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Fitness Tracker : Humans, once in constant motion as hunters and gatherers, are moving less than ever. At first, this trend seemed like progress: Transferring our heavy and dangerous work to animals, then machines, enabled more people to live longer. As recently as the 1950s, doctors considered exercise dangerous for people over age 40; for heart disease, which was then killing a record number of Americans, they prescribed bed rest. This was partly based on their concept of what “exercise” was: Early physiologists conducted studies on their (typically young, male) graduate students or on military servicemen — and in order to become more fit than they already were, these subjects needed to work out hard. “The mantra was, you have to go to a gym, you have to do high-intensity physical activity,” says Abby C King, a professor of health research and policy and medicine at Stanford University: “this sort of ‘no pain, no gain’ phenomenon.” That notion began to change with the 1968 ...

Australian health authorities have approved a new weight loss drug to help fight obesity . The weight loss drug Contrave has been listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods and is intended to be used with a diet control and increased exercise, according to a media report. Australian Researcher Michael Cowley, Head of the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute's Department of Physiology, developed the medication while working overseas after mapping key areas of the brain involved in the regulation of food intake. Cowley said he hopes the extra medication on the market, which has been approved for use in the US since 2014, will help people realise there are effective medical treatments available. That will also help break down inappropriate social stigma, he said. "There is a sector of the medical community and a sector of the Austra lian political community who regard obesity as a moral failing," he was quoted by AAP news agency. "Mo...

A diagnosis of prediabetes should be a wake-up call for people to make lifestyle changes to prevent diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to scientists at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Speaking about it, lead author of the study Michael P. Bancks said, "We know that having diabetes increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, so in our study we wanted to determine what the absolute risk or probability of developing heart disease was for people who were only at a pre-diabetic level of blood sugar." The study is published in the current issue of Diabetes Care . Prediabetes is indicated by a fasting blood sugar level between 100 and 125 mg/dL (5.6 to 6.9 mmol/L), while a fasting blood sugar level of less than 100 mg/dL (5.6 mmol/L) is considered normal. A level of 126 mg/dL (7 mmol/L) and higher is the diagnostic threshold for diabetes, Bancks said. The study saw researchers using data from seven observational studies that included both white...

Budget 2019 : Wearing a face mask and weighing just 32 kg, 39-year-old Vaishali Shah appeared more a lanky teenager than an adult when IndiaSpend met her in October 2018, at her one-bedroom apartment in Dombivli , a city in Maharashtra’s Thane district, 40 km away from central Mumbai in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Shah, a tuition teacher and mother of a 14-year-old, is an extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) patient. XDR-TB is an advanced form of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). As the names suggest, MDR-TB patients are resistant to first-line drugs such as rifampicin and isoniazid, which are used to treat the more common drug-sensitive TB. XDR-TB patients are resistant to some second line drugs as well. While TB is not uncommon in congested Mumbai, Shah’s case is unique because she is among the few drug-resistant TB patients in India who has been able to access two new oral drugs--bedaquiline and delamanid--to fight XDR-TB, along with an add-on...

A new study has found that prior to the onset of type 2 diabetes (T2D) , women with versus without prediabetes experience significantly have larger adverse differences in their cardiometabolic health than men. However, the mechanisms responsible for these sex differences remain a mystery. The research, conducted by the Maastricht University Medical Centre, aimed to evaluate sex-related differences in cardiovascular risk factor levels, both before and after the onset of T2D. T2D is known to reduce or even reverse the protective effect of being female on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease. The metabolic changes that eventually lead to T2D can precede the development of hyperglycemia (caused by poorly controlled blood glucose levels) by years or even decades. Despite this, there has been a little investigation into whether women suffer a relatively worse cardiometabolic risk profile before developing the disease. The authors analysed a population-based cohort of indiv...