Tag «health studies»

Although a growing number of Russians now exercise regularly, the overall figure remains low — only one-fourth of working women and less than one-third of working men are physically active. Are Russians just lazy or are gym memberships too expensive for them? What can stimulate people to adopt a more active lifestyle, and is Russia up to international standards in this regard? Find the answers in a newly released study from HSE University. IQ.HSE selected 10 of the most interesting facts from that research.

Russia has just had a great contraceptive revolution, and it is not over: unwanted pregnancies are more often prevented than terminated. Russians now engage in family planning with more confidence: the number of births is almost equal to the number of pregnancies. On the basis of studies completed by HSE demographers, IQ.HSE examines the Soviet and Russian culture of birth control.

In 2013, Russia banned smoking in public places such as cafes, restaurants and nightclubs, as well as on trains, in playgrounds, etc. Statistical analysis has revealed, however, that 26% of male and 28% of female smokers do not always comply with these smoking bans. A full report from a study by Ludmila Zasimova, Assistant Professor at the HSE Department of Applied Economics, has been published in the International Journal of Public Health.

Researchers have used machine learning to discover that the two most widespread DNA structures — stem-loops and quadruplexes — cause genome mutations that lead to cancer. The results of the study were published in BMC Cancer.

The existing approach to brain stimulation for rehabilitation after a stroke does not take into account the diversity of lesions and the individual characteristics of patients’ brains. This was the conclusion made by researchers of the Higher School of Economics and the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Sciences in their article, ‘Predicting the Response to Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Stroke’.

Scientists at the Higher School of Economics, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IBCh RAS), and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center created a genetic model that helps to understand how the body restrains autoimmune and oncological diseases. The researchers published their results in Nature Immunology.

Scientists at the Higher School of Economics and the Russian Academy of Science’s Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology have developed a new methodology for identifying biomarkers (indicators) of both early- and late-stage Parkinson’s disease. Their findings were published in the journal Molecular Neurobiology.

Researchers at the Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces and the Centre for Cognition & Decision Making of the Higher School of Economics utilized electroencephalogram (EEG) and the event-related potential (ERP) technique to study neural activity during simultaneous interpretation of continuous prose. Using event-related potentials as an index of depth of attention to the sounding fragment, the researchers assessed the competition between memory and auditory perception during simultaneous interpretation. The results of the study were published in the journal PLoS ONE.