How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
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Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
Alzheimer’s is just one cause of dementia, but it’s a very notable one, not least of all because it’s
- a) the most common cause of dementia, and
- b) a measurably terminal disease.
For that reason we’re focusing on Alzheimer’s today, although most of the advice will go for avoiding dementia in general.
First, some things not everyone knows about Alzheimer’s:
- Alzheimer’s is a terminal disease.
- People who get a diagnosis at age 60 are typically given 4–8 years to live.
- Some soldier on for as many as 20, but those are rare outliers.
- Alzheimer’s begins 20 years or more before other symptoms start to develop.
- This makes this information very relevant for younger people approaching 40, for example.
- Alzheimer’s accounts for 60–80% of dementia, and affects around 6% of people over 60.
- By the age of 65, that figure is 10%. By the age of 70, however, the percentage is still about the same—this is because of the mortality rate preventing the accumulation of Alzheimer’s patients over time.
Want to know more? Read: 2023 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts And Figures Special Report ← this is a very comprehensive downloadablereference, by the way, including a lot of information about diagnosis, treatmentpathways, and earlyinterventions.
Speaking of diagnosis…
Know what the symptoms are… and aren’t!
Forgetting your car keys can be frustrating. Forgetting them frequently can be worrying.
But: there’s a difference between forgetting your car keys, and forgetting what car keys are used for. The latter is the kind of memory loss that’s more of a red flag for Alzheimer’s.
Similarly: forgetting someone’s name can be embarrassing. Forgetting someone’s name, asking them, forgetting asking them, asking them again, forgetting again (lather rinse repeat) is more of a red flag for Alzheimer’s.
There are other symptoms too, some of them less commonly known:
❝Difficulty remembering recent conversations, names or events; apathy; and depression are often early symptoms. Communication problems, confusion, poor judgment and behavioral changes may occur next. Difficulty walking, speaking, and swallowing are common in the late stages of the disease❞
If you or a loved one are experiencing worrying symptoms: when it comes to diagnosis and intervention, sooner is a lot better than later, so do talk to your doctor.
As for reducing your risk? First, the obvious stuff:
The usual 5 things that go for almost everything:
- Have a good diet—the Mediterranean Diet is once again recommended (we expect this will not be a surprise to regular readers!)
- Get regular exercise—in the case of avoiding Alzheimer’s and other dementias, typically the most important thing here is heart health, so getting regular cardiovascular exercise, such walking, running, or dancing is great. Cycling too. Swimming, not so much. Not that swimming’s bad or anything, it’s just that when your body is horizontal, the heart has less work to do, especially in the upper part of the body, because it’s not defying gravity. Similarly, yoga is great for the health but won’t particularly help with this, nor will weight training.
- Get good sleep—as we get older, we tend to need less sleep, and tend more towards the lower end of the standard “7–9 hours” prescription, but getting at least those 7 hours makes a huge difference.
- Cut down (or eliminate) alcohol consumption—and especially avoid binge-drinking. While “binge-drinking” is typically associated with young people, that Christmas party where that one uncle gets very drunk is also binge-drinking, for example. Plus, heavy drinking in early life has also been correlated with higher risk of Alzheimer’s later.
- Don’t smoke. It’s bad for everything, and Alzheimer’s risk is no exception.
How much do lifestyle changes alone make a difference?
They make a big difference. This 2022 population-based cohort study (so: huge sample size) looked at people who had 4–5 of the healthy lifestyle factors being studied, vs people who had 0–1 of them. They found:
❝A healthy lifestyle was associated with a longer life expectancy among men and women, and they lived a larger proportion of their remaining years without Alzheimer’s dementia.❞
The numbers of years involved by the way ranged between 3 and 20 years, in terms of life expectancy and years without or with Alzheimer’s, with the average increase of healthy life years being approximately the same as the average increase in years. This is important, because:
A lot of people think “well if I’m going to go senile, I might as well [unhealthy choice that shortens lifespan]”, but they misunderstand a critical factor:
The unhealthy choices will reduce their healthy life years, and simply bring the unhealthy ones (and subsequent death) sooner. If you’re going to spend your last few years in ill-health, it’s better to do so at 90 than 50.
The other thing you may already know… And a thing about it that not everyone considers:
Keeping cognitively active is important. This much is broadly known by the general public, and to clinicians, this was the fourth “healthy factor” in the list of five (instead of the sleep that we put there, because we were listing the 5 things that go for most preventable health issues).
Everyone leaps to mention sudoku at this point, so if that’s your thing, great, enjoy it! (This writer personally enjoys chess, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; if it yours though, you can come join her on Chess.com and we’ll keep sharp together)
But the more parts of your mental faculties you keep active, the better. Remember, brainpower (as with many things in health and life) is a matter of “use it or lose it” and this is on a “per skill” basis!
What this means: doing sudoku (a number-based puzzle game) or chess (great as it may be) won’t help as much for keeping your language skills intact, for example. Given that language skills are one of the most impactful and key faculties to get lost to Alzheimer’s disease, neglecting such would be quite an oversight!
Some good ways to keep your language skills tip-top:
- Read—but read something challenging, if possible. It doesn’t have to be Thomas Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other, but it should be more challenging than a tabloid, for example. In fact, on the topic of examples:
- This newsletter is written to be easy to read, while not shying away from complex ideas or hard science. Our mission is literally to “make [well-sourced, science-based] health and productivity crazy simple”.
- But the academic papers that we link? Those aren’t written to be easy to read. Go read them, or at least the abstracts (in academia, an abstract is essentially an up-front summary, and is usually the first thing you’ll see when you click a link to a study or such). Challenge yourself!
- Write—compared to reading/listening, producing language is a (related, but) somewhat separate skill. Just ask any foreign language learner which is more challenging: reading or writing!
- Journaling is great, but writing for others is better (as then you’ll be forced to think more about it)
- Learn a foreign language—in this case, what matters it that you’re practicing and learning, so in the scale of easy to hard, or doesn’t matter if it’s Esperanto or Arabic. Duolingo is a great free resource that we recommend for this, and they have a wide range of extensive courses these days.
Now for the least obvious things…
Social contact is important.
Especially in older age, it’s easy to find oneself with fewer remaining friends and family, and getting out and about can be harder for everyone. Whatever our personal inclinations (some people being more introverted or less social than others), we are fundamentally a social species, and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have built us around the idea that we will live our lives alongside others of our kind. And when we don’t, we don’t do as well.
See for example: Associations of Social Isolation and Loneliness With Later Dementia
If you can’t get out and about easily:
- Online socialising is still socializing.
- Online community is still community.
- Online conversations between friends are still conversations between friends.
If you don’t have much (or anyone) in the category of friends and family, join Facebook groups related to your interests, for example.
Berries are surprisingly good
^This may read like a headline from 200,000 BCE, but it’s relevant here!
Particularly recommended are:
- blueberries
- blackberries
- raspberries
- strawberries
- cranberries
We know that many of these berries seem to have a shelf-life of something like 30 minutes from time of purchase, but… Frozen and dried are perfectly good nutritionally, and in many cases, even better nutritionally than fresh.
Read: Effect of berry-based supplements and foods on cognitive function: a systematic review
Turmeric’s health benefits appear to include protecting against Alzheimer’s
Again, this is about risk reduction, and turmeric (also called curcumin, which is not the same as cumin) significantly reduces the build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain. Amyloid plaques are part of the progression of Alzheimer’s.
See for yourself: Protective Effects of Indian Spice Curcumin Against Amyloid Beta in Alzheimer’s Disease
If you don’t like it as a spice (and even if you do, you probably don’t want to put it in your food every day), you can easily get it as a supplement in capsule form.
Lower your homocysteine levels
Lower our what now? Homocysteine is an amino acid used for making certain proteins, and it’s a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Foods high in folate (and possible other B-vitamins) seem to lower homocysteine levels. Top choices include:
- Leafy greens
- Cruciferous vegetables
- Tomatoes
Get plenty of lutein
We did a main feature about specifically this a little while ago, so we’ll not repeat our work here, but lutein is found in, well, the same things we just listed above, and lower levels of lutein are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not a proven causative factor—we don’t know entirely what causes Alzheimer’s, just a lot of factors that have a high enough correlation that it’d be remiss to ignore them.
Catch up on our previous article: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It
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A Surprisingly Powerful Tool: Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
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Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR)
What skeletons are in your closet? As life goes on, most of accumulate bad experiences as well as good ones, to a greater or lesser degree. From clear cases of classic PTSD, to the widely underexamined many-headed beast that is C-PTSD*, our past does affect our present. Is there, then, any chance for our future being different?
*PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
For more on C-PTSD, see our previous main feature:
So, what does eye movement have to do with this?
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapeutic technique whereby a traumatic experience (however small or large; it could be the memory of that one time you said something very regrettable, or it could be some horror we couldn’t describe here) is recalled, and then “detoothed” by doing a bit of neurological jiggery-pokery.
How the neurological jiggery-pokery works:
By engaging the brain in what’s called bilateral stimulation (which can be achieved in various ways, but a common one is moving the eyes rapidly from side to side, hence the name), the event can be re-processed, in much the same way that we do when dreaming, and relegated safely to the past.
This doesn’t mean you’ll forget the event; you’d need to do different exercises for that.
See also our previous main feature:
The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)
That’s not the only aspect of EMDR, though…
EMDR is not just about recalling traumatic events while moving your eyes from side-to-side. What an easy fix that would be! There’s a little more to it.
The process also involves (ideally with the help of a trained professional) examining what other memories, thoughts, feelings, come to mind while doing that. Sometimes, a response we have today associated with, for example, a feeling of helplessness, or rage in conflict, or shame, or anything really, can be connected to previous instances of feeling the same thing. And, each of those events will reinforce—and be reinforced by—the others.
An example of this could be an adult who struggles with substance abuse (perhaps alcohol, say), using it as a crutch to avoid feelings of [insert static here; we don’t know what the feelings are because they’re being avoided], that were first created by, and gradually snowballed from, some adverse reaction to something they did long ago as a child, then reinforced at various times later in life, until finally this adult doesn’t know what to do, but they do know they must hide it at all costs, or suffer the adverse reaction again. Which obviously isn’t a way to actually overcome anything.
EMDR, therefore, seeks to not just “detooth” a singular traumatic memory, but rather, render harmless the whole thread of memories.
Needless to say, this kind of therapy can be quite an emotionally taxing experience, so again, we recommend trying it only under the guidance of a professional.
Is this an evidence-based approach?
Yes! It’s not without its controversy, but that’s how it is in the dog-eat-dog world of academia in general and perhaps psychotherapy in particular. To give a note to some of why it has some controversy, here’s a great freely-available paper that presents “both sides” (it’s more than two sides, really); the premises and claims, the criticisms, and explanations for why the criticisms aren’t necessarily actually problems—all by a wide variety of independent research teams:
Research on Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) as a Treatment for PTSD
To give an idea of the breadth of applications for EMDR, and the evidence of the effectiveness of same, here are a few additional studies/reviews (there are many):
- An Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Group Intervention for Syrian Refugees With Post-traumatic Stress Symptoms: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy vs. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing for Treating Panic Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy in the treatment of depression: a matched pairs study in an inpatient setting
- Emergency room intervention to prevent post concussion-like symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder. A pilot randomized controlled study of a brief eye movement desensitization and reprocessing intervention versus reassurance or usual care
As for what the American Psychiatric Association says about it:
❝After assessing the 120 outcome studies pertaining to the focus areas, we conclude that for two of the areas (i.e., PTSD in children and adolescents and EMDR early interventions research) the strength of the evidence is rated at the highest level, whereas the other areas obtain the second highest level.❞
Source: The current status of EMDR therapy, specific target areas, and goals for the future
Want to learn more?
To learn a lot more than we could include here, check out the APA’s treatment guidelines (they are written in a fashion that is very accessible to a layperson):
APA | Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
Take care!
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Squat Variations for Painful Knees (No More Pain!)
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Having bad knees can be a bit of a catch-22; you want to squat to make them stronger, but you can’t do that because your knees are not good. But, there are ways to do it!
Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, a doctor of physical therapy, advises:
Gently does it
Ten ways to choose from:
- Pool Squats: performed in a pool for joint-friendly support. Can use both hands, one hand, or no support. Focus on sitting back and standing up, aiming for 10–20 reps.
- Supported Squats: use a sink, rings, or handles for support. Stand a distance away and sit back while keeping your knees behind your heels. Perform 10–20 reps for 2–3 sets.
- Chair Loop Squats: use a resistance band around your knees while sitting on a chair. Press your knees outward as you stand and sit to strengthen hip and knee stability. Do 8–12 reps for 2–3 sets.
- Heel Elevated Squats: place your heels on dumbbells to shift emphasis to thighs and reduce knee strain. Ideal for stiff ankles or back tightness. Perform 10–15 reps for 2–3 sets.
- Sumo Squats: a wide stance squat, good for hip strength and reducing knee stress. Adjust your foot positioning for comfort. Perform 15–20 reps for 2–3 sets.
- Chair Squats: hold a weight close to your chest while sitting and standing from a chair. Can use kettlebells or dumbbells. Do 8–10 reps for 2–3 sets.
- Band Squats: use a resistance band secured behind your knees to provide support and encourage proper squat mechanics. Perform 5–12 reps for 2–3 sets.
- Modified Single Leg Squat: sit-to-stand using one leg with the other as a kickstand. Adjust your foot position for difficulty. Perform 8–12 reps per side for 2–3 sets.
- Weighted Squats: add weight using dumbbells or a barbell. Maintain an upright torso. Adjust the weight and reps based on difficulty, and do 5–10 reps for 2–4 sets.
- Split Squat: a stationary lunge, keeping your feet in place and lowering straight down. Focus on your front leg while keeping balance. Can add weight if you want. Perform 5–12 reps per side based on difficulty.
For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
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Cashew & Chickpea Balti
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When it comes to curries, the humble balti is perhaps the best when you don’t have all day to let something simmer. Filled with healthful spices, this one also comes complete with lots of fiber as well as healthy proteins and fats, with most of its calories coming from the nuts themselves, and the haricot paste base makes for a deliciously creamy curry without having to add anything unhealthy.
You will need
- 1 cup cashews, soaked in warm water for at least 5 minutes, and drained (if allergic, omit)
- 1 can chickpeas (keep the water)
- 1 can haricot beans (keep the water)
- 1 can crushed tomatoes
- 2 medium (or 3 small) red onions, sliced
- red or green chilis, quantity per your preference re heat, chopped
- ½ bulb garlic, crushed
- ½ oz fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tbsp garam masala
- 1 tbsp ground coriander
- 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
- 2 tsp turmeric
- 1 tsp mustard seeds (if allergic, omit)
- 1 tsp sweet cinnamon
- 1 tsp coriander seeds
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Avocado oil, for frying (extra virgin olive-oil, or cold-pressed coconut oil, are fine alternatives)
- Garnish: handful fresh cilantro, chopped (or parsley, if you have the “cilantro tastes like soap” gene)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Heat a little oil in a large sauté pan (we’re going to need space to work; a large wok is traditional but a sauté pan is convenient), and add the garlic, ginger, mustard seeds, and coriander seeds, stirring for about 2 minutes, then add the onions and chilis, stirring for another 3 minutes. The onions and chilis won’t be fully cooked yet, but that’s fine, we just needed to get them started.
2) Add the crushed tomatoes, stirring them in, and when they get to temperature, turn the heat down to a simmer.
3) Add the chickpeas to the pan, but separately put the chickpea water into a high-speed blender.
4) Add the haricot beans, including the water they came in, to the high-speed blender, as well as the tomato paste and the remaining spices (including the MSG or salt), and blend on high until smooth. Add the curry paste (that’s what you’ve just made in the blender) to the pan, and stir in well.
5) Add the cashews, stirring in well. Taste, and adjust any spices if necessary for your liking. If the onions still aren’t fully cooked, let them simmer until they are, but it shouldn’t take long.
10almonds tip: if perchance you made it too spicy, you can add a little lime juice and the acidity will counteract the heat. Adding lemon juice, lime juice, or some kind of vinegar (depending on what works with the flavor profile of your recipe) is a good last resort to have up your sleeve for fixing a dish that got too spicy.
6) Add the garnish, and serve—we recommend serving it with our Tasty Versatile Rice, but any carb is fine.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- Three Daily Servings of Beans?
- Cashew Nuts vs Coconut – Which is Healthier?
- What Matters Most For Your Heart?
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← we hit 5/5 again today!
Take care!
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A Supplement To Rival St. John’s Wort Against Depression
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.
Do You Feel The SAMe?
S-Adeonsyl-L-Methionone (SAMe) is a chemical found naturally in the body, and/but enjoyed widely as a supplement. The main reasons people take it are:
- Improve mood (antidepressant effect)
- Improve joints (reduce osteoarthritis symptoms)
- Improve liver (detoxifying effect)
Let’s see what the science says for each of those claims…
Does it improve mood?
It seems to perform comparably to St. John’s Wort (which is good; it performs comparably to Prozac).
Best of all, it does this with fewer contraindications (St. John’s Wort has so many contraindications).
Here’s how they stack up:
This looks very promising, though it’d be nice to see a larger body of research, to be sure.
Does it reduce osteoarthritis symptoms?
The good news: it performs comparably to ibuprofen, with fewer side effects!
The bad news: it also performs comparably to placebo!
Read into that what you will about ibuprofen’s usefulness vs OA symptoms.
Read all about it:
S-Adenosylmethionine for osteoarthritis of the knee or hip
If you were hoping for something for OA or similar symptoms, you might like our previous main features:
- Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- (Science-Based) Alternative Pain Relief
Does it help against liver disease?
According to adverts for SAMe: absolutely!
According to science: we don’t know
The science for this is so weak that it’d be unworthy of mention if it weren’t for the fact that SAMe is so widely sold as good against hepatotoxicity.
To be clear: maybe it really is great! Science hasn’t yet disproved its usefulness either.
It is popularly assumed to be beneficial due to there being an association between lower levels of SAMe in the body (remember, it is also produced inside our bodies) and development of liver disease, especially cholestasis.
Here’s an example of what pretty much every study we found was like (inconclusive research based mostly on mice):
S-adenosylmethionine in liver health, injury, and cancer
For other options for liver health, consider:
Is it safe?
Safety trials have been done ranging from 3 months to 2 years, with no serious side effects coming to light. So, it appears quite safe.
That said, as with anything, there are contraindications, such as:
- if you have bipolar disorder, skip this unless directed by your health care provider, because it may worsen the symptoms of mania
- if you are on SSRIs or other serotonergic drugs, it may interact with those
- if you are immunocompromised, you might want to skip it can increase the risk of P. carinii growth in such cases
As always, do speak with your doctor/pharmacist for personalized advice.
Summary
SAMe’s evidence-based qualities seem to stack up as follows:
- Against depression: good
- Against osteoarthritis: weak
- Against liver disease: unknown
As for safety, it has been found quite safe for most people.
Where can I get it?
We don’t sell it, but here is an example product on Amazon, for your convenience
Enjoy!
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Jackfruit vs Durian – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing jackfruit to durian, we picked the durian.
Why?
Durian may look and smell like it has come directly from Hell, but there’s a lot of goodness in there!
First, let’s talk macros: jackfruit and durian are both unusually high in protein, for fruits. That said, jackfruit does have slightly more protein—but durian has more than 2x the fiber, for only slightly more carbs, so we call this section a win for durian.
Like most fruits, these two are an abundance source of vitamins; jackfruit has more of vitamins A and E, while durian has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B9, and C. Another win for durian.
When it comes to minerals, jackfruit has more calcium, while durian has more copper, iron, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc. We don’t usually measure this one as there’s not much in most foods (unless added in artificially), but durian is also high in sulfur, specifically in “volatile sulfur compounds”, which account for some of its smell, and are—notwithstanding the alarming name—harmless. In any case, mineral content is another win for durian.
These three things add up to one big win for durian.
There is one thing to watch out for, though: durian inhibits aldehyde dehydrogenase, which the body uses to metabolize alcohol. So, we recommend you don’t drink-and-durian, as it can increase the risk of alcohol poisoning, and even if alcohol consumption is moderate, it’ll simply stay in your system for longer, doing more damage while it’s there. Of course, it is best to simply avoid drinking alcohol regardless, durian or no durian, but the above is good to know for those who do imbibe.
A final word on durians: if you haven’t had it before, or had it and it was terrible, then know: much like a banana or an avocado, durian has a rather brief “ideal ripeness” phase for eating. It should be of moderate firmness; neither tough nor squishy. It should not have discolored spikes, nor should it have little holes in, nor be leaking fluid, and it should not smell of sweat and vinegar, although it should smell like sulfurous eggs, onions, and cheese. Basically, if it smells like a cheese-and-onion omelette made in Hell, it’s probably good. If it smells like something that died and then was kept warm in someone’s armpit for a day, it’s probably not. The best way to have a good first experience with a durian is to enjoy one with someone who knows and enjoys durians, as they will be able to pick one that’s right, and will know if it’s not (durian-sellers may not necessarily have your best interests at heart, and may seek to palm off over-ripe durians on people who don’t know better).
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
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World Menopause Day Health News Round-Up
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.
In order to provide variety in this week’s round-up, not all of this is menopause-related, but it is all important:
Menopause & CVD
Untreated menopause is associated with higher incidence of heart disease, and higher mortality. People often forget about how much estrogen does for us (well, for those of us with a physiology running on estrogen, anyway; gentlemen, your testosterone is fine for you), and think it is “just” a sex hormone, but it’s a lot more.
Read in full: Menopause transition linked to increased heart disease risk
Related: What Menopause Does To The Heart
Extraterrestrial medical technology
The much lower gravity in Earth orbit has allowed for tissue engineering techniques that Earth’s normal gravity imposes limitations on. This is big news, because it means that rather than replacing a whole liver, tissue implants could be grafted, allowing the extant liver to repair itself (something livers are famously good at, but they need enough undamaged base material to work with).
Read in full: How liver tissue from the International Space Station may transform tissue engineering
Related: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
One thing and then another
As if endometriosis weren’t unpleasant enough in and of itself, the endothelial dysfunction inherent to it also raises cardiovascular disease risk. This is important, because while endometriosis has (like many maladies predominantly affecting women) generally been shrugged off by the medical world as an unhappy inconvenience but not life-threatening, now we know it comes with extra existential risks too:
Read in full: Understanding cardiovascular risks in endometriosis patients
Related: What You Need To Know About Endometriosis
Push-button meditation
Unlike mindfulness meditation, listening to music is a very passive experience, and thus requires less effort from the user. And yet, it has been associated with lower perceived pain levels, lower self-reported anxiety levels, less opioid use, and measurably lower heart-rate.
Read in full: Listening to music may speed up recovery from surgery, research suggests
Related: Nobody Likes Surgery, But Here’s How To Make It Much Less Bad
Cholesterol in menopause: quality over quantity
Much like previous research has shown that the quantity of LDL is not nearly so predictive of health outcomes in women as it is in men, this study into HDL and menopausal women shows that quantity of HDL does not matter nearly so much as the quality of it.
Read in full: HDL quality, not quantity, contribute to the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease in women
Related: Statins: His & Hers? ← consistent with the above, statins (to lower LDL cholesterol) generally help more for men and produce more adverse side effects for women. So again, a case of “the actual amount of cholesterol isn’t so important for women as for men”.
Take care!
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