Features

By Lisa Rapaport

Pregnant women at high risk for developing gestational diabetes may be less likely to experience this complication when they switch to a Mediterranean diet instead of sticking with their usual eating habits, a recent experiment suggests. 

Researchers studied 1,252 women who had obesity, high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol before they conceived — all so-called metabolic risk factors that increase the risk of gestational diabetes during pregnancy. Midway through pregnancy, researchers randomly assigned roughly half of these women to switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in nuts, extra virgin olive oil, fruit, vegetables, whole grains and legumes and low on sugary foods as well as red and processed meat. The remaining mothers continued their usual diets, according to the report in PLoS Medicine. 

Compared to women who didn’t change their eating habits, mothers who switched to the Mediterranean diet were 35 per cent less likely to develop gestational diabetes, a version of the disease that shows up for the first time during pregnancy. 

With the Mediterranean diet, women also gained less weight: an average of 6.8kg versus 8.3kg for the control group of mothers on their usual diets. 

“A Mediterranean diet has been shown to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular complications in non-pregnant population,” said Shakila Thangaratinam, senior author of the study and a researcher at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. 

“This is the largest study in pregnancy to show that Mediterranean diet minimises the risk of gestational diabetes and weight gain,” Thangaratinam said by email. “It is a relatively easy to follow diet, with large benefits.” 

The study team concludes that a Mediterranean diet supplemented with nuts and extra virgin olive oil may help lower women’s’ risk of gestational diabetes or excessive weight gain during pregnancy.

Applications that let you keep and manage your contacts are probably among the most widely used of them all. Even if your computing needs are few, if you are not particularly demanding and like to keep your life with technology uncomplicated, chances are that you do use a contact application, if only as a simple phone book. And yet, quite strangely, after all these years, and in spite of the importance of the subject, the perfect contact application is yet to be found.

One of the difficulties in designing the ultimate contact software programme, one that would be so good that “you will never need another contact app” as they say, is that it could be very simple in structure or, at the other end, extremely complex.

Very simple means that it handles the basic, essential fields: first name, last name, telephone numbers and e-mail address, for example. From there you can take it to higher heights, to manage information like company name, job title, street address, business category, relationship, Skype name, location, website URL, ID photo, keywords, date of entry and tens of other possible fields.

Sometime users are given the possibility to create their own customised fields. In business, when such software is meant to handle a large number of fields and to follow up on clients, it is sometimes referred to as CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Naturally, the IT industry has been providing contacts software for decades. One of the best, most detailed such application is found in Microsoft Outlook. Another very popular one is Google Contacts that you use and operate online, as one of Google’s services, if you have a Google account (i.e. a Gmail address).

To satisfy everyone is impossible, understandably. After the basic data fields above, we all have different needs, different taste and want to deal with different levels of complexity. Over the last few years, however, coming up with the near-perfect contacts app has become more difficult for two specific reasons. The first is the need to run the app on various platforms and operating systems, namely Android, Windows, iOS, and of course online. The second is the need to have automatic, trouble-free, continuous backup of the data stored.

Indeed, no one likes to handle their contacts on their smartphone, and then manage another set of the same data on say a desktop Windows computer. We all know the headache and the time wasted that this implies.

If you go to Google Play store or the App Store, searching for a good contacts app, you will be confronted with a first, perhaps unexpected difficulty: the choice you will have to make between hundreds — literally — of such applications, all claiming to do the same job, and all claiming to be the best at it.

Taking everything into consideration, one of the most efficient, practical applications in this line probably is Google Contacts. Far from being perfect, from the purely technical viewpoint of an IT software professional, it has a reasonable, moderate level of complexity, handles the data fields that 90 per cent of the population needs rather well, and — the key point here — it automatically synchronises the data you have on your phone with the set stored online. You can then manage it from a web browser, from anywhere, or from your smartphone. Data will always be synchronised on both, and will be available, and safely backed up, what is more.

It has a few shortcomings though, which is quite surprising given that it is the brainchild of a leading, powerful IT player such as Google, one of the now famous GAFA group!

It lets you import and export data, in case you need to manipulate it in other applications, for mailing lists for instance. However, if you export in the well-known CSV (comma separated value) format, and although this format is usually opened and read with Microsoft Excel, it is only if you open the so-exported CSV file with the online Google Sheets that you will find your contacts in good shape. For example, a telephone number stored a +962 7 9900 5544 could be misunderstood by Excel and displayed as the “mathematical” number 9.62799E+11. There are ways, of course, to overcome such difficulty, but not everyone is willing or has the technical knowledge to correct this.

Despite the few imperfections, the qualities, the built-in functionalities and the advantages of Google contacts by far outweigh the shortcomings. Overall, it may well be the smartest way to handle your contacts, be it for personal or for professional use.

PUEBLA, Mexico — Trees are one of the best things we have to clean the Earth’s air, but they have certain drawbacks: they need time and space to grow.

Enter the BioUrban, an artificial tree that sucks up as much air pollution as 368 real trees.

Designed by a Mexican start-up, the towering metal structure uses microalgae to clean carbon dioxide and other contaminants from the air, returning pure oxygen to the environment.

Measuring 4.2 metres tall and nearly 3 metres wide, the device looks something like a cross between a tree and a post-modernist high-rise, with a steel trunk that radiates rising bands of concentric metal.

“What this system does, through technology, is inhale air pollution and use biology to carry out the natural process [of photosynthesis], just like a tree,” says Jaime Ferrer, a founding partner in BiomiTech, the company behind the invention.

Mexicans know a thing or two about air pollution.

Mexico City, a sprawling urban area of more than 20 million people, regularly grinds to a halt under air pollution alerts, triggered by emissions from the capital’s more than 5 million cars, its polluting industries and even the nearby Popocatepetl volcano.

Ferrer says the company’s goal is to help such cities achieve cleaner air in targeted areas — those used by pedestrians, cyclists or the elderly, for example — when planting large numbers of trees is not an option.

Not competing 

with trees

Worldwide, an estimated 7 million people die from exposure to air pollution each year, according to the World Health Organisation.

“We decided our job was to not just stand by and let people keep dying,” says Ferrer.

Launched in 2016, BiomiTech has so far “planted” three trees: one in the city of Puebla, in central Mexico, where it is headquartered; one in Colombia; and one in Panama.

It has a contract for two more in Turkey, and projects in the works to install them in Mexico City and Monterrey, in northern Mexico.

A BioUrban typically costs about $50,000, though the final price varies depending on the site.

The company has mainly sold them to local governments so far, though private donors are providing the funding in Monterrey, an industrial hub that is also no stranger to air pollution.

Each tree weighs about one tonne, and cleans as much air as a hectare of forest — the equivalent of what 2,890 people breathe in a day.

The project is reminiscent of another launched by a German firm in 2015, the “City Tree” — a giant, vertical square of moss that also uses photosynthesis to clean the surrounding air.

Ferrer insists the idea of the BioUrban is not to replace real trees, but complement them in areas where planting a forest would not be viable.

“They can be used in high-traffic areas, transportation terminals, where you can’t just plant a hectare of trees,” he told AFP.

“The system isn’t going to end air pollution in Mexico City. But it can alleviate the problem in high-traffic areas.”

Maria Jose Negrete, 21, who goes to university near the spot where the first tree was installed, is a fan.

“It uses technology to help the environment. That’s what we need right now,” she said.

By Carolyn Crist

Hearing loss in middle age is associated with higher odds of cognitive decline and dementia in later years, suggests a large study in Taiwan. 

Researchers tracked more than 16,000 men and women and found that a new diagnosis of hearing loss between ages 45 and 65 more than doubled the odds of a dementia diagnosis in the next dozen years. 

Even mild levels of hearing loss could be a risk factor, so hearing protection, screening and hearing aids may be important means of reducing cognitive risk as well, the study team writes in JAMA Network Open. 

“Hearing loss is a potential reversible risk factor for dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease,” said senior study author Charles Tzu-Chi Lee of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. 

Past research suggests that about two thirds of the risk for dementia is hereditary or genetic, which means about one third of the risk is from things that are modifiable, Lee noted. Among modifiable risk factors, hearing loss accounts for about 9 per cent of dementia risk, a greater proportion than factors like hypertension, obesity, depression, diabetes and smoking. 

“The early identification of hearing loss... and successful hearing rehabilitation can mitigate the negative effects of hearing loss,” Lee told Reuters Health by e-mail. “However, the ideal time to perform hearing loss screening to reduce the risk of dementia remains unclear.” 

Lee and colleague Chin-Mei Liu of the Taiwan Centres for Disease Control analysed data on people aged 45 and older from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan. They matched 8,135 patients newly diagnosed with hearing loss between 2000 and 2011 to 8,135 similar individuals without hearing loss and followed them all through 2013. 

All were free of dementia at the start, but over time, 1,868 people developed dementia — and 59 per cent of them came from the hearing loss group. 

Among people with hearing loss, new dementia cases were identified at a rate of 19 per 10,000 people, compared with 14 per 10,000 without hearing loss. Overall, hearing loss was associated with a 17 per cent risk increase for dementia, the researchers calculated. 

But when they looked at subsets of people, almost all the increased risk was concentrated in the youngest age group. Among those 45-65, dementia risk was 2.21-fold higher with hearing loss. 

“The present study suggests that screening for hearing loss should be performed when people are middle aged,” Lee said. 

The results factored in variables such as sex, age and insurance type, as well as other known risks for cognitive decline and dementia. Among these, six other conditions were associated with an increased risk of dementia: cerebrovascular disease, diabetes, anxiety, depression, alcohol-related illnesses and head injury. 

The study was not designed to determine how hearing loss might contribute to dementia, or if the two conditions share the same cause. One limitation of insurance data, the researchers note, is lack of precision in the dementia diagnoses. 

“In an aging population, dementia will present one of the greatest challenges to society in this century,” said David Loughrey of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin, who wasn’t involved in the study. 

“There are now more people over the age of 65 than under the age of five for the first time in human history,” he told Reuters Health by e-mail. “Pharmacological treatments for the most common cause of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, only offer symptom-modifying effects. This has led to suggestions that a change in approach to prevention rather than treatment after diagnosis may be more beneficial.” 

Future studies will investigate whether treating hearing loss can decrease the risk of dementia, the study team writes. 

“Hearing health is critically important to the human experience,” said Dr Richard Gurgel of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who wasn’t involved in the study. 

 “There is more to hearing loss than just hearing. Hearing loss affects the way we fundamentally communicate and connect with one another,” he said in an email. “Hearing loss impacts the overall health of older adults, including their emotional well-being and social isolation, as well as cognition.” 

LAMBAHRAUN LAVA FIELD, Iceland — To prepare for the next mission to Mars in 2020, NASA has taken to the lava fields of Iceland to get its new robotic space explorer ready for the job.

With its black basalt sand, wind-swept dunes and craggy peaks, the Lambahraun Lava Field at the foot of Iceland’s second biggest glacier, Langjokull, was chosen as a stand-in for the Red Planet’s surface.

For three weeks, 15 scientists and engineers sent by the US space agency descended on the site, 100 kilometres from the capital, Reykjavik, last month to develop a prototype.

It will aim to continue the work of the “Curiosity” rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2012 in search of signs of ancient life and making preparations for human exploration.

Experts say that Iceland, a volcanic island in the middle of the north Atlantic, is in many ways reminiscent of the fourth planet from the Sun.

“It’s a very good analogue for Mars exploration and learning how to drive Mars rovers,” said Adam Deslauriers, manager of space and education, at Canada’s Mission Control Space Services. 

The company has been commissioned by NASA to test a rover prototype as part of the SAND-E (Semi-Autonomous Navigation for Detrital Environments) project.

‘Indestructible’

The prototype is a small, electric vehicle with white panels and an orange chassis.

It has a four-wheel drive propelled by two motors and is powered by 12 small car batteries stacked inside.

“This rover we have... [is] basically indestructible,” Deslauriers told AFP. 

“The rovers that we have on Mars and the Moon would be a lot more sensitive to the environment and conditions of Iceland. 

“A Moon rover is completely unprepared for rain,” he added, just as a rain shower swept in.

Equipped with sensors, a computer, a dual-lens camera and controlled remotely, the rover moves its approximately 570 kilogrammes at a leisurely speed of about 20 centimetres per second.

The speed needs to be slow to enable the rover to collect data and imagery properly, Mark Vandermeulen, a robotics engineer at Mission Control Space Services, said.

The meagre pace on the lava field is still two to four times faster than the speed it will be driving at its extraterrestrial destination.

Transmitting 

from Mars to Earth

Utilising its sensors and camera, the rover gathers and classifies data from its environment and sends back the findings to the engineers’ trailer.

The engineers then package the data and forward it to a tent where the scientists are huddled, to simulate how the data would be sent from Mars to Earth. 

The rover exploring Iceland is just a prototype for the one that will be going to Mars next year.

That one, which has yet to be named, will also be able to collect samples and store them in tubes to be brought back to Earth by future missions.

As the prototype isn’t capable of doing this, researchers walk to the area studied, armed with radiometers and other equipment, to collect all the data samples that the finished rover would be able to do.

‘Similar to Mars’

The sites are selected to study how the chemical composition and physical properties of the sand and rocks change, as they move from the glacier to a nearby river.

Before Mars became an inhospitable frozen desert with an average temperature of 63ºC, scientists believe that the planet shared many of the characteristics of the subarctic island.

“The mineralogy in Iceland is very similar to what we would find on Mars,” Ryan Ewing, associate professor of geology at Texas A&M University, said.

In particular, Ewing referred to minerals such as olivine and pyroxenes, both dark so-called mafic rocks, which have also been found on Mars.

“In addition to that, we don’t have much vegetation, it’s cold and we have some of the environments like sand dunes and rivers and glaciers that Mars has evidence of in the past,” Ewing said.

Iceland has previously been used as a training ground for NASA missions.

During the Apollo mission years, 32 astronauts in the mid-1960s received geological training in the Askja lava fields and near the Krafla crater in the north of the country.

The setting allows NASA to test equipment and procedures, as well as the people performing them, in extreme environments while remaining on terra firma.

Mission Control says it is planning to return to Iceland next summer before the launch of the next Mars rover mission, scheduled between July 17 and August 5, 2020.

By Helene Dauschy and Tom Little

STOCKHOLM — Swedish climate activist and global star Greta Thunberg understood climate change at an early age, and has rallied youths around the world and parents to her cause, sparking criticism along the way. 

In less than a year the now 16-year-old’s humble “climate strike” has become a global movement and set her up as a potential 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

As her strict climate ethos prevents her from flying she is preparing to travel to the New York UN Climate Summit on September 23 by sailboat.

Thunberg’s climate struggle began quietly in August 2018 when she skipped school for the first three weeks, and then on Fridays to spend the day outside Sweden’s parliament with a sign labelled “School strike for climate”.

Swedish media, at the time occupied by upcoming parliamentary elections, didn’t pay much attention to the young girl’s message, but only at first.

Since then Greta, most often seen wearing her hair in tightly knit braids, has diligently continued her weekly protest until recently.

“I’m planning to continue until Sweden is in line with the Paris agreement and that might take a while,” she told AFP TV in late 2018.

Her demands have attracted attention and she has been asked to address global leaders, and adorned the cover of international magazines such as Time and Vogue.

Around the world, young activists have heard the call and modelled protests of their own after Greta’s, leading to both praise and criticism.

“We are after all just children. You don’t have to listen to us,” she said during a speech to France’s national assembly in July, responding to some of her critics, who had dismissed her as a “prophetess in shorts” and the “Justin Bieber of ecology”. 

Climate 

conscious family

It was in school, when Greta Thunberg was about “eight or nine”, that her interest in climate issues was first piqued.

“My teachers told me that I should save paper and turn off the lights. I asked them why and they said because there’s something called climate change and global warming, caused by humans,” Greta told AFP.

The notion was strange to the young girl, who felt that if that was the case, “then we would not be talking about anything else”.

Since then she has stopped eating meat, drinking milk and buying new things, unless “absolutely necessary”.

Greta’s family, who lives in a spacious but cosy Stockholm apartment, has also made changes to their lifestyle.

As an opera singer, her mother Malena Ernman used to travel the world, but she has bowed to her daughter’s cause and given up on flights, now performing only in Nordic countries.

Her mother, father Svante Thunberg, an actor turned producer, and younger sister Beata became aware of how much the climate issue weighed on Greta’s shoulders when she became depressed.

At age 11 Greta stopped eating, started missing school and even stopped talking as the “existential threat” of climate change loomed overhead, her father said.

‘It was worth it’

When she was 12, Greta was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a mild form of autism.

“My brain works a bit differently so I see the world from a different perspective,” Greta explained to AFP. 

“I am very direct, I say it the way it is, and when I decide to do something, I do it without doubt,” she continued, adding that she considers her condition a strength.

Greta, who graduated from the ninth grade in June, has had to catch up on her studies from abroad, due to her many travels.

That hasn’t stopped her from getting mostly straight A’s, with the exception of physical education and home economics.

“If I hadn’t striked from school and travelled so much, I could have gotten an A in all subjects,” she confessed to newspaper Dagens Nyheter in June.

“But it’s worth it,” she quickly added.

In late May, the teenage activist announced she would take a sabbatical year to visit the Americas for a series of meetings on the theme of climate change, a journey expected to last several months.

“We have to take the opportunity to act now because it may be too late in just a year,” she warned in December.

By Adrianna Rodriguez

Harvard researchers are advising millions of people who take aspirin every day to prevent heart attacks to stop their daily use.

Some 29 million people 40 and older were taking an aspirin a day in 2017 despite not having a heart disease, the published study found.

The study also found that about 6.6 million of them were using aspirin on their own even though a doctor never recommended it to them. And nearly 10 million people over 70 who don’t have heart disease were taking daily aspirin for prevention, the researchers reported in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The discovery comes after multiple, extensive studies last year found that only a marginal benefit, if any, could be found when taking routine aspirin — especially among older adults.

Another study also found that taking low-dose aspirin is associated with an increased risk for bleeding within the skull for people without heart disease.

The studies run counter to what doctors for decades had recommended: a daily 75 to 100 milligrammes aspirin to prevent strokes or heart attacks.

“Many patients are confused about this,” said Dr Colin O’Brien, a senior intern medicine resident at Beth Israel who led the most recent study from Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre.

The recent studies prompted the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology to change their guidelines in March:

— People over 70 who don’t have heart disease — or are younger but at increased risk of bleeding — should avoid daily aspirin for prevention.

— Only certain 40- to 70-year-olds who don’t already have heart disease are at high enough risk to warrant 75 to 100 milligrammes of aspirin daily, and that’s for a doctor to decide.

The Harvard study shows just how many millions of people that were taking a routine aspirin in 2017 should be taking a second look at these guidelines

“Clinicians should be very selective in prescribing aspirin for people without known cardiovascular disease,” cardiologist Roger Blumenthal, who was not involved in the Harvard study, said in a March statement. “It’s much more important to optimise lifestyle habits and control blood pressure and cholesterol as opposed to recommending aspirin.”

Although people without a history of heart problems shouldn’t be taking routine aspirin, it’s still recommended for heart attack survivors.

The American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology say regular exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding tobacco and eating a diet rich in vegetables and low in sugar and trans fats are among the best ways to prevent cardiovascular disease.

“We hope that more primary care doctors will talk to their patients about aspirin use, and more patients will raise this with their doctors,” O’Brien said.

Fake news is now beyond simple words and text. Deceptive, but advanced, very convincing fake video is the newest trend.

Hazards and threats on the Internet evolve as the technology itself does — for better or for worse. If the well-known, infamous hacking, data theft, viruses, phishing e-mails and Trojan horses are still here, their incidence has somewhat abated. This is because of increasing public awareness on the one hand, and thanks to the various methods available to get effective protection against them on the other.

The real annoyance — to put it mildly — now consists in the smart manipulation of images, still photos but mostly videos, using advanced techniques based on the latest artificial intelligence (AI) methods and software algorithms. It lets you create fake photos or videos that look very real. This reaches far beyond simple Photoshop editing or retouching.

The technique is often used to create fake videos of celebrities and politicians with the intention of damaging their reputation, making fun of them, hurting or humiliating them. The extent of the damage can be quite large sometimes.

Already plagued by the fake news phenomenon, often based on words, the media world now has to face incredibly realistic fake videos and images. The advanced software technique is called “deepfake”, a term that was adopted by the IT community less than two years ago. FakeApp and the open-source DeepFaceLab are two trade names of software that can generate entirely made-up, perfectly believable, stunning videos.

Among the possibilities of the deepfake technology, AI applied to videos lets the author, the “movie director”, not only put someone’s head on someone else’s body, with the consequences one can imagine, but also put, in the mouth of the character, words that were never said in the first place.

From Barack Obama and other leaders in the world of politics, to Taylor Swift in the pop music domain, many are those who have been victims of deceptive fake videos generated using the above described technique. Deepfake is also used on not-necessarily-famous people, to harm them on social networks, in personal, mean attacks.

The Swiss daily Aargauer Zeitung last year wrote “the manipulation of images and videos using artificial intelligence could become a dangerous mass phenomenon”.

Theverge.com says: “AI deepfakes are now as simple as typing whatever you want your subject to say. A scarily simple way to create fake videos and misinformation.”

The phenomenon is all the more complex when fake videos are sometimes created just for fun, for an honest laugh, with no intention of harming anyone. How then do you tell the difference, how can you predict what the intention of the video maker was in the first place?

The good news is that IT professionals have the necessary technical tools and skills to tell if a video was created using such AI-based software. To maintain a reasonable level of ethics on their network, social media like Twitter and Facebook, among others, are blocking videos created this way. That is when they can spot them in time. Otherwise they are removing them once detected.

Deepfake technology is simply making it more difficult than ever to tell what is true from what is made up in the digital world. At the same time, it is hard not to acknowledge the extraordinary power of AI and all it lets you do.

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Mexico’s prickly pear cactus, which is emblazoned on the country’s flag, could soon play a new and innovative role in the production of biodegradable plastics.

A packaging material that is made from the plant has been developed by a Mexican researcher and is offering a promising solution to one of the world’s biggest pollution conundrums.

“The pulp is strained to obtain a juice that I then use,” said Sandra Pascoe, who developed the product and works at the Atemajac Valley University in the western city of Guadalajara.

That substance is then mixed with non-toxic additives and stretched to produce sheets which are coloured with pigments and folded to form different types of packaging.

“What we’re doing is trying to concentrate on objects that don’t have a long life,” she said, particularly “single-use” packaging.

Pascoe is still conducting tests, but hopes to patent her product later this year and look for partners in early 2020, with an eye towards larger-scale production.

The cacti Pascoe uses for her experiments come from San Esteban, a small town on the outskirts of Guadalajara, where they grow by the hundreds.

San Esteban is located in Jalisco state where, starting next year, single-use non-recyclable plastic bags, straws and other disposable items will be banned.

‘Drop in the ocean’

Mexico City and states such as Baja California have also introduced similar measures.

In May, the capital city adopted a “historic” ban on plastic bags beginning in 2020. From 2021, straws, plastic plates and cutlery, and balloons will also be banned if they’re made “entirely or partially from plastic”, according to the bill adopted by the local congress.

Pascoe says her new material would be no more than a “drop in the ocean” in the battle to preserve the environment.

Given the rampant production of industrial plastics and the time it takes to make her material, there would need to be “other recycling strategies” to make any concrete difference, she said.

Latin America and the Caribbean account for around 10 per cent of worldwide waste, according to United Nations figures.

In March, UN member states committed to “significantly reduce” single-use plastics over the next decade, although green groups warned that goal fell short of tackling the Earth’s pollution crisis.

Plastic pollution has become a global concern, particularly after bans imposed by China and other countries on the import of plastic waste from overseas.

Despite widespread alarm on the environmental cost, Asia and the United States lifted world production of plastic last year while Europe saw a dip, according to numbers released by the PlasticsEurope federation in June.

More than eight million tons of plastics enter the world’s oceans every year.

Older women who are under a lot of social strain may be more likely to develop brittle, fracture-prone bones after menopause than their counterparts with worry-free lives, a recent study suggests. 

Researchers followed 11,020 postmenopausal women over six years, giving them periodic bone mineral density (BMD) tests and mood assessments. Participants rated their level of social strain, or negative interactions or relationships; their social support, or positive relationships; and social functioning, or limitations in social activity. 

Each one-point increase in social strain scores was associated with 0.082 per cent greater loss of BMD in the neck, 0.108 per cent greater loss of BMD at the hip, and 0.069 per cent greater loss of BMD in the lower spine, the study found. 

“Fractures are a major societal burden affecting one in two older women, due to a variety of risk factors that lead to bone loss,” said Shawna Follis, lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson. 

“We found that high social stress is one risk factor that increases bone loss in aging women,” Follis said by e-mail. 

Reduced oestrogen production during menopause and afterward can slow production of new bone tissues in women. Over time, this process leads to decreased BMD and increases the risk of osteoporosis. 

Bones thinned by osteoporosis are brittle and more easily fractured. 

Much of the previous research into connections between osteoporosis and mental health has focused on whether impairment due to bone thinning or fractures might contribute to mood disorders like depression or anxiety, the researchers note. 

In the current study, published in Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, high levels of social stress were associated with lower BMD even after researchers accounted for other factors that can impact bone health like age, education, chronic health problems, weight, smoking status, alcohol use, hormone therapy, age at menopause, physical activity, and fracture history. 

Lower social functioning was tied to greater decreases in BMD in the neck and hip, the current study found. And low social support was associated with greater decreases in the neck. 

The study doesn’t prove that social stressors directly impact bone mineral density, and researchers also didn’t look at the connection between various social stressors and falls or fractures. And it’s impossible to say from the study whether easing of social stress would have any effect on bone health. 

Still, the results suggest that older women who do a better job of managing stress may have healthier bones and a lower fracture risk, said Dr JoAnn Pinkerton, director of midlife health at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, Virginia and executive director emeritus of the North American Menopause Society. 

“For women who are anxious or have higher social stress levels, mindfulness, cognitive therapy, self-calming strategies, yoga, counselling, access to community building, or, if needed, medications might decrease the psychosocial stress levels,” Pinkerton, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. 

When women do have osteoporosis, there are still things they can do to prevent bones from becoming more brittle, Pinkerton added. 

“Calcium, vitamin D and strength training may prevent further bone loss,” Pinkerton said. “Although many women are fearful of the side effects associated with medications for treating osteoporosis, the side effects are actually rare while fractures may be life changing.” 

Osteoporosis medicines such as Fosamax (alendronate sodium), Actonel (risedronate sodium), and Boniva (ibandronate sodium) work by slowing down how fast the body removes old bone, allowing time to regrow bone and make fractures less likely. 

These medicines can cause nausea and abdominal pain, as well as rare but more serious side effects like cracks in the thighbone or damage to the jawbone. Alternative treatments include estrogen or two injected medicines, denosumab and teriparatide.