Vital Signs: Sept. 3

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Results of multitasking study a surprise

Media multitaskers — those extraordinary people who seem to be able to simultaneously chat on the phone, listen to music, surf the Net, text, e-mail, read, write, play computer games and watch video — seem to have unusual abilities. So Stanford researchers devised a study to figure out what skills helped them stay on task.

First, the researchers identified a group of college students who spent many hours a week using up to 12 forms of media, often at the same time, and another group whom they called light multitaskers. They then tested the groups while the students were not multitasking to assess three key cognitive skills: filtering out extraneous information, recalling important information from memory and switching easily from one task to another.

The results — which appear online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — astonished them.

"We were trying to figure out what they were good at, and it turns out: nothing," said Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor who was one of the study's authors. "They were worse at all three skills necessary for multitasking."

In fact, Nass said: "The more likely you are to multitask, the worse you are at it, and that shocked us. The high multitaskers overly focus on the irrelevant, keep their memory very sloppy, and they're very bad at switching from one task to another."

Moderate drinking

may help the brain

People over 60 who consume moderate amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk for Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, according to a large review of studies.

The analysis, which appeared in the July issue of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, reviewed 15 studies that together followed more than 28,000 subjects for at least two years. All the studies controlled for age, sex, smoking and other factors. The studies variously defined light to moderate drinking as one to 28 drinks per week.

Compared with abstainers, male drinkers reduced their risk for dementia by 45 percent, and women by 27 percent.

The researchers acknowledge that studying the effects of alcohol on dementia is complicated by issues like beverage type, standards of quantity and individual behavior that may interact with alcohol to affect mental acuity. But there is ample evidence from other studies that moderate alcohol consumption can increase HDL, or "good cholesterol," improve blood flow to the brain and decrease blood coagulation. All three factors may reduce the risk for dementia.

Disparities found in heart-related deaths

A new study comparing death rates of men and women after heart attacks and unstable angina finds that women are almost twice as likely to die within 30 days. But they tend to be older, to have complicating illnesses and to show different disease patterns.

Some 9.6 percent of women died within a month of a heart attack or unstable angina, compared with 5.3 percent of men. But the differences between the patients' characteristics explained most of the gap, said the paper's first author, Dr. Jeffrey S. Berger, an assistant professor of medicine and surgery at New York University School of Medicine.

The study, published Aug. 26 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, examined the cases of more than 130,000 patients from several countries. The researchers had access to clinical information about women that similar studies had lacked.

"If you had a 61-year-old woman with hypertension, cholesterol and diabetes, and a 61-year-old man with hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes, and both have acute coronary syndrome, you would expect the mortality to be the same — and it is," Berger said. But he added: "The women are not going to be like the men. They're going to be older, have more co-morbidities" — other diseases that complicate their heart condition — "and they are going to present differently."

Cancer is hardest on separated patients

Married cancer patients live longer than single ones, presumably because they have a built-in support system, are more likely to stick to their treatment regimens, and may even be in better health to begin with. But among single patients, those who are separated at the time of diagnosis have the worst life expectancy, a new study reports.