1 in 3 People Who Get Diabetes, Also Get This Within 5 Years

…and other items from this week’s health science news:

One thing and another

Certain things often come together, with one thing leading to another, whether by direct causality (i.e. one thing causes another), or because they are each caused by the same underlying factors. Cardiometabolic disease is one of those situations.

So, after a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, the 5-year risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD), heart failure, and/or death is 32.9%, rising to 55.1% at 10 years.

This, by the way, is based on a study looking at data from over 1.6 million adults newly-diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, wherein 19% developed CKD before heart failure, compared with 8.3% who developed heart failure first.

It’s also worth noting that among people who developed CKD, 22.7% developed heart failure within 5 years, while 42% of those who developed heart failure subsequently developed CKD within five years.

Fortunately, the same lifestyle interventions can be used to reduce the risks of each:

Read in full: Almost 1 in 3 adults develop cardiorenal disease or die within 5 years of type 2 diabetes diagnosis

Related: What Diabetes Does To Your Heart

“Clitorisn’t” to clitoris

After vulvar cancer is tended to surgically, often part of the clitoris is lost. However, a new clitoral reconstruction procedure has been developed for those who lose to whom this happens, with the aim of preserving sexual function and quality of life.

Notably, this can be done at the same time as the cancer surgery, and adds only about 15 minutes to the procedure!

How it works: after the tumor is removed, the nerve bundles are released and repositioned to form a new clitoral tip, which is then covered with a small graft of buccal mucosa from inside the cheek. This tissue resembles the tissue around the vulva and is intended to preserve sensation.

How it’s going: among the first 23 women treated, 90% were able to achieve a clitoral orgasm again after surgery, typically within three to six months. Sensitivity can initially be either increased or decreased, with recovery generally considered optimal after about one year.

As for rollout, the technique is being introduced at nine Dutch hospitals (the technique was developed in the Netherlands) through a research and training program, with specialists also being trained internationally:

Read in full: New surgical technique reconstructs the clitoris after treatment for vulvar cancer

Related: The Insider’s Guide To Making Hospital As Comfortable As Possible

It’s not about aging

It’s been found that while normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease both alter communication between brain regions, they do so rather differently in quite distinct patterns, rather than as different degrees of the same process.

• In Alzheimer’s disease, higher-order regions involved in functions such as memory become more similar in their communication patterns, while sensory and motor regions become more distinct.
• In normal aging, we see a different pattern, with executive-function regions becoming more similar while other regions become more distinct.

In particular, the Alzheimer’s-related connectivity pattern was detectable in people with low levels of Alzheimer’s pathology who were still cognitively unimpaired, showing how that these changes can show up before cognitive symptoms.

Notably, in people with cognitive impairments, the connectivity pattern was more strongly associated with cognitive function than with amyloid-beta and tau accumulation.

In practical terms, what this means is that brain connectivity may help identify Alzheimer’s-related changes before obvious brain shrinkage or cognitive symptoms, and thus improve how we can make (and monitor responses to) interventions.

Read in full: Alzheimer’s disease and aging reshape brain communication in different ways

Related: Is It Dementia? Spot The Signs (Because None Of Us Are Immune) ← If you’d like an objective test of memory and other cognitive impairments, this article also has a link to the industry’s gold standard test (it’s free)

(The Self-Administered Gerocognitive Exam (SAGE) is designed to detect early signs of cognitive, memory or thinking impairments)

Take care!