Exercise may be the stepping stone to fewer gallbladder surgeries. Women exercising just 30 minutes a day five times a week cut their risk by 20 percent, while physically active middle-aged men sliced their risk by almost 50 percent. Results of the ongoing Nurses' Health Study conducted at Harvard were first published in the New England Journal of Medicine . A recent study at the University of Manitoba, Canada, showed that damaged livers in rats were repaired faster with light alcohol consumption than with no alcohol consumption, while heavy alcohol consumption was bad news. The trial studied the effect of light, moderate and heavy doses of alcohol in rats with partially removed livers.
Researchers believe that light consumption of ethanol helps production of a repair-promoting gene.
Animals receiving heavy doses of alcohol showed retardation of hepatic repair and those given moderate amounts of alcohol showed no extraordinary improvement reports Family Practice News. It's all in the family. A recent study indicates that persons from larger families are at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. According to statistics, the risk that an individual will have the disease increases by 8 percent for each additional sibling in a family and is 39 percent greater for those with five or more siblings than in those with less than five siblings. The report, first published in Neurology , suggests that the areas of the brain affected by the disease correspond with those that take the greatest amount of time to mature during child and teen years, and that's why childhood factors play a role in development of the disease.