Recovery Michigan

The artificial intelligence that can blow human pilots out of the sky in air-to-air combat accurately predicted treatment outcomes for bipolar disorder, according to a new medical study by the University of Cincinnati.

The findings open a world of possibility for using AI, or machine learning, to treat disease, researchers said.

David Fleck, an associate professor at the UC College of Medicine, and his co-authors used artificial intelligence called “genetic fuzzy trees” to predict how bipolar patients would respond to lithium.

A low-carb diet might do more than affect your health – it could make you a more tolerant person. People who ate fewer carbohydrates for breakfast made more forgiving decisions in a money-sharing game they played a few hours later.

“Extreme [low-carb] diets might be influencing people’s behaviour,” says Soyoung Park of the University of Lübeck in Germany. This could be because less starchy meals tend to have more protein, which boosts levels of dopamine in the brain, involved in decision making.

Standard advice is that we should base our meals around starchy carbohydrates, such as bread, potatoes and pasta. Low-carbers tend to have a higher protein intake because they replace these foods with protein-rich meat, dairy and nuts.

Excuse the ableist headline......

https://goo.gl/Uo5AEb

Starting next year, a team led by Jeffrey Kaye, M.D., a professor of neurology and biomedical engineering at Oregon Health and Science University, will begin tracking the activities of 360 older adults using a network of sensors they’ve agreed to place in their homes. With research partners in other parts of the country, his team will be monitoring the vital signs, medication use, mobility, activities, sleep patterns, and phone and computer use of a cross-section of Americans, including African Americans in Chicago, Latinos in Miami, public housing residents in Portland, Ore., and veterans in rural communities. One of his goals in tracking older adults who are still relatively healthy is to identify the early signs of physical and cognitive decline—generating insights that may guide medical care and enable patients to retain their independence.

Kaye began developing the platform, known as Life Lab, more than 10 years ago and with a team of researchers, statisticians, and software developers has been analyzing data from over 700 volunteers. Early findings have been surprising. For one, patients' own reports—which doctors rely on to help determine diagnoses and treatment plans—aren’t entirely reliable.1  Asked to explain what they did in the last two hours, a quarter were wrong and another third were only partially right. "They knew we had the data on what they were doing, and they weren’t cognitively impaired," Kaye says." "They just couldn’t remember accurately what they’d done.'Another finding was that patterns in movement and behavior seemed to track cognitive impairment. For example, variable walking speed, less time spent away from home, and less time spent on computers “individually and together create a very strong signal that the person is in the early stages of cognitive decline," he says.

When someone commits suicide, their family and friends can be left with the heartbreaking and answerless question of what they could have done differently. Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, hopes his work in predicting suicide risk will give people the opportunity to ask “what can I do?” while there’s still a chance to intervene.

Walsh and his colleagues have created machine-learning algorithms that predict, with unnerving accuracy, the likelihood that a patient will attempt suicide. In trials, results have been 80-90% accurate when predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next two years, and 92% accurate in predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next week.

If you're a weekday early riser, sleeping in on weekends could be hazardous to your health, researchers reported here.

Sleeping in on weekends is a luxury that seemingly would translate to a net positive for health, rather than a negative. But Sierra B. Forbush, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, said the disruption to the body's circadian clock caused by late-night bedtimes followed by later weekend wake times appears to be an independent risk factor for poorer health.

"These results indicate that sleep regularity, beyond sleep duration alone, may play a significant role in overall health," she told MedPage Today, adding that keeping a regular sleep schedule throughout the week may prove to be an effective intervention for reducing cardiovascular risk and the risk of other health problems.

This is from the Harvard Medical School Blog and it is really scary......

https://goo.gl/4Yjfl1

Researchers analyzed health data from nearly 3,000 adults who had filled out diet surveys and determined their incidence of stroke or dementia over 10 years. The findings were alarming.

Compared with people who said they didn’t consume diet drinks, those who had at least one per day suffered three times more strokes and were three times more likely to develop dementia. Consumption of regular (non-diet) soft drinks was not linked to a higher risk of these brain problems. And the results were unchanged when accounting for other important factors such as gender, diet, smoking, and physical activity.

When I was in Vietnam, I spent three weeks of "Mosquito Spray Duty", using malathion and a homemade spray apparatus in a Huey. By the end of the 3 weeks, I had all the Gulf War symptoms and had stopped eating. Malathion is an organophosphate insecticide, the same class of chemicals as most nerve agents, including the ones that cause concern in Gulf War Syndrome. Malathion's safety claim is that it is supposed to break down entirely over 30 days. Even now, 48 years after my last significant exposure, I can still detect Malathion specifically even in low doses.......

https://goo.gl/9eA5IZ

At least 100,000 military veterans who served in the 1990-1991 Gulf War were exposed to chemical weapons, released into the air after the United States bombed an ammunition depot in Khamisiyah, Iraq. Today, many are still suffering from Gulf War Illness, a mysterious, multi-symptom disease that experts believe is linked to organophosphate nerve agents sarin and cyclosarin.

A new paper by researchers at Drexel University sheds light on the neurological consequences of exposure to low-levels of these nerve agents and suggests that drugs like tubacin could treat some of the toxins' neurological effects. The results were recently published in the journal Traffic.

To model Gulf War Illness, the researchers treated cultures of human and rat neurons with an organophosphate called diisopropyl flurophosphate, which is an analog of sarin. They also pretreated the neurons with stress hormones to better mimic the stressors of war.

Within the neurons, the research team was looking for deficits in the activity of microtubules, hollow cylinders that act as the cell's conveyor belt, which the investigators believe might go awry in Gulf War Illness patients. Organophosphates can affect a variety of proteins and pathways in cells, and the impacts on microtubules and microtubule-related proteins are likely to be many. The researchers wanted to find whether particular microtubule-related deficits could be identified and corrected pharmacologically to improve Gulf War Illness symptoms.

"In addition to being an architectural element that helps to shape the cell, the microtubule also acts as a railway, which transport organelles throughout the cytoplasm," said Peter Baas, PhD, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Drexel's College of Medicine. "We hypothesized that toxins would change the typical way microtubules are chemically modified in neurons and that a drug like tubacin could restore those modifications to normal, thereby treating the disease."

Once treated with tubacin, which makes the microtubules more chemically modified, the researchers observed a restoration in everything that went wrong with the microtubules due to the toxin and stressor treatments.

Surprisingly, they also found that once they corrected the microtubule deficit, defects in dopamine release also markedly improved. Fluctuations in dopamine are thought to be connected to many of the neurological symptoms that Gulf War Illness sufferers face, including insomnia, cognitive problems and headaches. This study's results suggest that dopamine alterations after toxin exposure are in part due to changes in microtubules, and restoring microtubule function to a more normal state could help to alleviate symptoms.