Use it or lose it

Long games of chess, weekly pub quizzes and sudoku puzzles won’t protect from dementia, writes Maurice Gueret, but may lend a higher perch from which to fall

Sudoku swindle

There was crushing disappointment for a generation of older people before Christmas when news of the great sudoku swindle was published. A team of Scottish spoilsports had been studying the cognitive function of about 500 people born in 1936. In their British Medical

Journal paper, they declared that those who liked to engage intellectually with crosswords, number puzzles, chess and quizzes, had the same trajectory of memory decline and slowing of processing speed as anybody else. My late mother would have been disappointed. A sudoku warrior for many years, Mum was firmly convinced that her daily number puzzles and crosswords, not to mention keeping a short diary seven days a week, kept her mind sharp as a pin into her 86th and final year. One detail from the study that was not reported quite as widely as the sudoku point, was that life-long engagement of the mind may provide you with a higher cognitive point from which to decline.

Brain Challenge

I’m not really a sudoku fiend, but what I do enjoy is the ‘word of the day’ service from the American dictionary company, Merriam-Webster. You can subscribe for free, and they will email a slumgullion of interesting words each week, telling you where the words came from and how they can be used. My other intellectual engagement is monomania with University Challenge. The quiz show was conceived in the same year that I was. Call me a nerd, but I try to watch each show three times. First as a quiz, where I shout wrong answers out loud — averaging a poor eight correct ones per show. Then I watch it a day later to see how many correct answers I can now call out. The sad news for my memory is that a previous viewing only adds about another 10 correct answers to my original tally. The third viewing is the really slow one, where I stop the recording at intervals, and dust off my Encylopedia Britannica to study subjects of interest. When my senility test next comes around, I’ll be able to tell my geriatrician all about the fat and ugly King Louis XI of France and why he was called the Universal Spider. And I’ll know that the poisonous hemlock taken in the successful suicide of Socrates is derived from the carrot family.

Cold feet

The UK has been pioneering phone-in health services for people who are ill, but an inquest before Christmas has been hearing about the downside of relying on such advice. The father of a six-year-old boy from Plymouth, who was vomiting once an hour into a bucket and had excruciating tummy pain with diarrhoea, made numerous calls to the NHS 111 service over a weekend. Three of the four call handlers didn’t judge the symptoms severe enough to pass the call on to a clinical practitioner. Nor could the dad get through to a doctor at the local surgery, despite being promised a call back. The lad died on the Monday, just hours after going into hospital. His postmortem revealed a serious gut blockage. We can all learn from tragedies like this. A consultant paediatrician at the hospital told the inquest that symptoms the father described, such as darkgreen bilious vomiting, cold hands, cold feet, and the boy’s confusion, should have raised red flags as markers for serious illness in children. Telephone triage services may well save money. But they don’t always save lives.

Ringworm terrier

I am hoping to discuss more of your old remedies and cures this year, so we’ll start with fungal infections, like ringworm of the scalp, athlete’s foot and jock itch. I’m always interested in your stories at mgueret@imd.ie, or by post to PO Box 5049, Dublin 6W. Nora was in touch with me about some very old medical books that she wanted to dispose of, and told me of her own case of scalp ringworm in the early 1940s, when anti-fungal treatments weren’t what they are now. She picked it up, as many did, in her first few weeks at school, and the cure at the time was to shave the head. A barber called to her house and told her that her that he was going to shave it ‘against the grain’ so it would grow curly in the future. And, true to his word, it did. When it was growing back, Nuala remembers taking a bus to school where her older sister was teased about having a wire-haired terrier for a sibling! Roald Dahl knew well one of the dark secrets of life. Children can be the cruellest human species of all.