Alzheimer's Disease

Exercise To Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease?

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Here I am running down the Santa Monica Pier

This study is literally running from the reaper – well, sort of.

Alzheimer’s disease, with its inexorable loss of memory and self, understandably alarms most of us. This is especially so since, at the moment, there are no cures for the condition and few promising drug treatments. But a cautiously encouraging new study from The Archives of Neurology suggests that for some people, a daily walk or jog could alter the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or change the course of the disease if it begins.

For the experiment, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recruited 201 adults, ages 45 to 88, who were part of a continuing study at the university’s Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Some of the participants had a family history of Alzheimer’s, but none, as the study began, showed clinical symptoms of the disease. They performed well on tests of memory and thinking. “They were, as far as we could determine, cognitively normal,” says Denise Head, an associate professor of psychology at Washington University who led the study.

Read all of the post.

All of those “LONG” runs, don’t see as arduous now!

In any case, there are many benefits of exercise and this may be just one of them.

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Diet

Junk Food in Schools Linked to Obesity?

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Apparently not, according to a new study.

Having access to junk food at school did not cause middle schoolers to gain weight, according to a longitudinal study.

Data from a nearly 20,000-student study showed that in the 1998-1999 school year, 59.2% of fifth graders and 86.3% of eighth graders in the U.S. attended schools that sold junk food, Jennifer Van Hook, PhD, and doctoral candidate Claire Altman, of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, found.

Eight years later, although there was a significant increase in the percentage of students attending schools that sold junk food, there was no corresponding rise in the percentage of students who were overweight or obese, they reported in Sociology of Education.

Junk food is certainly MORE available outside the school environment.

But, do students really eat any of the foods in the school cafeteria any more – whether healthy or not?

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Alzheimer's Disease

United States Sets Goal for Effective Alzheimer’s Prevention or Treatment by 2025

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The Alzheimer’s Brain

A worthy goal, especially since I am of the age where I might require it.

The government is setting what it calls an ambitious goal for Alzheimer’s disease: Development of effective ways to treat and prevent the mind-destroying illness by 2025.

The Obama administration is developing the first National Alzheimer’s Plan to find better treatments for the disease and offer better day-to-day care for those afflicted.

A newly released draft of the overall goals sets the 2025 deadline, but doesn’t provide details of how to fund the necessary research to meet that target date. Today’s treatments only temporarily ease some dementia symptoms, and work to find better ones has been frustratingly slow.

A committee of Alzheimer’s experts begins a two-day meeting Tuesday to help advise the government on how to finalize the plan.

An estimated 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or similar dementias. It’s the sixth-leading killer, and is steadily growing as the population rapidly ages. By 2050, 13 million to 16 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s, costing $1 trillion in medical and nursing home expenditures.

I hope not.

But, seriously, the disease is horrible and the research goal is much welcomed.

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Health

Does Running A Marathon Pose a Heart Risk?

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This is me finishing the Los Angeles Marathon in 2011

No, according to a new study.

Despite well-publicized stories of people dropping dead during or after running a marathon, the race isn’t all that risky, researchers found.

Among nearly 11 million marathoners and half-marathoners, only 59 went into cardiac arrest during a race, for an incidence rate of just 0.54 per 100,000 participants, Aaron Baggish, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Event rates among marathon and half-marathon runners are relatively low, as compared with other athletic populations, including collegiate athletes, triathlon participants, and previously healthy middle-aged joggers,” they wrote.

Men, however, were more likely to have an event than women, they noted.

In 2010, about two million people around the U.S. ran long-distance races, a figure that more than doubled from 10 years prior. But that growth has been accompanied by a rise in race-related heart problems and in news headlines about the risk of sudden death.

So the researchers created the Race Associated Cardiac Arrest Event Registry (RACER) to assess the incidence and outcomes of cardiac arrest associated with long-distance races in the U.S. between Jan. 1, 2000 and May 31, 2010.

The database included a total of 10.9 million runners; only 59 had suffered a cardiac arrest, for an overall incidence rate of 0.54 per 100,000 participants, the researchers reported. Their median age was 42.

A total of 71% of those cases were fatal.

As expected, rates of cardiac arrest were significantly higher during marathons than half-marathons (1.01 versus 0.27 per 100,000, respectively, P<0.001), as was the incidence of sudden death (0.63 versus 0.25 per 100,000, P=0.003).

I will be run/walk/running my 8th Los Angeles Marathon on March 18th.

By the way, I have already been cleared to run the race by my physician.

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