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WASHINGTON | Mon Oct 17, 2011 11:05am EDT (Reuters) – Full-time U.S. workers who have chronic health troubles or are overweight cost more than $153 billion in lost productivity each year from absenteeism, according to a Gallup-Healthways study released on Monday.

Compared with non-overweight healthy workers, the 86% of U.S. workers who have weight or health issues, or both, miss an estimated 450 million extra days of work a year, the study said.

“The high percentages of full-time U.S. workers who have less than ideal health are a significant drain on productivity for U.S. businesses,” the report said.

The $153 billion in annual lost productivity costs linked to unhealthy or overweight workers in the United States is more than four times the cost found in Britain, the study said.

The sharp difference is the result of fewer unhealthy workers in Britain. Only about 14% of full-time U.S. workers are of “normal” weight and have no chronic illnesses, compared with 20% in Britain, the study said.

Gallup based its study on surveys of 109,875 full-time workers — those who work at least 30 hours per week — between January 2 and October 2 2011.

In the survey, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index used respondents’ self-reports of their height and weight to calculate body mass index scores. BMI values of 30 or higher were classified as “obese,” 25 to 29.9 were “overweight,” and 18.5 to 24.9 were “normal weight.”

In addition to weight, chronic health conditions included having ever been diagnosed with a heart attack, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, diabetes, asthma, or depression; and recurring physical pain in the neck or back or knee or leg in the last 12 months.

Gallup calculated unhealthy days using answers to a question about how many days in the past month respondents found poor health kept them from doing their usual activities.

Full-time workers who were not overweight and suffered no chronic health conditions averaged 0.34 unhealthy days each month, or about four days per year, with a tiny rise for workers who were overweight with no chronic conditions.

At the other end of the scale, overweight workers with three or more chronic health conditions reported an average of about 42 unhealthy days per year, about the same as non-overweight workers with similar health woes.

Poll results indicated that respondents missed an actual day of work for roughly every three unhealthy days.

The survey showed that over 30% of workers were overweight and had one or two chronic health problems, while nearly 18% were overweight and had three or more chronic health issues.

Including presenteeism, when employees go to work but are less productive because of poor health or well-being, would increase the estimate of lost productivity, the study said.

Including part-time employees would also add to the estimate of costs in lost productivity.

“Other research that has examined a broader array of factors using a somewhat different list of chronic conditions places the economic effect of lost productivity at $1.1 trillion per year,” the study said.

-Reporting by Ian Simpson

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They Are Also More Likely to Struggle with Anxiety, Loneliness, Low Self-Esteem, and Sadness

WASHINGTON, DC, June 2, 2011 — Children whose parents get divorced generally don’t experience detrimental setbacks in the pre-divorce period, but often fall behind their peers—and don’t catch up—when it comes to math and interpersonal social skills after their parents begin the divorce process, according to a new study.

In addition, the study, which appears in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, finds that children of divorce are more likely to struggle with anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, and sadness. This increase in “internalizing problem behaviors” also begins during the divorce process and does not dissipate.

“People tend to think that couples go through intense marital conflict before they decide to divorce,” said study author Hyun Sik Kim, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “My original prediction was that children of divorce would experience negative impacts even before formal divorce processes began. But, my study finds that this is not the case.”

Instead, Kim finds that children begin experiencing developmental problems after their parents commence the divorce process, and these issues continue to plague them even after the divorce is finalized. Interestingly, these problems neither worsen nor improve following the divorce.

“This study reveals that these negative impacts do not worsen in the post-divorce stage, although there is no sign that children of divorce catch up with their counterparts either,” Kim said.

Relying on nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class 1998 to 1999, the study traces the development of 3,585 kids from the time they entered kindergarten in the fall of 1998 through fifth grade, and compares children of divorce with kids from intact families. A unique feature of the study is that it focuses on divorces that occur when children are between first and third grade, which enables Kim to examine the effects of divorce during three separate stages: pre-divorce (kindergarten to first grade), during-divorce (first to third grade), and post-divorce (third to fifth grade).

According to Kim, there are many reasons why children whose parents are divorced or in the process of getting divorced would experience developmental setbacks.

These factors may include stress that children experience as result of seeing their parents blaming each other for the divorce or arguing about custody; an unstable living situation in which children are shuttled between parents or forced to move to another region with a parent who receives primary or sole custody, thus disrupting the children’s social network; economic hardship due to a sudden drop in family income; and residual effects of a parent’s divorce related depression, Kim said.

“Having one’s parents go through a divorce can be very unsettling for a child,” Kim said.

While the study finds that divorce has adverse effects on children’s math test scores, interpersonal social skills, and internalizing problem behaviors, in general, children of divorce don’t experience negative impacts on their reading scores or “externalizing problem behaviors,” which indicates how often they do such things as argue, fight, or get angry.

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American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review

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If you’re trying to learn a new word, you may want to sleep on it, a new study suggests.

Researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening and then immediately tested their recall of the words. The volunteers slept in the laboratory while their brain activity was recorded. Tests conducted the next morning showed that the participants could remember and recognize more words than they did immediately after learning them.

This improvement was not seen in another group of participants who learned new words and were tested in the morning and re-tested in the evening, with no sleep in between tests.

The brain activity data collected from the volunteers in the sleep group showed that deep sleep (slow-wave sleep) helped strengthen their memories of new words.

The researchers also found that a type of brain activity called sleep spindles played a role in the ability to remember new words. Sleep spindles are brief but intense bursts of activity that indicate information transfer between two different memory storage areas, the hippocampus and the neocortex.

The more sleep spindles a person experienced during sleep, the more successful they were in using new words in their vocabulary.

“We suspected from previous work that sleep had a role to play in the reorganization of new memories, but this is the first time we’ve really been able to observe it in action, and understand the importance of spindle activity in the process,” study co-author Gareth Gaskell, a professor in the psychology department at the University of York in England, said in a university news release.

The study was published Nov. 2 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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Resistance exercise such as weight training affects blood vessels differently than aerobic exercise and offers other cardiovascular benefits, finds a new study.

Researchers at the Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., compared blood vessel (vascular) responses to two types of moderate-intensity workouts: three sets of 10 repetitions of eight resistance exercises and 30 minutes of aerobic cycling.

There were significant differences in the vascular responses to the two types of exercises. Resistance exercise produced greater increases in blood flow to the limbs, while aerobic exercise reduced arterial stiffness, but without an increase in blood flow.

Resistance exercise also led to a longer-lasting decrease in blood pressure after exercise, compared to aerobic exercise.

“Resistance exercise may offer greater benefits from the increases in blood flow to active muscles and could be implemented as a companion to an aerobic training program,” wrote study leader Scott R. Collier, of Appalachian State University, and colleagues in a press release.

They said their findings support previous research showing that resistance exercise has unique effects on blood pressure and limb blood flow.

“The present study indicates that an acute bout of resistance exercise shows many favorable cardiovascular benefits and should therefore be considered as part of a daily exercise training program,” the researchers concluded.

The study appears in the November issue of Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

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Starting Tuesday, June 28, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) ban on drop-side cribs will take effect.  The cribs, which allow parents to lower one side of the crib for easier access, are responsible for 150 suffocation and strangulation deaths between 2007 to 2010.

• Ban drop-side construction altogether, requiring instead that cribs have fixed sides.
• Require that mattress supports are stronger.
• Improve the strength of the crib slats.
• Require that crib hardware be more durable and less likely to fail.
• Make crib safety testing more rigorous.

• Families should not sell or donate a drop-side crib, even if it has been been fitted with immobilizing hardware.  Disassemble and discard the crib instead.
• Parents can see if their particular drop-side crib has been recalled, and request a free hardware kit to immobilize the drop-side.
• Some manufacturers may consider offering incentives or partial refunds for drop-side cribs, though they are not required by law to do so.
• If you have a drop-side crib and are unable to purchase a new crib, check your crib’s hardware frequently, do not use the drop-side function, and check regularly to see if your crib has been recalled.

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Men and women who get just six hours of sleep each night during the workweek will need more than the weekend to recover from the cumulative effects of this mild sleep deprivation, a new study revealed. Researchers also found that women are better able to cope with and recover from this kind of sleep loss than men. In the study, researchers installed 34 people, with an average age of 25 years and no sleep problems, in a sleep lab for 13 nights. There, they periodically measured sleepiness and performance. Participants were allowed to sleep eight hours a night for the first four nights to assess their typical functioning. For the next six nights, however, they were allowed to sleep only six hours a night, followed by three “recovery” nights of 10 hours of sleep each night. The study’s findings revealed that after a week of sleep restriction, two nights of extra sleep are not enough to fully reverse the adverse effects of the sleep loss. Men and women showed both significantly decreased performance on psychomotor tests, as well as subjective and objective sleepiness. Women recovered better than men, however, the study pointed out. The researchers said the gender differences were linked to slow wave, or deep sleep, considered the restorative potion of sleep.

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Step No. 1: Eat toast for breakfast
Skipping carbs may harm your memory. A Tufts University study found that folks who eliminated carbohydrates from their diets performed worse on memory-based tasks than those who included them. Why? Your brain cells need carbs, which are converted in your body to glucose, to stay in peak form, says study co-author Robin Kanarek, PhD, professor of psychology at Tufts. Pick whole grains and other complex carbs—they’re digested more slowly, so they deliver a steadier stream of glucose. Grab a whole-wheat muffin or slice of toast with a scrambled egg and cup of berries for a breakfast that’ll jump-start your gray matter.

Step No. 2: Take a kickboxing class before work
Exercise increases the blood flow to your noggin, bringing much-needed oxygen and glucose for fuel, explains Sandra Aamodt, PhD, co-author of Welcome to Your Brain. In fact, you can learn vocabulary words 20% faster if you try to memorize them after doing an intense workout rather than a low-impact activity, suggests a study in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Up the ante even more by taking a dance or kickboxing class—anything that requires you to remember a routine.

Step No.3: Change the font on your morning memo
Is Times New Roman your go-to? Try using a different, slightly difficult-to-decipher font—it’s been shown to improve your long-term retention, according to research published in the journal Cognition. Focusing on a new font may make your brain’s processing center work a little harder, upping your recall. Change to Comic Sans Italicized (the font used in the study) for a quick fix that you may not notice but your brain will.

Step No. 4: Do a Web search during lunch
Spending an hour a day looking online for something you’re interested in (like researching spots for your next vacation) may stimulate the part of your frontal lobe that controls short-term memory, according to a recent study from the University of California, Los Angeles. “The neural circuits involved in decision-making, visual-spatial, and verbal skills become very active when you do an Internet search,” explains Gary Small, MD, lead author of the study. Don’t just mindlessly surf, though: If it’s too easy, Dr. Small says, it won’t be effective. (Facebook won’t do the trick!)

Step No. 5: Eye your parking spot
Always forget where you parked your car? When you stop at the grocery store to pick up your dinner, try this exercise: Get out of your car, notice where you’re parked, then move your eyes side-to-side every 1/2 second for 30 seconds while standing in place. Practicing this simple eye movement may increase your long-term memory by up to 10%, say researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. “That little extra boost might be just what’s needed to help you recall an important piece of information,” says Andrew Parker, PhD, the study’s lead author.

Step No. 6: Drink a little with dinner
While being a heavy tippler can lead to memory loss, a new study finds that drinking in moderation may actually lower your risk for memory problems. In an analysis published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, participants who downed seven or fewer alcoholic drinks total per week had the lowest risk for cognitive impairment, compared with women who didn’t drink at all and those who imbibed more. Researchers believe alcohol’s anti-inflammatory properties may be the reason. Or it could be that people who drink moderately also tend to lead a healthier lifestyle. Cheers to that!

Step No. 7: Floss before bed
It’s good for your smile—but it may also do wonders for your mind. When you don’t floss, your gums become inflamed, making it easier for bad bacteria to enter your bloodstream, explains Jonathan B. Levine, DMD, an associate professor at New York University and author of Smile! Once in the bloodstream, the bacteria can cause inflammation throughout your body, including in the brain, which can lead to cognitive dysfunction. So floss daily (twice is ideal) to keep the absentmindedness away.

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Just five cups a day could be enough to make your ears play tricks on you, according to researchers. In an experiment, volunteers who had consumed ‘high levels’ of caffeine thought they were listening to Bing Crosby singing White Christmas even though the song was not being played. In the tests, 92 volunteers were asked to listen to a constant fuzzy sound known as white noise. Professor Simon Crowe, of La Trobe University in Melbourne, said: ‘We also told them that within the white noise there may be parts of the song White Christmas and if you hear it, press a button. ‘We didn’t include White Christmas in the white noise but found that more people who were very stressed and had high levels of caffeine thought they heard the song. ‘The combination of caffeine and stress affect the likelihood of an individual experiencing a psychosis-like symptom.’ The team from the university’s School of Psychological Sciences found that five cups of coffee a day was enough to trigger this.

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Older people who regularly exercise at moderate to intense levels may have a 40% lower risk of developing brain damage linked to ischemic strokes, certain kinds of dementia and mobility problems. New research published Wednesday in the journal Neurology says the MRIs of people who exercised at higher levels were significantly less likely to show silent brain infarcts — caused by blocked arteries that interrupt blood flow and are markers for strokes — than people who exercised lightly. Until now, studies have shown exercise helps lower blood pressure, bad cholesterol and insulin levels, all risk factors for strokes causing brain damage. Treating those conditions is helpful, but often brain damage from multiple infarctions is not reversible.