Health Wrap: Reports on Snoring, Fetuses and Pain, Forgetfulness and Baseball

A new study finds that habitual snoring in women is strongly tied to body mass index—a marker of fatness-- and age.

Overall, 7.6 percent of women snore.

The frequency of snoring reaches its peak in women ages 50 to 59.

Frequent snoring was found to increase with alcohol dependence, smoking and physical inactivity.
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According to an expert writing in this week’s British Medical Journal, there is good evidence that fetuses cannot feel pain.

The British author is specifically challenging proposals in his country--and in the u.s.-- to tell women seeking abortions that their unborn child will feel pain.

He says the neural circuitry necessary for processing pain can be considered complete by 26 weeks’ gestation.

However, he argues pain experience requires not only development of the brain but also development of the mind to essentially experience the pain.

He says development of the mind only occurs outside the womb.

The author does acknowledge the absence of pain in the fetus does not resolve the morality of abortion.

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Bill Cosby once did a whole routine on the thing you don’t want to hear a surgeon say: “hemostat….scalpel….oops.”

Well, we’re all human, and the oops factor gets all of us at one point or another.

Now, a team of University of Michigan researchers has looked inside the human brain and captured that oops instant when someone makes a costly mistake.

They found that a particular part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, or rACC, becomes much more active when a person realizes he or she has made an error that carries consequences – like, losing money.

Now, this same area is much more active in obsessive compulsive disorder patients, who obsess and fear excessively about making errors.

The authors hope that this kind of research will help lead to better treatments for these patients.

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And out of the very slim file labeled baseball medical news, university of new hampshire researchers who study visual psychophysics say of all the balls hit to the outfield, it’s the straight shot which is the most difficult to catch.

That’s because without a side view of a ball, a fielder has little information on the ball’s linear speed, making it hard to judge where and when it’s going to hit ground.

The authors say good fielders do not run to a place where the ball will land and then wait for it, but rather catch the ball while running.

This is contrary to what many coaches prescribe, which is to get under a ball and not drift on it.

Hopefully, this medical information will at least keep the ball from hitting your head, and causing injury.