Group-based trajectory modeling identified four groups of distinct occupational cognitive demands according to the degree of routine tasks in the participants occupations during their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. The researchers analyzed the link between these trajectory groups and clinically diagnosed MCI and dementia in participants in the HUNT4 70+ Study (2017-19). Additionally, the researchers accounted for important dementia risk factors such as age, gender, educational level, income, overall health, and lifestyle habits from assessments made in 1984-86 and 1995-97. Within age groupings the researchers looked at such occupations as primary school teacher, salesperson, nurse and caregiver, office cleaner, civil engineer, and mechanic, among others.
In a randomized-controlled trial, people who followed a time-restricted diet lost about the same amount of weight as people who ate the same diet without the time restriction, according to a study published Friday in Annals of Internal Medicine…nutrition experts Krista Varady and Vanessa Oddo of the University of Illinois wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “Using a controlled feeding design, Maruthur and colleagues show that TRE is effective for weight loss, simply because it helps people eat less.” It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight — https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/its-cutting-calories-not-intermittent-fasting-that-drops-weight-study-suggests/
In the pursuit of “fine” to “great,” we chase products. Through no fault of our own, we fall prey to messaging from social media users, algorithms, and expert marketers, urging us that this shampoo or this rug will shift the scales toward enoughness. “This is how the marketplace continues to work,” says Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, “which is by amplifying our inadequacies and insecurities.”
Baked into these social platforms is a natural ecosystem for comparison. In the past, people weighed themselves against celebrities in the media and those within their immediate social circles, Duffy says. Now, we can compare ourselves to the idealized version of millions of strangers online — who may be perpetuating an aesthetic trend inspiring us to buy in order to participate.
Cannabis use may increase the risk of myocardial infarction and stroke independent of tobacco use, according to recent findings in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Compared with nonusers, daily cannabis consumers had 25% higher odds of myocardial infarction and 42% higher odds of stroke. More frequent use was associated with a greater possibility of adverse cardiovascular outcomes regardless of whether cannabis was smoked, eaten, or vaporized. AMA. 2024;331(14):1172. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.2075 — https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2816618
Statins raise the risks for increased glucose levels and the development of type 2 diabetes among people who don’t have it at baseline, but those risks are outweighed by the cardiovascular benefit, new data suggested.
The meta-analysis of trials in the CTT Collaboration included individual participant data from 19 double-blind randomized, controlled trials with a median follow-up of 4.3 years comparing statins with placebo in a total of 123,940 participants, including 18% who had known type 2 diabetes at randomization. Also analyzed were another four double-blind trials of lower- vs higher-intensity statins involving a total of 30,724 participants followed for a median of 4.9 years, with 15% having diabetes at baseline.
In the 19 trials of low- or moderate-intensity statins vs placebo, statins resulted in a significant 10% increase in new-onset diabetes compared with placebo (rate ratio, 1.10), while high-intensity statins raised the risk by an also significant 36% (1.36). This translated to a mean absolute excess of 0.12% per year of treatment.
Compared with less intensive statin therapy, more intensive statin therapy resulted in a significant 10% proportional increase in new-onset diabetes (1.10), giving an absolute annual excess of 0.22%
In an accompanying editorial, Hertzel C. Gerstein, MD, and Marie Pigeyre, MD, PhD, both of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, noted that the decreased absolute annual incidence of life-threatening cardiovascular outcomes with statins in people at high risk for type 2 diabetes “clearly exceeds the 0.1%-1.3% per year increased absolute incidence of type 2 diabetes.”
It has been established that the human gut microbiome affects cholesterol levels, and previous research has pointed to microbial enzymes that might be involved. A 2020 study2 identified a bacterial enzyme called ismA that can convert cholesterol into coprostanol, a lipid that is excreted instead of absorbed by the body. People whose gut bacteria made this enzyme had lower cholesterol levels in their blood than did those who did not. This study was published by the same research group — led by gastroenterologist and microbiologist Ramnik Xavier at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston — that is responsible for the new finding. Until now, it was not clear which bacteria produced enzymes that metabolize cholesterol.
For the current study, the researchers analysed microbial genomes in stool samples from 1,429 participants in a long-term study of risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The team found many gut-bacteria species, including those in the genus Oscillibacter, that were correlated with lower cholesterol levels. The researchers confirmed their results in participants in two independent studies.
In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt lays out his argument that smartphones and social media are the key driver of the decline in youth mental health seen in many countries since the early 2010s.
The early 2010s were crucial, Haidt argues, because that was when smartphones really began to transform childhood into something unrecognizable. In June 2010, Apple introduced its first front-facing camera, and a few months later Instagram launched on the App Store. For Haidt, this was a fateful combination. Children were suddenly always online, always on display, and connected in ways that were often detrimental to their well-being. The result was a “tidal wave” of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, mostly affecting young girls.In Haidt’s telling, though, smartphones are only part of the problem. He thinks that children in the West are prevented from developing healthily thanks to a culture of “safetyism” that keeps children indoors, shelters them from risks, and replaces rough-and-tumble free play with adult-directed organized sports or—even worse—video games. For evidence of safetyism in action, Haidt contrasts a picture of a 1970s playground merry-go-round, (“the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented”) with a modern set of play equipment designed with safety in mind and, thus, giving children less opportunity to learn from risky play.
Next steps? Go back online, find a venture capital backed mental health provider, take a quiz, get a diagnosis that confirms your self-diagnosis, have drugs sent to you in the mail.
When Karla Adkins looked in the rear view mirror of her car one morning nearly 10 years ago, she noticed the whites of her eyes had turned yellow.
She was 36 at the time and working as a physician liaison for a hospital system on the South Carolina coast, where she helped build relationships among doctors. Privately, she had struggled with heavy drinking since her early 20s, long believing that alcohol helped calm her anxieties. She understood that the yellowing of her eyes was evidence of jaundice. Even so, the prospect of being diagnosed with alcohol-related liver disease wasn’t her first concern.
“Honestly, the No. 1 fear for me was someone telling me I could never drink again,” said Adkins, who lives in Pawleys Island, a coastal town about 30 miles south of Myrtle Beach.
But the drinking had caught up with her: Within 48 hours of that moment in front of the rearview mirror, she was hospitalized, facing liver failure. “It was super fast,” Adkins said.
After years of heavy drinking to ease her anxiety, Karla Adkins nearly died from liver failure 10 years ago. “You can’t get much worse from where I got,” says Adkins. She now works as a coach to help people change their relationship with alcohol and published a book about her health ordeal.(Allison Duff)
Historically, alcohol use disorder has disproportionately affected men. But recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on deaths from excessive drinking shows that rates among women are climbing faster than they are among men. The Biden administration considers this trend alarming, with one new estimate predicting women will account for close to half of alcohol-associated liver disease costs in the U.S. by 2040, a $66 billion total price tag.
It’s a high-priority topic for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture, which together will release updated national dietary guidelines next year. But with marketing for alcoholic beverages increasingly geared toward women, and social drinking already a huge part of American culture, change isn’t something everyone may be ready to raise a glass to.
“This is a touchy topic,” said Rachel Sayko Adams, a research associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. “There is no safe level of alcohol use,” she said. “That’s, like, new information that people didn’t want to know.”
Over the past 50 years, women have increasingly entered the workforce and delayed motherhood, which likely has contributed to the problem as women historically drank less when they became mothers.
“Parenthood tended to be this protective factor,” but that’s not always the case anymore, said Adams, who studies addiction.
More recently, the covid-19 pandemic “significantly exacerbated” binge-drinking, said George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, as people used alcohol to cope with stress. That is particularly true of women, who are more likely to drink alcohol because of stress than men, he said.
But women are also frequently the focus of gender-targeted advertising for alcoholic beverages. The growth of rosé sales and low-calorie wines, for example, has exploded in recent years. New research published by the International Journal of Drug Policy in February found that the “pinking of products is a tactic commonly used by the alcohol industry to target the female market.”
Also at play is the emergence of a phenomenon largely perpetuated by women on social media that makes light of drinking to deal with the difficulties of motherhood. The misperception of “mommy wine culture,” said Adams, is that “if you can drink in a normal way, a moderate way, if you can handle your alcohol, you’re fine.”
And while it’s unclear to what extent memes and online videos influence women’s drinking habits, the topic merits further study, said Adams, who with colleagues last year found that women without children at age 35 are still at the highest risk for binge-drinking and alcohol use disorder symptoms among all age groups of women. But over the past two decades, the research concluded, the risk is escalating for both childless women and mothers.
Research indicates stress is one of the main reasons that people misuse alcohol. Experts also say unique burdens lead many mothers to rely on alcohol. “It’s a vulnerable group,” says Rachel Sayko Adams, a research associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.(Chrissie Bonner)
These factors at play, coupled with the pressure to fit in, can make excessive drinking a difficult conversation to broach.“It’s a very taboo topic,” Adams said.
And when it does come up, said Stephanie Garbarino, a transplant hepatologist at Duke Health, it’s often surprising how many patients are unaware how their drinking affects their health.
“Often, they didn’t know there was anything wrong with what they’re doing,” she said. She is more frequently seeing younger patients with liver disease, including men and women in their 20s and 30s.
And public health and addiction experts fear that alcohol-related liver disease among women will become a costly issue for the nation to address. Women accounted for 29% of all costs associated with the disease in the U.S. in 2022 and are expected to account for 43% by 2040, estimated a new analysis published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology in February.
National dietary guidelines advise women to drink no more than one alcoholic drink a day. Those guidelines are up for a five-year review next year by the USDA and HHS, which has called a special committee to examine, among other questions, the relationship between alcohol consumption and cancer risks. The report will be made public in 2025.
When Canada published guidance in 2023 advising that drinking any more than two alcoholic beverages a week carried health risks, Koob sparked backlash when his comments to the Daily Mail suggested that U.S. guidelines might move in the same direction. The CDC report published in February suggested that an increase in alcohol taxes could help reduce excessive alcohol use and deaths. Koob’s office would not comment on such policies.
It’s a topic close to Adkins’ heart. She now works as a coach to help others — mostly women — stop drinking, and said the pandemic prompted her to publish a book about her near-death experience from liver failure. And while Adkins lives with cirrhosis, this September will mark 10 years since her last drink.
“The amazing thing is, you can’t get much worse from where I got,” said Adkins. “My hope is really to change the narrative.”
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