Pesticide peril
Green thumbs and lawn lovers may want to make the switch to kinder, gentler pest control. In a recent American Journal of Epidemiology study of more than 3,000 Long Island women, some forms of pesticide use were associated with an increased risk for breast cancer. Researchers interviewed 1,556 randomly selected breast-cancer-free women and 1,508 women newly diagnosed with the disease, asking each about her at-home use of pesticides. While they found little or no link between breast cancer and indoor bug sprays or pet pest-control products, the study’s authors discovered that using lawn and garden pesticides might raise breast cancer risk. As the first researchers to uncover a connection between residential pesticide use and breast cancer, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine team is calling for further investigations into other populations to confirm its findings.
Your brain on sleep
For a memory like an elephant, try to sleep like a bear. In a recent report from Nature Neuroscience, researchers found that skimping on sleep may thwart your brain’s ability to make new memories. To test the effects of sleep deprivation, 28 young adults either got a good night’s sleep or stayed up for 35 hours straight. The next day, all of the study’s participants received brain scans while watching a slide show that flashed 150 images of landscapes, objects and people. Among the sleep-starved, parts of the brain involved in memory showed less activity than the same brain regions of the well rested.
The following day, after all participants had a normal night of sleep, the same slides were shown again—this time randomly mixed with 75 new slides. When asked to identify the slides they’d viewed the previous day, members of the sleep deprivation group performed far worse than their counterparts. The study’s authors note that the findings are “worrying,” especially considering “society’s increasing erosion of sleep time.”
The skinny on the new fat
First there were pre-diabetes and pre-hypertension. Now there’s pre-obesity, a syndrome recently explored in a study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. With a normal weight but a high percentage of body fat, the study’s results suggest pre-obese people most likely have an increased risk of inflammation.
Working with 60 healthy Italian women (ages 20 to 35), the researchers divided study participants into three groups: 20 women were overweight or obese, 20 were healthy in both weight and percentage of body fat, and 20 had a normal weight but more than 30 percent body fat (classifying them as pre-obese). When their blood tests were analyzed, both the obese and pre-obese women showed the highest levels of LDL (“bad” cholesterol) and inflammatory chemicals. Linked to conditions ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s disease, inflammatory chemicals might be released by fat cells, according to the study’s authors.