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Drinking coffee

Coffee is the most popular beverage in the world. It is said that 7 out of 10 people drink coffee three times or more a day. Millions of people love drinking coffee in the morning and after lunch. When you feel tired or uncomfortable, a cup of coffee could help to lift your mood. Unfortunately, Coffee has caffeine contents which are not good for our health. For this reason, some people think that drinking coffee has only harmful affects.

Some people believe that too much caffeine in the coffee is not good for our health when we drink it everyday. Caffeine in the coffee helps increase alertness and sensitivity. Your usual drink coffee consumption habits will produce the same doses of drugs like eating, causing nervousness. The tendency for anxiety, caffeine can cause sweaty-palm, palpitations, tinnitus, these symptoms worsen. After that, the excess coffee consumption can cause restlessness, insomnia, headaches, muscle tremors, gastrointestinal problems, diarrhea, and nausea. After seeing this evidence, there is no way we can agree with what they say. In fact, several studies have shown that caffeine in the coffee is not totally bad for our health but it can be good for our oral health. It can reduce asthmatic attacks. Coffee has caffeine which helps promotes good respiratory health. It also can reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease and the risk of colon cancer by 25%.

Cooperative to popular belief, drinking coffee everyday may cause heart damage. Over consumption of coffee can cause panic in heart's regular activity. It can make our heart rate go faster because coffee is a good stimulant. To a certain extent they are right but in the other side that drinking coffee is good for the heart. It contains Tannin which promotes good cardiovascular health. In contrary to known effects of coffee to the heart, coffee does not constitute highly on having cardiovascular diseases which medical practitioners had been described. Consuming a small amount of espresso coffee can benefit your heart and found no negative effect.

Some people also argue that coffee can make high blood pressure and osteoporosis. If you have hypertension, the use of large amounts of caffeine will only make you more serious. Caffeine can make blood pressure to rise. The risk of high blood pressure groups should be avoided, especially in the working pressure when drinking caffeinated drinks. A study showed that drink a cup of coffee, elevated blood pressure. The time is 12 hours. Caffeine itself has very good effect, if long-term and heavy drinking coffee causes a loss of the bone. The preservation will have an adverse impact on women, osteoporosis, may increase the threat. Large amounts of caffeine could threaten to bone. They have a point in thinking like that but Coffee has also a medical care function.  Coffee is not only loaded with caffeine, but also contains antioxidants, such as chlorogenic acid, quinines and magnesium. These antioxidants are capable of increasing the insulin sensitivity of people suffering from diabetes. It protects you from having type 2 diabetes. Coffee has natural sugar content that makes it more blood sugar friendly. It is advisable though that you put less processed sugar when preparing coffee drinks and consume in small quantities. As an active antioxidant producer, coffee also can help reduce the risk of developing certain cancers.

Having said these, drinking coffee is good for our health if we drink it in moderation. If we want to get most benefits of drinking coffee, we should remember to drink coffee not more than two to three cups of brewed coffee every day. So be sure to drink coffee beverages moderately and do not treat it as a hobby.

Possible Genetic Link to Autism Identified

A gene variation associated with an increased risk of autism in boys has been identified by scientists.

Boys are three to four times more likely than girls to be affected by autism.

In this study, U.S. researchers analyzed genomic data from more than 3,000 children with autism and their family members, as well as children without autism.

The results showed a link between a variation in the gene for transducin beta-like 1X-linked (TBL1X) and an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in boys. TBL1X is part of the Wnt-signaling pathway involved in the system that controls embryonic neurological development and the maintenance of brain function in adults.

The study is published in the Nov. 3 online edition of the journal Molecular Autism.

“The [variation] in TBL1X is associated with an increase in risk for ASD of about 15 percent. This could reflect either an unidentified rare mutation (or mutations), which has large impact, or a more common change with a more subtle effect, on the development of ASD,” study leader Eden Martin, of the Hussman Institute for Human Genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said in a journal news release.

“Further study of TBL1X will help us to pinpoint the DNA changes involved and help us to understand exactly how these changes and the Wnt-signaling pathway is involved in ASD,” Martin added.

Autism affects about one in 110 children and can cause problems in language, communication and understanding other people’s emotional cues.

You Must Know that....

How Is Depression in the Elderly Different From Dementia?

Depressed people tend to put a negative spin on things; people with dementia try to cover up their shortcomings.

(ROYALTY-FREE/CORBIS/VEER)

There's no single test that can differentiate depression from dementia. But some behavior clues may help the doctor make an educated assessment.

"Alzheimer's disease and depression are probably related in ways we don't understand," says Brent Forester, MD, director of the mood disorders divison in the geriatric psychiatry research program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. "Forty to 50% of people with Alzheimer's disease get depression, but depression also may be a risk factor for Alzheimer's."

Here is how geriatric psychiatrists tell the two conditions apart.

• Memory: People who are depressed may have trouble concentrating. They may even suffer occasional memory lapses, which can make their mood worse. But people with Alzheimer's disease consistently have trouble storing new information, such as the recent visit of a close relative or what they ate for dinner. They may not remember eating dinner at all.
• Orientation: Most people who are depressed generally know with whom they're speaking, what time and day it is, and where they are. People with dementia tend to be confused about some or all of this.
• Language use: Depressed people use language properly, although they may speak slowly at times. People who are demented because of Alzheimer's disease or strokes often have lots of language problems. Particularly hard: remembering the names of common objects such as "pen" or "lamp" or "birthday cake."
• Use of familiar objects: Again, not a problem for people with depression. Someone with dementia may not recall how to get a pullover sweater on, for example. This is called apraxia—trouble remembering how to perform previously learned and routine motor activities.
• Negativity: Depressed people have a general tendency to put a negative spin on events. For example, if asked to take a test designed to screen for depression or Alzheimer's, they may jump to the conclusion that they did quite badly, and they often overestimate the problem. In contrast, someone with dementia may try to fabricate some story or excuse for a memory lapse or poor performance on a memory test.

monitoring glucose

Why You Should Monitor Your Blood Sugar at Home

Type 2 diabetes is a "silent" disease. Although you can feel thirsty, tired, hungry, or have frequent urination or blurry vision when blood sugar creeps into the danger zone, often there are no symptoms at all.

That's where home blood glucose monitoring comes in. There are two key elements to testing.

1. You prick your finger, get a drop of blood, and plug it into a glucose monitor (which can be purchased at any pharmacy). This tells you if your blood sugar is in the acceptable range.
2. You do something about it. After the test, you record the results (many monitors do this automatically) to discuss with your doctor. If your blood sugar is consistently too high, you should make changes in diet, exercise, or medication to keep blood sugar consistently in the "good" range. If it's too low (hypoglycemia), usually due to insulin or other medication, than you may need to consume glucose to bring it up.

Testing your blood sugar can show you that your medication is working, your diet is on track to control diabetes, and that you're not in danger from blood sugar that is too high or low.

• Blood sugar fluctuates

In people without diabetes, the pancreas works a bit like the thermostat in your house.

Blood sugar is kept within a very narrow range, because the pancreas produces a continuous low level of insulin (which encourages muscles and the liver to absorb glucose) and bursts of insulin after you eat a meal.

After you eat carbohydrates (the type of food that has the biggest impact on blood sugar), blood sugar rises, peaks about an hour after you eat, and then falls back to baseline within two hours.

But in people with diabetes, insulin isn't doing its job, and blood sugar can rise to dangerous levels (it can be too high before you eat, after you eat, or both).

It's not just food that can affect blood sugar. It also rises in response to hormones released when you are stressed, sick, or injured.

• Don't rely on hemoglobin A1C testing alone

If you rely solely on hemoglobin A1C tests, you'll never know if higher-than-normal test results are due to the plates of pasta, the stressful job promotion, a bout of the flu, or the fact that your diabetes is progressing and your medication is not doing its job.

That's why it's so important to test your blood sugar (though discuss with your doctor or diabetes educator how often you should be testing). If you're frequently monitoring, you should vary the time of day that you test. If blood sugar is too high first thing in the morning, it can mean something different from when it's too high after you eat or at night.

"If you test at the same time every day, you don't know how to manage your diabetes," says Donna Rice, immediate past president of the American Association of Diabetes Educators.

"Perhaps corn raises your blood sugar," she says. "You'd only know if you knew your level before a meal with corn, and after a meal with corn, and compared it with non-corn meals. That's the level of specificity that necessary for tight control."

And tight control—checking blood sugar and adjusting behavior or medicine—is necessary to prevent complications.

Because you have diabetes, you need to know when your blood sugar level is outside the target range for your body. Fortunately, you can see what your blood sugar level is anywhere and anytime by using a home blood sugar meter (blood glucose meter). Using the meter, you can find out what your blood sugar level is within a minute or two.

Knowing your blood sugar level helps you treat low or high blood sugar before it becomes an emergency. It also helps you know how exercise and food affect your blood sugar and how much short-acting insulin (if you take insulin) to take. Most importantly, it helps you feel more in control as you manage life with diabetes.

Three keys to success in monitoring your blood sugar anywhere are:

1. Keeping your meter and supplies with you at all times so that you always have them when you need them.
2. Making it a habit to check your blood sugar level by building it into your routine.
3. Checking your blood sugar meter's accuracy when you visit your doctor by comparing your results with your doctor's results.