Volunteer May Help You Live Longer

Observation from a large systematic review and meta-analysis led by the University of Exeter Medical School shows that volunteering may be good for your health.

Volunteering can improve mental health and help you live longer, finds the study which is published in the open access journal BWC Public Health. The research pools and compares data from multiple experimental trials and longitudinal cohort studies.

Some observational evidence points to around a 20 per cent reduction in mortality among volunteers compared to non-volunteers in cohort studies. Volunteers also reported lower levels of depression, increased life satisfaction and enhanced well-being, although the findings have yet to be confirmed in trials.

The systematic review was led by Dr Suzanne Richards at the University of Exeter Medical School, and was supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (NIHR PenCLAHRC).

Worldwide, the prevalence of adult volunteering varies with estimates of 22.5 per cent in Europe, 36 per cent in Australia and 27 per cent in the USA. Volunteers commonly cite altruistic motives for their habit -- 'giving something back' to their community, or supporting an organisation or charity that has supported them. Volunteering can also be used to gain work experience or to widen social circles, but its effects may go far deeper.

Previous reviews have highlighted supposed health benefits, including increased longevity, improved quality of life, reductions in stress and hospitalisation, but these tend to be based on narrative, rather than comparative evidence. Richards and colleagues pool data from 40 papers which reported data from 9 experimental trials and 16 cohort studies to arrive at their conclusions.

How Exercise Can Help Us Sleep Better

Many people believe exercise has relationship with better sleep, but there often are complaints about exercise. Some they exercise to the point of exhaustion, but they would not sleep better that night.This attracts a scientist and she decided to examine more closely the relationship between exercise in the day and sleep in the night.What she and her colleagues found was published in The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

The researchers randomly assigned their volunteers either to remain inactive or to begin a moderate endurance exercise program, consisting of three or four 30-minute exercise sessions per week, generally on a stationary bicycle or treadmill, that were performed in the afternoon. This exercise program continued for 16 weeks.

At the end of that time, the volunteers in the exercise group were sleeping much more soundly than they had been at the start of the study. They slept, on average, about 45 minutes to an hour longer on most nights, waking up less often and reporting more vigor and less sleepiness. But had the novice exercisers experienced immediate improvements in their sleep patterns

Boring deep into the data contained in the exercising group’s sleep diaries and other information for the new study, Dr. Baron discovered that the answer to both questions was a fairly resounding no. After the first two months of their exercise program, the exercising volunteers (all of them women) were sleeping no better than at the start of the study. Only after four months of the program had their insomnia improved.

They also rarely reported sleeping better on those nights when they had had an exercise session. And perhaps most telling, they almost always exercised for a shorter amount of time on the days after a poor night’s sleep.

In other words, sleeping badly tended to shorten the next day’s workout, while a full-length exercise session did not, in most cases, produce more and better sleep that night.

How Sleep Helps Brain Learn Motor Task

We have figured out that sleep is conducive to memory of waking status. When it comes to learning tasks, sleep also helps the brain consolidate what we’ve learned. However, it is not clear that what goes on in the brain to make that happen for different kinds of learned tasks. A new study shows the brainwave frequencies and brain region associated with sleep-enhanced learning of a sequential finger tapping task similar to typing, or playing piano.

In a sleep lab on Brown's campus researchers use now using caps of EEG sensors in studies of how the brain works to consolidate learning visual tasks. Here graduate student Aaron Berard models the cap.Specifically, the results of complex experiments performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and then analyzed at Brown show that the improved speed and accuracy volunteers showed on the task after a few hours sleep was significantly associated with changes in fast-sigma and delta brainwave oscillations in their supplementary motor area (SMA), a region on the top-middle of the brain. These specific brainwave changes in the SMA occurred during a particular phase of sleep known as "slow-wave" sleep.

Scientists have shown that sleep improves many kinds of learning, including the kind of sequential finger-tapping motor tasks addressed in the study, but they haven't been sure about why or how. It's an intensive activity for the brain to consolidate learning and so the brain may benefit from sleep perhaps because more energy is available or because distractions and new inputs are fewer, said study corresponding author Yuka Sasaki, a research associate professor in Brown's Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences.

"Sleep is not just a waste of time," Sasaki said.

The extent of reorganization that the brain accomplishes during sleep is suggested by the distinct roles the two brainwave oscillations appear to play. The authors wrote that the delta oscillations appeared to govern the changes in the SMA's connectivity with other areas of the cortex, while the fast-sigma oscillations appeared to pertain to changes within the SMA itself.

Quantum Teleportation: Transfer of Flying Quantum Bits at the Touch of a Button

Many years ago attempts were made by scientists to teleport photons or other light particles. Because experiments failed to achieve communication effect, it is believed that the transportation of photonic quantum bits is not compatible with convention techniques. Recently researchers in Tokyo and Mainz have managed to teleport photonic qubits with extreme reliability.

"Discrete digital optical quantum information can now be transmitted continuously -- at the touch of a button, if you will," explained Professor Peter van Loock of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). As a theoretical physicist, van Loock advised the experimental physicists in the research team headed by Professor Akira Furusawa of the University of Tokyo on how they could most efficiently perform the teleportation experiment to ultimately verify the success of quantum teleportation. Their findings have now been published in the journal Nature.

Quantum teleportation involves the transfer of arbitrary quantum states from a sender, dubbed Alice, to a spatially distant receiver, named Bob. This requires that Alice and Bob initially share an entangled quantum state across the space in question, e.g., in the form of entangled photons. Quantum teleportation is of fundamental importance to the processing of quantum information (quantum computing) and quantum communication. Photons are especially valued as ideal information carriers for quantum communication since they can be used to transmit signals at the speed of light. A photon can represent a quantum bit or qubit analogous to a binary digit (bit) in standard classical information processing. Such photons are known as 'flying quantum bits'.

The first attempts to teleport single photons or light particles were made by the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger. Various other related experiments have been performed in the meantime. However, teleportation of photonic quantum bits using conventional methods proved to have its limitations because of experimental deficiencies and difficulties with fundamental principles.

What makes the experiment in Tokyo so different is the use of a hybrid technique. With its help, a completely deterministic and highly reliable quantum teleportation of photonic qubits has been achieved. The accuracy of the transfer was 79 to 82 percent for four different qubits. In addition, the qubits were teleported much more efficiently than in previous experiments, even at a low degree of entanglement.

Entanglement 'on demand' using squeezed light

The concept of entanglement was first formulated by Erwin Schrödinger and involves a situation in which two quantum systems, such as two light particles for example, are in a joint state, so that their behavior is mutually dependent to a greater extent than is normally (classically) possible. In the Tokyo experiment, continuous entanglement was achieved by means of entangling many photons with many other photons. This meant that the complete amplitudes and phases of two light fields were quantum correlated. Previous experiments only had a single photon entangled with another single photon -- a less efficient solution.

"The entanglement of photons functioned very well in the Tokyo experiment -- practically at the press of a button, as soon as the laser was switched on," said van Loock, Professor for Theory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at Mainz University. This continuous entanglement was accomplished with the aid of so-called 'squeezed light', which takes the form of an ellipse in the phase space of the light field. Once entanglement has been achieved, a third light field can be attached to the transmitter. From there, in principle, any state and any number of states can be transmitted to the receiver. "In our experiment, there were precisely four sufficiently representative test states that were transferred from Alice to Bob using entanglement. Thanks to continuous entanglement, it was possible to transmit the photonic qubits in a deterministic fashion to Bob, in other words, in each run," added van Loock.

Earlier attempts to achieve optical teleportation were performed differently and, before now, the concepts used have proved to be incompatible. Although in theory it had already been assumed that the two different strategies, from the discrete and the continuous world, needed to be combined, it represents a technological breakthrough that this has actually now been experimentally demonstrated with the help of the hybrid technique. "The two separate worlds, the discrete and the continuous, are starting to converge," concluded van Loock.

Vitamin D supplementation does not seem to reduce blood pressure in patients with hypertension

Mikes D. Witham, Ph.D., of the university of Dundee, Scotland, United kingdom, and colleagues write a paper on vascular health in older patients with isolated systolic hypertension which is a common type of high blood pressure. In the paper observations show that Vitamin D supplementation does not appear to improve blood pressure or become the marker which indicate blood health.

Vitamin D supplementation does not appear to improve blood pressure or markers of vascular health in older patients with isolated systolic hypertension (a common type of high blood pressure), according to a study by Miles D. Witham, Ph.D., of the University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

A total of 159 patients (average age 77 years) with isolated systolic hypertension participated in the randomized clinical trial. Patients were randomly assigned to either the vitamin D group or the matching placebo group, and received supplementation every three months for one year. Researchers measured difference in office blood pressure, 24-hour blood pressure, arterial stiffness, endothelial function, cholesterol level, insulin resistance, and b-type natriuretic peptide level during the 12 month study period.

No significant treatment effect was seen for average office blood pressure, and no significant treatment effect was evident for any of the secondary outcomes (24-hour blood pressure, arterial stiffness, endothelial function, cholesterol level, glucose level, and walking distance), according to study results.

"It is still possible, however, that vitamin D supplementation could have beneficial effects on cardiovascular health via non-blood pressure effects, and ongoing large randomized trials are due to report on this in the next few years," the study concludes.

Electrical Signatures of Consciousness in the Dying Brain

The “near-death experience” reported by cardiac arrest survivors worldwide whose visions and perceptions are realer than real in the “near-death experience” may be grounded in science, according to research at the University of Michigan Health System.

Whether and how the dying brain is capable of generating conscious activity has been vigorously debated.

But in this week's PNAS Early Edition, a U-M study shows shortly after clinical death, in which the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain, rats display brain activity patterns characteristic of conscious perception.

"This study, performed in animals, is the first dealing with what happens to the neurophysiological state of the dying brain," says lead study author Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., associate professor of molecular and integrative physiology and associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

"It will form the foundation for future human studies investigating mental experiences occurring in the dying brain, including seeing light during cardiac arrest," she says.

Approximately 20 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report having had a near-death experience during clinical death. These visions and perceptions have been called "realer than real," according to previous research, but it remains unclear whether the brain is capable of such activity after cardiac arrest.

"We reasoned that if near-death experience stems from brain activity, neural correlates of consciousness should be identifiable in humans or animals even after the cessation of cerebral blood flow," she says.

Researchers analyzed the recordings of brain activity called electroencephalograms (EEGs) from nine anesthetized rats undergoing experimentally induced cardiac arrest.

Within the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, all of the rats displayed a widespread, transient surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with a highly aroused brain.

Furthermore, the authors observed nearly identical patterns in the dying brains of rats undergoing asphyxiation.

"The prediction that we would find some signs of conscious activity in the brain during cardiac arrest was confirmed with the data," says Borjigin, who conceived the idea for the project in 2007 with study co-author neurologist Michael M. Wang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology and associate professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the U-M.

"But, we were surprised by the high levels of activity," adds study senior author anesthesiologist George Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology and neurosurgery at the U-M. " In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage of clinical death.­­­"

The brain is assumed to be inactive during cardiac arrest. However the neurophysiological state of the brain immediately following cardiac arrest had not been systemically investigated until now.

The current study resulted from collaboration between the labs of Borjigin and Mashour, with U-M physicist UnCheol Lee, Ph.D., playing a critical role in analysis.

"This study tells us that reduction of oxygen or both oxygen and glucose during cardiac arrest can stimulate brain activity that is characteristic of conscious processing," says Borjigin. "It also provides the first scientific framework for the near-death experiences reported by many cardiac arrest survivors."

Loan debt shapes college lifestyle, which college students experience

Study shows that students with experiences of being debt-free are likely to live the “play hard” lifestyle, while students who are or were in debt may be not so much engaged in academic-trumping activities during college years.

Sociologist Daniel Rudel said this is one of the first studies to examine how student loan debt affects students' college experiences. He and colleague Natasha Yurk, also a graduate student in the Department of Sociology in IU Bloomington's College of Arts and Sciences, found "real and significant differences in experiences," with students falling fairly easily into one of three categories.

• Play hard.

Students without loan debt appeared most likely to live a lifestyle characterized by relatively little time studying but also characterized by a rich social life. Students tended to be much more involved in extracurricular activities and spent more time partying, developing relationships and networks that could last long after college.

• Disengaged students.

Some students with debt appeared to see it as a liability that kept them from partaking in campus life. They spent relatively little time on campus activities, including studying.

• Serious students.

Some students with debt appeared to accept the challenge and responsibility of the debt. They studied more than the other two categories of students, worked but also participated in extracurricular activities to prepare themselves for a good job after graduation. These students did not party much.

"These patterns could affect the social connections and networking students develop in college, where these relationships can lead to friendships, employment, marriage partners and other benefits," Rudel said.

Rudel and Yurk discussed their study, "Responsibility or Liability? Student Loan Debt and Time Use in College," in New York at 4:30 p.m. Saturday at the American Sociological Association's 108th annual meeting.

The researchers examined data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, housed in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Students interviewed from 1999 to 2003 attended one of 28 selective U.S. institutions: nine liberal arts colleges, 14 private research universities, four public research universities and one historically black college.

Rudel said college and university staff might want to consider whether their programs address challenges students face as they manage their financial obligations. Many people, in general, might not be aware of what college really is like for students with loan debt.

"We aren't saying what college students should or should not be doing," Rudel said. "But the lifestyles of students with debt diverge from the script people have of what college should be like."