Heena Sharma Blog

According to a new study, heart patients can prolong their life if they interrupt their sedentary lifestyle and move around every 20 minutes. The study was presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress (CCC) 2018. Visiting experts from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) also participated in joint scientific sessions with the Canadian Cardiovascular Society (CCS) as part of the ESC Global Activities programme. Heart patients spend most of their waking hours sitting, lying down, and watching television. Previous research has shown that being sedentary for long periods could shorten life but taking breaks to move around may counteract the risk, particularly if it means burning more than 770 kcal a day. This study investigated how many breaks should be taken, and for what duration, if one needs to expend 770 kcal. "Our study shows that heart patients should interrupt sedentary time every 20 minutes with a 7-minute bout of light physical activity. Simple ...

Language people use in their Facebook posts can predict a future diagnosis of depression as accurately as the tools clinicians use in medical settings to screen for the disease, suggests new research. "Social media data contain markers akin to the genome," said one of the researchers Johannes Eichstaedt from University of Pennsylvania in the US. "With surprisingly similar methods to those used in genomics, we can comb social media data to find these markers. Depression appears to be something quite detectable in this way," Eichstaedt said. For the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers identified data from nearly 1,200 people consenting to share Facebook statuses and electronic medical-record information. They then analysed the statuses using Machine Learning techniques to distinguish those with a formal depression diagnosis. Analysing social media data shared by the particip...