FRIDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Experts say the secret to a long marriage is communication, and new research now notes it's also the key to a long life.

A lengthy study of Midwestern couples finds that those who felt free to express their feelings lived longer than the perennially resentful. The couples with the most unexpressed anger died the earliest.

"The worst thing to do is to keep it in, not talk about the problem, brood about it, and be continuously angry," said study author Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. "Not talking about the problems in your close relationship is not good for your longevity."

The findings may seem obvious, but Harburg said previous research hadn't pinned down a connection between lifespan and level of marital communication. It's important, he said, to confirm what seems to be so.

Harburg and his colleagues have been following 192 couples from the small town of Tecumseh, Mich., for 17 years. The study, published in the January issue of the Journal of Family Communication, examines what happened to them between 1971 and 1988.

About 14 percent of the couples were defined as "anger-in" types, meaning both spouses developed resentments and failed to resolve problems. "They don't talk about the problem, and when they do, they just start fighting again," Harburg said.

After the mortality rates among the participants were adjusted for the impact of things like heart disease and smoking, the "anger-in" couples still died earlier than couples who handled anger in other ways.

Of the 192 couples studied, both spouses in 26 pairs suppressed their anger; there were 13 deaths in that group. With the remaining 166 couples, there was a total of 41 deaths. Both spouses died in 23 percent of the mutual suppression couples during the study period, compared to 6 percent of the other couples.

The better approach, Harburg said, is to work together. "You listen, you don't interrupt, you hear the other person, you talk back and forth. And then you use your imagination, resolve the problem and come to some kind of consensus."

Still, the findings did turn up some evidence that mutual open communication might not be entirely a good idea. The couples who seemed to live the longest were those in which the man expressed his anger and the wife held hers in.

Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of the Division of Health Psychology at Ohio State University College of Medicine, said it's clear that marital interactions affect the body. "We know that couples who are nasty or hostile with each other when discussing disagreements showed larger increases in stress hormones and greater dysregulation of immune function as a consequence," she explained.

Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues published a study in which they found that small blister wounds on a forearm took two days longer to heal in couples who were hostile to each other.

While the new study isn't as complete as it could be, Kiecolt-Glaser said, it does show "the importance of good communication that is consistent over time."

Harburg agreed. "If you're committed to using your intelligence and your creativity to stay in the relationship and solve the problems, then you'll get through all the rough patches," he said.

More information

Learn more about stress and the body from the American Institute of Stress  .

MONDAY, Feb. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Eye blinking may help doctors identify children exposed to alcohol during pregnancy but who don't have the distinctive facial features usually associated with the exposure, a new study suggests.

"Eyeblink conditioning (EBC) is a Pavlovian paradigm that involves temporal pairing of a conditioned stimulus, such as a tone, with an unconditioned stimulus, such as an air puff," study first author Sandra W. Jacobson, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Wayne State University School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

"Animal studies have shown that binge consumption of alcohol during pregnancy impairs EBC. We wanted to see if we could use the EBC paradigm to identify underlying or subcortical deficits that are specifically affected by prenatal alcohol exposure in children," Jacobson said.

She and her colleagues administered EBC (which paired a tone with an air puff) to 98 South African 5-year-olds and found a link between EBC deficit and fetal alcohol exposure.

"Our results show that there was a dose-response relation between alcohol exposure and FASD [fetal alcohol spectrum disorder] diagnosis and that a fundamental element of learning is affected by prenatal alcohol exposure," Jacobson said. "We next need to extend the study of the EBC paradigm with fetal alcohol-exposed children to see how their exposure impacts on children at different ages."

The findings were published in the February issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

"This study clearly links one brain area to the learning deficits experienced by FAS children, whether or not they have physical manifestations of the condition, and thus can provide a basis for the development of remediation programs," Lynn T. Singer, deputy provost and vice president for academic programs at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said in a prepared statement.

"Second, since normal human infants reach functional capacity on the EBC response by five months of age, and since the EBC deficit appears to be so sensitive, infants at risk can be identified early in life, and intervention programs can begin when the plasticity of the brain is greatest and have the strongest effect," Singer said.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about fetal alcohol syndrome  .

THURSDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists think they have discovered a mechanism that prompts early menopause and might account for some infertility problems in women.

PTEN -- a gene that's known for suppressing tumor growth -- apparently also keeps immature eggs in the ovary from ripening too quickly. When researchers deleted the PTEN gene in mice, the rodents ran out of their entire supply of eggs while they were still in the mouse equivalent of early adulthood. If ultimately applicable in humans, the revelation could lead to better infertility treatments.

"This finding is believed to have broad physiological, clinical and practical significance," said senior study author Kui Liu, an assistant professor of medical biochemistry and biophysics at Umea University, in Sweden. The report is published in the Feb. 1 issue of Science.

A woman's ovaries are made up of follicles, each of which contains an oocyte (the germ cell which will eventually give rise to an egg).

Over time, the majority of follicles remain dormant, acting as holding pens for immature oocytes. Some of these dormant follicles, however, slowly move over to the growing active follicle pool, where they are available for immediate release and, perhaps, fertilization. Menopause occurs when there are no more follicles and, therefore, no more oocytes left.

The length of a woman's reproductive life is determined by the size of her follicle pool and the rate at which this pool is depleted.

Until now, scientists have not completely understood what mechanisms are involved in this process.

For this study, Liu and colleagues deleted the PTEN gene in mice and found that these mice produced, at the most, one normal-sized litter after which they could no longer give birth. They were still in early adulthood (12 to 13 weeks of age) when they experienced this premature ovarian failure.

The same genetic variation may be responsible for premature ovarian failure in women, the authors stated. And manipulating the PTEN gene could hold hope for the future.

"Previously, it was not possible to use the sleeping primordial follicles for in vitro fertilization, as they are not able to grow up in a culture dish," Liu said. "Now that we know more about what is controlling the length of female fertility, it is also possible to culture a small slice of the ovary from an infertile woman, or a woman who will undergo chemo/radiation therapy, or an animal, and trigger the growth of primordial follicles in it by using synthetic PTEN inhibitors, and then further culture the follicles for in vitro fertilization. This means that a much richer resource of follicles can be used for in vitro fertilization."

Not only will humans potentially benefit, so might domestic animals and endangered animals that have difficulty breeding.

Future research, said Liu, will focus on finding good PTEN inhibitors.

More information

For more on fertility, visit the American Society for Reproductive Medicine  .

THURSDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News) -- Doctors should tell pregnant patients considering umbilical cord blood banking about the advantages and disadvantages of public versus private cord blood banks, new guidelines state.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued its revised Committee Opinion in the February issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The ACOG also said doctors who recruit patients for for-profit cord blood banks should disclose their financial interests or other potential conflicts of interest to patients and their families.

Initially, private facilities were developed to store umbilical cord blood stem cells from newborns for potential future use by the same child or a family member in case of disease. But there are now public banks that store, for free, stem cells that can by used by anyone who needs them.

"Patients need to be aware that the chances are remote that the stem cells from their baby's banked cord blood will be used to treat that same child -- or another family member -- in the future," Dr. Anthony R. Gregg, chairman of the ACOG's Committee on Genetics, said in a prepared statement.

The ACOG also recommends that doctors inform patients that there is no reliable estimate of a child's likelihood of using his or her own saved cord blood later in life. Experts estimate the likelihood at one in 2,700, or even lower. Patients should also be advised that it's not known how long cord blood can successfully be stored.

In addition, pregnant women need to be told that cord blood stem cells can't be used to treat genetic diseases in the same child from which they were collected, because those stem cells would have the same genetic mutation.

"Cord blood collected from a newborn that later develops childhood leukemia cannot be used to treat that leukemia for much the same reason," Gregg said.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about banking cord blood  .