Nutrition Review

Falls and balance problems may be early indicators of Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report July 17, 2011, at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Paris.

Patients who use anti-depressants are much more likely to suffer relapses of major depression than those who use no medication at all, concludes a McMaster researcher. In a paper that is likely to ignite new controversy in the hotly debated field of depression and medication, evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews concludes that patients who have used anti-depressant medications can be nearly twice as susceptible to future episodes of major depression.

Engaging in regular physical activity is associated with less decline in cognitive function in older adults, according to two studies published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The articles are being released on July 19 to coincide with the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Paris and will be included in the July 25 print edition.

Diabetes affects 18.2 million people in the United States and is expected to double by the year 2010. Additionally, diabetics who do not have good control over their blood sugar levels are more susceptible to oral health problems than non-diabetics, according to a study that appears in the November/December 2004 issue of General Dentistry, the Academy of General Dentistry's (AGD) clinical, peer-reviewed journal.

Periodontal disease may be an independent predictor of incident Type 2 diabetes, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. While diabetes has long been believed to be a risk factor for periodontal infections, this is the first study exploring whether the reverse might also be true, that is, if periodontal infections can contribute to the development of diabetes.

According to a recent report by Xinhua news agency, the prices of Chinese herbal medicines have gone up sharply across the board in China over recent months. Figures from the China Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) report that 84 percent of 537 types of traditional medicine were subject to a price hike in 2010. The selling price of 96 of them at least doubled.

The FDA is trying to turn a simple notification system for new supplements into a totally arbitrary approval system. Let’s tell the FDA that supplements are not drugs and ask Congress for help! Last week we told you about FDA’s draft guidance on New Dietary Ingredients, which allows FDA to arbitrarily deny the sale of any supplement created (or said to be created) in the past seventeen years!

In a study, Identification of unrecognized diabetes and pre-diabetes in a dental setting, published in the July 2011 issue of the Journal of...

Two years ago, researchers at UCLA found that specific regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger and had more gray matter than the brains of individuals in a control group. This suggested that meditation may indeed be good for all of us since, alas, our brains shrink naturally with age.

Obstructive sleep apnea may cause changes in blood vessel function that reduces blood supply to the heart in people who are otherwise healthy, according...