Winter Wellness & The Pills That Increase Your Alzheimer’s Risk

This week in health news…

Do not go gentle into that good night

As wildfires rage in California, snow is falling from Texas to Georgia, meaning that a lot of people are facing weather they’re not accustomed to, in houses that were not built for it. And that’s the lucky ones; there are many thousands of people who are homeless, of whom many will die.

Hopefully all our readers are safe, but it pays to watch out for the signs of hypothermia as it is a condition that really sneaks up on people and, in the process, takes away their ability to notice the hypothermia. You and your loved ones are not immune to this, so it’s good to keep an eye on each other, looking out for:

• Shivering, first ← when this stops, assuming it’s not because the temperature has risen, it is often a sign of hypothermia entering a later stage, in which the body is no longer responding appropriately to the cold
• Slurred speech or mumbling
• Slow, shallow breathing
• A weak pulse
• Clumsiness or lack of coordination
• Drowsiness or very low energy
• Confusion or memory loss
• Loss of consciousness
• In infants, bright red, cold skin

How cold is too cold? It doesn’t even have to be sub-zero. According to the CDC, temperatures of 4℃ (40℉) can be low enough to cause hypothermia.

Read in full: The warning signs to notice if someone has hypothermia

Related: Cold Weather Health Risks

Lethal lottery of pathogens

In Minnesota, hospital emergency room waiting times have skyrocketed since yesterday (at time of writing), with 40% of Minnesota’s 1,763 flu-related hospitalizations this fall and winter occurring in the same week, according to yesterday’s report. To put it further into perspective, 17 out of 20 of this season’s flu outbreaks have occurred in the past two weeks.

And that’s just the flu, without considering COVID, RSV, and Norovirus, which are also all running rampant in MN right now.

The advice presently is:

❝Go to the ER if you are super-sick. If you are not super-sick, go to urgent care, go to your clinic, schedule a virtual appointment.❞

And if you’re not in Minneapolis? These stats won’t apply, but definitely consider, before going to the hospital, whether you might leave sicker than you arrived, and plan accordingly, making use of telehealth where reasonably possible.

Read in full: Minnesota ERs stressed by “quad-demic” of COVID, flu, RSV, norovirus

Related: Move over, COVID and Flu! We Have “Hybrid Viruses” To Contend With Now

Sleep, but at what cost?

This was a study looking at the effects of sleeping pills on the brain, specifically zolpidem (most well-known by its brand name of Ambien).

What they found is that while it does indeed effectively induce sleep, part of how it does that is suppressing norepinephrine oscillations (which might otherwise potentially wake you up, though in healthy people these oscillations and the micro-arousals that they cause shouldn’t disrupt sleep at all, and are just considered part of our normal sleep cycles), which oscillations are necessary to generate the pumping action required to move cerebrospinal fluid through the glymphatic system while asleep.

This is a big problem, because the glymphatic system is almost entirely responsible for keeping the brain free from waste products such as beta-amyloids (whose build-up is associated with Alzheimer’s disease and is considered to be a significant part of Alzheimer’s pathogensesis) and alpha-synuclein (same but for Parkinson’s disease), amongst others:

Read in full: Common sleeping pill may pave way for disorders like Alzheimer’s

Related: How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)

Take care!