Lung cancer rates are rising in young women

Bergen, Mar 5: Divorce of parents may impact the academics of children negatively, suggests a new study.

According to the study, parental divorce is associated with a lower grade point average (GPA) among adolescents, with a stronger association seen in teens with more educated mothers.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Children and adolescents with divorced or separated parents are known to do less well in school than adolescents with nondivorced parents and to be less well-adjusted, on average, across a spectrum of physical and mental health outcomes.

In the new study, researchers used data from the youth@hordaland study, a population-based survey of adolescents aged 16-19 conducted in the spring of 2012 in Hordaland County, Norway.

19,439 adolescents were invited to participate and 10,257 agreed; of those, 9,166 are included in the current study.

Overall, adolescents with divorced parents had a 0.3 point lower GPA (standard error 0.022, p<0.01) than their peers.

Controlling for parental education reduced the effect by 0.06 points to 0.240 (SE 0.021, p<0.01). This heterogeneity was predominantly driven by maternal education levels, the researchers found.

After controlling for paternal education and income measures, divorce was associated with a 0.120 point decrease in GPA among adolescents whose mothers had a secondary school education level; a 0.175 point decrease when mothers had a Bachelor's level education; and a 0.209 point decrease when mothers had a Master's or PhD level education (all estimates relative to adolescents with a mother who had a basic level of education, such as ISCED 0-2).

Due to the cross-sectional structure of the study, researchers could not investigate specific changes between pre- and post-divorce family life, and future studies are needed to investigate potential mechanisms (such as reduced parental monitoring or school-involvement) which might drive this finding.

Nonetheless, this study provides new evidence that the negative association between divorce and teens' GPA is especially strong in families with more educated mothers.

"Among Norwegian adolescents, parental divorce was hardly associated with GPA among youth whose parents have low educational qualifications. In contrast, among adolescents with educated or highly educated mothers, divorce was significantly associated with lower GPA," said the authors.

Washington D.C., Jan 12: Disruption in one night's sleep can lead to getting Alzheimer's disease, a recent study has stated.

The interruption in the sound sleep for a single night aggravates the level of tau protein in any young male's body, thus gives rise to the chances of developing the disease.

According to CNN, the report was published on Wednesday in neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"Our study focuses on the fact that even in young, healthy individuals, missing one night of sleep increases the level of tau in blood suggesting that over time, such sleep deprivation could possibly have detrimental effects," says study author Dr Jonathan Cedernaes, a neurologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

As defined by the Alzheimer's Association, tau is the name of a protein that helps in stabilizing the internal structure of the brain's nerve cells. An abnormal build-up of tau protein in the body can end up in causing interior cells to fall apart and eventually developing Alzheimer's.

"When you get more of that deep sleep and you get the REM sleep in the normal amounts, that improves clearance of abnormal proteins which we think is good," said Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr Donn Dexter, not the study author but a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.

Earlier studies have also shown that getting deprived of sleep can allow higher tau development and accumulation. Thus that poor sleep can hasten the development of cognitive issues.

Researchers caution that the study is small and inconclusive, and acknowledged they were not able to determine what the increased levels might mean.

"This study raises more questions than answers," agreed Dexter on a concluding note, sharing, "What this is telling us is that we have to dig more deeply. Despite something we do for a third of our lives, we know so little about sleep and we're learning every day, particularly when it comes to sleep and dementia."

Taking multiple courses of antibiotics within a short span of time may do people more harm than good, suggests new research which discovered an association between the number of prescriptions for antibiotics and a higher risk of hospital admissions.

Patients who have had 9 or more antibiotic prescriptions for common infections in the previous three years are 2.26 times more likely to go to hospital with another infection in three or more months, said the researchers.

Patients who had two antibiotic prescriptions were 1.23 times more likely, patients who had three to four prescriptions 1.33 times more likely and patients who had five to eight 1.77 times more likely to go to hospital with another infection.

"We don't know why this is, but overuse of antibiotics might kill the good bacteria in the gut (microbiota) and make us more susceptible to infections, for example," said Professor Tjeerd van Staa from the University of Manchester in Britain.

The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, is based on the data of two million patients in England and Wales.

The patient records, from 2000 to 2016, covered common infections such as upper respiratory tract, urinary tract, ear and chest infections and excluded long term conditions such as cystic fibrosis and chronic lung disease.

The risks of going to hospital with another infection were related to the number of the antibiotic prescriptions in the previous three years.

A course is defined by the team as being given over a period of one or two weeks.

"GPs (general physicians) care about their patients, and over recent years have worked hard to reduce the prescribing of antibiotics,""Staa said.

"But it is clear GPs do not have the tools to prescribe antibiotics effectively for common infections, especially when patients already have previously used antibiotics.

"They may prescribe numerous courses of antibiotics over several years, which according to our study increases the risk of a more serious infection. That in turn, we show, is linked to hospital admissions," Staa added.

It not clear why hospital admissions are linked to higher prescriptions and research is needed to show what or if any biological factors exist, said the research team.

"Our hope is that, however, a tool we are working for GPs, based on patient history, will be able to calculate the risks associated with taking multiple courses of antibiotics," said Francine Jury from the University of Manchester.