RUSSIAN DENVER / HORIZON 10 by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe People who have been overweight or obese at any time during their lives may be more likely to die early, even if they lose weight later, a new study suggests. Among the people in the study, those who had ever been overweight were 19 percent more likely to die during the 23-year study period, compared with those who had never exceeded normal weight. Those who had ever been obese (with a body mass index, or BMI, from 30.0 to 34.9) were 65 percent more likely to die during the study than those who had never exceeded normal weight. And those who had ever been severely obese (with a BMI of 35.0 or above) were nearly 150 percent more likely to die during this time Even After Weight Loss, Obesity Can Reduce Life Span period than those who remained in the normal weight range. The new study “sheds light on the need for greater efforts to stem the obesity epidemic,” said study author Andrew Stokes, of the Boston University School of Public Health In the study, the researchers looked at the BMIs of more than 6,000 Americans who were between 50 and 74 years old when the study began, in 1988. In addition to looking at the participants’ current BMIs, at the time of the start of the study, the researchers looked at the history of the individuals’ lifetime BMIs. This approach differs from that of previous studies that have looked at the relationship between a person’s BMI and their risk of early death, the researchers said. Those previous studies tended to consider people’s BMIs at only a single point in time, the researchers said. “Imagine if you compared Strong Social Connections Linked to Better Health by Agata Blaszczak-Boxe Eating healthy food and exercising play important roles in health and well-being, but if you are feeling lonely, you may also want to consider reaching out: A lack of social connection may have a negative impact on your physical health, new research suggests. For example, older people ages 57 to 91 who felt socially isolated had more than double the risk of high blood pressure as those who didn’t feel isolated, the researchers found. They noted that this increase in risk (of 142 percent) was greater than the increase in the risk of high blood pressure that comes with having diabetes, which was a 49 percent increase in this age group. Moreover, adolescents and teens ages 12 to 18 who felt socially isolated had a 27 percent increased risk of inflammation, compared with those who did not feel socially isolated, the researchers found. This difference is comparable to the 21 percent increase in the risk of inflammation that comes with physical inactivity among teens, the researchers said. “It is as important to encourage individuals to build broad and good social relationships and increase social skills, interacting with others” as it is to N01/<strong>830</strong> от 01.08.2016 e-mail: info@gorizont.com Simply the best encourage them to eat a healthy diet and be physically active, said study author Yang Claire Yang, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Indeed, the people in the study who felt socially connected to family or friends seemed to have lower health risks. For example, teens in the study who said they felt integrated into their social circles were 48 percent less likely to be obese than those who were not socially integrated, the researchers found. And older adults who were socially integrated were 54 percent less likely to develop high blood pressure than those who were not socially integrated. “It seems that being socially connected, having a decent-size social network and also gaining support from the network– the quality as well as the quantity of the relationships– matter a great deal,” Yang said. In the study, the researchers looked at data from four large previous studies of people in the United States. Each study included between 863 and 7,889 people, whose ages ranged from 12 to 91. The researchers examined the association between the people’s relationships with others and their blood pressure, body mass index, waist circumference Do Pot Smokers Drink More or Less? Results Are Mixed nonsmokers to smokers,” Stokes said. “If there are former smokers in the nonsmoking group, it is going to skew the comparison.” One such study, published in January 2013, suggested that being overweight could actually increase a person’s life span, Stokes said. Moreover, that study found that being mildly obese was actually associated with no increased risk of death, he said. “You had to be morbidly obese to experience any elevated risks for death,” according to those findings, Stokes said. But the new study found that, “quite to the contrary, risks increase at every level of body mass index above the normal weight category,” he told Live Science. The new results suggest that the problem of obesity needs to be taken very seriously, Stokes said. “We see that obesity is affecting many people in a population,” he said. “It is not just restricted to certain individuals or groups.” This is why the solutions to the high rates of obesity really need to target not only individuals, but also the population as a whole, he added. Dr. Mitchell Roslin, chief of obesity surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, who was not involved in the new study, stressed the importance of physical fitness for the reducing the health risks that can come with obesity. “Bottom line is that not all heavy people will die young,” Roslin told Live Science in an email. “But those who are not fit [or who] have metabolic conditions such as diabetes or severe sleep apnea have a disproportionately high risk.” and levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation. The findings suggest that it is specifically social connections, or the lack of them, that drive certain health effects, and not the other way around, the researchers said. “We have reason to believe that the relationship is strongly likely to be causal– from social [factors] to illness as opposed to the other way around,” Yang told Live Science. People should try to evaluate the state of their social connections on a regular basis, the researchers suggested. For example, they can ask themselves if they feel close to family members such as their parents, and if they feel that they are satisfied with the quality of their relationships with their family. If there are any aspects of their relationships that they feel should be improved, they should work on them, Yang said. by Laura Geggel Do people who use legal marijuana drink less or more alcohol? The answer, it turns out, is complicated, a new study finds. It seems logical that people who are already high on marijuana would have less of a desire to drink alcohol than people who weren’t high, and so the pot smokers should drink less (which researchers sometimes refer to as “replacement,” meaning one drug is replaced with another.) However, it’s also possible that people who use one substance are more likely to use another, and so pot smokers might drink more. Researchers have been trying to find out which is true. “The evidence is definitely mixed,” said the lead author of the new study, Katar?na Guttmannov?, a research scientist in the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington in Seattle. “In the context of marijuana policy changes,” pot sometimes replaces alcohol use, but in other cases pot increases drinking, she said. The question about the relationship between the two substances is important, she said. As more states make medical and recreational marijuana legal, researchers are wondering what kinds of societal effects the new laws will have. On one hand, fewer people will be jailed for using cannabis, and costs to the criminal justice system will likely drop, Guttmannov? said. “On the other hand, legalization could also bring some big costs if it turns out that it leads to increases in marijuana and/ or other substance use,” Guttmannov? told Live Science in an email. To investigate how the increasingly popular drug affects people’s alcohol use, Guttmannov? and her colleagues looked at 15 peer-reviewed studies that addressed the decriminalization of marijuana, or the legalization of either medical marijuana or recreational marijuana, and the impact of these actions on alcohol use. Alcohol is the most widely used drug in the United States, the researchers said. “We chose to focus on alcohol because even relatively small changes in alcohol consumption could have profound implications for public health, safety and related costs,” Guttmannov? said in a statement. In the study, the researchers tried to determine whether legalized marijuana was becoming a substitute for alcohol– that is, whether people were drinking less alcohol and using pot instead. If this is the case, marijuana’s legalization would likely lower the costs to society that are related to excessive drinking, because of reduced health care costs, fewer traffic accidents and improved workplace productivity, the researchers said. However, it is also possible that legalizing weed (marijuana is recreationally legal in four states and the District of Co-
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