Author Archives: drrjv

Unknown's avatar

About drrjv

👴🏻📱🍏🧠😎 Pop Pop 👴🏻, iOS 📱 Geek, cranky 🍏 fanatic, retired neurologist 🧠 Biased against people without a sense of humor 😎

Mounjaro, Zepbound Help Sleep Apnea

A popular obesity drug may help treat a dangerous disorder in which people struggle to breathe while they sleep, a new study finds.

Tirzepatide, the medication in the weight-loss drug Zepbound and also the diabetes treatment Mounjaro, appeared to reduce the severity of sleep apnea along with reducing weight and improving blood pressure and other health measures in patients with obesity who took the drug for a year.

https://apnews.com/article/sleep-apnea-tirzepatide-obesity-cpap-3872cf70f3e3b385fe98f83afaadc91e

Medical Mysteries: A new mother is felled by ferocious back pain

While breastfeeding her new baby, she developed intense, unexplained pain that kept getting worse.

Several days after her parents’ departure Lucido stumbled into the bathroom early one morning and unintentionally sat down hard on the toilet. Instantly she felt a sickening shudder in her lower back followed by the sensation of an electric current shooting up her spine. Intense nausea came next. Worried she might pass out from the pain, Lucido lay on the bathroom floor.

Aimee Lucido with her baby, Lyra

In 2018 Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center had launched a program headed by endocrinologist Adi Cohen to recruit, study and treat women with a rare condition called pregnancy- and lactation-associated osteoporosis (PLO).

A severe form of early-onset osteoporosis — osteoporosis that occurs before age 50 — PLO can occur in the late stages of pregnancy or during breastfeeding when the loss of maternal calcium leads to a temporary decrease in bone mineral density. Unlike postmenopausal osteoporosis, which is common and affects about 10 million Americans, PLO is rare, although no one knows how rare.

Little is known about the condition, which was described more than 70 years ago. Misdiagnosis is common and many doctors have never seen a case.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/22/pregnancy-backpain-breastfeeding-medical-mysteries/

Daily multi-vitamin may slow dementia

Taking daily multivitamins appears to slow cognitive aging by about 2 years in older adults, three new studies show.

In the latest study, published Thursday in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers observed and tested 573 adults 60 and older in person. In the two previous studies, people taking part in the research responded by phone or online. Overall, about 5,000 people took part in the three studies.

The in-person study showed the multivitamin provided a “modest benefit” on global cognition over 2 years, compared to a placebo. Global cognition includes brain activities such as reasoning, attention, and planning. The multivitamin showed “a statistically significant benefit” for episodic memory, but not in executive function and attention, a news release said.

https://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/news/20240119/multivitamins-slow-cognitive-aging-seniors-study

https://www.amazon.com/Equate-Complete-Multivitamin-Compare-Centrum/dp/B00DPLZG3W

Do we have Alzheimer’s disease all wrong?

“As Science noted in its story on the retracted paper, scientists are still debating whether the amyloid theory is viable. The skeptics cite the fraudulent research and lack of a genuine breakthrough; supporters can point to this new class of drugs including donanemab that have led to some improvement in some patients.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/355108/alzheimers-disease-drug-approval-research-retraction

The US Healthcare System: How Did We Get Here and What Will It Take To Get Out’

Highly Recommended: Excellent must-read slide deck from Professor Richard Wender

What causes multiple sclerosis—and why are women more at risk?

“Around 2.9 million people worldwide—roughly one million in the United States—have multiple sclerosis or MS; Applegate and The Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn Sigler are two of them. In their podcast, the actresses speak candidly about their experiences with the disease.
MS affects the central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord. The immune system attacks sheaths of a material called myelin that surround nerve fibers. Like insulation on wires, myelin protects nerves and helps transmit signals. But when myelin deteriorates, the nerve fibers underneath are exposed. This disrupts the brain’s communication and leaves behind lesions, which can cause a myriad of symptoms as the disease progresses.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/multiple-sclerosis-ms-cause-treatment-ebv

Two Is Better Than One in the Alzheimer’s Market

“Last week, a panel of independent advisers to the FDA unanimously voted in support of Eli Lilly’s donanemab, a competitor in the same class of drugs that target amyloid plaques in the brain. The FDA is expected to decide on whether to approve the drug by the end of the year.

Life expectancies around the world have surged in recent decades, increasingly putting people at risk of dementia. About one in nine seniors has Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of the condition, which works out to some seven million Americans.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/two-better-one-alzheimer-market-110000384.html

Apple Vision Pro Game Changer for Disabled

The headset is already changing disabled users’ lives.

In her childhood bedroom, Maxine Collard had a PC connected to a cathode-ray tube monitor so massive it bowed her desk into a smile that grew deeper every year. Collard has oculocutaneous albinism, which means that her hair is naturally bleach white, her complexion maximally fair, and she has uncorrectably low visual acuity with limited depth perception. In order to see the screen, she had to crane her neck until her face was two inches from the monitor.

When Collard was in middle school, her mother bought an iMac for the family. Collard spent hours messing around on the new machine, her nose pressed almost to the glass. One day, deep in the computer’s accessibility settings, she discovered that if she held down the control key while spinning the mouse’s scroll wheel, she could instantaneously zoom the entire screen to whatever magnification level she wanted. There was a rudimentary magnifier app on her Windows computer, but she found the interface difficult to use, and the low-res image on the zoomed-in PC screen, she said, was pixelated, hard to read, “disgusting.” Her experience on the iMac, which allowed her to magnify the entire screen into a much clearer image, came as a revelation.

Earlier this year, Collard had a similar aha moment when she tried the Apple Vision Pro for the first time. Some critics of the AVP were skeptical of a device that pressed two high-resolution micro-OLED screens within millimeters of one’s eyes for hours at a time. But to Collard, the ability to (as she put it) “strap an iPad to my face” was instantly appealing.

See Link for more:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/apple-vision-pro-disabled-users.html

Medical Aid in Dying Nears Final Vote

Dr Varipapa Testifies in Legislative Hall

A legislative journey

The first attempt to pass medical aid in dying legislation in Delaware occurred back in 2015, and Rep. Paul Baumbach (D-Newark) has been persistently shepherding the measure through advancements and failures ever since.

This year, House Bill 140, also known as the Ron Silverio/Heather Block End of Life Options Law, named in honor of two advocates who died before its passage, has wound its way through the Delaware General Assembly. On Wednesday, the Senate Executive Committee advanced the bill to a Senate floor vote – it’s final step before heading to the desk of Gov. John Carney, where it’s future is uncertain.

The debate over physician-assisted suicide in the current legislative session has already seen some dramatic moments though, including its first approval by the House of Representatives in April. That vote was made possible in part by the vivid testimony from Middletown Republican Kevin Hensley, who changed his longstanding opposition after his own mother exercised the medically assisted suicide option last year in California, where it is already legal.

Just two weeks after her passing in April 2023, Hensley supported the measure through the House Health & Human Development Committee. Testifying through a choked-up voice, Hensley noted that he disagreed with her decision but came to understand that it was her choice to make.

Body mass index or BMI Falling out of favor

Body mass index was first developed in 1832 and has been the standard way to estimate a person’s body fat since the 1980s. The calculation, however, has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.

One major critique of BMI is that it doesn’t look at how much of a person’s weight is fat, and where fat is distributed around the body. It also doesn’t take into account the other elements that make up a person’s body composition beyond fat, including muscle, bone, water and organs.

“Fat distribution and body composition can vary dramatically among different people with the same BMI,” Wenquan Niu, a professor at the Capital Institute of Pediatrics in Beijing, wrote in an email.

Because muscle is much denser than fat, BMI skews higher in people who are very muscular but have less body fat, like athletes https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/bmi-flaws-body-roundness-index-better-rcna155898