The new research has found “that the sharp rise of dementia and other neurological deaths in people under 74 cannot be put down to the fact that we are living longer. The rise is because a higher proportion of old people are being affected by such conditions — and what is really alarming, it is starting earlier and affecting people under 55 years.”

The rise seems to be currently mostly concentrated in the Western countries. Out of the ten largest of the Western countries the US has had the steepest increase in all neurological deaths — men up 66% and women 92% between 1979-2010. The UK was in 4th — men up 32% and women 48%. With regards ti the total numbers of deaths, those are as of now relatively low — in the UK, “it was 4,500 and now 6,500, in the USA it was 14,500 now more than 28,500 deaths.”

Professor Pritchard of Bournemouth University says: “These statistics are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an ‘epidemic’ that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes.”

Tessa Gutteridge, Director YoungDementia UK states that it needs to become public knowledge that dementia is increasingly affecting people from an earlier age: “The lives of an increasing number of families struggling with working-age dementia are made so much more challenging by services which fail to keep pace with their needs and a society which believes dementia to be an illness of old age.”

But as the research shows, there is now a significant trend towards the development of dementia at an earlier and earlier age — a ‘hidden epidemic’ in adults (under 74) in Western countries, especially the UK.

“Total neurological deaths in both men and women rose significantly in 16 of the countries covered by the research, which is in sharp contrast to the major reductions in deaths from all other causes. Over the period the UK has the third biggest neurological increase, up 32% in men and 48% in women, whilst women’s neurological deaths rose faster than men’s in most countries.”

Lead researcher Professor Colin Pritchard said, “These rises in neurological deaths, with the earlier onset of the dementias, are devastating for families and pose a considerable public health problem. It is NOT that we have more old people but rather more old people have more brain disease than ever before, including Alzheimer’s. For example there are two new British charities, The Young Parkinson’s Society and Young Dementia UK, which are a grass-roots response to these rises. The need for such charities would have been inconceivable a little more than 30 years ago.”

With regards to what is causing these increases, he stated: “This has to be speculative but it cannot be genetic because the period is too short. Whilst there will be some influence of more elderly people, it does not account for the earlier onset; the differences between countries nor the fact that more women have been affected, as their lives have changed more than men’s over the period, all indicates multiple environmental factors. Considering the changes over the last 30 years — the explosion in electronic devices, rises in background non-ionising radiation- PC’s, micro waves, TV’s, mobile phones; road and air transport up four-fold increasing background petro-chemical pollution; chemical additives to food etc. There is no one factor rather the likely interaction between all these environmental triggers, reflecting changes in other conditions. For example, whilst cancer deaths are down substantially, cancer incidence continues to rise; levels of asthma are un-precedented; the fall in male sperm counts — the rise of auto-immune diseases — all point to life-style and environmental influences. These `statistics’ are about real people and families, and we need to recognise that there is an `epidemic’ that clearly is influenced by environmental and societal changes.”

The new findings were published in the journal Public Health.

Source: Bournemouth University

Image Credit: Manhattan Under Pollution via Flickr CC

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Even though the earthworms don’t have direct contact with the slugs or the plant growth above, they seem to very effectively protect the plants via increased nitrogen content in the plants, as a result of the earthworms being present. The researchers also found that with increased plant diversity the amount of damage that the slugs did to individual plants was greatly lessened.

Spanish slugs (Arion vulgaris) are considered to be one of the most damaging invasive species in Europe, and they are considered a pest more or less everywhere. So the researchers decided to investigate possible solutions and means to limit the damage that they cause, specifically: What effect would the presence of earthworms and plant diversity have on the amount of damage these slugs caused?

The research was done by using large incubators to simulate grassland environments where “the researchers could regulate the diversity of plant species and time the introduction of earthworms and slugs.” What was found was that the presence of the earthworms increased the nitrogen content of plants and reduced the number of leaves damaged due to slugs by 60%. And interestingly, even when the total leaf area damaged was compared, the slugs ate 40% less at high plant diversity than at low. That’s a significant improvement.

Lead researcher Dr Johann Zaller, explains: “Our results suggest that two processes might be going on. Firstly, earthworms improved the plant’s ability to protect itself against slugs perhaps through the build-up of nitrogen-containing toxic compounds. Secondly, even though these slugs are generalists they prefer widely available food and in high diverse ecosystems slugs eat less in total because they have to switch their diets more often since plants of the same species are less available. Therefore gardeners are to help protect earthworms by increasing plant diversity in the garden in order to keep slug damage low. In order to elucidate the mechanisms behind these complex interactions, all parts of an ecosystem need to be investigated.”

The new research was just published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Ecology.

Source: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna

Image Credit: Garden via Wikimedia Commons

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It has been known for some time that grapes are a significant natural source of antioxidants and polyphenols, which are theorized to be the compounds behind many of the beneficial health effects that are observed when grapes are added to a diet.

And now, the new research, done at the University of Michigan Health System, has “uncovered a novel way that grapes exert beneficial effects in the heart: influencing gene activities and metabolic pathways that improve the levels of glutathione, the most abundant cellular antioxidant in the heart.”

Glutathione is, essentially, the primary antioxidant that your body produces to prevent cellular damage, among other things. Low glutathione levels are highly associated with almost all chronic diseases, and many developmental diseases. Glutathione is critical to good health. Which is why your body produces about as much of it as it can with the nutrition available.

Back to the research — “an estimated 1 billion people worldwide have hypertension, which increases the risk of heart failure by 2 to 3-fold. Heart failure resulting from chronic hypertension can result in an enlarged heart muscle that becomes thick and rigid (fibrosis), and unable to fill with blood properly (diastolic dysfunction) or pump blood effectively. Oxidative stress is strongly correlated with heart failure, and deficiency of glutathione is regularly observed in both human and animal models of heart failure. Antioxidant-rich diets, containing lots of fruits and vegetables, consistently correlate with reduced hypertension.” And something else that is worth noting, is that even amongst those who consume diets containing many fruits and vegetables, those that exercise and are highly active have considerably higher levels of the antioxidant.

The new research was done by feeding a grape-enriched diet to “hypertensive, heart failure-prone rats” for a period of 18 weeks. “The results reproduced earlier findings that grape consumption reduced the occurrence of heart muscle enlargement and fibrosis, and improved the diastolic function of the heart.”

More interestingly though, the mechanism for this all was discovered — increased grape intake ‘activated’ antioxidant defense pathways, which increased the activity of related genes, and greatly boosted the production of glutathione.

“Our earlier studies showed that grapes could protect against the downward spiral of hypertensive heart failure, but just how that was accomplished — the mechanism — was not yet known,” stated primary researcher E. Mitchell Seymour, Ph.D. “The insights gained from our NIH study, including the ability of grapes to influence several genetic pathways related to antioxidant defense, provide further evidence that grapes work on multiple levels to deliver their beneficial effects.”

The study will now be continuing into its second phase, which will attempt to further clarify the “mechanisms of grape action, and also look at the impact of whole grape intake compared to individual grape phytonutrients on hypertension-associated heart failure.”

“Our hypothesis is that whole grapes will be superior to any individual grape component, in each of the areas being investigated,” said Dr. Seymour. “The whole fruit contains hundreds of individual components, which we suspect likely work together to provide a synergistic beneficial effect.”

The new research was recently published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

Source: University of Michigan Health System

Image Credit: Grapes via Flickr CC; Red Grapes via Flickr CC

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The research was done by feeding some laboratory rats a berry diet for a period of 2 months and monitoring their brains after exposing some of the them to irradiation. “All of the rats were fed berries 2 months prior to radiation and then divided into two groups- one was evaluated after 36 hours of radiation and the other after 30 days.

“After 30 days on the same berry diet, the rats experienced significant protection against radiation compared to control,” stated researcher Shibu Poulose, PhD. “We saw significant benefits to diets with both of the berries, and speculate it is due to the phytonutrients present.”

“The researchers looked at neurochemical changes in the brain, in particular what is known as autophagy, which can regulate the synthesis, degradation and recycling of cellular components. It is also the way in which the brain clears toxic accumulations.”

“Most diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s have shown an increased amount of toxic protein. Berries seem to promote autophagy, the brain’s natural housekeeping mechanism, thereby reducing the toxic accumulation,” stated Poulose.

Most of the brain damage that results from physical trauma (such as with concussions), is also as a result of toxic accumulations building up in the brain. It’d be interesting to know if the addition of berries to the diet could help in that regard. Could certainly be beneficial knowledge to the athletes that participate in sports where concussions are regular or semi-regular occurrences.

A human study is currently being conducted by the researchers on people between the ages of 60-75. “We have a lot of animal work that suggests these compounds will protect the aged brain and reverse some of behavioral deficits. We are hoping it will translate to human studies as well,” said Dr. Barbara Shukitt-Hale, the lead investigator conducting the human study.

I’m never really that sure what to think of studies like this. Everyone already has an almost innate recognition of berries as food, and as “healthy”, it seems a bit obvious that they would contribute to the functioning of a healthy body, why experiment on the rats with radiation at all? Couldn’t the researchers have simply started with human-based subjects?

Source: Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

Image Credit: Berries via Flickr CC

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As an example, if someone’s diet consisted primarily of foods such as fatty cold-water fish, roots, greens, berries, etc, simply by occasionally including small amounts of westernized sugary foods, or breads, in their diet, significant changes in gene expression can occur. Making the individual’s genome, as it’s actually expressed, markedly different from an individual without those foods in their diet.

Two new papers, published in the journal Cell, go into the details of how exactly metabolism and physiology are directly connected to diet. “Using C. elegans, a transparent roundworm often used as a model organism in genetic studies,” the researchers “observed how different diets produce differences in gene expression in the worm that can then be linked to crucial physiological changes.”

“In short, we found that when C. elegans are fed diets of different types of bacteria, they respond by dramatically changing their gene expression program, leading to important changes in physiology,” said A.J. Marian Walhout, PhD, and co-director of the Program in Systems Biology and professor of molecular medicine at UMMS. “Worms fed a natural diet of Comamonas bacteria have fewer offspring, live shorter and develop faster compared to worms fed the standard laboratory diet of E. coli bacteria.”

That’s a very interesting discovery, really makes you wonder much of observed differences in populations is down to epigenetic changes caused by diet.

The researchers identified “at least 87 changes in C. elegans gene expression between the two diets. Surprisingly, these changes were independent of the TOR and insulin signaling pathways, gene expression programs typically active in nutritional control. Instead, the changes occur, at least in part, in a regulator that controls molting, a gene program that determines development and growth in the worm.”

“Importantly, these same regulators that are influenced by diet in the worms control circadian rhythm in humans,” said Lesley MacNeil, PhD, a postdoctoral student in the Walhout Lab and first author on the paper. “We already know that circadian rhythms are affected by diet. This points to the real possibility that we can now use C. elegans to study the complex connections between diet, gene expression and physiology and their relation to human disease.”

Importantly, as the researchers note, even when fed a very “small amount of the Comamonas bacteria in a diet otherwise composed of E. coli bacteria, C. elegans exhibited dramatic changes in gene expression and physiology.

Which means that the inclusion of various foods in an animal’s diet, even in very small quantities, can have a pronounced effect on the gene expression of the animal.

“It’s just as true that a small amount of a ‘healthy’ food in an otherwise unhealthy diet could elicit a beneficial change in gene expression that could have profound physiological effects,” said Walhout.

Source: University of Massachusetts Medical School

Image Credits: Blueberry Pie via Wikimedia Commons

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