Facebook is 'dead and buried' for young people: Study

London: Facebook is 'dead and buried' for young people, who are moving on to 'cooler things', according to a major study of social media.

Professor Daniel Miller is one of team of eight ethnographic researchers based at University College London who are working on a study across seven countries including India, China, Brazil and the UK to examine social media trends.

Miller said the social networking site was 'simply not cool any more'.

"What we've learned from working with 16 to 18-year-olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried," said Miller.

Children and teenagers are increasingly communicating through newer contenders such as Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and WhatsApp. The young people are apparently logging off to avoid the stigma of using the same site as the older generation - and to keep their indiscretions private from relatives, 'The Times' reported.

"What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person's decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request," he wrote on the website theconversation.com.

"Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things," he wrote.

Miller said the switch was taking place despite the fact that none of the rising stars of social media apps can match Facebook for ease of use.

"In my school research, the closest friends are connected to each other via Snapchat, WhatsApp is used to communicate with quite close friends and Twitter the wider friends. Instagram can include strangers and is used a little differently," said Miller.

"Facebook, on the other hand, has become the link with older family, or even older siblings who have gone to university," he said. "I don't expect Facebook to necessarily disappear altogether. But I think it's finished for the young in the UK and I suspect other countries will follow," Miller said.

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Facebook is 'dead and buried' for young people: Study

London: Facebook is 'dead and buried' for young people, who are moving on to 'cooler things', according to a major study of social media.

Professor Daniel Miller is one of team of eight ethnographic researchers based at University College London who are working on a study across seven countries including India, China, Brazil and the UK to examine social media trends.

Miller said the social networking site was 'simply not cool any more'.

"What we've learned from working with 16 to 18-year-olds in the UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried," said Miller.

Children and teenagers are increasingly communicating through newer contenders such as Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and WhatsApp. The young people are apparently logging off to avoid the stigma of using the same site as the older generation - and to keep their indiscretions private from relatives, 'The Times' reported.

"What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person's decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request," he wrote on the website theconversation.com.

"Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young are moving on to cooler things," he wrote.

Miller said the switch was taking place despite the fact that none of the rising stars of social media apps can match Facebook for ease of use.

"In my school research, the closest friends are connected to each other via Snapchat, WhatsApp is used to communicate with quite close friends and Twitter the wider friends. Instagram can include strangers and is used a little differently," said Miller.

"Facebook, on the other hand, has become the link with older family, or even older siblings who have gone to university," he said. "I don't expect Facebook to necessarily disappear altogether. But I think it's finished for the young in the UK and I suspect other countries will follow," Miller said.

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Brain development is 'choreographed': Study

Washington: The human brain develops with an exquisitely timed choreography marked by distinct patterns of gene activity at different stages from the womb to adulthood, scientists say.

Researchers from the Yale University conducted a large-scale analysis of gene activity in cerebral neocortex an area of the brain governing perception, behaviour, and cognition - at different stages of development.

The analysis shows the general architecture of brain regions is largely formed in the first six months after conception by a burst of genetic activity, which is distinct for specific regions of the neocortex.

This rush is followed by a sort of intermission beginning in the third trimester of pregnancy.

During this period, most genes that are active in specific brain regions are quieted — except for genes that spur connections between all neocortex regions, researchers said.

Then in late childhood and early adolescence, the genetic orchestra begins again and helps subtly shape neocortex regions that progressively perform more specialised tasks, a process that continues into adulthood.

The analysis is the first to show this "hour glass" sketch of human brain development, with a lull in genetic activity sandwiched between highly complex patterns of gene expression, said Nenad Sestan, professor of neurobiology at Yale's Kavli Institute for Neuroscience and senior author of the study.

Researchers said some of the same patterns of genetic activity that define this human "hour glass" sketch were not observed in developing monkeys, indicating that they may play a role in shaping the features specific to human brain development.

The findings emphasise the importance of the proper interplay between genes and environment in the child's earliest years after birth when the formation of synaptic connections between brain cells becomes synchronised, which shape how brain structures will be used later in life, said Sestan.

For instance, disruptions of in synchronisation of synaptic connections during child's earliest years have been implicated in autism. Sestan said the human brain is more like a neighbourhood, which is better defined by the community living within its borders than its buildings.

"The neighbourhoods get built quickly and then everything slows down and the neocortex focuses solely on developing connections, almost like an electrical grid," said Sestan. The study was published in the journal Neuron. 

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Common knee surgery ineffective in study

One of the most common types of knee surgery performed in the U.S. is no more effective than fake surgery, at least for the first year, according to a new study.

The new evidence should give doctors pause before they try to repair the meniscus, which cushions the bones of the knee, according to the Finnish doctors behind the research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The experiment involved 146 volunteers whose knee pain appeared to be caused by wear and tear of that cushion. None of the participants had a recognized injury or osteoarthritis, both situations for which the surgery is already known to be ineffective.

After 12 months, the average improvement among the people who received real surgery and those who got "sham" surgery was essentially the same, said the research team, led by Dr. Teppo Jarvinen of University of Helsinki.

There was no significant improvement in knee pain after exercise and no sizable improvement in the likelihood that a patient would require subsequent knee surgery.

But Dr. Craig Bennett, chief of sports medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center, cautioned that the findings should not be over-generalized. One problem, he told Reuters Health in a telephone interview, is that such "sham" surgery is, in fact, a surgical procedure with potential benefit.

People with knee pain who seem to be candidates for meniscal repair may be suffering because of debris in a swollen knee joint. "If you scope the knee (without touching the cushion), that will often help even if you don't completely address the torn meniscus issue," he said.

During an arthroscopic examination, where fluid is injected to give doctors a good view, "you're taking out the junky, thick irritating fluid that can give a lot of people their pain," he said.

During both sham and regular surgery, small holes are poked through either side of the knee, so doctors can insert instruments to examine the joint. With the surgery, known as arthroscopic partial meniscectomy, damaged and loose pieces of the cushioning material that may be out of place and interfering with the motion of the knee are trimmed away.

Because about 700,000 such surgeries are done in the U.S. each year at a cost of $4 billion, the new findings "will not be welcomed with open arms," Jarvinen predicted in a phone interview.

The study was done at five medical centers in Finland. All the volunteers had experienced knee pain for at least three months and doctors believed the problem was a tear of the medial meniscus. Nonsurgical treatment had not helped them.

Patients did now know whether they had real surgery because of the way the researchers set up the experiment. Once a doctor had used arthroscopic techniques to examine the knee, if surgery seemed appropriate, the medical team opened an envelope - with the equipment still in place - to reveal whether the patient would receive fake surgery or real surgery.

For sham surgery, the microshaver that is typically used by the surgeon for meniscus removal didn't have a blade.

The patient was not told which option was randomly chosen and neither the orthopedic surgeon nor other operating room staff were involved in further care of the patient. The patients were unable to guess whether they had received real surgery or fake surgery.

On two scales objectively measuring symptoms, there was little difference in outcomes between sham and real surgery.

But patients regarded the treatment as a success whether they received real surgery or not. Surveys showed 89 percent in the actual surgery group and 83 percent in the sham group reported improvement.

Of those who got actual surgery, 77 percent said they were satisfied with the outcome, as did 70 percent of the sham surgery group. And 93 percent who got actual surgery and 96 percent who got the sham treatment said they would be willing to repeat the procedure.

Five patients in the sham-surgery group and two who actually had surgery had such persistent problems that further surgery was required, but that difference wasn't large enough to demonstrate that the operation worked better.

Jarvien said the lesson for patients is that if you have a sore knee that's not caused by an obvious injury, "it seems we really don't have a quick fix."

"Don't feel an obligation to seek help right away," he said. "You can just treat it with the conventional bag of tricks: painkillers, icing, losing weight, or slightly moderating your activities to make it a bit more tolerable."

"Try to ride a bike, swim, to get you back to what you used to do," he said.

Bennett, however, said the situation is more complicated. He predicted that if the patients were to be followed beyond one year, younger ones would eventually show a benefit from the surgery.

"If you have a 35-year old and I leave their torn piece of meniscus tissue alone, even though they're doing better at the one-year mark than the person in whom it was cleaned up, what's the story going to be 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 years down the road?" Bennett said. "Is that piece in a highly-active 35-year-old person going to rough up and scuff up cartilage that was originally okay?"

"Not every meniscus tear warrants surgery," he said. "There's a lot of factors that go into determining whether someone should have surgery, and you can't get much of that from this paper."

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Weight loss surgery safe, beneficial: study

Bariatric surgery results in substantial weight loss and can turn back some diseases related to obesity, a new study finds.

There is some risk of complications, but death rates appear to be lower than previously thought, researchers reported after reviewing about a decade's worth of recent data.

They were interested in updating current knowledge about the effectiveness and safety of various types of weight loss surgery, including gastric bypass, adjustable gastric banding (lap banding), vertical banded gastroplasty and sleeve gastrectomy.

These surgical procedures are used for people who are severely obese, or moderately obese with serious weight-related health problems. The last time there was a major update of bariatric surgical research was in 2003.

"Previous reviews included data from clinical trials and studies published before 2003, but because of advances in technology of bariatric surgery and accumulation of surgeons' experience, information provided in previous reviews is outdated," Su-Hsin Chang told Reuters Health in an email.

Chang is an instructor with the Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri and led the new study.

"We planned to answer general questions regarding effectiveness and risks of surgical treatment of obesity and which surgical procedure is the most efficacious," Chang said.

The results were published in JAMA Surgery.

The researchers reviewed 164 studies conducted from 2003 to 2012, which included a total of 161,756 patients. On average, the patients were about 45 years old and almost 80 percent were female.

The average body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight relative to height, of patients before surgery was nearly 46. A BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal weight and a BMI of 35 or higher is considered obese.

Patients' presurgery weight averaged 274 pounds. More than a quarter of patients had diabetes, nearly half had high blood pressure and almost 30 percent had high cholesterol. Seven percent had heart disease and 25 percent had sleep apnea.

Chang's group found that patients' BMI dropped by an average of 12 to 17 points within 5 years after surgery. The researchers also found that diabetes, high blood pressure and sleep apnea improved significantly.

Between 86 percent and 92 percent of patients with diabetes experienced remission of the disease. The same happened for about 75 percent of those with high blood pressure.

High cholesterol and heart disease were rolled back at slightly lower rates, but sleep apnea disappeared or improved dramatically in more than 90 percent of those who had it pre-surgery.

Death rates ranged from 0.08 within one month of surgery to 0.31 after 30 days. Complication rates ranged from 10 percent to 17 percent and the proportion of operations that needed to be repeated was 6 percent to 7 percent.

Gastric bypass surgeries were the most effective in terms of long-term weight loss, but the procedure had the highest complication rates. Sleeve gastrectomy was almost as effective as gastric bypass. Adjustable gastric bands (lap bands) weren't quite as effective but were the safest.

"Weight loss surgery provides substantial effects on weight loss and improves obesity-related conditions in the majority of bariatric patients, although risks of complication, reoperation and mortality exist," Chang said.

"The article is very interesting and overdue," Dr. Pratt Vemulapalli told Reuters Health in an email.

Vemulapalli is director of bariatric surgery and an associate professor of surgery at the Montefiore Medical Center of the University Hospital for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She was not involved in the study.

"Those of us doing bariatric surgery have seen this with our own patients and in studies that have been published in the literature but this meta-analysis simply ties that data together and has wrapped the impression like a present in a neat package," she said.

Vemulapalli said there are currently about 200,000 weight loss procedures performed each year. She said the most common procedures are the gastric bypass, the sleeve gastrectomy and, to a lesser extent, the adjustable gastric band.

"The article itself was very well done, and shows that the surgeons and centers who do surgery know how to do the operations, know which patients to operate on and how to identify and treat complications," she said, "All of this makes for safer surgery."

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