How old is your brain?
Lesbian and bisexual girls more likely to light up
Don't judge a videogame by its cover

Research rundown

How old is your brain?

In a study released in June, Bruce Yankner, MD, PhD, was the first to reveal the genetic "signature" of an aging brain—and the sobering news that damage to genes essential for brain function can start anytime after age 40.

Yankner, a neuroscience researcher, led a team from Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health in analyzing brain tissue from 30 deceased people ranging from 26 to 106 years old. They found the brain's genetic signatures were fairly consistent among both younger people and very old people, but variability from person to person was much greater in the 40-to-70 age group. "People may diverge in their rates of aging as they enter middle age," Yankner says. "A goal of future research will be to understand why." In the laboratory, Yankner's group was able to prevent gene damage in nerve cells by engineering them to make more gene-repair proteins. The group now wants to prevent the same damage in the living brain, preserve cognitive function and keep diseases like Alzheimer's at bay.

Lesbian and bisexual girls more likely to light up

Although cigarettes and tobacco promotional items cannot be legally promoted or sold to minors, millions of adolescents get their hands on the products every year, and it looks like lesbian and bisexual girls are more likely to smoke than heterosexual teens or homosexual/bisexual boys. A recent study led by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and Brigham and Women's Hospital found that almost 40 percent of lesbian and bisexual girls ages 12 to 17 reported that they smoked weekly, a rate almost 10 times that of heterosexual girls.

"Young people who are more socially isolated, sometimes because of stigma and harassment, are more likely to take up risky behaviors such as smoking," says Children's researcher S. Bryn Austin, ScD. "The tobacco industry has long been known exploit this vulnerable group of young people and promote an image of smoking as something that symbolizes status and independence."

Don't judge a videogame by its cover...

So says a study by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health. The study, which is the only independent analysis based on actual video game play, showed that many Teen-rated games have a surprising amount of violence.

In a random sample of 81 video games rated T (for teen), they found that 48 percent included violence, sexual themes, profanity, substance use, or gambling without noting these activities on the game box. Other findings: violence in 98 percent of games, representing 36 percent of game play time; deaths from violence occurred in 77 percent of games, at an average rate of 122 deaths per hour of game play—half involving human characters; 11,499 character deaths—nearly 5,700 of which were human—in approximately 95 hours of game play.

Kimberly Thompson, MS, ScD, senior author on the study and director of research for Children's Center on Media and Child Health, says, "This study should serve as a wake-up call to parents to pay attention to what's in their children's media diets."