Middle-aged smokers are much more likely to report having memory loss and confusion than nonsmokers, and the likelihood of cognitive decline is lower for those who have quit, even recently, according to a new study appearing in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
The study is the first to examine the relationship between smoking and cognitive decline using a one-question self-assessment asking people if they’ve experienced worsening or more frequent memory loss and/or confusion.
The findings build on previous research that established relationships between smoking and Alzheimer’s Disease and other forms of dementia, and could point to an opportunity to identify signs of trouble earlier in life, said Jenna Rajczyk, lead author of the study.
It’s also one more piece of evidence that quitting smoking is good not just for respiratory and cardiovascular reasons, but to preserve neurological health, said Rajczyk, a PhD student in Ohio State’s College of Public Health, and senior author Jeffrey Wing, assistant professor of epidemiology.
“The association we saw was most significant in the 45–59 age group, suggesting that quitting at that stage of life may have a benefit for cognitive health,” Wing said. A similar difference wasn’t found in the oldest group in the study, which could mean that quitting earlier affords people greater benefits, he said.
Researchers used data from the 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey to compare subjective cognitive decline (SCD) measures for current smokers, recent former smokers, and those who had quit years earlier. The analysis included 136 018 people 45 and older, and about 11% reported SCD.
The prevalence of SCD among smokers in the study was almost 1.9 times that of nonsmokers. The prevalence among those who had quit less than 10 years ago was 1.5 times that of nonsmokers. Those who quit more than a decade before the survey had an SCD prevalence just slightly above the nonsmoking group.
“These findings could imply that the time since smoking cessation does matter, and may be linked to cognitive outcomes,” Rajczyk said.
The simplicity of SCD, a relatively new measure, could lend itself to wider applications, she said.
“This is a simple assessment that could be easily done routinely, and at younger ages than we typically start to see cognitive declines that rise to the level of a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease or dementia,” Rajczyk said. “It’s not an intensive battery of questions. It’s more a personal reflection of your cognitive status to determine if you’re feeling like you’re not as sharp as you once were.”
Many people don’t have access to more in-depth screenings, or to specialists, making the potential applications for measuring SCD even greater, she said.
Wing said it’s important to note that these self-reported experiences don’t amount to a diagnosis, nor do they confirm independently that a person is experiencing decline out of the normal ageing process. But, he said, they could be a low-cost, simple tool to consider employing more broadly.
Following established guidelines about prescription drugs would seem an obvious choice, especially for the professionals that do the prescribing. Yet doctors – and their family members – are less likely than other people to comply with those guidelines, according to a large-scale study published in the American Economic Review: Insights.
This result could be surprising or else prompt a knowing nod. In any case, the finding flies in the face of past scholarly hypotheses. Previously, it was assumed that greater knowledge and easier communication with medical providers leads patients to follow instructions more closely.
The new study is based on over a decade of population-wide data from Sweden and includes suggestive evidence about why doctors and their families may ignore medical advice. Overall, the research shows that the rest of the population adheres to general medication guidelines 54.4% of the time, while doctors and their families lag 3.8% behind that.
“There’s a lot of concern that people don’t understand guidelines, that they’re too complex to follow, that people don’t trust their doctors,” says Amy Finkelstein, a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics. “If that’s the case, you should see the most adherence when you look at patients who are physicians or their close relatives. We were struck to find that the opposite holds, that physicians and their close relatives are less likely to adhere to their own medication guidelines.”
The paper, “A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise,” is The authors are Finkelstein, the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT; Petra Persson, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University; Maria Polyakova PhD ’14, an assistant professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine; and Jesse M. Shapiro, the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University.
Millions of data points
To conduct the study, the scholars examined Swedish administrative data from 2005 through 2016, for 63 prescription drug guidelines. Doctors and their close relatives were selected. All told, the research involved 5 887 471 people to whom at least one of the medication guidelines applied. Of these people, 149 399 were doctors or their close family members.
Using information on prescription drug purchases, hospital visits, and diagnoses, the researchers could see if people were adhering to medication guidelines by examining whether prescription drug decisions matched these patients’ medical circumstances. In the study, six guidelines pertained to antibiotics; 20 involved medication use by the elderly; 20 focused on medication attached to particular diagnoses; and 17 were about prescription drug use during pregnancy.
Some guidelines recommended use of a particular prescription drug, like a preference of narrow-spectrum antibiotics for an infection; other guidelines were about not taking certain medications, such as the recommendation that pregnant women avoid antidepressants.
Out of the 63 guidelines used in the study, doctors and their families followed the standards less often in 41 cases, with the difference being statistically significant 20 times. Doctors and their families followed the guidelines more often in 22 cases, with the difference being statistically significant only three times.
“What we found, which is quite surprising, is that they [physicians] are on average less adherent to guidelines,” says study author Maria Polyakova PhD, an assistant professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “So, in this paper we are also trying to figure out what experts do differently.”
Ruling out other answers
Since doctors and their close relatives adhere to medical guidelines less often than the rest of the population, what exactly explains this phenomenon? While homing in on an answer, the research team examined and rejected several hypotheses.
First, the lower compliance by those with greater access to expertise is unrelated to socioeconomic status. In society overall, there is a link between income and adherence levels, but physicians and their families are an exception to this pattern. As the researchers wrote, special “access to doctors is associated with lower adherence despite, rather than because of, the high socioeconomic status” of those families.
Additionally, the researchers did not find any link between existing health status and adherence. They also studied whether a greater comfort with prescription medication – due to being a doctor or related to one – makes people more likely to take prescription drugs than guidelines recommend. This does not appear to be the case. The lower adherence rates for doctors and their relatives were similar in magnitude whether the guidelines pertained to taking medication or, alternately, not taking medication.
“There are a number of first-order alternative explanations that we could rule out,” Polyakova says.
Resolving a medical mystery
Instead, the researchers believe the answer is that doctors possess “superior information about guidelines” for prescription drugs – and then deploy that information for themselves. In the study, the largest difference in adherence to guidelines is for antibiotics: Doctors and their families are 5.2% less in compliance than everyone else.
Most guidelines in this area recommend starting patients off with “narrow-spectrum” antibiotics, which are more targeted, rather than “broader-spectrum” antibiotics. The latter might be more likely to eradicate an infection, but greater use of them also increases the chances that bacteria will develop resistance to these valuable medications, which can reduce efficacy for other patients. Thus for things like a respiratory tract infection, guidelines call for a more targeted antibiotic first.
The issue, however, is that what is good for the public in the long run – trying more targeted drugs first – may not work well for an individual patient. For this reason, doctors could be more likely to prescribe broader-spectrum antibiotics for themselves and their families.
“From a public-health perspective, what you want to do is kill it [the infection] off with the narrow-spectrum antibiotic,” Finkelstein observes. “But obviously any given patient would want to knock that infection out as quickly as possible.” Therefore, she adds, “You can imagine the reason doctors are less likely to follow the guidelines than other patients is because they … know there’s this wedge between what’s good for them as a patients and what’s good for society.”
Another suggestive piece of data comes from different types of prescription drugs that are typically avoided during pregnancies. For so-called C-Class drugs, where empirical evidence about the dangers of the drugs is slightly weaker, doctors and their families have an adherence rate 2.3 percentage points below other people (meaning, in this case, that they are more likely to take these medications during pregnancy). For so-called D-Class drugs with slightly stronger evidence of side effects, that dropoff is only 1.2 percentage points. Here too, doctors’ expert knowledge may be influencing their actions.
“The results imply that probably what’s going on is that experts have a more nuanced understanding of what is the right course of action for themselves, and how that might be different than what the guidelines suggest,” Polyakova says.
Still, the findings suggest some unresolved tensions in action. It could be, as Polyakova suggests, that guidelines about antibiotics should be more explicit about the public and private tradeoffs involved, providing more transparency for patients. “Maybe it’s better for the guidelines to be transparent and say they recommend this not because it is [always] the best course of action for you, but because it is the best for society,” she says.
Additional research could also aim to identify areas where lower expert adherence with guidelines may be associated with better health outcomes –to see how often doctors have a point, as it were. Or, as the researchers write in the paper, “An important avenue for further research is to identify whether and when nonadherence is in the patient’s best interest.”
Over the festive season, the South African measles outbreak has now extended to five provinces, including Gauteng as of epidemiological week (epiweek) 51, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has reported.
From samples collected in epiweek 40 (end 8 Oct 2022) to epiweek 51 (end 24 Dec 2022), a total of 297 cases of laboratory-confirmed measles cases have been reported in South Africa. From epiweek 40 to mid-week 51, 2022, a total of 285 laboratory-confirmed cases were reported from five provinces with declared measles outbreaks in Limpopo (128 cases), Mpumalanga (68), North West (69), Gauteng (13), and Free State (7). The NICD classifies a measles outbreak as three or more confirmed laboratory measles cases reported within 30 days of disease onset, within a district.
The number of cases continues to increase daily as blood and throat swabs are submitted to the NICD for measles serology and PCR testing.
The age of laboratory-confirmed cases across the five provinces ranges from two months to 42 years. Of these, 41% were ages 5–9, followed by 28% for ages 1–4 and 15% for ages 10–14 . Vaccination status of 84 cases (29%) was known, of whom 33 (39%) were vaccinated.
Data on hospital admission rates and measles mortality rates are not yet known. Whilst cases that are seen at hospitals may not necessarily be admitted, this figure gives us an indication of the severity of illness, as patients consulted tertiary care facilities. The number of admitted patients will be a subset of these cases.
An explanatory model presented in a thesis from University of Gothenburg may make simplify the understanding of autism development. It provides new insights into how various risk factors give rise to autism and why there is such great variability between individuals.
Autism, a neurodevelopmental condition, affects how people perceive the world around them and how they interact and communicate with others. Among individuals with autism, there are major differences in terms of personal traits and manifestations alike. The disorder is therefore usually described as a spectrum, with numerous subtle variations.
While theoretical, the new explanatory model is also practical in application, since its various components are quantifiable through testing. The model describes various contributing factors and how they combine to prompt an autism diagnosis and cause other neurodevelopmental conditions.
Three contributing factors
The model links three contributing factors. Together, these result in a pattern of behaviour that meets the criteria for an autism diagnosis:
Autistic personality – hereditary common genetic variants that give rise to an autistic personality.
Cognitive compensation – intelligence and executive functions, such as the capacity to learn, understand others, and adapt to social interactions.
Exposure to risk factors – for example, harmful genetic variants, infections, and other random events during gestation and early childhood that adversely affect cognitive ability.
“The autistic personality is associated with both strengths and difficulties in cognition but does not, as such, mean that diagnostic criteria are fulfilled. Still, exposure to risk factors that inhibit people’s cognitive ability may affect their capacity to tackle difficulties, which contributes to individuals being diagnosed with autism,” says Darko Sarovic, physician and postdoctoral researcher at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, who wrote the thesis.
The model makes it clear that it is the many different risk factors combined that bring about the major differences among individuals on the spectrum. The various components of the model are supported by results from previous research.
Adaptive ability
High executive functioning skills may let people cover up their impairment, reducing their risk of meeting the diagnostic criteria for autism. This may explain why a lower degree of intelligence is observed among people diagnosed with autism, as well as other neurodevelopmental conditions. It also affords an understanding of why intellectual disability is more common among these groups. Thus, the model indicates that low cognitive ability is not part of the autistic personality but, rather, a risk factor that leads to diagnostic criteria being met.
“The autistic personality is associated with various strengths. For example, parents of children with autism are overrepresented among engineers and mathematicians. The parents themselves have probably been able to compensate for their own autistic personality traits and thus not met the criteria for an autism diagnosis. The impact of the disorder has then become more noticeable in their children owing, for instance, to an exposure to risk factors and relatively low cognitive ability,” Sarovic says.
Gender differences affect diagnosis
The diagnosis of autism is more common among boys than girls, and girls often get their diagnosis later in life. Some girls reach adulthood before being diagnosed, after many years of diffuse personal difficulties.
“Girls’ symptoms are often less evident to other people. It’s well known that girls generally have more advanced social skills, which probably means that they’re better at compensating for their own difficulties. Girls also tend to have fewer autistic traits and be less susceptible to the effects of risk factors. Accordingly, the model can help to answer questions about the gender gap,” Sarovic says.
Research and diagnostics
The model also proposes ways of estimating and measuring the three factors, enabling use of the model in research studies. Diagnostics is another conceivable area of use. In a pilot study in which 24 participants had been diagnosed with autism and 22 controls had not, measuring the three factors of the model enabled more than 93% to be correctly assigned to the right category. The model can also be used to explain the inception of other neurodevelopmental disorders, such as schizophrenia.
Analysing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans of nearly 2000 children, researchers found children who played video games for three or more hours a day did better in cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory compared to children who had never played video games. Published in JAMA Network Open, this study analysed data from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is supported by the and other entities of the National Institutes of Health.
“This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development,” said National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow, MD. “Numerous studies have linked video gaming to behaviour and mental health problems. This study suggests that there may also be cognitive benefits associated with this popular pastime, which are worthy of further investigation.”
Although a number of studies have investigated the relationship between video gaming and cognitive behaviour, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the associations are not well understood. Only a handful of neuroimaging studies have addressed this topic, and the sample sizes for those studies have been small, with fewer than 80 participants.
To address this research gap, scientists at the University of Vermont, Burlington, analysed data obtained when children entered the ABCD Study at ages 9 and 10 years old. The research team examined survey, cognitive, and brain imaging data from nearly 2000 participants from within the bigger study cohort, comparing those who reported playing no video games at all and those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more. This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Paediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend limiting videogames to one to two hours per day for older children. Researchers assessed their performance in two tasks that reflected the children’s ability to control impulsive behaviour and to memorise information, as well as brain activity while performing the tasks.
The researchers found that the children who reported playing video games for three or more hours per day were faster and more accurate on both cognitive tasks than those who never played. They also observed that the differences in cognitive function observed between the two groups was accompanied by differences in brain activity. Functional MRI brain scans found that children who played video games for three or more hours per day showed higher brain activity in regions of the brain associated with attention and memory than in never-gamers. At the same time, those children who played at least three hours of videogames per day showed more brain activity in frontal brain regions that are associated with more cognitively demanding tasks and less brain activity in brain regions related to vision.
The researchers think these patterns may stem from practicing tasks related to impulse control and memory while playing videogames, which can be cognitively demanding, and that these changes may lead to improved performance on related tasks. Furthermore, the comparatively low activity in visual areas among children who reported playing video games may reflect that this area of the brain may become more efficient at visual processing as a result of repeated practice through video games.
While prior studies have reported associations between video gaming and increases in depression, violence, and aggressive behaviour, this study did not find that to be the case. The three hours or more group tended to report higher mental health and behavioural issues compared to the non-gaming children, but was not statistically significant. The researchers note that this will be an important measure to continue to track and understand as the children mature.
Further, the researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games. The authors also emphasise that their findings do not mean that children should spend unlimited time on their computers, mobile phones, or TVs, and that the outcomes likely depend largely on the specific activities children engage in. For instance, they hypothesise that the specific genre of video games, such as action-adventure, puzzle solving, sports, or shooting games, may have different effects for neurocognitive development, and this level of specificity on the type of video game played was not assessed by the study.
“While we cannot say whether playing video games regularly caused superior neurocognitive performance, it is an encouraging finding, and one that we must continue to investigate in these children as they transition into adolescence and young adulthood,” said Bader Chaarani, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the lead author on the study. “Many parents today are concerned about the effects of video games on their children’s health and development, and as these games continue to proliferate among young people, it is crucial that we better understand both the positive and negative impact that such games may have.”
Through the ABCD Study, researchers will be able to track these children into young adulthood, looking for gaming-related changes in cognitive skills, brain activity, behaviour, and mental health.
Engineers have designed a system that can remotely measure blood pressure from video of a person’s forehead and using artificial intelligence algorithms to extracting cardiac signals across a range of skin tones. They describe their new technology in a new paper published in Inventions.
Using the same remote-health technology they pioneered for non-contact monitoring of vital health signs, this new technology could replace the existing uncomfortable and cumbersome method of strapping an inflatable cuff to a patient’s arm or wrist, the researchers claim.
The researchers, from the University of South Australia and Baghdad’s Middle Technical University, describe the technique, which involves filming a person from a short distance for 10 seconds and then using AI to extract cardiac signals from two regions in the forehead.
Experiments were performed on 25 people with different skin tones and under changing light conditions, overcoming the limitations reported in previous studies. Compared to a digital sphygmomanometer (itself subject to errors), the systolic and diastolic readings were around 90% accurate.
“Monitoring blood pressure is essential to detect and manage cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of global mortality, responsible for almost 18 million deaths in 2019,” says UniSA remote sensing engineer Professor Javaan Chahl. “Furthermore, in the past 30 years, the number of adults with hypertension has risen from 650 million to 1.28 billion worldwide.”
“The health sector needs a system that can accurately measure blood pressure and assess cardiovascular risks when physical contact with patients is unsafe or difficult, such as during the recent COVID outbreak,” Prof Chahl continues. “If we can perfect this technique, it will help manage one of the most serious health challenges facing the world today.”
The cutting-edge technology has come a long way since 2017, when the UniSA and Iraqi research team demonstrated image-processing algorithms that could extract a human’s heart rate from drone video.
In the past five years the researchers have developed algorithms to measure other vital signs, including breathing rates from 50 metres away, oxygen saturation, temperature, and jaundice in newborns.
Their non-contact technology was also deployed in the United States during the pandemic for non-contact monitoring of COVID signs.
People sleep less in mid-adulthood than they do in early and late adulthood, according to a large study published in Nature Communications. The study investigators found that sleep duration declines in early adulthood until age 33, and then picks up again at age 53.
The study, involving 730 187 participants spread over 63 countries, revealed how sleep patterns change across the lifespan, and how they were largely the same across countries.
Study participants were playing the Sea Hero Quest mobile game, a citizen science venture designed for neuroscience research, which was designed to aid Alzheimer’s research by shedding light on differences in spatial navigational abilities. Thus far, over four million people have played Sea Hero Quest, contributing to numerous studies across the project as a whole.
In addition to completing tasks testing navigational ability, anyone playing the game is asked to answer questions about demographic characteristics as well as other questions that can be useful to neuroscience research, such as on sleep patterns.
The researchers, led by Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) and Dr Antoine Coutrot (CNRS, University of Lyon) found that across the study sample, people sleep an average of 7.01 hours per night, with women sleeping 7.5 minutes longer than men on average. They found that the youngest participants in the sample (age 19) slept the most, and sleep duration declined throughout people’s 20s and early 30s before plateauing until their early 50s and increasing again. The pattern, including the newly-identified key time points of age 33 when declining sleep plateaus and 53 for sleep to increase again, was the same for men and women, and across countries and education levels.
The researchers suggest the decline in sleep during mid-life may be from the demands of childcare and working life.
Professor Spiers said: “Previous studies have found associations between age and sleep duration, but ours is the first large study to identify these three distinct phases across the life course. We found that across the globe, people sleep less during mid-adulthood, but average sleep duration varies between regions and between countries.”
People who report sleeping the most are in Eastern European countries such as Albania, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic, reporting 20–40 minutes extra sleep per night and the least in South East Asian countries including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. People in the United Kingdom reported sleeping slightly less than the average. People tended to sleep a bit less in countries closer to the equator.
The researchers found that navigational ability was unaffected by sleep duration for most of the sample, except for among older adults (aged 54–70) whose optimal sleep duration was seven hours, although they caution that the findings among older adults might be impacted by underlying health conditions.
Senior officials at the Tembisa Tertiary Hospital, including its former CEO Dr Lokopane Mogaladi, must be disciplined for their roles in the death of a patient, an independent ad hoc tribunal has ruled.
Shonisani Lethole was admitted to Tembisa Hospital on 23 June 2020 with COVID. He had chest pains, was weak and battling to breathe. He was intubated on 27 June. He died two days later.
But before he died, Lethole took to Twitter on 25 June to describe the unbearable and uncaring conditions he was experiencing. He said he had not eaten for two days.
An Ombud investigation was prompted by a complaint by the Minister of Health.
Health Ombud Prof Malegapuru Makgoba in January last year found that Lethole had been denied food for “100 hours and 54 minutes” and that medical staff had been grossly negligent. He recommended that 18 staff members, including doctors and nurses, should face disciplinary action.
Mogaladi was suspended almost immediately afterwards.
An appeal tribunal, set up in terms of the National Health Act, consisting of three members – two doctors, Prof Rudo Mathivha and Prof Ebrahim Variava, and retired Constitutional Court Judge Bess Nkabinde – considered appeals by Mogaladi and Dr Makhosazane Ngobese, head of the COVID unit at the time, against the Ombud’s findings and recommendations.
Mogaladi and Ngobese raised several grounds of appeal, including that there was no valid complaint, that the Ombud had acted beyond his mandate and that his findings were not supported by the evidence.
The tribunal returned two decisions. Judge Nkabinde said she would have upheld the appeal in its entirety. But the majority, Professors Mathivha and Variava, while setting aside some of the Ombud’s recommendations, said Mogaladi and Ngobese should still be disciplined.
Regarding Mogaladi, they said he should be disciplined for presiding over a hospital “that on two separate occasions could not provide Lethole food for prolonged periods”, and a “health establishment that showed poor record-keeping”. He should also face charges relating to substandard care at the hospital.
Regarding Ngobese, they set aside the findings against her except one, that she should face a disciplinary inquiry for her failure to ensure that critical care equipment in the COVID ward was available and functioning properly.
The tribunal said Lethole had been described by his family as a very responsible young man, a “son of the soil” who was deeply loved and cherished.
The two professors said they differed with Judge Nkabinde on the question of accountability.
“While we recognise the immense challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the norms and standards regulations remained applicable.
“Where we find, on a fair consideration of the facts, that these norms and standards have not been fulfilled, and where there is a prima facie indication that the appellants had some responsibility in relation to their non-fulfillment, we consider it appropriate and important to recommend that an accountability process follows,” they said.
Judge Nkabinde, in her ruling, placed emphasis on the impact of the pandemic on hospitals and said based on the rationality and procedural fairness grounds of appeal, the appeals should succeed.
“This conclusion should not, however, be understood to suggest that no-one should be held accountable when a proper case is made. It is difficult to accept a loss of life … but adverse factual findings and remedial action should be rational and should be right, just and fair.”
She said her judgment did not stop the Department of Health from taking steps to fix the systematic issues at the hospital or disciplining those “properly found” wanting in upholding a high standard of professionalism.
Making an intentional effort to mark positive life events and achievements while gathering for food and drink will leave people feeling more socially supported, according to new research published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.
The researchers found that celebrations with three conditions – social gathering, eating or drinking, and intentionally marking a positive life event – will increase perceived social support. Perceived social support, according to prior studies, is the belief that having a social network will provide support in case of future, negative life events. That belief is associated with health and well-being outcomes, including increased life-span and decreased anxiety and depression.
“Many celebrations this time of year include two of the three conditions — eating and drinking while gathering together,” said study co-author Kelley Gullo Wight, assistant professor at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. “Adding the third condition, making an intentional effort to recognise other’s positive achievements, is key. For example, take the time to congratulate someone for getting accepted to their first-choice university, or a work project that went well, or a new job offer. This will maximise the benefits to your well-being and the well-being of all the attendees at that holiday party.”
Wight and her co-authors used behavioural experiments to survey thousands of participants over several years.
The findings showed that even if gatherings are virtual, if everyone has food and drink (no matter if it’s healthy or indulgent) and they’re celebrating positive events, this also increases a person’s perceived social support, and they can receive the same well-being benefits from it.
It also has implications for marketing managers or anyone looking to raise funds for a good cause.
“We found that when people feel supported socially after a celebration, they’re more ‘pro-social,’ and more willing to volunteer their time or donate to a cause,” said co-author Danielle Brick, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut. “This would be a good time for non-profits to market donation campaigns, around the time many people are celebrating positive life events, like holidays or graduations.”
The researchers note that hosting celebrations that increase perceived social support can be especially beneficial at places serving populations at greater risk of loneliness and isolation, like nursing homes or community centres.
They also note the importance of understanding the well-being benefits of celebrations for policymakers looking to implement regulations or measures that could impact social gatherings, like COVID lockdowns, to avoid negative consequences to mental health. They recommend that if organisers need to have virtual celebrations, they should involve some type of consumption and the marking of a separate, positive life event, so people leave the celebration feeling socially supported.
Adults who stay well-hydrated appear to be healthier, develop fewer chronic conditions, such as heart and lung disease, and live longer than those who may not get sufficient fluids, according to a study published in eBioMedicine.
Using health data gathered from 11 255 adults over a 30-year period, researchers analysed links between serum sodium levels (which increase with reduced fluid intake) and various indicators of health. They found that adults with serum sodium levels at the higher end of a normal range were more likely to develop chronic conditions and show signs of advanced biological aging than those with serum sodium levels in the medium ranges. Adults with higher levels were also more likely to die at a younger age.
“The results suggest that proper hydration may slow down aging and prolong a disease-free life,” said Natalia Dmitrieva, PhD, a study author and researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
The study expands on previous research from the scientists, which found links between high-normal serum sodium levels and increased risks for heart failure. Both findings came from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, which started in 1987.
For this latest analysis, researchers assessed information study participants shared during five medical visits – the first two when they were in their 50s, and the last between ages 70–90. Adults who had high levels of serum sodium at baseline check-ins or with underlying conditions, like obesity, that could affect serum sodium levels, were excluded.
The researchers then evaluated how serum sodium levels correlated with biological ageing, which was assessed through 15 health markers such as systolic blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. These provided insight about how well each person’s cardiovascular, respiratory, metabolic, renal, and immune system was functioning. They also adjusted for factors, like age, race, biological sex, smoking status, and hypertension.
They found that adults with higher levels of normal serum sodium, normallu between 135–146 milliequivalents per litre (mEq/L), were more likely to show signs of faster biological ageing. This was based on indictors like metabolic and cardiovascular health, lung function, and inflammation. For example, adults with serum sodium levels above 142mEq/L had a 10-15% associated increased odds of being biologically older than their chronological age compared to ranges between 137–142mEq/L, while levels above 144mEq/L correlated with a 50% increase. Likewise, levels of 144.5–146 mEq/L were associated with a 21% increased risk of premature death compared to ranges between 137–142mEq/L.
Similarly, adults with serum sodium levels above 142mEq/L had up to a 64% increased associated risk for developing chronic diseases like heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation and peripheral artery disease, as well as chronic lung disease, diabetes, and dementia. Conversely, adults with serum sodium levels between 138–140 mEq/L had the lowest risk of developing chronic disease.
The researchers caution that randomised, controlled trials are needed to prove an association between fluid intake and signs of ageing.
“People whose serum sodium is 142mEq/L or higher would benefit from evaluation of their fluid intake,” Dmitrieva said. She noted that most people can safely increase their fluid intake to meet recommended levels, which can be done with water as well as other fluids, like juices, or vegetables and fruits with a high water content. The National Academies of Medicine, for example, suggest that most women consume around 6-9 cups (1.5–2.2 litres) of fluids daily and for men, 8-12 cups (2–3 litres).
Others may need medical guidance due to underlying health conditions. “The goal is to ensure patients are taking in enough fluids, while assessing factors, like medications, that may lead to fluid loss,” said study author Manfred Boehm, MD, director of the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at NHLBI. “Doctors may also need to defer to a patient’s current treatment plan, such as limiting fluid intake for heart failure.”
The authors also cited research that finds about half of people worldwide don’t meet recommendations for daily total water intake, which often starts at 6 cups (1.5 litres).
“On the global level, this can have a big impact,” Dmitrieva said. “Decreased body water content is the most common factor that increases serum sodium, which is why the results suggest that staying well hydrated may slow down the aging process and prevent or delay chronic disease.”
