As I’m sure many of us have heard Tiger Woods (Real name: Eldrick Tont Woods) has run into some problems in recent years. During the U.S. Open in June 2008, Woods seemed to be in pain, occasionally wincing after tee shots and favoring the left foot to keep weight off of it. Despite the pain, Woods managed to force the game into a sudden death playoff with Rocco Mediate which Woods won when Mediate missed his putt for par.

Now I’ll grant you that the phrase ‘sudden death’ can make anything more interesting, even golf, but what everyone considers the most impressive feat of that day is the fact that Tiger Woods managed to win while suffering a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and a double-stress fracture of his left tibia. Or as fellow PGA golfer Kenny Perry so succinctly put it, “He beat everyone on one leg.”

For those of you familiar with sports, you may not be surprised to hear of an ACL injury in basketball, football, rugby or American football since most injuries of that kind are due to quick acceleration, deceleration or changing direction (especially in contact sports), but a torn ACL in golf? Unpossible. And in this case, you’d be right. Although chronic problems may have contributed to the injury, the actual ACL injury happened while running near his Florida home sometime after the British Open in 2007, according to Woods.

This injury left Woods conspicuously absent from the world of golf for the latter part of 2008 (it also left spectators conspicuously absent from golf), and although he seemed to be getting back into the swing of things since he started playing tournaments again in February 2009 before taking a break at the end of this year. But is this injury going to intensify his chronic knee problems and continue to handicap him, or are there ways to manage the condition? Furthermore, where the heck is an ACL and what does it do?

Glad you asked, because the ACL plays an important role in stabilizing your knee so the lower leg doesn’t wobble around under you like a pirate’s poorly fitted peg leg. In order to more fully understand the impact of Tiger’s injury on his golfing performance, we’ll take a look at some basic knee anatomy.

The knee is often considered the most complex joint in the body because it allows for flexion and extension (right leg in, right leg out) as well as slight rotation (shake it all about), and it has to do all this while supporting the full weight of the human body. The complexity of the joint is not manifested in the bones as the knee is comprised of only 3 bones; the femur (thigh bone), the tibia (big, weight bearing shin bone in the lower leg) and the patella (kneecap). The fibula (little bone in the lower leg that runs down the calf) connects to the tibia below the joint and is thus not included in the actual joint functioning.

The way these bones are shaped and fit together is integral to the joint’s function. As you’ll see from the diagrams, the bottom end of the femur and the top end of the tibia where they form the knee joint, are formed into two rounded knuckles which are referred to as the Medial and Lateral condyles. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until you do what the medical profession did and think of an imaginary vertical plane bisecting your body equally into left and right halves, otherwise known as the median plane or midsagittal plane. In reference to this imaginary plane, the condyle on the outside of either knee is referred to as the Lateral condyle because it is further away from the median plane and the condyle on the inside of the knee is called the Medial condyle for obvious reasons.

These condyles are incredibly important because they function as a point of attachment for the many tendons and ligaments necessary for the function of the knee, while the space in between the condyles of the femur creates a groove for the patella (kneecap) to slide through. The condyles of the femur and tibia are what support the weight of the entire human body, which in some cases, can be considerable.

In order to prevent these bones grinding together during joint movement, there are pads of fibrous cartilage-like tissue between each condyle of the femur and tibia called menisci (plural), if you couldn’t guess already, they’re referred to as the Lateral meniscus and the Medial meniscus. The menisci of the knee are attached to each other as well as to surrounding parts of the knee by fibers of varying strength. Despite being anchored firmly in the knee, the menisci are sufficiently free moving to allow them to slide over the top of the tibia when the knee is rotated, while also being able to move over the condyles of the femur during extension or flexion of the knee.

Other forms of protection against wear and tear in the knees come in the shape of bursae, which are saclike structures that are strategically placed to reduce friction between soft tissues as well as around prominent bone structures in joints. There are at least 13 bursa in and around the knee, I told you it was a complicated joint. While usually not a problem, any of these bursae may become irritated, and possibly fill with fluid, becoming a cystic mass putting pressure on the joint instead of reducing friction.

Actually linking the bones together are the ligaments of the knee. The ones least relevant to us today are the patellar ligament joining the patella to the tibia, and the quadriceps tendon which connects the quadriceps muscle to the patella. Today we’ll focus on the four major ligaments of the knee; the cruciate ligaments and the collateral ligaments which are there for the purpose of stabilizing the knee.

The medial collateral ligament (MCL) runs from the medial epicondyle of the femur (fancy terminology for the outside of the femur’s medial condyle) to the medial condyle of the tibia, it prevents the knee from bending inwards towards the median plane by forces applied to the lateral side of the knee, which are called valgus forces. The lateral collateral ligament (LCL) runs from the lateral epicondyle of the femur to the top of the fibula and protects against varus forces which push the knee away from the median plane. If you’re an avid sports watcher, you may have seen a football, rugby or American football video where someone gets tackled hard and comes out with a knee bending to the side. That would be strong evidence for a collateral ligament injury.

Now while the collateral ligaments protect the knee from bending the wrong direction, i.e. sideways, the cruciate ligaments are there to protect your tibia from sliding out from under your knee either forwards or backwards. The posterior cruciate ligament, or PCL, (posterior refers to it being located towards the back) is attached between the medial condyle of the femur to the posterior intercondylar area of the tibia (in between the condyles), it prevents the lower leg from moving too far backwards relative to the femur and can usually only be damaged by direct trauma. The anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL (posterior/back, anterior/front) runs between the lateral condyle of the femur and the anterior intercondylar area. This ligament prevents the tibia from moving too far forward relative to the femur and is unfortunately easy to injure, usually while the knee is being twisted or bent.

Now we’ve waded through that terminally exciting parcel of medical academia, we can move onto more Tiger-centric knee information. Woods has had a string of surgeries on his left knee throughout the years, starting in 1994 with a surgery to remove a benign tumor. During this surgery doctors discovered substantial scar tissue related to childhood injuries from skateboarding, crashing dirt bikes, etc. Although it makes me wonder, if Woods had practiced skateboarding as much as golf when he was a kid, maybe he could’ve given Tony Hawk a run for his money? At least the games would’ve been better.

In 2002, Tiger went in for arthroscopic knee surgery, which is a minimally invasive surgery procedure where the arthroscope and other surgical tools are inserted through holes made in the skin in order to reduce the amount of anesthetics, cutting and recovery time of the surgery. The 2002 arthroscopic knee surgery was done to drain fluid around the ACL and remove a benign cyst. Apparently Woods enjoys surprising his doctors because this time during surgery, it was discovered Woods’ ACL was overly stretched.

Now, golfing can be fairly inimical to your knees, depending on your swing. For right handed players, on the back swing your left foot is planted as you rotate your hips to the right, this means that your tibia rotates externally relative to the femur and the rest of your body. On the swing and follow through golfers transfer the weight to the outside of their left foot, rotating the tibia inwards while the femur rotates externally bringing the hips and trunk around in rotation to the left. This can put a lot of stress on the knee joint if you don’t carry the kinetic force generated by your swing into the trunk and arms, leading to rotational overload of the knee.

Before his surgery in 2002, while many people stood in awe of Tiger’s swing, although he did have a nasty habit of forcing his knee into hyperextension for more distance. This puts an incredible amount of force on your knee, and when the knee is in hypertension it puts a much greater force on your ACL relative to the PCL, which could have contributed to the worrying stretching that doctors found in the ligament during the arthroscopic surgery in 2002.

For those who either really like golf or just enjoy stalking Tiger Woods, you’ll probably know that in 2003-4 after having recovered from his surgery, Woods decided to change his swing. After a period of time, he drifted away from his previous swing coach, Butch Harmon and ended up working with Hank Haney as his swing coach from early 2004.

Now, I understand nothing about keeping the golf club in the same ‘plane’ on the upswing and down, but both Haney and Woods consider this important as it will allow the body a tighter swing. What they’re really talking about is making sure when Tiger swings the club, he’s taking full advantage of the kinetic chain effect where energy is more efficiently transferred from the feet, through the knees and hips, up into the rotating shoulders, down the arms and through the club into the ball. The less energy lost in transfer through the chain means less stress put on the joints, so the smoother the swing, the less wear and tear on Tiger’s knee.

While Tiger’s game started to improve in 2008, meaning the new swing was working for him, something had gone wrong as he was once again limping on the green during the U.S. Open. A few days after the tournament, Tiger announced he would be undergoing surgery once more. This time it would be for a torn anterior cruciate ligament and a double stress fracture in his left tibia.

When Tiger found that his ACL had been stretched after his previous surgery in 2002, he may have started training his legs hard to compensate, as having strong quadriceps and hamstrings lends extra support to the knee. However, repeated overworking after the surgery may have contributed to or even caused the stress fractures in his shin. As for the ACL injury he picked up while running, it is entirely possible that with his history of knee problems and an already stretched ligament, he may have just put his foot down wrong, forcing his knee into hyperextension which caused the tear in his ACL.

Now in 2009, Tiger seems to have rehabbed well after the 2008 surgery on his knee as he has been doing fairly well this year, winning a number of tournaments. However, assuming Woods intends to keep playing the game into the SPGA, or at least keep walking without pain for the rest of his life, he’ll need to look after his knee. In order to do this, he’ll need to condition his legs so that the leg muscles help support the knee, he’ll also have to avoid underestimating the power of a proper warm up and stretching regimen. Then again, he plays sports for large sums of money, so we’re probably not springing any surprises on him.

While some poor souls in the U.S. may be wondering whether acne or bunions could lead to them being denied insurance, most of the rest of the developed world is concerned with reality and other things of actual significance. Matters of importance, such as: is today the day my iPod explodes and makes me a Eunuch; what is Kanye West’s major malfunction, and when is my lunch getting here?

But what many don’t realize is that some of the same kinds of technologies that imperil your reproductive organs with fiery touch screen shrapnel, and turn Kanye’s boneheaded outbursts into the butt of every joke on the internet are being applied to medicine with less dangerous and infinitely more useful and less cringe worthy results.

Watching What You Say

While many of you may have watched a video of Kanye making an ass of himself, researchers from the University of East Anglia have found that computers and videos can do so much more than just making people look profoundly stupid.

A team from the University’s School of Computing Science has come up with a computerized lip-reading system that far outshines human lip readers. The system is able to recognize what words are being said based on features that show the shape of the face and does not require a full video like humans do. The system works so well that when tested against human lip-readers, the computerized system was capable of recognizing 80 percent of the words compared to the 32 percent recognition rate achieved by humans at the same task.

This has greater implications than just being a handy way for our robot overlords to know what hairless apes are talking about. Indeed, it’s already causing some to rethink how we teach the hearing-impaired to read lips. Traditionally, we show people pictures and try to teach people to recognize key shapes the lips make during speech. However, the study showed that it may be more helpful to teach people to recognize signs that the entire face gives off as it makes noise. The researchers hope that this could give rise to a raft of new video-based, lip-reading education tools so we can stop shouting at granny around the dinner table.

Accessible Gene Therapy

I’d open up with a joke about someone taking their Levis to group therapy, but gene/jean jokes sound more tired than Kanye after a good cry with Leno (see what I mean about being the butt of every internet joke?). If you read news for actual information about the world, a laughable practice that rightly seems to be dying out, you may have read that some scientists in the US bequeathed the gift of full color vision to some adult male squirrel monkeys, which are naturally unable to distinguish between red and green. Female squirrel monkeys are able to distinguish these colors naturally, males, not so much. Nature is totally sexist, I know. By injecting therapeutic genes into the part of the eyes where the light-sensing cells reside, they were able to coax the cells into being able to differentiate between red and green. What’s great is that this shows proof of concept that you can cure color-blindness in primates; i.e. us. You’ll no longer be able to use the ‘I can’t differentiate red & green’ excuse when you run a red light. Go team Monkey Science!

So what gives? Gene therapy has been a term bandied about since the late 90s and could very well end up being the duct tape of medicine, curing everything from cancer to diabetes, but we’re only curing sight impaired monkeys now? Sad, I know, I was hoping for super mutant powers by this point. However, the reason gene therapy isn’t curing all that ails us is that performing actual gene therapy correctly, and safely for that matter, is incredibly hard. In effect, you’re trying to introduce foreign genes to correct problems in the patients DNA that give rise to diseases such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia or hell, even male pattern baldness. As you could imagine, this has problems not just in terms of how you get the genes into the person in the first place, but whether or not they’ll even be compatible with the patient’s personal biology. To date we’ve tried a lot of methods involving viruses, retroviruses, adenoviruses and a bunch of non-viral methods with really big words. However, with the advent of nanotechnology we may have a way that is safer and more effective.

Not content to just keep their bling on their ring fingers, a team of researchers at Northwestern University have pioneered a novel gene therapy technique involving surface-modified nanodiamonds. The problems faced by current gene delivery mechanisms are biocompatibility and efficiency of delivery. In English, it means they need something that won’t be toxic to human cells once inside the body, but will still get the new DNA to the right place in sufficient quantities. Our intrepid scientists started with a commercially available polymer used in DNA delivery called polyethelene-800 (PEI800) which has good biocompatibility but isn’t very efficient at delivering DNA and tried to improve it. What they found was when they coated nanodiamonds with PEI800 the delivery efficiency was over 70 times greater than PEI800 by itself with the added bonus of not causing massive cell death. While this is a first step with much more research needing to be done before it can be used to treat diseases, it shows that recent advances in technology are opening entirely new avenues of medical treatments for some of the most crippling illnesses on the planet.

Better Prosthesis through Granny Abuse

What do you do with your Grandmother? Keep her in the old folk’s home? Locked in the basement? Either way, I bet you’re not using her to advance science are you? One enterprising 71 year old is helping researchers at Nunnery Orthotic & Prosthetic Technologies (nothing to do with nuns) come up with better prosthetic legs by tripping her as she runs on a treadmill. While making old people fall down is generally frowned upon, if you put them in a harness that stops them hitting the floor and cover them in movement and pressure sensors it seems to be okay. When we trip or stumble our body can react almost instantly to try and recover from it. So, the researchers are trying to gather information about these kinds of physiological reactions through methods very similar to the motion capture technology used in movies and videogames.

The end result is to try and see if the research team can use the data they’ve collected from their test subjects (both able-bodied and those wearing prosthetic legs) to find a way to detect the body’s reaction to stumbling. If they can detect the reaction fast enough, they can program an appropriate response into the prosthetic limb so that it would work in tandem with the rest of the amputee’s body and provide active stumble protection, much akin to anti-lock brakes on legless people. Either way, our adventurous septuagenarian volunteer seems to enjoy overcoming all obstacles in her one-legged path.

Think Small

What do you get when you combine small things and lotion? Contrary to the deviants giggling about what they did to themselves last night, you get some astounding improvements in medicine. With nanotechnology beginning to come of age, it is fundamentally changing what we thought possible in terms of what we can make previously mundane materials do.

One of the ways our growing mastery of engineering and manipulating ridiculously tiny things is opening new worlds for us is in the realm of nanoemulsion. An emulsion is an ingenious method of getting two liquids that have no business mixing together to do just that. Generally, this occurs as an emulsion of oil and water based substances because trying to get these two kinds of liquids to mix any other way is like trying to herd cats. The end result is a usually cream, lotion or other kind of semi-gelatinous liquid, so pretty much any kind of ointment the Doctor gave you to rub on yourself is an emulsion.

What’s that you say? If we can herd cats and mix oil and water into goop, what makes nanoemulsion so special? Well, with regular emulsion we can make butter, with nanoemulsion we can take soybean oil, water, alcohol and detergents and turn them into a cream that is capable of the wholesale slaughter of most bacteria, viruses and fungi. Scientists seem to have created the Genghis Khan of the microbial world that may also provide us with a new vaccine for smallpox and HIV. Suck on that, butter.

By emulsifying four fairly simple ingredients and forcing them down a narrow, possibly partitioned tube (also known as extrusion) until they make droplets that are 400 nanometers big, we’ve made one of the most versatile medical breakthroughs in the world. Scientists at the University of Michigan, where all the cool nanotechnologists are hanging around these days, are testing the benefits of using nanoemulsions in treating second degree burns. Because the small size of the emulsion allows it to penetrate deeper into the skin, it is capable of reducing bacterial growth much better than the anti-bacterial cream currently used to prevent infection in burn victims.

The nanoemulsion’s small size offers it a number of unique properties which make it incredibly useful in medical settings. It can transverse mucous membranes (which are not limited to the snot factory in your nose) easily and it also spurs the body to produce a more comprehensive immunological response which gives it immense appeal as a platform for new vaccines. Nanoemulsion’s physical properties give it a novel way of destroying bacteria, which it does by disrupting their cell membranes, which means bacteria do not have a chance to develop resistances to anti-biotics. The fact that it can do all this while remaining non-toxic to most human cells means that you could very well be seeing a new wave of emulsion-based vaccines you administer through your nose, sans needle, that can protect against everything from gonorrhea to herpes.

Made to Match Organs

We all know that the only line longer than the one at the DMV is the one for getting an organ transplant. But what if you could go in to the doctors, have a sample taken, and then come back later when they’ve grown your replacement organ? Sound good right? As incredibly handy as that sounds, tissue engineering just isn’t that far along yet. Up till now, tissue engineering’s success has been mostly limited skin and cartilage growth. Most applications of the science have been limited to frivolous activities such as growing ears on mice and the Australian ‘performer’ who had an ear grafted to his arm. This, of course, gives credence to the views that science is awesome and performance artists are like carnies (small hands, smell like cabbage), minus a safe place to keep them away from the general populace.

The reason we’re not engineering free standing spleens yet is because when you start trying to grow organs you need a way to get nutrients to the entire structure and remove waste before it builds up, much like your arteries, blood vessels and veins do in your body. Without a system to feed the growing organ, you’re going to end up with a rotting fleshy mess in the Petri dish. Previous attempts to overcome this irrigation issue have centered on photolithography, the process used to make computer chips. However, because you have to individually engrave layer after layer with channels and grooves, the method is expensive and time-consuming, making it ill suited for the purpose of growing organs.

Feeling that tissue engineering had gone too long without a mad scientist moment, two colleagues from Texas A&M took inspiration from Frankenstein, deciding that lightning was the way to go. Thankfully they’re not reanimating corpses on campus, but instead running electricity through plastic. Using a phenomenon known as the Lichtenberg Effect as a conceptual starting point, they team used electron beam irradiation to electrically charge an acrylic (plastic) block, and then they hammered a nail into one side of the block or another. Each strike on the nail causes the electricity to run through the inside of the plastic like tendrils of lightning, leaving behind empty, interconnected trails.

The result is that the block is filled with branching, interconnected tubes that can carry liquid throughout the entire 3-dimensional area, which oddly enough is exactly what you need from an engineered vascular system. While this method is in its infancy, the study’s authors have already shown that the vasculature can be reproduced reliably, quickly and en masse, establishing it as a more cost-effective method than photolithography. With a few more modifications they will be able to create the vascular systems in porous, biodegradable material which would provide a medium in which to insert cell cultures around the vascular system to make blood vessels and kidney cells. With a little more experimentation in kidney molds, we could be seeing individually grown organs before you can sew a corpse together and strike it with lightning.

From the nanotech revolution to the computer mapping tricks that make movie magic possible, novel applications of technologies both new and old can inspire incredible breakthroughs in the medical world. We should value and cherish those whimsical folk who don the white lab coat for the good of us all. For showing us that there is always a reason for tripping the old and disabled, for showing us that our computer overlords vastly outstrip our capabilities, even in recognizing our own speech patterns, and for coming up with new ideas that may save us from our unhealthy ways; we salute you, you glorious nerds.

As a child, you’re pretty carefree about the things you and you’re also pretty feckless as to the effects of pretty much everything. But part of growing up is finding out how much all the fun things you used to do are going to come back and bite you. Hard.

I still remember the day my mom caught me eating wall candy, only to tan my hide as she educated me about the dangers of lead based paint. Who’d a thunk that those tasty flakes of paint on the wall could retard the mental development of… Ooh look, something shiny.

So in the spirit of celebrating our youthful indiscretions and the unforeseen consequences, we’re going to be covering 6 medical findings you wouldn’t have thought true, and even if you did have an inkling, you wouldn’t want to believe it.

1. Frequent sex and masturbation increases your chance of prostate cancer.

What man doesn’t like sex? Even puritans will admit they enjoy it as a guilty pleasure. Which is why a recent study by a group of UK researchers published in BJU (British Journal of Urology) International, caught me by surprise like a cold draught up a kilt. The study took an in depth look at 431 men who were diagnosed with prostate cancer and 409 control subjects and their findings show that men who are extremely sexually active in their 20’s and 30s are more likely to develop prostate cancer. The study also makes it clear that it’s generally more of a problem for people

engaging in frequent self-loving rather than sexual intercourse with another person.

Hormones play a large role in prostate cancer, with therapy being one treatment used to reduce hormones that seem to stimulate cancer cells. In the words of one illustrious author of the study “A man’s sex drive is also regulated by his hormone levels, so this study examined the theory that having a high sex drive affects the risk of prostate cancer.” Ouch. Not all is lost though, as small levels of sexual activity for men in their 50’s afford them a measure of protection against the disease. Still though, if you’re in the 20-30 age range and don’t have a girlfriend, it may be worth it to put yourself down and go find one. She may give you ulcers, but she could reduce the chance of cancer.

2. The long term repercussions of concussions.

Firstly, try saying that five times really fast. Secondly, don’t get a concussion. Researchers from the Montreal University in balmy Canada carried out a large array of tests on 40 former athletes now aged 50-60, 19 of whom had sustained at least one concussion in their youth. The tests included short term memory tests, following simple verbal and written commands, and motor control. Their findings were that people who suffered one or two concussions

earlier in life performed poorer in the tests than the other test subjects. Overall, they had a more difficult time with the memory tests, slightly delayed reactions to unexpected events and took a little bit longer than their counterparts to complete the motor control tests.

There were, thankfully, no signs of more serious problems such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Disease, and the former athletes are all leading active, healthy lifestyles. However, it remains to be seen whether the slight effects noted in the study would begin to worsen as the subjects get older. One Andrew Scheuber, from the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, pointed out the glaringly obvious when he said “Sportsmen and women should take extra care to avoid head trauma.” Oh really?

3. Video games are no end of terrible for you.

I’m sure this may come as no surprise to some of you, but a recent study from Brigham Young University, the Mormon university in Utah, shows a negative relationship between people’s video game and internet habits, and their relationship quality, perception of themselves, and risky behaviors like drug usage and sex. You know, fun.

The findings indicate that the more you play video games the more your relationship quality deteriorates, and apparently girls with high internet and video game use have lower self esteem. Also noted were the fact that people who play video games daily smoke twice as much marijuana as other players, and three times as much as people who don’t play games.

As tempting a target as it may be for some, the results should not be over generalized. The study contained 813 undergraduate students from BYU, 500 females and 313 males, 73% were European Americans, and most subjects came from a middle class family. Add onto that, the fact that University admittedly is 98.6% Mormon, and you hardly have a balanced cross section of American gamer society and even less representative of gamers internationally. Either way, many nerds will now suffer an unending string of “I told you so” from their girlfriend… If they have one.

4. Alcohol and Tobacco more dangerous than Mary-Jane and LSD?

Britain’s drug regulations are supposed to be based on how much harm it does or risk is poses, but seems to lack clarity as to how they are assed. Enter the University of Bristol. A study they published in the Lancet aimed to asses the of harm and risks of regulated drug on a clearer scale, measuring three things: the physical harm done to the user

by taking the drug; how addictive the drug is, or how likely it will be to induce dependency; and the effect that drug use has on families, communities and society at large. The findings were pretty interesting.

They assessed 20 drugs, 5 of which were legal but in danger of abuse, Heroin topped the charts followed by cocaine and barbiturates. That is to be expected, but this is where it gets a bit strange. The experts rated Alcohol 5th and Tobacco 9th, while cannabis came in at 11th, LSD 14th and Ecstasy coming in close to the bottom at 15th. It’s always fun to see experts call government classifications arbitrary and unspecific, but it may not be advisable to bump into a politician and tell him the experts decided the ecstasy you’re rolling on is less harmful than the glass of scotch and cigar in their hands.

5. Daily smokers have higher risk of Major depression and suicidal thoughts.

The Henry Ford Health System did a study of 1,000 people aged 21-30 over a 5 year period. Their findings were

notable both for what is showed was linked, and what was not. The study found that not only were smokers at risk of major depression, but depression may increase the amount of smoking in people who already smoke. Smokers with a history of major depression were found to be three times as likely to become daily smokers. Despite this finding, there was no conclusive data that depression makes you more likely to start smoking, or that depression makes it harder to quit.

The study’s authors say that it’s possible that depressed smokers are self medicating their moods with the effects of nicotine, but that more studies may be needed. I think I’ll go have a cigarette and a nice long cry now.

6. Diabetes before you hit the age of 60 could increase the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

A Swedish study published in the journal Diabetes showed that people who contract diabetes before the age of 65 have a 125% increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s. The risk is especially significant for middle age people who develop diabetes, with the risk of Alzheimer’s and other dementias substantially higher than people who develop diabetes after the 65 age mark.

If you were waiting for an upshot, prepare to be disappointed because the study’s authors say that the risk of diabetics developing dementia may be greater than the numbers in the study. The fact that diabetes has an earlier onset than dementia and an increased mortality rate means that the size of the sample available for the study could have been reduced. On top of that, about 30% of older adults with diabetes haven’t been diagnosed yet and would not have been available to the study. So stay healthy, because it would be a horrible set of circumstances where you’re constantly forgetting to check you insulin.

So there you have it, six medical findings that most of us probably wish weren’t the case. Having written this, it makes me wonder what little daily habits I have that will eventually conspire in my downfall. So, whether you’re the pot smoking gamer with poor relationship skills, or the depressed nicotine addict, it may be time to reassess your life and try to be healthier, or you could just go smoke another one.