Finding Geriatric Doctors for Seniors
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
❝[Can you write about] the availability of geriatric doctors Sometimes I feel my primary isn’t really up on my 70 year old health issues. I would love to find a doctor that understands my issues and is able to explain them to me. Ie; my worsening arthritis in regards to food I eat; in regards to meds vs homeopathic solutions.! Thanks!❞
That’s a great topic, worthy of a main feature! Because in many cases, it’s not just about specialization of skills, but also about empathy, and the gap between studying a condition and living with a condition.
About arthritis, we’re going to do a main feature specifically on that quite soon, but meanwhile, you might like our previous article:
Keep Inflammation At Bay (arthritis being an inflammatory condition)
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Take Care Of Your Lymphatic System To Beat Cognitive Decline
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First of all, for any unfamiliar with the lymphatic system, it’s mostly the body’s clean-up system (as well as a big part of the body’s anticancer system).
See: The Lymphatic System Against Cancer & More
It may not be the most glamorous job, but it’s certainly an essential one.
There’s no lymph in the brain, but…
Because of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) that keeps the astonishingly sensitive brain as safe as it can from unwanted things, there are many aspects of our physiology that only happen inside the brain, or only happen outside of it, as the compounds in question may be too large to get through the BBB.
The lymphatic system is, in and of itself, an entirely outside-of-the-brain affair. So, how does stuff get cleaned out from the brain (such as beta-amyloid and alpha-synuclein clearance, to avoid Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, respectively)?
The glymphatic system (a portmanteau of glial cells doing the job of the lymphatic system) is the brain’s own cleanup crew, and we wrote about it here:
How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
Why lymph still matters for the brain
Although the glymphatic system is doing a (hopefully) fine job of scrubbing up the brain, if the lymphatic system isn’t working at least as well, then this becomes the equivalent of what would happen if you at home were very attentive to taking the trash out, but the garbage disposal crews stopped doing their job, or did it much less well than they need to. Soon, you’d end up with a mountain of trash at home, even though you were doing your part correctly.
In short: the glymphatic system needs to pass the waste on somewhere, and the lymphatic system is its go-to.
You may be wondering about the role of blood in all of this, and the answer is that no part of any of the above systems can do its job without adequate oxygenation, and our blood also assists in the transport of things removed—which is one of the reasons why there are blood-based Alzheimer’s tests that can be done; they measure certain markers of neurodegeneration that become present in the blood having left the brain:
Early Dementia Screening From Your Blood & More ← the “and more” is actually quite interesting, but it’s the blood we’re interested in for this section
What can be done about it
Our first two links up above, about the lymphatic and glymphatic systems, respectively, also tell how to look after each of them, but we’ll mention a few salient pointers here.
For the lymphatic system:
- do lymphatic massage
- exercise, with a focus on maximizing movement
- eat an anti-inflammatory diet
For the glymphatic system:
- do vagal massage (Vagal! Not vaginal, which will not help! Or rather: it won’t help the glymphatic system, anyway)
- exercise, and/but also rest well (good quality sleep)
- eat omega-3 fatty acids
For more details and suggestions on each though, do check out:
Lymphatic health primer | Glymphatic health primer
How this was discovered
Until as recently as 2014, it was not known that there was any part of the lymphatic system around the brain, waiting to take things from the glymphatic system. Since then, research has slowly been done about the relationship between the two, how things work, and what affects what and how.
Most recently (the study was published two days ago, at time of writing this) it was discovered that, in mice at least, improving lymphatic function just outside of the brain (the meningeal lymphatic vessels, responsible for draining waste from the brain) improves memory.
Aged mice who underwent a process that rejuvenated the meningeal lymphatic vessels, performed better in memory tests afterwards.
How this worked, step-by-step:
- The mice were given a special protein that rejuvenated the meningeal lymphatic vessels¹
- The lymphatic vessels were then able to do their job better
- This meant that the glial cells of the glymphatic system were no longer drowning in excess stuff
- This reduced levels of a protein that says “help, too much stuff!” and starts inhibiting everything it can to try to cope²
- This meant that neural activity was no longer being suppressed, and memory improved
Technical bits for those who want it:
¹ We’re not being secretive about what this special protein was; it’s just that the special protein is called adeno-associated virus 1 cytomegalovirus murine vascular endothelial growth factor C, or “AAV1-CMV-mVEGF-C” for short, so for readability, “a special protein” does the job. Suffice it to say, a) you can’t exactly buy AAV1-CMV-mVEGF-C on Amazon, and b) you wouldn’t want it anyway, you’d want its close cousin AAV1-CMV-hVEGF-C (“m” for murine, i.e. mousey, vs “h” for human)
² This one’s just called interleukin-6 (IL-6); perhaps you’ve heard of interleukin; we’ve mentioned it sometimes before.
You can read the paper in its entirety here; if you don’t mind reading very technical stuff, it is very interesting:
Meningeal lymphatics-microglia axis regulates synaptic physiology
Enjoy!
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Plum vs Persimmon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing plum to persimmon, we picked the plum.
Why?
Looking at the macros first, persimmon has 3x the carbs for only the same amount of fiber, on account of which plum has the lower glycemic index, so we’ll go with plum here, though your opinion could vary.
In terms of vitamins, it’s much less subjective: plums have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, E, K, and choline, while persimmon has more vitamin C. So, unless you have scurvy, plums will be the best choice for most people.
In the category of minerals, plums have more copper, magnesium, manganese, and zinc, while persimmon has more calcium, iron, phosphorus, and potassium—thus, a 4:4 tie on minerals.
Adding up the sections gives an overall win for plums, but of course, enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
PS: plums have an extra bonus too; check out the link below…
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer ← plums kill cancer cells while sparing healthy ones
Enjoy!
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Long-acting contraceptives seem to be as safe as the pill when it comes to cancer risk
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Many women worry hormonal contraceptives have dangerous side-effects including increased cancer risk. But this perception is often out of proportion with the actual risks.
So, what does the research actually say about cancer risk for contraceptive users?
And is your cancer risk different if, instead of the pill, you use long-acting reversible contraceptives? These include intrauterine devices or IUDs (such as Mirena), implants under the skin (such as Implanon), and injections (such as Depo Provera).
Our new study, conducted by the University of Queensland and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked at this question.
We found long-acting contraceptives seem to be as safe as the pill when it comes to cancer risk (which is good news) but not necessarily any safer than the pill.
Peakstock/Shutterstock Some hormonal contraceptives take the form of implants under the skin. WiP-Studio/Shutterstock How does the contraceptive pill affect cancer risk?
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, which compiles evidence on cancer causes, has concluded that oral contraceptives have mixed effects on cancer risk.
Using the oral contraceptive pill:
- slightly increases your risk of breast and cervical cancer in the short term, but
- substantially reduces your risk of cancers of the uterus and ovaries in the longer term.
Our earlier work showed the pill was responsible for preventing far more cancers overall than it contributed to.
In previous research we estimated that in 2010, oral contraceptive pill use prevented over 1,300 cases of endometrial and ovarian cancers in Australian women.
It also prevented almost 500 deaths from these cancers in 2013. This is a reduction of around 25% in the deaths that could have occurred that year if women hadn’t taken the pill.
In contrast, we calculated the pill may have contributed to around 15 deaths from breast cancer in 2013, which is less than 0.5% of all breast cancer deaths in that year.
Previous work showed the pill was responsible for preventing far more cancers overall than it contributed to. Image Point Fr What about long-acting reversible contraceptives and cancer risk?
Long-acting reversible contraceptives – which include intrauterine devices or IUDs, implants under the skin, and injections – release progesterone-like hormones.
These are very effective contraceptives that can last from a few months (injections) up to seven years (intrauterine devices).
Notably, they don’t contain the hormone oestrogen, which may be responsible for some of the side-effects of the pill (including perhaps contributing to a higher risk of breast cancer).
Use of these long-acting contraceptives has doubled over the past decade, while the use of the pill has declined. So it’s important to know whether this change could affect cancer risk for Australian women.
Our new study of more than 1 million Australian women investigated whether long-acting, reversible contraceptives affect risk of invasive cancers. We compared the results to the oral contraceptive pill.
We used de-identified health records for Australian women aged 55 and under in 2002.
Among this group, about 176,000 were diagnosed with cancer between 2004 and 2013 when the oldest women were aged 67. We compared hormonal contraceptive use among these women who got cancer to women without cancer.
We found that long-term users of all types of hormonal contraception had around a 70% lower risk of developing endometrial cancer in the years after use. In other words, the risk of developing endometrial cancer is substantially lower among women who took hormonal contraception compared to those who didn’t.
For ovarian cancer, we saw a 50% reduced risk (compared to those who took no hormonal contraception) for women who were long-term users of the hormone-containing IUD.
The risk reduction was not as marked for the implants or injections, however few long-term users of these products developed these cancers in our study.
As the risk of endometrial and ovarian cancers increases with age, it will be important to look at cancer risk in these women as they get older.
What about breast cancer risk?
Our findings suggest that the risk of breast cancer for current users of long-acting contraceptives is similar to users of the pill.
However, the contraceptive injection was only associated with an increase in breast cancer risk after five years of use and there was no longer a higher risk once women stopped using them.
Our results suggested that the risk of breast cancer also reduces after stopping use of the contraceptive implants.
We will need to follow-up the women for longer to determine whether this is also the case for the IUD.
It is worth emphasising that the breast cancer risk associated with all hormonal contraceptives is very small.
About 30 in every 100,000 women aged 20 to 39 years develop breast cancer each year, and any hormonal contraceptive use would only increase this to around 36 cases per 100,000.
What about other cancers?
Our study did not show any consistent relationships between contraceptive use and other cancers types. However, we only at looked at invasive cancers (meaning those that start at a primary site but have the potential to spread to other parts of the body).
A recent French study found that prolonged use of the contraceptive injection increased the risk of meningioma (a type of benign brain tumour).
However, meningiomas are rare, especially in young women. There are around two cases in every 100,000 in women aged 20–39, so the extra number of cases linked to contraceptive injection use was small.
The French study found the hormonal IUD did not increase meningioma risk (and they did not investigate contraceptive implants).
Benefits and side-effects
There are benefits and side-effects for all medicines, including contraceptives, but it is important to know most very serious side-effects are rare.
A conversation with your doctor about the balance of benefits and side-effects for you is always a good place to start.
Susan Jordan, Professor of Epidemiology, The University of Queensland; Karen Tuesley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland, and Penny Webb, Distinguished Scientist, Gynaecological Cancers Group, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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3 Appetite Suppressants Better Than Ozempic
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Dr. Annette Bosworth gives her recommendations, and explains why:
What and how
We’ll get straight to it; the recommendations are:
- Coffee, black, unsweetened: not only suppresses the appetite but also boosts the metabolism, increasing fat burn.
- Salt: especially for when fasting (as under such circumstances we may lose salts without replenishing them), a small taste of this can help satisfy taste buds while replenishing sodium and—depending on the salt—other minerals. For example, if you buy “low-sodium salt” in the supermarket, this is generally sodium chloride cut with potassium chloride and/or occasionally magnesium sulfate.
- Ketones (MCT oil): ketones can suppress hunger, particularly when fasting causes blood sugar levels to drop. Supplementing with MCT oil promotes ketone production in the liver, training the body to produce more ketones naturally, thus curbing appetite.
For more on these including the science of them, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Ozempic vs Five Natural Supplements
- Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety
- The Fruit That Can Specifically Reduce Belly Fat
Take care!
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A Therapeutic Journey – by Alain de Botton
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We’ve often featured The School of Life’s videos here on 10almonds, and most of those are written by (and often voiced by) Alain de Botton.
This book lays out the case for mental health being also just health, that no person is perfectly healthy all the time, and sometimes we all need a little help. While he does suggest seeking help from reliable outside sources, he also tells a lot about how we can improve things for ourselves along the way, whether by what we can control in our environment, or just what’s between our ears.
In the category of limitations, the book is written with the assumption that you are in a position to have access to a therapist of your choice, and in a sufficiently safe and stable life situation that there is a limit to how bad things can get.
The style is… Alain de Botton’s usual style. Well-written, clear, decisive, instructive, compassionate, insightful, thought-provoking.
Bottom line: this isn’t a book for absolutely everyone, but if your problems are moderate and your resources are comfortable, then this book has a lot of insights that can make your life more easy-going and joyful, without dropping the seriousness when appropriate.
Click here to check out A Therapeutic Journey, and perhaps begin one of your own!
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Butter vs Margarine
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Butter vs Margarine
Yesterday, we asked you for your (health-related) opinion on butter vs margarine, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- A little over 60% said butter is a health food and margarine is basically plastic with trans fats
- A little over 20% said that both are woeful and it’s better to avoid both
- A little over 10% said that margarine is a lighter option, and butter is a fast track to cardiovascular disease.
Comments included (we will summarize/paraphrase, for space):
- “…in moderation, though”
- “I’m vegan so I use vegan butter but I know it’s not great, so I use it sparingly”
- “butter is healthy if and only if it’s grass-fed”
- “margarine has unpronounceable ingredients”
To address those quickly:
- “…in moderation” is a stipulation with which one can rarely go too far wrong
- Same! Speaking for myself (your writer here, hi) and not for the company
- Grass-fed is indeed better; alas that so little of it is grass-fed, in the US!
- Butter contains eicosatrienoic acid, linolelaidic acid, and more*. Sometimes big words don’t mean that something is worse for the health, though!
So, what does the science say?
Butter is a health food: True or False?
True or False, depending on amount! Moderation is definitely key, but we’ll return to that (and why not to have more than a small amount of butter) later. But it is a rich source of many nutrients, iff it’s grass-fed, anyway.
The nutritional profile of something isn’t a thing that’s too contentious, so rather than take too much time on it, in this case we’ll point you back up to the scientific paper we linked above, or if you prefer a pop-science rendering, here’s a nice quick rundown:
7 Reasons to Switch to Grass-Fed Butter
Margarine is basically plastic with trans fats: True or False?
False and usually False now, respectively, contingently.
On the first part: chemically, it’s simply not “basically plastic” and everything in it is digestible
On the second part: it depends on the margarine, and here’s where it pays to read labels. Historically, margarines all used to be high in trans fats (which are indeed woeful for the health). Nowadays, since trans fats have such a (well-earned) bad press, there are increasingly many margarines with low (or no) trans fats, and depending on your country, it may be that all margarines no longer have such:
❝It’s a public health success story. Consumers no longer have to worry about reading product nutritional labels to see if they contain hydrogenated oils and trans fats. They can just know that they no longer do❞
Source: Margarines now nutritionally better than butter after hydrogenated oil ban
So this is one where the science is clear (trans fats are unequivocally bad), but the consumer information is not always (it may be necessary to read labels, to know whether a margarine is conforming to the new guidelines).
Butter is a fast track to cardiovascular disease: True or False?
True or False depending on amount. In moderation, predictably it’s not a big deal.
But for example, the World Health Organization recommends that saturated fats (of which butter is a generous source) make up no more than 10% of our calorie intake:
Source: Saturated fatty acid and trans-fatty acid intake for adults and children: WHO guideline
So if you have a 2000 kcal daily intake, that would mean consuming not more than 200 kcal from butter, which is approximately two tablespoons.
If you’d like a deeper look into the complexities of saturated fats (for and against), you might like our previous main feature specifically about such:
Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?
Enjoy!
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