USA Today (11/20, Hellmich) reports, “People who are jobless at some point during their lifetime because they were laid off, fired or quit may be at an increased risk of having a heart attack after age 50,” according to a study published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The AP (11/20, Tanner) reports that investigators “analyzed data on more than 13,000 men and women aged 51 to 75 taking part in an ongoing health and retirement survey partly sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.” For the past 20 years, “participants have been interviewed every two years about their employment and health.” Altogether “there were 1,061 heart attacks during the study.”

The Los Angeles Times (11/19, Bardin) “Booster Shots” blog reports that the investigators “found that being unemployed was associated with a significantly increased risk of heart attack, with such subjects having heart attacks at 1.35 times the rate as people who were not unemployed.” The researchers also found that “each time somebody lost a job, their risk went up: People who had lost four jobs during the study had heart attacks at 1.63 times the rate of those who did not lose a job.”

Related Links:

— “Study: Unemployment may raise risk of heart attack,”Nanci Hellmich, USA Today, November 19, 2012.

The Washington Post (11/20, Kulkarni) reports that “for many of those who seek treatment for” eating disorders, “getting a full range of insurance coverage can be difficult.” Additionally, the article notes that “treatment of eating disorders is complicated because it often involves medical care, mental health services and nutritional therapy, requiring a team of specialists — often a” primary care physician, “a therapist, a psychiatrist and a dietitian.” According to the Post, “patients argue that insurers don’t adequately cover all those services, although estimates of how many patients receive coverage vary.”

Related Links:

— “Eating disorders often leave patients facing difficult insurance hurdles,”Shefali S. Kulkarni, The Washington Post, November 19, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (11/16, Bardin) reported, “While the lion’s share of youth anti-smoking efforts has focused on cigarettes, a new report in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease suggests more needs to be done to reduce the number of teens smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs.”

A recent report said that “18.5% of 12th-grade students admitted to using a hookah in the previous year. And what’s particularly concerning to the study authors…is that many young people don’t seem to recognize that hookah use carries serious health risks: Hookah smoke contains many of the same toxins as cigarettes and has been associated with a similar laundry list of diseases such as lung cancer and respiratory illness.”

Related Links:

— “Teenage hookah smoking rates must be reduced, experts say,” Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2012.

On its front page, the New York Times (11/19, A1, Quenqua, Subscription Publication) reports, “Pediatricians are starting to sound alarm bells about boys who take unhealthy measures to try to achieve Charles Atlas bodies that only genetics can truly confer. Whether it is long hours in the gym, allowances blown on expensive supplements or even risky experiments with illegal steroids, the price American boys are willing to pay for the perfect body appears to be on the rise.”

In fact, “in a study to be published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, more than 40 percent of boys in middle school and high school said they regularly exercised with the goal of increasing muscle mass,” with 38 percent saying “they used protein supplements,” and about six percent admitting to experimenting with steroids. The piece goes on to explain the anabolic steroid use in men may cause testosterone production to stop.

But it is not just boys who are trying to “increase muscle size or tone,” USA Today (11/19, Healy) reports. In “some cases, they are nearly as widespread among girls,” the study found. The “study is a reminder that parents and physicians need to be aware that these behaviors are going on and that they need to be discussed with their adolescents, says Joel Brenner, medical director of the Sports Medicine Program at Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Va., and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness.”

While “the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances is clearly dangerous and needs to be avoided…inappropriate changes to diet or exercise can also be hazardous, he says.”

Related Links:

— “Muscular Body Image Lures Boys Into Gym, and Obsession,” Douglas Quenqua, New York Times, November 19, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (11/16, Bardin) “Science Now” blog reports that “professional rappers have teamed up with researchers from the National Institutes of Health to study what happens in the brain during freestyle rapping.” The research, “published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest that the process is similar to that of other spontaneous creative acts, including jazz improvisation.” The research “was initiated by the Los Angeles-based rappers Daniel Rizik-Baer and Michael Eagle and carried out by Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu of the NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.”

AFP (11/16) reports, “Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the researchers compared the freestyle brain photos with those captured when the rappers repeated well-rehearsed lyrics.” The investigators “noticed a ‘functional reorganisation’ during the freestyle phase in the singers’ prefrontal cortex – an area of the brain associated with complex cognitive behaviour and decision making.”

Related Links:

— “This is your brain on freestyle rap, “Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2012.

CQ (11/16, Adams, Subscription Publication) reports that “teen smoking nationwide fell from 12.6 percent of adolescents in 2002 to 8.7 percent in 2010,” according to an analysis released Thursday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The SAMHSA report “included state-by-state results showing that the number of teenagers who said they smoked in the past month fell significantly in 41 states.” CQ notes that the analysis indicated that Wyoming “has the nation’s highest rate of teen smoking at 13.5 percent, which is more than double the rate of 5.9 percent for Utah, the state with the nation’s lowest rate.”

Medwire (11/15, Cowen) reports, “Peer support for patients with bipolar disorder (BD) may help improve adherence to online psychoeducation programs,” according to a study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The 407-patient study revealed that “among recently diagnosed BD patients assigned to an online psychoeducation program, those with peer support had significantly greater adherence than those without.” In addition, “patients with peer support had greater, albeit nonsignificant, improvements in depression symptoms and functioning than those without.”

Related Links:

— “Peer support benefits psychoeducation for bipolar patients,”Mark Cowen, Medwire News, November 15, 2012.

HealthDay (11/15, Preidt) reports, “People are more likely to be able to identify symptoms of depression in women than men,” according to a study published Nov. 14 in the journal PLoS One. The study “also found that skepticism about psychiatry and anti-scientific attitudes influenced people’s views about depression.” Foreign sources covering the story are the Daily Telegraph (UK) (11/15, Adams) and the Daily Mail (UK) (11/15).

Related Links:

— “Study Reveals Gender Gap in Spotting Depression,”Robert Preidt, HealthDay, November 14, 2012.

The New York Times (11/14, F2, Carrns, Subscription Publication) reports, “About a quarter of American adults suffer from some type of mental health problem each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and six percent suffer severe ailments, like…major depression.” For that reason, “taking periodic stock of your emotional well-being can help identify warning signs of common ailments like depression or anxiety. Such illnesses are highly treatable, especially when they are identified in their early stages, before they get so severe that they precipitate some sort of personal — and perhaps financial — crisis.” The Times quotes psychiatrist Jeffrey Borenstein, MD, editor in chief of Psychiatric News, published by the American Psychiatric Association, who said that having a “mental health checkup” is “just as important as having a physical checkup.”

Related Links:

— “A Regular Checkup Is Good for the Mind as Well as the Body, “Ann Carrns, The New York Times, November 13, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (11/14, Morin) reports, “Soccer players who repeatedly strike the ball with their heads may be causing measurable damage to their brains, even if they never suffer a concussion, according to a” research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “By examining brain scans of a dozen professional soccer players from Germany, researchers found a pattern of damage that strongly resembled that of patients with mild traumatic brain injury [TBI].”

HealthDay (11/14, Gordon) reports that the study’s senior author “noted that the researchers don’t know what caused the changes in the white matter of the soccer players, only that there were changes. ‘It could be from heading the ball, or due to impact of hitting other players or from sudden acceleration,’ she said.”

MedPage Today (11/14, Neale) reports, “As an alternate explanation,” the study authors “noted that ‘soccer players showed increased axial diffusivity in the absence of increased radial diffusivity limited to the corpus callosum, possibly resulting from specialized training or neuroinflammation.'”

Related Links:

— “Soccer players may injure brains when ‘heading’ ball, study says,”Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2012.