Partial recall
WORRIED about how much of your brain still works after the festivities? Forgetting your log-on or the names of colleagues is a common post-festive faux pas, but a new scanning discovery could help to tell whether it’s just mind-fug or the start of something more sinister.

Neurologists claim to have found a way to detect whether you are at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease many years before it has properly set in. Their test employs a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to monitor the way your brain physically handles memories.

They report in the Archives of Neurology that their scans of 20 people show that those who have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s have less activity in their left medial frontal lobe when solving memory puzzles.

The scientists, at the University of California, San Francisco, say that identifying at-risk people before clinical symptoms set in could enable doctors to administer preventive drugs at an early stage, when they might be effective.

Doctors could also encourage patients to adopt strategies that appear to help to preserve their brains, such as doing puzzles, learning foreign languages and developing a broad circle of friends.

Genes may be key to lethal side-effects
YOUR risk of suffering a potentially fatal reaction to painkillers may largely be determined by your genes, claims a study of drug side-effects.

Pennsylvania University scientists who studied 50 patients’ reactions to two controversial painkilling drugs, known as Cox-2 inhibitors, say that as much as a third of our risk of suffering side-effects comes down to our genetic make-up.

Drugs in the Cox-2 family have been found particularly effective in treating pain in patients with conditions such as arthritis, but mounting evidence also shows that some can boost certain patients’ risk of heart attacks and strokes. A study last year by Nottingham University, in the British Medical Journal, indicated that long-term use of the two drugs examined in the Pennsylvania report, Vioxx and Celebrex, increases the risk by 32 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.

No painkillers come without risks, but the new study, in Gastroenterology, shows that genetic testing could in future help doctors to tell which patients are vulnerable to side-effects from certain drugs. Cox-2 drugs seem to boost the death risk in 2 per cent of patients. This new study could help to identify them safely.

Nightcap for girls
WHETHER it’s due to snoring partners, restless legs or nagging consciences, women are more than 40 per cent more likely to suffer from insomnia than men, says a study of more than a million people on four continents.

The study, by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and published in Sleep, offers little by way of comfort: it says that the problem gets even worse with advancing age.

If that’s enough to drive women to drink, that might not be such a bad thing, according to Swedish doctors, who report that moderate drinking could help to protect women from kidney cancer.

Doctors at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm say that having at least one drink a day appears to lower the risk of developing renal cell carcinoma in women of all ages by more than a third. Unlike sleeplessness, things get better with the advancing years, the researchers report in The International Journal of Cancer. They say that in postmenopausal women, a drink a day lowers the kidney cancer risk by more than half. Here’s to that nightcap.

Best friends
PEOPLE in care homes for the elderly don’t appreciate the company of other humans as much as you might expect. They would much rather be visited by a dog, claims a St Louis University professor.

William Banks, a professor of pharmacological and physiological sciences, picked 37 lonely nursing home residents to be visited either by three human beings and a dog, or by a dog on its own. Man’s best friend won out, he reports in Anthrozoos.

“The residents found a little quiet time with the pooch a lot nicer than spending time with a dog and other people,” he says. Why? Banks says that the dogs scored higher because they were better at simply being with people; none of that tough job of keeping up a conversation when you haven’t been outside for days, weeks or months.

Flak attack
AMERICA’s top guns are set to teach Britain’s angels a thing or two about healthcare, says a report in Nursing Standard.

Former US Air Force fighter pilots are negotiating with hospitals about showing NHS nurses how to deal better with stress, after successful studies in the States. Hmm . . . can’t quite see the synergy between blowing people apart and patching them up again. And as for coping with flak, our nurses could surely teach the pilots a thing or two there.