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Health24.com | ‘Meaningful’ activities may mean healthier old age

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Older adults who find meaning in their daily activities may remain in better health as they age, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that when middle-aged and older adults felt their days held meaningful activities, they tended to report better health and well-being four years later.

A two-way relationship

Not only were they less likely to develop physical health conditions or chronic pain than other folks, they were also more physically active and less likely to be depressed.

The results do not prove that cultivating meaningful activities will make a person healthier, said lead researcher Andrew Steptoe, a professor at University College London, in England.

“But,” he said, “we think there is a two-way relationship between our experiences and life seeming worthwhile. People who are socially engaged and healthy may rate their activities as more meaningful, while at the same time this sense of meaning may contribute to more engagement, better mental health, less loneliness and so on.”

The bottom line, added Steptoe, is that “it seems sensible to think about how to add worthwhile activities to our lives”.

And what, exactly, is the definition of “worthwhile”? That’s in the eye of the beholder, he said.

The participants in his study were simply asked to rate, on a scale of one to 10, the extent to which they felt their daily activities were worthwhile.

Objective health tests

“The things that bring meaning to people’s lives are hugely variable,” Steptoe said. “It does not have to be a big project. For some people, things like hiking in the countryside, singing in a local choir, or looking after grandchildren will provide a strong sense of living a worthwhile life.”

The findings were published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They’re based on about 7 300 adults, aged 50 to 90, in the United Kingdom.

The study participants answered surveys on their health and lifestyle, and underwent objective health tests that measured their cholesterol levels, walking speed and hand strength, among other things.

Overall, the more meaning people saw in their lives, the better their physical and mental health at the outset, and four years later. The odds of developing a new disease, depression, chronic pain or a disability dipped as “worthwhile” ratings rose, the researchers found.

Of course, people who are in good health, or have high incomes or more education, may be more likely to see their daily activities as worthwhile. But Steptoe said his team factored in those other key variables – and there was still a connection between viewing life as meaningful and having better health four years later.

Plus, he noted, people with high ratings on the “worthwhile” scale were more likely to make positive lifestyle changes over those four years – such as starting an exercise routine or eating more fruits and vegetables.

‘Get off the couch’

James Maddux is a senior scholar with the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being, at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Maddux said he was not surprised by the findings, since they support connections seen in other studies: The more meaning people see in their lives, the healthier they tend to be.

Why would that be? Personality enters the picture here, he believes.

People who “naturally see the good, even in little day-to-day things”, are likely to take steps that support their physical and mental well-being – from exercise to eating well to spending quality time with family and friends, Maddux said.

But even though personality has a large genetic component, that doesn’t mean people with a less-sunny disposition are doomed. If you are grumping on the couch, “the first step is to get off the couch”, he said.

Think about what things in life are truly important to you, Maddux suggested whether it’s family, friends, a creative activity, volunteering or getting involved in a political issue. And then choose those things over Netflix marathons.

“Try to spend time, every day, doing something that reflects who you are,” Maddux said.

Image credit: iStock

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Health24.com | New implant to calm an overactive bladder

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An overactive bladder is a common urinary condition which causes a sudden urge to urinate. It may be difficult to control the urge, and this may lead to involuntary urination, called urge incontinence.

Urge incontinence may occur in anyone at any age, but is more common in women and the elderly.

Although incontinence is not detrimental to the physical well-being of the patient, it can have far-reaching effects on their social, sexual, recreational and working lives and cause a dip in self-confidence and body-image. It is therefore important that urge incontinence be managed. 

An implant may be the answer

New technology may offer a form of treatment. A new report by researchers, published online in the journal Nature, focuses on a soft, wireless implant that can help control the frequent urge to urinate.

This implant makes use of optogenetics, a method to control cells with light. The implant regulates the nerve cells which stop the bladder from overfilling by means of tiny light-emitting valves. The research was conducted on rats with medically induced overactive bladders.

Although optogenetics has previously been implemented to manipulate brain cells, research is increasingly focusing on investigating how it can be used to manipulate cells throughout the entire body.

More targeted than previous treatment

According to Bozhi Tian, a materials scientist at the University of Chicago, there is currently a treatment that uses electric currents to regulate the nerve cells in the bladder. However, this is not ideal, as the electric currents target a wide area of nerve cells and affect surrounding organs as well.

The new implant focuses on one specific area and does not affect surrounding nerves. It also only targets the specific area when necessary, according to Science News. The programme detects the urinary urge of the user, indicating to the implant when to turn on the tiny light frequencies. This then zaps the cells, preventing them from sending those messages to the brain.

This study is described as effective for short-term use, but more research is needed to see how the body responds to the implant over a longer period of time.

Other ways to manage an overactive bladder

While the implant is undergoing research and is not yet ready to be implemented, there are other methods to manage an overactive bladder you can use right now. These include:

  • Pelvic floor exercises
  • Bladder training
  • A treatment called “biofeedback”, where electrodes are placed on the abdomen and anal areas
  • Medication like imipramine or oxybutynin

Image credit: iStock 

Compiled by Marelize Wilke

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Dementia risk factors not known by half of population

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Risk factors for dementia include heavy drinking, smoking, genetics and high blood pressure.

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Your Best Work

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Do you have a job or career path that supports you in doing the best work of your life?

If I were to ask this of various people, some would laugh at the ridiculousness of this question because it’s a standard they’ve never come close to experiencing, so a jaded reply is all they can muster. If I ask certain friends who are very fulfilled by their work, their answers would be something like, “Of course… why would I tolerate any less?”

Consider that if you’re not aligned with this standard of doing your best work, then you’re currently tolerating a lesser standard. For some reason you’re currently okay with not doing your best work. Maybe that doesn’t sit well with you, but you’re still tolerating it.

Why is that? What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life this month? Why not take on a project that requires the very best you have to offer?

If you do less than your best, you know that you aren’t playing the game of life very well, and that awareness haunts you, and it drags down your motivation and self-esteem.

You’ll likely avoid connecting with more ambitious people as well since you’ll probably feel uncomfortable being reminded that your standards are lower than they could be. If you stick with less ambitious friends, however, you’ll only reinforce the lower standards that keep you stuck. Low standards tend to encourage social cocooning and hiding.

Motivation for High Standards

Where does the motivation come from to maintain high standards then?

Maintaining high standards just for our own personal gratification is tough. It’s also tough to maintain false standards for other people, like pretending to care about issues that don’t align with our values. The sweet spot of motivation is when we can satisfy our most important values and also connect with people who truly care about those values too. This encourages us to maintain high standards because we’re immersed in a circle of caring. We care, and the people around us care.

So there are two parts to a pattern of highly engaged work that brings out your best. First, your work needs to align with your values. Choose projects that matter to you personally, so you’ll care about doing quality work. Second, you need people who will deeply appreciate your work. These people could consist of co-workers, clients, customers, family, or friends, as long as they appreciate and support you in doing your best work.

What if you can’t choose your own projects? Perhaps you’ve temporarily granted someone else the authority to assign work to you, but you retain the option to reclaim that authority whenever you want. You’re not powerless. You can renegotiate the arrangement to get your work aligned with what you really care about. Or you can switch to different work where you can find that alignment, which may involve switching jobs, teams, or companies.

If your boss doesn’t support you in doing your best work, admit that you hired a bad boss, and let that person go. A key reason for hiring a boss is to serve you in doing your best work, so don’t tolerate a boss who falls below this standard. At least talk to your boss, raise a discussion about how to do your very best work, and offer suggestions and guidance for how to make this a reality. Be committed to getting what you need. If your boss isn’t (1) motivated and (2) capable to help you do your best work, that boss needs to go. And if you choose to remain beyond that realization, you can’t possibly continue to blame your boss since you hired that person to begin with, and you can un-hire that person when you’re ready to commit yourself to real professional growth. People of high standards don’t tolerate low performing bosses. If you tolerate a low performing boss, you proclaim to all around you that you’re a low standards person.

What if you got yourself trapped in a situation where no aligned work is possible? Then chalk that up as a bad decision on your part, and lean into the challenging process of correcting that mistake. This is a common mistake indeed, often accompanied by difficult lessons, and it usually takes serious effort to unwind it. But you can unwind it, and it’s wise to do so. The worst thing you can do is keep investing in a misaligned path. Shifting directions will bring relief, even when you must take a step back financially and/or professionally to get unstuck. There’s no shame in taking a step back to adjust course; this is so much better than investing another year being loyal to low standards.

Quite often you won’t even be able to see an aligned path while you remain stuck pursuing a misaligned one. There are many reasons for that. One of the most significant reasons is that people who are doing aligned work won’t normally be interested in making offers to those who maintain lower standards. When you do misaligned work, what you may not realize is that you’re advertising to everyone else that you’re a low standards type of person, and high standards people are likely to avoid connecting with you. In other words, the cool people won’t invite you to be on their teams because you’re making yourself look like a bad investment.

Misaligned work drags down your energy, and people pick up on this. In fact it’s pretty obvious if you shift between circles of high standards and low standards people. People who are doing their best work tend to broadcast certain frequencies of emotional energy and enthusiasm. Those who aren’t aligned with such standards tend to broadcast some restlessness or discomfort with their work instead, often without being consciously aware of it.

You almost always have to say a genuine no to the misaligned path before life will show you what the aligned path looks like. Quit the old first. Then work on building the new. I know that seems scary sometimes, but it works. You’ll be surprised at how quickly your energy and self-esteem can pop back up once you leave misaligned work behind. Life tends to respect those who commit to keeping their work standards high.

Aligned Appreciation

It would be nice if this alone were enough, but it isn’t. The next major point of stuckness is when you gain the freedom to do aligned work but still don’t feel the drive and motivation to do your very best. This is especially common among people who quit unfulfilling jobs to do something independent. After the newness of the transition wears off, they’re struggling to be productive.

The issue here is that even though the work itself may feel aligned, there may not be a strong enough connection to the people who will most appreciate it.

Initially you may try sharing value with the people that are most accessible, but you’ll usually get a ho-hum response in return. Selling can feel especially difficult when you’re trying to sell to people who are only semi-aligned with what you’re doing, even if many of those people are generally supportive of you (like old friends and family).

This is a good time to pause and ask questions like these:

  • If I do my very best work, which people would deeply appreciate and value it?
  • If I do my very best work, which people will only semi-appreciate it?
  • How can I scare off the second group, so I can only deal with the first group?

I imagine that the first question sits well with you, but the third question probably seems a bit harsh. Why should you scare off people who will semi-appreciate your work? Can’t you serve them too? Isn’t it better to serve more people, even if some aren’t receiving 100% of the value?

I understand this type of reasoning. It seems reasonable to want to serve as many people as you can. Of course some people will deeply appreciate your work, and some will only semi-appreciate it. But there’s a serious risk if you try to serve both groups equally, and that risk is that your standards will drift downwards.

The people who semi-appreciate your work will likely to be the larger group. You’ll get more feedback from them over time than you will from the most aligned people. They’ll influence your standards more than any other group if you let them. This is true of semi-appreciative bosses, teams, friends, relatives, co-workers, customers, clients, etc. Semi-appreciative matches are more common than deeply appreciative ones.

Semi-appreciative ultimately means misaligned though, but the misalignments won’t all be in the same direction. In order to improve at serving the semi-appreciative people, you’ll have to make concessions in opposing directions. You’ll always be trying to balance degrading your service to some of them with upgrading your service to others. The realization that it’s impossible to really please this group will degrade your own alignment with your work. You can’t powerfully serve the semi-appreciative group and still do your best work. By definition if you do your best work, the semi-appreciative will only semi-appreciate it. Usually this leads to blocks like procrastination and perfectionism.

Being semi-appreciated is only semi-satisfying. If you try to achieve more satisfaction or appreciation from serving this group, you’ll have to do work that feels less aligned, but that won’t satisfy you internally. There’s no way to win with this approach. At best you’ll have to disconnect from caring about serving these people and just do your own thing regardless of how they feel. But wouldn’t it be better if you could have both: inner alignment with your values and deep appreciation from the people you serve?

That’s possible, but in order to get there, you’ll want to focus on serving the most aligned people. When you do your best work, those people are delighted. However, you’ll get more feedback from the semi-appreciative, and they won’t be fully pleased with your best work, so they’ll suggest lots of conflicting changes in different directions. They’ll invite you to become someone you’d rather not become. And you’ll be tempted to serve them because there are more of them, and their feedback is the most frequent. If you prioritize numbers over alignment, you’ll automatically drift away from doing your best work. How many times have we seen this pattern play out in creative fields?

Instead of trying to serve the semi-appreciative outright, it’s easier and more fulfilling in the long run if you make it clear that you’re not going to adapt to serving them. This may seem like a bad idea at first, but the positive side effect is that when you demonstrate that you’re not aligned with serving the semi-appreciative, you’ll demonstrate that you’re an even better match for the deeply appreciative.

By making a bigger commitment to doing your best work, you may repel some semi-appreciative folks, but you’ll become that much more attractive to the deeply appreciative. This will make it easier for the most aligned people to recognize you as someone rare and special. It will help them feel more excited about investing in a long-term professional relationship with you. Quality invitations and opportunities will flow through them. You’ll also see more referrals from these deeply appreciative people.

Over time this will change the flavor of your life and work. The semi-appreciative may still engage with you, but they won’t be as front and center as before. Their presence will tend to recede into the background, crowded out by lots of highly engaged and deeply appreciative people. You won’t feel motivated to connect as much with the semi-appreciative when your life is rich in people who deeply appreciate your work. Most of your creative energy will flow into serving the deeply appreciative.

You won’t necessarily need a huge volume of deeply appreciative people, although this depends on what kind of work you do. Even if you only have a few people who deeply appreciate your best work, like a few co-workers or team members, that can make all the difference in the world. How many people would you really need to sustain yourself professionally?

Maybe you could even have a great career serving just one person – if it was the right person who had the motivation and the means to fully support you professionally. If you only served one person on earth in the most powerful and aligned way you could, who would that person be? If you can gain some clarity on that answer, it may help you identify a larger group of people who’d deeply appreciate your work as well.

All else being equal, would you rather serve the people who will deeply appreciate your work, or would you rather serve those who won’t? Do you really think you’ll do the best work of your life without the flow of that appreciation? If so, how’s that mindset working for you so far?

Saying No Before Finding the Yes

How do you reach the point of aligning your work with your values and serving the most appreciative people? Usually this involves saying no to the misaligned and the semi-appreciative. Stop capitulating to misaligned invitations. Stop trying so hard to please and satisfy the semi-appreciative.

If you have an offer to do something that won’t bring out your very best work, decline that offer. But also learn from that offer. What was misaligned about it? What would a better offer look like?

Tolerating lower standards isn’t a path to higher standards. So think about becoming less tolerant of the misaligned. This will reclaim some wasted energy that you can reinvest in a more aligned path. A common complaint from those who are doing misaligned work is that they don’t have the time and energy to pursue anything better. Of course they don’t – their time and energy is being drained away. It’s wise to plug that drain first, and then the energy and motivation can start to rise.

There are consequences when you shift directions, but the consequences of staying stuck are generally much worse. You may have some bills that go unpaid for a while, which is really no big deal in the grand scheme of life. A difficult transition is still a transition. What matters is simply that you make it happen. It doesn’t have to be pretty.

I’m not suggesting that you adopt a “screw the world for not appreciating me” attitude and just do your own thing regardless of what people think. We live in a social world, and we depend on each other. I invite you to engage with the world, not to retreat from it. No one engages with everyone on earth; we all engage with subsets of humanity. Which subset would most appreciate the work you could do? Which subset would you be delighted to serve?

If you find a subset of humanity that deeply appreciates your best work, that’s a good arrangement for you and for the people you serve. But it’s also good for the semi-appreciative and others who may seem less aligned with your work. By setting a high standard for serving the most aligned and focusing on them first and foremost, you’ll still serve many of the semi-aligned anyway. Moreover, you’ll be setting a positive example that will encourage others to raise their standards as well. This is generally good for all of us. We’ll all benefit from seeing more people doing their best work in the world, even if their specific work doesn’t inspire us personally.

Have you ever felt elevated and inspired by a world class performer in a different field than you’d ever pursue? Can you still appreciate and respect when someone does their best work, even if it doesn’t completely align with your values and preferences? If you follow the path of doing your own best work, you’ll elevate and inspire many more people along the way, including people in different fields. But if you hold back and tolerate misalignment instead, you may long regret that you missed out on a deeper level of fulfillment, despite many invitations from life to play in a bigger game. In the long run, the difficult alignment work is worth the effort, especially when you consider the types of ripples you’ll create either way.

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One step closer to growing made-to-order human kidneys

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In a study with significant implications for human organ transplantation, researchers have successfully grown functional mouse kidneys inside rats from just a few donor stem cells.

The results of the study, led by researchers from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature Communications.

For patients with end-stage renal disease, a kidney transplant is the only hope for regaining quality of life. Yet many of these patients will never undergo transplant surgery thanks to a chronic shortage of donor kidneys. With 95,000 patients on the waiting list for a donor kidney in the United States alone, demand far outstrips supply.

But researchers have been working on ways to grow healthy organs outside the human body. One such method, called blastocyst complementation, has already produced promising results. Researchers take blastocysts, the clusters of cells formed several days after egg fertilization, from mutant animals missing specific organs and inject them with stem cells from a normal donor, not necessarily of the same species. The stem cells then differentiate to form the entire missing organ in the resulting animal. The new organ retains the characteristics of the original stem cell donor, and can thus potentially be used in transplantation therapy.

“We previously used blastocyst complementation to generate rat pancreas in apancreatic mutant mice,” explains lead author of the new study Teppei Goto. “We therefore decided to investigate whether the method could be used to generate functional kidneys, which would have much greater application in regenerative medicine owing to the high donor demand.”

Initial attempts by the researchers to grow rat kidneys in mice proved unsuccessful, as rat stem cells did not readily differentiate into the two main types of cells needed for kidney formation. However, when the reverse scenario was attempted, mouse stem cells efficiently differentiated inside rat blastocysts, forming the basic structures of a kidney.

After being implanted into pseudo-pregnant rats, the complemented blastocysts matured into normal fetuses. Remarkably, more than two thirds of the resulting rat neonates contained a pair of kidneys derived from the mouse stem cells. Further screening showed that all of the kidneys were structurally intact, and at least half could potentially produce urine.

“Our findings confirm that interspecific blastocyst complementation is a viable method for kidney generation,” says study corresponding author Masumi Hirabayashi. “In the future, this approach could be used to generate human stem cell-derived organs in livestock, potentially extending the lifespan and improving the quality of life of millions of people worldwide.”

Summary: The chronic global shortage of donor kidneys leaves many end-stage renal disease patients reliant on continued dialysis treatment. To address the donor kidney shortage, a team led by researchers at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan attempted to grow mouse kidneys inside rats using transplanted stem cells. The resulting kidneys appeared to be functional, providing proof-of-concept validation that this approach could be used to generate human kidneys inside livestock.

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Materials provided by National Institutes of Natural Sciences. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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The first dexterous and sentient hand prosthesis has been successfully implanted

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A female Swedish patient with hand amputation has become the first recipient of an osseo-neuromuscular implant to control a dexterous hand prosthesis. In a pioneering surgery, titanium implants were placed in the two forearm bones (radius and ulnar), from which electrodes to nerves and muscle were extended to extract signals to control a robotic hand and to provide tactile sensations. This makes it the first clinically viable, dexterous and sentient prosthetic hand usable in real life. The breakthrough is part of the European project DeTOP.

The new implant technology was developed in Sweden by a team lead by Dr. Max Ortiz Catalan at Integrum AB — the company behind the first bone-anchored limb prosthesis using osseointegration — and Chalmers University of Technology. This first-of-its-kind surgery, led by Prof. Rickard Brånemark and Dr. Paolo Sassu, took place at Sahlgrenska University Hospital as part of a larger project funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 called DeTOP (GA #687905).

The DeTOP project is coordinated by Prof. Christian Cipriani at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and also includes Prensilia, the University of Gothenburg, Lund University, University of Essex, the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, INAIL Prosthetic Center, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, and the Instituto Ortopedico Rizzoli.

Conventional prosthetic hands rely on electrodes placed over the skin to extract control signals from the underlying stump muscles. These superficial electrodes deliver limited and unreliable signals that only allow control of a couple of gross movements (opening and closing the hand). Richer and more reliable information can be obtained by implanting electrodes in all remaining muscle in the stump instead. Sixteen electrodes were implanted in this first patient in order to achieve more dexterous control of a novel prosthetic hand developed in Italy by the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Prensilia.

Current prosthetic hands have also limited sensory feedback. They do not provide tactile or kinesthetic sensation, so the user can only rely on vision while using the prosthesis. Users cannot tell how strongly an object is grasped, or even when contact has been made. By implanting electrodes in the nerves that used to be connected to the lost biological sensors of the hand, researchers can electrically stimulate these nerves in a similar manner as information conveyed by the biological hand. This results in the patient perceiving sensations originating in the new prosthetic hand, as it is equipped with sensors that drive the stimulation of the nerve to deliver such sensations.

One of the most important aspects of this work is that this is the first technology usable in daily life. This means it is not limited to a research laboratory. The Swedish group — Integrum AB and Chalmers University of Technology — have previously demonstrated that control of a sentient prosthesis in daily life was possible in above-elbow amputees using similar technology. This was not possible in below-elbow amputees where there are two smaller bones rather than a single larger one as in the upper arm. This posed several challenges on the development of the implant system. On the other hand, it also presents an opportunity to achieve a more dexterous control of an artificial replacement. This is because many more muscles are available to extract neural commands in below-elbow amputations.

Bones weaken if they are not used (loaded), as commonly happen after amputation. The patient is following a rehabilitation program to regain the strength in her forearm bones to be able to fully load the prosthetic hand. In parallel, she is also relearning how to control her missing hand using virtual reality, and in few weeks, she will be using a prosthetic hand with increasing function and sensations in her daily life. Two more patients will be implanted with this new generation of prosthetic hands in the upcoming months, in Italy and Sweden.

“Several advanced prosthetic technologies have been reported in the last decade, but unfortunately they have remained as research concepts used only for short periods of time in controlled environments” says Dr. Ortiz Catalan, Assoc. Prof. at Chalmers University of the Technology and head of the Biomechatronics and Neurorehabilitation Lab, who has led this development since its beginning 10 years ago, initially in above-elbow amputations. “The breakthrough of our technology consists on enabling patients to use implanted neuromuscular interfaces to control their prosthesis while perceiving sensations where it matters for them, in their daily life.”

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EES8U5LwaUs&feature=youtu.be

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Materials provided by Chalmers University of Technology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Early parent-child conflicts predict trouble charting life path

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Children who have more conflict in relationships with their mothers during early years of elementary school may find it more difficult to find a sense of purpose in life as they reach adulthood, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

“One of the biggest takeaway messages from these findings is that the path to a purposeful life starts very early, well before we start to consider different goals for life,” said Patrick Hill, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences and co-author of the study.

“This research shows that it’s the child’s perspective of conflict that has the greatest effect on later sense of purpose and what matters most in this equation is the child’s relationship with his or her mother,” he said.

As defined by the study, a sense of purpose involves having the belief that one has a stable, far-reaching aim that organizes and stimulates behaviors and goals to promote progress toward that objective.

While having a sense of purpose is important to setting goals and picking careers, studies show it also plays a key role in motivating children to develop the life skills necessary for independence — learning how to cook, stick to a budget, buy insurance and a host of other day-to-day survival skills that millennials now refer to as “adulting.”

The study is one of the first to show long-term associations between a child’s reports of early life experiences and whether that child feels purposeful later in life.

Children who reported conflicted early relations with fathers were negatively influenced by the experience, but the negative impact on sense of purpose was not nearly as strong as it was found to be among children who reported early conflicts with mothers. Childhood reports of conflicts with fathers also predicted less life satisfaction in emerging adulthood.

Again, only the child’s perspective seemed to matter.

Parental reports of troubled relations with their young offspring turned out to be poor predictors of a child’s later sense of purpose, the study found.

The study, finally published in January 2019 print issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, is based on data from a long-running Oregon study of 1,074 students (50 percent female) and their parents, all of whom self-reported on levels of parent-child conflict in their families during grades 1-5. This study was first made available online in August 2018.

Children and parents were asked to respond to true-or-false statements about their interactions, such as “We joke around often,” “We never have fun together,” or “We enjoy the talks we have.” Other questions asked whether “We get angry at each other” at least once a day, three times a week, or “a lot.”

Follow-up surveys, which included questions on life satisfaction and perceived stress were repeated until the students reached early adulthood (ages 21-23 years).

Sense of purpose was scored based on responses to statements such as “There is a direction in my life,” “My plans for the future match with my true interests and values,” “I know which direction I am going to follow in my life,” and “My life is guided by a set of clear commitments.”

Other questions focused on life satisfaction and perceived stress: In the past month, how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life, confident about your ability to handle your personal problems, that things were going your way, or that difficulties were piling up so high that you could not overcome them?

Hill and his colleagues utilized this rich data set to link what children thought of their relationships with their parents to their attitudes about purpose in life as they were starting to enter adulthood. His co-authors include Joshua Jackson, the Saul and Louise Rosenzweig Associate Professor in Personality Science at Washington University; Leah Schultz, doctoral student in psychological and brain sciences at Washington University; and Judy Andrews, senior scientist at Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, Ore.

“A growing body of literature shows that having a sense of purpose is clearly something beyond just being satisfied with your life or not feeling stressed,” Schultz said. “With our design, we were able to disentangle these outcomes and see the direct relationship between parent conflict and sense of purpose.”

Schultz studies the development of individual differences such as personality traits and vocational interests across the lifespan. She is particularly interested in how individuals navigate these differences in their daily lives, how they select into the environments that fit them best, and what implications better person-environment fit may have for a variety of life outcomes.

“In this study, we were able to look at factors of the parent-child relationship, like how much parents and children experience conflict,” Schultz said. “But it will be important for researchers to understand, specifically, how are parents demonstrating the value of a purposeful life? How are they helping children to define and pursue their own purposeful paths? Understanding the content of those conversations can help us all understand how conversations matter to the children in our lives.”

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Exploding e-cigarette kills 24-year-old Texas man

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The pen exploded when the man tried to use it, causing what is at least the second such death in the US.

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Health24.com | Is Brexit a health hazard? Researchers warn on dietary implications

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Thousands more deaths from heart disease and stroke could occur in England if Brexit goes ahead, researchers warn.

Fruits and vegetables play an important role in heart health, and the United Kingdom is highly dependent on imported produce, the authors of a new study explained.

Brexit – the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union scheduled for March 29 – could trigger a sharp rise in produce prices in the United Kingdom, resulting in a steep drop in consumption, according to the results of a modelling study published online January 28 in BMJ Open.

In 2017, about 84% of the United Kingdom’s fruit and 48% of vegetables were imported.

For the new study, researchers used a wide range of data to calculate how produce price increases after four different Brexit scenarios might affect the number of heart disease and stroke deaths in England.

The scenarios included: a free trade agreement with the EU and half of non-European countries that have trade deals with the EU; a free trade agreement with the EU only; a Brexit with no trade deals with any country and relying on the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules; and the United Kingdom trading under WTO rules, with no tariffs imposed on fruit and vegetable imports.

A no-deal Brexit would trigger the largest price hikes. The study estimated prices would rise about 17% for bananas, more than 14% for citrus fruit, and nearly 15% for tomatoes.

Currently, more than half of the U.K. population doesn’t eat recommended levels of fruits and vegetables, and that would fall under each scenario, the researchers warned.

A no-deal Brexit would lead to the largest drop in produce consumption: about 11.4% for fruit and just over 9% for vegetables, according to the study.

The researchers suggested that the number of deaths from heart disease and stroke would rise under every Brexit scenario, but a no-deal situation would be the most harmful, resulting in an extra 12 400 deaths between 2021 and 2030. That’s a rise of nearly 2%.

There was no substantial change in that estimate after researchers included a potential yearly increase of 2% in home-grown fruit and vegetable production.

“Post-Brexit trade policy could increase price and decrease intake of fruit and vegetables, thus increasing [cardiovascular disease] mortality in England,” lead author Paraskevi Seferidi, of the public health policy evaluation unit at Imperial College London, and colleagues wrote.

“The UK government should therefore carefully consider the population health implications of Brexit during upcoming negotiations and post-Brexit planning, particularly adverse changes to food systems,” the team concluded.

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Health24.com | WATCH: Meet the woman who sweats 10 times more than normal

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Twenty-year old Sophie Dwyer suffers from hyperhydrosis – a clinical disorder that leads to over-production by the sweat glands.

In Sophie’s case, she sweats 10 times more than average, making basic tasks difficult – she faces the risk of her hands slipping off the steering wheel while driving, and has even had computers break down because of the excessive sweating in her hands.

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