People who were breast-fed as infants may have a lower risk of depression in adulthood, a new study has claimed.

German researchers looked at 52 people, whose average age was 44, who were being treated for major depression at an inpatient facility, and compared them with 106 healthy people who had never been diagnosed with depression.

Participants were considered to have been breast-fed if either they or their mothers said they had nursed for at least two weeks, MyHealthNewsDaily reported.

Results showed that 73 per cent of those without depression had been breast-fed, whereas 46 per cent of people with depression were breast-fed.

The association held when researchers took into account factors that could affect participants' risk of depression, such as age, gender and mother's level of education.

Additionally, the researchers found that how long a person had been breast-fed did not matter in terms of their depression risk.

While the finding suggests a link, it does not suggest a cause-and-effect relationship between breast-feeding and depression, the researchers said.

Breast-feeding could indicate the general quality of the mother-infant relationship, and other aspects of this relationship could be protective against depression, the researchers said.

They also suggested that breast-feeding could increase the behaviours in mothers that have been linked with the hormone oxytocin. Such behaviors are believed to protect against stress.

It could also be that components of breast milk promote brain development in a way that helps prevent depression, they said.

The study was published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

Being married helps patients with lung cancer live significantly longer than if they were single, according to a new research.

Similar benefit has been seen in other cancers, including those of the prostate, and head and neck, the independent reported.

A study of 168 patients with advanced lung cancer who were treated with chemotherapy and radiation over a decade from 2000 to 2010 found a third of those who were married were still alive after three years compared with 10 per cent of those who were single.

Previous research has shown marriage benefits men more than women, but among these survivors it was women who fared best. Almost half (46 per cent) lived for at least three years if they were married, compared with just 3 per cent of single men.

Cancer patients need support with daily activities, with proper follow up care and help travelling to and from hospital for appointments.

The researchers from the University of Maryland said this was the likely explanation of why married patients did better.
"Marital status appears to be an important independent predictor of survival in patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer. The reason for this is unclear, but our findings suggest the importance of social support in managing and treating our lung cancer patients," the paper quoted Elizabeth Nichols, a radiation oncology who led the study, as saying.

"We believe that better supportive care and support mechanisms for cancer patients can have a greater impact on increasing survival than many new cancer therapy techniques.

"Not only do we need to continue to focus on finding new drugs and cancer therapies, but also on ways to better support our cancer patients," she added.

The researchers presented their findings at the 2012 Symposium on Thoracic Oncology in Chicago.

Sipping green tea is not just good for you heart - it could boost the memory as well, say researchers.

A study from China found that the chemical properties of the healthy beverage promotes the generation of brain cells, providing benefits for memory and spatial learning.

Study leader Professor Yun Bai from the Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, China, said: 'There has been plenty of scientific attention on its use in helping prevent cardiovascular diseases, but now there is emerging evidence that its chemical properties may impact cellular mechanisms in the brain.'

Professor Bai's team focused on the organic chemical EGCG that is found in green tea.

'We proposed that EGCG can improve cognitive function by impacting the generation of neuron cells, a process known as neurogenesis,' said Prof Bai.

'We focused our research on the hippocampus, the part of the brain which processes information from short-term to long-term memory.'

The team found that ECGC boosts the production of neural progenitor cells, which like stem cells can adapt into various types of cells. The team then used laboratory mice to discover if this increased cell production gave an advantage to memory or spatial learning.

'We ran tests on two groups of mice, one which had imbibed ECGC and a control group,' said Prof Bai.

'First the mice were trained for three days to find a visible platform in their maze. Then they were trained for seven days to find a hidden platform.'

The team found that the ECGC treated mice required less time to find the hidden platform. Overall the results revealed that EGCG enhances learning and memory by improving object recognition and spatial memory.

'We have shown that the organic chemical EGCG acts directly to increase the production of neural progenitor cells, both in glass tests and in mice,' concluded Prof Bai.

'This helps us to understand the potential for EGCG, and green tea which contains it, to help combat degenerative diseases and memory loss.'

The research is published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research.

Simply describing your feelings at stressful times can make you less anxious, researchers have claimed.

UCLA research into people who were terrified of spiders found that by simply talking about their fear, they were able to deal with it - and even touch a tarantula.

The psychologists asked 88 people with a fear of spiders to approach a large, live tarantula in an open container outdoors.

The participants were told to walk closer and closer to the spider and eventually touch it if they could.

The subjects were then divided into four groups and sat in front of another tarantula in a container in an indoor setting.

In the first group, the subjects were asked to describe the emotions they were experiencing and to label their reactions to the tarantula - saying, for example, 'I'm anxious and frightened by the ugly, terrifying spider.'

'This is unique because it differs from typical procedures in which the goal is to have people think differently about the experience - to change their emotional experience or change the way they think about it so that it doesn't make them anxious,' said Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology at UCLA and the senior author of the study.

'Here, there was no attempt to change their experience, just to state what they were experiencing.'

In a second group, the subjects used more neutral terms that did not convey their fear or disgust and were aimed at making the experience seem less threatening.

They might say, for example, 'That little spider can't hurt me; I'm not afraid of it.'

'This is the usual approach for helping individuals to confront the things they fear,' Craske said.

In a third group, the subjects said something irrelevant to the experience, and in a fourth group, the subjects did not say anything - they were simply exposed to the spider.

'All the participants were re-tested in the outdoor setting one week later and were again asked to get closer and closer to the tarantula and potentially touch it with a finger.

The researchers measured how close subjects could get to the spider, how distressed they were and what their physiological responses were, focusing in particular on how much the subjects' hands sweated, which is a good measure of fear, Craske said.

The researchers found that the first group did far better than the other three.

These people were able to get closer to the tarantula - much closer than those in the third group and somewhat closer than those in the other two groups - and their hands were sweating significantly less than the participants in all of the other groups.

The results are published in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science and will appear in an upcoming print edition.

'They got closer and they were less emotionally aroused,' Craske said.

'The differences were significant.

'The results are even more significant given the limited amount of time involved.

'With a fuller treatment, the effects may be even larger.

'Exposure is potent,' she added. 'It's surprising that this minimal intervention action had a significant effect over exposure alone.'

'If you're having less of a threat response, which is indicated by less sweat, that would allow you to get closer; you have less of a fear response,' said study co-author Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.

'When spider-phobics say, 'I'm terrified of that nasty spider,' they're not learning something new; that's exactly what they were feeling - but now instead of just feeling it, they're saying it. For some reason that we don't fully understand, that transition is enough to make a difference.'

The scientists also analyzed the words the subjects used.

'Those who used a larger number of negative words did better, in terms of both how close they were willing to get to the tarantula and their skin-sweat response.

'In other words, describing the tarantula as terrifying actually proved beneficial in ultimately reducing the fear of it.'

A wireless medical implant that could replace pacemakers with a gadget small enough to fit on the head of a pin has been shown off.

A team of engineers at Stanford has demonstrated the feasibility of a super-small, implantable cardiac device that gets its power not from batteries, but from radio waves transmitted from outside the body.

The breakthrough could lead to a plethora of new medical sensors and even 'smart pill' that can be swallowed without having to include batteries.

The implanted device is contained in a cube just eight-tenths of a millimeter in radius, and could fit on the head of pin.

It is hoped they could revolutionise medicine by allowing devices such as pacemakers to be implanted without the need for large battery packs which need surgery to replace them.

Instead, wearers would wear wireless battery packs which transmit power to the implant.

"Wireless power solves both challenges," said Ada Poon, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, who led the research.

Last year, Poon made headlines when she demonstrated a wirelessly powered, self-propelled device capable of swimming through the bloodstream.

The findings were published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

Beyond the heart, they believe such devices might include swallowable endoscopes so-called "pillcams" that travel the digestive tract permanent pacemakers and precision brain stimulators; virtually any medical applications where device size and power matter.

In their paper, the researchers demonstrated wireless power transfer to a millimeter-sized device implanted five centimeters inside the chest on the surface of the heart a depth once thought out of reach for wireless power transmission.

The device works by a combination inductive and radiative transmission of power.

Both are types of electromagnetic transfer in which a transmitter sends radio waves to a coil of wire inside the body.

The radio waves produce an electrical current in the coil sufficient to operate a small device.

'For implantable medical devices, therefore, the goal is a high-frequency transmitter and a small receiver, but there is one big hurdle,' said Kim.

Existing mathematical models have held that high frequency radio waves do not penetrate far enough into human tissue, necessitating the use of low-frequency transmitters and large antennas too large to be practical for implantable devices.

However, this turned out to be untrue.

'In fact, to achieve greater power efficiency, it is actually advantageous that human tissue is a very poor electrical conductor,' said Kim.

'If it were a good conductor, it would absorb energy, create heating and prevent sufficient power from reaching the implant.'

According to their revised models, the researchers found that the maximum power transfer through human tissue occurs at about 1.7 billion cycles per second.

'In this high-frequency range, we can increase power transfer by about ten times over earlier devices.'

The discovery meant that the team could shrink the receive antenna by a factor of ten as well, to a scale that makes wireless implantable devices feasible.

At that the optimal frequency, a millimeter-radius coil is capable of harvesting more than 50 microwatts of power, well in excess of the needs of a recently demonstrated eight-microwatt pacemaker.