'WHO releases 7 new dementia risk factors'

 The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a major update to its guidelines on reducing the risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

The second edition of the original 2019 report was updated to “reflect the latest evidence and advances in dementia risk reduction.”

The following seven additional health conditions and exposures were added to the list.

1. Stroke
2. Traumatic brain injury
3. Vision impairment
4. Sleep problems
5. HIV
6. Air pollution
7. Menopausal hormone therapy


These new risk factors joined the previously existing 12, which are listed below.

1. Cognitive activity
2. Social activity
3. Physical inactivity
4. Harmful alcohol use
5. Tobacco use
6. Unhealthy diet/nutrition
7. Obesity
8. Diabetes
9. Hypertension
10. Dyslipidemia (abnormal amount of lipids (fats) or lipoproteins in the blood)
11. Hearing loss
12. Depression

Dr. Daniel Amen, physician and founder of Amen Clinics in California, has his own formula for reducing Alzheimer’s risk factors, following an acronym called BRIGHT MINDS.

This stands for blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation, genetics, head trauma, toxins, mental health, immunity and infections, neurohormones, diabesity (co-occurrence of obesity and type 2 diabetes) and sleep. The WHO’s updated guidelines offer similar advice.

Amen spoke with Fox News Digital about the new additions to the WHO’s list of risk factors.

Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT)

The WHO does not recommend menopausal hormone therapy specifically to prevent dementia in postmenopausal women 65 and older. For younger women, it says there is not enough evidence to determine whether MHT affects dementia risk.

Amen agreed that there is not enough evidence to support using MHT specifically to prevent dementia. He said hormonal changes during menopause may affect mood and memory, although the relationship between MHT and dementia risk remains uncertain.

“For women, as they go through menopause, lower progesterone makes them anxious, and [with] lower estrogen, they start to have memory problems,” he said. “Hormone replacement early on is helpful, and that’s what we see on the brain imaging work that we do.”

Experts note that while menopause-related hormonal changes can be associated with mood and cognitive symptoms, these effects can vary widely.

Stroke

A stroke occurs when blood flow to part of the brain is blocked or when a blood vessel in or near the brain bursts, according to the American Stroke Association.

Conditions that affect the heart and blood vessels can also affect brain health and are associated with a higher risk of dementia, according to Amen.

That can include conditions such as heart disease, heart rhythm problems, stroke and transient ischemic attacks. Erectile dysfunction can also be associated with underlying vascular disease, he said.

“And 40% of 40-year-olds have erectile dysfunction, 70% of 70-year-olds. So, if I’m an older person, I’m thinking if I get my brain right, my love life could be better, too,” Amen added.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Amen surmised that the WHO is “late to the party” in emphasizing the importance of head trauma as a dementia risk factor. TBI can range from a mild concussion to a severe brain injury.

“One of the big lessons from the brain imaging work we do is that mild traumatic brain injury ruins people’s lives,” he said. “They end up seeing psychiatrists because they have temper problems or … depression or anxiety, and it’s really from a snowmobiling accident in [their] 30s.”

Amen added that failing to protect the brain — which he described as “very soft” and having the consistency of “soft butter” — is “not the smart thing to do.”

Vision impairment

A significant portion of the brain is dedicated to vision, according to Amen.

“So, if your vision becomes troubled, your brain’s troubled,” he said.

Amen said vision impairment may place additional demands on the brain. While the condition has been linked with cognitive decline, the WHO says there is insufficient evidence to recommend vision treatment specifically for dementia prevention.

Sleep disorders

Sleep appears to support the brain’s waste-clearance processes, Amen noted.

Sleep challenges affect tens of millions of Americans. In 2024, 30.5% of U.S. adults reported getting less than seven hours of shut-eye per day, according to the CDC.

For those with sleep problems such as sleep apnea, it can cause changes in the brain that resemble the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, the expert said.

Research suggests that sleep may help the brain clear beta-amyloid, although the relationship between sleep and dementia remains complex and is still being studied.

HIV

Inflammation and infections can affect brain health. Untreated HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) can affect the central nervous system and is associated with HIV-related cognitive impairment.

Amen said he has scanned “hundreds of people” with HIV, stating that the virus is “clearly a risk factor.”

Untreated HIV is known to affect the central nervous system and is associated with HIV-related cognitive impairment. Effective antiretroviral therapy has greatly reduced the incidence of severe HIV-associated dementia.

Air pollution

Exposure to any toxins, from alcohol and marijuana to lead, mercury or air pollution, could be detrimental to brain health, according to Amen.

The WHO recommends reducing exposure to household and outdoor air pollution, particularly fine particulate matter. Research has linked long-term exposure to air pollution with a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia, although the WHO characterizes the evidence as low to very low certainty.

Getting ahead of it

Dementia risk rises sharply with age. A recent U.S. analysis estimated that about one in five people had developed dementia by age 85, with risk increasing further at older ages.

While those with a genetic predisposition to the disease have a higher risk, Amen noted that certain lifestyle factors can increase the risk for anyone.

“We should be on a dementia prevention program our whole lives,” the doctor said. “It’s not something to start when you’re 65.”

Amen urged everyone to ask themselves the question: “Is what I’m doing good or bad for my brain?”

“Social activity is one of the prevention strategies. New learning is a prevention strategy,” he added. “So always working on being connected with other people and then just making better decisions.”

“If you love and care for your brain, you’re going to love your life a whole bunch more.”

https://nypost.com/2026/09/01/health/who-releases-7-new-dementia-risk-factors-one-affects-millions-of-americans-every-night/

ICE nabs over 2K illegal migrants across NY in ‘Operation Rotten Apple’

 ICE nabbed nearly 2,200 illegal migrants, including convicted murderers, rapists and drug traffickers, in New York in the past month alone — and more agents and sweeps are on the way, the feds said Tuesday.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency caught up to 2,197 criminals in the Empire State between July 27 and Aug. 29 as part of “Operation Rotten Apple” — which Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin noted was conducted “with no help” from either New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or Gov. Kathy Hochul.

“These arrests included gang members, rapists, murderers and child predators — which I believe there is a special place in hell for those individuals,” Mullin told reporters at a press conference.

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Recent federal Department of Homeland Security busts in New York include a who’s who of violent criminals, the feds said Tuesday.

“Operation Rotten Apple did what sanctuary politicians in New York City and the state of New York refuse to do: made the Empire State safer,” he added in a statement. 

Asked by a reporter if he was prepared to send more federal agents to New York for round-ups, Mullin replied, “Absolutely.

“Because they refused to work with us … we will send as many people as we have possible to make sure we are restoring law and order,” he said.

While celebrating the operation, Mullin told reporters that the need for the mass round-up stemmed from the fact that the mayor and governor passed legislation this year severely limiting local government cooperation with ICE.

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DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday speaks at a press conference about the recent captures.Stephen Yang for NY Post

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Mullin said the Trump administration is doing what lefty New York officials are failing to do — keeping the public safe. Stephen Yang for NY Post

Mamdani “is extremely out of touch with what the American people want and what public safety actually looks like,” Mullin railed.

“These are individuals that we took off the streets of New York to protect the people here because you have a mayor here that refuses to work.”

Those arrested included Bogdan Detrovich Gren, a Ukrainian national in the US illegally with convictions for murder, kidnapping, abduction resulting in death, and criminal possession of a weapon, according to DHS.

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Mullin said more agents and sweeps are on the way to New York.Stephen Yang for NY Post

Andreas Bernal Chiquito, an illegal migrant from Colombia who was also caught, has past arrests for sexual conduct against a child and injuring a child under age 17.

Also taken into custody were Palvinder Singh, an illegal migrant from India who was convicted of rape in Germany, and Carlos Mendez-Acosta, a Venezuelan migrant convicted of rape, according to the feds.

Mamdani signed an executive order shortly after he assumed office in January, reinforcing sanctuary protections against what he called “abusive immigration enforcement” by the Trump administration. 

The move severely limits local agencies and law enforcement from working with ICE to put and keep many illegal migrants in custody.

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Those arrested include murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers, the feds said.Stephen Yang for NY Post

Hizzoner has since passed additional legislation making it harder for local law enforcement to cooperate with President Trump’s illegal-immigration crackdown. 

Hochul also successfully pushed through legislation preventing state cops from partnering with federal immigration authorities to catch people and barring ICE agents from most public places such as hospitals and parks. 

According to DHS, such “radical sanctuary policies” have resulted in more than 13,000 criminal aliens back onto New York streets.

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Some of those busted are child predators, according to DHS.Stephen Yang for NY Post

“Democratic politicians in New York and elsewhere say that they care about public safety, but won’t let immigration law enforcement officers into their jails to take criminals into custody; instead they release them to their streets,” said Trump administration border czar Tom Homan in a statement.

Mullin said the federal government should not send a single cent to New York until it complies with immigration authorities. President Trump is looking into options, he said.

“I don’t think we should be sending one federal penny to sanctuary states and sanctuary cities. And I know President Trump is looking at options there. In my opinion, I don’t think taxpayer dollars from the great people of Oklahoma or any other red state should be funding a state that embraces these criminals like New York,” Mullin said.

https://nypost.com/2026/09/01/us-news/ice-nabs-more-than-2k-illegal-migrants-across-new-york-in-operation-rotten-apple-including-child-rapists-murderers/

Jordan says 10 of 13 ballistic missiles intercepted

 Jordanian air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 10 of 13 ballistic missiles that entered the country's airspace, the Jordan Armed Forces-Arab Army said, according to the Jordan News Agency.

The remaining three missiles fell in remote areas away from population centers, the military added.

The announcement came after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed its latest strike on US bases in Jordan killed a number of American forces.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Jordan-says-10-of-13-ballistic-missiles-intercepted/67026139

Why Lefties and Islamists Believe the Way They Do

What is communism? asks Krzysztof Szczawinski on X. No, it’s not the “bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union.” No, it’s not “a discredited economic theory”.

[Instead, it’s] a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper -- a civilizational war against truth itself[.]

Then he goes on to give us two words that the Poles invented to describe life under communism:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] -- a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood[.]

And

Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] -- a deep, performative hypocrisy[.]

I’m sure he’s right. Only I believe that all politics amounts to a Big Lie, and utterly irradiated with hypocrisy.

But wait. Here is Hussein Aboubakr Mansour telling us “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crisis” or “How the myth of crisis imprisoned Arab (and leftist) political thought.”

I discussed it at length on my Substack.

Mansour tells the story about how Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, a Sunni cleric, [was] sent to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission. Five years later he published An Overview of Paris. Then he opened a school “where generations of Egyptian officials learned to turn French administrative and legal prose into Arabic.”

At the beginning, the Arabs didn’t have narrative fiction, didn’t have sentences, didn’t have punctuation and paragraphs, didn’t have a bunch of words that you need to describe life in post-industrial revolution Europe. So the first generation of western-educated Arabs learned it all in the culture of post-revolutionary France under the influence of left-wing radicalism.

No wonder Arabs are all total radicals committed to revolution and fundamental transformation, just like our leftie friends.

And no wonder that radical Islam is today joined at the hip with radical European leftism. It all makes sense.

Then in our century, in 1948 Constantine Zureiq gave us the nakba, the catastrophe. And a few years later came our good friend “Sayyid Qutb, the founding theorist of Islamism.” “The movements Zureiq and Qutb unleashed, secular Arab nationalism and jihadism, spent the following decades at war with one another”[.]

In this new ideology everything was a “crisis.” Nothing new there. That’s what the French Revolution and Marx and our beloved wokies are all about: permanent crisis.

And Mansour advises us that:

Crisis is the secular form of apocalypticism… In Scripture it is Judgment…

Now I am going to go off the reservation of received wisdom. Because I am so wise.

It seems to me that apocalyptic religion, apocalyptic secular ideology, apocalyptic communism, apocalyptic environmentalism are all selling the same soap. The world is ending unless you follow and obey Us.

Now, let’s go back to Krzysztof Szczawinski, and the question of communist lying, and let’s back off suggesting that communism, Islamism, and even many Christian sects are all about The Big Lie.

I think that all these folks are doing a very human thing, which is to collapse the inevitable uncertainty and tragedy of life on this Earth into a Faith of Certainty and solve their fear and uncertainty with the knowledge that they have discovered the only one and true answer.

You can see the temptation programmed into all these ideologies -- good, bad, or indifferent. They provide, for any human, a resolution to all problems. All you have to do is Believe! And follow the Leader.

Now I believe that we cannot know the One True Way, because there is no One True Way. I believe that this Universe in which we live -- if it is a Universe -- is a mystery. If there really was a Big Bang, and if there really is a One True Way, and if there really is a moment in the future when all will be well, or not, we don’t have a clue. And my faith is that we never will.

Will our lefty friends lead us into a Wilderness of Woke? We don’t know. Will radical Islam burn down western Europe and kill all the lefties, after they and their lefty friends have killed all the Christians? We don’t know. Will Elon make us interplanetary and will it make a dime’s worth of difference? We don’t know.

Will AI destroy the education system and the administrative state? Don’t get your hopes up.

I say that there has never been a saving faith that has the answer to life, the universe, everything, and there never will, and I believe that the beginning of wisdom is to understand this, and yet to live your life in confidence and courage and faith that things will turn out all right. And if things don’t turn out well for you, maybe they will turn out well for your children. I believe that the source of all problems is the real Termptation: to reduce life to a single faith and diminish humans into obedient followers of a Great Leader, be he mortal or demonic or divine.

Your mileage may vary.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/why-lefties-and-islamists-believe-the-way-they-do/

'UN faces contentious Iran nuclear vote ahead of General Assembly'

 France said on Tuesday the U.N. Security Council will vote this month on renewing the mandate of a panel monitoring sanctions on Iran, setting up a potential showdown with Russia and China, which oppose the sanctions regime and oversight mechanisms.

The mandate of the panel, which supports the work of the U.N. sanctions committee on Iran, is due to expire on September 26, during the annual meeting of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly. The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran is expected to top the agenda.

Outlining plans for the presidency of the 15-member Security Council, which France holds for September, French U.N. ambassador Jerome Bonnafont told reporters the nuclear issue and Iran's non-compliance with its U.N. obligations would be at the heart of discussions on the country this month.   

"The Council will finally have to vote on renewing the mandate of the ... panel of experts on Iran," he said. "That was a matter reintroduced in September 2025, when we restored sanctions on the country following Iran's non-compliance with its obligation under its nuclear program."

U.N. diplomats said the vote is expected on September 17.

Diplomats say a vote raises the prospect of vetoes by both Russia and China, which argue that the Security Council no longer has a mandate to consider the Iranian nuclear issue.

In a joint statement in March, Russia and China said in reference to the sanctions committee that the Security Council "cannot proceed to re-establish the 1737 Committee or its Panel of Experts."

Unlike the panel of experts, the sanctions committee does not have a fixed term. The committee was established in 2006 to oversee sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. It is known by the U.N. resolution number 1737, which created it.

Russia and China's U.N. missions did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the voting plans.

In 2024, Russia vetoed the annual renewal of a panel of experts monitoring enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

The Iran dispute stems from a decision by Britain, France and Germany to trigger a U.N. "snapback" mechanism last year, restoring sanctions lifted under the U.N.-endorsed 2015 Iran nuclear deal after concluding that Tehran was not complying with the agreement meant to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.

Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons, but its uranium-enrichment program has long caused the U.S. and its allies to worry that Tehran is at least keeping the option open of one day producing nuclear weapons, since enriched uranium can be used to fuel power plants or make the core of a nuclear bomb.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/un-faces-contentious-iran-nuclear-vote-ahead-of-general-assembly-ce7858d2da89fe25