Disco may yet be shown to have life saving potential, at least certain aspects of it. Let's hope that that doesn't apply to the polyester pant suits!
For CPR, or cardio pulmonary resuscitation (the process of pumping on the chest to get air into the lungs and the blood circulating in a person who has collapsed because their heart has failed) to work best, the chest compressions need to be done at a rate of 100 to 120 per minute. An excellent way to time the compressions as you're doing them is to follow the beat of the Bee Gees' classic " Staying Alive".
Can you get more disco than that? Yes we can.
A recently reported study in the Journal, Nature revealed that in a strain of mice bred to develop an Alzheimer's like disease so we could test therapies on them, before the disease develops, if you look at the electrical activity of their brains, there's a change. They lose their gamma oscillations, the brain cells no longer are synchronized at a specific frequency. Then the scientists somehow discovered that if you expose these Alzheimer predisposed-mice in a darkened room to light gently flashing at a frequency of 40 beats per second you could get their brain waves back in synch at the right speed and, even more surprising, you could stimulate the immune cells in their brains to clean up the beta-amyloid protein that we think is one of the causes of Alzheimer's disease.
Wouldn't that be something? Imagine being able to stop Alzheimer's disease by sitting in a darkened room with a disco ball gently flashing its lights for an hour a day, incredible!
Obviously these results need to be confirmed and then the proper work needs to be done with people not mice, but it would be nice to have something that could help people suffering from Alzheimer's and maybe bringing disco back wouldn't be too horrible a price to pay!