Cholesterol

Cholesterol is a fat that circulates in the blood. your body needs some cholesterol to manufacture some harmones and certian kinds of cells. Too much cholesterol can lead to clogged arteries and heart problems.

But you body (specifically your liver) can manufacture all the cholesterol you need. We get additional cholesterol directly from eating animal products -- meat, milk, eggs, etc.

Decreased response inhibition in middle-aged male patients with type 2 diabetes

The abstract:

Background

This study was performed to examine whether patients with type 2 diabetes have cognitive deficits associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
Methods

Twenty-seven middle-aged patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes and 27 healthy controls underwent physical measurements and neuropsychological tasks. Response inhibition, reward prediction, and executive function were assessed by the Go/NoGo task, the reversal and extinction tasks, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). To examine the interactions of being overweight with diabetes on cognitive performance, performance data were analysed by two-way ANCOVA with diabetes and overweight as factors and age as a covariate.
Results

Patients with type 2 diabetes showed significantly decreased response inhibition in the Go/NoGo task (discriminability index: P=0.001). There was an interaction of being overweight with diabetes on reaction time in the Go trials of the Go/NoGo task (P=0.009). Being overweight was related to retained responses to the presentiment of reward in the extinction task (P=0.029). The four groups showed normal cognitive performance in the WCST.
Conclusions

Our results showed that middle-aged, newly diagnosed and medication-free patients with type 2 diabetes have a particular neuropsychological deficit in inhibitory control of impulsive response, which is an independent effect of diabetes apart from being overweight.

The full article.

Diabetes plus other stuff

I have diabetes. I also have high blood pressure, bi-polar disorder, kidney failure, and had recent heart by-pass surgery. And I recently turned 60 so there's every reason to expect such a basket of health issues to continue. So this blog post on patient, doctor disagreements about the importance of different treatments caught my interest.

Newly diagnosed diabetics and their doctors don't always agree on which aspects of the disease are the most important to treat.

It prompted me to do some further reading on the subject. I'll try to get to some of that tomorrow.