The IAA One Minute Blog

A new study found that a person’s ability to cope with pain, also known as pain resilience, plays a bigger role in maintaining physical activity than the amount of pain they experience.

Pain Response and Physical Activity

It is not about the amount of pain you are in that determines if you are active, it is how you respond to that pain, says a new study.

Researchers analyzed data from 172 adults with chronic pain to better understand what factors influence activity levels.

Researchers looked at pain intensity, the number of painful areas, pain duration, frailty and fear of movement, and found that resilience was the only consistent predictor of higher activity levels.

Even after accounting for how severe the pain was, those with higher resilience were more likely to keep moving. In contrast, a fear of movement did not significantly impact physical activity.

The study suggests that building psychological resilience could be just as important as pain management for improving long-term health.

The findings were published in the journal “PLOS One.”

What is Chronic Pain?

Chronic pain is pain that lasts for over three months. You may feel the pain all the time or it may come and go. It can happen anywhere in your body and has countless causes.

Chronic pain is a very common condition and one of the most common reasons why people seek medical care. In 2021, about 51.6 million U.S. adults experienced chronic pain according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Moving away from your home state could benefit your health, according to a new study.

Moving and Your Health

Americans who migrate within the United States have significantly better health than those who remain in their birth state, researchers reported.

People who stayed were more likely to become disabled as seniors, with a higher risk of vision and hearing problems, cognitive impairment, limitations in daily activities, and physical weakness like difficulty walking or climbing stairs, researchers found.

For the study, researchers analyzed 10 years of data gathered on 5.4 million older adults in the U.S., comparing disability between people who remained in their home state with people who moved away. The results showed that people who left their home state had better health and less disability.

The research was reported in the “Journal of Ethnic and Minority Studies.”

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A new study shows nearly all people who suffer heart attacks or strokes have at least one of the four major cardiovascular risk factors beforehand.

New Study

Researchers found 99 percent of the participants in the study had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, elevated blood sugar or used tobacco leading up to a cardiac event. All four risk factors are preventable and can be managed, the study said.

More than 600,000 cases in South Korea and another 1,000 adults in the United States were tracked up to 20 years. Participants were monitored for blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, and smoke exposure. High blood pressure affected more than 95 percent of South Korean participants and over 93 percent of U.S. participants.

The study was published in the “Journal of the American College of Cardiology.”

Heart Attack Risk Factors

A heart attack occurs when the flow of blood to the heart is severely reduced or blocked.

Risk factors for a heart attack include:

•  Age
• Autoimmune condition
• Diabetes
• Family history of heart attacks
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol or triglycerides
• Metabolic syndromes
• Not enough exercise
• Obesity
• Stress
• Tobacco use
• Unhealthy diet

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A pill typically prescribed for rheumatoid arthritis and alopecia might help slow the progression of type 1 diabetes, a new study says.

New Treatment

The new medication safely preserved the body’s own insulin production in people newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, researchers reported. Further, patients’ diabetes started progressing once they stopped taking the medication, results show.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the immune system attacks insulin producing beta-cells in the pancreas. The medication works by quelling signals in the body that spur on the immune system.

The research team theorized that the medication might help protect beta-cells in people newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

For the study, researchers recruited 91 people ages 10 to 30 who had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the previous one hundred days. The patients were randomly prescribed the medication or placebo pills for 48 weeks.

Taking the medication preserved patients’ beta-cell function, decreased their blood sugar fluctuations, and reduced their need for insulin, the study found. Additionally, after people stopped taking the medications at 48 weeks, their blood sugar control declined to the point where it was about the same as among placebo patients by week 72 and 96, researchers said.   

Symptoms of Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes symptoms can appear suddenly and may include:

• Bed wetting in children who no longer wet the bed during the night
• Feeling irritable or having other mood changes
• Feeling more thirsty than usual
• Feeling tired and weak
• Feeling very hungry
• Having blurry vision
• Losing weight without trying
• Urinating a lot

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A new type of noninvasive brain stimulation may help people with severe to moderate depression, feel better faster than standard treatments, according to a new report.

New Treatment

The method called high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS), uses small electrodes on the scalp to deliver mild electrical currents to specific parts of the brain involved in mood regulation.

For the trial, 71 adults with major depression were randomly assigned to receive either active HD-tDCS or a sham treatment for 20 minutes a day over 12 working days.

The group receiving the treatment showed a greater drop in their depression scores than the control group.

On average, depression scores fell by nearly eight points in the active group compared to about six points in the sham group.

Patients who received HD-tDCS were also more likely to reach remission, with 39.5 percent reporting very low symptoms versus 13.3 percent in the sham group, the study noted.

The findings were published in “JAMA Network Open.”

Depression Symptoms

Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.

In general, symptoms include:

• Being easily irritated or frustrated
• Eating too much or too little
• Experiencing physical issues like headaches or stomachaches
• Feeling sad, hopeless, or worried
• Having a difficult time concentrating, making decisions or remembering things
• Having low energy or fatigue
• Not enjoying things that used to bring joy
• Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much

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Insurance Administrator of America is here to bring you news from the world of health. Learn more from IAA’s blog posts.