Fish oil supplements might help high-risk seniors stave off Alzheimer’s disease, a new study finds. Older people with a higher genetic risk of Alzheimer’s experienced slower breakdown of their brain’s nerve cells if they took fish oil capsules, researchers reported Aug. 1 in the journal JAMA Network Open. These people carry the APOE4 gene variant, which increases risk of Alzheimer’s and is associated with an earlier age of onset, according to the National Institute on Aging. “The fact that neuronal integrity breakdown was slowed in people randomized to omega-3 treatment who are also at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease is remarkable, and warrants a larger clinical trial in more diverse populations in the future,” said researcher Gene Bowman, a neurology instructor with the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. However, fish oil supplements did not benefit all seniors in general, researchers noted. “Our findings showed that over three years, there was not a statistically significant difference between placebo and the group that took fish oil,” said researcher Dr. Lynne Shinto, a professor of neurology with the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine. “I don’t think it would be harmful, but I wouldn’t say you need to take fish oil to prevent dementia.” For the study, researchers recruited 102 people ages 75 and older who had relatively low levels…  read on >  read on >

Skip the bacon and those holiday hot dogs: A new study finds eating processed red meats raises your odds for dementia. Overall, just two servings per week of processed red meat was linked to a 14% rise in dementia risk, compared to folks who ate less than three servings per month. The finding made sense to Heather Snyder, vice president of medical and scientific relations the Alzheimer’s Association, given what experts know about diet and the brain. “Prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and all other dementia is a major focus, and the Alzheimer’s Association has long encouraged eating a healthier diet — including foods that are less processed — because they’ve been associated with [a lowered] risk of cognitive decline,” Snyder said in an association news release. “This large, long-term study provides a specific example of one way to eat healthier.” The findings were presented Wednesday at the Alzheimer’s Association  International Conference in Philadelphia. The study was led by Yuhan Li, now a research assistant in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She conducted the study while a graduate student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Li’s team pored over 43 years’ worth of data from 130,000 people in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The researchers specifically looked at associations between…  read on >  read on >

Artificial intelligence is adding new luster to the old-fashioned EEG brain scan, increasing the potential usefulness of the century-old medical test, a new report says. The EEG, or electroencephalogram, tracks brain activity through a dozen or more electrodes stuck to the scalp. It is often used to detect epilepsy. But the test’s squiggly waves are difficult to interpret, so doctors have leaned on other, more expensive options like MRI or CT scans to spot early signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers said. However, AI can be taught to look for abnormal brain patterns in EEGs that are too subtle for humans to detect, a new study says. AI-guided EEGs could one day help doctors distinguish between different cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s or Lewy body dementia, researchers write in the journal Brain Communications. “There’s a lot of medical information in these brain waves about the health of the brain in the EEG,” senior researcher Dr. David Jones, director of the Mayo Clinic Neurology AI Program, said in a news release. “It’s well-known that you can see these waves slow down and look a bit different in people who have cognitive problems.” For the study, researchers had AI analyze EEG data from more than 11,000 patients who received the scan at the Mayo Clinic over the course of a decade. The AI was taught to simplify…  read on >  read on >

Added sugar can cause your cells to prematurely age, a new study warns. Each gram of added sugar is associated with an increase in a person’s cellular age, even when they eat healthy otherwise, researchers found. On the other hand, a diet rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and anti-inflammatory nutrients can help a person have a younger biological age on a cellular level, results show. Overall, the better a person eats, the younger their cells look, the study concluded. “We knew that high levels of added sugars are linked to worsened metabolic health and early disease, possibly more than any other dietary factor,” said researcher Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “Now we know that accelerated epigenetic aging is underlying this relationship, and this is likely one of many ways that excessive sugar intake limits healthy longevity,” Epel added in a UCSF news release. For the study, researchers analyzed food records for 342 Northern California women with an average age of 39. The research team then compared their diets with their “epigenetic clock,” using a saliva test that can estimate a person’s biological age as compared to their calendar age. On average, women in the study consumed an average 61 grams of added sugar daily, although the range was large between individuals, running from…  read on >  read on >

Americans’ risk of dying in a firearm accident depends in large part on where they live in the United States, a new study finds. People in Southeastern states like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama run the greatest risk of a gunshot accidentally killing them, researchers said. Meanwhile, the risk of accidental gun death is much lower in Northeastern states like Massachusetts, New York, Maryland and Connecticut, results show. “Crude rates in the states with the highest rates, clustered mostly in the Southeast, were about 10 times the rates in the states with the lowest rates, located mostly in the Northeast,” concluded researcher David Schwebel, a professor of psychology with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Nationwide, more than 12,300 people died in gun accidents between 2001 and 2021, Schwebel found in his analysis of firearms deaths data maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also found that specific factors within a state increased the risk of death in a firearms accident. Unsurprisingly, states with more gun owners carried a higher risk of accidental gun death. But the study, published July 25 in the journal Injury Prevention, also found that having a higher percentage of families living below the poverty line is associated with an increased risk of accidental death. Any solution to this risk is not going to be easy, Schwebel…  read on >  read on >

Millions of Americans deal with the sleep deficits brought on by sleep apnea, and many turn to one of the few treatments out there, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines. But what if new neurochemical targets in the brain could lead to new, less cumbersome therapies for sleep apnea? That’s what a team at the University of Missouri-Columbia are working on in their lab. They’ve pinpointed specific brain chemicals in mouse brains that link sleep apnea to one of its most unhealthy side effects, high blood pressure. “Our ultimate goal is to eventually help clinicians develop specific drugs to target either these neurochemicals or the proteins they bind to in a way that reduces high blood pressure,” explained senior study author David Kline, an investigator at the university’s Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. The study, which was led by postdoctoral researcher Procopio Gama de Barcellos Filho, involved mice whose brains were subjected to a low-oxygen state similar to what humans experience when they periodically stop breathing due to sleep apnea. Examining the rodents’ neurochemistry, Filho and Kline noticed key changes when in this “hypoxic” state. “When oxygen levels in the blood drop during sleep apnea, the forebrain sends warning signals to the brainstem area that controls heart and lung functions,” Kline explained. “By studying these signals, we found that two neurochemicals, oxytocin and corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH),…  read on >  read on >

Misuse of illicit prescription drugs is falling dramatically among U.S. high school students, a new study says. The percentage of seniors who say they’ve misused prescription drugs in the past year has dropped to 2% in 2022, down from 11% back in 2009, researchers reported July 24 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “To put these findings in context, the reduction over the past decade was like going from 1 in every 9 high school students using prescription drugs non-medically down to 1 in every 40 high school students,” said researcher Sean Esteban McCabe, director of the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health. For the study, researchers tracked trends regarding the three types of prescription drugs most commonly misused by teens — opioids, stimulants (for example, Ritalin and Adderall) and benzodiazepines (drugs such as Xanax and Valium). They used data collected by the University of Michigan as part of an annual survey of high school students. Not only has illicit use declined, but even legitimate use for medical reasons has dropped among teens. About 16% of high school seniors said in 2022 they’ve ever been prescribed one of these drugs for health reasons, down from 24% in 2009, researchers found. The means of getting a prescription drug for illicit use also has changed over time, with…  read on >  read on >