A team of US researchers has found that medical students, especially who are young, single and under high debt are twice as likely to abuse alcohol than their peers who are not attending medical school.

Burnout factors such as emotional exhaustion or feelings of depersonalisation were highly associated with alcohol abuse or dependence among the medical students.

"Our findings clearly show there is reason for concern," said Liselotte Dyrbye from Mayo Clinic in the US.

"We recommend institutions pursue a multifaceted solution to address related issues with burnout, the cost of medical education and alcohol abuse," Dyrbye added in the paper published in the journal Academic Medicine.

The researchers surveyed 12,500 medical students and one-third of those responded. Approximately 1,400 of that subgroup experienced clinical alcohol abuse or dependence.

The results indicate three factors that were independently associated -- a younger age than most peers in medical school, being unmarried and amount of educational debt.

No statistical difference was found between differing years of medical school or between men and women.

"In our paper we recommend wellness curricula for medical schools, identifying and remediating factors within the learning environment contributing to stress and removal of barriers to mental health services," added first author Eric Jackson.

A team of British researchers has found a link between gum disease and greater rates of cognitive decline in people with early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

According to researchers, periodontists or gum disease is associated with increased dementia severity and subsequent greater progression of cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer's disease.

"However, if there is a direct relationship between periodontists and cognitive decline, as this current study suggests, then treatment of gum disease might be a possible treatment option for Alzheimer's," added senior author Clive Holmes from the University of Southampton in Britain.

In the observational study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, 59 participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease were cognitively assessed and a blood sample was taken to measure inflammatory markers in their blood.

A dental hygienist who was blind to cognitive outcomes assessed participants' dental health.

The majority of participants (52) were followed-up at six months when all assessments were repeated.

The presence of gum disease at baseline was linked to six-fold increase in the rate of cognitive decline in participants over the six-month follow-up period of the study.

Periodontitis at baseline was also associated with a relative increase in the pro-inflammatory state over the six-month follow-up period.

The authors conclude that gum disease is associated with an increase in cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease, possibly via mechanisms linked to the body's inflammatory response.

However, growing evidence from a number of studies links the body's inflammatory response to increased rates of cognitive decline, suggesting that it would be worth exploring whether the treatment of gum disease might also benefit the treatment of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

We also believe, based on various research findings that the presence of teeth with active gum disease results in higher body-wide levels of the sorts of inflammatory molecules which have also been associated with an elevated risk of other outcomes such as cognitive decline or cardiovascular disease, the researchers stated.

Research has suggested that effective gum treatment can reduce the levels of these molecules closer to that seen in a healthy state.

Shedding new light on how differently men and women experience pain, researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have found that women are 1.38 times more likely than men to report neck pain due to cervical degenerative disc disease.

Cervical degenerative disc disease is a common cause of neck pain. Symptoms include stiff or inflexible neck, burning, tingling and numbness. Pain is most prevalent when the patient is upright or moving the head.

The study by Meda Raghavendra and Joseph Holtman from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine included 3,337 patients who were treated at Loyola's Pain Management Centre.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pain Medicine in Palm Springs, California, US.

The study adds to the growing body of research on the differences in which men and women experience pain.

Previous studies have found that females are more likely to be treated at pain clinics for chronic pain and that certain painful conditions, such as migraine headaches and fibromyalgia, are more common in women.

Various explanations have been proposed, including hormonal differences and the belief that men may be less willing to report pain.

Raghavendra and Holtman also conducted a similar study of patients who were treated at Loyola's Pain Management Centre for lumbosacral degenerative disc disease or lower back pain.

The prevalence in females was slightly higher than the prevalence in males, but this difference was not statistically significant, the researchers said.

You may want to start including broccoli in your diet as a recent study has shown that it can reduce the risk of liver cancer and preventing the development of fatty liver.

Since broccoli consumption has previously been linked to reducing the risk of certain cancers, including breast, colon and prostate cancers, researchers at the University of Illinois wanted to see if there was a link between the vegetable and liver cancer and fatty liver, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Researcher Elizabeth Jeffery says that the majority of the U.S. population eats a diet high in saturated fats and added sugars. However, both of these are stored in the liver and can be converted to body fat. Consuming a high-fat, high-sugar diet and having excess body fat is linked with the development of NAFLD, which can lead to diseases such as cirrhosis and liver cancer.

"We called this a Westernized-style diet in the study because we wanted to model how so many of us are eating today," Jeffery says.

The team wanted to find out the impact of feeding broccoli to mice with a known liver cancer-causing carcinogen and so they studied four groups of mice; some of which were on a control diet or the Westernized diet and some were given or not given broccoli.

The study shows that in mice on the Westernized diet both the number of cancer nodules and the size of the cancer nodules increased in the liver. But when broccoli was added to the diet, the number of nodules decreased. Size was not affected.

The study appears in Journal of Nutrition.

You may want to start including broccoli in your diet as a recent study has shown that it can reduce the risk of liver cancer and preventing the development of fatty liver.

Since broccoli consumption has previously been linked to reducing the risk of certain cancers, including breast, colon and prostate cancers, researchers at the University of Illinois wanted to see if there was a link between the vegetable and liver cancer and fatty liver, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Researcher Elizabeth Jeffery says that the majority of the U.S. population eats a diet high in saturated fats and added sugars. However, both of these are stored in the liver and can be converted to body fat. Consuming a high-fat, high-sugar diet and having excess body fat is linked with the development of NAFLD, which can lead to diseases such as cirrhosis and liver cancer.

"We called this a Westernized-style diet in the study because we wanted to model how so many of us are eating today," Jeffery says.

The team wanted to find out the impact of feeding broccoli to mice with a known liver cancer-causing carcinogen and so they studied four groups of mice; some of which were on a control diet or the Westernized diet and some were given or not given broccoli.

The study shows that in mice on the Westernized diet both the number of cancer nodules and the size of the cancer nodules increased in the liver. But when broccoli was added to the diet, the number of nodules decreased. Size was not affected.

The study appears in Journal of Nutrition.