Do antidepressants accelerate cognitive decline?
3 March 2025 If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know that I’m not the world’s biggest fan of antidepressant medications. Not only do they cause profound sexual dysfunction that may persist even after patients stop taking them, birth defects and an increased risk of premature birth in offspring of mothers who…
Fat body, starved brain
A study of over 35 000 brain scans has found that the more body fat you carry, the less blood flow your brain receives.
Are you fit enough to save your brain?
Updated 13 January 2025 It’s that time of year again, when fitness clubs cash in on the New Year surge. About 12 per cent of gym memberships are initiated in the month of January – that’s 25-30 per cent more than any other month. Unfortunately, the bloom comes off the ‘new year, new me’ rose…
New hope for people with Alzheimer’s disease
A ground-breaking new study provides compelling evidence that early-stage Alzheimer’s disease is reversible 17 June 2024 Dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is now the second leading cause of death in Australia, and the leading cause of death for women. It is estimated that over 421 000 Australians are currently living with dementia. And that means, of…
Of Bonds, brawn, brains and blubber
The ‘body positivity’ movement is bad for your brain… in more ways than one.
Keep your brain young with greens
Today, March 12, marks the beginning of Brain Awareness Week, a global campaign to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research into conditions such as Parkison’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, schizophrenia and epilepsy. Now, I’m a total geek for research, as you probably realise if you’ve been…
Reductionism vs wholism in medical research
Reading medical journals is generally a frustrating experience for me, as most articles emanate from the reductionist paradigm, defined by T. Colin Campbell in his masterwork, Whole, as the belief “that everything in the world can be understood if you understand all its component parts” (p. 47). Campbell contrasts this with wholism, the belief “that…
Preventing dementia
I’m devoting this, my fifth update on the 5th International Plant-Based Nutrition Healthcare Conference, held in Anaheim, California in September 2017, to just one presentation – ‘Alzheimer’s and Diet: New Research Frontiers’, by husband-and-wife researchers Drs Ayesha and Dean Sherzai. Dementia in general, and Alzheimer’s disease in particular, is probably the condition that people fear…
Crossword puzzles or pumping iron – what’s best for maintaining your marbles?
and Dementia. We all make jokes about it: grey nomads put ‘Adventure Before Dementia’ stickers on the back of their Winnebagos; middle-aged people ascribe forgetting a familiar name or fact to ‘having a senior moment’; and the ‘silly old bugger’ character is a standard fixture of TV shows and movies. But if you’ve…