Health

The Emotional Effects of OAB

Published

6 months ago

March 22, 2024

The physical effects of overactive bladder are obvious. But the emotional impact isn’t talked about as much. You might avoid going on road trips with friends, playing sports, or visiting your grandchildren because you’re self-conscious about leaking or having to stop a lot to use the restroom.

“People start to live their lives around management of their bladder,” says Aqsa Khan, MD, a urologist at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, AZ.

Even at home, OAB can make the simplest social interactions stressful. Khan says one of her patients, a 50-year-old woman, described having a nice chat with her neighbor in the yard when she suddenly started to pee in the middle of her conversation. To cover it up, she turned the garden hose onto herself.

The loss of control, Khan says, can be devastating. “It’s losing something that really defines you as a social being,” she says. “It makes you feel infantilized, in a way. It takes you back to wearing diapers.”

OAB can also impact intimacy. You might avoid sexual activity because you’re worried about leaking. This can lead to bigger relationship issues. If your partner doesn’t know what’s wrong, they may think it has something to do with them. Try your best to open up and trust your partner to be supportive.

Intimacy challenges are tough enough for couples who have been together for decades. They can be even more overwhelming when you’re in the dating game. “[OAB] can be a huge elephant in the room when starting up those more intimate relationships,” says A. Lenore Ackerman, MD, PhD. She’s the research director for UCLA Health’s Division of Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery.

You might wake up four times a night but go right back to sleep each time. Others may only get up twice a night. But they have so much trouble getting back to sleep each time that it has a huge effect on their quality of life. “It’s torture,” Khan says.

That’s because when you don’t get enough rest, your body doesn’t get the chance to recuperate. This could lead to other issues, including problems with brain function. There is a strong link between OAB and depression, Ackerman says, and poor sleep is a key factor. “Sleep is really centrally important to all of it,” she says.

The anxiety surrounding OAB can also make your physical symptoms worse. Just as you might clench your jaw without realizing it, people with OAB often clench their pelvic floor muscles, says Veronica Asence, DPT. She’s a physical therapist at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, MA, who specializes in pelvic health.

“Your pelvic floor is always active: supporting your pelvis, holding up your organs,” she says. “If we’re clenching our pelvic floor muscles in relation to the urge [to pee] and the anxiety surrounding that urge, it’s like we’re constantly tucking our tail.”

This nonstop squeezing can wear them out. So much so they lose control when you need them the most. You could see a big change in your symptoms just by working on ways to ease your anxiety and the pelvic floor tension that comes with it.

If you’re older, you might think urinary issues are a normal part of aging. (They’re not.) But if you’re young, OAB can carry an additional level of shame and self-blame. You might wonder how this could be happening or what’s “wrong” with you.

Shame can be a major block in asking for help, but OAB is more common than you think. “Talk to your friends,” Ackerman says. “Odds are some of them have it, too.” In fact, Ackerman says the first thing she does when meeting a new patient is tell them about her own urinary problems.

By talking about it more, others with OAB will likely feel more comfortable looking for long-term treatments instead of just managing symptoms with pads, backup underwear, catheters, and other items. They can be a great way to take back control. For instance, new products are often designed with light, flattering fabrics that secretly hold lots of fluids. But they sometimes stop people from getting professional help, Ackerman says.

“You don’t have to deal with this alone,” Ackerman says. “This happens to a lot of us, and there’s treatment, and we want to get you treatment.”

“Physicians get into this line of work because they want to help patients,” says Sevann Helo, MD, a Mayo Clinic urologist in Rochester, MN. “We can’t improve something we don’t know is a problem.”

If your doctor doesn’t know how to treat OAB, they should refer you to someone who can. With help, you can take control. “It doesn’t matter if you’re 28 years old or 88 years old,” Asence says. “Your bladder can be retrained at any point in your lifetime.” The key, she adds, is to be persistent and take care of your whole self. “The bladder’s personality is a lot like a toddler: it does best with structure, discipline, and a healthy environment.”

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Health

Walmart Is Selling a $300 Power Tower for Just $128, and Shoppers Say It's 'Surprisingly Sturdy'

Published

17 hours ago

September 7, 2024

Michael Charboneau

Men’s Journal aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.

When building a home gym, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the equipment options, especially when you’re working with limited space and a tight budget. But when you focus on versatile gear and hunt for deals, creating a useful setup is easily doable. Thankfully, Walmart has been slashing prices on a ton of fitness equipment, including its bestselling adjustable dumbbells and even a complete home gym system. Now, it’s reduced the price of a popular power tower by over $170, and it even ships for free.

The Pooboo Body Champ Multifunction Power Tower is on sale for $128, a 57% discount on its normal price of $300. This incredibly versatile workout station has earned nearly 250 five-star ratings from Walmart shoppers who’ve praised its “strong and sturdy” build and “quality fit and finish,” and it’s currently one of the top 5 bestselling models on the site.

Pooboo Body Champ Multifunction Power Tower, $128 (was $300) at Walmart

Don’t let the brand’s bizarre name fool you—this power tower is a well-made piece of gym equipment. It features steel construction and is rated to hold up to 480 pounds (the tower itself weighs 66 pounds). A nearly 42-inch H-shaped base gives it excellent stability, so it won’t wobble or shake when you’re exercising, and anti-slip feet on the bottom keep it securely planted on the floor. It’s also adjustable (from 71.4 inches to 94 inches) to accommodate users of varying heights. And, once it’s set up, you can use it for a huge range of exercises, including dips, pull-ups, chin-ups, push-ups, vertical leg raises, knee raises, and more.

According to Walmart reviewers, the Pooboo Body Champ stands out for its solid build and usefulness. “It’s a surprisingly sturdy piece of equipment,” a shopper said. “Everything about this fitness tower is perfect. I originally purchased this with the intention of only doing pull-ups on it, but after quickly assembling the power tower, I came to realize just how versatile it is. It has cushions for knee and leg raises, it’s sturdy, and the perfect width for dips.” Another shopper agreed, saying, “This was a much-needed addition to my home gym.”

“This thing is amazing and worth every penny,” said another, who added that it’s “easy to install and can hold a lot of weight.”

At just $128, this Pooboo power tower is a screaming deal, and it’s sure to get lots of use during your workouts. But this discount won’t last long, so grab one today before the price pumps back up.

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Health

Alzheimer’s Drug May Save Lives Through ‘Suspended Animation’

Published

1 day ago

September 7, 2024

Harvard Gazette

By Lindsay Brownell | Wyss Institute Communications | Harvard Gazette

Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital

Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Using Donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.

“Cooling a patient’s body down to slow its metabolic processes has long been used in medical settings to reduce injuries and long-term problems from severe conditions, but it can only currently be done in a well-resourced hospital,” said co-author Michael Super, director of immuno-materials at the Wyss Institute. “Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.”

This research, published Thursday in ACS Nano, was supported as part of the DARPA Biostasis Program, which funds projects that aim to extend the time for lifesaving medical treatment, often referred to as “the Golden Hour,” following traumatic injury or acute infection. The Wyss Institute has been a participant in the Biostasis Program since 2018, and has achieved several important milestones over the last few years.

Using a combination of predictive machine learning algorithms and animal models, the Wyss’ Biostasis team previously identified and tested existing drug compounds that had the potential to put living tissues into a state of suspended animation. Their first successful candidate, SNC80, significantly reduced oxygen consumption (a proxy for metabolism) in both a beating pig heart and in human organ chips, but is known to cause seizures when injected systemically.

In the new study, they once again turned to their algorithm to identify other compounds whose structures are similar to SNC80. Their top candidate was DNP, which has been approved since 1996 to treat Alzheimer’s.

Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.

–Michael Super

“Interestingly, clinical overdoses of DNP in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease have been associated with drowsiness and a reduced heart rate — symptoms that are torpor-like. However, this is the first study, to our knowledge, that focuses on leveraging those effects as the main clinical response, and not as side effects,” said the study’s first author, María Plaza Oliver, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute when the work was conducted.

The team used X. laevis tadpoles to evaluate DNP’s effects on a whole living organism, and found that it successfully induced a torpor-like state that could be reversed when the drug was removed. The drug, however, did seem to cause some toxicity, and accumulated in all of the animals’ tissues. To solve that problem, the researchers encapsulated DNP inside lipid nanocarriers, and found that this both reduced toxicity and caused the drug to accumulate in the animals’ brain tissues. This is a promising result, as the central nervous system is known to mediate hibernation and torpor in other animals as well.

Although DNP has been shown to protect neurons from metabolic stress in models of Alzheimer’s disease, the team cautions that more work is needed to understand exactly how it causes torpor, as well as scale up production of the encapsulated DNP for use in larger animals and, potentially, humans.

“Donepezil has been used worldwide by patients for decades, so its properties and manufacturing methods are well-established. Lipid nanocarriers similar to the ones we used are also now approved for clinical use in other applications. This study demonstrates that an encapsulated version of the drug could potentially be used in the future to buy patients critical time to survive devastating injuries and diseases, and it could be easily formulated and produced at scale on a much shorter time scale than a new drug,” said senior author Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

This research was supported by DARPA under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-19-2-0027, the Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities, and the University of Castilla-La Mancha (NextGeneration EU UNI/551/2021).

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This story is reprinted with permission from The Harvard Gazette.

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Health

Can Stuff in Rosemary Extract Fight Cocaine Addiction?

Published

2 days ago

September 5, 2024

Futurity

Researchers have discovered that an antioxidant found in rosemary extract can reduce intakes of cocaine by moderating the brain’s reward response, offering a new therapeutic target for treating addiction.

September 5, 2024 by Futurity Leave a Comment

By Pat Harriman-UC Irvine

The study in the journal Neuron describes researchers’ focus on a region of the brain called the globus pallidus externus, which acts as a gatekeeper that regulates how we react to cocaine.

They discovered that within the GPe, parvalbumin-positive neurons are crucial in controlling the response to cocaine by changing the activity neurons releasing the pleasure molecule dopamine.

“There are currently no effective therapeutics for dependence on psychostimulants such as cocaine, which, along with opioids, represent a substantial health burden,” says corresponding author Kevin Beier, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine.

“Our study deepens our understanding of the basic brain mechanisms that increase vulnerability to substance use disorder-related outcomes and provides a foundation for the development of new interventions.”

Findings in mice revealed that globus pallidus externus parvalbumin-positive cells, which indirectly influence the release of dopamine, become more excitable after being exposed to cocaine. This caused a drop in the expression of certain proteins that encode membrane channels that usually help keep the globus pallidus cell activity in check. The researchers found that carnosic acid, an isolate of rosemary extract, selectively binds to the affected channels, providing an avenue to reduce response to the drug in a relatively specific fashion.

“Only a subset of individuals are vulnerable to developing a substance use disorder, but we cannot yet identify who they are. If globus pallidus cell activity can effectively predict response to cocaine, it could be used to measure likely responses and thus serve as a biomarker for the most vulnerable,” Beier says. “Furthermore, it’s possible that carnosic acid could be given to those at high risk to reduce the response to cocaine.”

The next steps in this research include thoroughly assessing negative side effects of carnosic acid and determining the ideal dosage and timing. The team is also interested in testing its efficacy in reducing the desire for other drugs and in developing more potent and targeted variants.

Scientists from the University of West Virginia and the University of Colorado participated in the study.

Support for this work came from the National Institutes of Health, One Mind, the Alzheimer’s Association, New Vision Research, BrightFocus Foundation, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Source: UC Irvine

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Previously Published on futurity.org with Creative Commons License

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