A new study has suggested that people engaging in activities such as reading and playing games throughout their lives may be lowering levels of a protein in their brains that is linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

“Staying cognitively active over the lifetime may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s by preventing the accumulation of Alzheimer’s-related pathology,” said study author Susan Landau, a research scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Some of the literature has hypothesized this finding, but this is the first study to report that lifetime cognitive activity is directly linked to amyloid deposition in the brain,” she said. “We think that cognitive activity is probably one of a variety of lifestyle practices — occupational, recreational and social activities — that may be important.”

The report was published in the Jan. 23 online edition of the Archives of Neurology.

A new study has found that an experimental anti-blood-clotting drug may serve as a replacement for other drugs such as Plavix in the days before heart surgery.

The study authors reported that the intravenous drug cangrelor appears to have the potential to serve as a “bridge” medication for heart patients to take in the several days before procedures like coronary artery bypass grafting.

“This drug is investigational, so it is not yet an option for patients to ask about,” Dr. Gregg Stone, a heart specialist and professor of medicine at Columbia University in New York City pointed out, “but if [the U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approved it, it would likely be widely used.”

The report was published in the Jan. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Global health experts said on Tuesday that the UN General Assembly should devote a special session to mental illness and drug abuse that may wreak havoc in global societies and economies.

“The time has come for recognition at the highest levels of global development, namely the UN General Assembly, of the urgent need for a global strategy to address the global burden of MNS disorders,” said the article in PLoS Medicine.

Lead authors were Vikram Patel from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Judith Bass from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the United States.

“Depressive disorders markedly increase the risk for noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, coronary artery disease, stroke, and dementia,” said the article.

“Conflict, displacement, poverty, gender-based violence, and other social determinants of ill health increase the risk for MNS disorders,” it added.

A new study has suggested that babies born to poor mothers with pregnancy-related diabetes have an extra-high risk of developing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Gestational diabetes typically develops during the second or third trimester of pregnancy, particularly in women who are overweight before getting pregnancy, do not exercise, or eat an unhealthy diet.

“There seems to be more research going in the direction that… the brains of children with ADHD are different,” said Ginette Dionne, who has studied gestational diabetes and language development at Laval University in Quebec but wasn’t involved in the new study.

“Gestational diabetes may not be a specific cause (of ADHD), but may be one of the factors that affects brain development,” she added.

According to the latest results of a large screening trial, annual screening for prostate cancer doesn’t cut men’s chances of dying from the disease.

Researchers found while comparing men who were screened each year with so-called PSA tests, for prostate specific antigen, or rectal exams to those who received their usual care that more men in the screening group had been diagnosed with prostate cancer after 13 years and there was no difference in how many had died from it.

“Men, if they’re considering screening, should be aware that there’s a possibility that there’s little or no benefit (and) that there certainly are harms to PSA screening,” said study co-author Philip Prorok, from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.