.

Eggs offer a number of beneficial nutrients. One egg has 13 essential vitamins and minerals and is an excellent source of choline and selenium and a good source of high-quality protein, vitamin B12, phosphorus and riboflavin.
Besides providing one of the most affordable sources of all-natural, high-quality protein, eggs provide a valuable source of energy and help maintain and build the muscle tissue needed for strength. — PPI

SPACE

X-ray measurements boost dark energy theory

X-ray measurements of distant galaxy clusters confirm theories that dark energy is forcing the universe to expand infinitely, scientists said.

Their findings boost the theory that dark energy is pushing apart all the matter in the universe and will continue doing so until no other galaxies except the nearby Andromeda galaxy will be visible from Earth. And they support the idea that dark energy is the so-called cosmological constant - a correction to Einstein`s theories that help explain why the universe is expanding. “Putting all of this data together gives us the strongest evidence yet that dark energy is the cosmological constant,” said Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, who led the research. “A lot more testing is needed, but so far Einstein`s theory is looking as good as ever.”

David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey who did not work on the study, agreed. “Even nothing — empty space — weighs something, and because we have a lot of nothing, it is a major factor in the evolution of our universe and causes space itself to accelerate,” Spergel told a telephone briefing.

Vikhlinin`s team used Nasa`s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory to look at galaxy super clusters — collapsed globs that are the largest known objects in the universe.

Cosmologists once believed that the universe would expand for a while from the Big Bang explosion about 13 billion years ago, reach a critical point and then contract back to a tiny point. But measurements suggested that something else was going on — something was acting like a spring to push galaxies apart. This something has been named dark energy and astrophysicists still do not know exactly what it is.

But it is accounted for in Einstein`s theories, said William Forman, who works with Vikhlinin. “Particle physics predicted that even the empty vacuum of space contains energy.” The measurements of these superclusters of galaxies suggest that something is slowing their growth. This aligns with projection of what a universe dominated by dark energy would look like.

If dark energy is explained by the cosmological constant, the expansion of the universe will continue to accelerate and our own Milky Way and next-door Andromeda will drift away from the next-nearest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, briefed Forman.  — Reuters

INTER NET

Yahoos free email gets more social

Yahoo began weaving trendy social-networking features into its popular free email service as it vies to be the preferred launching point for internet surfers.

Yahoo says it is providing tools that let people use its email service to build interactive communities based on friends and interests. “Mail is the largest dormant social graph,” Yahoo Mail vice president John Kremer said while outlining enhancements to the service used by 275 million people worldwide every month.

“This is the first time we are exposing that in a significant way.” A “smarter inbox” puts messages from friends or family in a separate, tabbed file so they don`t get buried under mountains of spam or work email.

The inbox for the first time lets people install third-party applications such as movie-recommendation service Flixster and blogging tools from WordPress. Technology from start-up Xoopit (pronounced swoop-it) will fetch all pictures buried in stored emails, even retrieving images from website links found in messages.

“Yahoo users have years of gems in old emails. There are hundreds of millions of people not on social networks, but with years of data in their email,” Xoopit co-founder Bijan Marashi told.

Mirroring a winning move by social-networking star Facebook, Yahoo opened up its platform this year to let third-party developers create fun, hip, or functional applications adapted to its online offerings.

Yahoo wants to enhance the social aspects of its website in order to attract new people to its online services and get existing users to spend more time on its advertising-supported pages.

Yahoo is not trying to be a MySpace or Facebook, but wants to add “the right bits of social elements that make sense to our audience,” said Yahoo Audience Product Division vice president Ash Patel.

“To be a starting point in this day and age you have to add the best of the web  — social elements,” Patel said, referring to Yahoo`s stated goal of being the preferred launch point for web surfers.  — AFP

ATMOSPHERE

Scientists find hole in Earths magnetic field

Recent satellite observations have revealed the largest breach yet seen in the magnetic field that protects Earth from most of the sun`s violent blasts, researchers reported.

The discovery was made last summer by Themis, a fleet of five small Nasa satellites.

Scientists have long known that the Earth`s magnetic field, which guards against severe space weather, is similar to a drafty old house that sometimes lets in violent eruptions of charged particles from the sun. Such a breach can cause brilliant auroras or disrupt satellite and ground communications.

Observations from Themis show the Earth`s magnetic field occasionally develops two cracks, allowing solar wind — a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million mph (1.6 million kph) — to penetrate the Earth`s upper atmosphere.

Last summer, Themis calculated a layer of solar particles to be at least 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometres) thick in the outermost part of the Earth`s magnetosphere, the largest tear of the protective shield found so far.

“It was growing rather fast,” Themis scientist Marit Oieroset of the University of California, Berkeley told an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Such breaches are temporary, and the one observed last year lasted about an hour, Oieroset said.
Solar flares are a potential danger to astronauts in orbit but generally are not a risk to people on the surface of the Earth. The research was funded by Nasa and the National Science Foundation.

The Themis results could have bearing on how scientists predict the severity of solar storms and their effects on power grids, airline and military communications and satellite signals.

The Themis satellites were launched to find the source of brief powerful geomagnetic disturbances in the Earth`s atmosphere.  — AP

AT A GLANCE

Mineral points to Martian water suitable for life

Mineral evidence for a water environment capable of supporting life has been discovered on Mars, scientists said. Deposits of carbonate, formed in neutral or alkaline water, were spotted by Nasa`s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scientists told in a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Shocking study finds most will torture if ordered

Some things never change. Scientists said they had replicated an experiment in which people obediently delivered painful shocks to others if encouraged to do so by authority figures.

Seventy per cent of volunteers continued to administer electrical shocks - or at least they believed they were doing so — even after an actor claimed they were painful, Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University in California found.

CT imaging useful to measure bone loss in COPD

Computed tomography (CT) of the chest can serve a dual purpose in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), measuring both the severity of emphysema and vertebral bone density, physicians in Japan report.
Many features besides the lung are associated with COPD, indicating it is a systemic disease, Dr Toyohiro Hirai and colleagues at Kyoto University note in the journal Chest; one such feature is osteoporosis.

However, the association between the degree of lung involvement and loss of bone density is unclear.

Safety probe of plastics chemicals urged

The US regulators should examine whether a controversial class of chemicals found in many plastic products including children`s toys can hurt people, a panel of experts said.

A panel of the independent National Research Council said the scientific evidence justifies an Environmental Protection Agency assessment of the health effects from cumulative exposure to chemicals known as phthalates.

How leukaemia seduces blood cells

Leukaemia cells use powerful chemical signals to lure healthy blood-forming stem cells into their cancerous lairs, where they lose their power to make healthy blood cells, the US researchers said. But by jamming these signals in mice, the team was able to protect the stem cells, called haematopoietic progenitor cells.

Some cough medicine overdoses deliberate

Some children showing up in emergency rooms with overdoses of cough or cold syrup may have been intentionally medicated to keep them quiet, doctors cautioned.

An analysis of 189 children who died from medication overdoses showed a significant percentage appeared to have been intentionally overdosed, the doctors reported in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Metformin can prevent postpartum diabetes

Following gestational diabetes, a type of diabetes that develops during pregnancy and usually goes away after pregnancy, treatment with metformin or intensive lifestyle interventions can prevent or delay diabetes from becoming permanent in the postpartum period, new research shows.

Lead author Dr Robert E. Ratner at Medstar Research Institute in Hyattsville, Maryland, and co-researchers evaluated responses to each intervention among pregnant women with impaired glucose tolerance, a major risk factor for diabetes, enrolled in the prospective Diabetes Prevention Programme.

Video games may do the ageing brain good

Older adults might want to take an interest in their grandchildren`s video games, if early research on the brain benefits of gaming is correct. In a study of 40 adults in their 60s and 70s, researchers found that those who learned to play a strategy-heavy video game improved their scores on a number of tests of cognitive function.  
— Reuters