Poor sleep has been linked to the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and now a new study suggests a possible reason why.
A small group of young, healthy men deprived of just one night of sleep had higher blood levels of tau protein than when they had a full and uninterrupted night of rest, researchers reported in a study published online in Neurology.
Protein linked to Alzheimer’s
“This is interesting as accumulation of the protein tau is seen in the brains of individuals afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, or most common forms of dementia,” said senior study author Dr Jonathan Cedernaes, a senior researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden.
The researchers did not find any similar increase in amyloid beta, another brain protein long linked to Alzheimer’s, the Swedish researchers said.
The new findings come as Alzheimer’s research has started to shift its focus towards tau as a more important cause of brain damage associated with the disease.
Another group of researchers recently reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine that they can predict with reasonable accuracy which brain regions will wither and atrophy in Alzheimer’s by identifying the places where tau protein “tangles” have accumulated.
Tau is a protein found in normally active neurons, and it is typically cleared from the brain rapidly, Cedernaes said.
But in Alzheimer’s patients, tau sticks together to form tangles that linger in the brain.
Increase in tau levels
For this latest study, researchers recruited 15 men with an average age of 22, all of whom said they regularly get seven to nine hours of quality sleep each night.
The researchers observed each man through two sets of two-day sleep cycles. In the first cycle, they got two good nights of sleep, but in the second cycle they were deprived of sleep for one night.
The men had an average 17% increase in tau levels in their blood after a night of sleep deprivation, compared to an average 2% increase in tau levels after a good night of sleep, the findings showed.
No other biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s showed a similarly significant change, including amyloid beta, according to the report.
At this point, scientists don’t know why tau might build up in the bloodstream of people who’ve had bad sleep, Cedernaes said.
‘Trash removal’ interrupted
“When neurons are more active, they secrete more tau,” Cedernaes said. “It may be that when we remain awake for extended periods of time – much longer than the 15 to 18 daily hours that we are supposed to – then this increases levels of tau in the brain to a point where it exceeds the brain’s ability to clear it effectively for a given 24-hour period.”
Sleeplessness might also affect the way in which the body clears tau protein from the brain, said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programmes and outreach at the Alzheimer’s Association.
“Everyone produces amyloid and tau in their brain every day, and the brain is supposed to take out the trash,” Fargo said. “The thinking is if the sleep is disrupted in some way, the processes involved in taking out the trash are disrupted.”
Another possibility is that tau is released from brain cells when they are damaged, Fargo added. For example, head trauma can increase blood levels of tau.
“If a brain cell dies, the tau can spill out of the brain cell,” Fargo explained. “Maybe what you’re seeing is a loss of brain cell integrity if you’re not sleeping.”
Although the findings are interesting, Fargo noted that this was a very small study involving only young people.
More research needed
Larger studies involving middle-aged folks who have poor sleep for more than just one night – perhaps a week or a month – would provide even better data that could be more closely tied to dementia and Alzheimer’s, Fargo said.
Cedernaes agreed that more research is needed to come to a better understanding of this association.
“At present, we do not know exactly what these changes represent, nor do we have any data indicating that a single or even multiple nights of sleep loss lead to some permanent harmful event in the brain,” Cedernaes said. “Many individuals are forced to undergo repeated bouts of sleep loss and maintain perfect cognition throughout life.”
You made your resolution – this year was finally going to be the year you lost weight. But then your neighbour stopped by with a plate of cookies, and well, your resolve didn’t even last a day. Maybe next year?
But instead of looking at your resolutions as a sweeping year-long project, what if you concentrated on making healthy changes every Monday? That way, if you slip up and dive into that pile of cookies, another chance to get it right is just a few days away.
It’s called the Healthy Monday Reset, and the idea is to send you into the week with a fresh mindset.
Mindset change
“What we really want people to do is implement a mindset change. If you think about the New Year’s resolution, you pick one day a year to start changes and if you fall off the wagon, it’s another year,” explained Ron Hernandez, the managing director of The Monday Campaigns.
“But with Monday, you have 52 opportunities in a year. If you fall short one week, there’s always an opportunity right around the corner, so you don’t have to wait that long to make a change,” he said.
This, Hernandez added, is something you can really integrate: “‘Monday, I will make better choices.'”
A study conducted with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that people often describe Monday as the day they are seeking out health information.
“Monday becomes a cue, and if you start off the week well, you’re more likely to keep going through the rest of the week,” he said.
The Monday Campaigns recently surveyed nearly 1 000 adults with Data Decisions Group. Sixty percent of the group was white, 14% black and 18% Hispanic. The remaining 8% identified as “other”.
Only about one-quarter of respondents said they kept their resolutions all year long. Twenty percent made it just two weeks.
Some of the challenges they reported were staying on track, a lack of discipline, getting started and not seeing results fast enough.
Three-quarters of respondents said they thought refreshing their goals every Monday might help them maintain their resolutions.
Reflect and learn
Samantha Heller, a registered dietitian with NYU Langone Health in New York City, likes the idea of weekly goals. They’re more realistic, more achievable and less daunting than a year-long resolution, she said.
“You can use the Monday reset to reflect and learn. If my goal is to have vegetables every day for lunch, how did I do? If I managed three days, that’s good, but how can I plan so I’ll do better? People often make resolutions whether they’re prepared to do the work or not, but making a successful change takes thoughtful planning,” Heller said.
So, if you want to meet that vegetable every day for lunch goal, you have to plan time to shop, and then to prepare your lunches. “Learn to make a plan and set aside the time to reach your goal. You set aside time to get your hair done. Set aside time to achieve your goals,” Heller said.
And, if you didn’t reach your goal this week, look back at what works and then start fresh again on Monday. She said it’s important to be kind to yourself if you slip up.
“Change is difficult and there’s no quick fix. Start taking it step by step. You can’t walk on to a tennis court for the first time and start playing a Wimbledon-level match,” she explained.
“Use Mondays to reassess, learn and start doing something to be a happy, healthier person,” Heller added.
One of the biggest traps is life is trying to achieve goals that only you will care about, such as making money or achieving success in your career. Yes, those kinds of goals can still create some ripples for others, but if your intention is mostly about you and your personal gains, I’d predict a lot of stuckness and stagnation for you.
I fell into this trap as well. In my 20s I thought my goals were well-intentioned enough. I was trying to get my computer games business going, make some money, and have a nice life in the field of game development. I certainly wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. But I didn’t really care much about what happened beyond my immediate sphere. That seemed logical at the time, but I realized later that it was an irrational approach.
When I thought about goals back then, they were personal goals. I set fitness goals and financial goals and relationship goals. I achieved some of them, but the money and success goals always eluded me, even though at the time I made them a high priority.
What I didn’t realize back then was that money and business success goals are social goals, not personal goals. Do you see that?
Suppose you lived on an island by yourself. What sense does it make to set financial and business or career goals? There’s no economy. There are no social constructs. Such goals are meaningless.
Try Service on for Size
In 1999, mostly out of desperation, I decided to start volunteering in a nonprofit association. I was a member for a few years but never did much with my membership other than receiving the monthly newsletters. I recognized that something was terribly wrong with my previous approach to success because my results were terrible – lots of debt and then bankruptcy – even though I invested a lot of time and energy in the business.
I finally surrendered to the poor results I was getting and decided that I should explore new directions, if only to gain experience with other modes of living. Anything looked better than the stressed and frustrated mode of working hard on goals that I wasn’t achieving.
So I began volunteering and helping people more without worrying about personal gains. I began writing articles that same year, starting slowly at first. This totally turned my life around within a year. Sometimes it’s good to take a blind leap into unexplored areas when you aren’t getting results you want from what you’ve been doing thus far.
This attitude and practice helped me achieve what I previously thought were my personal goals. Every year since then I’ve been writing articles and seeking to be of service in other ways, which have created many ripples for other people. I know that because many of them tell me. And every year since then has been pretty financially abundant. This year will likely be the best ever in that regard.
What blocks a lot of people from being more service-oriented is that they can’t see the logic behind it. When you’re so concerned about your own gains, how are you possibly supposed to free up even more time and energy to help others on top of that?
I understand that mindset since it used to be mine. It’s an ineffective mindset though. It seems rational, but it isn’t. Is it getting good results for you? Do you see it working in your real time? Or does it only seem logical in an abstract way?
Do you really think that money and success will flow into your life because you’re hyper-focused on your own goals and needs? Great… try doing that alone on an isolated island. That should give you the best focus since no one will be there to distract you. See how far you get. What you don’t realize is that you’re essentially acting out this metaphor in real life if you regard financial and success goals mainly as personal goals.
Being hyper-focused on your personal goals for personal reasons can work in some areas of life, but it’s unlikely to get much flow going for more social goals. Financial and success goals are inherently social.
Success Is Social
Money flows from other people. Any evidence of your success, including having customers and clients, flows through people too. If you can’t achieve such goals without other people’s cooperation, doesn’t it make sense to deliberately invite their cooperation instead of just hoping it will happen?
When your goals are mostly solo, that creates friction and resistance. People aren’t likely to spend money to help you achieve such goals unless you provide a decent reason for them to care. Your own success isn’t a decent reason; it’s a pretty pathetic one actually.
Other may spend money for own their personal priorities and interests, which probably doesn’t include helping you succeed. But they may be very willing to spend money in order to participate in an interesting social flow that’s extends beyond you and them.
A simple way to sum this up is that you’re likely to receive way more help by reaching out and caring about others. If you focus on what only you want to receive, virtually no one will care to help you.
You want more abundance flowing to you? It flows from other people. And if they don’t care much about helping you, you’ll find it 10X more difficult to get that flow going, maybe 100X. Everything you try to achieve will be self-powered, and self power is weak.
You can test living in a more service-based mode for a few years like I did, but admittedly that can become draining after a while. I put in hundreds of hours in volunteer effect, and while it did help me turn things around, it’s hard to give, give, and give more.
For me this was an example of swinging the pendulum. I got terrible results from certain personal goals, so I wanted to see what would happen if I went into full-on service and volunteer mode to the extent that I had the time and energy to do so. That did improve my results very quickly, especially because it opened me up to a world of networking in my field. By reaching out to help others, a lot more people reached out to help me, such as members of the press who helped my games get more attention or other software developers who gave me good marketing advice.
Throw a Party
So what’s a good way to balance the solid social benefits of service with the inner drive and ambition of working on your personal goals?
Basically you throw a party. A good party is fun for you and for everyone else. Fun is a great binder because it’s personal and social.
There are many different kinds of fun, so you have lots of options for what kind of fun you want to create. Your party could be entertaining, amusing, playful, sexy, mentally stimulating, rowdy, etc.
The key is to recognize that a good party is both personal and social, especially if you host it in your home.
A good party is also very sensitive to the people you invite. You’ll need the right people to make it work. Invite the wrong people, and your party may become boring, creepy, frustrating, or some other form of bad.
A party is also sensitive to a good invitation. If your goals are entirely personal, that’s like making this offer:
You: Hey, I’m having a party at my house on Friday, and you’re invited!
Friend: Oh I love parties! What kind of party is it?
You: I’m inviting a bunch of people over to help me achieve my personal goals. We’ll have chips and guacamole too (as a lead magnet).
Friend: Umm… okay. Who else is coming?
You: Just me so far. Everyone keeps saying they’re busy.
Friend who’s about to ghost you for life: Okay, well I’ll try to make it, but I might be having surgery that day, so I’ll let you know!
How is that kind of offer working for you so far?
If you make equivalent offers in business and life, people will ghost you. Life will ghost you. That isn’t because you’re not a good person. It’s because you made a ridiculously lame offer. Everyone knows that wine is a much better lead magnet. 😉
If you want more money and success flowing through your life, don’t focus so much on trying to acquire and achieve. Think instead about throwing parties and inviting people with fun, interesting, and stimulating offers. Direct your ambition towards creating nice social flow.
Think about the people and businesses that you love to patronize. Think about the best companies or fields you’d love to work in. Can you see how their perceived invitations and offers are more interesting than just, Come help us achieve our goals? We wants moolah! That isn’t a typo, Dimi. 😉
When you host a party and invite people to it, everyone wants it to be a good experience, so your intentions are nicely aligned. You may still need to do some boundary management to make sure people don’t trash your home, but that mainly comes down to inviting the right people who can agree to your standards.
One of the greatest areas of stuckness among my readers stems from trying to work on personal goals that would work so much better when framed as social goals. When you do that, you have to self-power everything. It’s like hosting a party all by yourself and trying to make it fun and interesting all alone, with no one to help you, and with no guests participating. Then you may tell yourself that once you have a really good party going alone, then you’ll finally invite some people. What you don’t see is that people are the party.
In business and life, people are the success. People are the money. People are the fun.
The best part is that you don’t have to figure out all of the party details by yourself. You can co-create an awesome party together. It all starts with your intention. A party based on your personal goals isn’t likely land well. So step back and create a more aligned intention. Start telling people you want to host a fun party, and ask them if they’ll help steer you in the right direction. Ask them what would make them happy to attend? Listen. Involve them. Even if you only talk to one person about this, that can build momentum.
I’m hosting such a party right now – a character sculpting party where we all connect online to work on diagnosing, understanding, improving, enhancing, and upgrading our characters together. All for one and one for all. It’s intellectually stimulating and also playful as we explore the characters we’d most like to become, and then we work on becoming those characters for real. So far 266 people have opted into the party this year, and 150 others were already pre-invited, so there are 400+ people already inside. Fortunately I have a big house. 😉
What I’d really love for you to grasp is the mindset of moving beyond framing your goals as strictly personal and opening yourself up to the world of social flow. Most of the good stuff you want in life will come from this social flow, so it’s wise to stop trying to achieve your goals by acting like you’re on an island bouncing ideas off a shredded volleyball. If you honor this social flow and learn to appreciate it, you’ll achieve your goals more easily, and you’ll have a lot more fun in life as well.
One dog year is equal to seven human years, right? Researchers say there may be a better way to calculate your dog’s age.
Dog lovers likely know the old adage that one dog year is equal to seven human years. Researchers from UCSD have shown that this measurement is a bit arbitrary.
There are multiple zones of clarity. Let’s consider them.
First, there’s clarity with yourself – clarity about who you are, what you are, and about your skills and capabilities. This zone of clarity could be called self knowledge, self awareness, and self understanding.
Second, there’s clarity about this reality – about the world, the universe, and life in general. What is this place you find yourself in? What is its nature? What’s possible here? How does it work? What are its laws and rules?
And third, there’s clarity about your relationship with this reality. How do you connect with this world of existence? Can you trust it? Are you safe here? Do you need to protect yourself from threats, risks, or dangers? Which parts of this reality can you control or influence? And which would seem to be outside your control?
Those are the three big types of clarity:
clarity about yourself
clarity about this reality
clarity about the relationship between you and this reality
Think of this like a human relationship such as a friendship, a romantic relationship, or a marriage. We can say there are three types of clarity in such situations. There’s clarity about who you are. There’s clarity about who your partner is. And there’s clarity about how you relate to each other. A lack of clarity in any one of those areas could inject confusion and uncertainty into the relationship. If you’re unclear about yourself, if your partner is unclear in their identity, or if you’re unclear about how you and your partner are connecting with each other, then any or all of those issues could lead to fuzziness and uncertainty about the relationship.
If we go another step further here, we can see that there are even more layers to the clarity puzzle. First, we have your understanding of your identity, of your partner’s identity, and of the connection between you and your partner. But additionally we also have your partner’s understanding of these three roles as well. So we have how your partner perceives you, your partner’s self-perception, and how your partner perceives your relationship connection.
And then we could go even more layers deep, like how you think your partner sees you, your mental model of your partner’s self-perception, and how you think your partner sees your relationship connection. And if we wanted to, we could keep considering more and more layers: I think that my partner thinks that I think that she’s… and so on.
Therein lies the challenge of clarity. Here we’re only considering a relationship between two people who may claim to know each other to some degree. Now add the entire physical universe and all of the people within it to this puzzle, and also note that all of these entities are in flux and never remain static, and the potential for confusion just grows astronomically huge.
So what hope do we possibly have to resolve the clarity puzzle for ourselves as individuals? It is such a hopeless challenge as it may seem?
Well, yes – it is as hopeless as it may seem. If we look at this challenge from a certain perspective, we have to admit that we can’t possibly know all there is to know about ourselves, about the universe, and about our relationship with the universe – and keep all of that information 100% current and accurate 100% of the time. It’s a truly impossible task. There’s just no way we can hope to achieve clarity this way.
The shortcoming to this approach is that we can never hope to achieve clarity through information. We’ll simply get lost in infinite possibilities with such an approach. We won’t be able to predict how circumstances will unfold with sufficient accuracy. We’ll be frequently surprised – surprised by other people, by the world at large, and even by our own behaviors. A sense of consistency will always elude us with this approach.
So let’s just admit the truth of this. An information-based approach to clarity is doomed to failure. It will never work for us. Does this mean our efforts are doomed to failure though? Not necessarily. It just means that we have to approach clarity from a different angle. We can’t rely solely on gathering information.
When you catch yourself needing to do more research, reading, and information acquisition to gain clarity about a major life decision, beware the bottomless pit. Information alone won’t answer your most important questions, although it may help you research and buy a good toaster.
So what’s the alternative? I recommend focusing on the relationship between you and your reality because improving that relationship also improves your clarity about yourself and about reality. The challenge is that improving this relationship is akin to deciding to trust reality more. The more you trust reality, the more your relationship with reality improves, and the more clarity you gain across the board.
This trust factor is up to you. It’s within your control to trust more, to trust the same, or to trust less. So in that sense, clarity is really a decision to be made. It’s the decision to commit to creating a deeper level of trust with reality.
This makes sense when you look at the other side of clarity. Suppose you do gain tremendous clarity. Then what? Now the expectation is that you’ll take action in alignment with that clarity. This requires trust as well.
So I encourage you to frame your clarity challenges not as challenges of figuring out the right information but rather as trust challenges. How much are you willing to trust? If you want more clarity, especially with the expectation that you’ll act in alignment with greater clarity, then work on trust.
A good way to begin is just to say aloud to reality when you’re alone, “I want to trust you more. Help me do that.” This works with people too. 🙂
For people with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD/GORD) that doesn’t respond to the usual treatments, a complex surgery may help, a new study finds.
In carefully selected patients, the surgery provided much more relief than two different types of medication treatment – 67% for surgery compared to 28% for “active” drug treatment and 12% for the “control” (placebo) drug treatment.
Symptoms often remain
“GERD is an extremely common problem. About one in five people has GERD. Heartburn is the main symptom. Drugs called proton pump inhibitors [PPIs] are the best treatments we have for GERD, but as many as 30% of people still have symptoms when taking PPIs,” said study lead author Dr Stuart Jon Spechler. He’s chief of gastroenterology at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
In that group of people who don’t improve on PPIs, many have what’s known as functional heartburn. That means doctors can’t pinpoint a specific disorder that’s causing the heartburn. Surgery won’t help them, he said.
“If someone has heartburn, it was thought to be reflux-related. The thinking was that if it’s burning, there must be acid in the oesophagus. But there are a lot of other things that can cause that burning feeling,” Spechler said.
He said patients can’t tell if they have reflux or another kind of heartburn. And, if their heartburn isn’t reflux-related, surgery won’t provide relief.
“We only want to operate on the group that will benefit from the surgery,” Spechler explained.
So, for the first part of the new study, Spechler’s team took several steps to identify which patients would be good candidates for the surgery called fundoplication.
This surgery is done under general anaesthesia with a laparoscope, a thin tube with a tiny video camera. The surgeon sews the top of the stomach around the oesophagus. This adds pressure to keep the oesophagus from opening back up and allowing reflux, according to the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Procedures to determine cause
“It’s a big operation, but it does fix the plumbing problem and prevents the reflux of all material,” Spechler said. “There are some side effects. The surgery creates a very effective valve that may cause problems with belching or vomiting” because the valve no longer opens in that direction.
The study included 366 patients referred to Veterans Affairs clinics for heartburn that didn’t respond to PPI treatment. Their average age was 48.5 years; 280 were men.
All were given 20 milligrams of omeprazole twice daily for two weeks. If their heartburn persisted, they were scheduled for procedures to determine the cause.
In all, 288 patients didn’t move on to the study’s treatment phase. Some had relief from the initial treatment. Many didn’t complete all of the tests. Some had other oesophageal disorders, or were excluded for other reasons.
That left 78 patients who were randomly selected to receive one of three treatments: surgery; active treatment with omeprazole and baclofen, and possibly a third drug; or the control treatment, which was omeprazole plus a placebo.
In the “highly selected subgroup, surgery was superior to medical treatment,” the authors wrote.
Find an experienced surgeon
Dr Anthony Williams, chief of gastroenterology at Sinai-Grace Hospital at Detroit Medical Center, reviewed the findings and said the study group was small, but the research confirms what gastroenterologists are doing in practice.
“This was a good review that reiterates that we don’t need to send many people to surgery,” he said, adding that in 30 years of practice, he has sent only a few people for surgery.
When people do choose to have this surgery, Williams said, it’s very important to find a surgeon who has done the procedure many times.
“The success of this surgery is really operator-dependent. You need a surgeon who does hundreds of these surgeries a year,” Williams advised.
The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Supplements containing zinc and folic acid don’t appear to boost male fertility, a new study finds.
Despite marketing claims, these supplements don’t improve pregnancy rates, sperm counts or sperm function, researchers say.
More abdominal discomfort
“Our results suggest that these dietary supplements have little to no effect on fertility and may even cause mild gastrointestinal symptoms,” researcher Enrique Schisterman said in a news release from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the US National Institutes of Health. He is with the institute’s division of intramural population health research.
The researchers recruited more than 2 300 US couples planning to get fertility treatment. They randomly assigned the men to take a pill containing zinc and folic acid or a placebo.
Births didn’t differ between men who got the supplement and men who didn’t. Among men who took the supplement, there were 404 births, compared with 416 among men who took the placebo, the researchers reported.
Sperm health was also similar between the groups. But the proportion of broken DNA in the sperm was higher in the supplement group (30%) than in the placebo group (27%). Studies have linked a high rate of broken sperm DNA with infertility, the researchers noted.
Men who took the supplement also reported more abdominal discomfort, nausea and vomiting than men who took the placebo.
The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
