Research published today in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, the team analysed data from the UK Biobank and found impairment in several areas, such as problem solving and number recall, across a range of conditions.
The findings raise the possibility that in the future, at-risk patients could be screened to help select those who would benefit from interventions to reduce their risk of developing one of the conditions, or to help identify patients suitable for recruitment to clinical trials for new treatments.
There are currently very few effective treatments for dementia or other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. In part, this is because these conditions are often only diagnosed once symptoms appear, whereas the underlying neurodegeneration may have begun years – even decades – earlier. This means that by the time patients take part in clinical trials, it may already be too late in the disease process to alter its course.
RESEARCH
Battery tech breakthrough paves way for mass adoption of affordable electric car
Researchers develop new technique that charges EV battery in just 10 minutes
a battery on a table
This 10-min fast-charging battery was developed for electric cars, with the black box on the top containing a battery management system to control the module. Credit: EC Power. All Rights Reserved.
EXPAND
OCTOBER 12, 2022
By Adrienne Berard
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A breakthrough in electric vehicle battery design has enabled a 10-minute charge time for a typical EV battery. The record-breaking combination of a shorter charge time and more energy acquired for longer travel range was announced today (Oct. 12) in the journal Nature.
“The need for smaller, faster-charging batteries is greater than ever,” said Chao-Yang Wang, the William E. Diefenderfer Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State and lead author on the study. “There are simply not enough batteries and critical raw materials, especially those produced domestically, to meet anticipated demand.”
In August, California’s Air Resources Board passed an extensive plan to restrict and ultimately ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars within the state. By 2035, the largest auto market in the United States will effectively retire the internal combustion engine.
Under a worst-case scenario, half of coral reef ecosystems worldwide will permanently face unsuitable conditions in just over a dozen years, if climate change continues unabated. That is one of the findings from new research published on October 11, in PLOS Biology by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers. Unsuitable conditions will likely lead to the corals dying off and other marine life will struggle to survive due to disruptions in the food chain.
“While the negative impacts of climate change on coral reefs are well known, this research shows that they are actually worse than anticipated due to a broad combination of climate change-induced stressors,” said lead author Renee O. Setter, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environment in the College of Social Sciences. “It was surprising to find that so many global coral reefs would be overwhelmed by unsuitable environmental conditions so soon due to multiple stressors.”
A clinical study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center found that, for children who had a major stroke to the left hemisphere of their brain within days of their birth, the infant’s brain was “plastic” enough for the right hemisphere to acquire the language abilities ordinarily handled by the left side, while also maintaining its own language abilities as well.
The left hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for sentence processing (understanding words and sentences as we listen to speech). The right hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for processing the emotion of the voice — is it happy or sad, angry or calm. This study sought to answer the question, “What happens when one of the hemispheres is injured at birth?”
The findings appear in PNAS the week of October 10, 2022.
The participants in this study developed normally during pregnancy. But around birth they had a significant stroke, one that would have debilitating outcomes in adults. In infants, a stroke is much rarer, but does happen in roughly one out of every 4,000 births.
The researchers studied perinatal arterial ischemic stroke, a type of brain injury occurring around the time of birth in which blood flow is cut off to a part of the brain by a blood clot. The same type of stroke occurs much more commonly in adults. Previous studies of brain injury in infants have included several types of brain injury; the focus in this study on a specific type of injury enabled the authors to find more consistent effects than in previous work.
A team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center asked more than 6,000 participants to wear Fitbit activity trackers for at least 10 hours a day
Analysis revealed taking more than 8,200 steps a day – the equivalent of walking about four miles – was found to protect against obesity, sleep apnea, high blood pressure and major depressive disorder.
The results also suggested that obese people can reduce their risk of becoming obese by 64 percent if they increased their daily steps from 6,000 to 11,000.
As the number of steps increased, the risk of most conditions decreased.
However, the risk of hypertension and diabetes did not decrease further after the participants reached about 8,000-9,000 steps per day.
The authors said that people who wear Fitbits tend to be more active than the average adult.
Still, “the fact that we were able to demonstrate robust associations between steps and … disease in this active sample suggests that even stronger associations may exist in a more sedentary population”.
The team said their findings provide a necessary first step toward the development of personalized activity prescriptions.
Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, they said: ‘We investigated the relationship between pedometer volume and intensity across the full spectrum of human disease using commercial activity monitors linked to a person’s electronic health records.
“We identified consistent and statistically significant associations between activity levels and incident diabetes, hypertension, gastroesophageal reflux disease, major depressive disorder, obesity, and sleep apnea.
‘Taking more steps each day was related to lower risk of developing these chronic diseases.
‘Higher step counts were associated with protection against obesity in a high-risk population.’
Meditation may protect older people against Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, according to new research.
The ancient relaxation technique boosts brainpower among people over 65 years-old, scientists in France say. It can boost attention, awareness, and emotional health – faculties that decline with dementia.
Meditation was superior to non-native language training on changing a global composite score and two of its subscores reflecting attention regulation and socio-emotional capacities,” says corresponding author Dr. Gael Chetelat from Caen-Normandy University in a statement, according to SWNS.
French participants assigned to an 18-month course did better than those given English lessons instead to keep their brains busy.
They have been linked to well-being, suggesting meditation improves mental health and “human flourishing.”
“The attention regulation subscore increased after meditation only,” Dr. Chetelat tells SWNS. “In the context of meditation practices, this capacity allows a heightened awareness and monitoring of the contents of experience without becoming absorbed by them. Socio-emotional capacities decreased substantially after non-native language training, suggesting the difference observed may be due to maintenance of skills by meditation.”
New research based on data from 18 countries concludes that adults with better mental health are more likely to report having spent time playing in and around coastal and inland waters, such as rivers and lakes (also known collectively as blue spaces) as children.
The finding was replicated in each of the countries studied.
Mounting evidence shows that spending time in and around green spaces such as parks and woodlands in adulthood is associated with stress reduction and better mental health. However, we know far less about the benefits of blue spaces, or the role childhood contact has in these relationships in later life.
Data came from the BlueHealth International Survey (BIS), a cross-sectional survey co-ordinated by the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health. The current analysis used data from over 15,000 people across 14 European Countries and 4 other non-European countries/regions (Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and California).
Respondents were asked to recall their blue space experiences between the ages of 0-16 years including how local they were, how often they visited them, and how comfortable their parents/guardians were with them playing in these settings, as well as more recent contact with green and blue spaces over the last four weeks, and mental health over the last two weeks.
The research, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that individuals who recalled more childhood blue space experiences tended to place greater intrinsic value on natural settings in general, and to visit them more often as adults – each of which, in turn, were associated with better mental wellbeing in adulthood.
Up to 70 percent of mothers develop postnatal depressive mood, also known as baby blues, after their baby is born. Analyses show that this can also affect the development of the children themselves and their speech. Until now, however, it was unclear exactly how this impairment manifests itself in early language development in infants.
In a study, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have now investigated how well babies can distinguish speech sounds from one another depending on their mother's mood. This ability is considered an important prerequisite for the further steps towards a well-developed language. If sounds can be distinguished from one another, individual words can also be distinguished from one another. It became clear that if mothers indicate a more negative mood two months after birth, their children show on average a less mature processing of speech sounds at the age of six months. The infants found it particularly difficult to distinguish between syllable-pitches. Specifically, they showed that the development of their so-called Mismatch Response was delayed than in those whose mothers were in a more positive mood. This Mismatch Response in turn serves as a measure of how well someone can separate sounds from one another. If this development towards a pronounced mismatch reaction is delayed, this is considered an indication of an increased risk of suffering from a speech disorder later in life.
Oil and gas prices skyrocketed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022, creating a global energy crisis similar to the oil crisis of the 1970s. While some countries used the price shock to accelerate the transition to cleaner sources of energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal, others have responded by expanding the production of fossil fuels.
A new study appearing today in the journal Science identifies the political factors that allow some countries to take the lead in adopting cleaner sources of energy while others lag behind. The findings offer important lessons as many governments around the world race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the devastating impacts of climate change.
“We are really interested in understanding how national differences mediate the responses of countries to the same kind of energy challenge,” said study lead author Jonas Meckling, an associate professor of energy and environmental policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “We found that the political institutions of countries shape how much they can absorb costly policies of all kinds, including costly energy policies.”
The wear and tear on the body from chronic and lifelong stress can also lead to an increased risk of dying from cancer, Medical College of Georgia researchers report.
That wear and tear, called allostatic load, refers to the cumulative effects of stress over time. “As a response to external stressors, your body releases a stress hormone called cortisol, and then once the stress is over, these levels should go back down,” says Dr. Justin Xavier Moore, epidemiologist at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Cancer Center. “However, if you have chronic, ongoing psychosocial stressors, that never allow you to ‘come down,’ then that can cause wear and tear on your body at a biological level.”
Investigators, led by Moore, performed a retrospective analysis of more than 41,000 people from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES, collected between 1988-2019. That database includes baseline biological measures of participants — body mass index, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, hemoglobin A1C (higher levels indicate a risk for diabetes), albumin and creatinine (both measures of kidney function) and C-reactive protein (a measure of inflammation) — that the researchers used to determine allostatic load. Those with a score of more than 3 were categorized as having high allostatic load.
Wagamaga OP t1_is5b5zg wrote
Reply to Cambridge scientists have shown that it may be possible to spot signs of brain impairment in patients as early as nine years before they receive a diagnosis for one of a number of dementia-related diseases. by Wagamaga
Research published today in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, the team analysed data from the UK Biobank and found impairment in several areas, such as problem solving and number recall, across a range of conditions.
The findings raise the possibility that in the future, at-risk patients could be screened to help select those who would benefit from interventions to reduce their risk of developing one of the conditions, or to help identify patients suitable for recruitment to clinical trials for new treatments.
There are currently very few effective treatments for dementia or other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. In part, this is because these conditions are often only diagnosed once symptoms appear, whereas the underlying neurodegeneration may have begun years – even decades – earlier. This means that by the time patients take part in clinical trials, it may already be too late in the disease process to alter its course.
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12802