For Those With Alzheimer’s, Coping With Other Symptoms Can Be Worse Than Memory Loss

NPR: Alzheimer's Bring Other Health Problems With It
The first problem with the airplane bathroom was its location.It was March. Greg O'Brien and his wife, Mary Catherine, were flying back to Boston from Los Angeles, sitting in economy seats in the middle of the plane. "We're halfway, probably over Chicago," Greg remembers, "and Mary Catherine said, 'Go to the bathroom.' " (Hersher, 6/24)

NPR: How Forgetting Might Make Us Smarter
Intuitively, we tend to think of forgetting as failure, as something gone wrong in our ability to remember. Now, Canadian neuroscientists with the University of Toronto are challenging that notion. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, they review the current research into the neurobiology of forgetting and hypothesize that our brains purposefully work to forget information in order to help us live our lives. (Hsu, 6/23)

The Star Tribune: Reaching Deep Into The Brain To Treat Strokes
The market for minimally invasive tools and equipment to treat brain problems like strokes and aneurysms is worth more than $500 million in the United States today and is likely to surpass $1 billion by 2025, according to estimates from analyst Beata Blachuta with Decision Resources Group. Those estimates were considered conservative by another source.Industry analysts say the dominant player in the neurovascular-device market is Minnesota-run Medtronic PLC, by virtue of its 2015 acquisition of industry forerunner Covidien, which had neurointerventional devices once owned by Plymouth-based firm ev3. (Carlson, 6/24)

NPR: Doctor Tells A Personal Tale Of Racial Disparity In Organ Transplants
While she was a primary care doctor in Oakland, Calif., Dr. Vanessa Grubbs fell in love with a man who had been living with kidney disease since he was a teenager. Their relationship brought Grubbs face to face with the dilemmas of kidney transplantation — and the racial biases she found to be embedded in the way donated kidneys are allocated. Robert Phillips, who eventually became her husband, had waited years for a transplant; Grubbs ended up donating one of her own kidneys to him. And along the way she found a new calling as a nephrologist — a kidney doctor. (Martin, 6/24)

The Wall Street Journal: How Apps Can Help Manage Chronic Diseases
Technology is offering a new fix for one of the most confounding health-care challenges: getting patients with chronic disease to take better care of themselves. About half of all adults suffer from one or more chronic diseases, which account for seven of 10 deaths and 86% of U.S. health-care costs. But preventing and treating such ailments requires time that doctors don’t have in brief office visits, and a degree of daily self-management that many patients have been unable to handle. They often become overwhelmed by the demands of their daily regimens, slip back into poor health habits, fail to take their medications correctly—and end up in the emergency room. (Landro, 6/25)

The Washington Post: Physician Couple Toilet-Trains Newborn, Skips Diapers
When two California doctors were expecting their third child, they wanted to stop contributing to the more than 27 billion disposable diapers dumped yearly into U.S. landfills. But washing cloth diapers wasn’t an environment-friendly alternative, either. Then Rosemary She read about a way to skip diapers altogether. Called elimination communication, the method has parents and caregivers tune in to a baby’s cues and natural rhythms and bring the child to a toilet when it seems like the right time. (Cohen, 6/24)

The Washington Post: Some Scientists Have Been Their Own Guinea Pigs In The Lab
Werner Forssmann had a plan — a plan he knew his superiors would never approve. The 24-year-old German surgeon was frustrated by how difficult it was to access the human heart, but he doubted he’d get permission to perform a risky new procedure. And so, in 1929, he tried it on himself, thereby joining an age-old club: scientists who use themselves as guinea pigs. Forssmann’s plan was rudimentary and extremely dangerous. With the help of a nurse who hadn’t realized what was about to happen, he pushed an oiled urinary catheter through a vein in his arm and almost all the way to his heart, then rushed to another floor of his clinic to X-ray the results. An appalled colleague fought to remove the catheter but was unable to do so before Forssmann pushed the catheter all the way into his heart and proved the procedure wouldn’t kill a patient. (Blakemore, 6/24)

Reuters: More Playtime With Dad Linked To Lower Obesity Risk For Young Kids
Fathers who get increasingly involved in raising their children may be helping to lower the youngsters’ risk of obesity, a new study suggests. Researchers examined how often fathers participated in parenting activities such as caregiving, making meals and playing outside, and how much they participated in decisions related to nutrition, health and discipline when the children were 2 and 4 years old. (6/24)

The Washington Post: How Safe And Sanitary Is ‘Body Art’? Laws Regulating Tattoos, Piercing Vary Widely.
Anyone who goes into a tattoo parlor in North Carolina can be assured that it has a permit from the state health department and that inspectors have checked the premises for safe and sanitary conditions. But go for a body piercing in the state and there’s no such protection. A state law, approved in the 1990s, regulates tattoos but doesn’t apply to other forms of body art. “Most people think it’s all regulated,” said state Rep. Kevin Corbin, a Republican. “But we found out there’s no law on the books.” (Mercer, 6/25)

The New York Times: Antibiotic Eye Drops Often Unhelpful For Pinkeye
Doctors often prescribe antibiotic eye drops to people with conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, even though they are almost always ineffective, a new study found. About 80 percent of cases of pinkeye are caused by a virus, and there is no treatment for viral conjunctivitis. Most bacterial conjunctivitis is mild and will get better in a week or two without treatment. Antibiotics are effective only in the much smaller number of cases that involve the bacteria that cause gonorrhea or chlamydia. (Bakalar, 6/22)

Kaiser Health News: ‘No One Wants To Be Old’: How To Put The ‘Non-Age’ In Nonagenerian
Wilhelmina Delco learned to swim at 80. Harold Berman is in his 67th year practicing law. Mildred Walston spent 76 years on the job at a candy company. And brothers Joe and Warren Barger are finding new spots in their respective homes for the gold medals they’ve just earned in track-and-field events at the National Senior Games. These octogenarians and nonagenarians may not be widely known outside their local communities, but just as their more famous peers — think Carl Reiner, Betty White, Dr. Ruth (Westheimer) or Tony Bennett — the thread that binds them is not the year on their birth certificate but the way they live. (Jayson, 6/26)

The Baltimore Sun: Heart Healthy Diet As Effective As Statins, American Heart Association Says 
Replacing foods high in saturated fats with those that have unsaturated fats can reduce a person's chance of developing heart disease as much as cholesterol lowering drugs known as statins, according to new advice from the American Heart Association. This would mean, for instance, swapping that steak for a healthier avocado, using canola oil instead of butter, and not eating carb-filled junk food. (Cohn, 6/23)