Eating one fish meal a week may reduce by half the risk of sudden cardiac death in men. Researchers reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association studied 20,000 male physicians aged 40 to 84 and found those eating fish at least once a week had a 52 per cent lower risk of heart attack than those eating fish less than once a month.
Weight gain shortens life
Middle-aged spread, long accepted as a natural part of growing older, can shorten life, according to a study involving almost 333,000 people carried out by the University of North Carolina. "Excess body weight increased the risk of death from heart disease and other causes up until late life, and there was no change in the weight associated with the best survival until age 75," said Dr June Stevens. The best weight for a 60-year-old was the same as for a 30-year-old, the study concluded.
Galaxy with pulling power
A galaxy 50 million light years from Earth is so big it can "steal" clusters of stars from neighbouring galaxies. Astronomers at Johns Hopkins University, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, found clusters of stars in the big galaxy that had presumably been stripped from smaller ones by its gravitational pull.
Gene linked to mental illness
Researchers have found further evidence that a specific gene predisposes its carriers to psychiatric illness. Carriers of a single mutation in the Wolfram syndrome gene are 26 times more likely to require hospitalisation for depression or suicide attempts than those without it, according to a study published over the weekend in Molecular Psychiatry by Drs Ronnie G. Swift and Michael Swift of New York Medical College. They estimate that 1 per cent of the general population and 25 per cent of patients hospitalised for these psychiatric ills may carry the mutation.
Contact Science on Monday by emailing Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor, at dahlstrom@irish-times.ie