Health and Medicine – Page 11

Bird flu research halted

The UK’s Guardian newspaper is reporting that researchers working to prevent the spread of bird flu and the possible millions of deaths it could cause should a pandemic occur, have suspended their research for 60 days amid fears that they might accidentally trigger the very Â epidemic they hope to stop. A letter published on Friday in the scientific journals Nature and Science and signed by scientists from around the world appeals for public debate about the security of the work.

Bird flu scientists suspend work amid epidemic fears.

10 body myths debunked by science

Myth 1: Calories Counting Is All That Matters for Weight Management – Calories are the energy content as measured by complete combustion of the food. But, our bodies don’t burn food, they digest, ingest and metabolise it, so different foods even if they have the same “calories” can have a very different effect on our bodies.

Myth 2: Body Hair Grows Back Thicker When You Shave It – Nope. It doesn’t.

Myth 3: You Need Eight Hours of Sleep Per Day – Well, some people do, others need more and some kind survive on half that or less with no apparent ill effects.

Myth 4: Reading in Dim Light Ruins Your Eyes – it can “strain” your eyes, tiring them, but there’s no permanent damage to vision or the structure of the eye even from nightly reading in dim light.

Myth 5: Urinating on a Jellyfish Sting will Sooth the Pain – You should rinse with vinegar or seawater. Ammonia solution, urine and alcoholic preparations can cause the nematocysts (stinging cells) embedded in your skin to fire, making things worse.

Myth 6: Your Slow Metabolism Makes You Fat – It’s obviously not true. The bigger you are the more calories you burn to keep going, that’s a higher basal metabolism than someone lean who burns fewer calories and so has a lower basal metabolism.

Myth 7: You’ll Catch a Cold from Cold (and Wet) Weather Conditions – Nope. Colds are caused by viral infection not by snowballs and wet feet.

Myth 8: More Heat Escapes Through Your Head – Heat does escape through your head, but the rate of heat loss is the same as from any other area of your skin, it’s just that unless you usually wear a hat it’s the bit most often uncovered and so putting a hat on will reduce total heat loss.

UPDATED Myth 9: High Cholesterol Causes Heart Disease – The picture is complicated, there is some evidence that a raised level of an entirely different compound, homocysteine is a better indicator of risk. Of course, deposits of the waxy cholesterol and other lipid within the lining of the arteries that supply the heart does cause heart problems. Actually, it’s not strictly true to say that cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. You can be perfectly healthy with high cholesterol, but if waxy deposits form on the inside of the arteries supplying your heart and elsewhere then that’s not good, but this is not a given. if you’re arteries are chocked with lipids then that will raise your blood pressure. But not all hypertension is caused by that. Blood pressure can be higher than “normal”, just because that’s your body’s operating pressure.

Myth 10: It’s Dangerous to Wake a Sleepwalker – The reverse is probably true as a sleepwalker is more likely to trip and fall downstairs or wander off. They might get a shock when you wake them, but a shock isn’t likely to do much harm.

Adapted from a recent Lifehacker post: 10 Stubborn Body Myths

Just do one thing to boost your health

For 23.5 hours each day you can sit, slouch, sleep, whatever…but whatever the whatever, make sure you walk for the remaining 0.5 hours in the day. It is the single best thing you can do for your mental and physical health. It is the “green prescription” the cash-free Rx we can all self-prescribe to improve quality of life. It does assume you can walk, of course, so one might say it’s for the 99%

It’s an interesting idea, but I am not entirely convinced that walking for half-an-hour a day is quite enough. When we got a dog, my visits to the gym dwindled from three hour-long sessions a week to zero, but I was walking briskly, with the dog for an hour every day by that time. However, I noticed over the last few months that my cardiovascular fitness was not quite up to par, so back to the gym for me, three half-hour sessions there for just over a month (in addition to 6x and hour a week walking the dog) and I feel a whole lot better and have got back that “need” to go to the gym feeling again.

Certainly, the half an hour a day walking is going to be beneficial, but the human body also needs to roughly double its normal heart rate regularly to maintain CV. I also think you have to get as much face-to-face conversation and laughter for good mental health so don’t skimp on that, and maybe cut back on the sitting at a screen. An evening’s dancing can cover a lot of the latter. If you fancy a sing-song that does your lungs a world of good too, with little effort. Check out some of my own musical output on the Dave Bradley BandCamp page.

Cardiac lasers, nanotech and cancer

The Alchemist gets the beat from a laser charger for cardiac pacemakers, this week, while finding out how to sculpt a molecular trap for nanoparticles. In biomedicine, scientists have homed in on the factors influencing the cancer enzyme and theoretical physical-organic chemistry, benzene reveals new secrets about its aromatic breathing. A major development for miners could help reduce the incidence of silicosis, we hear, and among this year’s AAAS fellows are two chemists from New York University.

Read on in my Alchemist column this week on ChemWeb.

House and hypochondriacs

My wife and I have become addicted to viewing the serial exploits of Dr Gregory House MD, you know, the character played by the inimitable British actor Hugh Laurie. House MD has not only made Laurie very rich and famous and convinced a whole generation of Americans that the nouveaux blues singer is surely an Amercun not a Brit, but has underpinned the emergent psychological infection of seasonal hypochondriasis.

House MD is fundamentally a medical version of Sherlock Holmes and hinges on the notion of differential diagnostics. I was hoping to find or make a nice infographic of symptoms and outcomes or a flow chart based on the TV show, but GE have essentially beaten me to it with their interactive DD graphic.

When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a few pounds, or more? By combing through 7.2 million of our electronic medical records, GE has created a disease network to help illustrate relationships between various conditions and how common those connections are. You can take a look at conditions or condition categories and gender to uncover interesting associations.

Health InfoScape.

What are the main cancer risks?

NHS Choices recently summarised and analysed the findings of a UK study into cancer risk. It reports that for many people several factors are involved. Moreover, one’s personal risk also depends on genetics, family history and aging. According to the study in 2010, around 43% of UK cancer cases were blamed on lifestyle and environmental factors, equating to about 134,000 cancers. The research showed the following percentages for 34% of cancers in 2010 for which four key lifestyle factors were invoked:

Tobacco: 19.4%
Diet: 9.2%
Being overweight or obese: 5.5%
Alcohol: 4%

Smoking was commonly associated with lung, mouth, throat, trachea and oesophagal cancers.

Other risk factors included: occupation (3.7%), UV radiation (sun or sunbed) (3.5%), infection (3.1%), excess intake of red and processed meat (2.7%), lack of physical exercise (1%), breastfeeding for less than six months (0.5%), use of post-menopausal hormones (0.5%). Smoking was the single biggest risk factor for both men and women.

After smoking, the three biggest risk factors were: lack of fruit and vegetables (6.1%), occupation (4.9%)
and alcohol (4.6%). For women they were: overweight/obesity (6.9% link to breast cancer), infection (3.7%), UV radiation (3.6%), alcohol (3.3%), lack of fruit and vegetables (3.4%).

Alternative medicine hazard warning sign – !Rx

I just posted an interview with Edzard Ernst in which he discusses his very serious concerns with the widespread, unthinking acceptance of certain forms of alternative medicine. I used a little bit of pseudo-code, !Rx, which was meant to symbolise the opposite of conventional medicine. If Rx is symbolic of a medical prescription from the Latin verb “recipere” meaning “take thou”, then putting the logical operator, !, in front of it makes it read “NOT Rx”, in other words, “don’t take”. Subtle, huh? Feel free to share and re-use the icon.

The symbol is not actually an R and an x, of course, it’s meant to be an Italic R with a long tale that crosses a subscript x. This will show up properly here – â„ž – only if your browser’s character set is set the same as mine.

Edzard Ernst Q&A on !Rx

The recent death of Apple boss Steve Jobs is putatively yet another example of how dangerous spurious alternative medicine (!Rx) can be. In October 2003, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he turned not to real medicine but to acupuncture, macrobiotic diets, and visits to a spiritualist. If he had seen an oncologist sooner, who knows what might have been his chances?

There are still homeopaths around claiming their snake oil and sugar pills can prevent malaria and treat HIV. Yes…I knoooow…the placebo effect is strong, but there are limits.

Meanwhile, in this fascinating interview with Ernst he points out that we really don’t know how big a problem alt meds are:

“Risks of alternative medicine are under-researched and under-reported. We know of some 700 serious complications after chiropractic [damage to neck arteries leading to stroke and death, for instance]. We also know that under-reporting is such that this figure could be larger by one or two orders of magnitude.” — Ernst.

via Q&A: Edzard Ernst on alternative medicine – Health – Macleans.ca.

Alchemy, estrogen and obesity

This week, The Alchemist learns more about the link between estrogen and obesity, discovers that the colours of autumn leaves are not as degraded as was once thought, and how mineral tests can inform healthcare workers addressing the issue of night blindness. In Finland, we hear, researchers are converting food waste into fuel while a new theory explains Type 1.5 superconductivity. Finally, Chip Cody earns himself this year’s Anachem Award for his outstanding contribution to analytical chemistry.

Read on in The Alchemist Newsletter: Oct 28, 2011.

Your iPhone won’t give you brain cancer…

…nor will your Blackberry, Android handset and presumably not your iPad either.

Despite the hopes and dreams of millions of technophobes and pseudoscientists, the biggest ever study of mobile phone use shows that the devices do not increase the risk of brain tumours. The European study looked at more than a third of a million mobile phone users over an 18-year period, according to the BBC.

Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Society and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France assessed all Danes aged over 30 years born in Denmark after 1925 and subdivided into mobile phone subscribers and non-subscribers who had used the devices since before 1995. Writing in the British Medical Journal, the team describes how there were just 356 cases of the brain cancer, glioma, and 846 cancers of the CNS, which is about the same incidence rate as seen in people who did not use a mobile phone during that period. Even those who used mobiles for more than 13 years, there was no difference in risk, the researchers conclude.

So, will this be the end of the tabloid mobile phone cancer scaremongering? Of course, not! The tabloid media and the conspiracy theorists will claim the study is spurious, there will be another study (undoubtedly much smaller) that will show the opposite and that mobile phones do cause brain tumours. But, as it stands: “These results are the strongest evidence yet that using a mobile phone does not seem to increase the risk of cancers of the brain or central nervous system in adults,” Hazel Nunn, head of evidence and health information at Cancer Research UK, told the BBC.

So, is it time that the World Health Organisation abandoned its application of the precautionary principle and re-classified mobile phones as non-carcinogenic? There are always those people who are over-cautious and there always those who throw caution to the wind. But, like coffee, smoking, alcohol, crossing the road, and living in general, there are risks and precautions to be taken. It is unlikely that anyone will stop doing the things they want to do simply because there is some perceived risk associated with the activity. However, this latest study shows that mobile phone use really does not cause brain cancer. There has been no indication that anyone was seriously worried, as mobile phone use simply goes up and up. Time to stop worrying.

Frei, P., Poulsen, A., Johansen, C., Olsen, J., Steding-Jessen, M., & Schuz, J. (2011). Use of mobile phones and risk of brain tumours: update of Danish cohort study BMJ, 343 (oct19 4) DOI: 10.1136/bmj.d6387