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Health
Advice and studies that teach us how to be more healthy
Benefits of quitting smoking – The Why and How of ceasing this bad habit
Feb 17th
Are you a smoker and you can’t quit? Ever wondered what would it take to scare you or excite you enough that it would turn off this potent addiction. Scientists A Parsons, A Daley and R Begh carried a study that showed what influence smoking cessation had on future prognosis after diagnosis of early stage lung cancer.
Lung cancer is the commonest form of cancer in the world. The main cause of it is smoking, data showing us that a life-long smoker has a 20-fold increase in the risk of developing this disease.
So, logically one may deduce that ceasing this habit prior to developing some form of cancer reduces dramatically the chances that you will develop a cancerous tumor. In fact, this statement is highly sustained by scientific data. Until now the problem was that there were no studies taken that showed the beneficial effects such a ceasing would have on people which have already been diagnosed with some form of cancer, specifically lung cancer. Researchers led by A Parsons carried 10 studies in which almost all patients were diagnosed with early stage lung cancer so the results obtained by them would reflect as realistically as possible the actual effects such a ceasing would have.
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Type 2 diabetes lowers self-control abilities – What this teaches us about curing and preventing this disease
Feb 16th
Researchers Kaya T. Ishizawa, Hiroaki Kumano and Atsushi Sato writing for the BioPsychoSocial Medicine Journal showed in a recent study that type 2 diabetes may reduce certain neuro-psychological inhibition functions that lower ones ability to control himself. Patients with diabetes showed lower scores in inhibitory control and control of impulsive responses.
Most importantly is the fact that these deficient characteristics, that do not appear in healthy patients, are not related to the obesity of the patients but are direct consequences of type 2 diabetes.
The Pre-Frontal Cortex(PFC) of the brain is divided in many parts, but for this story we have to know that the dorso-lateral pre-frontal cortex is responsible for regulating executive functions that relate to planning, delayed outcome and specialized cognitive functions, whereas the ventral part of the pre-frontal cortex is responsible with immediate rewards, punishments and inhibition of certain impulsive thoughts. The study tried and managed to show how the interaction of the ventral and dorso-lateral parts of the PFC in the patients with type 2 diabetes resulted in lower self-control scores that, by the nature of the disease that caused these, scores, is in itself a major factor in aggravating type 2 diabetes.
