Insomnia therapy during pregnancy improves sleep A new research study by Canada’s University of British Columbia’s Okanagan and Vancouver campuses, and University of Calgary reveals that cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBTi) — a therapeutic intervention — administered to pregnant women improves sleep and reduces postpartum depression. Sixty-two women with insomnia and depressive symptoms participated in the study with half randomly assigned to an intervention group and the other half to a control group. “We found that CBTi during pregnancy significantly improved sleep and reduced postpartum depressive symptoms for participants,” says Dr. Elizabeth Keys, Assistant Professor in UBCO’s School of Nursing and study co-author. Results indicated that effective insomnia treatment during pregnancy could be a protective factor against postpartum depression. “Our study adds to the growing evidence that treating insomnia during pregnancy is beneficial for various outcomes. It’s time to explore how we can make this treatment more accessible to pregnant women across the country to improve sleep health equity,” adds Dr. Keys. Obese youth benefit long term from weight loss surgeries Severely obese youth who underwent weight loss surgery at age 19 or younger continued to experience sustained weight loss and resolved common obesity-related comorbidities ten years later. This is according to results of a large clinical study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US government’s primary agency that undertakes biomedical and public research. Researchers of the Teen Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery (Teen LABS) study assessed participants with an average age of 17 who underwent gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy weight-loss surgery. They concluded that after ten years, participants sustained an average of 20 percent reduction in body mass index, 55 percent reduction of type 2 diabetes, 57 percent reduction of hypertension, and 54 percent reduction of abnormal cholesterol. Both gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy showed similar results. Significantly, they noted that 55 percent reduction in Type 2 diabetes was much higher than rates observed in adults after weight-loss surgery (18 percent at seven years and 12.7 percent at 12 years) in another recently published study. Farm emissions affect children’s learning, memory A new study involving 8,500 children conducted by researchers of the University of Southern California (USC) published in Environmental Health Perspectives, reveals that a form of air pollution, mostly agricultural emissions, is linked to poor learning and memory loss in nine-ten-year-olds. The specific component of fine particle air pollution (PM2.5), ammonium nitrate, is implicated in Alzheimer’s and dementia risk in adults, suggesting that PM2.5 may cause neurocognitive harm across the human lifespan. “For this study, we used special statistical techniques to examine 15 chemical components in PM2.5 and their sources. That’s when ammonium nitrate — an outcome of agricultural and farming operations — in the air appeared as a prime suspect,” says senior author Megan Herting, associate professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. Herting has been working with data from the largest brain study across America, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study,…
