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Preventive Neurology is blog devoted to medical, lifestyle and wellness practices that are designed to avert and avoid neurological disease. For example, screening for hypertension and treating it before it causes diseases such as stroke or dementia, is good preventive neurology. Preventive neurology takes a proactive approach to patient care; prevention is better than having to deal with consequences of neurological disease. 

The activities on this blog are a public engagement tool to support several preventive neurology research initiatives within the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University London.  

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#DietSpeak: slaying the high fat dogma

It is about time we started rejigging our diets away from carbs to high-fat foods. #DietSpeak
Although this is not a randomised control trial we can use observational studies to draw conclusions. It is becoming increasingly clear that high carbohydrate intake is bad for you and that a high-fat diet is better for you. 
In this large macronutrient study higher carbohydrate intake is associated with an increased risk of total mortality whereas intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with lower risk of total mortality. 
This is just the latest piece of evidence showing a high-fat diet is good for you. 

Dehghan et al. Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study. Lancet. 2017 Aug 28. pii: S0140-6736(17)32252-3. 
BACKGROUND: The relationship between macronutrients and cardiovascular disease and mortality is controversial. Most available data are from European and Nort…
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#PredictPD: Is this the disease modifying therapy the PD community has been waiting for?

Is exenatide the game-changer we need in Parkinson's disease? #PreventiveNeurology #PredictPD
Would you participate in a study to define your future risk of getting Parkinson's Disease (PD)? In other words would you like to know you are likely to develop PD in the future? A lot of people answer by saying it depends if you have a treatment to prevent PD. At present we don't, but the study below of a exenatide,  a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, suggests it may be neuroprotective in patients with established PD. If this study's findings are confirmed in larger phase 3 studies and leads to exenatide being licensed as a disease-modifying therapy, or DMT, for PD changes all this. This means we can take people at high-risk of developing PD and randomise them to receive either placebo or exenatide to see if it can prevent, or at least delay the onset of, PD. This study alone creates the incentive for people from the general public to participate in population…
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#BrainHealth: another reason to hate margerine

Information rarely changes health outcomes on its own, which is why we need policy #PreventiveNeurology #BrainHealth
Although we have known about the cardiovascular risks associated with the consumption of trans fatty acids (TFAs) for decades little has been done by individuals to reduce their consumption. Therefore when the state of New York put in place restrictions on their use in 11 counties between 2007 and 2011 they set-up an experiment. This experiment now reports out: the study below included 25 counties and compared cardiovascular outcomes in the TFA non-restricted populations of 14 counties with the populations in the 11 TFA restricted counties. Three or more years after restrictions were put in place the people living in the counties with TFA restrictions experienced a significant decline in combined myocardial infarction and stroke events (-6.2%) compared with the TFA non-restricted populations. 

I sincerely hope you appreciate the significance of these findings? 

Lessons lea…
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