Does This New Machine Cure Depression?
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Let us first talk briefly about the slightly older tech that this may replace, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
TMS involves electromagnetic fields to stimulate the left half of the brain and inhibit the right half of the brain. It sounds like something from the late 19th century—“cure your melancholy with the mystical power of magnetism”—but the thing is, it works:
The main barriers to its use are that the machine itself is expensive, and it has to be done in a clinic by a trained clinician. Which, if it were treating one’s heart, say, would not be so much of an issue, but when treating depression, there is a problem that depressed people are not the most likely to commit to (and follow through with) going somewhere probably out-of-town regularly to get a treatment, when merely getting out of the door was already a challenge and motivation is thin on the ground to start with.
Thus, antidepressant medications are more often the go-to for cost-effectiveness and adherence. Of course, some will work better than others for different people, and some may not work at all in the case of what is generally called “treatment-resistant depression”:
Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!
Transcranial stimulation… At home?
Move over transcranial magnetic stimulation; it’s time for transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS).
First, what it’s not: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Rather, it uses a very low current.
What it is: a small and portable headset (as opposed to the big machine to go sit in for TMS) that one can use at home. Here’s an example product on Amazon, though there are more stylish versions around, this is the same basic technology.
In a recent study, 45% of those who received treatment with this device experienced remission in 10 weeks, significantly beating placebo (bearing in mind that placebo effect is strongest when it comes to invisible ailments such as depression).
See also: How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself ← this explains more about how the placebo effect works, to the extent that it can even be an adjuvant tool to augment “real” therapies
And as for the study, here it is:
…which rather cuts through the “depressed people don’t make it to the clinic consistently, if at all” problem. Of course, it still requires adherence to its use at home, for example three 30-minute sessions per week, but honestly, “lie/sit still” is likely within the abilities of the majority of depressed people. However…
Important note: you remember we said “in 10 weeks”? That may be critical, because shorter studies (e.g. 6 weeks) have previously returned without such glowing results:
Home-Use Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for the Treatment of a Major Depressive Episode
This means that if you get this tech for yourself or a loved one, it’ll be necessary to persist for likely 10 weeks, certainly more than 6 weeks, and not abandon it after a few sessions when it hasn’t been life-changing yet. And that may be more of a challenge for a depressed person, so likely an “accountability buddy” of some kind is in order (partner, close friend, etc) to help ensure adherence and generally bug you/them into doing it consistently.
And then, of course, you/they might still be in the 55% of people for whom it didn’t work. And that does suck, but random antidepressant medications (i.e., not personalized) don’t fare much better, statistically.
Want something else against depression meanwhile?
Here are some strategies that not only can significantly help, but also are tailored to be actually doable while depressed:
The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← written by your writer who has previously suffered extensively from depression and knows what it is like
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Men have a biological clock too. Here’s what’s more likely when dads are over 50
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We hear a lot about women’s biological clock and how age affects the chance of pregnancy.
New research shows men’s fertility is also affected by age. When dads are over 50, the risk of pregnancy complications increases.
Data from more than 46 million births in the United States between 2011 and 2022 compared fathers in their 30s with fathers in their 50s.
While taking into account the age of the mother and other factors known to affect pregnancy outcomes, the researchers found every ten-year increase in paternal age was linked to more complications.
The researchers found that compared to couples where the father was aged 30–39, for couples where the dad was in his 50s, there was a:
- 16% increased risk of preterm birth
- 14% increased risk of low birth weight
- 13% increase in gestational diabetes.
The older fathers were also twice as likely to have used assisted reproductive technology, including IVF, to conceive than their younger counterparts.
Steven van Loy/Unsplash Dads are getting older
In this US study, the mean age of all fathers increased from 30.8 years in 2011 to 32.1 years in 2022.
In that same period, the proportion of men aged 50 years or older fathering a child increased from 1.1% to 1.3%.
We don’t know the proportion of men over 50 years who father children in Australia, but data shows the average age of fathers has increased.
In 1975 the median age of Australian dads was 28.6 years. This jumped to 33.7 years in 2022.
How male age affects getting pregnant
As we know from media reports of celebrity dads, men produce sperm from puberty throughout life and can father children well into old age.
However, there is a noticeable decline in sperm quality from about age 40.
Female partners of older men take longer to achieve pregnancy than those with younger partners.
A study of the effect of male age on time to pregnancy showed women with male partners aged 45 or older were almost five times more likely to take more than a year to conceive compared to those with partners aged 25 or under. More than three quarters (76.8%) of men under the age of 25 years impregnated their female partners within six months, compared with just over half (52.9%) of men over the age of 45.
Pooled data from ten studies showed that partners of older men are also more likely to experience miscarriage. Compared to couples where the male was aged 25 to 29 years, paternal age over 45 years increased the risk of miscarriage by 43%.
Older men are more likely to need IVF
Outcomes of assisted reproductive technology, such as IVF, are also influenced by the age of the male partner.
A review of studies in couples using assisted reproductive technologies found paternal age under 40 years reduced the risk of miscarriage by about 25% compared to couples with men aged over 40.
Having a male under 40 years also almost doubled the chance of a live birth per treatment cycle. With a man over 40, 17.6% of treatment rounds resulted in a live birth, compared to 28.4% when the male was under 40.
How does male age affect the health outcomes of children?
As a result of age-related changes in sperm DNA, the children of older fathers have increased risk of a number of conditions. Autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and leukaemia have been linked to the father’s advanced years.
A review of studies assessing the impact of advanced paternal age reported that children of older fathers have increased rates of psychiatric disease and behavioural impairments.
But while the increased risk of adverse health outcomes linked to older paternal age is real, the magnitude of the effect is modest. It’s important to remember that an increase in a very small risk is still a small risk and most children of older fathers are born healthy and develop well.
Improving your health can improve your fertility
In addition to the effects of older age, some chronic conditions that affect fertility and reproductive outcomes become more common as men get older. They include obesity and diabetes which affect sperm quality by lowering testosterone levels.
While we can’t change our age, some lifestyle factors that increase the risk of pregnancy complications and reduce fertility, can be tackled. They include:
- smoking
- recreational drug taking
- anabolic steroid use
- heavy alcohol consumption.
Get the facts about the male biological clock
Research shows men want children as much as women do. And most men want at least two children.
Yet most men lack knowledge about the limitations of female and male fertility and overestimate the chance of getting pregnant, with and without assisted reproductive technologies.
We need better public education, starting at school, to improve awareness of the impact of male and female age on reproductive outcomes and help people have healthy babies.
For men wanting to improve their chance of conceiving, the government-funded sites Healthy Male and Your Fertility are a good place to start. These offer evidence-based and accessible information about reproductive health, and tips to improve your reproductive health and give your children the best start in life.
Karin Hammarberg, Senior Research Fellow, Global and Women’s Health, School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Moringa Oleifera Against CVD, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s & Arsenic?
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The Healthiest Drumstick
Moringa oleifera is a tree, whose leaves and pods have medicinal properties (as well as simply being very high in nutrients). It’s also called the drumstick tree in English, but equally often it’s referred to simply as Moringa. It has enjoyed use in traditional medicine for thousands of years, and its many benefits have caught scientists’ attention more recently. For an overview before we begin, see:
Now, let’s break it down…
Anti-inflammatory
It is full of antioxidants, which we’ll come to shortly, and they have abundant anti-inflammatory effects. Research into these so far has mostly beennon-human animal studies or else in vitro, hence the guarded “potential” for now:
Potential anti-inflammatory phenolic glycosides from the medicinal plant Moringa oleifera fruits
Speaking of potential though, it has been found to also reduce neuroinflammation specifically, which is good, because not every anti-inflammatory agent does that:
Antioxidant
It was hard to find studies that talked about its antioxidant powers that didn’t also add “and this, and this, and this” because of all its knock-on benefits, for example:
❝The results indicate that this plant possesses antioxidant, hypolipidaemic and antiatherosclerotic activities and has therapeutic potential for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases.
These effects were at degrees comparable to those of simvastatin.❞
~ Dr. Pilaipark Chumark et al.
Likely a lot of its benefits in these regards come from the plant’s very high quercetin content, because quercetin does that too:
Quercetin reduces blood pressure in hypertensive subjects
For more about quercetin, you might like our previous main feature:
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
Antidiabetic
It also has been found to lower fasting blood sugar levels by 13.5%:
Anti-arsenic?
We put a question mark there, because studies into this have only been done with non-human animals such as mice and rats so far, largely because there are not many human volunteers willing to sign up for arsenic poisoning (and no ethics board would pass it anyway).
However, as arsenic contamination in some foods (such as rice) is a big concern, this is very promising. Here are some example studies, with mice and rats respectively:
- Protective effects of Moringa oleifera Lam. leaves against arsenic-induced toxicity in mice
- Therapeutic effects of Moringa oleifera on arsenic-induced toxicity in rats
Is it safe?
A popular food product through parts of Africa and (especially) South & West Asia, it has a very good safety profile. Generally the only health-related criticism of it is that it contains some anti-nutrients (that hinder bioavailability of its nutrients), but the nutrients outweigh the antinutrients sufficiently to render this a trifling trivium.
In short: as ever, do check with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure, but in general terms, this is about as safe as most vegan whole foods; it just happens to also be something of a superfood, which puts it into the “nutraceutical” category. See also:
Review of the Safety and Efficacy of Moringa oleifera
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Healing After Loss – by Martha Hickman
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Mental health is also just health, and this book’s about an underexamined area of mental health. We say “underexamined”, because for something that affects almost everyone sooner or later, there’s not nearly so much science being done about it as other areas of mental health.
This is not a book of science per se, but it is a very useful one. The format is:
Each calendar day of the year, there’s a daily reflection, consisting of:
- A one-liner insight about grief, quoted from somebody
- A page of thoughts about this
- A one-liner summary, often formulated as a piece of advice
The book is not religious in content, though the author does occasionally make reference to God, only in the most abstract way that shouldn’t be offputting to any but the most stridently anti-religious readers.
Bottom line: if this is a subject near to your heart, then you will almost certainly benefit from this daily reader.
Click here to check out Healing After Loss, and indeed heal after loss
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Pistachios vs Pine Nuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pistachios to pine nuts, we picked the pistachios.
Why?
First looking at the macros, pistachios have nearly 2x the protein while pine nuts have nearly 2x the fat. The fats are healthy in moderation (mostly polyunsaturated, a fair portion of monounsaturated, and a little saturated), but we’re going to value the protein content higher. Also, pistachios have approximately 2x the carbs, and/but nearly 3x the fiber. All in all, we’ll call this section a moderate win for pistachios.
When it comes to vitamins, pistachios have more of vitamins A, B1, B5, B6, B9, and C, while pine nuts have more of vitamins B2, B3, E, K, and choline. All in all, pistachios are scraping a 6:5 win here, or we could call it a tie if we want to value pine nuts’ vitamins more (due to the difference in how many foods each vitamin is found in, and thus the likelihood of having a deficiency or not).
In the category of minerals, pistachios have more calcium, copper, potassium, and selenium, while pine nuts have more iron, magnesium, manganese, and zinc. This would be a tie if we just call it 4:4, but what’s worth noting is that while both of these nuts are a good source of most of the minerals mentioned, pine nuts aren’t a very good source of calcium or selenium, so we’re going to declare this section a very marginal win for pistachios.
Adding up the moderate win, the scraped win, and the barely scraped win, all adds up to a win for pistachios. However, as you might have noticed, both are great so do enjoy both if you can!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Take care!
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Can You Step Backwards Without Your Foot Or Torso Turning Out?
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Walking backwards is often overlooked, but research shows it can enhance forward walking, especially in stroke patients; it has other benefits for everyone else, too. The physiotherapists at Fitness4Life Physical Therapy explain:
…and one step back
How it works: walking backwards heightens proprioception and stimulates muscles, improving balance and posture. Additionally, our daily lives tend to involve forward-leaning postures, causing upper back bending, and walking backwards helps counterbalance this.
Extra benefits: training to walk backwards can reduce the risk of falls, as stepping back is a common movement that is often untrained.
Exercise: try doing backwards lunges, to assess your skill and balance while moving backward. If foot rotation or torso rotation occurs during the exercise, then there’s room for improvement. Correcting these movements is then simply a matter of practicing backward lunges without turning.
10almonds tip: any exercise is only as good as your will to actually do it. For this reason, dancing is a great exercise in this case, as almost all forms of dance involve stepping backwards (in order to have steps without travelling somewhere, forwards steps are usually balanced with backwards ones)
For more on all this, plus a visual demonstration of the exercise, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Fall Special ← About how to avoid falling, and how to avoid (and failing that, at least minimize) injury if you do fall. If you think this only happens to other/older people, remember, there’s a first time for everything, so it is better to be prepared in advance!
Take care!
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How stigma perpetuates substance use
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In 2022, 54.6 million people 12 and older in the United States needed substance use disorder (SUD) treatment. Of those, only 24 percent received treatment, according to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
SUD is a treatable, chronic medical condition that causes people to have difficulty controlling their use of legal or illegal substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, prescription opioids, heroin, methamphetamine, or cocaine. Using these substances may impact people’s health and ability to function in their daily life.
While help is available for people with SUD, the stigma they face—negative attitudes, stereotypes, and discrimination—often leads to shame, worsens their condition, and keeps them from seeking help.
Read on to find out more about how stigma perpetuates substance use.
Stigma can keep people from seeking treatment
Suzan M. Walters, assistant professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, has seen this firsthand in her research on stigma and health disparities.
She explains that people with SUD may be treated differently at a hospital or another health care setting because of their drug use, appearance (including track marks on their arms), or housing situation, which may discourage them from seeking care.
“And this is not just one case; this is a trend that I’m seeing with people who use drugs,” Walters tells PGN. “Someone said, ‘If I overdose, I’m not even going to the [emergency room] to get help because of this, because of the way I’m treated. Because I know I’m going to be treated differently.’”
People experience stigma not only because of their addiction, but also because of other aspects of their identities, Walters says, including “immigration or race and ethnicity. Hispanic folks, brown folks, Black folks [are] being treated differently and experiencing different outcomes.”
And despite the effective harm reduction tools and treatment options available for SUD, research has shown that stigma creates barriers to access.
Syringe services programs, for example, provide infectious disease testing, Narcan, and fentanyl test strips. These programs have been proven to save lives and reduce the spread of HIV and hepatitis C. SSPs don’t increase crime, but they’re often mistakenly “viewed by communities as potential settings of drug-related crime;” this myth persists despite decades of research proving that SSPs make communities safer.
To improve this bias, Walters says it’s helpful for people to take a step back and recognize how we use substances, like alcohol, in our own lives, while also humanizing those with addiction. She says, “There’s a lack of understanding that these are human beings and people … [who] are living lives, and many times very functional lives.”
Misconceptions lead to stigma
SUD results from changes in the brain that make it difficult for a person to stop using a substance. But research has shown that a big misconception that leads to stigma is that addiction is a choice and reflects a person’s willpower.
Michelle Maloney, executive clinical director of mental health and addiction recovery services for Rogers Behavioral Health, tells PGN that statements such as “you should be able to stop” can keep a patient from seeking treatment. This belief goes back to the 1980s and the War on Drugs, she adds.
“We think about public service announcements that occurred during that time: ‘Just say no to drugs,’” Maloney says. “People who have struggled, whether that be with nicotine, alcohol, or opioids, [know] it’s not as easy as just saying no.”
Stigma can worsen addiction
Stigma can also lead people with SUD to feel guilt and shame and blame themselves for their medical condition. These feelings, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, may “reinforce drug-seeking behavior.”
In a 2020 article, Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of NIDA, said that “when internalized, stigma and the painful isolation it produces encourage further drug taking, directly exacerbating the disease.”
Overall, research agrees that stigma harms people experiencing addiction and can make the condition worse. Experts also agree that debunking myths about the condition and using non-stigmatizing language (like saying someone is a person with a substance use disorder, not an addict) can go a long way toward reducing stigma.
Resources to mitigate stigma:
- CDC: Stigma Reduction
- National Harm Reduction Coalition: Respect To Connect: Undoing Stigma
- NIDA:
- Shatterproof: Addiction language guide (Disclosure: The Public Good Projects, PGN’s parent company, is a Shatterproof partner)
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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