Day: 02/10/2023

7 Natural Remedies for Headaches

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(goodluz/Shutterstock)

Headaches are an extremely common complaint in our society and are often treated with “quick fix” pain medication. In fact, over half a billion dollars is spent annually on this type of remedy. What is in these drugs and are they doing us more harm than good? Are there more effective and natural remedies we can use to alleviate headaches?

Ingredients in Conventional Headache Medication

There are two main ingredients in the leading headache medications. These are acetysalicylic acid (aspirin) and acetaminophen (Tylenol). Today, an estimated 80,000 tons of these two ingredients are consumed each year.

The main side effects of acetysalicylic acid include gastrointestinal ulcers, stomach bleeding, severe abdominal or stomach cramps/pain/discomfort, heartburn or indigestion, bruising, confusion, dizziness, fainting, nausea or vomiting, buzzing or ringing in ears, tiredness or weakness, loss of hearing, allergic reaction, bleeding, etc.

The main side effects of acetaminophen include nausea and vomiting, appetite loss, sweating, diarrhea, irritability, abdominal pain, yellow eyes or skin, liver failure, kidney failure, heart problems, ulcers, bleeding in the digestive tract, coma, seizures, death, etc.

Please also note that these symptoms do not necessarily have to manifest instantly after taking these medications. Continuous use of these products can slowly wreak havoc on your system.

Causes of Headaches

In some cases, a headache may be a symptom of a more serious underlying disorder, but often headaches are caused by stress, dehydration, tiredness, poor posture, caffeine, alcohol, drugs, food allergy, eyestrain, sinusitis, poor nutrition, or low blood sugar.

Alternative Remedies

Ginger

Traditional Chinese herbal medicine recommends ginger for headaches. Eat a small piece of fresh ginger root or make ginger tea from the fresh root or tea bags.

Ginger tea in a white cup on wooden background

Coriander Seeds

An Aryuvedic treatment for sinus-related headaches is the steam inhalation of coriander seeds. Put the coriander seeds into a small bowl. Pour on some boiling water, drape a towel over your head and the bowl, and inhale the steam.

Celery

Celery contains phthalide which helps you to relax and be less anxious, which helps with pain. It is also rich in potassium in which many headache sufferers are deficient. Celery seeds can be used in smoothies/juices or soups. Taking 2 ounces of celery juice and then laying down for 30 minutes has proven to be a very effective remedy for headaches.

Herbal

Sitting down with a relaxing cup of mild herbal tea is often good for a tension headache. Good choices are peppermint, spearmint, chamomile, rose hip, lemon balm, or valerian root (which may induce sleep). Additionally, adding cayenne pepper to your tea can help.

Vitamins and Minerals

Frequent headaches could be a sign that you are low in some important vitamins and minerals. Low levels of niacin and vitamin B6 can cause headaches. For example, all the B vitamins are needed to help combat stress and avoid tension headaches. The minerals calcium and magnesium work together to help prevent headaches, especially those related to women’s menstrual cycles. Good sources of calcium are dark green leafy vegetables, such as kale or broccoli, and beans and peas. Magnesium is found in dark green leafy vegetables, cacao, nuts, bananas, wheat germ, full spectrum salts, beans, and peas.

Epoch Times Photo

Aromatherapy

The relaxing qualities of lavender oil make it a good treatment for a tension headache. This essential oil is very gentle and can be massaged into your temples, the base of your neck, or the base of your nostrils. Taking a bath with relaxing oils such as chamomile or ylang-ylang will also help to soothe and relieve pain.

Emotional Freedom Technology (EFT, aka Meridian Tapping)

The EFT tapping points align with particular acupuncture points along the meridians. EFT tapping techniques can help to remove emotional blockage in your body’s electrical or subtle energy system. EFT is referred to as “acupuncture without needles.” For more information on EFT and where to find your meridian points, please visit The Tapping Solution.

Breathing

To learn how to relax and cope with headaches, you need to become familiar with your own breathing patterns and change them in ways that will help you relax. We tend to hold our breath when we are anxious, stressed, or in pain. Below are a few relaxation exercises:

  • Rhythmic breathing: If your breathing is short and hurried, slow it down by taking long, slow breaths. Inhale slowly then exhale slowly. Count slowly to five as you inhale, and then count slowly to five as you exhale. As you exhale slowly, pay attention to how your body naturally relaxes. Recognizing this change will help you to relax even more.
  • Deep breathing: Imagine a spot just below your navel. Breathe into that spot, filling your abdomen with air. Let the air fill you from the abdomen up, then let it out, like deflating a balloon. With every long, slow exhalation, you should feel more relaxed.
  • Visualized breathing: Find a comfortable, quiet place where you can close your eyes, and combine slowed breathing with your imagination. Picture relaxation entering your body and tension leaving your body. Breathe deeply, but in a natural rhythm. Visualize your breath coming into your nostrils, going into your lungs, and expanding your chest and abdomen. Then, visualize your breath going out the same way. Continue breathing, but each time you inhale, imagine that you are breathing in more relaxation. Each time you exhale, imagine that you are getting rid of a little more tension.

These are just a few natural remedies. There are many more. However, prior to any of these recommendations, we should always ensure that we are getting enough pure water throughout the day. It seems simple, but dehydration is the leading cause of headaches. By simply drinking more water during the day, we may reduce the frequency of headaches and their debilitating effects. Please note that some of the food items mentioned, such as bananas, cacao, and nuts, can actually trigger headaches in some individuals. If this happens to you, don’t give up. With a little research, you will definitely be able to find the remedy that works best for you.

Trusting in Our Natural Ability to Heal

Our bodies are amazing designs. If we allow ourselves to trust the body’s ability to heal itself, the results will be astounding. Let’s treat our bodies with the respect and loving care they deserve. If we do, symptoms such as headaches will occur much less frequently.

Results of Phase III Randomized Trial for Use of Docetaxel as a Radiosensitizer in Patients With Head and Neck Cancer, Unsuitable for Cisplatin-Based Chemoradiation.

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PURPOSE: There is a lack of published literature on systemic therapeutic options in cisplatin-ineligible patients with locally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (LAHNSCC) undergoing chemoradiation. Docetaxel was assessed as a radiosensitizer in this situation.

METHODS: This was a randomized phase II/III study. Adult patients (age = 18 years) with LAHNSCC planned for chemoradiation and an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0-2 and who were cisplatin-ineligible were randomly assigned in 1:1 to either radiation alone or radiation with concurrent docetaxel 15 mg/m2 once weekly for a maximum of seven cycles. The primary end point was 2-year disease-free survival (DFS).

RESULTS: The study recruited 356 patients between July 2017 and May 2021. The 2-year DFS was 30.3% (95% CI, 23.6 to 37.4) versus 42% (95% CI, 34.6 to 49.2) in the RT and Docetaxel-RT arms, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.673; 95% CI, 0.521 to 0.868; P value = .002). The corresponding median overall survival (OS) was 15.3 months (95% CI, 13.1 to 22.0) and 25.5 months (95% CI, 17.6 to 32.5), respectively (log-rank P value = .035). The 2-year OS was 41.7% (95% CI, 34.1 to 49.1) versus 50.8% (95% CI, 43.1 to 58.1) in the RT and Docetaxel-RT arms, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.747; 95% CI, 0.569 to 0.980; P value = .035). There was a higher incidence of grade 3 or above mucositis (22.2% v 49.7%; P < .001), odynophagia (33.5% v 52.5%; P < .001), and dysphagia (33% v 49.7%; P = .002) with the addition of docetaxel.

CONCLUSION: The addition of docetaxel to radiation improved DFS and OS in cisplatin-ineligible patients with LAHNSCC.

Ten-Day Vonoprazan-Amoxicillin Dual Therapy as a First-Line Treatment of Helicobacter pylori Infection Compared With Bismuth-Containing Quadruple Therapy.

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INTRODUCTION: No study has investigated the efficacy and safety of vonoprazan-amoxicillin dual therapy compared with bismuth quadruple therapy (B-quadruple). This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of 10-day vonoprazan-amoxicillin dual therapy as a first-line treatment of Helicobacter pylori infection compared with B-quadruple and to explore the optimal dosage of amoxicillin in the dual therapy.

METHODS: A total of 375 treatment-naive, H. pylori-infected subjects were randomly assigned in a 1:1:1 ratio into 3 regimen groups including VHA-dual (vonoprazan 20 mg twice/day + amoxicillin 750 mg 4 times/day), VA-dual (vonoprazan 20 mg + amoxicillin 1,000 mg twice/day), and B-quadruple (esomeprazole 20 mg + bismuth 200 mg + amoxicillin 1,000 mg + clarithromycin 500 mg twice/day). Eradication rates, adverse events (AEs), and compliance were compared between 3 groups.

RESULTS: The eradication rates of B-quadruple, VHA-dual, and VA-dual were 90.9%, 93.4%, and 85.1%, respectively, by per-protocol analysis; 89.4%, 92.7%, and 84.4%, respectively, by modified intention-to-treat analysis; 88.0%, 91.2%, and 82.4%, respectively, by intention-to-treat analysis. The efficacy of the VHA-dual group was not inferior to the B-quadruple group (P < 0.001), but VA-dual did not reach a noninferiority margin of -10%. The AEs rates of the B-quadruple group were significantly higher than those of the VHA-dual (P = 0.012) and VA-dual (P = 0.001) groups. There was no significant difference in medication compliance among 3 treatment groups (P = 0.995).

CONCLUSIONS: The 10-day VHA-dual therapy provided satisfactory eradication rates of >90%, lower AEs rates, and similar adherence compared with B-quadruple therapy as a first-line therapy for H. pylori infection. However, the efficacy of VA-dual therapy was not acceptable.

How Sleep Deprivation Affects Cognitive Performance

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Summary: Sleep deprivation doesn’t just alter brain activity, it also changes the connection between neurons. Both changes have a significant effect on working memory and cognitive performance.

Source: Leibniz Research Center for Working Environment and Human Factors

Anyone who has ever had a night of poor sleep or no sleep at all knows how much the lack of sleep can affect concentration the next day.

Researchers at the Leibniz Research Center for Working Environment and Human Factors have studied how exactly sleep deprivation affects brain performance.

The results show that not only brain activation, but also the alteration of connections between neurons is affected by sleep deprivation. Both have a significant effect on memory performance and working memory.

Sufficient sleep is essential for optimal daytime performance. A lack of sleep not only impairs attention, but also memory and learning processes. To encode new memory content, connections between neurons in the brain are strengthened or weakened during wakefulness.

This process is called neuroplasticity. During sleep, relevant connections are further strengthened, and irrelevant ones weakened.

In case of sleep deprivation, this weakening of irrelevant connections does not take place. Cortical excitability remains increased, which leads to impaired signal transmission. New, external stimuli and information can therefore only be processed poorly or not at all and learning becomes more difficult.

This shows a tired looking woman studying
Sufficient sleep is essential for optimal daytime performance.

That increased cortical excitability disturbs neuroplasticity. This means that cerebral overactivity makes it more difficult for the neurons to shape connections.

Optimal excitability of the brain could prevent diseases

However, there is a difference between complete sleep deprivation and working against personal sleep and wake phases (chronotype). In the latter, brain excitability and neuroplasticity are reduced during suboptimal times of day.

In sleep deprivation, however, excitability is increased. Especially in demanding activities, working in accordance with one’s chronotype can improve work performance.

Since brain plasticity and excitability depend on sleep, it could play a role in preventing diseases with cognitive deficits. Examples of such diseases are Alzheimer’s disease, which is often accompanied with sleep disturbances, and major depression.

With depression brain activity and neuroplasticity are reduced, and this could be counteracted upon by sleep deprivation, a well-introduced antidepressant treatment.

Study presents unexpected — and complicated — findings on link between alcohol and dementia

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These are the questions doctors ask to figure out if you have dementia

Keeping alcohol consumption to one or two drinks a day lessened the odds of developing dementia, according to a study of nearly 4 million South Koreans.

However, drinking more than two drinks a day increased that risk, according to the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open.

“We found that maintaining mild to moderate alcohol consumption as well as reducing alcohol consumption from a heavy to moderate level were associated with a decreased risk of dementia,” said first author Dr. Keun Hye Jeon, an assistant professor at CHA Gumi Medical Center, CHA University in Gumi, South Korea, in an email.

But don’t rush to the liquor store, experts say.

“This study was well done and is extremely robust with 4 million subjects, but we should be cautious not to over interpret the findings,” said Alzheimer’s researcher Dr. Richard Isaacson, a preventive neurologist at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases of Florida. He was not involved in the new study.

Alcohol use can be a risk factor for breast and other cancers, and consuming too much can contribute to digestive problems, heart and liver disease, hypertension, stroke, and a weak immune system over time, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are red flags for Alzheimer’s as well. For example, if a person has one or two copies of the APOE4 gene variant, which raises your risk of developing the mind-wasting disease, drinking is not a good choice, Isaacson said.

“Alcohol has been shown to be harmful for brain outcomes in people with that risk gene — and about 25% of the US population carries one copy of APOE4,” he said.

Sizing up alcohol consumption

The connection between alcohol and health is complicated and unclear, experts say.

The connection between alcohol and health is complicated and unclear, experts say.

The new study examined the medical records of people covered by the Korean National Health Insurance Service (NHIS), which provides a free health exam twice a year to insured South Koreans who are 40 and older. In addition to doing various tests, examiners asked about each person’s drinking, smoking and exercise habits.

The study looked at the data collected in 2009 and 2011 and categorized people by their self-reported drinking levels. If a person said they drank less than 15 grams (approximately 0.5 ounces) of alcohol a day, they were considered “mild” drinkers.

In the United States, a standard drink contains 14 grams of alcohol, which is roughly the same as 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits.

If study participants told doctors they drank 15 to 29.9 grams a day — the equivalent of two standards drinks in the US — the researchers categorized them as “moderate” drinkers. And if people said they drank over 30 grams, or three or more drinks a day, researchers considered them “heavy” drinkers.

Researchers also looked at whether people sustained or changed the amount they drank between 2009 and 2011, Jeon said.

“By measuring alcohol consumption at two time points, we were able to study the relationship between reducing, ceasing, maintaining and increasing alcohol consumption and incident dementia,” he said.

The team then compared that data to medical records in 2018 — seven or eight years later — to see if anyone studied had been diagnosed with dementia.

After adjusting for age, sex, smoking, exercise level and other demographic factors, researchers found people who said they drank at a mild level over time — about a drink a day — were 21% less likely to develop dementia than people who never drank.

People who said they continued to drink at moderate level, or about two drinks a day, were 17% less likely to develop dementia, the study found.

“One has to be cautious when interpreting studies using medical records. They can be fraught with challenges in how diseases are coded and studied,” Isaacson said. “Any anytime you ask people to recall their behaviors, such as drinking, it leaves room for memory errors.”

Dangers of increasing drinking over time

The positive pattern did not continue as drinking increased. People who drank heavily — three or more drinks a day — were 8% more likely to be diagnosed with dementia, the study found.

If heavy drinkers reduced their drinking over time to a moderate level, their risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s fell by 12%, and the risk of all-cause dementia fell by 8%.

However, people aren’t very good at judging how much alcohol they are drinking, Isaacson said.

“People don’t really monitor their pours of wine, for example,” Isaacson said. “They may think they are drinking a standard-sized glass of wine, but it’s really a glass and a half every time. Drink two of those pours and they’ve had three glasses of wine. That’s no longer mild or moderate consumption.”

In addition, too many people who think they are moderate drinkers do all of their drinking on weekends. Binge drinking is on the rise worldwide, even among adults, studies show.

“If someone downs five drinks on Saturday and Sunday that’s 10 drinks a week so that would qualify as a moderate alcohol intake,” Isaacson said. “To me, that is not that is not the same as having a glass of wine five days a week with a meal, which slows consumption.”

The new study also found that starting to drink at a mild level was associated with a decreased risk of all-cause dementia and Alzheimer’s, “which, to our knowledge, has never been reported in previous studies,” the authors wrote.

However, “none of the existing health guidelines recommends starting alcohol drinking,” Jeon said, adding that since the study was observational, no cause and effect can be determined.

“Our findings regarding a initiation of mild alcohol consumption cannot be directly translated into clinical recommendations, thereby warranting additional studies to confirm these associations further,” Jeon said.

A study published in March 2022 found that just one pint of beer or glass of wine a day can shrink the overall volume of the brain, with the damage increasing as the number of daily drinks rises.

On average, people between 40 and 69 who drank a pint of beer or 6-ounce glass of wine per day for a month had brains that appeared two years older than those who only drank half of a beer, according to that previous study.

“I’ve never personally suggested someone to start drinking moderate amounts of alcohol if they were abstinent,” Isaacson said. “But there’s really not a one-size-fits-all approach towards counseling a patient on alcohol consumption.”

Source: CNN

Will an AI be the first to discover alien life?

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SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is deploying machine-learning algorithms that filter out Earthly interference and spot signals humans might miss.

The alien from the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Machine learning is good at picking out unconventional signals that might have come from an E.T.

From the hills of West Virginia to the flats of rural Australia, some of the world’s largest telescopes are listening for signals from distant alien civilizations. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, is an effort to find artificial-looking electromagnetic-radiation signals that might have come from a technologically advanced civilization in a far-away solar system. A study published today1 describes one of several efforts to use machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), to help astronomers sift quickly through the reams of data such surveys yield. As AI reshapes many scientific fields, what promise does it hold for the search for life beyond Earth?

“It is a new era for SETI research that is opening up thanks to machine-learning technology,” says Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

The problem of big data is relatively new for SETI. For decades, the field was constrained by having hardly any data at all. Astronomer Frank Drake pioneered SETI in 1960, when he pointed a telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, towards two stars and listened for radio transmissions. Most of the SETI searches that followed were also limited to a small number of stars.

But in 2015, billionaire Yuri Milner funded the biggest SETI programme ever, in Berkeley, California: the Breakthrough Listen project to search one million stars for signs of intelligent life. Using telescopes in West Virginia, Australia and South Africa, the project looks for radio emissions that come from the direction of a star and that change steadily in frequency, as would happen if an alien transmitter were on a planet moving with respect to Earth.

Data blizzard

The trouble is that these searches yield a blizzard of data — including false positives produced by Earthly interference from mobile phones, GPS and other aspects of modern life.

“The biggest challenge for us in looking for SETI signals is not at this point getting the data,” says Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer at the SETI Institute. “The difficult part is differentiating signals from human or Earth technology from the kind of signals we’d be looking for from technology somewhere else out in the Galaxy.”

A radio telescope against a cloudy sky.
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is one of several helping to look for alien civilizations.

Going through millions of observations manually isn’t practical. A common alternative approach is to use algorithms that look for signals matching what astronomers think alien beacons could look like. But those algorithms can overlook potentially interesting signals that are slightly different from what astronomers are expecting.

Enter machine learning. Machine-learning algorithms are trained on large amounts of data and can learn to recognize features that are characteristic of Earthly interference, making them very good at filtering out the noise.

Overlooked signals

Machine learning is also good at picking up candidate extraterrestrial signals that don’t fall into conventional categories and so might have been missed by earlier methods, says Dan Werthimer, a SETI scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Peter Ma, a mathematician and physicist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and lead author of today’s paper, agrees. “We can’t always be anticipating what ET might send to us,” he says.

Ma and his colleagues sifted through Breakthrough Listen observations of 820 stars, made using the 100-metre Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. They built machine-learning software to analyse the data; this netted nearly three million signals of interest but discarded most as Earth-based interference. Ma then manually reviewed more than 20,000 signals and narrowed them down to 8 intriguing candidates.

The search ultimately came up empty — all eight signals disappeared when the team listened again. But the methods could be used on other data, such as a flood of observations from the MeerKAT array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa, which Breakthrough Listen began using in December. The machine-learning algorithms could also be used on archived SETI data, says Ma, to seek signals that might previously have been overlooked.

Citizen SETI

Machine learning is also at the heart of a separate SETI effort that will launch next month. On 14 February, astronomers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), will launch a community-science project in which volunteers from the public will sort through images of radio signals and classify them as potential types of interference, to train a machine-learning algorithm to search SETI data from Green Bank.

And AI can help with other stages of the SETI process. Werthimer and his colleagues have used machine learning to come up with a ranking of stars to be observed in an ongoing SETI project that uses the world’s largest single-dish telescope, the 500-metre FAST radio telescope in China.

Still, SETI will probably continue to use a mixture of classical and machine-learning approaches to sort through data, says Jean-Luc Margot, an astronomer at UCLA. Classical algorithms remain excellent at picking up candidate signals, and machine learning is “not a panacea”, he says.

“The machines can’t do it all, yet,” agrees Werthimer.

Source: Nature

Turkey–Syria earthquake: what scientists know

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Turkey and Syria’s buildings have always been vulnerable to earthquakes, but war has made things worse.

Residents in front of a collapsed building.
The earthquake destroyed buildings in the town of Jandaris, near Afrin, Syria.Credit: Rami al-Sayed/AFP/Getty

A magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria in the early hours of the morning of 6 February. At least 17,000 people are known to have lost their lives, with thousands more injured. The quake was followed by a magnitude-7.5 event some 9 hours later, as well as more than 200 aftershocks.

The earthquake and its aftershocks have flattened buildings and sent rescuers digging through concrete debris to find survivors, with the death toll expected to increase further. Nature spoke to four researchers about the seismic activity in the region and what the next few days will bring.

Turkey is in an active earthquake zone

Most of Turkey sits on the Anatolian plate between two major faults: the North Anatolian Fault and the East Anatolian Fault. The tectonic plate that carries Arabia, including Syria, is moving northwards and colliding with the southern rim of Eurasia, which is squeezing Turkey out towards the west, says David Rothery, a geoscientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. “Turkey is moving west about 2 centimetres per year along the East Anatolian Fault,” he adds. “Half the length of this fault is lit up now with earthquakes.”

Seyhun Puskulcu, a seismologist and coordinator of the Turkish Earthquake Foundation, based in Istanbul, says people in Turkey are well aware of their vulnerability to earthquakes. “This wasn’t a surprise,” says Puskulcu, who last week was touring the cities of Adana, Tarsus and Mersin, and areas of western Turkey, delivering workshops on earthquake awareness.

The epicentre of the main earthquake was 26 kilometres east of the city of Nurdaği in Turkey’s Gaziantep province, at a depth of 17.9 kilometres. The magnitude-7.5 event occurred around 4 kilometres southeast of Ekinözü in the Kahramanmaraş province (see ‘Earthquakes and aftershocks’).

Earthquakes and aftershocks. Map showing the locations of earthquakes in southern Turkey.
US Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program

War has destabilized already-vulnerable buildings

Deaths in earthquakes are often caused by falling bricks and masonry. According to the US Geological Survey, many people in Turkey who were affected by the earthquake live in structures that are extremely likely to be damaged by shaking, with unreinforced brick masonry and low-rise concrete frames.

In a study1 published last March in Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Arzu Arslan Kelam at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and her colleagues suggested that the centre of the city of Gaziantep would experience medium-to-severe damage from a magnitude-6.5 earthquake. This is because most existing buildings are low-rise brick structures that are constructed very close to each other.

In 1999, a magnitude-7.4 earthquake hit 11 kilometres southeast of Izmit, Turkey, killing more than 17,000 people and leaving more than 250,000 homeless. After this tragedy, the Turkish government introduced new building codes and a compulsory earthquake insurance system. However, many of the buildings affected by this week’s quake were built before 2000, says Mustafa Erdik, a civil engineer at Boğaziçi University, Turkey.

Things are worse in Syria, where more than 11 years of conflict have made building standards impossible to enforce. The earthquake struck Syria’s northwestern regions, with buildings collapsing in Aleppo and Idlib. Some war-damaged buildings in Syria have been rebuilt using low-quality materials or “whatever materials are available”, says Rothery. “They might have fallen down more readily than things that were built at somewhat greater expense. We’ve yet to find out,” he adds.

What’s next?

Researchers say people need to brace themselves for yet more quakes and aftershocks, as well as deteriorating weather. “The possibility for major aftershocks causing even more damage will continue for weeks and months,” says Ilan Kelman, who studies disasters and health at University College London.

“The weather forecast for the region for tonight is dropping below freezing. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble, who might be rescued, could well freeze to death. So these hazards continue,” he adds.

Indoor air pollution kills and science needs to step up

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Researchers and policymakers are only now waking up to the effects of dirty indoor air. As ever, low-income and marginalized communities are most exposed.

Close-up of mould growing inside a closet with white walls

The World Health Organization’s most recent guidelines on damp and mould are from 2009.

The image of air pollution is often one of chimney stacks and smoggy cities. But this can be a misleading picture. Indoor air pollution killed more than 3 million people in 2020, almost as many as did its outdoor counterpart. And yet it has been mostly invisible to science, and to policy.

In a Comment article in Nature this week, three researchers describe how that needs to change. Christopher Whitty, the UK government’s chief medical adviser, and colleagues Deborah Jenkins and Alastair Lewis, show what researchers and policymakers must do to improve our understanding of, and ultimately to reduce, indoor air pollution. Most people spend 80–90% of their time indoors, in homes, schools and places of work, the authors observe. But, in contrast to detailed and legally enforceable national standards for outdoor pollution that exist in many parts of the world, indoor spaces are mostly not subject to similar air-quality controls.Hidden harms of indoor air pollution — five steps to expose them

The authors are right to draw attention to something that has been neglected for too long. Progress is hampered by our ignorance of basic facts, such as what indoor air pollution actually consists of. It includes familiar compounds such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from coal burning, and nitrogen oxides from natural-gas boilers. But there is also a multiplicity of other sources, for example chemicals from synthetic compounds in paints and fabrics, mould from damp buildings and viruses and bacteria from human breath. Researchers need to be doing more to understand how all of these circulate, how they interact with each other, their impact on human health and how they will be affected by climate change.

Although indoor air pollution is a global problem, the right strategies for combating it will vary between regions, countries and even localities. “Construction styles and materials, climate and energy sources, as well as behaviours and cultural practices, all affect indoor air”, the authors point out.

What’s clear, however, is that, just as poorer and marginalized people are disproportionately affected by bad outdoor air quality (A. Jbaily et al. Nature 601, 228–233; 2022), indoor air pollution is a source of inequality, too. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, 700,000 people are estimated to have died from indoor air pollution in 2019, many of them from the effects of particles from indoor biomass stoves (B. Khavari et al. Nature Sustain. https://doi.org/grqrbg; 2023). Cleaner alternatives do exist, but their large-scale use needs a panoply of research-based interventions — from engineering and design to behavioural sciences.

In richer or colder countries, people on lower incomes tend to rely on gas or solid fuels for heating, or live in homes affected by damp and mould. Targeted interventions to improve air quality by, for example, incentivizing the switch to cleaner fuels, can be a win–win situation, with the happy complementary effect of assisting decarbonization, too. (The reverse is, perhaps, less true: interventions to improve energy efficiency by better insulating indoor environments might have a negative effect on air quality, a relationship that must be carefully examined.) But, as the authors write, “it is essential that decarbonization, building improvement and gains in indoor air quality are, as much as possible, delivered equitably across society.”

Indoor air pollution clearly needs to attract urgent attention from policymakers — the most recent guidelines from the World Health Organization on damp and mould were published in 2009. That’s where Whitty and colleagues’ article, coming from researchers who advise governments, will undoubtedly help. Ultimately, science must be better prepared for when it is called on to advise about the various strategies. Indoor air pollution should become as mainstream a public-health concern as its outdoor sibling, with all the requisite funding that flows towards it. This is one good intention that shouldn’t go up in a puff of smoke.

Source: Nature

Vitamin D May Lower Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes

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A nurse teaches a diabetes patient how to do her own insulin injections. A new national survey shows Canadian diabetes patients are most concerned with blindness and amputations as major health complications resulting from the disease while doctors are more worried about heart and kidney failure. (John Moore/Getty Images)

A nurse teaches a diabetes patient how to do her own insulin injections. A new national survey shows Canadian diabetes patients are most concerned with blindness and amputations as major health complications resulting from the disease while doctors are more worried about heart and kidney failure. (John Moore/Getty Images)

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A study published this week found that regular vitamin D supplementation may lower the risk of Type 2 diabetes among millions of adults who have prediabetes.

A team of researchers with the Tufts Medical Center found that taking the vitamin supplements has been associated with a 15 percent drop in the chance of developing Type 2 diabetes among those adults. Their study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Feb. 7.

Dr. Anastassios Pittas, chief of endocrinology at Tufts, said in a statement, noted that the findings “could have significant public health implications for the 96 million adults in the U.S. (38 percent of all U.S. adults) and more than 400 million people worldwide who are at risk for diabetes,” adding, “However, there are still some important unknowns.”

“For example, we do not know the optimal vitamin D dose or formulation, and whether we should be aiming for a specific vitamin D level in the blood that would maximize benefit in this population, with little or no risk of any side effects,” he said, adding that their study shows the vitamin gives a “modest benefit” in lowering the risk. “Our team plans to design future studies to answer these important questions,” he said.

The researchers came to their conclusions though carrying out a systematic review and meta-analysis of three clinical trials that compared vitamin D supplementation’s impacts on diabetes.

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Studies show the consumption of Vitamin D has been associated with a number of benefits.

In a three-year follow-up period, it was found that “new-onset diabetes occurred in 22.7 percent of adults who received vitamin D and 25 percent of those who received placebo,” said a news release. The researchers said that because hundreds of millions of people suffer from Type 2 diabetes around the world, their findings could delay the development of diabetes for millions of people.

“According to the authors, extrapolating their findings to the more than 374 million adults worldwide who have prediabetes suggests that inexpensive vitamin D supplementation could delay the development of diabetes in more than 10 million people,” it said.

How to Get Vitamin D

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that is produced by the body when ultraviolet rays from the sun hit the skin. It’s also added to some foods or supplements.

Some food sources include cod liver oil, salmon, swordfish, tuna fish, egg yolk, beef liver, and sardines. Orange juice, dairy products, and cereals are often “fortified” with the vitamin.

“Few foods are naturally rich in vitamin D3. The best sources are the flesh of fatty fish and fish liver oils,” says an article from Harvard University’s School of Public Health. “Smaller amounts are found in egg yolks, cheese, and beef liver. Certain mushrooms contain some vitamin D2; in addition some commercially sold mushrooms contain higher amounts of D2 due to intentionally being exposed to high amounts of ultraviolet light. Many foods and supplements are fortified with vitamin D like dairy products and cereals.”

Mushrooms like morel, chanterelle, maitake, and some portabellas tend to contain vitamin D, although levels vary, according to the Office of Dietary Supplements. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, says that chanterelle mushrooms have about 114 IU per cup, whereas cooked pink salmon has 647 IU of vitamin D per half fillet.

Ancient Chinese Secrets for a Long Life

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China is a nation known for its longevity. The ancient Chinese believed that there are five things that need to be done to enjoy longevity. These practices may seem cumbersome, but they are beneficial to the body and soul and can help one thoroughly relax. They can also improve the quality of sleep and enable one to work energetically.

Walking

It is said that calmly walking 10 to 20 minutes a day can bring the blood circulation to the surface of the body and thus help our skin maintain itself after falling asleep.

Before sleep, be sure to avoid reading news and avoid thinking about big issues once we lie down because it’s necessary to reduce the activity of the brain. Doing so will enable a person to fall asleep rapidly.

Rubbing the Feet

There are Chinese sayings about the benefits of caring for the feet: “Washing your feet with hot water is much more effective than taking sleeping pills when you are ready for bed.” “If you want to protect a tree, you should protect its roots; if you want to protect a person, you should protect his or her feet.”

Many Western medical scientists regard the feet as “the second heart of the human body” or “the pump of the heart.” They all praise the role of foot care.

Chinese medical science believes there are more than 60 acupuncture points on the feet that have strong ties with the internal organs. If we use warm water (104 F–122 F) to wash our feet and rub the soles and toes of our feet, we can promote blood circulation, relax the muscles, and balance the yin and yang of the body. This can also help heal wounds and maintain fitness for older people.

Room Ventilation

It is important to keep the bedroom air fresh, even on windy or cold days. We can still open the windows for a while, especially before going to bed, as fresh air is helpful for sleeping well during the night. Do not to cover the head when sleeping.

Cleaning the Teeth and Body

It is more important for us to brush our teeth before going to bed than to do it in the morning, as this not only helps us clean away oral sediments, but it protects our teeth so we can sleep well during the night.

It is also very helpful to wash the face and clean the body before getting ready for bed. This will keep the skin clean and help us relax and sleep comfortably.

Brushing the Hair

Ancient Chinese medical scientists found that there are many acupuncture points on the head, so while brushing the hair, we can massage and stimulate them to open those acupuncture points, relieve pain, and brighten the eyes.

It is said that rubbing the scalp with our hands until it is warm and rosy two times a day, in the morning and again at night, is beneficial. Massaging the scalp may clear the blood flow to the head, improve the thought and memory capacity of the brain, promote nutrition to the hair follicles, reduce the loss of hair, eliminate brain fatigue, and make it easier to fall asleep.