(Newswire.net — January 17, 2015) Atlanta, Georgia — Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born into a musical family on 9 August 1963, in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of gospel star Cissy Houston, cousin of singing star Dionne Warwick and goddaughter of soul legend Aretha Franklin. She began singing in the choir at her church, The New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, as a young child and by the age of 15 was singing backing vocals professionally with her mother on Chaka Khan’s 1978 hit, ‘I’m Every Woman’. She went on to provide backing vocals for Lou Rawls, Jermaine Jackson and her own mother and worked briefly as a model, appearing on the cover of ‘Seventeen’ magazine in 1981. She began working as a featured vocalist for the New York-based funk band Material and it was the quality of her vocal work with them that attracted the attention of the major record labels, including Arista with whom she signed in 1983 and where she stayed for the rest of her career. Her debut album, ‘Whitney Houston’, was released in 1985 and became the biggest-selling album by a debut artist. Several hit singles, including ‘Saving All My Love For You’, ‘How Will I Know’, ‘You Give Good Love’, and ‘The Greatest Love of All’, were released from the album, setting her up for a Beatles-beating seven consecutive US number ones. The album itself sold 3 million copies in its first year in the US and went on to sell 25 million worldwide, winning her the first of her six Grammies. The 1987 follow-up album, ‘Whitney’, which included the hits ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go’ and ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, built on her success but it was the 1992 film The Bodyguard (1992) that sealed her place as one of the best-selling artists of all time. While the movie itself and her performance in it were not highly praised, the soundtrack album and her cover of the Dolly Parton song ‘I Will Always Love You’ topped the singles and albums charts for months and sold 44 million copies around the world. That same year she married ex-New Edition singer Bobby Brown with whom she had her only child, their daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown in March 1993. Her 2009 comeback album ‘I Look To You’ was positively received and sold well, her final acting performance was in Sparkle (2012) (a remake of the 1976 movie, Sparkle (1976)) Whitney Elizabeth Houston was an American singer,actress, producer, and model. In 2009, Guinness World Records cited her as the most awarded female act of all time.
Zekel Healthcare – How an iPod Can Fight Alzheimer’s and Dementia. The concept is elegantly simple: Provide a dementia sufferer with an MP3 player that has been loaded with music tailored to their taste. Let them listen. Ask them about it.As a researcher, I spend my time exploring life beyond adulthood. I am often dismayed at the many ways in which we medicalize a natural phenomenon that affects us all—aging. Perhaps there is no better example of this than the way in which we treat our elders living with dementia. In the United States today, some 1.5 million old people have been institutionalized for medical problems. About 80 percent of those have been segregated from the general population because they are living with Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia.
Patients tucked away from sight, they are often treated with powerful psychotropic drugs. The treatment is not aimed at curing a disease, but at making the patient more malleable and manageable at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars annually for drugs that provide limited relief and often cause significant side effects.Yet there is mounting evidence that non-pharmacological interventions for dementia, including use of dietary supplements, access to companion animals, art therapy, and memory training, provide meaningful benefits without the cost or the dangers. The power of music may be understood at some level because implicit memories are relatively well preserved in people living with dementia. Implicit memory is the kind associated with routines and repetitive activities. We tend to listen to music we like over and over and since Alzheimer’s impacts the ability to form new memories, music we once loved remains accessible in the brain. Music is far more complex than I can discern. But we know it employs everything from our emotions, to coordination, to visual memory and parts of our brain that resource rhythm, melody, lyrics and harmony. Music, it appears, stimulates many parts of the brain simultaneously. Perhaps that’s why it can calm, improve mood, increase socialization, bring back memories, and almost instantaneously bring to life the whole person. Foremost among these exciting and promising techniques is the use of personalized music. The concept is elegantly simple: Provide a dementia, alzheimer sufferer with an MP3 player that has been loaded with music tailored to their taste. Let them listen. Ask them about it. The benefits of this powerful intervention, which has no side effects and little cost, include better memory, improved mood, decreased pain, increased involvement in the world and, most importantly, enhanced well-being.