If You Want Better Cognitive Health Later, Improve/Protect These Things Now

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

Keep your eyes and ears open (keep your mind open, too)

A new study from Sweden has shown a link between good hearing and good vision in older adults (looking especially at the changes between the ages of 65 years and 75 years), and better cognitive health outcomes (that is to say, less age-related cognitive decline is experienced by those with good hearing and vision, than by those with hearing loss and/or vision loss).

Both of those two things, in turn, were influenced by education level, which may suggest that ongoing learning has a protective effect too. And while in the US, “education level” is often a very strong indicator of someone’s financial standing, in Sweden, it is arguably less so—which suggests that it may really be (at least in part) the education level itself that’s relevant, not merely the socioeconomic class for reasons of financial security (and financial security being necessary for good healthcare—which is again, still a factor, but somewhat less of a factor in Sweden than in the US).

Note: the study included data from older people throughout Europe, but the vast majority of the study participants were from Sweden and Denmark, countries that are well-known for their very high health-related quality of life scores.

Read in full: Better hearing and vision linked to stronger cognitive health in older adults

Related: 12 Questions For Better Brain Health

Atherosclerosis: His & Hers?

Hormones affect a lot of things that people don’t commonly associate them with, and heart disease risk is one of those things.

While it’s been well-established for some time that hormones affect CVD risk in general, and heart attack risk in particular, it’s now been discovered that the physical attributes of arterial plaque differ according to sex:

❝Men tend to develop cardiovascular diseases earlier and are more susceptible, often showing lipid-rich plaques and bleeding.

In contrast, women—possibly due to protective effects of pre-menopausal hormones—typically develop carotid stenosis later, with plaque erosion being more common❞

Specifically, for those who like to know the technical ins and outs: estrogen promotes more osteogenic smooth muscle cells, macrophages that help regulate the immune response, and endothelial cells that change into mesenchymal cells, while testosterone promotes more chondrocyte-like smooth muscle cells, macrophages involved in tissue remodeling, and angiogenic endothelial cells that promote the formation of new blood vessels.

Or, in simpler English: things get built differently, which means that when things go wrong, they go wrong differently, too.

Little wonder that treatment efficacy of certain medications varies so much by sex!

Read in full: Sex differences in carotid artery plaques and stroke symptoms revealed in new study

Related: Statins: His & Hers?

Are you as stressed as the rest?

Over in the UK, there’s a big debate presently about whether mental health issues are being overdiagnosed—the idea seems to be that if a sufficiently large number of people are being diagnosed with something, then surely most of them do not really have it. This logic relies on an assumption that mental health (good or bad) is distributed fairly and conservatively amongst the population with only a tiny minority of randomly-lucky people getting bad mental health, as some sort of immutable law of the universe, with the percentages of the distribution remaining more or less the same over time. It doesn’t account for the fact that if things are happening that adversely affect many people, then many people’s health will suffer, including their mental health.

In the US, meanwhile, there’s a growing mental health crisis too. We may hypothesize that this is for “out of the pandemic, into the economic crisis” reasons (i.e. things that adversely affect many people), but that’s just a hypothesis, of course. What’s not a hypothesis, and is actual data, is that stress levels are rising amongst the American population.

And while any individual stressful event can be managed and soon we get to the other side of it in one piece, chronic stress has knock-on deleterious effects for the rest of health:

Read in full: Nearly half of Americans are stressed at least once a week, and one in six are stressed every day

Related: How To Reduce Chronic Stress

Take care!