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America’s Fittest City? The Answer Isn’t a Shocker 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Brenda Goodman
HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, May 29 (HealthDay News) — It’s a three-peat. For the third year in a row, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area is the fittest in America, according to the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual rankings released Wednesday.
“Minneapolis may be under snow for three months, but they capitalize on the resources that they have,” said Walter Thompson, chair of the advisory board that compiles the report, called the American Fitness Index, or AFI.
“We’re very pleased,” said Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak in an interview with HealthDay. “We get up off the couch, in every season.”
To compile the annual rankings, the AFI takes into account city policies, community resources, health care access, the local prevalence of chronic diseases and preventive health behaviors in 50 metro areas across the United States.
Minneapolis topped the list with 78.2 points. It was closely followed by Washington, D.C. with 77.7 points. Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Denver rounded out the top five.
Near the bottom were Memphis, Tenn., Louisville, Ky., San Antonio and Detroit. Once again, Oklahoma City ranked last in the nation for measures of health. It’s fallen to the bottom of the list each year since 2008, the first year of the AFI rankings.
Despite its dead-last position, Oklahoma City is making positive changes. Thompson pointed out that the city debuted on the list with a score of 24 points. This year, the metro area scored 31.2 on measures of health, wellness and fitness. The American College of Sports Medicine met with city leaders in 2011 to work on a plan to improve the city’s fitness.
The biggest movers on the list were Portland and Denver. Portland jumped from number seven in 2012 to take the number-three slot this year. Denver leapt from number nine to number five.
Thompson said that most cities that make big moves on the list do so because of significant policy changes. They spend more money on parks, for example, or they enact citywide smoking bans.
What sets the top-tier cities apart? Thompson noted that they each have an infrastructure that supports physical activity. And they value their city parks. Minneapolis-St. Paul, for example, spends about $227 per person, per year on its city parks. Oklahoma City, by contrast, spends far less, about $60 per person, per year, according to a 2012 Trust for Public Land report.
More than half of the residents in the Twin Cities say they’re at least moderately physically active. That may be because they have more playgrounds, swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, baseball diamonds and dog parks, per capita, than other cities. They’re also more likely to take public transportation or to bike or walk to work, according to the report.
Mayor Rybak credits the city’s founding fathers for its wealth of public spaces. “The founders made sure every inch of parkland was open to everyone. Unlike a lot of places where there’s a beautiful lake and homes are built right onto the water, we have bike and walking trails in public realm dedicated along all of them,” he said.
And they’ve got a mayor who is constantly looking for new ways to use all that public space. Rybak started a cross-country ski festival called the City of Lakes Loppet that takes over the city streets every winter.
Residents who observed the mayor’s “Ski-to-Work Day” — they had to ski at least three miles to work — got a free entry to the city’s new Tri-Loppet, a summertime event that will have residents canoeing, mountain biking and running around the city.
And they’re planning a new two-block park called The Yard, which will connect the city’s new football stadium to its downtown.
“And this is going to be a place we envision skate parks. And maybe taking all the snow we plow in the winter and creating huge hills to snowboard. The idea isn’t just to have a passive park, but an active place,” Rybak said.
More information
For the full list of fittest cities, head to the American Fitness Index 2013 Report.


Health News Reports May Spur ‘Symptoms’ in Some People

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TUESDAY, May 28 (HealthDay News) — The news media and the mind may have a powerful role in people’s experience of so-called “Wi-Fi syndrome,” if a new study is correct.
Researchers found that when they showed people a news report on the purported health risks of Wi-Fi, some of them suddenly developed symptoms when they were later exposed to a Wi-Fi signal. Except that “signal” wasn’t real.
The findings, researchers say, point to the power of the media and the power of the “nocebo effect” — where your worries over ill health effects actually make you feel sick. It’s the negative version of the storied placebo effect, which causes you to feel better because you expect good things from a therapy.
“Our study represents the first to demonstrate that sensational and one-sided media reports might be able to amplify the nocebo effect in this particular form of environmental intolerance,” said lead researcher Michael Witthoft, with the psychology department at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, in Germany.
“Environmental intolerance” refers to symptoms that people develop in reaction to chemicals or other exposures in their daily surroundings. Witthoft’s study zeroed in on one: electromagnetic fields (EMFs) — which include the radio waves given off by cell phones and Wi-Fi networks.
There is little evidence that those fields pose a cancer risk, or have other health effects. Still, some people report suffering symptoms, like headaches, tingling sensations, nausea and concentration problems, that they attribute to electromagnetic field exposure.
Witthoft’s team studied the phenomenon by recruiting 147 adults and randomly assigning them to watch one of two BBC news reports: one on the potential health effects of Wi-Fi, or another on the security of Internet and cellphone data.
Afterward, volunteers sat in a room with a laptop, where they believed they were being exposed to a Wi-Fi signal — when, in fact, they were not. Yet 54 percent of the study participants reported suffering symptoms, like tingling and concentration problems, that they blamed on the Wi-Fi exposure.
And people who had seen the scary news report were more vulnerable, Witthoft said — particularly if they were anxiety-prone types to begin with, a trait the researchers assessed with a standard questionnaire.
The findings, which recently appeared in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, highlight how the mind — and the media — influence how you feel, experts said.
“For the media, I think it is essential to present the available scientific evidence in a balanced and cautious way,” Witthoft said.
The particular report his team used was a notoriously one-sided program that was seen by close to 5 million Britons when it aired in 2007. It was later called “misleading” by the BBC’s own Editorial Complaints Unit.
It is “disturbing” that for some people in this study, just seeing the report was enough to trigger symptoms, according to John Kelley, an associate professor of psychology at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.
Kelley is also deputy director of Harvard Medical School’s Program in Placebo Studies, which was created about two years ago specifically to research the placebo response.
“Unfortunately,” Kelley said, “people’s expectations can work in the negative direction, as well as the positive.”
He said it would be interesting to see whether a more balanced news report on the issue of electromagnetic fields and health would have produced the same results. But it’s possible that wouldn’t make much difference, Kelley noted.
It may be that simply getting the information makes many people more vigilant for symptoms — especially the anxiety-prone.
“You start to pay more attention to your body and may notice some things — a headache, a dry mouth — that you otherwise wouldn’t notice,” Kelley said.
And it’s not just a phenomenon of “gullible” people falling victim to sensationalist media reports, he noted. Medical students are famous for developing symptoms of the diseases they are currently studying. “It happens to doctors, too,” Kelley said.
Study author Witthoft recommended viewing health news with a skeptical eye. “It appears essential to stay critical about any kind of scientific, or pseudo-scientific, information in the media,” he said. “I would advise consumers not to jump to simple conclusions prematurely, but to critically review several sources of evidence.”
Simply knowing that the things you hear and see can influence actual physical experiences may be helpful — and eye-opening — to many people, according to Kelley. “We don’t like to believe that we can be pushed to feel something we wouldn’t otherwise feel,” he said. “But we can be.”

 

Alzheimer’s Patients Tend to Mimic Emotions of Those Around Them 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TUESDAY, May 28 (HealthDay News) — People with Alzheimer’s disease or early thinking and memory problems tend to mirror the emotions of those around them, researchers find.
This transfer of emotions, known as emotional contagion, appears heightened in people with Alzheimer’s and related mental decline, according to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) team. And it can be important in the management of these patients, they added.
“Calm begets calm,” said Dr. Sam Gandy, associate director of the Mount Sinai Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in New York City, who was not involved in the study.
Emotional contagion is a rudimentary form of empathy, enabling people to share and experience other people’s emotions, said lead researcher Virginia Sturm, an assistant professor in the UCSF department of neurology.
“It’s a way by which emotions travel across people quickly and even without awareness,” explained Sturm. This process can shape behaviors and cause changes in the brain, she added.
In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and in people with mild thinking and memory problems, emotional contagion increases, the researchers found. It is even more apparent in people with dementia, they noted.
“In Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia we think some people may have an increased sensitivity to other people’s emotions,” Sturm said.
“As their memory and thinking abilities decline, it seems this is accompanied by the enhancement of other emotional processes,” she said.
This means that if caregivers are anxious or angry, their patients will pick up and copy these emotions.
On the other hand, if the caregiver is calm and happy, patients will emulate these positive emotions, Sturm said.
“This is a way Alzheimer’s patients connect with others, even though they don’t have an understanding of the social situation,” she said. “In order to manage patients, it might be that the caregivers being calm and happy would go a long way in keeping their patient calm and happy.”
Alzheimer’s disease is an age-related brain disorder that begins slowly and gradually robs people of their ability to lead their everyday lives. In the United States, one-third of the nation’s seniors die with Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
The study, published online May 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved 237 adults. Sixty-two patients had mild memory and thinking problems and 64 had Alzheimer’s disease. The others were mentally healthy.
Participants took tests to identify depression and other mental health problems and also underwent MRI scans to identify changes in the brain related to emotional contagion.
The researchers found higher emotional contagion in those with mild mental impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, compared with those who did not have these conditions.
This growth of emotional contagion paralleled the increase in damage to the right temporal lobe of the brain, reflecting biological changes in the neural system, the study found.
“The right temporal lobe is important for different aspects of emotion and social behavior,” Sturm said.
Depression was also greater among those with mild mental impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, the study found.
From a neurologist’s perspective, “it is extraordinary that something so complex as emotional perception can be controlled by such a localized part of the brain,” Gandy said.
“Also, classically it has been the frontal lobe damage that leads to emotional disturbance,” Gandy added. “Now we know the temporal lobes can play similar roles.”

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