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Snoring Good for the Elderly

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If you think that snoring is bad for your health, think again, for a study has suggested that the nocturnal snorts, whistles and wheezes can give you a long and healthy life, particularly if you are elderly.

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Researchers in Israel have carried out the study and found that people aged over 65 years who suffer from a snoring -related condition, called sleep apnoea, tend to live longer than those who do not snore.

According to the researchers, this is because short bursts of hypoxia — interrupted breathing — actually have a protective effect on the elderly people by conditioning their cardiovascular system to cope with lack of oxygen.

This means that when oxygen supplies are cut off, as in a heart attack or stroke, the body is better able to cope, they said.

But the study has found that the effects of sleep apnoea do not have the same effect in younger people — in fact, middle-aged men in particular are at a higher risk of heart disease, the Daily Mail paper reported.

The researchers at Technion Institute have based their findings on an analysis of more than 600 elderly people over a period of four years — they found fewer heart-related deaths than in a control group of ‘healthy’ volunteers.

The findings of the study have been presented at a meeting of the European Association for Sleep Research in Glasgow.

Sources: The Times Of India

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How Simple Water Keeps Elderly Healthy

A year ago, 88-year-old Jean Lavender used to find walking any distance a struggle.

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Jean Lavender has been drinking more water under the scheme

Now she is keen to get outside for a walk most days.

And she puts the transformation down to the most simple of medicines – water.

She is one of a group of residents at a care home in Suffolk who have been encouraged to increase their intake of water.

And they have all reported dramatic results.

Jean says she feels 20 years younger.

“I feel more alert – more cheerful too. I’m not a miserable person, but it’s added a sort of zest.”

Staff at The Martins care home in Bury St Edmunds started a “water club” for their residents last summer.

Residents were encouraged to drink eight to 10 glasses of water a day, water coolers were installed, and they were each given a jug for their room.

They report significant improvements in health as a result – many fewer falls, fewer GP call-outs, a cut in the use of laxatives and in urinary infections, better quality of sleep, and lower rates of agitation among residents with dementia.

Dehydration

Doctors have long highlighted the risks of dehydration for elderly people. It can cause dizziness and potentially serious falls, constipation, and confusion.

While most people’s systems can adjust to insufficient water, frail old people are far less equipped to cope.

So when Wendy Tomlinson, a former nurse, took over the management of the charity-run home, she suspected that drinking more water might help the residents feel better.

Even she has been surprised by how much difference it’s made, though.

“It’s been fantastic,” she said. “The whole home buzzes now; there isn’t that period after lunch when everyone goes off to sleep.”

For Baroness Greengross, a cross-bench peer, it reinforces a conviction she has had for some time now – that many old people simply are not drinking enough, and it is harming their health.

She wants to see tougher regulations in care homes across the UK, so that staff have to make sure residents drink enough.

“We hear a great deal about malnutrition among old people,” she says.

“But we forget about the need for them to have enough water. It shouldn’t be very difficult to change the habits of care staff.”

Sources: BBC NEWS:June 23Rd. ’08

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Older Brain May be a Wiser Brain

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit

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The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, Progress in Brain Research .

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13% of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand.

That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

Sources: The Timers of India

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Less Sleep Makes You Obese

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No matter which part of the world you live in, if you don’t get enough of sleep, there’s a fair chance you are going to put on weight, states a new study.

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What’s more is that it doesn’t matter if you’re an adult or a child.

In one of the first studies to observe cross-sectional relationships between duration of sleep and obesity in both children and adults, researchers have discovered a consistent increased risk of obesity among short sleepers.

The study, led by Francesco P Cappuccio, MD, of Warwick Medical School in the United Kingdom, involved an orderly search of publications on the relationship between short sleep duration and obesity risk.

Of the 696 studies, the researchers short-listed 12 studies on children and 17 studies on adults based on the inclusion criteria. This involved report of duration of sleep as exposure, body mass index (BMI) as continuous outcome and prevalence of obesity as categorical outcome, number of participants, age and gender.

In children, the study included 13 population samples from the 12 studies, representing 30,002 participants aged between two to 20 years, and found that 7 of 11 studies showed a significant link between short sleep duration and obesity.

In case of adults, 22 population samples from the 17 studies were included that meant a total of 604,509 participants aged between 15-102 years. It was discovered that 17 population samples showed a significant association between short duration of sleep and obesity.

In fact, all studies in adults showed a consistent and significant negative association between hours of sleep and BMI, quite unlike studies in children.

Cappuccio said that this study showed a consistent pattern of increased odds of being a short sleeper if you are obese, both in childhood and adulthood.

“By appraising the world literature, we were able to show some heterogeneity amongst studies in the world. However, there is a striking consistent overall association, in that both obese children and adults had a significantly increased risk of being short sleepers compared to normal weight individuals. The size of the association was comparable (1.89-fold increase in children and 1.55-fold increase in adults),” said Dr Cappuccio.

He added: “This study is important as it confirms that this association is strong and might be of public health relevance. However, it also raises the unanswered question yet of whether this is a cause-effect association. Only prospective longitudinal studies will be able to address the outstanding question.”

Click to see also :->Lack of Sleep and Obesity

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New Weight Loss Prescription
Sources: The Times Of India

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Blood Test Can Tell Alzheimer’s Risk

A simple blood test will soon predict six years before any symptoms appear whether you are at risk of developing Alzheimer’s — a neurodegenerative disease which causes memory loss among older people.

The most disturbing feature of the disease is the difficulty in determining whether mild memory loss is the beginning of Alzheimer’s or just part of normal ageing.

Scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine in California now say that the blood test, with over 90% accuracy, will greatly help in the disease’s early diagnosis, thereby improving chances of slowing down its progress in the patient. This discovery on how to predict the old man’s disease proves to be of prime importance for India where by 2050, the average Indian might live from the current 64.7 years to 75.6 years.

According to the 2006 World Population Prospects, by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, by 2050, the number of Indians aged above 80 will increase more than six times from the current number of 78 lakh to nearly 5.14 crore. At present, 20% of this category in India suffers from Alzheimer’s.

The number of people over 65 years of age in the country is expected to quadruple from 6.4 crore in 2005 to 23.9 crore, while those aged 60 and above will increase from 8.4 crore to 33.5 crore in the next 43 years. According to one estimate, Alzheimer’s kills one out of four Indians over the age of 80.

The early stage of Alzheimer’s is often overlooked and incorrectly labelled as normal old age outcomes.

The blood test identifies changes in a handful of proteins in blood plasma that cells use to convey messages to one another. The research team discovered a connection between shifts in the cells dialogue and the changes in the brain accompanying Alzheimer’s.

Dr Anshu Rohatgi, neurologist at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said, “This is a huge breakthrough with enormous potential. It will be a valuable tool in the detection of early-stage mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We are now trying to see whether drugs meant for Alzheimer’s can retard or slow down the progress of the disease, when it is administered at the early state of MCI. This blood test will tell us when that early stage is approaching.”

“Just as a psychiatrist can conclude a lot of things by listening to the words of a patient, so by listening to different proteins we are measuring whether something is going wrong in the cells,” said Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology and senior author of the study.

Currently, the clinical diagnosis for Alzheimer’s is one of exclusion — by testing for other causes of memory loss and cognitive decline, such as stroke, tumours and alcoholism.

If those conditions are eliminated as causes of memory loss, what remains is Alzheimer’s — a disease which robs patients of memory, thinking and the ability to communicate.

Source:The Times Of India

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