Brain health Archive

Do you struggle with decisions? These strategies can help you make good choices more efficiently.

We make countless choices every day. Most are the mundane variety: what to eat, what to wear, what movie to watch. But often our decisions (or lack thereof) have a significant impact on our well-being.

Poor decision making is often a consequence of natural cognitive decline. This can cloud people's judgment about what is the right course of action or make it harder to weigh multiple options. The result is that people make questionable choices, or they feel overwhelmed and don't make any decision, which is sometimes even worse.

If you haven't made a video call yet, give it a try to fight isolation.

When much of the world began lockdowns to battle coronavirus in March 2020, many people turned to video calls to fight off the loneliness that often accompanies social isolation. Tech companies reported that the use of video calls for socializing surged by as much as 80%, enabling people to "see" family and friends. But it doesn't take a lockdown to warrant the use of this technology.

The epidemic of loneliness and isolation

Loneliness affects more than a third of older Americans. Another third of older adults feel isolated: they may be living alone, lack transportation, or live far from loved ones. Or they may have outlived a spouse or friends.

An analysis of multiple studies looking at the relationship between high blood pressure and cognitive health –– abilities like thinking, memory, and attention –– found that older people who lower high blood pressure are slightly less likely to develop cognitive impairment or dementia.

Research we're watching

Eating a vegetarian diet may lower your risk of stroke, according to a study in the March 17 issue of Neurology.

The study included two groups of people from Buddhist communities in Taiwan, where vegetarian diets are encouraged. About 30% of the more than 130,000 participants were vegetarian, meaning they didn't eat any meat or fish. Their average age was 50, and none had a prior stroke.

Research we're watching

People with clogged arteries in their hearts (coronary artery disease) or legs (peripheral artery disease) face a high risk of having a heart attack or stroke, particularly if they also have diabetes. For such people, a combination of clot-preventing drugs lowers the risk of those dangerous outcomes, according to a study published online March 28 by the journal Circulation.

The study included just over 18,300 people with coronary or peripheral artery disease; about 38% also had diabetes. They all took low-dose aspirin daily, but half also took 2.5 milligrams of rivaroxaban (Xarelto) twice daily while the others took a placebo. Like aspirin, rivaroxaban helps discourage blood clots, but through a different mechanism.

Research we're watching

Could a single blood test one day enable doctors to diagnose Alzheimer's disease? Researchers writing in the March 2 issue of Nature Medicine say they've made advances in this area. The blood test they developed measures the concentration of pTau181 — a form of the tau protein associated with brain changes in Alzheimer's disease — in the body's blood plasma. They used the test on samples collected from more than 400 people who were part of an ongoing -memory study.

The researchers found that the blood test was able to accurately detect which patients had Alzheimer's, which were healthy, and which had a different type of dementia caused by a neurodegenerative disease. Today, doctors typically diagnose Alzheimer's using a series of tests designed to rule out other causes, but the process is time-consuming and costly. The researchers are now aiming to refine the test further, in hopes that it will someday make it easier to detect Alzheimer's at an early stage, when the disease may be easier to treat.

In the journals

Bleeding is a common side effect of anticoagulants (blood thinners). However, people with atrial fibrillation (afib) who take the drug for stroke prevention should not ignore any bleeding from their lower gastrointestinal (GI) tract, as it may signal colon cancer. That study finding was published online Feb. 7, 2020, by the European Heart Journal.

Researchers analyzed 125,418 patients who took anticoagulants for afib. Only 2,576 had lower GI bleeding during the first six months of treatment, regardless of age. Yet those who did experience bleeding had 10 times the risk of being diagnosed with colon cancer during the subsequent year compared with those who hadn't had any bleeding.

As more older people undergo surgeries, the risk of complications increases, including for cognitive decline following their procedures, particularly after cardiac surgery. But awareness and pre-planning with your care team can help you avoid such complications.

Headaches have many possible causes, and proper management requires accurate diagnosis. Someone with increasingly severe headaches would want to have a brain imaging test to determine the underlying causes, but such tests are more effective in certain situations than others.

Here's what the numbers mean — and strategies to lower your cholesterol if it's too high.

For some women who've had normal cholesterol readings all their lives, that changes at menopause. "Going through menopause often results in lipid and cholesterol changes for the worse," says Dr. Samia Mora, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a specialist in cardiovascular medicine the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Drops in the female hormone, estrogen, are associated with a rise in total cholesterol levels due to higher amounts of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the "bad" cholesterol, and another blood lipid (fat) known as triglyceride. Over time this can raise heart risks, which is a reason for concern, as cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 cause of death in postmenopausal women, says Dr. Mora.

"So, it's especially important to track the numbers in perimenopause and the early years after menopause, as LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol tend to increase," she says.