Beware! Playing too many video games can lead to
Alzheimer’s disease
Spending too much time
playing video games may increase your risk of developing neurological disorders
such as Alzheimer’s disease, says a new study.
Playing too much video games could lower functional
brain activity in the hippocampus that plays a major role in memory formation
and spatial navigation, the researchers said.
‘People who spend a lot of
time playing video games may have reduced hippocampal integrity, which is
associated with an increased risk of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s
disease,’ said Gregory West, assistant professor at the University of Montreal
in Canada.
While video game players exhibit more efficient
visual attention abilities, they are also much more likely to use navigation
strategies that rely on the brain’s reward system (the caudate nucleus) and not
the brain’s spatial memory system (the hippocampus), the findings showed.
Video gamers now spend a collective three billion
hours per week in front of their screens. In fact, it is estimated that the
average young individual would have spent some 10,000 hours gaming by the time
they are 21, the study noted.
The study was conducted among a group of adult
gamers who were spending at least six hours per week on this activity.
‘For more than a decade now, research has
demonstrated that action video game players display more efficient visual
attention abilities, and our current study has once again confirmed this
notion,’ first author West added.
‘However, we also found that gamers rely on the
caudate-nucleus to a greater degree than non-gamers. Past research has shown
that people who rely on caudate nucleus-dependent strategies have lower grey
matter and functional brain activity in the hippocampus.’
The study was published in the journal Proceedings
of the Royal Society B.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
21.05.2015
Skipping meals could make you fat!
If you
are dieting with a size zero figure in mind, think again! Researchers have
found that skipping meals can ultimately result in abdominal weight gain. ‘This
does support the notion that small meals throughout the day can be helpful for weight loss, though
that may not be practical for many people,’ said senior author of the study
Martha Belury, professor of human nutrition at The Ohio State University in the
US. ‘But you definitely do not want to skip meals to save calories because it
sets your body up for larger fluctuations in insulin and glucose and could be
setting you up for more fat gain instead of fat loss,’ Belury explained. In the
study, mice that ate all of their food as a single meal and fasted the rest of
the day developed insulin resistance in their livers.
When the liver does not respond to insulin signals
telling it to stop producing glucose, that extra sugar in the blood is stored
as fat. These mice initially were put on a restricted diet and lost weight
compared to controls that had unlimited access to food. The restricted-diet mice
regained weight as calories were added back into their diets and nearly caught
up to controls by the study’s end. But fat around their middles – the
equivalent to human belly fat – weighed more in the restricted-diet mice than
in mice that were free to nibble all day long. An excess of that kind of fat is
associated with insulin resistance and risk for Type-2
diabetes and heart
disease. The research was published online in the Journal
of Nutritional Biochemistry.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
21.05.2015
You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day
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