Could gut bacteria lead to depression? Plus, monitoring toilet sounds could help spot disease, and more health news
Could bacteria in your gut help spur depression?
Depression may be a disorder of the brain, but new research adds to evidence that it also involves the gut.
While depression is complex, recent research has been pointing to a role for bacteria that dwell in the gut — suggesting that certain bacterial strains might feed depression symptoms, while others might be protective.
In a pair of new studies, researchers identified 13 groups of bacteria that were related to the odds of adults having depression symptoms. In some cases, the gut bacteria were depleted in people with depression, while in others they were present at relatively high levels.
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Eating lots of ‘ultra-processed’ foods could harm your brain
Chips, pizza, cookies: Delicious, but a diet full of ultra-processed foods like these may contribute to brain deterioration, researchers report.
Ultra-processed foods have lots of added and unhealthy ingredients, such as sugar, salt, fat, artificial colors and preservatives. Examples include frozen meals, soft drinks, hot dogs and cold cuts, fast food, packaged cookies, cakes and salty snacks.
These foods have been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, metabolic syndrome and obesity.
Now, scientists in Brazil have tied them to a greater risk of declining brainpower.
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Special human-cat bond may have started 10,000 years ago
That special link you may have with a purring, four-legged friend has been going on between the species for millennia, new research shows.
The human-cat relationship was probably forged over a shared interest in rats more than 10,000 years ago, investigators say. As farming became a way of life, cats served as ancient pest control, killing rodents and making a bond with people that continues to this day.
For the study, the researchers from the University of Missouri studied these relationships using DNA, finding that rodents were the catalyst for the bond that led humans to bring cats with them on their travels.
The research team collected and analyzed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
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Monitoring toilet sounds could help spot disease
A small toilet-based sound sensor that can tell the difference between peeing, pooping and diarrhea may one day help prevent cholera outbreaks.
“The hope is that this sensor, which is small in footprint and noninvasive in approach, could be deployed to areas where cholera outbreaks are a persistent risk,” said researcher Maia Gatlin of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta.
Cholera is an acute diarrheal disease that can kill within hours if untreated, according to the World Health Organization.
So Gatlin and her team wanted to see if they could identify bowel sounds. They tested the idea in a way that might seem a little stomach-turning: They used audio data of people on the toilet after gathering the sounds from online sources.
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More Americans are moving to wildfire-prone areas
Some Americans appear to be moving from areas with frequent hurricanes and heat waves to places threatened by wildfire and rising heat.
They’re trading in the risk of one set of natural disasters for another because the wildfires are only beginning to become a national issue, according to researchers.
“These findings are concerning, because people are moving into harm’s way — into regions with wildfires and rising temperatures, which are expected to become more extreme due to climate change,” lead author Mahalia Clark said in a news release from the University of Vermont. She’s a researcher at the university’s Gund Institute for Environment and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.
The researchers studied the issue by combining U.S. Census data with that on natural disasters, weather, temperature, land cover, demographics and socioeconomic factors.
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Vegetable intake linked to reduced risk for type 2 diabetes
Vegetable intake is associated with a reduced risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D), while potato intake does not increase risk after accounting for underlying dietary pattern, according to study published online Dec. 5 in Diabetes Care.
Pratik Pokharel, from the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen, and colleagues examined associations between exposure to vegetables/potatoes and incident T2D and quantified mediation by body mass index (BMI).
A total of 7,695 cases of T2D were recorded during a median follow-up of 16.3 years among 54,793 participants in the Danish Diet, Cancer, and Health cohort.
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Cooler noses may be cause of spike in colds during winter
Researchers may have sniffed out why colds are more likely in wintertime: The answer may lie within the nose.
A previously unidentified immune response inside the nose is responsible for fighting off the viruses that cause upper respiratory infections, according to researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Northeastern University in Boston.
Unfortunately, cold weather inhibits this protective response, making it more likely that a person will come down with anything from a cold to COVID-19.
The new study offers the first biological explanation why respiratory virus infections are more likely to spike in colder seasons, researchers said.
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Your dog’s behavior is in its DNA
Is your pooch a herder or a hunter? You can try taking them to a trainer, but new research shows much of their behavior is hardwired in their DNA.
For the new study, researchers analyzed DNA samples from more than 200 dog breeds and surveyed 46,000 pet-owners to try to suss out why certain breeds act the way they do.
“The largest, most successful genetic experiment that humans have ever done is the creation of 350 dog breeds,” said senior study author Elaine Ostrander, founder of the Dog Genome Project at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). “We needed dogs to herd, we needed them to guard, we needed them to help us hunt, and our survival was intimately dependent on that.”
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