Gene Morphis ' View

The approach that Kan Ding, MD, Takashi Tarumi, PhD, and team used to evaluate brain health in relation to breathing is unique and interesting. They used oxygen uptake as a measure of fitness. You’ve likely seen a tv commercial or video with a professional athlete or perhaps an Olympic hopeful running or biking with a mask and tube strapped to their face. That equipment is measuring “VO2Max” or the use of oxygen by someone exercising. Distance runners, cross country skiers and the like must consume and burn oxygen highly efficiently if they want to be competitive The University of Texas Southwest Medical Center recently opened its new Brain Institute. That’s where Doctors Ding, Tarumi and associates work. They recruited 91 participants diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Generally, that means they were able to care for themselves but were noticing some memory difficulty. Participants in the study had VO2Max measured, had brain image scans, and various tests of cognition per...

If you do it right, puzzles and games might just save your brain. There are millions of players of strategy games, memory games, word games and puzzles. They want to know that working crosswords, solving sudoku, playing bridge, mahjong or chess will help preserve mental acuity. Some are counting on it. Cognitive Reserve Cognitive reserve is the term developed after researchers found instances of examination of the brains of individuals that showed signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, but, while alive, the individual had exhibited no signs of dementia.  We want to build cognitive reserve, and there is evidence that puzzles can do that. One key-and positive- study from 2011 found that solving crossword puzzles delayed onset of memory loss by 2.5 years, and may have had much longer beneficial impact. NIH Research The National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research funded a study on brain-training and cognition. That study is related-ad...

Tuesday, the CDC reported that being overweight or obese is associated with higher risk of 13 different cancers. They put it into perspective with two additional pieces of data: first, two-thirds of American adults are overweight , and second, in 2014, there were 630,000 diagnoses of those forms of cancer in the U.S. That is, there were 630,000 cases of the kinds of cancer associated with being overweight. Over a third of Americans are obese. Now, that’s not someone’s judgement call. That is a statistical finding, based on studies of body mass index (BMI). Here's the formula for BMI so that you can calculate it for yourself. You may want to convert your height and weight into meters; some of the formulas I’ve found use the metric system. Here's a converter for inches into meters. A friend of mine said he is writing a three-hundred-page book on diet. On one page it has “Eat Less”. The facing page has “Exercise More”, for all three hundred pages. There is no mystery...

The research team of Dr. Claire J. Steves, Dr. Ted Spector and others at Kings College in London are doing some amazing research on aging (and other important research as well). Much of that examines aging effects on the brain. One of the research studies involved exercise and cognitive decline. Here is a quote from that research : “ A striking protective relationship was found between muscle fitness (leg power) and both 10-year cognitive change… and subsequent total grey matter”. In other words, the women with better leg strength and fitness showed less cognitive decline as they aged. As we continue to note, the link between physical fitness, exercise and so on to maintaining a healthy brain is well known. And, we’ve seen studies where older adults improved cognition with dancing, which obviously requires use of leg muscles. (See Dance Your *** Off; Grow a Bigger Brain ). But this is the first I recall where leg muscles in particular were noted, and the first where a muscle gro...