Benedryl / Diphenhydramine Linked to Delirium and Alzheimer’s
One of the big impacts of being long term expats is that as you move from country to country, you also move from doctor to doctor. We managed by getting most of our health care while back in the US, but for those things that can’t be scheduled, we had to see local doctors. No one followed our cases. We knew we were paying a price, and determined that it would be a priority when we retired to find good health care. We were determined to find a doctor who would be a partner in keeping us fit and healthy.
We found a really great doctor, a young guy who really keeps up with things. He gave us complete exams, then started us on rounds of other exams, those annoying tests like colonoscopies, mammograms, lung function, etc.
We’re doing well. To my great surprise, however, he told me at our last visit that I needed to give up my nightly Benedryl capsule.
I’ve always been a light sleeper. I took this news with dismay, but I gave up Benedryl. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I find I sleep just fine without it. It took some time to make the adjustment; Benedryl had helped me bridge those wakeful times between sleep cycles. Now, I sleep differently, but I sleep.
It occurred to me that I never looked it up online, so this morning I did. This is from a US News and World Report article in 2011:
By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, June 4 (HealthDay News) –Older people taking common over-the-counter drugs for pain, cold symptoms or help with sleep may increase their risk for cognitive impairment, including delirium, University of Indiana researchers report.
These drugs include Benadryl, Dramamine, Excedrin PM, Nytol, Sominex, Tylenol PM and Unisom.
All of these over-the-counter (OTC) drugs contain benadryl (diphenhydramine), a molecule that blocks the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is essential for normal functioning of the central and peripheral nervous systems, the researchers explained.
“Before taking any medication prescribed by your doctor or an OTC medication, make sure there is no negative impact of this medication on your brain,” said lead researcher Dr. Malaz Boustani.
His group analyzed data from 27 prior studies on the relationship between anticholinergic effects and brain function, as well as looking into anecdotal data. The team found a consistent link between anticholinergic effects and cognitive impairment in older adults.
“Any OTC medication with the term ‘PM’ will indicate the presence of benadryl, which is bad for the brain,” Boustani concluded.
He noted that the effects of benadryl can add up, so the more medications you take that contain benadryl the worse it may be for cognition. “There is a relationship with the number of medications and the burden on your aging brain,” the researcher said.
People aged 65 and older who take these medications also run the risk of developing delirium, Boustani said. Delirium is a decline in attention-focus, perception and cognition, or “acute brain failure,” as Boustani calls it. Delirium typically increases the odds of dying or being institutionalized, he said.
In addition, taking these medications for 90 days or more may triple your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, Boustani said.
Given the risks, older adults should look for drugs that don’t contain benadryl, he said.
“A lot of these medications are not recognized for these side effects,” he contended. “It’s time for the FDA to start taking this negative impact of these medications on the aging brain seriously.”
The report is published in the May online issue of the Journal of Clinical Interventions in Aging.
According to Boustani, researchers in brain pharmacoepidemiology at Indiana University’s Center for Aging Research is conducting a study of 4,000 older adults to see if the long-term use of medications with anticholinergic effects is associated with the development of severe cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Clinton Wright, an associate professor of neurology at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, agreed that more study is needed to assess the effects of these drugs on the brain.
“These findings don’t surprise me at all,” Wright said. “People tend not to think of their OTC medications as medication, but any medication that has anticholinergic effects can affect people’s cognition.”
Wright believes the drugs should carry a warning of this potential side effect.
Deborah G. Bolding, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of Sominex, defended the product and said it complies with all current FDA regulations. However, she would not comment specifically on whether diphenhydramine is associated with an increased risk of delirium in older adults.
“Sominex is a mild sleep aid designed to help individuals through periods of nervous tension or stress, which are accompanied by sleeplessness. It has been proven safe and effective in medical tests when taken as directed, and has been safely used by millions of satisfied customers,” Bolding said.
“For all formulations, Sominex’s active ingredient is diphenhydramine hydrochloride. This is marketed under a final FDA monograph as an over-the-counter sleep aid,” she added.
Video of Meteor Exploding in Russia; 500 Injured
From Huffpost Science:
Meteorite Streaks Across Russian Urals, Leaves Approximately 500 Injured (VIDEO)
By JIM HEINTZ 02/15/13 06:56 AM ET EST
MOSCOW — A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia’s Ural Mountains on Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more.
The Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement that the meteor over the Chelyabinsk region entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of at least 54,000 kph (33,000 mph) and shattered about 30-50 kilometers (18-32 miles) above ground.
The fall caused explosions that broke glass over a wide area. The Emergency Ministry says more than 500 people sought treatment after the blasts and that 34 of them were hospitalized.
“There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.
“We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound,” he told The Associated Press by telephone.
Another Chelyabinsk resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.
Some fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Cherbakul, the regional governor’s office said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. It was not immediately clear if any people were struck by fragments.
The agency also cited military spokesman Yarslavl Roshupkin as saying that a six-meter-wide (20-foot-wide) crater was found in the same area which could be the result of fragments striking the ground.
Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are traveling much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily rare.
Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov said that about 600 square meters (6000 square feet) of a roof at a zinc factory had collapsed. There was no immediate clarification of whether the collapse was caused by meteorites or by a shock wave from one of the explosions.
Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told The Associated Press that there was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a single meteor.
Amateur video broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding across the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time (0320 GMT), leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash.
Donald Yeomans, manager of U.S. Near Earth Object Program in California, said he thought the event was probably “an exploding fireball event.”
“If the reports of ground damage can be verified, it might suggest an object whose original size was several meters in extent before entering the atmosphere, fragmenting and exploding due to the unequal pressure on the leading side vs. the trailing side (it pancaked and exploded),” Yeoman said in an email to The Associated Press.
“It is far too early to provide estimates of the energy released or provide a reliable estimate of the original size,” Yeomans added.
Russian news reports noted that the meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to make the closest recorded pass of an asteroid — about 17,150 miles (28,000 kilometers).
But the European Space Agency, in a post on its Twitter account, said its experts had determined there was no connection.
Small pieces of space debris – usually parts of comets or asteroids – that are on a collision course with the Earth are called meteoroids. When meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere they are called meteors. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere, but if they survive the frictional heating and strike the surface of the Earth they are called meteorites.
The dramatic events prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russian political figures. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, said the meteor could be a symbol for the forum, showing that “not only the economy is vulnerable, but the whole planet.”
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalist leader noted for vehement statements, said “It’s not meteors falling, it’s the test of a new weapon by the Americans,” the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space.
“At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies” to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Catastrophic Vanishing Water in Middle East
I found this article in the Weather Underground News this morning:
DOHA, Qatar — An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA study.
The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater, the second fastest loss of groundwater storage loss after India.
About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground reservoirs for ground water, including 1,000 wells in Iraq, and another fifth was due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs and soil drying up. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the decline, the study found.
“This rate of water loss is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,” the authors wrote in the study, noting the declines were most obvious after a drought.
The study is the latest evidence of a worsening water crisis in the Middle East, where demands from growing populations, war and the worsening effects of climate change are raising the prospect that some countries could face sever water shortages in the decades to come. Some like impoverished Yemen blame their water woes on the semi-arid conditions and the grinding poverty while the oil-rich Gulf faces water shortages mostly due to the economic boom that has created glistening cities out of the desert.
In a report released during the U.N. climate talks in Qatar, the World Bank concluded among the most critical problems in the Middle East and North Africa will be worsening water shortages. The region already has the lowest amount of freshwater in the world. With climate change, droughts in the region are expected to turn more extreme, water runoff is expected to decline 10 percent by 2050 while demand for water is expected to increase 60 percent by 2045.
One of the biggest challenges to improving water conservation is often competing demands which has worsened the problem in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins.
Turkey controls the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, as well as the reservoirs and infrastructure of Turkey’s Greater Anatolia Project, which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria and Iraq, the researchers said. With no coordinated water management between the three countries, tensions have intensified since the 2007 drought because Turkey continues to divert water to irrigate farmland.
“That decline in stream flow put a lot of pressure on northern Iraq,” Kate Voss, lead author of the study and a water policy fellow with the University of California’s Center for Hydrological Modeling in Irvine, said. “Both the UN and anecdotal reports from area residents note that once stream flow declined, this northern region of Iraq had to switch to groundwater. In an already fragile social, economic and political environment, this did not help the situation.”
Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the new study and a hydrologist and UC Irvine professor of Earth System Science, plans to visit the region later this month, along with Voss and two other UC Irvine colleagues, to discuss their findings and raise awareness of the problem and the need for a regional approach to solve the problem.
“They just do not have that much water to begin with, and they’re in a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change,” Famiglietti said. “Those dry areas are getting dryer. They and everyone else in the world’s arid regions need to manage their available water resources as best they can.”
Karen Thompson Walker and The Age of Miracles
The Age of Miracles is a very odd name for this book, which starts off in a beautiful little coastal town in California, a very normal, modern town, and then everything changes. Suddenly, the earth’s rotation is slowing, incrementally, but resulting in longer and longer days and longer and longer nights. The difference is small at first, but grows.
Julia is in sixth grade, a painful time anyway in most lives where your body suddenly changes and all your relationships with all your friends change, and boys become a major factor. Imagine. All this AND the earth’s rotation is slowing.
No one knows what to expect. No one knows why or how the rotational slowing is happening, and no one has a clue how to fix it. Do you stay on a 24 hour clock, as the days grow to 30 hours? Forty hours? Can you even function in a forty hour day, or sleep a 40 hour night? How do you stay on a 24 hour clock and force yourself to sleep when the sun is shining brightly overhead? How do you have a school day entirely in the middle of the darkest part of the night? How does food continue to grow? What impact does this have on birds? Migrations? How does kicking a soccer ball feel when earth’s gravitational field starts to lessen?
The author does a brilliant job in a what-if situation, and manages to make it quite real. Don’t read this book if you are the suggestible type – it’s just one more thing you’ll start worrying about when you don’t need to. If you can read speculative fiction without letting it influence you, then by all means read this book, it is a good read.
New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence’
And Republicans wonder why they have problems getting elected, why they are accused of war on women. This proposed law is not a whole lot different than Morocco’s law that the rapist can escape prosecution by marrying the rape victim. Like let’s just go back a couple centuries where women have no rights, and a rape victim is considered damaged property. So a rape victim who has an abortion is prosecuted for destroying evidence???’
New Mexico is an interesting state, historically Republican but trending Democrat. No wonder . . .
New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence’
Laura Bassett
lbassett@huffingtonpost.com
A Republican lawmaker in New Mexico introduced a bill on Wednesday that would legally require victims of rape to carry their pregnancies to term in order to use the fetus as evidence for a sexual assault trial.
House Bill 206, introduced by state Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R), would charge a rape victim who ended her pregnancy with a third-degree felony for “tampering with evidence.”
“Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime,” the bill says.
Third-degree felonies in New Mexico carry a sentence of up to three years in prison.
Pat Davis of ProgressNow New Mexico, a progressive nonprofit opposing the bill, called it “blatantly unconstitutional” on Thursday.
“The bill turns victims of rape and incest into felons and forces them to become incubators of evidence for the state,” he said. “According to Republican philosophy, victims who are ‘legitimately raped’ will now have to carry the fetus to term in order to prove their case.“
The bill is unlikely to pass, as Democrats have a majority in both chambers of New Mexico’s state legislature.
UPDATE: 12:25 p.m. — Brown said in a statement Thursday that she introduced the bill with the goal of punishing the person who commits incest or rape and then procures or facilitates an abortion to destroy the evidence of the crime.
“New Mexico needs to strengthen its laws to deter sex offenders,” said Brown. “By adding this law in New Mexico, we can help to protect women across our state.”
The Magic that is Us: From Conception to Birth
This is amazing and wonderful imagery From Conception to Birth:
Wikipedia Campaign
So many times when I go to look for information (much of which I share with you on this blog) the first and most comprehensive place to pop up with the information I need is Wikipedia. Today, when I was gathering information on school shootings, I saw, for the second time (the first time was a couple years ago) a banner asking me to donate to keep Wikipedia going.
I did. And I hope you will, too, if you use Wikipedia.
If you donate, you will get one of the nicest thank-you letters you will ever receive. I used to write these letters. I know how hard it is to strike just the right tone. I applaud the people at Wikipedia who wrote this one. (What is the goal of a fund-raiser’s thank you? To be sure you donate again the next time 🙂 )
Dear Donor,
Thank you for donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. You are wonderful!
It’s easy to ignore our fundraising banners, and I’m really glad you didn’t. This is how Wikipedia pays its bills — people like you giving us money, so we can keep the site freely available for everyone around the world.
People tell me they donate to Wikipedia because they find it useful, and they trust it because even though it’s not perfect, they know it’s written for them. Wikipedia isn’t meant to advance somebody’s PR agenda or push a particular ideology, or to persuade you to believe something that’s not true. We aim to tell the truth, and we can do that because of you. The fact that you fund the site keeps us independent and able to deliver what you need and want from Wikipedia. Exactly as it should be.
You should know: your donation isn’t just covering your own costs. The average donor is paying for his or her own use of Wikipedia, plus the costs of hundreds of other people. Your donation keeps Wikipedia available for an ambitious kid in Bangalore who’s teaching herself computer programming. A middle-aged homemaker in Vienna who’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. A novelist researching 1850s Britain. A 10-year-old in San Salvador who’s just discovered Carl Sagan.
On behalf of those people, and the half-billion other readers of Wikipedia and its sister sites and projects, I thank you for joining us in our effort to make the sum of all human knowledge available for everyone. Your donation makes the world a better place. Thank you.
Most people don’t know Wikipedia’s run by a non-profit. Please consider sharing this e-mail with a few of your friends to encourage them to donate too. And if you’re interested, you should try adding some new information to Wikipedia. If you see a typo or other small mistake, please fix it, and if you find something missing, please add it. There are resources that can help you get started. Don’t worry about making a mistake: that’s normal when people first start editing and if it happens, other Wikipedians will be happy to fix it for you.
I appreciate your trust in us, and I promise you we’ll use your money well.
Thanks,
Sue
Gemenid Meteor Showers Peak Tonight!
I found this on BBC News; if where you live is as cold – or colder – that Pensacola, you will need to bundle up in a heavy down sleeping bag while you “relax and enjoy the view.”
The annual Geminids meteor shower will reach its peak late on Thursday night and into early Friday morning.
The meteors will appear to radiate from a point near the star Castor, in the constellation Gemini.
In the Northern hemisphere, that will be westward and nearly overhead in the early hours of Friday.
Sky watchers can expect an average of dozens of “shooting stars” per hour, made easier to see by darkness provided by the “new moon” phase.
The shower comes about each year as the Earth passes through the path of an asteroid called 3200 Phaethon.
The asteroid leaves behind a trail of rocky debris that the Earth ploughs into each year – debris moving at 35km per second that burns up in the atmosphere in what can be spectacular displays.
According to the International Meteor Organization, the “radiant” – the apparent point from which the meteors seem to come – will be visible from sunset in high northern latitudes, rising at about midnight local time in the southern hemisphere.
“For those old enough or tough enough to stay up until two in the morning, then the radiant point [in the Northern hemisphere] is almost overhead so you could basically look anywhere and see them,” Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society told BBC News. “Go outside, wrap up well, get yourself into a comfortable chair, relax, and enjoy the view.
“It could be 30 [meteors] an hour, it could be 100 an hour. But those are only average figures there maybe a period of 10 minutes that you don’t see anything but equally there may be a period of 10 minutes when you see 30.”
The Geminids are less well-known relative to other annual meteoric performances such as the Perseids, in part because December weather often threatens a clear view of the show.
For the UK that may again be case; BBC Weather reports that southern Scotland and the North of England will have clearest conditions into Friday morning but conditions will tend toward cloudy and windy across the UK through the night.
Flying out of Pensacola: Moonset and Sunrise
Flying out of Pensacola I saw something I have never seen before. On one side of the plane, the moon is setting, it is gorgeous. On the other side of the plane, the sun is rising, it is glorious. I have never seen both at the same time before:
Gene Predicts Your Time of Death
This is absolutely fascinating to me – and no, it does not predict the day you will die, but the time of day that in all probability you will die. It’s fascinating, and you probably don’t even have to take a genetic test to make a good guess as to what time of day you might likely expire. This is from HuffPost Science:
Gene Predicts Time Of Death Down To Hour, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post | By Ryan Grenoble
Posted: 11/19/2012 2:39 pm EST Updated: 11/19/2012 3:05 pm EST
In an study published in the November 2012 issue of the Annals of Neurology scientists studying the body’s biological clock (a.k.a. the circadian rhythm) report the discovery of gene variant that not only determines the likelihood of your being a morning person, but also predicts, with unsettling accuracy, your likely time of death.
The gene typically allows for three possible combinations of nucleotides (the four molecular building blocks of DNA): adenine-adenine (A-A), adenine-guanine (A-G), and guanine-guanine (G-G), according to a written statement released by Harvard Medical School.
“This particular genotype affects the sleep-wake pattern of virtually everyone walking around,” Dr. Clifford Saper, chief of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wrote in the statement. “And it is a fairly profound effect so that the people who have the A-A genotype wake up about an hour earlier than the people who have the G-G genotype, and the A-Gs wake up almost exactly in the middle.”
Moreover, investigators realized as some of the 1,200 older subjects in the project died that these nucleotide sequences were accurate predictors of their time of death, within a range of only a few hours. Patients with the A-A and A-G genotypes typically died just before 11 a.m., while subjects with the G-G combination tended to die near 6 p.m.
“So there is really a gene that predicts the time of day that you’ll die. Not the date, fortunately, but the time of day,” said Saper.
The Atlantic reports researchers believe their results may be due to the human body reverting to its more natural, circadian rhythm-induced state as death approaches, instead of the cycle created by social commitments.
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