The decision from the Supreme Court, on the case of a child who sustained a brain injury at birth in 2015, could have significant cost implications for the NHS.
A new study reports a clear association between high sugar drink intake and anxiety symptoms in teenagers.
Researchers from Bournemouth University collaborated on a large review that examined findings from multiple earlier studies exploring the relationship between diet and mental health. By analyzing the combined data, the team looked for patterns that appeared consistently across different groups of young people. The results were published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.
Mental Health Often Overlooked in Diet Research
“With increasing concern about adolescent nutrition, most public health initiatives have emphasized the physical consequences of poor dietary habits, such as obesity and type-2 diabetes,” said Dr. Chloe Casey, Lecturer in Nutrition and co-author of the study. “However, the mental health implications of diet have been underexplored by comparison, particularly for drinks that are energy dense but low in nutrients,” she added.
Anxiety disorders remain one of the most common mental health challenges among young people. In 2023, an estimated one in five children and adolescents were living with a mental health disorder, and anxiety was among the most frequently reported conditions.
Survey Data Links Sugary Beverages to Anxiety Symptoms
The studies included in the review relied on survey data to measure both sugary drink consumption and mental health symptoms. Drinks high in sugar can include fizzy sodas, energy drinks, sweetened juices, squashes, sweetened tea and coffee, and flavored milks.
Across the research analyzed, the findings pointed in the same direction. Higher consumption of sugary beverages was consistently associated with greater reports of anxiety symptoms in adolescents.
Association Does Not Prove Cause
The researchers stress that the evidence does not show sugary drinks directly cause anxiety. Because the review was based on previously conducted studies, it cannot determine cause and effect.
It is possible that teens who already experience anxiety may consume more sugary drinks. Other shared influences, such as family circumstances or sleep disorders, could also contribute to both increased sugar intake and anxiety symptoms.
“Whilst we may not be able to confirm at this stage what the direct cause is, this study has identified an unhealthy connection between consumption of sugary drinks and anxiety disorders in young people,” Dr. Casey said.
“Anxiety disorders in adolescence have risen sharply in recent years so it is important to identify lifestyle habits which can be changed to reduce the risk of this trend continuing,” she concluded.
The study was led by former Bournemouth University PhD student Dr. Karim Khaled, who now works at Lebanese American University, Beirut.
Intermittent fasting does not appear to help overweight or obese adults lose more weight than standard diet advice or even no structured program at all, according to a new Cochrane review. The findings challenge the widespread belief that changing when you eat leads to better weight loss results than traditional approaches.
Obesity remains a major public health concern and is now one of the leading causes of death in high income countries. The World Health Organization reports that adult obesity rates have more than tripled globally since 1975. In 2022, about 2.5 billion adults were overweight, including 890 million who were living with obesity.
At the same time, intermittent fasting has gained enormous popularity. Social media trends, wellness influencers, and claims of fast weight loss and improved metabolism have helped turn fasting into a mainstream strategy.
Review of 22 Clinical Trials Finds No Clear Benefit
To evaluate whether intermittent fasting truly offers an advantage, researchers examined data from 22 randomized clinical trials involving 1,995 adults in North America, Europe, China, Australia, and South America. The studies tested different fasting methods, including alternate-day fasting, periodic fasting, and time-restricted feeding. Most followed participants for up to one year.
When compared with conventional diet advice or no intervention, intermittent fasting did not produce a clinically meaningful difference in weight loss. In practical terms, fasting schedules did not outperform more traditional guidance or doing nothing specific.
Researchers also noted that side effects were not consistently reported across studies, making it difficult to fully assess potential risks. With only 22 trials available, many of them small and uneven in their reporting, the overall evidence base remains limited.
“Intermittent fasting just doesn’t seem to work for overweight or obese adults trying to lose weight,” said Luis Garegnani, lead author of the review from the Universidad Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires Cochrane Associate Centre.
Social Media Hype vs Scientific Evidence
Garegnani cautioned that online enthusiasm may be running ahead of the data. “Intermittent fasting may be a reasonable option for some people, but the current evidence doesn’t justify the enthusiasm we see on social media.”
Another concern is the lack of long term research. Few studies have examined how well intermittent fasting works over extended periods. “Obesity is a chronic condition. Short-term trials make it difficult to guide long-term decision-making for patients and clinicians,” Garegnani added.
Most of the trials included primarily white participants from high income countries. Because obesity is increasing rapidly in low and middle income nations, more research is needed in these populations.
The authors emphasize that the findings may not apply equally to everyone. Results could differ based on sex, age, ethnic background, medical conditions, or existing eating disorders or behaviors.
“With the current evidence available, it’s hard to make a general recommendation,” said Eva Madrid, senior author from Cochrane Evidence Synthesis Unit Iberoamerica. “Doctors will need to take a case-by-case approach when advising an overweight adult on losing weight.”
Almost everyone will watch their hair turn gray as they approach their golden years. For most people, there isn’t much they can do except gray gracefully or pick out a shade of hair dye they like.
Although it’s not as common, others start to go gray much younger, even before they turn 20. When hair turns gray prematurely, the reason isn’t always obvious. Rumors abound that everything from stress to a good scare can turn your hair gray, sometimes instantly.
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We asked four top doctors specializing in hair what causes our locks to turn gray and if there is ever a reason to be concerned. Here’s what they said.
Hair turns gray when it loses a pigment called melanin, Dr. Akhil Wadhera, a dermatologist with Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, explained to HuffPost. Typically, this occurs as part of the normal aging process starting in your mid-30s to early 40s. However, some people turn gray at a relatively young age.
The most common reason for premature graying is genetics, he said. If your parents went gray at a young age, your hair is likely to turn gray earlier, too.
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Nevertheless, some young adults whose parents retained vibrant hair color into old age experience premature graying for various reasons. Some of those, like genetics, are beyond their control. Others are a result of lifestyle choices or environmental factors.
It’s common for people to say they’re under so much stress that they’re going gray. Although most people make these statements in jest, there is some truth behind them.
“Stress can cause premature graying of hair,” Wadhera said. “In fact, there was a study with over 1,000 young Turkish adults that showed that perceived stress scale scores correlated with premature hair graying severity.”
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However, Dr. Ehsan Ali, an internal physician at Beverly Hills Concierge Medicine and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with specialized training in geriatric medicine, emphasizes that acute or chronic stress is required to cause premature graying. “A bad week at work isn’t enough to turn hair gray,” he explained.
That’s because acute stress can trigger a fight-or-flight response, says Dr. Zafer Çetinkaya, head hair transplant surgeon at EsteNove in Istanbul. When this happens, our bodies release stress hormones, including norepinephrine, he said. Norepinephrine can stop the production of the pigment-producing cells that give our hair its color. “Once this ‘reservoir’ of stem cells is empty, the follicle can no longer produce color,” causing hair to gradually turn gray, he explained.
External factors can also cause our hair to turn gray early. “Hair follicles are particularly sensitive to oxidative stressors in the environment such as pollution, ultraviolet light, smoking, hydrogen peroxide and ionizing radiation, all of which can result in premature graying,” Wadhera said.
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The oxidative stress caused by exposure to these elements “disproportionately affects the cells responsible for hair pigment,” explained Dr. Corey Maas, a hair transplant specialist at the Maas Clinic in California. “Over time, this damage reduces the follicle’s ability to maintain consistent color.”
However, these external factors typically play only a small role in the graying process. Moreover, how much the environment affects your hair color depends on several factors that vary widely from person to person, Maas explained. “Graying is the result of a complex interaction between genetics, cumulative exposure, and how well an individual’s body is able to repair and replace damaged processes of youthful pigmentation,” he said. “The environment can nudge the process along,” but when and how quickly depends on the individual, Maas said.
In horror movies, a character sometimes suddenly develops a streak of white hair after a particularly frightening experience. However, off-screen, hair won’t turn gray instantly, no matter how scared we are.
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“The idea of hair turning white overnight from fright is often referred to as Marie Antoinette syndrome,” because the queen’s hair supposedly suddenly turned white before her execution, Çetinkaya said. “In reality, hair that is already outside of the scalp cannot change color” naturally, he said.
Nevertheless, sudden shock or intense fear can cause hair to go gray over time. Extremely stressful situations can trigger a condition called alopecia areata, Çetinkaya said. When this happens, “the immune system selectively attacks pigmented hairs, which causes dark hairs to fall out rapidly,” he explained. When a person with some existing gray hair develops alopecia areata, their gray hairs are left behind as their darker hair sheds. That “creates the appearance of sudden graying,” when what’s really happening is that the loss of darker hair is making the existing gray hair more noticeable, Çetinkaya explained.
Several medical conditions can also contribute to premature graying. “As a specialist, I look for vitamin B12 deficiency, pernicious anemia, and thyroid dysfunction,” Çetinkaya said. “These conditions can disrupt the metabolic environment of the hair follicle,” which can result in hair turning gray prematurely. Rare autoimmune conditions such as vitiligo can also target pigment, causing hair to grow in white, he added.
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According to Wadhera, low levels of vitamin D3 and deficiencies in minerals such as iron and zinc can also cause premature graying.
If you start graying due to age, there is nothing to worry about except deciding whether to accept your gray hair or visit a salon to choose a new color.
However, if you start going gray early, before your mid-30s, you may want to investigate. One or two gray hairs usually aren’t cause for concern, Ali said. However, if you notice a proliferation of grays “very early or very rapidly, this can be a clue to look deeper at nutrition, thyroid function, autoimmune issues or lifestyle stressors,” he explained. Your primary care physician can help if you are concerned.
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Nevertheless, Ali stresses that going gray isn’t usually a medical or personal failure. Even though there is “a lot of unnecessary fear and marketing around this topic,” going gray is “usually a normal, genetically programmed process,” he said.
The patient was the victim of a “life-changing error” when a drill slipped during surgery.
Today, oxygen is essential to life and constantly present in the air we breathe. But for most of Earth’s early history, that was not true. Oxygen did not become a stable part of the atmosphere until about 2.3 billion years ago, during a transformative period known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). That shift permanently altered the planet and paved the way for oxygen breathing organisms to evolve and thrive.
Now, researchers at MIT report evidence that some forms of life may have learned to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before the GOE. Their findings could represent some of the earliest signs of aerobic respiration on Earth.
In research published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, MIT geobiologists investigated the origins of a crucial enzyme that allows organisms to consume oxygen. This enzyme is present in most aerobic, oxygen breathing life today. The team determined that it first evolved during the Mesoarchean, a geological era that occurred hundreds of millions of years before the Great Oxidation Event.
Their results may help answer a long standing mystery in Earth’s history. If oxygen producing microbes appeared so early, why did it take so long for oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere?
Cyanobacteria and Early Oxygen Production
The first known oxygen producers were cyanobacteria. These microbes developed the ability to harness sunlight and water through photosynthesis, releasing oxygen as a byproduct. Scientists estimate that cyanobacteria emerged around 2.9 billion years ago. That means they were likely generating oxygen for hundreds of millions of years before the Great Oxidation Event.
So what happened to all that early oxygen?
Researchers have long suspected that chemical reactions with rocks removed much of it from the environment. The new MIT study suggests living organisms may also have been consuming it.
The team found evidence that certain microbes evolved the oxygen using enzyme long before the GOE. Organisms living near cyanobacteria could have used this enzyme to rapidly consume small amounts of oxygen as it was produced. If so, early life may have slowed the buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
“This does dramatically change the story of aerobic respiration,” says study co-author Fatima Husain, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “Our study adds to this very recently emerging story that life may have used oxygen much earlier than previously thought. It shows us how incredibly innovative life is at all periods in Earth’s history.”
Other co-authors include Gregory Fournier, associate professor of geobiology at MIT, along with Haitao Shang and Stilianos Louca of the University of Oregon.
Tracing the Origins of Aerobic Respiration
This work builds on years of research at MIT aimed at reconstructing the history of oxygen on Earth. Previous studies helped establish that cyanobacteria began producing oxygen around 2.9 billion years ago, while oxygen did not permanently accumulate in the atmosphere until roughly 2.33 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event.
For Husain and her colleagues, that long gap raised an important question.
“We know that the microorganisms that produce oxygen were around well before the Great Oxidation Event,” Husain says. “So it was natural to ask, was there any life around at that time that could have been capable of using that oxygen for aerobic respiration?”
If some organisms were already using oxygen, even in small amounts, they might have helped keep atmospheric levels low for a significant stretch of time.
To explore this idea, the researchers focused on heme copper oxygen reductases. These enzymes are essential for aerobic respiration because they convert oxygen into water. They are found in most oxygen breathing organisms today, from bacteria to humans.
“We targeted the core of this enzyme for our analyses because that’s where the reaction with oxygen is actually taking place,” Husain explains.
Mapping Enzymes on the Tree of Life
The team set out to determine when this enzyme first appeared. They identified its genetic sequence and then searched massive genome databases containing millions of species to find matching sequences.
“The hardest part of this work was that we had too much data,” Fournier says. “This enzyme is just everywhere and is present in most modern living organism. So we had to sample and filter the data down to a dataset that was representative of the diversity of modern life and also small enough to do computation with, which is not trivial.”
After narrowing the data to several thousand species, the researchers placed the enzyme sequences onto an evolutionary tree of life. This allowed them to estimate when different branches emerged.
When fossil evidence existed for a particular organism, the scientists used its estimated age to anchor that branch of the tree. By applying multiple fossil based time points, they refined their estimates for when the enzyme evolved.
Their analysis traced the enzyme back to the Mesoarchean, which spanned from 3.2 to 2.8 billion years ago. The researchers believe this is when the enzyme, and the ability to use oxygen, first arose. That timeframe predates the Great Oxidation Event by several hundred million years.
The findings suggest that soon after cyanobacteria began producing oxygen, other organisms evolved the machinery to consume it. Microbes living near cyanobacteria could have quickly absorbed the oxygen being released. In doing so, these early aerobic organisms may have helped prevent oxygen from accumulating in the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
“Considered all together, MIT research has filled in the gaps in our knowledge of how Earth’s oxygenation proceeded,” Husain says. “The puzzle pieces are fitting together and really underscore how life was able to diversify and live in this new, oxygenated world.”
This research was supported, in part, by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement Scialog program.
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