Risk of Falling...

Increased Risk of Fall Accident Begins at Age 40 

 

One of the main health concerns of elderly people is falling, which is often related to poor balance. In fact, many studies show that people begin to have balance problems starting at the age of 40 years. The older you get, the weaker your physical body and sensory abilities will be, which are all factors in having poor balance.

In Japan , more than 7,000 people a year die from falling accidents, which already exceeds the number of traffic accidents.

In this article, we'll examine in more details the cause of falling and why you lose balance as you age.

 

 

 

Test Your Balance by Standing on One Leg

 

You can determine how good your balance is by measuring the length of time that you can stand on one leg.

The following table shows the average balance time by age group in a study conducted at a Japanese health institute.

 

Average time with eyes open

20-39 years old: 110 seconds
40-49: 64 seconds
50-59: 36 seconds
60-69: 25 seconds

 

Average time with eyes closed

20-39 years old: 12 seconds
40-49: 7 seconds
50-59: 5 seconds
60-69: less than 3 seconds

 

If your balance time is below average, then you'll have higher risk of falls, or slipping and tripping accidents.

 

In the above study, women tend to lose their balance more than men but only by a small margin (1-2%). From this study, it is also evident that there's a sudden significant decrease in the ability to maintain balance among middle-aged people (40 years and above).

 

Please take note that the numbers stated above are only average. There are people who were able to maintain balance much longer, and there are also those who were only able to maintain their balance at much shorter time regardless of age and gender. The reason why they vary is explained further below.

 

 

 

The Soles of Your Feet Have Sensors

 

The skins all throughout your body have significant amount of tiny pressure sensors or mechanoreceptors. Some areas have few pressure sensors, while other areas have thousands, like on the soles of your feet.

The pressure sensors on the foot soles provide information to your brain to help balance your body. As you get older, the sensors will get weaker and your foot sole lose sensitivity. But there are also other factors that can lead to weaker pressure sensors.

 

 

 

## Poor Blood Circulation Can Disrupt the Pressure Sensors

 

In our study, people are almost twice as likely to be in a fall accident caused by poor blood circulation.

 

This can be simulated by soaking your feet into ice cold water for about 3 minutes. Because of the cold temperature, the pressure sensors on the foot sole begin to lose sensitivity.

 

 

Pay Attention to Your Forward-Moving Foot

 

If your forward-moving foot hit something, your body will be off-balance causing you to fall or trip.

 

Well, it's a matter of common sense to always have your eyes on path and watch where you are going. Remember the old adages -"Prevention is better than cure", "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", "Look before you leap", etc.?

But that's not the only problem. Here are the other two major reasons why you stumble while walking.

 

 

1. Your forward-moving foot is pointed down.

If your foot is pointed down while making a step, then you are more prone to falling. To avoid this, your forefoot or toes should be flexed upwards as shown on the image below.

2. You walk like a pendulum.

The height of your step can greatly increase your risk of falling. To prevent this, your forward-moving foot must be higher off the ground (at least 5 cm) while the knee is raised high as shown on the image below.

Actually, all the mechanoreceptors located throughout your body as well as the soles of your feet are sending information to the brain that include muscle contractions and joint angles.

 

When this information is not transmitted well to your brain, which happens as you get older, then the movement will get weak or ineffective making it hard for you to maintain your foot higher off the ground.

 

 

 

How to Prevent Yourself from a Fall, Trip, or Slip

 

1. Keep Your House Clean

There are a lot of things in your house that can contribute to clutters that can cause you to trip or fall. Always make sure to put away or store properly all personal belongings and other unnecessary things even if it is only a newspaper, remote control, and laundries scattered on the floor or carpet.

 

2. Stretch Your Feet and Ankles

 

You might think that your feet do not need exercise or stretching compared to other parts of your body, but in reality, feet stretching exercise can really help your feet maintain balance.

 

 

 

3. Keep Your House Warm and Ensure Adequate Lighting

Cold muscles and pressure sensors work less well and are less responsive to signals. A decreased temperature will also cause your muscles to have less strength and less flexible, which can lead to accidents.

Always try to keep your house warm or wear proper clothes and footwear, especially during winter. Since most falls occur indoors, make sure your house has adequate lighting.

 

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.








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Virtual reality helps stroke survivors improve memory

Researchers over at the University of Canterbury have showed through their study that there exists a possible treatment that could enable care takers to improve memory of stroke survivors.

University of Canterbury Professor Tanja Mitrovic said that one of the crucial points for those who have suffered from stroke is to improving prospective memory — the ability to remember to perform actions in the future. Mitrovic added, “This kind of memory is often impaired in stroke survivors and can interfere with independent living, as it can result in forgetting to take medication or remember something they had to do.”

Classifying it as a complex cognitive ability, Mitrovic said that it requires coordination of multiple cognitive abilities including spatial navigation, retrospective memory, attention and executive functioning.
 
To address this, the researchers developed a computer-based treatment based on visual imagery that taught participants how to remember time and event-based prospective memory tasks. After the treatment, participants practiced their skills using videos first and later in a 3D virtual reality environment.

“We conducted a study which ended in October last year with 15 stroke survivors. Each participant had 10 individual sessions spread over 10 weeks. The analysis shows that the memory skills of the stroke patients we tested increased significantly,” said Mitrovic.

The final goal was to make the training available freely over the internet to stroke survivors, enabling them to lead a better quality life and freeing some of them from round-the-clock care.

 The research team is now planning for a larger clinical study to explore the effect of similar treatment on brain-injury patients.
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New paper strip test diagnoses Ebola, yellow fever and dengue in just 10 minutes

Early diagnoses of deadly diseases holds a vital key in ability of doctors to try and fend off the virus behind the disease and a new paper strip test developed by MIT researchers does just that. The new test can diagnose deadly Ebola, as well as other viral hemorrhagic fevers such as yellow fever and dengue fever, in just 10 minutes.

Currently utilised lab-based tests for Ebola are accurate, but they are time consuming as they involve sending patients’ blood samples to a lab that can perform advanced techniques such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which can detect genetic material from the Ebola virus. Some areas of Africa where Ebola and other fevers are endemic have limited access to this kind of technology.

“For many hemorrhagic fever viruses, like West Nile and dengue and Ebola, and a lot of other ones in developing countries, like Argentine hemorrhagic fever and the Hantavirus diseases, there are just no rapid diagnostics at all,” says Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

The new paper-strip based test developed by MIT researchers relies on lateral flow technology, which is used in pregnancy tests and has recently been exploited for diagnosing strep throat and other bacterial infections.

Until now, however, no one has applied a multiplexing approach, using multicoloured nanoparticles, to simultaneously screen for multiple pathogens.

Unlike most existing paper diagnostics, which test for only one disease, the new MIT strips are colour-coded so they can be used to distinguish among several diseases.

To achieve that, the researchers used triangular nanoparticles, made of silver, that can take on different colours depending on their size.

The researchers created red, orange, and green nanoparticles and linked them to antibodies that recognise Ebola, dengue fever, and yellow fever.

As a patient’s blood serum flows along the strip, any viral proteins that match the antibodies painted on the stripes will get caught, and those nanoparticles will become visible.

This can be seen by the naked eye; for those who are colour blind, a cellphone camera could be used to distinguish the colours.

“When we run a patient sample through the strip, if you see an orange band you know they have yellow fever, if it shows up as a red band you know they have Ebola, and if it shows up green then we know that they have dengue,” Hamad-Schifferli said.

This process takes about 10 minutes, allowing health care workers to rapidly perform triage and determine if patients should be isolated, helping to prevent the disease from spreading further.

“As we saw with the recent Ebola outbreak, sometimes people present with symptoms and it’s not clear what they have,” said a visiting scientist in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the technical staff at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

“We wanted to come up with a rapid diagnostic that could differentiate between different diseases,” he said.
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New blood test for early cancer detection

Researchers, led by an Indian-origin scientist, have developed a new blood test that may detect a broad range of cancers in the earliest stages by forcing tumours to create a unique protein. 

Stanford University Medical School researchers injected DNA microcircles, a customised genetic construct consisting of tiny rings of DNA, into mice. 

They used a blood test to show that mice with tumours produced a substance that tumour-free mice did not. With blood and urine tests, doctors must depend on detecting biomarkers that the tumour itself makes, ’FoxNews.com’ reported. 

“The challenge for those kinds of biomarkers is that they’re rarely very specific and often not made in sufficient quantities,” Sanjiv “Sam” Gambhir, professor and chair of radiology and director of the Canary Centre at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection, said. 

On the other hand, DNA minicircles work by forcing tumours to make a protein that it otherwise would not to detect the presence of cancer. 

“We flip the problem around. (You’re) no longer dependent on nature to make a molecule that’s unique to cancer. You’re given a pill that forces cancer cells to make the molecule for you,” said Gambhir, the study’s senior author. 

For the purposes of their animal trial, Gambhir noted that a cancerous tumour one cubic millimetre in size, equal to about a grain of rice, would be detectable. 

While researchers have yet to conduct trials with human participants, Gambhir said he hopes minicircles will be able to help detect early and stage 1 cancer. 

The DNA minicircles, which are comprised of tiny rings of DNA, work by going into a cancer cell and turning on the cell’s machinery to make RNA. 

The RNA then makes protein, which in this case is secreted embryonic alkaline phosphatase (SEAP), which then serves as a cancer biomarker. 

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