Popular Medications tied to Brain Damage

Huh, how do you like that little tidbit of information? And I think I just heard on the radio on the 4th that the third highest cause of death is hospital mistakes, though they don't track hospital deaths in that category. (versus airline crashes, etc., which they track and disseminate best practices to pilots.)

EAT FOOD! (Not too much, mostly plants.)

I swear, we only have ourselves to blame. Though I can't persuade my husband to live on a farm and grow our own vegetables. I would love to have some farm animals, but I suppose I am romanticizing it. I am sure I don't have the stick-to-it-iveness needed for such an endeavor. Dang! I'm too soft! Though I do have ideas for a commune with all my besties and a lovely communal kitchen where we can benefit from all the goodness of community! And dancing! (I just heard on the radio that dancing with a group doing the same type of dancing raises the pain threshold... I better find that information and write a little blog post on that! Ok, note to self: add another section to my Commune Plan entitled Dance Night!)

Your favorite cold medicine could be shrinking your brain. A new study reveals that drugs used to treat colds and a range of other common health issues, including allergies, heartburn, hypertension, insomnia, and depression, may erode gray matter and increase the risk for dementia and other cognitive problems in older adults. Over-the-counter and prescription medications, such as Tylenol PM, Benadryl, Claritin, Dimetapp, Paxil, Xanax, Zyrtec, Lasix, and Coumadin, belong to a class of drugs known as anticholinergics. They work by blocking acetylcholine, a chemical that transmits electrical impulses between nerve cells. Using PET and MRI scans, researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine examined the brain structure and metabolism of 451 people with an average age of 73. The study found those taking anticholinergic drugs had smaller brains and lower levels of glucose metabolism, particularly in the hippocampus—a brain region involved with memory that is vulnerable to early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. People on anticholinergics also performed less well on tests measuring short-term memory and executive functions, including planning, verbal reasoning, and problem solving. Alzheimer’s patients are deficient in acetylcholine, which is why, the researchers warn, these drugs could trigger or worsen the disease. If taking them is absolutely necessary, study author Shannon Risacher tells Time.com, “I’d suggest that doctors monitor medications and their effects, and use the lowest dose that’s effective.”

Taken from the May 6th edition of the Week Magazine.

Is obesity CONTAGIOUS? Spores of bacteria from the gut's of fat people 'could spread to healthy individuals'

Hmmm... the hype of this article is that obesity might be contagious, but the thrust is that we might be able to learn some more about the microbiota and get some tailor-made medicine out of it - and the end of fecal transplants! So, whereas the media went negative, this looks positive.

Keep eating your fermented foods to keep up the health of your microbiota!

Obesity could spread from person to person in a similar way to the contagious bug, C.difficile, a new study has suggested.

A growing body of evidence has placed increasing importance on the balance of bacteria in our gut.

Imbalances in the gut microbiome can contribute to a number of complex conditions, including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome and allergies, studies have shown.

But, for the first time, scientists believe traces of the bacteria can survive outside the body, raising the possibility that it could be ingested.

If that bacteria disrupts a person's gut microbiome in a negative way, it is possible, the researchers say, for these complex diseases to manifest themselves.

A team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute turned their attention to the proportion of bacteria that form spores within the gut.

Spores are a form of bacterial hibernation, that allows some bacteria to remain dormant for long periods of time.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute discovered approximately one third of the gut microbiota from a healthy person produced spores that allow bacteria to survive in open air and potentially move between people.

They said this provides a means of microbiota transmission that has not been considered before.

And, furthermore, the authors suggest it could imply that health and certain diseases could be passed, not just through human genetics, but also via the microbiome.

Dr Trevor Lawley, group leader at the Sanger Institute, said: 'Being able to cast light on this microbial "dark matter" has implications for the whole of biology and how we consider health.

'We will be able to isolate the microbes from people with a specific disease, such as infection, cancers or autoimmune diseases, and study these microbes in a mouse model to see what happens.

'Studying our "second" genome, that of the microbiota, will lead to a huge increase in our understanding of basic biology and the relationship between our gut bacteria and health and disease.'

This research will allow scientists to start to create tailor-made treatment with specific beneficial bacteria, they said.

Research in this field has expanded greatly in recent years, with the intestinal microbiome being labeled the 'forgotten organ', such is its importance to human health.

Around two per cent of a person's body weight is linked to bacteria.

Many of these bacteria are sensitive to oxygen and are difficult to culture in the laboratory, so until now it has been very difficult to isolate and study them.

Hilary Browne from the Sanger Institute, explained: 'It has become increasingly evident that microbial communities play a large role in human health and disease.

'By developing a new process to isolate gastrointestinal bacteria, we were able to sequence their genomes to understand more about their biology.

'We can also store them for long periods of time making them available for further research.'
Antibiotics wipe out our gut bacteria - killing both the pathogen targets and the beneficial bacteria too.

There is then the potential for less desirable bacteria, such as those with antibiotic resistance, to repopulate the gut faster than the beneficial bacteria, leading to further health issues, such as Clostridium difficile infection.

Current treatment for C. difficile infection can involve transplants of faeces from healthy people, to repopulate the gut.

However this treatment is far from ideal.

Using the library of new bacteria, Dr Lawley and his team are hoping to create a pill, containing a rationally selected, defined mix of bacteria, which could be taken by patients and replace faecal transplants.

Dr Sam Forster from the Sanger Institute and Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Australia said: 'The extensive database of genomes we have generated from these bacteria is also essential for studying which bacteria are present or absent in people with gastrointestinal conditions.

'Now we can start to design mixtures of therapeutics candidates for use in these diseases.'

The findings are published in Nature.

After searching for 50 years, woman, 82, finds her 96-year-old birth mother

What a wonderful story; to have waited so long, but to be lucky enough that your Mom is still living. How fortunate! I believe it is 70 years after pieces of information are generated before they can be published openly. Clearly this illustrates that 70 years isn't enough for privacy - but for those of us doing research, too long! How nice that Morrell's daughter had the genealogy bug!

Taken from the February 19, 2016 edition of The Week Magazine, by Catherine Garcia:

It took five decades, but Betty Morrell, 82, finally tracked down her 96-year-old birth mother after stumbling upon a key piece of information online.

Morrell was adopted as an infant, and told that her biological mother died during childbirth. She waited until her adoptive parents died before trying to find her birth mother, and since it was a closed adoption, information was scarce. Morrell was finally able to determine that she was born in Utica, New York, in 1933 to a 13-year-old ward of the state named Lena Pierce. Her name at birth was Eva May.

Morrell's granddaughter, Kimberly Miccio, 32, spent years helping her grandmother search for any details on her birth family, and in September, she finally found on Ancestry.com the name of a distant relative, who put her in touch with Pierce's daughter, Millie Hawk. "I had found my baby sister, who's 65," Morrell told The Associated Press. "We just clicked. It was like we had known each other all our lives." It turns out, she also has three other sisters and two brothers, and Pierce is still alive and living in Hallstead, Pennsylvania.

Hawk said when she told her mother about Morrell, "she just sat down in a chair and cried. She said, 'My Eva May, they found her?' It was just so emotional." Morrell flew up from Florida with Miccio to meet her newfound family, and there were tears, Pierce said. "It sure was a joy to finally meet up with her," she added. "It's kind of hard when you have a child that you get separated from. I never wanted to give her up." Morrell and Hawk now talk all the time, and they're already planning their next visit. Morrell told AP that people searching for their birth families should keep hope alive: "I say absolutely don't give up. There's always something that will link it. It's a lot of work. It took me 50 years."

Johann Christoph Dommerich - lived in the mid 17th century

I started thinking about Johann Christoph Dommerich, 'the first of the line whom certain knowledge exists." (Of course, from where? Who has this knowledge?) The book Our Colonial and Continent Ancestors: The Ancestry of Mr. and Mrs. Louis William Dommerich reveals that "he was a citizen and master boot-maker at the town of Erfurt, Germany and lived during and after the middle of the seventeenth century. He married Maria Magdalene Bode and had a son of the same name as his own..."

That's all I have to go on.

With that information, I put together a little outline:

Erfurt in 1650 (Taken from Wikipedia)

1. Johann was born in the middle of the 17th century in Erfurt, Germany
1. There was a University in Erfurt – being in existence from 1379
1. Means educated people
2. People from all over the area; cosmopolitan environment
2. Erfurt was the capital of Thuringia and geographically the center of modern Germany (which of course does not come about until 1871)
1. The city is still intact and it is a medieval city (see above)
2. The city was situated on the Via Regia, a medieval trade and pilgrims road network
1. Again, lots of different people blowing through town
3. The city lost its independence in 1664, the time when Johann was wandering through the streets
4. The Electorate of Mainz built a fortress on Petersburg Hill between 1665 and 1726 ‘to control the city and instituted a governor to rule Erfurt.'
3. The cathedral has been there for 1,200 years
1. Martin Luther was ordained in this Cathedral in 1507
4. The Ottoman Empire was expanding during this time and was held back at the Battle of Vienna in 1683
2. Johann was a citizen
1. Does this mean he owned land?
3. Johann was a master boot maker
1. Is this a respected profession?
2. Would he be educated if he were a master bootmaker? 
4. Wife was Maria Magdalene Bode

Photographs taken from Wikipedia.

Alter of the Cathedral

Cathedral on the left

German Family Research

My grandmother privately published a book called Our Heritage in 1955. I found many of the books she used as source material, including a book entitled Our Colonial and Continental Ancestors: The Ancestry of Mr. and Mrs. Louis William Dommerich.

I confess I haven't studied the bibliography of that book; I have a terribly reproduced copy of the book, though an aunt has an original book, so I might go ahead and check there.

However, my grandmother claims that a Dommerich married a Heusinger von Waldegg. I am trying to make/document that connection. I have been using the resources of a German Genealogy Facebook page and when asking questions I did get a mildly snarky answer that 'family stories are fun, but rarely is there any truth.' Now, why would one need to say something like that? BUT, it seems that perhaps the von Waldegg is a royal line.... hence the snarkiness. Though I did not know that, of course. And, I haven't yet documented the connection, so perhaps my grandmother was trying for a royal line! Though she never, ever said anything to me about it, nor to any of my relatives, and if it were a fun family story, then I should have gotten to enjoy some of that fun, right?

I was kindly pointed to a website which had the line, with names similar though spelled differently, that brought me down to exactly the point I needed to be, the parents of the bride, Johanne Katharine Heusinger von Waldegg, but this web site claims no children sprang from the union! Ha! So no little Johanne to marry lonely little Christoph Carl Dommerich!

Unfortunately my German in nonexistent... so I don't know what this website is. How reliable is the information contained in this web site? I have posed the question to a fellow user of the Facebook group and hopefully I will get an answer.

Insomnia linked to brain changes

Put away your phones! Turn off Netflix! Light a candle and find a Griot to tell you a story! And then get to bed!

You know you want that sleep, so really, turn off that TV. (I am not going to practice what I preach though... luckily I can wake when I want to, or when the cat jumps on me for food.)

About 5 percent of the population suffers from insomnia, and new research indicates chronic sleeplessness may be damaging their brains. Using an advanced MRI technique, researchers in China compared the brains of 23 patients with insomnia with the brains of 30 people with normal sleep habits. Those with insomnia had significantly less white matter, the communication system that relays neural signals to different parts of the brain, MedicalDaily​.com reports. “If white matter tracts are impaired, communication between brain regions is disrupted,” says study author Shumei Li. Among the affected areas are the thalamus, which regulates sleep and alertness, and the limbic system, which is involved in learning, memory, and emotion. At this early stage, researchers caution, it’s not clear whether degraded white matter is a cause of insomnia—or a result.

And yet another tidbit taken from the April 22 edition of the Week Magazine.

Did humans kill off the hobbits?

Honestly, I need more information on how scientists figure this stuff out. I am taking a MOOC through Coursera on the subject of 3-D printing to learn the basics of that technology, maybe I should search for an anthropology free course... Anyway, they still need proof for this 'hunch.'

It's funny to think about evolution, isn't it? I mean I guess I always sorta had it in my head that we were the end result of evolution, not just a point on a never ending chain. And to think about all the iterations of life on this planet... why would we think that humans are the pinnacle? I think Stephen Hawkings recently publicly voiced that we really should be looking for ways to protect ourselves from another meteor crash a la Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck's silly movie whose name I can't think of at the moment. I found reference to Hawkings' pronouncement here, though I have no idea about the credibility of the website.

I guess this theory also supports the additonal data that humans have been wiping out species left and right for millions of years. Too bad our detectives are finding the clues to the crimes; we can't get away with it forever.

Evolutionary researchers are fascinated by Homo floresiensis, a mysterious species of 3-foot-tall human ancestors unearthed a dozen years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. At first, fossil remains seemed to suggest these creatures—nicknamed hobbits, after the diminutive characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels—lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. But new excavations indicate they roamed the island much earlier than previously thought—perhaps between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that hobbits outlived Neanderthals, which became extinct at least 28,000 years ago, and that they co-existed with Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. In fact, Homo floresiensis did not survive long once modern humans arrived in the region, suggesting that they may have been driven to extinction. “We were likely the decisive factor in their demise,” researcher Bert Roberts of Australia’s University of Wollongong tells Reuters.com. “But we still need to find hard evidence to back up this hunch.”

Taken from the April 22 edition of the Week Magazine.

1919 May Report

And here we are... Gone from France and finding our way back to American soil. Herb and his section leave France on May 7th and arrive in the US on the 19th, having sailed on the USS Rhode Island. You can read about the USS Rhode Island here. I took the following photograph from that wikipedia site.



It is fun to see Herb's handwriting on this final report... back to handwritten forms, no longer typed.

A global obesity epidemic

WTF? I am so disappointed in us. This is all since 1975? And we are shipping it abroad? No wonder everyone hates Americans. (I don't really mean that... well, maybe I do, but I am sure it's not our food that the rest of the world objects to... wait, or is it? Diplomacy by keeping our plastic food to ourselves?) Why have we not definitively agreed on the cause? I suppose the entire global economic system might implode if we did what was right for our health - like Michael Pollan said: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If we didn't eat the crap manufactured by the likes of General Mills and Kraft all the employees would be jobless... Check out this previous Blog Post for discussions about manufactured food and the American military. Can you imagine if we fell back to being an agrarian society? Crap, seems like a lot of news stories are about the younger generations doing just that... with their smart phones in their back pockets.

So, looking for the correct wording of Michael Pollan's quote I found this other quote. Perfect for this blog: "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Those are words to live by! Ok, Nellie Jane Kirkpatrick, I look to you from now on! (I probably should have been for a long time now.... I wish I had learned some things from her.)

Again, taken from the April 22 edition of The Week Magazine:

Obesity now affects more human beings on this planet than hunger. New research reveals that as wealth and abundant food spread throughout the world, chronic overeating has reached epidemic proportions, putting millions of people at risk for heart attack, stroke, cancer, and other life-­threatening ailments. Based on studies encompassing 186 countries, researchers found that the number of obese men has tripled since 1975, while the number of obese women has doubled. Just 2.6 percent of the world’s population was classified as obese 40 years ago, but by 2014 that figure had climbed to 8.9 percent, roughly 640 million people. “We have changed from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” says study author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London. The crisis has struck almost every corner of the planet, most severely in affluent, English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the U.K. If the trend continues, about one-fifth of the world’s adults will be obese by 2025, The Guardian (U.K.) reports, a particular threat to low-income nations ill-equipped to manage obesity-related disease. The epidemic is too widespread to combat only with medications or “a few extra bike lanes,” Ezzati says. “We need coordinated global initiatives, such as looking at the price of healthy food compared [with that of] unhealthy food, or taxing high-sugar and highly processed foods.”

I know it is not a popular position, but I agree we should tax high-sugar and highly processed "food". (Though I believe in the US we do not tax actual food, just the rest of the stuff in the grocery store, like tampons, but that is another discussion and probably not for here.)

It Must Be True... I Read It In The Tabloids

I think about my blog all the time, why I can't get here to write, I don't know. I am here today, though to share with you a tidbit from The Week Magazine.

This was taken from a recent edition of the publication, April 22. Please look for it here.

Identical twin sisters from China and their identical twin husbands plan to undergo plastic surgery because they can’t tell who is married to whom. The mix-ups began as soon as Yun Fei and Yun Yang got hitched to brothers Zhao Xin and Zhao Xua in a joint ceremony, with one brother finding himself holding hands with his sister-in-law during a romantic after-dinner stroll. The confusion got so bad on their joint honeymoon that the couples decided to get plastic surgery. Surgeons have agreed to subtly alter the quartet’s noses and foreheads, making each twin more identifiable.

Why plastic surgery? Why not a tattoo? Or, how about getting different wardrobes, and shopping as a couple so the spouse knows what you purchased. (Though perhaps everyone has the same sense of style...) How about living in different places so you don't run in to each other so often? I mean, really, a joint wedding and then a joint honeymoon? And why is it the women who will be getting the surgery? Hmmm?

And, if you are willing to do this in the first place, does it even matter if you are with your sister's husband? I mean, what does it really matter at that point, you haven't asserted any individuality.


Can you imagine as a future genealogist trying to identify who is who in photographs? What a B-I-T-C-H! And, how similarly will the children look to one another? What a freaky idea to contemplate.

AND, of course, this could all be baloney, as the title suggests... 'This must be true, I read it in the tabloids.' Man, I was actually getting my panties in a bunch there....