We are looking for a better quality of life and maybe to start a family.”She added: “We have found a house to buy in a beautiful country area in south-west France. Many people hope to win the lottery and buy a house. But one Kentish couple have decided to play the gamble the other way around. They intend to raffle their £270,000 home to fund a new life in south-west France

Many people hope to win the lottery and buy a house. Three studies compared the performance of 154 adults on tasks designed to reveal early stages of cognitive decline, and found those who were bilingual responded faster and performed better The study is in Psychology and Ageing.. The higher rates among men are due to unhealthy lifestyles – men smoke and drink more and eat fewer fruit and vegetables than women – and the failure of men to notice early signs of cancer or seek help when they spot them. “Men are more likely to deny the likelihood of developing cancer and more likely to attempt to ignore potential symptoms,” the study says.The forum has teamed up with the publishers of the Haynes car manuals to produce a new cancer guide.

It looks like a car manual but tells men how to keep their bodies like a well-tuned engine.¿ Learning a language may protect against dementia. The remaining nine cancers – lung, bowel, bladder, stomach, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, oesophagus, leukaemia, kidney and pancreas – are more common in men.Overall, the incidence of the 10 cancers is 236 cases per 100,000 population among men, compared with 131 per 100,000 among women, an 80 per cent difference. Cancer has overtaken heart disease as the biggest killer of men.It said there had been no recognition that men “think differently about their bodies and their health” from women, have different attitudes to smoking, drinking and diet and respond differently to health advice. Health checks for men should be established in workplaces, barber’s shops, pubs and sports venues.Peter Baker, director of MHF, said: “The statistics could not be clearer; men are at far greater risk of developing and dying from cancer than women. We need to introduce male-specific approaches to tackling the disease.”Of the 10 main cancers to affect both sexes, only malignant melanoma, the lethal form of skin cancer, is commoner in women. Every year, 80,000 men die from cancer and 134,000 are diagnosed.

“People who are hostile have a chronically ‘turned on’ sympathetic nervous system,” says Professor Catherine Stoney, a psychologist at Ohio State University. “This gives them higher blood pressure, higher heart rates and higher cholesterol.” The stress of being angry and hostile also increases the amount of inflammation in the blood vessels, which in turn encourages the build-up of damaging plaque.Stoney found something else at work that suggests an even more direct link between anger and heart problems. A few months ago a report said that sulky, bad-tempered men were 30 per cent more likely to develop a dangerously irregular heartbeat.What makes these findings different from the claims of 20 years ago is that there is a much clearer idea of the sort of mechanism that might be involved. Both have been linked with a raised risk of heart attack.Recently, researchers have focused more on specific emotions such as anger, which has been linked with a worsening of irritable bowel disease, ulcers, headaches and sensitivity to pain, and even with backache, arthritis and a greater chance of becoming addicted to nicotine.

Twenty or 30 years ago, the search focused on links between disease and personality types – a striving, ambitious Type A and a socially inept and anxious Type D. As recently as the 1940s, the psychiatric explanation for Parkinson’s disease was that it was the result of “conflict between an aggressive drive to action and an equally strong internal pressure to inhibit action”. The specific conflict was the result of “the wish to masturbate in the ambitious moralistic man”.Despite these absurdities, evidence kept mounting that mental states can affect our health in very physical ways. Even people with tuberculosis can be free of symptoms for years and then succumb after suffering some kind of emotional trauma. Freud, for instance, distinguished between real illnesses and hysterical ones brought on by unconscious emotional conflicts – asthma, for example, was explained as “the fear of losing parental love”. At the time, it was a liberating idea, and medicine made huge strides by ignoring the mind and treating the body as a mechanical system. Antibiotics work, whatever your personality.As a result doctors, by and large, have never been terribly keen on the links between psychological states and disease.