US veterans have increased risk of suicide
Male US military service veterans are more than twice as likely to commit suicide compared with their peers who never served in the armed forces, a new study shows.
And veterans with some type of disability were at particularly high risk of killing themselves, Dr. Mark S. Kaplan of Portland State University in Oregon and colleagues found.
Giving antibiotics to babies boosts asthma risk
Children who received antibiotics as babies have a higher risk of developing asthma by age 7, Canadian researchers said on Monday.
Antibiotics are commonly prescribed to children under age 1 for a host of reasons, most often for lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia or upper respiratory tract infections like ear and sinus infections.
New study shows exposure to smokers in movies increases likelihood of smoking in the future
A new study appearing in the July issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reports that watching an actor smoke on the big screen may make smokers more likely to continue smoking in the future, and make nonsmokers more favorably disposed toward smoking.
Sonya Dal Cin, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center of Dartmouth Medical School, and colleagues from the University of Waterloo and Central Michigan University, assessed the level to which identification with a protagonist on film alters our implicit associations between the self and smoking.
Sleep restriction reduces heart rate variability
Chronic sleep restriction has a negative effect on a person’s cardiac activity, which may elevate the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality, according to a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
The study, conducted by Siobhan Banks of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, was based on preliminary analyses of 39 subjects, each of whom participated in a laboratory-controlled chronic sleep restriction protocol. The subjects underwent two nights of baseline sleep followed by five hours of sleep restriction. The results showed a statistically significant decrease in the heart rate variability after five nights of sleep restriction.
