Children and young people attending the National Eisteddfod this week will be able to enter a competition to say what they would change to make things better for children and young people. The children's charity, Children in Wales is distributing postcards at the Eisteddfod which ask "If you were running Wales what is the one thing you would do to make things better for children and young people?" The winning entries will receive a £20 Amazon voucher and appear in Children in Wales magazine.

Children in Wales will also be handing out a questionnaire to young people who come to the Children's Organisation stand to find out how much they know about their rights.

Sarah Thomas, Development Officer at Children in Wales said: "Having the opportunity to speak with children and young people at the Eisteddfod enables us to gather views and experiences from across Wales. The questionnaire will provide us with a 'snapshot' of children and young people's awareness of their Rights and whether they feel able to access them."

Notes

1. Children in Wales is hosting the Children's Organisations Stand, stand number 1115 to 1118.

2. Children in Wales was established in March 1992 and became a registered charity in 1993. It aims to promote the interests of children, to improve services in Wales and to put children high on the Welsh agenda. We work closely with our members who comprise professionals, policy makers and consumer groups to improve the lives of all children living in Wales, but especially young children, those affected by family instability, children with special needs or disabilities and those suffering the effects of poverty and deprivation. We collect and disseminate information about children and promote good practice in children's services through research, policy and practice development, publications, conferences, seminars, training and access to an extensive library and information service. Children in Wales has offices in Cardiff and Caernarfon.

Children in Wales

New research by the University of Warwick's Warwick Medical School shows that the biggest health threat to fat and obese people isn't the fat itself but the fact that the fat fuels a killer inflammation response in people.

The research published in the International Journal of Obesity on Tuesday 7th March shows that inflammation is a crucial and dangerous step in the development of obesity.

Warwick Medical School researchers Professor F P Cappuccio and Dr M A Miller have studied a large group of people, belonging to 3 different ethnic groups, and have measured a variety of markers of inflammatory activation and related these to measures of obesity or fatness such as body mass index (BMI) and waist-hip ratio (WHR). The study clearly showed that the levels of sE-selectin, a marker of inflammation produced by artery vessel walls, are strongly associated with measures of obesity, and in particular with the amount of fat around the waist. The research found that every 2% increase in sE-selectin led to the increase of 1 unit in Body Mass Index and 0.01 units in Waist - Hip Ratios.

This inflammation can directly trigger thrombosis, heart disease, strokes and diabetes.

There have been suggestions from earlier studies of small patient groups that inflammation had this importance but this is the first ever study to find these results across an unselected population of healthy subjects which covered both sexes and three ethnic groups (White, South Asian and people of African origin)

Dr Miller and Professor Cappuccio said:

"This study highlights the importance of the activation of the endothelium, the inner layer of the artery vessel wall, in the metabolic processes leading to obesity and cardiovascular disease". "This observation opens opportunities to develop new treatments that deal directly with inflammation either through diet or drugs".

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
Coventry
UK
warwick.ac

Three leading mental health charities in Wales are granted nearly £2 million for collaboration and joining forces today to challenge the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental health problems with the launch of a new national programme.

Time to Change Wales will be led by Gofal, Hafal and Mind Cymru and funded by the Big Lottery Fund Cymru, Comic Relief and the Welsh Government.

The new anti-stigma programme aims to improve attitudes to mental health by building on the success of Time to Change in England, to achieve real and lasting change in Wales.

Time to Change Wales will include three key strands

- High-profile national social marketing and media work to challenge the negative attitudes that can surround mental health, and raise awareness of the campaign

- People with lived experience of mental health problems delivering anti-discrimination training to the people whose attitudes to mental health matter most, including employers and community leaders

- A range of community activities that will bring together people with and without lived experience of mental health problems, to empower people with experience of mental distress to challenge the discrimination they face every day.

Time to Change has been actively working in England since 2007 to tackle the stigma surrounding mental illness and improve public knowledge, attitude and behavior around this issue.

The programme has already seen positive change in England, with a 4 percent reduction in reported discrimination and a 2.2 percent improvement in public attitudes since its launch (4).

Ewan Hilton, Chief Executive of Gofal:Experience of stigma and discrimination are stories we hear every day from the people who use our services - experiences that prevent people from seeking help, contribute to people becoming more unwell and prevent people from living fulfilled lives. Yet we know that what drives people to discriminate is built on ignorance and myth.

We are thrilled that with the support of the Welsh Government, Comic Relief and the Big Lottery Fund and in partnership with fellow mental health charities we will be able to change this situation in Wales for the better.

Bill Walden-Jones, Chief Executive of Hafal:Hafal is delighted to be working with our friends in Gofal and Mind Cymru on this exciting initiative. Hafal's members, people with a serious mental illness and their families, look forward to joining with our partners and others across Wales to build a mass movement of service-users dedicated to removing discrimination.

Lindsay Foyster, Director of Mind Cymru:We know that campaigns to tackle discrimination against people with mental health problems have had real success in England and Scotland through the work done by Time to Change and See Me.

This partnership gives a great opportunity for Wales to build on this work and make a positive difference to the lives of people who experience mental distress.

Recent findings show that:

- 46% of people in Wales think that those who have experienced depression are unsuitable to work as primary school teachers (5)

- 66% of people in Wales would not rent a room in a shared flat to someone with a mental health condition (6)

- Fewer than four in 10 employers would recruit someone with a mental health problem (7)

- Over a quarter of people think that those with mental health problems should not have the same rights to a job as anyone else (7)

- Black people were 40 per cent more likely to be turned away than white people when they asked for help from mental health services (8)

Karen from South Wales:I was employed within the care sector for 10 years when I became ill. My employers and colleagues saw the signs as my depression progressed. Nobody even asked if I was ok, people just shied away from it and I ended up on long term sick and then losing my job.

An anti-stigma campaign could have helped to dispel the myths and fears around mental ill health and start on the path to ending prejudice within the workplace.

To get a flavour of what you can expect to see in Wales, visit Time to Change

Notes

A bilingual Brand for the campaign will be developed as a priority.

1. The Big Lottery Fund has been rolling out grants to health, education, environment and charitable causes across the UK since its inception in June 2004. It was established by Parliament on 1 December 2006. Full details of the Big Lottery Fund, its programmes and awards are on the Big Lottery Fund website.

2. Comic Relief is committed to supporting people living with mental health problems. The projects Comic Relief funds ensure people with mental health problems get their voices heard in the decisions that affect their lives and to get the help they need to recover.

Comic Relief also helps people to promote their rights and reduce the stigma and discrimination they face so that they feel more included in society. The grant to Time to Change Wales is part of Comic Relief's long-standing commitment to this issue.

3. Time to Change Wales is Wales's national programme to end the discrimination faced by people with mental health problems, and improve the nation's wellbeing. Mind Cymru, Gofal and Hafal are running the programme, funded with money from the Big Lottery Fund Cymru, Comic Relief and the Welsh Assembly Government.

4. Attitudes to mental illness 2010, Department of Health

5. Equality and Human Rights Commission Wales (2008), Who do you see? Living together in Wales

6. 2010 YouGov poll commissioned by Time to Change. Total sample size was 2,233 adults, of which 112 are from Wales. Fieldwork was undertaken between 18 and 20 August 2010. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults.

7. Department for Work and Pensions and Department of Health (2009), Working our way to better mental health: a framework for action.

8. The Centre for Social Justice (February 2011), Mental Health: Poverty, Ethnicity and Family Breakdown

Source:
MIND

New research published in the journal Science says people think about things they think they don't think about. Vanderbilt University psychologists Gordon Logan and Matthew Crump say when highly skilled people such as surgeons, carpenters, or pilots perform actions without thinking, those actions are highly controlled. The finding adds key information to a debate on whether people consciously perform actions in which they are highly skilled.

Previous research suggests conscious control of driving a car for an experienced driver, for example, is an illusion. These studies point to cases in which people intend to do one thing but do another. But the Vanderbilt research, involving a simple typing test, shows otherwise.

"Our research shows a very tight coupling between intention and action that suggests conscious control is not an illusion," said Logan, Vanderbilt's Centennial Professor of Psychology. "In highly-skilled activities like typing, intention and action fit together very tightly."

The National Science Foundation funded the research, "Cognitive Illusions of Authorship Reveal Hierarchical Error Detection in Skilled Typists," through its Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in its directorate for social, behavioral and economic sciences.

Logan and Crump tested 72 college-age typists each of whom had about 12 years of typing experience and typed at speeds comparable to professional typists. In three experiments, these skilled typists typed single words shown to them one at a time on a computer screen and their responses appeared on the screen below the word to be typed.

The researchers then secretly introduced errors to see if the typists would detect them. In some instances, they secretly corrected errors made by the typists. In both cases, responses were gauged by measuring the speed at which words were typed.

Logan and Crump found the typists' fingers did not slow down after an error was secretly inserted even though the typists thought they made the error. But when typists made errors, their fingers slowed down whether researchers corrected those errors or not.

The researchers concluded this happens because there are two different processes that create and detect errors. "The 'outer loop' or thinking part of the process tries to decide whether the 'inner loop' or doing part of the process is right or wrong," said Logan.

He contends the 'inner loop' or doing part of the process looks at the hands, fingers and the feel of the keyboard to decide whether the action is correct.

"The illusion of authorship was the most surprising thing," said Logan. "People thought they typed correctly if the screen looked right and they thought they typed incorrectly if the screen looked wrong even though their fingers 'knew' the truth."

This "knowing of the truth" proves that skills people perform without thinking are highly controlled. Logan and Crump argue that control is hierarchical. That part of a person that does the thinking relies on different feedback than the part that does the doing. But the two kinds of feedback together allow people to consciously achieve tremendous degrees of precision and speed.

Logan and Crump dismiss an alternative possibility that there is only one process that detects errors. They contend that if there was only one process, then conscious reports should match what the fingers do.

Typists should have slow down whenever they reported an error and typed at full speed whenever they reported a correct response. Instead, the researchers discovered a mismatch between conscious reports and behavior, suggesting two error detection processes.

"What's cool about our research is that we show there are two error detection processes: an outer loop that supports conscious reports and an inner loop process that slows keystrokes after errors," said Logan. "Typing slows down after corrected errors just like it slows down after actual errors. It maintains the same speed after inserted errors as after correct responses, as if nothing was wrong."

These finger movements, according to project researchers, show people consciously control actions in which they are highly skilled even when they don't think about them.

Source:
Bobbie Mixon
National Science Foundation

A higher level of symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder may increase the risk of coronary heart disease in older men, according to a report in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A link between stress and coronary heart disease (CHD) has long been proposed. Numerous studies have found that cardiovascular disease and its risk factors are more common among individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to background information in the article. But to the authors' knowledge, no prospective studies to date have examined PTSD in relation to CHD risk.

Laura D. Kubzansky, Ph.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues conducted a prospective study to test the hypothesis that high levels of PTSD symptoms may increase CHD risk, using two different measures of PTSD (the Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related PTSD and the Keane PTSD scale). The authors analyzed data on 1,946 men enrolled in the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study. All the study subjects were community-dwelling men from the Greater Boston area who served in the military. The authors looked for incident (new cases) of coronary heart disease occurring during follow-up through May 2001.

Using the Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related PTSD, the authors found that for each increase in symptom level, the men had a 26 percent increased risk for non-fatal heart attack and fatal CHD combined. They had a 21 percent increased risk for all CHD outcomes combined (non-fatal heart attack, fatal CHD, and angina). The findings were replicated using the Keane PTSD scale.

"This pattern of effects suggests that individuals with higher levels of PTSD symptoms are not simply prone to reporting higher levels of chest pain or other physical symptoms but may well be at higher risk for developing CHD," the authors write.

"These data suggest that prolonged stress and significant levels of PTSD symptoms may increase the risk for CHD in older male veterans," they conclude. "These results are provocative and suggest that exposure to trauma and prolonged stress not only may increase the risk for serious mental health problems but are also cardiotoxic."

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(Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007;64:109-116.)

Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

Contact: Todd Datz
JAMA and Archives Journals