Moved to substack

Dear Reader

We have moved the preventive neurology unit blog to a new platform called substack. Google is discontinuing its Feedburner and has not added many new features to blogger for some time, which is why we have decided to move the site.

https://preventiveneurology.substack.com/

Thanks

Gavin Giovannoni

Comments

Corpulence and poverty

Since stating my intention to join the #BackTo21 campaign to get my BMI back to what it was when I was 21 years of age, I have had several emails and direct messages on social media questioning the wisdom of my intention. Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash It is clear that despite BMI being a relatively poor metric of health there is overwhelming evidence that at a population level it predicts poor health outcomes. Importantly there is new data that indicates the target BMI for the prevention of type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome depends on your ethnicity. For people of South Asian origin, there is a call to reset the BMI cutoff to 23.9, which for most people is within the normal range. At the same time, there is a call to classify obesity as an important social determinant of health. Arnaud Chiolero argues below for using BMI as a socioeconomic indicator. Do you agree? Isn’t it quite amazing that in a previous era corpulence was a sign of affluence, whereas in th...

To be teetotal or not

In summary, any form and any amount of alcohol consumption is unhealthy for the brain. Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash He was only 64 when his daughter noticed that his forgetfulness had started to impact on his ability to function independently. Her father had forgotten to pay the gas and electricity bill and social services had contacted her as next of kin to find out why. It was clear that years of excessive alcohol was having an impact on his memory. The scenario above is one that is played out across society thousands of times if not hundreds of thousands of times. This is why the study below from the UK biobank is so worrying; when it comes to brain volume, a crude measure of the brain's neuronal and cognitive reserve, there is no safe alcohol consumption limit. Importantly, comorbidities such as high blood pressure and obesity interacted with alcohol consumption to reduce brain health. Not surprisingly binging on alcohol made things worse and this was over and above the vo...

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