Women who feel unattractive may feel so obsessed about gaining weight during pregnancy that they risk the health of their babies.
A University of Michigan study of 172 women found that women who said they felt unattractive before and during pregnancy were 17 times more likely to gain too little weight during pregnancy.
“Gaining too little during pregnancy is dangerous because it increases the risk of having a low birth weight baby who, in turn, is at increased risk of a wide range of health problems,” said U. of M. epidemiologist Viktoria L. Shayna.
Women tended to be confused about the appropriate amount of weight they should gain during pregnancy for optimal fetal development, Shayna said. While only 27 percent of the women in the study gained the appropriate amount of weight, 64 percent said they thought their weight gain was correct, she said.
Underweight women should generally gain 25 to 40 pounds, overweight women should gain 15 to 25 pounds, and normal-weight women should gain 15 to 25 pounds, she said.
SPECIAL GLASSES HELP PARKINSON’S PATIENTS
Glasses that were originally designed to allow someone to watch TV while mowing the lawn or playing golf may help Parkinson’s patients walk a straight line.
Instead of a TV picture, the specially designed glasses project a series of dots that seem to be suspended in space up to 10 feet in front of the wearer, said Thomas A. Furness, the University of Washington professor of industrial engineering who invented the image-projecting glasses.
Some Parkinson’s patients have a hard time initiating a walking motion. But if they can visually follow a series of coins on the ground that are steps apart, their brains are tricked into taking those steps.
Tom Riess, a 46-year-old Parkinson’s patient from San Anselmo, Calif., found that the coin trick worked, but the obvious limitation was running out of coins. Reading about the TV glasses, Riess asked Furness if he could make a set that projected a path of dots a Parkinson’s patient could follow.
Using a series of projected dots, dashes and other geometric designs, Riess quickly discovered he could walk back and forth across the laboratory floor at a nearly normal gait. Furness is now working with other researchers to determine just how useful the image-projecting glasses might be for Parkinson’s patients.
AIDS VACCINE WOULD BE NO CURE-ALL, DOCTOR SAYS
Even if scientists do develop an effective vaccine for AIDS, it won’t end the epidemic or the many problems associated with it, a San Francisco medical ethicist told a recent gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.
Because the AIDS virus mutates so well, almost like influenza, many scientists expect that the best one could hope from a vaccine would be 60 percent effectiveness, said Dr. Bernard Lo, a professor of medicine at the University of California’s San Francisco campus.
So even after receiving a vaccination, a person would still have to follow restrictions on sexual freedom to be assured of avoiding infection, he said.
“We need to think of vaccination for human immunodeficiency virus not simply as a series of injections,” Lo said, “but rather a combination of shots and sustained behaviors to avoid being infected.”
WORLD MAY HAVE ONCE HAD COMMON LANGUAGE
The largest comparison of grammatical structures ever undertaken suggests that the world’s languages today had a common ancestor some 100,000 years ago, Johanna Nichols, professor of slavic languages at the University of California in Berkeley reported to the AAAS meeting in San Francisco.
Nichols compared some grammatical structures of some 200 language families to conclude that language arose long before humans spread around the globe when they still inhabited the tropical regions of Asia, Africa and the Near East.
By looking at the differences and similarities of grammatical features that change little over time, such as subject-object relationships and the ways in which single and plural are designated, Nichols concluded that the time it would take to create existing global diversity is at least 100,000 years.
FATALISM CAN INCREASE LIKELIHOOD OF DEATH
A strong belief in fate, especially if it is bad, can increase the likelihood of death, according to a study of 28,169 adult Chinese Americans.
Those who had a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, and who also had a birth year that Chinese astrology and medicine consider ill-fated, died 1.3 to 4.9 years earlier than non-Chinese with the same diseases and in the same age groups, said David Phillips of the University of California at San Diego.
Traditional Chinese born in ill-fated years tend to accept their diseases and do nothing to improve their chances, such as quitting smoking, he reported in the Lancet, a British medical journal.
“The more strongly a group is attached to Chinese traditions, the more years of life are lost,” he said. “Our data suggest that psychosomatic factors can markedly affect the longevity of patients with most diseases.”
AMERICANS GAIN WEIGHT, CUT LIFE EXPECTANCY
Americans are getting heavier, a trend that could shorten their lives, according to a Harvard study.
The study, which involved 19,297 men who attended Harvard University between 1916 and 1950, found that increased body weight is a risk factor for early death, I-Min Lee of Harvard’s School of Public Health reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Contrary to the findings of some other studies, which led some officials to say it was OK to gain weight with age, lean men did better than those who were heavier, Lee said.
“Lowest mortality was observed among alumni weighing, on average, 20 percent below the U.S. average for men of comparable age and height,” he said. “Thus, the upward trend in recommended desirable weights appears unjustified by these data.”
GRANDPARENTS SEEK HELP IN RAISING CHILDREN
An increasing number of grandparents are finding that they have to raise their grandchildren and they are turning for help to such groups as Grandparents as Parents (GAP), Raising Our Children’s Kids: An Intergenerational Network of Grandparents (ROCKING) and Grandparents As Second Parents (GASP).
More than 300 of these support groups have sprouted up across the country, said Meredith Minkler of San Jose State University. One out of every 20 children now live with their grandparents or other relatives, an increase of 40 percent over the last decade, she reported in The Gerontologist, a publication of the The Gerontological Society of America.
In inner city areas, beetween 20 and 50 percent of children may be living with their grandparents or other relatives, she said.
Community support programs are making an important difference in the lives of grandparents, “particularly helping them feel less isolated as they cope with the demands and challenges of the new care-giving role,” Minkler said.
ALZHEIMER’S PATIENTS’ DRIVING RISK VARIES
Recently diagnosed Alzheimer’s patients have a lower risk of car accidents than young, normal males, but they have a slightly greater risk of such accidents than the overall average American driver, a University of Massachusetts Medical Center study has found.
For the first three years after diagnoses, Alzheimer’s patients’ accident rates are well within the accepted risk for other registered drivers, Dr. David A. Drachman reported in Neurology, a publication of the American Academy of Neurology.
Although the accident rate goes up after three years, the degree of disability caused by Alzheimer’s disease varies widely with each patient, he said.
