Vitamin D Determines Severity in COVID-19: Researchers Urge Government to Change Advice

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin are calling on the government in Ireland to change recommendations for vitamin D supplements.

A new publication from Dr. Eamon Laird and Professor Rose Anne Kenny, School of Medicine, and the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), in collaboration with Professor Jon Rhodes at University of Liverpool, highlights the association between vitamin D levels and mortality from COVID-19.

The authors of the article, just published in the Irish Medical Journal, analyzed all European adult population studies, completed since 1999, which measured vitamin D and compared vitamin D and death rates from COVID-19.

Vitamin D is produced in the skin from UVB sunlight exposure and is transported to the liver and then the kidney where it is changed into an active hormone that increases calcium transport from food in the gut and ensures calcium is adequate to keep the skeleton strong and free of osteoporosis.
But vitamin D can also support the immune system through a number of immune pathways involved in fighting SARS-CoV-2. Many recent studies confirm the pivotal role of vitamin D in viral infections.

This study shows that, counter intuitively, countries at lower latitude and typically sunny countries, such as Spain and Northern Italy, had low concentrations of vitamin D and high rates of vitamin D deficiency. These countries also experienced the highest infection and death rates in Europe.

The northern latitude countries of Norway, Finland, and Sweden, have higher vitamin D levels despite less UVB sunlight exposure, because supplementation and fortification of foods is more common. These Nordic countries have lower COVID-19 infection and death rates. The correlation between low vitamin D levels and death from COVID-19 is statistically significant.

The authors propose that, whereas optimizing vitamin D levels will certainly benefit bone and muscle health, the data suggests that it is also likely to reduce serious COVID-19 complications. This may be because vitamin D is important in regulation and suppression of the inflammatory cytokine response, which causes the severe consequences of COVID-19 and ‘acute respiratory distress syndrome’ associated with ventilation and death.

Professor Rose Anne Kenny said:

“In England, Scotland and Wales, public health bodies have revised recommendations since the COVID-19 outbreak. Recommendations now state that all adults should take at least 400 IU vitamin D daily. Whereas there are currently no results from randomized controlled trials to conclusively prove that vitamin D beneficially affects COVID-19 outcomes, there is strong circumstantial evidence of associations between vitamin D and the severity of COVID-19 responses, including death.”

“This study further confirms this association. We call on the Irish government to update guidelines as a matter of urgency and encourage all adults to take supplements during the COVID-19 crisis. Deficiency is frequent in Ireland. Deficiency is most prevalent with age, obesity, in men, in ethnic minorities, in people with diabetes, hypertension and in nursing homes.”

Dr. Eamon Laird added:

“Here we see observational evidence of a link of vitamin D with mortality. Optimizing vitamin D intake to public health guidelines will certainly have benefits for overall health and support immune function. Research like this is still exploratory and we need further trials to have concrete evidence on the level of vitamin D that is needed for optimal immune function. However, studies like this also remind us how low our vitamin D status is in the population (even in sunny countries) and adds further weight to some sort of mandatory vitamin D fortification policy. If the Nordic countries are allowed to do this, there is no reason Ireland, the UK or rest of Europe can’t either.”

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5 Neuroscience Based Ways to Clear Your Mind

As an ultra-endurance athlete, I’ve competed in the Badwater Ultramarathon a few times. Some call Badwater the “world’s toughest footrace” because it's a 135-mile non-stop run from the bottom of Death Valley to Mt. Whitney—in the middle of July, when temperatures can reach 130 degrees.

The physical discomfort of running five marathons back-to-back through Death Valley in the middle of July requires more psychological finesse than it does aerobic endurance. Succeeding in sports is always going to rely on mastering your mindset and explanatory styles. As Yogi Berra said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical.”

One of the most important skills I've learned as an ultra-endurance athlete is how to clear my mind of unwanted thoughts. When your feet are covered in blisters, the pavement is hot enough to fry an egg, and you still have three marathons to run, you learn quickly how to pull any tricks from your psychological toolbox that will help you reach the finish line.

When every alarm in your body and brain is sounding a red alert telling you to stop, how does someone push through and keep on going? When it comes to clearing your mind of unwanted thoughts, taking a multi-pronged approach that gives the situation what it needs has always worked for me in sports, and I think it will work for you, too, in sport and in life.

For this post, I’ve compiled a top-five list of mental tricks I learned as an athlete to clear my mind of pain, negative thinking, anxiety, rumination, and self-sabotage. I’ve paired the lessons I learned through life experience with the latest neuroscientific evidence. I also included some images that capture the essence of each point, as a picture really is worth a thousand words.

1. Distraction

American editor and publisher Elbert Hubbard,once said, “Life without absorbing occupation is hell—joy consists in forgetting life.” Neuroscientists at Brown University recently confirmed that the key to “optimal inattention” lies in occupying your mind with something else through distraction.

The mind can only really think of one thing at a time. When you concentrate your attention on one thing, you inevitably engage the parallel act of purposefully ignoring other things. In a 2015 study, “Attention Drives Synchronization of Alpha and Beta Rhythms between Right Inferior Frontal and Primary Sensory Neocortex,” published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers at Brown were able to identify how the brain achieves "optimal inattention" by changing the synchronization of brainwaves between different brain regions. The researchers hope that by harnessing the “power to ignore," people with chronic pain will have new cognitive tools for reducing their pain.

For this study, participants were told that they would feel a brief tap on the left middle finger or the left big toe. In some cases, they were then told to report only stimuli felt on the foot and to disregard what they might feel on their hand. In other cases, they were told to attend to or report sensations only in the hand and to ignore those in the foot.

The researchers found significant patterns of synchrony between various regions which showed that the mind could direct attention to either the hand or the foot, but not both at the same time.

If you ever find yourself obsessing or ruminating about a thought, remember that distraction is a highly effective way to shift the synchronization of your brainwaves and gives you the "power to ignore" on demand. 

2. MindfulnessThe Brown study's co-senior author, Catherine Kerr, is an assistant professor of family medicine in the Alpert Medical School. Her team has also found that people can learn how to manipulate their alpha rhythms in the somatosensory cortex as they switch their attentional focus though mindfulness training.

The results of their latest research expand our understanding of how mindfulness might possibly operate using the mechanism of redirecting attention via control of alpha rhythms in the brain, which can help people ignore depressive thoughts. In a press release, she said:

This is part of a really cool effort ... to see if you can take pretty high-level cognitive questions, find the relevant areas in the brain, and then figure out how to put that in a context with the underlying neurophysiology, at the level of computational models and animal models. We're linking different ways of looking at the brain that don't usually come into dialogue with one another.

In another recent study from Lund University in Sweden, researchers led by Jan Sundquist found that mindfulness treatment can be as effective as individual cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in patients with depression and anxiety.

3. Suppression
Nietzsche said, “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.” It turns out that modern brain imaging technology has allowed neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge to identify two opposite ways in which the brain forgets unwanted memories.

In a 2012 study, “Opposing Mechanisms Support the Voluntary Forgetting of Unwanted Memories,” published in the journal Neuron, the researchers’ findings help explain how individuals can cope with negative or traumatic experiences, and could lead to the development of treatments to improve disorders of memory control.

In a press release, lead author Roland Benoit, then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, said, "This study is the first demonstration of two distinct mechanisms that cause such forgetting: one by shutting down the remembering system, and the other by facilitating the remembering system to occupy awareness with a substitute memory."  

During memory suppression, a brain structure called dorsolateral prefrontal cortex inhibited activity in the hippocampus, a region critical for recalling past events.

"A better understanding of these mechanisms and how they break down may ultimately help understanding disorders that are characterized by a deficient regulation of memories, such as post-traumatic stress disorder," Benoit said. "Knowing that distinct processes contribute to forgetting may be helpful, because people may naturally be better at one approach or the other."

4. Substitution

Although the strategies of using suppression and substitution were found to be equally effective at voluntarily forgetting unwanted memories, the researchers at Cambridge found that they activated very distinct neural circuits.

If suppression doesn't work, you might want to put on your "rose-tinted glasses" and try substitution, by using your imagination to pretend you're in a different place or experiencing something else.

The Cambridge researchers found that memory substitution was supported by caudal prefrontal cortex and midventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These are two regions typically involved in bringing specific memories into awareness in the presence of distracting memories.

The next time you need to clear your mind, remember that you can forget unwanted memories by either suppressing them or substituting them with more desirable ones, and that each of these tactics engages distinct neural pathways.

5. Meditation

Rebecca Erwin Wells, M.D.,and Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D. at Wake Forest Baptist Health are investigating the power of meditation as a therapy to reduce pain and everyday anxiety in healthy individuals with no previous meditation experience.

When Wells was a varsity rower at the University of North Carolina, her coach had all the members of the team take a yoga and meditation class. The experience had a huge impact. In a press release Wells recalled the experience:

My teammates and I noticed that yoga and meditation improved our flexibility and focus, but also made us feel better, not just when we were rowing but in our everyday lives. I wondered if yoga and meditation really have scientific benefits, especially if they have specific effects on the brain, and if so, how that works.

"We're coming to recognize that meditation changes people's brains," said Wells, now an assistant professor of neurology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "And we're just beginning to gain understanding of what those changes mean and how they might benefit the meditator."

In the first study, her team found that just eight weeks of meditation significantly improved functional connectivity in the brain's network that is active during introspective thought such as retrieving memories. They also observed trends of less atrophy in the hippocampus.

Zeiden is exploring the specific brain mechanisms that influence meditation's ability to reduce perceptions of pain and the experience of anxiety. In Zeidan's pain study, participants were asked to grade the pain caused by a device that heated a small area of their skin to 120 degrees. Participants who rated the pain they felt while they meditated reported the pain as 40 percent less intense and 57 percent less unpleasant than when they simply rested with their eyes closed.

The brain imaging performed during this experiment showed decreased neural activity in the area of the brain involved in feeling the location and intensity of pain and increased activity in brain regions associated with attention and the ability to regulate emotions.

In Zeiden's anxiety-related research, the subjects reported decreases in everyday anxiety by as much as 39 percent after practicing meditation. The scans of their brains while meditating showed increased activity in areas of the cortex associated with regulating thinking, emotions, and worrying. In a press release Zeiden said:

In these studies we've been able to get a better sense of the brain regions associated with reducing pain and anxiety during meditation. Basically, by having people meditate while their brains are being scanned we've been able to objectively verify what people like Buddhist monks have been reporting about meditation for thousands of years.

"Our research shows that meditation produces robust effects in behavior and in the brain and may provide an effective way for people to substantially reduce their pain," Zeidan concluded. "What we have to do now is continue to find out exactly how it works and what it involves."

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
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New drug could offer first treatment for irreversible Huntington's disease

The unstoppable progression of the inherited disease Huntington’s could be slowed or even halted by an experimental new treatment which has proved “enormously successful” in early patient trials.

A trial led by researchers  has demonstrated for the first time that a treatment is capable of suppressing the genetic defect which causes toxic proteins to build up in the brain.

Huntington's sufferers currently face the deterioration of their motor skills, memory and eventually death.

Patients ultimately die from complications including pneumonia and heart failure.

Currently treatments only exist for the symptoms of Huntington’s, which usually begin to appear between the ages of 30 and 50, leading to their gradual decline over the next 10 to 25 years.

Huntington’s sufferers carry a mutation in the Huntington gene, which results in the production of a toxic form of the Huntington protein that attacks the neurons making up the brain and nervous system.

The trial, involving 46 patients with the disease, saw a new experimental drug injected into the spinal fluid to silence the defective section of the genetic code which produces this toxic protein.

Patients were from different countries and roughly a quarter were given a placebo treatment.
 
The participants in the trial saw a drop in the levels of Huntington in the nervous system and, crucially, the drug appeared to be safe without harmful side-effects for patients.

Roughly 10,000 people in the UK have Huntington's, and around 25,000 people have inherited a gene that means they are at risk of developing it later in life.

The trial’s lead investigators, a professor of clinical neurology said: "The results of this trial are of ground-breaking importance for Huntington's disease patients and families.

“For the first time, a drug has lowered the level of the toxic disease-causing protein in the nervous system, and the drug was safe and well tolerated.

“The key now is to move quickly to a larger trial to test whether the drug slows disease progression".
 
“We are encouraged by the performance of IONIS-HTT_Rx in the clinical study,” said a Dr.

He added that the treatment “substantially exceeded our expectations and we were equally encouraged by the safety profile of the drug".

A Dr.  said: “This is a potential game-changer, not only for Huntington's disease patients but also for genomic medicine in general.

"Though more work needs to be done, if gene silencing lives up to this promise we could be on the brink of some of the personalised treatments that patients with severe genetic diseases need so badly.
"But this will also raise further questions for society and for policy-makers about how best to use such a powerful technique.”

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Cheap drug boosts prostate cancer survival

A new study has suggested that increase in chemotherapy can help men with advanced prostate cancer and increase their lifespan. The finding is the reverse of the common wisdom, which says that less treatment is better for cancer patients.

Dr. Christopher Sweeney of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who led the study, said that this is one of the biggest improvements in survival we have seen in patients with adult solid metastatic tumors.

The treatment for men whose prostate cancer has spread is called androgen suppression or chemical castration. Doctors use medicines to reduce testosterone production. It is necessary because this hormone feeds the tumor. But this is not always effective and the doctors then find it tough to decide when to add more chemotherapy.

Doctors, however, take time before recommending chemotherapy because chemo can be toxic. Dr. Clifford Hudis, president of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, said that it is necessary to make right decision at the right time.

Sweeney's team studied 790 men who got either chemical castration alone or with the drug docetaxel. The study was funded by the government. The study showed that after two and a half years, 136 men who received only hormone treatment had died, while 101 men who got both drugs survived.

Hudis said that the study shows a remarkable and meaningful prolongation in survival for advanced prostate cancer. Over 240,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and 30,000 die from it.

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

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Cortisol

The Clues 
When you're under pressure, your cortisol spikes to provide the body with a quick dose of energy. Chronic stress, however, can keep your cortisol elevated continuously--a dangerous state, since the hormone can suppress the immune system and has been linked to the accumulation of abdominal fat. 

What You Can Do 
When I'm stressed, I close my eyes and breathe deeply for two to three minutes with one hand on my chest and the other on my belly; my chest stays still while my abdomen rises and falls. As you calm down, your cortisol should drop to normal levels.

ps- this is only for information, always consult you physician before having any particular food/ medication/exercise/other remedies.

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High intensity workouts may curb people's appetite

Some studies have shown that high intensity exercise is tied to appetite suppression and changes in hormones that regulate hunger and fullness, and the new research found different effects on those hormones among the various exercise regimens.

In the latest research,  17 overweight men volunteered to participate in four 30-minute exercise sessions: one in which they only rested and three involving stationary cycling at either moderate, high or very high intensity.

The moderate exercise involved continuous cycling, while the more intense workouts alternated between short bursts of speed and longer stretches of pedalling at a lower speed.

After each session the men drank a liquid meal of about 267 calories. Then, a little over an hour later, the researchers offered the participants oatmeal and told them to eat until they were "comfortably full."

The men ate fewer calories after the high and very high intensity workouts compared to the times when they rested. They also ate less after the very high intensity workout than after the moderate exercise, while the difference between the high intensity workout and the moderate workout was small enough that it could have occurred by chance.

After the sessions, the men ate 764 calories after resting, 710 calories after the moderate exercise, 621 calories after the high intensity workout and 594 calories after the very high intensity workout.

The men also reported eating fewer calories on the day following the highest intensity workout than they did on the days following the other exercise sessions.

They ate 2,000 calories during the day following the very high intensity workout, while they ate a little more than 2,300 calories during the day after the moderate exercise and more than 2,600 during the day following the resting session.

While the study shows promising cuts in calorie intake in the short-term, it's unclear whether high intensity exercise can affect longer term weight loss.

A researcher  who has studied exercise's effect on food intake, cautioned that this was a small study that needs to be repeated before any conclusions can be drawn.

"This study provides some promising preliminary support for this notion, but further research is needed to investigate this in a longer-term study," it is said.

ps- this is only for information, always consult you physician before having any particular food/ medication/exercise/other remedies.

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