You Can Improve Your Health From Head to Toe With These Strategies

We are approaching the new year, and that means that people will be making their new year’s resolutions, and many of them will involve living a healthier life. The good news is that there are many easy strategies that you can begin today that can help you to live your best life, and you can achieve them all with effort and persistence. Here at Patient Talk, we love to help people of all ages and characteristics live their best lives, so we have some tips that you can implement today to have a healthier life.

Start By Eliminating Stress From Work and Consider Online College

Many times we dread a new year because we know that we will be returning to the same job that has been causing us stress every day. If this is the case, then make 2023 a chance to find a career that can make you feel fulfilled day after day. One way that you can ensure a successful transition is by going to school online. This is a great way to take your classes on your own time so you can get a great degree and still keep working at your existing job.

There are many amazing degrees that can help you find a fulfilling career. One idea is to enroll in a bachelor of education program, which offers you many great opportunities to start a career as a teacher or to learn about early childhood education, and many other great options. Before going to a school, ensure that it is accredited and that you can find affordable rates that will fit in your budget.

Find Ways to Walk More Often

An easy way to ensure your physical and mental health is to walk whenever and wherever you can. When you walk, you get the blood flowing, and when you walk outside, you get a chance to clear your head so you can get rid of your anxiety. Look for opportunities to walk, including when you go to the store, to work, and in the mornings when you need a workout.

Walking is especially important if you work from home in a sedentary job where you are sitting most of the day. In this case, you need to find reasons to walk. Make sure that you take your breaks and your lunch every day, and consider walking at those times. You could also walk to other offices to have lunch with your friends or organize a group of coworkers who go out walking together during breaks.

Get Enough Sleep Every Night

Another way to ensure your health from head to toe is to make it a point to get eight to nine hours of sleep every night. When you rest, you give your mind a chance to relax and refresh, so you wake up without anxiety. Also, sleeping helps your body to repair your immune system, which makes it less likely that you will get sick.

If you have trouble getting enough sleep, then you may need to reset your circadian rhythm. You can do that by going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, including on weekends. Also, avoid looking at your phone while you lay in bed, as the blue light can also disrupt your sleep. If you have trouble falling asleep, then read a book or put on relaxing music.

As you can see, there are several strategies that you can try to live the healthiest life possible in 2023 and beyond. Remember to prioritize walking more often, find ways to get enough sleep, and consider returning to school and earning an online degree so you can find that dream job and you’ll be truly happy. If you would like to know more about the help we can provide at Patient Talk, then please contact us at info@patienttalk.org.

For most of the past century, drugs approved and released to market have been tested only on male patients, leading to improper dosing and unacceptable side effects for women. The important physiological differences between men and women have only recently been considered in medical research. Emergency doctor Alyson McGregor studies these differences. In this fascinating talk, she discusses the history behind how the male model became our framework for medical research and how understanding differences between men and women can lead to more effective treatments for both sexes.

Targeting a receptor responsible for our sense of touch and temperature, which researchers have now found to be present in our colon, could provide a new avenue for treating chronic pain associated with gastrointestinal disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome.

A team examining the colon, led by Professor Hongzhen Hu at Washington University and Professor Nick Spencer at Flinders University, identified the presence of Piezo2, the subject of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, now known to be responsible for sensing light touch on our skin.

“In discovering that this receptor is also in our gut, there’s the potential that selectively targeting these channels could be used for long-term silencing of pain sensations from internal organs, without the need for frequent consumption of opiate pain medications,” says Professor Spencer, a Matthew Flinders Professor in the College of Medicine and Public Health.

Professor Nick Spencer

“Chronic pain from internal organs, such as the gut or bladder, is notoriously difficult to treat. Opiates, including morphine and their derivates have been commonly used to treat a variety of types of pain but visceral pain doesn’t respond well to the treatment and the drugs are highly addictive with a multitude of side effects.”

The authors say the availability of selective pain medications for the gut has been hindered by a lack of understanding about how sensory nerves communicate pain sensations from the gut to the brain.

“It was previously known that many different ion channels are located on the ‘pain-sensing’ neurons that communicate from the gut to the brain, but our study, published in the journal Neuron, has now identified the major ion channel in the colon that responds to mechanical stimulation leading to the sensation of pain,” says Professor Spencer.

“Furthermore, we have discovered that the major ion channel that responds to this mechanical pain is a member of the Piezo ion channel, specifically Piezo2.

“From this knowledge we can focus on targeting these channels to silence the pain sensations and hopefully produce a treatment for visceral pain, common in conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, endometriosis or abdominal cancers, while avoiding the devastating side effects of opioids.”

An x-ray depicts a hand fully affected by rheumatoid arthritis, characterized by swollen, painful joints, most commonly involving the wrists and hands.

Using a novel systems biology approach, scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have further parsed the cellular players and roles involved in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a complex disease that affects more than one million Americans in ways that have defied development of uniform treatments.

The findings, published in the October 20, 2022 issue of Nature Communications, show that the same molecules involved in RA can have opposite functions in cells obtained from different patients — and help explain why current targeted therapies evoke different responses in patients with the same diagnosis and similar symptoms.

Arthritis encompasses more than 100 conditions that affect the joints, tissues around the joint and other connective tissues. It is estimated that more than 58 million adults in the United States (one in five) have been diagnosed with the condition. 

Osteoarthritis is the most common form, involving degeneration of joints, often in the hands, hips, and knees. RA is less common, but still affects more than two million Americans, primarily women. It is a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by long lasting or chronic, painful tissue inflammation in affected joints. It can also cause problems in other organs, such as the lungs, heart, and eyes. 

The causes and risk factors for RA are myriad and not well understood. They range from age, sex, and lifestyle (such as smoking) to obesity and inherited traits. There is no cure for RA, but there are a broad range of targeted treatments that can help slow disease progression, prevent joint deformity, and reduce pain and disability. 

“Although that RA arises with similar clinical appearance between patients, response to any individual treatment is unpredictable and requires a trial and error method. This process is repeated until a drug that decreases disease activity for that particular patient is identified,” said co-corresponding author Gary Firestein, MD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine and director of the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute at UC San Diego School of Medicine. 

“Many patients have improved outcomes, but a significant percentage do not. They have persistent inflammation. These variable responses to therapy indicate the same disease can have diverse mechanisms.”

That diversity or heterogeneity of disease with varying cell types in individual RA patients has driven efforts to find personalized mechanisms that would help to better understand the nature of RA and reliably prescribe effective, early treatment. In the new study, the UC San Diego team focused on fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLS), a specialized cell type found inside joint synovium — a soft connective tissue that lubricates joints and minimizes wear-and-tear. FLS play a major role in RA joint destruction. 

Examining cultured primary FLS, the researchers identified specific transcription factors (proteins that regulate the transcription or copying of genes) that are involved in individual RA patients’ cell lines. The analysis allowed scientists to stratify those cell lines into at least two subtypes with different predicted activated pathways that could contribute to inflammation. 

“Essentially, we biologically validated these predictions for the top subtype-specific transcription factors,” said co-corresponding author Wei Wang, PhD, professor in the departments of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “This study is the first to characterize groups of cell lines from RA patients with distinctive transcription factor biology by integrating transcriptomic and epigenomic data.”

System biology is a computational approach that studies the interactions and behavior of all components of a biological entity, based on the understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  In taking this approach, the authors wrote, the findings could help pave the way toward a greater understanding of RA’s heterogeneity while providing better focus on existing and future therapies personalized to individual patients.