Health TO YOUR
June 2013
Mid-Valley Newspapers
A guide to wellness and healthy living in the Mid-Willamette mette Valley
STAT Quick reads about health topics in the news:
Untreated apnea Sleep apnea is not uncommon — about 12 million Americans suffer from it. Yet, the America Sleep Association estimates that as many as 80 percent of the people with the disorder are left undiagnosed, mostly because they are unaware of their condition. Untreated sleep apnea can be dangerous. “It affects your brain health and your heart health,” says Cleveland Clinic neurologist Dr. Po-Heng Tsai, adding it can be easily diagnosed and treated. “It must be addressed.” Sleep apnea has been linked to diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. And now more recently it’s been associated with cognitive impairment and dementia. – The Miami Herald (June 5)
Prostate numbers Anita Rager, 77, works out on a treadmill for 50 minutes a day as part of an exercise study conducted by UT Southwestern and Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas. The study aims to discover if exercise by older adults helps delay or prevent early stages of dementia. SONYA HEBERT-SCHWARTZ | DALLAS MORNING NEWS (MCT)
Alzheimer’s cure may be in sight Three approaches have scientists excited that growth trend will reverse By NANCY CHURNIN, DALLAS MORNING NEWS
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lzheimer’s disease is on the rise, but researchers like Dr. Michael Devous expect the numbers to shift into reverse. “I think we’re going to cure Alzheimer’s disease, and we’re not far away from it,” said Devous, a professor and director of the NeuroImaging Core for the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “Ten years ago I didn’t think so, but we’ve made tremendous progress,” he said. “We haven’t done it. We haven’t cured anyone from this disease yet, but I’m hopeful that the trials we’ve started will change the course of this disease in a positive way.” It’s a rare burst of good news for this specific disease. According to an April study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia or memory loss that typically worsens over time, is now the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. It has surpassed cancer and heart disease to become America’s costliest disease, affecting more than 5.4 million Americans with about 4.1 million requiring intensive care that totals $200 billion a year. Patients live an average of four to eight years after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, but some live as long as 20 years, with 75 percent of those with Alzheimer’s going to a nursing home by age 80. Current treatments may temporarily ease
TOP 5 TIPS FOR BRAIN HEALTH • Talk: Socialization may help preserve cognitive function and improve mental health. • Think: Continuing to learn can help improve processing speed, working memory and attention. • Exercise: It stimulates brain-cell growth and decreases risk for high blood pressure and diabetes. • Eat: Put baked or broiled fish on the menu at least once a week for omega-3 essential fatty acids, which prevent or slow dementia. • Sleep: It improves memories, which consolidate during sleep, and lowers stress. — Source: University of Texas Southwest neurologist Dr. Mary Quiceno
symptoms but don’t slow the disease down, which can lead to patients losing recognition of loved ones, the ability to speak or recall the names for objects and mastery of simple life skills. Researchers, however, find hope in three promising approaches: healthful lifestyle changes, genetic testing to identify those at higher risk and removal of amyloid plaque. While the precise role of plaque is still being studied, it’s known that these deposits of apparently toxic protein peptide settle between the brain’s nerve cells and are found disproportionately in people with Alzheimer’s, according to the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Aging. For Devous, the game changer came last year with the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Amyvid, an amyloid imaging agent that allows researchers to track plaque in
positron emission tomography scans. So far, he’s learned that plaque removal doesn’t help those in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, probably because at that point, the plaque has already done irreversible damage. That has turned his team’s focus to finding and removing plaque from those who don’t have symptoms or are in the early stages of the disease. “There’s a mild cognitive impairment which precedes dementia,” Devous said. “We are having clinical trials to see if removing plaque will keep them from getting worse and maybe even allow them to get better.” Lifestyle changes can also slow or prevent the growth of plaque, says Dr. Mary Quiceno, a neurologist and director of the Cognitive and Memory Disorders Clinic at the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Texas Southwestern. Conversely, plaque buildup can be accelerated by high blood pressure, arterial sclerosis, strokes, clogged arteries, concussions, inflammation and diabetes. “All of us are at risk, and all of us can do something about it,” Quiceno said. Quiceno also said exercise is drawing attention from researchers as a deterrent. “Exercise has a direct effect on brain-cell growth, particularly in the hippocampus,” an area of the brain that plays an important role in memory, she said. “It’s something we need to emphasize earlier with our kids.” Getting adequate sleep, socializing and building cognitive reserve by learning new things can lower the risk for Alzheimer’s, too, Quiceno said.
New film puts breast-cancer researcher in the spotlight BY MOIRA MACDONALD THE SEATTLE TIMES
SEATTLE — When Dr. MaryClaire King, a geneticist at the University of Washington, learned Helen Hunt was portraying her in an upcoming feature film, she thought it must have been a joke. A graduate student in King’s lab stumbled across a description of the movie-in-progress on the Internet last winter. “The student came to me and said, ‘You didn’t tell me they were making a movie about you!’” King said in an interview last week. “I said, “Nobody’s making a movie about me.’” But “Decoding Annie Parker” was indeed real. The film is based on two concurrent stories of real-life women: Anne Parker (played by Samantha Morton), a Toronto cancer survivor determined to understand why cancer repeatedly struck the women in her family, and King’s groundbreaking, decades-long work at the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley, to discover the gene (BRCA1) that leads to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The film recently screened at the Seattle International Film Festival as a benefit for King’s lab, where she and her students are working to develop accurate and affordable testing for BRCA1, BRCA2 and searching for other genes that lead to breast or ovarian cancer. “Annie Parker is, I think, iconic of many women that I’ve met in the course of doing this work — women who were stunned by what happened, devastated by what happened, and responded not by giving up but by learning, by becoming involved, by figuring out what had happened,” King said. The subject matter of “Decoding Annie Parker” is very much current and relevant: Angelina Jolie’s announcement several weeks ago that she carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene and underwent a preventive double mastectomy suddenly had everyone talking about inherited breast cancer.
King characterized Jolie’s editorial in The New York Times as “a beautiful piece, really good, very clear, very accurate,” but was careful to note that Jolie’s perspective, and Parker’s, are “absolutely the correct perspective for each of them,” but that everyone’s profile is different. Mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 can be inherited from fathers as well as mothers, so many women who have the mutations have no family history of breast or ovarian cancer. And she also said that “the vast, vast majority of women do not have mutations in either of these genes.” Director Steven Bernstein is seeking U.S. distribution for the film. After the film was completed earlier this year, Bernstein wrote to King and invited her to view it. The filmmaker said he worried he might have done King “a bit of a disservice” but believed he would write a better script if he did it “once removed” — without meeting King or Parker. “The science is important, but I
can’t tell you the science,” Bernstein said. “What I can tell you — this is what I have observed happens to people in the face of catastrophic illness, this is what happens to relationships. That’s what I hoped to do with the film, and I thought I could only do that if I stepped away from the science.” King acknowledged that as a scientist she had “a few quibbles” with “Decoding Annie Parker,” and one large concern: the film’s omission of Asian Americans in its depiction of her Berkeley lab. “The idea that one could carry out serious science in America without the involvement of Asian Americans is just ludicrous,” she said. But she had high praise for Hunt, who’d clearly studied videos of King (“she’s got a bunch of mannerisms right!”), and found the film as a whole “beautifully acted.” “The story is gripping,” she said, “and it will have enormous appeal to women who are concerned about breast cancer — which is all of us.”
Other than skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men. The American Cancer Society’s estimates for prostate cancer in the United States for 2013 are: • About 238,590 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed. • About 29,720 men will die of prostate cancer. • Prostate cancer can be a serious disease, but most men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not die from it. In fact, more than 2.5 million men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point are still alive today. • About one man in six will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. • Prostate cancer occurs mainly in older men. Nearly two thirds are diagnosed in men age 65 or older, and it is rare before age 40. The average age at the time of diagnosis is about 67. — Atlanta JournalConstitution (June 7)
Holding off Alzheimer’s People who are fit at midlife have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias later, according to a study that followed more than 19,000 men and women over a period of 24 years, published in the February Annals of Internal Medicine by the Cooper Institute in collaboration with the University of Texas Southwestern and Cooper Clinic. — Dallas Morning News (June 7)
Controlling stress When stress hormones are kept under control, people sleep better and the body is better able to repair itself: The body digests food more effliciently and blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure are lower. Here are some suggestions to control those stress hormones: • Schedule time to sleep well. Stress hormones are turned off when we are in deep sleep. And it’s during this time that the body and brain are in restoration mode. • Cut out caffeine at least six hours before beddy-bye. That’s how long it takes for this stimulant to be cleared out of the body for better sleep. • Put a lid on the bottle. Alcohol suppresses REM sleep — the deep, dreamrelated sleep that refreshes the brain and stores memory. • Take time to be active. Inactivity can trigger anxiety, while regular exercise calms the stress response. — The Monterey County Herald (June 7)
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013
To Your Health