http://www.huffingtonpost.com/samina-raza/56-today_b_10900588.html

A great man, a Pakistani humanitarian and great philanthropist.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/abdul-sattar-edhi-january1-1928-july-8-2016_us_57806b47e4b03288ddc67c1f

June 30th was my 56th birthday and I decided to have a photo shoot done for it. I enlisted my friend  Sparrow Jesse Lane, who is an artist and an amazing photographer, his contact is artsbysparrow@gmail.com.

We went to the Yew Dell Botanical Gardens in Louisville KY. I’d taken a couple of dresses with me for the photo shoot, I put on the floral one and off we went. When I had conceived of this idea, I had thought of it as something empowering for all women of my age, that age, where you are neither overly young, nor have you really gotten old yet. You can still consider yourself youthful! Not too many aches and pains, hopefully not for a long time yet, seemingly not too many wrinkles, postmenopausal, so no more reproductive issues to worry about.

Is this, could it be, that this is the time of our lives? Our children are grown and hopefully either are or will soon be off our payroll. We look pretty good, feel pretty good, we have come into your own. We’re not afraid to speak our mind, we have become our own person.

For all that, I celebrate my 56th birthday. I celebrate that I am still young enough to enjoy myself, yet old enough to be my own woman. And I did it to have fun! And it was a lot of fun, we roamed around the botanical gardens, looking for vistas at which to shoot. It is a lovely environment, and for an hour, time was suspended, the only thing on our minds was taking a picture, hopefully a good one. I think we did, out of an idea came all these pictures, and I really love them and will have them forever, to reflect upon when I do get old. Ladies, and gentlemen as well, I highly recommend it!

A little Maleficent, thrown in just for fun!

If there is one thing I totally and completely love, it is a flower! And roses are among my most favorite flowers. I also have taken thousands of pictures of flowers, and I did again today when I visited the Rose Garden in Delaware Park, an Olmstead park in Buffalo NY. Flowers are incredibly attractive to me, and it makes sense as tat is their purpose, to attract creatures that will pollinate them so the species can go on and survive. Perhaps in my past life, I was a butterfly!

Home, what is home? Coming back to Buffalo, I always feel I’m home. However, that feeling is getting less strong and anyway, this is not my home any longer. I live in Louisville now, so technically that is my home. But if home is where the heart is, then Buffalo is my home, still. I moved here when I was just shy of my 12th birthday in 1972, and lived here pretty continuously till November 2013, when I moved to Louisville. From NY to KY, believe me I prefer NY. I still have my NY license. I’ll be changing it soon to KY though, so I can vote in Kentucky this November. Terrified of these elections. Hope I don’t have to move to CA, as in Canada and make that my home. Yes it’s the running joke for everyone terrified of this upcoming election’s results. But I digress. This post is about home, the ephemeral, emotional, sometimes imaginary, always beloved construct that all of us are trying to find. And lucky, the ones who have found it and inhabit it! Where are those darn ruby slippers when you need them!?

I am in Buffalo, actually Amherst, again. Staying with my mom’s best friend, a little weird, but it is so my son can get a restful night’s sleep in his own bed rather than giving me his bedroom and he sleeping on the couch. He is busy studying for the Bar exam, 8-10 hours a day! I came to bolster him with this huge amount of studying, as well as make him home cooked meals and help in any other way I can. This is an important time for my son and any help I can give him will be well worth it! Whenever I come here, it feels like I’m home. 😊 I know Amherst, a suburb of Buffalo, like the back of my hand. Our grocery store here, Wegmans, is one of the best in the country and it is my favorite! Also seeing my son’s kitty, Leo, the adorable, giant Maine Coon, is wonderful. His chirps and meows and his purring is so sweet. Of course he recognized me immediately, rubbed himself all over me, and of course immediately went to his food cupboard. Because, after all that’s what moms do, they feed you 😻 I’m staying for about 10 days, perhaps longer if my son needs me to. I’ll be seeing all my girlfriends and having lunches and dinners with them. But most of all, of course, I’ll be doing whatever my son needs me to do. Ah yes, a mother’s work is never done! And may it never be done as long as our darling children need us. 

These are my experiences, observations, and opinions about some social media sites. Let me know what yours are. 🙂

: in my experience, it is the nicest, most supportive, most positive, informative, happy, socially conscious place to be! Love it. I could do without having everyone know when I’m on, and everyone knowing what I liked, oh and yes their owning all my data and pictures… But sharing with people, my relatives overseas and friends in US, as well as all over the world in one fell sweep is priceless!

: I love it, there are some very pretty pictures on it, and everyone likes the pictures and the comments are always positive! I think the most likes I’ve gotten is about 15… I did get 28 views of a video (Zumba) I posted… but I recently discovered hashtags, haha, so lets see if that improves the likes…

: It is quite indifferent to me and I am quite indifferent to it, (shrugging my shoulders, is there a shmsh?) I never get any replies or likes or anything on my once every month tweets. I also don’t comment much on anyone else’s. I find Twitter a bit meaningless, maybe just my age, as I know things can often go viral there and all… whatever, it doesn’t speak to me.

: Youtube is great, I love the videos, I’ve posted some. Not as interactive as the other social media sites, but the videos can be amazing, and I like it.

: This is the only site I’ve had a very negative experience with. I was posting my blog posts on, I think it was the bipolar subreddit, and people on there started saying “this person has an ulterior motive, stay away from them.” Then one of them looked at my blog and said I explicitly stated that I wanted to get more views by posting on Reddit. Duh, of course I wanted to get more views, that’s why I post on FB, Twitter, Google +. So anyway, I don’t post in that subreddit anymore, I just post in other ones. But it’s not very user friendly and tells you all the time that “You’re doing that too often, come back in 8 minutes!” Sheesh, a website with an attitude. Also you can’t make your own sunreddit till you’ve been on it for a month and received so many karma points. I may just stop using it.

: Awww Flickr, I think that was the first such site I ever used, and posted a bunch of pictures, but I haven’t really been using it for years. There are some amazing photographs on it though.

: I have a google+ account, basically all I ever use it for is to post my blogposts from this blog on it. I never get any likes on it, no one has ever indicated that they are reading the posts, no comments. So it’s not all that useful for me…

: I have an account here, but I don’t think I’ve pinned much here. I don’t really understand the point of pinterest… but that’s just me. I’m sure many people find it absolutely fascinating!

Considering how often opioids are used to treat pain, this is an unfortunate finding. In rats, both male and female, the duration of pain is extended after they are given opioids to treat pain. I really dislike research on animals that causes them pain, like this one, but of course, I do very grudgingly admit that we do learn things from it. So giving rats opioids extended the duration of their pain and when they started to heal from an injury. It is most likely due to the immune system which sees the opioids as foreign and starts an immune reaction or inflammatory response against the opioid molecules. This inflammatory response then makes the pain last longer and the healing start later.

Hmmm, in addition to their high addictive potential, this is another reason to rethink using opioids for pain. We need study this and ascertain whether this is also happening in humans.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/morphine-may-make-pain-last-longer

Painkillers in the opium family may actually make pain last longer. Morphine treatment after a nerve injury doubled the duration of pain in rats, scientists report the week of May 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results raise the troubling prospect that in addition to having unpleasant side effects and addictive potential, opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin could actually extend some types of pain. If a similar effect is found in people, “it suggests that the treatment is actually contributing to the problem,” says study coauthor Peter Grace, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Scientists have known that opioid-based drugs can cause heightened sensitivity to pain for some people, a condition called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. The new study shows that the effects linger weeks after use of the drugs is stopped. Male rats underwent surgery in which their sciatic nerves, which run down the hind legs, were squeezed with a stitch — a constriction that causes pain afterward. Ten days after surgery, rats received a five-day course of either morphine or saline.

Rats that didn’t receive morphine took about four weeks to start recovering, showing less sensitivity to a poke. Rats that got morphine took about eight weeks to show improvements — double the time. “That’s far bigger than we had anticipated,” Grace says. “We were definitely surprised by that.”

These experiments were done with male rats, but unpublished data indicate that morphine extends pain even longer in female rats, Grace says, results that fit with what’s known about differences in how males and females experience pain.

Longer-lasting pain in the rats came courtesy of an inflammatory response in the spinal cord. The immune system sees morphine as a threat, the researchers suspect, and responds by revving up inflammation through specialized cells called microglia. Experiments that shut down this process in microglia shortened the duration of the pain.

Many questions remain. Scientists don’t yet know if a similar immune reaction happens in people. Nor is it known whether all opioid-based painkillers would behave like morphine.

Understanding the details of how the process works has important implications for doctors, many of whom may be unaware of opioids’ complex relationship with pain, says internal medicine physician Jonathan Chen of Stanford University School of Medicine. Clarity on how opioids influence pain could change doctors’ prescribing habits and encourage the search for better pain treatments, he says.

Grace points out that the experiments were done in genetically similar rats, and that people may have more varied responses to opioids. That variability might mean that not everyone would be at risk for such long-lasting pain, he says. “But clearly these data suggest that there may be a subset of people who might be in trouble.”

Metformin, also known as Glucophage, a drug used to treat Diabetes Type 2, has been shown to have a longterm protective effect against neurodegenrative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Metformin, also known as Glucophage, a drug used to treat Diabetes Type 2, has been shown to have a longterm protective effect against neurodegenrative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

The mechanism of this protection is unclear, however it is known that Metformin does cross the blood brain barrier.

I think it is pretty amazing that a drug that is used to lower glucose levels in Type 2 Diabetes patients can have a protective effect against neurodegenerative diseases! It will be interesting to find out how this occurs. This may be an indication as to how it does this http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/767139. This article says “Metformin may help renew neurons.” In this article they say that Metformin activates a key pathway that activates neurogenesis!

And yet another article  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/807886, which says
Metformin cuts dementia risk in Type 2 Diabetes. Whereas other therapies such as Insulin increased dementia risk!

All amazing findings. I wonder what it would do people who don’t have diabetes? Well for one it would lower their blood sugar too much so it cannot be used on wildtype people. So the folks who have Type 2 Diabetes get to enjoy this neuro-protective effect.

 

The article in the title, or the titular article, haha, always wanted to use that word: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/864681

Metformin may exert a long-term protective effect against neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, new research suggests.

Findings from a retrospective longitudinal study of data from Veterans’ Affairs electronic medical records were presented June 11 here at the annual American Diabetes Association (ADA) 2016 Scientific Sessions by Qian Shi, a PhD candidate at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

“For metformin exposure longer than 2 years, we found a significant reduction in neurodegenerative disease.…Metformin may be neuroprotective,” Ms Shi told Medscape Medical News.

The results were consistent even after researchers controlled for kidney function, chronic renal disease, and other diabetes medications.

The mechanism is unclear, but metformin is known to cross the blood-brain barrier, she noted.

Asked to comment, session moderator Lawrence S Phillips, MD, professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, said: “Metformin has pleiotropic effects, and it is of great interest for a variety of reasons.”

He added that there was an entire symposium here yesterday at the ADA meeting devoted to emerging findings regarding metformin, including its possible preventive roles in cancer and heart disease.

But at the same time, Dr Phillips cautioned that even though the investigators controlled for renal function and other potential confounders, “the hard question in all of these epidemiologic analyses is ruling out confounding by indication.…You wonder if the patients who didn’t get metformin or stay on it were somehow sicker in ways other than what [estimated glomerular filtration rate] eGFR might  have been picked up in the analysis. I think that’s very hard to tell in an epidemiologic analysis of an administrative database.”

Nonetheless, he told Medscape Medical News, “It absolutely deserves further study.”

Effect Seen After 2 Years

Ms Shi said that prior data on metformin and neurodegenerative diseases have been conflicting. While two previous population studies have shown that long-term treatment with metformin may reduce the risk of cognitive decline, other data indicated that cognitive performance was worse among patients taking metformin, possibly due to vitamin B₁₂ deficiency. And long-term use of the drug was associated with a slightly increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease in another trial.

The current study population consisted of patients with type 2 diabetes older than 50 years from the Veterans Affairs electronic medical records database who were receiving insulin treatment. They were followed from the time of diagnosis until death or outcome.

Out of 150,435 who met those criteria, 41,696 were excluded for a variety of confounders, including neuropathy, vitamin B₁₂ deficiency, prior neurodegenerative diseases, cognitive impairment, or late effects of cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or end-stage renal disease. Patients who took insulin for less than two-thirds of the study period were also excluded.

The final study sample was 6046 patients (over 90% male) with a mean age of 63 years. They were followed for a median of 5.25 years.

In addition to renal function and other diabetes medications, Ms Shi and colleagues also controlled for age, gender, race, tobacco use, obesity, and history of other complications and comorbidities at baseline.

During follow-up, 334 cases of dementia were diagnosed, as were 100 of Parkinson’s, 71 Alzheimer’s disease cases, and 19 with cognitive impairment.

The adjusted incidence of developing one or more neurodegenerative diseases per 100 person-years was 2.08 for those who never used metformin, 2.47 for those using metformin less than 1 year, 1.61 for less than 2 years, 1.30 for 2 to 4 years, and 0.49 for 4 or more years.

The protective relationship between metformin and neurodegenerative disease was statistically significant only after 2 years.

Compared with no metformin, the hazard ratios for 2 to 4 years of metformin therapy for all neurodegenerative diseases combined was 0.623 and for 4 or more years 0.216.

The findings were also significant for dementia specifically (0.567 at 2–4 years and 0.252 for 4+ years) and for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases only beyond 4 years (0.038 and 0.229, respectively).

“Similar risk reductions occurred in dementia and Parkinson’s but were not duplicated to other subtype diseases, most likely due to the limited numbers of events,” Ms. Shi explained.

“A large-scale prospective cohort study may be needed to confirm the relationship and the causality between metformin exposure and the risk for neurodegenerative disease,” she concluded.