Adolescence

New York - High intake of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence can affect brain development and cause impairments in learning and memory in adulthood, shows a study conducted on rodents. While previous research linked high-sugar diets with obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function, less is known about its effects on mental development particularly on the hippocampus -- brain region critical for learning and memory. The new findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, showed that higher consumption sugar during early life increased the level of parabacteroides -- a type of gut bacteria. The higher the level of parabacteroides, the worse the animals performed in the memory and learning task. For the study, the team gave juvenile rats their normal chow and an 11 percent sugar solution, which is comparable to commercially available sugar-sweetened beverages. The rats were then subjected to a hippocampus-dependent memory task designed to measure episodic contextual memory, or remembering the context where they had seen a familiar object before. "We found that rats that consumed sugar in early life had an impaired capacity to discriminate that an object was novel to a specific context, a task the rats that were not given sugar were able to do," said lead author Emily Noble, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, US.A "Early life sugar consumption seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory," Noble said. Additionally, the researchers experimentally increased levels of parabacteroides in the microbiome of rats that had never consumed sugar. Those animals showed impairments in both hippocampal dependent and hippocampal-independent memory tasks. "(The bacteria) induced some cognitive deficits on its own. We found that the bacteria alone was sufficient to impair memory in the same way as sugar, but it also impaired other types of memory functions as well," Noble said. She noted that future research is needed to better identify how the gut bacteria alters development of the brain. (Agency) 

London- Obese people, read this carefully. Researchers have found that men with a history of obesity in their late teens, in adult life, are more at risk of a blood clot (thrombus) in a leg or lung. The risk rises successively and is highest in those who were severely obese in adolescence. A thrombus in the leg or lung is known as venous thromboembolism (VTE). This is one of our most common cardiovascular diseases. Risk increases with advancing age and, overall, 5-10 per cent of the population are affected at some time during their lives. The disease is potentially fatal, but its degree of severity varies. "Up to now, the association between VTE and obesity has been studied mainly in populations where body mass index (BMI) is measured relatively late in life," said study first author Katarina Glise Sandblad from University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The current study, published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, is based on data on 1,639,838 men who enlisted for military service in Sweden in the years 1969-2005. Their average age on enlistment was just over 18 years.These individuals were followed up using patient and cause-of-death registers. During the follow-up period, with a median duration of 28 years, a blood clot in the leg or lung was registered among just over one per cent of the study participants.A clear association was found between body mass index (BMI) at the time of enlistment and subsequent thrombus risk. A successive rise in VTE risk was also observed in the group in the middle and the upper part of the normal BMI range (20-25), compared with the lower part of the normal range (18.5-20).The risk then continued to rise in the two higher BMI groups, those with obesity and severe obesity, to which more than 36,000 of the study participants belonged. In the group with obesity (BMI 30-35), the relative risk was 2.93 compared with the reference group in the study -- over twice as high. For those with severe obesity, the corresponding relative risk was 4.95, i.e. a nearly fivefold risk for blood clots in the leg or lung during the follow-up period. "The study participants may have developed obesity-related diseases, such as certain forms of cancer, that also affect their thrombus risk. Consequently, there's a danger of underestimating the risk from obesity," Sandblad said.As obesity and severe obesity become more prevalent among children and adolescents, it's increasingly important to study the long-term risks involved," Sandblad added. Although the current study covers men only, the patterns and associations found are probably similar for women, the researchers noted. (Agency)