Antibiotics improve growth in kids
Researchers
have suggested that antibiotics are able to improve growth in children at risk
of undernourishment in low and middle income countries.
Their results suggest that the youngest children from the most vulnerable populations benefit most and show significant improvements toward expected growth for their age and sex, particularly for weight.
A team of researchers from McGill, the University of British Columbia and others, set out to determine whether antibiotics lead to improvements in growth in pre-pubertal children living in low and middle income countries.
Paper's first author Ethan Gough, McGill PhD candidate in the Faculty of Medicine (Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health), said they looked at changes in both height and weight.
He said that they searched the research literature for studies that treated children aged 1 month to 12 years with an antibiotic, and analyzed the results of 10 trials involving 4,316 children in seven low and middle income countries. Children were generally smaller in height and weight than adequately nourished children of the same age. This group of studies reflects the spectrum of stunting and wasting malnutrition seen in these countries.
Amee Manges, a professor in the School of Population and Public Health, at the University of British Columbia, said that overall they we found that antibiotic treatment had a positive effect on both height and weight with increases of 0.04 cm/month for height and by 23.8 g/month for weight, asserting that after accounting for differences in the age of the study participants, effects on height were larger in the youngest children and effects on weight were larger in the trials that were conducted in Africa.
The results have been published in the British Medical Journal.
Source: www.timesofindia.com
21.06.2014
Playing football can lower BP in women
Instead of just thumping your desks or pumping your
fists even as you watch a World Cup football match on television, you should
also get into some real action if reducing blood pressure is one of your
concerns.
Playing football could help lower blood pressure in women aged 35-50, a study shows.
Women within this age group with high blood pressure achieved a significant reduction in blood pressure and body fat percentage through playing recreational football for 15 weeks.
"After 15 weeks of participation in recreational football, systolic and diastolic blood pressure had fallen by 12 and 6 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) and the women had lost 2.3 kg of fat on average," said Magni Mohr from University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
"The football training produced an impressive reduction in blood pressure that was more than twice as big as with swimming performed over the same period as with football," Mohr said.
The study involved 41 untrained women aged 35-50 years of age with high blood pressure of around 140/90 mmHg.
"As well as the impressive effects on blood pressure and body composition, we also saw a drop in cholesterol and a big improvement in physical fitness as a result of the 15 weeks of football training," said Peter Krustrup, professor at University of Exeter in Britain.
The study appeared in Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
Source: www.timesofindia.com
21.06.2014
No comments:
Post a Comment