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Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes.

During a strength workout, the heart's muscle tissue contracts forcefully to push the blood out. Like all muscles, stress causes small tears in the muscle fibers. When the body repairs those tears, muscles grow. The result is a stronger heart, not just one that's more efficient at pumping. Another big advantage of working out with weights is improving glucose metabolism, which can reduce the risk of diabetes. Strength training boosts the number of proteins that take glucose out of the blood and transport it into the skeletal muscle, giving the muscles more energy and lowering overall blood-glucose levels.

A 2010 study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology suggested that people on dialysis can benefit from building muscle. Researchers found that kidney dialysis patients who had the most lean muscle mass — a measurement derived from the circumference of the mid-arm muscle — were 37% less likely to die than the patients who had the least.

A growing body of research shows that working out with weights has health benefits beyond simply bulking up one's muscles and strengthening bones. Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes. "Muscle is our largest metabolically active organ, and that's the backdrop that people usually forget," said Kent Adams, director of the exercise physiology lab at Cal State Monterey Bay. Strengthening the muscles "has a ripple effect throughout the body on things like metabolic syndrome and obesity."

Strength training often takes a back seat to cardiovascular training, but it can benefit the heart in ways that its more popular cousin can't. During cardio exercise, the heart loads up with blood and pumps it out to the rest of the body: As a result, Potteiger said, "the heart gets better and more efficient at pumping." But during resistance training, muscles generate more force than they do during endurance exercises, and the heart is no exception, Potteiger said. During a strength workout, the heart's muscle tissue contracts forcefully to push the blood out. Like all muscles, stress causes small tears in the muscle fibers. When the body repairs those tears, muscles grow. The result is a stronger heart, not just one that's more efficient at pumping. Another big advantage of working out with weights is improving glucose metabolism, which can reduce the risk of diabetes. Strength training boosts the number of proteins that take glucose out of the blood and transport it into the skeletal muscle, giving the muscles more energy and lowering overall blood-glucose levels. "If you have uncontrolled glucose levels," Potteiger said, "that can lead to kidney damage, damage to the circulatory system and loss of eyesight."

The brain may get a boost from the body's extra muscle as well. A 2010 study in Archives of Internal Medicine found that women ages 65 to 75 who did resistance training sessions once or twice a week over the course of a year improved their cognitive performance, while those who focused on balance and tone training declined slightly. One reason for the improvement, researchers believe, may be that strength training triggers the production of a protein beneficial for brain growth.

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.”

More Americans with psychiatric conditions are being treated with drugs alone compared with a decade ago, while "talk therapy" -- either by itself or in combination with medication -- is on the decline, a new study finds.

The results, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are based on data from two government health surveys conducted in 1998 and 2007.Over that period, the percentage of Americans who said they'd had at least one psychotherapy session in the past year remained steady -- at just over 3 percent in both 1998 and 2007.However, among Americans receiving any outpatient mental health care, the proportion being treated with drugs alone rose from 44 percent in 1998 to 57 percent in 2007.Meanwhile, combined treatment with drugs and psychotherapy declined from 40 percent to 32 percent, and the use of psychotherapy alone slipped from 16 percent in 1998 to about 10 percent in 2007.National spending on psychotherapy also declined -- from an estimated total of $11 billion in 1998 to $7 billion in 2007. Overall spending on mental health care remained fairly steady, however -- at $15.4 billion in 1998 and $16 billion in 2007- suggesting an increase in the proportion of mental health spending devoted to drug therapies.

"Mental health care," he said, "is evolving in a way that means more people are receiving treatment, but are not necessarily getting the most effective therapy."

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,"

Every minute, there's a death due to cardiovascular disease in women, says Gregg Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who was not an author."This constitutes 422,000 deaths a year — more than cancer, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's and accidents combined," Fonarow says.The guidelines recommend that women:•Avoid smoking and exposure to environmental smoke.•Be physically active, getting 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise.•Establish a comprehensive risk-reduction regime if diagnosed with heart disease or have a heart event.•Achieve a healthy body weight.•Eat a diet rich in fruits and vegetables; choose whole-grain, high-fiber foods; eat oily fish at least twice a week; limit saturated fat, cholesterol and sugar; avoid trans-fatty acids.•Consume omega-3 fatty acids by eating fish, or in capsule form if they have high cholesterol.

Being a 'happy' teenager is linked to increased well-being in adulthood, new research finds.

For the first time, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing have analysed the link between a positive adolescence and well-being in midlife. Using information from 2776 individuals who participated in the 1946 British birth cohort study, the scientists tested associations between having a positive childhood and well-being in adulthood.

teenagers rated positively by their teachers were significantly more likely than those who received no positive ratings to have higher levels of well-being later in life, including a higher work satisfaction, more frequent contact with family and friends, and more regular engagement in social and leisure activities. Happy children were also much less likely than others to develop mental disorders throughout their lives - 60% less likely than young teens that had no positive ratings.

The adventures of Paul, Black and Breinan offer a glimpse into a forgotten aspect of the running boom of the late 1970s. Preternaturally self-disciplined, they were among about 75 children (ages 8 to 13) who tackled the early years of the New York City Marathon in a time of novelty and naïveté. Organizers were uneasy about young runners, but it was not until 1981, records show, that age 16 became the requirement. New York’s official minimum age became 18 in 1988, after an advisory set by the International Marathon Medical Directors Association in the early 1980s, and reasserted in 2001. With no conclusive study, physicians still debate risks to children who compete in marathons, like muscular-skeletal injuries, stunted growth, burnout, parental pressures and the ability to handle heat stress.

Some marathons — Houston and Twin Cities in Minnesota — allow teenagers or admit younger runners on a case-by-case basis. Los Angeles has a program for schoolchildren ages 12 to 18.

Hospitalized patients diagnosed with coronary artery disease who had a positive outlook about their recovery were less likely to die over the next 15 years and had better physical functioning after one year, according to a new study. Previous studies have found that heart patients’ optimism and expectations have positively influenced their functional status and return to work. But researchers say this study takes it a step further by showing how patient beliefs affect their health over the long term and ultimate survival. The findings are published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center followed 2,818 heart patients after they had coronary angiography to evaluate blood flow in the coronary arteries of the heart. They measured how patient expectations affected their recovery and ability to perform normal physical activities. Patients completed a questionnaire about their future lifestyle (e.g. “My heart condition will have little or no effect on my ability to do work,” “I expect that my lifestyle will suffer because of my heart condition”) and their future outcome (e.g. “I can still live a long and healthy life,” “I doubt that I will ever fully recover from my heart problems”).

the death rate of patients with the highest expectations was 31.8 deaths per 100 patients, compared to those with the lowest expectations at 46.2 deaths per 100 patients.

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.

Obese children in America are much less physically active, consume larger quantities of food during school meals, and watch much more TV than their normal-weight schoolmates, researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School revealed in The American Heart Journal. Lifestyle is by far the major driving force behind childhood obesity in the USA, and not heredity, the authors stressed after examining data on check-ups of 1,003 Michigan sixth-graders in a school-based health program.

The obese children in this study tended to eat a school lunch rather than a packed one made at home, and spent a considerable amount of time either playing video games or watching television.

58% of the obese children in the study had watched at least two hours of TV the day before, the authors reported, compared to 41% among the other kids. 34% of non-obese children ate school lunches regularly, compared to 45% of the obese ones. Regular exercise, being a member of a school sports team, and rates of physical activity were considerably lower among the obese pupils.