According to a new research, females making attempts to have a baby after 35 years are six times more likely to fertility problems as compared to those ten years younger.

As per a major research from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the elder parents are making it more difficult for themselves to have kids and raising the probability of grave medical problems for both mother as well as infant.

By 40, a female is more likely to have a spontaneous abortion than give birth.

Men's fertility also drops speedily from 25 and the physicians guess that the average 40-year-old takes two years to make his wife pregnant - even if she is in her 20s.

According to the numbers in the report by the Royal College, around 30% of 35-year-old females take more time than a year to become pregnant as compared to only 5% of 25-year-olds,.

Hopeful mothers in their late 30s and 40s are far more likely to have problems like as preeclampsia, ectopic gestation, spontaneous abortion or stillbirth and they are also more likely to need a Caesarean.

Kids born to them are more likely to be untimely, smaller or have mongolianism and other genetic troubles.

David Utting, specialty registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology at Kingston Hospital NHS Trust and co-author of the review, stated, "Clear facts on fertility need to be made available to women of all ages to remind them that the most secure age for childbearing remains 20-35."

The results of the research have been released in the medical journal Obstetrician and Gynaecologist.

Medical services in Kerala have been badly hit. Around 1500 resident doctors and house surgeons are on an indefinite strike in five government-run medical colleges of the state.

Many patients were turned away from government-run hospitals due to lack of medical staff.

The doctors are demanding roll back of the recent hike in fees for PG medical courses and better accommodation facilities.

The talks between the doctors' representatives and the government have so far failed to resolve the issue. The doctors have now warned of intensifying their agitation.

The strike has left even patients needing emergency medical attention in the lurch. Thirty eight-year-old Asha was among the many turned away from the hospital due to lack of doctors.

"They just asked us to go somewhere else. Isn't this a hospital meant for the poor? We have no money. Where will we go?" questioned Asha, Patient.

As resident doctors form the backbone of government medical services, the strike totally paralysed the functioning of various medical college hospitals across the state.

"A responsible government should give concrete assurances and also follow them. It is the responsibility of the government to avoid such strikes, not ours," said Jassar Abdul Jabbar, President, Medical Post Graduate Association.

Talks between the agitating doctors and the government failed to break the deadlock.

"There is absolutely no need to go on indefinite strike, now, by virtually declaring a war on the patients," said PK Sreemathy, Minister for Health, Kerala.

With the government and the resident doctors refusing to budge from their stated positions, it seems it's these hapless patients who will continue to bear the brunt of the strike.

Fear of snakes, spiders and other creepy crawlers is so universal that most of us probably believe we must have been born with it. It's universal, so it must be innate.

Not necessarily, according to research at several major universities.

That work suggests that we learn which things can be harmful at a very young age -- even just a few months -- because we have an evolutionary bias that predisposes us to fear things that have posed a threat throughout human history.

"What we're suggesting is that we have these biases to detect things like snakes and spiders really quickly, and to associate them with things that are yucky or bad, like a fearful voice," developmental psychologist Vanessa LoBue of Rutgers University said in releasing the research.

LoBue's co-authors of the study, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, are David H. Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University and Judy S. DeLoache of the University of Virginia.

The research is based on experiments with infants and very young children to see if they automatically know something can be harmful, like a snake, or if they have to learn it by observing fearful faces of adults, or associating a snake with something unpleasant, like a loud shriek.

Babies Not Born With Fear of Threats, Scientists Propose

They found repeatedly that babies don't recognize something as potentially harmful until they are conditioned to do so by something in their environment, and even then they may not show actual fear for a while.

"We propose that humans have a perceptual bias for the rapid detection of evolutionarily relevant threats and a bias for rapid association of these threats with fear," the researchers conclude in their paper.

But we weren't born with it, and in some cases female babies reacted differently from male babies, possibly explaining why some little boys seem fearless of snakes and spiders and things that go bump in the night, but most little girls scream at the mere sight of a snake.

In his part of the research, Carnegie Mellon's Rakison studied 11-month-old infants to see if an image of a snake, for example, alongside a human face showing either happiness or fear, would cause them to recognize that a snake is either harmless or dangerous.

It worked for the girls, but not the boys.

He found that "11-month old girls -- but not boys of the same age -- associated recurrent threats with fearful faces," according to the study. Interestingly, when the babies were shown flowers or other non-threatening images along with faces showing either fear or happiness, it made no difference.

That suggests the presence of a bias to recognize that snakes may be threatening, but not flowers.

DeLoache and LoBue tested infants (8 to 14 months old) and 3-year-old children and adults to see if they found images of snakes more quickly in a matrix of several images than they found harmless objects, like flowers. In all three cases the participants found snakes faster than flowers.

But apparently that instant recognition wasn't necessarily driven by fear. All participants were tested to see if they were really afraid of harmful items, like snakes, or just recognized that they were not supposed to include snakes as close friends.

Study: To Develop an Actual Fear of Snakes, Learning Is Required

The kids, and the adults, who showed signs of actual fear were no faster than participants who were unafraid of snakes at zeroing in on the snakes. That suggests it was a bias to learn fear, not fear itself, that governed the performance.

Similarly, infants who were shown a fearful face along with a picture of a snake recognized that the snake was probably not a good thing, but showed no sign of actual fear (no crying, for example.)

That compelled the researchers to conclude that "to develop an actual fear of snakes or of spiders, learning is required." That fear didn't come automatically, or with the body.

The work builds on previous research by other scientists, involving both humans and monkeys.

Susan Mineka of Northwestern University in Chicago showed that monkeys raised in the lab showed no fear of snakes, but they -- like humans -- visually detected snakes more quickly than harmless images, suggesting they somehow knew snakes could be dangerous, even though they had no direct experience with reptiles.

Humans Not Born With Fear of Snakes but Conditioned to Fear Potential Threats

Mineka and her colleagues suggested that part of the brain automatically invokes a fear response based on threats to survival throughout the history of primates, so it is evolutionarily based. That may explain why persons who live in industrialized countries who have never seen a snake still fear them.

Theoretically, at least, we all have a bias to avoid things that posed problems even in ancient human history.

We aren't born with a fear of snakes. But we have been conditioned by evolution to fear things that pose a threat, so we learn soon after birth that it's not a good idea to pick up a snake.

But of course, that doesn't explain the boy in the back of the class who is about to slip a garden snake over the shoulder of the girl in the next row. How come he's not afraid of the snake?

Maybe -- and this is just a layman's opinion -- proving to the girl that he's tough overrides his evolutionary bias to offer her a piece of candy instead of the snake. After all, me Tarzan, you Jane, still stands.

Changes in the brain consequent on meditation have been documented by the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers.

A structured 8-week meditation program leads to measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress, the study seems to show.

"Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."

Previous studies from Lazar's group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.

For the current study, MR images were take of the brain structure of 16 study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. In addition to weekly meetings that included practice of mindfulness meditation - which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind - participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of MR brain images were also taken of a control group of non-meditators over a similar time interval.

A study - using MRI to study the brains of migraine sufferers - has shown that a higher proportion of these patients exhibit lesions of the brain microvessels than the rest of the population.

Buzz up!
According to several studies, the presence of a large quantity of this type of brain lesion increases the risk of cognitive deterioration (reasoning, memory, etc.) and of Alzheimer's disease. This is why the research team coordinated by Christophe Tzourio, director of the Inserm-Universit‚ Pierre et Marie Curie Mixed Research Unit 708 "Neuroepidemiology", advanced the hypothesis that migraines could "damage" the brain.


To test this hypothesis, the researchers evaluated the impact of migraine on cognitive function. The team used the EVA study-group of individuals aged over 65 years, recruited from the general population in Nantes, and monitored them over a 10-year period.

Cerebral MRI was performed on more than 800 of the participants and these individuals were also questioned about their headaches by a neurologist.

The cognitive tests performed, involved an evaluation of the volunteers orientation in time and space, their short-term memory and their capacity and speed to correctly carry out specific tasks.

The results show that 21 pc of people suffer or have suffered from severe headaches over the course of their lives. For more than 70 pc of these, this involves migraines, some of which are with aura. The MRI scans for those participants having severe headaches confirm that they are twice as likely to have a large quantity of microvascular brain lesions as subjects without headaches.

In contrast, the cognitive scores were identical for individuals with or without severe headaches and for those having or not having cerebral microvascular lesions.

Among participants having a migraine with aura (2pc of the total sample), a specific increase in silent cerebral infarcts and certain lesions was observed, hence confirming previous studies, but without detectable cognitive harm.

"This is a very reassuring result for the many people who suffer from migraine. In spite of the increased presence of lesions of the brain microvessels, this disorder does not increase the risk of cognitive decline. Therefore, we have not observed negative consequences of migraine on the brain ", concludes Tobias Kurth, lead author of the study, who designed and carried out these analyses. (ANI)