Women don't need to run marathons or do intense aerobics to reduce their stroke risk.
Moderate-intensity exercise – such as brisk walking or playing tennis – may do the trick, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2014.
"I was surprised that moderate physical activity was most strongly associated with a reduced risk of stroke," said Sophia Wang, Ph.D., the study's lead author and professor in the department of population sciences within the Beckman Research Institute at the City of Hope in Duarte, Calif. "More strenuous activity such as running didn't further reduce women's stroke risk. Moderate activity, such as brisk walking appeared to be ideal in this scenario."
The study found that moderate exercise also helps offset the increased stroke risk seen with postmenopausal women taking menopausal hormones, but not completely.
Researchers analyzed information from the 133,479 women in the California Teachers Study to see how many suffered a stroke between 1996 and 2010.
Those who reported doing moderate physical activity in the three years before enrolling in the study were 20 percent less likely than women who reported no activity to suffer a stroke.
"The benefits of reducing risk of stroke were further observed among the group of women who had a sustained moderate level of physical activity over time," Wang said.
Postmenopausal women taking menopausal hormone therapy had more than a 30 percent higher risk of stroke than women who never used menopausal hormone therapy. After the women stopped taking hormones, their risk began to diminish.
"The effects of physical activity and hormone therapy appear immediate and the benefits of physical activity are consistent in premenopausal and postmenopausal women," Wang said.
Therefore, Wang recommends that women incorporate some type of physical activity into their daily routine. "You don't have to do an extreme boot camp. The types of activities we're talking about are accessible to most of the population."
Power walking and recreational tennis, for example, do not necessarily require special memberships to gyms.
The study also found that women with diabetes had elevated stroke risk, although this group encompassed women who also were overweight.
"Physical activity, obesity and diabetes are all highly correlated with one another," Wang said. "Stroke prevention among diabetics is thus a particularly important scientific question to address."
Although 87 percent of the women were white, Wang said she believes the study's results may also apply to women in other racial/ethnic groups because the amount of stroke risk reduction was so robust.
Further studies are needed to determine how much moderate exercise helps those with diabetes avoid strokes.
The incidence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the United States is growing at an alarming rate. Partnership HealthPlan of California (PHC) has launched a program to help its members with chronic kidney disease by offering support to CKD patients who have not yet started dialysis.
Designed to delay the progression to dialysis by reducing complications of common underlying conditions such as diabetes or hypertension, the program also prepares timely for dialysis when the need should arise.
“Our CKD Care Coordination Program can help ensure a better quality of life for our members with kidney disease,” said Jack Horn, chief executive officer of Partnership HealthPlan of California. “Dialysis can be a very intense and disruptive therapy. Offering support to our members in a way that can negate or delay that need is a welcome course of action.”
Phase One enrollment is open to PHC members living in Solano or Napa counties currently assigned to a primary care provider who are in Stage 4 or 5 of their Chronic Kidney Disease as identified by two or more Glomerular Filtration Rates (eGFR) of less than 30.
Two nephrologists in the PHC provider network have been instrumental in getting the program started: Dr. Thomas Paukert and Dr. Ehsan Shamir.
PHC plans to expand the program as more resources become available and more eligible members are identified.
Referrals to the CKD Care Coordination program can be made by calling the PHC Care Coordination Help Line at 707-863-4276.
PHC began operating in 1994 and serves Medi-Cal recipients in 14 northern California counties: Del Norte, Humboldt, Lake, Lassen, Marin, Mendocino, Modoc, Napa, Shasta, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Trinity and Yolo.
Additional information can be found at www.partnershiphp.org .
What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age?
Traditionally it is thought that age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function, but new research in Topics in Cognitive Science argues that older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, and this has often been misidentified as declining capacity.
The study, led by Dr. Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen, takes a critical look at the measures that are usually thought to show that our cognitive abilities decline across adulthood.
Instead of finding evidence of decline, the team discovered that most standard cognitive measures are flawed, confusing increased knowledge for declining capacity.
Dr. Ramscar's team used computers, programmed to act as though they were humans, to read a certain amount each day, learning new things along the way.
When the researchers let a computer “read” a limited amount, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult.
However, if the same computer was exposed data which represented a lifetime of experiences its performance looked like that of an older adult.
Often it was slower, not because its processing capacity had declined, but because increased “experience” had caused the computer's database to grow, giving it more data to process, and that processing takes time.
“What does this finding mean for our understanding of our ageing minds, for example older adults' increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea,” said Dr. Ramscar. “Technology now allows researchers to make quantitative estimates about the number of words an adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the team to separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from the actual performance of memory itself.”
“Imagine someone who knows two people's birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can 'only' match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?” asks Ramscar.
“It is time we rethink what we mean by the aging mind before our false assumptions result in decisions and policies that marginalize the old or waste precious public resources to remediate problems that do not exist,” said Topics in Cognitive Science, Editors Wayne Gray and Thomas Hills.
As the abundance of genetically modified (GM) foods continues to grow, so does the demand for monitoring and labeling them.
The genes of GM plants used for food are tweaked to make them more healthful or pest-resistant, but some consumers are wary of such changes.
To help inform shoppers and enforce regulations, scientists are reporting in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry the first comprehensive method to detect genetic modifications in one convenient, accurate test.
Li-Tao Yang, Sheng-Ce Tao and colleagues note that by the end of 2012, farmers were growing GM crops on more than 420 million acres of land across 28 countries. That's 100 times more than when commercialization began in 1996.
But doubts persist about the potential effects on the environment and human health of these biotech crops, created by changing the plants' genes to make them more healthful or more able to resist pests. In response, policymakers, particularly in Europe, have instituted regulations to monitor GM products.
Although researchers have come up with many ways to detect genetic modification in crops, no single test existed to do a comprehensive scan, which is where Yang and Tao come in.
They developed a test they call “MACRO,” which stands for: multiplex amplification on a chip with readout on an oligo microarray.
It combines two well-known genetic methods to flag about 97 percent of the known commercialized modifications, almost twice as many as other tests.
It also can be easily expanded to include future genetically modified crops.
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Transgenic Plant Special Fund, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University, the State Key Development Program for Basic Research of China, the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China.