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Brits Are Europe's Angriest People, Says New Poll But All We Do Is Bite Our Lips, Says British Association Of Anger Management, United Kingdom
A poll commissioned by comedy channel Gold and to be revealed shows that we Britons are the angriest people in Europe, losing our cool on average four times a day and topping even the Italians and French. And what do we believe makes us most angry? Queue jumpers.

A Compound Found In The Sea Provides Promising New Treatment For Neuropathic Pain
A paper just published in the British Journal of Pharmacology reports that a compound originally isolated from a soft coral (Capnella imbricate) could lead scientists to develop a new variety of treatments for neuropathic pain. This composite is collected at Green Island off Taiwan and could be a new option for treatment. Neuropathic pain is chronic and occasionally follows damage to the nervous system. Presently this type of pain is very poorly controlled by the usual analgesics: aspirin like drugs (NSAIDS) or even opioids like morphine. New treatments are urgently required.
News of the day
Are Breast Cancer Patients Being Kept In The Dark?
Despite the increase of breast reconstruction procedures performed in 2008, nearly 70 percent of women who are eligible for the procedure are not informed of the reconstructive options available to them, according to a recently published report. Newly released statistics by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) shows there were more than 79,000 breast reconstruction procedures performed in 2008 - a 39 percent increase over 2007. But in spite of this, current research suggests that many breast cancer patients are missing out on a key conversation that should take place at the time of diagnosis.
Mental Health

Local Food Environments Can Lead To Obesity

Living in an area with more fast food outlets and convenience stores than supermarkets and grocers has been associated with obesity in a Canadian study. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health have shown that your local food environment can affect your weight. John Spence from the University of Alberta, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to study associations between the "Retail Food Environment Index" (RFEI) and levels of obesity. He said, "The RFEI is based upon a ratio of the number of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to supermarkets and specialty food stores in a given radius around a person"s house. We"ve shown that it correlates very well with the odds that that person may be obese". The availability of fast food and scarcity of outlets for natural ingredients within 800m of a person"s home was shown to be associated with weight, while the RFEI within a 1600m radius did not have the same effect. The researchers claim that this demonstrates that the proximity of the unhealthy environment is an important risk factor for obesity. According to Spence, "These findings may help explain the observation that geographic concentration of fast-food restaurants is associated with mortality and hospital admissions for acute coronary events in Canada". Fast-food is cheaper and more energy-dense per measure of weight than other healthier foods such as fruits and vegetables that are purchased in a grocery store. If governments want to reduce people"s intake of these energy-efficient, but ultimately unhealthy "meals", the authors recommend that they intervene to limit the creation of areas where tempting junk-food outlets are so much more prevalent than other shops. They write, "A plausible policy option for decreasing the prevalence of obesity among adults is improving the retail food environment, possibly through zoning by-laws". Notes: Relation between local food environments and obesity among adults John C Spence, Nicoleta Cutumisu, Joy Edwards, Kim D Raine and Karen Smoyer-Tomic BMC Public Health (in press) Article available at journal website. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central"s open access policy. BMC Public Health is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of epidemiology and public health medicine. BMC Public Health (ISSN 1471-2458) is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE, Thomson Scientific (ISI) and Google Scholar. Graeme Baldwin BioMed Central


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