Stress in America Runs High
Feeling stressed? You’re not alone. An annual Gallup poll of more than 150,000 people found that Americans are among the most stressed people in the world, with adults reporting the highest levels of anger, worry, and stress in a decade.
Gallup’s annual poll on stress, which surveys people from across the globe on how often they experience positive or negative feelings, began in 2005. This past year, 55 percent of American adults reported experiencing stress for “a lot of the day,” compared to 35 percent of adults worldwide. Digging deeper, Gallup found there are three key indicators of feeling negative experiences: Being under age 50, being low-income, and having a dim view of the current president.
Despite being stressed out, Americans also generally report having positive experiences (versus feelings). Nearly 65 percent of adults said they did something interesting the prior day, compared to just 49 percent worldwide.
Mobile Game May Detect Alzheimer’s
Gamers, rejoice—a recent study determined that the mobile game Sea Hero Quest could help predict early Alzheimer’s by determining how a person performed on a wayfinding skill. In the study, researchers found that people who have a high genetic risk for Alzheimer’s—they possess a gene called APOE4 that’s linked to a predisposition for the disease—performed worse on spatial navigation tasks than those without that gene.
The game requires the player to navigate a small boat through various mazes, but the people with the APOE4 gene typically had a harder time getting through the mazes and took less efficient routes to checkpoints. Spatial navigation—or the ability to quickly move through a space toward a specific point—is one of the first functions to diminish when someone develops Alzheimer’s. Finding new ways to predict Alzheimer’s is crucial for learning more about the disease. Standard memory and thinking tests have not yet been able to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s. “Dementia will affect 135 million people worldwide by 2050,” lead researcher Professor Michael Hornberger says. “We need to identify people earlier to reduce their risk of developing dementia in the future.”
One in Five Deaths Associated with Unhealthy Diet
A poor diet contributes to so many chronic diseases that long-term research has concluded it can be associated with one in five deaths worldwide. The study, which reviewed dietary trends and consumption statistics between 1990 and 2017 in 195 countries, estimated that approximately 11 million deaths could be linked to a bad diet. “This study affirms what many have thought for several years—that poor diet is responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor in the world,” says study author Christopher Murray, MD, of the University of Washington.
Researchers looked at 15 components of a diet, including consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, fiber, calcium, process meat, sodium, and more. Diets that were high in sodium, low in whole grains, and low in fruit consumption together accounted for more than 50 percent of all diet-related deaths in 2017.
