Health Beat 4.5.13

Health Beat is our weekly roundup of important healthcare, wellness and research news from around the web. Explore our previous roundups here.

Watch the video below to learn about PresidentObama’s “BRAIN Initiative” (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies):

Obama unveils brain mapping project to unlock mysteries (USA Today)
“There’s this enormous mystery, awaiting to be unlocked,” said President Obama, unveiling a $100 million project designed to map the inner workings of the brain, and unlock mysteries that could reveal answers to such challenges as epilepsy, autism and Alzheimer’s disease.

Obama’s “BRAIN Initiative” (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will study the way that people think, learn and remember.

Grandfathers’ Age Linked to Autism(NY Times)
A new study shows that the older a man is when his child is born, the greater the risk for autism in his grandchild. Researchers discovered that compared with men who had a child when they were 20 to 24, those who became fathers when they were 50 or older were about 73 percent more likely to have a grandchild with autism.

Pay-as-you-weigh airfares the ‘next step’ (CNN)
The head of Samoa Air defends its policy of having passengers pay by their weight, arguing that the system is not only fair but should be a model for other airlines.

“The next step is for the industry to make those sort of changes and recognize that ‘Hey, we are not all 72 kilograms (about 160 pounds) anymore and we don’t all fit into a standard seat,”’ Chris Langton, Samoa Air chief executive told CNN. “What makes airplanes work is weight. We are not selling seats, we are selling weight.”

Want to Be Healthier? You Might Need to Move(Takepart)
The County Health Rankings report, created by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, ranks nearly every county in the U.S. on healthand wants less-healthy communities to see the ranking as a call to action.

They looked at 25 factors related to health, including poverty, smoking, obesity, teen pregnancy, access to doctors, education, physical activity, insurance coverage, and access to healthy foods, clean drinking water, and recreational facilities, among other things.

Find our how your county ranks on all 25 measures atCountyHealthRankings.org.

Who owns your health data? You may be surprised (Fox News)
By 2014 doctors will be required to have electronic health records in place, under the Affordable Care Act. Digital records are designed to improve efficiency and quality. But, there are a lot of questions coming up as to who actually owns your data and it’s not that straight-forward.

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