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?
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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
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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...
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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."
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