Briefing: A Health and Wellness news roundup for people dealing with pituitary disease

From the PWN research desk, another group of interesting articles on health and wellness specifically selected for those interested in – and affected by – pituitary disease.

Can compassion lead to wellness?  Does helping others bring the same pleasure as the gratification of personal desire?  Sometimes it feels we are on a bullet train moving at ridiculous speeds into an ever more complicated world where cruelty and despair seem to be the order of the day. Even in our own country, “the richest country on earth”, we still talk about healthcare being a privilege, not a right, and our politicians seem to want to leave 23,000,000 people without health insurance and complicate more than resolve. This article by Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, struck a chord.  In it, Dacher Keltner discusses the compassionate instinct in humans where benevolence and compassion are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.  Read this fascinating article here.

 

On a more practical vein, from Cell Metabolism comes this article that suggests that certain types of exercises can positively impact aging muscles.   The study was conducted at the Mayo Clinic where the aerobic fitness, blood-sugar levels, gene activity and mitochondrial health in muscle cells was measured after each participant was assigned an exercise regime. This recent article from the New York Times has a very nice summary of the experiment. Bottom line: Exercise is good for people of all ages! The Mayo Clinic study, which you can read here, highlights that high-intensity aerobic interval exercise can improve age-related muscle decline. All in all a fascinating experiment, so our advice: Get on that bike!

 

From my friend JOHN SWARTZBERG, M.D. Chair of the Editorial Board of BerkeleyWellness.com and the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter, comes this poignant reminder that climate change is not just about climate.  As he aptly points out, there are severe “adverse effects of increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere”.  In this very informative article Dr. Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist, explains the dramatic effects on human health resulting from extreme weather and other climatic factors.  Read the article here  

 

This next article also from the BerkeleyWellness newsletter discusses the risk for certain diseases and conditions depending on our blood type.  It offers a very handy discussion about the recent interest in how blood type may relate to disease risk.  The article by Jeanine Barone asks “are people with certain blood types more vulnerable to developing heart disease, cancer, or diabetes? Might your blood type even affect your memory or your response to diet? Here, in brief, is what we know.” –  Read about it here

 

And finally, from BuzzFeed News an article about Apple (the computer company not the record label) and their effort to become a key player for people to track, manage and understand their health.  Although there is nothing specific related to pituitary disease, this article points to some very intriguing possibilities about using devices such as Apple’s iPhone and wearables to monitor and improve your health.  Click here to read the article

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