Flesh-eating bacteria can be contracted when open wounds are exposed to brackish ocean water. Contaminated seafood can also result in infection. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
It’s a horrible fate: You take a cool dip in the ocean and become infected with flesh-eating bacteria.
Climate change is making this terrifying scenario more common in the northern part of the United States, one infectious disease expert says.
These infections are caused by Vibrio vulnificus bacteria. There are about 80,000 such infections each year in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most infections resolve within a few days, but there are about 500 hospitalizations and 100 deaths each year due to such infections.
There are a number of ways to protect yourself, according to David Cennimo, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
Vibrio bacteria can get into the body through open wounds. If you have any, it’s best to stay out of the water, especially brackish water. Cover the wound with a waterproof bandage if it’s likely to come into contact with water or raw seafood or raw seafood juices, Cennimo advised.
Cook all seafood thoroughly and wash your hands after handling raw shellfish, he added.
Most infections caused by Vibrio bacteria are gastrointestinal and cause food poisoning-like symptoms, such as diarrhea, vomiting, cramping, abdominal pain and sometimes fever. Symptoms usually start one day after ingestion and last for three days.
Skin infections caused by the bacteria may be inflamed and red, with blisters. The site may also turn deep blue like a severe bruise. A fever may develop and confusion can occur in severe cases. Immediate emergency medical care is required because the infection can progress rapidly to death, Cennimo said.
For most people, the skin infection can be treated with antibiotics. However, necrotizing (flesh-eating) infections can be very serious and move very fast.
People especially at risk of severe and aggressive infection include those with a weakened immune system due to conditions such as liver disease, cancer, diabetes or HIV, and those who are on immune-suppressing therapy or are recovering from stomach surgery.
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)
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.”
Nearly 13 million Americans will have dementia by 2040—nearly twice as many as today, a new report says.
The number of women with dementia is expected to rise from 4.7 million next year to 8.5 million in 2040.
The number of men with dementia is projected to increase from 2.6 million to 4.5 million.
Over the next 20 years, the economic impact of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia will be more than $2 trillion.
Women will shoulder more than 80% of those costs, according to a report released recently at the 2019 Milken Institute Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C.
“Longer life spans are perhaps one of the greatest success stories of our modern public health system,” said lead author Nora Super, senior director of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging.
“But along with this success comes one of our greatest challenges,” she added in an institute news release. “Our risk of developing dementia doubles every five years after we turn 65; by age 85, nearly one in three of us will have the disease.”
With no cure on the horizon, reducing the risk of dementia and its cost must be the focus, Super noted.
“Emerging evidence shows that despite family history and personal genetics, lifestyle changes such as diet, exercise and better sleep can improve health at all ages,” she said.
The report recommends expanded research, programs to maintain and improve brain health, increased access to testing and early diagnosis and services and policies that promote supportive communities and workplaces for people with dementia and their caregivers.
“As this important new report shows, dementia is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” said Sarah Lenz Lock, the AARP’s senior vice president for policy and brain health.
“It also demonstrates that we have the power to create change, whether by helping consumers maintain and improve their brain health, advancing research on the causes and treatment of dementia, or supporting caregivers who bear so much of the burden of this disease,” Lock said in the news release.
Golfers with knee osteoarthritis do not need to be concerned about worsening their disease by walking the course. In fact, walking provides the best health benefit. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
Golfers with knee arthritis should park the golf cart and walk the links instead, researchers say.
While using a golf cart may seem the obvious choice for golfers with knee problems, a new small study finds that walking provides much greater health benefits. Moreover, it’s not associated with increased pain, inflammation or cartilage breakdown, the researchers said.
“Individuals with knee osteoarthritis are often concerned about pain and may be more likely to use a golf cart,” said lead study author Dr. Prakash Jayabalan. He’s an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
However, “this study has shown that golfers with knee osteoarthritis do not need to be concerned about worsening their disease through walking the course. In fact, walking provides the best health benefit,” Jayabalan said in a university news release.
More than 17 million Americans older than 50 golf regularly. Knee osteoarthritis is a leading cause of disability in this age group. The condition causes swelling, pain and difficulty moving the joint.
The study included 10 older golfers with knee osteoarthritis and five without the disease, which is usually caused by wear and tear of the joint.
On one day, the study participants played one round of golf (18 holes) walking the course. On another day, they used a golf cart to play 18 holes. On each occasion, the researchers monitored the participants’ heart rates to determine their level of exercise intensity, and took blood samples to measure markers of knee inflammation and cartilage stress.
On both occasions, the golfers had an increase in these markers, but there was no difference between use of the golf cart and walking, the findings showed.
When walking the course, the heart rates of the golfers with knee problems were in the moderate-intensity zone for more than 60 percent of the time, compared with 30 percent when using a cart.
But even using the cart, golfers met daily exercise recommendations, according to the study authors.
“Bottom line: walking the course is significantly better than using a golf cart, but using a golf cart is still better than not exercising at all,” Jayabalan concluded.
The study was presented recently at the Osteoarthritis Research Society International annual meeting in Liverpool, England. Research presented at meetings is usually considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Cases of deadly melanomas on the head and neck rose more than 51% over two decades among young people in the United States and Canada, a new study reports.
Researchers found that the incidence of head and neck melanoma rose nearly 4% a year from 1995 to 2001 and 1.2% a year from 2001 to 2014 in children and young adults.
Using data from a North American cancer registry, the investigators looked at patients from infancy to age 39 who were diagnosed with head and neck melanoma between 1995 and 2014.
During that time, nearly 12,500 people were diagnosed with the cancer.
Of those, 55% were boys and men, and 91% lived in the United States, the study found.
“This is an important finding because melanoma in other parts of the body are usually more common in females than males,” said study co-author Nosayaba Osazuwa-Peters. He is an assistant professor in the department of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at St. Louis University School of Medicine.
“It is therefore important that melanoma prevention campaigns do not only focus on young women,” he explained.
The researchers zeroed in on melanoma of the head and neck because, although it accounts for only one in five melanoma cases, its survival rates are worse than for other melanomas.
“In fact, the five-year survival rate of head and neck melanoma is worse than the 10-year survival rates of other regions of the body,” Osazuwa-Peters explained in a university news release.
Also, while melanoma patients are diagnosed at an average age of 63, this type of cancer from sun exposure and indoor tanning is most common among teens and young adults.
Osazuwa-Peters said that the public can help spot melanoma early.
“For example, barbers and stylists might be the first to spot irregular skin on the scalp before the doctors do. It is therefore important to increase awareness about this cancer,” he said.
The report was published online recently in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery.
Excessive foot pronation increases the stress at the knee and hip joints, which can create problems in the foot, ankle, knee, hip and lower back. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
When packing for your summer vacation, be sure to include the right footwear, a podiatrist advises.
“The type of vacation you go on will determine the type of shoe you need,” Dr. Ronald Lepow, an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine’s department of orthopedic surgery, in Houston, said in a school news release.
If you’ll be doing a lot of walking, wear shoes with good support and consider where you’ll be going. For example, if you’ll be strolling on uneven cobblestones, the flexibility of your shoes will be more important than if you’re visiting a location with smooth, level walkways.
If you’re going to the beach, bring flip-flops or clogs, Lepow said. Don’t walk barefoot on hot sand because doing so can cause blisters. Be sure to put sunscreen on your feet, he added.
Athletic shoes can be a good choice for evening walks along the beach, and water shoes can help prevent injuries from stepping on objects or uneven surfaces under the water.
If available, use foot showers to wash off any potential contaminants from your feet, Lepow advised.
At pools, wear shoes or flip-flops when not swimming to protect yourself from athlete’s foot, nail fungus and warts, he said.
And if you’re going hiking, you should wear hiking boots. They are well-insulated and provide good heel, arch and ankle support.
Finally, if you buy new shoes, be sure to break them in a couple of weeks before your trip. Walk around the house in them, bend them and use shoe inserts to stretch them, Lepow suggested.
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)
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.
If you come across a suspected triatomine, the CDC recommends placing it in a container with alcohol and taking it to your local health department. It can be tested for Chagas disease. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
It sounds like something out of a horror film: A blood-hungry insect feeds on its prey’s faces while they sleep, leaving behind a parasite that can cause stroke and heart disease.
But the triatomine, or so-called “kissing bug,” is all too real and found regularly in Latin America, but also has been found in several areas of the United States, as far north as Illinois and Delaware.
And while it often targets faces, the insect will settle for any patch of exposed skin.
With summer barbecue season on the horizon, how worried should people be?
It’s important to keep things in perspective, said Dr. Caryn Bern, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California School of Medicine.
After an acute flu-like period that lasts from weeks to months, most people who test positive for Chagas disease show no symptoms.
“The estimate is that 20 percent to 30 percent of people with Chagas disease will eventually develop heart or gastrointestinal disease, although heart disease is much more common,” Bern said. “That’s over a lifetime and it usually doesn’t show up until years after the infection occurred.”
It’s not the bug that causes Chagas disease, but rather a parasite that lives in its poop.
When a person inadvertently rubs the bug’s feces into the bug wound, their eye or another mucous membrane, the parasite sometimes makes itself at home.
Chagas disease also can be transmitted from mother to fetus, from contaminated blood transfusions, via an infected organ donor or, in rare cases, through food or drink.
While about 300,000 people in the United States have Chagas disease, most of them contracted it while living in Mexico, Central America and South America, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates up to 6 million to 8 million have been infected.
All told, the disease causes more than 10,000 deaths a year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
But it’s important to keep in mind that since 1955, there have been fewer than 50 documented cases of people who have acquired the parasite from exposure to the triatomine in the U.S., said Dr. Susan Montgomery, who leads an epidemiology team in the Parasitic Diseases Branch of CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria.
“The parasite has to get into a human’s body or an animal’s body by contaminating the wound,” Montgomery said. “It’s pretty complicated.”
But there is cause for concern, said Paula Stigler Granados, an assistant professor at Texas State University who leads the Texas Chagas Taskforce.
Stigler Granados and her team work to raise awareness about Chagas in a state where more than 60 percent of triatomines test positive for the parasite that causes the disease.
“The more we look, the more we find,” Stigler Granados said, noting that since the American Red Cross started screening new blood donors for Chagas disease, they have identified many people infected with the disease. “Although the blood donation tests are extremely sensitive and sometimes have false positives, that’s an indicator that it could be a bigger problem we should be monitoring.”
There is a treatment for people who have Chagas disease.
In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration approved benznidazole, a 60-day medication regimen for people ages 2 to 12.
Once Chagas disease becomes chronic, the medication may not cure it but could slow the progression in younger people.
For older people who are affected, experts recommend doctors and patients weigh the individual benefits with the possible side effects of the medication, which can include rash, abdominal discomfort and numbness or tingling in the hands and feet.
The best bet is to avoid infection altogether.
The CDC advises people to use window screens, seal any gaps in the home, allow pets to sleep indoors and eliminate things near the house that attract insects, including lights and wood, brush and rock piles.
If you do come across a triatomine, don’t kill it, the CDC recommends.
Instead, capture it with a container and either fill it with rubbing alcohol or freeze it.
Then take it to your local health department or university laboratory for identification. Testing can help to determine if it is a triatomine, and if so, whether it carries the parasite.
In the meantime, experts agree on one thing: People should stay calm.
“The important thing to remember is that these bugs are more interested in staying out in the woods and feeding on animals than they are in feeding on you,” Montgomery said. “It’s important to prevent Chagas disease if you can, but it’s very hard to get this infection and it’s not happening often.”
The conclusion of a recent study suggests possible new ways to prevent or slow the memory-destroying disease, Alzheimer’s, researchers said.
For the study, the researchers analyzed brain samples from patients at memory clinics and found that the presence of healthy dendritic spines (connections between neurons) provide protection against Alzheimer’s in people whose brains have proteins associated with the disease.
The findings, published in the Annals of Neurology, are the first of their kind, the study authors said.
“One of the precursors of Alzheimer’s is the development in the brain of proteins called amyloid and tau, which we refer to as the pathology of Alzheimer’s,” said the study’s lead author, Jeremy Herskowitz.
He’s an assistant professor with the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine’s department of neurology.
“However, about 30 percent of the aging population have amyloid and tau buildup but never develop dementia. Our study showed that these individuals had larger, more numerous dendritic spines than those with dementia, indicating that spine health plays a major role in the onset of disease,” Herskowitz said in a university news release.
Neurons, which are brain cells, are constantly sending out dendritic spines in search of other neurons. When they connect, a synapse—an exchange of information—occurs between neurons. This is the basis for memory and learning, the researchers explained.
“One obvious culprit in Alzheimer’s disease is the loss of dendritic spines and thus the loss of synapses,” Herskowitz said.
“This would impair the ability to think, so the assumption has been that those without dementia had healthy (dendritic) spines and those with dementia did not. But no one had gone in to see if that was true,” he noted.
Healthy dendritic spines could be genetic, or the result of beneficial lifestyle habits—such as good diet and exercise—which are known to reduce the risk of dementia, Herskowitz said.
The findings provide “a target for drugs that would be designed to support and maintain dendritic spine health in an effort to rebuild neurons or prevent their loss,” he added.
“This data suggests that rebuilding neurons is possible. And as we are better able to identify the increase of amyloid and tau early in the progression of the disease, even before symptoms arise, we might be able to one day offer a medication that can contribute to maintaining healthy dendritic spines in those with the Alzheimer’s pathology,” he concluded.
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.
A bonfire adds a warm, welcoming glow to any graduation party. Just make sure the atmosphere is calm, not raucous and reckless. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
Bonfires are a popular way to celebrate big events among teens, but they’re at risk for serious burn injuries, an expert warns.
“The only guaranteed way to prevent bonfire burn injuries is to not have a fire in the first place,” said burn surgeon Dr. Arthur Sanford, of Loyola Medicine in Maywood, Ill. “But if you do decide to have a fire for a prom, graduation or other occasion, there are simple ways to minimize the risk of burns.”
Check the weather and cancel the bonfire if high winds are forecast, he recommended in a Loyola news release. Clear all brush from the area and make a fire pit. Keep a bucket of water and garden hose close by.
Newspaper and small kindling provide the safest way to start a fire. If you decide to use charcoal lighter fluid, seal the container after use and keep it well away from the fire. Do not put lighter fluid on a fire after it’s started, Sanford said.
And, he added, never use accelerants such as gasoline, diesel fuel or kerosene, and never spray aerosols or throw canisters or fireworks into the fire.
Keep the bonfire at a manageable size, no more than about four feet square, Sanford advised.
Everyone should stay a safe distance away and never horse around near a fire, he said. No one should drink alcohol.
Always put the fire out completely before you leave. Stir the ashes and douse them thoroughly with water. Sanford said Loyola’s burn center has treated numerous patients who suffered burns after accidentally walking on hot ashes.
Those with dairy in their diet have a lower risk of diabetes—possibly because they’re eating less refined, low-fiber carbohydrates, according to one study. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
Dairy foods have been getting a lot of attention from researchers in recent years, notably from studies done both jointly and separately by scientists at Harvard and Tufts universities.
They looked at the relationship between full-fat dairy and the risks for heart disease and diabetes.
A 3,000-participant study found that people who included dairy fat in their diet had a lower risk of diabetes. One theory for the link is that people who skip or limit dairy might compensate by eating more refined, low-fiber carbohydrates, which can increase diabetes risk.
A study that followed more than 200,000 people over several decades looked at the relationship between dairy fat intake and heart disease.
It found no increase in heart disease risk among people who ate dairy fat, although the risk was lowered when calories from dairy fat were replaced with calories from plant-based fats or whole grains—24% when they were replaced by polyunsaturated fats and 28% when replaced with whole grains.
On the other hand, the risk went up by 6% if those calories went instead to foods with other types of saturated fat, like red meat.
A third piece of research reviewed nine studies that looked specifically at butter—another source of saturated fat—and its role in heart disease, diabetes and all causes of death.
The analysis found that while plant-based fats are healthier, small amounts of butter aren’t likely to hurt you.
What might you do with all this information? The familiar bottom line is moderation.
While it’s still healthier to cook with olive oil, for instance, you can indulge in a pat of butter on your hot whole-grain cereal or an ounce of cheese on whole-grain bread or, perhaps best of all, a serving of full-fat yogurt and a cup of berries.
In your later years, it matters less what type of movement you choose—it’s all about the fact that you’re up and moving. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
As people age, physical activity still needs to be part of the game plan for living a healthy, happy life—and experts say it’s never too late to get active and build strength.
“We try to tell people the body can still adapt and it can still improve,” said Barbara Nicklas, a professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
Those who engage in more occupational or leisure time physical activity have a lower risk of disease and death—and the health benefits of movement can extend to all ages, Nicklas explained in an editorial in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Nicklas cautions against placing all “older adults” who are age 60 and up into one category. Rather than basing exercise and activity goals on age, they should be geared to one’s “physical functional status.”
“What can the person do?” she said. “Not everybody is the same.”
Whether you’re 65 or 85, or a runner, a tennis player or perhaps someone who has difficulty getting around, one constant remains: the importance of moving.
“Any time you can incorporate more movement throughout the day, it is good,” said Nicklas, who urges “starting where you’re at and doing what you can.”
The U.S. Health and Human Services Department and the American Heart Association recommend at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity or a combination of both, as well as muscle-strengthening activity.
For those who have been living a sedentary lifestyle, walking is the best way to begin getting physically active, Nicklas said. She suggests going with a friend or enrolling in a walking program like the one her university offers. It adds accountability, a social component and safety, to guard against falls.
Using a “walking tool,” such as a cane or walker, if it’s needed, can help you stay active, Nicklas said.
“Slow and steady—the tortoise pace—is better than the rabbit pace when you’re starting out or starting over,” she said.
Resistance or strength training—through free weights, weight machines, pushups or pull-ups—can help with range of motion around joints and improve muscle mass, muscle strength and bone strength. It can help in the ability to perform everyday activities, improve balance and may reduce the risk of falls.
Fred Bartlit, 87, proves the point that chronological age isn’t the determining factor when it comes to strength and feeling young.
A former U.S. Army ranger, Bartlit always had been physically active. He also was an avid skier and golfer. As he reached his 50s, at the urging of his future wife, he intensified his workouts and began strength training at a gym.
Today, the Colorado attorney and author said he is stronger than when he was in the Army at age 22. In addition to practicing law, he makes it his mission to inform older adults about battling sarcopenia, the loss of muscle with aging.
“Our bodies, they’re crying out for physical activity,” he said. “And now the world is sedentary.”
For someone as active as Bartlit, strength training helps him ski challenging mountains trails with his 58-year-old son and 16-year-old granddaughter.
Multiple scientific studies point out that building strength is important in performing everyday activities and in avoiding or managing chronic disease.
Bartlit suggests working with a trainer at first, if possible, and trying to fit in strength training three times per week.
“You have to create habits,” said Bartlit. “It’s about living a full life. It changes the way you think, the way you feel, your confidence in doing things.”
Boosting physical activity and strength helps aging adults do the things they want to do in daily life—and that can be motivating, Nicklas said. It may be as simple as going to the grocery store on your own or having the energy to take grandchildren to the park or to a soccer game.
Older adults are disproportionately affected by conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and heart disease, with 80% of people over 65 having at least one of those chronic conditions, according to the National Council on Aging.
But even though some health setbacks may occur with advancing age, they don’t have to completely derail an exercise plan. “This is just reality and it’s going to happen,” Nicklas said.
“Steady improvement” should be the aim, she said. “The body is still capable of adapting.”
The genetic traits that helped our ancestors battle food scarcity could today be contributing to excess weight and related illnesses. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
It’s not easy maintaining a healthy weight. Even when you manage to drop a few pounds, they often return.
Why would the body seem to encourage obesity?
New research suggests the answer lies far back in human evolution, with an anti-starvation mechanism that primes the body to store fat.
The key to this mechanism is a protein dubbed “RAGE,” according to New York University scientists working with mice. They believe RAGE evolved to help keep ancient humans from starving when food was scarce.
But today, in times of plenty, there’s a glitch at work: RAGE is produced to combat the cellular stress caused by overeating.
The protein seems to mistake this stress as similar to starvation, and so it switches off the body’s ability to burn fat. The result: fat becomes easy to accumulate, but tough to shed.
Still, there’s a silver lining to all of this, the NYU team said, because the research might lead to anti-obesity drugs.
“Our thinking is that RAGE is targetable. When we put mice with no RAGE expression at all on a high-fat diet, they ate the food but were not becoming obese,” explained study author Dr. Ann Marie Schmidt, from the NYU School of Medicine.
And a lack of RAGE appeared to be safe, at least for mice.
“When you totally delete RAGE in mice, they have normal reproduction and no problems with cognition,” she said.
The researchers hope that because RAGE seems to be active just during times of metabolic stress instead of during everyday functions, taking it away won’t create problems.
But don’t pin your hopes on a RAGE-deleting drug just yet.
Schmidt was quick to note that any such drug is a long way off yet because the research is currently in mice. Findings from animal studies don’t always translate to humans.
Still, Schmidt said the potential is exciting.
In addition to limiting the body’s ability to burn fat, RAGE also may contribute to inflammation throughout the body. So, along with taming obesity, it’s possible that removing the RAGE protein might help with some of the inflammatory consequences of obesity, such as diabetes, cancer, hardening of the arteries and Alzheimer’s disease, according to the researchers.
Dr. Michael Wood, medical director for bariatric surgery at the Detroit Medical Center’s Harper University Hospital, said the study was interesting, although very early.
And, Wood said, “obesity is a very complicated problem, and I think these findings are an oversimplification.”
But Wood noted that it’s possible the RAGE protein plays a role in excess weight. It’s just not likely the only factor in the development of obesity.
“I don’t think there’s one switch or any one thing that can solve this complicated issue. There’s no magic bullet for obesity,” he said.
Right now, if someone wants to lose weight, they have to commit to lifestyle changes, Wood said.
And, that’s true even if someone has weight-loss surgery. He added that the most significant change comes from eating fewer calories. Exercise is a healthy habit, but only a small component of weight loss.
The study was published online recently in the journal Cell Reports. Funding was provided by the American Heart Association, the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Diabetes Association.
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.
A cheap, century-old drug in most Americans’ medicine cabinets—aspirin—may come to the rescue for people suffering from migraines, a new study finds.
While there are effective prescription medications, many migraine patients in the United States don’t have access to them due to limited access to doctors or good insurance, or high insurance co-pays, said researchers at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton.
Aspirin might often be a viable option for these patients, said the research team, who reviewed 13 studies of migraine treatment involving more than 4,200 patients.
The investigators also looked at data on the prevention of recurrent migraine in tens of thousands of patients.
The results suggest that giving a high dose of aspirin—900 to 1,300 milligrams—when migraine symptoms set in is an effective and safe treatment for acute migraine.
There’s also evidence that daily aspirin doses of 81 to 325 milligrams may be an effective and safe treatment for prevention of recurrent migraine, the team said. The standard “low-dose” aspirin pill, taken by millions of Americans to help lower heart risks, contains 81 milligrams.
The bottom line: “Our review supports the use of high-dose aspirin to treat acute migraine as well as low-dose daily aspirin to prevent recurrent attacks,” senior author Dr. Charles Hennekens, professor and senior academic advisor at the university’s College of Medicine, said in a school news release.
According to review first author Bianca Biglione, a second-year medical student, “Migraine headaches are among the most common and potentially debilitating disorders encountered by primary health care providers.”
Biglione added that, “in fact, about one in 10 primary care patients present with headache and three out of four are migraines. Aspirin is readily available without a prescription, is inexpensive and, based on our review, was shown to be effective in many migraine patients when compared with alternative more expensive therapies.”
About 36 million Americans suffer from migraines, the researchers noted.
Dr. Noah Rosen directs Northwell Health’s Headache Center in Great Neck, N.Y. Reading over the new findings he noted that “aspirin has been in continual use for headaches since its introduction during the industrial revolution of the late 19th century. Clearly, the part that it contributes to pain relief is quite significant and should be considered for primary treatment in an appropriate population.”
But the benefits of taking the drug regularly to prevent headaches need to be balanced against potential risks, especially the risk of bleeding, Rosen said.
“The cost benefit (of aspirin) is a huge component and out-of-pocket expense is quite low,” Rosen said. “But the risk of bleeding with daily use needs to be considered.”
The findings were published online in the American Journal of Medicine.
Although colonoscopy screens for cancer, it can also uncover a common condition called diverticulosis.
This is when one or more pockets develop in the colon wall, often in the large bowel. These pockets occur over time, possibly from not getting enough fiber in your diet or eating too much red meat.
They’re so common that about 50% of people have them by age 50, according to the American Gastroenterological Association.
Problems can occur if a pocket gets infected, swollen and inflamed, which happens to about 5% of people with diverticulosis.
This condition is called diverticulitis.
“Attacks” of it can come with pain in the lower left abdomen, fever, chills and changes in stool. You may also experience nausea and vomiting.
Treatment for diverticulitis often centers on a short-term low-fiber diet to quiet the digestive tract and possibly antibiotics to get rid of the infection.
Some people get repeated attacks.
There’s also the possibility of developing a serious abscess in a pocket and needing surgery to remove the affected section of intestine if the damage is severe.
But you can take steps to lower the risk for repeated attacks and complications.
After—and only after—the infection clears, slowly reintroduce fiber to your diet by eating more whole grains, legumes (including beans and lentils), vegetables, berries, fruits with edible skins, nuts and even popcorn.
The goal is 25 grams of fiber a day for women, 38 for men. Replace at least some red meat with poultry and fish. Vigorous cardiovascular exercise also offers some protection.
Also, ask your doctor about any medications that might raise your risk of a flare. These could include nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, like aspirin or ibuprofen. Acetaminophen may be safer for you.
These same steps may help prevent diverticulosis or stop it from progressing to diverticulitis.
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)
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.
It happens to most aging Americans: Excess pounds pile on, despite efforts to eat right and exercise.
Now, research in fat cells reveals why it’s so tough to stay slim as you get older. The new findings could point to new ways to treat obesity, Swedish investigators say.
A team led by Peter Arner of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm analyzed fat cells taken from 54 men and women over an average of 13 years.
People in the study who consumed the same or more calories as they got older had an average 20% weight gain.
Why? According to Arner’s group, fat cells showed age-linked declines in the rate at which fats—lipids—were removed and stored from the cells over time.
It’s a process called “lipid turnover.”
The researchers also assessed lipid turnover in 41 women who had weight-loss surgeries and how their lipid turnover rate affected their ability to maintain their weight loss four to seven years after surgery.
Only the women who had a low cellular lipid turnover rate before the surgery had increases in their rate after the surgery and were able to keep pounds from coming back in the years after the surgery.
The Swedish team suggested that these women may have had more “room” to increase their lipid turnover compared to women who already had a high turnover rate before weight-loss surgery. That gave them an advantage in terms of being able to stay relatively slim.
“The results indicate for the first time that processes in our fat tissue regulate changes in body weight during aging in a way that is independent of other factors,” Arner, a professor of medicine, said in an institute news release.
One U.S. expert in weight loss said the findings make sense, but many other factors are probably involved.
“A normal process of aging is slower metabolic rate. Our body uses less energy to function and as a result there is less ‘lipolysis,’ or breakdown of fat,” said registered dietitian Sharon Zarabi. She directs the bariatric program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.
But, “ultimately, what influences weight loss is our metabolism, microbiome, hormones, nutrient intake, genetics, muscle composition, exercise and environmental toxins—yes, that’s a mouthful,” Zarabi said.
Arner said his team’s findings might “open up new ways to treat obesity.”
Prior research has shown that one way to speed up the lipid turnover in the fat tissue is to boost the amount of exercise you get, Arner noted.
The new study supported that theory and also suggests that increased physical activity might improve weight-loss surgery patients’ long-term chances of success.
And Zarabi stressed that “the good news is that although you can’t control your age, if you are more physically fit and have higher muscle mass, fat breakdown is still possible.”
The new findings were published in Nature Medicine.
City dwellers who live on tree-lined streets might be happier and healthier for it, a large new study suggests.
The study, of nearly 47,000 urban residents, found that those who lived in areas shaded by tree canopy reported less psychological distress and better general health over six years.
Green grass, on the other hand, didn’t cut it: People in neighborhoods with more grassy areas actually reported poorer health than those largely surrounded by concrete.
The researchers said the findings suggest there might be something particularly health-promoting about trees. Maybe people who have them nearby have more chances for walking and recreation, or enjoy a buffer against noise and traffic pollution, for example.
The bottom line: Trees seem to matter to our well-being, said Kathleen Wolf, a research social scientist at the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, in Seattle.
Wolf, who was not involved in the study, said it adds to a body of research finding a link between “green space” and better health.
A U.K. study published recently is a case in point. It found that people who spent two hours a week outdoors gave higher ratings to their physical and mental health than those who preferred the great indoors.
“If you have one study showing an association,” Wolf said, “it gives you a heads-up—’Hey, this is an interesting finding.’”
When multiple studies show the same pattern, it suggests something is really there, she added.
A strength of the new study is that it followed people over time, Wolf said, rather than measuring well-being only once.
On average, it found, city dwellers who lived near more tree canopy were less likely to develop new symptoms of psychological distress—like nervousness, hopelessness and unexplained fatigue.
The benefit was seen among people living in areas with tree coverage of at least 30% within a mile of home. Compared with residents with few nearby trees, they were about one-third less likely to report distress symptoms on a standard questionnaire.
They were also one-third less likely to downgrade ratings of their general health to “fair” or “poor.”
Of course, there could be many things about living in greener areas that make people happier and healthier. But the researchers tried to account for those differences—weighing factors like household income, education levels and marital status.
Even then, trees still mattered to mental and physical well-being.
Why would that be? Wolf pointed to various possibilities.
Tree-lined streets and parks may give people more opportunities for exercise—which, she noted, is important not only for physical well-being but mental health, too.
There’s also a theory that being out in nature offers a better sense of perspective, which makes our daily stresses seem less significant.
“Human beings tend to ruminate on the bad things that happen, rather than the good,” Wolf said.
Some of that mental playback may fade when you’re outdoors, with things to see, smell and experience, she noted.
Living near grassy surroundings, on the other hand, was linked to higher odds of distress and poor health.
The study cannot reveal why, said Sjerp de Vries, a researcher with Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. But, he said, unlike grass, trees can make an area more walkable.
Trees are also more obvious, de Vries said. Tall trees, especially, make their presence known whether people are outside or inside.
Plus, de Vries noted, there is an argument to be made that trees are beneficial because they release chemicals called phytoncides, which may boost human immune function.
He wrote an editorial accompanying the new study, which was published online recently in JAMA Network Open.
The study results were based on 46,786 adults aged 45 and older in three large Australian cities. All remained in the same neighborhood over six years and completed the same health questionnaires at the beginning and end of the study period.
It’s possible, de Vries said, that healthier people chose to live in tree-lined areas.
But other studies have suggested that “green space” has particular benefits for lower-income people, he noted. And they have less choice about where to live than their wealthier counterparts.
Add a social component to your exercise by joining a fitness class or finding a workout buddy. You’ll incorporate two major components that fight inflammation: socializing and exercising. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
Tamping down inflammation is a must for people with a chronic inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.
But you can be exposed to damaging inflammation without having a specific medical condition.
Inflammation prevents the body from adequately reacting to stressors and puts the aging process on an unwanted fast track, increasing the likelihood of problems like heart disease.
The negative effects of inflammation can be so significant that leading researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy coined the phrase inflamm-aging.
So making anti-inflammation lifestyle choices is good for everyone.
How to avoid inflamm-aging
Eat a heart-healthy diet focusing on foods like fatty fish, fruits and vegetables. Keep in mind that sugar is highly inflammatory.
Get active with moderate cardio exercise. Remember: Good health guidelines call for 30 minutes a day on at least five days per week.
Lose excess weight, especially if you’re carrying those pounds around your middle.
Avoid exposure to all forms of secondhand smoke and, of course, if you smoke, quit.
Limit alcohol to one drink per day if you’re a woman, two if you’re a man.
Clock seven to eight hours of sleep every night. Some people need more, others need less, but this is the sweet spot between not enough and too much.
Manage stress. Stress is often unavoidable, but you can minimize its effects with techniques like deep breathing and meditation.
Stay social with strong connections to friends and family.
Also, talk to your doctor about ways to boost heart health and any other steps appropriate to your needs to counter inflammation.
Here are 10 suggestions from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Test your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors every month. Yes, this is an addition to changing the batteries once a year.
Wash your child’s toys just as you do your hands. (Think of how much time they spend on the floor.)
Wipe up spills as soon as they happen to avoid bacteria growth.
Put together a mini health kit and tuck it into your daily tote. Include adhesive bandages, alcohol wipes, pain relief medication, hand sanitizer, a mini tube of sun protection and an instant ice pack.
Make that wellness appointment you’ve been putting off. Ask if you need a tetanus booster. It’s a must every 10 years.
Put the poison control number—800.222.1222—on all phones and make sure all family members know when to call it.
Before leaving the house do a double check for safety. That means putting on sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat for a walk and other activities, or a helmet and other gear for bike riding, or looking at the treads of your shoes before a run.
Schedule a radon test for the air in your home. Have your water checked if you get it from a private well.
Change your contact lenses on the right schedule. Don’t risk eye health by trying to extend their life past the prescribed usage, whether they’re dailies, monthlies or anything in between.
Can’t do a full floss after lunch? Use dental picks to get rid of food caught between your teeth and prevent bacteria buildup.
The evidence continues to mount that staying socially engaged as you age helps keep dementia at bay.
In a new study, British researchers found that being socially active in your 50s and 60s may reduce the risk of developing dementia.
The findings showed that people in their 60s who interacted with friends nearly every day had a 12% lower risk of developing dementia than people who saw a couple of friends every few months.
“This has important implications for people in middle-age as it suggests that keeping socially active is important for brain health. We know that it has other health benefits in terms of benefiting physical and mental health,” said lead researcher Andrew Sommerlad, a research fellow in the division of psychiatry at University College London.
Social activity during midlife was linked with better memory and reasoning skills, he said.
“We think this may be because social contact gives us a chance to exercise different aspects of thinking, like memory and language, which may make people more resilient against the damage which accumulates in the brain in people who develop dementia,” Sommerlad explained.
For the study, Sommerlad and his colleagues collected data on more than 10,200 people who took part in the Whitehall II study between 1985 and 2013. During that time, the participants were asked about their contact with friends and relatives.
In 1997, the study participants also took tests of their thinking abilities. The group was followed until 2017.
The researchers also found an association between being socially active and dementia risk for those who were 50 and 70, but it wasn’t statistically significant.
Sommerlad said that other studies have shown similar results, but this study followed people for a much longer time.
“This gives us much more confidence in the idea that more social contact may reduce dementia risk, although a study like this can never definitively prove it,” he said, since it can only show an association.
In any case, Sommerlad encouraged people to stay connected.
Dr. Sam Gandy is director of the Mount Sinai Center for Cognitive Health and NFL Neurological Care in New York City. He said, “I tend to believe these findings are correct.”
Many studies have shown that being mentally and physically active affects keeping the mind sharp, he noted.
“Physical activity, mental stimulation and social engagement are popping up in these studies left and right all around the world,” Gandy said.
Some patients in these studies may have the beginnings of mild cognitive impairment, which is an early stage of dementia, he said. But he is confident that this possibility is well known and researchers can take it into account.
The bottom line for Gandy is that keeping your blood pressure and cholesterol low and maintaining a healthy weight along with eating a healthy diet—and staying mentally and socially active—is the best recipe for delaying or preventing dementia.
Some studies have suggested that even people with dementia can benefit from a healthy lifestyle, he added.
Gandy thinks that for those with early signs of dementia, these interventions might have some value.
“But not for those with mid- to late-stage dementia or those who are bed-bound,” he said.
The report was published online recently in PLOS Medicine.
Do you eat healthy during the week, then ease off the brakes on the weekend? You’re not alone.
But such a five days on-two days off eating regimen can erode diet quality, according to a study published recently in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Not only did participants take in more calories on weekends than on weekdays, they were less healthy calories, to boot.
They consumed more alcohol and fat, and ate less of the good stuff, like yogurt, fruits, dark green and orange vegetables, chicken, nuts and seeds, and whole grains.
And if the calories you consume on the weekend exceed the number you take in during the week, that’s a net surplus—read: weight gain.
Besides stalling any weight-loss efforts, weekend junk-food binges can also negatively impact the healthy bacteria in your gut.
A lab study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research found that cycling on and off junk food was almost as detrimental to the delicate balance of the gut microbiome as eating it all the time.
In particular, a junk-food diet reduces the microbes needed to metabolize flavonoids, a category of micronutrients thought to help with weight loss and brain health.
If you look forward to letting loose on the weekends, find other ways to unwind.
For instance, try a new activity—you’ll burn more calories and boost your weight-loss (or control) efforts.
If going out for a big brunch is your downfall, schedule a trip to the gym instead.
Weekends are also perfect for doing some healthy cooking. Make enough to have for brown-bag lunches so weekday eating is more satisfying.
Nearly nine in 10 American adults lose sleep to binge watch TV, a new survey finds.
The more than 2,000 U.S. adults who took part in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine poll in September ranked sleep as their second-highest priority, with family being first.
But despite considering sleep important, 88% said they’d stayed up late to watch multiple episodes of a TV show or streaming series.
The rate was highest (95%) among 18- to 44-year-olds. Many also delay bedtime to play video games, read and watch sports, the survey revealed.
“It’s encouraging that Americans rank sleep as one of their highest priorities, but choosing to binge on entertainment at night instead of sleeping has serious ramifications,” AASM president Dr. Kelly Carden said in an academy news release.
Younger adults (aged 18 to 34) were more likely than those 35 and older to have stayed up late to play video games (72% versus 38%), and men were more likely to do so than women (59% versus 42%).
Two-thirds of respondents said they’d lost sleep to read. Women were more likely to do so than men (71% versus 61%), the survey found.
Nearly 60% of adults lost sleep to watch sports, including 75% of men and 45% of women. Adults between 25 and 54 years of age were more likely than those in other age groups to have stayed up late for overtime or extra innings (54% versus 51%).
That lost shut-eye can have serious consequences, Carden said.
“Sleep is essential to health, well-being and safety—and chronic insufficient sleep can lead to an increased risk of health problems, mood disorders and motor vehicle accidents,” she pointed out.
Losing sleep due to streaming, reading or playing video games can also lead to negative feelings. For example, 24% of respondents admitted feeling frustrated after delaying their bedtimes.
Feeling bad was most common for those in Generation Z (born in 1997 or later), who said that staying up late caused frustration (32%), worry (23%) and guilt (19%).
Such feelings can make it harder to drift off, especially if a person tries to make up for the lost sleep, according to the AASM.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points and a confidence level of 95%.
Joining social groups and establishing their own support network is an essential component to a caregiver’s quality of life. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
If you’re a caregiver for a family member, you need to look after your own mental health to provide the best care for others, an expert says.
Caregivers are at increased risk for depression and anxiety.
Clinically significant symptoms of depression occur in 40%-70% of caregivers, and major depression occurs in 25%-50% of these caregivers, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance.
“Taking time to care for yourself is not selfish. In order to have the strength to care for a loved one, it is extremely important that caregivers take care of their own physical and mental health,” said Dr. Vassilios Latoussakis, a psychiatrist at Gracie Square Hospital, a psychiatric facility in New York City.
Latoussakis offered the following advice.
Pay attention to your stress levels, he said in a hospital news release. If you find yourself crying, losing your temper or having fantasies of rescue or flight, seek help.
Stress can affect your physical health, causing problems such as headaches, sleep issues, heart troubles, high blood pressure, and elevated fat and sugar levels.
If you’re feeling the effects of stress, make an appointment with your primary care provider, Latoussakis advised.
There are a number of ways to reduce stress, including regular physical activity, relaxation techniques such as breathing, yoga or mindfulness, making time to see friends and doing activities you enjoy.
It’s important to have a support network of people with whom you can talk, confide and gripe.
Another good idea is to join a support group of caregivers where you can share concerns, practical issues and problems, Latoussakis said.
More than 34 million Americans have provided unpaid care to an adult aged 50 or older in the past year, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP.
Even mild anemia—low levels of hemoglobin in the blood—may raise a person’s odds for Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, a new study finds.
The same Dutch research also found a correlation between heightened dementia risk and high blood levels of hemoglobin.
“With around 10% of people over age 65 having anemia in the Americas and Europe and up to 45% in African and southeast Asian countries, these results could have important implications for the burden of dementia,” noted study lead author M. Arfan Ikram, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Hemoglobin is the protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen.
The new study included more than 12,000 people averaging 65 years of age. None of the participants had dementia at the beginning of the research.
Hemoglobin levels were measured at the start of the study and 6% of the participants were found to have anemia.
The participants’ health was then tracked for an average of 12 years. During that time, 1,520 developed dementia, including 1,194 who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the report published online recently in Neurology.
The study was not designed to prove cause and effect.
However, the research showed that people with anemia were 41% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and 34% more likely to develop any type of dementia than those without anemia, the team reported.
In another finding, people with high levels of hemoglobin were also more likely to develop dementia.
Those with the highest levels were 20% more likely to develop dementia than those with levels in the middle.
Those with the lowest hemoglobin levels were 29% more likely to develop dementia than those with levels in the middle, the research found.
In a journal news release, Ikram added that the findings could be significant, given that “the prevalence of dementia is expected to increase threefold over the next decades, with the largest increases predicted in the countries where the anemia rate is the highest.”
The question of how hemoglobin levels affect dementia risk is still unclear, however.
“More research is needed to determine whether hemoglobin levels play a direct role in this increased risk or whether these associations can be explained by underlying issues or other vascular or metabolic changes,” Ikram explained.
Dr. Satjit Bhusri is a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Looking over the findings, he stressed that hemoglobin’s role as an oxygen transporter to the brain might be key.
“Any quick or slow loss of oxygen will lead to a cognitive decline and manifest as dementia,” he noted. Conversely, Bhusri said, “elevated hemoglobin is a reaction to some underlying disease. That disease is forcing the body to produce more hemoglobin. This can result in an increase in thickness of blood and poor flow to the brain.”
Another expert believes the findings should serve as a reminder to doctors to pay attention to even mild anemia when it occurs.
“I think that physicians should not write off mild anemia in any age group, because it clearly is associated with brain dysfunction over time,” said Dr. Guy Mintz. He directs cardiovascular health at Northwell Health’s Sandra Atlas Bass Heart Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y.
Mintz also noted that many of the participants in the study were still in their 60s and 70s, so “we are not looking at an elderly, frail group of patients.”
As for people with elevated levels of hemoglobin, he believes that in many instances this happened in response to the smoking habit.
So, the link between hemoglobin levels and dementia “can be another motivational tool to get these patients to stop smoking,” Mintz said.
Your dog might be your heart’s best friend, if a new study is any indication.
Researchers found that compared with people who had no pets, dog owners tended to have fewer risk factors for heart disease: They got more exercise and had healthier diets and lower blood sugar levels.
Even compared with other pet owners, they were doing better with diet and exercise.
The study of nearly 1,800 Czech adults is not the first to suggest our canine friends can do our hearts good. In fact, in 2013 the American Heart Association issued a scientific statement saying that dog ownership is likely linked to a lower risk of heart disease.
That was largely based on evidence that people with dogs are more physically active. The new findings suggest the benefit might extend to diet and blood sugar levels.
It’s easy to see how having a dog could get people moving, according to senior researcher Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez.
And it’s possible that dog owners’ lower blood sugar levels were related to their exercise habits, said Lopez-Jimenez, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
It’s less obvious, though, why dog ownership would encourage a healthier diet. One possibility is that the two are not directly related, he said.
On the other hand, past research has shown that dogs do more than demand walks and get us moving: They offer companionship and emotional support, according to Lopez-Jimenez.
“They can decrease your feelings of loneliness and give you a sense of purpose,” he said. “You have someone to look after.”
And that, he speculated, might encourage people to take better care of themselves.
Dr. Glenn Levine, a volunteer medical expert with the AHA, was lead author of its statement on pets and heart health. He said that, overall, there is “reasonably good data” that adopting a dog can increase people’s physical activity levels.
“That’s the strongest and most direct (cardiovascular) benefit,” said Levine, who is also a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
He agreed, though, that pets might support heart health in less-direct ways, too.
“There may be other benefits as well—including reduced stress, greater companionship and happiness, and other factors that could lead people to take better care of themselves,” he said.
For the study, the researchers used data from a health survey of 1,769 Czech adults, aged 25 to 64.
Overall, more than two-thirds of dog owners (67%) met the “ideal” AHA recommendations for exercise. That means 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, each week—along with muscle strengthening exercises a couple of days per week.
In contrast, only 48% of people without pets met that ideal, as did 55% of other pet owners, the findings showed.
When it came to diet, few people met the AHA ideal, which includes plenty of fruits, vegetables, beans, fiber-rich grains, fish and lean meat.
But dog owners were doing better than others: Fewer than 7% scored in the “poor” range for diet, versus 16% of people without pets and 13% of other pet owners.
Dog owners did, however, fall short in one heart-health measure: Their smoking rates were highest.
It’s not clear why, according to Lopez-Jimenez—and it might not hold true in other countries, such as the United States. In general, smoking is more common in Eastern Europe.
The bottom line, according to Levine, is that people might enjoy health benefits from having a canine companion. But the AHA does not advocate adopting a dog for that purpose.
“The primary purpose of adopting or rescuing a dog should be to give the dog a loving and caring home,” Levine said. “The health benefits that may come from this are a bonus.”
The findings were published recently in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes.
A good mood is infectious among teens, but depression is not, a new study suggests.
Researchers looked at more than 2,000 American high school students to see how they influenced each others’ moods. They found that a positive mood seems to spread through groups of teens, but having depressed friends doesn’t increase a teen’s risk of depression.
In fact, having plenty of friends in a good mood can halve the chances that a teen will develop depression over six to 12 months. Having a lot of happy friends can also double the likelihood of recovering from depression over the same time period, the researchers found.
However, the study could only show an association between happy friends and a lower risk of depression or a faster recovery from depression. It cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship between these factors.
“We know social factors, for example living alone or having experienced abuse in childhood, influences whether someone becomes depressed. We also know that social support is important for recovery from depression, for example having people to talk to,” study author Thomas House, a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Manchester in the U.K., said in a university news release.
“Our study is slightly different as it looks at the effect of being friends with people on whether you are likely to develop or recover from being depressed,” he added.
These findings suggest that promoting friendships, through such activities as social clubs, might help guard against depression, House noted.
“This was a big effect that we have seen here. It could be that having a stronger social network is an effective way to treat depression. More work needs to be done but it may that we could significantly reduce the burden of depression through cheap, low-risk social interventions,” House concluded.
Taking a moment each day to journal or plot out your thoughts could help you improve your focus, a key aspect of your well-being. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
If you’re satisfied with your life, you probably have emotional well-being.
Emotional well-being can be mastered just like any other skill, according to Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
How? By developing four key traits, said Davidson, a neuroscientist.
Resilience
The first is resilience. Research at the Center for Healthy Minds found that, over time, regular mindfulness meditation can help you learn how to bounce back from adversity.
Mindfulness meditation teaches you to become aware of your thoughts and emotions, center yourself and decide how you would like to proceed with the rest of your day. Find out more at mindful.org.
Positivity
Having a positive outlook is the second key trait—both finding the positive in others and being positive in the way you approach life.
Another type of meditation called compassion meditation is said to bring measurable changes after two weeks of 30-minute-a-day sessions. The goal is to switch from being judgmental to being caring.
Focus
Next is improving your attention level. A Harvard study found most people spend nearly half of their waking hours not paying attention to what they’re doing.
Letting the mind wander typically makes people unhappy, the researchers concluded. Practice focusing on the here and now, one task or activity at a time.
Generosity
Finally, become more generous of spirit. This means feeling happy for others when they do well rather than being envious or bitter, emotions that only hurt you.
Generous behavior activates circuits in the brain that promote well-being while enhancing the lives of those around you.
Yes, it takes time and effort to change your thinking and the way you see the world, but the benefits are infinite. And the more you practice, the more natural it will feel.
Extreme early birds seem to function well in the daytime but they have trouble staying awake for evening social commitments, according to researchers. (Courtesy Spectrum Health Beat)
Early to bed and early to rise? In its extreme form, this tendency is more common than previously believed, according to a new study.
Going to sleep at 8pm and waking up as early as 4am is called advanced sleep phase. It was believed to be rare, but this study concluded that it may affect at least one in 300 adults.
In advanced sleep phase, your body clock (circadian rhythm) is on a schedule hours earlier than most other people’s. You have premature release of the sleep hormone melatonin and shift in body temperature.
Advanced sleepers also wake more easily than others and are satisfied with an average of five-to-10 minutes extra sleep on non-work days, compared with the 30-to-38 minutes more sleep that other people would take advantage of, according to study senior author Dr. Louis Ptacek. He’s a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Advanced sleep is not the same as early rising that develops with normal aging, or the waking in the early hours linked to depression.
“While most people struggle with getting out of bed at 4 or 5am, people with advanced sleep phase wake up naturally at this time, rested and ready to take on the day,” Ptacek said in a university news release.
“These extreme early birds tend to function well in the daytime but may have trouble staying awake for social commitments in the evening,” he added.
In order to determine the prevalence of advanced sleepers, the researchers analyzed data from more than 2,400 patients at a sleep disorder clinic. Of those, 0.03% were determined to be advanced sleepers. This is a conservative estimate, the study authors explained, because it did not include patients who didn’t want to participate in the study or advanced sleepers who had no need to attend a sleep clinic.
The researchers also said that all of the advanced sleepers in the study reported at least one close relative with the same early sleep-wake schedule.
“We hope the results of this study will not only raise awareness of advanced sleep phase and familial advanced sleep phase, but also help identify the circadian clock genes and any medical conditions that they may influence,” Ptacek said.
The report was published recently in the journal Sleep.
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)
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.
Difficulties with daily activities such as dressing, walking and eating can be seen in rheumatoid arthritis patients a year or two before they’re diagnosed, a new study shows.
“This is a new finding, and a finding that is quite intriguing,” said lead author Dr. Elena Myasoedova, a rheumatologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
“It may reflect an accumulation of symptoms between the time of first onset and the time required for providers to actually diagnose patients,” she said in a Mayo news release.
The study also found that chronic increased levels of difficulty with daily activities (functional disability) continued even after patients were diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and began treatment.
That may be due to a number of factors, including increasing physical and mental pain, use of treatments such as glucocorticoids and antidepressants and anticipation of relief from symptoms, she added.
For the study, the researchers looked at 586 rheumatoid arthritis patients and 531 people without the disease in the Rochester Epidemiology Project database of medical records.
The rate of functional disability was more than two times higher among rheumatoid arthritis patients than in those without rheumatoid arthritis. In most age groups, rheumatoid arthritis patients had a 15% or higher rate of functional disability than those without the disease.
The findings show the importance of early treatment for rheumatoid arthritis patients, according to Myasoedova.
“Alerting your health care provider to difficulties in daily living can assure that patients receive the help they need,” she said.
About 1.5 million Americans have been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that most often affects the joints but can also impact other parts of the body.
Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the most common chronic conditions associated with functional disability in the United States and has a significant impact on well-being and quality of life.
Symptoms can include joint pain or swelling, but 40% of patients have symptoms that don’t involve the joints, such as fatigue, fever and loss of appetite.
The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Could your personality as a teen forecast your risk for dementia a half-century later?
Very possibly, say researchers, who found that dementia risk is lower among seniors who were calm, mature and energetic high schoolers.
“Being calm and mature as teen were each associated with roughly a 10% reduction in adult dementia risk,” said study co-author Kelly Peters, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C. “And vigor was associated with a 7% reduction.”
The finding has its origins in the 1960s, when more than 82,000 students in roughly 1,200 U.S. high schools took a personality test. More than 50 years later, their personality traits were compared to dementia diagnoses.
While Peters said there’s plenty of evidence that personality changes near the time of a dementia diagnosis, the lingering question has been whether personality or some aspects of it actually causes dementia.
“That’s the big question,” she said. “Is it only that personality can be affected by dementia? Is it just an expression of the disease?” By focusing on teens who didn’t later develop dementia, Peters said, “this study really starts to tease that out.”
At an average age of 16, the students were assessed for 10 traits: calmness, vigor, organization, self-confidence, maturity/responsibility, leadership, impulsivity, desire for social interaction, social sensitivity, and artistic and intellectual refinement.
By 2011-2013, when they were almost 70 years old, more than 2,500 had developed dementia.
Enter lead author Benjamin Chapman, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York.
After stacking 50-year-old personality profiles up against current medical records, he and his team found that the risk of dementia was notably lower among seniors who were calm, vigorous and mature as teens.
Calmness was defined as being stress-free and not neurotic, vigor as being energetic and outgoing, and maturity as being responsible, reliable and conscientious.
Peters said the findings could guide policy thinkers to develop improved social support systems “to help kids build up protective qualities.”
But she highlighted some reservations.
For one thing, the team “only looked at traits that were protective,” she said.
And money seemed to matter: Calmness, vigor and maturity did not appear to protect against adult dementia among teens who grew up in relatively poor households.
Chapman’s study also tracked dementia only around age 70. That, said his Rochester colleague Dr. Anton Porsteinsson, means “there’s a lot more work to do.”
He was not involved in the study.
“The average age of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is around the early 80s,” said Porsteinsson, director of the university’s Alzheimer’s Disease Care, Research and Education Program. “So it would be really good to repeat this in another 10 to 15 years, to see what’s happening when dementia risk is really at its peak.”
While the findings highlight a link between dementia and personality, he said that it’s hard to draw a direct correlation.
“If you’re calm and conscientious, do you make better health choices in your life? And if so, are specific personality traits directly decisive with respect to dementia? Or does your risk for dementia indirectly reflect those better decisions?” Porsteinsson said.
Heather Snyder is vice president of medical science relations at the Alzheimer’s Association.
“There are a wide variety of social, environmental and genetic factors that may contribute to our risk for dementia, and more research is needed to determine what those are and how they interact,” said Snyder.
But she said that “there is not enough evidence at this time to suggest that an intervention strategy for personality type in high school would be effective.”
Porsteinsson warned against using the study to conclude that there’s clearly a “good” personality and a “bad one.” It could be, he said, that impulsiveness and neuroticism, while bad for dementia, “bring a different skill set to the table” that has value.
“We don’t necessarily want all kids to be calm and composed at all times. We don’t want everyone to fit into the same mold,” Porsteinsson said.
“So we have to be very careful about how we interpret these findings until we really understand a lot more about what this is all really about,” he said.
The study was published recently in JAMA Psychiatry.
Teenagers living in cohesive neighborhoods—where trusted neighbors get involved in monitoring each other’s children—experience fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, a study suggests.
The researchers also found consistent results across different cities regardless of family composition and neighborhood income, indicating strong neighborhoods help teen mental health across various populations.
Along with common risk factors, neighborhood environments should probably be given more attention when looking for potential factors linked to teen mental health problems, said study author Louis Donnelly. He’s a postdoctoral research associate at the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J.
“Notably, whether a child grew up in a higher- or lower-income household, the associations were similar. The findings can be generalized across different city contexts,” he added.
About 14 percent of adolescents in the United States have had depression or a mood disorder. Eight percent have been severely impaired from an anxiety disorder, the study said.
The study included information on more than 2,200 children born in large U.S. cities. The information was collected between 1998 and 2000.
The study authors wanted to see if “neighborhood collective efficacy”—a blend of social cohesion and shared expectations for social control—was linked to better teen mental health.
The teens evaluated their own mental health at age 15. Parents provided “collective efficacy” information when their children were 3, 5 and 9. Parents ranked their agreement with statements such as, “People around here are willing to help their neighbors,” or “People in this neighborhood generally don’t get along with each other.”
Another scale asked parents to express their belief in statements demonstrating that neighbors would be likely to intervene or get involved in scenarios such as, “Children were spray-painting buildings with graffiti,” or “Children were showing disrespect to an adult.”
The researchers found that the “neighborhood effect” offered a protective effect similar to depression prevention programs targeting teens.
“There are really two (measurements) that are distinct, one being social cohesion and mutual trust. This is the idea of believing that people in your neighborhood share similar values and can be relied on for support,” Donnelly explained.
“The second dimension relies on informal social control,” he added. “We measured that based on the extent to which families and other adults can be relied upon to intervene … (such as) if a fight broke out in the street or children are not attending school.”
Maurice Elias said he wasn’t at all surprised by the study findings. He’s a professor of psychology at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J.
“The idea that being in a supportive environment would be good for children’s mental health shouldn’t be a revolution,” said Elias, also director of the Rutgers Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab. “It’s always nice when research helps confirm common sense. I see this as one of those examples.”
