6 Ways Blood Type Can Influence Personal Health

Blood type is one of the body’s more mysterious taxonomies. There are four bins our blood call fall into — A, B, AB, and O — and together they represent the four groups of antigens found on the surfaces of red blood cells. But they don’ t just signal who we can donate to and receive from; our blood types can reveal complex patterns of personal health. Here are six to consider:

1. Memory Problems

At-risk: AB
Your brain and vascular system have more in common than you may think. A recent study found people with type AB blood were 82 percent more likely to experience difficulties with memory recall, language, and attention than people with other types. One reason, researchers suspect, is due to the key clotting protein, known as coagulation factor VIII, which may actually reduce the quality of blood flow to the brain, rather than sealing up injury sites.
“Since factor VIII levels are closely linked to blood type, this may be one causal connection between blood type and cognitive impairment,” said Mary Cushman, author of the recent study, to Yahoo Health.

2. Pancreatic Cancer

At-risk: Non-O

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It may be more accurate to say people with type O blood are at a lower risk for pancreatic cancer, given the work researchers from Yale University are doing on bacterial infection. In a study conducted last July, scientists from the University’s Cancer Center looked at cases of a common species of bacteria called Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori, that lives in people’s gut.
They found people with H. pylori were significantly more likely to develop pancreatic cancer, due to the way A and B antigens help the bacteria thrive. People with type O blood carry no antigens on the surface of their red blood cells. This is what allows them to donate to anyone.

3. Heart Disease

At-risk: AB
A 2012 study from Harvard University found people with non-O blood also happen to have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease. But those with type AB blood were the most at-risk overall, demonstrating a 23 percent greater chance of suffering from heart disease than type O subjects.
Study author Dr. Lu Qi, an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition, said the particular makeup of people’s antigens should be given the same weight we already assign to cholesterol and blood pressure. "While people cannot change their blood type, our findings may help physicians better understand who is at risk for developing heart disease,” Qi said in a statement.

4. Stress

At-risk: A
Because certain blood types are more likely to co-occur with varying levels of hormones in the body, physicians commonly tailor their exercise recommendations to the patient’s type. People with type A blood, for example, are more likely to have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in their body. So, stress-reducing exercises, like Tai Chi and yoga, may be more beneficial at cutting that tension than running or weightlifting alone.
When the adrenal gland dumps more and more cortisol into the blood, people’s stress response grows more acute. People with type A blood may find themselves getting anxious more quickly and having a harder time letting troubles roll off their back.

5. Exercise Demands

More generally, the makeup of a person’s antigens on his or her red blood cells can determine how much of a certain hormone gets released. People with type A and B blood respond better to calming, low-intensity exercise like yoga, especially if depression runs in the family. Likewise, people with AB blood benefit from well-rounded workouts that keep their immune systems in check. Type O people, however, are a different story.
“Type O’s are more prone to problems that arise from an inability to clear stress hormones from their system quickly,” Dr. Ginger Nash, a naturopathic physician, told Personalized Living. “It takes more to get a Type O stressed but it takes more to de-stress them as well.”

6. Gut Bacteria

In addition to living on your red blood cells, antigens are often found in the lining of your digestive tract — about 80 percent of people fall into this category. Much of the bacteria living in people’s gut uses these antigens as food, which largely determines which bacteria flourish and which disappear. Prior research has estimated, for instance, that people with type B blood contain up to 50,000 times the number of strains of friendly bacteria than people with either type A or O blood.
“Increasingly, studies are showing that changes in the microflora content of the digestive tract can be linked to metabolic illnesses, including type II (adult onset) diabetes and obesity,” wrote Dr. Peter D’Adamo, physician and author of Eat Right 4 Your Type, in a blog post. “Blood group and secretor status play an important role in conditioning the overall characteristics of the digestive tract.”

Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.
Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.
A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.
“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher, though estimates on a global scale are even harder to make because neurocysticercosis is most common in poor places that lack good public-health systems. “Minimally there are 5 million cases of epilepsy from neurocysticercosis,” Nash says.
He puts a heavy emphasis on minimally. Even in developed nations, figuring out just how many people have the illness is difficult because it is easy to mistake the effects of a tapeworm for a variety of brain disorders. The clearest proof is the ghostly image of a cyst in a brain scan, along with the presence of antibodies against tapeworms.
The closer scientists look at the epidemiology of the disease, the worse it becomes. Nash and other neurocysticercosis experts have been traveling through Latin America with CT scanners and blood tests to survey populations. In one study in Peru, researchers found 37 percent of people showed signs of having been infected at some point. Earlier this spring, Nash and colleagues published a review of the scientific literature and concluded that somewhere between 11 million and 29 million people have neurocysticercosis in Latin America alone. Tapeworms are also common in other regions of the world, such as Africa and Asia. “Neurocysticercosis is a very important disease worldwide,” Nash says.
Cyst Attack 
The alarming illness occurs when tapeworm larvae lose their way. Normally, Taenia solium has a life cycle that takes it from pigs to humans and back to pigs again. Adult tapeworms, living in the intestines of humans, produce up to 50,000 eggs apiece. The eggs are shed in the infected person’s feces. Pigs swallow these eggs accidentally as they rummage for food on the ground. When the parasite eggs reach a pig’s stomach, larvae hatch and burrow their way into the animal’s bloodstream. Eventually they end up lodged in small blood vessels, typically in the animal’s muscles. There they form cysts and wait until their host is eaten by a human. (Pork has to be undercooked for the tapeworms to complete their journey.)
But sometimes tapeworms take a wrong turn. Instead of going into a pig, the eggs end up in a human. This can occur if someone shedding tapeworm eggs contaminates food that other people then eat. When the egg hatches, the confused larva does not develop into an adult in the human’s intestines. Instead, it acts as it would inside a pig. It burrows into the person’s bloodstream and gets swept through the body. Often those parasites end up in the brain, where they form cysts.
The tapeworm larvae often get stuck in ventricles, or fluid-filled cavities, in the brain, sprouting grapelike extensions. In this way the worm actively cloaks itself from immune cells. Protected and well fed, its cysts can thrive there for years.
As a tapeworm cyst grows, it may push against a region of the brain and disrupt its function. It may get stuck in a passageway, damming the flow of cerebrospinal fluid. This impasse can cause hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, along with dangerously high pressure. A resulting brain hernia can result in stupor, coma, or death

Chris Brown has hinted that he is secretly meeting ex-girlfriend Rihanna

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The 25-year-old singer, who is reportedly dating model Karrueche Tran, said in an interview that he is  "just having fun" with his ex-flame.
Brown said: ''We're friends. Nothing too serious. We're not trying to start a life together right now, we're just having fun.
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However, Karrueche Tran is not worried about losing her man to Riri.
A source told Hollywood Life: "Karrueche is one of the main reasons Chris is back on his feet and becoming more mature as the days go by. He wouldn't break her like that. He loves Karrueche too much and wants her in his life forever. Especially on a romantic level.
"In Chris' mind, not too many girls can replace Karrueche or even walk in her shoes. He has promised her he'd never cheat on her or break her heart again and he meant that," the source added.
"Chris can have any woman he wants, and they keep throwing themselves at him no matter where he goes, but they don't hold a candle to Karrueche. He and Karrueche are solid"

Chris Brown & Karreuche TranGetty

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'Drunk Texting' lyrics
Brown's new song Drunk Texting, featuring the line "If by chance you're laying next to someone else right now/I hope it's the worst sex ever," is speculated to be about Rihanna.
In an interview with  Entertainment Tonight the singer denied such rumours, and said: ''Oh no, not at all. I think that's just the fans' perception or the media's perception at all times because of our history. But whenever we do music, people can make the assumption and that's fine because if they buy more because they think that, then go ahead and buy a thousand copies."
He continued: ''But as far as me writing and going into that, I don't really try to put my focus on Rihanna every song. At the end of the day it's almost six, seven years later. It's like, how many more times am I going to talk about the same situation?''