The effect of body mass index on global brain volume in middle-aged adults: a cross sectional study

BACKGROUND: Obesity causes or exacerbates a host of medical conditions, including cardiovascular, pulmonary, and endocrine diseases. Recently obesity in elderly women was associated with greater risk of dementia, white matter ischemic changes, and greater brain atrophy. The purpose of this study was to determine whether body type affects global brain volume, a marker of atrophy, in middle-aged men and women. METHODS: T1-weighted 3D volumetric magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess global brain volume for 114 individuals 40 to 66 years of age (average = 54.2 years; standard deviation = 6.6 years; 43 men and 71 women). Total cerebrospinal fluid and brain volumes were obtained with an automated tissue segmentation algorithm. A regression model was used to determine the effect of age, body mass index (BMI), and other cardiovascular risk factors on brain volume and cognition. RESULTS: Age and BMI were each associated with decreased brain volume. BMI did not predict cognition in this sample; however elevated diastolic blood pressure was associated with poorer episodic learning performance. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that middle-aged obese adults may already be experiencing differentially greater brain atrophy, and may potentially be at greater risk for future cognitive decline

Dissolving the Dichotomies Between Online and Campus-Based Teaching: a Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

Screening for non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease using the NMSQuest scale

The clinical picture of Parkinson's disease (PD) includes a wide range of non-motor symptoms (NMS) that substantially worsen quality of life in patients. These symptoms are poorly diagnosed because they are not emphasized by patients themselves and their relatives. The low detectability of NMS can be attributable to the lack of awareness amongst specialists about a wide range of PD symptoms and to that of time at a visit for physician advice.Objective: to evaluate the effectiveness of using the screening scale to timely detect NMS in PD.Patients and methods. Examinations were made in 2 patient groups: 1) 95 PD patients aged 47 to 83 years (mean age, 64.91±7.66 years) (a study group); 2) 37 sex- and age-matched healthy individuals aged 48 to 77 years (mean age, 62.22±6.58 years) without signs of PD and PD of another etiology (a control group). To identify NMS, all the study participants filled out the NMSQuest scale.Results. The mean number of NMS per patient with PD was 9.13±4.81 in the study group and 5.43±3.4 in the control group (p<0.001).Symptoms, such as hypersalivation, hyposmia, dysphagia, nausea, vomiting, constipation, excessive sweating, decreased motivation, and a feeling of sadness, were statistically significantly more common in PD. There were no significant differences between the number of NMSs and the form of PD or convincing data on their relationship to age, disease stage, and the total equivalent dose of taken antiparkinsonian drugs (calculated with reference to levodopa).Conclusion. The use of questionnaires in patients with PD allows the timely detection of the majority of NMSs. Given the limited time for counseling the patient, especially at an outpatient stage, the questionnaires should be filled out by the patient while he/she is waiting for a doctor's consultation