(Press-News.org) In a major register-based study, scientists at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now demonstrated a connection between inferior physical fitness in young adults and elevated risk of the autoimmune disease psoriasis. For the male recruits to compulsory military training who were rated as the least fit, the risk of developing psoriasis later was 35 percent higher than for the fittest.
The study was based on data on more than 1.2 million men conscripted, aged 18, into the Swedish Armed Forces between the years 1968 and 2005. During the enrollment process, all these young men underwent the same fitness test on an exercise bicycle. The researchers divided the data, according to how fit the men were, into three levels (low, medium, and high fitness). They then merged the data with other registers, using Sweden's National Patient Register to obtain diagnostic codes for psoriasis and the joint disease psoriatic arthritis. The men who had already received one of these diagnoses before conscription were excluded from the study.
Later in life, between the ages of 37 and 51, just over 23,000 of the conscripts developed psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis. In the low-fitness group, 2.5 percent developed one or both of these diseases, while only 1.7 percent in the high-fitness group did so. In calculating this risk differential, the scientists adjusted for other risk factors, such as body mass index (BMI).
Association not causal
Thus, the less fit the men were when they were recruited, the higher the proportion of them who later fell ill with psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis. In the low-fitness group, the risk of developing psoriasis was 35 percent higher, and that of developing psoriatic arthritis 44 percent higher, than in the high-fitness group.
"We show that there's an association between lower fitness and raised risk of developing psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, but we don't show a causal connection. So we can't say that these health conditions can be prevented by exercising," says the study's first author Marta Laskowski, a doctoral student in dermatology at the University of Gothenburg and resident physician (specialist trainee) at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Group in need of monitoring
The group of men who were least fit was also the smallest: just under 48,000 or 3.9 percent of all the conscripts in the study. This is a group that healthcare services should try to monitor regularly.
"Low fitness was already known to boost the risk of incurring cardiovascular disease, and psoriasis as such is linked to raised cardiovascular disease risk, too. The results from our study confirm the reasons for assessing people's fitness early in life, to identify individuals at a higher risk for adverse health outcomes later in life," Laskowski says.
Previous research has indicated that, in general, people with psoriasis are less fit than those without it who engage in an equal amount of physical activity. However, the reasons for this difference have not been fully clarified.
"One weakness of our study is that we weren't been able to monitor the trends of the men's fitness during the intervening years, between their conscription and the disease onset. We're also lacking data on smoking, which is a known risk factor for psoriasis," Laskowski explains.
Scaly skin patches
Some 300,000 Swedes have psoriasis in a mild, moderate, or severe form. It is a chronic, systemic inflammatory disease that affects women as often as men. What triggers its onset is not entirely clear, but heredity is known to play a large part in combination with external factors. The most common type, plaque psoriasis, causes reddened, flaking, and itchy skin lesions ("plaques").
Psoriasis sufferers also often have other diseases. Some 30 percent get the inflammatory joint condition known as psoriatic arthritis. Examples of other known comorbidities are obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression.
In recent years, treatment options have substantially improved. Today, besides ointments with local effects, there are drugs that have systemic effects. Recent years have also seen the emergence of efficacious biological agents that modulate the signaling cascade in the inflammatory process that drives psoriasis.
INFORMATION:
Article: Cardiorespiratory fitness in late adolescence and long-term risk of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis among Swedish men. PLOS ONE; https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243348
Contact: Marta Laskowski, doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg and resident physician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital: 46 739 560 449, marta.laskowski@vgregion.se
Nausea and vomiting symptoms during pregnancy start within a three day timeframe for most women, according to new study from University of Warwick
More accurate measurement achieved by calculating start of pregnancy from date of ovulation - rather than last menstrual period
Points to a potential biological cause for nausea and vomiting, and supports the view that the condition has been trivialised
Researchers from the University of Warwick have narrowed the time frame that nausea and vomiting during pregnancy will potentially start to just three days for most women, opening up the possibility for scientists to identify ...
Photosynthesis, the process by which plants and other organisms convert sunlight into chemical energy, has been a major player during the evolution of life and our planet's atmosphere. Although most of the ins and outs of photosynthesis are understood, how the necessary mechanisms evolved is still a topic of debate. The answer to this question, however, may actually lie buried in the mineral world.
In a recent study published in Earth Science Frontiers (10.13745/j.esf.sf.2020.12.3), scientists from Peking University, China, shifted the focus in photosynthesis research from plants and bacteria one step further back to rocks and substances found in what's ...
UK government plans to widen the roll out of the Innova lateral flow test without supporting evidence risks serious harm, warn experts in The BMJ today.
More than £1 billion have been spent on purchasing lateral flow tests, but Professor Jon Deeks and colleagues argue that the public is being misled about their accuracy, as well as the risks and implications of false negative results, and they call on the government urgently to change course.
Mass testing may be helpful and necessary in certain circumstances if delivered to high quality, they explain, but the Innova lateral flow test is not fit for this purpose.
For example, in the Liverpool pilot study, 60% of infected symptomless people went undetected, including 33% of those with ...
Scientists from the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have developed a technique that will enable researchers to more efficiently isolate and identify rare T cells that are capable of targeting viruses, cancer and other diseases.
The approach could increase scientists' understanding of how these critical immune cells respond to a wide range of illnesses and advance the development of T cell therapies. This includes immunotherapies that aim to boost the function and quantity of cancer or virus-targeting T cells and therapies ...
EUGENE, Ore. -- Jan. 12, 2020 -- Insufficient interactions with academic advisors and peers and financial problems are derailing career aspirations of women and minority groups pursing graduate degrees in the nation's highest-funded chemistry programs.
The challenges, tied to systemic gender and racial inequities, emerged from a deep analysis of data compiled in a 2013 American Chemical Society survey of 1,375 chemistry graduate students in the top 100 university chemistry departments in terms of research funding reported by the National Science Foundation.
The findings are detailed in a study, led by University of Oregon researchers, publishing this ...
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Wild bees are more affected by climate change than by disturbances to their habitats, according to a team of researchers led by Penn State. The findings suggest that addressing land-use issues alone will not be sufficient to protecting these important pollinators.
"Our study found that the most critical factor influencing wild bee abundance and species diversity was the weather, particularly temperature and precipitation," said Christina Grozinger, Distinguished Professor of Entomology and director of the Center for Pollinator Research, Penn State. "In the Northeastern United States, past trends and future predictions show a changing climate with warmer winters, more intense precipitation ...
A major risk of being hospitalised is catching a bacterial infection.
Hospitals, especially areas including intensive care units and surgical wards, are teeming with bacteria, some of which are resistant to antibiotics - they are infamously known as 'superbugs'.
Superbug infections are difficult and expensive to treat, and can often lead to dire consequences for the patient.
Now, new research published today in the prestigious journal Nature Microbiology has discovered how to revert antibiotic-resistance in one of the most dangerous superbugs.
The strategy involves ...
Producing clean energy and reducing the power consumption of illumination and personal devices are key challenges to reduce the impact of modern civilization on the environment. As a result, the surging demand for solar cells and light-emitting devices is driving scientists to explore new semiconductor materials and improve their performances, while lowering the production costs.
Semiconductor nanocrystals (materials with sizes about 10 nanometers, which is approximately 10,000 times thinner than our hair) hold great promise for these applications: they are cheap to produce, can be easily integrated in these devices and possess exceptionally enhanced properties upon interaction with ...
Curtin University researchers have used ancient crystals from eroded rocks found in stream sediments in Greenland to successfully test the theory that portions of Earth's ancient crust acted as 'seeds' from which later generations of crust grew.
The findings not only advance an understanding of the production of the Earth's crust through deep time, along with its structure and composition, but reveal a planet-wide crustal growth spurt three billion years ago when mantle temperatures peaked.
Lead author Professor Chris Kirkland, from Curtin University's Timescales of Mineral Systems ...
You are likely familiar with the serious consequences of anorexia for those who experience it, but you might not be aware that the disorder may not be purely psychological. A recent review from researchers at the University of Oxford in the open-access journal END ...
