"Caring for a pet helps stave off cognitive decline for people over 50 who live on their own, according to a new study of almost 8,000 participants.
Researchers found that pet ownership was associated with slower rates of decline in verbal memory and verbal fluency among the older adults who were living alone.
The study included 7,945 mostly-white British participants from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing with an average age of 66.
Followed over an eight year period, more than a third of the group (35.1 percent) owned pets; about 30% of the group lived alone.
Previous studies suggested that solitary living is a risk factor for developing dementia and cognitive decline, but among those folks, raising dogs or cats was related to reduced loneliness.
Some research has found that pet ownership is associated with better verbal memory and executive function, but others failed to find any evidence.
The new research published in JAMA Network aimed to further explore the association between aging by oneself—a trend which has been on the rise over the past few decades—and pet ownership. And the results were clear.
“Pet ownership offset the associations between living alone and declining rates in verbal memory and verbal fluency,” said study corresponding author Professor Ciyong Lu, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.
It was “a significant modifier” in all 3 associations—composite verbal cognition, verbal memory, and verbal fluency.
“Pet ownership was associated with slower rates of decline among older adults living alone.”
But owning a cat or dog did not make any difference for older people who lived with other people.
“These findings suggest that pet ownership may be associated with slower cognitive decline among older adults living alone.”
Prof. Lu is now calling for clinical trials that could help inform public health measures to address dementia among the elderly."
-via Good News Network, November 30, 2023
love elizabeth s.
fatima aamer bilal, from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am your mould, but the shape of you is true absence, leaving me purposeless.’
[text id: and is this not treason? / my soul belongs far more to you than it does to me.]
A newly discovered communication pathway linking far-flung nerve centers within the brain and skull, and the body beyond, could provide a new target to stop migraine pain in its tracks. Researchers have long tried to pinpoint where migraines begin in the brain, and how these one-sided, nauseating headaches induce pain and other symptoms, such as vomiting. Understanding this would help find new ways to prevent migraines from happening or at least ease the searing pain once it starts.
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One dose of a new treatment, delivered by nasal spray, clears away build-ups of the toxic tau protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease from inside brain cells, improving memory, according to new research. It paves the way for new treatments for the debilitating disease. A few years ago, abnormal clumps of tau proteins in the brain were found to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Since then, researchers have been working on a way of eradicating these toxic tangles, which have become a hallmark of the degenerative disease.
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— Sylvia Plath (via lunamonchtuna)
people who work/study in quantitative bio-adjacent fields, rise up. computational neuroscience where you get to see someone's thoughts in feelings in graph form??? so cool. biophysics where you can pass blood plasma through an electric field to determine whether a patient has cancer or not?? unbelievable. biomedical engineering where you can literally build a device to pump someone's heart and be the difference between their life and death??? oh my god. disease modelling, being able to predict AND prevent communities being affected by disease on a large scale through your analysis of data??? i love science