Author Archives: markdowe1

Health, Medical, Research, Science

Lifestyle factors in keeping dementia at bay

MEDICAL RESEARCH

DOCTORS have identified seven lifestyle factors in middle age which have a significant influence on the risk of developing dementia in later life.

A major study suggests each of the seven elements – weight, diet, exercise, cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure and smoking – contributes to the chance of getting dementia.

Scientists at the University of Bordeaux tracked more than 6,600 French people from Bordeaux, Dijon and Montpellier.

The participants, who were at least 65 at the start of the study, were tested for the seven elements and then monitored for an average of eight and a half years.

For each of the seven tests that they “passed” as healthy, the risk of developing dementia over the following years went down by 10 per cent.

The scientists, whose findings were first reported and published in the JAMA medical journal, said their study demonstrates the link between cardiovascular health and the resilience of the brain.

“These findings may support the promotion of cardiovascular health to prevent risk factors associated with cognitive decline and dementia,” they wrote.

Experts in Britain say the findings from the research highlight the fact that the risk of dementia can be reduced with a healthy lifestyle.

A spokesperson for Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “Although age is the largest risk factor for dementia, the condition is not an inevitable part of getting older and there are things we can all do to help reduce our risk.

“This large study of over 6,000 older people in France adds to a wealth of existing evidence indicating that what is good for the heart is also good for the brain.

“We know that the diseases that cause dementia can begin to develop in the brain up to 20 years before symptoms show so it’s never too early to take steps to reduce your risk.

“As well as these seven aspects of healthy living, drinking within recommended guidelines and staying mentally active and socially engaged have also been linked to better brain health in later life.”

Dr Doug Brown, chief policy officer at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “Of all the diseases in the UK dementia is now the biggest killer, so exploring potential factors which could reduce the risk of developing this devastating condition is fundamental to beating it.

“Taking care of your cardiovascular health… may help slow cognitive decline and reduce your risk of getting dementia.

“Although this study stopped short of examining whether participants had healthy hearts in earlier life – which might have contributed to fewer of them getting dementia in later life – everyone should take steps from an early age such as eating a balanced diet, avoiding smoking and heavy drinking, and exercising regularly.”

The Seven Lifestyle Factors

. Weight – Have a body mass index (BMI) of less than 25

. Diet – Eat fish twice a week and fruits and vegetables at least three times a day

. Exercise – Walk more than two hours a day or take part in intensive sport more than twice a week

. Cholesterol – Levels need to be less than 200 mg/dL (milligrams per decilitre)

. Blood Sugar – Should be less than 100 mg/dL

. Blood Pressure – Should be less than 120/80 mmHg

. Smoking – Not smoking

MANY adults put off going to see their GP because they do not like being told what to do, research suggests.

Data from 4.300 Britons saw nearly one in five admit they had delayed making an appointment to avoid being lectured about lifestyle changes.

Experts say patients stay away for fear of giving away control – even when they are already showing worrying health symptoms – and warns this poses a considerable threat to public health.

The report, by experts at University College London, the University of Bedfordshire and thinktank 2020 Health, says many people also have a “fear of finding out” they are unhealthy and so avoid their doctor.

This can lead to major issues in the long term because minor problems missed at an early stage can escalate into far more severe issues. Many people – especially the rising number who know they do too little exercise or are overweight – do not report health complaints for fear of being lectured about their lifestyle.

GPs are encouraged by the NHS to ask patients about their weight and how much exercise they do, and are often given financial incentives to give weight-loss advice.

A spokesperson for 2020 Health, said: “It’s easy to think that consumers are wilfully refusing to change unhealthy habits, but the truth is, we are bombarded by conflicting health advice and mixed messages everywhere we turn.

“This is both confusing and dangerous as it can lead to important, evidence-based health information and guidance being lost or overlooked.

“Not only are lifestyle changes undermined, but the importance of getting specific symptoms checked out early are obscured.” Some 18 per cent of participants in the study – nearly one in five – said they had delayed an appointment because they were worried they might be pressured to change their lifestyle.

With 68 per cent of men and 58 per cent of women in Britain now overweight or obese, many may have reason to fear being lectured.

A quarter of participants said they had avoided a doctor because they did not want to be physically examined. A fifth said they were anxious about treatment that might be required, and another fifth were worried about the impact a diagnosis may have on family members.

The report, funded by pharmaceutical firm AbbVie, said patients who go to their doctor when they have a problem actually have a smaller impact on the NHS.

It said: “The model of the ‘good patient’ [is] one who adopts a healthier lifestyle, sees the doctor promptly if they notice what could be the early signs of illness and turns up to routine health checks and screening appointments.”

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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: Endeavour

REVIEW

Endeavour

“Endeavour” by Peter Moore is a factual historical insight into the ship’s discovery of the New World. The ship was led by Captain James Cook.

THERE are many books about Captain James Cook and his circumnavigation of the globe whilst aboard HMS Endeavour. Cook’s biographer, JC Beaglehole, wrote: “Really, that voyage makes most of the other Great Occasions of the 18th century seem pretty silly.”

Peter Moore is the first to concentrate on the ship itself, which set sail 250 years ago this week, having begun life as the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby-built collier: flat-bottomed, round and sturdy, with a broad and voluminous hull, launched in 1764 to ship coal from Newcastle to London.

Moore’s approach is lavishly digressive, and he is inclined to foreground his subject’s background. So, he gives a detailed account of Whitby’s development from a fishing village, and of the career of the master shipbuilder Thomas Fishburn. Nor does he neglect the oak trees used for the Earl of Pembroke’s floors, futtocks and so forth, beginning with their growth from acorns to oaklings, “capped with a pair of helicopter leaves that tilt and turn and thrill to the sun”. After rather a lot of this, Moore turns to the transformation of an “utterly ordinary” ship into a “completely extraordinary” one, and his story takes wing.

 

IN 1766, the Royal Society resolved to send astronomers to North America, Norway and the South Seas to observe the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun, on June 3, 1769. To lead the South Seas mission it chose Alexander Dalrymple, a thrusting young Scot determined to discover the rumoured southern continent of Terra Australis.

However, in March 1768, the Society’s clerk and collector absconded with all its money. It appealed for funds to the King, who provided £4,000. That meant that the voyage would be a joint venture between the Society and the Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty, which vetoed the civilian command of a king’s ship. Dalrymple was ousted in favour of James Cook, a seasoned naval commander, joined by the 25-year-old Joseph Banks, “a remarkable botanist and intrepid man of science”.

The Earl of Pembroke was not an elegant ship, and had no great cabin for officers, but she was strong, and her massive hold was suitable for the storage of necessary provisions. She was duly acquired and refitted at Deptford with a new internal deck and cabins, including a great one. As “a hybrid of a transport and a sloop”, it was given the more dashing name of Endeavour, and stock with great quantities of bread, salt beef and pork, oil and sugar, beer and spirits and, to remedy scurvy, “a proper quantity of Sour Kraut”.

In 1767, Samuel Wallis, commanding HMS Dolphin in search of the elusive Terra Australis, had claimed Otaheite (Tahiti) for Britain as King George’s Island, to which the Endeavour set off on August 25, 1768. When it landed the next April, Cook set about building Fort Venus, with an observatory, telescopes, clocks and astronomical quadrant.

During its three months on the island, the expedition met the formidable Purea, known to them as “Queen Oboreah”, and her lover, Tupaia, who became their fixer and prepared them a dinner of roast dog to celebrate King George’s birthday. Tupaia insisted on accompanying them on their departure, and guided them through the 250-mile archipelago that Cook named the Society Islands, and onwards to New Zealand.

Initial contracts with the Maoris were violent, and Cook shot four of them, but after Tupaia addressed them in his own language, and was understood, Cook and a Maori “saluted by touching noses”, which Moore inevitably calls “an iconic first encounter”. With great accuracy, Cook then charted the 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coastline. In April 1770, the expedition had its first view of the eastern coastline of New Holland, failing to realise that it had found Terra Australis, and landed at what would be called Botany Bay, where the natives seemed indifferent to the Endeavour and its proffered trinkets.

Cook decided not to explore the bay to the north, so missing what became Sydney Harbour, and Endeavour set off on her return voyage. On the night of June 10, she crashed into the Great Barrier Reef and was badly holed. It put in for repairs at what would become the Endeavour River, in what is now Queensland, where many of the ship’s company died, Tupaia among them. Before they left, they sighted a strange new creature, “as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift.” The natives called it a kanguru.

The Endeavour’s return to London in July 1771 was met with general acclamation, but Samuel Johnson was unimpressed. “They have found very little, only one new animal, I think,” he told James Boswell, who recalled his imitation of it: “He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.”

In 1776, after three voyages to the Falkland Islands, the by now rather decrepit Endeavour was patched and plugged and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and carried Hessian mercenaries to defeat Washington’s army in New York. The next year she became a prison ship at Newport, Rhode Island, and in August 1778, to obstruct the French fleet that had come to the aid of the Americans in the Battle of Rhode Island, she was scuttled. In 1971, a fragment of her travelled to the moon on Apollo 15.

Much of the story of Cook’s ship is familiar, and Moore’s telling of it makes for quite heavy going, but it is, undeniably, a rollicking yarn.

– Endeavour, by Peter Moore, is published by Chatto & Windus for £20, EBook £9.99

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Banking, Economic, European Union, Greece

The Greek bailout: Athens is still being betrayed by the EU

ESSAY

AFTER several years in which Greece was kept afloat by the munificence of the eurozone countries, Athens was trumpeted by many media outlets this week as being free at last from an EU bailout programme worth 61.9billion euros (£55billion) in emergency loans. That was part of an eight-year rescue package worth £258billion.

Despite the reports of economic privation and the dark clouds over Greece finally lifting, the reality is that Greece is far from saved from pecuniary disaster. The harsh economic medicine forced on the country by the EU and Germany in particular as conditions of the bailout has resulted in death by a thousand cuts.

The country’s once elegant capital has become one of the most depressing and untidiest cities in Western Europe, a city that is now in terrible decay. Shops on once booming boulevards are shuttered, while heavy machines and cranes stand idle over the shells of unfinished buildings. Much of Athens is covered in ugly graffiti. Even the awnings around Greece’s most revered ancient site the Parthenon, on the Athenian Acropolis, is covered in unsightly painted drawings.

The hardships and deprivations are everywhere – all the more heart-breaking in that this downward spiral had been caused by European leaders who were masquerading as people bearing gifts. Most Athenians are struggling to make ends meet.

 

HOSPITAL doctors, for example, have seen their monthly pay cut to just over a thousand pounds a month. It is only through social conscience and the love of their country that has kept some of them in Athens.

Some 70,000 highly skilled professionals including doctors, dentists and pharmacists have left the country as part of a broader Grexodus of 500,000 people.

The best way for any country to emerge from financial crisis is to increase its national income so that tax revenues rise and global debts can be paid off. But during the last eight years, Greece has moved in precisely the opposite direction. National output has slumped by an astonishing 25 per cent. The result is adult unemployment of 20 per cent. Even more shocking and socially disruptive, some 40 per cent of 18 to 25-year olds are out of work.

Without any income for the young, it is now commonplace for three generations of the same family to be forced to live cheek by jowl in the same crowded apartments. The fact is that the austerity imposed by the eurocrats has ruined Greece and done nothing to relive it of its monstrous level of debt.

It has snuffed out entrepreneurship, as well as created a poisonous political legacy where a far-Left Marxist party headed by Alexis Tsipras rules with the support of fanatical politicians on the populist Right.

The end of the EU’s bailout programme may technically mean that Greece can return to the international markets to borrow again, but any notion that the world’s commercial bankers and financiers will be queuing at Athens’ overcrowded and dilapidated airport to lend – and pour good money after bad – is a fantasy.

After all, the country is still sitting on a debt pile of 289billion euros (£258billion) which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts at 191 per cent, or almost twice the nation’s total annual output.

To place that in context, it is more than two times the ratio of Britain’s national debt to output, which after a decade of UK cuts to public services and surging tax incomes as the economy has grown is now, thankfully, on a downward path.

Not only that, Greece’s stricken financial system is currently being kept afloat by short-term cash assistance of some 40billion euros (£35.6billion) per month from the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank. Without this help, which is akin to that provided by the Bank of England to the British banks at the height of the financial crisis a decade ago, the four biggest Greek lenders would be effectively bankrupt.

Together the bad loans on the books of these banks – Piraeus, Alpha, Euro Bank and National Bank of Greece – amount to 101billion euros (£90billion) or 50 per cent of the total, the highest level of any country in the European Union. Indeed the banks, the lifeblood of any Western economy, are so indebted that they cannot lend any more.

 

WHICH means the small and medium-sized enterprises that are the country’s business bedrock cannot get the finance they need to carry on and invest. Nor do ordinary consumers find it possible to obtain credit.

This desolate financial scenario is a direct result of the austerity conditions demanded by Brussels eurocrats and German central bankers. Over the last eight years successive Greek governments have been forced to attend no fewer than 95 meetings at which the most stringent measures have been imposed on them.

The results for the Greek people have been nothing short of catastrophic.

Yet in their determination to preserve the greater political project of the eurozone and the EU, and to keep Greece as their client state, Brussels and German politicians have been utterly ruthless.

In spite of personal appeals from the IMF’s euro-supporting managing-director Christine Lagarde to forgive Greece its debt burden and allow the country to be given a fresh start, the eurofanatics have been unrelenting in their determination to keep the debt anvil hanging around its neck.

Greece is in an armlock it cannot escape because of a combination of its debt burden and the fact that its membership of the eurozone means it can longer devalue its currency. And the EU and Germans are determined to keep it that way to save their precious euro.

So, despite the joyous and uplifting media reports about the bailout this week, be in no doubt that this Greek tragedy is very far from being over.

 

GREECE should ditch the euro as it emerges from eight years of austerity caused by punishing EU bailouts.

The country also should have been afforded the right to have gone bankrupt at the height of the eurozone crisis instead of having been forced into a strict rescue package dictated by Brussels and Germany.

The EU pushed the country into accepting massive loans to save German and French banks from collapse. Greece’s creditors effectively turned the country into a dead colony that had been left devastated by fiscal austerity, with citizens having endured years of pain and misery.

Greece has now existed the final stage of an eight-year, £258billion bailout programme, which has left Athens crippled by soaring unemployment.

On the face of it, what has really changed? Greece’s state debts have not become lower, but higher still. The state is still destitute, private citizens have become poorer, companies are liquidating at an unprecedented rate, and its gross national product has decreased by 25 per cent.

The bailout was intended only for German and French banks who had, against all reasonable logic, loaned vast sums of money to the Greek state and oligarchy. As for the Greek banks and state, they should not have been saved. The country should have been allowed in declaring insolvency, to have suffered the consequences but then being allowed to have picked themselves up and by moving on – something these huge bailouts prohibited.

In a television interview, Yanis Varoufakis, a former minister who served in the Left-wing Syriza government, said: “It was absolutely necessary that the country be prepared to return to its national currency”. Unable to pay its debts, Greece faced a so-called “Grexit” from the eurozone in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. The economy has now returned to modest growth, but one in five Greeks are unemployed, average incomes have dropped by more than a third and taxes have rocketed.

Critics have argued that Greece would have fared better outside the euro, enabling it to carry out a range of measures including devaluing its currency and lowering interest rates to make the economy more competitive.

EU figures have this week tried to paint the bailout programme as a success, with European Council president Donald Tusk saying: “You did it! With huge efforts and European solidarity, you seized the day.”

Rather, the EU put Greece into a permanent coma and prefer to call it stability.

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