Thursday thaw?

We had our first snow of the season today. We awoke to a fairly light dusting sitting on top of our cars - not enough to cover the cars and not lying on the roads yet, but it's a start - and it certainly feels like winter is about to bite.

Of course, it's Thanksgiving in USA today. We now know, courtesy of Luca and Grannie Jo's Google search, that it's always held on the 4th Thursday of November. The Lesina family are celebrating, for a change, at Scott's sister, Laramie's house today. It means Lucy won't have quite so much prep work to do this year, but she's still got to shuffle her clients around a bit to accommodate the holiday. In recent years, it's become heavily commercialised with the onset of Black Friday - a habit that we've picked up now on this side of the pond.

Jo and I have been discussing what we'd like for Chrsitmas this year. We've tended not to bother too much in recent years - especially last year, when we were flying off to Australia on Boxing Day - but we might revert to the prior norm this year. We've discussed updating our main IT - Jo's iPad is probably ready for replacement/upgrade, as is my laptop. Somewhere in the not-too-distant future an e-Bike would also be on my wish list, but I may have to wait a bit for that one - unless the price comes down soon.

I got a phone call from our medical practice the other day, following the blood samples that were taken at the annual Cardio Clinic last week. They want me to do them all again in a month's time. I can only deduce from this that everything wasn't quite right - not bad enough to ring alarm bells and call me in to see one of the Doctors now, but perhaps something that wasn't quite normal and which they want to check again?

Got another live show on River Dee Radio tonight - tune in at 8 pm, UK time!

To close, I spotted this newspaper article recently concerning Atrial Fibrillation and the use of anti-coagulant/"blood-thinning" drugs:

Blood-thinning drugs taken to prevent strokes may dramatically reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Patients with abnormal heart rhythms who took anticoagulants to stop blood clots had a 48 per cent lower risk of dementia than untreated patients.

Large clots cause strokes by reducing blood flow to the brain. Smaller clots are suspected of causing unnoticed strokes that lead to cognitive deterioration. “No brain can withstand a constant bombardment of microscopic clots,” said Leif Friberg, associate professor of cardiology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who carried out the research.

About a million people in Britain have an abnormal heart rhythm, known as atrial fibrillation (AF), which carries a risk of blood clots forming in the heart chambers. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommends anticoagulants for many AF patients to prevent stroke. They can raise the risk of bleeding but the NHS says the benefits outweigh the dangers.

Professor Friberg said that many patients stopped taking the drugs prematurely and had a “fatalistic” attitude to strokes, believing that “either you get it or you don’t”. He added: “Few patients are fatalistic about dementia.” He would not recommend anticoagulants for people without AF to prevent dementia.

The study, in the European Heart Journal, involved all 444,106 patients in Sweden with AF between 2006 and 2014, 26,120 of whom were found to have dementia. The 54 per cent taking anticoagulants when the trial began had a 29 per cent lower risk of dementia overall. The sooner anticoagulants — including warfarin and rivaroxaban — were taken after diagnosis, the greater the protective effect appeared to be.

Professor Friberg said that researchers were right to suggest a causal link. An earlier study found that people on statins had a 29 per cent lower risk of dementia. Age is the strongest risk factor; smokers and diabetics are also at greater risk. In Britain 800,000 people have dementia.

So - some good - well better, anyway - news? During our lifetimes, Cancer had always been the great health fear. Not that it's been eliminated yet - far from it - but at least the cure and survival rates have improved dramatically - it's no longer an automatic death sentence. Huge publicity and investment in research have brought about this change, but very little has been done so far on dementia, Alzheimer's etc research and it's now the number one health fear of our generation, occasioned partly by our ageing population, with average life spans apparently ever increasing. That reminds me - time to get our Powers of Attorney completed before it's too late!