Currency

Research Archive

Welcome to our Chinese medicine and acupuncture research news pages. We add to the content of these pages continuously as more research news comes in. Browse through the complete archive below or use the category links on the right.

Please note that the most twenty recent research archive items are free to view but access to the thousands of items in the archive require a journal subscription.

Grief can be addictive

Categories: Lifestyle research

Prolonged, unabated grief, known as complicated grief, activates neurones in the brain's reward centres, possibly giving memories of lost loved ones addictive qualities. US researchers looked at 23 women who had lost a mother or sister to breast cancer. They found that 11 had complicated grief, while 12 had the more normal, non-complicated grief. Study participants looked at a photograph of their ...

Twenty minutes housework enough to boost mental health

Categories: Lifestyle research

Taking part in just 20 minutes of any physical activity per week is enough to improve mental health. Researchers interviewed 19,842 Scottish men and women about their state of mind and weekly physical activity. Doing any form of daily physical activity (including housework, gardening, walking and sports) was associated with a lower risk of psychological distress, although a dose-response pattern w ...

Exercise reduces cancer deaths in men

Categories: Lifestyle research

Men who exercise often are less likely to die from cancer than those who don't exercise. A cohort of 40,708 Swedish men aged 45-79 was followed for six years. Men who walked or cycled for at least 30 minutes a day had a 33% reduction in cancer mortality compared with men who exercised less or not at all. (Association of physical activity with cancer incidence, mortality, and survival: a population ...

Active women protected against breast cancer

Categories: Lifestyle research

Physically active women are less likely to get breast cancer. A review of all published literature to September 2007 was conducted using online databases; 34 case-control and 28 cohort studies were included. Evidence for a risk reduction associated with increased physical activity was found in 76% of studies, with an average risk decrease of 25-30%. The most physically active women were found to b ...

A troubled childhood leads to an unhealthy adult

Categories: Lifestyle research

Adverse experiences in childhood increase the risk of developing obesity and type 2 diabetes in adulthood. 9310 members of the 1958 British birth cohort took part in a biomedical interview at 45 years of age. Several adversities in childhood were associated with increased risk for obesity by 20% to 50%. These included physical, verbal, or witnessed abuse; humiliation; neglect; strict upbringing; p ...

Breastfeeding reduces mother's risk of ra

Categories: Lifestyle research

Women who breastfeed for longer have a decreased chance of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Researchers compared 136 women with rheumatoid arthritis with 544 women of a similar age. They found that those who had breast fed for longer were much less likely to get RA. Women who had breastfed for 13 months or more were half as likely to get rheumatoid arthritis as those who had never breastfed. ...

Breastfeeding means brighter kids

Categories: Lifestyle research

Breastfeeding during the first months of life appears to raise a child's verbal IQ, according to a study of nearly 13,889 children carried out in Belarus. Six-year-olds whose mothers had been part of an education program that encouraged them to breast-feed were found to have a verbal IQ that was 7.5 points higher than children in a control group. The experimental intervention led to a large increa ...

He with the lowest handicap lives longest

Categories: Lifestyle research

Swedish investigators have found the death rate amongst golfers is 40% lower than for other people of the same sex, age and socioeconomic status, which equates to an increased life expectancy of five years. The cohort study included 300,818 golfers. Golfers with the lowest handicap (i.e. the most skilled players) were found to have the lowest mortality. The authors conclude that the physical activ ...

Football is bad for the heart

Categories: Lifestyle research

Viewing a stressful soccer match more than doubles the risk of an acute cardiovascular event. A German study carried out during the 2006 World Cup, which was hosted by Germany, found that there were significant increases in cardiac emergencies on days when the host nation was playing. According to the authors, it is not the outcome of a game that triggers a stress-induced coronary events, bu ...