The harder your brain works at your job, the less likely you may be to have memory and thinking problems later in life, according to a new study published in the April 17, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. This study does not prove that stimulating work prevents mild cognitive impairment. It only shows an association.
“We examined the demands of various jobs and found that cognitive stimulation at work during different stages in life — during your 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s — was linked to a reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment after the age of 70,” said study author Trine Holt Edwin, MD, PhD, of Oslo University Hospital in Norway. “Our findings highlight the value of having a job that requires more complex thinking as a way to possibly maintain memory and thinking in old age.”
The study looked at 7,000 people and 305 occupations in Norway.
Researchers measured the degree of cognitive stimulation that participants experienced while on the job. They measured the degree of routine manual, routine cognitive, non-routine analytical, and non-routine interpersonal tasks, which are skill sets that different jobs demand.
Routine manual tasks demand speed, control over equipment, and often involve repetitive motions, typical of factory work. Routine cognitive tasks demand precision and accuracy of repetitive tasks, such as in bookkeeping and filing.
Non-routine analytical tasks refer to activities that involve analyzing information, engaging in creative thinking and interpreting information for others. Non-routine interpersonal tasks refer to establishing and maintaining personal relationships, motivating others and coaching. Non-routine cognitive jobs include public relations and computer programing.
Researchers divided participants into four groups based on the degree of cognitive stimulation that they experienced in their jobs.

The most common job for the group with the highest cognitive demands was teaching. The most common jobs for the group with the lowest cognitive demands were mail carriers and custodians.
After age 70, participants completed memory and thinking tests to assess whether they had mild cognitive impairment. Of those with the lowest cognitive demands, 42% were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Of those with the highest cognitive demands, 27% were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment.
After adjustment for age, sex, education, income and lifestyle factors, the group with the lowest cognitive demands at work had a 66% higher risk of mild cognitive impairment compared to the group with the highest cognitive demands at work.
“These results indicate that both education and doing work that challenges your brain during your career play a crucial role in lowering the risk of cognitive impairment later in life,” Edwin said. “Further research is required to pinpoint the specific cognitively challenging occupational tasks that are most beneficial for maintaining thinking and memory skills.”
A limitation of the study was that even within identical job titles, individuals might perform different tasks and experience different cognitive demands.
The study is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

In the long history of recommendations for nutritional intake, current research is trending toward the concept of “food as medicine” — a philosophy in which food and nutrition are positioned within interventions to support health and wellness. In the paper — “Guidance on Energy and Macronutrients Across the Lifespan” — by Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Dr. Steven Heymsfield, he shares the latest clarity and recommendations in the rich and storied history of energy and macronutrient intake.
The research paper by Dr. Heymsfield and colleague Dr. Sue Shapses, Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University and Director of the Next Center at the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showcasing recommendations with increased clarity for protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber and water intake at various stages in the human lifespan.
“Couple with the amount and pattern of the foods people eat, the primary macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates and fat can shape the major determinates of health throughout the lifespan,” said Dr. Heymsfield, who is a professor of Metabolism & Body Composition at Pennington Biomedical. “Even considering the incredible diversity of traits and nutritional needs across the global population, we can potentially provide effective care for all patients, including the growing number of patients with diet-related diseases, so long as we recognize the subtle effects of the key macronutrients.”
Throughout the research document, the authors frequently reference the original, historic research for which they are providing the latest incarnation and related knowledge. Focusing primarily on energy and three macronutrients — protein, carbohydrates and fat, and their subsequent substrates — amino acids, glucose and free fatty acids, the paper shows how these can fuel growth and maintenance throughout life. For optimal health, the study provides dietary reference intakes for the three micronutrients at various stages: 0 to 6 months, 7 months to slightly less than a year old, one year to three, four to eight years, nine to 13 years, 14 to 18 years, over 19 years, and then additional recommendations for pregnancy and lactation.
The research goes on to provide recommendations to patients and caregivers on healthy eating patterns consistent with the energy and macronutrient guidelines and includes an online calculator. While the energy requirements and variable needs for the three main macronutrients and multiple micronutrients vary across the nine life stage groups, there are overarching nutritional goals for patients when choosing healthy food patterns. A variety of healthy meal pattern examples are available, but reoccurring components feature the inclusion of vegetables of all types, whole fruits, fat-free or low-fat dairy, lean meats, seafood, eggs, beans, and nuts, plant- and seafood-based oils, and grains, with at least half of those being whole grains.
The need to incorporate the three main macronutrient groups and micronutrients into the diets of the various life stage groups is a matrix that is further complicated as varying financial resources, personal preferences, cultural backgrounds and ethnic food traditions are accounted for. The paper structures a priority framework, offering better insights into those diets that can be tailored for specific diet-related chronic conditions, such as obesity or type 2 diabetes.
“The legacy of research into dietary nutrition continues to refine what we know about our bodies and the capacity for a tailored diet, featuring key macronutrients to support our long-term health,” said Dr. John Kirwan, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “Dr. Heymsfield’s recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine is the latest contribution to this research history of contributing to the knowledge base, and further promotes the notion of ‘food as medicine’ — delivering the potential to improve health across the lifespan with bespoke, nutrient-rich diets.”

Penn State researchers may have uncovered another layer of complexity in the mystery of how diet impacts aging. A new study led by researchers in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development examined how a person’s telomeres — sections of genetic bases that function like protective caps at the ends of chromosomes — were affected by caloric restriction.
The team published their results in Aging Cell. Analyzing data from a two-year study of caloric restriction in humans, the researchers found that people who restricted their calories lost telomeres at different rates than the control group — even though both groups ended the study with telomeres of roughly the same length. Restricting calories by 20% to 60% has been shown to promote longer life in many animals, according to previous research.
Over the course of human life, every time a person’s cells replicate, some telomeres are lost when chromosomes are copied to the new cell. When this happens, the overall length of the cell’s telomeres becomes shorter. After cells replicate enough times, the protective cap of telomeres completely dissipates. Then, the genetic information in the chromosome can become damaged, preventing future reproduction or proper function of the cell. A cell with longer telomeres is functionally younger than a cell with short telomeres, meaning that two people with the same chronological age could have different biological ages depending on the length of their telomeres.
Typical aging, stress, illness, genetics, diet and more can all influence how often cells replicate and how much length the telomeres retain, according to Idan Shalev, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. Shalev led the researchers who analyzed genetic samples from the national CALERIE study — the first randomized clinical trial of calorie restriction in humans. Shalev and his team sought to understand the effect of caloric restriction on telomere length in people. Because telomere length reflects how quickly or slowly a person’s cells are aging, examining telomere length could allow scientists to identify one way in which caloric restriction may slow aging in humans.
“There are many reasons why caloric restriction may extend human lifespans, and the topic is still being studied,” said Waylon Hastings, who earned his doctorate in biobehavioral health at Penn State in 2020 and was lead author of this study. “One primary mechanism through which life is extended relates to metabolism in a cell. When energy is consumed within a cell, waste products from that process cause oxidative stress that can damage DNA and otherwise break down the cell. When a person’s cells consume less energy due to caloric restriction, however, there are fewer waste products, and the cell does not break down as quickly.”
The researchers tested the telomere length of 175 research participants using data from the start of the CALERIE study, one year into the study and the end of the study after 24 months of caloric restriction. Approximately two-thirds of study participants participated in caloric restriction, while one-third served as a control group.
During the study, results showed that telomere loss changed trajectories. Over the first year, participants who were restricting caloric intake lost weight, and they lost telomeres more rapidly than the control group. After a year, the weight of participants on caloric restriction was stabilized, and caloric restriction continued for another year. During the second year of the study, participants on caloric restriction lost telomeres more slowly than the control group. At the end of two years, the two groups had converged, and the telomere lengths of the two groups was not statistically different.

“This research shows the complexity of how caloric restriction affects telomere loss,” Shalev said. “We hypothesized that telomere loss would be slower among people on caloric restriction. Instead, we found that people on caloric restriction lost telomeres more rapidly at first and then more slowly after their weight stabilized.”
Shalev said the results raised a lot of important questions. For example, what would have happened to telomere length if data had been collected for another year? Study participants are scheduled for data collection at a 10-year follow-up, and Shalev said that he was eager to analyze those data when they become available.
Despite the ambiguity of the results, Shalev said there is promise for the potential health benefits of caloric restriction in humans. Previous research on the CALERIE data has demonstrated that caloric restriction may help reduce harmful cholesterol and lower blood pressure. For telomeres, the two-year timeline was not sufficient to show benefits, but those may still be revealed, according to Shalev and Hastings.
Three of Shalev’s trainees, Hastings, current graduate student Qiaofeng Ye and former postdoctoral scholar Sarah Wolf, led the research under Shalev’s guidance.
Hastings said the opportunity to lead this study was critical to his career.
“I was recently hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at Texas A&M University, and I will begin that work in the fall semester,” Hastings said. “Prior to this project, I had limited experience in nutrition. This project literally set the course of my career, and I am grateful to Dr. Shalev for trusting me with that responsibility.”
Calen Ryan and Daniel Belsky of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Sai Krupa Das of Tufts University, Kim Huffman and William Kraus of Duke University School of Medicine, Michael Kobor and Julia MacIsaac of University of British Columbia, Corby Martin and Leanne Redman of Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Susan Racette of Arizona State University College of Health Solutions all contributed to this research.
The National Institute on Aging funded this research.

As anyone with seasonal allergies knows, unseen airborne particles can really wreck a person’s day. Like the tree pollen that might be plaguing you this spring, small concentrations of trace elements in the air can have significant negative impacts on human health. However, unlike pollen counts and other allergy indices, which are carefully tracked and widely available, limited knowledge exists about the ambient concentrations of cancer-causing trace elements like lead and arsenic in urban areas of developing countries.
A recent effort led by Randall Martin, the Raymond R. Tucker Distinguished Professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, analyzed global ambient particulate matter (PM) to understand two of its key components, mineral dust and trace element oxides. Trace elements — such as lead and arsenic — have well documented associations with adverse health outcomes. While dust originates from both natural sources like deserts and human activities like construction and agriculture, trace elements are predominantly emitted by human activities like fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes.
Martin’s team, including Jay Turner, the James McKelvey Professor of Engineering Education at WashU, and Xuan Liu, a graduate student working with Martin and Turner in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, examined data collected by the Surface PARTiculate mAtter Network (SPARTAN), the only global monitoring network that measures PM elemental composition. Their work, published March 10 in ES&T Air, produced a valuable dataset and methodology to identify regions with elevated trace elements. The findings also highlighted regions of concern in Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, which might benefit from interventions to reduce trace element emission from human activities.
“Reliable elemental composition data of ambient PM is crucial to understand the health risks associated with exposure to airborne trace elements,” said Liu, the first author on the paper. “Our work highlights the significant health risks caused by elevated levels of airborne trace elements, particularly arsenic, in South and Southeast Asia.”
“This work draws attention to the need for sustained consistent monitoring of the elemental composition of fine particulate matter in urban areas worldwide,” Martin added. “Identifying potential emission sources of these elements will inform targeted interventions to mitigate exposure and safeguard public health.”
Though Martin and his collaborators have found in previous studies that global air pollution from fine particulate matter fell between 1998 and 2019 and strategies like replacing traditional fuel sources with sustainable sources of energy could further curb PM pollution, their SPARTAN analysis points to ongoing concerns regarding exposure to trace elements through inhalation of PM. The team identified informal lead-acid battery recycling, e-waste recycling and coal-fired brick kilns as potential contributors to the elevated concentrations of trace elements particularly in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
More broadly, the team noted that concentrations of trace elements are particularly high in low-income and middle-income countries due to unregulated urbanization and industrialization. However, PM monitoring networks in these areas are spotty at best, hindering researchers’ understanding of dust and trace element levels and their emission sources. Uniform sampling methods and reliable analyses are needed to enable comparisons across the world.
“Our growing sample collection will lead to better estimations of dust and trace element concentrations, which will allow us to perform more accurate health risk assessment and thorough investigation into emission sources,” Liu said. “Certain SPARTAN sites have been selected or established as part of the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) satellite mission dedicated to studying the health impacts of various types of airborne particles. This collaboration will yield a large dataset with increased sampling frequency, helping us identify pollution sources more effectively in the future.”
This work was supported by the Clean Air Fund and the National Science Foundation (grant 2020673), with additional contributions from NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development via the MAIA project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Additional support was provided by research grants from the Israel Science Foundation (grant #928/21) and by Horizon Europe Framework Program (EASVOLEE, No. 101095457).

The US saw a 22% decline in rates of prescription-opioid overdose related emergency department (ED) visits in children 17 and younger between 2008 and 2019, but an uptick in the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Henry Xiang of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, US, and colleagues. The authors also note that rates of pediatric opioid overdoses remain high in many populations.
Opioid overdose has been declared a public health emergency in the United States but much of the focus has been on adults. In the new study, researchers analyzed overdoses in children by using data spanning 2008 to 2020 from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, which provides anonymized information on emergency department (ED) visits across the country.
Overall, prescription-opioid overdose ED visits for patients from 0-17 years old decreased by 22% from 2008 to 2019, and then increased by 12% in 2020. That overall increase could be mostly attributed to an increase in overdoses among males, children aged 12 to 17, and those in the West and Midwest. Across all time spans, the highest rates of overdoses were seen in ages 0 to 1 and ages 12 to 17, among females, and in urban teaching hospital EDs.
The authors conclude that efforts to reduce opioid overdoses should include increased focus on young children and adolescents and note that further studies could investigate the impact of the later years of the COVID-19 pandemic on the opioid epidemic.
The authors add: “Overall, prescription opioid overdose ED visits of US children had a decreasing trend during the past decade, suggesting the effectiveness of a variety of interventions and campaigns. However, 0-1 years and 12-17-year-olds still face a significant risk of prescription opioid overdose.”

The clinical knowledge and reasoning skills of GPT-4 are approaching the level of specialist eye doctors, a study led by the University of Cambridge has found.
GPT-4 — a ‘large language model’ — was tested against doctors at different stages in their careers, including unspecialised junior doctors, and trainee and expert eye doctors. Each was presented with a series of 87 patient scenarios involving a specific eye problem, and asked to give a diagnosis or advise on treatment by selecting from four options.
GPT-4 scored significantly better in the test than unspecialised junior doctors, who are comparable to general practitioners in their level of specialist eye knowledge.
GPT-4 gained similar scores to trainee and expert eye doctors — although the top performing doctors scored higher.
The researchers say that large language models aren’t likely to replace healthcare professionals, but have the potential to improve healthcare as part of the clinical workflow.
They say state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-4 could be useful for providing eye-related advice, diagnosis, and management suggestions in well-controlled contexts, like triaging patients, or where access to specialist healthcare professionals is limited.
“We could realistically deploy AI in triaging patients with eye issues to decide which cases are emergencies that need to be seen by a specialist immediately, which can be seen by a GP, and which don’t need treatment,” said Dr Arun Thirunavukarasu, lead author of the study, which he carried out while a student at the University of Cambridge’s School of Clinical Medicine.

He added: “The models could follow clear algorithms already in use, and we’ve found that GPT-4 is as good as expert clinicians at processing eye symptoms and signs to answer more complicated questions.
“With further development, large language models could also advise GPs who are struggling to get prompt advice from eye doctors. People in the UK are waiting longer than ever for eye care.
Large volumes of clinical text are needed to help fine-tune and develop these models, and work is ongoing around the world to facilitate this.
The researchers say that their study is superior to similar, previous studies because they compared the abilities of AI to practicing doctors, rather than to sets of examination results.
“Doctors aren’t revising for exams for their whole career. We wanted to see how AI fared when pitted against to the on-the-spot knowledge and abilities of practicing doctors, to provide a fair comparison,” said Thirunavukarasu, who is now an Academic Foundation Doctor at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
He added: “We also need to characterise the capabilities and limitations of commercially available models, as patients may already be using them — rather than the internet — for advice.”
The test included questions about a huge range of eye problems, including extreme light sensitivity, decreased vision, lesions, itchy and painful eyes, taken from a textbook used to test trainee eye doctors. This textbook is not freely available on the internet, making it unlikely that its content was included in GPT-4’s training datasets.

The results are published today in the journal PLOS Digital Health.
“Even taking the future use of AI into account, I think doctors will continue to be in charge of patient care. The most important thing is to empower patients to decide whether they want computer systems to be involved or not. That will be an individual decision for each patient to make,” said Thirunavukarasu.
GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 — or ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformers’ — are trained on datasets containing hundreds of billions of words from articles, books, and other internet sources. These are two examples of large language models; others in wide use include Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2) and Large Language Model Meta AI 2 (LLaMA 2).
The study also tested GPT-3.5, PaLM2, and LLaMA with the same set of questions. GPT-4 gave more accurate responses than all of them.
GPT-4 powers the online chatbot ChatGPT to provide bespoke responses to human queries. In recent months, ChatGPT has attracted significant attention in medicine for attaining passing level performance in medical school examinations, and providing more accurate and empathetic messages than human doctors in response to patient queries.
The field of artificially intelligent large language models is moving very rapidly. Since the study was conducted, more advanced models have been released — which may be even closer to the level of expert eye doctors.

A form of heart failure that occurs during late pregnancy or early postpartum, peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a major cause of maternal death.
New research led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, reveals new insights into the mechanisms behind PPCM’s development and points to potential new strategies for therapeutic development. The results are published in Science Translational Medicine.
“Even though heart disease now represents the leading cause of maternal death in the US, our understanding of the biology driving many of these diseases is still very limited,” said co-lead author Jason Roh, MD, MHS, a cardiologist who runs a cardiovascular aging laboratory in the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center. “Our study identifies some underlying aging-related biology that contributes to the development of maternal heart failure in pregnancy and provides evidence from both patients and animal models.”
Roh and his colleagues work began with an unexpected finding. While studying the role of senescent (or aged) cells in older adults with heart failure, they were surprised to find that proteins secreted by these aged cells were being detected at even higher levels in the blood of young pregnant women with heart failure.
Based on these initial findings, the researchers conducted experiments to see whether these senescence proteins might be contributing to the development of PPCM as well as preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy that is a leading risk factor for PPCM and postpartum heart failure.
Their reasoning was based on prior work showing that the placenta, a hybrid maternal-fetal organ unique to pregnancy, manifests markers of increased senescence towards the end of pregnancy.
When the team assessed placentas from women with preeclampsia, they found that they displayed multiple markers of amplified senescence and tissue aging, as well as increased expression of many of the senescence proteins that were detected in the blood of women with preeclampsia or PPCM.

The most highly expressed cellular senescence protein in these placentas was activin A, and higher levels of this protein were linked to either more severe heart dysfunction or heart failure in women with preeclampsia or PPCM.
“While the placenta undergoes a normal physiological process of aging (or senescence) throughout pregnancy, this seems to be further amplified in those who develop heart failure during pregnancy,” said Roh. “We believe this causes it to secrete various factors into the mom’s blood that can negatively impact the function of the heart.”
In experiments conducted in mice, the placentas of mice with PPCM showed similarly increased expression of cellular senescence-associated proteins. Treating these mice with fisetin, a drug that can selectively clear highly senescent cells, during mid to late pregnancy partially reduced placental senescence and improved heart function. Treatment with an antibody directed against the receptor for activin A, after pregnancy, had similar effects in these animals.
“Although we are still in the very early stages of understanding how amplified placental senescence can affect the function of the mom’s heart, we believe our findings answer some fundamental questions about the biology underlying heart failure in pregnancy,” said Roh. “It is important to note that placental senescence is a normal part of pregnancy. Fully understanding why this process becomes perturbed in pregnancy-related heart disease and rigorously determining how to safely regulate it are critical next steps before translating these findings.”

Published12 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, ReutersBy Francesca GillettBBC NewsSweden’s parliament has passed a law lowering the age at which people can change their legal gender from 18 to 16, and making the process easier.The law passed with 234 votes in favour and 94 against in Sweden’s parliament.Though Sweden was the first country to make gender transition legal, in 1972, the new law has sparked intense debate.Some say it will make an “important difference” but critics say more research is needed.Currently, Swedes require a doctor’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria to be allowed to change their legally recognised gender.But under this new law – which would come into force in July 2025 – the process will be simpler, for example a shorter consultation with a doctor or a psychologist will be enough, along with approval from the National Board of Health and Welfare.Legally changing a person’s gender will also be possible from the age of 16, although those under 18 will need the approval of their parents or guardian, a doctor and the National Board of Health and Welfare.The new law will also separate the process of changing legal gender from gender surgery, which will still need a longer assessment and will still only be allowed from the age of 18.”It is not reasonable that there should be the same requirements for changing legal gender as for making an irreversible gender confirming surgery,” said Johan Hultberg of the ruling Moderate Party, during a lengthy six-hour debate in parliament.”The great majority of Swedes will never notice that the law has changed, but for a number of transgender people the new law makes a large and important difference,” he added.But the plan is unpopular with those on the right. The Christian Democrats – who are in the government’s coalition – and the far-right Sweden Democrats – who have backed the government – both did not support the law, with many MPs saying they wanted to see more research into gender dysphoria first.The leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson, said he thought it was “deplorable that a proposal that obviously lacks support among the population is so casually voted through”.Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has defended the proposal as “balanced and responsible”.The public has also been generally less supportive of the law change, with a recent poll by Swedish television network TV4 finding that 59% of Swedes thought it was a bad or very bad proposal, while 22% thought it was a good one, Reuters reported.Sweden country profile Germany eases gender change rulesA number of European countries have already passed laws making it easier for people to change their legal gender.Last week, the German parliament passed a similar law no longer requiring a doctor’s certificate for someone to change their legal gender – including for under-16s, although they will need the consent of their parents or guardian.And last year, Spain gave its final approval to a law allowing people over 16 to legally change their gender without medical evaluation.In the UK, to change your legally recognised gender you need a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, or meet certain other criteria, including having had gender surgery and lived “in your affirmed gender for at least two years”.More on this storySweden country profilePublished29 March 2023Germany eases gender change rulesPublished5 days agoLife on transgender waiting listPublished20 March

Consumers have grown accustomed to the prospect that their personal data, such as email addresses, social contacts, browsing history and genetic ancestry, are being collected and often resold by the apps and the digital services they use.With the advent of consumer neurotechnologies, the data being collected is becoming ever more intimate. One headband serves as a personal meditation coach by monitoring the user’s brain activity. Another purports to help treat anxiety and symptoms of depression. Another reads and interprets brain signals while the user scrolls through dating apps, presumably to provide better matches. (“‘Listen to your heart’ is not enough,” the manufacturer says on its website.)The companies behind such technologies have access to the records of the users’ brain activity — the electrical signals underlying our thoughts, feelings and intentions.On Wednesday, Governor Jared Polis of Colorado signed a bill that, for the first time in the United States, tries to ensure that such data remains truly private. The new law, which passed by a 61-to-1 vote in the Colorado House and a 34-to-0 vote in the Senate, expands the definition of “sensitive data” in the state’s current personal privacy law to include biological and “neural data” generated by the brain, the spinal cord and the network of nerves that relays messages throughout the body.“Everything that we are is within our mind,” said Jared Genser, general counsel and co-founder of the Neurorights Foundation, a science group that advocated the bill’s passage. “What we think and feel, and the ability to decode that from the human brain, couldn’t be any more intrusive or personal to us.”“We are really excited to have an actual bill signed into law that will protect people’s biological and neurological data,” said Representative Cathy Kipp, Democrat of Colorado, who introduced the bill. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Prescriptions for social activities, exercise and the arts — first popularized in Britain — are coming to America. But some experts say the U.S. health care system may get in the way.Last spring, Tia Washington, 52, a mother of three in Dublin, Calif., received a stern warning from her doctor: If she didn’t quickly gain control of her high blood pressure, she was likely to end up in the emergency room.He wrote a prescription for blood pressure medication and urged her to see a health coach, too. Ms. Washington reluctantly agreed.“I didn’t want to die,” she said.To her surprise, the health coach wanted to talk about more than vital signs. Ms. Washington found herself opening up about how she disliked doctors (and medications). How she tended to address the needs of work or family before her own. How her job had created “tremendous stress.”Together, they decided that Ms. Washington would attend two weekly movement classes, check in regularly with a nurse practitioner and receive free fruits and vegetables from a “food as medicine” government program.By the end of the conversation with the health coach, Ms. Washington said, the message was clear: “Tia, pay attention to yourself. You exist.”Ms. Washington’s experience is just one example of how a practice called social prescribing is being explored in the United States, after being adopted in more than 20 other countries. The term “social prescription” was first popularized in Britain after it had been practiced there in various forms for decades. While there isn’t one universally accepted definition, social prescriptions generally aim to improve health and well-being by connecting people with nonclinical activities that address underlying problems, such as isolation, social stress and lack of nutritious food, which have been shown to play a crucial role in influencing who stays well and for how long.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.