Those who skip breakfast to lose weight not only eat more for lunch, they also crave fatty and sugary foods, researchers say.

Over time, this could lead to slimmers piling on the pounds, despite their best intentions, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

The warning comes from doctors and scientists at Imperial College London who scanned the brains of 21 healthy young men and women while they looked at pictures of various foods.

The volunteers also rated how appealing they found the foods, which ranged from salads and vegetables to calorie-laden chocolates, desserts, cakes, pizzas and burgers.

The river Ganga, lifeline to millions of Indians and the most holy river to Hindus, has become a source of carcinogens as well.

With pollutants being continuously dumped into the river, a study has found that people living along its course are more susceptible to cancer than anywhere else in the country.

According to the National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP), the river is suffused with heavy metals and poisonous chemicals, especially along the stretches in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

"Ganga water is now laced with toxic industrial discharge such as arsenic, choride, fluoride and other heavy metals," Jaideep Biswas, director of Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, an associate of the National Cancer Registry Programme, was quoted saying to a leading newspaper.

Gallbladder cancer cases in these areas are the second highest in the world and prostate cancer highest in the country.

The research revealed that of every 10,000 people surveyed, 450 men and 1,000 women were gallbladder cancer patients. Other forms of cancer were also found among the people living along the river course, such as kidney, oesophagus, liver, urinary bladder and skin cancer.

"Those who've been bathing in this poison river are equally at danger," said Biswas.

For at least eight years, a Philadelphia heart specialist and his colleagues have been smuggling used cardiac devices in suitcases to India to help poor people who might die without them.

Now, Dr. Behzad B. Pavri, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, reports that recycled implantable cardioverter-defibrillators or ICDs -- devices that jolt a failing heart back into rhythm -- can be collected safely from U.S. patients and funeral homes, transported, sterilized and re-implanted in people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.

"The patients who are getting these devices are the sickest of the sick, the poorest of the poor," Pavri said.

In a review of 81 patients who received recycled ICDs between 2004 and 2011, Pavri and his colleagues found no evidence of infection or malfunction of the ICDs. Nine of the patients died during follow-up, but the deaths didn't appear related to the ICDs, the authors said.

Though there's been growing evidence that heart pacemakers may be safely reused, this is one of the first published reports to suggest that the more sophisticated ICD device may also be recycled, Pavri said.

"The outcomes were what we expected and hoped for," Pavri said of the study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

But the study also renews ongoing questions about the legality -- and ethics -- of reusing cardiac devices, a practice that is prohibited by federal regulators and device manufacturers in the U.S.

In an accompanying editorial, Harvard Medical School experts Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Gene Bukhman caution that such well-meaning efforts should be careful not to offer inferior treatment to the poor.

"Flagship projects must remain free of the taint of the secondhand, in part by making it clear when devices can safely be reused," wrote those authors. Farmer is a renowned expert in global health disparities and one of the co-founders of Partners in Health, the international health and social justice organization.

The patients in Pavri's study, conducted in cooperation with Holy Family Hospital in Mumbai, included 66 men and 15 women. They ranged in age from 27 to 79 and were all at highest risk for life-threatening irregular heart rhythms that could be treated with ICDs.

All told, the patients received 106 reused devices, including 22 who got a second device and three who received a third ICD during the course of the trial.

More than 40 percent of the patients got life-saving shocks from the ICDs, including one 27-year-old patient, Mohd Asif, who received more than 300 pacing charges or larger jolts during so-called ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation "storms," in which the heart runs wildly out of rhythm.

He is "still very much alive," said Dr. Yash Lokhandwala, a cardiologist at the Mumbai hospital who treated Asif and others.

The patients who got the ICDs were those who otherwise could not pay for them. In India, a new ICD might cost 3 lakhs, the equivalent of $6,000 U.S., far beyond the reach of ordinary Mumbai residents who earn about 1.41 lakhs a year. Those who can pay foot the bill themselves, but those who can't are treated with other, often inferior methods, including drug therapies.

Cost is the chief barrier preventing use of cardiac devices such as ICDs and pacemakers in developing nations, Pavri said. Rates of new ICD implantation are about 1 per million in many Asian and South American nations, compared with 434 per million new ICD implantations per year in the U.S., according to the World Society of Arrhythmia.

At the same time, ICDs are removed every day from patients in the U.S. who get new devices or who die each year, Pavri said. Modern ICDs have a projected battery life of six to 10 years, and many used ICDs have three years or more of remaining charge when they're explanted.

Funeral directors frequently remove ICDs from bodies to prevent explosions during cremation. Perhaps one-fifth to one-third of devices discarded by funeral homes may have sufficient battery life to save someone else.

"We don't know exactly how many but it's clearly in the thousands," said Pavri.

For his study, Pavri and his colleagues collected the devices one by one over several years from consenting patients or from funeral homes. Shipping them by traditional methods was difficult because of the explanation involved, so the doctors packed them into checked luggage and transported them themselves.

Reusing ICDs is prohibited in the U.S. by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which classifies them as single-use devices. However, the FDA has no jurisdiction over the devices if they're treated and implanted elsewhere and Lokhandwala said the Cardiological Society of India has authorized the practice.

The ICDs were collected, cleaned and sterilized during a multi-step process and then re-implanted into the new patients.

Researchers were able to follow up on 75 of the 81 patients; those who survived appeared to be doing well, Pavri said.

This study offers important new information about the apparent safety of reusing ICDs, but it also highlights obstacles, said Dr. Thomas Crawford, a cardiologist at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the research.

Crawford is part of Project My Heart-Your Heart, a program that is collecting used pacemakers for future donation in developing countries. So far, they've amassed some 10,000 devices. However, researchers involved with that program have petitioned the FDA for permission to conduct a clinical trial to confirm the safety and efficacy of the reused devices in living people.

As it stands now, projects like Pavri's aren't officially sanctioned.

"It's a very uncharted territory," Crawford said. "It's not exactly legal."

Pavri acknowledged as much in the study, saying "any complications associated with such off-label use could be grounds for legal action."

But, he added, such off-label research is necessary to bolster arguments that regulators and manufacturers should allow reuse of these devices on humanitarian grounds.

"It is worse practice, in my opinion, to not offer a patient anything," Pavri said.

"A secondhand device is better than no device at all."

Pregnant women who sleep on their back may increase the risk of miscarriage or stillbirth, a five-year Australian study has found.

The research titled the "Sydney Stillbirth Study" looked at pregnancies of 295 women from eight hospitals around Australia, the Daily Mail reported.


The study found that women who sleep on their back are six times more likely to have a stillborn baby.

A stillborn baby is a baby born dead after 24 weeks of pregnancy. If the baby dies before 24 completed weeks, it is known as a late miscarriage.

Lead researcher Adrienne Gordon, from Sydney`s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, said previous research suggested prolonged periods of lying in this position restricted blood flow to the baby.

It is believed that sleeping on the right side or on the back reduces blood flow through a major vein from the legs to the heart, which affects the supply to the womb, the study said.

However, the researchers said it was important that women who are currently pregnant "don`t become alarmed if they sometimes sleep on their back".

Experts said three-quarters of pregnant women sleep mostly on the left side.

The daily said this may suggest they instinctively choose a sleeping position that works best for the baby.

In almost half of stillbirths, the direct cause of the baby`s death cannot be established.

Ten percent of stillborn babies have some kind of abnormality and other possible causes include problems with the mother`s health or problems with the placenta, which links the baby`s blood supply to that of the mother.

Stillbirth Foundation Australia, which funded the study, said the research was unique as it looked exclusively at women who were more than 32 weeks pregnant.

In 2011, a University of Auckland study found that mothers who slept on their back or right-hand side on the night before giving birth were twice as likely to have a stillborn child compared to those who slept on their left.

Eating oily fish may boost women's heart health more than men's, claim researchers.

The oils - found in fish like salmon, mackerel and tuna - are known to improve chances of surviving a repeat heart attack.

But a new study suggests women could benefit more from their effect on the heart.

Researchers at the University of Reading found fish oils have a direct impact on the muscle cells that control the elasticity of our blood vessels.

In tests, women got double the benefit compared with men as elasticity improved four-fold in women compared with two-fold in men.

In fact the beneficial effect of the fish oil in women was as potent as that of drugs that are prescribed to people with poor blood vessel elasticity, such as those with diabetes.

At least 39,000 women a year in the UK suffer heart attacks and their chances of dying are higher than a man's.

Study leader Professor Christine Williams, the University's first Hugh Sinclair Professor of Nutrition and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, said: 'Studies examining women's heart health are much less common than those which study men, partly because the studies are harder to carry out in women due to the varying effects of hormones during the menstrual cycle.

'In addition, many believe men are the only ones to suffer from heart disease.

'However nearly 40,000 women die of coronary heart disease each year in the UK and we do not yet know whether all the diet recommendations which we currently advise are as effective for women as for men.

'The good news here is that current recommendations that we should all eat more oily fish appears to be more effective for women than men.'

However, two thirds of Britons never eat oily fish even though official guidelines recommend its consumption at least once a week.

In the study around 60 people, half men and women, were given test drinks containing either saturated fats or a combination with omega 3 fish oils, equivalent to a 200g portion of oily fish.

Imaging was used to check the reaction of the blood cells to the different drinks, says a report in the Journal of Lipid Research.

Prof Williams said 'As well as discovering the effect of fish oils is greater in women we also found that people with a gene variation that produces the protein eNOS, which helps to increase blood flow, also benefitted more.

'Our study showed that people who carry the rarer form of the protein, which is about 10 per cent of the UK population, respond twice as well to fish oils, suggesting they would particularly benefit from additional oily fish intake.

'This research supports the view that the effects of diets vary, being more effective in certain genders and genotypes. Our study was very carefully designed to include equal numbers of men and women and also equal numbers of people with the two types of gene variants, so that the results are very unlikely to be due to chance. 'Although the responses varied, all the subjects in the study benefitted from taking fish oils with a meal.

'However, for women and those with the gene variant, the responses were very marked indeed, and when it comes to their diet could give them considerable health benefits in the future.' The work was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Fish oil is known to increase the release of nitric oxide from the lining of the blood vessel wall which causes relaxation of the vessel and increases blood flow.

However the researchers found that some of the relaxation effect on the blood vessel wall may be due to direct actions of the fish oil acting on the muscle cells themselves, rather than on the cells lining the blood vessel wall.

Professor Williams added 'This is an exciting discovery which gives us a new way of looking at how our diet affects the health of our blood vessels, and possibly more effective ways of improving heart health in the future.' The best dietary source of omega 3 fatty acids is oily fish because the human body cannot produce omega-3 fatty acids.

There has been an explosion in the number of foods fortified with omega-3 oils, such as chickens, margarine, eggs, milk and bread, but they contain only small amounts.

Types of fish that contain high levels include tuna, salmon, mackerel, herring, sardines, and anchovies.

White fish is also a healthy food including cod, haddock and plaice although it contains lower levels of essential fatty acids.

Fish oil supplements are recommended as protection against repeat heart attacks, with regular fish eaters a third more likely to survive a heart attack.

Fish oil supplements are approved for prescribing on the NHS to patients after a heart attack, or who have metabolic syndrome or high triglycerides - unhealthy blood fats.

Omacor, which is licensed for post-heart attack treatment, has been shown in clinical trials to cut the risk of sudden death by up to 45 per cent.

Omega-3 fats are important throughout adult life for mental wellbeing but in particular help heart patients, and those with arthritis, by blocking the body's response to inflammation.

They work in several ways to reduce heart attack risk by cutting blood fats, reducing the chances of a blood clot and blocking dangerous heart rhythms that might otherwise prove fatal.