Alzheimer’s: Who’s Taking Care of the Caregiver?
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About 300,000 Canadians over 65 suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, and 17% of Canadians have someone with the disease in their family, according to the Alzheimer Society of Canada. People who suffer from Alzheimer’s usually receive long-term help and support from caregivers. But who is taking care of these caregivers? Researchers are finding ways to help caregivers stay mentally and physically healthy, overcome their challenges, and better understand the disease.
Several experts from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are available to comment on different aspects related to the health issues experienced by caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients on January 13.
Experts:
Preventing distress in Alzheimer’s caregivers
Protein That Regulates Hormones Critical to Women’s Health Found in Pituitary
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University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have solved the mystery surrounding a “rogue protein” that plays a role in the release of neurotransmitters and hormones in the brain.
The scientists found abundant amounts of the puzzling protein — whose main location and function were unknown until now — in a specific area of the pituitary gland. Like someone at a control knob, the protein may adjust the release of the two hormones that come almost exclusively from the posterior pituitary: oxytocin, which controls many reproductive functions, and vasopressin, which controls fluid balance.
“The findings raise very interesting possibilities for women’s health, in which rising and falling hormone levels play a key role in many biological processes,” says senior author Meyer Jackson, a professor of physiology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). More studies will be needed to better understand the protein, he adds.
The study appears in the Jan. 11 Nature Neuroscience.
Smoking ups brain-bleed risk with family history
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Smokers whose family members have had a type of bleeding stroke are six times more likely to suffer the same fate than people without these risk factors, according to a new study.
The stroke type known as an “aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage”—essentially a burst blood vessel in the brain—runs in families, note Dr. Daniel Woo and others in the medical journal Neurology, and they wanted to see if smoking added to the hereditary risk.
Their study, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, compared 339 patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage with 1016 “controls” without the condition, matched by age, race and gender.
UK’s first breast cancer gene screen baby born
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The first baby girl in Britain to have been screened before conception for a genetic form of breast cancer has been born, doctors said on Friday.
While a first in Britain, the strategy has been used elsewhere across the world to screen for the cancer-related BRCA1 gene variant, and the technique has also been previously applied by British doctors to avoid the transmission of other cancers and diseases.
In the current case, doctors at University College Hospital in London (UCL) had created a number of embryos through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) for the baby’s parents and screened them for the variant BRCA1 gene.
Cancer patients’ distress often unaddressed
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Only a minority of patients with advanced cancer are referred by their cancer doctor for specialized psychological care, even if they’re clearly distressed, results of a study from Canada indicate.
Among a group of 326 patients being treated in a comprehensive cancer center for advanced lung or gastrointestinal cancer, only one third were referred for psychosocial care to a social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist, Dr. Gary Rodin and colleagues report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
“Further, more than half of those with clinically significant levels of depression were not referred for psychosocial care of any kind throughout the course of their disease,” Rodin told Reuters Health.
Touching helps couples reduce stress
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Couples may be able to enhance one another’s health by being more physically affectionate with one another, new research in Psychosomatic Medicine shows.
Couples who underwent training in “warm touch enhancement” and practiced the technique at home had higher levels of oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone” and the “cuddle chemical,” while their levels of alpha amylase, a stress indicator, were reduced, Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad of Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah, and her colleagues found.
Emotional and social support is key to both mental and physical health, Holt-Lunstad and her team note, while support between spouses may be particularly vital. One important but little-studied way that people express this support, they add, is through “non-sexual, caring physical touch, such as hand-holding, hugs, and sitting or lying ‘cuddled up.’”
Physical activity may not be key to obesity epidemic
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A recent international study fails to support the common belief that the number of calories burned in physical activity is a key factor in rising rates of obesity.
Researchers from Loyola University Health System and other centers compared African American women in metropolitan Chicago with women in rural Nigeria. On average, the Chicago women weighed 184 pounds and the Nigerian women weighed 127 pounds.
Researchers had expected to find that the slimmer Nigerian women would be more physically active. To their surprise, they found no significant difference between the two groups in the amount of calories burned during physical activity.
News from the January 2009 Journal of the American Dietetic Association
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The January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association features research studies focusing on everyday eating habits of consumers. Researchers look at why sack lunches may not always meet the nutritional needs of preschool children and how making time for meals directly influences diets of young adults.
Packing a Lunch for Preschoolers May Not Be a Good Idea
Approximately 13 million children in the United States eat three or more meals and snacks each day at one of the country’s 117,000 regulated child-care centers. Due to increasing cost of food preparation and storage, more and more of these centers are requiring parents to provide food for their children.
But sack lunches sent from home may not regularly provide adequate nutrients for the growth and development of young children, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Third Coast Research and Development Inc. of Galveston, Texas. The study included 74 three to five-year-olds attending full-time child-care centers that required parents to provide lunches. Lunch contents were observed and recorded for three consecutive days.
International experts weigh-in on harmful algal blooms
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An international group of scientists is linking nutrient pollution in the world’s coastal seas to an increase in the number of harmful algal blooms reported in recent years. When harmful algal blooms (HAB’s) occur, they taint seafood with toxins, cause human respiratory and skin irritations and cause fish or mammal kills in coastal waters.
In the December edition of the journal Harmful Algae, scientists present a compilation of 21 articles outlining the role of nutrient pollution in the increasing frequency of these events.
“Harmful algal blooms can have direct effects on human health and the environmental balance of our coastal waters,” said journal editor and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science researcher Dr. Patricia Glibert. “By tapping the expertise of many of the world’s leading voices on harmful algal blooms, this series of papers hopes to elevate this issue to the forefront of coastal management issues needing immediate attention.”
For Kids, More Screen Time Means Lower Fitness Scores
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If videogames like “Madden NFL” didn’t exist, 12-year-old Tom might go outside and toss around a real football — and he’d have a better chance of sprinting for a touchdown without getting winded.
Too much small-screen recreation could undermine physical fitness, Australian researchers have found, in a new study that looks at how e-mail and text messaging, TV, videogames and net surfing affect aerobic endurance in adolescents.
Two hours of daily screen time appears to be the “cut point” above which kids are significantly less likely to be fit, found researchers led by Louise Hardy, Ph.D., at the New South Wales Centre of Overweight and Obesity at the University of Sydney.
“The effect was consistently stronger among all girls compared with boys,” Hardy said. “The longer girls spent on screen recreation the less fit they were, and the evidence of this effect increases with age among girls.”
Study Helps Explain Connection Between Sleep Apnea, Stroke and Death
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Obstructive sleep apnea decreases blood flow to the brain, elevates blood pressure within the brain and eventually harms the brain’s ability to modulate these changes and prevent damage to itself, according to a new study published by The American Physiological Society. The findings may help explain why people with sleep apnea are more likely to suffer strokes and to die in their sleep.
Sleep apnea is the most commonly diagnosed condition amongst sleep-related breathing disorders and can lead to debilitating and sometimes fatal consequences for the 18 million Americans who have been diagnosed with the disorder. This study identifies a mechanism behind stroke in these patients.
The study, “Impaired cerebral autoregulation in obstructive sleep apnea” was carried out by Fred Urbano, Francoise Roux, Joseph Schindler and Vahid Mohsenin, all of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. It appears in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.
Food regulation threat if obesity plan fails
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The government will consider regulating the food industry if a three-year health lifestyle campaign fails to reduce obesity levels in England, Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said on Friday.
The government kicks off the Change4Life campaign on Saturday with television, magazine and billboard adverts urging people to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
The action is being taken after forecasters said obesity was rising so fast that by 2050 four out of 10 children and nine out of ten adults will be overweight or obese.
Fast food near schools means fatter kids
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Adolescents who go to school within a half-mile of a fast-food restaurant are more likely to be overweight or obese than kids whose schools are further away, new research suggests.
The young people in the study also ate fewer servings of fruits and vegetables and drank more soda if there was at least one fast food restaurant within a half-mile radius of their school, Drs. Brennan Davis of Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California and Christopher Carpenter of the University of California at Irvine found.
“Overall, our patterns are consistent with the idea that fast food near schools affects students’ eating habits, overweight, and obesity,” they conclude in a report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Chromosome disorder raises risk of death
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Turner syndrome, the most commonly diagnosed sex chromosome abnormality in women, not only leads to substantial illness but is also raises the risk of death, according to UK researchers.
“This study,” lead investigator Dr. Minouk J. Schoemaker told Reuters Health, “shows that mortality in women with Turner syndrome is three-fold higher than in the general population, and that mortality is raised for almost all major causes of death, and throughout adulthood.”
Turner syndrome is a genetic condition caused when one of the two X chromosomes that girls normally have is missing. It results in various physical characteristics and incomplete ovaries.
Study finds favorable trends in stroke
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Fewer people are suffering stroke and fewer people are dying from stroke, new research from Sweden hints.
To varying degrees, there have been improvements in the incidence of stroke and in stroke deaths among both diabetic and non-diabetic adults, Dr. Aslak Rautio and colleagues from Umea University report in the journal Stroke.
The researchers used data from a Swedish stroke registry to compare time trends in incidence, case-fatality, and death in stroke patients with or without diabetes. All strokes in patients 35 to 74 years old were registered from January 1, 1985, and December 31, 2003.
