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Sleeping Pills Taken By Millions Linked To Alzheimer’s

Feb 132015

Common sleeping tablets and anxiety drugs taken by millions of patients has been linked to a 50 per cent increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have found.

Taking the drugs known as benzodiazepines, which include diazepam and lorazepam, for three months or more was linked with a greater chance of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years later.

At least six million prescriptions were issued for the drugs in England last year and the researchers said the findings are important because of the large numbers of older people taking the medicines.

Researchers behind the study described the findings as being of “major importance for public health”.

They warned that although it cannot be definitively proven that the drugs are causing Alzheimer’s there is a strong ‘suspicion of possible direct causation’.

The drugs should be not be taken for more than three months in light of these findings, the researchers said.

However, other experts said the results may reflect that people who are already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s are often treated for sleep problems and anxiety and this is confusing the findings.

In a research paper published in the British Medical Journal, scientists from the University of Bordeaux and the Univeristy of Montreal beind the latest study said their findings were especially important “considering the prevalence and chronicity of benzodiazepine use in elderly populations and the high and increasing incidence of dementia in developed countries.”

They said: “It is now crucial to encourage physicians to carefully balance the benefits and risks when initiating or renewing a treatment with benzodiazepines and related products in elderly patients.”

The French and Canadian researchers examined data from Quebec from a period of at least six years and identified 1,796 cases of Alzheimer’s disease which where then individually matched with 7,184 healthy people matched for age, sex, and duration of follow-up.

They found that past use of benzodiazepines was associated with a 51 per cent increased risk fo Alzheimer’s disease. The link was stronger with longer exposure to the drugs or use of long-acting versions of the medicines.

In an accompanying editorial Professor Kristine Yaffe of the University of California at San Francisco and Professor Malaz Boustani of the Indiana University Centre for Aging Research, said that in 2012 the American Geriatrics Society included benzodiazepines in a list of drugs that should not be used in older people because of the side effects of brain function.

Dr Liz Coulthard, Consultant Senior Lecturer in Dementia Neurology at University of Bristol, said: “This work provides yet another reason to avoid prescription of benzodiazepines for anything other than very short term relief of insomnia or anxiety.

“In addition to short term cognitive impairment, falls and car accidents already known to be associated with benzodiazepine use, there is a hint from this study that these drugs might in some way increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

“However, we know that Alzheimer’s disease pathology accumulates for up to 17 years prior to diagnosis and this study looked at benzodiazepine use well into the course of the pathological cascade in the disease.

“In addition, retrospective studies such as this cannot prove causation. Therefore there is still a possibility that, rather than causing Alzheimer’s disease, benzodiazepines tend to be prescribed to patients presenting with anxiety or insomnia as part of an as yet undiagnosed dementia.”

Prof Gordon Wilcock, Emeritus Professor of Geratology at University of Oxford, said: “This carefully conducted study provides convincing evidence that the use of benzodiazepines may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, and importantly may be another factor we could modify to reduce the occurrence of dementia.

“However, these drugs would have been given to treat symptoms and it is possible that the latter may have been the earliest signs of unrecognised Alzheimer’s disease, although the authors have tried to control for this as far as was possible in their study.

“Ideally more research needs to be undertaken, but it will be difficult to do this prospectively as most clinicians would avoid long term prescription of these drugs in older people.”

Dr James Pickett, head of research at Alzheimer’s Society, said: “With 1.5million people in the UK being prescribed benzodiazepines at any one time, evidence that their long-term use increases the risk of dementia is significant, and raises questions about their use.

“This research should not be used to condemn benzodiazepines completely, since their short-term use can have an important role in the management of anxiety and insomnia, but people and doctors should be aware of the longer-term risks associated with these drugs.”

“This report comes the day before the G7 Global Dementia Legacy Event in Canada where leaders will discuss how we tackle dementia through research. There are currently 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK, and with so few drugs available to treat Alzheimer’s disease, these findings show the need for us to look at how we might change prescription habits to reduce people’s risk of developing dementia.”

Prof Guy Goodwin, President of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, said: “Many treatments can look bad because they are given to sick people. This is “confounding by indication”, and is the bane of all epidemiological studies of drug exposure. This publication recognises the problem but may not have an adequate solution.

“The finding that benzodiazepine exposure is associated with the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease five years or more later could mean that the drugs cause the disease, but is more likely to mean that the drugs are being given to people who are already ill. In other words, we are seeing an association, rather than a cause.

“Non-specific symptoms arise in the 14 years before an Alzheimer diagnosis, so a five year study, as in this paper, may not be long enough to exclude what we call reverse causality; in other words symptoms in the early phases of Alzheimer’s disease may increase the probability of being prescribed a benzodiazepine.

“It is very difficult to control for this in most databases because the detail is insufficient to reconstruct the clinical reality.

“Nevertheless, benzodiazepines can impair memory by their direct effect on the brain (unrelated to dementia), and their use in the elderly always merits caution and care to balance side-effects with benefits.”

Prof John Hardy, Professor of Neuroscience at University College London, said: “The apparent association between benzodiazepines and Alzheimer’s disease is interesting and deserves further investigation.

“There are many possible explanations: it could be a true association in that it reflects benzodiazepine use in the early stage of disease (this is the reverse causation discussed by the authors), it could be caused by benzodiazepine causing minor brain damage which is clinically additive to Alzheimer disease, there could be a direct relationship between benzodiazepine drug action and the disease process, or it could be a false positive, a statistical fluke.

“Clearly more work is needed before any firm conclusions are drawn. Clinicians are already careful about benzodiazepine prescribing so I would not regard this unexplained and as of yet unreplicated study as cause for any alarm.”

What Happens In The Brain When You Learn A Language?

Feb 132015

Learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain.

This is what Swedish scientists discovered when they used brain scans to monitor what happens when someone learns a second language. The study is part of a growing body of research using brain imaging technologies to better understand the cognitive benefits of language learning. Tools like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electrophysiology, among others, can now tell us not only whether we need knee surgery or have irregularities with our heartbeat, but reveal what is happening in our brains when we hear, understand and produce second languages.

The Swedish MRI study showed that learning a foreign language has a visible effect on the brain. Young adult military recruits with a flair for languages learned Arabic, Russian or Dari intensively, while a control group of medical and cognitive science students also studied hard, but not at languages. MRI scans showed specific parts of the brains of the language students developed in size whereas the brain structures of the control group remained unchanged. Equally interesting was that learners whose brains grew in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex related to language learning had better language skills than other learners for whom the motor region of the cerebral cortex developed more.

In other words, the areas of the brain that grew were linked to how easy the learners found languages, and brain development varied according to performance. As the researchers noted, while it is not completely clear what changes after three months of intensive language study mean for the long term, brain growth sounds promising.

Looking at functional MRI brain scans can also tell us what parts of the brain are active during a specific learning task. For example, we can see why adult native speakers of a language like Japanese cannot easily hear the difference between the English “r” and “l” sounds (making it difficult for them to distinguish “river” and “liver” for example). Unlike English, Japanese does not distinguish between “r” and “l” as distinct sounds. Instead, a single sound unit (known as a phoneme) represents both sounds.

When presented with English words containing either of these sounds, brain imaging studies show that only a single region of a Japanese speaker’s brain is activated, whereas in English speakers, two different areas of activation show up, one for each unique sound.

For Japanese speakers, learning to hear and produce the differences between the two phonemes in English requires a rewiring of certain elements of the brain’s circuitry. What can be done? How can we learn these distinctions?

Early language studies based on brain research have shown that Japanese speakers can learn to hear and produce the difference in “r” and “l” by using a software program that greatly exaggerates the aspects of each sound that make it different from the other. When the sounds were modified and extended by the software, participants were more easily able to hear the difference between the sounds. In one study, after only three 20-minute sessions (just a single hour’s worth), the volunteers learned to successfully distinguish the sounds, even when the sounds were presented as part of normal speech.

This sort of research might eventually lead to advances in the use of technology for second-language learning. For example, using ultrasound machines like the ones used to show expectant parents the features and movements of their babies in the womb, researchers in articulatory phonetics have been able to explain to language learners how to make sounds by showing them visual images of how their tongue, lips, and jaw should move with their airstream mechanisms and the rise and fall of the soft palate to make these sounds.

Ian Wilson, a researcher working in Japan, has produced some early reports of studies of these technologies that are encouraging. Of course, researchers aren’t suggesting that ultrasound equipment be included as part of regular language learning classrooms, but savvy software engineers are beginning to come up with ways to capitalise on this new knowledge by incorporating imaging into cutting edge language learning apps.

Kara Morgan-Short, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, uses electrophysiology to examine the inner workings of the brain. She and her colleagues taught second-language learners to speak an artificial language – a miniature language constructed by linguists to test claims about language learnability in a controlled way.

In their experiment, one group of volunteers learned through explanations of the rules of the language, while a second group learned by being immersed in the language, similar to how we all learn our native languages. While all of their participants learned, it was the immersed learners whose brain processes were most like those of native speakers. Interestingly, up to six months later, when they could not have received any more exposure to the language at home because the language was artificial, these learners still performed well on tests, and their brain processes had become even more native-like.

In a follow-up study, Morgan-Short and her colleagues showed that the learners who demonstrated particular talents at picking up sequences and patterns learned grammar particularly well through immersion. Morgan-Short said: “This brain-based research tells us not only that some adults can learn through immersion, like children, but might enable us to match individual adult learners with the optimal learning contexts for them.”

Brain imaging research may eventually help us tailor language learning methods to our cognitive abilities, telling us whether we learn best from formal instruction that highlights rules, immersing ourselves in the sounds of a language, or perhaps one followed by the other.

However we learn, this recent brain-based research provides good news. We know that people who speak more than one language fluently have better memories and are more cognitively creative and mentally flexible than monolinguals. Canadian studies suggest that Alzheimer’s disease and the onset of dementia are diagnosed later for bilinguals than for monolinguals, meaning that knowing a second language can help us to stay cognitively healthy well into our later years.

Even more encouraging is that bilingual benefits still hold for those of us who do not learn our second languages as children. Edinburgh University researchers point out that “millions of people across the world acquire their second language later in life: in school, university, or work, or through migration or marriage.” Their results, with 853 participants, clearly show that knowing another language is advantageous, regardless of when you learn it.

Sniffer Dogs ‘Reliable’ At Detecting Early Lung Cancer

Scientific Findings That Support Happeh Theory No Responses »

Feb 132015

Tests found that trained animals correctly identified 71 per cent of people who had the disease and correctly dismissed 93 per cent of those who were healthy.

They were able to distinguish between people who had tumours and those who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a separate condition also linked to smoking, according to a paper published in the European Respiratory Journal.

Scientists at Schillerhoehe Hospital in Germany believe that dogs, long used by police to sniff out drugs, are able to use their sensitive noses to detect chemicals known as volatile organic compounds that are present in cancer sufferers and exhaled in their breath.

The study author, Thorsten Walles, said: “In the breath of patients with lung cancer, there are likely to be different chemicals to normal breath samples and the dogs’ keen sense of smell can detect this difference at an early stage of the disease. Our results confirm the presence of a stable marker for lung cancer.

“This is a big step forward in the diagnosis of lung cancer, but we still need to precisely identify the compounds observed in the exhaled breath of patients. It is unfortunate that dogs cannot communicate the biochemistry of the scent of cancer!”

Dogs Used As ‘Early Warning System’ For Diabetics

Scientific Findings That Support Happeh Theory No Responses »

Feb 132015

Specially trained “glycaemia alert dogs” were able to detect when their owners’ blood sugar levels were outside their normal range and warn them of the fact, researchers found.

It is believed that the dogs are able to detect potential danger because their keen sense of smell can detect chemical changes in their owner’s sweat or breath.

Similar studies have suggested that dogs may be able to detect cancer by catching the scent of chemical compounds released by tumours.

In the new project, funded by pet training specialists The Company of Animals, studied seventeen dogs which had been trained to spot when their owner’s blood sugar levels began to drop too low or rise too high.

Some of the dogs had been donated and trained by the Medical Detection Dogs charity, while others belonged to participants and were specially trained for the study.

Results published in the PLOS ONE journal showed that all seventeen patients reported benefits, including fewer ambulance call-outs and fainting episodes, and greater independence.

Data recorded by the patients suggested that the dogs had been able to warn their owners of high or low blood sugar with an accuracy significantly above the level of chance, although the success rate varied from animal to animal.

Dr Nicola Rooney, who led the study, said current electronic systems designed to do the same job have “numerous limitations” and that dogs could offer “significant improvements”.

She added: “Some of the owners also describe their dogs respond[ing] even before their blood sugars are low but as they start to drop, so it is possible that the dogs are even more effective than this study suggests.

“While it is believed that dogs use their acute sense of smell to detect changes in the chemical composition of their owner’s sweat or breath to respond to glycaemic control, further research is now needed to further understand how dogs carry out this amazing task.”

Dogs Can Sniff Out Bowel Cancer

Scientific Findings That Support Happeh Theory No Responses »

Feb 132015

A specially trained female black Labrador retriever picked out early stage bowel cancer in 33 out of 36 cases by smelling the patients’ breath alone – a 90 per cent success rate.

The dog was even more accurate when given stool to smell, correctly identifying the faeces of someone with early stage bowel cancer with 98 per cent accuracy (37 out of 38 cases).

However, the former is potentially more exciting as it holds out the possibility that a person could be “breathylised” for early stage bowel cancer.

This would be a much more pleasant and less invasive testing method than is currently available.

At the moment in England, all men and women aged 60 to 74 are eligible for screening every two years.

They are sent do-it-yourself kits to test for tiny amounts of blood in their stool, called faecal occult blood (FOB) tests.

The result indicates whether a colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy is required, which involves putting a probe up the anus to check for abnormalities.

However, the FOB tests are unpleasant to do and not particularly accurate.

The researchers, from Kyushu University in Japan, believed their black Lab was able to identify certain chemicals – called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – produced by cancerous cells.

While one option would be to train up teams of dogs, they thought this was impractical “owing to the expense and time required”.

Writing in the journal Gut, they concluded: “It is therefore necessary to identify the cancer-specific VOCs detected by dogs and to develop an early cancer detection sensor that can be substituted for canine scent judgement.”

Bowel cancer is Britain’s second biggest cancer killer, claiming over 16,000 lives every year.

Mark Flannagan, chief executive of the charity Beating Bowel Cancer said: “This study looks interesting but it is for the scientists to verify whether these findings could lead to future developments for screening.”