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Socioeconomic status seems to make no difference in mental decline after the age of 70, according to new research.

The study, published in the Aug. 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, challenges claims that economic status and background have an impact on cognitive functioning among the elderly. Rather, the University of California, Los Angeles study found that rates of cognitive decline among people aged 70 and older depended on other factors and were similar across socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups.

“It has been known that cognitive performance at any given age appears to depend on demographic characteristics; the more educated, for instance, perform better,” said lead investigator Dr. Arun Karlamangla, associate professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, in a university news release. “But though there are differences in the level of performance you start with in your late 60s, this study’s surprise is that the rate of decline in your 70s is the same for every group.”

The study authors looked at data collected from 6,476 people born before 1924 who took part in the study of Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old. Participants were tested five times between 1993 and 2002 on various memory and cognition tasks, including word recall, subtraction, attention, language and knowledge of current affairs.

The researchers found that cognitive decline depended on how active people were earlier in life, whether or not they were widowed or ever married, and how old they were. Other social factors appeared to have little impact.

“The most consistent predictors of faster declines in cognitive functioning were being old and being single,” the study authors wrote.

Most generally healthy adults starting an exercise program do not need to see their doctor first, researchers say.

Routine medical screening before starting a regular exercise regimen with the goal of reducing the risk of sudden exercise-induced death is not recommended, the researchers wrote in a report published this month.

“Sudden death is a rare adverse effect of exercise,” Dr. Mayer Brezis, of Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel, told Reuters Health in an interview.

“Medical screening before initiating regular exercise is often advised but without scientific basis,” Brezis noted.

An exercise electrocardiogram — a test that detects and records the heart’s electrical activity — is thought to help identify people at risk but the test yields “many” falsely positive and falsely negative test results, the researcher warned.

In a “simulation study,” Brezis and colleagues found that routine screening decreases deaths in intermediate to high-risk people but not in those who are at low risk.

“Actually, medical screening may cause damage,” Brezis said, “for instance because of labeling healthy people as sick or because of the side effects” of tests to check for heart disease.

“Medical screening may actually prevent the known benefit from exercise by diverting attention from the main goal: i.e., to have people exercise,” Brezis said.

“Sedentary people should be encouraged to initiate exercise gradually and go to a physician if they feel chest discomfort or dizziness during exercise,” Brezis said.

“Gyms should post boards explaining these warning signs. Exercise coaches should understand and explain these warning signs to customers,” he added.

Still, Brezis emphasized that this advice does not apply to individuals with known heart disease. “These people should be referred to cardiac rehabilitation centers where they can resume physical activity under supervision.”

A study published last year suggested that bipolar disorder may be over diagnosed in people seeking mental health care. Now new findings shed light on which disorders many of these patients actually have.

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, involves dramatic swings in mood — ranging from debilitating depression to euphoric recklessness.

In the original 2008 study, researchers at Brown University School of Medicine found that of 145 adults who said they had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, 82 (57 percent) turned out not to have the condition when given a comprehensive diagnostic interview.

In this latest study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the researchers used similar standardized interviews to find out which disorders those 82 patients might have.

Overall, they found, nearly half had major depression, while borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety and social phobia were each diagnosed in roughly one-quarter to one-third.

When the researchers then compared the patients with 528 other psychiatric patients who had never been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, they found that those in the former group were nearly four times more likely to have borderline personality disorder.

They were also 70 percent more likely to have major depression and twice as likely to have PTSD.

Some of other diagnoses were less common but still seen at elevated rates among the patients previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder. These included antisocial personality disorder and impulse-control disorder.

Over diagnosis of bipolar disorder is concerning, in part, because it is typically treated with mood-stabilizing drugs that can have side effects — including effects on the kidneys, liver, and metabolic and immune systems, explained lead researcher Dr. Mark Zimmerman, an associate professor at Brown and director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital.

In addition, he told Reuters Health in an email, over diagnosis means some patients are likely not getting the appropriate care for the problems they do have.

Bipolar disorder shares certain characteristics with some other psychiatric conditions. Borderline personality disorder, for instance, is marked by unstable mood, impulsive behavior and problems maintaining relationships with other people.

But Zimmerman and his colleagues suspect that some doctors are over diagnosing bipolar disorder because — unlike certain other causes of mood disturbance — it does have effective drug therapies.

There are no medications approved specifically for treating borderline personality disorder, for instance, but research suggests that some forms of “talk therapy” are effective.

“We believe that clinicians are inclined to diagnose disorders that they feel more comfortable treating,” Zimmerman explained.

“The increased availability of medications that have been approved for the treatment of bipolar disorder might be influencing clinicians who are unsure whether or not a patient has bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder to err on the side of diagnosing the disorder that is medication-responsive,” he added.

This “bias,” Zimmerman said, is reinforced by drug company marketing, which highlights certain studies that have suggested that bipolar disorder goes unrecognized in many people.

Female kidney recipients whose donated organ came from a deceased male face an increased risk for failure in the first year after their transplant, Canadian researchers have found.

The risk is short-term, though, and may stem from proteins on male donor cells, the researchers said. Their study found that the risk goes away after 10 years.

The researchers analyzed data on 117,877 adults who had kidney transplants in the United States between 1990 and 2004. All kidneys came from deceased donors. Within a year, transplant failure had occurred in 16,135 people, and 6,878 had died. Among the 97,906 people who were followed for up to 10 years after their transplant, there were 35,084 transplant failures and 22,566 deaths.

Compared with all other gender combinations, female recipients of male donor kidneys had a 12 percent greater risk of failure and a similar increased risk for death a year after the transplant. They had no increased risk for failure or death after 10 years.

The researchers, from the University of Toronto and University of British Columbia, said that H-Y antigens, derived from the male chromosome and not found in women, might cause an adverse immune response in women who receive kidneys from men who had died.

They recommended that “future research should examine the potential mechanisms underlying the H-Y effect in order to better understand the specific role of minor histocompatibility antigens in determining kidney allograft outcomes.”