A smile is not just a smile, it can boost your memory!

Feb 26: While too much stress can be toxic to your health, a new study suggests that despite its negative side effects, it may also lead to a surprising social benefit.

The research, published in the journal Stress & Health, found that experiencing stress made people both more likely to give and receive emotional support from another person.

This was true on the day they experienced the stressor as well as the following day.

"Our findings suggest that just because we have a bad day, that doesn't mean it has to be completely unhealthy," said study researcher David Almeida from Penn State University in the US.

"If stress can actually connect us with other people, which I think is absolutely vital to the human experience, I think that's a benefit. Stress could potentially help people deal with negative situations by driving them to be with other people," Almeida added.

For the study, the researchers interviewed 1,622 participants every night for eight nights. They asked the participants about their stressors and whether they gave or received emotional support on that day.

Stressors included arguments, stressful events at work or school, and stressful events at home.

The researchers found that on average, participants were more than twice as likely to either give or receive emotional support on days they experienced a stressor.

Additionally, they were 26 per cent more likely to give or receive support the following day.

The researchers said that while this effect, on average, was found across the participants, it differed slightly between men and women.

"Women tended to engage in more giving and receiving emotional support than men," said study researcher Hye Won Chai.

"In our study, men were also more likely to engage in emotional support on days they were stressed, but to a lesser extent than women," Chai added.

The researchers said they were surprised that stress was linked to people not just receiving emotional support, but giving it, as well.

"We saw that someone experiencing a stressor today actually predicted them giving emotional support the next day," Almeida said.

"This made me think that it's actually possible that stress helps to drive you to other people and allows it to be ok to talk about problems -- your problems, my problems," Almeida added.

California, May 13: A fasting-mimicking diet could be more effective at treating some types of cancer when combined with vitamin C, suggests a new study conducted by the scientists from USC and the IFOM Cancer Institute in Milan.

In studies on mice, researchers found that the combination delayed tumour progression in multiple mouse models of colorectal cancer; in some mice, it caused disease regression. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

"For the first time, we have demonstrated how a completely non-toxic intervention can effectively treat an aggressive cancer," said Valter Longo, the study senior author and the director of the USC Longevity Institute at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

"We have taken two treatments that are studied extensively as interventions to delay ageing-- a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C -- and combined them as a powerful treatment for cancer," added Longo.

The researchers said that while fasting remains a challenging option for cancer patients, a safer, more feasible option is a low-calorie, plant-based diet that causes cells to respond as if the body were fasting.

Their findings suggest that a low-toxicity treatment of fasting-mimicking diet plus vitamin C has the potential to replace more toxic treatments.

Results of prior research on the cancer-fighting potential of vitamin C have been mixed. Recent studies, though, are beginning to show some efficacy, especially in combination with chemotherapy.

In this new study, the research team wanted to find out whether a fasting-mimicking diet could enhance the high-dose vitamin C tumour-fighting action by creating an environment that would be unsustainable for cancer cells but still safe for normal cells.

"Our first in vitro experiment showed remarkable effects. When used alone, fasting-mimicking diet or vitamin C alone reduced cancer cell growth and caused a minor increase in cancer cell death. But when used together, they had a dramatic effect, killing almost all cancerous cells," said Longo.

Longo and his colleagues detected this strong effect only in cancer cells that had a mutation that is regarded as one of the most challenging targets in cancer research.

These mutations in the KRAS gene signal the body is resisting most cancer-fighting treatments, and they reduce a patient's survival rate. KRAS mutations occur in approximately a quarter of all human cancers and are estimated to occur in up to half of all colorectal cancers.

The study also provided clues about why previous studies of vitamin C as a potential anticancer therapy showed limited efficacy. By itself, a vitamin C treatment appears to trigger the KRAS-mutated cells to protect cancer cells by increasing levels of ferritin, a protein that binds iron.

But by reducing levels of ferritin, the scientists managed to increase vitamin C's toxicity for the cancer cells. Amid this finding, the scientists also discovered that colorectal cancer patients with high levels of the iron-binding protein have a lower chance of survival.

"In this study, we observed how fasting-mimicking diet cycles are able to increase the effect of pharmacological doses of vitamin C against KRAS-mutated cancers," said Maira Di Tano, a study co-author at the IFOM, FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy.

"This occurs through the regulation of the levels of iron and of the molecular mechanisms involved in oxidative stress. The results particularly pointed to a gene that regulates iron levels: heme-oxygenase-1," added Tano.

The research team's prior studies showed that fasting and a fasting-mimicking diet slow cancer's progression and make chemotherapy more effective in tumour cells while protecting normal cells from chemotherapy-associated side effects. The combination enhances the immune system's anti-tumour response in breast cancer and melanoma mouse models.

The scientists believe cancer will eventually be treated with low-toxicity drugs in a manner similar to how antibiotics are used to treat infections that kill particular bacteria, but which can be substituted by other drugs if the first is not effective.

To move toward that goal, they say they needed to first test two hypotheses: that their non-toxic combination interventions would work in mice, and that it would look promising for human clinical trials.

In this new study, they said that they've demonstrated both. At least five clinical trials, including one at USC on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, are now investigating the effects of the fasting-mimicking diets in combination with different cancer-fighting drugs.

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.