Low neural activity tied to risk of obesity

Health service in part of Scotland hit by malware attack

Indian workers manufacture disposable face masks at a workshop on the outskirts of Ahmedebad on Aug 21. The recent rise of cases by the Swine Flu

(H1N1) virus in the Indian state of Gujarat has increased the demand of face masks.

BALTIMORE, Md, Aug 26, (Agencies): In a small study that scanned the brains of teenagers while exposing them to tempting “food cues,” researchers report that reduced activity in the brain’s “self-regulation” system may be an important early predictor of adult obesity.

The researchers used functional MRI (fMRI) scans on 36 New York teenagers to measure neural responses to food cues and found that food stimuli in the form of words activated regions of the brain associated with reward and emotion in both overweight and lean teens. However, participants who were lean at the time but considered at increased risk for adult obesity because of family history had less neural activity in the brain’s selfregulation and attention areas than lean adolescents with lean mothers..

In a report of the study’s findings, published July 25 in NeuroImage, the investigators suggest that reduced activity in the brain’s self-regulation system may be a better predictor of obesity than heightened responses of the reward system to food cues.

“Our findings suggest that we may be able to predict which teens will ultimately become obese adults by effectively looking at how their brains respond when they read a food menu. It’s remarkable to me that we see these effects just by having participants read words like ‘French fries’ or ‘chocolate spread,’” says Susan Carnell, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, core faculty member of the Global Obesity Prevention Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the paper’s first author.

More than half of all adolescents in the United States are either overweight or obese. Children of overweight parents, or two-thirds of adults in the US, already are or are likely to become overweight. Since excess weight has been linked to a variety of health issues such as high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes, researchers such as Carnell are hoping to better understand the causes of obesity in hopes of preventing it.

For the study, the researchers recruited 36 teens, ages 14 to 19 from New York City, of whom 10 were overweight/obese; 16 were lean but considered at high risk for obesity because they had overweight/obese mothers; and 10 were lean/low risk because they had lean mothers.

The teens underwent brain scanning using fMRI while they viewed words that described high-fat foods such as chicken wings, low-fat foods such as Brussels sprouts and nonfood office supply items such as Post-it notes. Participants rated their appetite in response to each word stimulus. After the activity, all participants were offered a buffet that included low- and high-calorie foods — to see if their brain responses were associated with real-world behavior.

fMRI scans are a noninvasive, minimal risk method of assessing neural activation based on the flow of oxygenated blood to different brain regions.

The investigators reported that after viewing food-related words, all participants experienced stimulation of the insula and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex — areas of the brain that support reward and emotion. In adolescents who were overweight or were lean but at high familial risk for obesity, however, the research team saw less activation in the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and basal ganglia nuclei, which support self-regulation.

Brain circuits that support selfregulation showed the greatest activation in lean/low-risk adolescents, less activity in lean/high-risk participants and the least activation in the overweight group. The buffet portion of the experiment complemented the fMRI findings — that is, overweight participants ate the most, followed by the lean/high-risk adolescents and then the lean/low-risk group.

NEW YORK:

Also:

A regional authority in Britain’s state-run health service was hit by a malware attack on Friday and warned people with non-emergency medical conditions to stay away from its hospitals.

NHS Lanarkshire said in a Facebook post it was investigating and working to resolve the issue.

“I would ask that patients do not attend our hospitals unless it is essential,” said acute division medical director Jane Burns. “Emergency care will still be provided for those who do require to be seen.”

In May, hospitals and doctors’ surgeries across Britain were forced to divert ambulances, turn away patients and cancel appointments after a cyber attack crippled some computer systems.

“As far as we know this has just affected NHS Lanarkshire. It is not the same malware as in May”, NHS Lanarkshire responded on Facebook to an inquiry from Reuters.

Lanarkshire is a region in the Lowlands of southern Scotland.

LOS ANGELES:

A US consumer advocacy group said that actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop lifestyle business makes deceptive claims about some of its products, and it has asked the California Food Drug and Medical Device Task Force to open an investigation.

Truth in Advertising (TINA), in a posting on its website, said it sent a letter this week to the California Food Drug and Medical Device Task Force saying it had found more than 50 instances in which Goop gave “unsubstantiated, and therefore deceptive, health and disease-treatment claims to market many of its products.”

The group said Goop claims “either expressly or implicitly, that its products (or those it promotes) can treat, cure, prevent, alleviate the symptoms of, or reduce the risk of developing a number of ailments. These include crystal harmonics for infertility, rose flower essence tincture for depression, black rose bar for psoriasis, wearable stickers for anxiety, and vitamin D3 for cancer.”