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In Austria, around ten per cent of over-65-year-olds are frail, while a further 40 per cent are in a preliminary stage of frailty. The Healthy For Life project, with the MedUni Vienna as the academic lead, aims to raise fitness levels and quality of life for older people whose nutritional condition is inadequate. The first results show that regular strength training is particularly beneficial for increasing hand strength, and thus enabling people to live independently, says Thomas Dorner of the MedUni Vienna's Centre for Public Health to mark World Health Day (7 April).

The Healthy For Life project is a collaboration between the MedUni Vienna, Wiener Hilfswerk and Sportunion - sterreich and is sponsored by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain condition known to affect athletes who are exposed to repetitive brain injuries.

The team believes their findings - published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - provide new insights into understanding chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain condition known to affect athletes who are exposed to repetitive brain injuries in their sport.

A particular molecular pathway permits stem cells in pediatric bone cancers to grow rapidly and aggressively, according to researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center.

In normal cell growth, the Hippo pathway, which controls organ size in animals, works as a dam, regulating cell proliferation. What the researchers found is that the transcription factor of a DNA binding protein called sex determining region Y box 2, or Sox2 for short, which normally maintains cell self-renewal, actually releases the floodgates in the Hippo pathway in osteosarcomas and other cancers, permitting the growth of highly aggressive, tumor-forming stem cells.

Those suffering from depressive symptoms have an increased risk for physical diseases, especially for arthrosis and arthritis. These findings were reported by researchers from the University of Basel and the Ruhr-University Bochum. Their results, based on data from 14,300 people living in Switzerland, have been published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Depression is one of the leading health risks and affects 350 million people worldwide. In Switzerland, around 400,000 people individuals suffer from it each year. Several studies in countries around the globe have shown that depression is associated with an elevated risk for a variety of physical diseases.

Research by Johns Hopkins scientists suggests that having a short series of phone conversations with trained counselors can substantially boost recovery and reduce pain in patients after spinal surgery.

The phone calls, designed to enrich standard pre- and post-operative care by reinforcing the value of sticking with physical therapy and back-strengthening exercise regimens, are a relatively inexpensive and simple intervention that can maximize surgical outcomes for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who undergo spinal surgeries every year, the investigators say.

A report on the findings of the federally funded research is published online in the journal Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

New research at the University of Michigan offers evidence that a drug being developed to treat osteoporosis may also be useful for treating osteogenesis imperfecta or brittle bone disease, a rare but potentially debilitating bone disorder that that is present from birth.

Previous studies have shown the drug to be effective at spurring new bone growth in mice and in humans with osteoporosis, and a U-M research team believes that it may spur new growth in brittle bone disease patients as well. This would be a significant improvement over current treatments, which can only reduce the loss of existing bone.

Got milk? If you are overweight and have osteoarthritis, you may want to bone up on your dairy products that have vitamin D. According to a University of Florida study, higher levels of vitamin D may decrease pain and improve function in obese individuals with osteoarthritis.

Findings published in a recent issue of The Clinical Journal of Pain indicate that obese individuals who suffer from osteoarthritis and have adequate vitamin D levels could walk, balance and rise from sitting to standing better than obese participants with insufficient vitamin D levels.

Drug options for lower back pain are narrowing, so research doctors are calling for more use of physical treatment.

The systematic review and meta-analysis is a synthesis of the research evidence from 13 randomized controlled trials designed to investigate the safety and efficacy of acetaminophen in the management of spinal pain - lower back or neck - and osteoarthritis.