Category: Lifestyle

California/Health/Holidays/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/USA/Women
Posted on

Alzheimer's: old music, new songs

by Fran Johns

Think nursery rhyme. Sing the words. How long is it since you learned that ditty?

Years ago a friend of mine named Alice suffered a stroke that left her with the ability to say only two words: “one, two.” Or she may have been saying “want to.” In the months ahead she developed a skill for packing more meaning into that phrase than most of us can manage in several paragraphs. “ONE two!,” she would fairly shout at her husband, expressing displeasure (something she did with regularity before the stroke.) “OnetwoONEtwo?” she would ask, in a “Do you really like it?” voice. Still, it was tough on friends and family, and had to have been more than frustrating for her.

Eventually Alice and her husband moved into an assisted living facility. Though she was a woman of limited education and resources, she was able to resume a minimal degree of activity within that community. I saw her about once a week there, for a period of months.

At Christmas time, a group of us went caroling in Alice’s building. Midway through one old, familiar song, as we stood facing an assembled group of residents, someone noticed that Alice was singing merrily along, word for word. There was a lot of nudging and head-nodding, and by the end of the last verse not a dry eye. As we left, Alice smiled and said, “One two, one two.”

Now comes another interesting word about music and the mind, from a Science Daily article posted on the PositScience blog. It cites results from research by the Boston University School of Medicine showing that people with Alzheimer’s retain verbal information better when it comes within the context of music. The findings appear online in Neuropsychologia, an international journal to which I admittedly do not subscribe.

To determine whether music can enhance new learning of information, AD (Alzheimer’s Disease) patients and healthy controls were presented with either the words spoken, or the lyrics sung with full musical accompaniment along with the printed lyrics on a computer screen. The participants were presented visually with the lyrics to 40 songs. Twenty of the song lyrics were accompanied by their corresponding sung recording and 20 were accompanied by their spoken recording.

After each presentation, participants were asked to indicate whether or not they were previously familiar with the song they had just heard. The BUSM researchers found accuracy was greater in the sung condition than in the spoken condition for AD patients but not for healthy older controls.

The blog elicited responses ranging roughly from “that’s very interesting” to “so what else is new?” I come down on the “that’s very interesting” side of the issue, because it is.

And the more we know about connections of this sort, the more we begin to understand about the workings of the mind and the broader the possibilities of unlocking its secrets. Those pesky memorizations of yore, set to music, still manage to survive all manner of afflictions.

I still can’t figure out where I put the keys… but I can sing you every line of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

California/General interest/Health/Law/Lifestyle/New York/Politics & Causes/seniors/teens/USA/Women
Posted on

Abortion foes winning with fear tactics

by Fran Johns

This is the way abortion rights end (apologies to T.S. Eliot): not with a bang, but with something worse than a whimper. The steady, relentless chipping away of those rights, state by state. And where a straightforward denial of women’s rights might face opposition, abortion foes are stooping to emotion-twisting, privacy-invading, fear-inducing tactics the likes of which have not been seen in a half century.

The “pro-lifers” (which is to say, the people who worry about some potential, unwanted life but don’t give a tinker’s dam for the lives of grown — often just barely grown — women) want abortion absolutely banned in this country. They are pushing closer to that goal every day. They like to talk about “protecting the unborn,” but the big losers in this dangerous game will be those who most need protection: poor, disadvantaged, un-empowered women.

New York Times editorial writer Dorothy Samuels offered a sharp overview of the dangerous times ahead for women’s rights, after reporting on a recent lunch celebrating the 40th anniversary of New York’s becoming the first state to fully legalize abortion. That law, Samuels notes, “began to reduce the death and injury toll from back-alley abortions and set the stage for the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which made abortion legal nationwide and recognized a constitutional right to privacy.

But abortion-rights groups are newly anxious about new assaults on women’s reproductive rights, including a fight over abortion that snarled the last days of the health care reform debate. Anti-abortion groups are newly emboldened.

The health care reform law contains advances for women’s reproductive health care, including enlarged access to insurance coverage for maternity care, contraception and other services. But President Obama and pro-choice Congressional lawmakers made abortion coverage vulnerable as part of the effort to secure the measure’s passage.

Kelli Conlin, head of Naral Pro-Choice New York, told guests at the lunch that “anti-choice forces are mobilizing in every single state to limit a woman’s access to abortion in more insidious ways than we can imagine.”

As Ms. Conlin was speaking, members of the Oklahoma House were getting ready to override vetoes of two punishing abortion measures. The state’s Democratic governor, Brad Henry, rightly viewed these intrusions into women’s lives and decision-making as unconstitutional.

One of the measures, which seems destined to spawn copycat bills in other states, requires women to undergo an ultrasound before getting an abortion and further mandates that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and hear a detailed description of the fetus.

The other law grants protection from lawsuits to doctors who deliberately withhold fetal testing results that might affect a woman’s decision about whether to carry her pregnancy to term.

Several states have either passed or are considering bills that would ban abortion coverage in insurance plans sold through the state exchanges established by the federal health care law.

A new Utah law criminalizes certain behavior by women that results in miscarriage. Embarking on a road that could lead to the Supreme Court, Nebraska last month banned most abortions at the 20th week of pregnancy based on a questionable theory of fetal pain.

About two dozen states are looking at bills to increase counseling requirements or waiting periods prior to abortions. About 20 states are considering new ultrasound requirements. This is on top of an already onerous regimen of state restrictions that has drastically cut down on abortion providers and curtailed a woman’s ability to exercise a constitutionally protected right.

Draconian laws will not stop unintended pregnancies. Once abortion foes succeed in eliminating a woman’s right to privacy and ability to make her own, often difficult, choices the lucrative business of back-alley abortions will once again thrive. And women will die.

Editorial Observer – A Spreading Peril for Women’s Privacy and Freedom – NYTimes.com.

California/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/USA
Posted on

Brain exercises oversold, study says

by Fran Johns

What? Brain exercises aren’t all they’re cracked up to be? Bah, humbug. But indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s Gautam Naik in a recent article, “a large new study casts doubt on whether such programs can deliver what they promise.”

The hallmark of a good brain-training program isn’t whether it simply improves a person’s ability to do the specific mental tasks in the training, but whether it also boosts other cognitive skills. The latest study, published in the journal Nature, found no evidence for such cognitive transfers.

“Our brain-training groups got better at the tests they practiced, and the more they practiced, the better they got. But there was no translation to any improvements in general cognitive function,” said study co-author Jessica Grahn, a scientist at the Medical and Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. The unit has close links to the University of Cambridge.

Full disclosure: Posit Science CEO Steven Aldrich (quoted below) provided this geezer-driver writer with his company’s DriveSharp program at no charge. Whenever I can snatch some time (unfortunately that is seldom in 30-minute segments) I work on brain-training computer exercises designed to make me a safer driver.  This is anecdotal and unscientific, but I believe it has made a small improvement.

But back to the study.

The brain-training field has been boosted by studies suggesting that even adult brains are “plastic,” and cognitive ability can be improved with the right mental training. Another spur is an aging population, and the hope that cognitive exercises and lifestyle changes may help to forestall brain maladies such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The authors of the Nature study point out that some modest benefits to cognitive abilities have been reported in studies of older people, preschool children and videogame players who outperform nonplayers on some tests of visual attention. But wider empirical support has been lacking, they said.

The six-week online study involved 11,430 healthy participants, all viewers of a BBC television science program. They were first tested for their existing “benchmark” cognitive abilities, and then randomly assigned to one of three groups, each with a different set of tasks.

One group took part in online games aimed at improving skills linked to general intelligence, such as reasoning, problem-solving and planning. A second test group did exercises to boost short-term memory, attention and mathematical and visual-spatial skills—functions typically targeted by commercial brain-training programs. A third “control group” was asked to browse the Internet and seek out answers to general knowledge questions.

The conclusion: Those who did the brain-training exercises improved in the specific tasks that they practiced. However, their improvement was generally no greater than the gains made by the control group surfing the Internet. And none of the groups showed evidence of improvement in cognitive skills that weren’t specifically used in their tasks.

This study may be in, but the jury is still out. Proponents cite other sources and other studies in this still-new field, most aimed at helping the aging population keep up memory function and stave off general decline. And sites maintaining that it’s possible to build new brain cells continue to proliferate. Critics of the new study weighed in:

Some critics said the study’s design was flawed. For example, the participants were asked to do brain workouts for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a day, for six weeks. But that may not have been long enough.

“It’s not brain training,” said Alvaro Fernandez, chief executive officer of SharpBrains. Past studies, he said, indicate that proper cognition transfer “only happens after more than 15 hours of training and where each session lasts at least 30 minutes.”

Steven Aldrich, chief executive of Posit Science of San Francisco, which sells brain-training programs, said the “study overreaches in generalizing that since their methods did not work, all methods would not work.” Mr. Aldrich added that other randomized, peer-reviewed studies have shown that brain training improves some aspects of brain performance.

Given the growing aging population and its accompanying mental struggles, from Where did I leave the keys? to fears of Alzheimer’s, this space endorses all efforts to better the brain cells. I’m still working on my driving and in favor of giving a game a try.

Study Finds Mental Exercise Offers Brain Limited Benefits – WSJ.com.

California/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/seniors/teens/USA
Posted on

OMG: Texting drivers crash, maim, kill — to the tune of 1.6 million annual accidents

by Fran Johns

Nearly 28% of crashes, some 1.6 million per year according to the National Safety Council, can be attributed to drivers who are talking on cell phones or texting. Crossing the intersection of Clement Street and Arguello Blvd in San Francisco an hour or so ago I almost made it 1.6 million plus one: driver on phone, self on foot, alert driver blasted horn at talking driver with whom I thought I’d made eye contact (apparently not) or this space would’ve been toast. Are we a nation of nuts, or what?

The issue has gotten the attention of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the Orthopaedic Trauma Association, folks who see the reality of these abstract statistics every day. The two groups have joined forces to launch a print and PSA campaign designed to staunch the wound.

The campaign features a bloody, shattered windshield accompanied by the words:  OMG! Get the message. Texting while driving is a deadly distraction.

It’s definitely time. According to the AAOS release, “general statistics on distracted driving are startling:

  • 80 percent of all crashes and 65 percent of near crashes involve some type of distraction. (Source: Virginia Tech 100-car study for NHTSA)
  • Nearly 6,000 people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver, and more than half a million were injured. (NHTSA)
  • The worst offenders are the youngest and least-experienced drivers: men and women under 20 years of age. (NHTSA)
  • Drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves. (Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

Wall Street Journal “Driver’s Seat” blogger Jonathan Welsh posted a commentary somewhat courageously including himself in the Bad Guy category in discussing the billboard camapaign:

So, when did you stop texting behind the wheel? It’s a loaded question, but appropriate for many if not most of us. I don’t think I know anyone with a mobile phone and a driver’s license who doesn’t tap out the occasional message while driving.

In the era of multitasking and rapid communication, driving and texting are a tempting combination. Too bad it’s so dangerous.

“To say this habit can be deadly is the truth. It is an outcome we unfortunately see every day,” said AAOS president John J. Callaghan. “The problem with the use of 24/7 communications devices is that every driver believes he or she is immune to slip ups, but isn’t.”

Of course many people are so immersed in typing or reading their handheld screens that they might miss the billboards as they drive past. We have all seen — or even performed — outrageous driving maneuvers after distractions caused us to stray from our lane, miss an exit or nearly run a red light. I find that once I get over the initial anger I always feel at least a touch of empathy.

This space feels no empathy at all. It’s easy to be righteous when you never got into the phoning/texting/driving habit, and easy not to have done so if you were grew up in the dark ages before cell phones were invented.

Still, staying alive is good. I hope the lady driving the beige SUV through the intersection of Clement and Arguello gets the message before it’s too late.

Texting While Driving: Medical Groups Speak Out – Driver’s Seat – WSJ.

California/Lifestyle/seniors/teens/USA/Women
Posted on

Girl drivers more aggressive than boys – and texting, loud music now the norm

by Fran Johns

My 19-year-old granddaughter, who totaled her car a few months ago, swears she wasn’t texting at the time. Well… maybe the music was playing a little loud. She was unhurt, didn’t hit anyone else or damage anything other than her late lamented car, so there are a lot of blessings to count. But does she text occasionally? “Everybody does.” And in general, besides the decibel level, and the phone which is an extension of her left hand, a shrinking violet she is not. I hasten to say this is a young woman I greatly love and admire; she may also be typical of today’s teenage girl drivers.

Some big auto insurers are raising the rates they charge to cover teenage girls, reflecting the crumbling of conventional wisdom that young women are more responsible behind the wheel.

In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance Co. found that 48% of girls said they are likely to drive 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted to speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just over half of the girls said they are likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared to 38% of the boys.

The results were “a surprise to many people,” says Meghann Dowd of the Allstate Foundation, an independent charitable organization funded by Allstate which sponsored the survey.

While teens fessed up about their own bad behavior, they also said their friends drive even worse. The study found that 65% of the respondents, male and female, said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers. This suggests teens recognize in their friends the dubious and dangerous behavior they won’t admit to indulging in themselves.

A few interesting findings of the new survey:

16% of girls describe their driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005.

84% of girls are likely to adjust music selection or volume while driving, versus only 69% of boys.

82% of teens report using cell phones while driving.

23%of teens admit they have felt unsafe with another teen’s driving.

23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers.

More teens (22%) consider parents in the car more distracting than having their friends in the car (14%).

OK, geezer drivers (this one is still working on the DriveSharp program we all hope is building neurons in my brain and helping me expand my useful field of view) are an admitted hazard on the road. But this new data about our grandchildren isn’t terribly encouraging either. It’s a scary road out there.

Girls Say They Speed, Drive Aggressively More than Boys – WSJ.com.

California/crime/Health/Law/Lifestyle/Medicine/Politics & Causes/seniors/teens
Posted on

Medical marijuana: a boon & a challenge

by Fran Johns

When my sister Mimi found that marijuana could relieve her severe gastrointestinal distress, years ago, one joint after dinner was all it took. Unfortunately we couldn’t keep up the supply. After one foray into the rather scary realm of pot-dealing in a state (Georgia) where we could have wound up in jail very quickly, we decided that not even such clear relief was worth the risk.

Today, at least in California and 14 other states — with the District of Columbia possibly to be added soon — the risk is minimal but the dosage is fuzzy. The conundrum was outlined by writer Lena K. Sun in the San Francisco Chronicle:

On Tuesday, District of Columbia officials gave final approval to a bill establishing a legal medical marijuana program. If Congress signs off, D.C. doctors – like their counterparts in 14 states – will be allowed to add pot to therapies they can recommend to certain patients, who will then eat it, smoke it or vaporize it until they decide they are, well, high enough.

The exact dosage and means of delivery – as well as the sometimes perplexing process of obtaining a drug that remains illegal under federal law – will be left largely up to the patient. Doctors say that upends the way they are used to dispensing medication, giving the straitlaced medical establishment a whiff of the freewheeling world of weed.

Even in states where marijuana is allowed for medical use, doctors cannot write prescriptions because of the drug’s status as an illegal substance. Physicians can only recommend it, and have no control over the quality of the drug their patients acquire.

Because there are no uniform standards for medical marijuana, doctors have to rely on the experience of other doctors and their own judgment. That, they say, can lead to abuse.

California’s “quick-in, quick-out mills” that readily hand out recommendations have proliferated, worrying advocates. The state, the first to legalize medical marijuana 14 years ago, allows for a wider range of conditions, including anxiety.

To guard against abuse, some doctors say they recommend marijuana only after patients exhaust other remedies. Some doctors perform drug tests as part of pre-screenings.

Mimi died over a year ago. Her last decades, like almost all of her adult life, were spent in the State of Georgia, where medical marijuana is still against the law. I know what her required dosage was; legalization and proper oversight would allow doctors to learn dosages that work for their patients. It seems worse than cruel that thousands of other sick and dying citizens continue to be denied the potential relief that legalized medical marijuana could bring.

Dispensing medical pot a challenge for doctors.

California/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/USA
Posted on

When Mom & Dad go wandering: dementia on a relentless rise

by Fran Johns

“MISSING,” the sign reads. “Distinguished-looking elderly man. 6′ 1” slightly stooped. Gray hair. Wearing dark blue sweater and gray slacks. Name: George; does not always respond. Suffering from mild dementia. Wandered away from the Laurel Village shopping center area. Please call 415-xxx-xxxx with any information.”

The sad, 8″ x 10″ flyer has appeared (once the words were slightly different, but it was clearly the same George) at the bus stop near my home twice in recent months. I kept the number in my wallet for a while, hoping I might spot him because I walk the city myself. But the difference is that I have on a warm jacket — it’s way too cold in San Francisco, especially after dark, for only a sweater — and I know how to get home.  I have wanted to call the number and learn whether George got home, but it seems intrusive.

Last year for the first time, as reporter Kirk Johnson writes in The New York Times, people like George and a 60-year-old Virginia woman named Freda Machett accounted for more missing-person alerts than children and adolescents. They are confused and lost, and often are not found in time.

Ms. Machett, 60, suffers from a form of dementia that attacks the brain like Alzheimer’s disease and imposes on many of its victims a restless urge to head out the door. Their journeys, shrouded in a fog of confusion and fragmented memory, are often dangerous and not infrequently fatal. About 6 in 10 dementia victims will wander at least once, health care statistics show, and the numbers are growing worldwide, fueled primarily by Alzheimer’s disease, which has no cure and affects about half of all people over 85.
It started with five words — ‘I want to go home’ — even though this is her home,” said Ms. Machett’s husband, John, a retired engineer who now cares for his wife full time near Richmond. She has gone off dozens of times in the four years since receiving her diagnosis, three times requiring a police search. “It’s a cruel disease,” he said.
“You have to stop thinking logically, because the people you’re looking for are no longer capable of logic,” said Robert B. Schaefer, a retired F.B.I. agent who cared for his wife, Sarah, for 15 years at home through her journey into Alzheimer’s. He now leads two-day training sessions for the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services.

How to deal with dementia is the most bewildering of end-of-life issues, whether for oneself or for a family member. Most of us would choose almost any other scenario for our last months or years, but the choice is often not ours to make. We can file advance directives (mine includes a “Dementia Provision“) and express our wishes and do brain exercises; still, one in seven Americans, according to most fairly recent reports, now suffers from dementia and the numbers are on the rise.

Here’s one interesting perspective. My greatly beloved brother-in-law, who recently relocated with my sister to a retirement community, has Parkinson’s. Though his mobility and function are diminished, the disease has yet to affect his mind. Several weeks ago he told me he no longer fears dementia. “I see people more and more with varying stages of dementia,” he said, “and I believe you can be happy.”

But you can also wander off.

More Wander Off in Fog of Age – NYTimes.com.

California/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/Politics & Causes/Religion/seniors/teens/USA/Women
Posted on

Mike Huckabee jumps on anti-abortion bandwagon

by Fran Johns

The goal: criminalize abortion, make it impossible for a physician in the U.S. to perform an abortion or for a woman in the U.S. to obtain a safe, legal abortion. The progress: excellent. The methods: distortion, sensationalism and more than a few outright lies. The concern for women: zero.

But it’s working. Obviously it’s going to get a lot of conservative Republicans elected.

This just in from Georgia Right to Life:

Today (May 3) Governor Mike Huckabee announced his support for SB 529 in a message that is going out to Georgia constituents asking for their support for SB 529. Governor Huckabee noted the importance of this bill, “SB 529 is a simple bill that prevents a woman from being forced to have an abortion against her will and prohibits the use of abortion as a means of race or gender discrimination. I’m asking you to support SB 529 and to ask your representative to support SB 529.”

Two weeks ago the Georgia Senate passed SB 529 with overwhelming support. On Tuesday, April 13, 2010, SB 529 had a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee, but no vote was taken.

SB 529 was drafted by some of the leading pro-life attorney’s in the nation and was reviewed positively by the American Center for Law and Justice, Liberty Counsel, the Thomas Moore Law Center, Americans United for Life, and Focus on the Family.

Here are just a few interesting factoids: Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas, currently a regular on Fox News, formerly a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Presumably his “constituents” are those who will now support his next presidential — or whatever — bid because of this brave stand against “forced abortion.” Focus on the Family is a Christian organization that is not averse to messing around in political campaigns. The un-subtle message of that “as a means of race discrimination” is the bizarre hook with which abortion foes are seeking to manipulate African Americans, by equating abortion with Black genocide.

It is simply not so. Women do not need pious white guys protecting them from being marched in droves into abortion clinics. African American women do not need anybody telling them what they may or may not do with their bodies.

What we need is the right to life, our lives. The right to choose. The right to control our own bodies. Once the abortion foes win this battle — which gets scarier by the day — those basic human rights will be taken away from American women. Because women get pregnant. Sometimes that pregnancy is a mistake, a threat, a danger. When abortion becomes illegal, women will have no option but the back alley abortionist.

Decreasing numbers of us know what that was like, but I can tell you. Before Roe v Wade, legions of women, for countless valid reasons, needed to terminate a pregnancy. A few found doctors willing to risk their license in order to give a woman a safe choice. But uncounted thousands of us wound up in the filthy, unsafe, demeaning hands of back alley abortionists. Uncounted thousands died. Those who died were white, Black and all shades in between.

Would Mike Huckabee like to see his daughter go through that tragic indignity? That’s where we are headed.

1 … 16 17 18 19 20 … 31