Women drinkers face greater
mortality risk
Read this carefully if you cannot imagine your evenings
without wine or vodka, and especially if you are a woman. The increased risk of
death associated with alcohol intake is not the same for men and women, a study
has warned. ‘While alcoholism is more common in men than women, female drinkers
face greater risks to their health compared with male drinkers,’ said Susan G.
Kornstein, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Women’s Health that
published the study.
A Chinese team of researchers compared the amount of alcohol
consumed and death from all causes among nearly 2.5 million women and men. It
showed that the differences between the sexes became greater as alcohol intake
increased. ‘Females had an increased rate of all-cause mortality conferred by
drinking compared with males, especially in heavy drinkers,’ noted Chao Wang
from Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
Wang and co-authors modelled the relationship between
alcohol consumption and the risk of death and compared the results for drinkers
versus non-drinkers and among male and female drinkers.
12.04.2014
Revealed — why babies wake you up in
the middle of the night!
A leading
evolutionary biologist has put forward the theory that an infant’s tendency to
wake up in the night may have been a Darwinian tactic to make mothers
breastfeed more, thus reducing their fertility and limiting the number of
siblings that will be born, which in turn improved a child’s chances of
survival.
Breastfeeding
acts as a natural contraceptive during the first six months after birth,
stopping women from menstruating. Encouraging the effect would have been
beneficial for our ancestors, because the fewer siblings one had, the more
competition there would be for scarce resources, and the lower the risk of
infectious disease spreading, according to Professor David Haig, of Harvard
University. Pointing out that shorter delays between siblings being born is
associated with higher infant mortality, Professor Haig said that the ‘benefits
of delay can be substantial’, perhaps explaining babies’ instinctive urge to
keep their mums awake, breastfeeding at all hours, the Independent reported.
He said
that natural selection will have preserved suckling and sleeping behaviours of
infants that suppress ovarian function in mothers because infants have
benefited from delay of the next birth. It may be fathers’ genes that are
responsible, he added. Evidence from babies with Angelman syndrome (AS), a rare
developmental disorder marked by extreme restlessness, indicated that paternal
genes promote suckling and waking.
Professor
Haig said that the behaviour, was ‘part of our natural heritage’. He said that
the time of life when babies are most likely to wake often in the night, around
six months, corresponded to the time when mothers were most likely to be
becoming fertile again. The research is published in the journal Evolution,
Medicine and Public Health today.
12.04.2014
Only normal people say that 'success knocks your door once'.. but
achievers say 'knock the door of failure till you meet the success’
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