Top Doctors: How Nancy Davis Took Action to Combat MS and Addiction
And for a person diagnosed [with MS] today, there's about a 92% chance that they will have an independent life, which is pretty amazing.My son, Jason Davis, who I love more than life itself, always worked with me in my charity. We've had great success coming up with medicines, and he came to me one day and said, 'Mom, I have an addiction problem, and the [Alcoholics Anonymous] 12-step program is not working for me. We have to do something science-based, just like we do for MS.' And he goes, 'I'm going to way too many funerals of people my age.'So we started a charity together [called Cure Addiction Now], and we got our 501(c)(3), about four months before Jason passed away. For 25 years, nobody put any money into basic science research for addiction, and it is the leading cause of death in our country for people 50 years old and under. I'm on a mission, and I have to make this happen, no matter what. It's my son's legacy, and it inspires me every day.I'm passionate. I really want to find a cure — just to think of the number of lives that are changed any time you come up with a medication is kind of overwhelming and exciting.'Nancy Davis is the founder of Race to Erase MS and co-founder of Cure Addiction Now. The 32nd Race to Erase MS gala will take place May 16 at the Fairmont Century Plaza.
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Fox News
5 hours ago
- Fox News
Specific symptoms could warn of MS more than a decade before diagnosis, study finds
People with multiple sclerosis (MS) may show warning signs long before classic symptoms appear — and mental health concerns could be among the first red flags, according to new research. A University of British Columbia (UBC) study, published last week in JAMA Network Open, examined the medical records of 2,038 patients with the autoimmune disease and compared them to 10,182 patients without it. The researchers found that future MS patients had elevated rates of mental health-related issues, psychiatrist and general practice visits, and complaints of vague symptoms such as fatigue and pain — all as early as 15 years before the onset of clear symptoms. "These findings suggest that MS may begin much earlier than previously recognized, with mental health–related issues as early indicators," the researchers wrote. MS, which attacks the protective myelin coating around nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, affects about one million adults in the U.S., according to Cleveland Clinic. While there is no known cause or cure, treatment can help manage symptoms and slow the progression of the disease, which can cause muscle weakness, vision changes, numbness and memory issues. Previous research has shown that in the five to 10 years leading up to an MS diagnosis, people typically seek medical attention more frequently for headaches, fatigue, sleep disorders, pain, gastrointestinal issues and psychiatric concerns, the researchers wrote. The UBC study, however, tracked physician visits in the 25 years leading up to the onset of symptoms in MS patients in British Columbia. They found a steady uptick in general practice visits starting 15 years out, followed by more frequent trips to psychiatrists beginning 12 years before symptoms. Neurology and ophthalmology visits increased eight to nine years prior, likely due to blurred vision or eye pain, two common early symptoms of MS. Three to five years before onset, emergency room and radiology visits rose sharply. Across nearly every specialty, physician visits peaked in the year before symptoms began. Psychiatrist consultations, in particular, skyrocketed 159% before MS onset, and mental health visits increased 76%, according to the research. The increase in psychiatric visits may correlate to the earliest stages of MS-related immune dysregulation, as higher levels of certain inflammation-related chemicals and problems with the blood-brain barrier can affect mood, the researchers noted. While most people who experience mental health issues, fatigue and headaches do not develop MS, the researchers said that recognizing and characterizing the "prodromal phase" — the early period marked by subtle symptoms — could speed up diagnosis and improve outcomes. "Mental health and psychiatric-related issues may be among the earliest features of the prodromal phase of MS, preceding nervous system-related symptoms and neurologist visits by several years," senior author Dr. Helen Tremlett, professor of neurology at UBC, told Fox News Digital. "This suggests that in the future, there may be an opportunity to recognize and manage MS early, maximizing mental health and brain reserve," she said. The findings also open "new avenues for research into early biomarkers, lifestyle factors and other potential triggers that may be at play during this previously overlooked phase of the disease," the researcher added. Monitoring for early warning signs could also potentially help to detect other brain diseases, like Alzheimer's or ALS, and ensure early intervention, Tremlett noted. For more Health articles, visit Between 2016 and 2021, MS cases increased globally from about 2.2 million to as many as 2.9 million, according to research published in July in the journal Frontiers in Neurology. The disease has gained public attention in recent years as celebrities like Selma Blair, Christina Applegate and Montel Williams have shared their experiences of living with MS.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
The app will see you now: New AI scans faces to predict diseases, disorders, and early death
Facial recognition apps detect pain in dementia patients, trauma in children, and diagnose infections. I tried Harvard's FaceAge app using photos to estimate biological age and, in turn, overall health. This article is part of "Transforming Treatments," a series on medical innovations that save time, money, or discomfort. I look like I'm about 28. Or maybe 38. That's according to Harvard's "FaceAge" algorithm, which uses photos to determine a person's supposed biological age — meant as a quick proxy for wellness. This app is one of several new efforts to turn selfies into diagnostic tools. There's one for diagnosing nasal congestion, another for seasonal allergies, and a few safe driving apps that watch your face for signs of drowsiness. Some face scanners measure pain, illness, or signs of autism. One aims to track PTSD in kids to spare them from having to talk about traumatic issues over and over again. Since 2022, facial recognition for the clinic has blossomed, alongside rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and chipmaking. This year, new face technologies promising to diagnose diseases earlier, treat patients better, and ostensibly predict early death are taking off. "It's a medical biomarker, not just a gimmick," said FaceAge creator and radiologist Dr. Raymond Mak, who's leading the team at Harvard and Mass General Brigham developing facial recognition technology that Business Insider recently tested. Ethics experts worry about what we're barreling into, without better understanding exactly what this tech is measuring, or why. "AI is entering these spaces fast," Malihe Alikhani, an assistant professor of machine learning at Northeastern University, told Business Insider. "It's about making sure that it is safe and beneficial." Your face is a reflection of your health Our faces say a lot about our physical, mental, and biological health. While this is new territory for computers, humans have read faces to make quick judgments for thousands of years. Research suggests we developed a third type of cone in our eyeballs about 30 million years ago, specifically to scan each other's faces for signs of health or sickness. That cone allows us to read faces in shades of red and green. "People look at rosy cheeks and they see that as a sign of health. When we want to draw a face that's sick, we'd make it green," Professor Brad Duchaine, a neuroscientist who studies facial perception at Dartmouth, told Business Insider. It's true: A flush can indicate good blood flow, or high levels of carotenoids in the skin from fruits and veggies we eat. Dr. Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon in Cleveland, studied identical twins with different lifestyles to see how factors like smoking and stress impact their faces. Consistently, the twin with more stress and more toxins in their bodies looked several years older. Sagging skin and wrinkles can reflect poorer internal health, with lower collagen production and higher levels of stress hormones. Conversely, studies show that superaging centenarians — whose organs and cells are working unbelievably efficiently — look, on average, about 27 years younger than they are. I tried a face scanning app One of the first medical applications of face-reading tech was Face2Gene, an app first released in 2014 that helps doctors diagnose genetic conditions. Studies suggest Face2Gene is better than human doctors at extracting information from a person's face and then linking those features to a specific genetic issue. The Australian app PainChek has tracked the pain of nursing home patients since 2017. It is mostly used for dementia patients who may not be able to verbalize pain. In a recent announcement, the company said it is awaiting FDA approval and could be cleared by September 2025. I wanted to try one of these apps for myself. Since I write a lot about aging, I decided to try FaceAge, Harvard's new app that ostensibly measures your biological age. It is not yet available for public use; it is being used as a research tool for now. The ultimate goal, researchers say, would be to use selfies to do better diagnostic work. FaceAge could one day improve cancer treatments by tailoring them to a patient's unique biology and health status, or maybe even help flag other health issues before they happen. The FaceAge algorithm pays attention to two main areas of the face: the nasal labial folds, from the nose to the lips, and the temples between the eyes and ears. The idea is to spot premature or accelerated signs of aging that could be a red flag for internal problems. "If your face age is accelerating quicker than your chronological age, it's a very poor prognostic sign," Mak, one of the developers behind FaceAge, told Business Insider. I submitted four photos to the app. In the darkest, blurriest photo I provided, the app thought I was 27.9 years old — a little more than a decade below my actual age. The picture I took with no makeup on, and my face thrust out into the bright mid-day sunshine, gave me the oldest FaceAge, even though all of these pictures were taken within the past year. One selfie taken in the dark of winter and another on a cloudy day ended up somewhere in the middle, making me look young-ish. Humans (and face-scanning apps) use the proliferation of lines, sharp edges, and more details to assess someone's age. That's why people look younger in blurry photos — or with surgery or makeup to smooth over their wrinkles. In "a really, really, really blurry photograph of a face, what you've done is you've stripped out all of the high spatial frequency information," neuroscientist Bevil Conway, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, told Business Insider. Direct light, like a ring light, can help mask old age. The midday sun, coming down on my face from above, had the opposite effect. So, what did I learn from my experiment? FaceAge told me I'm looking great (and young!) and should keep up my healthy habits. Still, its assessments were all over the place. Face Age is confident each time you run it, but that confidence masks the fact that it can't really tell how well I'm aging over time. Is my body 10 years younger than me, or just one? While I do eat a relatively healthy diet and exercise regularly, I'm curious how much the differences in lighting affected my results. The ethics are blurry Even if it's something as seemingly innocuous as measuring your age, bringing AI into the doctor's office is fraught with ethical conundrums. "We have been through a few years now of companies coming up with these systems, selling them to hospitals, selling them to doctors, selling them to border protection, and then after a while they're like, 'oops,'" Alikhani, the AI ethics expert, said. Readers may remember the uproar over the highly controversial Stanford study that developed "gaydar" AI in 2017. The app purported to spot someone's sexual orientation. Critics said it was just picking up on social and environmental cues that had nothing to do with sexuality, like makeup, facial hair, and sun exposure. Another team of researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University developed an algorithm that promised to identify criminals and terrorists, or people with law-breaking tendencies. These efforts feel uncomfortably close to the pseudoscientific practice of physiognomy, a deeply flawed practice that's been used for centuries to justify racism and bigotry, Alikhani said. Facial expression is highly context-dependent, varying not only based on a person's gender and culture, but also by the individual and the moment, she said. "Better healthcare involves patients more in the decision-making," Alikhani said. "What are we doing if we're putting that in the hands of AI?" Read more from the Transforming Treatments series: In an era of quiet glow-ups, no-prep veneers are the new 'it' cosmetic procedure Colonoscopies are no fun. These at-home colon cancer screenings offer a shortcut. Skin tightening is getting more advanced — and less painful. Here are the new techniques replacing facelifts. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Yahoo
Bad news: Study finds French fries can raise risk of this serious health condition by 20%
A new study published in the BMJ found that a regular French Fry habit can raise your type 2 diabetes risk by up to 20 percent. Harvard Public Health researchers found that the way potatoes are prepped makes a big difference in risk; those who ate baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes didn't see a big change in risk. Potatoes themselves are nutrient-dense, say experts, so it's best to consume them in the context of balanced meals. French fries are technically made from a vegetable, putting them in a weird grey zone of health. But while diving into a basket of fries has arguable mental health perks, it's probably not doing your physical health any solids. Now, brand new research suggests that fries could negatively impact your health in a very specific way. The study, which was recently published in The BMJ, found that a regular French fry habit can raise your risk of type 2 diabetes by up to 20%. While preparing potatoes differently than the fried version was better for type 2 diabetes risk, the researchers still found potatoes aren't the best starch for your health. While this doesn't mean you should never, ever have fries or potatoes again (thankfully!), experts say it's a good idea to keep a few things in mind about the taters going forward. Meet the experts: Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, is chief of the division of endocrinology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Jessica Cording, RD, CDN, is author of The Little Book of Game-Changers; Mir Ali, MD, is medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA What exactly did the study find? For the study, Harvard Public Health researchers looked at detailed information on the diets and health status of more than 205,000 people who participated in three longitudinal studies in the US. Those studies tracked their information for more than 30 years, and included details on how much they ate of French fries, baked, boiled, and mashed potatoes, and whole grains. During the 30-year study period, more than 22,200 people were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. And, when the researchers drilled down on the data, they found that those who ate three servings of fries a week had a 20% higher risk of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. On the flip side, people who consumed baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes didn't see a big impact on their risk of developing type 2 diabetes. One more thing to point out: people who had whole grains (think: farro, whole grain pasta, and whole grain bread) instead of baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes had a 4% lower risk of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. And when people had whole grains instead of fries, that risk dropped by 19%. Okay, but what's wrong with fries? The study didn't determine the exact reason this link exists, but there are a few things that could be behind this. One is that eating a lot of fries could lead to weight gain, which is a known risk factor for type 2 diabetes, says Jessica Cording, RD, CDN, author of The Little Book of Game-Changers. 'Due to their high palatability, it's easy for many people to eat a large serving very quickly,' she points out. It's also possible that people who eat a lot of fries have other dietary habits that can raise the risk of type 2 diabetes, including a lot of foods that are high in refined starches, fats, and sugars, says Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, chief of the division of endocrinology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. 'So, the issue is less about French fries specifically, and more about the broader dietary context in which they're often consumed,' he says. Cording agrees. 'There is something to be said for context – what other foods and beverages are most commonly consumed with fries compared to what someone might have with whole grains or with boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes?' she says. It's hard to say for sure what's behind this, says Mir Ali, MD, medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA. 'Frying changes the nutritional quality of the potatoes and undoes the benefits of potatoes,' he says. 'Deep frying also creates chemicals that are less healthy for you. It's probably a combination of all of these.' So are potatoes healthy? These findings don't mean you shouldn't touch a potato again. 'Potatoes are actually inherently very nutrient dense,' Cording says. 'They contain vitamin A and potassium, for example.' But she suggests enjoying potatoes in the context of a balanced meal that provides protein, healthy fats, and high-fibre, non-starchy vegetables. 'While an occasional serving of French fries isn't something I'd tell someone to worry about, the majority of the time, I'd encourage reaching for roasted or baked potatoes,' she says. Buettner agrees. 'It's fine to eat a few French fries with a lot of vegetables and some protein,' he says. 'But you should not eat them by itself or as snacks.' You Might Also Like 13 Buys To Help You Feel Great From £5 16 Speedo Swimsuits that Won't Flash Your Bum When Getting Swim-fit 11 Best Gym Trainers for Different Types of Workouts
