A heart attack happens when the blood supply to the heart is blocked. It deprives the heart of oxygen and thus causes severe damage. While many people believe that a heart attack comes all of a sudden, and one of the most common and heard of symptom is a dramatic chest pain, doctors emphasize that warning signs may be subtle and have been there from a long time.

Many times, the warning signs exist, but we ignore it, because we do not know that it could be related to heart diseases. Awareness of these early indicators could be life-saving.

A Delhi-based physician Dr Obaidur Rahman, helps us identify one such symptom of heart attack that you would otherwise miss.

Orthopnoea: A Subtle Sign

Dr Rahman is a physician at Delhi's Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, and says that the signs of heart attack could arrive days in advance, including orthopnoea.

It is a condition where a person experiences difficulty breathing while lying flat. “The problem is that 92 per cent of people ignore them,” he says. Dr. Rahman’s Instagram post on the topic has gained widespread attention, emphasizing the importance of recognizing this subtle, potentially life-saving symptom.

What is Orthopnea?

Orthopnea is breathlessness that occurs when lying on your back, but improves when sitting or standing up. It can appear randomly or worsen gradually over time. Experts stress that orthopnea is often a sign of a more serious underlying condition, making it essential to consult a healthcare provider if you experience breathing difficulties.

According to Dr. Rahman, orthopnea typically happens because the heart is struggling. “When the heart weakens, blood backs up into the lungs,” he explains. “The moment you lie flat, gravity no longer helps, and you wake up feeling suffocated, restless, and drenched in sweat.” People experiencing orthopnea may need to sleep with multiple pillows or even sit upright on a couch or chair to breathe comfortably.

What Causes Orthopnea?

Doctors have seen cases of orthopnea is people who already have an underlying medical condition. Such a condition could lead to fluid accumulation around the lungs or make it difficult for the lungs to expand. When lying flat, blood usually naturally redistributed from legs to the lungs, which increases pressure. If you have a healthy heart, it can pump this extra blood efficiently, however, a weak heart cannot, and thus it makes breathing difficult.

What medical conditions could trigger orthopnea?

• Congestive heart failure
• Pulmonary hypertension
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• Obesity
• Pulmonary edema
• Severe pneumonia
• Diaphragm paralysis

Why early recognition matters?

Recognizing orthopnea early can be crucial in preventing a full-blown heart attack. While it may seem minor compared to chest pain or extreme fatigue, this symptom signals that the heart is under stress and may need urgent attention.

Dr. Rahman also emphasizes that individuals should not ignore recurring breathlessness when lying flat, as early medical intervention can make a significant difference in outcomes.

Unlike what most of us think, our organs, even the brain, get worn out over time. The concept of wear and tear also applies here, however, how susceptible is our brain to this process? Can it affect our brain size? Research shows it may.

A new study published in Nature Communication, suggests that knowing how the shape of your brain changes over time could be really important for spotting dementia early. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) and the University of La Laguna in Spain found that when the brain's overall structure shifts, it's often connected to a drop in your mental abilities, like how well you can remember things or figure out problems. Getting a better handle on this could lead to improved care and better treatments for memory loss.

How Does Your Brain’s Shape Change

Scientists think that some of the normal wear and tear that eventually causes diseases like dementia also change the brain's structure and shape. If we can watch out for these changes in shape, it might be a relatively easy way to catch dementia sooner than before.

Most research on the aging brain just focuses on how much tissue is lost in certain areas. But these researchers looked at something different. the overall shape of the brain shifts in systematic ways, and those shifts are closely tied to whether someone shows cognitive impairment.

The team studied 2,603 MRI brain scans from people ranging from 30 up to 97 years old. They tracked how the brain's structure and shape changed over time and compared these changes to the scores people got on tests measuring their thinking abilities.

They noticed that as people got older, the changes (shrinking and expanding) didn't happen evenly everywhere in the brain. They also saw that in people who were already struggling with their thinking skills, this unevenness was much clearer.

For example, the areas of the brain toward the back were found to shrink more with age, particularly in those who scored poorly on tests for reasoning ability. The researchers need to collect a lot more information to be absolutely certain about these links, but this study strongly suggests they exist.

Can The Size Of Our Brain Be A Sign Of Alzheimer’s?

The findings offer a new, surprising idea about what might cause neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, where brain damage gets worse over time.

The researchers suggest that the changes in the brain's shape over time might actually start to squeeze a very important memory center called the entorhinal cortex. This is critical because that same region is the place where the harmful, toxic proteins linked to Alzheimer's typically begun to gather first.

UC Irvine neuroscientist Michael Yassa said this squeeze could help explain why the entorhinal cortex is the "ground zero" for Alzheimer's damage. He explained that if the aging brain is slowly changing shape in a way that "squeezes this fragile region against a rigid boundary, it may create the perfect storm for damage to take root."

Understanding this physical process gives scientists a whole new way to think about how Alzheimer's disease works and offers the exciting possibility of detecting it much earlier.

To move forward, the team needs to look at more brain scans and take more precise measurements. They are especially interested in finding out why some brain areas might expand with age and how that relates to thinking ability.

We had lost many years, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the life expectancy was cut short. In fact in 2021, COVID-19 was the leading cause of death. However, it seems to have recovered in the recent times, reports a new Lancet Study, conducted by the University of Washington School of Medicine's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). As per the new report, the numbers have returned to pre-pandemic levels after falling during the height of COVID-19.

Humans are now living nearly two decades longer than they were in 1950. The research was based on the study of 204 countries and territories. However, the issue that scientists point out remain in the "emerging crisis" of rising death rates among the adolescent and young adults.

As far as COVID-19 itself is concerned, it fell from the leading cause of death in 2021 to 20th place in 2023, with heart disease and stroke rising to again becoming the leading cause of death, worldwide.

What Shifts Have Been Noticed?

Across the world, deaths have shifted away from infectious diseases. Many experts have time and again said that now these viruses, while they continue to mutate, no longer pose a serious threat. In fact, deaths from measles, diarrhea, and tuberculosis have seen a decline, with noncommunicable diseases now accounting for about two-thirds of global mortality and morbidity.

Experts say that while deaths from cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke have declined since the 1990s, cases of diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and Alzheimer’s have surged. “The world’s rapidly aging population and shifting risk factors have created a new wave of global health challenges,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). “The findings of the Global Burden of Disease study serve as a wake-up call for governments and healthcare leaders to act quickly and strategically against these emerging threats to public health.”

More Than Half Of These Diseases Are Preventable

Research tells us that more than half of these diseases are preventable.

IHME in its study found that conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar levels and obesity are among the 10 risk factors that can have greatest effect and increase mortality rates. Between 2010 and 2023, there was an 11% higher burden of disease due to high body mass index and a 6% increase due to high blood sugar.

However, most of these can be prevented. Other factors include environmental factors like pollution and lead exposure. This could also lead to issues in newborn health, low birthweight and short gestation.

Why Do The Youth Have Shorter Life Expectancy?

As per the research, deaths among people aged 20 to 39 in high-income North America have surged over the past decade. This has been driven by suicide, drug overdoses, and excessive alcohol use. Mortality among those aged 5 to 19 has also climbed in places like Eastern Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases and accidental injuries remain major causes.

“The world’s aging population and shifting risk factors have created a new wave of global health challenges,” said IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray. “The Global Burden of Disease study is a wake-up call for governments and healthcare leaders to act swiftly and strategically in addressing these alarming trends.”

When we are learning things, we use our five senses sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. However, even after understanding things with these five senses, one cannot guarantee that they will retain all the information they learn from these senses. Is there a way we can increase our capability of learning? Researchers have found out that if we had 7 senses, they could’ve aided us in better learning.

Researchers at Skoltech created a math formula, a mathematical model, to figure out how our memory works. The results they got are really interesting and could help make robots and artificial intelligence (AI) smarter and also teach us more about the human brain. The study's main idea, published in Scientific Reports, is that there might be a perfect number of senses for storing information, and that our current five senses might not be enough.

How Can We Measure Memories?

To build their model, the team focused on tiny, basic parts of memory called engrams. Think of engrams as the building blocks of memory. An engram is essentially a small, spread-out group of brain cells (neurons) that flash or "fire" together when you think of something. Each engram represents a single concept or idea, like your memory of a banana.

How do we know what a banana is? We use our senses! Its yellow appearance, its sweet smell, its unique taste. The model treats these sensory details as features or dimensions. Since humans have five main senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, a banana, in your mind's memory space, it is a five-dimensional object.

These memory blocks, the engrams, don't stay the same. They change over time, becoming clearer or fuzzier depending on how often you interact with the real-world object. This process of changing engrams is how we learn and forget.

How Many Senses Do We Need For Memory?

First, they showed that memories tend to settle down into a stable, lasting pattern over time. They called this a "steady state." This means that after a learning period, a fixed, or "mature," way of organizing memories is set up.

Next, the team tried to figure out the maximum number of distinct ideas or concepts (the memory capacity) that could be held in this stable system. They discovered that memory is at its absolute best (it stores the most distinct concepts) when each idea is described by seven features or dimensions.

The experts working on the research explained that they found out that when we understand the concept with all seven senses, there is a bigger probability of retaining things. This means that if our brains had seven senses instead of five, we might be able to process and remember a much larger number of distinct concepts, leading to the "seven senses claim."

Can We Train AI To Have 7 Senses?

This number, seven, suggests that if you want a system to have the deepest understanding of the world, having seven inputs is the way to go. Researchers found that the number seven showed up consistently as the best number, no matter how they slightly changed the other parts of their memory model. It seems to be a solid rule for how memory blocks (engrams) work.

While the idea of evolving new human senses is just a fun thought, the seven-sense finding is very practical for technology. If you design an AI or robot to have seven different ways of "sensing" the world, its memory and ability to understand new concepts might be greatly improved. One small detail is that the model considers memories that are very similar, even if they have slightly different sizes to represent just one concept when counting the total capacity.