HEALTH REVIEW

Alzheimer’s Prediction May Be Found in Writing Tests

Is it possible to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s disease simply by looking at writing patterns years before there are symptoms?
According to a new study by IBM researchers, the answer is yes.
And, they and others say that Alzheimer’s is just the beginning. People with a wide variety of neurological illnesses have distinctive language patterns that, investigators suspect, may serve as early warning signs of their diseases.
For the Alzheimer’s study, the researchers looked at a group of 80 men and women in their 80s — half had Alzheimer’s and the others did not. But, seven and a half years earlier, all had been cognitively normal.
The men and women were participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running federal research effort that requires regular physical and cognitive tests. As part of it, they took a writing test before any of them had developed Alzheimer’s that asks subjects to describe a drawing of a boy standing on an unsteady stool and reaching for a cookie jar on a high shelf while a woman, her back to him, is oblivious to an overflowing sink.

“What is going on here is very clever ” said Dr. Jason Karlawish

The researchers examined the subjects’ word usage with an artificial intelligence program that looked for subtle differences in language. It identified one group of subjects who were more repetitive in their word usage at that earlier time when all of them were cognitively normal. These subjects also made errors, such as spelling words wrongly or inappropriately capitalizing them, and they used telegraphic language, meaning language that has a simple grammatical structure and is missing subjects and words like “the,” “is” and “are.”
The members of that group turned out to be the people who developed Alzheimer’s disease.
The A.I. program predicted, with 75 percent accuracy, who would get Alzheimer’s disease, according to results published recently in The Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.
“We had no prior assumption that word usage would show anything,” said Ajay Royyuru, vice president of health care and life sciences research at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where the A.I. analysis was done.
Alzheimer’s researchers were intrigued, saying that when there are ways to slow or stop the illness — a goal that so far remains elusive — it will be important to have simple tests that can warn, early on, that without intervention a person will develop the progressive brain disease.

Two Masks Are the New Masks

Double-masking is a sensible and easy way to lower your risk when you have to spend more time around others — in a taxi, on a train or plane, or at an inauguration.

Many of us who watched the inauguration this week were delighted by the fashion on display — the colorful matching coat and mask ensembles worn by the first lady, Jill Biden, and the Biden granddaughters, the power purple worn by Vice President Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, and of course, Senator Bernie Sanders’s delightful mittens made of recycled wool sweaters.
But the fashion trend that most excited me was the double mask! Double-masking is a sensible and easy way to lower your risk, especially if circumstances require you to spend more time around others — like in a taxi, on a train or plane, or at an inauguration. Pete Buttigieg, the former presidential candidate and now the nominee for secretary of transportation, was spotted double-masking. It appears he was wearing a high-quality medical mask underneath a black cloth mask. His husband, Chasten, was sporting a similar double-masked look, but with a fashionable plaid cloth mask that coordinated with his winter scarf.
We should all be thinking about the quality of our masks right now. New variants of the coronavirus continue to emerge, and one in particular is cause for pressing concern in the United States because it’s so contagious and spreading fast. I wrote about the steps you can take to better protect yourself.
The bottom line is that you should keep taking the same pandemic precautions you always have, but do a little better. The new variant spreading in the United States appears to latch onto our cells more efficiently. The mutation in the virus may mean it could take less virus and less time in the same room with an infected person for someone to become ill. People infected with the variant may also shed larger quantities of virus, which increases the risk to people around them.

How Climate Change May Affect Your Health

Melting ice caps, warmer oceans, intense storms, heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires — all these well-documented effects of climate change may seem too remote to many people to prompt them to adopt behaviors that can slow the warming of the planet. Unless your neighborhood was destroyed by a severe hurricane or raging wildfire, you might think such disasters happen only to other people.
But what if I told you that no matter where you live or how high your socioeconomic status, climate change can endanger your health, both physical and mental, now and in the future? Not only your health, but also the health of your children and grandchildren? Might you consider making changes to help mitigate the threat?
Relatively few Americans associate climate change with possible harms to their health, and most have given little thought to this possibility. Even though I read widely about medical issues, like most Americans, I too was unaware of how many health hazards can accompany climate change.
Studies in the United States and Britain have shown that “people have a strong tendency to see climate change as less threatening to their health and to their family’s health than to other people’s health,” according to Julia Hathaway and Edward W. Maibach at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

Two recently published reports set me straight. One, by two public health experts, called for the creation within the National Institutes of Health of a “National Institute of Climate Change and Health” to better inform the medical community, public officials and ordinary citizens about ways to stanch looming threats to human health from further increases in global warming.
The experts, Dr. Howard Frumkin and Dr. Richard J. Jackson, both former directors of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that recent climate-related disasters, including devastating wildfires and a record-breaking hurricane season, demonstrate that our failure to take climate change seriously is resulting in needless suffering and death.
The second report appeared just as I began investigating the evidence supporting their proposal: a full-page article in The New York Times on Nov. 29 with the headline “Wildfire Smoke in California Is Poisoning Children.” It described lung damage along with lifelong threats to the health of youngsters forced to breathe smoke-laden air from wildfires that began raging in August and fouled the air throughout the fall.

Sources: www.washingtonpost.com