For patients with diabetes, it is better to eat a single large meal than several smaller meals throughout the day, a new study has found.

Researchers at Linkoping University in Sweden studied the effect on blood glucose, blood lipids and different hormones after meals were compared using three different macronutrient compositions in patients with type 2 diabetes.

The three diets were a low-fat diet, a low-carbohydrate diet and a Mediterranean diet. The scientists included 21 patients that tested all three diets in a randomised order. During each test day blood samples were collected at six time points.

The low-fat diet had a nutrient composition that has traditionally been recommended in the Nordic countries, with about 55 per cent of the total energy from carbohydrates.

The low-carbohydrate diet had a relatively low content of carbohydrate; approximately 20 per cent of the energy was from carbohydrates and about 50 per cent of the total energy came from fat.

The Mediterranean diet was composed of only a cup of black coffee for breakfast, and with all the caloric content corresponding to breakfast and lunch during the other two test days accumulated to one large lunch.

Furthermore, the total caloric content included energy from 150 ml (women) to 200 ml (men) of French red wine to ingest with the lunch.

The food in the Mediterranean diet had an energy content from carbohydrates that was intermediate between the low-fat and the low-carbohydrate meals, and sources of fat were mainly olives and fatty fish.

"We found that the low-carbohydrate diet increased blood glucose levels much less than the low-fat diet but that levels of triglycerides tended to be high compared to the low-fat diet," said Doctor Hans Guldbrand, who together with Professor Fredrik Nystrom was the principal investigator of the study.

"It is very interesting that the Mediterranean diet, without breakfast and with a massive lunch with wine, did not induce higher blood glucose levels than the low-fat diet lunch, despite such a large single meal," said Nystrom.

"This suggests that it is favourable to have a large meal instead of several smaller meals when you have diabetes, and it is surprising how often one today refers to the usefulness of the so-called Mediterranean diet but forgets that it also traditionally meant the absence of a breakfast," Nystrom said.

"Our results give reason to reconsider both nutritional composition and meal arrangements for patients with diabetes," Nystrom said.

Women suffering from diabetes and wishing to start a family should monitor their blood glucose levels and take a daily high dose of folic acid before pregnancy to avoid risk to their baby's health, a new study said Wednesday.

The risk of stillbirth - when the foetus dies in the uterus or death during the first year of birth - was over four times greater in women with diabetes than in those without the disease.

The team from Newcastle University studied the outcome of over 400,000 pregnancies delivered in north of England between 1996 and 2008.

"We found that 2.7 percent of births in women with diabetes resulted in stillbirth, six times than the rate for women without diabetes, while 0.7 percent died during the first year of life, nearly double the rate in women without diabetes," said Ruth Bell, one of the researchers.

The research also said that nearly 40 percent of deaths might have been avoided if all of the women were able to achieve good control of their blood glucose before pregnancy.

"Stillbirths and infant deaths are thankfully not common, but they could be even less common if all women with diabetes can be helped to achieve the best possible control of their blood glucose levels before becoming pregnant," added Bell.

COPD patients can improve their lung function by practicing yoga, a new research led by Indian origin scientist has revealed.

The study by researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Department of Pulmonary Medicine and Sleep Disorders found that lung function, shortness of breath, and inflammation all showed significant improvement after patients completed 12 weeks of training.

"COPD is a systemic inflammatory disease that causes difficulty breathing. We investigated to see whether simple, structured yoga training affects the level of inflammation, shortness of breath, and quality of life in patients with stable COPD," study presenter Randeep Guleria said.

The study included 29 stable patients with COPD who received yoga training in a format that included the use of physical postures (asanas), breathing techniques (pranayama), cleansing techniques, (kriyas), meditation, and a relaxation technique (shavasan) for 1 hour, twice a week, for 4 weeks.

Following the 4-week period, patients were trained for 1 hour every 2 weeks, with the remaining sessions completed at home. Patients were evaluated on assessment of lung function, breathing, quality of life, and inflammation status.
A repeat assessment was done at the end of the 12-week training session. All parameters showed significant improvement at the end of the 12-week period.

Guleria said that yoga can be a simple, cost-effective method that can help improve quality of life in patients with COPD .

The study was presented at CHEST 2013.

Researchers have suggested that disabling a gene that helps keep track of time makes brain cells more likely to die spontaneously, and they believe that this connection may help strong connections between sleep problems and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania have shown that brain cell damage similar to that seen in Alzheimer's disease and other disorders results when a gene that controls the sleep-wake cycle and other bodily rhythms is disabled.

The researchers found evidence that disabling a circadian clock gene that controls the daily rhythms of many bodily processes blocks a part of the brain's housekeeping cycle that neutralizes dangerous chemicals known as free radicals.

"Normally in the hours leading up to midday, the brain increases its production of certain antioxidant enzymes, which help clean up free radicals," first author Erik Musiek, assistant professor of neurology at the School of Medicine, said. "When clock genes are disabled, though, this surge no longer occurs, and the free radicals may linger in the brain and cause more damage."

Musiek studied mice lacking a master clock gene called Bmal1. Without this gene, activities that normally occur at particular times of day are disrupted.

Musiek found that as the mice aged, many of their brain cells became damaged and did not function normally. The patterns of damage were similar to those seen in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

The study was published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Older men who spend several hours walking each day are less likely to have a stroke than their peers who rarely walk, a new study suggests. And walking pace didn't seem to matter.

Researchers said few studies have looked specifically at how both walking speed and walking time or distance are linked to stroke risk.

"Stroke is a major cause of death and disability and it is important to find ways to prevent it, especially in older people who are at high stroke risk," Barbara J. Jefferis told a news agency in an email. She led the research at University College London in the UK.

"Our study suggests that maintaining an active lifestyle, specifically by spending more time on all forms of walking, could be an important part of stroke prevention strategies in older people," Jefferis said.

She and her co-authors analyzed data from men enrolled in a long-term British heart study.

The men entered the study in 1978 to 1980. In 1998 to 2000, when they were in their 60s and 70s, they filled out surveys about how often they were physically active.

The new analysis includes 2,995 men who had not had a stroke or heart disease at the time of that survey. Researchers followed them for another 11 years.

More than half of the men walked an hour or less each day. About one in six reported walking more than two hours per day.

During the follow-up period, 195 of the men had a stroke. The researchers found that the more time men spent walking, the lower their risk of stroke.

Men who walked four to seven hours each week were 11 percent less likely to have a stroke than men who walked for three hours per week or less. But that difference could have been due to chance, Jefferis and her colleagues reported in the journal Stroke.

A stronger finding was that men who walked the most - for more than three hours each day - had a two-thirds lower risk of stroke than those who spent the least time walking.

Walking pace was also tied to stroke risk, such that average-pace or brisk walkers had a 38 percent lower risk of stroke than slow walkers. But distance walked explained that finding: men who walked at an average or brisk pace also walked further than their slower peers, according to the study.

The findings don't prove walking prevents strokes. But they could not be explained by factors known to increase a person's risk of stroke, like age, blood pressure and cholesterol. More recently identified markers of stroke, such as proteins associated with inflammation, blood clotting or heart muscle damage also weren't behind the link.

"What we found was that all of these factors explained only a small amount of the relationship between time spent walking and onset of stroke," Jefferis said. "This suggests that there may be other factors operating which explain why walking protects against stroke."

Her team's study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research and the British Heart Foundation.

Although it only included men, Jefferis said other research has suggested walking is good for women, too.

For instance, a team of Spanish researchers reported late last year that women who walked briskly for at least three and a half hours per week had a lower risk of stroke than inactive women.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), close to 800,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke every year, and strokes are the most common cause of serious long-term disability.

"Getting into the habit of walking every day for at least an hour could protect against stroke," Jefferis said. That can include walking that is done while running errands, walking for leisure in a park or just walking around indoors.

Both the World Health Organization and CDC recommend adults get at least two and a half hours of moderate exercise each week.