Archives
All posts for the day November 4th, 2023
The team ran a trial involving 72 adults aged over 60 across the course of 12 weeks. The participants were split randomly and unknowingly into two groups: the first group took a wasabi tablet once a day, while the second group took a placebo tablet.
At the end of the experiment, those who had ingested wasabi tablets showed significantly better performance in their episodic memory (recalling events from the past) and working memory (holding information temporarily) based on a series of cognitive tests.
https://www.sciencealert.com/wasabi-boosts-cognitive-ability-in-older-people-study-shows
03 November 2023
(Aksana Ban/Moment/Getty Images)
A new study shows that the traditional Japanese spice wasabi can improve some types of cognitive function in those aged over 60, offering a straightforward and rather tasty way of looking after our brains as we get older.
Key to the association is the wasabi ingredient 6 methylsulfinyl hexyl isothiocyanate (6-MSITC), a bioactive compound that has previously been linked to antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects that slow down damage to cells and protect them.
While a small number of studies have shown 6-MSITC having a beneficial effect on cognition, this hasn’t yet been tested with older adults – the people who are most at risk of cognitive decline and related problems like dementia.
“Previous studies suggested that antioxidants and anti-inflammatories have an important role in cognitive health in older adults,” write the researchers in their published paper. “Therefore, 6-MSITC is expected to have a positive effect on cognitive performances in older adults.”
The team ran a trial involving 72 adults aged over 60 across the course of 12 weeks. The participants were split randomly and unknowingly into two groups: the first group took a wasabi tablet once a day, while the second group took a placebo tablet.
At the end of the experiment, those who had ingested wasabi tablets showed significantly better performance in their episodic memory (recalling events from the past) and working memory (holding information temporarily) based on a series of cognitive tests.
However, no significant differences were found in other areas of cognitive performance, including reasoning, attention, and processing speed. The team thinks the wasabi, and 6-MSITC, might be particularly affecting the hippocampus part of the brain, which is particularly important for memory function.
“These findings suggest that the 12 weeks’ 6-MSITC intake selectively enhances working and episodic memory functions in healthy older adults,” write the researchers.
The team now wants to look in more detail at what might be happening on the biological and molecular level. In this particular study, no antioxidant or anti-inflammatory biomarkers were measured, so it’s only possible to hypothesize about the effect the wasabi is having and why it’s having that effect.
Even with those limitations though, the study shows a clear link between the 6-MSITC-containing wasabi and better memory function. When it comes to maintaining healthy brains into old age, picking foods that are particularly good for us and avoiding those that aren’t can be a simple, relatively easy-to-follow strategy.
“Older adults with lower cognitive performances feel difficulties in daily behaviors such as shopping, banking, and cooking,” write the researchers.
“Therefore, it is important to improve cognitive functions in older adults.”
The research has been published in Nutrients.
See here:
Social Security Works said that the new House speaker’s “NUMBER ONE priority is to cut our earned benefits behind closed doors.”
“A week into his tenure, MAGA Mike Johnson is ALREADY calling for closed-door cuts to the Social Security and Medicare benefits American workers have earned through decades of hard work,” warned Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/mike-johnson-debt-commission
When Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives elected Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson as speaker last week, critics quickly sounded the alarm about his previous calls to cut trillions of dollars from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and the GOP leader triggered a fresh wave of fears on Thursday with related comments to a Capitol Hill journalist.
NBC News‘ Sahil Kapur reported on social media that Johnson “says he pitched a debt commission to Senate Republicans yesterday and ‘the idea was met with great enthusiasm.’ He says it will be bipartisan and bicameral. He says he wants ‘very thoughtful people’ in both parties to lead it. He wants this ‘immediately.'”
In response to Johnson’s remarks—which echoed his first speech as speaker—the Alliance for Retired Americans wrote, “Translation: They’re eager to begin gutting Social Security behind closed doors.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla)—who led the ouster of ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—celebrated Johnson’s rise as a win for the far-right. He declared last week that “MAGA is ascendant,” referring to the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan of former President Donald Trump, who is the GOP front-runner for 2024.
Critics of the new speaker have similarly framed his election as a display of the far-right’s hold on the Republican Party, and are even calling him “MAGA Mike,” including in response to his comments Thursday.
“A week into his tenure, MAGA Mike Johnson is ALREADY calling for closed-door cuts to the Social Security and Medicare benefits American workers have earned through decades of hard work,” warned Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Social Security Works said that “MAGA Mike Johnson’s NUMBER ONE priority is to cut our earned benefits behind closed doors.”
“The White House has rightfully called this type of commission a ‘death panel’ for Social Security and Medicare,” the group noted. “HANDS OFF!”
Back in February, long before McCarthy struck a deal with President Joe Biden to suspend the country’s debt ceiling, Republicans in Congress and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) were floating the idea of a commission, and White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said that “the American people want more jobs and lower costs, not a death panel for Medicare and Social Security.”
As Republican lawmakers have continued to pursue the idea, others have embraced the “death panel” description.
After Johnson’s mention of the commission in his speech last week, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote:
On the whole, Johnson’s approach to social safety net programs comes right out of the GOP library of lies about the programs’ finances and their effect on the federal budget.
“The reality is, they’re headed towards bankruptcy,” he said in his July 2022 C-SPAN appearance. “In just a few number of years, Social Security goes belly up. So does Medicare, Medicaid, all of these big-spending programs because we’re drowning in debt.”
The idea that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are going “bankrupt” is standard Republican hogwash. So is the idea that Social Security will go “belly up” in some number of years—even if Congress sits on its hands, the program will still have enough revenue to cover three-quarters of the benefits due.
“The notion that those programs are drivers of the federal debt is also a bog-standard GOP talking point,” Hiltzik added. “A far more significant portion of the federal budget deficit is the lavish tax cut that Johnson’s party gifted to corporations and the wealthy in 2017, a $1.5-trillion giveaway from which the U.S. economy received no significant gain.”
Most House Republicans and a dozen Democrats on Thursday evening voted to pass a bill that would deliver on Biden’s request for $14.3 billion to help Israel wage war on Gaza—which experts are condemning as genocide—and cut Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding.
Analysts and Democrats in Congress have warned that the IRS cut would hamper the agency’s ability to crack down on wealthy tax cheats, bolstered by the Congressional Budget Office finding Wednesday that the measure would reduce federal revenues by $26.8 billion and add $12.5 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who opposed the bill and is among the few Democrats demanding a cease-fire in Gaza, said that “the only thing crueller than sending $14 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars for weapons that will result in the deaths of thousands more innocent Palestinian children in Gaza is exploiting that war—exploiting the death of over 1,400 Israeli mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, and hundreds more hostages—to help corporate CEOs and billionaire donors cheat on their taxes.”
Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
Nov 3, 2023
U.S. infant mortality rate rose 3%, with 20,538 deaths recorded in 2022
“In a country as well-resourced as the U.S., with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”
Arjumand Siddiqi
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-infant-mortality-rate-rises-first-time-over-20-years
Nov 3, 2023
FRIDAY, NOV 03, 2023
U.S. infant mortality rate rose 3%, with 20,538 deaths recorded in 2022, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Wednesday.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the rate has been almost continuously falling since CDC records began in 1995, even though in an international comparison, the U.S. stays behind most developed nations in this metric.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Infant mortality is the death of a child before its first birthday.
Infant deaths between 2 and 11 months of age rose faster than the average infant mortality rate at 4 percent, while those between birth and 28 days of age rose by 3 percent as well.
Two common causes of infant death – pregnancy complications and meningitis – became more prevalent.
Experts interviewed by news outlets said that the reasons for the increase were not quite clear yet and offered different explanations for parts of it, for example, infectious diseases on the upswing after social distancing ended, expanding maternity care deserts in the country, unwanted pregnancies continuing to term due to abortion bans, an increase of maternal complications due to Covid-19 and more women in general starting pregnancy with underlying health conditions like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure as these become more prevalent in the population.
While Black and native populations have the highest infant mortality rates in the United States, a statistically significant increase in 2022 happened among white and American Indian/Alaska Native populations specifically.
The increase in the overall rate was the first statistically significant one since 2002 and researchers are not sure if it will continue. However, a smaller increase between 2020 and 2021 as well as data for the beginning of 2023 are pointing in this direction.
Additionally, Statista’s Buchholz points out that even though the world has made progress in reducing the mortality rate of children under the age of one, infant deaths continue to be prevalent in developing countries.
Especially post-neonatal deaths – those occurring between the ages of 2 and 11 months – continue with a higher prevalence in lower-income countries, the same as deaths between the ages of 1 and 4 years.
North America and the United States specifically are an outlier in the statistics, ranking behind Europe and other high-income nations for all types of child mortality.
You will find more infographics at Statista
According to the data, infants in the African countries of Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Somalia and Nigeria have the greatest risk of not reaching their first birthday.
Mortality rates exceed 70 in 1,000 live births in all four nations. Pakistan is the lowest-ranked country not on the African continent at 52.8 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
Estonia is at the opposite end of the spectrum with an infant mortality rate of 1.6 per 1,000 live births, the highest-ranked non-micro nation.
Japan ranked second, sharing with Singapore, followed by Norway, Finland and Slovenia in rank 3.
“The U.S. is falling behind on a basic indicator of how well societies treat people,” said Arjumand Siddiqi, a University of Toronto professor who studies population health, to the Wall Street Journal.
“In a country as well-resourced as the U.S., with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”
Researchers will have to examine next year’s data to determine whether it’s a “blip” or an indicator of an “underlying health care issue,” said Danielle Ely, a National Center for Health Statistics health statistician and one of the report’s authors, to CNN.
People who received hydroxychloroquine were less likely to die than those who did not, according to a new study.
Those who received HCQ and AZ were more likely to survive regardless of whether they were inpatients or outpatients.
The biggest effect was recorded in outpatients aged 50 to 89.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/hydroxychloroquine-associated-lower-covid-19-mortality-study
FRIDAY, NOV 03, 2023
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
People who received hydroxychloroquine were less likely to die than those who did not, according to a new study.
Just 0.8 percent of patients at a facility in France who received hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and an antibiotic died, compared to 4.8 percent of patients who did not receive the drug combination, French researchers reported on Nov. 1.
“This study represents the largest single-center study evaluating HCQ-AZ in the treatment of COVID-19. Similarly, to other large observational studies, it concludes that HCQ would have saved lives,” Dr. Didier Raoult, with Aix-Marseille Universite in Marseille, and his co-authors wrote.
The paper was published in the journal New Microbes and New Infections. It was released as a preprint earlier this year, but withdrawn because authors said they have changed their “analytic strategies.”
Researchers examined records from 30,423 patients with COVID-19 who were treated at another institution in Marseille, IHU Méditerranée Infection. They included all adults who tested positive for COVID-19 and who were treated in the hospital as an inpatient or an outpatient between March 2, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2021.
The study set ended up with 30,202 patients because treatment information was not available for the 221 others.
Most of the patients received off-label prescriptions of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (AZ), a common antibiotic.
Of the set, 23,172 patients received the drug combination. The other 7,030 did not.
Among those who received the drugs, 191, or 0.8 percent, died. Among those who did not, 344, or 4.8 percent, passed away.
Those who received HCQ and AZ were more likely to survive regardless of whether they were inpatients or outpatients.
The biggest effect was recorded in outpatients aged 50 to 89.
Limitations of the study included drawing from records from a single center. Funding came in part from the French government.
HCQ has been cleared in both France and the United States for decades but not for treating COVID-19.
Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said that clinical trial data do not support using HCQ against the illness.
“Hydroxychloroquine has not been shown to have any benefit in randomized clinical trials,” Dr. Boulware, who was not involved in the new study, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“There is zero antiviral effect in humans and zero reduction in hospitalization among 11 randomized clinical trials pooled together,” he added, referring to a metanalysis he co-authored that was published in January. Dr. Boulware also helped carry out a randomized trial examining HCQ as a prophylaxis in people who were exposed to COVID-19 and found it did not prevent illness or confirmed infection.
Mixed Evidence
Dr. Raoult and his co-authors acknowledged that several large randomized trials have found no benefits for HCQ against COVID-19, including a World Health Organization trial. But they said that the largest, funded by the World Health Organization and the United Kingdom government, suffered from “significant methodological problems,” including high dosing during the first 24 hours.
The group also criticized smaller trials with similar findings as underpowered, including a trial in France that was stopped due to enrollment issues.
“In contrast, several large observational retrospective studies published in the literature, including a total of 47,516 patients report a benefit of using HCQ on the mortality of COVID-19 patients,” the authors said, pointing to studies from France, Iran, and Spain.
They said the number of patients in the observational studies outweighs the number of patients in the randomized trials and support using HCQ as an early treatment.
Dr. Boulware said that observational data can suffer from serious problems, pointing to a response in 2020 to an observational U.S. paper that reported an association between HCQ with AZ and lower mortality among hospitalized patients.
Dr. Raoult and his co-authors acknowledged the limitations of observational data but lamented what they see as a dearth of clinical trials that use proper dosing.
“Unfortunately, few if any of the RCTs that have attempted to demonstrate the efficacy of HCQ on COVID-19 patients were run with an appropriate methodology,” they wrote.
“Inadequate target (late treatment), excessive dosage of the drug, or inappropriate study power were the main troubles. While observational studies have also confounding factors, as discussed above, significant effect estimate differences between RCTs and observational studies are more likely to be linked to the quality of the study than to its design,” they added, referencing a Cochrane Review that there was little difference between observational studies and clinical trials.
“In any case, since the epidemic has now vanished, it is no longer possible to conduct RCTs,” they concluded. “Only observational studies can bring any more insights to support policy- makers with repositioning of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19.”
Dr. Raoult was director of the facility at which the patients were seen but retired in 2022 after a French agency investigation found issues at the facility with regulation compliance. Several of his papers have since been retracted.
Dr. Raoult did not respond to a request for comment.
The new study came about a month after researchers in Belgium reported in another observational study that HCQ with AZ reduced COVID-19 mortality among hospitalized patients.
“Our study suggests that, despite the controversy surrounding its use, treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin remains a viable option,” Dr. Gert Meeus, a nephrologist with AZ Groeninge Hospital, and other researchers wrote.
That group offered similar concerns regarding trials as the French group, including over the dosing levels.
Nov 3, 2023
© AFP 2023 / FADI ALWHIDI
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – The United States and Israel will try to block a possible future investigation into the alleged use of white phosphorus by Israel, Former director of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights Craig Mokhiber told Sputnik.
On Tuesday, the letter by Mokhiber to Volker Turk, High Commissioner for Human Rights, was made public, which explained that the UN high-ranking diplomat resigned over the Organization’s stance on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Mokhiber stopped working at the Organization on November 1.
Mokhiber noted that successive UN investigations in the past, in prior attacks by Israel, have confirmed the use of white phosphorus.
“In the current round, I’m not sure what information is available. I can tell you that this is being raised by the Independent Human Rights mechanisms of the UN Human Rights Council,” he said.
“I think we can fully expect that there will be a full investigation, independent international investigation, you can also expect as in all previous investigations, that Israel will not cooperate with that investigation, and will try to block it. You can also expect that powerful western states, especially the United States, will try to block it from taking place as they have done in our previous investigations,” the former director added.
A US intelligence report recently affirmed that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons, but reality doesn’t stop Iran hawks in the US and Israel from constantly hyping up the threat of a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program. The same officials do not officially recognize that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal.
FRIDAY, NOV 03, 2023
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
The House earlier this week passed a resolution that suggested the US would use force against Iran in the future in the name of preventing the country from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The resolution passed Wednesday says a nuclear-armed Iran is “unacceptable” and declares that it’s the policy of the US to “use all means necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
A US intelligence report recently affirmed that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons, but reality doesn’t stop Iran hawks in the US and Israel from constantly hyping up the threat of a non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program. The same officials do not officially recognize that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal.
The resolution passed in a vote of 354-53, with 50 Democrats and three Republicans voting against the measure. Explaining his opposition, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said he voted no because it seemed like a call for war.
“Yesterday Congress passed a resolution (354 to 53) that claims Iran possesses all it needs for a nuclear weapon,” Massie wrote on X.
“The same resolution says the US should ‘use all means necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.’ Seems like a call for war on Iran. I voted No.” Here is the full pertinent section:
Resolved, That the House of Representatives declares it is the policy of the United States—
(1) that a nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran is not acceptable;
(2) that Iran must not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon under any circumstances or conditions;
(3) to use all means necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; and
(4) to recognize and support the freedom of action of partners and allies, including Israel, to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The resolution pointed to Iran’s uranium enrichment at 60% and its stockpiles of enriched uranium as evidence it could make a bomb. But in order to make a nuclear weapon, uranium needs to be enriched at 90%, and there’s no sign Tehran is considering taking that step.