Social Work Today E-Zine

How should you eat as you get older? Which foods are likely to keep you most healthy and which ones should you limit? Is it possible to eat well and stay within a healthy weight? These and other questions are addressed in "Eating Well as You Get Older," the latest topic to be added to NIHSeniorHealth, the health and wellness Web site developed by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Library of Medicine.

"Eating well is vital at any age, but as you get older, your daily food choices can make an important difference in your health. Good nutrition is one component of an overall strategy to stay healthy," says Richard J. Hodes, MD, director of the NIA, which developed the content for the topic on NIHSeniorHealth. Eating a well-planned, balanced mix of healthy foods every day may help prevent heart disease, type 2 diabetes, bone loss, some kinds of cancer, and anemia.

However, eating healthy may not always be easy for older adults. Changing appetites, slower metabolism, eating alone, buying ready-to-eat meals, and living on a fixed income can affect the quality of one's food choices. Yet our need for healthy foods does not diminish with age. As we age, our bodies still require essential nutrients to help us maintain function, and most of those nutrients are found in foods.

"It is important for older adults to select foods that provide them with the nutrients and energy they need for healthy, active living," says Hodes. "NIHSeniorHealth is a valuable source of information on this important issue."

— Source: National Institutes of Health

The influence of genetics increases as young women transition from taking their first drink to becoming alcoholics. A team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that although environment is most influential in determining when girls begin to drink, genes play a larger role if they advance to problem drinking and alcohol dependence.

The researchers studied 3,546 female twins aged 18 to 29 to separate the influences of genes and environment in the development of alcohol dependence. Their findings appear in a recent issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The study found that females who had their first drink at an earlier age were more likely to develop serious alcohol problems. The researchers found that all transitions were attributable in part to genetic factors, increasing from 30% for the timing of first drink to 47% for the speed at which women progressed from problem drinking to alcohol dependence. But genetics did not explain everything.

"Even when genetic factors are most influential, they account for less than half of the influence on drinking behavior," says lead author Carolyn E. Sartor, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Medicine.

— Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Would you rather support research for a disease that affects 30,000 Americans a year or one that affects just .01 percent of the U.S. population?

The numbers represent about the same number of people, but how you answered explains how you understand numerical information, according to a psychology professor at Kansas State University. "People are comfortable with simple frequencies and percentages," says Gary Brase, an associate professor of psychology at Kansas State.

"Everybody can understand five, six, 10, 20, or even 100, and percentages like 30% or 40%. We have a really good sense of how much that is. But it's really large numbers that we don't have nailed down exactly. If you say there were 20,000 people at a concert versus 30,000 people, we don't have a good sense of how much bigger that is exactly."

Brase says this research suggests that people prefer working with frequencies. "When you want to persuade, you're interested in whole numbers and using a large reference class like the U.S. or world population," Brase says. "Take the numbers of people who have a rare disease. The percentage could be a tiny amount. But it also could be an impressive number if you consider a large population. You get something that sounds like an important issue."

The opposite, Brase says, is doing something like saying that a person has a .0001 percent chance of getting that disease. "People really are not understanding the numbers," Brase says. "All they get out of that information is that it's a really, really tiny amount."

For people to really understand an issue, Brase says perhaps the best approach is to present numerical information in as many ways as possible.

— Source: Kansas State University

Workers who reported increased work flexibility from one year to the next also had fewer absences for illness and improved job commitment, according to new research from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. In addition, these workers were less likely to say that health problems affected their job performance.

The study’s results, based on a health survey completed by 3,193 employees of a large multinational pharmaceutical company, are reported in the current issue of the Psychologist-Manager Journal.

“This study provides evidence that flexibility is associated with health or well-being over time,” says Joseph G. Grzywacz, PhD, senior author and an associate professor of family medicine. “For managers, the results suggest that implementing flexible work arrangements can contribute to the bottom-line.”

The researchers analyzed data obtained from health risk appraisals to determine how increases or decreases in perceived flexibility from one year to the next were associated with various factors. Workplace flexibility refers to workers’ ability to modify where, when, and how long job-related work is performed. There are two main types of flexibility: location, such as telecommuting, and schedule, such as flextime and job sharing.

Results indicate that an increase in perceived flexibility was associated with a decrease in sickness absences and work-related impairment, and improved job commitment. Decreases in perceived flexibility over the year were associated with a significant increase in impairment and reduced job commitment, but had little impact on absence.

“These results strengthen the evidence suggesting that programs and policies that promote flexibility in the workplace may have beneficial health effects for workers,” says Grzywacz.

— Source: Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

A new report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides a detailed summary of a full year of data from 16 states concerning all types of violent deaths collected by the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). The report provides information about the circumstances surrounding these violent deaths.

The findings in the April 11, 2008 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries, provide data on violent deaths from 16 U.S. states for 2005. Although NVDRS operates in 17 states, this report includes 2005 data from 16 states. Data from California are not included because NVDRS has been implemented in a limited number of California counties.

The report shows that the majority of violent deaths were suicides (56.1%), followed by homicides and deaths involving legal interventions (29.6%), violent deaths of undetermined intent (13.3%), and unintentional firearm deaths (0.7%).

Other findings from the report include: rates of violent death were highest for persons aged 20 to 24; rates of violent death by suicide were highest for persons aged 75 to 84 and 45 to 54 (17.0 and 16.9, respectively); mental health problems were the most commonly noted circumstance for suicide; although 42% of suicide victims were diagnosed with mental health problems, only 33% were known to be receiving treatment at the time of death; suicides by current and former military personnel comprised 20% of all suicides; the home was the most common location of violent death for all manners of death; homicides were precipitated primarily by an argument over something other than money or property, or in conjunction with another crime; relationship problems or intimate partner violence were precipitating factors for many forms of violence.

— Source: The National Violence Prevention Network

Some kids with autism may have a genetic defect that affects the muscles, according to research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting in Chicago.

The study looked at 37 children with autism spectrum disorders who were evaluated for mitochondrial disease, which causes muscle weakness and prevents a child from being able to participate in physical activities and sports. Mitochondrial disease occurs when genetic mutations affect the mitochondria, or the part of the cell that releases energy.

A total of 24 of the children, or 65%, had defects in the process by which cells produce and synthesize energy in the muscles, or oxidative phosphorylation defects in the skeletal muscles.

“Most children with autism spectrum disorders do not have recognizable abnormalities when you look at genetic tests, imaging, and metabolic tests,” said study author John Shoffner, MD, owner of Medical Neurogenetics, LLC in Atlanta, GA, and member of the American Academy of Neurology. “But a subset of these children does have significant defects in this area. Identifying this defect is important for understanding how genes that produce autism spectrum disorders impact the function of the mitochondria.”

— Source: American Academy of Neurology

Parents of children with autism were roughly twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, than parents of other children, according to an analysis of Swedish birth and hospital records by a University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill researcher and colleagues in the United States and Europe. The study appeared in a recent issue of the journal Pediatrics.

“We are trying to determine whether autism is more common among families with other psychiatric disorders. Establishing an association between autism and other psychiatric disorders might enable future investigators to better focus on genetic and environmental factors that might be shared among these disorders,” says study author Julie Daniels, PhD, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Public Health’s epidemiology and maternal and child health departments.

“Earlier studies have shown a higher rate of psychiatric disorders in families of autistic children than in the general population,” she says. “We wanted to see if the parents of autistic children were more likely to be diagnosed with mental disorders. Our research shows that mothers and fathers diagnosed with schizophrenia were about twice as likely to have a child diagnosed with autism. We also saw higher rates of depression and personality disorders among mothers, but not fathers.”

The study examined 1,237 children born between 1977 and 2003 who were diagnosed with autism before age 10, and compared them with 30,925 control subjects matched for gender, year of birth and hospital. The large sample size enabled researchers to distinguish between psychiatric histories of mothers versus fathers in relation to autism. The association was present regardless of the timing of the parent’s diagnosis relative to the child’s diagnosis.

— Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill