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The Body
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
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Create Your Own Longevity!
May 25, 2006
In Western nations studies have shown that fewer than 40 percent of adults aged 65 and above have a regular exercise routine, which can extend their years of independent life. You can sit yourself to death!
Now a new UCLA study, published in the October issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that seniors with the lowest expectations for aging --that is, for what one can do at an advanced age -- were the most likely to lead sedentary lifestyles. Seniors with the lowest age expectations were more than twice as likely to report engaging in less than 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity during the previous week than those with higher age expectations.
The study was based on the survey responses of 636 seniors recruited from 14 Los Angeles-area community-based senior centers.
The study reveals that the low age expectation mindset may be keeping seniors from exercising. "We know that the No. 1 way we can improve the health of older adults is to increase physical activity -- it's more powerful than common expensive medications," said lead researcher Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, assistant professor of medicine, geriatrics division, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We might be able to help more seniors exercise if we can change what seniors believe about aging."
This is just the latest example of how dramatically our perceptual filter--the beliefs we have of ourselves and the world--can alter how we live.
Read more in the Journal of General Internal Medicine
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Suicide Attempts Linked to Weight Perception
Aug 5, 2005
Suicidal impulses and attempts are much more common in teenagers who think they are too fat or too thin, regardless of how much they actually weigh, a study found. Using actual body size based on teens' reports of their height and weight, the researchers found that overall, overweight or underweight teens were only slightly more likely than normal-weight teens to have suicidal tendencies.
But teens who perceived themselves at either weight extreme--very fat or really skinny--were more than twice as likely as normal-weight teens to attempt or think about suicide.
The study was based on a nationally representative 2001 survey involving 13,601 students in ninth through 12th grade. The findings appear in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics &Adolescent Medicine.
About 19 percent said they had considered suicide in the previous year and about 9 percent said they had attempted it. About 65 percent of students were in the normal-weight range, but only about 54 percent perceived themselves as "about the right weight." Some thought they weighed too much; others thought they were too thin. "Suicide ideation was more likely even among students whose perceptions of body size deviated only slightly from 'about the right weight,'" said lead author Danice Eaton, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Because nearly half of the students perceived themselves as too thin or too heavy, "these results suggest that a sizable proportion of students may be at increased risk" for suicide, the researchers said.
Perceptions of being very overweight were linked with an increased risk for suicide attempts among whites. But black and Hispanic students who saw themselves as being very overweight were no more likely to say they had attempted suicide than blacks and Hispanics who thought they were about the right weight. The link between perceptions of being very underweight and an increased risk for suicide attempts existed for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike.
The study did not determine which came first--perceptions of extreme weight or suicidal tendencies. But the results suggest that extreme weight perceptions might be a suicide warning sign, the researchers said.
Read more in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine
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A Little Praise Goes A Long Way
June 6, 2005
In our books and articles we constantly stress the value of praise, not just praise for achievement, but for effort and also for just being who you are. Researchers at Kansas State University have now shown that a little praise can aid in body-image and maybe even encourage weight-loss as well!
When many women look in the mirror, they see themselves as a collection of body parts--and they don't like what they see. Everywhere we look, we are bombarded by the media telling us how we should look and it affects our body image. Even cartoon characters are drawn a certain way, often sending an unrealistic message--especially to women, but also to men--about the way they are supposed to look. It's enough to cause some women to suffer from anxiety, depression and to be ashamed of their bodies. It also discourages them, other researchers have found, from even trying to lose weight or to become fitter.
According to Courtney Fea, a researcher at Kansas State University a compliment can go a long way in easing a woman's anxiety over her looks. Fea said a kind word can reduce a woman's shame about her body if she looks at herself negatively. "What we found was that if you compliment women, they do feel better about themselves. And it doesn't matter what kind of compliment you give them; it doesn't matter if you compliment them about how they physically look or about who they are as a person."
Fea presented a paper based on her research, at the American Psychological Society's convention May 27 in Los Angeles.
Although self-objectification (seeing one's self as a thing-in this case a body--rather than a person) has been discovered in girls as young as 4-5 years old, Fea's research focused on older subjects who often voice concerns like "my arms are too flabby" or "my hips are too wide."
"It's those things that they indicate the most embarrassment about," Fea said.
Fea would like to use the study to develop awareness that such a small thing like a compliment can do so much for boosting a woman's confidence and reduce their likelihood to experience depression about their body. "Anyone can offer a compliment and it's really simple to do," Fea said. "In our case we only gave people one compliment and that was enough. So you can imagine if people are aware, like parents who are raising their daughter, they know 'wow, if I just give them one compliment,' that she's less likely to feel depressed or experience anxiety. Imagine what it would be like if parents gave their child or teenager compliments frequently."
"The area isn't new but the way of studying it is new," Fea said. "People are just starting to put the pieces together. They knew beforehand that women got depressed and women had body shame but now they're really trying to figure out how to stop this." She emphasized that the compliments, do not have to be based on a woman's appearance. Fea hopes that based on this research, people take into greater consideration how they talk to each other. "I hope they keep in mind we can have a great impact on those around us," Fea said. "I hope the impact will be for the better and not for the worse."
Note: The research is not available online.
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Exercise Slows Onset of Alzheimer's
June 6, 2005
Recently exercise has been proven to be better than antidepressants for depression and better than Ritalin for ADD/ADHD. Now it would seem that exercise has the same beneficial effect on those suffering from Alzheimer's Disease.
Researchers have found that physical activity appears to inhibit Alzheimer's-like brain changes in mice, slowing the development of a key feature of the disease. Their research demonstrated that long-term physical activity enhanced the learning ability of mice and decreased the level of plaque-forming beta-amyloid protein fragments--a hallmark characteristic of Alzheimer's disease (AD)--in
their brains.
A number of population-based studies suggest that lifestyle interventions may help to slow the onset and progression of AD. Because of these studies, scientists are seeking to find out if and how physical or mental activity might delay the onset and progression of the disease. In this study, scientists have now shown in an animal model system that one simple behavioral intervention--exercise--could delay, or even prevent, development of AD-like syptoms by decreasing beta-amyloid levels.
Results of this study, conducted by Paul A Adlard, PhD, Carl W Cotman, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, are published in the April 27, 2005, issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
To directly test the possibility that exercise (in the form of voluntary running) may reduce the cognitive decline and brain changes that characterize AD, the study used genetically engineered animals rather than normal mice. These mice begin to develop AD-like amyloid plaques at around 3 months of age. Initially, young mice (6 weeks or 1 month of age) were placed in cages with or without running wheels for periods of either 1 month or 5 months, respectively.
Mice with access to running wheels had the opportunity to exercise any time, while those without the wheels were classified as "sedentary." On 6 consecutive days after the exercise phase, the researchers placed each mouse in a Morris water maze to examine how fast it could learn the location of a hidden platform and how long it retained this information. (This water maze task involves a small pool of water with a submerged platform that the mouse must learn how to find.)
The animals that exercised learned the task faster. Thus, the mice that used the running wheels for 5 months took less time than the sedentary animals to find the escape platform. The exercised mice acquired maximal performance after only 2 days on the task, while it took more than 4 days for the sedentary mice to reach that same level of performance. This suggests that exercise may help to offset learning/cognitive deficits present in AD patients.
Next, the investigators examined tissues from the brains of mice that had exercised for 5 months. Compared to the sedentary animals, mice that had exercised for 5 months on the running wheels had significantly (50%) fewer plaques and fewer beta-amyloid fragments (peptides) in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus, that characterize AD. Additional studies, of exercised animals at 10 weeks old, showed that the mechanism underlying this difference began within the first month of exercise.
"These results suggest that exercise--a simple behavioral strategy--in these mice may bring about a change in the way that amyloid precursor protein is metabolized," says D. Stephen Snyder, Ph.D., director of the etiology of Alzheimer's program in the NIA's Neuroscience and Neuropsychology of Aging Program. "From other research, it is known that in the aging human brain, deposits of beta-amyloid normally increase. This study tells us that development of those deposits can be reduced and possibly eliminated through exercise"
Mental exercise also helps!
These findings follow another recent report of a link between an enriched environment and Alzheimer's-like brain changes. That study, published by Orly Lazarov, PhD, and colleagues in the March 11, 2005, issue of the journal Cell, found that beta-amyloid levels decreased in the brains of another kind of genetically modified mice when they were housed in groups and in environments that were enriched with running wheels, colored tunnels, and toys.
"Both of these studies are exciting because they offer insight into one of the pathways through which exercise and environment might promote resistance to development of cognitive changes that come with aging and AD," Snyder notes.
Read more in the Journal of Neuroscience
Read more in Cell
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Eating Disorders Affect Preschoolers
A team from the Flinders University of South Australia interviewed over 80 girls aged five to eight. The study reported in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology found 47 percent wanted to be slimmer, and most thought that would make them more popular.
Because of the girls' age, the researchers asked them about their awareness, rather than actual experience, of teasing and likeability on the basis of body shape. They were also asked what they thought about their peers' level of body dissatisfaction, and how much body shape was discussed accepted amongst the girls they knew.
Researchers also questioned the children on how much they knew about dieting. Forty-five percent said they would diet if they gained weight, with older girls in the group more likely to do so.
Most girls believed being thin would increase likeability, yet very few claimed to discuss their bodies with their friends. Five-year-old girls displayed little dissatisfaction with their bodies.
Researcher Hayley Dohnt, who led the study, said: "Previously, research has focused on adolescence as the likely time for the emergence of body dissatisfaction. However, clear evidence has accumulated that a substantial number of pre-adolescent girls are dissatisfied with their bodies and wish to be thinner."
A spokesman for the UK's Eating Disorders Association was qoted on BBC News Online as saying: "Eating disorders have been recorded in children as young as eight, and there may have been instances in children of an even younger age. Low self esteem is a major contributory factor of eating disorders: media images, peer pressure and family situations can also affect people.We believe there are lots of pressures from many areas on young people to be thin. We are concerned but not surprised that school children as young as six are affected by them."
Eating Disorders Begin in Childhood
In a separate story Italian researchers have traced the origin of eating disorders to very early childhood. In fact the root cause of the problems may be an infant's separation anxiety when his or her mother is absent.
This is the finding of a study by Alfonso Troisi and colleagues in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of Rome which is published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology.
The researchers investigated whether 78 women with eating disorders (aged 17 to 36) had a higher frequency of childhood separation anxiety symptoms compared with 64 healthy women. Using a questionnaire study design, participants were assessed for the presence of retrospective separation anxiety.
Separation anxiety can manifest itself in unrealistic worries about harmful things happening to the key figure while they are away or the fear of being lost, kidnapped or even killed. The researchers found that women with eating disorders reported more severe separation anxiety during childhood. This may be because control over body change is an external way to divert attention away from attachment-related concerns.
The study also measured the women's current approaches to relating to significant others. The findings showed that women with eating disorders had more insecure attachments.
The findings support the idea that women with eating disorders respond to imagined minor separations from loved ones in extreme ways. The results can also be interpreted as indirect evidence linking insecure styles of adult attachment to adverse early experiences with attachment figures.
But the researchers also stress that while insecure attachment may predispose an individual to an eating disorder, it is in fact other factors that will determine the type of eating disorder that emerges.
Read more in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology
Read more in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology
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Pain Linked to Permanent Brain Loss
December 6, 2004
Researchers at Northwestern University had previously shown patients with back pain had decreased activity in the same brain region called the thalamus. This area is known to be important in decision-making and social behavior.
The team's current study in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests some of the changes may be irreversible and render pain treatment ineffective. If this is born out by subsequent research, it makes it all the more important to treat pain early to prevent any permanent change, say Dr Vania Apkarian and colleagues.
They scanned the brains of 26 patients with chronic back pain and 26 healthy people. The patients with chronic pain caused by damage to the nervous system showed shrinks in the brain by as much as 11%--equivalent to the amount of gray matter that is lost in 10-20 years of normal aging.
The decrease in volume, in the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus of the brain, was related to the duration of pain. Every year of pain appeared to decrease gray matter by 1.3 cubic centimetres. What the researchers now need to find out is whether this loss is permanent or whether it can be reversed with treatment.
Dr Apkarian said: "It is possible that some of the observed decreased gray matter shown in this study reflects tissue shrinkage without substantial neuronal loss, suggesting that proper treatment would reverse this portion of the decreased brain matter." However he cautioned that the prospects are not that hopeful because other research in rats had shown that spinal cord neurons die, which suggests the brain changes could be irreversible.
Dr Nigel Lawes, senior lecturer in biomedical science at St Georges Medical School, London told BBC Online that people with chronic back pain tended to move in automatic ways that perpetuate the pain. Therapies to teach people how to pay attention to and control their movement to limit this pain might help, he said.
Feldenkrais and our Repatterning Movements teach people new and more functional options for movement, helping people break the cycle of habitual movement and chronic pain.
Read more in the Journal of Neuroscience
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For Some Women Exercise Ain't All Its Cracked Up To Be
September 30, 2002
Exercise not only improves your health, it makes you feel good. It's a message constantly reinforced through research, advertisements and the news media. However for a subset of women -- those with eating disorders -- exercise may have no feel-good effects. In fact, it may induce just the opposite feeling. And women in general may get less psychological benefit from exercising than men.
Those are among the conclusions presented last month by researchers Jennifer Gerlach and Dorothy Espelage at the American Psychological Association annual convention in Chicago.
The study involved 324 undergraduates at Illinois, 235 women and 86 men, with an average age of 19.9 years, who were asked to complete questionnaires assessing exercise behavior, strategies for coping with stress, self-esteem, life satisfaction, positive and negative affect (similar to mood), depression, anxiety and eating behavior. The men and women were comparable in their level of exercise.
The researchers' primary goal was to determine how exercise was used as a strategy for coping with stress. But what they found in the process were curious associations between exercise and psychological health. For the men as a group, they found statistically significant associations between exercise and almost every measure of psychological health. For the women, however, most of those associations were either weak or statistically insignificant.
The researchers also found that exercise was related to both positive and negative affect, "and that didn't make sense," Gerlach said. They hypothesized that eating disorders played a part in the contrary numbers, and so split the women into subgroups. Eleven percent were categorized as having an eating disorder, based on their responses in the questionnaires. The other 89 percent were put in a non-eating-disorders group.
For the majority group, exercise was related to positive affect, Gerlach said. "But for the women who had an eating disorder, exercise was related to negative affect, and there was a slight trend for more depression and more anxiety." For those women, "exercise isn't related to positive psychological health," she said.
One possible explanation may be that men and women exercise for different reasons, with societal pressures causing women to worry more about body image, over just feeling good or having fun, Gerlach said. Over-exercise may be a component of eating disorders that needs further exploration, she said.
Read more on the University of Illinois website
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Flexible Elderly Reduce Risk of Falls
January 23, 2002
Osteopaths have taught older women to walk more confidently as part of a project to help reduce the number of falls among the elderly. Almost a third of people over the age of 65 hurt themselves falling each year, increasing to around half of those in their 80s.
Each of the 45 participants in the study was given treatment over five weeks to improve their flexibility. Experts worked on increasing the length of their stride and improving their gait.
Osteopath Guillaume Climent, who treated the women, said: "When we carried out the first tests, we found stepping and striding were quite short. But after treatment there was a significant difference. Their stride and step increased along with their velocity."
Elderly people become less steady on their feet due to a loss of flexibility and sensory deterioration. This can be more serious for women, who may be exposed to an increased risk of osteoporosis, or brittle bone disease, after menopause. Mr Climent concentrated on improving flexibility in the women's lower back, pelvis, knees and ankles.
The research is being carried out at the Sports and Exercise Science Centre at the University of Greenwich in London.
Mr Climent's colleague, Dr Mark Goss-Sampson, said: "Elderly people tend to shuffle but by improving their flexibility they became much more confident."
Injuries from falls among the elderly are often serious, causing permanent immobility or even death, and the fear of falling can have a dramatic impact on their quality of life.
At the risk of seeming self-promoting I would point out that our exercise tape sets are excellent for increasing flexibility and enhancing movement, especially "Empower Your Body." These Repatterning Exercises (RPMs) TM can be done by virtually anyone of any age and will certainly keep the body flexible. There are Fortinberry-Murray practitioners in many areas who give classes in RPMs and we would be happy to send you the names of any in your area. Failing that I would suggest Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes. Both RPM and ATM exercises will help increase and maintain essential flexibility. BM
Read more in BBC News
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Gorgeous Muscles -- In Your Dreams!
November 26, 2001
One of the points that Alicia Fortinberry makes in all her classes (and Repatterning Movement Audio-cassettes)is that if you just imagine yourself doing a particular exercise, you will benefit. Studies have shown that those who imagine they are practising their sport, or their musical instrument, do equally well as those who actually do the work.
Well now a new study has provided the answer to a couch-potato's dream -- just imagining yourself exercising can increase the strength of even your large muscles.
The discovery could help patients too weak to exercise to start recuperating from stroke or other injury. And if the technique works in older people, they might use it to help maintain their strength.
Muscles move in response to impulses from nearby motor neurons. The firing of those neurons in turn depends on the strength of electrical impulses sent by the brain.
"That suggests you can increase muscle strength solely by sending a larger signal to motor neurons from the brain," says Guang Yue, an exercise physiologist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio. Yue and his colleagues have already found that mentally visualising exercise was enough to increase strength in a muscle in the little finger, which it uses to move sideways. Now his team has turned its attention to a larger, more frequently used muscle, the biceps.
They asked 10 volunteers aged 20 to 35 to imagine flexing one of their biceps as hard as possible in training sessions five times a week. The researchers recorded the electrical brain activity during the sessions. To ensure the volunteers were not unintentionally tensing, they also monitored electrical impulses at the motor neurons of their arm muscles.
Every two weeks, they measured the strength of the volunteers' muscles. The volunteers who thought about exercise showed a 13.5 per cent increase in strength after a few weeks, and maintained that gain for three months after the training stopped. Controls who missed out on the mental workout showed no improvement in strength.
The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego.
Read more in New Scientist online
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Exercise 'Halves Cancer Risk'
November 10, 2001
Experts in Scotland have gathered up all the evidence on the issue, and say that it points more firmly than ever to the conclusion that exercise, even gentle exercise, is a great preventative against cancer of the bowel.
Bowel cancer is one of the developed world's biggest killers and the causes are still not fully understood, although eating fresh fruit and vegetables also appears to have a protective effect.
The research, carried out by the Cancer Research Campaign and Scottish Cancer Foundation, combined and analysed the results of more than 50 separate studies into bowel cancer. It found that people who exercised regularly were 50% less likely to develop the disease.
Dr Linda Sharp, from Aberdeen University, found that sport, manual work, and even hiking and gardening all seemed to count as exercise in terms of cancer protection. She said: "This is exciting, because it provides a relatively easy way for us all to reduce our risk of this terrible disease, which claims the lives of over 300 people each week in the UK.
"We've analysed a wide range of studies looking at many different types of physical activity, and taken together they provide convincing evidence that exercise really does protect against bowel cancer."
It is not clear yet why exercise should help -- it may alter levels of hormones which are key to cancer development, or perhaps alter the speed at which food moves through the bowel, which may also have a bearing.
Other surveys have suggested that a large proportion of men and women avoid the physical exercise that could keep them disease-free. Just under a quarter of men, and just over a quarter of women confessed to taking no moderate or vigorous physical activity.
Professor Gordon McVie, Director General of the Cancer Research Campaign, said: "This research is important, because it suggests that by making a simple lifestyle change, people could substantially reduce their chances of developing bowel cancer.
"Regular physical activity doesn't have to mean running a marathon each week. A brisk walk for half an hour, five times a week, is as good a way as any of getting the exercise we need."
Exercise is also well recognised as protective against other illnesses such as heart disease.
It's interesting how so many of our present emotional and physical illnesses come down to not doing what our hunter-gatherer ancestors did naturally. In this case the act of hunting or gathering provided the exercise necessary for protection against cancer and heart disease. When will we learn? To find out how the mismatch between our present life-style and our genetic heritage effects psychological disorders I would recommend a book I have just finished reading called "Evolutionary Psychiatry" by Anthony Stevens and John Price. BM
Read more in BBC News
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Running Marathons Leads to Heart Attacks
October 26, 2001
The research was published in The American Journal of Cardiology. Arthur Siegel, MD, director of Internal Medicine at McLean Hospital, and his collaborators analyzed the blood of marathoners less than 24 hours after finishing a race and found abnormally high levels of inflammatory and clotting factors of the kind that are known to set the stage for heart attack.
"My concern is for people who exercise thinking 'more is better,' and that marathon running will provide ultimate protection against heart disease," said Siegel. "In fact, it can set off a cascade of events that may transiently increase the risk for acute cardiac events."
Few studies have defined the cardiovascular risks imposed by a 26-mile run on a person with a presumably healthy heart. However, it is known that there are diminishing returns from the benefits of exercise as intensity and duration are increased. What's more, other studies indicate that overtraining leads to decreases in immune function and increases your risk of disease.
Also troubling, Siegel and his colleagues found that early stage markers used to detect heart attack in the emergency room (creatine kinase-MB, considered the gold standard) produced positive results on the runners, none of whom displayed any obvious cardiac symptoms.
"The benefits of an active lifestyle are tremendous," said Susan Kalish, executive director of the American Medical Athletic Association. "But Dr Siegel's work shows that marathoning may have its risks. If your goal is to improve your health, go for a run... but perhaps don't train for a marathon."
It is easy to see why overexercising leads to heart problems if we look at the why that humans were designed to move. Men are designed to be hunters. Hunting involves hours of walking, stalking the prey, followed by a burst of speed at the end when the spear is thrown or the ax is wielded. Women, as gatherers, were not designed for running at all. The best exercise for both sexes is walking and most studies have shown that a hour's walk a day is perfect. Our own Repatterning Movement (RPM) exercises are the ideal companion to the walking for all round flexibility and suppleness. BM
Read more in Uniscience
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Why Exercise Cheers You Up
October 7, 2001
It has long been known that exercise lifted mood and acted like an antidepressant, but until now it has not been clear why exercise has that effect.
But, doctors from Nottingham Trent University suggest the chemical phenylethylamine could play a part. Phenylethylamine is a naturally produced chemical that has been linked to the regulation of physical energy, mood and attention. An enzyme changes the chemical into phenylacetic acid. There is evidence that levels of both substances are low in the biological fluids of depressed patients.
In what are thought to be the first attempts to test the effects of exercise on levels of the chemical, the researchers found, overall, levels of the acid increased by 77% after exercise.
Twenty healthy men, with an average age of 22 were tested. All regularly did around four hours of moderate to hard aerobic and anaerobic exercise each week. Before the study began, they refrained from exercise for a day, and a urine test was done to check for levels of levels of phenylacetic acid, the most accurate measurement of the chemical.
The next day the men exercised on a treadmill at 70% of their maximum heart rate capacity for 30 minutes. Doctors chose that level because mood changes are commonly reported at that level.
The men were also asked to rate how hard they had found the exercise. When urine levels were checked, it was found phenylacetic acid levels were increased in 18 out of the 20 participants. The highest rises were seen in two out of the three who had rated the exercise as hard.
Dr Ellen Billet, who was one of the team of researchers from Nottingham Trent who carried out the research, told BBC News Online: "We felt there may be an effect of exercise on phenylethylamine. We also know that moderate exercise has these beneficial effects."
A spokeswoman for the mental health charity Mind said: "Physical exercise has a valid place in the treatment and prevention of some mental health problems. In a recent Mind survey of Cannons gym users, 75 % said they exercised to reduce their stress levels and 67% said they used exercise to maintain their mental health, like lifting 'low' moods. Mind is calling for all GPs to offer exercise sessions on prescription to patients with mental health problems, particularly as we know that most people with mental health problems don't know this non-drug 'treatment' option exists."
The Repatterning Movements (RPMs), which we use in our
Uplift Program, are very useful in raising moods. These exercises can be done by people of all ages and even those with quite severe disabilities. Some of these RPMs are available as
audio-programs. BM
Read more in BBC News
And in New Scientist online
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Workouts May Turn Back The Clock
October 7, 2001
At least that seems to be the case when it comes to aerobic performance, according to a new study published last week in the journal Circulation.
The study was a follow-up to one conducted in 1966 that became known as the Dallas Bed Rest and Training Study. Then, a group of 20-year-old men performed physical tests, spent three weeks in bed, and then were put through a six-month program of moderate endurance training. Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas examined five of the men in 1996. Only two had continued to exercise regularly; all had gained weight and on average they had doubled their body fat.
In many ways, the researchers found, the deterioration was comparable to the deconditioning that had occurred when the men had been confined to bed.
The subjects were then enrolled in a fitness program, choosing to walk, jog or work out on a stationary bicycle. Starting slowly, they built up over six months to working out about five hours a week. That training "restored 100 percent of the age-associated decline in aerobic power," the article said, meaning that tests of their cardiovascular output at the end of the 1996 trial were comparable to those at the start of the 1966 trial.
"Even an older person who has failed to maintain fitness over time can benefit from an exercise program," said Dr Benjamin Levine, an author of the study.
The 50-year-olds were not, however, able to match the performances that they produced after the earlier round of training. And, the exercise program did not help them lose significant amounts of either weight or body fat.
Read more in the New York Times online
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Was Methuselah Short, Squat and Fit?
February 10, 2001
Methuselah, so the bible and the famous song from Porgy & Bess stated, lived 500 years. But what if all humans had been designed to live beyond age 100 and remain free of many of the diseases and disorders associated with aging? We might have looked like short, stout elves. This conclusion may be drawn from illustrations that accompany the article, "If Humans Were Built to Last," by UIC Professor of Biostatistics S. Jay Olshansky in the UIC School of Public Health and his colleagues in the March 2001 issue of the magazine Scientific American.
Our bodies evolved to survive long enough to reproduce and raise our young, says Professor Olshansky, a noted demographer of aging. Human ingenuity has made it possible for us to extend our lives well past our reproductive years.
The article outlines design 'flaws' that lead to bodily malfunctions as we age, and some hypothetical, evolutionary design 'fixes' that would allow us to enjoy good health well into our postreproductive years.
For example, some of the extended-use features might include rewired eyes, bigger ears that are mobile, a curved neck, forward-tilting upper torso, extra-padded joints, larger bones and muscles, shorter limbs and stature and backward-bending knees. Walking upright probably contributed to human intelligence and an expanded foraging range, the authors note, but at the price of aging-related disorders, including slipped disks, lower back pain and worn-out joints. Where our heads are concerned, the authors cite the weak link between the optic nerve and retina, which is prone to detaching after decades of use, fragile hair cells in our ears leading to hearing loss, and a common passageway for food and air, raising the risk of inhaling food or drink as muscle tone decreases with age.
Then, there are what the authors refer to as 'plumbing problems' in males, these problems include a urethra prone to constriction by an enlarged prostate that may obstruct the flow of urine, and in females, bladder and pelvic-floor muscles and ligaments that weaken with time and multiple pregnancies, which may lead to incontinence.
Okay, Evolution, fix that!
Read more on the Daily University Science News
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Exercise Halts Mental Decline and Fights Depression
January 17, 2001
According to a study reported on BBC News Online (Jan 16), which was carried out by researchers at Duke University Medical Center (one of the places we have lectured at) in Durham, North Carolina, exercise can improve mental abilities in the elderly. Researchers believe it could be linked to the fact that exercise improves the body's ability to pump blood and blood's oxygen-carrying capacity.
The implication is that exercise might be able to offset some of the mental decline that we often associate with the ageing process.
The original purpose of the study was to show how exercise affected depression. It would seem that exercise is of great benefit here as well -- something that our students and clients will not be surprised to hear. Improvements were seen "above and beyond" what was expected after the depression had lifted, say researchers. One of the key findings was that exercise had beneficial effects on functions controlled by specific areas of the brain. Memory, planning, organisation and juggling different tasks all improved under the study.
The link between exercise and depression is, of course one of the reasons we have dance and Feldenkrais-like Repatterning Movements (RPMs) in our Uplift Program.
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RPM Exercises May Help People With Schizophrenia
October 30, 2000
According to research carried out by Dr Joseph Loizzo of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in NY exercise of the kind that is found in
Repatterning Movements (RPMs) offer people with schizophrenia an opportunity to be with other people without having to depend on verbal communication, which can be frightening for some patients. This kind of exercise "helps people with schizophrenia realize that they have control over what their bodies are doing. It allows them to experience a more motor, less verbal mode."
The main thing about RPMs is that, in Dr Loizzo's view, there is no 'toxic feedback' -- they are non-competitive and there are no critical comments or 'right' way of doing things.
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About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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