By Williams ABAH
An Australian-based Nigerian gynaecologist, Uche Menakaya, has urged women to resist the belief that fibroid is a spiritual problem or death sentence.
Menakaya said this while interracting with journalists in Abuja on the sidelines of a Coastal/Junic Gynaecologic Ultrasound Training Programme scheduled to hold in Owerri, the Imo state capital.
He described fibroid as a denied growth of the muscles of the uterus, which could sometimes be caused by hormonal imbalance in women.
The Australian trained specialist said the complication was more prevalent in the African-American clime, noting that not all fibroids are problematic.
In his words, “Fibroid is very common in our population. My advice is that no spirit thing is attached to it. It is just an imbalance of hormones. It can be managed and not a death sentence.
“What the women need to do is to get their ultrasound scan done to see if they have fibroid or not.
“If they have, know where they are, the size and choose a system of monitoring it, over time.
“If it is getting too big, the doctor can offer treatment options to manage it before it gets so big,”
Menakaya said most fibroid patients could conceive a child, except when complications from surgery affected the line of the uterus where conception takes place.
He advised patients to always do a rescanning after their surgery had been concluded.
Speaking on the training programme, Menakaya said the goal was to build the capacity of women’s health specialists with the required skill to provide ultrasound services at the point of care for patients.
Exercise protects aging synapses
When elderly people stay active, their brains have more of a class of proteins that enhances the connections between neurons to maintain healthy cognition, a UC San Francisco study has found.
This protective impact was found even in people whose brains at autopsy were riddled with toxic proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
“Our work is the first that uses human data to show that synaptic protein regulation is related to physical activity and may drive the beneficial cognitive outcomes we see,” said Kaitlin Casaletto, an assistant professor of neurology and lead author on the study, which appears in the January 7 issue of Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
The beneficial effects of physical activity on cognition have been shown in mice but have been much harder to demonstrate in people.
Casaletto, a neuropsychologist and member of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences, worked with William Honer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and senior author of the study, to leverage data from the Memory and Aging Project at Rush University in Chicago.
That project tracked the late-life physical activity of elderly participants, who also agreed to donate their brains when they died.
“Maintaining the integrity of these connections between neurons may be vital to fending off dementia, since the synapse is really the site where cognition happens,” Casaletto said. “Physical activity — a readily available tool — may help boost this synaptic functioning.”
Honer and Casaletto found that elderly people who remained active had higher levels of proteins that facilitate the exchange of information between neurons. This result dovetailed with Honer’s earlier finding that people who had more of these proteins in their brains when they died were better able to maintain their cognition late in life.
To their surprise, Honer said, the researchers found that the effects ranged beyond the hippocampus, the brain’s seat of memory, to encompass other brain regions associated with cognitive function.
“It may be that physical activity exerts a global sustaining effect, supporting and stimulating healthy function of proteins that facilitate synaptic transmission throughout the brain,” Honer said.
