Meningitis Outbreak
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Don’t Let Your Guard Down
In the US, meningitis is currently enjoying a 10-year high, with its highest levels of infection since 2014.
This is a big deal, given the 10–15% fatality rate of meningitis, even with appropriate medical treatment.
But of course, not everyone gets appropriate medical treatment, especially because symptoms can become life-threatening in a matter of hours.
Most recent stats gave an 18% fatality rate for the cases with known outcomes in the last year:
CDC Emergency | Increase in Invasive Serogroup Y Meningococcal Disease in the United States
The quick facts:
❝Meningococcal disease most often presents as meningitis, with symptoms that may include fever, headache, stiff neck, nausea, vomiting, photophobia, or altered mental status.
[It can also present] as meningococcal bloodstream infection, with symptoms that may include fever and chills, fatigue, vomiting, cold hands and feet, severe aches and pains, rapid breathing, diarrhea, or, in later stages, a dark purple rash.
While initial symptoms of meningococcal disease can at first be non-specific, they worsen rapidly, and the disease can become life-threatening within hours. Immediate antibiotic treatment for meningococcal disease is critical.
Survivors may experience long-term effects such as deafness or amputations of the extremities.❞
~ Ibid.
The good news (but still don’t let your guard down)
Meningococcal bacteria are, happily, not spread as easily as cold and flu viruses.
The greatest risks come from:
- Close and enduring proximity (e.g. living together)
- Oral, or close-to-oral, contact (e.g. kissing, or coughing nearby)
Read more:
CDC | Meningococcal Disease: Causes & How It Spreads
Is there a vaccine?
There is, but it’s usually only offered to those most at risk, which is usually:
- Children
- Immunocompromised people, especially if HIV+
- People taking certain medications (e.g. Solaris or Ultomiris)
Read more:
CDC | Meningococcal Vaccine Recommendations
Will taking immune-boosting supplements help?
Honestly, probably not, but they won’t harm either. The most important thing is: don’t rely on them—too many people pop a vitamin C supplement and then assume they are immune to everything, and it doesn’t work like that.
On a tangential note, for more general immune health, you might also want to check out:
Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
The short version:
If you or someone you know experiences the above-mentioned symptoms, even if it does not seem too bad, get thee/them to a doctor, and quickly, because the (very short) clock may be ticking already.
Better safe than sorry.
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Dry Needling for Meralgia Paresthetica?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Could you address dry needling, who should administer it, and could it be a remedy for meralgia paresthetica? If not, could you speak to home-based remedies for meralgia paresthetica? Thank you?❞
We’ll need to take a main feature some time to answer this one fully, but we will say some quick things here:
- Dry needling, much like acupuncture, has been found to help with pain relief.
- Meralgia paresthetica, being a neuropathy, may benefit from some things that benefit people with peripheral neuropathy, such as lion’s mane mushroom. There is definitely not research to support this hypothesis yet though (so far as we could find anyway; there is plenty to support lion’s mane helping with nerve regeneration in general, but nothing specific for meralgia paresthetica).
Some previous articles you might enjoy meanwhile:
- Pinpointing The Usefulness Of Acupuncture
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
- Peripheral Neuropathy: How To Avoid It, Manage It, Treat It
- What Does Lion’s Mane Actually Do, Anyway?
Take care!
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Does Eating Shellfish Contribute To Gout?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝I have a question about seafood as healthy, doesn’t eating shellfish contribute to gout?❞
It can do! Gout (a kind of inflammatory arthritis characterized by the depositing of uric acid crystals in joints) has many risk factors, and diet is one component, albeit certainly the most talked-about one.
First, you may be wondering: isn’t all arthritis inflammatory? Since arthritis is by definition the inflammation of joints, this is a reasonable question, but when it comes to classifying the kinds, “inflammatory” arthritis is caused by inflammation, while “non-inflammatory” arthritis (a slightly confusing name) merely has inflammation as one of its symptoms (and is caused by physical wear-and-tear). For more information, see:
- Tips For Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis ←inflammatory
- Tips For Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis ← “non-inflammatory”
As for gout specifically, top risk factors include:
- Increasing age: risk increases with age
- Being male: women do get gout, but much less often
- Hypertension: all-cause hypertension is the biggest reasonably controllable factor
There’s not a lot we can do about age (but of course, looking after our general health will tend to slow biological aging, and after all, diseases only care about the state of our body, not what the date on the calendar is).
As for sex, this risk factor is hormones, and specifically has to do with estrogen and testosterone’s very different effects on the immune system (bearing in mind that chronic inflammation is a disorder of the immune system). However, few if any men would take up feminizing hormone therapy just to lower their gout risk!
That leaves hypertension, which happily is something that we can all (barring extreme personal circumstances) do quite a bit about. Here’s a good starting point:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
…and for further pointers:
How To Lower Your Blood Pressure (Cardiologists Explain)
As for diet specifically (and yes, shellfish):
The largest study into this (and thus, one of the top ones cited in a lot of other literature) looked at 47,150 men with no history of gout at the baseline.
So, with the caveat that their findings could have been different for women, they found:
- Eating meat in general increased gout risk
- Narrowing down specific meats: beef, pork, and lamb were the worst offenders
- Eating seafood in general increased gout risk
- Narrowing down specific seafoods: all seafoods increased gout risk within a similar range
- As a specific quirk of seafoods: the risk was increased if the man had a BMI under 25
- Eating dairy in general was not associated with an increased risk of gout
- Narrowing down specific dairy foods: low-fat dairy products such as yogurt were associated with a decreased risk of gout
- Eating purine-rich vegetables in general was not associated with an increased risk of gout
- Narrowing down to specific purine-rich vegetables: no purine-rich vegetable was associated with an increase in the risk of gout
Dairy products were included in the study, as dairy products in general and non-fermented dairy products in particular are often associated with increased inflammation. However, the association was simply not found to exist when it came to gout risk.
Purine-rich vegetables were included in the study, as animal products highest in purines have typically been found to have the worst effect on gout. However, the association was simply not found to exist when it came to plants with purines.
You can read the full study here:
Purine-Rich Foods, Dairy and Protein Intake, and the Risk of Gout in Men
So, the short answer to your question of “doesn’t eating shellfish contribute to the risk of gout” is:
Yes, it can, but occasional consumption probably won’t result in gout unless you have other risk factors going against you.
If you’re a slim male 80-year-old alcoholic smoker with hypertension, then definitely do consider skipping the lobster, but honestly, there may be bigger issues to tackle there.
And similarly, obviously skip it if you have a shellfish allergy, and if you’re vegan or vegetarian or abstain from shellfish for religious reasons, then you can certainly live very healthily without ever having any.
See also: Do We Need Animal Products, To Be Healthy?
For most people most of the time, a moderate consumption of seafood, including shellfish if you so desire, is considered healthy.
As ever, do speak with your own doctor to know for sure, as your individual case may vary.
For reference, this question was surely prompted by the article:
Lobster vs Crab – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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‘Noisy’ autistic brains seem better at certain tasks. Here’s why neuroaffirmative research matters
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Pratik Raul, University of Canberra; Jeroen van Boxtel, University of Canberra, and Jovana Acevska, University of Canberra
Autism is a neurodevelopmental difference associated with specific experiences and characteristics.
For decades, autism research has focused on behavioural, cognitive, social and communication difficulties. These studies highlighted how autistic people face issues with everyday tasks that allistic (meaning non-autistic) people do not. Some difficulties may include recognising emotions or social cues.
But some research, including our own study, has explored specific advantages in autism. Studies have shown that in some cognitive tasks, autistic people perform better than allistic people. Autistic people may have greater success in identifying a simple shape embedded within a more complex design, arranging blocks of different shapes and colours, or spotting an object within a cluttered visual environment (similar to Where’s Wally?). Such enhanced performance has been recorded in babies as young as nine months who show emerging signs of autism.
How and why do autistic individuals do so well on these tasks? The answer may be surprising: more “neural noise”.
What is neural noise?
Generally, when you think of noise, you probably think of auditory noise, the ups and downs in the amplitude of sound frequencies we hear.
A similar thing happens in the brain with random fluctuations in neural activity. This is called neural noise.
This noise is always present, and comes on top of any brain activity caused by things we see, hear, smell and touch. This means that in the brain, an identical stimulus that is presented multiple times won’t cause exactly the same activity. Sometimes the brain is more active, sometimes less. In fact, even the response to a single stimulus or event will fluctuate continuously.
Neural noise in autism
There are many sources of neural noise in the brain. These include how the neurons become excited and calm again, changes in attention and arousal levels, and biochemical processes at the cellular level, among others. An allistic brain has mechanisms to manage and use this noise. For instance, cells in the hippocampus (the brain’s memory system) can make use of neural noise to enhance memory encoding and recall.
Evidence for high neural noise in autism can be seen in electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, where increased levels of neural fluctuations were observed in autistic children. This means their neural activity is less predictable, showing a wider range of activity (higher ups and downs) in response to the same stimulus.
In simple terms, if we imagine the EEG responses like a sound wave, we would expect to see small ups and downs (amplitude) in allistic brains each time they encounter a stimulus. But autistic brains seem to show bigger ups and downs, demonstrating greater amplitude of neural noise.
Many studies have linked this noisy autistic brain with cognitive, social and behavioural difficulties.
But could noise be a bonus?
The diagnosis of autism has a long clinical history. A shift from the medical to a more social model has also seen advocacy for it to be reframed as a difference, rather than a disorder or deficit. This change has also entered autism research. Neuroaffirming research can examine the uniqueness and strengths of neurodivergence.
Psychology and perception researcher David Simmons and colleagues at the University of Glasgow were the first to suggest that while high neural noise is generally a disadvantage in autism, it can sometimes provide benefits due to a phenomenon called stochastic resonance. This is where optimal amounts of noise can enhance performance. In line with this theory, high neural noise in the autistic brain might enhance performance for some cognitive tasks.
Our 2023 research explores this idea. We recruited participants from the general population and investigated their performance on letter-detection tasks. At the same time, we measured their level of autistic traits.
We performed two letter-detection experiments (one in a lab and one online) where participants had to identify a letter when displayed among background visual static of various intensities.
By using the static, we added additional visual noise to the neural noise already present in our participants’ brains. We hypothesised the visual noise would push participants with low internal brain noise (or low autistic traits) to perform better (as suggested by previous research on stochastic resonance). The more interesting prediction was that noise would not help individuals who already had a lot of brain noise (that is, those with high autistic traits), because their own neural noise already ensured optimal performance.
Indeed, one of our experiments showed people with high neural noise (high autistic traits) did not benefit from additional noise. Moreover, they showed superior performance (greater accuracy) relative to people with low neural noise when the added visual static was low. This suggests their own neural noise already caused a natural stochastic resonance effect, resulting in better performance.
It is important to note we did not include clinically diagnosed autistic participants, but overall, we showed the theory of enhanced performance due to stochastic resonance in autism has merits.
Why this is important?
Autistic people face ignorance, prejudice and discrimination that can harm wellbeing. Poor mental and physical health, reduced social connections and increased “camouflaging” of autistic traits are some of the negative impacts that autistic people face.
So, research underlining and investigating the strengths inherent in autism can help reduce stigma, allow autistic people to be themselves and acknowledge autistic people do not require “fixing”.
The autistic brain is different. It comes with limitations, but it also has its strengths.
Pratik Raul, PhD candidiate, University of Canberra; Jeroen van Boxtel, Associate professor, University of Canberra, and Jovana Acevska, Honours Graduate Student, University of Canberra
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Black Bean & Butternut Balti
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Protein, fiber, and pungent polyphenols abound in this tasty dish that’s good for your gut, heart, brain, and more:
You will need
- 2 cans (each 14 oz or thereabouts) black beans, drained and rinsed (or: 2 cups black beans, cooked, drained, and rinsed)
- 1 butternut squash, peeled and cut into ½” cubes
- 1 cauliflower, cut into florets
- 1 red onion, finely chopped
- 1 can (14 oz or thereabouts) chopped tomatoes
- 1 cup coconut milk
- ½ bulb garlic, crushed
- 1″ piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
- 1 fresh red chili (or multiply per your preference and the strength of your chilis), finely chopped
- 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 1 tbsp garam masala
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 2 tsp ground coriander
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- 1 tsp ground paprika
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Juice of ½ lemon
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400℉ / 200℃.
2) Toss the squash and cauliflower in a little olive oil, to coat evenly. No need to worry about seasoning, because these are going into the curry later and will get plenty there.
3) Roast them on a baking tray lined with baking paper for about 25 minutes.
You can enjoy a 10-minute break for the first 10 minutes of that, before continuing, such that the timing will be perfect:
4) Heat a little oil in a sauté pan (or anything that’s suitable for both frying and adding volume; we’re going to be using the space later; everything is going in here!) and fry the onion on medium for about 5 minutes, stirring well.
5) Add the spices/seasonings, including the garlic, ginger, and chili, and stir well to combine.
6) Add the tomatoes, beans, and coconut milk, and simmer for 10 minutes. You can add a little water at any time if it seems to need it.
7) Stir in the roasted vegetables (they should be finished now), and heat through. Add the lemon juice and stir.
8) Serve as-is, or with your preferred carbohydrate (we recommend our Tasty Versatile Rice recipe), or if you have time, keep it warm for a while until you’re ready to use it (the flavors will benefit from this time, if available).
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Chickpeas vs Black Beans – Which is Healthier?
- Butternut Squash vs Pumpkin – Which is Healthier?
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← 5/5 today!
Take care!
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Coach’s Plan – by Mike Kavanagh
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A sports coach’s job is to prepare a plan, give it to the player(s), and hold them accountable to it. Change the strategy if needs be, call the shots. The job of the player(s) is then to follow those instructions.
If you have trouble keeping yourself accountable, Kavanagh argues that it can be good to separate how you approach things.
Not just “coach yourself”, but put yourself entirely in the coach’s shoes, as though you were a separate person, then switch back, and follow those instructions, trusting in your coach’s guidance.
The book also provides illustrative examples and guides the reader through some potential pitfalls—for example, what happens when morning you doesn’t want to do the things that evening you decided would be best?
The absolute backbone of this method is that it takes away the paralysing self-doubt that can occur when we second-guess ourselves mid-task.
In short, this book will fire up your enthusiasm and give you a reliable fall-back for when your motivation’s flagging.
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Staying Sane In A Hyper-Connected World
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Staying Sane In A Hyper-Connected World
There’s a war over there, a genocide in progress somewhere else, and another disease is ravaging the population of somewhere most Americans would struggle to point out on the map. Not only that, but that one politician is at it again, and sweeping wildfires are not doing climate change any favors.
To borrow an expression from Gen-Z…
“Oof”.
A Very Modern Mental Health Menace
For thousands of years, we have had wars and genocides and plagues and corrupt politicians and assorted major disasters. Dire circumstances are not new to us as a species. So what is new?
As some reactionary said during the dot-com boom, “the Internet doesn’t make people stupid; it just makes their stupidity more accessible”.
The same is true now of The Horrors™.
The Internet doesn’t, by and large, make the world worse. But what it does do is make the bad things much, much more accessible.
Understanding and empathy are not bad things, but watch out…
- When soldiers came home from the First World War, those who hadn’t been there had no conception of the horrors that had been endured. That made it harder for the survivors to get support. That was bad.
- Nowadays, while mass media covering horrors certainly doesn’t convey the half of it, even the half it does convey can be overwhelming. This is also bad.
The insidious part is: while people are subjectively reporting good physical/mental health, the reports of the symptoms of poor physical/mental health from the same population do not agree:
Stress in America 2023: A nation grappling with psychological impacts of collective trauma
Should we just not watch the news?
In principle that’s an option, but it’s difficult to avoid, unless you truly live under a rock, and also do not frequent any social media at all. And besides, isn’t it our duty as citizens of this world to stay informed? How else can we make informed choices?
Staying informed, mindfully
There are steps that can be taken to keep ourselves informed, while protecting our mental health:
- Choose your sources wisely. Primary sources (e.g. tweets and videos from people who are there) will usually be most authentic, but also most traumatizing. Dispassionate broadsheets may gloss over or misrepresent things more (something that can be countered a bit by reading an opposing view from a publication you hate on principle), but will offer more of an emotional buffer.
- Boundary your consumption of the news. Set a timer and avoid doomscrolling. Your phone (or other device) may help with this if you set a screentime limit per app where you consume that kind of media.
- Take (again, boundaried) time to reflect. If you don’t, your brain will keep grinding at it “like a fork in the garbage disposal”. Talking about your feelings on the topic with a trusted person is great; journaling is also a top-tier more private option.
- If you feel helpless, help. Taking even small actions to help in the face of suffering somewhere else (e.g. donating to relief funds, engaging in advocacy / hounding your government about it), can help alleviate feelings of anguish and helplessness. And of course, as a bonus, it actually helps in the real world too.
- When you relax, relax fully. Even critical care doctors need downtime, nobody can be “always on” without burning out. So whatever distracts and relaxes you completely, make sure to make time for that too.
Want to know more?
That’s all we have room for today, but you might like to check out:
- Distressing images and videos can take a toll on our mental health. How can we stay informed without being traumatised?
- PTSD expert on how to protect yourself and your kids from overexposure to war images from the Mideast
You also might like our previous main features:
- C-PTSD, And What To Do When Life Genuinely Sucks
- A Surprisingly Powerful Tool: Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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