Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Wearing Tight Belt Increases Chance Of Throat Cancer - A Study

Beware people! The tight belts can look OK on you but it is just getting you closer to a cancer risk. The recent study in UK shows that the chances of getting infected with throat cancer doubles when you are using a tight belt on your waist. Experts believe wearing a belt can force acid into the oesophagus, damaging the cells and increasing the risk of throat cancer.

The researchers, from Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities and The Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, tested 24 people with no history of acid reflux.

They asked them to swallow a probe, which took measurements before and after each person had eaten a meal.

Half of the participants were normal waist sizes and the other overweight and readings were taken when they had a belt on and off.

They found that even in healthy people, wearing a tight belt caused a partial hiatus hernia, which makes acid reflux more likely. A hiatus hernia happens when part of the stomach squeezes into the chest through an opening in the diaphragm, which can in turn cause acid to leak into the oesophagus.

This is linked to cancer because the acid pushed up into the gullet by wearing a belt can damage cells in the oesophagus, causing them to change.

They also found this was more pronounced in those who were overweight. The findings were reported in the British Medical Journal Gut. Researchers said they were concerned as oesophageal cancer is one of the most rapidly increasing forms of the disease in the world.

Cancer of the oesophagus is fairly rare in the UK, with around 8,200 people diagnosed every year. But the number of people with the disease has almost doubled in 30 years, with the rise being linked to obesity and acid reflux.

The study also suggested that taking in antacids was reducing the risk of throat cancers by 41%. Also the fact that the symptoms of esophagus cancer are rarely detected as heartburns are diagnosed at very late stages. The chances of survival just gets reduced by the time.

Inputs n Photo From Telegraph

Unknown

- Unknown Updated at: Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Too Much Time On Social Media Results In Short Term Memory Loss - A Study

Always online? Take a break!People who spend too much time browsing social media could be squandering their memories or losing important information, a new study has warned.

Contrary to common wisdom, an idle brain is in fact doing important work - and in the age of constant information overload, it's a good idea to go offline on a regular basis, according to a researcher from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Erik Fransen, whose research focuses on short-term memory and ways to treat diseased neurons, said that a brain exposed to a typical session of social media browsing can easily become hobbled by information overload.

The result is that less information gets filed away in your memory.

The problem begins in a system of the brain commonly known as the working memory, or what most people know as short-term memory. That's the system of the brain that we need when we communicate, Fransen said.

"Working memory enables us to filter out information and find what we need in the communication. It enables us to work online and store what we find online, but it's also a limited resource," he said.

"At any given time, the working memory can carry up to three or four items. When we attempt to stuff more information in the working memory, our capacity for processing information begins to fail.

"When you are on Facebook, you are making it harder to keep the things that are 'online' in your brain that you need. "In fact, when you try to process sensory information like speech or video, you are going to need partly the same system of working memory, so you are reducing your own working memory capacity.

"And when you try to store many things in your working memory, you get less good at processing information," he said.

You're also robbing the brain of time it needs to do some necessary housekeeping. The brain is designed for both activity and relaxation, Fransen said.

"The brain is made to go into a less active state, which we might think is wasteful; but probably memory consolidation, and transferring information into memory takes place in this state. Theories of how memory works explain why these two different states are needed.

"When we max out our active states with technology equipment, just because we can, we remove from the brain part of the processing, and it can't work," Fransen said.

Shared From Indian Express