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To lose weight, it’s important to watch what you eat. but UAB researchers are discovering that watching when you eat could be helpful as well.
Read more: Changing your meal schedule could have healthy benefits
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Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Case Western Reserve University have received a $3.25 million, five-year R01 grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research to begin recruiting for the first longitudinal study — PROSPER-HIV — investigating how exercise and nutrition affect the symptoms adults with HIV experience.
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Lifestyle changes, including dietary modifications, increased physical activity, and other behavioral strategies, can help people lose weight. In fact, many individuals lose enough weight with lifestyle modifications to experience meaningful physical and psychological benefits. However, preventing weight regain, or keeping the weight off for the long-term, is a significant challenge for most people.
Read more: Losing weight isn't always easy, but keeping it off is even harder
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More than 35 percent of American adults are considered obese, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With so much emphasis put on weight and healthy living, many people turn to “quick-fix” or fad diets that promise rapid weight loss and a new waistline in a short amount of time.
Read more: Fad diets or lifestyle changes - where do three popular weight-reduction plans fit in?
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The longest-lived human on record didn’t make it much past 120 years. That’s nothing compared to the ocean quahog, a fist-sized clam found off the coast of Maine. “They can live 500 years or longer,” said Steven Austad, Ph.D., chair of UAB’s Department of Biology and associate director of the UAB Comprehensive Center for Healthy Aging. “They’ve been sitting out there on the seafloor since before Shakespeare was born.”
Read more: Hunting for clues to healthy aging, from the lab to the sea floor
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University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers are trying to find out whether changing a person’s eating schedule can help them lose weight and burn fat. The first human test of early time-restricted feeding, or eTRF, found that this meal-timing strategy reduced swings in hunger and altered fat and carbohydrate burning patterns, which may help with losing weight. With eTRF, people eat their last meal by the mid-afternoon and do not eat again until breakfast the next morning. The findings were unveiled during a presentation at The Obesity Society Annual Meeting at Obesity Week 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Read more: Time-restricted feeding study shows promise in helping people shed body fat
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Kevin Fontaine, Ph.D., has an idea for a better way to lose weight, and the professor in UAB’s Department of Health Behavior already has a catchy title: Gain to Lose. He also has some seed funds to develop his idea thanks to the Back of the Envelope Awards, a program in the UAB School of Public Health that acts like a venture capital fund for innovative research proposals.
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New research conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has shown that a particular type of diet could help women with ovarian cancer to lose weight and improve their quality of life and cancer-related measures.
Read more: In human clinical trial, UAB to test diet’s effect on ovarian cancer patients
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The old saying in Hollywood is that the camera adds 10 pounds. But UAB obesity researcher Olivia Affuso, Ph.D., thinks that the right software could transform even a basic digital camera into a very accurate judge of body fatness.
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University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers have made a microscopic snapshot of the early renal lipid changes in acute kidney injury, using a laser-scanning method called MALDI tissue imaging to localize the changes.
Read more: UAB Tissue Imaging Mass Spectrometry detects early lipid changes in acute kidney injury
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Nefertiti Durant, M.D., wanted to know how the Internet could help young African-American women lose weight. To find out, the UAB adolescent medicine physician is taking an approach straight out of Silicon Valley: crowdsourcing
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Life-threatening heart damage is an adverse side effect of the cancer drug doxorubicin, damage that also limits the use of newer chemotherapeutic agents such as trastuzumab and imatinib. The ability to protect the heart from these side effects would benefit patients, including cancer survivors who are at risk of developing heart damage years later, and it also could allow safer use of these drugs at higher doses.
Read more: Heart damage can be prevented by overexpression of heme oxygenase-1
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Marcas Bamman, Ph.D., wants to take exercise research to a whole new level. “While we all know that some exercise is good for us, there are a number of scientific questions that have yet to be answered,” says Bamman, director of the UAB Center for Exercise Medicine (UCEM). “What’s the right exercise dose for a patient with heart disease versus someone with Alzheimer’s, or a patient who has just had a joint replacement? How often should they exercise, and at what intensity?”
Bringing Multisite Trials to Exercise Medicine
Marcas Bamman, Ph.D., wants to take exercise research to a whole new level. “While we all know that some exercise is good for us, there are a number of scientific questions that have yet to be answered,” says Bamman, director of the UAB Center for Exercise Medicine (UCEM). “What’s the right exercise dose for a patient with heart disease versus someone with Alzheimer’s, or a patient who has just had a joint replacement? How often should they exercise, and at what intensity?”
Studies to answer those questions are already underway at UCEM, Bamman says, but no single site can generate the data needed to make definitive recommendations for every type of patient. Bamman illustrates his point by citing a recent UCEM study, in which investigators tested a hybrid workout regimen for patients with Parkinson’s disease. “Two things are happening in Parkinson’s that we haven’t much of an answer to before,” Bamman says. First, patients have an “increased perception of fatigue” they just don’t want to do much,” he explains. Second, their mitochondria the powerhouses of the cell have reduced capacity, not just in the brain but “all over the body.”
Bamman’s team designed a workout that would improve patients’ mitochondrial capacity while reducing their perception of fatigue. “It combines strength training with high-intensity intervals so that patients rest very little during the exercise sessions,” which lasts about 45 minutes, Bamman says. By the time fatigue takes over, the sessions are done. In a pilot study, Bamman notes, “we had really good responses.”
But what if there was something about the participants’ ethnicity or genetic makeup that skewed the results? It’s possible that the UAB investigators just know how to push patients to perform harder, where other, less-experienced instructors might fail. “Not everyone responds the same way to certain drugs or devices, and exercise falls into that same category,” Bamman says.
To get truly definitive results, Bamman continues, exercise researchers need to follow the standard practice for drug treatments and expand into collaborative multisite research. He’s leading the way by founding a national exercise clinical trials network known as NExTNet, with UAB as the coordinating center. NExTNet already has 48 member institutions, and a first meeting is scheduled to take place at UAB in February 2014.
Adding more patients, and therefore more statistical power to the results, is one benefit of such a network, Bamman says. “But another major one is that you can standardize the conduct of the treatment itself,” he adds. “Today, one site will prescribe a three-day-per-week exercise regimen, with a very particular intensity or type of equipment.” And even though on the surface the regimens seem the same, “another site may define a very different intensity, or use different equipment,” potentially skewing the results, says Bamman. “Just like any trial, the first step is to make sure we collect data the same way.”
Bamman’s UAB team recently submitted a two-site exercise trial with a group from the University of Kentucky, which will take advantage of the NExTNet infrastructure. “We have visited each other’s facilities and have matched equipment and testing procedures, so we’re not combining apples and oranges,” Bamman says. “Our goal for the network is to stimulate interactions that will catapult this field forward into the treatment realm with definitive exercise prescriptions.”
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As a member of UAB's Nutrition Obesity Research Center and Center for Exercise Medicine, Olivia Affuso, Ph.D., has a clear goal: preventing obesity and chronic disease through physical activity. During many of her evenings and weekends, she helps women and girls put these ideas into practice.
Read more: A researcher in motion, chasing trials and trails