Daily Health Update for April 1 2021 by Toronto Chiropractor Dr. David Koivuranta in Davisville.

Hello everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well, having a nice week, looking forward to the first day of April. Another new month is upon us. Coming at you on behalf of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic with your daily health update. It's April 1st, 2021, a Thursday in your week. This week, gonna look at 6 areas of health and wellness together with you today. Somewhere around this video, you can read through all 6 of those areas. If you'd like a copy of the daily health report, you can DM us on social, send us an email here here at the clinic or give us a call and we'll be sure to get that to you. Not going to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any illness or disease with our time together today. However, we'll try to have a little bit of fun with the latest and greatest in the research and literature when it comes to health and wellness. And by sharing that with you, uh, throughout the week and you staying tapped in, tuned in, and turned on to some good health information, it may influence your own thoughts, decisions, and actions when it comes to your health and wellness, steering you in a wonderful direction to create those great experiences you'd like every day. In other words, staying healthy. It's a good thing. All right, so according to the Journal of Nutrition, Health, and Aging, March 2021, most seniors have pain or discomfort. They looked at over 1,500 adults 75+ years of age, and they found that 82% experienced dizziness, back pain, joint pain, chest pain, shortness of breath, leg pain, loss of appetite, or urinary incontinence in the preceding 2 weeks. Furthermore, the research team identified an association between the number of such symptoms a participant reported and their risk for death in the following 5 years. So the greater the number of symptoms, the greater the likelihood of some morbidity in the next 5 years. So he or she who gets through life with the most functionality and maintaining the function of their parts will probably not only live longer but with better quality. It's probably easier to control the quality of that life and not so much the duration. That may be set in stone either from out genetic maybe or environmental and other reasons that are hard to control. Some of them which have maybe been set up early on in life when we could have had a bigger impact. But the quality still we want to try and preserve. All right, so we don't want any of those symptoms to slow down those great experiences we're trying to create every day. So keep living those great lifestyle factors and choices as best you can. It's well worth the effort. Effort. According to the European Journal of Nutrition, March 2021, sometimes a very divisive and controversial topic with ADHD is the role that diet can play. So they had a report there that they looked at a group of 80 children who had ADHD, and they put them on a Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet, a specific diet that emphasizes fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, poultry, fish, and low-fat dairy, and limits the intake of salt, meat, sweets, and sweetened beverages, and they had a decrease in their ADHD symptoms. Now, that diet sounds awfully similar to the Mediterranean diet, which is great for most people to help control any health problems or improve health problems they may have, but also to avoid them. So a diet can go a long way with many different conditions according to the research and literature. Cleaning up that diet, you just can't go wrong. In our fitness, uh, area on the Daily Health Update, the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention in March 2021 looked at walking speed and cancer survival. So they looked at data from the National Institutes of Health American Association of Retired Persons Diet and Health Study, and it suggested that walking at a slower pace may be linked to an increased risk of early death among cancer survivors. It's still possible that slow walking may be due to the cancer itself, according to the authors of the study, but adverse effects of treatment or change in lifestyle could also play a role. There's still much to be learned about these complex relationships, but our results highlight the importance of monitoring, even targeting, walking pace after cancer. So some level of increased effort, even for those who have successfully treated and recovered from cancer, may want to try increasing their effort with some of their fitness as it may help their body be healthier. The role of fitness, although some of us do it for aesthetics and, and maybe some other health reasons overall, is actually to drive waste out of the tissues, out of our cells, and push in fluids and nutrients— clean water, clean air, and clean food. That way, on the cellular level, those engines that drive our tissues that make up our organs, glands, and body parts can carry over their life cycle as best they can. And that process will retain that function we talked about earlier for as long as possible in life, maintaining some good quality of what your body was designed to do. So hence the importance of fitness. You don't necessarily need to be the strongest, fastest, and the most engaged when it comes to activity or sports, but you do want to keep your tissues healthy, and activity helps to do that. So keep up the good work with that fitness plan part of your lifestyle. It will help. The Boston University February 2021 looked at mental health and academic performance. They looked at 33,000 college students across the United States, and 83% of them felt that their mental health had negatively affected their academic performance and that loneliness and isolation have been a struggle during the last year. It's kind of sad to know that at that age, that part of their life, um, these students are suffering with those kinds of mental health challenges, and it's affecting the quality of the education that they wanted to pursue. So we wanna ensure that colleges and universities provide support, information, reach out, outreach programs for these students, and that as parents, as friends of some of these people of this age, we wanna ensure that we're there to ask questions, make sure they're doing well, and lend them a hand when and if needed, all right? We can help support each other on those different parts of the journey we're on at different stages of our life so that we can be happy and create some good experiences out of those challenging times. Education at the college and university level is not necessarily easy. It challenges us and what we wanna learn and what we wanna do, but also just the time management of it all can be very stressful. So good to help people who are going through that as well as other things on their health or life journey. Heading into the spring and summer season, especially here in Canada, it may or may not apply, but interestingly, the journal Current Biology, March 2021, looked at catnip catnip as a mosquito repellent. They did a study and the active ingredient in catnip, nepetalactone, may be as effective at repelling mosquitoes as synthetic repellents. It's a plant-based repellent, might be easier to produce in those areas where mosquito-borne diseases are a significant health concern. But even good to know that it might help if it's something you're looking forward to getting outdoors in your area, but there's mosquitoes. Maybe catnip is one of those home remedies you can try and see see how it works. And if you do, I would love to hear from you. Let me know. Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, March 2021, looked at post-traumatic headaches. Current research suggests that up to 4% of headaches may be classified as post-traumatic, coming from whiplash or traumatic brain, brain injury. The headaches can share characteristics with migraines and tension-type headaches, often occurring with neck pain and cognitive symptoms. Of course, the research shows that spinal manipulation, mobilization, and other manual therapies, including some soft tissue therapies and self-care, can be beneficial when dealing with a traumatic brain injury and whiplash-associated disorders, and thereby having an impact also on improving the related headaches. So if you are a neck pain headache sufferer and you haven't reached out or gone for an assessment to see the correlation between that neck function and your headaches, might be good to to do so could be of huge relief and benefit. All right, a big daily health update for the first day of April. Hope you enjoyed it. Head you into the tail end of the week with some good information to think about, and, uh, always some good stuff to look up on the internet to keep yourself engaged in your own health pursuits. Just make sure that the source of your information is reliable and that you balance it out with multiple opinions. And then finally, always a good idea to reach out and get the advice of a qualified healthcare provider to support you as you go through making some of your own health and wellness decisions. You will not go wrong by making that effort and taking the time to make sure you're as healthy as you want to be. And that's our goal with the daily health update, because as long as you hear it, sometimes it may not seem like it applies, but just actively pursuing that information can help keep you healthy. So we'll send you a written format tomorrow on Friday, Good Friday, at the end of the week, head you into the weekend, and we'll catch up with you next Monday. Possibly, and I think we will have the next video a daily health update then. All right, happy Easter, enjoy the weekend, stay well, take care of each other, and we'll see you next week. All the best.