THE HEALTH CENTRAL DAILY PODCAST - MONDAY 14th JULY

Many people fail to recognise they are overweight

It is well known that women often view themselves as ‘too fat’ while men typically underestimate their weight. But how far has people’s perception of their weight changed with the growing obesity epidemic?

Researchers from the Health Behaviour Research Centre at University College London, compared data taken from two household surveys carried out in 1999 and 2007. In each survey participants were asked to give their height and weight (from which their Body Mass Index (BMI) and clinical weight category could be determined) and also categorise themselves as either: ‘very underweight’, ‘underweight’, ‘about right’, ‘overweight’ or ‘very overweight’. The 2007 survey also included ‘obese’ as a category.

Compound honokiol, from Magnolias blocks, elusive pathway for cancer growth

A laboratory led by Jack Arbiser, MD, PhD, at Emory University School of Medicine, has been studying the compound honokiol, found in Japanese and Chinese herbal medicines, since discovering its ability to inhibit tumor growth in mice in 2003.

Arbiser’s team’s results were published in the July issue of Clinical Cancer Research. The research was a collaboration with the laboratory of David Foster, PhD, at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Hunter graduate students Avalon Garcia and Yang Zheng are the first authors of the paper. The collaboration also involved the lab of Dafna Bar-Sagi at New York University School of Medicine.

Slowing the biological processes of aging is way to prevent and fight diseases

“The traditional medical approach of attacking individual diseases — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease — will soon become less effective if we do not determine how all of these diseases either interact or share common mechanisms with aging,” says S. Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health and senior author of the commentary.

Middle-aged and older people are most often impacted by simultaneous but independent medical conditions. A cure for any of the major fatal diseases would have only a marginal impact on life expectancy and the length of healthy life, Olshansky said.

Stem cells help keep the brain healthy and active

Speaking at Europe’s major neuroscience conference today (Sunday 13 July), Professor Gerd Kempermann from the Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden explained that the emerging hypothesis for the function of these neural stem cells is for maintenance of a healthy brain, rather than regeneration. The hippocampus - the region of the brain that is central to memory - requires modifications (plasticity) at a cellular level, a much more complex process than synaptic plasticity at the junction of the neurons used by other brain regions. In the adult hippocampus, stem cells produce new neurons throughout life, a process known as ‘adult neurogenesis’. Surprisingly, cognitive activity, as well as physical exercise, stimulate this process..

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