Our brain is just like a muscle and it thrives on exercise. Moreover, it is the fastest-aging organ in the body. Studies show that brain volume naturally decreases with age due to neuronal loss, starting as early as your late 20s or 30s. This process accelerates over time, leading to a decline in cognitive functions such as memory, processing speed, and decision-making.

However, there is a way to counter it. Neurologists across the world agree that frequently playing brain games can prevent brain ageing. Backing them up is research showing that brain-training games may help improve attention levels, memory, response time, logic skills, and other measures of cognitive function if played over a long period.

And the good news is that these brain games are affordable and easily accessible to all. you just need a pen and paper for sudoku and the same goes on for crosswords. However, if you are someone who is up for a high-tech, options for brain games are plentiful.

To give your brain a workout while having fun, try these games and activities:

Sudoku

Crosswords

Elevate

Peak

Happy Neuron

Happy Neuron is another game that organizes its games into memory, attention, language, executive functions, and visual/spatial categories. Training is personalized, and progress tracking is available. While a subscription is required, a free trial lets you explore its offerings. The app is available only for Android users.

Braingle

Queendom

Queendom features personality tests, puzzles, and "brain tools" for cognitive improvement. Free accounts provide limited access, while full reports require payment.

My Brain Trainer

My Brain Trainer offers an online "brain gym" with games and puzzles to boost mental fitness. It recommends 10 minutes of training twice a day. Subscription plans are more affordable than similar platforms and free trials are available.

The United States is currently experiencing one of its worst Cyclospora outbreaks in recent years, with health officials still unable to determine the source of the infections.

According to the latest data, the outbreak has spread across at least 18 states. Michigan has reported at least 1000 cases, emerging as the hardest-hit state. With around 40 hospitalisations, no deaths have been reported so far.

Cyclospora Outbreak In The US

The outbreak is being investigated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and state health departments. Investigators have not yet identified a single contaminated food source.

Several other states have also reported rising case counts. New York City has confirmed hundreds of infections since May. Health officials believe the actual number of infections is likely higher because Cyclospora is not routinely tested for in people with diarrhea. Symptoms usually begin about one week after exposure and can last weeks if untreated.

Also read: Walked Through Floodwater Recently? 5 Things To Do After Reaching Home To Minimise Risk Of Infections

About Cyclospora

A Cyclospora infection can be mild or severe and may last for weeks or even months. It is typically treated with antibiotics. People with weakened immune systems, such as those with HIV/AIDS or cancer, are at greater risk of severe disease.

Cyclospora infection commonly causes:

• Prolonged watery diarrhea
• Severe abdominal cramps
• Fatigue
• Loss of appetite
• Nausea
• Weight loss
• Bloating

Health authorities in the US continue to advise people to wash fresh produce thoroughly, maintain good hand hygiene, and seek medical care if they develop prolonged watery diarrhea, especially if symptoms persist for several days.

Does India’s Monsoon Raise Risk Of Cyclospora?

While there is no indication of a similar outbreak in India, infectious disease experts say the country's monsoon season creates conditions that can facilitate the spread of intestinal parasites if food and drinking water become contaminated.

HealthandMe spoke to Dr. Devashish Desai, Consultant, Infectious Diseases at Ruby Hall Clinic, if India, too, faces a possibility of a parasitic infection like cyclospora, especially in monsoon season.

Dr Desai said, “The answer is yes. India's monsoon creates conditions that favour the spread of several water and food-borne infections, including Cyclospora. Heavy rainfall can contaminate drinking water sources and fresh fruits and vegetables with sewage or infected soil. Consuming raw salads, unwashed herbs, or untreated water significantly increases the risk of infection.”

Unlike bacteria, cyclospora parasites require time in the environment before they become infectious, meaning direct person-to-person transmission is uncommon. Instead, contaminated food and water remain the primary sources of infection. This makes maintaining hygiene from farms to kitchens essential for prevention.

The expert added, “Although Cyclospora outbreaks are not commonly reported in India, the environmental conditions during the rainy season make vigilance essential. Strong food safety practices, clean water, and good personal hygiene remain the most effective defences against this preventable parasitic infection.”

Although India has not reported a similar outbreak, experts say the current situation in the US is a stark reminder that food safety and sanitation become even more critical during the monsoon.

For millions of people living with diabetes, the condition is not managed in moments; it is managed in the countless choices made between moments. From planning meals and staying active to monitoring glucose levels and following treatment schedules, people living with diabetes make countless decisions every day that shape their long-term health.

In clinical practice, we often see that the success of treatment is determined not only by how effective a therapy is, but also by whether it can be realistically sustained over years and decades. This is why the future of diabetes care must move beyond advancing therapies alone and focus on developing treatment approaches that are simpler, more flexible, and designed around patients' lives.

Diabetes In India: A Growing Public Health Challenge

Despite being one of the most widely recognized health conditions today, diabetes is still often misunderstood as simply a condition of “high sugar levels”. In reality, it is a metabolic disorder that develops when the body either does not produce enough insulin or is unable to use insulin effectively.

While genetic factors play an important role, rapid urbanization, sedentary lifestyles, changing dietary patterns, and rising obesity have contributed significantly to its increasing prevalence. Today, nearly 101 million adults in India are living with diabetes, according to the ICMR-INDIAB study.

Why Early And Consistent Diabetes Care Matters

With diabetes, time itself becomes a critical risk factor; the longer a person lives with the condition, the more severely it affects multiple organ systems. Diabetes can affect the heart, kidneys and nerves, with complications developing silently over several years. While improvements in the management of key cardiometabolic risk factors such as blood pressure, lipids and glycaemia have helped improve outcomes in several areas, lifestyle-related factors continue to contribute to long-term risks. This highlights the need for early risk identification, timely intervention and continuous monitoring to reduce the long-term burden of disease.

The Daily Burden Of Living With Diabetes

The progressive nature of diabetes also means that care is not limited to clinic visits; it extends into everyday life. It requires individuals to make repeated decisions throughout the day, and this constant cognitive load can become overwhelming, often leading to treatment fatigue and difficulty in maintaining consistent control.

Thus, treatment adherence is one of the strongest determinants of diabetes control. Yet real-world adherence is shaped by multiple overlapping factors. Limited understanding of the disease and its often-silent progression, along with psychological challenges such as anxiety or depression, can affect a person’s ability to remain consistent with treatment.

At the same time, complex treatment regimens, polypharmacy and the long-term burden of managing a chronic condition can make adherence more challenging. Financial constraints, limited access to medicines, and gaps in regular follow-up and patient–provider communication further add to the difficulties of sustained diabetes management.

Together, these factors contribute to poorer glycemic control, higher complication rates, increased hospitalizations and reduced quality of life.

Innovations Are Transforming Diabetes Care

Recognizing the realities of living with diabetes, care has increasingly shifted towards approaches that balance clinical effectiveness with practicality in everyday life, with greater emphasis on long-term sustainability and individual patient needs. Supporting this shift is a new generation of innovations in diabetes care that is making it more personalized, flexible and easier to manage, including:

Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has helped shift focus from HbA1c alone to include dynamic measures such as Time in Range (TIR) and glucose variability, enabling more real-time, personalized adjustments.

Oral therapies such as DPP-4 inhibitors (gliptins) and SGLT2 inhibitors (gliflozins) have expanded treatment options by helping improve glucose control while supporting more personalized and holistic diabetes management.

Newer ultra-long-acting basal insulins and ultra-rapid-acting mealtime insulins have improved glycemic stability.

Once-Weekly Insulin: A New Option For Patients

More recently, innovative solutions like once-weekly insulin icodec have been available globally that offer a simplified regimen, reduced treatment burden and improved patient adherence. This weekly insulin is now approved and launched in India for adults living with diabetes. This novel therapy could potentially reduce the practical burden of treatment and make long-term management more achievable in real-world settings.

Ultimately, the future of diabetes care will not be defined by how strictly patients follow treatment schedules, but by how well treatment fits into their lives. When care is designed around patients rather than systems, adherence becomes more natural, outcomes improve more sustainably, and diabetes management becomes less about daily struggle and more about improving the quality of life for those with diabetes.

A team of UK scientists has developed a non-invasive brush biopsy test that can detect oral cancer within just 60 minutes, potentially transforming the way the disease is diagnosed.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London say the test could prevent more than 90% of unnecessary scalpel biopsies, reducing pain, infection risk and diagnostic delays. The findings were published in the journal Biomarker Research.

Early diagnosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is critical. However, most oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMDs) are benign, meaning many patients undergo invasive scalpel biopsies that ultimately show no cancer.

These procedures can be painful, carry a risk of infection and, in areas such as the gums, can be difficult to perform and may damage the underlying tooth or bone.

Beyond diagnosis, researchers say the test could also help monitor patients with persistent OPMDs over time. Because the test is non-invasive and repeatable, it can be used for regular surveillance, improving the chances of detecting malignant transformation at an early stage, when treatment is most likely to be successful.

How Does The Brush Test Work?

The newly developed brush biopsy requires only a simple swab of the mouth, without removing any tissue. According to the researchers, the test can identify low-risk patients and potentially spare more than 90% of them from unnecessary invasive tissue biopsies. Another advantage is speed—the results are available within one hour.

"This test gives clinicians a rapid, accurate, and non-invasive way to triage patients, and crucially, it can be repeated. That means we can now monitor patients with persistent pre-malignant lesions regularly and systematically — and pick up cancers much earlier than we would have been able to before," said Muy-Teck Teh, Professor of Molecular Oral Oncology at Queen Mary.

How Was The Study Conducted?

The study is the largest of its kind, involving more than 1,000 samples from 545 patients. The team collected brush biopsies from the mouths of 545 patients with lesions that could potentially be cancerous.

The test was found to have an overall accuracy of 95.5 percent, with false-positive and false-negative rates of less than 5 percent. The results were available within an hour.

The latest study builds on an earlier version of the test, qMIDS-V2, which required a 1 mm microbiopsy and had already been validated using more than 530 samples from the UK, India and China.

The new qMIDS-V3 requires only a brush swab of the mouth, with no tissue removal, yet achieves test performance comparable to its microbiopsy predecessor.

Oral Cancer Remains A Growing Global Burden

According to Global Burden of Disease data, lip and oral cancer are among the world's fastest-growing causes of early death.

More than 10,000 people in the UK were diagnosed with oral cancer last year, while 3,637 people died from the disease, according to the charity Mouth Cancer.

Worldwide, oral cancer affects around 650,000 people every year. Major risk factors include tobacco use, smoking, alcohol, HPV infection and sun damage. More than 53% of mouth cancers are diagnosed at Stage IV, when the disease is at its most advanced.