Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

Irene Greenhalgh, 83, considers herself a pretty computer-savvy senior, but even she got lost in a maze of websites and e-mails trying to get an appointment for her COVID-19 vaccine. One health provider’s e-mail provided links to sites that were giving vaccinations, but the dates listed were a week old. A board of health’s website proved glitchy and unusable. After weeks of searching, Greenhalgh finally got an appointment, but it’s more than two months away and she’ll have to travel about 13 miles from her home in Amityville, N.Y., to Jones Beach for her first shot. “I had a hard time,” Greenhalgh said. “My daughter did finally get me an appointment, but it’s on April 7.” Exasperation is building among seniors across the United States, many of whom are encountering similar roadblocks trying to line up a potentially life-saving vaccination, experts say. ‘No good stories’ In much of the country, seniors don’t know where to call, when to call, how to get an appointment. “There’s a great deal of frustration,” said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. “I was just on a call with about a dozen people from different parts of the country, and people were talking about their parents’ experiences. Everybody had a different story to tell, but nobody had a good story to tell,” Neuman added. “Nobody had… read on > read on >

Puffy coats have their place, but it’s not inside a car seat. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) offers a variety of tips for keeping your little ones safe and warm while traveling by car. The first is to avoid dressing children in puffy coats or snowsuits before buckling them in, because car seat straps won’t tighten enough. That creates a danger that the fluffy padding will flatten in the force of a crash and the youngster will slip from the seat and be thrown from the car. Puffy coats are not safe in a car seat or under a seat belt for someone of any age, the AAP said. “Parents may not recognize the potential danger of buckling up a child who is wearing a puffy coat,” said Dr. Sarah Denny, a pediatrician with expertise in injury prevention. “A car seat harness or belt needs to fit snugly enough so that you cannot pinch the straps of the car seat harness. A safer alternative is to drape a blanket or coat over the car straps.” The AAP offers additional tips, including staying warmer by storing the carrier portion of an infant seat indoors and packing extra socks, mittens and hats. If your child likes to suck his or her thumb, choose half-gloves with open fingers. Dress your child in thin layers. This would include… read on > read on >

Researchers have found a way to track what your mind is doing when thoughts begin to wander. Using electroencephalograms (EEG) to measure brain activity while more than two dozen study participants did mundane attention tasks, the researchers identified brain signals associated with a daydreaming mind. They found that the participants had increased alpha brain waves in the prefrontal cortex when their thoughts skipped from one topic to another. Alpha waves are slow brain rhythms with frequency ranging from 9 to 14 cycles per second. The findings provide an electrophysiological signature for free, spontaneous thought, according to the researchers. They also found that the participants had weaker brain signals known as P3 in the parietal cortex when they weren’t paying attention to the task at hand. The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “For the first time, we have neurophysiological evidence that distinguishes different patterns of internal thought, allowing us to understand the varieties of thought central to human cognition and to compare between healthy and disordered thinking,” study senior author Robert Knight, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a university news release. The findings suggest that tuning out the outside world and letting your thoughts flow freely and creatively are necessary to promote mind relaxation and exploration, according to the… read on > read on >

Here’s one reason why past or current smoking may handicap you if you are battling breast cancer: New research suggests that nicotine promotes the spread of the disease to your lungs. Smoking is known to increase the risk that breast cancer will spread, which lowers the survival rate by one-third at diagnosis. But the role of nicotine in the spread of breast cancer to the lungs has been less clear. To learn more, researchers studied almost 1,100 breast cancer patients. They found that current smokers and former smokers had higher rates of breast cancer spread to the lungs than those who never smoked. In studies of mice, researchers found that nicotine fosters that spread. And this was true even after no exposure to nicotine for 30 days. That suggests there’s an ongoing risk for breast cancer patients who are former smokers, according to the team from Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. Their findings were published online Jan. 20 in the journal Nature Communications. “Our data shows that nicotine exposure creates an environment in the lungs that is ripe for metastatic growth,” said lead study author Kounosuke Watabe, a professor of cancer biology at Wake Forest. Long-term exposure to nicotine creates an “inflammatory microenvironment” in the lungs. That attracts immune cells called neutrophils, which release a protein that encourages the spread of cancer,… read on > read on >

Not many people have had the opportunity to get the COVID-19 vaccine yet. But while you wait your turn, there are some steps you can take to give the vaccine — whichever brand you get — a boost when it’s available to you. An Ohio State University review of 49 vaccine studies dating back 30 years examined how stress, depression and healthy behaviors, such as exercise, can affect immune response to a vaccine. Although it’s not realistic to entirely transform your health and habits in a few weeks or months, there are some steps everyone can take — even last-minute ones — to make a difference. Those include getting good sleep as well as exercise in the days before and after you get your shot, said the review’s senior author, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser. She is director of Ohio State’s Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, in Columbus. “There are several things that are really reasonable and relatively easy,” she said. Pandemic-related stress may have set people back when it comes to maintaining the behaviors that keep them healthier, the study authors noted. Recent data from around the world have revealed higher rates of depression and anxiety, more insomnia, increased alcohol sales and more overeating, according to the review. The studies in this review looked at the effects of psychological factors and behaviors on immune response to a… read on > read on >