Could Too Much Salt Harm MS Patients?

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Too much salt in the diet may worsen symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), a new study from Argentina suggests.

“Many environmental factors affect MS, such as vitamin D, smoking and Epstein Barr virus infection. Our study shows that high salt intake may be another environmental factor affecting MS patients,” said lead researcher Dr. Mauricio Farez, of the Raul Carrea Institute for Neurological Research in Buenos Aires.

Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the nervous system that causes weakness, visual disturbances, trouble with balance, numbness and thinking and memory problems. The most common form is called relapsing-remitting MS, meaning symptoms subside and then become worsen.

Earlier research found that salt may alter autoimmune response, which is involved in the development of MS.

Farez cautioned that this study does not show that salt causes MS to worsen, but there does seem to be an association.

“This is a small observational study showing a relationship between salt intake and MS disease activity, and these data need to be further validated in larger studies, including different populations,” he said.

For the study, Farez’s team measured the levels of sodium (the main component of salt), creatinine and vitamin D in the blood and urine of 70 patients with the relapsing-remitting form of MS. Creatinine is a marker of inflammation, and low levels of vitamin D have been associated with MS.

Sodium intake was divided into three levels: less than 2 grams daily, between 2 and 4.8 grams a day, and more than 4.8 grams daily. Current guidelines for heart disease prevention recommend a maximum sodium intake of 1.5 grams to 2.4 grams per day. At the upper end, that’s just under half a teaspoon of table salt a day.

Farez’s group found that people with daily sodium intake of between 2 and 4.8 grams and those who consume more than 4.8 grams — a little less than a teaspoon of salt — were up to four times more likely to have more episodes of worsening MS symptoms as those who consumed the least salt.

To check the progression of the disease in patients’ brains, the researchers analyzed X-rays and scans. They found that patients who had the highest salt intake were about 3.4 times more likely to have their disease worsen, compared with those with the lowest salt intake.

Similar results were found in a second group of 52 MS patients, the researchers added.

“It is too soon to say that MS patients should cut their salt intake,” Farez said. “Our findings could serve as a basis for clinical trials with salt restriction in MS patients,” he said.

The report was published Aug. 28 in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Salt’s influence on MS is a subject of increasing interest, said Nicholas LaRocca, vice president of health care delivery and policy research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

“At this stage you really can’t assign cause and effect, but it’s beginning to look like there is a significant role of salt in MS disease activity and progression,” he said.

The mechanism for this association isn’t known, LaRocca said. Salt may make the immune system more prone to the disease, he suggested.

He agreed that there isn’t enough evidence to recommend that MS patients reduce salt in their diet.

“However, in a more general sense, we should all be watching our salt intake. We should all be careful about consuming excessive amounts of salt,” he said.

For the study, salt intake was estimated from sodium excreted in urine samples the participants provided three times over nine months. In addition, the researchers tracked the course of the patients’ MS from 2010 to 2012.

After accounting for factors such as smoking, age, gender, length of time after diagnosis, weight, treatment and vitamin D, the link between more salt and worsening MS remained, the researchers said.

More information

For more on MS, visit the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

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Parents’ Fights May Strain Bonds With Their Kids

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Arguments between parents may damage their relationships with their children, a new study indicates.

Parents in more than 200 families were asked to make daily diary entries for 15 days. At the end of each day, mothers and fathers rated the quality of their marriage and their relationship with their children.

On days when parents reported conflict and tension in their marriage, their dealings with their children were also strained, according to the study recently published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

However, there were notable differences between mothers and fathers. Marital conflict affected mothers’ relationships with their children for just one day.

“In fact, in that situation, moms appeared to compensate for their marital tension. Poor marital quality actually predicted an improvement in the relationship between the mom and the child. So, the first day’s adverse spillover is short-lived for moms,” study author Chrystyna Kouros, an assistant professor in the psychology department at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, said in a university news release.

It was a different story with fathers.

“In families where the mom was showing signs of depression, dads on the other hand let the marital tension spill over, with the result being poorer interactions with their child, even on the next day,” Kouros said.

The study shows that the quality of their marriage affects each parent’s ties with their children.

“We see from the findings that the marriage is a hub relationship for the family,” Kouros said. “The quality of that relationship spills over into each parent’s interactions with the child. So if mom and dad are fighting, it will show up initially — and in some cases on the second day — in a poorer quality relationship with their kids.”

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about parenting.

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Most U.S. Babies Get Their Vaccines: CDC

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — The vast majority of American babies are getting the vaccines they need to protect them from serious illnesses, federal health officials said Thursday.

More than 90 percent of children are getting the vaccines that prevent measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR); polio; hepatitis B and chickenpox (varicella), according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Nationally, vaccination among children 19 to 35 months of age remains stable or has increased for all of the recommended vaccines, and that’s really good news,” said Dr. Melinda Wharton, acting director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“There is still room for improvement,” she added. “Coverage is not as high as we would like it to be for doses of vaccines and boosters given in the second year of life.”

Wharton suggested one way to improve vaccine coverage could be with electronic medical records to help doctors keep track of when vaccinations are needed.

While some parents are reluctant to have their children vaccinated, or don’t believe in vaccines at all, Wharton doesn’t see this as a major problem. “The number of children who do not get any vaccine remains low and stable at less than 1 percent,” she said.

Vaccines are essential in preventing sickness and death, the CDC said. “Among children born during 1994-2013, vaccination will prevent an estimated 322 million illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths during their lifetimes,” the CDC report stated.

The new findings were published in the Aug. 29 issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The report also found that:

• the vaccination rate for rotavirus — which causes gastrointestinal problems such as diarrhea and vomiting — increased slightly from nearly 69 percent in 2012 to about 73 percent in 2013;


• the vaccination rate for one or more doses of the hepatitis A vaccine rose from just under 82 percent in 2012 to 83 percent in 2013. And the rate for hepatitis B vaccines rose from nearly 72 percent to 74 percent for the same time period.

While initial vaccination rates are high, getting second doses and booster shots that are needed when children are 2 years old remains a challenge, Wharton said.

These vaccines include the DTaP vaccine, which prevents diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (whooping cough); Hib, which protects against haemophilus influenzae type b, which can cause severe diseases like meningitis — an infection of the fluid and lining around the brain and spinal cord; and the PCV vaccine, which prevents pneumococcal disease, which can trigger ear infections and meningitis.

Poor children are less likely to get booster shots, and the full series of polio, rotavirus and hepatitis B vaccines, according to the report.

Wharton said most insurance plans cover vaccines. People who can’t afford them can turn to the federal Vaccines for Children Program, which provides vaccines for free.

Vaccine coverage also varies by state and vaccine, the CDC report found.

When the researchers looked at immunizations against 11 different diseases — including chickenpox, measles and polio — coverage ranged from a high of 82 percent in Rhode Island to 57 percent in Arkansas. Also, 17 states had less than 90 percent coverage with the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine.

For one disease, measles, which has made a recurrence in the United States, national coverage with at least one dose of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine was 92 percent. While this seems high, one in 12 children did not receive the first dose of the MMR vaccine on time, putting lots of kids at risk for measles, the CDC noted.

As of Aug. 22, there had been 592 measles cases reported in the United States this year, the most since 1994, according to the CDC.

Measles is most often introduced into the United States by unvaccinated Americans who travel overseas to areas where measles is endemic. Measles can spread quickly in communities with unvaccinated and under-vaccinated people, the CDC pointed out.

Dr. Adriana Cadilla, a pediatrician at Miami Children’s Hospital, said, “We still have a ways to go, but it’s good to know that we’re headed in the right direction” with childhood vaccinations.

Despite that progress, there are still some parents who oppose vaccinations, Cadilla said. “Those who are refusing are the ones that increase the risk to their communities,” she said.

Since vaccines have made a lot of diseases rare, many parents don’t have experience with how devastating they can be, she explained. “Vaccines are safe, and make sure your children are getting vaccinated,” she added.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on childhood vaccinations.

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Less Sleep in Teen Years Tied to More Pounds at 21

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Lack of sleep not only puts teens at risk for poor grades, it also puts them at increased risk for obesity, researchers warn.

The study authors analyzed data collected from more than 10,000 Americans when they were aged 16 and 21. Nearly one-fifth of them got less than six hours of sleep a night when they were age 16, and this group was 20 percent more likely to be obese at age 21 than those who got more than eight hours of sleep per night at age 16, the investigators found.

Although lack of exercise and too much time spent watching television were also risk factors for obesity, these behaviors did not account for the link between lack of sleep and obesity, according to the study published online recently in the Journal of Pediatrics.

“Lack of sleep in your teenage years can stack the deck against you for obesity later in life. Once you’re an obese adult, it is much harder to lose weight and keep it off. And the longer you are obese, the greater your risk for health problems like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer,” study author Shakira Suglia, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City, said in a university news release.

“The message for parents is to make sure their teenagers get more than eight hours a night. A good night’s sleep does more than help them stay alert in school. It helps them grow into healthy adults,” Suglia added.

Teens should get nine to 10 hours of sleep a night, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s known that daytime sleepiness and fatigue affect what and how people eat by triggering cravings and altering appetite. For example, sleep-deprived people find it easier to buy calorie-laden fast food rather than preparing a healthy meal.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about sleep.

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Electrical Pulses to Scalp May Boost Memory: Study

By Amy Norton

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Scientists have found that sending electrical currents through the scalp to a specific network of brain structures can enhance people’s memories, for up to a day.

In a small study of healthy young adults, researchers used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to fire up certain networks involved in memory. That, in turn, boosted participants’ performance on memory tests — an improvement apparent 24 hours after the brain stimulation.

During TMS, an electromagnetic coil is placed on the scalp to create electrical currents that stimulate brain cells. In the United States, the procedure is approved for hard-to-treat cases of depression that don’t improve with standard treatments.

Experts stressed, however, that no one should seek out TMS to get better grades or to treat memory loss.

“This study is really a proof-of-concept,” said senior researcher Joel Voss, an assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

“It will take a lot more development before this could be used therapeutically,” Voss said.

The study, which appears in the Aug. 29 issue of Science, included 16 healthy adults aged 21 to 40. All underwent MRI scans to pinpoint a network of brain cells right below the skull that are well connected with the hippocampus — a structure deep in the brain that is key in memory.

The researchers hoped that by stimulating those superficial brain structures with TMS, they could rev up the hippocampus and improve people’s memories.

To test that idea, Voss’s team had the study participants take a test of associative memory, where they had to learn and remember a set of arbitrary associations between faces and words. The men and women then received 20 minutes of TMS every day for five consecutive days.

After three days, the researchers found, test performance started to improve. The gains were still there when the participants took the test 24 hours after the final TMS session.

It wasn’t just a matter of the test-takers getting better over time, according to the researchers. On a separate week, study participants all had “placebo” TMS — with no real brain stimulation — and their test performance did not improve.

“This is a really interesting study,” said Mary Sano, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York City.

According to Sano, the results help identify the “pathways of memory consolidation” in the healthy brain. “That kind of basic knowledge is very important to understanding what goes wrong in disease,” she said.

But she agreed that years of research remain before TMS could potentially be used to either treat memory problems — from Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or other brain disorders — or to give healthy people a memory boost.

“Everybody probably has a desire to gain more control over their memory,” Sano noted. But she said researchers have much to learn about whether there are safe, feasible ways to do that.

As for TMS, specifically, Voss said it’s “remarkable” that a few sessions were able to improve memory performance — even in people with no impairments. “It’s amazing that the brain is so plastic,” he said, referring to the brain’s capacity to change.

“But,” Voss stressed, “we have a lot to learn, in terms of safety and effectiveness. We don’t even know if (in someone with a brain disorder) this would have benefits, or possibly make things worse.”

Based on what’s known from depression treatment, TMS is relatively safe. The main side effects are a short-lived headache and scalp discomfort. There also appears to be a small risk of seizure.

Right now, TMS is pricey. When it’s used for depression, one session typically costs around $300. And there is no MRI involved, whereas, if TMS were used for memory problems, an MRI would be needed to zero in on the brain networks connected to the hippocampus.

The precise location of those networks varies from person to person, Voss explained.

His team is planning a study of TMS in older adults in the early stages of memory loss. “Within about five years, we should have an idea of whether it’s potentially useful,” Voss said.

More information

The Alzheimer’s Association has more on memory loss.

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Gene Research Yields Insights Into Ebola Virus

By Dennis Thompson

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Genetic research performed during the early days of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has given scientists unprecedented insight into how the virus mutates and spreads.

Researchers report in the Aug. 28 online issue of Science that they have now determined the following:

• The Ebola strains responsible for the current outbreak likely have a common ancestor, dating back to the very first recorded outbreak of Ebola in central Africa in 1976.


• The virus is spreading from person-to-person, an insight that will help guide public health efforts to quell the outbreak.


• Ebola has mutated often during the current crisis, undergoing hundreds of genetic changes that separate the current virus from strains detected in previous outbreaks.

The researchers’ efforts have quadrupled the amount of genetic data available on Ebola, creating mounds of new and publicly available information about the DNA structure of the deadly virus, said senior study author Dr. Pardis Sabeti.

Sabeti is a senior associate member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and an associate professor at Harvard University.

The ongoing Ebola outbreak has infected 3,069 people and claimed the lives of 1,552, according to the World Health Organization.

The genetic researchers rapidly sequenced and analyzed more than 99 Ebola viruses from 78 patients in Sierra Leone during the first 24 days of the outbreak there.

Government health officials traced the entrance of Ebola into Sierra Leone to the burial of a traditional healer who had treated patients in neighboring Guinea. Thirteen women who attended the burial contracted Ebola, and researchers drew viral samples from these women to begin genetic sequencing.

Such genetic data is comparable to “fingerprints at the scene of the crime,” said Dr. Lee Norman, chief medical officer of the University of Kansas Hospital.

“It tells you so much about how and where the virus came from, and what we can do about it,” Norman said.

The team has found more than 300 genetic changes that make the 2014 Ebola virus distinct from the strains tied to previous Ebola outbreaks.

They also have found evidence that the Ebola outbreak started from a single introduction into humans, and has subsequently spread from person to person over many months. Animals are not helping spread Ebola.

“This is very important, because if you’re trying to contain an outbreak that’s coming in through an animal population, you have to do something about human contact with those animals,” said Dr. Robert Amler, dean of the School of Health Sciences and Practice and dean of the Institute of Public Health at New York Medical College.

Knowing that the virus is only spreading from human-to-human will help public health workers use time-tested isolation and quarantine procedures to protect people against further spread, Amler said.

“The basic principles of disease control in a population still hold,” he said. “That’s reassuring, because we have a lot of experience in controlling disease outbreaks in densely populated areas, and those principles hold.”

The researchers involved in this effort have publicly released all of the Ebola genetic information they’ve gathered, making it available through a U.S. National Institutes of Health database starting in June, Sabeti said.

This huge amount of genetic information regarding the virus hopefully will help spur and direct new research into therapies, vaccines and treatments for Ebola, Sabeti said.

“A lot of important findings that will come out of data will not come from us, but from others,” Sabeti said, noting that some of the world’s leading epidemic specialists are now working with the data they gathered.

Norman hailed the “integrity” behind making the genetic data available to the global health community.

“Releasing the DNA sequence into the public domain is just the right thing to do,” he said. “That shows an altruistic intent, which is perfect for something as heart-rending as this outbreak has been.”

The researchers involved in this effort have been tracking lethal viruses in West Africa since the middle of the last decade, initially focusing on the Lassa virus, Sabeti said.

When the ongoing Ebola outbreak began in Guinea, they were perfectly positioned to set up shop in Sierra Leone and start watching for the first cases there.

“We’ve built a lot of capacity to work with these deadly viruses in these rural areas,” Sabeti said. “We had surveillance going for months before the first case came in, and of course that first case led to a devastating cascade.”

More information

For more about Ebola virus, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Your Family’s Germs May Move With You

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Your family carries its own unique population of bacteria that accompany you when you move to a new home, a new study finds.

Over the course of six weeks, seven families — with a total of 18 people, three dogs and one cat — swabbed their hands, feet and noses every day to collect samples of bacteria living in and on them. The participants also collected samples from household surfaces such as doorknobs, light switches, countertops and floors.

The samples underwent DNA testing to identify the different species of bacteria they contained.

“We wanted to know how much people affected the microbial community on a house’s surfaces and on each other,” study leader Jack Gilbert, a microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, said in a government news release.

The results showed that people have a major impact on the bacterial populations in their homes. For example, when three of the families moved, it took less than a day for their new homes to have the same bacteria populations as their old homes.

The researchers also found that regular physical contact between people had a strong effect. For example, in a home where there was a couple and another person, the couple shared many more bacteria. Married couples and their young children also shared many of the same bacteria.

Within homes, people’s hands were most likely to have similar bacteria, while there was more variation in the types of bacteria in their noses. Homes with indoor-outdoor dogs or cats had more plant and soil bacteria, according to the study published Aug. 28 in the journal Science.

The findings suggest that by analyzing bacteria in a home, it would be possible to “predict whether a person has lived in this location, and how recently, with very good accuracy,” Gilbert said.

In one case, the researchers tracked a potentially harmful strain of bacteria called Enterobacter. It first appeared on one person’s hands, then the kitchen counter, and then another person’s hands.

“This doesn’t mean that the countertop was definitely the mode of transmission between the two humans, but it’s certainly a smoking gun,” Gilbert said. “It’s also quite possible that we are routinely exposed to harmful bacteria — living on us and in our environment — but it only causes disease when our immune systems are otherwise disrupted.”

The study provides new insight into the interaction between people and the bacteria that live in and on them, and play a role in their health.

“We know that certain bacteria can make it easier for mice to put on weight, for example, and that others influence brain development in young mice,” Gilbert said.

“We want to know where these bacteria come from, and as people spend more and more time indoors, we wanted to map out the microbes that live in our homes and the likelihood that they will settle on us,” he explained.

Learning more about bacteria is “essential for us to understand our health in the 21st century,” Gilbert concluded.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has more about microbes.

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Donated Livers Not Harmed by Travel Distances, Study Finds

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Transporting donated livers long distances does not affect the quality of the organs, according to new research.

This finding may impact the number of organs transported by air rather than road.

The study was triggered by concerns about the increasing distances from donor to recipient that are being caused by the ongoing shortage of liver donations in the United States. The concern involves organ quality because increased travel time significantly increases the time the liver is in a cooled state outside the body (called “cold ischemia time”).

In this study, researchers looked at more than 1,200 livers removed from donors in 2010, and found that the average time the liver was kept in a cooled state outside the body was six hours for livers shared locally and seven hours for those shared regionally.

Average transport times were one hour for livers shared locally and two hours for those shared regionally. Ninety percent of livers shared regionally were transported by air, compared with 22 percent of livers shared locally, according to the study published online recently in the journal Liver Transplantation.

“Our findings indicate that non-transport factors impact [cold ischemia time] much more than transport time,” Dr. Sommer Gentry, of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said in a journal news release.

“Broader sharing of livers will not have much effect on [cold ischemia time] or negatively impact the liver transplant recipient, but will significantly increase the number of organs transported by flying,” Gentry concluded.

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about liver transplantation.

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Ebola Outbreak Could Infect 20,000 People, U.N. Says

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — The deadly Ebola outbreak hitting four West African nations could eventually infect more than 20,000 people, the World Health Organization announced Thursday.

Already the largest Ebola outbreak ever, the viral infection has produced 3,069 cases so far and killed 1,552 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Nearly 40 percent of the total number of reported cases have occurred in the past three weeks, the health agency said.

“This far outstrips any historic Ebola outbreak in numbers. The largest outbreak in the past was about 400 cases,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO’s assistant director-general for emergency operations, said at a news conference, the Associated Press reported.

Part of the problem, he said, is that the outbreak is occurring in large cities and broad sections of the affected countries.

“What we are seeing today, in contrast to previous Ebola outbreaks: multiple hotspots within these countries — not a single, remote forested area, the kind of environments that have been tackled in the past. And then not multiple hotspots within one country, but international disease,” Aylward said.

In response to the crisis, the U.N. health agency unveiled a battle plan Thursday that calls for stopping Ebola transmissions within six to nine months, while “rapidly managing the consequences of any further international spread,” the WHO said in a news release.

The plan calls for spending $489 million over the next nine months and enlisting 750 international workers and 12,000 national workers, the AP reported.

Also Thursday, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it would begin testing an experimental Ebola vaccine in humans next week. It will be tested in 20 healthy adults in Maryland to see if it’s safe and able to produce an appropriate immune system response.

The vaccine was developed by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and drug maker GlaxoSmithKline. It will also be tested on healthy volunteers in Great Britain and the West African nations of Gambia and Mali, the NIH said.

Earlier this week, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, visited Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where he acknowledged that the virus currently has the “upper hand” in the outbreak.

“Lots of hard work is happening, lots of good things are happening,” Frieden said during a meeting in Liberia, the AP reported. “But the virus still has the upper hand.”

“Ebola doesn’t spread by mysterious means, we know how it spreads,” he said. “So we have the means to stop it from spreading, but it requires tremendous attention to every detail.”

Unlike diseases such as tuberculosis or flu, Ebola isn’t spread by breathing air from an infected person. Transmission requires direct contact with blood, secretions, organs or other body fluids of infected living or dead persons or animals, according to the WHO.

Ebola, one of the world’s most virulent diseases, kills up to 90 percent of people it infects. Symptoms include a sudden fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, poor kidney and liver function and, in some cases, both internal and external bleeding.

Many of those killed during the current Ebola outbreak have been health care workers.

According to the CDC, health care workers must be able to recognize a case of Ebola and be ready to use “isolation precautions or barrier nursing techniques.” Barrier nursing techniques include:

• wearing protective clothing, such as masks, gloves, gowns, and goggles;


• using infection-control measures, including complete equipment sterilization and routine use of disinfectant;


• isolating patients with Ebola from contact with unprotected persons.

The aim of these techniques is to avoid contact with the blood or secretions of an infected patient, the CDC said.

More information

For more on Ebola virus, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Young Driver’s Gender May Play Role in Timing, Type of Crash

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — The types of vehicle crashes involving young drivers often vary by gender, a new study has found.

Researchers analyzed data from 2007 to 2011 for all crashes involving drivers between the ages of 16 and 24 in Kansas and found a number of differences between male and female drivers.

Young women were 66 percent more likely to wear a seat belt, 28 percent more likely to drive on a restricted license and they had more crashes at intersections and with pedestrians. They were also more likely to have crashes on weekdays.

Young men, on the other hand, had more crashes at night, more off-road crashes and were more likely to have crashes on weekends, according to the study published recently in the Journal of Safety Research.

“There are often different risk factors for young male and young female drivers because their behavior and attitudes are generally different,” lead researcher Sunanda Dissanayake, a civil engineering professor at Kansas State University, said in a university news release.

“This may help explain why one gender is more likely to be involved in a certain type of crash. For example, young males may have more off-road crashes because this crash type is more frequently involved with speeding on rural roads — a driving habit exhibited more by young males than young females,” she added.

The findings could be used to develop educational materials specifically targeted at either young male or young female drivers, the researchers added.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about motor vehicle safety.

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Concussion Recovery Can Reverse After Return to Activity, Study Shows

By Amy Norton

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Aug. 28, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Athletes who seem to have recovered from a concussion may actually show a subtle worsening in a particular mental ability after they return to exercise, a small study suggests.

The findings come from a study of 19 high school athletes who suffered a concussion and then got medical clearance to return to physical activity — most often football, although a few were on soccer, wrestling or volleyball teams.

Researchers found that for 12 of those athletes, a particular mental ability that had been improving post-concussion reversed course once they were up and moving again.

Specifically, the athletes’ ability to simultaneously walk and do simple mental tasks “regressed,” the researchers report in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

In real-life terms, that means walking down the street while talking to a friend would be a bit harder, explained Li-Shan Chou, one of the researchers on the study.

The shift would be too subtle for a person to actually notice, said Chou, a professor of human physiology at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

But he and his colleagues were able to detect the regression in lab tests where the athletes walked while performing basic mental tasks — like listening to a spoken word, then saying whether it was a high or low pitch.

What does it all mean? That’s not clear, said Kenneth Podell, a concussion expert who was not involved in the study.

For one, since the study group was so small, the findings need to be replicated in larger studies to know whether they are “real,” according to Podell, co-director of the Houston Methodist Concussion Center in Texas.

He also questioned how the athletes could show an improvement in their test performance early on, when they were “most concussed,” but then worsen after all their other signs and symptoms had improved.

Chou agreed that the implications of his findings are unclear. For now, he said the study highlights the importance of giving concussions time to heal.

“Have patience, and give the brain time to recover,” Chou added.

According to the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), more than 1 million athletes in the United States suffer a concussion each year.

Concussion symptoms include headache, dizziness, nausea, ringing in the ears, fatigue and confusion — though these problems may not become noticeable until hours after the jolt to the head. And contrary to popular belief, concussions usually do not cause unconsciousness.

When athletes are recovering from a concussion, the “standard of care” is to gradually return them to physical activity before they can get back on the field, Podell said.

In fact, all 50 states and the District of Columbia now have some kind of law on youth concussions, protecting athletes from returning to the playing fields too soon.

But there is no “set timeline” for safe return to play, according to the AAN. And judging recovery is subjective, Chou said, because it involves asking patients how they feel.

The current findings are based on 19 high school athletes who were periodically assessed for two months after sustaining a concussion. All returned to physical activity, with medical clearance, during that time.

Chou’s team found that once they were active again, 12 of the athletes showed some reversal in their ability to walk and perform mental tasks simultaneously. The problem showed up as a subtle change in their walking speed or balance.

Still, Podell said, it’s not clear what to make of that. Even if the athletes’ gait did regress when they first started physical activity, it might have been “fine” by the time they got back into their sport, he noted.

“The take-away for parents is, the return from concussion is complex, and the best clinical practice calls for a slow and gradual return to activity under the guidance of professionals,” Podell said.

But it’s not only physical activity that matters, he added. Concussed kids should also take a break from mental stress and only gradually return to schoolwork.

“Just because a student-athlete is ready to exercise does not mean they are 100-percent ready for a full load at school,” Podell said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on post-concussion return to play.

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