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Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, studies anxiety's effects on decision-making. "Under certain circumstances anxious people are more sensitive in detecting potentially bad outcomes associated with choices. They do avoid harm, so, as a consequence, it may be useful to be anxious," he says.

Paulus and his team have found that anxious people tend to take a "bottom-up" approach to life—their emotional reactions to events are stronger, while their ability to reason and intellectually interpret events is weaker. "Chronically anxious peoples' brains experience everything as aversive," he says. Less anxious people, in contrast, take more of a "top-down" approach—the rational parts of their brain take over when they experience something potentially anxiety inducing, and they essentially talk themselves into not getting worked up.

Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

Exercises that look like pilates or yoga routines are in. And the traditional bane of the new private, the long run, has been downgraded. This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.

“What we were finding was that the soldiers we’re getting in today’s Army are not in as good shape as they used to be,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army. “This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.”

“Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent,”

Although mind-bending drugs such as psilocybin are still used most often by people looking to get high, researchers around the country have begun to explore whether these and other illegal drugs can help treat intractable depression, anxiety, and other mental-health problems.

n the past month alone, studies have been published on the benefits of MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) in people with post-traumatic stress disorder and on the fast-acting antidepressive effects of the club drug ketamine (aka "Special K").

But research into the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs ground to a halt in the early 1970s, after the federal government criminalized LSD and psilocybin -- and after the drugs were eagerly adopted by college students and the hippie counterculture. "These studies had to be shut down because of the cultural reaction,"

A new study to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology 63rd Annual Meeting in April shows that people with an elevated heart disease risk in middle age were more likely to have associated memory and other cognitive problems. Researchers found that people who have a 10% higher risk of cardiovascular disease were more likely to have lower cognitive function and a faster rate of cognitive decline, compared to people with the lowest risk of heart disease.

The study looked at heart disease risk and cognitive function in more than 4,800 middle-aged men and women in the U.K. who participated in a long-term British study. The participants had their blood pressure, cholesterol, and other heart disease risk factors measured three times over a 10-year period and were also tested on various areas of cognitive function. Researchers found that middle-aged men and women with a 10% higher than average heart disease risk scored lower on all cognitive areas except reasoning for men and fluency for women. For example, a 10% higher heart disease risk was associated with a 2.8% lower score on memory tests among men and a 7.1% lower score among women.

American adults have a significantly higher rate of obesity than their neighbors to the north, a new study says. About 24 percent of Canadians are obese compared to more than 34 percent of Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Wednesday.

The two countries have different racial demographics. The United States has more black and Hispanic people, and both have higher rates of obesity. But even looking solely at white people, there was still a big difference - a 26 percent obesity rate in Canada compared to 33 percent in the United States.

Another mystery: In children there was little difference. The childhood obesity rate was 15.5 percent in the United States and 12 percent in Canada, but the difference was not statistically significant.

David Nieman, DrPH (photo above), and colleagues have shown that you DO burn a lot of calories after exercising, at least if you exercise at an intensity roughly equal to 70 percent of your vo2 max. That's a little slower than your marathon pace, but a little faster than your everyday EZ run pace.

In Nieman's study, a group of 10 healthy young-adult males (including three clinically obese subjects) burned 519 calories while exercising for 45 minutes on an exercise bike. Then, over the next 14 hours, they burned an additional 190 calories (above their normal calorie burn) while just sitting around.That's a 37 percent boost beyond the calories burned on the bikes. Another way of looking at it: If you burn 500 calories by running about 5 miles, you can gain almost another 2 miles of running through your after-burn calories. Thus, 5 miles becomes 7 miles, at least in terms of calorie-burning. That's great news for runners and other vigorous exercisers.

Public bicycle sharing schemes such as Barcelona's "Bicing" program or London's "Boris Bikes" save lives and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study on Friday.

Researchers at the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona found in a study, however, that around 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide pollution are averted and some 12 lives saved each year by Barcelona's scheme, which was introduced in March 2007.

From this they estimated the number of deaths associated with traveling by bike compared with driving for three main factors -- physical activity, road traffic incidents and exposure to air pollution. They also estimated the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.Looking at the Barcelona "Bicing" scheme, they calculated an annual increase of 0.13 deaths from air pollution and 0.03 deaths from traffic accidents among cyclists compared with car users.But as a result of high levels of physical activity, 12.46 deaths were avoided, making a total of 12.28 deaths avoided among cyclists every year, the researchers said. They also estimated a reduction in carbon emissions of over 9 million kg or 9,000 tons per year, the equivalent to flying 1,800 people to Sydney and back from london.The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends adults should do at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week and says this could be done by walking for 30 minutes five times per week or by cycling to work every day.

The normal resting heart rate for an adult ranges from 60 to 100 beats per minute. But some researchers believe it may be time to re-examine what’s considered normal.Researchers have found that a resting pulse at the upper end of “normal” may indicate a higher risk of stroke and heart disease. Some have linked it to a greater risk of diabetes and obesity. Instead of drawing the line at 100 beats per minute, some say, anything above 90 — and perhaps even 80 — may be considered cause for concern.

In one study published in The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, scientists followed 50,000 healthy men and women over two decades, looking at whether a resting heart rate at the upper end of normal increased the risk of dying of a heart attack. Just more than 4,000 of the subjects died of heart disease, and the authors found that resting heart rate was a good predictor: For each rising increment of 10 heart beats per minute, the risk of dying of a heart attack increased 18 percent among women and about 10 percent in men.Another study, published in The American Journal of Hypertension, found that a large group of adults who started out with resting heart rates above 80 beats a minute were more likely to become obese and develop diabetes after two decades.To lower the heart rate, try stepping up your cardio exercise, particularly with interval training, which is known to increase the amount of blood the heart pumps with each beat.