The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Aspirin shown to reduce cognitive decline in some elderly women Posted: 05 Oct 2012 06:52 AM PDT STOCKHOLM, Oct 5 — According to a new Swedish study, an aspirin a day may slow brain decline in elderly women at high risk of cardiovascular disease. To reach their findings, researchers tracked 682 women (with 601 of them at high risk for heart disease and stroke) between the ages of 70 to 92 for five years. Both at the beginning and at the end of the five-year time frame, the women underwent a battery of tests to measure their intellectual and physical health, including tests on verbal fluency and memory as well as dementia. In the study, the 129 women who took a low dose of aspirin (75 to 160 mg) every day to ward off a heart attack or stroke saw their test scores fall much less than those who did not. The BBC adds that while the findings showed that aspirin slowed changes in cognitive ability, it didn't make an impact on the rate at which the subjects developed dementia, as examined by a neuropscyhiatrist. Dr. Silke Kern, one of paper's authors, told the BBC: "We don't know the long term risks of taking routine aspirin. For examples ulcers and serious bleeds may outweigh the benefits we have seen. More work is needed. We will be following up the women in this study again in five years." The study was published Wednesday in BMJ Open. — AFP/Relaxnews |
| Can meditation make you more empathic? Posted: 05 Oct 2012 03:14 AM PDT ATLANTA, Oct 5 — According to a study announced yesterday, a meditation program that focuses on compassion was found to boost a person's ability to read the facial expressions of others as well as activate regions in the brain that help us be more empathic.  A form of meditation called Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, developed by US researchers, is shown to improve our ability to empathize with others. — Photo courtersy of iofoto The meditation program is called Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, and was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership. Derived from Tibetan Buddhist practices, the program (which is secular) includes elements of concentration and non-judgmental awareness of thoughts and feelings, similar to the much-talked-about mindfulness meditation. Yet according to the university, the CBCT also focuses on training people to analyze and reinterpret their relationships with others. "The idea is that the feelings we have about people can be trained in optimal ways," Negi says. "CBCT aims to condition one's mind to recognize how we are all inter-dependent, and that everybody desires to be happy and free from suffering at a deep level." In the study, 13 subjects with no prior meditation experience were randomized to CBCT meditation, where they completed regular weekly training sessions and at-home practice for eight weeks. Eight subjects in the control group didn't meditate but attended health discussion classes that covered the topics of stress and wellbeing. All participants received fMRI brain scans while completing a version of a facial expression test called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), which consists of black-and-white photographs that feature only the eyes of people making various expressions. Subjects were asked to interpret what the person in the photograph is thinking or feeling. These tests were performed before and after the meditation training. According to the findings, those in the meditation group improved their RMET scores by an average of 4.6 per cent, while the control group showed no increase. The meditators, in comparison to the control group, "also had significant increases in neural activity in areas of the brain important for empathy, including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex." "These findings raise the intriguing possibility that CBCT may have enhanced empathic abilities by increasing activity in parts of the brain that are of central importance for our ability to recognize the emotional states of others," says senior author Charles Raison. — AFP/Relaxnews |
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