Seniors who are drowsy during the day and find it hard to muster enthusiasm for activities could be at higher risk of a brain condition that precedes dementia, a new study warns. These sleep-related problems are associated with “motoric cognitive risk syndrome,” a pre-dementia condition that causes slow walking speed and some memory problems, researchers explained. People with excessive daytime sleepiness and a lack of enthusiasm are more than three times more likely to develop this syndrome, compared to people without those sleep-related problems, researchers reported Nov. 6 in the journal Neurology. “More research needs to be done to look at the relationship between sleep issues and cognitive decline and the role played by motoric cognitive risk syndrome,” said researcher Dr. Victoire Leroy, with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. “We also need studies to explain the mechanisms that link these sleep disturbances to motoric cognitive risk syndrome and cognitive decline.” For the study, researchers recruited 445 people, average age 76, without dementia. These seniors filled out questionnaires about sleep habits and memory issues, and their walking speed was repeatedly tested on a treadmill. About 177 people met the definition for poor sleepers, and 268 met the definition for good sleepers. At the start of the study, 42 people had motoric cognitive risk syndrome. During the average three-year follow-up, another 36…  read on >  read on >

In 1972, Britain bumped up the total school years mandated for its children from 15 to 16 years. That created a “natural experiment”: Would Britons who got that extra year of education fare any better, neurologically, as they aged? Unfortunately, the answer is “no.” “This surprised us,” said study co-author and brain researcher Nicholas Judd, from Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. “We know that education is beneficial, and we had expected education to provide protection against brain aging,” he said in a medical center news release. “Aging shows up in all of our MRI measures, for instance we see a decline in total volume, surface area, cortical thickness and worse water diffusion in the brain. However, the extra year of education appears to have no effect here.” The findings were published Nov. 5 in the journal eLife. Judd and Radboudumc co-researcher Rogier Kievit accessed the MRI brain scans of more than 30,000 adult Britons taken an average of 46 years after they attended school in the early 1970s. Education has long been associated with brain resiliency, so it was assumed that the brains of people who went to school that extra year might differ in subtle ways from those who graduated before the new law was enacted. But Judd and Kievit saw no differences in various aspects of brain structure that they…  read on >  read on >

Poorer folks’ access to blockbuster weight-loss drugs through Medicaid remains limited, a new KFF analysis has found. Only 13 states currently allow Medicaid to cover treatment of obesity using glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist (GLP-1) medications, researchers discovered. Under the Medicaid system, individual states are allowed to decide whether to cover GLP-1 drugs, which include Wegovy (semaglutide), Zepbound (tirzepatide) and Saxenda (liraglutide), the KFF report noted. Among those states that don’t cover the drugs, half reported that they are considering adding coverage in the near future, the researchers added. But GLP-1 drugs are pricey, and nearly two-thirds of states said cost is a hurdle to approving coverage of the meds through Medicaid. “Expanding Medicaid coverage of these drugs could increase access for the almost 40% of adults and 26% of children with obesity in Medicaid,” wrote the research team led by senior investigator Clea Bell, a research assistant in state health reform for KFF. “At the same time, expanded coverage could also increase Medicaid drug spending and put pressure on overall state budgets.” Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs mimic the GLP-1 hormone, which helps control insulin and blood sugar levels, decreases appetite and slows digestion of food. However, the drugs are costly — people without insurance face paying more than $1,000 a month to take them. The 13 states where Medicaid covers GLP-1 drugs for obesity are California,…  read on >  read on >

Current treatments sometimes fail to help people with “wet” age-related macular degeneration — and researchers now think they know why. Wet AMD is caused by an overgrowth of blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye. The vessels leak fluid or bleed, damaging the retina and causing vision loss. To combat this, doctors prescribe medications that slow the growth of new blood vessels, called anti-VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) drugs. Unfortunately, these anti-VEGF drugs might actually hamper vision improvements by triggering the over-expression of a second blood-vessel-related protein, researchers have discovered. This second protein, ANGPTL4, also can stimulate overproduction of abnormal blood vessels in the retina, researchers reported Nov. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These findings could explain why fewer than half of patients who receive monthly anti-VEGF eye injections wind up showing any major improvements in their vision, researchers said. “We have previously reported that ANGPTL4 was increased in patients who did not respond well to anti-VEGF treatment,” said researcher Dr. Akrit Sodhi, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. “What we saw in this paper was a paradoxical increase of ANGPTL4 in patients that received anti-VEGF injections — the anti-VEGF therapy itself turned on expression of this protein,” Sodhi said in a Hopkins news…  read on >  read on >