Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts

So nerdy it can desist senility old time

Monday, May 5, 2014

So nerdy it can desist senility old time - Penchant read or write from childhood to adulthood it can provide benefits in old age. Research shows that people who actively use the brain for reading, thinking, and writing has remained brilliant brain when they are older.

This study also shows that activities that stimulate the brain such as reading and writing could prevent a person from dementia or other memory problems when they are older, as reported by CBS News.

"Our research shows that exercising the brain by doing some habits such as reading, writing, and more important to maintain the sharpness and brain health in old age," said study author Robert S. Wilson, of Rush Alzheimers Disease Center at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago.

These results were found after researchers observed 294 older adults who underwent tests of memory for six years. The participants were also asked about the habit of reading, writing journals, or other activities related to brain activity when they were children, teenagers, to adults.

After the participants died, researchers then examined their brains to find a plaque which is a sign of dementia or other brain diseases associated with decreased memory and ability to think.

Researchers found that people who make a habit to make known their brains active memory decline 32 percent more slowly than people who do not have the habit of making their brains active. While people who have never accustom them to the active brain decreased memory and brainpower 48 percent faster.
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Weight at time of diagnosis linked to prostate cancer mortality

Monday, April 28, 2014



Men who are overweight or obese when they are diagnosed with prostate cancer are more likely to die from the disease than men who are of healthy weight, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice. In patients with more aggressive forms of prostate cancer, the researchers also found an even stronger correlation between obesity and mortality.

This study included 751 Kaiser Permanente patients with prostate cancer who underwent radical prostatectomy, an operation that includes removal of the prostate and surrounding tissue. The researchers explored the association between the patients body mass index and prostate cancer mortality, adjusted for tumor aggressiveness and other characteristics.

The researchers found men who died from prostate cancer were 50 percent more likely to be overweight or obese at diagnosis compared to men who did not die from the disease. Men with high Gleason scores, a rating of the aggressiveness of prostate cancer cells, had the highest association between BMI and death, specifically men with Gleason scores of 8 or higher. The Gleason score ranges from 2 to 10, with the highest number representing the greatest likelihood of tumor cells spreading.

"We found among patients undergoing surgical treatment for prostate cancer, weight at time of diagnosis is more strongly correlated with prostate cancer survival than many other factors researchers have studied in the past, including some prostate cancer treatments," said lead author Reina Haque, PhD, a researcher at Kaiser Permanente Southern Californias Department of Research & Evaluation in Pasadena, Calif. "Moving forward, we are hoping future studies will examine the effect of weight loss and other lifestyle modifications on prostate cancer mortality."

Additional studies are needed to determine which lifestyle modifications, such as diet or exercise, could prolong a prostate cancer patients life. Further investigation also is needed to determine if the findings of this study, which looked at men who had prostate cancer surgery, apply to men who received other treatments such as radiation or hormone therapy.

Although the connection between mens weight at prostate cancer diagnosis and likelihood of survival has been examined, many previous studies were limited by self-reported body weight data or it was unclear when the BMI data were obtained. So the link between obesity and prostate cancer mortality remains controversial. However, the methodology of this study was different because the researchers used BMI collected from medical records, instead of self-reported data. The researchers identified men who died of prostate cancer and compared their BMI at time of diagnosis to controls to determine if body weight is related prostate cancer death. The biological relationship between obesity and prostate cancer prognosis is still not understood, and is an active area of research.

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Health Care Microtargeting Just A Matter of Time

Thursday, April 17, 2014

The Disease Management Care Blog is proud of its native ability to resist the highly tailored "microtargeting" of advertisers. It can confidently say this because it uses its own independently formed perences to take advantage of on-line sales, movie placements, Twitter prompts, cable TV commercials and internet radio ads. Its not its fault that it attracts certain targeting and rejects the DMCB spouses assertion that theres no discernible difference between Chopin and Smirnoff.

Smart DMCB readers undoubtedly feel just as secure about their native immunity to outside influencers. But that doesnt mean they wont be impressed by just how industrialized microtargeting has become when they look at this Feb 27 C-SPAN Washington Journal on Targeted Political Ads. The same decades-old science that matches a particular product to a certain profile for automobiles, accessories and aspirin is now being used as never before in the 2012 political campaigns.

The DMCB thinks there may be a silver lining here.  As this gets better every day, microtargeting is undoubtedly destined to be adopted by the disease and population health management industry. Over and beyond its ability to use details from insurance claims and electronic health records, microtargeting can also vacuum up and digest data on the magazines we subscribe to, the cable shows we watch, the credit charges we amass, the computer "cookies" we accumulate or the social media we embrace to triangulate on consumers health profiles.

For example.... the analytics modeling could fit a known behavior (like having a lot of flat screens in the home tuned to reruns of the gluttonous Man vs. Food ) with certain conditions (like undiagnosed diabetes). It could also be used to link key health consumer attitudes (like wanting to sign up for your PCPs newly minted patient centered medical home) with a certain behaviors (such as being unable to resist viewing online images of cute puppies). Or what about leveraging the most obvious association: possessing high native intelligence and reading this blog.

Silliness aside, to the DMCBs knowledge, tapping into our public, demographic and on-line footprints for "health care microtargeting" hasnt been really commercialized - yet. It searched the published medical literature and didnt find much that was useful (though given its academic pedigree, that shouldnt be surprising), but, thanks to Google, it did find this blog post (as if wed expect otherwise) by "Sirensong. She points out that geeks are on it, so the DMCB suspects its just a matter of time.

If any readers are aware of anything more to this, please share.

Image from Wikipedia
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