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(CNN)Nearly half of women and a third of men over the age of 45 will develop Parkinson’s, dementia or stroke during their lifetime, a new study says.

The three conditions are among the leading causes of mortality and disability in the older population, with global costs estimated to be 2% of the annual world gross domestic product.

“Usually we hear about heart disease and about cancer but for some reason, there is less focus on these diseases,” said lead researcher Kamran Ikram, associate professor of neurology and epidemiology at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

The study observed 12,102 individuals from Rotterdam over 26 years, carrying out full medical checks every four years. Over the course of the study, starting in 1990 and ending in 2016, a total of 1,489 people were diagnosed with dementia, 1,285 with stroke and 263 with Parkinson’s. Four hundred thirty-eight people were diagnosed with multiple diseases.
“These numbers are alarmingly high,” Ikram said.
The team found that 48.2% of women and 36.2% of men developed one of the three conditions.

Women had a higher risk of developing dementia and stroke, with a 31.4% chance of developing dementia after the age of 45, compared with an 18.6% chance among men. Women had a 21.6% chance of developing stroke compared to 19.3% of men, according to the study published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.
Ikram suggested that longer life expectancies for females was the underlying reason for the different rates women and men face.
The risk of developing Parkinson’s disease was near equal for both genders, with women having a 4.3% risk and men a 4.9% risk of developing the disease. casino siteleri

“From a societal point of view, it is important to have these numbers in terms of planning for health care providers,” said Ikram, citing the lack of therapies addressing the root causes of the three brain diseases. “We do have symptomatic treatments, but we need to focus more research efforts to find durable treatments for these diseases.”
Previous studies have shown that neurological diseases such as dementia and stroke received less research funding in the UK than diseases such as cancer — with 64% of the UK’s charity and government funding going to cancer research compared to 11% being assigned to dementia research and 7% to stroke.

The risk of developing stroke, dementia and Parkinson’s steadily increase with people’s age, says the study.
Between the ages of 45 and 65, women have a 2.6% chance and men a 3.2% chance of developing one of the three conditions. The risk rises as people age — beyond age 45, women have a more than 48% risk of developing one of these conditions during their lifetimes, and men have more than a 36% risk. deneme bonusu

Taking proactive measures

Patients diagnosed with these neurological diseases were also more likely to have a higher prevalence of other health issues at the beginning of the study, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and atrial fibrillation — an irregular heartbeat.

James Pickett, head researcher at the Alzheimer’s Society in the UK, said: “This study further highlights the well-established fact that women are at a greater risk of dementia than men, but shows how taking proactive healthy lifestyle measures can significantly lessen that dementia risk, regardless of age.”
“As researchers found that people who had dementia were more likely to have had high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, what we can take from this is that healthy lifestyle choices such as eating a Mediterranean-style diet, exercising regularly and not smoking can make a real impact on reducing dementia risk, and it’s never too late to start. We need more research to better understand the link between heart and brain health.”

A recent study suggested that a Mediterranean diet can reduce risks of developing dementia.

Ikram’s findings highlight that if diagnoses of any of the three diseases are delayed by one, two or three years, the potential risk of developing the disease drops by 20% to 50%. 1xbet
Dr. Claudia Cooper, professor at UCL Psychiatry and consultant old age psychiatrist, said: “If we look at key factor of dementia, like lifestyle factors such as diets, exercise, less social isolation and not smoking, and if we address these factors, then there is a likelihood that we delay or prevented a third of dementia cases,” she said.
“We are realizing more and more that if we can prevent or delay these diseases in old age we can have a very important impact on wellbeing for the older population.”

Johnson and Johnson recently announced that it was halting a clinical trial for a new Alzheimer’s drug after safety issues emerged. This latest failure adds to the dozens of large, costly clinical trials that have shown no effect in treating this devastating disease.
The growing list of failures should give us pause for thought — have we got the causes of Alzheimer’s all wrong?
In the first analysis of the disease, the German physician Alois Alzheimer noted odd changes in the brain of a patient who died of the condition. Alzheimer identified two kinds of protein aggregates that are not found in younger brains: plaques that are found between brain cells and tangles that are found inside brain cells.
Later research identified the proteins that made up the plaques as amyloid and those that form the tangles as tau. What these structures actually do is still under debate.

Unheeded warning

Alzheimer advised scientists not to jump to the conclusion that these proteins caused the disease. Unfortunately, his caution was ignored, and over the years it has become essaywritingservice gospel that the build up of these proteins causes Alzheimer’s disease.
One problem is that it’s not possible to test, in a scientific experiment, if this theory is correct. Only in recent years has technology been developed that can test what these proteins do, and it is clearly not what scientists previously assumed. For example, genetically engineered mice that accumulate human amyloid in their brains show only mild impairment. But the pharmaceutical industry made up its mind a long time ago that amyloid is the culprit, and this has been the target for Alzheimer’s drugs ever since.
The aim of these drugs is to reduce the levels of amyloid in the brain, either by slowing down the formation of amyloid or by removing it from the brain. Both approaches have been tested many times now using different techniques and drug types. None of these trials have shown any effects, and some large drug companies, including Pfizer, have abandoned this area of research altogether.
The continued failure of new drugs to make a difference has to be interpreted as evidence that the amyloid protein is not the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Some companies have changed their target to the tau protein. But again, drugs companies are assuming that a single protein is the cause of the disease. film izle

Promising new avenues

Perhaps it is time to rethink the disease altogether. One approach is to look for genes that increase the risk of developing the disease. The problem with this approach is that there are surprisingly few of these genes, and they are rare. Alzheimer’s does not appear to be driven by gene mutations, so this approach does not shed new light on the Underlying processes.
Another option is to look at the risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s. One of these is type 2 diabetes. Clearly, diabetes is very different from Alzheimer’s disease, so what’s the connection?
In diabetes, insulin becomes less effective at controlling blood sugar levels. But insulin does a lot more than just control blood sugar; it is a “growth factor”. Neurons (brain cells) are very dependent on growth factors, and if they don’t get enough, they die.
The loss of insulin’s growth factor effects in the brain appear to make neurons vulnerable to stress and reduce the brain’s ability to repair damage that accumulates over time. (Neurons live as long as we do, so there is a lot of time for damage to accrue.)
When looking at brain tissue taken from deceased Alzheimer’s patients, researchers found that insulin lost its effectiveness as a growth factor, even in people who were not diabetic. This observation suggests that diabetes drugs might be an effective treatment for people with Alzheimer’s. Some experiments showed impressive results in animal studies, and several clinical trials have started.
Testing these drugs in animal models of another neurodegenerative disorder, Parkinson’s disease, also showed impressive effects, and two clinical trials in Parkinson’s patients showed good protective effects. In one of the trials — a pilot study — the patients who received the diabetes drug did not get any worse for two years while the control group, who received a standard treatment for Parkinson’s, deteriorated significantly. The other trial, a larger trial with a placebo control, confirmed this result and showed no deterioration in the drug group during the 12 months of study. betmatik
To see any protective effect in the brain in a clinical trial is completely new, and it supports the new theory that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are caused, at least in part, by a lack of growth factor activity in the brain. These new theories bring a fresh view on how these diseases develop and increase the likelihood of developing a drug treatment that makes a difference.
Christian Holscher is a professor of neuroscience at Lancaster University. He receives funding from the Cure Parkinson’s Trust and the Alzheimer’s Society.

The brain-health benefits of walnuts and berries are promoted heavily by those industries, but Harlan says the marketing claims are legitimate.

“There’ve been a lot of studies done with walnuts and blueberries specifically, because they’ve been funded by the walnut and blueberry guys,” he says. “While you always are a little questionable about the quality of those studies, I don’t think anybody is going to say walnuts and blueberries aren’t good for you.” deneme bonusu

A heaping helping of health

Harlan is uniquely qualified to teach food as medicine; after all, he’s worked in both worlds.

He entered the culinary arts early, managing a restaurant at the age of 18. He studied under top chefs and opened his own French bistro. He eventually left that to study hotel and restaurant management, but a career in medicine called. He received his degree from the Emory University School of Medicine.

Harlan is a practicing, board-certified internist and a nationally recognized expert in food and nutrition who has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. His website, drgourmet.com, offers evidence-based information on diet, health and wellness. He has been an on-air expert for the show “Cooking Thin” on the Food Network and won an Emmy for his public broadcast program “The Dr. Gourmet Show.”

He’s also published several books, including “Just Tell Me What to Eat!,” a six-week plan for healthy eating that features his favorite tips and plenty of mouth-watering recipes. superbetin

Harlan believes that “eating great food is the easiest path to health.” And he says getting started down that path can be easier than you think.

Tiny steps, big gains

The secret is to take small steps. Just work to improve your diet a bit at a time. Harlan makes that simple for you by breaking the Mediterranean Diet down into nine basic elements. You can see those in the table below.

Pick one of those elements, and incorporate it into your diet. Maybe you’ll set a goal of having a banana every morning. Or maybe you want to cut back on red meat and eat a little more fish.

One way to know you’re improving your eating habits is to keep score, based on the Mediterranean diet table of foods.

Give yourself one point for each one of the nine food elements that you eat the recommended amount of. Over time, see how many points you can earn, but don’t feel you have to make radical changes to your diet all at once. Harlan says adopting even a few of these food recommendations can serve to improve your health. vdcasino

“It doesn’t take a lot to get a point on the Mediterranean diet score for, say, increasing your amount of legumes,” he says. “That works out to a nice handful of peanuts, or choosing to have beans as your side dish, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Harlan encourages you to make simple changes, such as eating a piece of fruit every day. And it helps to choose whole foods that come from plants.

“It’s really just about trying to consume more legumes, more vegetables, more whole grains, and more fruits and nuts,” he says. “Those four points — which are actually five different ingredients — those are all plant-based ingredients, and the more you’re doing those plant-based ingredients and the less you’re consuming the animal-based protein, the healthier you’re going to be.”

The guide below offers detailed information on how to incorporate the Mediterranean diet into your weekly eating plan. It is reprinted with permission of the Goldring Center, and you can download a PDF from the center’s website. canlı casino

For cancer patients, tattoo removal can be sign of hope

For NJ Advance Media
While Lisa Eyerkuss successfully beat back breast cancer four years ago, she was left with a visible reminder of the experience: four tiny black radiation markers on her chest and one on her back.

“They’re small and it’s not that I’m a vain person, but when I wear a low-cut dress or am getting dressed after a shower, I can see those dots,” said the 57-year-old Little Silver resident. “Some women see them as battle scars that they earned, but they have a bad connection for me.”

She assumed she was stuck with them. However, progress in the field of laser surgery means the markers can be now removed much more easily than ever.

That has led one breast surgeon, Stephen Chagares, of Tinton Falls, to partner with a plastic surgery practice to remove them without charge for cancer patients.

‘WE vs. C’ ballet tells breast cancer survivors’ stories
‘WE vs. C’ ballet tells breast cancer survivors’ stories
Roxey Ballet parntered with the YWCA Princeton Breast Cancer Survivors Resource Center to create this unique performance starring professional dancers and breast cancer survivors.

“Many people’s marks are hidden, so they don’t mind them, while others see them as a badge of honor that they don’t want to remove,” Chagares said of the blue-black, 3-4 millimeter-sized dots placed on the body to align the radiation dose and ensure it is aimed at the same target each treatment session.

For some breast cancer patients, however, visible spots near the cleavage or throat make them self-conscious, he said. “For these individuals, the markers essentially reveal their medical identity without their consent, exposing to the world that they had breast cancer or some other cancer that involved radiation – which may be very uncomfortable for them,” he said.

When Chagares heard that colleagues at the nearby Plastic Surgery Center in Shrewsbury had acquired a high-speed laser that reduced the tattoo removal process from as many as a dozen sessions to as few as three, he came up with a way to help his patients shed that souvenir of treatment.

Since Chagares was already trained in laser surgery, he wondered if he could use the Center’s machine for his patients at times when the machine would otherwise be idle.

How family hit twice by cancer got by: ‘One small victory at a time’
How family hit twice by cancer got by: ‘One small victory at a time’
While Maddox Shepard was undergoing treatment for childhood leukemia, his mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The plastic surgery practice readily agreed to share its laser with Chagares. “We’re very involved with the breast cancer community, and this program is a great fit that we feel good to be a part of,” said Plastic Surgery Center reconstructive surgeon Andrew Elkwood.

The program was launched earlier this year. Since then more than a dozen breast cancer patients have already had their radiation marks removed.

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Most insurance plans don’t cover removal of radiation markers, Chagares said, a reality that made him even more intent on offering this service — which could normally cost individuals up to $1,000 – for free to anyone who wants it.

Eyerkuss, the breast cancer survivor, said he was thrilled to see her markers nearly disappear as the laser sessions went along. “Those marks bring me back to a really difficult time in my life, and we shouldn’t have to live with something that triggers bad memories,” she said.

“It helps a woman or man come through it, go back to work, and be themselves again. They don’t have to be pitied or reminded of their experience for the rest of their lives,” said Chagares.

He said tha as far as he knows, no one else in the state is offering a free ongoing program for patients regardless of thetype of cancer or the location of the patient’s treatment. He’d like to see that change.

“My hope is that we become so busy doing these procedures that we inspire other practices statewide to get involved,” he said.