The IAA One Minute Blog

Four out of five adults in the United States will be overweight or obese by 2050 if the current trend holds, a new study warns.

New Obesity Study

About 213 million Americans ages 25 and older will be carrying around excess weight within 25 years, along with more than 45 million children and young adults, between the ages of eight and 24, researchers reported.

For the study, researchers estimated future overweight and obesity rates by combining 134 unique data sources, researchers said.

They found nearly three-quarters of the adult population was overweight or obese in 2021. Obesity doubled between 1990 and 2021 in both men and women, researchers found.

The study predicts that an additional 33 million children and teens and another 3.4 million young adults will be overweight or obese by 2050.

The research was published in “The Lancet.”

Healthy Weight Loss

Managing your weight contributes to good health now and as you age. In contrast, obesity can lead to serious health problems including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

Ready to lose weight in a healthy way? Here are some steps to begin the journey:

1. Make sure you are ready: Long-term weight loss takes time and effort. Be sure you are ready to eat healthily and become more active.
2. Find your inner drive: No one else can make you lose weight. You need to make diet and physical activity changes to help yourself.
3. Set goals you can reach
4. Enjoy healthy foods: To lose weight you need to lower total calories you take in from food and drinks.
5. Get active, stay active
6. Change your mindset: Lifestyle changes start with taking an honest look at your eating patterns and daily routine.

What IAA has to Say

Insurance Administrator of America wants you to evaluate your routine and see where you can make healthy changes. IAA knows you can do it!

Adding just five minutes of exercise to your daily routine lowers your blood pressure and might cut your odds for heart disease, new research shows.

Adding Exercise to Daily Routine

According to researchers, high blood pressure affects almost 1.3 billion adults globally.

High blood pressure is defined as a systolic blood pressure (upper number) greater than 130 or a diastolic blood pressure (lower number) greater than 80.

The new study focused on almost 15,000 adult volunteers who were given activity trackers to chart their daily involvement in six key activities:

1. Sleep
2. Sedentary behavior
3. Slow walking
4. Fast walking
5. Standing
6. More vigorous exercise (such as running or stair climbing)

Each day the average participant got seven hours of sleep, 10 hours of sedentary behavior, three hours of standing, one hour of slow walking, one hour of fast walking, and just 16 minutes of exercise activities such as running, according to the data.

Using those numbers, the team calculated what would happen to blood pressure if a person replaced a less active behavior with even five minutes of exercise.

The result was a healthy drop in blood pressure.

The findings were published in the journal “Circulation.”

What IAA has to Say

Insurance Administrator of America wants you to fit some exercise into that routine. IAA knows that your blood pressure will thank you for it!     

An experimental therapy may slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease symptoms, a small preliminary study suggests.

Alzheimer's Treatment

Using a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device (which can be used to treat depression), researchers were able to target a key brain network that engages in storing memories and is typically hit hard by the disease.

Researchers found that when the device was aimed at the right spot in the brain, it could slow down the development of symptoms, such as memory loss. In Alzheimer's, nerve cells in the brain at some point start to dysfunction, leading to debilitating symptoms of memory loss.

The idea is that the electrical signals generated by the TMS might enhance the ability of neurons to make connections with one another.

The researchers determined the exact spot in the brain’s default mode network, which participates in storing memories of life events. When the right spot was nudged into action by using TMS, a signal would spread through the network.

Signs of Alzheimer's

The top signs of Alzheimer's are:

1. Memory loss that disrupts daily life
2. Challenges in planning or solving problems
3. Difficulty completing familiar tasks
4. Confusion with time or place
5. Trouble understanding visual images and spatial relationships
6. New problems with words in speaking or writing
7. Misplacing things and losing the ability to retrace steps
8. Decreased or poor judgement
9. Withdrawal from work or social activities
10. Changes in mood or personality

About 6.9 million people have Alzheimer’s in the United States.

What IAA has to Say

Insurance Administrator of America is here to bring you updates on the world of health. Remember, with IAA one call does it all.

Brain scans can provide early warning of who will develop chronic pain following a whiplash injury, a new study finds.

Brain Scans Provide Chronic Pain Insight

Researchers found that higher levels of communication between two specific brain regions within one to three days of a whiplash injury increases the risk that pain will last long-term.

The more the hippocampus (the brain’s memory center) talked to the cortex (involved in long-term memory), the more likely a person was to develop chronic pain, results showed. Additionally, the higher the person’s anxiety was immediately after a whiplash accident, the more precisely doctors could predict the chronic pain they would feel a year later.

For the study, researchers gathered data on more than 200 whiplash patients, of whom 177 had MRI scans performed on their brains within three days of their injury. The data was collected from March 2016 to December 2021.

Patients were then tracked over the next year to see who went on to suffer chronic pain and who recovered fully from their whiplash.

The increased communication observed between the hippocampus and the cortex could be cementing into place new memories related to the initial pain of the whiplash, researchers said. In this theory, the brains of these patients are encoding a powerful memory associating head and neck movement with pain.

The results highlight the role that memory plays in a person’s pain perception.

The study was published in the journal “Nature Mental Health.”

Signs and Symptoms of Chronic Pain

Chronic pain can last for months or years and can affect any part of your body. This type of pain lasts for over three months and has countless causes.

Chronic pain symptoms vary from person to person. The pain may be described as:

• Aching
• Burning
• Shooting
• Squeezing
• Stiffness
• Stinging
• Throbbing

In 2021, about 20.9 percent of U.S. adults experienced chronic pain, according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

What IAA has to Say

Insurance Administrator of America is here to keep you updated on the world of health. Remember, with IAA one call does it all.

Music can help people more easily recover from surgery with fewer pain killers, a new review finds.

Music and Pain Relief

Listening to music reduces the anxiety, pain and heart rate of patients waking from surgery, researchers found.

Surgical patients provided with music tended to need less than half the amount of morphine required by those who were not listening to music.

For the review, researchers analyzed the pooled data from 35 prior studies on music and its role in recovery from surgery.

Patients who listened to music had significant reductions in pain and anxiety the day after surgery, the data showed.

While it could not be stated that the patients were actually in less pain, they perceived they were in less pain. Listening to music helped them dissociate and relax.

Patients with music had a lower heart rate, which can improve recovery by allowing effective circulation of oxygen and nutrients throughout the body, researchers said.

Researchers also think that listening to music causes a reduction in levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

What IAA has to Say

Insurance Administrator of America is here to bring you updates on the world of health. Remember, with IAA one call does it all.