Some light exercise can help people with failing hearts literally breathe easier. Three months of carefully controlled exercise sessions on treadmills or stationary bikes reduced the labored breathing called dyspnea that often afflicts people with moderate heart failure, according to a report last week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
One purpose of the study was to show that people with heart failure can be helped by light exercise, even if their condition makes them feel shortness of breath during mild exertion, said Dr. Donna Mancini, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.
Twenty-five patients were enlisted in the trial, and 17 of them agreed to do light exercise during the three-month period. The other eight attended classes on relaxation and guided imagery techniques, with no exercise training, to serve as a control group.
“We were able to show that in the training group there was less shortness of breath during exercise than before the training program, while in the control group there were no changes,” Mancini said.
Though Mancini said the study indicates that “even a low level of exercise is beneficial in improving symptoms,” she also warned that anyone with heart failure should approach exercise with caution and should start training only after talking with a physician.
Drugs and young brains
Drug use during adolescence, including such commonly prescribed drugs as Ritalin, may upset brain chemistry more than any other time in a person’s life, new research shows.
The findings should help scientists better understand why addictions generally begin during adolescence and what the long-term risks may be.
“This is a major public health question,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Michelle Ehrlich, a neurology professor at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “The adolescent brain appears to be more sensitive to certain effects of these psychostimulant drugs. We need to see whether this sensitivity leads to permanent brain changes and behavior changes.”
In the study, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researcher gave cocaine and amphetamines to groups of adult, adolescent and baby mice every day for a week. Then they compared the chemistry in two sections of the mice brains against that of a control group.
After taking the drugs, all the mice had elevated levels of an addiction-marking protein in the part of the brain that controls movement and hyperactivity.
But adolescent mice also had high levels of the protein in the part of the brain that controls the “reward” mechanism.
Because of that chemical imbalance, adolescents may depend on drugs to stimulate their reward mechanism, leading to addictive behavior, Ehrlich said.
Unstrapped stroller kids
If you don’t fasten the safety restraint on your children’s strollers, you could be pushing them straight into trouble.
Every year nearly 13,000 American children end up in emergency rooms after falling from their strollers, according to a new study reported in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics, and about 200 of them have to be admitted to the hospital for injuries.
“Because most of these injuries were from falls, it suggests that proper restraint use would prevent injury,” said study author Dr. Elizabeth Powell, a pediatric emergency-medicine physician at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “We’ve all had a scare at some point. . . . But they only have to fall once, and then you strap them in every time.”
