Your age, on your page: the latest research

Juggling a career along with being a wife or partner and parent may help to keep women healthy, scientists said after analyzing data from a study that tracked the health of Britons born in 1946. Women who had multiple roles were less likely than homemakers, single mothers or childless women to report poor health or be obese in middle age, said the report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

ZERO -12

Detecting hearing impairment does not affect speech

Detecting and addressing hearing impairment in the first few months of life can improve the ability to understand and use language, but it seems to have little effect on speech. A study, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, involving 120 children, found hearing loss confirmation by 9 months was tied to higher scores for understanding language, but fell short of expression.

12-20

Academic stars often bullied

More than two-thirds of academically talented teens are bullied at school and nearly one-third of them harbored violent thoughts as a result, according to a recent US study published in Gifted Child Quarterly. The study involved 432 students in 11 states, who had been identified by their school systems as gifted. The personality traits and interests of many gifted children make them targets of bullying, say researchers.

20-40

Don’t blame job stress for high blood pressure

The notion that being stressed out on the job causes high blood pressure doesn’t hold up, according to a new analysis of studies involving more than 100,000 people. “There’s no doubt that stress raises blood pressure,” said the study’s author, Dr Samuel J Mann of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, “but there’s virtually no evidence that such stress leads to chronic high blood pressure, or hypertension”.

40 and above

Exercise, self-help improve knee arthritis

Exercise and education may give people with knee arthritis a small but important physical and emotional lift, a research review suggests. In an analysis of 16 studies, researchers at San Diego State University found that both exercise therapy and self-management programmes tended to lessen the overall burden of having knee osteoarthritis.