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HAPPY WORLD HEART DAY; EMBRACE A HEALTHY HEART

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Every year, World Heart Day is celebrated on 29th September, to raise awareness around Cardiovascular Diseases(CVD) and how they can be prevented. World Heart Day is a reminder for people across the world to stop and assess lifestyle choices for them and their loved ones. Due to the inherent genetic makeup, Indians are more vulnerable to heart diseases. The role of salt intake in the development of heart failure is not known. Maintaining healthy weight behavior for 25 years may reduce the risk of hypertension in young adulthood and middle age. Estimated sodium intake of more than 3.7 g per day appears to be associated with adverse cardiac remodelling, worse systolic strain, and worse diastolic e' velocity. A heart healthy lifestyle can improve brain health in adults and reduce the risk for cognitive impairment, including dementia. Research has shown that the same risk factors that cause atherosclerosis are also major contributors to late - life cognitive impairment and Alzheimer&#

WHAT IF YOU HAD A SECOND BRAIN?

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 The brain... Everytime you think, feel or perform a multitude of unconscious processes, the 100 billion neurons in your skull conduct electrical signals to communicate and carry messages between them, ultimately creating, well - you, and everything you do. It's the most complex, essential and identifiable organ in the body, acting as the centre of the nervous system in all vertebrates. But what if how you think and feel isn't just controlled by the brain, basically the central nervous system, but in fact, a second brain that you didn't know about? The brain uses the vagus nerve to connect and communicate with many parts of the body, including the vocal cords, heart, lungs and most of the digestive tract. It also uses this nerve to convey 'fight or flight' messages to the body, which explains why you might experience a cracking voice, racing heart, shortness of breath and a knot in your stomach when you're really stressed or nervous.  But while this extensive ne

AN INSIGHT INTO THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF CANCER TREATMENT

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  First of all, thanks to everyone for attending the 2 min survey I had posted earlier. Since many were unaware about the different terms mentioned there, I decided that through this platform, I'll share with you what each term actually means. Starting, with the different types of cancer treatments currently available:  1. Chemotherapy - It is a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to kill fast growing cells in your body. This treatment is most often used to treat cancer, since cancerous cells grow and multiply much more quickly than most cells in the body.  2. Bone marrow transplantation - It is a procedure in which a patient receives healthy stem cells (blood forming cells) to replace their own cells that have been destroyed because of high doses of chemotherapy or radiation. 3. Surgery - It is the process of removing the tumor and the nearby tissue by operation.  4. Radiation therapy - It is the process which uses beams of intense energy to kill cancerous cells.  WHAT ARE

A LOOK INTO THE SCIENCE OF ATTENTION AND FOCUS

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My friends have been complaining to me like this - "Dude, I don't know why but my mind is wandering a lot and I'm struggling to stay focused in what I'm doing. Can you please suggest me something to help me focus better?" So I decided to write this blog mainly for them and for many others who face the same issue.. When we're reading, our minds typically wander anywhere from 20 to 40 % of the time. Voluntarily keeping our attention on one thing continuously can take a lot of effort, so it's not surprising that many struggle with this sometimes. Luckily, there are ways to keep our attention spans from burning out, once we understand how they work. Our brain is split into 2 systems - System 1 and system 2. System 1 is the involuntary, always - on network in our brains that takes in stimuli and process it. It's the system that makes automatic decisions for us, like turning our heads when we hear our names or freezing when we see a spider. System 2 runs

BIODIVERSITY IS MUCH MORE THAN JUST COUNTING THE SPECIES

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Today, being World Environment Day, why not celebrate the environmentalist living inside each of us? The 2020 theme being 'Celebrate biodiversity', let's conserve and protect this biodiversity, which is very much essential for us. It's an idea that is increasingly in vogue for ecologists. Biodiversity doesn't have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to keeping an ecosystem healthy and resilient are the species' different characteristics and the things they can do - in terms of specific traits such as branch length or body size. It may be necessary for understanding and forecasting how flora and fauna cope with a changing climate. For decades, the study of biodiversity was essentially a numbers game: the more species an ecosystem had, the more stable and resilient to change it was thought to be. That mindset made sense because there was so little information available about the structures of an ecosystem and the function

THE RESULT OF MISSING A NIGHT OF SLEEP

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In the screen - lit of modern life, sleep is expendable. There are television shows to binge - watch, emails to answer, homework to finish, social media posts to scroll through. We'll catch up on shut - eye later, so the thinking goes - right after we click down one last digital rabbit hole. Preschoolers who skip naps are worse at a memory game than those who snooze, even after the children "catch up" on sleep the next night. Poor sleep may increase the risk of Alzheimer's, as even a single night of sleep deprivation boosts brain levels of the proteins that form toxic clumps in Alzheimer's patients. All - nighters push anxiety to clinical levels, and even modest sleep reductions are linked to increased feelings of social isolation and loneliness. When you fall asleep, several foolish things happen - You're not finding food, not finding someone to talk to. Worse still, you're vulnerable to predation. Sleep problems have long been recongnised as a symptom

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS KILLING YOUR FRIENDSHIPS

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Nobody is a stranger to deep diving into the Facebook rabbit hole. You know the scenario. For many, it's the night after a stressful day, and they'd be unwinding in bed, mindlessly scrolling "just a little", when half an hour later, they're no closer to resting. They'll comment on a friend's post and then Facebook suggests friending a former classmate, but instead of doing that, they'll scroll through their profile and learn about the last few years of their life... until they see an article that sends them down a research spiral and a comments section that leaves their brain on hyperdrive.. The next morning, they wake up feeling drained. Maybe the blue light that illuminates their faces as they scroll through feeds and friends is to blame for disrupting their sleep cycle. This scenario is being constant especially during this lockdown period. Being unrested can explain the grogginess and irritability, one has, or it could be something else. Maybe a