"Pumping iron," an activity thought of as something for young people, turns out to be beneficial for the elderly according to a UM study. Neil Alexander, assistant professor of internal medicine in the Geriatric Medicine division, and Melissa Gross, assistant professor of movement science, found that six weeks of strength training dramatically improved the ability of seniors to rise from chairs. Some 2.5 million Americans older than 65 have serious difficulty getting out of a chair or bed. Albert Schultz and James Ashton-Miller, faculty in the department of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics, designed a chair that permits quantitative determinations of changes in the ability to rise from a chair following resistance training. The study was funded by the Veterans Administration and the National Institute of Aging.
A new study of employee health costs confirms what has been only a reasonable hunch. If enough high risk employees-smokers, heavy drinkers, and sedentary persons-improve their health habits, a company's health care costs can plummet. In a company the size of Steelcase Inc. with 8,000 employees, the savings could amount to roughly $20 million over three years. The UM Fitness Research Center began a 10-year study of Steelcase, Inc. of Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1985. It is the longest running evaluation of its kind in the country, according to D.W. Edington, director of the center, and Louis Yen, assistant research scientist in the UM Division of Kinesiology. The study correlates health risk and lifestyle assessments with medical claims costs.
Reduced tobacco sales would not hurt the economies of non-tobacco-producing states and, in fact, would lead to new jobs in other industries, according to research by Kenneth Warner, professor of public health policy and administration, and George Fulton, research scientist in the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and the department of economics. However, the researchers found that an end to tobacco use would not immediately reduce health costs because current levels of tobacco-related disease reflect long-time smoking habits.
Ovide Pomerleau, director of the psychiatry department's behavioral medicine program, has found that a person's vulnerability to nicotine dependence may be inherited. This finding may have profound impact on anti-smoking classes and campaigns. Highly vulnerable people may need medically and psychologically supervised programs to quit smoking, says Pomerleau.
An important work on population policies, The New Politics of Population: Conflict and Consensus in Family Planning, has been edited by Alison McIntosh, director of the population fellows program, and Jason Finkle, professor of population planning and international health. The book's central thesis is that the nature of the population policy debate has changed in fundamental ways over the past three decades. For example, as governments of developing nations accept the idea that slower population growth is important, the primary mechanisms for achieving that reduction-family planning programs-have become embroiled in heated controversy.
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