Category Archives: Health Care

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Excellent articles on eating healthy but also provides a nice insight in the practice scientific inquiry: Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

That is the advice on how to eat more healthfully by Michael Pollan the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Interactions are critical in many experiments. That is why multi-factor experimentation is so important (One-Factor-at-a-Time Versus Designed Experiments) though even using these techniques the complexity of interactions provides an incredibly challenging environment.

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The Future of the Scholarly Journal

Publishing Group Hires ‘Pit Bull of PR’:

Those groups, along with many members of Congress, want to make the published results of federally financed medical research freely available to the public whose taxes funded the work — results that today are typically available only to journal subscribers or to people willing to pay expensive per-page fees.

The publishing association, which includes among its members some of the world’s biggest and most profitable scientific journals, has argued that free Internet access to the publicly funded portion of their contents would undermine their subscription bases. Lacking that income, they claim, they would not be able to do the invisible, unsung but important, work of screening out bad science and publishing and archiving the very best.

As I have said before, this information should be publicly available. The funding mechanism for peer review needs to change. If the Journals want to stay in business they need to find a way to add value that doesn’t keep public funded information from the public.

RNA interference webcast

If you are like me, it might take awhile to understand all that is said, it is packed with information.

via: Video of RNAi in action

How The Brain Rewires Itself

How The Brain Rewires Itself:

The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it. But Pascual-Leone did not stop there. He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

When the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups–those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so–they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter.

TB Pandemic Threat

The dilemma of a deadly disease: patients may be forcibly detained

More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, have been identified in South Africa.

But doctors believe there have been hundreds, possibly thousands, more and the numbers are growing among the millions of people with HIV, who are particularly vulnerable to the disease. Their fear is that patients with XDR-TB, told that there is little that can be done for them, will leave the isolation wards and go home to die. But while they are still walking around they risk spreading the infection.

Millennials in our Lifetime?

No I don’t mean the generation Y types born in the 1980s and 1990s I mean 1,000 year old people. I doubt it, but according to Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey – yes. And his credentials are better than mine, well I guess some of us might see who is right. ‘We will be able to live to 1,000’. Do You Want to Live Forever?:

As he surveyed the literature, de Grey reached the conclusion that there are seven distinct ingredients in the aging process, and that emerging understanding of molecular biology shows promise of one day providing appropriate technologies by which each of them might be manipulated — “perturbed,” in the jargon of biologists. He bases his certainty that there are only seven such factors on the fact that no new factor has been discovered in some twenty years, despite the flourishing state of research in the field known as biogeronÂtology, the science of aging; his certainty that he is the man to lead the crusade for endless life is based on his conception that the qualification needed to accomplish it is the mindset he brings to the problem: the goal-driven orientation of an engineer rather than the curiosity-driven orientation of the basic scientists who have made and will continue to make the laboratory discoveries that he intends to employ.

Aubrey de Grey Responds – Methuselah Mouse Man – Aubrey de Grey on TEDTalks: Aging is “an engineering problem” – The Prophet of Immortality

Lethal Secrets of 1918 Flu Virus

Lethal secrets of 1918 flu virus

Analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW) revealed that a key component of the immune system, a gene called RIG-1 appeared to be involved. Levels of the protein produced by the gene were lower in tissue infected with the 1918 virus, suggesting it had a method of switching it off, causing immune defences to run wild.

This ability to alter the body’s immune response is shared with the most recent candidate for mutation into a pandemic strain, the H5N1 avian flu. Experts are worried that if the virus changes so that it can infect humans easily, it could again be far more lethal than normal seasonal flu. “What we see with the 1918 virus in infected monkeys is also what we see with H5N1 viruses,” said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who led the analysis at UW.

Cancer Deaths – Declining Trend?

3,000 fewer cancer deaths:

Cancer deaths in the United States dropped for the second year in a row, health officials reported yesterday, confirming that the trend is real and becoming more pronounced, too.

The news was cause for celebration among doctors and politicians. “When we saw the first decline, the number wasn’t that enormous,” Dr. Felice Schnoll-Sussman, a cancer physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center said. “But once you start to see a trend like this, it obviously makes you feel like ‘We must be doing something right! ‘”

Is this really a trend? I have not examined the data at all but I seriously doubt it. People (the media even more so) constantly overreact to variation in data. Maybe I am wrong, certainly I should look at the data and see what it says – and I will if I get some time and remember. But I am more confident in my belief this is more overreaction to random variation than in the headlines. Why? Because so often when I do look more closely at the numbers my general observation of overreaction to random variation is confirmed while news reports talk of “trends.” Hopefully I am wrong this time.

Ok, I couldn’t resist and I did a little looking for some data. This is how crazy it is. The press release from the American Cancer Society states:
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Cheap, Safe Cancer Drug?

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Well I have been told I am too skeptical, but it does sound too good to be true. How many stories of cancer cures do we hear every year? Even if the drug companies leave it alone (I would imagine they could easily find ways to have drugs that partially rely on this and partially on things they can patent, but anyway…) foundations and universities will invest in it if it is truly deserving. Now maybe I am being too optimistic?

Edinburgh University $115 Million Stem Cell Center

Stem cell centre plan confirmed

Additional Scottish Executive funding of Â£24m will allow Edinburgh University to develop the Â£59m centre in collaboration with Scottish Enterprise. The Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine (SCRM) is thought to be equalled only one in Kobe, Japan. Prof Ian Wilmut, formerly of the Roslin Institute, will be the director.

The state-of -the-art facilities are expected to house 220 academic researchers and will include a centre for “scale-up” development and manufacture of cells. Space will also be made available for commercial regenerative medicine. It is hoped that the SCRM, which will be part of the new Centre for Biomedical Research at Edinburgh’s Little France, will create about 560 jobs and generate Â£18.2m per year for the Scottish economy.

via: Univ. of Edinburgh Launches $115 Million Dollar Stem Cell Research Center