Training program for depressed moms helps babies
Infants of depressed mothers show “quite dramatic” increases in positive responses after their mothers complete a 5-week course designed to help them better interpret and respond to infant behavior, even though the course had no apparent effect on depression.
“It was a significant difference and gave us a pretty strong message that it was having a pretty powerful effect,” Dr. Robert Short of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health.
Simple question gets school children to eat fruit
Getting children to eat more fruit may be as simple as getting cafeteria workers to use a simple verbal prompt in the lunch line, a study of school lunch programs suggests.
The study found that when cafeteria workers asked elementary school children if they wanted fruit or juice with their lunch, the children usually took one or the other. More importantly, most of the children actually consumed it.
Animal study links prediabetes and gum disease
People with “prediabetes” may want to pay close attention to their dental health, if new animal research findings apply to humans.
In experiments with rats, Dutch researchers found that animals with a condition that mimics prediabetes were more susceptible to developing periodontitis, which causes the gums to recede and the bone supporting the teeth to erode.
Male Breast Cancer: Racial Disparities in Treatment and Survival
A new study shows that among men treated for breast cancer, African-American men are more likely to die of the disease compared with white men. Results of the study are published in the March 20, 2007 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO).
The studies by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center analyzed race and other predictors of treatment and survival among 510 men over 65 diagnosed with stage I-III breast cancer between 1991 and 2002. The researchers found five-year survival rates of approximately 90% among 456 white men and 66% among 34 African-American men.
