Having more years of formal education delays the memory loss linked to Alzheimer’s disease, but once the condition begins to take hold, better-educated people decline more rapidly, researchers said.
Their study, published in the journal Neurology, tracked memory loss in a group of elderly people from New York City’s Bronx borough before they were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or another form of old-age dementia, Reuters said.
Every year of education delayed the accelerated memory decline that precedes dementia by about 2-1/2 months, according to the researchers at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
But once this memory loss began, the rate of decline unfolded 4 percent more quickly for each additional year of education, the researchers said.
Someone with 16 years of schooling might experience memory decline 50 percent more quickly than another person with just four years education, based on the findings.
Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative brain malady that is the most common form of dementia among the elderly.
“An elderly person who starts to see memory loss might well deteriorate fairly rapidly, particularly if he or she has a high education or high IQ,“ Charles Hall, a professor of epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
“And this is important to clinicians to know so they can advise their patients that things might well get very bad very fast, whereas in a lot of other people the decline is relatively gradual over a long period of time,“ Hall added.
People with more years of formal education appear to have a greater “cognitive reserve,“ Hall said, referring to the brain’s ability to keep working despite damage.
While better-educated people may be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s later than people with less education, it appears they have suffered brain damage but their “cognitive reserve“ was able to hide and delay the effects, the researchers said.
The study started in the 1980s, tracking 488 people born from 1894 and 1908 and giving them periodic memory tests. The findings published on Monday were based on 117 of them who eventually developed Alzheimer’s or another dementia. Most of the participants were followed until either death or diagnosis of dementia. Those diagnosed with dementia were followed for up to about 16 years, with an average of six years.
The study included people with postgraduate education as well as others with fewer than three years of elementary school. Hall noted that levels of education that people received varied much more in the early part of the 20th century than they do now.

A simple device for detecting carbon monoxide in the blood may help doctors get an honest answer out of patients who smoke, US researchers said.
The device, called a pulse cooximeter, is typically used to test for carbon monoxide levels in firefighters, but it can also detect carbon monoxide levels in people who smoke, offering a powerful tool for educating patients about the effects of smoking, according to HealthDay.
“We were trying to just solve a little problem,“ said Dr. Sridhar Reddy, a lung specialist in St. Clair, Michigan, who presented the study at a scientific meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians in Chicago, along with his 16-year-old son Ashray.
“There is no good way to screen people for smoking,“ said Dr. Reddy, who encouraged Ashray to take on the study as a school science project.
“You can ask them directly, do you smoke. But once they say they don’t smoke and they lie about it, they will never volunteer that information,“ Dr. Reddy said in an interview.
Dr. Reddy was looking for a quick, convenient method to detect whether a person smokes. Current tests involve breath, blood or saliva samples, but the pulse cooximeter simply involves placing a clip-like device on a finger tip.
The pulse cooximeter reads percentages of poisoned blood through a light that is shined through the finger nail.
Dr. Reddy’s son Ashray wanted to find out how much carboxyhemoglobin--blood poisoned by carbon monoxide--would indicate whether a person is a smoker.
Working with his dad, he devised a questionnaire to determine patients’ smoking habits. Meanwhile, Dr. Reddy recruited 476 patients in his office to take the test.
Together, they determined that patients with blood carbon monoxide levels of more than 6 percent were smokers, a finding Ashray confirmed through his patient surveys.
Ashray and his dad think the device might be a cheap, easy way to help doctors talk to their patients about smoking.
Dr. Reddy said most patients know what carbon monoxide is, and they respond strongly when they find it is circulating in their blood.
Dr. Reddy now routinely uses the test as part of a patient work-up. And instead of asking whether a patient is a smoker, he presents the test results and asks whether the finding could be related to smoking. His hope is this can become part of routine screening.

Most people know eating broccoli is good but it also can help skin cells fend off damage from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

Most people know eating broccoli is good but it also can help skin cells fend off damage from harmful ultraviolet radiation, US researchers said.
The extract derived from newly sprouted broccoli seeds reduced skin redness and damage by more than one-third compared with untreated skin, they said. The extract already has been shown to help skin cells fight UV damage in mice, Reuters reported.
“This is a first demonstration that a human tissue can be protected directly against a known human carcinogen,“ said Dr. Paul Talalay of Johns Hopkins University, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“This is not a sunscreen,“ Talalay said in a telephone interview. Instead, the extract helped fortify skin cells to fight the effects of UV radiation.
Unlike sunscreens, which provide a physical barrier against UV rays by absorbing, blocking or scattering the light, the extract helped boost the production of protective enzymes that defend against UV-related damage, Talalay said.
He has been studying sulforaphane--a compound in broccoli sprout extract--for more than 15 years. It has been shown to prevent tumor development in a number of animals treated with cancer-causing agents.
Talalay and colleagues tried it on six people, testing different doses of the extract on several small patches of skin, which was then exposed to a short pulse of UV radiation sufficient to cause varying degrees of sunburn.
They compared the redness of the skin in the treated and untreated areas. “That redness is a measure of a series of processes that go on in the skin which are harmful, including DNA damage,“ Talalay said.
At the highest doses, the extract reduced redness and swelling by an average of 37 percent.
The effect was long-lasting, Talalay said. “Two days after we stopped treatment, there was still an effect,“ he said.
The effect varied widely among the volunteers, ranging from 8 percent to 78 percent protection, due to genetic differences.
“What we have shown is important because it works in humans,“ Talalay said. “How it should be applied to humans--that requires further work.“
The extract might be useful as a means of protecting against exposure to UV radiation, especially in people with suppressed immune systems who are most at risk for skin cancer, such as transplant patients, Talalay said. But it is no substitute for sunscreen.
“It does not prevent the radiation from penetrating into skin cells,“ he said.

Ever get a little testy after a bad night’s sleep? Scientists may now know why.
A new study finds that lack of sleep causes the brain’s emotional centers to dramatically overreact to negative experiences.
A shutdown of the prefrontal lobe--a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control- is the reason for heightened emotional response in sleep-deprived people, said the researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley, HealthDay said.
Reporting in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Current Biology, the team said its study is the first to determine, at the neural level, why lack of sleep can lead to emotionally irrational behavior and may help improve understanding of the link between sleep disruptions and psychiatric disorders.
“This adds to the critical list of sleep’s benefits,“ Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a prepared statement. “Sleep appears to restore our emotional brain circuits, and, in doing so, prepares us for the next day’s challenges and social interactions. Most importantly, this study demonstrates the dangers of not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation fractures the brain mechanisms that regulate key aspects of our mental health.“
The study included 26 healthy people who were assigned to either a normal sleep group or to a sleep deprivation group, where they were kept awake for 35 hours. Afterwards, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure the participants’ brain activity.
“We had predicted a potential increase in the emotional reaction from the brain (in people deprived of sleep), but the size of the increase truly surprised us,“ Walker said. “The emotional centers of the brain were over 60 percent more reactive under conditions of sleep deprivation than in subjects who had obtained a normal night of sleep.“
He said it’s almost as though lack of sleep causes the brain to revert “back to a more primitive pattern of activity, becoming unable to put emotional experiences in context and produce controlled, appropriate responses.“

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the appendix may not be useless after all. New research suggests that the structure helps beneficial bacteria survive and repopulate the colon after these organisms become depleted as a result of an infection or drug treatment.
Beneficial bacterial, also referred to as commensal bacteria, help maintain a proper balance in the intestine and may also kill dangerous microbes. For example, this is why patients frequently develop gastrointestinal problems during or after a course of antibiotics. Along with the pathogen causing the infection, the antibiotic may destroy commensal bacteria as well, Canada.com reported.
This report “proposes a novel and unique function for the human appendix, for which the appendix is well suited,“ senior author Dr. William Parker, from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, told Reuters Health. “Importantly, the proposal explains clearly why the function is not evident in our industrialized culture.“
The researchers’ hypothesis appears in the online issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
A series of experiments and observations, led Parker’s team to theorize that the appendix serves as a protected reservoir for commensal bacteria. After a bout of diarrhea that evacuates the microbial contents of the colon, the bacteria in the appendix can emerge to repopulate the intestine.
In industrialized societies with good sanitation, this function may not be important, he and his colleagues suggest.
Whether or not the appendix actually has this apparent beneficial effect should not change how appendicitis is treated, Parker said.
For patients and physicians alike, the message is that symptoms of appendicitis always need to be evaluated, he emphasized.
“Although the function of the organ may have been determined, it is most certainly not important in our culture, and if you try to hang on to it after it gets inflamed, it could be deadly.“

Eating half a cup to a cup of whole grain breakfast cereal may help lower your blood pressure.

Eating whole grain cereals has already shown promise for lowering blood pressure and warding off heart attacks, but it may also significantly reduce the risk of heart failure, US researchers said.
According to Webmd.com, they found that men who ate a bowl a day of whole grain cereal had a 28 percent lower risk of developing heart failure over a 20-year study.
“Eating half a cup to a cup of whole grain breakfast cereal may help lower your blood pressure. It may help lower your risk of diabetes and heart disease,“ said Dr. Luc Djousse of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“This study adds another piece to the puzzle. It may also lower your risk of heart failure,“ Djousse, whose study appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine, said in a telephone interview.
Djousse and colleagues studied the breakfast habits of more than 21,000 male doctors with an average age of 53.7 years for nearly 20 years.
Men in the study tracked their cold cereal intake with questionnaires, and the researchers also tracked new cases of heart failure on an annual basis. Cereals with at least 25 percent whole grain or bran by weight were classified as whole grain.
Over the course of the study, 1,018 of the men had heart failure. Most new cases were in the men who ate no whole grain cereals--362 cases of heart failure out of nearly 7,000 participants.
Those who ate at least one bowl a day of whole grain cereal had the lowest incidence of heart failure, with 189 cases out of more than 4,000.
Since heart failure often develops as the result of a heart attack, the study may simply be an added bonus to the already proven benefits of reduced blood pressure and heart attack risk that come with eating whole grains, Djousse said.
Whole grains also have been shown to help control body weight and reduce the risk of diabetes, he said.
“If you can consume whole grain cereals, go for it,“ Djousse said.
“The more fiber the cereal contains, the more likely you are getting the right type,“ he added.
He suggests looking for 4 grams of fiber or more per serving.
Heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalization in the United States. It occurs when the heart becomes less efficient at pumping blood to the body’s organs and is usually brought on by clogged arteries, high blood pressure or diabetes.

Scientists at Duke University Medical Center may have solved the mystery surrounding the healing properties of gold--a discovery they say may renew interest in gold salts as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases.
Physicians first used injections of gold salts in the early 1900s to ease the pain and swelling associated with arthritis. But treatment came at a high cost: The shots took months to take effect and side effects included rashes, mouth sores, kidney damage and occasionally, problems with the bone marrow’s ability to make new blood cells, Physorg.com said.
Recently, new treatments like methotrexate and biologically engineered drugs have replaced gold as a preferred treatment, and gold salts, while remaining effective, are usually administered as a last resort.
But Dr. David Pisetsky, chief of the division of rheumatology and immunology in the department of medicine at Duke had long been interested in a particular molecule, HMBG1, which provokes inflammation, the key process underlying the development of rheumatoid arthritis. HMBG1 is a dual-function molecule, which means that it behaves one way when it’s inside the nucleus of a cell, and quite another way when it’s released from the cell.
Pisetsky says that inside the nucleus, HMGB1 is a key player in transcription, the process that converts genetic information in DNA to its RNA equivalent. But when HMGB1 is released from the cell--either through normal processes or cell death--it becomes a stimulus to the immune system and enhances inflammation.
“Interestingly, HMGB1 is not produced evenly throughout the body,“ says Pisetsky.
“There is an unusually high amount of it in the synovial tissue and fluid around the joints--where arthritis occurs.“
Pisetsky, working with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, stimulated mouse and human immune system cells to secrete HMGB1, then treated them with gold salts. They found that the gold blocked the release of HMGB1 from the nucleus. That, in turn, should lessen the amount available to provoke the body’s immune system, weakening the inflammatory response.
Pisetsky says gold inhibits the release of HMGB1 by interfering with the activity of two helper molecules that ease HMGB1’s release from the cell, interferon beta and nitric oxide.