Tag Archives: Dennis Thompson

The fan—friend or foe?

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If the ambient air is warmer than your body temperature, you might increase your core temperature if you try to cool down with a fan. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Thinking of picking up an electric fan to help keep you cool and protect your health during the next heat wave?


You might want to think again.


Electric fans might make you feel cooler, but they can actually increase your risk of becoming heat sick and even dying from a heat stroke, the evidence shows.


Electric fans could contribute to a potentially dangerous increase in a person’s core heat if outdoor temperatures exceed 95 degrees Fahrenheit, a recent Cochrane evidence review says.


“The fan actually will be blowing air that is hotter than our body at us,” said co-author Mike Clarke, director of the Northern Ireland Clinical Trials Unit at Queen’s University Belfast.


It’s like switching on an electric oven’s convection fan to speed up the cooking process, the researchers said.


Meanwhile, another new study found that electric fans are particularly dangerous during very hot and dry conditions, but can help lower core temperatures and heart strain in hot, humid weather. That study appears in a recent issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.


Electric fans are seen as a cheap way to help people cope with the several days of high temperatures that make up a heat wave, researchers for the Cochrane review said.


Global warming means heat waves will become more frequent and they can have terrible health consequences.


As many as 30,000 people died during a European heat wave in August 2003, while a Moscow heat wave in 2010 was responsible for nearly 11,000 deaths, the researchers noted.


The Cochrane review team found that there’s not a lot of research related to the effectiveness of electric fans, even though they’ve been around for well over a century. No studies at all met their review criteria, which were looking for experiments directly comparing electric fans with no fans.


They did find several studies that had looked at the effectiveness of cooling options employed during heat waves, however.


These studies had mixed results, with some suggesting that an electric fan might increase the risk of dying during a heat wave.


Fans don’t cool us down by circulating cooler air, Clarke noted. The air moving through a fan is the same temperature as the surrounding environment.


Instead, they cool us by speeding up evaporation of our sweat. That means fans also are causing our bodies to lose water faster.


According to Dr. Teresa Amato, head of emergency medicine at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Forest Hills, in Forest Hills, N.Y., “If you sweat more and don’t replace it quickly with fluids, there is a theoretical increased risk of dehydration, which could potentially put a person at greater risk for heat stroke or heat-related illness.”


If the ambient air is warmer than the human body, then the air blowing from the fan could actually increase a person’s core temperature, the researchers explained.


For the new study, Australian researchers exposed volunteers for two hours to laboratory conditions that mimicked two different types of heat waves.


One condition was very hot and dry, the same as the peak conditions of the July 2018 California heat wave, with a heat index of about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.


The other condition involved a hot, humid day with a heat index of 133 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to a July 1995 heat wave in Chicago.


The experiment showed that electric fans lowered volunteers’ core temperature and heart strain in the humid condition, but were detrimental in weather that was less hot but very dry.


“Bottom line is that during a heat wave, the safest thing is to be in a cool, air-conditioned area,” Amato said. “If that is not possible in your own home or dwelling, you should seek out ‘cooling stations’ throughout your community. Once there is an alert that a heat wave is coming, many local health departments work to identify these safer alternatives and will use places such as libraries and schools.”


People who stay home and rely on an electric fan should remain aware of signs of heat-related illness, such as nausea, muscle cramps or headaches, she said.


“Be mindful to check on elderly neighbors who might not have working air conditioners and are relying on electrical fans,” Amato added. “They are at a much higher risk and they may not show signs of heat-related illness until they are critically ill.”


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.



Lyme-bearing ticks more widespread in U.S. than thought

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The most commonly encountered ticks—the deer tick, the western black-legged tick and the lone star tick—carry the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Think you live in a place that’s free from disease-carrying ticks? Don’t be so sure.


Citizen scientists found ticks capable of transmitting Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses in dozens of places across the United States where the pests had never previously been recorded, a new study reports.


All told, disease-carrying ticks were detected in 83 counties where they’d never been found before across 24 states.


The numbers reflect a rise in tick populations across the country, said study author Nate Nieto. He’s an associate professor with Northern Arizona University’s department of biological sciences.


“People should be aware of ticks and tick-borne disease, even when they may think there’s not a recorded incidence of a tick in a county,” Nieto said. “These things, they’re not obeying borders. They’re going by biology. If they get moved there by a deer or bird or people or pets, they’re going to establish themselves and start growing.”


The massive nationwide study also provides evidence that ticks are born carrying infectious diseases, rather than picking germs up from the animals upon which they feed, said Wendy Adams, research grant director for the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, in California.


All life stages of the most commonly encountered ticks—the deer tick, the western black-legged tick and the lone star tick—carried the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Adams said.


“That’s important, because that would say that a tick doesn’t need to acquire an infection from a blood meal. It’s born with the infection,” Adams explained.


These findings are the result of an unexpectedly successful effort by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation to collect tick samples from across the country.


Between January 2016 and August 2017, the foundation and Northern Arizona University offered free tick identification and testing to the general public. People were encouraged to send in ticks they found on themselves, their pets or around their communities.


The scientists’ original goal was to collect about 2,000 ticks. They wound up with more than 16,000, sent in by people from every state except Alaska.


“We got such a phenomenal participation,” Nieto said. “Two weeks in May, we got almost 2,000 packages per week. That is just powerful data.”


People found ticks in areas not represented in tracking maps maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the researchers discovered.


Most of these new areas were right next to counties with known tick populations, Adams said.


“Ticks are spreading. Tick populations have exploded,” Adams said. “This is good data to show the extent of that. It’s a message to people that even if you think ticks aren’t a problem, they could be.”


The 24 states that contain counties with newly documented populations of deer ticks or Western black-legged ticks are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.


Further, ticks were found in states where they simply weren’t supposed to be, Adams said. Lone star ticks were found in California and black-legged ticks were found in Nevada, both for the first time ever.


People also found ticks carrying Babesia—microscopic parasites that infect red blood cells and cause the potentially life-threatening disease babesiosis—in 26 counties across 10 states in which the public health department does not require physicians to report cases of the disease.


The new study “highlights the geographic variability of ticks and the pathogens they carry,” said Dr. Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.


“Surveillance is increasingly important as we see climate and environmental changes, because we do see expanding ranges of ticks. We’ve seen that with Lyme disease. We’ve seen that with babesiosis,” said Auwaerter, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.


Adams agreed, suggesting that more funding should be directed to these sorts of crowd-sourced tracking efforts.


“We have to invest federal dollars to examine the spread of ticks,” she said.


In the meantime, the Bay Area Lyme Foundation suggests that people protect themselves from ticks by:

  • Wearing light-colored clothes to make ticks more visible.
  • Do regular tick checks after being in a tick-infested area, and shower immediately after to wash away ticks that might be crawling on you.
  • Consider using tick repellents like DEET for skin and permethrin for clothing.
  • Talk with your doctor if you develop any symptoms following a tick bite.

The new study was published online in the journal PLOS One.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.


Anxious? Distressed? You’re not alone

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Hundreds of thousands of Americans live with serious psychological distress. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


More Americans than ever before are stressed, depressed and anxiety-ridden, and many are unable to get the help they need, a study suggests.


An estimated 8.3 million American adults─about 3.4 percent of the U.S. population─suffer from serious psychological distress, an evaluation of federal health data concluded. Previous estimates put the number of Americans suffering from serious psychological distress at 3 percent or less, the researchers said.


“Mental illness is on the rise. Suicide is on the rise. And access to care for the mentally ill is getting worse,” said lead researcher Judith Weissman. She’s a research manager in the department of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City.


This increase is likely a lasting after-effect of the Great Recession that began in late 2007─a stress-filled time that caused long-term emotional damage to many Americans, Weissman suggested.


Many people psychologically affected by the Great Recession haven’t been able to get the help they need, either because they can’t afford it or because their condition hampers their ability to seek out treatment, she said.


As a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans live with serious psychological distress, an umbrella term that runs from general hopelessness and nervousness all the way up to diagnosable conditions such as depression and anxiety, Weissman explained.


“The recession seemed to have pushed the mentally ill to a point where they never recovered,” she said. “This is a very disturbing finding because of the implications of what mental illness can do to a person in terms of their ability to function and their life span.”


The study included national health data from a survey conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 35,000 households nationwide participate each year.


The investigators found that between 2006 and 2014, access to health care services deteriorated for people with serious psychological distress, compared to people without emotional distress.


Comparing self-reported psychological distress symptoms across nine years, the research team estimated that nearly one in 10 distressed Americans in 2014 did not have health insurance that would give them access to a psychiatrist or mental health counselor.


In 2014, people with serious psychological distress were nearly three times more likely to experience delays in getting professional help due to insufficient mental health coverage than people without serious distress, the study findings showed.


Approximately 10 percent of people with serious psychological distress could not afford to pay for their psychiatric care in 2014, up from just under 9 percent in 2006.


The economic turmoil caused by the Great Recession struck at the heart of the American dream, rattling some to their core, Weissman said.


“Earning and sustaining a living is getting harder for people, especially for men,” Weissman said. “The loss of jobs could mean there’s a loss of community and a loss of role as wage earners and providers.”


Dr. Harsh Trivedi is president and CEO of Sheppard Pratt Health System, a Maryland mental health provider. He said constant noise from the internet and social media likely serve to amp up people’s anxiety and angst.


“In the past, you may go out and meet with your friends and talk about something, but when you got home you’d go to sleep,” Trivedi said. “The difficulty now is you can’t really turn things off. We don’t necessarily have downtimes to recharge and get our bearings straight again.”


Weissman pointed out that psychologically distressed people already struggle to deal with the health care system, and on top of that there are national shortages of mental health professionals.


And, Trivedi added, the ongoing debate over the Affordable Care Act isn’t doing distressed individuals any favors.


“If you are in a more distressed state, how easy is it for you, from a psychological perspective, to seek care?” Trivedi said. “If the overall market is shifting, and you are more psychologically distressed, how are you going to have the faculties to keep track of your access to health care?”


Weissman said insurance companies should pay for mental health services, which need to be more fully integrated into primary care for people.


“We need to increase access to care for the mentally ill,” she said. “We also need to put trained psychiatrists and mental health providers within the primary care setting. If you have linkages of care within primary care, then the mentally ill patient can be helped even if they’ve come in for some other reason.”


The study was published in the journal Psychiatric Services.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.




Marriage—a life-extender?

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When you’re married, you’re more likely to have someone looking out for you and reinforcing healthy behaviors. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Married folks not only live longer than singles, but the longevity gap between the two groups is growing, U.S. government health statisticians report.


The age-adjusted death rate for the married declined by 7% between 2010 and 2017, according to a new study from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


“Not only is the rate for married lower, but it’s declining more than any other group,” said lead author Sally Curtin, an NCHS statistician.


Statistically, death rate is the annual number of deaths for every 100,000 people. It’s adjusted so that a 26-year-old and an 80-year-old married or widowed or divorced are on equal footing.


The new study reported that the death rate for never-marrieds declined only 2%, while that for divorced people hasn’t changed at all.


Worst off were the widowed, for whom the death rate rose 6%. They have the highest death rate of all the categories, researchers said.


Married men in 2017 had an age-adjusted death rate of 943 per 100,000, compared to 2,239 for widowers.


The death rate was 1,735 per 100,000 for lifelong bachelors and 1,773 for divorced men.


Married women had a death rate of 569 per 100,000, two-and-a-half times lower than the 1,482 rate for widows. The death rate was 1,096 for divorcees and 1,166 for never-married women.


Part of the marriage benefit could be explained by the fact that people in good health are more likely to marry, said Katherine Ornstein, an associate professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.


Once you’re in a marriage, there are a host of tangible and intangible benefits that give you a health advantage, experts said.


Married people are more likely to have health insurance, Ornstein said, and therefore, have better access to health care.


Being married also means you have someone looking out for you and reinforcing healthy behaviors, said Michael Rendall, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland.


“Having somebody there who’s your spouse will tend to promote positive health behaviors—going to the doctor, eating better, getting screened,” he said.


This is particularly true of men, who previous studies have shown derive more health benefits from marriage than women.


“Men tend to have fewer skills than women in terms of looking after themselves,” Rendall said.


Finally, the companionship of marriage staves off health problems associated with loneliness and isolation, Ornstein said.


“Social support and the social engagement that comes with being married is a huge benefit for mental health and physical health,” she said.


All these benefits also explain why widowed people tend to do so badly after the death of their spouse, Ornstein said.


Widows and widowers have to deal with heartache, loneliness and financial stress, she said. They no longer have a partner looking after them, so they are more likely to neglect their health.


The study found some gender differences in trends.


While the death rate for married men and women declined by the same 7%, women’s overall death rate was much lower.


But the death rates among men in all other marital categories remained essentially the same between 2010 and 2017, researchers found.


On the other hand, the death rate for widowed women rose 5%, while the rate for never-married women declined by 3% and remained stable for divorced women.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.




The power of a hearty nap

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In a years-long study, those who napped once or twice a week cut their risk of heart attack, stroke and heart failure nearly in half. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Could grabbing a nap once or twice a week help you live longer?


A new study reports the occasional nap appears to cut in half people’s risk of heart attack, strokes and heart disease, compared with folks who never nap.


But more frequent napping provided no benefit, researchers found.


“In fact, we found that frequent nappers had initially a higher risk for incident cardiovascular disease,” said lead author Nadine Hausler, a postdoctoral researcher at University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland. “However, when we took sociodemographic, lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors into account, this increased risk disappeared.”


The findings left experts scratching their heads.


“I don’t think it’s anything definitive, in terms of whether napping is actually helpful or not helpful,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, director of the sleep program at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.


She noted that the health benefits of napping are a source of intense debate among researchers, with many arguing that naps are a sign of lousy nighttime sleep and, therefore, not a good thing.


“This throws a little bit of a curveball, because they found one to two naps per week might be beneficial,” St-Onge said.


For this study, researchers looked at napping patterns of nearly 3,500 randomly selected people in Switzerland and then tracked their heart health for more than five years.


About three in five said they don’t nap.


One in five said they nap once or twice a week—the same number who reported napping three or more days a week.


Frequent nappers tended to be older men with excess weight and a tobacco habit. Though they reported sleeping longer at night than those who don’t nap, they also reported more daytime sleepiness and were more likely to have sleep apnea, a condition that wakes a person repeatedly in the night when their breathing stops.


During the five-year follow-up, participants had 155 fatal and non-fatal heart events, the findings showed. These could include heart attacks, strokes and heart disease caused by clogged arteries that required surgical reopening.


Napping once or twice a week cut a person’s risk of heart attack, stroke and heart failure by 48%, compared with people who don’t nap at all, the researchers found.


Frequent naps initially appeared to increase a person’s heart risk by 67%, but that disappeared after accounting for other risk factors, the study authors noted.


Dr. Martha Gulati, a cardiologist who is editor-in-chief of CardioSmart.org, the American College of Cardiology’s patient website, said it makes sense that frequent napping could be a red flag for health problems.


“I worry that somebody that naps every day isn’t getting good sleep,” she said. “Somebody who takes six or seven naps a week, I ask, are you not sleeping well at night? Is that how you’re catching up with your sleep?”


Gulati added, “But I am still going to enjoy my Sunday naps and now say I am working on lowering my risk for heart disease when my husband asks.”


Researcher Hausler couldn’t say exactly why a couple of naps each week might do a body good.


“The mechanisms are not straightforward,” she said. “We assume that occasional napping might be a result of a physiological compensation allowing to decrease the stress due to insufficient nocturnal sleep and, thus, could have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease events.”


Though she said the results should first be confirmed by other studies, Hausler added: “We can say that an occasional nap can potentially decrease cardiovascular disease risk for healthy adults.”


The study was published online recently in the journal Heart.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.



The power of purpose

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Volunteering for community events and helping others are great ways to find purpose in your downtime. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Do you feel like you know why you’re here?


The answer to that question could determine how you feel day-to-day.


If you’ve found meaning in your life, you’re more likely to be both physically and mentally healthy, a new study reports.


On the other hand, people restlessly searching for meaning in their life are more likely to have worse mental well-being, with their struggle to find purpose negatively affecting their mood, social relationships, psychological health and ability to think and reason.


“We found presence of meaning was associated with better physical functioning and better mental functioning,” said senior study author Dr. Dilip Jeste. He is senior associate dean for the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.


“Many think about the meaning and purpose in life from a philosophical perspective, but meaning in life is associated with better health, wellness and perhaps longevity,” Jeste continued. “Those with meaning in life are happier and healthier than those without it.”


This conclusion comes from a three-year study of more than 1,000 people aged 21 and older living in San Diego County.


All participants were asked to fill out a battery of questionnaires that assessed their physical and mental health, as well as how sharp their brains function.


They also filled out a questionnaire aimed at determining the amount of meaning they’d found in life, as well as their continued search for meaning.


Meaning in life is a very individualized concept, Jeste said. It could be drawn from your faith or from your family, from your work or your community service, or your role in society.


Jeste and his colleagues found that as people get older, they tend to follow along a U-shaped curve in their search for meaning in life.


The search for meaning is high in young adulthood, as people make decisions about career and education and family that will shape the rest of their lives, the study reports.


“That’s a period of considerable anxiety. You are desperately searching for meaning, but you haven’t found it,” Jeste said of people in their 20s.


As people grow older and settle into their lives, they are more and more likely to discover the things that give their lives meaning, the researchers found.


But then, as people enter their old age, the search for life’s meaning again starts to roil within them, results show.


Physical and mental infirmity challenges their notion of themselves—and the increasingly frequent deaths of family and friends force them to contend with grief and their own mortality, Jeste said.


“They start questioning the meaning that they’d found in life at an earlier age and they start searching again,” Jeste said. “The purpose at 75 cannot be the same as that at 35.”


These big questions—and whether you’re still looking for the answers, at whatever age—are associated with your personal health, results show.


Contentment with life was associated with better physical and mental health, while a continuing search for meaning was associated with poorer mental health and less effective brain function, the study showed.


You could imagine that a doctor finds meaning in their life because they help people who are suffering, and that provides them with satisfaction and a solid base for happiness, said Dr. Philip Muskin, a professor of psychiatry with the Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City.


On the other hand, a doctor suffering from burnout who questions whether they’re really helping others isn’t going to be either happy or healthy.


“If you are still searching for meaning as a physician, that is likely to make you unhappy,” Muskin said. “Not necessarily depressed, but if you are still searching for meaning that is likely to make you uncomfortable in life.”


So what can you do to provide yourself with a firmer understanding of your life’s purpose?


Jeste suggests that the Serenity Prayer provides one blueprint—accepting the things in life you can’t change while working to improve the things you can.


“You can find the things that you can do that make you happy and that are useful to others,” Jeste said. “By doing that, you create your own value to society.”


Thoughtful conversation also can help, Muskin said, either with your friends or your family, or a religious figure or a therapist.


“Ask yourself the hard question. What is it I want to get out of this?” Muskin said. “Meaning comes from many different sources, and if you truly feel you don’t have meaning, you should sit with someone and have that conversation. What are we doing?”


Middle-aged people can help maintain the meaning they’ve found in life by making solid plans for what they will do in retirement, Muskin added.


“I see this all the time in my practice—people who retire into nothing,” Muskin said. “They have made no plans. They were professionals for years and decided to retire and their lives are empty. Now they’re searching for meaning in life because what they did and who they were never much separated.”


The new study was published online recently the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.



Is your mattress malicious?

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Researchers are concerned that chemicals used in the manufacture of mattresses could affect the health of children and infants. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Most people consider their bed a safe haven, but new research suggests your body heat might trigger the release of potentially harmful chemicals from your mattress.


Mattresses are known to release minute amounts of gaseous chemicals called volatile organic compounds.


These compounds come mainly from the polyurethane used in the mattress, but also from other chemicals used in flame retardants and plastics, the researchers said.


Unfortunately, your body heat appears to increase compound emissions from your mattress, according to tests conducted on eight different types of polyurethane mattresses.


But don’t toss out your mattress just yet: The estimated doses of most compounds remained well below the levels that could cause health effects, researchers noted.


However, some compounds did reach levels of concern for infants and young children, if their ages were considered in exposure calculations, the researchers added.


“There is no reason to panic and yet it is important to understand that air quality in our sleeping micro-environment is important with regard to our exposure to various pollutants such as VOCs,” said senior researcher Yael Dubowski, an associate professor with the Israel Institute of Technology. “Hence, we should make an effort to improve it.”


Health effects associated with compounds range from eye, nose and throat irritation to headaches and organ damage, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.


Some compounds, including benzene, acetaldehyde and formaldehyde, have been associated with increased cancer risk.


For the study, Dubowski and her colleagues subjected eight different mattresses to simulated sleeping conditions, mimicking the elevated body heat, humidity and carbon dioxide caused by humans when they sleep for even a few hours.


The mattresses had been allowed to air out for at least six months prior to the study, noted Sarah Evans, an assistant professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.


“Often we think, well, if you let something air out for a little while, you can dramatically reduce the level of chemicals that are off-gassed,” said Evans, who wasn’t involved with the study. “In this case, even after six months they still saw appreciable levels of off-gassing.”


Body heat appeared to increase each mattress’s release of compounds, compared with the levels released when the mattresses were not in use, researchers found.


Estimated exposures remained below the “No Significant Risk Levels” set under strict California environmental laws, researchers noted.


However, if the exposure levels took into account a child’s age, the picture took on more concern. For example, compounds linked to cancer such as acetaldehyde, formaldehyde and benzene approached or exceeded age-adjusted levels, researchers said.


The new study was published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.


Experts are generally more concerned about children’s exposure to compounds, said Dr. Kenneth Spaeth, chief of occupational and environmental medicine at Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y.


Babies in particular spend a lot of time in their crib, lying on foam mattresses that produce these gases, said Spaeth, who had no part in the study.


“By virtue of their age and size, they have heightened vulnerability to potential toxic effects,” he said.


Even if these chemicals don’t do immediate harm, there is concern that exposure will increase their lifelong risk of cancer, Evans and Spaeth said.


The best way to protect against compounds is to maintain good ventilation inside your home, by opening windows and using fans, they said.


“Indoor air can have as much as 10 times higher VOCs than outdoor air,” Evans said. “Getting fresh air in can really help reduce those exposures.”


Consumers also can choose mattresses made of materials other than polyurethane foam, Evans said. Mattresses containing cotton, wool and natural latex will all produce lower levels of gases.


Unfortunately, it can be very difficult for consumers to suss out what’s in a mattress and what sort of compounds those materials might produce, Spaeth said.


“Consumers are in a very difficult position,” Spaeth said. “It’s very hard to get good information about what a mattress contains, and even if you know that, unless you have a good understanding of the different materials it’s hard to know what chemicals might be emitted from those materials.


“The chemicals that are being emitted are not going to be listed in a label that indicates what the mattress is made of,” Spaeth said. “These are byproducts of the materials.”


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.



Feeling glum? It’s all in the wrist

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Feel a dark mood coming on? Wearable technology could one day alert you in advance, aiding in management of depression or other mood disorders. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Remember the “mood ring” craze of the 1970s?


A high-tech wristband is being developed along the same lines, potentially helping patients who struggle with mood disorders.


The smart wristband would use a person’s skin to track their emotional intensity. During a mood swing, either high or low, the wristband would change color, heat up, squeeze or vibrate to inform the wearer he might be in the throes of depression or anxiety, the researchers said.


“As the feedback is provided in real time, our devices encourage people to become more aware of their emotions, name them, potentially reflect on what causes them and even learn how to control their emotional responses in order to change the visual or tactile feedback provided by the device,” said researcher Corina Sas. She is a professor of human-computer interaction and digital health at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.


About 10% of U.S. adults struggle with a mood disorder, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or seasonal affective disorder, according to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.


Part of the treatment for a mood disorder involves becoming more aware of emotions and then learning to regulate emotional response, the study authors said in background notes in their report.


Co-author Muhammad Umair, a Lancaster research associate, explained, “We wanted to create low-cost, simple prototypes to support understanding and engagement with real-time changes in arousal. The idea is to develop self-help technologies that people can use in their everyday life and be able to see what they are going through,” he said in a university news release.


To that end, the U.K. researchers are developing wristbands that use sensors to detect changes in a person’s emotional intensity by tracking the electrical conductivity of their skin.


The devices then communicate those emotional changes either through materials that change color, heat up, vibrate or squeeze the wrist, the researchers said.


“Depression has a range of emotions, but if we talk about sadness, then as this is associated with low arousal—or what we call emotional intensity—the device will most likely reflect low arousal,” Sas said. “On the other hand, anxiety tends to be associated with high-intensity arousal, so that device will most likely reflect this.”


However, Sas noted, the device does not differentiate between positive or negative emotions, but between high- and low-intensity ones.


The researchers tested six wrist-worn prototypes with 12 people who wore them over two days.


Participants said the wristbands effectively prompted them to evaluate their emotions.


One participant told the researchers: “When I see the feedback, I feel present, I start to reflect what I was doing before and try to think how I am feeling at that moment.”


Another said: “It made me more aware of my feelings and made me think what feelings I have. But if I didn’t have the device, I wouldn’t be probably as aware as I am when wearing it. It did give me a way to think of my own emotion; made me aware of my own emotions.”


But participants were also concerned that negative feedback from the device might pose a potential hazard.


One said it could “be used as a trigger and might push you down the negative path.”


That’s a concern shared by Jessy Warner-Cohen, a health psychologist with Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y.


“I caution against letting a device dictate to a person their own emotions,” she said.


On the other hand, such a device is consistent with a long-established tradition of biofeedback, in which people use “physiological cues to help us actively try to regulate our minds and bodies,” Warner-Cohen said.


The device could help people recognize specific habits or tics that occur when they have a mood swing, she added.


“For example, if a person can identify that they clench their jaw when stressed then, in reverse, noticing when they clench their jaw can help a person recognize they are getting stressed and take proactive steps to alleviate such,” Warner-Cohen explained.


Dr. Victor Fornari, a psychiatrist with Zucker Hillside Hospital in Queens, N.Y., said the wristbands may be the beginning of “a new frontier” in helping to identify and regulate anxiety and depression.


“Increasing awareness about emotional reactions and improving the way individuals can self-regulate their emotions can be very helpful and important for everyone, but particularly for individuals with a mood or anxiety disorder,” Fornari said.


The technology is not yet patented, Sas said, and it is some ways off from being available to consumers.


“We need about another year to develop a more robust version of our research prototypes so that we can integrate both visual and tactile feedback, for which we will need increased computational power,” she said. “At that stage, we will look into running clinical trials to explore its value for people living with affective disorders, such as depression or anxiety.”


The researchers were scheduled to present their work  at the Designing Interactive Systems conference in San Diego, Calif.


Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.


FDA loosens drug rules

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New rules on prescription medicine could help lower drug prices for consumers. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Federal health officials have unveiled plans to allow prescription drug imports from Canada and other foreign nations.


The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing a rule under which states could import some prescription drugs from Canada, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced recently.


The agency also plans to make it easier for drug manufacturers to import their own FDA-approved drugs that are manufactured abroad and intended for sale in other countries.


“This would potentially allow for the sale of these drugs at lower prices than currently offered to American consumers, giving drug makers new flexibility to reduce list prices,” Azar told reporters.


Azar touted the proposals as “historic.”


All imported drugs would have to be FDA-approved, tested to ensure quality and relabeled to meet U.S. labeling requirements, added Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health.


State programs created to import medications would be limited to pills that patients would typically get from a pharmacy, Azar said.


Injectable products, controlled substances, biologic products and intravenous drugs would not be allowed.


States would create these programs, possibly in conjunction with wholesalers or pharmacies, and then submit them to FDA for approval, Giroir said.


However, drug manufacturers would be able to import any of their own products from other foreign countries, Azar said. That would include products such as insulin, which has recently been subject to steep price hikes.


“Every product is available for importation from every country by a manufacturer,” Azar said. “There is no restriction there, if a manufacturer is willing.”


The manufacturer pathway is intended to address the “bizarre” system of drug rebates that some pharmaceutical companies have blamed for high prices, Azar said.


“Even if the drug company would like to lower the list price of their drug, they may actually be precluded from doing so because of their arrangements with these middle men, where they have to funnel a certain amount of rebate money to those middle men,” Azar said.


Drug companies have said if they can get a new National Drug Code for an imported version of the exact same medicine, then they would compete against their own products at a lower list price, Azar said.


The new proposals are only aimed at brand-name drugs, Giroir said.


“The draft guidance does not address generic drugs because we are not aware of similar private market challenges for reducing the cost of generic drugs,” Giroir said.


The FDA is open to considering similar proposals for generic if warranted, he added.


The officials could not say how soon patients will benefit from these proposals, but said that the manufacturer’s guidance will likely move faster because it faces fewer regulatory hurdles.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.




Creeping threat: Kratom

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Kratom is often marketed as a safe alternative to opioid painkillers, but this unregulated substance poses a significant health risk. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Calls to U.S. poison control centers related to the herbal drug kratom have skyrocketed, increasing more than 50-fold in a matter of six years, a new study shows.


Back in 2011, poison centers received about one call a month regarding someone who’d taken too much kratom, a plant that is purported to produce mild opioid-like effects.


These days, nearly two calls a day are received concerning kratom exposures, researchers report in a recent issue of the journal Clinical Toxicology.


“We’re now getting literally hundreds of cases a year versus 10 or 20,” said researcher Henry Spiller, director of the Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. He noted that kratom reports underwent a “relatively big spike” sometime between 2015 and 2016.


The researchers identified 11 deaths associated with kratom use, including two in which kratom was used by itself and nine where kratom was used with other drugs.


Unfortunately, kratom is being promoted as a safe alternative to opioid painkillers for people with chronic pain, Spiller said.


“Because it’s a plant and it’s natural, at this point it’s unregulated,” Spiller said. “A lot of people have been Google-searching it for use in chronic pain and other things and we’ve started to see a really significantly increased use and, in many cases, abuse of it.”


But taking too much kratom can cause some unintended health problems, including agitation, seizures, rapid heart rate and high blood pressure, Spiller said. In extreme cases, kratom overdose can put a person into a coma, stop their breathing or cause kidney failure.


“Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s harmless,” Spiller said.


The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning to consumers against using kratom and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has listed it as a “drug of concern.”


Kratom has not been approved for any medical use by the FDA.


For this study, researchers analyzed calls to U.S. Poison Control Centers between 2011 and 2017, finding more than 1,800 reports related to kratom use.


The annual number of calls increased dramatically, going from 13 calls in 2011 to 682 calls in 2017, researchers found.


About two of every three of these calls occurred recently, in either 2016 or 2017.


About a third of the calls resulted in a person needing hospitalization and more than half resulted in serious medical outcomes, the researchers said.


“The belief that kratom is harmless because it is classified as an herbal supplement is directly challenged by the findings in this report—and policy efforts need to address this knowledge gap,” said Dr. Harshal Kirane, director of addiction services at Staten Island University Hospital.


Most dangerous kratom exposures occurred among males (71 percent), adults aged 20 and older (89 percent), in a home (86 percent) and involving intentional abuse or misuse (60 percent), findings show.


Although kratom appears confined to adult use for now, children and teenagers could be exposed to the herb if its popularity keeps increasing, said Kirane, who wasn’t involved with the study.


“The dramatic increase in the rate of reported kratom exposures in recent years suggests a growing demand for this substance,” Kirane said. “Increasing prevalence of kratom use may place young children in dangerous situations, particularly if regulatory measures are not in place to ensure childproof packaging and consistency in quality of kratom.”


Idaho and Oregon are the states with the most reported kratom poisonings, while Delaware and Wisconsin had the lowest rates.


Using kratom with another substance significantly raised a person’s chances of poisoning, nearly tripling the odds that they’d land in a hospital and more than doubling the risk of having a serious medical outcome.


Of the nine deaths involving a mixture of kratom with another substance, kratom was the first-ranked substance in seven, researchers said. The deaths involved kratom used alongside antihistamines, alcohol, benzodiazepines (such as Valium or Xanax), caffeine, fentanyl or cocaine.


“Though the drug claims to cure anxiety and depression, there are very few ‘cure-alls’ in the medical world and anything that claims to alter an individual’s mental state should be taken with the utmost seriousness,” said Dr. Teresa Amato. She is chair of emergency medicine at Northwell Health’s Long Island Jewish Forest Hills in New York City.


“We, as doctors, are unable to tell patients how this ‘medication’ might affect them and cannot in good conscience advise the use of this medicine without a thorough FDA investigation,” said Amato, who had no part in the study.


People should be aware that kratom can interact with medications or illicit drugs in harmful ways and could exacerbate existing health problems, Spiller said.


There’s also a concern that because it’s unregulated, people may be getting kratom that either varies in potency or is mixed with other substances, he added.


“I’d be cautious,” Spiller said. “At this point, we’re not sure of everything kratom does.”


Pregnant women in particular should be careful with kratom.


The researchers identified seven babies who had been exposed to kratom in the womb, three of whom required admission to a critical care unit after birth.


Five of the babies experienced withdrawal symptoms from their mothers’ kratom use and four of those had been exposed to kratom alone.


“I would very much caution pregnant women,” Spiller said. “You can have a real impact on your child.”


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.



Up next: Cognitive corrosion?

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Long spells in front of the television may give rise to cognitive declines, according to researchers. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


The old saying, “TV rots your brain,” could have some validity for folks as they age.


In a new study, middle-aged people who watched television for more than 3.5 hours a day experienced a decline in their ability to remember words and language over the next six years, British researchers found.


What’s worse, it appears that the more TV you watch, the more your verbal memory will deteriorate, researchers said.


“Overall, our results suggests that adults over the age of 50 should try and ensure television viewing is balanced with other contrasting activities,” said lead researcher Daisy Fancourt. She’s a senior research fellow at University College London.


For the study, researchers relied on data from a long-term study of aging involving more than 3,600 residents of England.


Participants reported the amount of hours of TV they watched daily. They also had their thinking and reasoning skills regularly tested as part of the study.


People who watched less than 3.5 hours of TV a day didn’t seem to suffer any deterioration in their brain power, Fancourt said.


But more than that amount, people became increasingly apt to struggle with words or language in tests conducted six years later.


The decline in language skills is similar to that experienced by the poor as they age, Fancourt said.


“We already know from a number of studies that being of low socio-economic status is a risk factor for cognitive decline,” Fancourt said. “If we compare the size of association for watching television for greater than 3.5 hours a day, it has a similar-sized association with verbal memory as being in the lowest 20 percent of wealth in the country.”


The worst deficits occurred in those people who watched more than seven hours of television daily, researchers found.


While only an association was seen in the study, there are a couple of potential reasons why this might happen.


“Due to the fast-paced changes in images, sounds and action, yet the passive nature of receiving these—i.e., television does not involve interaction as gaming or using the internet does—watching television has been shown in laboratory studies to lead to a more alert, but less focused, brain,” Fancourt explained.


Some TV viewing is also stressful and stress has been associated with a decline in brain power, she added.


The specific effect on verbal skills indicates that avid TV viewing could be replacing other activities that would be better for the brain, said Rebecca Edelmayer, director of scientific engagement at the U.S.-based Alzheimer’s Association.


“You’re spending more time not engaging with your family, your friends and having social conversations, because they’re specifically reporting a decrease in verbal recall,” Edelmayer said. “We know engagement with others in conversation is something that supports and protects verbal recall.”


People who want to protect their thinking skills need to socialize often and engage in other activities that “stretch” their brain, Edelmayer said.


In fact, a long-term study published just last week in the journal Neurology found that exercising both the brain and body during middle age may guard against dementia. Such mental exercise includes reading, playing music, sewing or painting, according to the report.


“The recommendation would always be to stretch yourself and stay as engaged as you can be, whatever the connection is,” Edelmayer said. “We’re asking you for best brain health to go outside your normal passive box.”


The new study was published recently in the journal Scientific Reports.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.


Do you know your ‘body time’?

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Misaligned body clocks have been tied to a wide range of illnesses, including diabetes, obesity, depression, heart disease and asthma. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


No matter what your watch says, your body may be on a whole other schedule. Now, scientists say they’ve created a blood test that pinpoints the timing of your own internal clock.


The TimeSignature test evaluates dozens of genes to reveal an individual’s “circadian rhythm”—the crests and troughs that occur throughout the day as your body and brain cycle between sleepiness and alertness.


“Everyone’s clock ticks at a different rate. If you want to do personalized medicine, knowing the clock time of the patient is very important,” said sleep expert Dr. Mark Wu, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.


Two blood samples taken about 12 hours apart could provide a solid estimate of your internal clock, said lead researcher Rosemary Braun.


“By looking at a set of 40 different genes that are expressed in blood, we can pinpoint a person’s internal clock to within an hour and a half,” said Braun. She’s an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago.


Easy and accurate assessment of a patient’s body clock could potentially help doctors treat more than just sleep disorders, experts said.


For example, cholesterol-lowering statin drugs work better when a person is winding down, because the enzyme they block is more active in the evening, said Wu, who wasn’t involved in the current study.


There’s also some evidence that chemotherapy works better when administered at specific times of day when cancer cells are actively dividing, added Wu, an associate professor of neurology.


Your internal biological clock orchestrates processes in nearly every organ system throughout the body. Anyone who has worked a night shift or flown overseas can tell you the entire body is thrown off kilter when your internal body clock doesn’t match the timing of the external world.


Until now it’s been extremely cumbersome to precisely determine an individual’s circadian rhythm, said Dr. Steven Feinsilver, director of sleep medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He played no role in the new research.


Doctors can take urine or saliva samples from a patient every hour for a day or two and measure levels of melatonin or cortisol, hormones closely related to the sleep/wake cycle, Feinsilver and Wu said.


The other option is to use a rectal probe to monitor core body temperature for a day or so, the experts said.


“The current approach clinically is impractical and costly,” Braun said. “It requires multiple samples across the day and night. That makes it really burdensome to the patient and expensive to do.”


Northwestern University researchers evaluated about 20,000 genes to determine which ones are most closely linked to the rhythms of the body, Braun said.


They pared their test down to 40 genes that told internal time most accurately. Then they developed a computer process that reads those genes to establish an individual’s circadian rhythm.


“Some of them are known clock genes. Others are genes that are not directly related to the clock, but we know they’re under circadian control,” Braun said. “Between 30 and 40 percent of genes fluctuate over the course of the day, in keeping with that clock. That’s the signal we’re picking up.”


Blood samples for the test can be taken any time of day. And the test is accurate whether or not you’ve had a good or poor night’s sleep, researchers said.


Northwestern has filed for a patent on the blood test. The test will need more validation before it’s put on the market for clinical use, but it’s now available for free to other researchers for use in scientific studies, Braun said.


Misaligned body clocks have been tied to a wide range of illnesses, including diabetes, obesity, depression, heart disease and asthma, researchers said.


“We might be able to predict ahead of time who is at risk of getting sick before they develop symptoms,” Braun said.


This test also could have applications outside medicine. For example, employers could use it to design the best shift schedule for their workers by sorting out early birds and night owls, Feinsilver said.


The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.

Growing menace: Asian longhorned tick

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Specific regions of the U.S. are more prone to infestations of a new invasive species: the Asian longhorned tick. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


An Asian tick newly introduced into the United States has the potential to infest a wide swath of the country, researchers say.


It could carry with it numerous diseases that threaten humans.


The Asian longhorned tick “could spread all the way from the Gulf Coast to southern Canada,” said study author Ilia Rochlin, an entomologist with the Rutgers University Center for Vector Biology in New Brunswick, N.J.


This highly adaptable pest originated in regions of China that share a similar climate to much of the United States, Rochlin said.


Huge swaths of land along the Eastern seaboard, the Midwest and the South would provide highly suitable habitat for the bloodsucking parasite, Rochlin’s computer models predict.


The tick has already been found in nine states—eight on the East Coast, and Arkansas.


“The first real detection occurred in New Jersey in 2017,” Rochlin said.


This tick is not yet known to have infected any humans in North America, but it is linked to severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome, an emerging tick-borne virus in China, South Korea and Japan.


Thrombocytopenia syndrome is fatal for 10 percent to 30 percent of people infected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


Thrombocytopenia syndrome is very similar to the tick-borne Heartland virus, which already is transmitted in the United States, Rochlin added. It’s possible the Asian longhorned tick could serve as a vector for Heartland virus as well.


The populations of this tick can grow rapidly once it finds a suitable habitat, said Thomas Mather, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease.


Mather recounted a recent trip to a park in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs in New York City, during which he dragged a length of tick-grabbing cloth called a “flag” along the parking lot to see how badly infested that area had become.


“Within seconds our flag was covered in larvae,” Mather said. “We were surprised at how abundant they were.”


For this new report, Rochlin studied climate data from places where the Asian longhorned tick is already established, including East Asia, Australia and New Zealand.


He then used climate data from North America to estimate likely suitable habitats for the tick. They include:

  • Coastal areas from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in Canada to Virginia and North Carolina on the East Coast.
  • A large inland stretch of land from northern Louisiana up to Wisconsin and into southern Ontario and Quebec.
  • A westward extension that includes Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri.
  • Coastal areas from southern British Columbia to northern California on the West Coast.

Warmer temperatures to the south, cold winters to the north and dry terrain in the west make the rest of the United States less suitable, Rochlin said.


The Asian longhorned tick reproduces asexually, allowing its populations to grow rapidly and rendering moot any insect control efforts that would target its mating cycle, Rochlin said.


Mather said the ticks employ an “ambush” strategy to help find fresh sources of blood. Its larval ticks, thirsty for blood, hang out in tight clumps on the tips of tall grasses.


“They’re all clumped there, ready to get onto something,” Mather said.


“Not just one or two get onto something—they all get onto something,” he continued. “If there were 75 or 80 larvae on the tip of a blade of grass and our flag went over the blade of grass, there would be 65 of them on my flag.”


Severe infestations can threaten livestock, weakening them by depleting their blood supply.


Mather is concerned that pets will make the Asian longhorned tick’s spread more likely.


One of the ticks was found recently on a dog in Colorado that had traveled there from a New Jersey “hot zone,” Mather said.


“What if it had gone to Seattle instead, which has a more permissive climate according to this model?” Mather said. “The number of emotional support animals flying on domestic airline carriers in the United States has more than doubled in the last year or two. Not just people are moving around, but pets are, and most of the reports of longhorned ticks so far have come from pets.


“The group sitting on the front line are pet owners and veterinarians,” Mather continued. “They need to be aware of the potential of them picking up and moving these ticks throughout the country.”


Rochlin’s study was published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.


Brush teeth, save brain?

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Researchers may one day add brain health to the list of reasons you should floss and brush regularly. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay


Regular brushing and flossing can save your teeth into old age.


Could it also save your brain?


The bacteria involved in gum disease might play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, new research suggests.


DNA from the bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis is more often found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, said lead researcher Jan Potempa, a professor at the University of Louisville School of Dentistry in Kentucky.


P. gingivalis is one of the causes of periodontitis, the most serious type of gum disease.


“The DNA can be found in the Alzheimer’s brain, but less frequently at a lower level in the brain of people who died at the same age from causes other than Alzheimer’s,” Potempa said.


Alzheimer’s-affected brains also contain higher levels of a toxin secreted by P. gingivalis called gingipain, he said.


Potempa and his colleagues think the bacteria and its toxins might be connected with Alzheimer’s disease, a suspicion supported by their research involving laboratory mice.


Researchers infected the mouths of mice with P. gingivalis and found that the bacteria did spread into the brain. The infection appeared to increase production of amyloid beta, a protein linked to Alzheimer’s, and also caused inflammation in the brain.


The researchers also found that a drug targeting gingipain blocked movement of the bacteria into the brains of the mice.


The experimental drug, known as COR388, reduced the amount of P. gingivalis in mouse brains, with an accompanying decrease in amyloid beta production and brain inflammation, researchers reported.


A phase 1 clinical trial is underway to see if COR388 can prevent Alzheimer’s, researchers said. The company Cortexyme Inc., based in San Francisco, developed the drug and is supporting the research.


There are several routes by which P. gingivalis could get into the brain, Potempa said. It could be carried through the bloodstream, by cell-to-cell infection, or through the nervous system.


“There a lot of nerves going into our mouth which have direct connection to the brain,” he added. “If the bacteria gets into these nerves, it can translocate directly into the brain.”


If this theory of Alzheimer’s disease proves true, then it could be that the amyloid plaques that are thought to disrupt brain function might actually be the brain defending itself against infection, Potempa said.


“Beta amyloid has an antibacterial function,” he said. “It’s not just there to form the plaques. It can kill the bacteria. These beta amyloid plaques may be essential for defending the brain against bacteria.”


About 46% of adults 30 and older have gum disease, with about 9% having very severe disease, Potempa said.


You can avoid gum disease by brushing your teeth twice a day, flossing regularly to remove plaque between teeth and visiting the dentist for regular checkups and cleanings, according to the U.S. National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.


This study is part of a growing field of research looking into whether viral or bacterial infections might be associated with Alzheimer’s, said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs and outreach at the Alzheimer’s Association.


Another well-respected research team is investigating possible links between herpes virus and Alzheimer’s, he said.


“It’s actually receiving a lot of attention over the past couple of years. If you’d have asked me three years ago, I would have said it’s a fairly fringe idea,” Fargo said.


But a direct cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be established between any infectious agent and Alzheimer’s, Fargo said.


He said it’s possible that bacteria like P. gingivalis are found at higher levels in Alzheimer’s brains because those brains are weakened and less able to defend against infection.


“As the brain gets sick with Alzheimer’s disease or with something else, it becomes less able to fight off these things,” Fargo said.


Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Research Center, agreed that the link between bacterial infection and Alzheimer’s is still “quite speculative.”


“I certainly wouldn’t worry a group of readers that this is the cause of Alzheimer’s, or if you’ve got gum disease you’re more likely to develop dementia later in life,” he said.


Petersen said the mouse evidence is interesting, but still a step removed from Alzheimer’s in humans. Research on animals does not always produce the same results in humans.


“That would argue this is plausible but again, it’s genetically engineered mice and it’s kind of far from human reality at this point,” he said.


Potempa presented his research recently at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists, in Orlando, Fla. Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.


Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.

Many talks on end-of-life wishes end in confusion

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By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay

 

You’ve filled out a living will, and designated a surrogate to make medical decisions if you’re incapacitated.

 

But, your end-of-life planning may not be done yet.

 

That’s because, according to a new study, your surrogate may still not have a clear idea about what you really want done in a crisis situation—even after you’ve discussed your wishes with them.

 

In the study, seven out of every 10 surrogates didn’t have an accurate understanding of their loved one’s wishes regarding potentially life-altering medical treatment, even though both believed they had adequately discussed the topic.

 

“There were a lot of surrogates in those pairs where they both said, ‘yes, we’ve had this communication,’ who didn’t have a good understanding of the patient’s goals of care,” said lead researcher Dr. Terri Fried. She is a professor of geriatrics with the Yale School of Medicine.

 

The surrogates couldn’t accurately say whether their loved one would want treatment even if afterward they would have to live in extreme chronic pain or with severe mental or physical impairments, Fried said.

 

“Those are the kinds of things that make people say, ‘Oh, maybe I don’t want to get life-sustaining treatment if that’s the way it’s going to leave me,’” she explained.

 

These results show health-care professionals need to take a more active role in helping patients make end-of-life preparations, and that includes facilitating in-depth conversations between them and their chosen surrogates about their preferences, Fried said.

 

“It’s becoming more a part of the responsibility of primary care to make sure this happens as part of health maintenance, the same as flu shots or cancer screening,” Fried said. “We need to do a more thorough assessment of what patients have done and haven’t done, so we know what they still need to do.”

 

For their study, Fried and her colleagues interviewed 350 veterans, all aged 55 or older. The researchers also separately interviewed their end-of-life surrogates.

 

Just over half of the surrogates were spouses. Another 27 percent were children. The rest had other relationships with the veterans, according to the study.

 

About two of every five veterans hadn’t bothered to complete a living will or officially designate someone as their surrogate (health care proxy), or talked about the quality of life they’d like to maintain near the end, the findings showed.

 

And often, surrogates remained in the dark about the loved one’s wishes even if both agreed that they had discussed the matter.

 

Only 30 percent of surrogates who thought they’d talked it over could display an accurate knowledge of their loved one’s desires regarding quality versus quantity of life, the researchers found.

 

That’s better than the performance of surrogates who hadn’t had the conversation (21 percent) or pairs that disagreed whether they’d discussed the matter (15 percent), Fried noted.

 

But that still leaves a majority of people in a position of thinking that their surrogate knows their wishes when the person really doesn’t, the study authors pointed out.

 

“Part of it is that patients and surrogates don’t really know what the things are that they ought to be talking about,” Fried said.

 

In joint interviews conducted after the main study, many of the pairs said that “after you asked us those questions, we realized these are the things we need to sit down and talk about,” she added.

 

Dr. Timothy Farrell is an associate professor of geriatrics with the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. He said that “a visit with a physician is often the first time that such a discrepancy may become apparent.”

 

Doctors who treat the elderly should consider end-of-life conversations as “anticipatory guidance,” similar to the guidance provided parents during well-child visits, Farrell said.

 

Either a doctor, a physician assistant, a social worker or some other health-care professional can help lead a facilitated discussion that ensures someone’s wishes have all been communicated to the surrogate, he suggested.

 

“Being proactive is the key, (as is) regularly coming back to this topic before the crisis occurs,” Farrell concluded.

 

The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

 

Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.

Think genes dictate your life span? Think again

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Courtesy Spectrum HealthBeat

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay

 

Your life partner has a much greater influence on your longevity than the genes you inherited from your family, according to a new analysis of the family trees of more than 400 million people.

 

“While it is a widely held belief that lifes pan heritability ranges from approximately 15 to 30 percent, the findings discussed in this paper demonstrated that the heritability of human longevity is likely well below 10 percent,” said lead researcher Cathy Ball. She is a chief scientific officer for Ancestry, the popular genealogy website.

 

Earlier estimates were skewed because they didn’t account for the strong influence that a person’s spouse or life partner can have on their longevity, Ball and her colleagues said.

 

People tend to select partners who share traits like their own, the researchers explained. If you have a lifestyle that’s going to contribute to a longer life, you’ll likely choose a mate who shares that lifestyle.

 

Dr. Gisele Wolf-Klein is a geriatrician with Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y. She said, “Chances are you’re going to try to partner with someone with equal interests in terms of health habits. If you find someone who wants to run a marathon with you rather than be a couch potato, chances are you’ll keep running more marathons.”

 

Wealth could be another nongenetic trait shared by mates, the researchers suggested. If income contributes to lifespan and wealthy people tend to marry other wealthy people, that could also add to their longevity.

 

After correcting for the effects of such mating, Ball’s team concluded that genetics contributes not more than 7 percent to longevity, and possibly even less.

 

“The research findings expose the complex dynamics of longevity,” Ball said. “Although there is a genetic component, this study shows that there is a major impact from many other forces in your life.”

 

For the study, researchers combed through 54 million public family trees generated by Ancestry.com subscribers, which represented 6 billion ancestors.

 

From there, the team refined the records until they wound up with a set of human pedigrees that included more than 400 million people, each connected to another by either birth or marriage.

 

Things got interesting when the researchers started looking at people related only by marriage. They found that siblings-in-law and first-cousins-in-law had similar life spans, even though they aren’t blood relatives and generally don’t live under the same roof.

 

Further analysis showed that factors important to life span tend to be very similar between mates. People are choosing folks who share values that will either shorten or extend longevity, the researchers noted.

 

The findings were published Nov. 6 in the journal Genetics.

 

“I think it’s a very optimistic and positive message for us,” said Wolf-Klein, who was not involved in the research.

 

“It outlines something that’s becoming more and more obvious to all of us—we have a certain control over who we are and what we become,” she added. “Regardless of your genetics, if you adhere to good diet, good exercise, healthy habits, you can overcome some of the dooms of genetics.”

 

Reprinted with permission from Spectrum HealthBeat.

Lamenting the noisy neighbor

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Living by airports, highways and other noisy environments could lead to adverse heart health, according to new research. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay 

 

Living in noise-saturated neighborhoods might be more than simply annoying, with new research suggesting it seems to raise the risk for serious heart problems.

 

Chronic noise from traffic and airports appears to trigger the amygdala, a brain region critically involved in stress regulation, brain scans have revealed.

 

Noise is also associated with increased inflammation of the arteries, which is a risk factor for stroke, heart attack and heart disease, said lead researcher Dr. Azar Radfar. She is a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

 

“We are not the first group talking about noise and cardiovascular disease,” Radfar said. “What we really show here is the mechanism linking noise to major adverse cardiovascular events.”

 

For the study, Radfar and her colleagues analyzed imaging scans of 499 healthy people, looking specifically at their brains and blood vessels.

 

The investigators then used the participants’ home addresses to obtain noise level estimates of their neighborhoods, based on aviation and highway noise data kept by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

 

People in the noisiest neighborhoods had higher levels of activity in their amygdala and more inflammation in their arteries, the researchers found.

 

The research team then followed the study participants for an average 3.7 years, to see if these symptoms of stress would lead to heart problems.

 

The findings showed that people exposed to chronic noise had a greater than threefold risk of suffering a heart attack, stroke or other major cardiovascular event, compared with people who had lower levels of noise exposure.

 

That risk remained elevated even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors, such as air pollution, high cholesterol, smoking and diabetes.

 

But the study could not prove that noise caused heart risks to rise.

 

Still, the amygdala appears to increase heart risk by triggering the release of hormones that fuel blood vessel inflammation, the researchers concluded.

 

Dr. Nieca Goldberg is director of the NYU Langone Tisch Center for Women’s Health in New York City. She said, based on this research, noise is “a link in the chain of cardiovascular risk, and I think it is an interesting question for doctors to ask their patients when assessing their cardiac risk.”

 

Radfar even suggested that people affected by transportation noise might consider soundproofing their homes.

 

On a community level, highway and urban planners can protect the populace by making road-noise barriers a part of road construction, Radfar suggested.

 

And, Goldberg added, if you’re in a noisy neighborhood, you might also want to consider other ways to reduce your stress. These might include yoga, meditation or aerobic exercise.

 

The findings are to be presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. Such research is considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

 

Does human life span really have a limit?

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There are few people who make it to extreme old ages—the influence of good genes and healthy life choices are key. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay

 

The limits of human existence might not be as limited as we have long thought.

 

A person’s risk of death slows and even plateaus above age 105, a new study reports, challenging previous research saying there’s a cutoff point past which the human life span cannot extend.

 

Longevity pioneers lucky enough to make it past the perilous 70s, 80s and 90s could potentially live well into their 110s, if fortune remains on their side, said senior author Kenneth Wachter, a professor of demography and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

“Our data tell us that there is no fixed limit to the human life span yet in sight,” Wachter said. “Very few of us are going to reach those kinds of ages, but the fact that mortality rates are not getting worse forever and ever tells us there may well be more progress to be made improving survival past the ages of 80 to 90. This is a valuable, encouraging discovery.”

 

Specifically, the study showed that people at age 110 had the same continued chances of survival as those between the ages of 105 and 109—a 50/50 chance of dying within the year and an expected further life span of 1.5 years.

 

This plateau runs counter to the way death risk relentlessly rises as we age from age 40 onward, Wachter said.

 

“If mortality rates kept rising at the rates they rise from age 40 to age 90, then there would be a strong barrier to progress at extreme ages — great diminishing returns to behavioral change or to new medical advances,” Wachter said. “The fact these rates ultimately level out gives hope there’s more leeway for those advances.”

 

The oldest known human on record is Jeanne Calment of France, who died in 1997 at age 122.

Different findings

There’s been ongoing debate about whether there’s a maximum human life span.

 

Last year, researchers at McGill University in Montreal issued a report challenging earlier assertions that human life span peaks at about 115 years.

 

“The statistics aren’t good enough to be able to say you can’t live much longer than that, based on the data we have,” said report author Siegfried Hekimi, chairman of developmental biology at McGill. “It’s simply not good enough to make that claim.”

 

To investigate this further, Wachter and his colleagues tracked the death trajectories of nearly 4,000 residents of Italy who reached age 105 between 2009 and 2015.

 

The investigators found that the odds of survival inexorably decline as a person enters middle and old age.

 

For example, Italian women who reached age 90 had a 15 percent of chance of dying within the year and an expected further life span of six years on average, results showed.

 

But if they made it to 95, their odds of dying within a year increased to 24 percent and their life expectancy dropped to 3.7 years.

 

One might think these odds would continue to increase indefinitely, as people age toward an undefined vanishing point.

 

That’s not what happened, though. The chances of survival instead plateaued once people made it past 105.

 

“The risk of death is very high at 105 years, but next year it’s not higher,” Hekimi said of the new study. “Every year you have the same chance of dying, and every year you can be the one who wins the coin toss.”

 

This plateau likely occurs due to evolutionary selection and the influence of good genes and healthy life choices, Wachter said.

 

“When you look at a group of older people who are all the same age, some are already quite frail and some are robust. There’s a big difference in the level of frailty,” Wachter said.

 

“People who go to college 50th reunions, you just look around you and some people are climbing mountains while some people are walking with canes. Now go 15 to 20 years later, the people who were already frail are the ones who are likely to have died,” he said.

Not enough study participants

So far, looking at the genetics of long-lived people has provided maddeningly few clues for extending overall human life span, Hekimi said.

 

There are just too few people who make it to these extreme old ages, and the genes that seem to be working in their favor vary from place to place, Hekimi said. For example, genes that seem to be supporting extended life span on Okinawa are not the same ones found in England.

 

But this study shows there’s a good chance of extending the survival plateau earlier into the average human life span, making it increasingly likely that more people will survive into their 100s, Wachter said.

 

“It gives us a good piece of hope, because there is now lots of opportunity to look at these bad variants as they are in populations today and to try to understand the interaction of those genetic variants with potential medicines and different health challenges,” Wachter said.

 

“This basic theory could help us inform medical progress and public health progress 10 to 15 years from now as genetic research continues,” he said.

 

Hekimi agreed.

 

“Given that our life span keeps increasing, maybe the plateauing is going to start earlier and earlier,” he said.

 

The new study is published in the June 29 issue of the journal Science.

 

Live your best life for longevity. Browse Spectrum Health’s classes and events to find nutrition and exercise programs that fit your schedule.

 

Reprinted with permission from Spectrum Health Beat.