Brisk Walks May Boost Memory in Older Adults

Older adults who took a brisk walk three times a week did better on memory tests and increased the size of their hippocampus, a portion of the brain involved with memory formation, researchers report. The findings suggest that loss of brain volume in old age can be delayed, and may even be reversible. Brain shrinkage is associated with memory impairment in the elderly. "We can change the brain in older adults," said lead study author Kirk Erickson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

"It's amazing that a one-year period of moderate exercise isn't just slowing down the atrophy, it's actually reversing it." For their the study, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, University of Illinois, Rice University and Ohio State University divided 120 sedentary adults in their mid to late 60s, on average, into two groups: one group walked around a track for 40 minutes of aerobic exercise, three days a week, while the other group did stretching. Both groups performed better on a test of spatial memory. Spatial memory helps us to remember things like driving directions or where we left our keys.

But the groups differed in one important way. MRI brain scans showed that after a year on the exercise program, the aerobic exercise group's hippocampus was about 2 percent bigger than it was when they started, the equivalent to a reversal in age-related brain shrinkage of about one to two years, the researchers said. Those in the stretching group had a decrease of hippocampal volume of about 1.4 percent, the investigators found. Those who showed the greatest improvements in memory also showed the greatest increases in hippocampal volume, according to the study, published online Jan. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Odds of Quitting Smoking May Be Clear on Scans

Brain scans can predict a smoker's chances of being able to quit, according to a new study. It included 28 heavy smokers recruited from a smoking cessation program. Functional MRI was used to monitor the participants' brain activity as they watched television ads meant to help people quit smoking. The researchers contacted the participants one month later and found that they were smoking an average of five cigarettes a day, compared with an average of 21 a day at the start of the study.

But there was considerable variation in how successful individual participants were in reducing their smoking. The researchers found that a reaction in an area of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, while watching the quit-smoking ads was linked to reductions in smoking during the month after the brain scan. Previous research by the same team suggested that activity in the prefrontal cortex is predictive of behavior change.

In the new study, published in the current issue of Health Psychology, "we targeted smokers who were already taking action to quit, and we found that neural activity can predict behavior change, above and beyond people's own assessment of how likely they are to succeed," study author Emily Falk, director of the Communication Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and Department of Communication Studies, said in a university news release.

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Breast Cancer Outcome: Your Doctor Matters

How doctors choose to treat their breast cancer patients and whether those treatment choices follow established recommendations may play a larger role in whether a cancer returns than experts have believed. In a new analysis looking at 994 women with ductal carcinoma in situ, the most common type of noninvasive breast cancer, researchers found treatment variations from surgeon to surgeon are significant, and may account for up to 30 percent of recurrences.

"Treatment variation is a troubling but well-known phenomenon in health care," said study author Andrew W. Dick, a researcher at RAND Corp. in Pittsburgh. The report is published online Jan. 3 and in the Jan. 19 print issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "The reason it is surprising in this case is that the variation is quite large, and related to factors that are very important in health outcomes," Dick said.

Those factors include having "negative margins" meaning that cancer cells are more than 2 millimeters away from the removed tissue's edge and getting radiation therapy after breast-conserving surgery. The variation by surgeon in treatments accounted for 15 percent to 35 percent of cancer occurring in the opposite breast in the next five years and 13 percent to 30 percent of recurrences over 10 years, the investigators found.

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In U.S., Obesity Afflicts Even Some of the Tiniest Tots

American kids are becoming obese, or nearly so, at an increasingly young age, with about one-third of them falling into that category by the time they're 9 months old, researchers have found. There are some caveats about the research, however. The infants were not studied recently: They were born about a decade ago. And it's not clear how excess weight in babies may affect their health later in their lives. The study found no guarantee that a baby who's overweight at 9 months will stay flabby when his or her second birthday rolls around.

Still, the study in the January-February 2011 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion does present a picture of babies and infants who are carrying around a lot of extra weight. The findings also suggest that small changes in an infant's diet can make a big difference, said Dr. Wendy Slusser, medical director of a children's weight program at Mattel Children's Hospital at the University of California, Los Angeles. For example, she said, "if you don't give your kid juice and have them eat the fruit instead, suddenly there's 150 calories less a day that can make a big difference in weight gain over a long term."

The researchers examined federal data about 16,400 children in the United States who were born in 2001. After adjusting the statistics so they wouldn't be thrown off by such factors as high numbers of certain kinds of kids, the study authors found that 17 percent of 9-month-olds were obese and 15 percent were at risk for obesity, for a total of 32 percent. At two years, 21 percent were obese and 14 percent were at risk of becoming obese, the investigators found.

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