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Smoking shrinks the human brain, and once that brain mass is lost then it’s gone for good, a new study warns. Brain scans from more than 32,000 people strongly link a history of smoking with a gradual loss of brain volume. In fact, the more packs a person smoked per day, the smaller their brain volume, researchers found. The study also establishes the potential series of events that leads to smoking-related brain loss, with a genetic predisposition to smoking eventually causing decreased brain volume. “It sounds bad, and it is bad,” said senior study author Laura Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “A reduction in brain volume is consistent with increased aging,” Bierut added in a university news release. “This is important as our population gets older, because aging and smoking are both risk factors for dementia.” The study, published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, helps explain previous studies that have found smokers at higher risk for age-related brain decline and Alzheimer’s disease. “Up until recently, scientists have overlooked the effects of smoking on the brain, in part because we were focused on all the terrible effects of smoking on the lungs and the heart,” Bierut said. “But as we’ve started looking at the brain more closely, it’s become apparent that smoking is… read on > read on >

Regular exercise appears to enhance and even grow crucial areas of the human brain, new research using MRI scans shows. It’s long been known that physical activity is a brain-booster, but this international study illustrates ways this could be happening. “With comprehensive imaging scans, our study underscores the interconnected synergy between the body and the brain,” said study senior author Dr. Rajpul Attariwala, a radiologist at Prenuvo, a medical imaging center in Vancouver, Canada. Reporting recently in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Attariwala and colleagues analyzed more than 10,000 brain scans conducted at various Prenuvo centers. A pattern emerged: People who regularly engaged in running, walking or sports tended to have larger volumes of gray matter in their brains. Gray matter helps with the processing of incoming information, the researchers noted. These avid exercisers also tended to have larger volumes of white matter. White matter helps connect different brain regions and is crucial to memory. You didn’t have to run marathons to get a brain benefit, the team found. “We found that even moderate levels of physical activity, such as taking fewer than 4,000 steps a day, can have a positive effect on brain health,” study co-author Dr. David Merill said in a journal news release. He directs the Pacific Brain Health Center at Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. “This is much less… read on > read on >

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey confirmed Wednesday that she has used a weight-loss medication to help her shed pounds and get healthy. Winfrey has added the drug to a regimen that includes regular exercise and other lifestyle tweaks, People magazine reported. Weight fluctuations “occupied five decades of space in my brain, yo-yoing and feeling like why can’t I just conquer this thing, believing willpower was my failing,” Winfrey told the magazine. Her most recent weight-loss journey began after she had knee surgery in 2021. “I started hiking and setting new distance goals each week. I could eventually hike three to five miles every day and a 10-mile straight-up hike on weekends,” she said. “I felt stronger, more fit and more alive than I’d felt in years.” But that wasn’t the only change she made to her life, said Winfrey, who turns 70 in January. “I eat my last meal at 4 o’clock, drink a gallon of water a day, and use the Weight Watchers principles of counting points. I had an awareness of [weight-loss] medications, but felt I had to prove I had the willpower to do it. I now no longer feel that way.” “I was actually recommending it to people long before I was on it myself,” she noted. After an epiphany in July during a panel conversation with weight-loss experts, she changed her… read on > read on >

Being in a marriage or long-term relationship typically includes promises of monogamy, but new research shows a surprising number of folks, mostly men, are open to the idea of having another person in the mix. Fully one-third of men in the United Kingdom are open to the idea of having more than one wife or long-term girlfriend, while only 11% of women would want someone else in their relationship, results show. Those trends hold when considering both types of polygamy, researchers said. Those are polygyny, a man marrying more than one woman, or polyandry, where a woman marries more than one man, researchers found. About 9% of men said they would share their partner, versus 5% of women interested in such a relationship, according to the report in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. “This study shows that a sizable minority of people are open to such relationships, even in the U.K, where such marriages are prohibited,” said lead researcher Andrew Thomas, a senior lecturer in psychology at Swansea University in Wales. “Interestingly, many more men are open to the idea than women — though there is still interest on both sides,” Thomas added. For this study, researchers asked 393 heterosexual men and women in the U.K. how they felt about a committed partnership in which they shared their other half with someone else. “Comparing polygyny… read on > read on >

Mpox is making headlines again, as an outbreak of severe disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa has infected thousands of people and killed hundreds. Amid this worrying scenario, researchers at New York University (NYU) offer a glimmer of good news: Smaller doses of the mpox vaccine Jynneos, given in a different way, still offer good protection against the infection. “Our study shows that smaller vaccine doses of mpox vaccine administered in two doses, spread out over weeks to months, were similar to the full [subcutaneous] FDA-approved dose,” said study co-lead investigator and NYU infectious disease specialist Dr. Angelica Cifuentes Kottkamp. That could be welcome news in a crisis. “Implementing the smaller dose was a good emergency measure in the face of immediate shortages of the vaccine,” Kottkamp said in an NYU news release. Her team published its findings in the Dec. 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. After an outbreak of mpox last year stretched vaccine supplies, researchers tried the new formulation to help meet demand. Instead of injecting a large dose of vaccine below the skin, the new formulation uses two much smaller doses, given between the skin’s layers, and spaced out by as much as three months. In August 2022, the United States approved this new delivery method in the face of mpox vaccine shortages. According to the… read on > read on >

A California company has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve MDMA, the active ingredient in party drugs like molly and ecstasy, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When announcing the new drug application (NDA) filing on Tuesday, MAPS Public Benefit Corp. noted it has been studying the drug for this use for years. The FDA has 60 days to decide whether whether MDMA will be accepted for review and whether it will be fast-tracked through the approval process, the company said. The drug would be given in concert with talk therapy. “The filing of our NDA is the culmination of more than 30 years of clinical research, advocacy, collaboration and dedication to bring a potential new option to adults living with PTSD, a patient group that has experienced little innovation in decades,” MAPS CEO Amy Emerson said in a company news release. “If approved, MDMA-assisted therapy would be the first psychedelic-assisted therapy, which we hope will drive additional investment into new research in mental health.” MDMA belongs to a class of psychoactive drugs that produce experiences of emotional connection, relatedness and emotional openness. Meanwhile, roughly 13 million Americans suffer from PTSD each year, the company said. The symptoms can be debilitating, and patients can also suffer anxiety, depression and substance use disorder. That doesn’t include the economic burden of treating PTSD,… read on > read on >

An overwhelming majority of older Americans think health insurers and Medicare should cover the cost of weight-loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy or Zepbound, a new survey has found. More than four out of five older adults (83%) think insurance companies should pay for drugs that help obese people manage their weight, according to poll results from over 2,600 people ages 50 to 80. And about three in four (76%) believe Medicare should cover weight-loss drugs, researchers at the University of Michigan National Poll and Healthy Aging found. “Our data show the strong awareness and interest in these medications, and in access to them through insurance, alongside coverage for other weight-focused care including nutrition counseling, exercise programs and bariatric surgery,” said researcher Dr. Lauren Oshman, an obesity medicine specialist and associate professor in the University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine. Weight-loss drugs have been in the spotlight since the approval of Wegovy, an injectable drug initially approved for treating type 2 diabetes under the name Ozempic. The FDA has since approved Zepbound for weight loss, a diabetes drug previously approved under the name Mounjaro. These new medications are pricey, costing more than $12,000 a year for people who pay out of their own pockets. But the drugs are nearly as effective as bariatric surgery in helping people with obesity lose 10% or more of their… read on > read on >

A healthy plant-based diet can reduce a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes by 24%, a new study has found. Eating plenty of fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains has this protective effect even in people with a genetic predisposition for diabetes or risk factors like obesity, advanced age or lack of physical activity, researchers report. And for the first time, researchers identified specific health improvements from a plant-based diet that would shield a person from obesity, according to their report published in the January issue of the journal Diabetes and Metabolism. These included improved processing of blood sugars, as well as better liver and kidney function, researchers said. That means the protective effects of a plant-based diet go far beyond simply losing weight and dropping fat, researchers said. “Our study is the first to identify biomarkers of central metabolic processes and organ functions as mediators of the health effects of a plant-based diet,” said lead researcher Tilman Kühn, a professor of public health nutrition at the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Vienna in Austria. However, researchers noted that there’s such a thing as an unhealthy plant-based diet. Those that are still high in sweets, refined grains and sugary drinks are associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, researchers found. For the study, Kuhn and colleagues reviewed data on more… read on > read on >

A study involving twins suggests that if you have a sibling who develops dementia, that might not bode well for your life span. That’s true even if you don’t go on to develop dementia yourself, according to a study from U.S. and Swedish researchers. One investigator was surprised by the finding. “We expected a different result. We expected that, in twins where one developed dementia and the other did not, the difference in life span would be just like we see in unrelated people,” said lead study author Jung Yun Jang. She led the trial as part of her doctoral studies in the department of psychology at the University of Southern California (USC), in Los Angeles. The object of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was to assess typical life span after a dementia diagnosis. “One of the most frequently asked questions when a family member receives a diagnosis of dementia is: How much time do we have?” Jang noted in a USC news release. The study involved 90 pairs of identical twins (who share all their genes) and 288 pairs of fraternal twins, all from a 40-year database out of Sweden known as the Swedish Twin Registry. In all sets of twins used in in the new study, one twin had developed dementia while the other had not. As has been… read on > read on >

Gun advocates often claim that mental illness is the driving force behind mass shootings in the United States. But new research argues that gun violence is more likely driven by the massive numbers of firearms available throughout the country, providing easy access to anyone with a homicidal bent. In the study, investigators compared mental illness and gun violence between three countries — the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. The United States has a rate of mental illness not much different than those of the U.K. or Australia, the researchers said. Nearly 16% of Americans had some sort of mental illness in 2019, compared with about 18% in Australia and 14% in the U.K. But in the first half of 2023, the United States had experienced about 21,000 gun homicides among a population of 335 million, compared to 225 murders among 26.4 million in Australia and about 200 killings among 67.7 million in the U.K. “The U.S. is experiencing more than 10 times higher death rates from gun violence than Australia and more than 40 times higher death rates than the U.K.,” said researcher Dr. Charles Hennekens, a professor with the Florida Atlantic University Schmidt College of Medicine in Boca Raton. What is different between the three countries is the number of firearms freely available, his team noted. There are about 393 million guns owned… read on > read on >

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Smoking Can Shrink Your Brain

More Research Shows the Brain Benefits of Exercise

Oprah Winfrey Says She Uses Weight-Loss Medication

1 in 3 Men Open to Having More Than One Partner. Women, Not So Much

As Congo Outbreak Continues, Study Finds Low-Dose Mpox Vaccine Still Offers Protection

FDA Asked to Consider Party Drug MDMA as Treatment for PTSD

Most Older Americans Think Medicare Should Cover Weight-Loss Meds: Poll

Plant-Based Diets Cut Diabetes Risk by 24%

A Sibling’s Dementia May Mean Shorter Life Span for Brothers, Sisters

Firearm Access Drives High Rate of U.S. Gun Deaths, International Study Finds