Although the nation has invested billions of dollars preparing to respond to emergencies, current plans leave millions of Americans at risk because they do not account for critical problems people face when they actually try to protect themselves. To fix this fundamental flaw, The New York Academy of Medicine has released a report and tools — available at redefiningreadiness/ — that will enable households, work places, schools and early childhood/youth programs, and governments to anticipate and address problems they would face in emergencies. The tools are released during National Preparedness Month, an initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The report, “With the Public’s Knowledge, We Can Make Sheltering in Place Possible”, is based on two years’ work gathering the insights and experiences of nearly 2,000 people who live and work in four communities around the country. It identifies serious and unanticipated problems that currently make it neither feasible nor safe for many people to shelter in place. In conjunction with that report, the Academy is releasing four Shelter-in-Place Issue Sets (in both Spanish and English) to help members of households and organizations recognize and address their own vulnerabilities in these kinds of emergencies. Sheltering in place means staying inside whatever building you happen to be in — a workplace, school, store, or at home — for a period of a few hours to several days in order to stay safe, even if that requires you to be separated from other family members.

“Sheltering in place is a very important protective strategy in situations ranging from dirty bombs, toxic explosions, and chemical spills to much more common emergencies, like electrical blackouts and snowstorms,” said Roz D. Lasker, MD, Director of the Academy’s Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health and Division of Public Health, and lead author of the report.

The Academy’s main report documents that the emergency preparedness instructions being given to people and organizations do not address many important sheltering-in-place issues and sometimes make matters worse. Among the many gaps it uncovered:

* The public is being instructed to keep a supply of food and water in their homes, and most keep their medications there as well. But in a shelter-in-place emergency, many people will not be at home and will need to take shelter in other buildings, so their home-supply of food, water, or medicines won’t be accessible.

* The public is being told to identify places for family members to reunite in the event of an emergency. But those instructions don’t address situations in which it might be unsafe to go to such a place, such as if you would have to go through a danger zone to get there.

* While instructions describe how to identify and seal “safe rooms” in homes, schools, and other buildings, they pay little attention to assuring that the rooms can accommodate the number of people who are likely to need shelter, provide them with breathable air and tolerable temperatures, or give them safe access to water, food, lavatories, telephones, and medical supplies.

* Schools have been preparing for emergencies that affect the school directly, but children are also at risk if their parents and other guardians need to shelter in place because of an emergency and no other adult is available to pick the children up or be at home with them after school.

“The disconnect between current instructions and the problems people face in shelter-in-place emergencies isn’t surprising, since the public never had an opportunity to think about these situations in such detail before,” Lasker said.

The Academy has been harnessing the public’s knowledge about emergencies for several years now, with generous support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. In 2004, the Academy’s research study, Redefining Readiness: Terrorism Planning Through the Eyes of the Public, predicted that large numbers of people would suffer or die unnecessarily in emergencies, because planners were developing instructions for the public to follow without finding out whether it is actually possible, or safe, for all groups to do so. The prediction was proven to be correct during Hurricane Katrina, when many people could not follow instructions to evacuate due to barriers that had not been identified or addressed beforehand.

Over the past two years, the Academy has been working to prevent such needless death and suffering with teams in four Redefining Readiness demonstration sites in Carlsbad, NM; Chicago, IL; Savannah, GA; and southeast Oklahoma. In more than 200 small group discussions, almost 2,000 residents from diverse backgrounds explored the particular problems they would face trying to protect themselves in shelter-in-place emergencies, and the actions that they and other people and organizations could take. “Because of these efforts, we now know how to protect many more Americans in shelter-in-place emergencies than is currently possible,” said Lasker.

The insights generated in the small group discussions provided the basis for the Academy’s four Shelter-in-Place Issue Sets, which are tailored specifically to people in households, work places, schools and early childhood/youth programs, and governments. These practical tools — which consist of sets of questions rather than instructions — are designed to help users become aware of critical protection problems that their own household or organization can address and to develop workable solutions. The four issue sets are available on-line in Spanish as well as English.

Nan D. Hunter, JD, Director of the Center for Health, Science, and Public Policy at Brooklyn Law School and a co-author of the Academy’s new report, highlighted the importance of these tools for schools and work places. “The issue sets can help these organizations avoid liability by clarifying what they might reasonably be expected to do in shelter-in-place emergencies,” Hunter said. “Government agencies and private philanthropies can go a long way toward helping schools and work places realize those expectations — protecting employees, students, and customers in the process — by integrating the use of the issue sets in their current grant programs and by providing schools and work places with other incentives and supports.”

“This work is an important example of ways in which the Academy can play a role in assuring that individuals and communities affected by policies and programs have a great voice in creating them and thereby making them more effective” said Jo Ivey Boufford, MD, Academy President.

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Founded in 1847, The New York Academy of Medicine is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit institution whose mission is to enhance the health of the public. Our research, education, community engagement, and evidence-based advocacy seek to improve the health of people living in cities, especially disadvantaged and vulnerable populations. The impact of these initiatives reaches into neighborhoods in New York City, across the country, and around the world. We work with community based organizations, academic institutions, corporations, the media, and government to catalyze and contribute to changes that promote health. Visit us online at nyam/.

For more information about National Preparedness Month, an initiative each September of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security designed to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools, visit ready/.

Source: Kathryn Cervino

New York Academy of Medicine Continue reading →

The Fresno Bee on Sunday examined efforts to boost the number of minority physicians practicing in the San Joaquin Valley. The area has 30% fewer primary care physicians and 50% fewer specialists per capita than the state as a whole, the Bee reports. In addition, only 5% of doctors in the area are Hispanic, 3% are black and a few are Southeast Asian, according to Katherine Flores, director of the Latino Center for Medical Education and Research at the University of California-San Francisco.

The center oversees the Doctors Academy, which provides academic help, counseling and mentoring opportunities to students at three high schools in the San Joaquin Valley who are interested in medical careers. The academy, which started in 1999 and had about 200 students last year, aims to help young people become doctors who will work in the area.

Academy participants can take specialized classes taught by faculty at the high schools. Last year, about half of the students in the academy were Hispanic, 20% were Southeast Asian, 20% were East Indian and the remainder were black, white or Filipino. More than 80% of the academy’s students have studied or are studying science, health or math in college, and a couple students have enrolled or are planning to enroll in medical school.

Flores said, “If we could get two or three physicians a year, we would be successful.” She added, “If you want a fancy car and a fancy house, all the more power to you, but my hope is that [the students] come back to provide culturally sensitive care.”

A proposed medical school at the University of California-Merced also could boost the number of physicians working locally, according to the Bee. The closest medical schools to the San Joaquin Valley are in Davis and San Francisco. Last month, 63 students completed their medical training at UCSF-Fresno, which each year trains about 200 resident physicians in pediatrics, internal medicine, surgery and other specialties. Twenty-two of those physicians plan to remain in the area, the Bee reports (Hoagland, Fresno Bee, 6/22).

Reprinted with kind permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

© 2008 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved. Continue reading →

The American Academy of Neurology has issued a new guideline recommending the most effective treatments to help people with Parkinson’s disease who experience sleep, constipation, and sexual problems, which are common but often underrecognized symptoms. The guideline is published in the March 16, 2010, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“While the main symptom of Parkinson’s disease is movement problems, there are many other symptoms to be aware of, including sleep disorders, constipation, and problems with urination and sexual function,” said lead guideline author Theresa A. Zesiewicz, MD, with the University of South Florida in Tampa and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. “Without treatment, these symptoms can cause as much pain and discomfort as movement problems and greatly affect daily routines and quality of life.”

Sexual problems often affect people with Parkinson’s disease. In men with Parkinson’s, erectile dysfunction is common. According to the guideline, the drug sildenafil citrate may improve erectile dysfunction. The guideline also found the drug isosmotic macrogol may improve constipation in people with Parkinson’s disease.

For problems with excessive daytime sleepiness, the guideline recommends that doctors consider the drug modafinil to help people feel more awake. However, it’s important to note that one study showed people taking modafinil had a false sense of alertness. This may pose a safety risk for activities such as driving. The guideline also found the drug methylphenidate may help with fatigue.

The guideline mentions two tests to help identify nonmotor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. One is the NMSQuest rating scale. The other is the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). The original UPDRS mainly tests for movement problems. Doctors use the updated version of the UPDRS to test for all Parkinson’s symptoms, including those unrelated to movements. People with Parkinson’s disease should talk to their doctor about whether these tests may be helpful.

“More research is needed into these symptoms of Parkinson’s disease since there are still a lot of unknown answers as to what causes these symptoms and how they can best be treated to improve lives,” said Zesiewicz.

The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 22,000 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Parkinson’s disease, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), dementia, West Nile virus and ataxia.

Source: American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Continue reading →

When two individuals face off in conflict, the classic problem in evolutionary biology known as the prisoner’s dilemma says that the individuals are not likely to cooperate even if it is in their best interests to do so. But a new study suggests that with incentives to cooperate, natural selection can minimize conflict, changing the game from one of pure conflict to one of partial cooperation.

The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that the prisoner’s dilemma game, which has reigned as the dominant theoretical paradigm used to explain the costs and benefits of the evolution of cooperation, is not as evolutionarily stable a strategy as once assumed.

In the prisoner’s dilemma game, both players have the incentive not to cooperate independently. Collectively, they would be better off if they did cooperate. Evolutionary biologists have long sought to explain how cooperation can be maintained in such conflict by considering conditional behaviors in repeated interactions such as reciprocity. The new study, on the other hand, tries a different tack. Instead of accepting the underlying conflict of the prisoner’s dilemma game as immutable, they consider whether so-called “mutants” can invade a population of prisoner’s dilemma players and change the nature of the game.

“We wanted to look at how payoffs from social interactions can evolve, and what we found was that in the case of prisoner’s dilemma, mutants that provide incentives to each other for cooperating can invade, which changes the game to one of partial cooperation or coordination,” said Erol Ak?§ay, the study’s lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis.

Ak?§ay and co-author Joan Roughgarden, professor of biology at Stanford University, developed a mathematical model to illustrate how payoffs evolve in behavioral games as a result of evolution of individual traits. The model showed that when animals are able to recognize their payoffs and have the potential to react to incentives, the problem of the prisoner’s dilemma is less likely to occur and instead the game becomes more cooperative.

The results also showed that polymorphism, a genetic variant which can change the way a particular gene functions, is possible under a wide range of conditions, which results in a single population playing a variety of different behavioral games. The findings suggest that diversity in behavioral games could be more common in nature than previously recognized and might account for the diverse behavioral traits seen in nature.

Citation: Akcay E, Roughgarden J. 2010. The evolution of payoff matrices: providing incentives to cooperate. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Published online 8 December 2010.

Source:
Catherine Crawley
National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) Continue reading →

Noncommunicable diseases such as heart attacks, strokes, cancers, diabetes, respiratory diseases, and common injuries account for the vast majority of all global deaths, but because they are not yet included as priorities in the global development agenda, donors and international organizations have yet to pledge support to help developing countries address these leading health problems.

As the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meets in Geneva this week to focus on global public health commitments, many health and development leaders will call upon the international development community to integrate indicators on noncommunicable diseases and injuries into the core Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) monitoring and evaluation system.

To support these efforts, the World Health Organization (WHO) today announced the launch of a network of leading organizations and experts from around the world. The network will scale up action to combat noncommunicable diseases, strengthen global partnerships and help governments plan and implement measures to reduce the burden of these diseases.

The new Global Noncommunicable Disease Network (NCDnet) will unite currently fragmented efforts by bringing the cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes and respiratory communities together with tobacco control, healthy diets, and physical activity advocates.

”
Integrating the prevention of noncommunicable diseases and injuries into the national and global development agendas is not only achievable but also a priority for developing countries,” said Dr. Ala Alwan, Assistant Director-General Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health, WHO. “The goals of the new network are to increase focus on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases, to increase resource availability and to catalyse effective multi-stakeholder action at global and country levels.”

Strengthened by the support of the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and leading NGOs such as the World Heart Federation, the International Diabetes Federation and the International Union against Cancer, NCDnet will advocate for action to raise the priority accorded to noncommunicable diseases in development work at global and national levels.

“Noncommunicable diseases are a serious threat to global well-being,” said Richard Samans, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum. “They present a growing economic and social challenge for many developed and developing countries. At the World Economic Forum we are committed to working with WHO, and in collaboration with other international partners, to build an effective Global Noncommunicable Disease Network.”

“The challenges policy makers face include how to address the links between noncommunicable diseases and poverty, how to minimize the health and economic losses among the economically active population, and how to prepare for the pressures on health systems resulting from the growing numbers of people with noncommunicable diseases,” commented Joy Phumaphi Vice-President of the Human Development Network of the World Bank.

“I want to highlight the glaring omission of noncommunicable diseases in the Millennium Development Goals. I believe that this is a serious omission and this anomaly should be corrected. It is in this light that I propose we seriously consider an MDG-plus which would set goals for noncommunicable diseases, as we have done for other public health challenges,” commented Minister of Health Dr Leslie Ramsammy of Guyana.

Noncommunicable diseases cause 38 million deaths annually and together with injuries are responsible for 70% of all global deaths, with 80% of these deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries. WHO estimates that globally, deaths from noncommunicable diseases are forecast to increase by 17% over the next 10 years, with the greatest increase projected in the African Region (27%) followed by the Eastern Mediterranean Region (25%).

Source
WHO Continue reading →

Doctors attending the BMA’s annual conference in Edinburgh said they believed that patients should have the choice to purchase treatment that is not available on the NHS while still continuing to receive the rest of their treatment and medication on the health service.

However, the conference stopped short of demanding the introduction of co-payments and instead called on the Government to set up a Royal Commission to review all the evidence and allow a wider debate to take place.

The following motion was passed by doctors at the BMA conference:

That this meeting:

- recognises that not all treatments and medications are available to patients on the health service equitably across the UK;

- believes that patients should have the choice to purchase non health service treatments and medications if they wish and still receive the rest of their treatment and medication on the health service without being forced to pay for all their treatment privately;

- required that the Health Departments recognise that banning co-payments denies patients treatments that may be to their benefit and forces patients to accept healthcare rationing;

- calls on the government to set up a Royal Commission to review all the evidence and implications for the NHS and patients and report with recommendations by summer 2009.

If the government were to introduce co-payments, doctors said that there should be the following safeguards:

- the introduction of co-payments must not be a route to extend NHS user charges.

- any co-payments be introduced only after a mechanism is devised to prevent the extension of NHS user charges.

Commenting after the debate, Dr Hamish Meldrum said: “In principle doctors believe that patients should have the choice to buy additional treatment that is not available on the NHS, without being forced to pay for all their treatment privately.

“However, they stopped short of asking for co-payments to be introduced until there has been a wider debate with the profession and public and the evidence has been collected and examined. Doctors recognised that there were many potential problems with introducing co-payments and suggested a number of safeguards they would wish to see considered were they to be introduced.”

British Medical Association Continue reading →

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are harnessing two new, non-invasive techniques to look more closely inside the working lungs – leading to early detection of diseases, like emphysema, before it becomes evident in other modes of imaging.

“Up until now, imaging the way lungs function in real time has been limited by conventional methods which result in rather low resolution images,” comments Warren Gefter, MD, Chief of Thoracic Imaging in the Radiology Department at Penn. “We are developing a way to get a better look inside the lungs by polarizing atoms — making them all spin in the same direction — with magnetic resonance [MR], which allows the atoms to have a strong signal for sharper images.”

Hyperpolarized 3He gas allows radiologists to observe the lung as gas flows in and out, giving them high resolution images of human ventilation. Combining several techniques enables researchers to measure the rate of diffusion of these helium gas molecules, which reflect the size of the air sacs in the lung. This, in turn, allows researchers to detect very early emphysema, even before it’s evident on CT (computed tomography) – providing physicians with additional information in which to make diagnoses and offer treatment.

Gefter adds, “We have moved from imaging the structure to imaging the function of the lung to a scale well below a millimeter in size. It’s truly groundbreaking.”

To use this extremely powerful research tool, which provides accurate and precise measurements, patients must inhale the helium at the exact right time, after it’s been exposed to a laser light to make all of the atoms spin in the same direction, creating the polarized helium, which then enters the lung.

Utilizing another new MR technique, Penn imaging researchers are pushing the scale of what we see in the lung down to an even smaller level — to the cellular and intracellular level. Investigators have figured out a way in which they hope to look for a “marker” of disease inside the body. In animal models, they are injecting polarized carbon-13-labeled molecules and watching its conversion in real time. They can take images of the carbon-13 as it shuffles through the metabolic steps inside the cell.

Rahim Rizi, PhD, Associate Professor of Radiology at Penn, explains, “We observe the polarized carbon-13 labeled molecule as it breaks down and releases energy. What this ‘flagged molecule’ converts into could tell us whether the cell is normal or abnormal. This is a whole new approach to molecular imaging. For the first time, we can now follow the C-13 molecule, in real time, as it moves throughout the body to pinpoint the location of disease. It’s real-time molecular imaging. This is revolutionary to MRI technology.”

Penn is one of only a few sites in the world, and the only site on the East Coast, with this capability. Penn researchers hope to translate this technique for use in humans before the end of 2007.

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The National Institutes of Health funded this research work, with additional aid by General Electric.

For more information on the Metabolic Magnetic Resonance Research and Computing Center at Penn

Warren Gefter, MD — on-line bio

Rahim Rizi, PhD on-line bio

PENN Medicine is a $2.9 billion enterprise dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and high-quality patient care. PENN Medicine consists of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Penn’s School of Medicine is ranked #2 in the nation for receipt of NIH research funds; and ranked #3 in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent ranking of top research-oriented medical schools. Supporting 1,400 fulltime faculty and 700 students, the School of Medicine is recognized worldwide for its superior education and training of the next generation of physician-scientists and leaders of academic medicine.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System includes three hospitals [Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center]; a faculty practice plan; a primary-care provider network; two multispecialty satellite facilities; and home care and hospice.

Contact: Susanne Hartman

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Continue reading →

Nymox Pharmaceutical Corporation (NASDAQ: NYMX) is please to announce that the presentation of NX-1207 clinical study data at the AUA South Central Section annual meeting in Santa Ana Pueblo, NM was featured in the Urology Times, the widely distributed and most read publication of U.S. urologists. At the meeting, Raphael Wurzel, MD, reviewed clinical data from the most recent NX-1207 trial that showed that treatment with a single dose of NX-1207 significantly improved BPH symptom scores and significantly reduced prostate size after 90 days.

In addition, news of the NX-1207 clinical studies success has been shown on several U.S. television networks.

Dr. Wurzel’s presentation was one of series of recent presentations of NX-1207 clinical study data at annual regional meetings of urologists across the U.S. Further presentations are scheduled in the coming month. NX-1207 has entered its Phase 3 development program, the last stage before filing with the FDA for approval for commercial distribution and sale. The drug involves a new targeted approach to the treatment of BPH. NX-1207 is injected by a urologist in an office setting directly into the zone of the prostate where the enlargement occurs and the injection takes only a few minutes and involves little or no pain or discomfort. In multicenter U.S. clinical trials to date NX-1207 has been found to produce improvements in BPH symptom score that are approximately double that reported for currently approved BPH drugs without the side effects associated with those drugs, which can include sexual dysfunction, blood pressure changes and other adverse reactions.

Presentations of clinical study data at urology have been well-received and the Company has received a large number of communications from patients and doctors throughout the U.S. and internationally, interested in participating in clinical trials and wanting to learn more about the drug. Investigative site recruitment activities are proceeding well.

nymox

This press release contains certain “forward-looking statements” as defined in the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and the actual results and future events could differ materially from management’s current expectations. The conduct of clinical trials and the development of drug products involve substantial risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from expectations. Promising early results do not ensure that later stage or larger scale clinical trials will be successful or will proceed as expected. Such factors are detailed from time to time in Nymox’s filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory authorities. Continue reading →

If you adopt a Mediterranean diet and become as physically active as US national recommendations advise, over a 5-year period your chances of dying will be significantly lower, according to two reports in Archives of Internal Medicine (JAMA/Archives), December 10/24 issue.

The two studies used data from the NIH (National Institutes of Health) AARP Diet and Health Study, which was carried out during the 1995/1996 year. It involved 566,407 AARP members, aged 50-71 from six US states.

First Study

Panagiota N. Mitrou, Ph.D., National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md. (at that time), University of Cambridge, England (now), and team examined 380,296 participants, using a nine-point scale to gauge adherence. None of the participants had any history of chronic disease.

The diet included..

– vegetables
– legumes
– fruits
– nuts
– whole grains
– fish
– monounsaturated fats ratio
– alcohol
– meat

Over a five-year period 12,105 people died, of which 5,985 died from cancer, while 3,451 died from cardiovascular disease. The researchers found that those who followed a Mediterranean diet were significantly less likely to die of any cause, including cancer or heart disease.

Second Study

Michael F. Leitzmann, M.D., Dr.P.H., National Cancer Institute, and team looked at the results of two physical activity questionnaires, involving 252,925 participants, of which 110,97 were men, and 142,82 were women. During the follow-up period 7,900 of them died. Those who took part in 30 minutes of physical activity five times per week, in line with US national guidelines, had a 27% lower chance of dying, compared to those who did not. People who managed to do even more vigorous physical activity for 20 minutes per day, five days per week, had a 32% lower risk of dying, the researchers reported. Even those who just did a bit of physical activity appeared to have a lower risk of death, compared to people who did nothing at all.

“Physical Activity Recommendations and Decreased Risk of Mortality”
Michael F. Leitzmann, MD, DrPH; Yikyung Park, ScD; Aaron Blair, PhD; Rachel Ballard-Barbash, MD; Traci Mouw, MPH; Albert R. Hollenbeck, PhD; Arthur Schatzkin, MD, DrPH
Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(22):2453-2460
Click here to view abstract online

Continue reading →

There is a possibility that a pregnant mother’s poor diet may affect how long her child lives (life expectancy).

In a recent study, researchers found that mice whose pregnant mothers were fed on a low-protein diet had shorter lives (by months) than the ones whose mothers were fed on a normal diet.

Months, in a mouse’s life equates to many human years. If the child itself goes on to eat a high fat high sugar diet the effect is even worse. The study was carried out at Cambridge University (UK) and was published in Nature.

It is not clear how relevant the maternal diet of a mouse is to humans. The researchers did find, however, that even small changes in the mother’s diet (mice) had a profound impact on the future health of their offspring.

In this study, the mice were fed a low-protein diet (during pregnancy). Some of these mice went on to receive a low-protein diet while suckling their pups (baby mice).

When the baby mice were 21 days old (and weaned off mother’s milk) some went on to normal healthy diets while others went on high fat and sugar diets (cafeteria cuisine).

The mice that were fed normally (healthy diet) lived for 765 days. The high fat, high sugar fed mice lived for 715 days. Mice whose mothers (while pregnant) were on a low-protein diet (half the normal protein) but were suckled on nutritious milk only lived for 568 days.

The shortest lifespan went to mice whose pregnant mothers were on the low-protein (half the amount of protein) diets and then (the baby mice) went on the high fat high sugar diet lived for only 517 days.

Longer-lived

Oddly, normally-nourished foetuses who were given less nutritious milk after birth actually lived longer, even if fatty food was introduced at weaning.

Dr Susan Ozanne, who led the research, said: ‘Our research demonstrates that, in mice at least, minor manipulations of maternal diet can have a significant impact on offspring lifespan.

‘At the two extremes tested here, dietary changes increased the difference in lifespan by more than 50%.

‘In humans, this could equate to the difference between reaching 50 and living to be 75 years old.’

Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, which funded the research, said: ‘Although the importance of a balanced diet is clear, further research is needed to understand the effects of nutrition on human development. Continue reading →