Category Archives: Health

Caloric restriction boosts immune response

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Photo: D. Sharon/Flickr CC

Here’s to hoping that resveratrol, which mimics the life-extending benefits of severe caloric restriction, might do the same. — MB

Tufts scientists recently deprived a group of chubby men, for six months, of about one-third of their daily caloric intake.

The result: The subjects’ white blood cells, central to the body’s immune response systems, performed better:

“Scientists funded by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) found that volunteers who followed a low-calorie diet or a very low-calorie diet not only lost weight, but also significantly enhanced their immune response. The study may be the first to demonstrate the interaction between calorie restriction and immune markers among humans.”

The study might also help scientists determine whether resveratrol, which is found in red wine and other foods, mimics the immune regulating effects of caloric restriction — an impractical lifestyle change for millions of Americans.

via Less is More When Restraining Calories Boosts Immunity.

Europeans to get Alzheimer's vaccine

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Alzheimer’s prevention by 2015? — MB

The first to receive the experimental vaccine will be those with the disease, according to this article. The plaques-busting drug, however, may be converted to a prophylactic.

“The clinical trials will now test its efficacy, with results expected as early as 2012, the company said.

ADO2 is meant to prevent the building up of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain, which cause the degradation of nerve cells and are believed to play a crucial role in causing Alzheimer’s disease.

The vaccine works by causing the body to attack these plaques by producing more antibodies, Till Jelitto, a spokesman for Affiris, told AFP.”

via New Alzheimer vaccine to be tested in Europe – Yahoo! News.

Small talk sucks, scientists discover

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Conversation: Keep it heavy. Duncan Harris/Flickr CC

The next time someone wants to talk sports around the water cooler, tell them, “sorry, bud, but you’re bringing me down.”

Turns out, according to a University of Arizona study, deep conversations leave us feeling better.

Here’s a bit of the Telegraph’s coverage:

Volunteers wore an unobtrusive recording device to monitor conversations with friends and colleagues for four days.

Researchers then listened to the recordings and identified them as trivial small talk or substantive discussions.

via Idle chit chat can make you unhappy – Telegraph.

Pot scare of the week: "may cause psychosis"

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Crazy, man. (Photo: Dana Ocker/Flickr CC)

Here’s your alarmist marijuana headline for the week (from Businessweek): “Marijuana Use Can Up Psychosis Risk”

What researchers found, actually, was an association between tokers who start blazing heavily at a young age, and an increased likelihood they will develop a serious mental illness.

And, of course, we’ve known about the comorbidity of substance abuse and psychoses for many years.

But you can’t blame the media for going overboard, this time: The Australian scientists who found the association between heavy, early use of pot and psychotic symptoms (such as hallucinations), themselves suggest a causal link:

“‘This demonstrates the complexity of the relationship: those individuals who were vulnerable to psychosis [i.e., those who had isolated psychotic symptoms] were more likely to commence cannabis use, which could then subsequently contribute to an increased risk of conversion to a non-affective psychotic disorder,’” wrote the study authors.

Another possibility, of course, is that young people, experiencing early psychotic symptoms, might be engaging in drug-seeking behavior to self-medicate, period.

via Marijuana Use Can Up Psychosis Risk – BusinessWeek.

Plug: Check out my Boston Globe personal technology column, User Friendly.

Pill poppers tap fish oil over multivitamins

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A new survey from ConsumerLab (former FDA scientists who test supplements, to see what’s really in them), finds that pill poppers are stuffing themselves with fish oil, more often than multivitamins.

Among the results:

Fish oil/omega-3 supplements were used by 74.0% of respondents (up from 71.6% in 2008), followed in popularity by multivitamins, which were used by 72% (down from 73.8% in the prior year).  Among the heaviest supplement users (10 or more per day), 87% used fish oil.  The percentage of people using fish oil/omega-3 remained steady among those aged 35 through 74, dropping slightly among older people.

· CoQ10 became third most popular supplement with 55% using it, up from 50.9% last year.  Calcium use fell from 55.3% to 51.2%.

· Vitamin D was used by 47.9% of respondents, up from 36.9% in 2008 – a 30% increase, making it the fifth most popular supplement.  Vitamin D use was seen to increase dramatically with increasing age.

· Probiotics were used by 30.4% of respondents, up from 25% last year.  One-third of women in the survey used a probiotic.

· Resveratrol was used by 19.4% of respondents, up from only 11.7% last year – a 66% increase.  Men polled were 50% more likely than women to use resveratrol.

Kill your iPhone, before it kills you

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Image: Marshall Astor/Flickr CC

A stunning piece from GQ strongly suggests that the Wi-Fi and mobile phone businesses are screwing with our health by burying bad experimental results.

There’s a precedent for this: The author of the GQ piece, Christopher Ketchum, notes that the tobacco, asbestos, and herbicide industries all hid the dangers of their products for years.

Now, it’s the mobile phone industry’s turn, and they’re using the standards body, the IEEE, to do their dirty work, Ketchum writes:

“The committees setting the EM safety levels at the IEEE historically have been dominated by representatives from the military, companies like Raytheon and GE, the telecom companies, and now the cell-phone industry. It is basically a Trojan horse for the private sector to dictate public policy.” The IEEE's “safe limits” for microwave exposure are considerably higher than what they should be, says Allan Frey, who was a member of the organization in the '70s. “When it comes to this matter, the IEEE is a charade,” Frey told me.

via Warning, Your Cell Phone May Be Hazerdous To Your Health: Gear + Gadgets: GQ.

Some additional reading.

Pot as "miracle drug": It's complicated

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Andrew Sullivan. (Photo: Trey Ratcliff/Flickr CC)

Marijuana not only doesn’t kill brain cells, as do alcohol and heroin — and depression –   it grows ‘em back, Andrew Sullivan asserts.

He quotes some recent rat brain research:

The team found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. This region of the brain is associated with learning and memory, as well as anxiety and depression.

The effect is the opposite of most legal and illicit drugs such as alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine. “Most ‘drugs of abuse’ suppress neurogenesis,” Zhang says. “Only marijuana promotes neurogenesis.”

For me, the key phrase in this excerpt (above), is “drugs of abuse.” No doubt, pot is one of them — experience tells us this. (There is also massive anecdotal evidence of pot’s benefits.)  And the drug’s effects on the brain are more complex than Sullivan’s post suggests.

Still, as Lester Grinspoon says, that pot will eventually emerge as the gold standard among anti-anxiety medicines.

I also agree with Sullivan: Reason dictates that pot must be made legal, and fully available to scientists, if we are serious about relieving human suffering.

via The Miracle Of Marijuana – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

Deathwatch 2012: $27 million to keep elders "in place"

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Little help? Big gov spending aims to keep old folks afloat. Photo: Steve Evans/Flickr CC

The US federal government recently announced plans to help the elderly age “in place,” rather than at some godforsaken nursing home.  (I spent enough time around these dumps, particularly on the south shore of Long Island, New York, to know.)

The government is also spending millions in a new effort to help GLBT folks get the support they will need to avoid being warehoused in old age. More about that effort, later this week.

This is all  not to say that the government isn’t going to try to do it all on the cheap. The feds (see announcement, excerpted below, with a link) seems to require that non-medical folks take up some health care responsibilities.

The take-away, incredibly enough, is that we will need even more underpaid, poorly-trained,  elder care providers, than anyone imagined, to care for a generation of half-dead Americans (thanks to medications that prolong life, even as they enfeeble the body).

The intervention has been tested through randomized controlled trials and has been shown to be: i. effective at improving and/or maintaining the health status of older people; and, ii. suitable for deployment through community-based human services organizations and involve non-clinical workers and/or volunteers in the delivery of the intervention; 2) The research results have been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal; and 3) The intervention has been translated into practice and is ready for broad national distribution through community-based human services organizations.

via Grants.gov – Find Grant Opportunities – Opportunity Synopsis.

Scientists link abuse and early aging

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Dr. Audrey Tyrka finds a direct connection between abuse and telemore length. Photo: Brown University News Office

You really can blame your parents for everything. A Brown University doctor (and #1 on the Heretic’s 2009/2010 list of “scientists actually doing something useful”) reports that mean, shitty parents could be condemn their kids to shorter lives.

I looks like they used a small sample, but it’s a start:

For this study, the scientists looked at 22 women and nine men between ages 18 and 64. Some of the subjects had no history of childhood maltreatment, but others said they had endured either moderate or severe mistreatment as children.

The adults who endured mistreatment as children varied in terms of the type of trauma they reported. They suffered individually from emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse.

via Possible Link Studied Between Childhood Abuse and Early Cellular Aging | Brown University Media Relations.

The tooth? Hg fillings-risk a mystery

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Photo: Christopher Walker. Flickr/CC

Photo: Christopher Walker. Flickr/CC

The good news : What’s left of that old mercury filling in your mouth is probably not toxic. The bad news: That’s because you’ve already eaten 95-percent of the mercury in it.

Whatever the cause, human exposure to mercury lost from fillings is still of concern. While this depletion has been extensively studied with many insightful and elegant studies, none of the previous work uses techniques that can directly address the chemistry or the surface of the system. The feasibility of electron yield Hg LIII XAS opens up a number of possible areas for research, including investigation of changes in surface chemistry due to dental hygiene products containing peroxides or other strong oxidizers, the effects of exposure to cigarette smoke, and exposure to various foodstuffs. Such studies combined with the extensive information already available could shed light on the various chemical mechanisms of mercury loss from dental amalgam fillings.

via The Chemical Forms of Mercury in Aged and Fresh Dental Amalgam Surfaces – Chemical Research in Toxicology ACS Publications.