Thinking skills take biggest hit from anxiety in midlife women with HIV

Menopause stage found to have little effect

2014-02-08

(Press-News.org) CLEVELAND, Ohio (Friday, February 7, 2014)—Hot flashes, depression, and most of all, anxiety, affect the thinking skills of midlife women with HIV, so screening for and treating their anxiety may be especially important in helping them function, according to a study just published online in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). The reproductive stage, whether it was premenopause, perimenopause or postmenopause, did not seem to be related to these women's thinking skills. The conclusions come from a new analysis of data on 708 HIV-infected and 278 HIV-uninfected midlife women from the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WHIS), a national study of women with HIV at six sites across the country (Chicago, Bronx, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC). Today, nearly 52% of persons with HIV/AIDS are 40 to 54 years old. Because more women with HIV are now living to midlife and beyond, it is important to understand what challenges menopause pose for them. We learned just recently, from a study published online in Menopause in July, that women with HIV do face a bigger menopause challenge than uninfected women because they have worse menopause symptoms. Whether, how, and when the process of transitioning through menopause affects cognition have been debated. Large-scale studies of healthy women indicate that the menopause-related thinking deficiencies are modest, limited to the time leading up to menopause ("perimenopause"), and rebound after menopause. But in these women who underwent mental skills testing, menopause symptoms and mood symptoms did affect thinking skills. Mental processing speed and verbal memory were more related to depression, anxiety, and hot flashes in both HIV-infected and healthy women than the stage of menopause. Hot flashes in particular correlated with slightly lower mental processing speed, a skill that is also affected by the HIV virus. Depression correlated with decreased verbal memory, processing speed, and executive function (such as planning and organizing). Of all the symptoms measured, anxiety stood out as having the greatest impact on thinking skills, and the impact was much greater on women with HIV. Anxiety particularly affected their verbal learning skills. So treating anxiety may be key to improving the lives of midlife women with HIV, concluded the investigators. "Unfortunately, HIV infection is associated with modest deficits in multiple domains of cognitive function, even in women who regularly take their HIV medications. These depression and anxiety symptoms add to those cognitive vulnerabilities, but can be treated," says senior author and NAMS Board of Trustees President-Elect Pauline M. Maki, PhD, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. INFORMATION: The article, "Investigation of menopausal stage and symptoms on cognition in human immunodeficiency virus-infected women," will be published in the September 2014 print edition of Menopause. Founded in 1989, The North American Menopause Society (NAMS) is North America's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the health and quality of life of all women during midlife and beyond through an understanding of menopause and healthy aging. Its multidisciplinary membership of 2,000 leaders in the field—including clinical and basic science experts from medicine, nursing, sociology, psychology, nutrition, anthropology, epidemiology, pharmacy, and education—makes NAMS uniquely qualified to serve as the definitive resource for health professionals and the public for accurate, unbiased information about menopause and healthy aging. To learn more about NAMS, visit http://www.menopause.org.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

WASP gives NASA's planetary scientists new observation platform

2014-02-08

Scientists who study Earth, the sun and stars have long used high-altitude scientific balloons to carry their telescopes far into the stratosphere for a better view of their targets. Not so much for planetary scientists. That's because they needed a highly stable, off-the-shelf-type system that could accurately point their instruments and then track planetary targets as they moved in the solar system. That device now exists. NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., has designed a new pointing system — the Wallops Arc Second Pointer (WASP) — that can point ...

Study provides surprising new clue to the roots of hunger

2014-02-07

BOSTON – While the function of eating is to nourish the body, this is not what actually compels us to seek out food. Instead, it is hunger, with its stomach-growling sensations and gnawing pangs that propels us to the refrigerator – or the deli or the vending machine. Although hunger is essential for survival, abnormal hunger can lead to obesity and eating disorders, widespread problems now reaching near-epidemic proportions around the world. Over the past 20 years, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) neuroendocrinologist Bradford Lowell, MD, PhD, has been untangling ...

New method developed for ranking disease-causal mutations within whole genome sequences

2014-02-07

Seattle, Wash. and Huntsville, Ala.—Researchers from the University of Washington and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology have developed a new method for organizing and prioritizing genetic data. The Combined Annotation–Dependent Depletion, or CADD, method will assist scientists in their search for disease-causing mutation events in human genomes. The new method is the subject of a paper titled "A general framework for estimating the relative pathogenicity of human genetic variants," published in Nature Genetics. Current methods of organizing human genetic variation ...

Study identifies protein to repair damaged brain tissue in MS

2014-02-07

Vittorio Gallo, PhD, Director of the Center for Neuroscience Research at Children's National Health System, and other researchers have found a "potentially novel therapeutic target" to reduce the rate of deterioration and to promote growth of brain cells damaged by multiple sclerosis (MS). Current therapies can be effective in patients with relapsing MS, but have little impact in promoting tissue growth. The brain produces new cells to repair the damage from MS years after symptoms appear. However, in most cases the cells are unable to complete the repair, as unknown ...

Analysis of calls to IBD clinic predicts emergency visits and hospitalizations, Pitt finds

2014-02-07

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 7, 2014 – A comprehensive analysis of patient telephone records at an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) clinic revealed that 15 percent of patients account for half of all calls to the clinic. Forty-two percent of frequent-caller patients also were seen in the emergency department or hospitalized within the following year. The results, which can help doctors identify patients with the most severe disease and those at risk of potentially avoidable high-cost medical interventions, were reported in a study published online this week in the journal Clinical ...

Ice age's arctic tundra lush with wildflowers for woolly mammoths, study finds

2014-02-07

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- A recent study in the journal Nature finds that nearly 50,000 years ago during the ice age, the landscape was not as drab as once thought -- it was filled with colorful wildflowers. These wildflowers helped sustain woolly mammoths and other giant grazing animals. The study, "Fifty thousand years of Arctic vegetation and megafauna diet," included Joseph Craine, assistant professor in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University. It was led by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen and was a collaboration of more than 25 academic ...

Bottom-up insight into crowd dynamics

2014-02-07

Stampedes unfortunately occur on too regular a basis. Previously, physicists developed numerous models of crowd evacuation dynamics. Their analyses focused on disasters such as the yearly Muslim Hajj or of the Love Parade disaster in Germany in 2010. Unfortunately, the casualties at these events may have been linked to the limitations of the crowd dynamics models used at the time. Now, a new study outlines a procedure for quantitatively comparing different crowd models, which also helps to compare these models with real-world data. In a paper published in EPJ B, Vaisagh ...

Researchers use genetic signals affecting lipid levels to probe heart disease risk

2014-02-07

New genetic evidence strengthens the case that one well-known type of cholesterol is a likely suspect in causing heart disease, but also casts further doubt on the causal role played by another type. The findings may guide the search for improved treatments for heart disease. Most of us have heard of "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol" coursing through our bloodstream. In the conventional health wisdom of the past 30 years, having more of the "good" variety (high-density lipoprotein, or HDL) lowers your risk of heart disease, while more of the bad one (low-density ...

Shape-sifting: NIST categorizes bio scaffolds by characteristic cell shapes

2014-02-07

Getting in the right shape might be just as important in a biology lab as a gym. Shape is thought to play an important role in the effectiveness of cells grown to repair or replace damaged tissue in the body. To help design new structures that enable cells to "shape up," researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have come up with a way to measure, and more importantly, classify, the shapes cells tend to take in different environments.* With the notable exception of Flat Stanley, we all live, and are shaped by, a 3-dimensional world. Biologists ...

Computer models help decode cells that sense light without seeing

2014-02-07

Researchers have found that the melanopsin pigment in the eye is potentially more sensitive to light than its more famous counterpart, rhodopsin, the pigment that allows for night vision. For more than two years, the staff of the Laboratory for Computational Photochemistry and Photobiology (LCPP) at Ohio's Bowling Green State University (BGSU), have been investigating melanopsin, a retina pigment capable of sensing light changes in the environment, informing the nervous system and synchronizing it with the day/night rhythm. Most of the study's complex computations were ...

Thinking skills take biggest hit from anxiety in midlife women with HIV

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: