UBJ: CDC communication undermines trust in vaccines.
SUBtitle: Why sitting all day is so bad for you — and what to do about it.
True courage is not taking a life, but knowing when to spare one – Gandalf
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SHORT NOTES:
1..CDC communication undermines trust in vaccines.
2..Why sitting all day is so bad for you — and what to do about it.
3..Change your position frequently. Take a five-minute activity break every 30 minutes.
4..Brain health supplements are booming, but only curcumin is worthwhile.
5..15 warning signs of dementia. 1. Short-term memory loss. 2. Word loss…
6..Nearly 1 in 5 cosmetic surgery patients screen positive for Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
7..Vaginal bacteria turn newborn skin to promote brain development.
8..Swabbing with vaginal fluid can provide it to C-section babies, study finds.
9..Deafness gene therapy approved, restores hearing to most infants born deaf.
10..Exercise training was beneficial across the spectrum of ages.
11..25 Health Mistakes That Age You – 1. Doing cardio without strength training 2…
12..Genome editing can be risky, but technology could tackle diseases such as atherosclerosis and hepatitis B.
13..Epigenetic editing employs biotechnology that makes no cuts in the DNA.
14..Dr Qi is a visionary who see epigenetic editing as a path to a better, longer old age.
15..A treatment for pre-eclampsia may be on the horizon.
16..Study after study has found that exercise boosts mood and reduces anxiety.
17..25 foods to skip after age 50: I suggest moderation in all you eat.
LONG NOTES:
Science 30 Apr 2026 pg 475 – CDC communication undermines trust in vaccines. Uncertainty-based framing raises doubt, lowers vaccination intentions, and boosts science denial. Public debate over a purported link between vaccination and autism spectrum disorder has persisted for decades, despite a broad scientific consensus that vaccines are neither causally nor correlationally associated with autism (3). Misinformation on this issue remains widespread and consequential for public trust and health behavior (4).
Washington Post: Why sitting all day is so bad for you — and what to do about it
Sitting isn’t exactly the “new smoking,” but it still isn’t a healthy habit. Here’s what too much sedentary time is doing to you and how to move more. Sitting for 10 hours a day once in a while isn’t the end of the world. Rather, researchers look at sedentary behavior over the course of years. When sitting all day becomes a regular habit, it’s also tied to a higher risk of cancer, Type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, depression and cognitive impairment. 6,000 older women found that those who spent more than 11 hours sitting per day had a 57 percent higher risk of death from any cause during the 10-year study period and a 78 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease compared with women who sat for fewer than nine hours per day.
Change your position frequently. Take a five-minute activity break every 30 minutes.
Washington Post: Brain health supplements are booming. Here’s what one longevity expert takes. Only one has been shown in clinical trials to slow cognitive aging, by about two years. This is what the science says about which supplements work. The global market for nutritional supplements was estimated at $517.1 billion in 2025 and projected to be $862.5 billion by 2033. In 1997, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that high doses of vitamin E — 2,000 units — delayed functional deterioration in moderately severe Alzheimer’s disease patients. Best ones to take: A 2024 review of published studies on curcumin (turmeric) found a “statistically significant improvement in cognitive performance.”
AARP: 15 warning signs of dementia. 1. Short-term memory loss. 2. Word loss. 3. Difficulty multitasking. 4. Repetition. 5. Personality changes. 6. New sleep behaviors. 7. Worsening sense of direction. 8. Depression. 9. Confusion about time and place. 10. Difficulty with visual or perceptual tasks. 11. Financial missteps. 12. Changes in judgment. 13. Misplacing things. 14. Misusing items. 15. Hallucinations.
Nearly 1 in 5 cosmetic surgery patients screen positive for Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a mental health condition characterized by obsessive concerns about perceived physical flaws. This highlights the critical role that psychological screening plays in today’s cosmetic consultations.
Science 30 Apr 2026 pg 450 – Vaginal bacteria turn newborn skin into a beneficial ‘bioreactor’. A lipid synthesized on skin may promote brain development—and a swabbing with vaginal fluid can provide it to C-section babies, study finds.
Science 30 Apr 2026 pg 455 – Deafness gene therapy approved, restores hearing to most infants born deaf.
Science 30 Apr 2026 pg 480 – Powerhouse of the aging muscle – Frailty associated with aging is a multifactorial condition with variable clinical manifestations, but skeletal muscle dysfunction is a central feature of its pathogenesis. By studying muscle tissue from both mice and humans across a spectrum of ages and functional statuses, García-Domínguez et al. determined that mitochondrial remodeling plays a key role in this process. Aging reduced exercise capacity in mice, whereas exercise training was beneficial across the spectrum of ages, and the authors observed improved mitochondrial function and exercise ability both in trained animals and in those engineered to have greater mitochondrial activity. Similar findings were noted in skeletal muscle biopsies from human donors, supporting the clinical relevance of these observations.
AARP 25 Health Mistakes That Age You – 1. Doing cardio without strength training 2. Skimping on sleep 3. Not staying organized 4. Getting stuck in your comfort zone 5. Being a couch potato 6. Neglecting the skin on your neck and hands 7. Smoking or vaping 8. Keeping to yourself 9. Eating too many processed foods 10. Avoiding intimacy 11. Ignoring hearing and vision problems 12. Being too cynical 13. Not balance training 14. Never breaking a sweat 15. Wearing the wrong footwear 16. Not sleeping well 17. Heavy drinking higher risk of death for women who consumed two drinks a day, and men who consumed three drinks or more. 18. Taking too many medications taking five or more at once, called polypharmacy, can be risky for older adults. 19. Staying inside all day 20. Worrying all the time 21. Using plastic bottles and containers. Tiny bits of plastic called microplastics are everywhere. 22. Relying on a sleep aid. 23. Ignoring your limits 24. Believing ageist stereotypes. 25. Skipping preventive care. 8 Vaccines You Need After 50.
Economist May 2-8 2026 pg64 – Genome editing can be risky. Meet the epigenome editors. The technology could tackle diseases such as atherosclerosis and hepatitis B. Epigenetic editing, as this alternative is called, employs similar biotechnology to gene editing but makes no cuts in the DNA. Instead it tinkers with the epigenome, a set of chemical markers attached to the genome that regulate genes’ activities. The tinkering is less intrusive than gene editing, and allows a gene’s output to be modulated, rather than simply switched on or off.
Epigenetic editing already shows promise for the treatment of certain metabolic problems, chronic viral infections and inherited genetic diseases. Over time that list should lengthen, as the role of the epigenome is better understood. And some visionaries hope for still more. They note that harbingers of old age, such as chronic inflammation and cellular senescence, have an epigenetic component, too. It is possible, they say, that epigenetic editing could one day be used not just to treat disease, but also to extend human lifespan. Current boss has a list of possible targets for ELXR, at the top of which is a gene called PCSK9. This encodes a liver protein that reduces the breakdown of cholesterol-rich packages called low-density lipoproteins (LDLs). These, if too abundant in the bloodstream, can lead to atherosclerosis, the main cause of heart attacks and strokes. And those, in turn, kill around 17m people a year.
Scribe’s proposed answer to this—which will, all being well, enter clinical trials in the summer—is an epigenetic edit that turns down the volume on PCSK9 and thus ups the destruction of LDLs.
For now treatment is a daily dose of a drug that stops the virus reproducing—but only while it remains in the patient’s system. By disabling HBV genes, epigenetic editing offers the possibility of a cure.
Dr Qi has his sights on facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a currently incurable creeping paralysis caused by the activation in adulthood of a gene useful in embryonic development.
Dr Qi is also among the visionaries who see epigenetic editing as a path to better and longer old age. But even in this highly speculative area, there are rival approaches. Other researchers, for example, seek to restore youthful vigour using a set of transcription factors that can perform epigenetic “factory resets” on cells.
Economist May 2-8 2026 pg65 – A treatment for pre-eclampsia may be on the horizon. Blood filtering has performed well in early trials. FEW PROBLEMS in pregnancy are as mysterious and dangerous as pre-eclampsia. The condition, which causes a sudden spike in the mother’s blood pressure, can quickly lead to organ failure and death. It is hard to see coming and the only known treatment is to deliver the baby fast, often by emergency C-section. If the pregnancy is 32 weeks or less along at this point, as is the case for roughly 20,000 such births in America each year, the baby’s chances of survival and healthy development are significantly lower. Even a small extension of the pregnancy in such cases could have huge benefits, if ways to safely achieve it could be found.
There is now a glimmer of hope that this can be done. On April 27th an international collaboration led by Ravi Thadhani and Ananth Karumanchi from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles reported the early results for a promising novel treatment. In a study published in Nature Medicine, they showed that filtering the blood of women with pre-eclampsia to remove a troublesome protein can safely slow its progression.
To sidestep this issue, Dr Karumanchi’s team decided to remove problematic components from a woman’s blood rather than adding anything new. The target they settled on was a protein called soluble Fms-like tyrosine kinase 1 (sFlt-1) which is secreted by the placenta in order to boost blood flow. Scientists have known for about 15 years that this protein spikes in pre-eclampsia and plays a direct causal role in the development of the disease in the mother. But nobody had previously managed to safely lower its levels in a woman’s blood.
Neither the women with pre-eclampsia on the trial nor their babies had any ill effects. The median extension of pregnancy in the treated women was ten days—meaningfully longer than the four days current treatment offers, and long enough for some babies to be classified as “moderately” rather than “very” preterm. After decades of better risk prediction without better treatment, adds Dr Walker, this study offers genuine grounds for optimism.
Economist May 2-8 2026 pg67 – Is exercise as effective as treatments for depression and anxiety? FOR THOSE in the doldrums, few things are more tiresome than being told to exercise. But unwelcome advice is not necessarily wrong. Study after study has found that exercise boosts mood and reduces anxiety. Two large analyses published earlier this year go further, suggesting it works about as well as therapy or antidepressants. All the same, most researchers are confident that exercise helps improve mood. Aerobic workouts, such as running, walking or cycling, seem to be particularly beneficial across the board. For depression, group-based or supervised exercise is more effective than sweating alone, and the benefits of exercise accrue over several months. For anxiety, the best results seem to come from lower-intensity activity. Other pathways are also being triggered. Exercise seems to reduce inflammation and improve brain plasticity, as well as increasing the transmission of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is involved in the process of weighing effort against reward and so increasing transmission may help reverse the loss of motivation associated with depression.
There are purely psychological benefits, too: exercise can provide people with a sense of achievement, agency and eventually mastery, all of which are known to lift mood. Plenty of reasons, then, to work up a sweat.
AARP: 25 foods to skip after age 50: 1. Sweetened yogurt. 2. Ramen- super high in sodium. 3. Deli meats. 4. Instant oatmeal packs (and other sugary cereals). 5. French fries. 6. Canned fruit, especially with added sugar. 7. Frozen pizza. Many ultra-processed foods like “meat lovers” frozen pizzas add food coloring, sodium, preservatives and other hard-to-pronounce additives. 8. Canned soup. a day-plus of sodium. 9. Microwavable flavored rice. 10. ‘Healthy’ veggie chips. 11. Frozen low-calorie meals. 12. Processed cheese. 13. Canned veggies. 14. High-FODMAP foods. 15. Bottled pasta sauce. 16. Granola and protein bars. 17. Bottled salad dressing. 18. Premade marinade for meat/fish/other proteins. 19. Cookie and cake mixes. 20. Alcoholic beverages. 21. Sweetened bottled tea. 22. Soda, both sugary and artificially sweetened. 23. Fruit juice, particularly sweetened. 24. Fancy coffee drinks. 25. Sports drink.
