Zoomer Report

Here’s more evidence that walking is good for the brain. Specifically the hippocampus — a part of the brain important to the formation of memories — It usually begins to atrophy around 55 or 60. Now psychologists are suggesting that the hippocampus can be modestly expanded, and memory improved, by nothing more than regular walking.

Researchers randomly assigned 120 healthy but sedentary men and women in their 60”s to one of two exercise groups. One group walked around a track three times a week, building up to 40 minutes at a stretch; the other did a variety of less aerobic exercises, including yoga and resistance training.

After a year, brain scans showed that among the walkers, the hippocampus had increased in volume by about 2 percent on average; in the others, it had declined by about 1.4 percent. Since such a decline is normal in older adults, the researchers say a 2 percent increase is fairly significant. Both groups also improved on a test of spatial memory, but the walkers improved more.

The researchers were delighted to learn that the hippocampus might expand with exercise - and it didn’t take that much. The study is published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Do you worry a lot? That’s usually considered a bad thing. According to Dr. Martin Rossman, a pioneer of mind/body healing, that's because most of us don't know how to worry well. He says we can learn to use worry to manage stress instead of causing it. Good worry is an adaptive survival function: we use our imaginations to anticipate potential dangers, then develop ways to avoid them.

If our primeval ancestors walked through the jungle without thinking about it in advance, we probably would not be here now. Worry not only helps us anticipate dangers, but it also helps us solve problems.

The thing is that worry can easily degrade from a problem-solving function into a bad habit, through which we ruminate and obsess about what we don't want to have happen. Research shows that over 85 percent of things people worry about never happen. At some deep, unconscious level of the brain, it may conclude that these things did not happen specifically because we worried about them!

Rossman says the good news is that because worry is a learned habit, we can learn to worry well. The solution, like the problem itself, lies in how we use our imaginations.

Have you ever lost a friendship after your friend found a new love interest? Now research confirms it happens all the time. A study out of Oxford University found that on average, people shed one friend and one family member from their inner circles when they start a new romantic relationship.

An anthropologist surveyed people aged 18 to 69 online about their friends and lovers. Participants were asked to list all the people they felt they could turn to in a severe emotional or financial crisis. They were also asked how long they’d been involved in their personal relationships.

While the singletons listed an average of five people in their support network, those in relationships only had four including romantic partners. The researchers say this shows there’s a kind of isolation effect occurring when a new relationship forms

They point out there’s a downside for the new romantic partners as well. It can put a lot of pressure on because suddenly, as a mate, the individual is expected to offer the same amount of support that two people once brought to the table.

And they could regret deserting their friendships in the event of a breakup.

Do you ever feel like you need a coffee and a sweet to get through your work? Well, it turns out there’s a reason for that. The combination of caffeine and glucose can improve the efficiency of brain activity, according to a recent study that used MRI to identify the effects of these two substances.

Participants were tested after drinking a study beverage containing either caffeine, glucose or the two combined or a placebo consisting only of water.

The researchers found that the combination of the two substances improves cognitive performance in terms of sustained attention and working memory by increasing the efficiency of the areas of the brain responsible for these two functions. This supports the idea that there’s a synergy between two substances, in which each one boosts the effect of the other.

The study was published in the journal Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental.

Here’s another reason being bilingual is a good thing. It can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and its symptoms for between years. This is the surprise finding from researchers at Toronto's Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest.

In a study of more than 100 bilingual patients and 100 monolingual patients, they found that the bilinguals experienced the onset of symptoms and were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease between four and five years later than monolingual patients.

This confirms results from an earlier study.

What is not clear is why. It may have something to do with a unique ability in people who speak more than one language. Research has shown they have an ability to suppress irrelevant or interfering information so they can concentrate on information that is relevant.

In other words, they damp down the language they are not using and focus on the language they are using.

One of the researchers finds that bilingualism does not necessarily stop the brain from degenerating, but rather it may provide something that compensates for the brain degeneration.

And there is some evidence that speaking more than two languages provides even more of a benefit.

We know that good nutrition has a role in staving off mental decline. Now it seems there’s an even easier way to boost your short term memory: drink more water. Or at least make sure you’re drinking enough. This, according to a new study from Britain, which tested how volunteers reacted to 30 degree temparatures for four hours. Half were allowed to drink 300 millilitres of water and half were not.

Those who did not drink water found the tests more difficult to perform than those who hydrated during study, and their scores were lower. Previous work has also shown that being even just slightly dehydrated can impair attention and memory, and it is easy to get this minor degree of dehydration even in cool fall temparatures if you don’t drink water often enough. Dehydration can also reduce your mood, which in turn can affect memory.

The researchers say men need 12 to 13 cups of water and women need 9 cups. The good news is that all drinks except alcoholic one count towards that requirement. That includes beverages with caffeine. The work is published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Here’s some news for guilt-stricken working parents. A surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.

The research from the University of California, San Diego, analyzed a dozen surveys of how Americans say they use their time, taken from 1965 to 2007. It found the amount of child care time spent by parents at all income levels — and especially those with a college education — has gone up dramatically since the mid-1990s.

Before 1995, mothers spent an average of about 12 hours a week attending to the needs of their children. By 2007, that number had risen to more than 21 hours a week for college-educated women and 16 hours for those with less education.

At the same time, fathers more or less doubled the time they spend: to 9.6 hours a week for college-educated men, and 6.8 hours for other men.

Where is the extra time coming from? Women, in particular, are spending less time cooking and cleaning their homes, while men are putting in fewer hours at the office.

Here's a sobering finding that underscores the importance of getting enough sleep. A report, from the US "AAA" Foundation for Traffic Safety, finds that missing just an hour or two of shut-eye nearly doubles your chances of a car crash the next day. And getting behind the wheel after getting only four to five hours of sleep quadruples that risk. That's comparable to driving with a blood alcohol level that is considered legally drunk. Researchers studied 4,600 serious police reported crashes. They found sleep deprived driver's crash risk increased steadily with fewer hours of sleep, compared with drivers who got seven or more. Drivers whose mistakes contributed to crashes were more likely to report having slept less than usual in the 24 hours before the crash. Drivers operating on four or fewer hours of sleep are a whopping eleven and a half times more likely to be involved in a crash than well rested drivers. The researchers say this is the first study to quantify the relationship between lack of sleep and the risk of collision and they hope it will inspire authorities to take the risk of sleep impaired driving more seriously.

Do you like to talk about the good old days? Do you take time to listen when elders do it? It turns out that speaking about important events in the past can go a long way to improve wellbeing for people in nursing homes. It’s called reminiscence therapy and an Australian gerontologist compared it to other types of interventions for people in long term care. She found that it was more effective than social activities, indoor gardening, or playing games – as a matter of fact - reminiscence therapy was the only thing that addressed both feelings of isolation and depression, according to the work in the Journal Quality of Life Research.

The researchers believe the problem is not the lack of opportunity to interact with others in long-term care, but the quality of the interactions. They think reminiscing with others can lead to the kind of meaningful conversations that older people crave. And without that meaningful contact, feelings of loneliness and depression can double the mortality risk in older people.

Here’s another reason to hate excessive noise. According to Swedish researchers. Exposure to noise from traffic, trains, planes and maybe even deafening restaurants could be linked to a burgeoning belly.

The study in Occupational & Environmental Medicine followed 5000 people around Stockholm for four years. It found that women had a 0.08-inch increase in waist size for every additional 5 decibels in noise exposure. For men the increase was .06 inches. And the risk of a larger waist rose with the number of sources of noise someone was exposed to at the same time.

The scientists speculate that long-term exposure to noise, especially from traffic may affect our metabolism and lead to abdominal obesity. That’s because noise is stressful, and stress can alter levels of hormones which influence where in the body excess calories are deposited. Earlier research has shown associations between traffic noise and high blood pressure and heart attacks. They conclude that since abdominal obesity is a risk factor for many diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, noise should be recognized as a serious threat to public health.