Breakthroughs Today

If you think depression just comes to adolescents without reason at all, think about. Any reason might do. Read on to find out. BRITISH rowing athlete Penelope Sweet once said: “Depression is nourished by a lifetime of ungrieved and unforgiven hurts.” At times, though, the hurts do not have last a lifetime. Among adolescents, depression comes as a natural part of growing up. That’s what Colleen Conley and Karen Rudolph found out in their recent study, published in Developmental Psychopathology and available online on Jan. 1. Conley teaches at the Loyola University Chicago Department of Psychology while Rudolph at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Campaign). Adolescence comes as a period of multiple... ( Read more. ) This article appears in Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on 23 June 2010.

Like any social destination, the bar can attract patrons based on motives that generally reflects how it is generally perceived by consumers. Find out what motives are these. ERNEST Hemingway wrote in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940): “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.” Each different man or woman has his or her own reason for visiting, even patronizing, a bar or two. Recently, though, eight different focus groups, consisting of 82 individual each including bar patrons and bartenders, identified four clusters of motivations that people have in frequenting bars. ( Read more. ) This article appears in Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on 16 June 2010.

If you think that obesity is only in the genes, think again when you see that it is in the family with genetics out of the consideration. Television writer Gene Perret once said: “Like good wine, marriage gets better with age.” A recent study adds, though, marriage gets the couple obese together. But even unmarried cohabiting partners, too, have not been spared, noted lead researcher and nutritionist Natalie The, on what we may as well call “cohabitational obesity.” ( Read more. ) This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 09 June 2010.

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.

Breakthroughs , the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper column which brings breaking news in health research every Wednesday, took its existence in the local community of Cebu in the month of May some five years ago today. It started from a dream of bringing the hard technical language of medical research to the common people who considered technical terms in medical science and technology as archaic as well as strange and often unfathomable even while using the ordinary English dictionary. Our fifth year testifies that goal may have been achieved through the years, and its readers may have obtained some form of benefits after reading each article each week since then. And yet any child cannot claim existence without the mother who gave birth to it. And for Breakthroughs , no other mother can rightly assume that matriarchal honor than my retired Live section editor, Pura Kintanar, whose perception may have seen ahead of time the years that Breakthroughs will be serving the local community of Ceb

"THE reward for work well done," wrote researcher and virologist Jonas Salk, "is the opportunity to do more." And the reward for doing more, and longer hours of work, let me add, will impact on your health in ways you may not desire. Philippine working hours are considered worldwide as long working hours compared to the standard 40 hours per week [in other countries]. Even without overtime, Filipino workers regularly log excess hours each week. But that is also common worldwide. Studies found associations between long working hours and many risk factors such as... ( Read more. ) (This article appears in Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on 26 May 2010.)

PROLIFIC historical novelist Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet of Scotland, wrote: “A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy.” In cancer medicine, a toenail rich in selenium, a purplish-gray element, may make an important difference in protecting us from bladder cancer... (Read more ) This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 19 May 2010.