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General Disclaimer: Please note that the opinions expressed here are those of the individual bloggers and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London or Barts Health NHS Trust.

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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
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Addicted to coffee

Are you addicted to coffee? Do you need a reason to justify your addiction? Read on!  Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash I justify my coffee addiction (6-8 espresso shots per day) by claiming that I am preventing myself from developing Parkinson’s disease in the future. This is #PreventiveNeurology in practice. Sadly coffee consumption doesn’t protect you from getting Alzheimer’s disease or all-cause dementia. However, I was thrilled to note that it seems to protect you from developing chronic liver disease and dying from liver disease. The molecular mechanisms underlying this are plausible. Caffeine is a non-selective blocker of the A2aA receptor, activation of which stimulates collagen production by hepatic stellate cells, which are the primary mediators of fibrosis. But as decaffeinated coffee is also protective it may be the other ingredients in coffee such as chlorogenic acid, kahweol and cafestol, which protect against liver fibrosis. Whatever the mechanism underlying coffee’...
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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...
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