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Single or unhappily married men may have an elevated risk of fatal stroke in the coming decades, according to a large study presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2010.

The findings are based on earlier work in which researchers examined 10,059 civil servants and municipal workers (average age 49) who participated in the Israeli Ischemic Heart Disease Study in 1963. Using the national death registry and other records, researchers tracked the fate of the men through 1997, the last year for which underlying causes of death had been coded.

Among the men who in 1963 were single, 8.4 percent died of stroke in the following 34 years, compared with 7.1 percent of the married men. Considering age at death and adjusting for socioeconomic status, obesity, blood pressure, smoking habits and family size, as well as existing diabetes and heart disease at the time of the earlier survey, single men had a 64 percent higher risk of fatal stroke than did married men. That figure is comparable to the risk of fatal stroke faced by men with diabetes, said Uri Goldbourt, Ph.D., author of the study.

Furthermore, in 1965, the married men had been asked to evaluate their marriages as very successful, quite successful, not so successful, or unsuccessful. In an analysis of the 3.6 percent of men who had reported dissatisfaction in their marriage, adjusted risk of a fatal stroke was also 64 percent higher, compared with men who considered their marriages very successful.

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a cocktail of ingredients that forestalls major aspects of the aging process.

The findings are published in the current issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine.

"As we all eventually learn, ageing diminishes our mind, fades our perception of the world and compromises our physical capacity," says David Rollo, associate professor of biology at McMaster. "Declining physical activity—think of grandparents versus toddlers—is one of the most reliable expressions of ageing and is also a good indicator of obesity and general mortality risk."

The study found that a complex dietary supplement powerfully offsets this key symptom of ageing in old mice by increasing the activity of the cellular furnaces that supply energy—or mitochondria—and by reducing emissions from these furnaces—or free radicals—that are thought to be the basic cause of ageing itself.

Self-help books based on the traditional principles of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, including popular titles like 'CBT for Dummies', can do more harm than good, according to a new study, reported by the British Psychological Society.

The risks were highest for readers described as 'high ruminators' - those who spend time mulling over the likely causes and consequence of their negative moods.

The new research focuses on the use of self-help books as a preventative intervention for people at risk of developing depression. Gerald Haeffel identified 72 undergrads at risk and allocated each of them randomly to work through one of three self-help books. A third of the students spent four weeks working through a traditional self-help CBT-based book, of the kind typically found in book stores, which involved learning the links between thoughts, behaviour and mood, as well as identifying negative thoughts and re-evaluating them. Another group of students followed a 'non-traditional' CBT-based self-help book, similar to the first but modified so that the task of identifying and challenging one's own negative thoughts was removed. The final group followed a book that taught academic skills such as time-management and memory aids.

Here's the bottom line - among students who tended to ruminate and who had suffered an increase in stress, those who followed the traditional CBT book displayed more depressive symptoms after the four-week study period than those who followed either of the other two books. At four-month follow-up, the traditional CBT study group as a whole tended to have more depression symptoms than the other groups, although high ruminating and stressed students in the traditional group remained the biggest losers.

A forensic pathologist thinks some people's embarrassment about taking herbal medicines can leave them vulnerable to taking a lethal cocktail of drugs, the ABC reports.

Professor Roger Byard of Adelaide University has published a research paper on the dangers of herbal medicines when taken in large quantities, injected or combined with use of prescription drugs.

He has found it can lead to serious illnesses, worsen pre-existing conditions or cause death.

Professor Byard says people are often reluctant to tell their doctor they are taking herbal medicines for fear of ridicule, but it can be a fatal mistake.

"Although obviously a number of herbal substances are quite safe, you don't know what's in the package sometimes and there may be interactions, so it is important to talk to your doctor," he said.

A British and Dutch team of scientists has identified for the first time definitive variants associated with biological ageing in humans. The team analyzed more than 500,000 genetic variations across the entire human genome to identify the variants which are located near a gene called TERC.

British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the University of Leicester Professor Nilesh Samani, of the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, who co-led the project explained that there are two forms of ageing – chronological ageing i.e. how old you are in years and biological ageing whereby the cells of some individuals are older (or younger) than suggested by their actual age.

He said: "There is accumulating evidence that the risk of age-associated diseases including heart disease and some types of cancers are more closely related to biological rather than chronological age.

"What we studied are structures called telomeres which are parts of one's chromosomes. Individuals are born with telomeres of certain length and in many cells telomeres shorten as the cells divide and age. Telomere length is therefore considered a marker of biological ageing.

"In this study what we found was that those individuals carrying a particular genetic variant had shorter telomeres i.e. looked biologically older. Given the association of shorter telomeres with age-associated diseases, the finding raises the question whether individuals carrying the variant are at greater risk of developing such diseases"

Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts, reports Fergus Walsh Medical correspondent, for BBC News.

The research, carried out in the UK and Belgium, involved a new brain scanning method.

Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.

The study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that scans can detect signs of awareness in patients thought to be closed off from the world.Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage.

The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which shows brain activity in real time.They asked patients and healthy volunteers to imagine playing tennis while they were being scanned. In each of the volunteers this stimulated activity in the pre-motor cortex, part of the brain which deals with movement.

This also happened in four out of 23 of the patients presumed to be in a vegetative state.

A spot of sunbathing may be just the thing to lift a man's libido, say experts after an Austrian study finds testosterone is boosted by vitamin D, the BBC reports.

The bulk of this essential nutrient is made by the skin on exposure to sunlight. The rest comes from the diet.

A study in Clinical Endocrinology journal of 2,299 men found those with enough of the vitamin had more of the male sex hormone than those with less.

Blood levels of both dipped in the winter and peaked in the summer.

People who spend a lot of time browsing the net are more likely to show depressive symptoms, according to the first large-scale study of its kind in the West by University of Leeds psychologists.

Researchers found striking evidence that some users have developed a compulsive internet habit, whereby they replace real-life social interaction with online chat rooms and social networking sites. The results suggest that this type of addictive surfing can have a serious impact on mental health.

Lead author Dr Catriona Morrison, from the University of Leeds, said: "The internet now plays a huge part in modern life, but its benefits are accompanied by a darker side.

"While many of us use the internet to pay bills, shop and send emails, there is a small subset of the population who find it hard to control how much time they spend online, to the point where it interferes with their daily activities."

These 'internet addicts' spent proportionately more time browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and online communities. They also had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than non-addicted users.