Tai Chi Can Reduce Falls in Old People
Old people who took part in a structured programme of Tai Chi found that their balance and physical strength improved, reducing the risk of falls, according to a paper in the latest Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Researchers studied a group of fall-prone (易摔跤的) adults, with an average age of 78, living in residential care. 29 people undertook a 12-week Tai Chi programme and the other 30 formed the non-exercise control group. The exercise programme consisted of 10 minutes of warming-up exercises, 20 minutes of Sun-style Tai Chi movement and 5 minutes of cooling down exercises. During the exercise, traditional instrumental music was used. It helped the group maintain slow and continuous movements and provide a comforting effect.
Both groups underwent a series of tests before and after the 12-week exercise programme. They measured their muscle strength, balance and confidence in avoiding falls. Researchers analyzed the data and compared them with those of the non-exercise control group. They found that the physical fitness of the exercise group showed significant improvement, with stronger knee and ankle muscles, improved flexibility and better balance.
Tai Chi, an ancient Chinese martial art (武术), consists of a series of slow, gentle, continuous movements. It is particularly suitable for old people as it helps them to develop stronger muscles and better balance and concentration. “Our study shows that low-intensity exercise such as Tai Chi has great potential for health promotion. It can help old people to avoid falls by developing their balance, muscle strength and confidence,” says Professor Song. “We believe that regular exercise should be a fundamental part of caring for old people living both in the community and in residential care.”
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How to Stay Healthy in Autumn
In recent days, the weather in most regions is no longer hot, and people can relax and enjoy the cool autumn. However, there is a big gap in temperature in the morning and evening, and the air is also drier. All of these factors can lead to dry mouth and nose, sore throat, dry cough, dry hair loss and other symptoms. People are more likely to get sick during the seasonal change from summer through autumn. So, here are some tips to keep you healthy and comfortable into the winter months.
Do eat watery food. According to traditional Chinese medicine, autumn corresponds to the lungs of the human body.Pay attention to wet lungs in dry weather.The most convenient and easy way to protect lungs in autumn is to drink more water. In addition, you can adopt the diet therapy of traditional Chinese medicine, eating some watery food, like pear and duck meat.
Do have easily digested food. People’s spleen (牌) and stomach functions are weakened because of the raw and cold food they had during the long, hot summer. So in autumn, you should give your spleen and stomach a rest. For example,you can choose some nutritious food that is easy to digest to eat, such as fish and red bean.
Be sure to take vitamin supplements. Vitamins play an important role in the body’s immune system. The number and vitality of immune cells are related to vitamins when the body resists foreign invasion. It is recommended that you eat plenty of fresh vegetables and fruits rich in vitamin C, such as kiwi and oranges.
Sleep is an important means for people to restore their physical strength, ensure their health and enhance their immunity. In autumn, it is suggested that you go to bed at 9 pm, or try to fall asleep before 11 o’clock. If you sleep at this time, it is great for your body and you can get a good quality of sleep.
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Marathons can be bad for your health, scientists have warned after a study found 80 percent of competitors suffer kidney (肾) injury because of dehydration (脱水).
Researchers said that although the kidneys of the participants in the 26.2 mile race fully recovered within two days, their findings raise questions concerning the potential long-term impact at a time when marathons are increasing in popularity.
The findings were published by the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, as thousands of people prepare for next month's London Marathon.
Previous research has shown that engaging in unusually vigorous activities - such as military training - in warm climates can damage the kidneys, but little is known about the effects of marathon running.
A team of researchers led by Professor Chirag Parikh, of Yale University in the US, studied a small group of participants in the 2015 Hartford Marathon.
They collected blood and urine (尿液) samples before and after the event. They analysed a variety of markers of kidney injury, including serum creatinine (肌酐) levels, kidney cells on microscopy, and proteins in urine.
The researchers found that 82 percent of the runners that were studied showed Stage 1 Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) soon after the race. AKI is a condition in which the kidneys fail to filter (过滤) waste from the blood.
Prof Parikh said: "The kidney responds to the physical stress of marathon running as if it's injured, in a way that's similar to what happens in hospitalised patients when the kidney is affected by medical and surgical complications (并发症)."
The researchers stated that potential causes of the marathon-related kidney damage could be the sustained rise in core body temperature, dehydration, or decreased blood flow to the kidneys that occur during a marathon.
While the measured kidney injury resolved within two days of running the marathon, the researchers said the study still raises questions about the effects of repeated strenuous activity over time, especially in warm climates.
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Why Laughter Yoga Makes You Smile
“Friends, I must tell you, laughter yoga is not a comedy.” Dr Madan Kataria, the creator of laughter yoga, an exercise programme involving prolonged laughter, said. Laughter yoga, a combination of breathing exercises and deliberate (故意的) laughter, came from humble beginnings, but has mushroomed into a global movement. Hundreds of clubs, usually free to attend, have now been established across Asia, Europe and North America.
“I had read so much about the benefits of laughter, and how acting out emotions, especially through facial expressions, can create them,” Kataria tells me. But he realised he wouldn’t often see people laughing in Mumbai. “The idea struck me: why not start a laughter club? Laughter reduces stress,” Kataria goes on, following some yogic postures, “it makes your immune (免疫) system stronger and keeps your mind positive!” Five people attended Katana’s first meet-up in Mumbai in 1995. He initially asked participants to tell jokes to force laughter, but as attendances grew Kataria learned that laughing for no reason at all was the best method. “We started just faking laughter,” he says. “And then people started laughing for real. It was infectious; we couldn’t stop.”
Laughter yoga addresses a deep-seated need to laugh that is being stifled (遏制).Young children can laugh hundreds of times a day. But as we get older, the fun begins to stop —our brains learn how to adapt our emotions in tune with the needs of others. We develop empathy (同理心). But so are we told to stop laughing and be serious about life. There’s often a sense that if you’re laughing, you’re not properly learning, or working, or focusing, or paying respect. Sometimes this is justified, but not always. Perhaps that is the recipe for the growing popularity of laughter yoga.
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Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children. Who are able from a young age to gather their own food.
In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random — he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.
Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate a achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of expensive with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an worried adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.
There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive skills, at least when compared with chimps.In tests conducted by Tomtasell, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.
The cure of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t in what Tomasello calls what. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.
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New Research on Kids’ Poor Math Achievement
If the thought of a math test makes you break out in a cold sweat, Mom or Dad may be partly to blame, according to the new research published in Psychological Science.
A team of researchers found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to be math-anxious themselves—but only when these parents provided frequent help on the child’s math homework.
Previous research from this group has established that when teachers are anxious about math, their students learn less math during the school year. The current study is novel in that it establishes a link between parents’ and children’s math anxiety. These findings suggest that adults’ attitudes toward math can play an important role in children’s math achievement.
“We often don’t think about how important parents’ own attitudes are in determining their children’s academic achievement. But our work suggests that if a parent is walking around saying ‘Oh, I don’t like math’ or ‘this stuff makes me nervous,’ kids pick up on this messaging and it affects their success,” explained Beilock, professor in psychology.
“Math-anxious parents may be less effective in explaining math concepts to children, and may not respond well when children make a mistake or solve a problem in a novel way,” added Levine, Beilock’s colleague.
438 first- and second-grade students and their primary caregivers participated in the study. Children were assessed in math achievement and math anxiety at both the beginning and end of the school year. As a control, the team also assessed reading achievement, which they found was not related to parents’ math anxiety. Parents completed a questionnaire about their own nervousness and anxiety around math and how often they helped their children with math homework.
The researchers believe the link between parents’ math anxiety and children’s math performance stems more from math attitudes than genetics.
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Men may eat more in summer
Winter may be seen as the time to fill up with food, but in fact, sunny summer months are when men eat more calories—unlike women.
The effect seems to occur because sunlight makes the skin release an appetite-stimulating hormone (激素), says Carmit Levy at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Levy and her colleagues noticed the effect in experiments in mice, in which male animals exposed to UV light (紫外线) ate more food.
To see if humans do the same, the team used data on about 3000 people who had filled in questionnaires as part of the Israeli government’s national health and nutrition survey. Between March and September, the men consumed about 17 per cent more calories per day than they did during the rest of the year, while the women’s food intake stayed about the same.
Human appetite is influenced by many complex systems, but a substance called ghrelin, a hormone produced in the body that stimulates appetite, seems to be the only hormone that directly stimulates eating. It was thought to be mainly produced by the stomach when empty. “It tells the brain to eat more,” says Caroline Gorvin at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Further investigation revealed that exposing male mice to UVB (紫外线 B 段波) radiation, which is present in sunlight, raised levels of ghrelin production by fat cells in their skin. This was blocked by the female sex hormone, which may explain why the effect wasn’t seen in the female mice or the women. Boosted ghrelin production was also seen in men’s skin samples that were exposed to UV light in the lab.
Skin hasn’t previously been thought to play a role in appetite, says Gorvin. The reason for the effect is unclear, but it may be an adaptive response to fuel greater physical activity in summer, says Levy.
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