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Depression is one of the most costly health conditions in the United States, and the situation does not seem to be getting a whole lot better.

The economic burden of major depressive disorder among U.S. adults was an estimated $236 billion in 2018, an increase of more than 35% since 2010. Much of this burden is not due to direct expenses of treatment, but the indirect toll that the disease takes on productivity (not to mention su***de).

Part of the problem, of course, is that treatments for depression just aren’t very good.

US clinical guidelines promote pharmacotherapy as the initial treatment approach. But as University of Michigan’s Elissa H. Patterson and Jay Kayser have discussed extensively, nearly 3 out of 4 people who use antidepressant medications fail to achieve remission from depression. Consequently, these individuals are deemed as having "treatment-resistant depression," which is pretty discouraging.

Meanwhile, lifestyle interventions, like physical activity, are characterized as "complementary alternative treatments." But a huge new review of more than a thousand studies suggests that exercise may actually elicit improvements in symptoms comparable to or even surpassing current available medications (plus added physical benefits). Which raises this question: should activity interventions actually be part of the first-line treatment for depression?

https://mailchi.mp/humanos.me/newsletter-258

The performance-enhancing effects of caffeine for a broad range of physical activities have been well-established in numerous meta-analyses.

An intriguing new review from Japan sheds a little more light on how exactly caffeine has this ergogenic impact.

Importantly, this may also mean that caffeine could augment some of the health-promoting effects associated with physical activity as well.

But one dilemma associated with caffeine, that many people wonder about, is the potential for tolerance. Does using caffeine regularly make you habituated to its effects? Do you need to "save" it for the times when you really need it? A new meta-analysis might provide the answer. 👀

Check out the newsletter to learn more!

https://mailchi.mp/humanos.me/newsletter-255

Hey friends, in honor of Sleep Awareness Week, I thought we would take a look at how sleep affects aspects of immunity.

The connection between sleep and illness has been intuitively obvious to humans for a very long time.

“Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease,” said the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates more than 2400 years ago. However, it's only quite recently, with the advent of technology to objectively measure sleep and the rise of scientific microbiology in the twentieth century, that we've been able to conduct experiments to rigorously test how sleep affects our ability to resist infections.

For instance, Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon has conducted an array of trials in which brave volunteers are administered nasal drops containing either respiratory viruses or saline (placebo), and then keeping them in quarantine to see if they get sick. In one such study, subjects who were getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night were nearly three times more likely to go on to develop a cold, compared to those who averaged 8 hours.

Furthermore, sleep loss may interfere with the ability of the immune system to respond appropriately to vaccines. When flu vaccines were administered to subjects who were in a state of sleep debt their mean antibody titers 10 days later were less than half of those in control subjects.

More recently, several studies were published examining how sleep loss affects

1) odds of developing an infection;
2) antibody response to vaccination;
3) probability of experiencing "long COVID" symptoms.

Check out the newsletter to learn more:

Hey friends, this week I'd like to talk about one of the most underappreciated sleep aids: masks. Like, the kind that you wear over your eyes.

First, let's talk about why they might be useful in the first place. Obviously, it's really tough to get deep restorative sleep when you're surrounded by a lot of external stimuli, like bright light or noise. If you stop and think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, that makes a ton of sense. In a natural environment, sounds or movement around us could signify potential danger. Consequently, most of us need the right conditions to fall asleep and stay asleep — quiet, comfortable, and free of stimulation.

That's where sleep masks enter the picture. They can help create those conditions by blocking out any light that might deliver an alerting signal to the brain. This is especially useful in the modern world, where light pollution can pervade at any time or place from artificial light sources.

Strangely enough, there have been very few studies that have actually examined the effects of sleep masks, and virtually none that look at masks in isolation. Most of this literature looks at the effects of eye masks (together with ear plugs) as a way to improve sleep in ICU patients.

But what about healthy folks? Well, a newly published trial suggests that wearing a sleep mask could not only improve the quality of your sleep, but also lead to a modest boost in performance the next day. Given that these masks are pretty much risk-free, and not terribly expensive, I was hyped to see this. It also caught my eye because of another recent study which suggested that we may be more sensitive to the brightness of ambient light than previously thought — even through closed eyelids. Check out the newsletter to learn more. 👀

https://mailchi.mp/humanos.me/newsletter-253

We recently came across a couple of intriguing new studies exploring benefits of zinc - both supplementally and from food - on biomarkers related to brainpower and lifespan.

To learn more, check out our newsletter 👀

https://mailchi.mp/humanos.me/newsletter-249