As Super Bowl Sunday comes to a close, America's National Football League "is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game," reports the Associated Press: The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in the HealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety. The challenge invites inventors, engineers, startups, academic teams and established companies to improve the impact protection and design of football helmets through improvements to how facemasks absorb and reduce the effects of contact on the field... Most progress on helmet safety has come from improvements to the shell and padding, helping to reduce the overall rate of concussions. Working with the helmet industry, the league has brought in position-specific helmets, with those for quarterbacks, for example, having more padding in the back after data showed most concussions for QBs came when the back of the head slammed to the turf. But the facemask has mostly remained the same. This past season, 44% of in-game concussions resulted from impact to the player's facemask, up from 29% in 2015, according to data gathered by the NFL. "What we haven't seen over that period of time are any changes of any note to the facemask," [said Jeff Miller, the NFL's executive vice president overseeing player health and safety]... "Now we see, given the changes in our concussion numbers and injuries to players, that as changes are made to the helmet, fewer and fewer concussions are caused by hits to the shell, and more and more concussions as a percentage are by hits to the facemask..." Selected winners will receive up to $100,000 in aggregate funding, as well as expert development support to help move their concepts from the lab to the playing field. Winners will be announced in August, according to the article, "and Miller said he expected helmet manufacturers to start implementing any improvements into helmets soon after that."

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"After a half-century asking us to exercise more, doctors and physiologists say we have been thinking about it wrong," writes Washington Post columnist Michael J. Coren. "U.S. and World Health Organization guidelines no longer specify a minimum duration of moderate or vigorous aerobic activity." Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular bursts of effort — as short as 30 seconds — can capture many of the health benefits of the gym. Climbing two to three flights of stairs a few times per day could change your life. Experts call it VILPA, or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. "The message now is that all activity counts," said Martin Gibala, a professor and former chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Canada... Just taking the stairs daily is associated with lower body weight and cutting the risk of stroke and heart disease — the leading (and largely preventable) cause of death globally. While it may not burn many calories (most exercise doesn't), it does appear to extend your health span. Leg power — a measure of explosive muscle strength — was a stronger predictor of brain aging than any lifestyle factors measured in a 2015 study in the journal Gerontology... How little activity can you do? Four minutes daily. Essentially, a few flights of stairs at a vigorous pace. That's the effort [Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity and population health at the University of Sydney] found delivered significant health benefits in that 2022 study of British non-exercisers. "We saw benefits from the first minute," Stamatakis said. For Americans, the effect is even more dramatic: a 44 percent drop in deaths, according to a peer-reviewed paper recently accepted for publication. "We showed for the first time that vigorous intensity, even if it's done as part of the day-to-day routine, not in a planned and structured manner, works miracles," Stamatakis said. "The key principle here is start with one, two minutes a day. The focus should be on making sure that it's something that you can incorporate into your daily routine. Then you can start thinking about increasing the dose." Intensity is the most important factor. You won't break a sweat in a brief burst, but you do need to feel it. A highly conditioned athlete might need to sprint to reach vigorous territory. But many people need only to take the stairs. Use your breathing as a guide, Stamatakis said: If you can sing, it's light intensity. If you can speak but not sing, you're entering moderate exertion. If you can't hold a conversation, it's vigorous. The biggest benefits come from moderate to vigorous movement. One minute of incidental vigorous activity prevents premature deaths, heart attacks or strokes as well as about three minutes of moderate activity or 35 to 49 minutes of light activity.

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A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive "interval" breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study -- published in Thursday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet -- more than 100,000 women had mammography screenings. Half were supported by AI and the rest had their mammograms reviewed by two different radiologists, a standard practice in much of Europe known as double reading. It is not typically used in Canada, where usually one radiologist checks mammograms. The study looked at the rates of interval cancer, the term doctors use for invasive tumors that appear between routine mammograms. They can be harder to detect and studies have shown that they are more likely to be aggressive with a poorer prognosis. The rate of interval cancers decreased by 12 percent in the groups where the AI screening was implemented, the study showed. [...] Throughout the two-year study, the mammograms that were supported by AI were triaged into two different groups. Those that were determined to be low risk needed only one radiologist to examine them, while those that were considered high risk required two. The researchers reported that numerically, the AI-supported screening resulted in 11 fewer interval cancers than standard screening (82 versus 93, or 12 per cent). "This is really a way to improve an overall screening test," [said lead author, Dr. Kristina Lang]. She acknowledged that while the study found a decrease in interval cancer, longer-term studies are needed to find out how AI-supported screening might impact mortality rates. The screenings for the study all took place at one centre in Sweden, which the researchers acknowledged is a limitation. Another is that the race and ethnicity of the participants were not recorded. The next step, Lang said, will be for Swedish researchers to determine cost-effectiveness.

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For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer's disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. "They have a piece of the puzzle," says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "It's not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an interesting piece." [...] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer's disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

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