Research has found that declines in temporal information processing (TIP), the rate at which auditory information is processed, underlies the progressive loss of function across multiple cognitive systems in the elderly, including new learning, memory, perception, attention, thinking, motor control, problem solving, and concept formation. In a new study, scientists have found that elderly subjects who underwent temporal training improved not only the rate at which they processed auditory information, but also in other cognitive areas. The study is published in the current issue of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience.

"Our study showed for the first time significant benefits of temporal training on broad aspects of cognitive function in the elderly. The results were long-lasting, with effects confirmed 18 months after the training," says lead investigator Elzbieta Szelag, Professor, Head of Laboratory of Neuropsychology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, and Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities (www.swps.pl), Warsaw, Poland.

Thirty subjects between 65 and 75 years of age were randomly assigned to three groups. One group received temporal training using Fast ForWord Language® (FFW), a program composed of several computer games designed to improve memory, attention, and sequencing abilities. The program was developed to help children who have trouble reading, writing, and learning. The second group participated in non-temporal training by playing common computer games. The third group, the control, underwent no training.

The more that we understand the brain, the more complex it becomes. The same can be said about the genetics and neurobiology of psychiatric disorders. For "Mendelian" disorders, like Huntington disease, mutation of a single gene predictably produces a single clinical disorder, following relatively simple genetic principals. Compared to Mendelian disorders, understanding bipolar disorder has been extremely challenging. Its biology is not well understood and its genetics are complex.

In a new paper, Dr. Inti Pedroso and colleagues utilize an integrative approach to probe the biology of bipolar disorder. They combined the results of three genome-wide association studies, which examined the association of common gene variants with bipolar disorder throughout the genome, and a study of gene expression patterns in post-mortem brain tissue from people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The findings were analyzed within the context of how brain proteins relate to each other based on the Human Protein Reference Database protein-protein interaction network.

"None of our research approaches provides us with sufficient information, by itself, to understand the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders. This innovative paper wrestles with this challenge in a creative way that helps us to move forward in thinking about the neurobiology of bipolar disorder," commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.

It is very encouraging to see a mainstream medicine insider with impressive credentials come out and confirm what some of us outsiders have known for a while. Dr. Dwight Lundell has been a heart specialist MD and surgeon for 25 years, having performed 5,000 open heart surgeries. He was Chief Surgeon at the Banner Heart Hospital in Mesa, AZ, and he ran a successful private practice.

This is how he begins his personal testimony: "We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong."

Dr. Dwight Lundell and his Current Perspective on Heart Health

Dr. Lundell has seen through the cholesterol myth and hoax, the low fat diet scam recommended by medical authorities, and the high adverse risks without benefits of statin drugs. From his experience as a heart specialist, he realizes that statin drugs are much more dangerous than high cholesterol.

He maintains that lowering cholesterol unnaturally invites other health issues. Our bodies need cholesterol for cell walls, nervous system sheathing, and brain matter. Cholesterol is part of our necessary physiology. Cholesterol is also converted into various hormones by the endocrine system.

Recent research also points to statin drugs leading to Alzheimer's disease; but this is not necessarily a side effect. This is the result of statin drugs' working as they should, lowering cholesterol, which the brain and nervous system need to build and maintain healthy tissues.

Dr. Dwight Lundell points to low fat diet recommendations as a major factor for raising cardiac and diabetes issues statistics nationally. He points out that healthy fats do exist and they're important. Medical dietary recommendations have expanded an already toxic food industry by promoting unhealthy fats.

Did you know that the multi-billion drug category known as "acid blockers," despite being used by millions around the world daily, may not work as well as the humble ginger plant in relieving symptoms of indigestion and heartburn?

Ginger is a spice, a food, and has been used as a medicine safely for millennia by a wide range of world cultures. Research on the health benefits of ginger is simply staggering in its depth and breadth. In fact, the health benefits of ginger have been studied extensively for over 100 health conditions or symptoms, making it one of the world's most versatile, evidence-based remedies.

The biomedical literature on acid blockers, on the other hand, is rife with examples of the many adverse health effects that come with blocking stomach acid production with xenobiotic, patented drugs, i.e. proton pump inhibitors and H2 antagonists.

What started out as "heartburn" - which in its chronic form is now called "acid reflux" or "gastroesophageal reflux disorder" - soon becomes stomach acid barrier dysfunction, when these drugs remove the acid which protects us from infection, helps to break down food, and facilitate the absorption of minerals and nutrients.

The list of 30+ harms is extensive, but here are a few of the most well-established adverse effects you may not be aware of:

• Clostridium Infections
• Diarrhea
• Pneumonia
• Bone Fractures
• Gastric Lesions and Cancer

Back to our friend - our "plant ally" - ginger. What happens when Pharma meets Farm in a biomedical face-off? When acid-blocking drugs are compared in efficacy to our little spicy ginger root? Well, this is what the journal Molecular Research and Food Nutrition found back in 2007 ...

A parasite found in cats is tampering with people's brains and driving them to suicide, research suggests.

Scientists have shown that men and women infected with a bug that breeds in cats' stomachs and worms into people's brains are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than others.

They say that Toxoplasma gondii may tinker with the delicate chemistry of the brain and screening people for it could help identify those at risk of taking their own lives.
The parasite, which is carried by many Britons, has a complicated life cycle but can only breed inside cats. The microscopic eggs are passed on in cat faeces, spreading the infection.

Two seemingly groundbreaking studies, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that type 2 diabetes, or "diabesity", could be cured with gastric bypass surgery. The flurry of media attention and medical commentary hail this as a great advance in the fight against diabetes. The cure was finally discovered for what was always thought to be a progressive incurable disease. But is this really a step backwards? Yes, and here's why.

No one is asking the most obvious question. How did the surgery cure the diabetes? Did the surgeons simply cut out the diabetes like a cancerous tumor?

No. The patients in the studies changed their diet. They changed what they put in their stomach and that's something that doesn't require surgery to change. If they had surgery and they didn't stop binging on donuts and soda they would get violently ill and vomit and have diarrhea. That's enough to scare anyone skinny. If I designed a study that gave someone an electric shock every time they ate too much or the wrong thing, I could reverse diabetes in a few weeks. But you can get the benefits of a gastric bypass without the pain of surgery, vomiting, and malnutrition.

Most don't realize that after gastric bypass diabetes can disappear within a week or two while people are still morbidly obese. How does this happen? It is because food is the most powerful drug on the planet and real whole fresh food and can turn on thousands of healing genes and hundreds of healing hormones and molecules that create health within days or weeks. In fact, what you put on your fork is more powerful than anything you can find in a prescription bottle.

The researchers asked the wrong question. It should not have been does surgery work better than medication, but does surgery work better than intensive lifestyle and diet change.

Astonishingly, the researchers just compared surgery to medication, which has been proven over and over not to reverse diabetes, and often promotes progressive worsening of the diabetes. Patients who get on insulin gain weight and their blood pressure and cholesterol go up. And in recent studies, those who had the most aggressive medical therapy to lower blood sugar had higher rates of heart attack and death.

These two new studies on gastric bypass should have included a treatment group that had intensive lifestyle therapy as well as medical therapy or surgery.

Lifestyle change and changes in diet work faster, better, and cheaper than any medication and are as effective or more effective than gastric bypass without any side effects or long term complications. These changes are not easy, but then neither is gastric bypass.

Recently, I attended a convention of the American Diabetes Association in New York City where the main booth heralded a breakthrough "cure" for diabetes. Excited to think I might learn something new, I hustled right over. Imagine my dismay when all the information at the booth was about weight-loss surgery!

Do we need a cure? Absolutely!

Is surgery a one-size-fits-all solution for diabetes? No way.

I understand the desire to find a solution. After all, Type 2 diabetes is looming as the biggest epidemic and public health issue in human history. Close to 300 million people are affected worldwide and another 150 million forecast to be diagnosed by 2030. The reason? Obesity.

Yes, obesity is a tenacious problem but surgery is only a Band-Aid solution, albeit one that is growing in popularity. In the last decade alone, the rate of weight-loss surgeries performed each year in the United States has increased from 10,000 to 230,000. But how many of the 1.7 billion overweight citizens of the world can afford gastric bypass? And how many of those will regain the weight?

I have seen many patients go under the knife for these procedures only to gain back the weight they lost, plus some. Weight-loss surgery may seem like a panacea, but it won't solve the underlying hormonal and metabolic imbalances that are driving the diabetes and obesity.

My patient Alan is a prime example. Alan has been overweight since he was 6 years old and has never experienced a day without ravenous hunger. At age 40, he had gastric-bypass surgery and shrunk from 450 to 250 pounds. The size of his stomach changed, but his overall lifestyle did not. Eventually, he gained back 100 pounds. Even with a stomach the size of a walnut, he managed to gain weight one tiny, fattening bite at a time. By the time he landed in my office, he was 60 years old and tired of juggling all the complications of weight-loss surgery.

In a shocking new study published online in Pediatrics this week, researchers found that from 2000 to 2008, the number of teenagers aged 12 to 19 with pre-diabetes or diabetes increased from 9% to 23%.

Yikes, one in four kids have either pre-diabetes or diabetes - what I like to call diabesity. How did this happen? Just 15 years ago, less than 3% of new cases of childhood diabetes were Type 2 (or what we used to call adult onset), now it is nearly 50% of all new cases of diabetes in kids.

In this study of 3,383 children, the most shocking finding was not just the exploding rates of pre-diabetes and Type 2 diabetes in children, which alone should make us all stop whatever we are doing and become health activists, it was the fact that 13% of kids of normal weight were either pre-diabetic or diabetic.

We need to stand up in our homes, communities and schools and create healthy environments for kids. We need to take back our kid's taste buds, our kitchens and our homes, which have been hijacked by the food industry and ban anything except real food.

We need to lobby to change food marketing to kids, tax soda, limit access to junk food in our schools and neighborhoods, and protect our children, their future, our global economic competitiveness, and our national security.

Sick kids have been shown to have an achievement gap doing less well in school and throughout their lives. And a full 75% of military recruits are not fit to serve.

Remember the '70s when doctors equated eggs with cholesterol and heart disease? A recent Canadian study involving over 1,200 adults published in the peer-reviewed journal Atherosclerosis says that eating eggs yolks is about as bad as smoking cigarettes when it comes to advancing coronary heart disease. We're already seeing cracks in the theory.

In the study, researchers recorded the number of eggs eaten and packs of cigarettes smoked as recalled by each adult (average age 62). Everyone in the study had been referred to a vascular prevention clinic at a Canadian hospital, meaning their heart health (and the habits that led them there) was already in question. The researchers found that, as expected, plaque build-up in their subjects' carotid artery thickened with age, and even correlated with smoking and egg-eating habits.

Publications like The Daily Mail and Fox News have reported blindly on the matter, but thankfully there are others out there suspiciously raising eyebrows.

The UK's National Health Service points out some of the study's limitations, including:

• The accuracy of the participants' recollections of egg yolk consumption.

• A lack of details regarding how the eggs were cooked (or not).

• Disregard for other factors of heart disease advancement, including but not limited to exercise, alcohol consumption, antidepressant use (antidepressants have been shown to cause arteries to thicken 400% faster than aging,) and other important dietary factors.

In a nine-year population study, Canadian researchers have determined that at least two fluoroquinolone-based antibiotics - commonly given to patients with respiratory infections, diarrhea, conjunctivitis and other infections - cause acute liver damage.

The research comes from Toronto's Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, the University of Toronto, and the Ontario Departments of Medicine and Healthy Policy, Management and Evaluation. The research team was led by David N. Juurlink, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Toronto and a leading liver disease researcher.

The researchers analyzed liver injury cases for different antibiotics over nine years in a hospital population from Ontario. The antibiotics studied included moxifloxacin, levofloxacin, cefuroxime axetil and ciprofloxacin. They studied cases where patients were prescribed antibiotics at some point between 2002 and 2011. They matched the patients with other patients of the same age and sex that were given other antibiotics. Liver damage cases were compared to patients prescribed the antibiotic clarithromycin. None of the study population had a history of liver injury or disease prior to the study.

The researchers found that those patients given the moxifloxacin antibiotic had more than double the risk of acute liver injury, while those given levofloxacin had almost twice the risk of liver damage when compared to those taking clarithromycin. Moxifloxacin and levofloxacin are both fluoroquinolones.

The study population yielded 144 patients who suffered from severe liver injury inside of 30 days from the time they began taking one of these antibiotics. Of those 144 patients, over 60% of them - 88 patients - died of liver complications as a result of their use of these antibiotics.