GREETINGS everyone! Well, it’s been a long time since we dipped into the medical file and I found a couple of interesting stories that definitely have local ramifications. One of the things I noticed when I moved here all those years ago is that most people on the island have a real taste for salt. Everybody loves Spam and potato chips and pickles of all kinds and the local diet contains an incredible amount of salt.

Now we all know that excessive salt intake has been linked to high blood pressure and a whole bunch of other health problems. But new research by a team of Duke University Medical Center and Australian scientists have found that the appetite for salt may have been hijacked by something else that causes a whole lot of problems here: addictive drugs.

Their research on rats showed that certain genes are controlled by the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s equilibrium of salt, water, energy, reproduction and many other bodily functions. Then they discovered that these genes also regulate cocaine or opiate (such as heroin) addiction and that blocking these addiction-related pathways also interfered with the appetite for salt.

Our bodies need salt and for many animals and historically for humans, salt’s pretty hard to come by. Our relatively recent free access to salt may have just set up our brains so that drug addiction uses the nerve pathways of that instinct for salt.

Those deeply embedded pathways may explain why addiction treatment with the chief objective of abstinence is so difficult, and may explain why maintenance approaches that don't involve abstinence – like replacing heroin with methadone, and cigarettes with nicotine gum or patches – have more success.

And if the fact that your taste for salt may be predisposing you to drug addiction isn’t bad enough, it turns out you don’t need zombies to eat your brain, your other bad lifestyle choices are doing it for you!

A new study by researchers at the University of California Davis suggests that smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and being overweight in middle age may cause brain shrinkage and lead to dementia later in life.

The study involved 1,352 people without dementia with an average age of 54. Participants had body mass and waist circumference measures taken and were given blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes tests. They also underwent brain MRI scans over the span of a decade, the first starting about seven years after the initial exam.

The study found that people with high blood pressure developed small areas of vascular brain damage at a faster rate than those with normal blood pressure and that their scores on tests that measured their planning and decision-making skills were worse than those with normal blood pressure.

People with diabetes in middle age lost brain volume in the hippocampus at a faster rate than those without diabetes. Smokers lost brain volume overall and at a faster rate in the hippocampus than nonsmokers. Smokers were also more likely to have areas of vascular brain damage.

People who were obese at middle age were more likely to be in the top 25 percent of those with the faster rate of decline in scores on tests that measured their planning and decision-making skills. People with a high waist-to-hip ratio were also more likely to be in the top 25 percent of those with faster decrease in their brain volume.

Whew!! Looks like it really does pay to keep the weight off, stop smoking, lower your blood pressure, control your diabetes and stop eating so much salt. Of course here, all you really have to do is look at your older relatives to figure it out!