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healthbriefs


A Cup of Peppermint Tea Boosts Alertness R


esearchers from Northumbria University, in England, have discovered that drinking peppermint tea can improve working and long- term memory. After 180 healthy adults fi lled out questionnaires about their mood, they were selected at random to consume one of three drinks—peppermint tea, chamomile tea or water— and then rested for 20 minutes. The subjects were then tested for memory and other cognitive factors


and given a second mood questionnaire. Those that drank peppermint tea exhibited improvements in both types of memory and were more alert than the other two groups. The participants that drank chamomile tea displayed reductions in both memory and attention functions compared to the others. Researcher Mark Moss, Ph.D., notes, “The enhancing and arousing effects of peppermint and the calming, sedative effects of chamomile observed in this study are in keeping with the claimed properties of these herbs and suggest benefi cial effects can be drawn from their use.”


Teens Hooked on Ear Buds Prone to Tinnitus


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esearchers from the University of São Paulo Medical School, in Brazil, have found high


levels of tinnitus, a ringing or buzzing in the ear, and hearing loss in adolescents that use ear bud speakers. They examined the hearing of 170 students between the ages of 11 and 17 and asked them about their experiences with tinnitus in the previous year. More than half of the respondents had experienced the condition. The principal investigator for the study, Tanit Ganz Sanchez, an associate professor of otolaryngology at the medical school, notes that the prevalence of tinnitus among adolescents should be viewed as an early warning of a serious hearing loss risk. She says, “If this teenage generation continues to expose themselves to very high noise levels, they’ll probably suffer from hearing loss by the time they’re 30 or 40.”


Fracking Linked to Asthma Attacks


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esearchers from the Johns Hopkins


School of Public Health have found that individuals living close to a natural gas hydraulic fracking site have a signifi cantly higher occurrence of asthma attacks. The study examined health records from


the Geisinger Health System, a healthcare provider in Pennsylvania, where the fracking industry has experienced incredible growth of more than 9.000 natural gas wells in the past decade. The records of more than 35,000 Geisinger asthma patients between the ages of 5 and 90 were studied between 2005 and 2012. Patients that reported attacks were mapped and studied in relation to the fracking well locations, and the results compared with other patients not reporting attacks in the same year. The researchers discovered that those that lived in close proximity to multiple or larger active natural gas wells were 1.5 to four times more likely to experience asthma attacks. Brian S. Schwartz, a medical doctor and a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Services at the Bloomberg School, in Baltimore, Maryland, was the senior author of the study. He states, “We are concerned with the growing number of studies that have observed health effects associated with this industry. We believe it’s time to take a more cautious approach to [fracking] well development with an eye on environmental and public health impacts.”


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