category : Dr. Mixon's Longevity Journal

Secondhand smoke damages hearing in children. A recent study of 1500 kids between 12 and 19 years of age demonstrated that the more exposure they had to secondhand smoke, the worse their hearing tended to be. By measuring the amount of cotinine in the blood of these adolescents, researchers were able to calculate the extent of their exposure to secondhand smoke.

Overall it was found that 60% of the kids with secondhand smoke exposure had some degree of hearing loss. The best current theory is that the secondhand smoke is actually damaging the auditory nerves in the still growing young people.

We often think of secondhand smoke as triggering asthma or causing breathing problems in younger people. But it now appears that secondhand smoke is actually causing neurologic damage. Here’s one more good reason why every smoking parent should quit.

How fast your heart beats may predict how long you live. There are a lot of fancy and expensive medical tests that can be done to determine your risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death. But there’s one test that you can actually do at home sitting on your couch that costs nothing, takes about one minute, and will give you a pretty good idea of your risk.

Here’s how you do the test. Sit quietly and rest for 15 minutes. Then find your pulse in your wrist or your neck and count the beats for one minute. If your resting heart rate is more than 84 bpm, your overall risk of cardiovascular disease goes up by about 40%. And the odds are you will live about a year and a half less than others your age.

But if you will lose your excess fat and start exercising, your heart rate should slow, and your risk should return to normal.

Berries help prevent heart disease. A study that looked at 93,000 nurses over 18 years, found that the more deeply pigmented berries they consumed, the lower the risk of heart attacks.

The magic number for blueberries, strawberries and raspberries seems to be about three servings per week. Even those women who were overweight, smoked, or suffered from diabetes had a reduction in their risk of heart attacks, when deeply pigmented berries were a significant part of their diet. But as expected, thin women who exercise regularly did even better than their sedentary and overweight counterparts.

Once more we find

Fast food is both fast and cheap. This makes it popular for parents and children alike. But beware, fast food does more damage than just making you fat.

A recent international study of asthma and allergies in childhood demonstrated that children who eat fast food three or more times per week, have a 30% increase in their incidence of asthma, eczema, and hay fever. Thus far, no one knows if it’s the high-fat diet or the fact that these kids tend to weigh more than normal, damaging their immune systems, or if there is something in the way of food additives or even the way the fast food is prepared, that is damaging these children.

There is obviously a lot we don’t know. But this much is clear, you should limit fast food for both you and your children to the status of an infrequent treat. Those quick takeout meals are convenient and inexpensive, but they may be dangerous.

If you are not yet bald, but are getting rather thin on top, there is an new option to help you grow new hair. It’s called platelet rich plasma injections.

Platelets are tiny structures in your blood, which helped plug little breaks in your blood vessels. Platelets contain nine separate growth factors which are released to trigger rapid healing should you suffer damage to a blood vessel. In this procedure a few vials of your own blood are drawn with a needle. The blood is spun down and the platelets are concentrated and separated into a smaller volume of plasma. This platelet rich plasma can then be injected into 100 or more tiny points across your scalp. The growth factors released seem to trigger the hair follicles back to robust growth.

I have seen men and women who have doubled and tripled the amount of hair on their head by this simple and relatively inexpensive procedure.