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In thin, athletic women who need breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, an adequate source of body fat can be hard for surgeons to find, but researchers now say “love handles” may be the answer.

And, the surgical technique for this procedure has an added bonus: It’s less complicated than other strategies, according to the report released online in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the journal Microsurgery.

“When implants aren’t used, the most common technique for reconstructing breasts after a mastectomy is to make breast tissue from a flap of fat and skin from the abdominal region,” study co-author Dr. Ariel N. Rad, an assistant professor of cosmetic surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said in a news release from the school. “Thin, athletic women don’t have enough tissue there. But even they often have some excess fatty tissue in that space between the hip and waist. For them, using those love handles is a new option.”

This is an alternative to pulling fat from the buttocks, a strategy that can be deforming and often requires follow-up surgery, Rad said.

Rad and colleagues tested the technique on 12 patients between 2008 and 2009. All successfully underwent breast reconstruction.

The technique won’t be appropriate for every thin woman, Rad said. But for those who are eligible for it, the treatment can actually make their waists and hips look better, he added.

SOURCE: Johns Hopkins Medicine, news release.

The painkiller morphine may help protect against HIV-associated dementia, says a new study.

Georgetown University Medical Center researchers found that morphine protected rat neurons from HIV toxicity, a discovery that could lead to the development of new drugs to treat people with HIV-related dementia, which causes depression, anxiety and physical and mental problems.

“We believe that morphine may be neuroprotective in a subset of people infected with HIV,” lead investigator Italo Mocchetti, a professor of neuroscience, said in a Georgetown news release.

He and his colleagues conducted the study because they knew that some people with HIV who are heroin users never develop HIV brain dementia. Morphine is similar to heroin.

In their tests on rats, the researchers found that morphine triggers brain cells called astrocytes to produce a protein called CCL5, which activates factors that suppress HIV infection in immune cells.

CCL5 “is known to be important in blood, but we didn’t know it is secreted in the brain,” Mocchetti said. “Our hypothesis is that it is in the brain to prevent neurons from dying.”

The study was to be presented at the annual meeting of the Society of NeuroImmune Pharmacology, April 13 to 17 in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

“Ideally, we can use this information to develop a morphine-like compound that does not have the typical dependency and tolerance issues that morphine has,” Mocchetti said.

SOURCE: Georgetown University Medical Center, news release.

Parents have little to fear when their teens turn to blogging, new research suggests.

In fact, most adolescents blog to maintain friendships and engage in positive discussions of everyday teenage life.

The finding, based on a month-long review of teen content on a popular blogging Web site, may help relieve parental concerns that teens are hopping online to participate in violent, drug-laced or sexual discourse.

“There’s a lot of hype about the use of online technology and the abuse of it, but here we found that it seems that it’s just another example of typical adolescent behavior,” said study author Dawn Anderson-Butcher, an independent social worker and associate professor in the college of social work at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Anderson-Butcher and her colleagues reported their findings recently in the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal.

To explore the world of teen blogging, in 2007 the authors analyzed an entire month’s worth of quotable content posted by 100 American teens from across the country (aged 13 to 18) on the Xanga.com social networking Web site (pronounced “Zanga”).

The goal: to count up how many times teens remarked on so-called “good” or “bad” behaviors.

About three-quarters of the teens were female, and teen usage was uneven, with some teens adding posts daily while others threw in their two cents just once or twice a month.

Teens did engage in some degree of complaining and expression of negative feelings. Sixty-five percent blogged about being bored, while others discussed feeling blue (30 percent), feeling angry (28 percent), and/or feeling like they didn’t fit in (22 percent). The age-old reluctance to do homework was a subject raised by 16 percent of the teens, while concern about bad grades was mentioned by 11 percent.

But there was relatively little mention of “bad” behavior: just 8 percent said they had cut class, 6 percent said they had consumed alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes, and only 1 percent referred to engaging in sexual activity.

Instead, the bulk of teens used blogging to discuss positive events and behaviors central to teen living.

Video game playing was the prime topic for 65 percent of the teen bloggers, followed by TV-viewing (45 percent), homework (40 percent), after-school non-religious activities (38 percent), Web surfing (29 percent), and religious activities (22 percent).

The researchers did not explore whether or not the very public nature of this particular Web site — which has relatively less restrictive access policies than sites such as Facebook — influenced the positive nature of the observed teen content.

Parental supervision of the site — self-described as “accessible to anyone, including people who are not registered Xanga users” — was not assessed. Nor was the degree to which teen users might have engaged in self-censorship.

Nonetheless, Anderson-Butcher said the study demonstrates that the world of teen blogging is not the social threat some have suggested.

“Contrary to what many people might assume, the kids we looked at weren’t describing problem behaviors very often or rambling on about negative interactions,” she noted. “They were just talking about their day in ways that we might have talked about ours on the phone when we were kids.”

One expert wasn’t surprised by the findings.

“There only has to be a very, very few inappropriate uses of new media to grab our attention and get us to jump to the wrong conclusion that inappropriate behavior online is common,” said Sam Gosling, a personality and social psychologist and professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. “But it’s clear that what makes the latest media so popular with teens is that they are actually just using it to maintain social bonds and keep in touch, just as with any other form of communication.”

Jeffrey Hall, an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, concurred.

“Parents and others are often very afraid of their children doing things online that will be negative or detrimental,” he noted. “But this really points to the growing use of computer media to do things that are relatively mundane — to seek social support, build friendships, share social experiences and communicate with people that you already like.”

SOURCES: Dawn Anderson-Butcher, Ph.D., associate professor, college of social work, Ohio State, Columbus, and licensed independent social worker; Jeffrey Hall, Ph.D., assistant professor, department of communication studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence; Sam Gosling, Ph.D., professor, department of psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, online.