Researchers have reported that texting was a direct predictor of sleep problems among first-year students in a study that examined links among interpersonal stress, text-messaging behaviour, and three indicators of college students' health: burnout, sleep problems and emotional well-being.

Although the study by Karla Murdock from Washington and Lee University showed that the impact of texting on students' psychological well-being depended on the level of interpersonal stress they were already facing, more texting was associated with poorer sleep regardless of their previous level of stress.

The students in the study, all in their first year, answered questions that measured academic and social burnout, emotional well-being and sleep problems. Murdock also asked them to estimate how many text messages they send and receive on an average day.

The study's findings on sleep were especially significant given the well-documented compromises in sleep that students experience throughout college, but especially in the first year.

To assess students' sleep quality, Murdock used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index with minor modifications to fit the college sample and found that a higher number of daily texts was associated with more sleep problems.

Among the potential causes for this connection are two tendencies: students' feeling pressured to respond immediately to texts, no matter what time of day or night, and students' sleeping with the phone nearby, thus being awakened by the alerts from incoming texts.

Meantime, the study found that frequent text messaging was also associated with greater psychological vulnerability to interpersonal stress.

The study is published in journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.

Diet can help lower hypertension and improve heart function in patients suffering from a common type of heart failure, according to a new research.

After 21 days of following a low-sodium Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) eating plan, patients saw a drop in blood pressure similar to taking anti-hypertension medicine.

Scott Hummel, M.D., cardiologist at the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center, said that their work suggests diet could play an important role in the progression of heart failure, although patients should always talk to their doctor before making major dietary changes.

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or "diastolic" heart failure, happens when the heart becomes stiff and does not pump out enough blood.

The patients, most of them in their 60s and 70s, agreed to keep food diaries and eat only the meals prepared for them in the metabolic kitchen at the University of Michigan Clinical Research Unit.

The meals, which could be picked up and heated at home, matched the DASH diet eating plan, which is high in potassium, magnesium, calcium and antioxidants and is recommended for hypertension treatment by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.

The study diet also contained a daily sodium intake of no more than 1,150 milligrams. That's much lower than what adults in the United States usually eat - about 4,200 mg a day for men, and 3,300 mg a day for women.

The U-M study, although small, showed the DASH diet can improve left ventricular relaxation and reduce diastolic chamber stiffness, meaning a more efficient transfer of blood between the heart and arteries, Hummel says.

People with depression may benefit as much from acupuncture as they do from counseling, suggests a new study.

Researchers found one in three patients was no longer depressed after three months of acupuncture or counseling, compared to one in five who received neither treatment.

"For people who have depression, who have tried various medical options, who are still not getting the benefit they want, they should try acupuncture or counseling as options that are now known to be clinically effective," said Hugh MacPherson, the study's lead author from the University of York in the UK.

Previous studies looking at whether acupuncture helps ease depression have been inconclusive. Those studies were also small and didn't compare acupuncture to other treatment options.

"What's more important for the patient is does it work in practice and that is the question we were asking," MacPherson said.

For their study, he and his colleagues recruited 755 people with moderate or severe depression. The researchers split participants into three groups: 302 were randomly assigned to receive 12 weekly acupuncture sessions, another 302 received weekly counseling sessions and 151 received usual care only.

About 70 percent of people had taken antidepressants in the three months before the study and about half reported taking pain medications. People did not have to stop taking their medicine to participate in the study.

At the outset, participants had an average depression score of 16 on a scale from 0 to 27, with higher scores symbolizing more severe depression. A 16 is considered moderately severe depression.

After three months, people assigned to the acupuncture group had an average score of about 9 - on the higher end of the mild depression category. Scores fell to 11 among members of the counseling group and about 13 in the usual care group, both considered moderate depression.

Participants who received acupuncture or counseling saw larger improvements over three months than those who had neither treatment. Those benefits remained for an additional three months after the treatments stopped.

However, any differences between acupuncture and counseling could have been due to chance, the researchers reported Tuesday in PLOS Medicine.

They found doctors would need to treat seven people using acupuncture and 10 people with counseling for one person to no longer be depressed.

"What this says is if you don't get completely better, there are other options," Dr. Philip Muskin, a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, told Reuters Health.

"One option would be to take a different medication, but by this study these would be valid options," said Muskin, who was not involved with the new research.

He cautioned, however, that counseling and acupuncture are not replacements for medication. The majority of study participants were still taking antidepressants at the end of the three months.

Muskin said the study also doesn't show what types of patients respond best to acupuncture or counseling.

"What I can't tell from this study is who's who. Not everybody got better," he said.

MacPherson said it's best to ask patients for their treatment preference.

"If you talk to people, they would almost always have a leaning one way or the other," he said.

Acupuncture is only covered by health insurance in the UK for chronic pain, MacPherson said. In the U.S., some plans also cover acupuncture for pain or nausea.

According to online information from the Mayo Clinic, the risks of acupuncture are low if people hire competent and certified practitioners. Complications can include soreness, organ injury and infections.

"Cleary acupuncture is a new option," MacPherson said. "This is the first evidence that acupuncture really helps."

Eating walnuts daily can ward off diabetes and heart disease in at-risk individuals, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Connecticut found that daily intake of 56 g of walnuts improves endothelial function in overweight adults with visceral adiposity.

The study included a sample of 46 adults aged 30-75.

Participants had a Body Mass Index larger than 25, and a waist circumference exceeding 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women.

They were also required to be non-smokers, and all exhibited one or more additional risk factors for metabolic syndrome, a precursor of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The group was randomly assigned to two 8-week sequences of either a walnut-enriched ad libitum diet or an ad libitum diet without walnuts.

Those chosen for the walnut diet were instructed to consume 56 g of shelled, unroasted English walnuts per day as a snack or with a meal.

"We know that improving diets tends to be hard, but adding a single food is easy," explained Dr David Katz, Director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and lead author of the research team.

"Our theory is that if a highly nutritious, satiating food like walnuts is added to the diet, there are dual benefits: the benefits of that nutrient rich addition and removal of the less nutritious foods," Katz said.

The research found that daily intake of 56 g of walnuts improves endothelial function in overweight adults with visceral adiposity.

"The primary outcome measure was the change in flow-mediated vasodilatation (FMD) of the brachial artery," researchers said.

"Secondary measures included serum lipid panel, fasting glucose and insulin, Homeostasis Model Assessment-Insulin Resistance values, blood pressure, and anthropometric measures.

"FMD improved significantly from baseline when subjects consumed a walnut-enriched diet as compared with the control diet. Beneficial trends in systolic blood pressure reduction were seen, and maintenance of the baseline anthropometric values was also observed. Other measures were unaltered," they said.

The study is published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

A new research has revealed that 'energy less' artificial sweeteners are unable to satisfy the sugar craving of the body, and instead make people more desperate to gorge on sugary snacks.

According to the research, our pleasure in consuming sweet solutions is driven to a great extent by the amount of energy it provides: greater reward in the brain is attributed to sugars compared to artificial sweeteners.

Professor Ivan de Araujo, who led the study at Yale University School of Medicine USA, said that the consumption of high-calorie beverages is a major contributor to weight gain and obesity, even after the introduction of artificial sweeteners to the market.

"We believe that the discovery is important because it shows how physiological states may impact on our choices between sugars and sweeteners," Araujo said.

Specifically, it implies that humans frequently ingesting low-calorie sweet products in a state of hunger or exhaustion may be more likely to 'relapse' and choose high calorie alternatives in the future, Araujo asserted.

Araujo added that the results of the study suggest that a 'happy medium' could be a solution, which would combine sweeteners with minimal amounts of sugar so that energy metabolism doesn't drop, while caloric intake is kept to a minimum.

The study was published in the Journal of Physiology.