Six-fold rise in brain pressure disorder that affects mostly women
Linked with obesity and deprivation
2021-01-21
(Press-News.org) A brain pressure disorder that especially affects women, causing severe headaches and sometimes permanent sight loss, has risen six-fold in 15 years, and is linked to obesity and deprivation, a new study by Swansea University researchers has shown.
Rates of emergency hospital admissions in Wales for people with the disorder were also five times higher than for those without.
The condition is called idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH). It causes increased pressure in the fluid surrounding in the brain. This can lead to severely disabling headaches as well as vision loss, which can be permanent.
The research team, from Swansea University Medical School, used anonymised health records of Welsh patients held in the SAIL databank, a national healthcare database managed by the University. They analysed 35 million patient years of data from 2003 to 2017. They identified 1,765 people with IIH during that time, 85% of whom were women.
They recorded the body mass index of people in the sample and estimated their relative deprivation using a standard national scoring system. For each person with IIH, they compared three people with a comparable profile who did not have the condition.
They found:
A six-fold increase in the number of cases of the disorder over the course of the study - from 12 cases per 100,000 in 2003 to 76 cases in 2017.
Rates of emergency hospital admissions were 5 times higher in people with IIH, compared to others - 9% of people with IIH require brain surgery to try and preserve vision.
There were strong links for both men and women between body mass index and risk of the disorder.
Obesity rates in Wales over the same period rose from 29% of the population to 40%
For women only, deprivation was linked to risk, even after adjusting for body mass index. Women in the most deprived areas had 1.5 times greater risk of developing the disorder than women in the least deprived areas
Dr Owen Pickrell of Swansea University Medical School, who led the study, said:
"The considerable increase in idiopathic intracranial hypertension we found may be due to many factors but likely mostly due to rising obesity rates. What is more surprising from our research is that women who experience poverty or other socioeconomic disadvantages may also have an increased risk, independent of obesity."
More research is needed to determine which socioeconomic factors such as diet, pollution, smoking or stress may play a role in increasing a woman's risk of developing this disorder.
At present we don't know exactly what causes IIH, but the link with deprivation evident in our research could help provide clues.
Our findings offer yet more reasons why it is essential to address the obesity epidemic, deprivation and inequalities in Wales."
INFORMATION:
The study is published in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Notes to Editors
Swansea University is a world-class, research-led, dual campus university offering a first-class student experience and has one of the best employability rates of graduates in the UK. The University has the highest possible rating for teaching - the Gold rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in 2018 and was commended for its high proportions of students achieving consistently outstanding outcomes.
Swansea climbed 14 places to 31st in the Guardian University Guide 2019, making us Wales' top ranked university, with one of the best success rates of graduates gaining employment in the UK and the same overall satisfaction level as the Number 1 ranked university.
The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 results saw Swansea make the 'biggest leap among research-intensive institutions' in the UK (Times Higher Education, December 2014) and achieved its ambition to be a top 30 research University, soaring up the league table to 26th in the UK.
The University is in the top 300 best universities in the world, ranked in the 251-300 group in The Times Higher Education World University rankings 2018. Swansea University now has 23 main partners, awarding joint degrees and post-graduate qualifications.
The University was established in 1920 and was the first campus university in the UK. It currently offers around 350 undergraduate courses and 350 postgraduate courses to circa 20,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students. The University has ambitious expansion plans as it moves towards its centenary in 2020 and aims to continue to extend its global reach and realise its domestic and international potential.
Swansea University is a registered charity. No.1138342. Visit http://www.swansea.ac.uk
For more information:
Kevin Sullivan, senior press officer, Swansea University k.g.sullivan@swansea.ac.uk
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/SwanseaUni
Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/swanseauniversity
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-01-21
Despite the anticounterfeiting devices attached to luxury handbags, marketable securities, and identification cards, counterfeit goods are on the rise. There is a demand for the next-generation anticounterfeiting technology - that surpasses the traditional ones - that are not easily forgeable and can hold various data.
A POSTECH research team, led by Professor Junsuk Rho of the departments of mechanical engineering and chemical engineering, Ph.D. candidates Chunghwan Jung of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Younghwan Yang of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have together succeeded in making a switchable display device using nanostructures that is capable of encrypting full-color images depending on the polarization of light. These findings were recently published in ...
2021-01-21
In a Nature Reviews Endocrinology article authors from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) highlight the interconnection of obesity and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19. First, they provide information about the independent relationships of obesity, disproportionate fat distribution and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19. Then they discuss mechanisms for a complicated course of COVID-19 and how this disease may impact on the global obesity and cardiometabolic pandemics. Finally, they provide recommendations for prevention and treatment in clinical practice and in the public health sector to combat these global pandemics.
Norbert Stefan, Andreas Birkenfeld and Matthias Schulze summarize ...
2021-01-21
Letters, syllables, words and sentences--spatially arranged sets of symbols that acquire meaning when we read them. But is there an area and cognitive mechanism in our brain that is specifically devoted to reading? Probably not; written language is too much of a recent invention for the brain to have developed structures specifically dedicated to it.
According to this novel paper published in Current Biology, underlying reading there is evolutionarily ancient function that is more generally used to process many other visual stimuli. To prove it, SISSA ...
2021-01-21
Research led by the universities of Kent and Oxford has found that fans of the least successful Premier League football teams have a stronger bond with fellow fans and are more 'fused' with their club than supporters of the most successful teams.
The study, which was carried out in 2014, found that fans of Crystal Palace, Hull, Norwich, Sunderland, and West Bromwich Albion were found to have higher loyalty towards one another and even expressed greater willingness to sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of other fans of their club. This willingness was much higher than that of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester City fans. A decade of club statistics from 2003-2013 was used to identify the ...
2021-01-21
Schools are closing again in response to surging levels of COVID-19 infection, but staging randomised trials when students eventually return could help to clarify uncertainties around when we should send children back to the classroom, according to a new study.
Experts say that school reopening policies currently lack a rigorous evidence base - leading to wide variation in policies around the world, but staging cluster randomized trials (CRT) would create a body of evidence to help policy makers take the right decisions.
The pandemic's rapid ...
2021-01-21
Despite being the subject of increasing interest for a whole century, how preeclampsia develops has been unclear - until now.
Researchers believe that they have now found a primary cause of preeclampsia.
"We've found a missing piece to the puzzle. Cholesterol crystals are the key and we're the first to bring this to light," says researcher Gabriela Silva.
Silva works at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Centre of Molecular Inflammation Research (CEMIR), a Centre of Excellence, where she is part of a research group for inflammation in pregnancy led by Professor Ann-Charlotte Iversen.
The findings are good news for the approximately three per cent of pregnant ...
2021-01-21
Amsterdam, NL, January 21, 2021 - The bacterial gut microbiome is strongly associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), but no studies had previously investigated he role of fungi in the gut. In this novel study published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease, a team of investigators at the University of British Columbia examined whether the fungal constituents of the gut microbiome are associated with PD. Their research indicated that gut fungi are not a contributing factor, thereby refuting the need for any potential anti-fungal treatments of the gut in PD patients.
"Several studies conducted since 2014 have characterized changes in the gut microbiome," explained lead investigator Silke Appel-Cresswell, MD, Pacific Parkinson's Research Centre and Djavad ...
2021-01-21
The cause of the inflammatory lung disease sarcoidosis is unknown. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have investigated whether a type of immune cell called a monocyte could be a key player in sarcoidosis pathogenesis and explain why some patients develop more severe and chronic disease than others. The study, which is published in The European Respiratory Journal, opens new possibilities for future diagnostic and therapeutic methods.
Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that in 90 percent of cases affects the lungs, but can also attack the heart, skin and lymph system. The cause of the disease is not yet established, and there is currently ...
2021-01-21
Scientists have developed a pioneering new technique that could revolutionise the accuracy, precision and clarity of super-resolution imaging systems.
A team of scientists, led by Dr Christian Soeller from the University of Exeter's Living Systems Institute, which champions interdisciplinary research and is a hub for new high-resolution measurement techniques, has developed a new way to improve the very fine, molecular imaging of biological samples.
The new method builds upon the success of an existing super-resolution imaging technique called DNA-PAINT ...
2021-01-21
Scientists have been pondering if the microbiome of plants is due to nature or nurture. Research at Stockholm University, published in Environmental Microbiology, showed that oak acorns contain a large diversity of microbes, and that oak seedlings inherit their microbiome from these acorns.
"The idea that seeds can be the link between the microbes in the mother tree and its offspring has frequently been discussed, but this is the first time someone proves the transmission route from the seed to the leaves and roots of emerging plants", says Ahmed Abdelfattah, researcher at the Department of Ecology Environment and Plant ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Six-fold rise in brain pressure disorder that affects mostly women
Linked with obesity and deprivation
