This article was written by Julianne Wyrick.

February is American Heart Month. Sponsored by the American Heart Association, American Heart Month is a time to battle cardiovascular disease and educate people on what they can do to live heart-healthy lives. Heart disease, including stroke, is the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States.

How much do you know about the condition of your heart? Heart health awareness typically focuses on heart disease in older adults caused by an unhealthy diet and a lack of exercise. But what if you could be at risk for cardiac arrest and sudden death even though you are young and in shape?

Image credit: Heart arrhythmia via Shutterstock

With warmer days ahead, children will start flocking to the outdoors for fresh air and sunshine. However, according to a new study in the journal Pediatrics, only 25% of them will be appropriately shielded from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays [1]. This is down from 50% of children who reported using sunscreen “often or always” in 2004.

Image credit: Skin care on the back via Shutterstock

It seems to be a fact of life that memory performance decreases as we age, but new research helps to understand what precisely is decreasing, why and points towards strategies that might help. A study published in the journal Memory suggests that older adults perform less well on working memory tasks as they do not forget information that is no longer relevant [1]. This might sound like a good thing, but it leads to overload of memory processes, damaging memory performance.

Images in the mind image via Shutterstock

It’s not you. You’re not imagining it. It really, actually, legitimately is harder to keep weight off than it is to lose it in the first place. You really do feel hungrier than you used to, and still the pounds keep creeping back on. This is the conclusion that Dr. Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne just published in the New England Journal of Medicine [1].

Lose weight image via Shutterstock

It’s obvious that obese people more have fat than non-obese people, but it’s not as clear how it happens. Do obese individuals have more adipocytes (fat cells) than lean people, or do they have the same number of adipocytes, just larger ones? It turns out to be both. But the way that comes to pass is just being worked out by scientists. Engineering Professor Dr. Amit Gefen and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University recently demonstrated in a mouse cell line model that preadipocytes (precursors to fat cells) subjected to prolonged periods of “mechanical stretching loads” — the kind of weight we put on our body tissues when we sit or lie down — differentiate significantly faster, and retain significantly larger fat droplets, than those that are not. The research was published in the American Journal of Physiology — Cell Physiology [1].