SCIENTISTS are developing a physical workout plan that aims to give you a beautiful mind. It could pump up a crucial part of your brain’s memory and learning centre.

The exercise regimen will aim at a specific region of your hippocampus, the dentate gyrus. It could prove to be the one workout that is guaranteed to keep you smarter and sexier for many years to come.

Researchers at Columbia University say that they can develop the workout thanks to an advance in MRI scanning methods, which has enabled them to watch neurons grow in the human brain for the first time. They discovered that the neurons in our dentate gyrus region grow in response to physical exercise. The region usually starts to shrink when we hit our thirties. This decline is responsible for the type of age-related worsening in memory that we all tend to suffer. The older we get, the less activity we have in this area. But it is the only brain area where new neurons can grow as well.

Scott Small, a neurology professor, reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that the study is the first to show how hitting the gym boosts human brains. He says that the next step for his team is to find which exercises best stimulate neurons to grow, in the hope that they will soon enable doctors to prescribe brain-boosting workout regimens.

Logged off by a computer

COMPUTER says no? Oh dear. Software may in future decide whether to turn off your life-support system, after researchers claimed that computers are better than spouses or close kin at predicting patients’ wishes.

Every year thousands of doctors face the dilemma of deciding, on the basis of life quality, whether coma patients should be kept alive after serious accidents or illnesses.

“Living wills” may help, but they have no status in law, so doctors may ask spouses and kin informally what they think the unconscious patient would decide, given the details of their condition, disabilities and outlook.

But scientists at the US National Institutes of Health say that their new computer program can predict patients’ wishes better than close kin.

The program is loaded with survey data about the stated preferences of thousands of patients, grouped by age, race and income. The scientists’ trial involved asking healthy people if they would want to go on living if their life quality was badly diminished. It found that the software predicted their answers correctly in 68 per cent of cases.

This beats spouses’ scores, says David Wendler, the lead researcher. He asks in PLoS Medicine: “Do patients care more about who makes decisions for them, or what decisions are made?” Hmm.

TB gets booted

FOOT cream may offer a cure for tuberculosis, Manchester University biologists claim. They report that fungus-killing chemicals called azoles, which are found in athlete’s foot remedies, kill the TB bacteria and may even work against drug-resistant strains.

Professor Andrew Munro says his team has discovered that TB has a high number of enzymes called P450s, which are killed by antifungal drugs that target similar enzymes in foot-rot fungi.

Eczema extra

PEOPLE who develop asthma and hay fever as children, or eczema as adolescents, have something to cheer about: they have a lower risk of developing brain tumours called meningiomas, says a study of 2,191 Britons in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Dr Minouk Schoemaker, of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, says people with allergies may have higher levels of alert for unusual cells, and thus may be able to spot and kill cancer cells more efficiently.

Plump for joy

IF LIFE gets heavy, it’s best to be an obese man, according to a study which found that overweight men are 42 per cent less likely to commit suicide than those who are on the skinny side of normal.

The survey of 45,000 men over a 20-year period, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that for each one-unit increase in body mass index, the suicide risk fell by 11 per cent.

The study, by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston, speculates that the risk may be lowered by obese men’s increased production of insulin and other hormones that affect mood.

This may also explain why the same effect is not seen in women — their hormones are different. Another factor is that obese women are subject to greater social stigma and are thus made more anxious.

The study is careful to remind men that obesity carries plenty of other health risks, such as heart disease.

Bareheaded cheek

SELLING snow to Eskimos has nothing on the latest haircare fad: products for baldies. The New York Times reports that bare-care gels and creams have opened a new front in the £25 billion male-grooming market in America. Gels to make pates matt or shiny vie with special sun-blocks and headspritzers. All on a shelf near you — and soon.

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