We have all encountered people, perhaps our grandparents, who now have trouble remembering things that they could instantly recall when they were younger. What happened to those missing memories? Why are they so hard for an older person to recall? Those memories used to be present in the brain and easily accessible. What has changed? Continue reading
Covid-19 is a scary disease. There are a number of unhappy possible outcomes of an infection.
In the “Jaws” movie franchise, there is one movie after another where a great white shark attacks people at the beach who venture too far from shore. Clearly, it was not safe to get back in the water, but the people did anyway. Frolicking at the beach is a great summer recreation, but if Jaws is still out there somewhere, it is not a great idea.
We have a similar situation with Covid-19. After an initial peak, social distancing, mask wearing, and then vaccination sent infections and deaths down in countries that practiced those intervention. However, like Jaws, Covid-19 keeps coming back, more dangerous than ever. Why is this? Continue reading
In the world today, people spend huge sums on clothing styles, hair styles, hair color, cosmetics, creams, and potions, all in an effort to look younger than the age noted on their birth certificate. It’s fine to want to look youthful, but an older person who uses such interventions to change their looks is not fooling Father Time. Are there any interventions that could instead roll back the infirmities of age, so that a person would have the functionality and health of a younger person? A lot of research is going into finding such an intervention. So far, the mythical Fountain of Youth alleged to have been sought in Florida by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, has not been found. There has been some progress in this effort however. Continue reading
Some people are infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus, without having any symptoms at all. Others may show mild symptoms for a few days, and then seem to be back to normal. In either case, you may not be back to normal at all.
You have probably heard of “long Covid.” This is the persistence of symptoms of Covid-19 long after the virus is no longer detectable in a person’s body. There is a whole laundry list of symptoms, such as loss of smell, loss of taste, headache, shortness of breath, chest pains, brain fog, fatigue, and even anxiety and depression. Long haulers may have any subset of these symptoms, plus others. Bad as these symptoms are, they are not the worst. Covid-19 can also cause serious heart damage. Continue reading