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30 April, 2007

OK TO BE FAT IF YOU ARE OLD

The journal article abstracted below is a lot of fun. It starts out admitting that among older people your weight has little or no bearing on how long you will live. Being greatly dissatisfied with that pesky truth, however, they say that maybe fatties are sicker, even if they don't die. But even their findings there were pretty pesky. What they found is in fact the usual finding: That people of MIDDLING weight are the healthiest! Both the skinnies and the real fatties had slightly more illness

The Effect of Obesity on Disability vs Mortality in Older Americans

By Soham Al Snih et al.

Arch Intern Med. 2007;167:774-780

Background: The association between obesity and mortality is reduced or eliminated in older subjects. In addition to mortality, disability is an important health outcome. The objectives of this study were to examine the association between body mass index (BMI), calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared, and subsequent disability and mortality among older Americans, as well as to estimate the effect of BMI on life expectancy and disability-free life expectancy among older Americans.

Methods: We studied 8359 non-Hispanic white Americans, 1931 African Americans, and 2435 Mexican Americans 65 years or older who were not disabled at baseline from 5 sites of the Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly. Measures included BMI, medical conditions, activities of daily living, and demographic information. Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was used to estimate the hazard ratios (HRs) for subsequent disability and mortality during 7 years of follow-up. Total life expectancy and disability-free life expectancy were estimated using the interpolation of Markov chain approach.

Results: The lowest HR (1.02; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.94-1.10) for disability was at a BMI of 25 to less than 30. Subjects with BMIs of lower than 18.5 or 30 or higher at baseline were significantly more likely to experience disability during the follow-up period. In contrast, the lowest HRs for mortality were seen among subjects with BMIs of 25 to less than 30 (HR, 0.78; 95% CI, 0.72-0.85) and 30 to less than 35 (HR, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.72-0.90), with subjects with BMIs of lower than 25 or 35 or higher experiencing higher hazards for mortality. Disability-free life expectancy is greatest among subjects with a BMI of 25 to less than 30.

Conclusion: Assessments of the effect of obesity on the health of older Americans should account for mortality and incidence of disability.




ARE STOMACH ULCERS GOOD FOR YOU?

If you followed the usual crazy logic in these matters you might think so. The study below shows that kids who were infected with the bug that causes ulcers are slightly less likely to get asthma and allergies. The prevailing theory of asthma is that it is an autoimmune disease caused by insufficient exposure to mild pathogens. So it follows that ANY infection with ANY bug in early life would reduce your chance of getting asthma. So the findings are probably right and serve only to show how careful we should be in drawing policy conclusions from small group differences. This is a good absurd case to bear in mind for the next outburst of hysteria about such differences

Inverse Associations of Helicobacter pylori With Asthma and Allergy

By Yu Chen et al.

Arch Intern Med. 2007;167:821-827

Background: Acquisition of Helicobacter pylori, which predominantly occurs before age 10 years, may reduce risks of asthma and allergy.

Methods: We evaluated the associations of H pylori status with history of asthma and allergy and with skin sensitization using data from 7663 adults in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Adjusted odds ratios (ORs) for currently and ever having asthma, allergic rhinitis, allergy symptoms in the previous year, and allergen-specific skin sensitization were computed comparing participants seropositive for cagA- or cagA+ strains of H pylori with those without H pylori.

Results: The presence of cagA+ H pylori strains was inversely related to ever having asthma (OR, 0.79; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.63-0.99), and the inverse association of cagA positivity with childhood-onset (age ~15 years) asthma was stronger (OR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.43-0.93) than that with adult-onset asthma (OR, 0.97; 95% CI, 0.72-1.32). Colonization with H pylori, especially with a cagA+ strain, was inversely associated with currently (OR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.62-0.96) or ever (OR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.62-0.94) having a diagnosis of allergic rhinitis, especially for childhood onset (OR, 0.55; 95% CI, 0.37-0.82). Consistent inverse associations were found between H pylori colonization and the presence of allergy symptoms in the previous year and sensitization to pollens and molds.

Conclusion These observations support the hypothesis that childhood acquisition of H pylori is associated with reduced risks of asthma and allergy.

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



29 April, 2007

New drug of abuse

Worm medicine!

A new recreational drug is sending patients to the hospital with life-threatening symptoms! The case of an 18-year-old girl who collapsed in a nightclub last May after taking a tablet containing 1-benzylpiperazine is highlighting the dangers of this new drug. The teenager who was rushed to a London hospital emergency room was one of seven patients admitted with similar symptoms, including high blood pressure and a low body temperature.

Piperazines were developed to control worms in animals in the 1950s. They are chemically similar to amphetamine and are marketed in the United Kingdom in stores and online as the legal alternative to other recreational drugs such as ecstasy. The manufacturers of the drugs claim they are safe, citing that 20 million pills containing piperazines have been consumed in New Zealand with no deaths or significant long-term injuries. But a prospective study in New Zealand shows 80 cases of patients who went to the emergency room with symptoms similar to those from taking amphetamines, such as nausea, vomiting, rapid heartbeat, anxiety and agitation. Fifteen of these patients had seizures after eight hours -- three had potentially life threatening incidents.

The authors conclude, "Clinicians should be aware of the potential presenting features of piperazine toxicity, particularly because commercially available urine toxicological screen kits for drugs of abuse may not detect piperazines."

Source. (Original report in "The Lancet" - Vol. 369, Issue 9571, 28 April 2007, Pages 1411-1413)




Barbecues under attack again

Australians are very frequent barbecuers and are yet one of the world's longest lived populations -- but little bottom-line facts like that must not detain us, of course. Simplistic theories are so much easier

With the backyard grilling season approaching, medical experts have managed the scientific equivalent of pouring cold water on a pile of fiery briquettes: Grilling and other high-heat cooking methods accelerate aging and several serious health conditions.

How food is cooked turns out to be extremely important, said Helen Vlassara, a professor of medicine and geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. She investigated a relatively new class of toxins called glycation end products, or AGEs, which develop during cooking, particularly when grilling, frying and flame-broiling.

"The highest levels are found in fried chicken, or broiled or grilled meats," Vlassara said.

AGEs, she said, tend to accumulate in the body and have been associated with diabetes and insulin imbalances. But she also sees a strong link between the compounds and aging, Alzheimer's disease, inflammatory disorders, vascular problems and kidney conditions. In addition to frying and cooking, she theorizes that AGEs are probably produced during pasteurization.

Over the years, AGEs build up in the body, Vlassara said, causing damage by rogue oxygen molecules and increasing the likelihood of inflammation, which underlies medical conditions from arthritis to heart disease. Sustained inflammation damages the kidneys, joints, blood vessels, heart and brain, she said.

Writing in the current issue of the Journal of Gerontology, Vlassara described her analysis, which involved testing blood levels of AGEs in 172 test subjects. Men and women were divided into two age groups, those 18 to 45 and those 60 to 80.

Boiling, stewing and poaching are cooking methods that avoid production of AGEs, she added.

Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Center, said AGEs need to be taken seriously.

"People have to realize that cooking is a chemistry project," Connolly-Schoonen said. "There are a lot of chemical changes that occur to our food as we cook it. Negative compounds are produced when food is exposed to heat as a result of the sugars in the food, the fat in the food and the protein."

Rashmi Sinha, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, said grilling and frying produce a variety of compounds that can damage DNA, and possibly pave the way to cancer development. Sinha has been studying a DNA-damaging chemical called PhIP, a compound that is produced from the amino acids and creatinine in meats when they are cooked at high levels of heat.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



28 April, 2007

The sperm count scare again: More absurd reasoning

The original headline on this article is "Fertility treatment 'reduces sperm in offspring'". But the very last sentence below fingers the real problem: Women with low fertility have children with low fertility

SPERM counts in the first generation of men born after their mothers received fertility treatment appear to be nearly 50 per cent lower than in men conceived naturally. The world's first study looking at the fertility of children born after their mothers received fertility treatment two decades ago has found their sperm concentration was 46 per cent lower, and sperm counts 45 per cent lower than in other men.

Nearly 2000 Danish men volunteered to be examined as part of the research. In addition to having lower sperm counts, the 47 men whose mothers said they had conceived following fertility treatment were also found to have smaller testes, fewer sperm that "swam" as they are supposed to, and more sperm cell deformities compared with the other men.

The effect was more exaggerated in the 25 mothers who identified their form of fertility treatment as hormonal therapy - most likely to have been anti-oestrogen drugs to stimulate follicle growth and ovulation. Experts say almost all women receiving fertility treatment in Australia receive similar drugs.

The research, published earlier this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, has become possible as the first generation of children born thanks to assisted reproduction techniques enter young adulthood and become sexually mature.

Fertility experts in Australia yesterday said the findings ought to be taken into account by couples considering assisted reproduction, including in-vitro fertilisation - rates of which are soaring in Australia. However, some expressed caution at the findings, saying Denmark has the world's highest rate of testicular cancer and results in Danish men could not be assumed to apply elsewhere without further research.

Fertility expert John Aitken, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Biotechnology and Development at the University of Newcastle, said the findings were "interesting and should be looked at more carefully" in Australia. "We have not seen anything like this before," Professor Aitken said. "It's data that should encourage us to look very carefully for the consequences of specific forms of treatment."

Sperm concentration was a median of 48 million per millilitre in the natural-born men, compared with 33 million in the men whose mothers had had fertility treatment, before statistical adjustments. The World Health Organisation defines the lower threshold of normal as 20 million sperm per millilitre. Thirty per cent of the fertility-treatment men were below this threshold, compared with 20 per cent of the normal-birth men. "The worry has always been that by bypassing biology, gametes (sperm and egg cells) are participating in conception in vitro that (they) would never have participated (in) in real life," Professor Aitken said.

Peter Illingworth, medical director of the private Sydney-based fertility clinic IVF Australia, said the study "may suggest ... a higher likelihood of reproductive health problems among boys conceived from fertility treatments". However, he said the men's sperm counts were still normal, and the study was consistent with previous research that found fertility-treatment children were at a slightly higher risk for a range of health problems.

It remained unclear whether this was because of the fertility treatment itself, or whether it reflected a continuation of their parents' fertility problems.

Source




Doubtful diabetes drugs

Drugs to prevent type 2 diabetes probably do more harm than good, according to three specialists. They say that most patients at risk of developing the disease would be better advised to change their diets and do more exercise - interventions of proven benefit. The warning, from specialists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, appear to contradict directly the results of a widely publicised study of a new drug combination, ramipril and rosiglitazone.

A trial to test this combination in people who did not have diabetes but had evidence of poor glucose control was terminated early when results showed many fewer people progressing to diabetes proper. The Dream trial was hailed as evidence that diabetes could be prevented and the treatment, the three doctors say in British Medical Journal, is now being "aggressively marketed". The trial showed a 62 per cent reduction of the risk of progressing from impaired glucose tolerance to type 2 diabetes. But it also showed an increased risk of heart failure and no evidence of a fall in deaths.

Since diet and exercise changes have been shown to cut the risk of diabetes by 58 per cent, cost much less and do not have the effect of "medicalising" healthy people, they are to be preferred, says the team, led by Victor Montori, of the Mayo Clinic. They add that it was entirely possible that the improvements found in the Dream trial were the result of rosiglitazone treating diabetes rather than preventing it. That could be proved only by discontinuing treatment and observing whether people who had been treated progressed to diabetes more slowly than they otherwise would have done. Such a trial had not yet been done.

From the patients' point of view, it came down to the issue of whether they would prefer to take pills now in the hope of taking fewer pills later. That would be justified only if it could be shown that doing so would avoid the later complications of diabetes, which were severe. The trials had not shown this yet. "The benefits of rosiglitazone on outcomes important to patients remain speculative," the authors say.

The downside of taking "preventive" medicine was cost and healthy people being labelled as ill and becoming anxious as a result. "The threshold for use of drugs in otherwise healthy people must be set high," the doctors say. "Clinical use of glitazones to prevent diabetes is, at present, impossible to justify because of unproved benefit on patient-important outcomes or lasting effect on serum glucose, increased burden of disease labelling, serious adverse effects, increased economic burden and availability of effective, less costly lifestyle measures."

The Dream trial, published in The Lancetin September, suggested that as many as one in 12 people should be taking rosiglitazone to prevent diabetes. Simon O'Neill, of Diabetes UK, said: "The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency state that rosiglitazone is a safe and effective treatment for those diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Used as a preventative medication, the Dream study has shown that it can reduce the risk of developing the condition." He added, however, that Diabetes UK "strongly recommends that people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes should be incorporating increased levels of physical activity into their daily lives alongside making changes to their diet".

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



27 April, 2007

IATROGENIC ILLNESS

I suffer from a chronic iatrogenic illness. As would be clear to everyone who knows his Greek, iatrogenic illness is illness caused by what doctors do. Usually it is illness caused as a side-effect of medication. As far as we know, iatrogenic illness is universal. All medications have side-effects. The iron law of medication is: "No side effects = No main effects". If we banned all medications that had side effects we would have no medications.

But the hysteria over side-effects never lets up for all that. Aspirin was once thought to be very safe but it does appear to cause some bleeding in the stomach EVERY time is it used. So despite aspirin's very great benefits and the long recognized great safety of it, doctors everywhere for a long time would recommend it only with the greatest hesitation. For routine pain relef they would generally recommend paracetamol instead. We now find, however that paracetamol causes liver damage. The neurosis about small but generally harmless side effects in aspirin has, in other words, exposed people to SERIOUS side effects in paracetamol.

So, as blind Freddy should be able to see, it is the tradeoff that is important. Side-effects that are very rare or side effects that cause little harm should be disregarded if the medication provides significant benefit.

You would think that doctors, of all people, would recognize that and maybe many family doctors do, but many medical researchers certainly do not. If they see a side effect that is found in only one in a thousand people, they will rush to press with warnings not to use that medication. And that is doubly absurd when we realize that very rare effects may be random events anyway. A rare side-effect may not be a side effect at all. If one woman in a thousand is said to get cancer out of taking HRT, what are we to make out of the 999 women who did NOT get cancer from it? Surely they prove that HRT does NOT cause cancer!

And most of the unending stream of scare stories rely on an assumption that is KNOWN to be false. They conclude from a correlation between two things that the correlation indicates causation. Because some studies have found a very slight correlation between taking HRT and getting cancer, for instance, the hysterics claim that HRT causes cancer. Yet "Correlation is not causation" is just about the first thing anyone learns in a course on statistics. For instance, recent history indicates that people have both been living longer and getting fatter. Getting fatter and living longer are correlated. So does getting fatter prolong life? To be consistent the hysterics would have to claim that! That women who take HRT might tend to have more health anxieties to start with and that those anxieties (whether justified or not) might be the problem (if there is a problem) is just not considered.

There is no such ambiguity in the case of real iatrogenic disasters of course. How many women who took thalidomide during the critical periods of gestation delivered normal babies? Not many. How many people who in their youth were frequently given old-fashioned medications containing arsenic (as I was) are now free of skin cancer? Not many.

So we should ignore the attention seekers who are constantly pretending that tiny fluctuations in their statistics reveal iatrogenic disasters going on. There will of course be real iatrogenic disasters in the future (Thalidomide was approved by many national health authorities) but listening to the attention-seekers will just deflect us from gaining the real benefits that medication can also deliver.




Hope for autism

It would help to know more about which categories of autism were helped by which aspect of the treatment but the evidence that SOME treatment works for some children is encouraging

Toddlers found to have autism who undergo intensive teaching programmes from the age of 3 can raise their IQ by as much as 40 points, according to a three-year study. The research found that intensive, early education, which costs about 30,000 pounds a year per child, also led to “significant positive changes” in language, daily living skills, motor ability and social skills.

The study, conducted by the University of Southampton, will put pressure on the Government to help to fund early intervention for autistic children. It often costs households more than 30,000 pounds a year as one parent is forced to give up work completely to oversee about 40 hours of tuition a week. Most of the money is spent on hiring tutors and a course supervisor who shapes the programme for the child and assesses its progress.

It is the first major study of its kind in Britain, although thousands of families are known to be using the programme, the best known of which is applied behaviour analysis (ABA). It breaks down learning into tiny chunks, using imitation and reinforcement to encourage autistic children to communicate, then speak and follow commands, before moving on to more advanced skills.

Half the 44 autistic children had the treatment for two years, significantly starting at the age of 30-42 months. That is usually the time at which families who suspect their child may be autistic are struggling to get a formal diagnosis.

The children in the study ranged from the high-functioning, with better communication skills and higher IQs, to the low-functioning with poor speech and few social skills. All had a formal diagnosis of autism.

The researchers found that early intervention was more effective with the higher-functioning children who had a higher mental age and better social skills, although all benefited to some degree. [A possible "fudge" there. Overgeneralized results probable]

The first group of children in the study were given 25 hours of one-to-one treatment a week from between three and five tutors, and also from their parents, all using the principles of ABA. This is fewer hours than the 40 a week most parents sign up to. The control group had received the basic speech or language therapy normally offered by local education authorities.

As well as improved communication and social skills, more than a quarter of the children showed “very substantial improvements” in their IQ. In one case IQ increased from 30 to 70, in another, from 72 to 115. Most of the population has an IQ of between 85 and 115. “This form of teaching can, in many cases, lead to major change,” said Professor Bob Remington, deputy head of the University of Southampton School of Psychology. “In practice, the positive changes we see in IQ, language and daily living skills can make a real difference to the future lives of children with autism.”

With one in a hundred children thought to be suffering from some form of autism, the costs are potentially very high. However, John Wylie, chief executive of TreeHouse Trust, a school for autistic children, said: “It has to be compared with the cost of looking after someone with autism which conservative estimates put at 3 million pounds over their lifetime. Spending the money at a time when it can make a difference is surely better than pouring it about when it can make little difference.”

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



26 April, 2007

Wi Fi scare

The evils of radio-waves have been combed over exhaustively for many years but no amount of evidence will ever convince some nature freaks that cellphones are safe -- and now the same performance is revving up over WiFi -- which uses similar radio waves

Being "wired-up" used to be shorthand for being at the cutting edge, connected to all that is cool. No longer. Wireless is now the only thing to be. Go into a Starbucks, a hotel bar or an airport departure lounge and you are bound to see people tapping away at their laptops, invisibly connected to the internet. Visit friends, and you are likely to be shown their newly installed system. Lecture at a university and you'll find the students in your audience tapping away, checking your assertions on the world wide web almost as soon as you make them. And now the technology is spreading like a Wi-Fi wildfire throughout Britain's primary and secondary schools.

The technological explosion is even bigger than the mobile phone explosion that preceded it. And, as with mobiles, it is being followed by fears about its effect on health - particularly the health of children. Recent research, which suggests that the worst fears about mobiles are proving to be justified, only heightens concern about the electronic soup in which we are increasingly spending our lives.

Now, as we report today, Sir William Stewart, the man who has issued the most authoritative British warnings about the hazards of mobiles, is becoming worried about the spread of Wi-Fi. The chairman of the Health Protection Agency - and a former chief scientific adviser to the Government - is privately pressing for an official investigation of the risks it may pose. Health concerns show no sign of slowing the wireless expansion. One in five of all adult Britons now own a wireless-enabled laptop. There are 35,000 public hotspots where they can use them, usually at a price....

So far only a few, faint warnings have been raised, mainly by people who are so sensitised to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, their masts and Wi-Fi that they become ill in its presence. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to three out of every hundred people are "electrosensitive" to some extent. But scientists and doctors - and some European governments - are adding their voices to the alarm as it becomes clear that the almost universal use of mobile phones may be storing up medical catastrophe for the future.

Professor Lawrie Challis, who heads the Government's official mobile safety research, this year said that the mobile could turn out to be "the cigarette of the 21st century".

There has been less concern about masts, as they emit very much less radiation than mobile phones. But people living - or attending schools - near them are consistently exposed and studies reveal a worrying incidence of symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness and memory problems. There is also some suggestion that there may be an increase in cancers and heart disease.

Wi-Fi systems essentially take small versions of these masts into the home and classroom - they emit much the same kind of radiation. Though virtually no research has been carried out, campaigners and some scientists expect them to have similar ill-effects. They say that we are all now living in a soup of electromagnetic radiation one billion times stronger than the natural fields in which living cells have developed over the last 3.8 billion years. This, they add, is bound to cause trouble

More here




Attitudes to autism

The following review of Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker, Basic Books, 2007; Constructing Autism: Unravelling the `Truth' and Understanding the Social by Majia Holmer Nadesan, Routledge, 2005; Send in the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism by Kamran Nazeer, Bloomsbury, 2006 finds that strange attitudes towards autism have arisen in the absence of much real understanding of it. My own view is that there is no such thing as autism -- merely a range of quite different disorders that happen to have communication problems in common. And the different accounts of autism summarized below do rather bear that out.

Like Roy Richard Grinker, whose daughter was diagnosed as autistic at around the same time as my son in the early 1990s, at the time I `knew little about the condition and knew no-one else who had it'. Autism was then regarded as a rare disorder affecting three children in 10,000. A decade later, the increasing numbers of children with autism are widely described as a crisis and an epidemic, with cases occurring at a rate of 60 per 10,000 births. Grinker, a social anthropologist as well as a parent, observes that the term epidemic `implies danger and incites fear' and wisely cautions that we should `step back and take a closer look at our fears about autism'.

Through a comprehensive review of the history and epidemiology of autism, Grinker shows how a greater awareness of autism among parents and professionals, together with a widening concept of autism, have led to a dramatic increase in the recognition of cases, rather than a true increase in numbers. He challenges the conviction among many parents that an epidemic of autism can be readily attributed to toxins and vaccines and regards the search for environmental causes (and cures) as misconceived: `If there is no real epidemic, we might just have to admit that no-one is to blame.' He insists that `we cannot find real solutions if we're basing our ideas on false premises and bad science'.

For Grinker, the increased recognition of autism in Western society is a welcome sign `that we are finally seeing and appreciating a kind of human difference that we once turned away from'. With insights derived from his studies in India, South Korea and South Africa (as well as in Europe), he shows how in other cultures autism is only beginning to emerge from being hidden, stigmatised and denigrated. While Grinker describes the familiar parental struggle to secure appropriate schooling for his daughter even in the USA of today, he readily acknowledges that `autism is a terrible, life-long disorder, but it's a better time than ever to be autistic'. However, when he claims that `the prevalence of autism today is a virtue, maybe even a prize', he never asks whether the current popularity of autism reflects a perverse celebration of themes of alienation and atomisation in contemporary society - for that we need to turn to a sociologist.

Majia Holmer Nadesan, who also has a child with autism, brings a welcome sociological and historical perspective to her thoughtful and thought-provoking survey of current controversies. For her, autism is not so much a discovery of the 1940s that became an epidemic in the 1990s, as a product of the social and cultural circumstances of the late twentieth century. She argues that the `classical' autism described by US psychiatrist Leo Kanner in his landmark 1943 paper emerged as a result of the development of distinctive concepts and institutions of childhood and child psychology over the preceding half-century. In contrast with the current vogue for identifying autistic personalities in history and literature, she insists that autism was `unthinkable' within the diagnostic categories of nineteenth-century psychiatry, at a time when any child presenting such behaviours would have been `abandoned, neglected or institutionalised'.

Nadesan considers that the expanding range of autism diagnoses in recent years - with a particular emphasis on cases of `higher functioning' autism or Asperger's syndrome - can be attributed to the more intensive parental and professional focus on child development fostered by cognitive psychology and to the scope offered to the more able autistic individuals within the wider culture of information technology. (Though Hans Asperger first described cases of his syndrome in Austria in the 1940s, his work did not become widely known in the English-speaking world before the 1980s.) In a perceptive discussion of `Asperger's as cyborgs', Nadesan notes the way this syndrome has been constructed as `the sublimation of humanity by technology, cloaked in the guise of human genius'. She attributes the impact of popular accounts of `autistic intelligence' to `the public's simultaneous fascination and repulsion with a stereotyped and reified form of "autistic genius"'.

Whereas Grinker uncritically welcomes the wider recognition of autism, Nadesan is alert to the danger that, in technically advanced countries in the late twentieth century, `we have pathologised people' who would formerly have been regarded as merely eccentric.

Nadesan develops philosopher Ian Hacking's theory of autism as a `niche disorder' arising from the interaction of biological and cultural factors in modern society. She challenges the one-sided emphasis on the biological determination of autism evident in both mainstream research and in popular `biomedical' alternative approaches. Emphasising the dynamic interaction of biological and social aspects, Nadesan insists that people with autism cannot be reduced to defective genetic and neurological states. Indeed, it is the recognition that genes, brain and mind are loosely coupled rather than mechanistically determined that offers scope for therapeutic intervention.

Kamran Nazeer, who was diagnosed with autism as a child, is well aware of the difficulties facing even higher functioning adults with autism. Twenty years after leaving his elementary school in New York, he has traced some of his former classmates and now tells their stories.

Craig, whose echolalic childhood phrase provides the title, was a speechwriter for the Democratic Party who became unemployed after George W Bush's 2004 election victory. After a spell in a juvenile detention centre for a serious assault, Andre lives with his sister, works in computers and uses hand puppets to facilitate social interaction. Randall works as a bicycle courier in Chicago and is now back with his parents after separating from his former partner Mike, a writer. Though Elizabeth committed suicide in 2002 at the age of 26, we hear her story from her parents, Henry and Sheila.

The most enigmatic case is that of the author. Born to Pakistani parents, he has lived in Jeddah, Islamabad and Glasgow, studied philosophy and legal theory and is now a policy adviser in Whitehall. Nazeer writes with intelligence and wit, providing finely observed and deeply sympathetic profiles of each of his former classmates, together with thoughtful reflections on matters such as the art of conversation, the question of genius and the challenges facing the families of people with autism. His account of the cruelty to psychologists of adolescents with high-functioning autism is hilarious. He concludes with a discussion of autism controversies with two of his former teachers, Ira and Rebecca, who are both still engaged in autism education, though his old school has now closed.

Nazeer observes that, with the decline of psychogenic theories and the rise of genetics, there is now `a different sense of shame about autism'. He attributes the influence of vaccine theories of causation to a `lingering, perhaps renewed, sense of shame about having a child with a developmental disorder'. He finds the quest for environmental explanations `terribly sad' as parents `throbbing with guilt and shame' have pursued `whatever external cause they could identify, to exculpate themselves'.

When Ira and Rebecca suggest to Nazeer that he is no longer autistic, his rejoinder is that `we all got better, to say it that way'. He insists that it is not `simply that we're all less idiotic than before' but that `we became that way through exposure to the world that lay beyond the horizon of our own selves'. He rejects the `notion perpetrated on' himself and his classmates, `that our minds are singular, glowing, remarkable and untouched by others' - and expectations that people with autism will be socially inept but brilliant with computers. For him, all these preconceptions derive from the same belief - `that autistic people are themselves only, self-enclosed and sealed off to the world'. He dismisses the view that people with autism `can't be reached, or shouldn't be, that self-enclosure is or ought to be permanent'.

In the course of his study Nazeer found `something rather different': `Our autism eased, in each case, because of other people, our parents, friends, and our teachers, of course.' He rejects both `credulity and cretinhood', both the notions that an alienated autistic identity should be celebrated and that autistic children are doomed, without prospect of improvement. He affirms the humanity of people with autism as participants in the networks of human society. `This realisation sometimes expands inside me until I feel as if my organs are going to bruise one another.' Let's hope that writing this book has reduced his risk of internal injury. As he truly writes, his approach `marks a big change compared to how autism is typically thought about'.

For anybody in a quandary over which books to select from the recent profusion of autism-lit titles, here are three excellent choices. If you only have time for one, choose Nazeer's. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry; above all it will make you think about autism.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



25 April, 2007

Jogger dies of salt deficiency

They call it a "sodium" deficiency below to pull the wool over your eyes. But it is ordinary table salt they are talking about -- the stuff that has recently been heavily (and fraudulently) demonized. It's just too embarassing to mention what it really is. Chemically, common salt is sodium chloride (NaCl)

A man who died after completing the hottest London Marathon was named last night as a 22-year-old fitness instructor. David Rogers became the ninth person to die in the race's 27-year history after suffering from hyponatraemia, where high water intake results in a sodium deficiency. Mr Rogers, of Milton Keynes, was one of 70 runners taken to hospital in sweltering temperatures. Running his first marathon, he collapsed after completing the race in 3 hours and 50 minutes.

On the website justgiving.com he said that he was raising money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, in memory of his grandfather. Donations on the website had reached more than 1,300 pounds. He wrote: "My Grandad was 78 when he passed away and although I was only young when he died, I can still remember many happy memories spent with him."

Mr Rogers' father, Chris, and mother, Sarah had travelled to London to watch their son race. Chris Rogers, 52, of Westoning, near Bedford, told The Daily Telegraph that his son was "a happy-go-lucky lad who brought happiness to everyone". He said: "We saw him coming across Tower Bridge. He was ecstatic. He saw us and waved and then leapt in the air in a star jump. He was doing what he wanted to do." The next time he saw his son there was less than a mile of the race to go. His son was "labouring a bit but only like everyone else at that stage because it was a very hot day".

It was only when Mr Rogers failed to meet his family at the end of the race that they learnt he had been admitted to Charing Cross Hospital, where he died yesterday morning.

Race organisers offered their "deepest sympathy and condolences to his family and friends". They added that warnings had been issued to runners not to drink too much water: "The medical advice was not to drink excessive levels. That advice was on the website, in the magazine and in the runners' information packs." Another runner who had also been in a critical condition was transferred out of intensive care and was said to be recovering well.

The death of one runner and the fact that thousands of others had to be treated in the intense heat led to calls for the London Marathon to be staged earlier in the year. Gordon Trevett, lecturer at the department of exercise and health sciences at Bristol University, thought it would be sensible "so competitors can run in lower temperatures". He said: "The organisers could be worried that they might lose sponsorship if less people are running, if it's a bit colder, but because it is such a popular event and raises so much money, I think that people would still run if it was brought forward to March."

Nick Bitel, chief executive of the Flora London Marathon, was opposed to the idea. He said: "Some people think the marathon should be later in the year so they can train in warmer weather. Some like to train in summer and think a winter marathon would be best. We think we are at the right time of year."

More runners than ever began the race on Sunday, but as temperatures soared to 23.5C (74F) [Which would be cool in most of Australia!], 721 dropped out before the finish line. Among them was the athlete widely tipped to win the men's race, Haile Gebrselassie, of Ethiopia, who stopped after about 19 miles. Matt Dawson, the England rugby player, described seeing runners pass out in front of him, while Gordon Ramsay, the celebrity chef, who was running his eighth marathon, said: "It was like running in a desert. People were dropping like flies." St John Ambulance said that it treated 5,054 people.

Source




Tomorrow's iatrogenic disaster coming up?

An iatrogenic illness is one caused by medication (In Greek "Iatros" = "medical practitioner"). There have been many such illnesses. I suffer from one myself. There is a saying that "Today's miracle cure is tomorrow's iatrogenic disaster". Anybody who medicates a perfectly healthy baby would have to be insane.

A hormone-like substance could be added to babies' milk or given to their mothers during pregnancy to stop them becoming obese as adults. Scientists gave pregnant and lactating rats food laced with leptin and found that their offspring did not put on weight no matter what they ate. The theory is that leptin given at this crucial stage in life "hard-wires" the body's energy-balance settings. The more leptin they are given the more inefficient the infant rats' bodies are at turning calories into fat. Instead, they burn it up metabolically.

Leptin was greeted as the cure for obesity when it was discovered a decade ago. Produced by fat, it tells the brain when fat deposits are adequate, and thus discourages eating. However, leptin injections benefit very few obese people. Dr Mike Cawthorne of the University of Buckingham said that breast milk contained leptin but formula feed did not, and foods fortified with leptin should be available soon.

But Professor Steve O'Rahilly, a leptin expert from Cambridge, said: "There is no evidence that this `early life' imprinting effect of leptin is at all relevant for humans."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



24 April, 2007

AMAZING PILL

A pill that can correct a wide range of faulty genes which cause crippling illnesses should be available within three years, promising a revolution in the treatment of thousands of conditions. The drug, known as PTC124, has already had encouraging results in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. The final phase of clinical trials is to begin this year, and it could be licensed as early as 2009. As well as offering hope of a first effective treatment for two conditions that are at present incurable, the drug has excited scientists because research suggests it should also work against more than 1,800 other genetic illnesses.

PTC124 targets a particular type of mutation that can cause very different symptoms according to the gene that is disrupted. This makes it potentially useful against a range of inherited disorders. The same drug could be given to patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the most serious form of the muscle-wasting condition, cystic fibrosis, which mainly affects the lungs, and haemophilia, in which the blood does not clot. It can be taken orally, and safety trials have not revealed any major side effects. “There are literally thousands of genetic diseases that could benefit from this approach,” Lee Sweeney, of the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading the research, said. “What’s unique about this drug is it doesn’t just target one mutation that causes disease, but a whole class of mutations.”

In most genetic conditions, between 5-15 per cent of cases are caused by a defect called a “nonsense mutation”. Genes are instruction manuals for cells to make proteins, but nonsense mutations in effect introduce a command halfway through that stops production. The kind of protein disrupted determines the nature of the disease. In Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for example, the protein necessary for normal muscle development is not made, and the fatal wasting disease is the result. In haemophilia, it is the gene for the clotting agents factor VIII or factor IX that is disrupted.

PTC124 works by binding to a part of the cell called the ribosome, which translates genetic code into protein, and allows it to ignore nonsense mutations. The gene can be read straight through and a normal protein is produced. The beauty of the drug is that it should be useful with any disease caused by a nonsense mutation, no matter what its outward effects. The error is not corrected, but ignored. Patients would have to take the pill throughout their lives.

PTC124, which is made by PTC Therapeutics, has been staggeringly successful in animal models. A study published today in Nature shows that in mice with a nonsense mutation that causes Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the drug starts dystrophin production and restores their muscles to health. The drug has passed safety trials in humans, and the results of phase-two trials on cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy will be published shortly. About 13 per cent of patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy have a nonsense mutation and should respond to the drug. It would not be suitable for treating different mutations in the dystrophin gene, or diseases not caused by nonsense mutations.

Other diseases that can be caused by nonsense mutations include beta thalassaemia, a blood disorder, and Hurler syndrome, in which children’s mental and physical development stops and most patients die by the age of 10.

Source




Pesky genes again: This time for exercise

The Government may be wasting its time encouraging children to spend more time on sport and exercise in an effort to reduce obesity. Research at Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, reported in today’s times2, suggests that a child’s propensity to be active is genetically determined. Children are said to find their own activity level, regardless of how many opportunities are offered. If the naturally inactive are forced to be more active at school, they do less at home, while the naturally active need no encouragement.

Professor Terence Wilkin, who has carried out trials with young people, says that his research shows that Government programmes to increase levels of activity do not reduce obesity. There are 1.8 million overweight children and 700,000 obese young people in Britain. Rates of obesity more generally have trebled since the 1980s, and the condition is estimated to cost the nation 7 billion in health expenditure. But while active children may be healthier, it remains unproven that inactive ones can be persuaded to do more, Professor Wilkin says. “So far, the evidence is bleak,” he adds.

The claim follows US research last week suggesting that a fat gene can decide whether some people have a propensity to put on weight. Some research has suggested that activity does help. In one study, children who tried a nine-week programme with their parents, which involved a combination of exercise, healthy eating, motivation and positive thinking strategies, were still benefiting from the scheme 12 months later.

The researchers found improvements in the overweight children’s body mass index, waist circumference, fitness, lifestyle and self-esteem following the programme and these were “largely sustained” after a year. “Thirty per cent of UK children are now considered to be obese or overweight — it is an immense public health issue in both immediate and long-term health,” said Professor Alan Lucas, director of the Medical Research Council childhood nutrition research centre at University College London Institute of Child Health.

His “Mend” approach — “mind, exercise, nutrition, do it!” — was adopted by 107 families during the trial but it is now being rolled out across the country. More specifically, a study in Bristol found a link between increased activity alone and obesity, suggesting that an extra quarter of an hour vigorous exercise a day was enough to make a difference. But the problem with these studies is that they do not show if fat children are fat because they are inactive, or inactive because they are fat. If Professor Wilkin is right, efforts to expand school sports may make children fitter, but no thinner.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



23 April, 2007

WORRY KILLS YOU

Neuroticism is highly hereditary, sadly, so it is possible that it is some trait associated with neuroticism that causes premature death -- though the adverse effects of worry itself (stress syndrome) could clearly be the problem

While mellowing with age has often been thought to have positive effects, a Purdue University researcher has shown that doing so could also help you live longer. Dan Mroczek (pronounced Mro-ZAK), an associate professor of child development and family studies at Purdue University, compared neurotic and non-neurotic men over time and tied change in the trait with mortality. "We found that neurotic men whose levels dropped over time had a better chance at living longer," Mroczek said. "They seemed to recover from any damage high levels of the trait may have caused. On the flip side, neurotic men whose neuroticism increased over time died much sooner than their peers."

A neurotic personality was defined as a person with the tendency to worry, feel excessive amounts of anxiety or depression and to react to stressful life events more negatively than people with low levels of the trait. Neuroticism levels were measured using a standardized personality test. Results of the study will be published in the print edition of the journal Psychological Science in late May. The study is available online at http://www.psychologicalscience.org

In the study, researchers tracked the change in neuroticism levels of 1,663 aging men over a 12-year period. Using the data gathered in the first analysis, researchers calculated the men's mortality risk over an 18-year period using the average levels and rates of change. By the end of the study, half of those men classified as highly neurotic with increasing levels of neuroticism had died while those whose levels decreased or were classified as less neurotic had between a 75 percent and 85 percent survival rate. Even small increases in neuroticism were shown to have negative effects. Participants with as little as a one-unit increase in neuroticism over the course of the study were shown to have a 40 percent higher chance of death than a participant who showed no change.

Data was taken from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study, a longitudinal investigation of aging in men founded at the Boston Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in 1963. In 1988, the beginning of this study, the men ranged in age from 43 to 91.

Mroczek and Avron Spiro, an associate professor of epidemiology at Boston University's School of Public Health, also controlled the data for age, depression levels and both subjective and objective ratings of overall health. "We found that neuroticism levels are a clear indicator of how long one can expect to live," Mroczek said. "The link between mortality and the rate of change in neuroticism is similar to the way we think about change in high blood pressure and risk of heart attack. If you have high blood pressure but make sure to lower it, you are likely to reduce your heart attack risk."

While those who were very neurotic and grew worse over time had a higher death rate, those who were the least neurotic and improved over time did not die at a significantly lower rate. Mroczek said the anomaly could be traced to how these types of attitudes affect personal choices. "It's possible that the key with neuroticism is having just the right amount," Mroczek said. "If you are too laid back, you may not be taking your health seriously enough. These folks might be engaging in more risky behaviors like smoking or drinking to excess because they don't believe anything bad will happen to them."

Mroczek, a member of Purdue's Center on Aging and the Life Course, said he sees a future in which doctors and other health practitioners include some form of personality assessments with routine medical screenings. Learning to deal with some of the potentially negative aspects of human personalities in a positive way could become part of a balanced and healthy lifestyle. "For example, very neurotic people can work toward dealing better with stress," he said. "They can seek therapy, take up yoga, schedule daily walks to help themselves unwind, listen to calming music or even meditate."

While participants in the study were male and more than 90 percent Caucasian, Mroczek said there is little reason to believe that results for women or other ethnicities would show vastly different results. "You can find the full range of personalities in any ethnic or gender group," Mroczek said. "There are those who are laid back and then there are those who worry, who react very poorly to stress, who are always on edge."

Mroczek will begin testing later this year to determine why higher levels of neuroticism increase mortality. He plans a study which tests cortisol levels in neurotic men to determine if they have higher levels of the damaging stress hormone that could contribute to early death. Other possible contributing factors might include unhealthy coping techniques, such as overeating or drinking to excess.

This study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging and by the Clinical Sciences Research and Development Service of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA Normative Aging Study is supported by the Cooperative Studies Program/ERIC of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and is a research component of the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center.

Source




Obesity: A Conjecture

From David Friedman. Also see his site for some interesting comments

Obesity is a current hot issue, problem, crisis ... . One reason is that it is a real problem. Another, I suspect, is that it provides people who want governments to do things with a new argument.

My evidence for that conjecture is how much of the talk about obesity focuses on the evils of marketers cleverly manipulating people into eating junk food. While sellers of junk food do, of course, advertise their products, so do sellers of diet soda, exercise equipment, metrecal and health foods. I understand why people concerned about obesity might see the regulation of advertising as a potentially useful tool--it is at least more likely to be politically viable than an attempt to ban hamburgers and french fries from the American diet. But I do not see marketing as a plausible explanation for the increasing frequency of obesity. It seems particularly implausible given that the increase is not limited to rich countries such as the U.S.; I doubt the consumption patterns of people in India or China are much influenced by advertising.

My alternative explanation for obesity is straightforward. Humans evolved in an environment where food was costly, fat scarce, sweetness a useful signal that fruit was ripe. We are designed by evolution to put on weight when we can as a precaution against future famines and to favor fat and sugar when we can get them. In a world where food is inexpensive and plentiful we are inclined to overeat, in particular to eat more fat and sugar than is good for us.

The obvious explanation of the increase in obesity is that real incomes around the world have been trending up for decades. Now poor people in the U.S., and increasingly in poorer parts of the world, can afford to eat all the calories they want. Since all the calories they want represents more than what they require, the result is that they get fat.

There is one problem with this explanation. According to the figures I have seen, in the U.S. obesity is less common in high income groups than in low income groups. The richer you are, the less your diet is constrained by cost, so we would expect higher income groups to be at least as obese as lower income groups. To explain why they are not I must add one additional factor: Time lags in adjusting behavior and social norms to changed circumstances.

Suppose you are part of a population where food has been costly, where people engage in a lot of physical labor, and so where the problem is getting enough to eat, not avoiding too much. You, and those around you, have adapted their behavior to that environment.

Now things change; food gets cheap, wages go up, almost everyone can afford to eat as much as he wants. For a while, perhaps a generation or two, people follow the old patterns in the new circumstances; the result is that many of them end up fat. Over time, although the hardwired elements of behavior do not change--evolution is slow--the cultural elements do. Instead of demonstrating how wealthy and generous you are by urging your guests to have a second and third helping of dinner, you do it by providing them smaller amounts of particularly tasty, sophisticated, or expensive dishes. Instead of making a point of avoiding physical exertion when you can, you enter the Boston Marathon. Eventually you and those around you have adapted your behavior, although not your hardwired tastes, to the new environment.

Well off people in developed societies have been able to afford second and third helpings at every meal for a long time. Hence, if my argument is right, they have had time to adapt to a world of plenty. For poor people, being able to eat all they want of more or less what they want is a newer thing, so they are still following the old ways--the pattern of the traditional Jewish (or Italian) mother who insists that her guests have a little more of this and that before they end their meal. Hence, if my conjecture is correct, greater obesity among the poor reflects the lag in adapting to circumstances that are relatively new for them. The rich have had time to adjust.

One implication of this is that, at some point in the past, richer people should have been more often obese than poorer--back when the rich were no longer constrained by the availability of food but the poor still were. That fits my casual impression, but I have no actual data to support it.

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



22 April, 2007

The anti-salt war jerks back into life

Another over-hyped finding of tiny differences -- and this time the differences are not even statistically significant. The article below appears to be a rewrite of a BMJ press release but at the time of writing this I could find no trace of the article in the current issue of BMJ -- which suggests extraordinary eagerness to publicize findings that are yet to be put up for detailed scrutiny -- not unexpected in the heavily politicized BMJ.

But working from the figures below we find that there were only 25 deaths out of a sample size totalling 769 and only a 25% difference between the two subgoups. Reconstructing from that information, it seems that around 10 controls died of heart attacks and 15 salt-eaters died of heart attacks. Given the differing subgroup sizes of 337 and 432, the expected frequencies would be 11 and 14 -- yielding a Chi-squared of 1.00! -- which is nowhere near statistical significance.

Note also that the findings concern hypertensives only. Among people in general those on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And the Japanese eat heaps of salt -- soy sauce is VERY salty -- yet have exceptionally long lifespans. This is really crazy stuff below but the fact that it appeared in "The Times" of London will make it very influential nonetheless

Eating less salt reduces the chances of suffering a heart attack or stroke, the first long-term study of salt's impact on health confirms today. The findings, from a 15-year study, offer the clearest evidence yet that cutting salt consumption saves lives by reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease. People who ate less salty food were found to have a 25 per cent lower risk of cardiac arrest or stroke, and a 20 per cent lower risk of premature death. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, underline the need for population-wide salt reductions in the diet, the scientists conclude.

Despite campaigns to reduce salt intake, such as that run by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), actual evidence of any benefit has been limited. This has enabled the salt industry to contest vigorously the value of such campaigns. Both sides accept that cutting salt consumption reduces blood pressure, although not very dramatically. This ought to translate over the longer term into reductions in strokes and heart attacks, but no studies have been able to show this convincingly until now.

The new findings are the result of work by a US team led by Nancy Cook, of Harvard Medical School, which has followed up two trials originally conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were designed to persuade people to cut their salt intake and to measure how far their blood pressure fell. By pursuing these trials, Dr Cook's team has shown that those who reduced their salt intake did have a lower risk of heart disease and stroke. "Our study provides unique evidence that sodium reduction might prevent cardiovascular disease and should dispel any residual concern that sodium reduction might be harmful," it concludes. The interventions had reduced sodium intake by about 25-35 per cent - roughly the same as is planned by the FSA, which is seeking to reduce daily intake in Britain from an average of 9.5g to 6g ( /3 oz to /5 oz) a day.

Ellen Mason, cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "Salt intake amongst many adults and children in Britain is way too high. Many people could lower the level of salt in their diet by reducing the amount of processed food they eat. Also, by simply checking the labels and switching to a lower salt option, you'll be doing your heart a favour."

But the Salt Manufacturers' Association questioned the quality and conclusions of the study. "The research only relates to subjects who already have high blood pressure. Most people have acknowledged for some time that such individuals may be advised to restrict their salt intake with their GP's advice. "What the evidence does not prove is that salt reduction will have any significant health benefits for the majority of us."

The original studies - called the trials of hypertension prevention (TOHP 1 and 2) - used counselling and advice to persuade participants to reduce intake. In the first trial, 327 healthy men and women aged 30-54 who took part in the intervention were compared with 417 controls who did not. Measurements of sodium in urine showed that a reduction of roughly one third in salt intake had been achieved in the 327 who took part- but blood pressure was found to fall only slightly.

The authors of the original study had no idea if this reduction would be sustained, but estimated that if it were it might reduce stroke deaths by 6 per cent, heart disease deaths by 4 per cent, and deaths from all causes by 3 per cent. However, the follow-up has shown much more marked health benefits. The actual numbers of heart attacks and strokes are small - 76 heart attacks, 19 strokes and 23 heart deaths without previous warning - in both TOPH 1 and 2. So it remains possible that chance, or incomplete follow-up, have distorted the findings.

Graham MacGregor, a professor at St George's University of London, said the size of the benefit was not surprising. "When there was a campaign in Finland to cut salt there was a very large reduction in stroke and heart attacks."

Exactly how salt increases blood pressure is still in dispute. The simplest explanation is that when salt intake is too high, the kidneys cannot pass it all into the urine and some ends up in the bloodstream. This then draws more water into the blood, increasing volume and pressure. But not everybody is equally sensitive to salt, and so not everybody will benefit equally from reducing intake.

Source




ANOTHER BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL IS HEAVILY POLITICIZED: "Lancet" meddles in Australian politics!

Though anybody who knows of their absurd "600,000 Iraqi deaths" claim will not be surprised. The BMJ has also of course long been known for its frantic Leftism. This politicization does of course explain the very low intellectual standards in both journals that I have repeatedly noted on this blog. With their openly avowed contempt for the truth ("There is no such thing as right and wrong") and their failure to consider ALL the facts of most matters, Leftists corrupt everything they touch

A leading international medical journal has denounced the Prime Minister and urged its Australian readers to vote against him in the election. In an editorial titled "Australia: the politics of fear and neglect", The Lancet said John Howard had jeopardised Australia's enviable reputation in medical science with his suggested ban on HIV-positive migrants. It also censured the Health Minister, Tony Abbott, for saying those who spoke up for indigenous health were "simply establishing politically and morally correct credentials", and criticised the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for his stance on climate change. It said Australian politicians were scoring below par on health.

The journal said Australian clinical and health research was "an emblem of excellence" in the Asia-Pacific: "That enviable position is being put at risk by Prime Minister John Howard's indifference to the academic medical community and his profound intolerance to those less secure than himself and his administration."

The latest example was his comment last week that HIV migrants should not be allowed, says the journal, whose editor, Dr Richard Horton, spoke at a conference on global health in Sydney this month. "To any visitor, Australian culture feels progressive and inclusive," The Lancet says. "This attractive exterior belies a strong undercurrent of political conservatism, which Howard is ruthlessly tapping into." The Lancet has a significant readership throughout the world and regularly takes a stand on key medical issues.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



21 April, 2007

HRT now linked to ovarian cancer!

The drumbeat of the anti-HRT war grows louder. Yesterday HRT was accused of causing breast cancer. Today it is accused of causing ovarian cancer -- on equally frivolous grounds. A PDF of the full journal article in "Lancet" is here. I reproduce a media report of it below. Rather than adding to my own comments of yesterday, I follow the media report with a reproduction of Prof. Brignell's comment on the nonsense. Prof. Brignell is a mathematician who campaigns against the ignorant and malicious misuse of statistics

HORMONE replacement therapy, a contested treatment for post-menopausal women that has already been linked to breast cancer, is also associated with ovarian cancer, a study in The Lancet said today.

Women who take HRT are on average 20 per cent likelier to develop and die from ovarian cancer compared to women who have never been on this treatment, according to the research. The evidence comes from a major British investigation into female health, the Million Women Study, covering 1.3 million British women from 1996-2001.

HRT entails taking substitutes for oestrogen or progesterone after natural levels of these key female hormones diminish after menopause. The idea behind it is to reduce symptoms such as hot flushes and vaginal dryness and boost protection against osteoporosis and heart disease.

The British researchers assessed data from 948,000 post-menopausal women, who had been questioned and later given a follow-up exam some three years later. Around 30 per cent were current HRT users; 20 per cent had previously received HRT; and the remaining 50 per cent had never taken it. Across all three groups, a total of 2273 women developed cancer, and 1591 died from it.

The increased risk of cancer, though, was shouldered by current HRT users, especially those who had been taking the hormones for at least five years. The risk was largely unchanged by such factors as a smoking habit or past use of oral contraceptives. Women who had stopped HRT had the same risk level as counterparts who had never taken the treatment.

In a commentary, Steven Narod of the Women's College Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, said the relative risk of 20 per cent might be thought of as small, "but enormous numbers of women have been exposed." In the Million Women Study alone, nearly 500,000 had taken HRT, he pointed out. Extrapolated across the British population, around 1000 extra women died from ovarian cancer between 1991 and 2005 because of HRT.

The HRT link with breast cancer surfaced in 2002 [See my post of 14th. for a comment on THAT crap study], prompting many women in the US to drop the treatment - a trend that notably coincided with a sharp fall in new breast cancer cases in the US. The authors of the new study are led by Valerie Beral of the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, Britain. The paper appears in next Saturday's issue of The Lancet. Beral says HRT's effect should be seen in the context of breast and endometrial (uterine wall) cancer, as well as ovarian cancers. These three types of tumour account for 40 per cent of all cancers diagnosed in British women. "The total incidence of these three cancers in the (Million Women Study) population is 63 per cent higher in current users of HRT than never-users," the study notes.

Source




The empire strikes back

By John Brignell

Like the environmentalists, the epidemiologists do not like to have their hegemony over their corner of the media to be challenged. No sooner has their dangerous and destructive nonsense over breast cancer been thwarted than they come out with even more dangerous and destructive nonsense about ovarian cancer. Valerie Beral, a women noted for the size of her Trojan Numbers, has come out with a relative risk of 1.2.

There are at least two well known confounding factors to which such an observational study such as this are prey:

* If the therapy is successful then the patient will have a marked change of life style.
* The reasons for which the therapy was prescribed in the first place might well pose a risk factor.

The second of these can be eliminated in a properly conducted double-blind randomised trial, but the first cannot.

A personal anecdote will illustrate how this factor works. Last year your bending author was reduced to life as a housebound cripple by a marked increase in arthritic inflammation. Eventually, therapy with Diclofenac and Co-Codomol restored an element of normal living and the patient celebrated by going out and digging over a large allotment. In retrospect this was rather foolish, a such violent activity after a period of forced idleness would have exacerbated any incipient heart disease. Fortunately, survival indicates that there was none.

It seems, however, more likely that the second of these confounding factors would be more important in this case, but more haunting is the possibility of confounding factors we have not thought of.

Which words in the truism "Correlation is not Causation" do the epidemiologists not understand? There is no reason to suppose from these tacky observations that any women at all have been killed by HRT.

Is there anything more despicable than pinning your claim to fame on scaring millions of women out of using a hugely liberating therapy? As for Cancer UK, which we all know from the constant begging letters, it could put the product of its suppliance to better use by supporting science rather than nonsense.

Source

Prof. Brignell is too contemptuous of the study to comment at length on it above but he is making essentially the same point that I do: The very low percentage of women apparently affected makes it highly likely that the result is random noise. That some of the results are statistically significant rules out only one source of random fluctuation -- small sample size. A large enough sample will make ANY observed effect statistically significant. Statistical significance does not and cannot rule out other random (or non-random) events, effects and influences.

Prof. Brignell has some links in his article that I have not reproduced above. See the original for those links

This whole anti-HRT campaign is quite despicable. It aims to get women to take large risks (of osteoporosis etc.) in order to avoid tiny risks (of cancer)

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



20 April, 2007

ANOTHER FRAUDULENT HRT SCARE

This is completely desperate stuff. The minute elevation of risk reported below is way below the 100% increase normally considered necessary for a finding in a low-incidence area to be taken seriously. To sum up: It is just scare-mongering HOKUM. What the data really shows is that HRT is a NEGLIGIBLE risk. Yet again the once-reputable "Lancet" publishes garbage. They just KNOW what is good for you -- like the Leftists they generally are

Women were advised yesterday to think "very carefully" about taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after evidence was published showing that it has killed 1,000 women in Britain since 1991 by increasing their risk of ovarian cancer. HRT increases the risk of the disease by 20 per cent, the biggest investigation of links between HRT and cancer has found. Although the absolute risk is low, millions of women took HRT in the 1990s and so the total impact is large: an extra 1,300 cases of the disease and 1,000 deaths between 1991 and 2005, according to the Million Women Study.

Previous results from the same study have linked HRT with an increased risk of breast and womb cancer. The latest findings suggest that HRT raises the combined risk of all three diseases by more than 60 per cent, the researchers say. Despite a sharp decline in recent years in HRT use, there are believed to be about one million women in Britain still on it.

Valerie Beral, director of the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at the University of Oxford, said: "The results of this study show that not only does HRT increase the risk of getting ovarian cancer, it also increases a woman's risk of dying of ovarian cancer." Ovarian cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women in Britain. Each year about 6,700 women develop the disease and 4,600 die from it.

The findings come from a study of 948,576 post-menopausal women, or a quarter of all women aged 50 to 64 in the country. It was largely funded by Cancer Research UK. About a third of those in the study were taking HRT, and another fifth had taken it in the past. The women were followed for an average of more than five years for signs of ovarian cancer, and seven years for death. During the follow-up period a total of 2,273 women developed ovarian cancer and 1,591 died from it.

These results imply that the use of HRT - of whatever sort - increased the risk of developing and dying from ovarian cancer by 20 per cent, the team reports in the online version of The Lancet. To put the findings in perspective, they mean that over a period of five years there is likely to be one extra case of ovarian cancer among every 2,500 women receiving HRT, and one additional death for every 3,300 women on the therapy.

HRT is used to combat unpleasant symptoms of the menopause, including hot flushes, vaginal dryness and night sweats. It was promoted strongly by doctors in the 1970s, and many women claimed that it had transformed their lives. But in recent years numbers have plummeted after a series of health scares. According to the GP Research Database, the number of women in Britain on HRT fell from two million in 2002 to one million in 2005. John Toy, the medical director of Cancer Research UK, said: "Considering this alongside the increases in risk for breast and endometrial cancer, women should think very carefully about taking HRT. Women who choose to take HRT should aim do so for clear medical need and for the shortest possible time."

The findings were challenged by John Stevenson, of the Royal Brompton Hospital in London and the chairman of the charity Women's Health Concern. "The study grossly overestimates the breast cancer risk, and now we have findings from a five-year study that have to be extended to a 14-year time frame to make them more sensational," he said. "This is not science, and the findings themselves fly in the face of cancer biology."

Breast, ovarian and endo- metrial cancer, which affects the womb lining, account for almost 40 per cent of cancers in women in Britain, and a quarter of female cancer deaths. HRT appears to raise the combined risk of all three diseases by 63 per cent, according to the Million Women Study. "When ovarian, endometrial and breast cancer are taken together, use of HRT results in a material increase in these common cancers," the study authors wrote.

Journal abstract below:

Breast cancer and hormone-replacement therapy in the Million Women Study

Background: Current use of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) increases the incidence of breast cancer. The Million Women Study was set up to investigate the effects of specific types of HRT on incident and fatal breast cancer.

Methods: 1084110 UK women aged 50-64 years were recruited into the Million Women Study between 1996 and 2001, provided information about their use of HRT and other personal details, and were followed up for cancer incidence and death.

Findings: Half the women had used HRT; 9364 incident invasive breast cancers and 637 breast cancer deaths were registered after an average of 2·6 and 4·1 years of follow-up, respectively. Current users of HRT at recruitment were more likely than never users to develop breast cancer (adjusted relative risk 1·66 [95% CI 1·58–1·75], p<0·0001) and die from it (1·22 [1·00–1·48], p=0·05). Past users of HRT were, however, not at an increased risk of incident or fatal disease (1·01 [0·94–1·09] and 1·05 [0·82–1·34], respectively). Incidence was significantly increased for current users of preparations containing oestrogen only (1·30 [1·21–1·40], p<0·0001), oestrogen-progestagen (2·00 [1·88–2·12], p<0·0001), and tibolone (1·45 [1·25–1·68], p<0·0001), but the magnitude of the associated risk was substantially greater for oestrogen-progestagen than for other types of HRT (p<0·0001). Results varied little between specific oestrogens and progestagens or their doses; or between continuous and sequential regimens. The relative risks were significantly increased separately for oral, transdermal, and implanted oestrogen-only formulations (1·32 [1·21–1·45]; 1·24 [1·11–1·39]; and 1·65 [1·26–2·16], respectively; all p<0·0001). In current users of each type of HRT the risk of breast cancer increased with increasing total duration of use. 10 years' use of HRT is estimated to result in five (95% CI 3–7) additional breast cancers per 1000 users of oestrogen-only preparations and 19 (15–23) additional cancers per 1000 users of oestrogen-progestagen combinations. Use of HRT by women aged 50–64 years in the UK over the past decade has resulted in an estimated 20000 extra breast cancers, 15000 associated with oestrogen-progestagen; the extra deaths cannot yet be reliably estimated.

Interpretation: Current use of HRT is associated with an increased risk of incident and fatal breast cancer; the effect is substantially greater for oestrogen-progestagen combinations than for other types of HRT.

Correspondence to: Prof Valerie Beral, Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit, Gibson Building, Radcliffe Infirmary, Woodstock Road, OxfordOX2 6HE, UK




"Speed" gives you brain haemorrhages

Journal abstract (Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007;64:495-502) below:

Stroke in Young Adults Who Abuse Amphetamines or Cocaine

A Population-Based Study of Hospitalized Patients

By Arthur N. Westover et al

Context: The abuse of stimulant drugs is increasing in the western United States. Although numerous case reports and animal studies suggest a link with stroke, epidemiologic studies have yielded conflicting results.

Objective" To test the hypothesis that young adults who abuse amphetamines or cocaine are at a higher risk of stroke.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Using a cross-sectional design and from a quality indicators' database of 3 148 165 discharges from Texas hospitals, we estimated the secular trends from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2003, in the abuse of various drugs and of strokes. We developed separate logistic regression models of risk factors for hemorrhagic (n = 937) and ischemic (n = 998) stroke discharges of persons aged 18 to 44 years in 2003, and for mortality risk in patients with stroke.

Main Outcome Measure: Incidence of stroke using definitions from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's stroke mortality Inpatient Quality Indicator.

Results: From 2000 to 2003, the rate of increase was greatest for abuse of amphetamines, followed by cannabis and cocaine. The rate of strokes also increased, particularly among amphetamine abusers. In 812 247 discharges in 2003, amphetamine abuse was associated with hemorrhagic stroke (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 4.95; 95% confidence interval [CI], 3.24-7.55), but not with ischemic stroke; cocaine abuse was associated with hemorrhagic (OR, 2.33; 95% CI, 1.74-3.11) and ischemic (OR, 2.03; 95% CI, 1.48-2.79) stroke. Amphetamine, but not cocaine, abuse was associated with a higher risk of death after hemorrhagic stroke (OR, 2.63; 95% CI, 1.07-6.50).

Conclusion: Increases in stimulant drug abuse may increase the rate of hospital admissions for strokes and stroke-related mortality.

Note the contrast between this study and the HRT study above. Where the HRT study showed a meaningless 20% increase in risk (off a tiny base), the drug study above showed a nearly 500% increase in risk

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



19 April, 2007

You knew bacon was bad for you, didn't you?

Anything popular will be targeted by the attention-seekers. Nitrites used as preservatives are once again in the crosshairs. The fact that nitrites are found naturally in many "correct" foods (such as broccoli and spinach) seems to have been overlooked. The journal abstract is here. Once again the conclusions appear to rely on comparisons between extreme groups -- which is inherently uninformative about the population at large, suggests weak effects and is very prone to confounding from other influences. For an earlier comment on this perennial scare see here



People who frequently eat cured meats such as ham, hot dogs and bacon face a higher risk of lung disease, researchers said today, citing additives called nitrites as a possible cause. Those who ate cured meat products at least 14 times a month were 78 per cent more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease than people who did not eat these meats, even after the researchers sought to account for many other risk factors including smoking, overall diet and age. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also called COPD, refers to emphysema and chronic bronchitis, which interfere with normal breathing.

This amount of consumption also was associated with poorer overall lung function, according to a study involving data on 7352 Americans age 45 or older. The average age of the people studied was 64.5 years.

The American Meat Institute, an industry trade group, said the findings were based on outdated assumptions about nitrite levels in cured meats. "This article in no way changes a basic fact - and that is that cured meats are among the safest meat products on the market," said institute spokeswoman Janet Riley. "The very premise of this study - that cured meats are high in nitrite - is patently false," Ms Riley added, saying less than 5 per cent of human nitrite intake comes from cured meats and their nitrite levels have declined greatly in recent decades.

The research was led by Dr Rui Jiang of Columbia University Medical Centre in New York and was published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Dr Jiang said nitrites - added to cured meats to prevent spoilage and provide colour - may cause damage to lung tissue resembling emphysema, but added the study's design did not allow her to state definitively that the nitrites caused lung disease. More research is needed before that claim can be made, Dr Jiang said.

She could not rule out, for example, that people who eat a lot of cured meats - hot dogs, cold cuts, sausage, bacon, cured hams and the like - may be more likely to have an unhealthy diet and lifestyle that might account for the higher lung disease risk. The people in the study who ate the most cured meats were more likely to be lower-income men and smokers and were more likely to have diets lacking in fruits, vegetables and a number of vitamins.

Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of COPD. Previous research linking nitrites in cured meats to certain cancers has proven controversial, with many scientists faulting the methodology and conclusions in these studies.

Source

And I suppose it is altogether too wicked of me to mention this:

"Could the salt that preserves hot dogs also preserve your health? Scientists at the National Institutes of Health think so. They've begun infusing sodium nitrite into volunteers in hopes that it could prove a cheap but potent treatment for sickle cell anemia, heart attacks, brain aneurysms, even an illness that suffocates babies."




Killers lurk in spa bath

THERE could be a killer lurking in your spa, and the best way of slaying it and its lethal compadres is simple, effective and very cheap. It's elbow grease.

This week Queensland Health sent out a notification that two visitors to a Gold Coast resort had been diagnosed with legionnaires disease - which they had contracted after using the resort's spa bath.

It makes sense that the warm, moist environment inside the filters and pipes of spa baths and pools would make the perfect place for bugs such as legionnaires pneumophilia to set up home and procreate. Australian Medical Association Queensland infectious diseases expert Michael Whitby said the legionella bug was readily found throughout the world, from Antarctica to jet engine oil, but it was most commonly found in water. He said the major outbreaks in Australia, which include a scare at the Yamanto police station in Ipswich in 2005, had been associated with the cooling towers of large buildings that had not been properly maintained. "They have a lot of metal fragments that help legionella to grow, and for legionella to get into your lungs it has to be in very small particle size so you have to actually spray them out of the airconditioning system to breathe them in," Dr Whitby said.

It's this spray, created when water is expelled at high pressure, that can make spas a risk. Queensland Health senior director of population health Linda Selvey said the mist provided a perfect avenue for bugs to make their way into lungs. "The big issue with spas is that the water is warmer so it provides a nice environment for bugs to live in," Dr Selvey said. "Secondly, because you're forcing air through the pipes at reasonably high pressures to get bubbles, you get a mist of water above the spa pool and you actually acquire legionella infection by breathing in the bugs."

Dr Selvey said the best way to prevent infection was to empty spa pools once a month and manually clean the filters and pipes. "With spa pool maintenance it's very important to empty the pool and pull out the filters and with a bit of elbow grease scrub them clean," she said. "And the emptying and cleaning of filters needs to be done once a month."

There are several types of legionella, but the two that occur most commonly here are pneumophilia and longbeachae. Pneumophilia is the type associated with spas and cooling towers, as it produces pneumonia-like symptoms such as a high temperature, coughing and shortness of breath. Longbeachae is found in soil and is the reason behind many potting mixes carrying safety warnings. Both are potential killers.

This year there have been 12 cases of legionnaires disease in Queensland. Legionella is a relatively modern bug, identified in the late 1970s after several delegates from an American Legion conference in Boston fell ill and died shortly after the meeting. While a good scrub is the best way of keeping pipes and filters clean, washing spas out with degreasing solutions is also important to control buildups of body fats, soap residue, oils and scum

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



18 April, 2007

Stem cells help Australian woman to walk

A sad day when Indian bureaucracy is less restrictive than Australia's



A BRISBANE woman who was paralysed in a car accident is walking again after receiving controversial stem-cell treatment in India. Australian doctors told mother-of-three Sonya Smith 18 months ago that she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Her spine was broken after she was crushed by her car when the handbrake failed and it rolled down a hill. But after eight weeks of embryonic stem-cell injections, Mrs Smith, 45, is now able to stand with the aid of calipers and has regained bowel and bladder control.

She says she has recovered "deep sensation" in her thighs and feet and has been able to swing her legs. "When I first moved my toes, I was blown away," she said. "The doctors in Australia told me I would never walk again, but now I actually think I will be able to - without calipers some day."

Mrs Smith heard about the treatment from her sister, who lives in India, where medical guidelines are less stringent. Phil Smith, 44, said yesterday that his wife's recovery had been "amazing". Mr Smith, an editor with Channel 7 in Brisbane, spoke from the family home in Bardon where the couple live with their daughters, Kirsty, 10, Holly, 8, and Carly, 7. He said his wife would be coming home next month for Holly's birthday. "I've been speaking to her every day and she gets better all the time," he said. "It's been hard for her having the treatment in India and we hope one day it is available here. "Of course there are concerns about stem cells, but Sonya wouldn't have had a chance."

Mrs Smith is one of more than 300 patients who have been treated in New Delhi by controversial stem-cell pioneer Dr Geeta Shroff. The treatment, forbidden in Australia, involves collecting stem cells from embryos and injecting them into injured or diseased patients. When taken from embryos, the cells are undeveloped and seem better able to replace damaged tissue.

Critics have described the treatment as irresponsible and unethical. But Dr Shroff shrugged off the scepticism. "These are people who are desperate and I have given them hope. What is wrong with that?" she said. Dr Shroff claims to have an "inexhaustible" bank of stem cells from a single embryo, which she uses to treat Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease. She has never submitted her work for international scrutiny.

Australian legislation was passed last year allowing scientists to clone human embryos to extract stem cells, but only for research. This month, state MPs will vote on whether to allow the practice in Queensland. Mrs Smith, a teacher aide at Petrie Terrace State School, urged governments to do more to make the treatment available in Australia.

Source




New HIV drug shows 'unprecedented' results: study

A new category of drugs has shown promising results for HIV/AIDS patients who failed to respond to other treatments, a new study shows. Especially when combined with other medications, raltegravir - the first in a new class of anti-retroviral drugs called integrase inhibitors - dramatically reduced the presence of the HIV virus and boosted immunity in clinical-trial patients, according to the study in the British journal, The Lancet.

Integrase inhibitors act by targeting and disrupting an enzyme that facilitates the insertion of the HIV virus into the host's cellular genome. In clinical tests on 178 patients with advanced HIV infections that had proved resistant to standard treatments, raltegravir "showed unprecedented levels of virological efficiency", virologists Pedro Cahn and Omar Sued wrote in a commentary in the same journal.

The treatment "achieved virological suppression even in patients with limited options", they wrote, predicting that the new drug would "have a major role in salvage therapy", the term used to describe last-ditch efforts to save those with highly-compromised immune systems. "Clearly, we are in a new era of anti-retroviral therapy," they said.

There are three types of enzyme needed for HIV to replicate, namely reverse-transcriptase, protease and integrase. Up to now, no drug has successfully inhibited integrase enzymes.

A team of US researchers at Merck Research Laboratories in Westpoint, Pennsylvania, led by Beatriz Grinsztejn, divided the 178 patients into four groups during clinical trials. Each of three groups were given different doses of raltegravir, ranging from 200 to 600 mg, and the fourth group received a placebo. All four also took a basic "background treatment". After 24 weeks, the amount of HIV genetic material in the blood dropped below a measurable threshold (50 copies per ml) in 65 per cent of the patients taking raltegravir, nearly five times as many as the placebo group. Immune system responses were also dramatically improved. "If no long-term unexpected side-effects or resistance issues emerge, raltegravir will have a major role in salvage therapy, particularly in combination with another new drug," Cahn and Sued concluded.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



17 April, 2007

Broccoli, soy and cancer

The article below is a rewrite of a press release from the AACR here. The AACR has not chosen to make the abstract available online but it should be noted that the research has not yet passed peer review so the "findings" should not be taken seriously at this stage

EATING foods like broccoli and soy has been linked to lower cancer rates, and California researchers said today that they may have discovered the biological mechanism behind the protective effect. Using cells in a lab dish, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that diindolymethane (DIM), a compound resulting from digestion of cruciferous vegetables, and genistein, an isoflavone in soy, reduce the production of two proteins needed for breast and ovarian cancers to spread. "We think these compounds might slow or prevent the metastasis of breast and ovarian cancer, which would greatly increase the effectiveness of current treatments," said Erin Hsu, a UCLA graduate student in molecular toxicology.

The UCLA team, which reported its finding at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, will next test the theory in mice. The findings highlight "an entirely unique mechanism ... Preventing the invasion and metastasis of cancer cells is crucial," said Dr Alan Kristal, associate head of the cancer prevention program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle.

Cancer cells express very high levels of a surface receptor known as CXCR4, while the organs to which the cancers spread secrete high levels of CXCL12, a ligand that binds to that particular receptor. This attraction stimulates the invasive properties of cancer cells and acts like a homing device, drawing the cancer cells to organs like the liver or brain.

The study found that when cancer cells were treated with either DIM or genistein, movement toward CXCL12 is reduced by at least 80 per cent compared to untreated cells. Hsu says that this same chemotactic attraction is thought to play a role in the development of more than 23 different types of cancer.

The amount of DIM and genistein used in the study is probably comparable to use of a high dose of supplements, and is likely not achievable through consumption of food alone, the researchers said.

Both DIM and genistein are already being developed for use as a preventive, and a chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer, although more extensive toxicological studies are needed, they added.

Source




Food fanaticism hurts single mothers

Comment from Australia by Sue Dunlevy

I DECIDED I'd had enough of the nanny state the day my kids came home in disgrace because they had hummus for lunch - it was the same day the ACT Government banned me from walking my dog to school. Business is always whingeing about government regulations, but what about the red tape strangling family life? Governments are now trying to micro-manage every aspect of a parent's job - from telling you what you can feed your kids and how you can discipline them to how much television they can watch. Now Kevin Rudd wants to test what sort of a parent you are by measuring your child's waistline, empathy, curiosity and whether they pick up a pencil dropped by a classmate.

My one luxury as a working mum used to be lunch order day - but the healthy canteen policy has robbed me of that. Instead of sleeping in one day a week I'm now up packing lunches - because cream cheese and lettuce sandwiches just don't have the same appeal to my kids as chicken nuggets. "Mum, I don't do sandwiches," my 11-year-old solemnly informed me during the canteen's healthy sandwich drive.

Even the task of concocting a healthy home-made lunch has become a feat of Olympic proportions, thanks to the school's new nut-free policy. After calling a family conference to workshop lunch ideas that removed nuts, muesli bars and peanut butter from my kids' lunchboxes, I thought I had the perfect solution: chicken and hummus rolls that are not only good but tasty.

Wrong. Hummus (which I never realised until now is a nut) is also banned because it has sesame seed paste in it.

That just happened to be the day the school newsletter informed me that getting the kids fit by walking the dog to school with them was now also illegal and I'd be fined if I took the dog on to school grounds.

If governments want to wrap families in red tape they should at least make sure the rules they set are consistent. Do they want us to feed our kids healthy food and get them fit or not?

What annoys me most about the burgeoning nanny state is that all families are being penalised by rules meant to stop the bad practices of a minority. If one in four children are overweight, that means the overwhelming majority aren't. The 75 per cent of families who buy their kids one junk food meal a week at the school canteen as a treat are penalised because a few parents feed their kids junk more often.

This is an election year and I reckon it's time for families to fight back against the government red tape that is taking the spontaneity out of parenting. Ban boring televised debates between two leaders and put them to a real life test. Before we let Kevin Rudd or John Howard impose any more we-know-better-than-you rules on families, they should have to try to battle with the problems their rules have already caused.

Let's run the election campaign like a reality TV show. Instead of touring the country making staged policy announcements, John Howard and Kevin Rudd should each be put in a suburban home with two kids for five weeks. Hidden cameras can show the voters how they manage the family budget with child care fees of $90 a day and subsidies of just $4.57 a day. Every morning they will have to come up with a packed lunch that's not only healthy but complies with the school's nut-free, seed-free, taste-free allergy policy and yet is still eaten by the children.

They'll have to work out how to fit in exercising the dog and the kids while getting the kids to school without straying on to school grounds. They'll have to juggle working overtime with the massive penalties for picking your kids up late from childcare and still get home in time to cook a healthy meal. They'll have to figure out how to entertain the starving and exhausted kids who aren't allowed to watch television or play on the computer and can't go to the local park because it has been stripped of its play equipment because of public liability risk.

And, before they can creep exhausted into bed, John and Kevin will have to find a non-existent product which will kill nits and spend an hour of quality time combing lice out of the childrens' hair. Only when they can do all this do they deserve the right to impose more new rules on us.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



16 April, 2007

Breast cancer linked to alcohol

This appears to be a "consensus" arrived at in a "conference" so may well be wrong. If I know anything about what can be expected of the evidence, it will depend on tiny group differences that can only be fished out with the usual special medical statistics

DRINKING alcohol directly causes two common cancers, breast and bowel, a landmark international study has found. The World Health Organisation says there is enough evidence to add breast and colorectal (colon or bowel) cancer to the list of cancers already associated with drinking alcohol, which include mouth, throat and liver cancer.

WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) estimated those who drank 50 grams of alcohol a day - the equivalent of five standard drinks - were 40per cent more at risk of getting colorectal cancer than non-drinkers. Women who drank 50grams a day faced a 50per cent increased risk of breast cancer. Even women who had 18grams a day - less than two standard drinks - showed a significant increase in cancer risk. The type of alcohol had no impact, with beer, wine and spirits all considered to have a carcinogenic effect.

IARC director Peter Boyle said the link between cancer and alcohol consumption was more likely than previously thought and a major concern "in view of the changing drinking patterns of women in many countries". The findings are the work of 26 scientists from 15 countries and are published in the April issue of Lancet Oncology.

Source




There is a general syndrome of biological bad functioning

Ever since the longditudinal studies of high IQ kids by Terman and Oden (beginning in the 1920s) we have known that high IQ tends to indicate a syndrome of generally good biological functioning so it is no surprise that the opposite is found too. The article below has the expected nonsensical interpretation of the causal chain but the underlying findings seem sound

ANTISOCIAL behaviour doesn't just harm society - it may also harm the perpetrators' health. That's the message of a 30-year study examining the hidden costs of petty crime to society. The researchers, who monitored 500 children for 30 years, found that naughty boys who didn't reform in adulthood suffered worse health than their peers, including many who were equally deprived in childhood. The researchers are now seeking a way of identifying those who are most likely to become persistent offenders, with a view to intervening before it is too late.

"It's the first study to demonstrate the link between children who engage in antisocial behaviour and deficits in physical health when they grow up," says study leader Candice Odgers of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. As well as accounting for more than their share of crime in later life, "they also incur hitherto unrecognised medical costs", she says.

Odgers analysed data on more than 500 men in their early 30s from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in Dunedin, New Zealand. The results, published in Archives of General Psychiatry (vol 64, p 476), show that individuals whose bad behaviour began in childhood and persisted into adulthood were twice as likely to be infected with the herpes virus and three times as likely to suffer from chronic bronchitis or gum disease as those who never engaged in bad behaviour.

Although these individuals accounted for just 10 per cent of the sample, they were responsible for 18 per cent of traffic injuries, 29 per cent of the days spent in psychiatric hospitals, 72 per cent of the months spent in jail and 42 per cent of the total months where study members were homeless or taken in by others. Persistent offenders also had three times the healthy blood level of C-reactive protein, a marker that indicates raised risk of heart attacks or stroke. It is surprising to see this marked risk for heart disease in such young men, Odgers says. "As we follow them to their 50s and 60s, the health burden will likely get even worse."

Her analysis so far suggests that nurture plays a strong role in determining who is most likely to offend, and their subsequent health. For example, 40 per cent of persistent offenders came from families of low economic status, and 23 per cent experienced maltreatment as a child - at least double that in any other group.

Odgers's study reinforces previous research that early intervention could help. Around a quarter of the sample were badly behaved as children, but reformed at adolescence. Many of them had the same deprived backgrounds as the persistent offenders, yet by the age of 32 they were almost as healthy as the controls. The key question, says Odgers, is how to identify which boys are most likely to offend in later life. Possible markers include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - which affected 38 per cent of persistent offenders - and a family history of alcohol addiction. Further analyses are under way to assess the impact of genes.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



15 April, 2007

'Fat' gene found by scientists

A GENE that contributes to obesity has been identified for the first time, promising to explain why some people easily put on weight while others with similar lifestyles stay slim. People who inherit one version of the gene rather than another are 70 per cent more likely to be obese, British scientists have discovered. One in six people has the most vulnerable genetic make-up and weighs an average 3kg more than those with the lowest risk. They also have 15 per cent more body fat.

The findings provide the first robust link between a common gene and obesity, and could eventually lead to new ways of tackling one of the most significant causes of ill health in the developed world. Obesity is a main cause of heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes. [Rubbish!]

If the biological function of the gene, known as FTO, can now be understood, it could become possible to design drugs that manipulate it to help people to control their weight. "Even though we have yet to fully understand the role played by the FTO gene in obesity, our findings are a source of great excitement," Mark McCarthy, of Britain's University of Oxford, who led the research, said. "By identifying this genetic link it should be possible to improve our understanding of why some people are more obese, with all the associated implications such as increased risk of diabetes and heart disease. New insights will hopefully pave the way for us to explore novel ways of treating this condition."

While it has long been understood from family studies that obesity is heavily influenced by genetics, scientists have struggled to pin down individual genes that are involved. A handful of serious genetic mutations that cause rare obesity disorders such as Prader-Willi Syndrome have been found, but the search for common genes that affect an ordinary person's risk of becoming obese or overweight has remained elusive.

The effect of FTO emerged from a key study of the genetic origins of disease funded by the Wellcome Trust known as the Case Control Consortium, in which 2,000 people with type 2 diabetes had their genomes compared to 3,000 healthy controls. Scientists from Oxford and the University of Exeter first found that certain versions of the FTO gene were more common among people with type 2 diabetes, but that the effect disappeared when the data were adjusted for obesity. This led them to wonder whether FTO really influenced obesity instead, and they followed up their theory in a further 37,000 people.

FTO comes in two varieties, and everyone inherits two copies of the gene. The team found that those who inherit two copies of one variant - 16 per cent of white Europeans - were 70 per cent more likely to be obese than those who inherited two copies of the other variant. The 50 per cent of subjects who inherited one copy of each FTO variant had a 30 per cent higher risk of obesity. Those in the highest risk group weighed an average of 3kg more and those at medium risk were an average of 1.2kg heavier. In each case the extra weight was entirely accounted for by more body fat, not greater muscle or extra height. The results, published in the journal Science, apply to men and women, and to children as young as 7.

FTO will not be the only gene that influences obesity, and inheriting a particular variant will not necessarily make anyone fat. "This is not a gene for obesity, it is a gene that contributes to risk," Professor McCarthy said. The research involved too many people to control for exercise and diet, so it is not yet known whether FTO affects how much people eat or how active they are. But it may explain how people with apparently similar lifestyles differ in propensity to put on weight. Independent experts called the discovery highly significant. Susan Jebb, of the MRC Human Nutrition Unit, said: "This research provides clear evidence of a biological mechanism which makes some people more susceptible to gaining weight in a world where food is plentiful and sedentary lifestyles the norm."

Source




Gonorrhoea joins 'superbugs' list

US health officials are recommending wider use of a new drug to treat gonorrhoea because the sexually transmitted disease is steadily becoming resistant to the longtime standard antibiotic. Fluoroquinolones, a class of antibiotics that includes Cipro, have been the most common way to treat the bacterial disease since the early 1990s. Since then, gonorrhoea has grown increasingly resistant to those drugs. The Federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that a different class of antibiotics, cephalosporins, be used instead.

"Gonorrhoea has now joined the list of other superbugs for which treatment options have become dangerously few," said Dr Henry Masur, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America. "To make a bad problem even worse, we're also seeing a decline in the development of new antibiotics to treat these infections."

The CDC made the new recommendation after discovering that nearly seven per cent of gonorrhoea cases among heterosexual men in a survey of 26 US cities last year had drug-resistant strains of the disease. In 2001, only about 0.6 per cent of gonorrhoea cases among heterosexual men were drug-resistant. "That leaves us with a single class of highly effective antibiotics," said Dr John Douglas Jr, director of the CDC's division of STD prevention. Other experts called the situation perilous. It's the first time cephalosporins have been recommended to treat gonorrhoea for the entire US population, although the CDC recommended the antibiotics to treat against drug-resistant gonorrhoea in California and Hawaii in 2002. Two years later, the CDC made the same recommendation to treat the bacterial infection among American men who have sex with men.

The newly recommended class of antibiotics includes the generic drug ceftriaxone, also known under the brand name Rocephin, which must be injected and "works very well" although the drug is not commonly stocked in doctor's offices, Douglas said. In contrast, Cipro and other fluoroquinolones were more commonly available and easy to use because they could be taken orally in a single dose. Ceftriaxone must be given as a shot and costs about $US20 ($A24).

The CDC estimates that more than 700,000 people in the US acquire gonorrhoea each year through sexual contact. It is the second most commonly reported infectious disease in the United States, the infectious disease society says. The highest rates of infection are among sexually active teens, young adults and African-Americans. Because many people don't have obvious symptoms, they can unknowingly spread it to others. Though treatable, gonorrhoea puts people at greater risk of catching the AIDS virus. In women, gonorrhoea can cause pelvic inflammatory disease. In men, it can cause epididymitis, a painful condition of the testicles that can lead to infertility if untreated, the CDC said.

In the survey of 26 cities last year, Philadelphia had the highest percentage of drug-resistant cases with almost 27 per cent, followed by areas in California and Hawaii where health officials long have known about gonorrhoea drug resistance. A quarter of gonorrhoea cases among heterosexual men in Honolulu, San Diego and Orange County, California, were drug-resistant, followed by 22.5 per cent of cases in San Francisco and 22 per cent in Long Beach, California. More than 15 per cent of cases in Miami were drug-resistant to the bacteria, the CDC said.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



14 April, 2007

HRT PANIC FINALLY LAID TO REST?

There was some crap science reported in 2002 that encouraged older women to give up their Hormone Replacement Therapy. The science was crap because the differences between groups that it relied on were not apparently statistically significant. See my post of October 27 2003. There is also a dismissive academic re-analysis of the 2002 "findings" here.

Nonetheless, everybody hates drug companies so doctors everywhere jumped on the bandwagon and tried to get women off their pills. We now see how dangerous crap science is. It looks like the advice could have killed a lot of women. Read this report:

"Hormone replacement therapy significantly increases the life expectancy of older women, but only if they begin taking the drugs soon after the onset of the menopause, a major review of the evidence has found. A new analysis of 30 trials involving a total of 26,708 women has revealed that the benefits of the treatment substantially outweigh the risks, so long as it is started before a woman reaches the age of 60. In women who started HRT at 56, the risk of death from all causes was cut by 39 per cent".

Some more high quality data has just emerged which scotches the risk of increased heart attacks in women on HRT but which did find a slightly increased incidence of stroke. Abstract follows:

Postmenopausal hormone therapy and risk of cardiovascular disease by age and years since menopause

By Rossouw JE et al.

CONTEXT: The timing of initiation of hormone therapy may influence its effect on cardiovascular disease.

OBJECTIVE: To explore whether the effects of hormone therapy on risk of cardiovascular disease vary by age or years since menopause began.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Secondary analysis of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) randomized controlled trials of hormone therapy in which 10,739 postmenopausal women who had undergone a hysterectomy were randomized to conjugated equine estrogens (CEE) or placebo and 16,608 postmenopausal women who had not had a hysterectomy were randomized to CEE plus medroxyprogesterone acetate (CEE + MPA) or placebo. Women aged 50 to 79 years were recruited to the study from 40 US clinical centers between September 1993 and October 1998.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Statistical test for trend of the effect of hormone therapy on coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke across categories of age and years since menopause in the combined trials.

RESULTS: In the combined trials, there were 396 cases of CHD and 327 cases of stroke in the hormone therapy group vs 379 cases of CHD and 239 cases of stroke in the placebo group. For women with less than 10 years since menopause began, the hazard ratio (HR) for CHD was 0.76 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.50-1.16); 10 to 19 years, 1.10 (95% CI, 0.84-1.45); and 20 or more years, 1.28 (95% CI, 1.03-1.58) (P for trend = .02). The estimated absolute excess risk for CHD for women within 10 years of menopause was -6 per 10,000 person-years; for women 10 to 19 years since menopause began, 4 per 10,000 person-years; and for women 20 or more years from menopause onset, 17 per 10,000 person-years. For the age group of 50 to 59 years, the HR for CHD was 0.93 (95% CI, 0.65-1.33) and the absolute excess risk was -2 per 10,000 person-years; 60 to 69 years, 0.98 (95% CI, 0.79-1.21) and -1 per 10,000 person-years; and 70 to 79 years, 1.26 (95% CI, 1.00-1.59) and 19 per 10,000 person-years (P for trend = .16). Hormone therapy increased the risk of stroke (HR, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.12-1.56). Risk did not vary significantly by age or time since menopause. There was a nonsignificant tendency for the effects of hormone therapy on total mortality to be more favorable in younger than older women (HR of 0.70 for 50-59 years; 1.05 for 60-69 years, and 1.14 for 70-79 years; P for trend = .06).

CONCLUSIONS: Women who initiated hormone therapy closer to menopause tended to have reduced CHD risk compared with the increase in CHD risk among women more distant from menopause, but this trend test did not meet our criterion for statistical significance. A similar nonsignificant trend was observed for total mortality but the risk of stroke was elevated regardless of years since menopause. These data should be considered in regard to the short-term treatment of menopausal symptoms.

Putting that into plain English: 2% of women on the pills had a stroke versus 1% who were not on anything. That's a pretty tiny risk. And all drugs and therapies have side effects. The iron rule of drug therapy is: No side effects = no main effects either. So the slightly increased risk of stroke has to be weighed against the risk of brittle bones. Any woman with either a family history of osteoporosis or some osteoporosis already visible in herself via a bone-density scan would be pretty foolish not to go onto HRT in my non-medical opinion. By going onto HRT you would be taking a tiny risk in order to avert an almost certain major problem.

There are some more reactions to the recent study here.

NHS blog doctor has a coverage of the subject but I cannot see why he is so indecisive about what to recommend in the circumstances. Maybe he can't follow the statistics. He would not be alone in that. I used to teach social statistics in a major Australian university and I find medical statistics pretty obfuscatory. They seem uniformly designed to make mountains out of molehills.

Many times in the academic literature I have excoriated my colleagues in psychology and sociology for going ga-ga over very weak correlations but what I find in the medical literature makes the findings in the social sciences look positively muscular. In fact, medical findings are almost never reported as correlations -- because to do so would exhibit how laughably trivial they generally are.

The 2002 study was the basis for a great drama, with the risk of breast cancer particularly highlighted. The study was halted when too many women on HRT were getting cancer. The women on HRT in the study were told to throw away their pills because they were too risky. And millions of women worldwide followed suit.

But what they actually found was that 3 women in a thousand in their study group who were NOT taking HRT pills got breast cancer. So how many who WERE taking HRT got breast cancer? 4. Yes. 4. 4 out of a thousand compared to 3 out of a thousand. See here. Some people have just got no sense of proportion.

So, regardless of statistical significance (statistical significance simply tell you that the result was unlikely to be an effect of small sample size), there was absolutely no real-world significance in the result. It could have been due to any number of randomly-present factors. Aren't we lucky to have such wise medical attention-seekers researchers to guide us?




Royal Canadian Food Cops

Here we go again. The headline-hungry mob of food scolds at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) have trotted out (or perhaps invented) another statistic claiming to link a high death toll with a food ingredient they don't approve of. This time it comes from Bill Jeffery, CSPI's national coordinator for Canada, who told Toronto's Globe and Mail today that excess salt consumption -- a longstanding CSPI bogeyman -- is costing our neighbors to the north 15,000 lives per year.

It should come as no surprise that Jeffery failed to offer a shred of proof for the figure, and that science indicates little or no link between salt intake and increased mortality. To name just one example: A study published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension found that "few data link sodium intake to health outcomes, and that which is available is inconsistent."

Jeffery's evidence-free estimation is eerily similar to CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson's 2003 assertion that acrylamide -- a chemical found in CSPI no-nos like potato chips and French fries -- causes "tens of thousands" of cancers among Canadians. As we pointed out in a brief to the FDA, numerous scientific investigations have demonstrated no link between acrylamide in food and human cancers. And, in those few instances in which acrylamide was found to have some adverse health consequences, you would literally need to eat your weight in fries every day to be at risk.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



13 April, 2007

It's official: diets make you fatter

THE world's largest study of weight loss has shown diets do not work for the vast majority of slimmers, and most dieters put more weight back on. More than two-thirds pile the kilos straight back on, raising the danger of heart attack, stroke and diabetes. Researchers warned the strain this repeated weight loss and gain places on the body meant most people would have been better off not dieting at all. The findings, published in the American Psychologist journal, follow other research released in 2004 that showed 2.5 million Australians had tried or intended to try a low-carb diet.

Last night, the US scientists behind the latest research - the most thorough and comprehensive analysis of its kind - said dieting simply did not work. The University of California researchers analysed the results of more than 30 studies involving thousands of slimmers. Although the overview did not name specific weight loss plans, popular diets in recent years include the low carbohydrate, high protein Atkins diet and the GI diet, which is rich in slow-burning wholegrain carbohydrates.

Pooling the results of the various studies clearly showed that, while people did lose weight initially, most quickly put all the weight back on. In fact, most people ended up weighing more than they did to begin with. Researcher Dr Traci Mann said: "You can initially lose 5 per cent to 10 per cent of your weight on any number of diets. "But after this honeymoon period, the weight comes back. "We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more."

Dr Mann's research showed that up to two-thirds of dieters put on all the weight they lost - and more - over a four to five-year period. Half of those taking part in one study were more than 5kg heavier five years later, while dieters taking part in another study actually ended up heavier than other volunteers who hadn't tried to lose weight. A four-year study into the health of 19,000 men revealed that most of those who put on weight had dieted in the years before the start of the study.

Bleak as these figures seem, the true picture could be even worse, as it is thought that most people lie about their weight and don't like to tell researchers that their weight has started to creep up again. Weight loss expert Dr Samantha Thomas from Monash University in Melbourne said Australian research supported the US findings. "We've also seen that dieting can be linked to a lot of poor mental health outcomes," she said. "That just means that people take the weight off and feel really great about themselves and when they put the weight on again - which is kind of inevitable with yo-yo dieting - that people become depressed, have really low self-esteem and feel even worse about themselves than when they went on the diet in the first place."

Dr Thomas said people who struggled with their weight often became discouraged when, after embarking on fad diets, they found the results were not long-term. "The really awful thing about dieting is that it's become a cultural or fashionable thing and most people have spent lots of years and thousands of dollars on it, when there's no evidence to suggest that there's long-term weight loss benefits," she said.

Rebecca McPhee from Nutrition Australia agreed: "Dieting works in the short term but it just encourages unhealthy behaviours in the long term because it puts the body under so much strain. "Everyone is time-poor and they want results quickly, so they diet and then regain the weight after going back to eating normally. "If you look at The Biggest Loser, for example, the contestants lose too much weight, far too quickly, and they haven't developed the sort of skills to then go away and manage their diets."

Source




BACTERIA AND MOULD IN CARS

I don't think this should bother anyone too much but it may be worth bearing in mind

If you're like most people you spend at least a few hours a day in the car--whether it's commuting to and from work, running to the grocery store or picking up the kids from a soccer game. But though you might think twice before touching the seat on a public bus or holding the rail on the subway, you probably don't think too much about your car's cleanliness. Sure, there are coffee stains from a few weeks ago on your cup holder and an inch of dust coating your dashboard.

But it isn't hurting anybody, is it? Research shows otherwise. Charles Gerba, a professor at the University of Arizona who has been researching germ hot spots for years, showed in a 2006 study that our cars are littered with bacteria--and in a few places you might not expect. The dashboard, for instance, turned out to have the second-largest amount of microorganisms present. While often untouched, its vents may draw bacteria via the air circulation system. The fact that it's usually the warmest spot in a car, since the sun shines directly on it, also promotes germ growth, says Gerba, who worked on the study with University of Arizona research specialist Sheri Maxwell. A spot where you've spilled food, such as fries or donut crumbs, may look harmless. But spills produced the most bacteria among the car sites tested.

The researchers sampled 11 different sites inside 100 cars in Illinois, Arizona, Florida, California and Washington, D.C., and looked for both mold and bacteria. The study also examined variables such as vehicle type, whether children traveled in the car, geographic location and the gender and marital status of the drivers.

Single people and men proved to have the cleanest cars and those in Arizona had the lowest bacteria numbers, while married people and women had the germiest vehicles. That's because women tend to drive the family car, which holds the car seats and harbors children's germs, the study found. More bacteria were isolated in vans and SUVs, typical family vehicles, than in cars.

But beyond whether you have children, the city you call home can make it easier or harder to keep your car clean. Of the cities tested, Tampa, Fla., ranked highest in average amounts of bacteria. Thanks to its humid, high temperatures, the city's drivers had 10 times more bacteria in their cars than Tucson, Ariz., residents. Higher average monthly rainfall in cities also translated to more bacteria, according to the study, possibly because bacteria can survive longer in moist environments. Cars in Chicago, on the other hand, had 15 times more mold occurrences than those in Tampa due to the differences in temperature.

If your car is suddenly starting to sound like it needs a cleaning, Gerba recommends disinfecting it once a week. Start with any food stains and work your way down to the change holder and steering wheel, the place our hands come into contact with the most. "Don't become overly paranoid," Gerba says. "Just clean the seat before the kids start sticking to the bottom."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



12 April, 2007

AMAZING ADVANCE FOR DIABETICS

Diabetics using stem-cell therapy have been able to stop taking insulin injections for the first time, after their bodies started to produce the hormone naturally again. In a breakthrough trial, 15 young patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes were given drugs to suppress their immune systems followed by transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood. The results show that insulin-dependent diabetics can be freed from reliance on needles by an injection of their own stem cells. The therapy could signal a revolution in the treatment of the condition, which affects more than 300,000 Britons. People with type 1 diabetes have to give themselves regular injections to control blood-sugar levels, as their ability to create the hormone naturally is destroyed by an immune disorder.

All but two of the volunteers in the trial, details of which are published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), do not need daily insulin injections up to three years after stopping their treatment regimes. The findings were released to reporters yesterday as the future of US stem-cell research was being debated in Washington.

Stem cells are immature, unprogrammed cells that have the ability to grow into different kinds of tissue and can be sourced from people of all ages. Previous studies have suggested that stem-cell therapies offer huge potential to treat a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neuron disease. A study by British scientists in November also reported that stem-cell injections could repair organ damage in heart attack victims. But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells - those acquired from human embryos - is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

The JAMA study provides the first clinical evidence for the efficacy of stem cells in type 1 diabetes. Sufferers of the chronic condition, which normally emerges in childhood or early adulthood, have to inject themselves at least four times a day. Type 2 diabetes, which tends to affect people later in life, is linked to lifestyle factors such as obesity. There are almost two million type 2 diabetics in Briton, most of whom control their blood-sugar levels with pills or through diet.

The new study, by a joint team of Brazilian and American scientists, found that one of the first patients to undergo the procedure has not used any supplemental synthetic insulin for three years. "Very encouraging results were obtained in a small number of patients with early-onset disease," the authors, led by Julio Voltarelli, from the University of Sao Paulo in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil. write. "Ninety-three per cent of patients achieved different periods of insulin independence and treatment-related toxicity was low, with no mortality."

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's own immune system malfunctions and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, causing a shortage in the hormone. By the time most patients receive a clinical diagnosis, 60 to 80 per cent of their beta cells have been wiped out. The disease progresses from this point very quickly, and can result in serious long-term complications including blindness, kidney failure, heart disease and stroke.

Dr Voltarelli's team hoped that if they intervened early enough they could wipe out and then rebuild the body's immune system by using stem cells, preverving a reservoir of beta cells and allowing them to to regenerate. They enrolled Brazilian diabetics aged between 14 and 31 who had been diagnosed within the previous six weeks. After stem cells had been harvested from their blood, they then underwent a mild form of chemotherapy to eliminate the white blood cells causing damage to the pancreas. They were then given transfusions of their own stem cells to help rebuild their immune systems.

Richard Burt, a co-author of the study from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said that 14 of the 15 patients were insulin-free for some time following the treatment. Eleven of those were able to dispense with supplemental insulin immediately following the infusion of stem cells and have not had recourse to synthetic insulin since then, he said. "Two other patients needed some supplemental insulin for 12 and 20 months after the procedure, but eventually both were able to wean themselves from taking daily shots," he added. One patient went 12 months without shots, but relapsed a year after treatment after suffering a viral infection, and resumed daily insulin injections. Another volunteer was eliminated from the study because of complications. The therapy, known as autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, has already shown benefits to individuals with a range of auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and lupus.

There are still question marks about exactly how the treatment works, and further studies will be required to fully evaluate it's safety and efficacy. "As a research scientist I am always hesitant to speak of a cure, but the initial results have been good and show the importance of conducting more trials," Dr Burt said. Given the right funding opportunities, university hospitals in London could be conducting research into the therapy within the next 12 months, he added. "It will probably be five to eight years before we see a treatment being widely available," he said. In an accompanying editorial in JAMA, Dr Jay Skyler, of the Diabetes Research Institute at the University of Miami, wrote: "Research in this field is likely to explode in the next few years and should include randomised controlled trials, as well as mechanistic studies."

Source




Smokers have daughters?

If true it is odd that it has not been picked up before

COUPLES who smoke when they conceive a child are almost twice as likely to have a girl, according to new research that suggests tobacco "kills" male foetuses. An Australian fertility expert has voiced concern that the startling results could encourage prospective parents to take up smoking to determine their baby's gender.

In an analysis of 9000 pregnancies between 1998 and 2003, researchers at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in Britain found that mothers who smoked during pregnancy were a third less likely to have a boy than non-smokers. When the father also smoked, the chance of having a boy was almost halved. The researchers believe that chemicals in cigarettes, like nicotine, inhibit sperm carrying male, or Y, chromosomes from fertilising eggs. The study's leader, Professor Bernard Brabin, said the results raised serious questions about the impact of smoking on population balance. "The message is clear: if you want an increased chance of a male baby, don't smoke during pregnancy," Professor Brabin said.

Dr Anne Clark, of the Fertility Society of Australia, said it was already known that male embryos were less robust and more likely to miscarry than females. "More male are conceived than girls but about the same number are born, once this weakness is accounted for," Dr Clark said, "but we didn't know about this smoking connection." She said she was concerned they could motivate parents wanting a girl child to smoke. "If people think that smoking might get them what they want, they're wrong," Dr Clark said. "The mother is going to be three times more likely to have a fertility problem and twice as likely to have a miscarriage if she takes up [smoking] around . conception. The message is, don't smoke at all if you want a child."

Source




Fat kids not schools' fault

Australian writer Anita Quigley has some sharp words for the "obesity" whiners

OF all the middle-class, neurosis-inducing, guilt-ridden topics, the subject of children's eating habits takes the cake - low-fat of course. But it really is very simple: If you are the parent of a fat child and think his or her school canteen is to blame, then you are kidding yourself. Your child is pudgy, plump or obese - thanks to you.

And yesterday's uproar by parents over schools that aren't doing enough to stop students eating junk food - either in the canteen or by ordering in-- is ridiculous. The fact pupils are being delivered pizzas and sell bootlegged Coke at school just shows the ingenuity of today's mobile phone-equipped, pepperoni-craving children. More importantly it also shows that the war on childhood obesity won't be won in the classroom.

Parents are well within their rights to demand more influence over what their children eat at school. However, they also need to be reasonable and meet their end of the bargain. It is impossible to instil a habit of healthy eating if your children go home to soft drinks and takeout for dinner five nights a week. Equally, you may argue that schools providing foods high in fat and sugar undo all the good work done at home. However, School Canteens Association of NSW's Jo Gardner says of school kids aged five to 15, less than 3 per cent of their food consumption comes from the canteen.

Meanwhile, Duncan Irvine, head of Duncan's Catering, which operates canteens in 37 government high schools, says 75 per cent of all food consumed at school is brought in from home. Based on those figures, you cannot blame the school tuckshop for your child's weight problems. But what you can blame it on is what you pack into your children's lunchboxes. You can also blame the parents for the amount of money they give their kids to buy lunch.

Part of being a parent means making school lunches, and nourishing ones at that. Not a peanut butter sandwich every day with a bag of chips thrown in. However, like most parenting issues these days, "time-poor" mums and dads are outsourcing their responsibilities to schools. They demand schools be chiefly responsible for the exercise their children get, all the sex education their children need to know, and the discipline their children aren't getting at home. Now they are demanding that healthy eating be the school's obligation too.

Of course, most are only echoing our political leaders. For every time there is an issue in the community about the failings of young people, politicians want a remedy included in the curriculum. It was therefore refreshing to yesterday hear new Education Minister John Della Bosca say forcing students to eat healthy food is not the responsibility of schools. The pressure on schools today to turn out model citizens is absurd. When is there time anymore for teachers to do the basic teaching of core subjects?

Government and private schools began phasing in healthy food regimens at canteens nearly four years ago, amid rising evidence of a childhood obesity epidemic. This year all sugary soft drinks were banned. But as you can see students are taking alternative measures to acquire fast food.

In Britain, where government-supplied school lunches have just been turned upside-down by super cook Jamie Oliver to be more healthy, parents have been caught throwing junk food over school fences to their children. A friend, Emma, who does canteen duty at her children's primary school on the North Shore, says it is not unusual for pupils to produce $50 and $20 notes to buy their lunch - clearly with no budget attached. "In some cases, it's not even a matter of what they're eating, it's how much," she says. "You will see the same child twice at morning recess and at lunchtime they come back three times."

I appreciate that the older your kids get, when you kiss them goodbye at the school gate you also kiss goodbye to the ability to control their diets. However, it's parents who have a lesson to learn - stop passing the buck.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



11 April, 2007

Busting modern medical myths

In the early days of medicine, physicians might diagnose patients using bumps on their head, or dispense a couple of leeches to draw off "ill humours". Yet a medieval doctor might give a more confident response than his modern equivalent if a patient asked for the evidence to support their treatment. These days, it seems many of our "tried and tested" approaches to disease are nothing of the kind.

Researchers writing recently in the British Journal of Surgery concluded the practice of daubing patients with a disinfectant skin gel prior to operations made little or no difference to the rate of infections they suffered afterwards. Simple soap and water was just as effective. However, despite this, it's more than likely that, in future, waking up after your operation in many British hospitals, you'll have that tell-tale orange stain around your wound. You'll have been given a treatment that doesn't work.

This isn't a single example. Many techniques in common use today don't have cast-iron evidence that they do any good. In some cases, firm evidence suggests the opposite is true. Andrew Booth, from the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) in Sheffield, is assessing the proportion of modern treatments that are "evidence-based" - supported by "randomised controlled trials", which, if run correctly, give the best view on the value of a drug or device.

In the UK, researchers have assessed this in a variety of different parts of the health service, from busy GP surgeries to specialist hospital haematology units. In many units, between 15% and 20% of the treatments offered did not have a shred of worthwhile evidence to support their use. Andrew Booth said the medical establishment was well aware of this. "The public might be surprised at the low number of treatments which have evidence that they work - but doctors might be surprised that it is so high," he said. He added that frequently, even when new research suggested clearly that doctors should stop using a particular treatment, nothing changed.

Michael Summers, chairman of The Patients Association, said patients would be "really surprised" to learn how little of what doctors did had been proven to work. "We need to improve medical training, to make sure that doctors do know more about the effectiveness of the drugs they are prescribing," he said.

One of those doing this is Professor Paul Glasziou, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University. "I try to change the way individual doctors work," he says, "but really, the main thing we can hope to do is change the next generation of medical practitioners." He can list dozens of examples where treatments are still widely used despite it being clear that all they give patients is side-effects. "An example is PSA [prostate specific antigen] screening for prostate cancer. What the best studies tell us is that patients who have the test are equally likely to die from prostate cancer compared with those who don't," he says. "This actually does harm, because patients who test positive may undergo unnecessary prostate surgery. But the test is still being carried out."

Even a simple antibiotic eye-drop prescription for a child's minor infection is likely to make no difference, and may help make the bacteria involved more resistant to treatment, he says.

Part of the problem for doctors is the sheer quantity of research emerging from hospitals, universities and laboratories across the globe. "There are 90 new randomised controlled trials published every single day - this flood of information makes it very difficult for any doctor to stay up to date." And when the evidence is disregarded, Prof Glasziou says, patients can be harmed. When doctors measure blood pressure for the first time in a patient they should check both arms, as the readings may differ significantly. But Prof Glasziou says this guideline isn't followed everywhere. "I know of one case where a patient was being taken on and off his medication every couple of months simply because every time he visited the doctor, the reading was taken from a different arm. "There are a lot of good things out there, but an awful lot of myths as well."

Source




Australia: "Healthy" school menus help Maccas most of all



Pity about the parents trying to raise funds via heavily regulated tuckshops



HEALTHY canteen menus forced on to NSW schools to fight obesity are being openly snubbed as students order in pizzas, sell bootlegged Coke and leave school grounds to eat at fast-food outlets. A Daily Telegraph investigation has revealed students are resisting the low-fat menus - and private canteen operators are battling to survive with higher labour and ingredient costs. Canteen bosses estimate their revenue is dropping by up to a third as students take their business elsewhere.

Pizza, Chinese takeaway and other fast-food deliveries to school playgrounds are becoming commonplace as students tire of salads, wraps and low-fat pies and diet soft drinks to order in lunch on their mobile phones.

Last Wednesday at Granville South High School at 1pm a pizza delivery man was photographed in action outside the front footpath preparing to make a delivery of two family-sized pizzas. Nearby Villawood Domino's Pizza manager Mohammed Ahsan said his business did make deliveries to Granville South and other schools in the area. "We have a policy not to refuse a delivery to anyone," Mr Ahsan said.

Government and most private schools began phasing in the NSW Healthy School Canteen Strategy in 2003 following a childhood obesity summit. Last year alone more than $600,000 was spent implementing and promoting the scheme to convince schools to speed up compliance. This year all sugar soft drinks were banned. Under the dietary guidelines, "red" foods such as salty snacks and fatty foods are limited to two days per school term. Canteens are supposed to fill the menu with "green" foods such as wraps. "Amber" foods like low-fat pies should be used sparingly.

Also at 1pm last Wednesday, Engadine High students in uniform were dining out at Engadine McDonald's. The senior students, who were happy to be photographed, were not breaking school rules by being there. They said canteen food was "expensive" and not always appetising.

Duncan's Catering boss Duncan Irvine, operator of 38 public high school canteens, said the healthy foods policy was "naive". "The most profitable business to own now is a corner store near a school - they are now getting all our business," he said.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



10 April, 2007

High African prostate cancer risk tied to DNA

A team led by Harvard researchers has found dramatic genetic links to prostate cancer that appear to underlie many of the cases and help explain the higher occurrence of the disease among African-American men. The scientists said yesterday that they have identified a set of changes in human DNA that are common in the American population and that, together, can increase the risk of the disease by more than five times. These changes may be responsible for up to two-thirds of African-American cases and one-third of the cases among Caucasian-Americans, according to a report in the journal Nature Genetics. The discovery may eventually allow doctors to improve screening, a strategy that has had an impact on the disease, by identifying high-risk people to be tested at an earlier age. And it could someday lead to better treatments for the second-leading cancer killer of men.

The finding also poses a compelling mystery. All the dangerous genetic changes identified lie in stretches of DNA that contain no genes and have no known biological function. This, researchers said, suggests that scientists are now on the trail of a new mechanism behind cancer, and it raises the possibility that this mechanism is behind some other forms of cancer. "It is a smoking gun to something new," said Dr. Tom Hudson, who was not involved in the research and is president and scientific director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto. "It is very exciting."

The field of prostate cancer genetics is moving rapidly. Last year, deCODE Genetics, a company in Iceland, identified the first genetic variant, a portion of DNA that is different from the rest of the population's, which is associated with a 60 percent increase in risk of prostate cancer. The new work, led by David Reich of Harvard Medical School, identified five variants. These six variants , as well as another one already found, are more common in Americans with African ancestors than those with European ancestors, Reich said. The study suggests that genetics are a powerful reason for African-Americans' greater susceptibility to prostate cancer. African-Americans are 56 percent more likely to get the disease than Caucasian men, and 2 1/2 times more likely to die of it, according to the Prostate Cancer Foundation in Santa Monica, Calif.

Reich cautioned, however, that scientists could not tell from the research how much the genetic variants contribute to the disparity in the incidence or death rate of the disease. Other factors, including genetic changes that have not been identified and the environment, may play a role in the disease's higher incidence among African-Americans.

The new variants were identified by studying the DNA of 7,500 people, some of whom had prostate cancer. The research team focused on a particular region on chromosome 8, which previous research, including the deCODE work, has implicated in the disease. They looked for DNA variants that victims of prostate cancer tended to have, but healthy people did not

Source




Defeating malaria with both high- and low-tech

O death, where is thy sting? Far too often it comes at the end of a mosquito's proboscis. The worst mosquito-borne disease, malaria, infects about 400 million people worldwide each year (90 percent in sub-Saharan Africa) and kills about 1.3 million of them. So it's great that scientists at the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland have genetically built a better mosquito, which is to say that it still bites and leaves an itchy welt but cannot spread malaria. The idea is that large numbers of engineered mosquitoes would be released in malaria-ridden areas so they could interbreed with wild ones. Over time more and more of the mosquito population would carry the new trait.

This is not a new concept. Various types of harmful male insects are irradiated to make them sterile, and then released to interbreed with fertile bugs and thereby reduce the overall population. The problem with sterilization, though, is that it often weakens the insect and gives fertile wild competitors the advantage in breeding.

But these biotech mosquitoes actually have a breeding advantage. Mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, don't die from it but are weakened. The engineered ones, being immune, can drink their natural cousins under the table. "When fed on Plasmodium-infected blood, the transgenic malaria-resistant mosquitoes had a significant fitness advantage over wild-type," the researchers remarked in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Thus, in an experiment in which the engineered mosquitoes began as 50 percent of the laboratory population, over the course of nine generations (several months) they grew to become 70 percent of the population.

Richard Tren, director of the group Africa Fighting Malaria, with offices in both South Africa and Washington, D.C., nevertheless cautions against over-enthusiasm. The mosquito work "is great research," he told me, but notes that what works beautifully in the lab may not work in the field for reasons we can't even guess at now. Further, he observes, "The research was done on a mosquito mostly found in Southeast Asia, Anopheles stephensi, and not in the more aggressive sub-Saharan African mosquito that spreads malaria called Anopheles gambiae." He also worries about whether it would be possible to introduce a large enough number of the engineered mosquitoes to squeeze out the natural population. But his greatest fear is that people "will get the idea this is a magic bullet." Even if all goes well, it may not be ready for prime time for ten years or more - or to measure it another way, 13 million deaths.

Tren calls for a holistic approach in fighting the disease. That includes full rehabilitation of the use of the insecticide DDT. "We're inching towards a vaccine," he told me, one that also will be genetically engineered. But he notes malaria vaccine research has been going on for many decades and "it seems like we're always just seven years away." Says Tren, "During the time we're waiting on this mosquito research it could be distracting from things that are already proved. This is a really complex disease and we need a range of interventions."

Don Roberts agrees. Roberts is a professor of tropical public heath at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. The engineered mosquito "is interesting research and an advancement of the science," he says. But among the problems is that even within anopheles gambiae there are an almost infinite genetic variety of mosquitoes. "A population of mosquitoes is a result of evolutionary force," he told me. "Just go downstream and you'll find a population that is different." He supports the biotech mosquito and vaccine research but says the emphasis for now must be insecticides, to include DDT but not to exclude developing others that may be far more effective.

"If you look at the amount of money going into a vaccine, it's probably in the billions" Roberts says. "Look into what's gone in to drugs to treat malaria and that's probably in the tens of billions. Then there's the environmentalist fight against DDT, which has probably also consumed billions of dollars," he notes. "But how much is being spent on an insecticide that would be less controversial and yet could be more effective at killing mosquitoes than DDT? Zero." He adds, "For me, it's a failure that's almost breathtaking."

So bring on the mosquito research and vaccine research. But for now and in the indefinite future the best weapon we have against this vicious mass-murderer of a disease is old-fashioned insecticide. Low-tech works now and we cannot afford to wait.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



9 April, 2007

Paracetamol causes liver damage

Aspirin used to be the first-choice analgesic but it tends to promote bleeding so paracetamol became the new religion. I wonder what the next religion will be now? That any drug that does anything also has side effects is a REAL "inconvenient truth". I have always stuck with aspirin, myself. Its ratio of benefit to risk is huge

PARACETAMOL, the drug commonly found in headache tablets, has surpassed hepatitis and alcohol to become the most common cause of liver failure in Australia. Doctors are being urged to exercise caution when prescribing paracetamol following cases of patients suffering accidental poisoning after taking only the recommended dose of the painkiller, often sold under the brand Panadol.

A report published in The Medical Journal of Australia found people who didn't eat enough, drank a lot of alcohol or took certain medications were vulnerable to toxic effects from paracetamol. Elderly people with kidney or heart and lung problems may also be at increased risk. "Accidental paracetamol poisoning should be suspected in any patient with acute liver failure," the report said. "Clinicians should be cautious about prescribing regular doses of paracetamol for pain control in malnourished or fasting patients, and need to counsel patients who are regular users of the drug." Healthy people are usually able to metabolise paracetamol, most of which is excreted from the body in urine. But the drug can accumulate in people with risk factors, rendering even a normal dose toxic.

The Accidental Paracetamol Poisoning report, compiled by experts from Austin Health in Victoria, describes the case of a 45-year-old Australian woman who died from liver failure. She was taking paracetamol for abdominal pain after having a hysterectomy and suffering complications. Her eating had been poor because of pain, vomiting and treatment. "The patient ... was noted to be displaying odd behaviour," the record states. "The following morning she became increasingly confused and drowsy. "She was admitted to the intensive-care unit, where her conscious state deteriorated rapidly and she required intubation." The woman was transferred to a liver transplant unit but died before a donor organ became available. A post-mortem examination found a toxic level of paracetamol in her body.

Hepatitis and alcoholism is another major cause of acute liver failure. Parents are warned not to give children painkillers unless they have high fever or severe pain. Dr David Thomas, pediatric spokesman for the Australian Medical Association, said: "Paracetamol and ibuprofen are drugs - they aren't without risks or side-effects

Source




Another stupid birthday cake ban

Why not ban milk? It is highly calorific. No-one even THINKS of offering any evidence that the cake ban will make anyone slimmer, of course. Who needs evidence when you KNOW?

[NSW] schools are banning students from bringing birthday cakes to class in an effort to curb unhealthy eating habits. They say the no-cake policy will also help reduce the risk of allergic reactions among students, such as the potentially fatal anaphylaxis that can be triggered by peanuts. The move follows a crackdown on junk food in most school canteens that has involved a ban on items such as chips and soft drinks.

Cranbrook School's junior school is among the first to ask pupils not to bring birthday cakes, also requesting that parents do not send in other types of celebratory treats. Its new "nutritious food and beverage" policy also encourages parents to provide healthy school lunches and covers food eaten while on school camps and excursions. Pupils are discouraged from bringing sports or carbonated drinks. The junior school's latest newsletter to parents says: "There are many other enjoyable ways for the boys to celebrate their friends' birthdays at school and we will be exploring these instead. The boys can always enjoy a birthday cake with family and friends outside of school time." Junior school head Michael Dunn said the policy would come into effect at the start of the new term. He said that, as well as being health-conscious, the policy showed respect for children with allergies. Some Sydney preschools have already introduced a strict no-cake policy, as well as lunch-box inspections, to ensure children do not eat junk food during the day.

"This could be something that is going to become bigger," NSW Parents and Citizens Federation president Di Giblin said. "If you have got 30 children, you have got 30 birthday cakes coming through. "We have got to acknowledge that it's a treat, and part of healthy eating is a balance and choice, so while we understand it is a celebration, we can do it in a way that is healthy."

Tina Jackson said an all-out ban on birthday cakes at school seemed too strong. At Mosman Public, attended by her year 2 daughter Angelica, pupils can bring cakes but smaller-sized treats are recommended. "The school does prefer that you give cupcakes," Ms Jackson, executive director of the National Trust of Australia, said. "The kids so enjoy having the cupcakes and it makes the day really special. A ban does seem a bit harsh." She said there had been efforts to ensure the school canteen offered healthy options.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



8 April, 2007

New prostate treatment

Seattle-based biotech Dendreon is hoping to get U.S. approval for the first cancer drug that would train the body to fight off cancer on its own, with few side effects. But researchers, statisticians and Wall Street analysts are fiercely debating whether there is enough data about this radical new treatment.

Dendreon's Provenge is a so-called cancer vaccine. Researchers prefer the term immunotherapy because it would treat, not prevent, cancer. A personalized drug, composed of human immune system cells, is created for each patient; the idea is to give the immune system the tools it needs to fight off the disease.

On Thursday, a panel of experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration will debate whether the drug is ready to be marketed. The FDA often follows the recommendation of such panels, but it doesn't have to. Already, briefing documents have been posted saying that the drug seems very safe--although there is a worry of stroke--and reviewing the arguments about whether or not it is effective at prolonging patients' lives.

Why is there any question at all? When researchers run a clinical study, they define a specific goal. For instance, that drug will extend life over a prespecified time or prevent tumors from growing compared to a placebo. The whole study is designed around this goal. If the trial falls short, its results can only be used to generate new questions, not to draw scientific conclusions.

Provenge has failed in both of its main studies--but it seems to help patients live longer. The clinical trials tested the drug in a relatively small number of cases, with only 127 men in the main study who showed a benefit. But survival was extended four months for patients with metastatic prostate cancer. Statistical rules aside, Provenge fans say, survival is awfully hard to fake, and desperate metastatic prostate cancer patients who would get Provenge have only one drug, the chemotherapy Taxotere, at their disposal. The Taxotere drug, made by Sanofi-Aventis, has many unpleasant and dangerous side effects.

The data has convinced some who were skeptical that Provenge may have merit. Philip Kantoff, a urological oncologist at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, is conducting a big clinical trial that should firmly establish whether and how much Provenge helps patients. He has consulted with Dendreon. For a long time, he was one of Provenge's doubters. "I thought the concept was too simplistic for belief," Kantoff says. "I didn't think it had a snowball's chance in hell of working."

But the data showing the drug increases survival has made him cautiously optimistic. "I'm still skeptical, but I think there's something going on here," he says. His doubts rest mainly on the fact that results were small. "If this were a much larger study, to me this would be a slam dunk."

Kantoff says that if the drug were approved, he would probably prescribe it. So far Provenge seems mostly to cause flu-like symptoms, but FDA reviewers note there may also be an increased risk of stroke. If the medicine is fairly safe and might be effective, why not offer it to patients?

David Penson, a urologist at USC's Keck School of Medicine, has also gone from being a doubter to an investigator in a Provenge clinical trial and a consultant for Dendreon (he says he has received less than $10,000 in fees). "When they first released their data, they had to massage some data to show a clinical difference," he says. Dendreon's first study showed efficacy only in less-sick patients.

Colleagues convinced Penson to give Provenge a try in clinical trials, and he was impressed. He remembers one patient, a doctor, who went from being wasted and fatigued from his metastatic prostate cancer to being able to play golf again. Patients don't care if a drug meets the original primary endpoint of Dendreon's study, an improvement in X-rays, says Penson. "All they care about is living longer."

This is the argument at the heart of the case for Provenge. Neal Shore, medical director of the Carolina Research Center, says rejecting Provenge now would be "grossly unfair to the patients who have no other options but to enter clinical trials." Shore argues that "a lot of people will end up dying" before bigger clinical trials could show a benefit.

But there are other issues at play. Once a drug is approved, other medicines can get on the market by proving they are better. If an ineffective drug slips through, that could open the door to other less effective medicines. Another worry is that the benefit of Provenge might be real but less robust than it appears. Because larger issues are at play, this is exactly the kind of situation in which the FDA might go against the decision of an advisory panel. Even if Dendreon has a great day on Thursday, the company won't be home free.

Source




Pesky! Top nutritious choice is in the can



CHALLENGING a long-held belief, a Choice study has found that canned and frozen vegetables can be more nutritious than their fresh counterparts. The consumer magazine tested frozen, canned, week-old and fresh vegetables, both cooked and uncooked, for the contents of certain nutrients. With the exception of broccoli, all canned and frozen vegetables tested contained more or equal percentages of vitamins and anti-oxidants.

"Frozen English spinach was more nutritious than cooked fresh spinach," Choice spokeswoman Indira Naidoo said. Canned tomatoes contained about five times more lycopine, which is believed to prevent heart diseases and prostate cancer, than fresh ones. Accordingly, canned green beans and carrots were more nutritious than their fresh counterparts, and there was little difference between canned and fresh corn.

The vegetables were purchased in Melbourne, but University of Queensland expert Mike Gidley said he would not expect different results for vegetables bought in a Queensland supermarket. "Absolutely fresh is the most nutritious," the director of Centre for Nutrition and Food Sciences said. "But what we call fresh has often taken a long time to get from the field to the supermarket."

New technologies made it possible to keep these vegetables looking fresh for weeks, Choice states. Frozen and canned vegetables, in contrast, are often processed directly after being picked. When buying canned vegetables, consumers may face another problem. Choice claims it is very difficult for Australian consumers "to compare the true cost of prices". Cans in different sizes have different prices, and sometimes bigger cans or packets are not the cheapest option as one might believe, Choice states.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



7 April, 2007

Germans claim Alzheimer's toxin breakthrough

GERMAN researchers claim they have found a way of blocking the formation of a toxin blamed for the onset of Alzheimer's disease. The researchers from the chemistry department at Berlin's Free University said the discovery could prove useful in the development of medicines to combat the fatal brain disease.

Biochemist Gerd Multhaup said his team had largely managed to inhibit the formation of Amyloid-Beta Asse42, which destroys nerve cells and plays a key role in the onset of Alzheimer's. They have patented the technique which subverts the formation of the toxin, he said.

The group's findings will be published in The Embo Journal science review at the end of April. There is currently no cure for Alzheimer's but there are medicines aimed at mitigating the effects of the debilitating disease.

Source




Big blow for cholesterol theory

Pfizer spent more than $900 million testing its experimental heart pill, torcetrapib. But in December a 15,000-patient study revealed that this chemical increased death rates, forcing Pfizer to suddenly drop the project. What went wrong? Why torcetrapib failed is the biggest mystery facing the $260 billion global pharmaceutical industry, which has spent years in a research dry spell. On paper, torcetrapib looked like a winner. It boosted levels of good cholesterol, known as HDL, by 50%. It cut bad cholesterol, or LDL, by 20% on top of existing meds like Pfizer's Lipitor. Pfizer had hoped that would lead to a wave of new good-cholesterol-raising drugs that could reduce heart attack rates far beyond what Lipitor can do alone.

But the terrible results have thrown the whole concept of raising HDL via drugs into turmoil. Here at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), researchers unveiled results of new studies that examined the neck and coronary arteries of patients on the drug using ultrasound imaging. They showed Pfizer's pill did nothing to clear out clogged arteries as had been hoped.

One study used a technique that peers directly inside the coronary arteries using a catheter. It found the drug raise blood pressure by 4.6 points, far more than expected. Two other ultrasound studies even hinted that torcetrapib might have made plaque buildup in the carotid artery in the neck worse. These murky results may not stop other drug companies from testing HDL boosters, but they will significantly delay the development of those drugs. For the foreseeable future, doctors will probably be forced to refocus on getting bad cholesterol down as far as they can. Other HDL-boosting drugs presented at the meeting also failed or yielded mixed results. An Eli Lilly pill to raise HDL and cut triglycerides, or particles of fat in the blood, proved no more effective than older drugs and were potentially dangerous. A method of injecting HDL into patients' veins, developed by Australian flu-shot-maker CSL Limited, failed to confirm the promise of a similar experiment three years ago, although it did hint that the medicine might clear arteries some.

The torcetrapib mystery is deepened because data from the big 15,000-patient trial are not yet available. Study head Philip Barter of the University of Sydney told an overflow crowd at the meeting that it would be the early fall before results of that trial can be fully analyzed to see what went wrong. "Nothing is being hidden," he said. "We still just do not know" what happened. Pfizer Senior Vice President Michael Berelowitz said Pfizer is exhaustively reviewing "every element" of the patient data to figure out what happened.

Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and ACC head Steven Nissen, who conducted one of the ultrasound studies, says there are three possible explanations of how torcetrapib went awry. One is that torcetrapib produced HDL that did not work properly. Another is that the blood pressure side effect made the drug toxic. Experts who still hold out hope for such medicines are betting on a third possibility. The drug might have caused some nasty damage to blood vessel walls, and the increased blood pressure was just a consequence of this more severe damage. The drug "was obviously toxic. It may be doing something bad to blood vessels, and the blood pressure is just a manifestation," Nissen said.

The Pfizer drug worked by blocking the cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP), and there has long been a controversy among cardiologists whether this approach to raising good cholesterol would be beneficial. If so, then it would mean that similar CETP-blocking drugs in development at Merck and Roche Holding are highly unlikely to work.

But some experts say it's at least possible that the drug's problems were caused by strange side effects linked to torcetrapib's tendency to raise blood pressure. "I realize that it is proposing a lot," says Daniel Rader of the University of Pennsylvania, "but I do think it is possible." He thinks other companies should cautiously continue to test their HDL-raisers. John Kastelein of the University of Amsterdam, who conducted two of the imaging studies, says it is still possible other CETP inhibitors like those from Merck and Roche might work.

With two big studies indicating no positive effect on arteries, "it starts to increase the evidence that this may not have been a good idea at all, and that the whole concept is just not the right approach," says Baylor College of Medicine cardiologist Christie Ballantyne, who noted that there had long been "a major debate" about whether CETP inhibitors could work.

The genetic evidence about CETP inhibitors was always murky, says Evan Stein, director of the Metabolic and Atherosclerosis Research Center in Cincinnati. He says doctors should focus as much as possible on reducing bad cholesterol, which has proven benefits.

Nissen argues that the potential of CETP inhibitors is too great to abandon, even given the risks. But he says that the failure of torcetrapib is a setback that will cost drug developers many years. "You cannot kill the whole class just because the first drug has an unusual toxicity," he says.

Experts agree that to test new HDL-boosters or other drugs designed to prevent or reverse the build-up of artery plaque, drug companies are going to have to take a much more cautious approach. Pfizer plunged ahead with all its studies at once. Now drug companies will have to do imaging studies like those conducted by Kastelein and Nissen first, before plunging into larger, more definitive trials. These take at least three years.

Allen J. Taylor, chief of cardiology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, says it is "reassuring" that imaging studies were consistent with the large torcetrapib trial and would have prevented torcetrapib from being developed if they were done first. But Pfizer's Berelowitz warns he would derive "no certainty" based on imaging studies, given that they have not always delivered clear results.

For the moment, doctors who are treating heart disease may find themselves going back to the future. They will treat bad cholesterol as well as they can with medicines like Lipitor and Zocor, which have been around since the introduction of Merck's Mevacor 20 years ago. HDL-boosting drugs are "not ready for prime time," says Sanjay Kaul, of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He believes that developing HDL drugs is going to be a long and difficult road. "The next 10 to 15 years will be a fertile time for research on HDL. And sooner or later we will get there."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



6 April, 2007

Australia's folate battle

That folate is bad for the elderly does not matter, of course. Let them eat cake!



The humble loaf of bread has become the meat in the sandwich, as health experts and food authorities slug it out over whether our staple food should be put on medication. Now the big manufacturers have entered the bun fight, releasing to the Herald a white paper on why the industry will fight the Government over its plan to introduce synthetic folate into our daily bread. On Monday, Food Standards Australia New Zealand put its final paper up for industry discussion on why mandatory folic acid fortification of the flour used exclusively for bread was needed to cut down the number of neural tube birth defects such as spina bifida.

But George Weston Foods and Goodman Fielder, with backing from the Australian Food and Grocery Council, have amassed a wealth of reasons why mandatory fortification is a bad idea. The industry is raising concerns over the risks to the general population in "medicating the food supply", including cancer scares, and are arguing that there are far more effective means of reducing birth defects than adding 200 micrograms of folic acid to every loaf of bread they produce.

Both sides agree that mandatory fortification would not protect the section of population targeted - women planning to get pregnant and those in the early stages of pregnancy. They would still have to take a folic acid supplement to guard against spina bifida. The bread industry claims that for pregnant women to protect themselves, they would need to eat between 10 and 18 slices of bread per day.

But the food standards agency, which has the support of the Australian Medical Association, is arguing that in the US long-term fortification has shown a marked decrease in the incidence of spina bifida. And while pregnant women would still have to take a supplement, the fortification of bread would act as a "safety net". However, Dr Rosemary Stanton, a nutritionist, opposes the Government move, comparing adding folic acid to bread to "adding vitamins to lollies". "It's just giving people another excuse not to eat fruit and vegetables," she said.

Source




Quarantine rediscovered

Similar measures might have prevented the spread of AIDS. But we must not be nasty to homosexuals, must we? Better to let them die! That's just the sort of values we expect from the morally incoherent Left

Behind the county hospital's tall cinderblock walls, a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient sits in a jail cell equipped with a ventilation system that keeps germs from escaping. Robert Daniels has been locked up indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life, since last July. But he has not been charged with a crime. Instead, he suffers from an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. It is considered virtually untreatable. County health authorities obtained a court order to lock him up as a danger to the public because he failed to take precautions to avoid infecting others. Specifically, he said he did not heed doctors' instructions to wear a mask in public.

"I'm being treated worse than an inmate," Daniels said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press last month. "I'm all alone. Four walls. Even the door to my room has been locked. I haven't seen my reflection in months." Though Daniels' confinement is extremely rare, health experts say it is a situation that U.S. public health officials may have to confront more and more because of the spread of drug-resistant TB and the emergence of diseases such as SARS and avian flu in this increasingly interconnected world.

"Even though the rate of TB in the U.S. is at the lowest ever this last year, we live in a globalized world where, if anything emerges anywhere, it could come to our country right away," said Mark Harrington, executive director of the Treatment Action Group, an American advocacy group.

The World Health Organization warned last year of the emergence of extensively drug-resistant TB. The new strain, which has been found throughout the world, including pockets of the former Soviet Union and Asia, is resistant not only to the first line of TB drugs but to some second-line antibiotics as well. HIV patients with weakened immune systems are especially susceptible. In South Africa, WHO reported that 52 of 53 HIV patients died within an average of 25 days after it was discovered they also had XDR-TB.

How to deal with people infected with the new strain is a matter of debate. Dr. Ross Upshur, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto, said authorities should detain people with drug-resistant tuberculosis if they are uncooperative. "We're on the verge of taking what was a curable disease, one of the best known diseases in human endeavors, and making it incurable," Upshur said. But a paper Upshur co-wrote on the issue in a medical journal earlier this year has been strongly criticized. "Involuntary detention should really be your last resort," Harrington said. "There's a danger that we'll end up blaming the victim."

In the United States, which had a total of 13,767 reported cases of tuberculosis in 2006, public health authorities only rarely have put TB patients under lock and key. Texas has placed 17 tuberculosis patients into an involuntary quarantine facility this year in San Antonio. Public health authorities in California said they have no TB patients in custody this year, though four were detained there last year.

Upshur's paper noted that New York City forced TB patients into detention following an outbreak in the 1990s, and saw a significant dip in cases. In the Phoenix area, only one other person has been detained in the past year, said Dr. Robert England, Maricopa County's tuberculosis control officer.

Daniels has been living alone in a four-bed cell in Ward 41, a section of the hospital reserved for sick criminals. He said sheriff's deputies will not let him take a shower -- he cleans himself with wet wipes -- and have taken away his television, radio, personal phone and computer. His only visitors are masked medical staff members who come in to give him his medication. The ventilation system draws out the air and filters it to capture the bacteria-laden droplets he expels when he coughs. The filters are periodically burned. Daniels said he is taking medication and feeling a lot better. His lawyer would not discuss his prognosis. Daniels plans to ask for his release at a court hearing late this month. Daniels lived in Russia for 15 years and returned to the United States last year after he was diagnosed. He said he thought he would get better treatment here, and hoped eventually to bring his wife and children from Russia. He said he briefly worked in an office in Arizona for a chemical company before he was put away. He said that he lost 50 pounds and was constantly coughing and that authorities locked him up after they discovered he had walked into a convenience store without a mask. "Where I come from, the doctors don't wear masks," he said. "Plus, I was 26 years old, you know. Nobody told me how TB works and stuff."

County health officials and Daniels' lawyer, Robert Blecher, would not discuss details of the case. But in general, England said the county would not force someone into quarantine unless the patient could not or would not follow doctor's orders. "It's very uncommon that someone would both not want to take treatment and will willingly put others at risk," England said. "It's only those very uncommon incidents where we have to use legal authority through the courts to isolate somebody."

University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Art Caplan said Maricopa County health officials were confronted with the same ethical dilemma that communities wrestled with generations ago when dealing with leprosy and smallpox. "Drug-resistant TB, or drug-resistant staph infections, or pandemic flu will raise these questions again," Caplan said. "We may find ourselves dipping into our history to answer them." Daniels said he realizes now that he endangered the public. But "I thought I'd come to a country where I'd finally be treated like a person, and bam, here I am."

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



5 April, 2007

Red meat seems to increase breast cancer risk -- but does it?

This seems to be a comparison of meat-eaters with vegetarians. That vegetarians suffer fewer adverse outcomes could be due to many factors -- reduced total calorie intake, greater care about lifestyle etc. Making meat consumption the cause rather than a marker goes beyond the evidence

EATING even small amounts of red meat can greatly increase a woman's risk of breast cancer, according to a study published today. Post-menopausal women who ate large amounts (more than 103 grams) of processed meat a day could be 64 per cent more likely to suffer the disease, while the researchers found as little as 57g of beef, pork or lamb a day showed an effect. Even younger women faced a slightly raised risk if they ate red meat every day, according to the study which appears in the British Journal of Cancer.

The study, led by Professor Janet Cade of the University of Leeds, involved studying the diets of 35,000 women aged between 35 and 69 for eight years. The research states: "Women, both pre and post-menopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer. "Women generally consuming most total meat, red and processed meat were at the highest increased risk compared with non-meat consumers."

The women completed 217-item food questionnaires and were divided into three groups depending on whether they were low, medium or high meat-eaters. They were compared with women in the study who were vegetarian and researchers also took into account smoking, weight, fruit and vegetable intake, education, age and use of hormone replacement therapy.

Professor Cade told Britain's Daily Telegraph: "The findings are robust. Whatever we adjusted the data for we could find an association. "Really, these results could apply to all women. At home I have cut down on the amount of red meat we eat as a family a week. "I am not suggesting that everyone should become a vegetarian, that would be unrealistic, but the findings were strong and I think we should pay attention to them."

But the study was dismissed as "rubbish" by Sandy Crombie, chairman of the Scottish region of The Guild of Q Butchers, who pointed out that 56g of meat was roughly half a quarter-pound burger. He told the newspaper: "Two ounces (57g) is absolutely tiny. I have never heard such rubbish, it's a tiny amount. "This is ridiculous, it's silly, it's barely worth talking about."

Source

Abstract from the British Journal of Cancer (2007) 96, 1139-1146 follows:

Meat consumption and risk of breast cancer in the UK Women's Cohort Study

E F Taylor et al.

We performed a survival analysis to assess the effect of meat consumption and meat type on the risk of breast cancer in the UK Women's Cohort Study. Between 1995 and 1998 a cohort of 35 372 women was recruited, aged between 35 and 69 years with a wide range of dietary intakes, assessed by a 217-item food frequency questionnaire. Hazard ratios (HRs) were estimated using Cox regression adjusted for known confounders. High consumption of total meat compared with none was associated with premenopausal breast cancer, HR=1.20 (95% CI: 0.86-1.68), and high non-processed meat intake compared with none, HR=1.20 (95% CI: 0.86-1.68). Larger effect sizes were found in postmenopausal women for all meat types, with significant associations with total, processed and red meat consumption. Processed meat showed the strongest HR=1.64 (95% CI: 1.14-2.37) for high consumption compared with none. Women, both pre- and postmenopausal, who consumed the most meat had the highest risk of breast cancer.




Telling toxic tales about GM food

A Greenpeace-financed study claims GM corn is bad for us. Why did the media swallow it?

Another month, another GM-crop scare. `Monsanto Corn Allegedly Toxic,' read the headline in Red Herring. The Daily Mail faithfully parroted the Greenpeace scare-line that `GM corn "could cause liver and kidney damage".' But this story demonstrates nothing more than the ability of the anti-biotech campaigners at Greenpeace to manipulate the media. In turn, several media outlets have demonstrated their willingness to unquestioningly accept the agenda of a political pressure group when it fits in with their own long-running paranoia about what big business is doing to our food.

The concocted controversy is over the supposed dangers posed by a variety of biotech corn that has been safely grown in the US and Canada since 2003, and safely consumed for three years there, and Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Russia, the Philippines, and Mexico. The allegations (technically, they're more innuendo than specific allegation) are made in a peer-reviewed paper in the May issue of Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. But this is all old non-news.

European safety authorities approved the corn, called MON863, for import, feed, and processing in 2005 and again in 2006. Sold under the name YieldGard Rootworm, it reduces the need to spray insecticides with an organic-approved protein that is safe for fish, birds, mammals, and people.

Greenpeace didn't like the European approval, so they sued in order to get access to the data used to make those decisions. After getting the data, they paid a group of researchers at the University of Caen to `re-evaluate' it. Not surprisingly, given their near-religious opposition to agricultural biotechnology, the Greenpeace-paid group says the data show `signs of toxicity'. `Our counter-evaluation show that there are signs of toxicity and that nobody can say scientifically and seriously that consumption of the transgenic maize MON863 is safe and good for health,' lead author of the study, Professor Gilles Eric Seralini, told France's TF1 television station.

Sounds scary, right? But it's not. Even after applying an overly `sciency' thicket of statistical gimmickry, all that they show is that there is variation among rats - normal variation like you would find in any group of people. None of the findings are in any way alarming or out of the range of normal variability. As Andrew Apel at AgBioView notes: `In a nutshell, the Greenpeace-backed reinterpretation rests on data which show statistically significant differences in serum protein values or triglycerides mainly in rats fed low doses of MON863, but not in rats fed high doses of the corn. It's generally thought that the dose makes the poison, but in this case high doses showed no discernible effects. Does this truly reveal, as the title of the new paper suggests, "Signs of Hepatorenal Toxicity?" The authors of the paper attempt to explain this by saying, cryptically, "This sex- and dose-related effect resulted in the fact that the growth variations of the 11 per cent GMO males are highly statistically lower [emphasis added] than their controls, and 33 per cent-GM-fed females higher."'

However you'd like to interpret that, it remains the case that scientists evaluating MON863 rat studies have consistently found the variations occurred randomly, were generally of small magnitude, and were within the normal range for laboratory rats. The fully-accountable food safety scientists of more than a dozen governments have approved this corn after exhaustive safety evaluation. These public servant-scientists have staked their jobs and reputations on the integrity and accuracy of their safety approvals. If something goes wrong, they will be the ones who will be called upon to explain their decisions.

Greenpeace wants us to ignore these dozens and dozens of expert scientists in favour of the self-serving `counter evaluation' of raw data by three scientists who claim to see `disturbed' livers and kidneys where dozens of others see only normal variation. The European Food Safety Authority has announced they will give the report a thorough read. Then I hope they will escort it, tout suite, into the `circular file', aka the bin!

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



4 April, 2007

Wacky idea

I expected the date of the article below to be April 1, but it wasn't! There are any number of isotopes. Are they all the same? If this were serious science at least the class of isotopes would have been identified. As it is, it looks like just another bit of pseudo-scientific health-nuttery

Indulging in an isotope-enhanced steak or chicken fillet every now and again could add as much as 10 years to your life. Scientists have shown for the first time that food enriched with natural isotopes builds bodily components that are more resistant to the processes of ageing. The concept has been demonstrated in worms and researchers hope that the same concept can help extend human life and reduce the risk of cancer and other diseases of ageing, reports Marina Murphy in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI.

A team led by Mikhail Shchepinov, formerly of Oxford University, fed nematode worms nutrients reinforced with natural isotopes (naturally occurring atomic variations of elements). In initial experiments, worms' life spans were extended by 10%, which, with humans expected to routinely coast close to the centenary, could add a further 10 years to human life.

Food enhanced with isotopes is thought to produce bodily constituents and DNA more resistant to detrimental processes, like free radical attack. The isotopes replace atoms in susceptible bonds making these bonds stronger. 'Because these bonds are so much more stable, it should be possible to slow down the process of oxidation and ageing,' Shchepinov says.

The isotopes could be used in animal feed so that humans could get the "age-defying" isotopes indirectly in steaks or chicken fillets, for example, rather than eating chemically enhanced products themselves. Shchepinov says an occasional top-up would be sufficient to have a beneficial effect.

Ageing experts are impressed with the isotopic approach. Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge-based gerontologist, says it could be very relevant to the rates of several chemical and enzymatic processes relevant to ageing 'It is a highly novel idea,' he says. 'But it remains to be seen whether it can be the source of practicable therapies, but it is a prospect that certainly cannot be ruled out.'

Charles Cantor, a professor of biomechanical engineering at Boston University, said: 'Preliminary data indicates that this approach can potentially increase lifespan without adverse side effects. If this is borne out by further experiments the implications are profound.'

Isotopes could also be used in pet food or as a means to protect workers or soldiers from radiation. Deuterium, a natural isotope of hydrogen (with one proton and on neutron rather than just one proton) could be used routinely. Previous successes in extending lifespan have involved withdrawing food to the point of near starvation, a process called caloric restriction.

Source



Plastic panic

It started innocently. A mother on my local parenting email list here in New York asked a question about weaning her baby from the pacifier. Moms and dads in my neck of the woods are a good natured lot and soon began a lively exchange of war stories, of pacifiers lost on long haul flights, of binkies exchanged for coins by the `pacifier fairy' and how the dentist says they rarely affect teeth, so one shouldn't worry. And then someone, half in jest, mentioned that she had read somewhere that pacifiers cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and wasn't that just absurd? Debate and speculations ensued: `It was the plastic ones'; `No, the rubber ones'; `They don't make that kind any more'; `What about the silicon ones?'; `Actually the real threat is plastic baby bottles'.

The story emerged in the form of cut-and-paste quotations with links to articles on the internet and went something like this: When plastic containers are heated, they break down, leaching a dangerous toxic chemical into the foods stored in them. The nasty chemical, bisphenol-A (BPA), supposedly mimics the effects of the hormone estrogen causing cancers, impaired immune function, premature puberty, obesity, diabetes and ADHD.

By coincidence a new study from the Environmental California Research and Policy Center purported to show that the levels of BPA leaching from baby bottles were far higher than previously reported and recommended 11 `simple and easy changes' to help parents avoid exposing their children to toxic chemicals, including: avoiding canned goods and foods wrapped in plastics, buying aluminium or stainless steel sippy cups, selecting only plastics displaying the numbers one, two or five in the triangular recycling symbol on their undersides, while avoiding those displaying the number three (number four was not mentioned) and never allowing children to put plastic toys in their mouths.

And then things got a little torturous. It seems there are only a few local places that sell aluminium-lined sippy cups. Glass baby bottles, though aesthetically pleasing, are heavy and breakable. And it's all a bit pricey. One woman got prepared to throw out every last plastic cup, plate and utensil. In the playground, parents joked nervously about the damage already sustained over months of wanton plastic gnawing. Scary stuff - if it was true. Except that the evidence was as flimsy as the wrapper on a juice box straw.

This particular scare traces its roots back to a 1998 study by Frederick von Saal, a researcher and environmental activist at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His work with mice exposed to low levels of BPA seemed to show side effects including the early onset of puberty in female mice and increased prostate weight in males.

The study caused some initial concern, but so far no other peer-reviewed study has been able to replicate von Saal's results. Scientists commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration, the European Community and the Japanese Ministry of Health have all tried and failed. Finally, last year, the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis released its report reviewing the studies of BPA and found that there is `no consistent affirmative evidence of low-dose BPA effects for any endpoint'. (2) Among the inconsistencies they pointed to were: the effects seen in mice don't occur in rats; effects seen in small numbers of mice aren't observed in studies of larger numbers of mice; no studies have been done on animals more closely related to human beings; human exposure to BPA is typically significantly lower than even the low levels used in lab experiments on rodents. Furthermore, they pointed out that while estrogen and BPA share some similar properties, they aren't exactly the same; large doses of the hormone estrogen, for instance, have been shown to cause cancer, while large doses of BPA do not.

You might think this information, coupled with the fact that many of today's parents used plastic containers throughout their own childhoods with no apparent ill effects would be reassuring enough. But parents don't get off that easily. `It's all about exposure over time', one mother explained. `There is no way, in our society, to completely protect ourselves or our children against the dangerous toxins in plastics, cleaning products, pesticides etc. So my attitude is: do what you can, but don't make yourself nuts.' And yet, the hyper-awareness of risk that has come to define parenting today seems uniquely suited to accomplish just that....

And while it might be tempting to label New Yorkers as the `most neurotic and obsessive parents in the world', as Manhattan gossip-mag Gawker.com did, anxieties like these are ubiquitous. In the past month alone, every major parenting magazine in the country ran a story about toxins in the environment. Mothering magazine, a publication all about `natural family living', regularly advises parents about the dangers of vaccines, ultrasounds, epidurals, pesticides, non-organic baby clothing and other products.

One mom told me: `I was just talking with a friend yesterday about the new studies about fish, which now say the advice to avoid it while pregnant (due to mercury) is wrong, and that children born to women who did not eat fish during pregnancy are at risk of lower IQ's! I'm one of those who avoided most fish during pregnancy. It really is crazy making!' ....

In the end, perhaps the best thing we can do is to accept that though we will love our children for all time, we can't keep them safe for all time. Nor should we feel obliged to try. To be a parent is to discover the world anew alongside our children. Whether they experience the world as something to be embraced or as a threatening place riddled with hidden dangers and risks depends on how we, the parents, approach it. That, at least is something all of us can control.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



3 April, 2007

End to blood typing problems?

A life-saving method of converting blood from one group to another has been pioneered by scientists. The breakthrough could potentially mean the end of blood-donor shortages and boost supplies of sought-after group O negative blood. O negative blood is known as “universal” because it can be given to anyone in a blood transfusion. Giving patients the wrong type of blood can cause severe immune system reactions and can be fatal.

Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, an international team of researchers described how they converted blood from group A, B or AB to group O. The process uses bacterial enzymes found in fungi, which can be used as biological “scissors” to cut sugar molecules from the surface of red blood cells.

People inherit blood type through their parents’ genes, and the system of categorising groups as A, B, AB or O dates back to 1900. Those in groups A and B have blood containing one of two different sugar molecules that can trigger an immune response. People in group O, the most common group, have neither of these “antigens”, while those in group AB have both.

Patients produce antibodies against the antigens they lack. For this reason, AB individuals, who lack neither, can receive blood safely from any group. But group A patients cannot be given a transfusion of group B blood, and vice versa. Group O patients react badly against A, B or AB blood. However, their own blood, having neither of the sugar antigens, is suitable for people from all the ABO groups. Group O donors are therefore always in demand, and O blood is often in short supply.

A further antigen that can trigger an immune response, a protein called RhD, exists in blood labelled “rhesus positive”. Truly “universal” group O blood is rhesus negative, meaning that it is also missing this antigen, but at the moment this type makes up only 4 per cent of stocks for the National Blood Service (NBS).

The scientists, led by Henrik Clausen, from the University of Copenhagen, screened 2,500 types of fungi and bacteria looking for useful proteins. They found two bacteria, Elizabethingia meningosepticum and Bacterioides fragilis, that yielded enzymes capable of removing A and B antigens from red blood cells. In tests, the antigens were found to vanish from 200ml samples of A, B and AB blood after an hour’s exposure to the appropriate enzyme. The researchers wrote: “Clinical translation of this approach may allow improvement of the blood supply and enhancement of patient safety in transfusion medicine.” Group O blood created using the new method will have to be tested on human beings before it can be used in hospitals.

To create supplies of group O negative blood, rhesus negative A, B and AB blood would have to be selected. No way has yet been found to turn rhesus-positive blood into rhesus-negative. The present system of blood transfusions is wasteful, with 10 per cent of donations in the UK never reaching patients. It is also expensive, with each unit costing more than 120 pounds to extract, screen and store. The NBS, which serves England and North Wales, holds 40,000 units of blood in stock — enough to last about 5½ days. A unit is a single blood donation, or two thirds of a pint. Red blood cells can be stored for only 35 days, and stocks must be replenished continuously by donors.

Source




A feelgood germ

FORGET the spring-cleaning. A study has found evidence that bacteria common in soil and dirt could improve people’s spirits. According to the research, the action of Mycobacterium vaccae (M vaccae) on the brain is similar to that of some commonly used antidepressants. The bacterium, which is related to the microbe that causes tuberculosis, appears to work by stimulating the body’s immune system. This, in turn, prompts certain cells in the brain to produce more serotonin, a hormone associated with feelings of wellbeing.

“These studies help us to understand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining mental health,” said Dr Chris Lowry, a neuroscientist at Bristol University who carried out the research. “They also leave us wondering if we shouldn’t all spend more time playing in the dirt.”

The finding follows separate research by other scientists into the impact of bringing children up in “overhygienic” conditions. They found evidence that exposure to a wide range of common microbes in early life helped to promote healthy development of the immune system. Without such exposure, the immune system seems more likely to mistake the body’s own cells as invaders and launch attacks on them. This could be one of the mechanisms underlying the surge in conditions such as asthma and eczema.

The research by Lowry and a team of 12 scientists at Bristol and University College London (UCL) takes this “hygiene hypothesis” a step further by linking exposure to the microbes found in dirt with good mental, as well as physical, health. Interest in the project arose after human cancer patients being treated with M vaccae unexpectedly reported increases in their quality of life. This could have been caused by the microbe having indirectly activated the brain cells that produce serotonin.

The researchers injected some mice with the bacteria while others were made to inhale it. They then analysed the blood and brains of the infected mice to see what effect the microbes might have had on their immune systems and on serotonin levels. Details will be published in Neuroscience, an academic journal, this week.

The study is highly unlikely to lead to new therapies for depression in the near future but it does build on the growing body of research showing the importance of the human immune system in regulating even the subtlest aspects of health. There are a range of studies supporting the hygiene hypothesis and the idea that exposure to microbes is good for long-term health. In families with several children, the youngest often has the least allergies, most likely because it picks up the elder siblings’ infections so activating the child’s immune system.

Graham Rook, a professor of immunology at UCL who worked with Lowry, has already published research into the link between exposure to microbes and subsequent development of allergies. Rook and two of his co-researchers are also working with S R Pharma, a company looking into whether M vaccae could become the basis of treatments for conditions such as asthma. Rook believes that improved cleanliness may be a contributory factor in diseases such as asthma, eczema and hay fever, along with autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disorders such as Crohn’s disease. He said: “We’ve known for a couple of decades now that a whole group of chronic inflammatory disorders are becoming much commoner in the rich developed world.”

The body’s response to such inflammatory diseases is regulated by immune cells which, said Rook, need to encounter harmless bacteria early in life in order to work out how to respond effectively to real threats. Without these encounters, he said, the regulatory cells can malfunction, leading to health problems.

Mark Pepys, professor of medicine at UCL, said that there was “quite a lot of evidence” to support the hygiene hypothesis but said he would be cautious about extending the theory to mental wellbeing.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************



2 April, 2007

Belgian fries "healthier"?

Pandering to popular panics

It is the answer to many a diner's prayer in Britain and on the Continent: a way to eat chips and maintain a healthy heart. A new blend of cooking oil, which exploits the healthy properties of the grape seed, is being hailed by French scientists as a breakthrough in the quest for the fast-food industry's holy grail. The oil, which blends rape, sunflower and grape seed, is said to slash the level of damaging fat in fried potatoes. It will replace the artery-clogging greasy chip with the promise of a Mediterranean-style diet, says Quick, the Belgian-based hamburger chain that will introduce it this year.

The group appears to have stolen a march on rivals such as McDonald's and Burger King in the race to create a politically correct form of fast food. "There is really a very impressive level of difference," said David Garbous, sales director for Lesieur, the company that developed the product. "It's possible to say we're going to get healthy chips with this." Lesieur, a business controlled by French farming co-operatives, spent two years putting together what it claims to be the ideal mixture. It says that the results were validated by the French Higher National School of Food Industries in Nancy, eastern France.

These found that the new chips contained low levels of the saturated fatty acids linked to heart disease. The Quick group asked researchers to spend a year evaluating three new cooking oils by "pushing them to the limit" in the laboratory. The scientists cooked and studied 50 kilos (110lb) of chips every day over a two-month period in a deep fryer. They assessed the stability and durability of the oils through chemical and electronic analysis, heating them day after day. The nutritional values were checked by the scientists, who also cooked 600 kilos of dips in the oils. The researchers were then asked to determine which chips tasted best and which had the crispiest coating in blind laboratory tests. Students' impressions of the chips and dips were measured and quantified.

Three tonnes of chips were used before the researchers came to the conclusion that the product met the gastronomic, health and economic requirements laid down by Quick. Their results were then verified in another series of blind tests in the group's restaurants. Quick has already tested the oil in some of its restaurants and says that it will introduce the product throughout the chain later this year.

Source



Beef about sperm

Consumers were frightened this week by media reports about a new study claiming to link mothers' consumption of beef with reduced sperm counts in their sons ( "Sperm Count Low if Mom Ate Beef, Study Finds" ). But the study amounts to nothing more than a transparent effort to resurrect an already debunked 1990s-era health scare with appalling science and sensational headlines.

From "Mom's beef puts son's sperm count at stake" (Los Angeles Times) to "Meaty momma's boys lose" (Edmonton Sun, Canada) to "Sunday roasts could have hit male fertility" (Daily Mail, UK), gullible media around the world once again fell for science-by-press-release committed by longtime environmental activist-researchers.

The supposed findings of the study were that "men whose mothers had eaten more than seven beef meals a week had a sperm concentration that was over 24 percent lower than in men whose mothers ate less beef "and that three times more sons of high-beef consumers had a sperm concentration that would be classified as sub-fertile, according to World Health Organization standards, in comparison to men whose mothers ate less beef."

But for anyone who makes the effort to look past the press releases touting these findings and to examine the study that supposedly backs them up, these findings fall apart as easily as slow-cooked pot roast.

First, the researchers approached the question of what caused the reduced sperm counts exactly backwards. Rather than investigating all possible causes and eliminating those for which there are no supporting evidence, the researchers, according to their own admission, set out to link maternal beef consumption with fertility problems while ignoring other possible causes. There are myriad causes of infertility. Focusing on a novel one that might make for good headlines - while overlooking established, but less newsworthy, causes - simply does not constitute bona fide scientific investigation.

Then, of course, none of the men studied seemed to have fertility problems in the first place. In fact, the men had all fathered children. But they were nonetheless targeted by the researchers because "[their] rate of consulting a doctor in the past for possible infertility was significantly higher." Simply consulting a fertility specialist, however, does not necessarily indicate that a man has fertility problems.

The researchers' hypothesis is not that beef itself causes infertility, but rather that the hormone-like medicines and chemicals to which cattle may be exposed are at fault. But even if it were true, for the sake of argument, that hormone-like chemicals were linked with male infertility, the researchers would still be obligated to rule out other potential exposures to these chemicals, such as through other foods or occupational exposures in both the mothers and sons, before blaming beef consumption by mothers.

But the study gets worse. Although the researchers tout a study size of 387 subjects, only 51 of the sons had mothers who allegedly ate beef more than seven times per week when they were pregnant. So the researchers drew an awfully sweeping conclusion from a minuscule study population. Moreover, the data on mothers' beef consumption during 1949 to 1983 were collected by surveying the mothers during 1999 to 2005, as long as 50 years after they were pregnant. Such self-reported dietary data were not verified by the researchers and are subject to phenomena known in scientific circles as "recall bias" (memory-impaired responses) or "response bias" (intentionally incorrect responses to, say, avoid embarrassing answers). No one really knows what or how much these women actually ate.

It's also not necessarily true that more frequent beef consumption is greater beef consumption. Someone who consumes four 8-ounce portions of meat per week consumes 14 percent more beef than someone who consumes a 4-ounce portion every day -- yet, in this study, the everyday-meat eater is assumed to be the greater consumer of beef.

Although the researchers say in their media release, "We don't have enough information yet to make any recommendations, and this is not what this study was designed to do," they then proceed to make dietary recommendations including eating only organic beef and generally reducing beef consumption. This study is about causing alarm, not about sound scientific research.

So just who are these researchers and what's their real beef? The University of Rochester's Shanna Swan and Danish researcher Niels Skakkebaek are well-known to followers of the now-defunct 1990s controversy over hormone-like chemicals in the environment, so-called "endocrine disrupters" or "environmental estrogens." Swan, Skakkebaek and others have been trying to scare people that man-made chemicals in the environment and food are reducing fertility, particularly sperm counts. Swan has published 15 related studies since 1997 and Skakkebaek has more than 80 related citations in the scientific literature dating back to 1992.

Despite tremendous media attention, the science of Swan and Skakkebaek has never been particularly persuasive. A National Academy of Sciences committee concluded in 1999 that, "Given the evidence to date, increases in the incidence of male reproductive disorders in humans . cannot be linked to exposures to [hormonally-active agents] found in the environment." And since there do not appear to be any sort of worldwide fertility problems that cannot be explained by other causes, it's no wonder that the endocrine disrupter scare never gained traction.

In addition to the news media's predilection for scary health stories, who, after all, could pass up a story about hamburgers as intergenerational contraceptives? It unfortunately suffers from an abysmal institutional memory, particularly when it comes to science. So Swan and Skakkebaek can always count on gullible reporters parroting their "findings" as if they were novel, credible and important, rather than what they really are: stale, unbelievable and meaningless.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

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1 April, 2007

Kill that Alzheimer!

Or so the policy looks in Britain

Drugs commonly prescribed to people with Alzheimer’s disease are accelerating their deaths by an average of six months, a study has found. Up to 45 per cent of people with Alzheimer’s in nursing homes are given sedative drugs known as neuroleptics to try to control behavioural symptoms such as aggression. In severe cases, the drugs may be justified. But a five-year study by the Alzheimer’s Research Trust showed that, as well as reducing life expectancy, they were of no benefit to patients with mild symptoms and were associated with significant deterioration in verbal fluency and cognitive function.

Clive Ballard, professor of age-related disorders at King’s College London, who presented the findings at the charity’s conference in Edinburgh yesterday, said: “It is very clear that even over a six-month period of treatment there is no benefit of neuroleptics in treating the behaviour in people with Alzheimer’s disease when the symptoms are mild. “For people with more severe behavioural symptoms, balancing the potential benefits against increased mortality and other adverse events is more difficult, but this study provides an important evidence base to inform this decision-making process.”

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “These results are deeply troubling and highlight the urgent need to develop better treatments. “Seven hundred thousand people are affected by dementia in the UK, a figure that will double in the next 30 years. The Government needs to make Alzheimer’s research funding a priority. Only 11 pound is spent on UK research into Alzheimer’s for every person affected by the disease, compared with 289 for cancer patients.”

The study examined 165 people with Alzheimer’s living in nursing homes in Oxford-shire, Newcastle upon Tyne, Edinburgh and London. They had been taking neuroleptic drugs for at least three months and took part in a trial in which some were taken off the drugs and others were not. The drugs involved were thioridazine (Melleril), chlorpromazine (Largactil), haloperidol (Serenace), trifluoperazine (Stelazine) and risperidone (Risperdal). Follow-ups in succeeding years showed striking differences in survival. After two years survival was 78 per cent in those taken off the drugs, and 55 per cent in those still on them. After three years the figures were 62 per cent against 35 per cent, and at 42 months 60 per cent against 25 per cent.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society , said: “Neuroleptics have been used as a dangerous fix for ‘challenging behaviour’ in people with dementia for too long. “These drugs have now been exposed as having no benefit for people with dementia, while causing a dramatic increase in the risk of death. It is a disturbing revelation that confirms some of our worst fears about neuroleptics, which have been the subject of numerous health warnings. “It is a national scandal that people are being sedated in this way. These drugs must be a last resort only used when all other methods have failed to alleviate the most distressing symptoms of dementia.”

Source




More vaccination needed?

Waning immunity after childhood vaccinations has prompted concerns we may need to better protect adults from disease. The report below is from Australia but the implications apply anywhere

When you think chickenpox, do you imagine spotty but otherwise happy kids quarantined at home and amused with colouring books and hot drinks? If so, you may be surprised to learn that pneumonia, inflammation of the heart muscle and swelling of the brain (encephalitis) are all potential complications of this highly contagious disease, which causes 1500 hospitalisations and seven deaths in Australia each year.

Although it's a mostly mild illness in children, chickenpox - caused by the varicella zoster virus, one of the herpes family - can be nasty in adults, particularly the elderly, pregnant women, and other people with compromised immune systems. Since November 2005 a federal Government funded vaccine for varicella has been available free to all children aged 18 months (and at 10-13 years for non-immune children who haven't already been immunised). The problem is, no one is quite sure how long this protection lasts - estimates range from 10 to 20 years, or longer. It's a question that has significant implications as people age and become more susceptible to disease.

An editorial in the respected New England Journal of Medicine (2005;352(22):2344-6) suggested that mass childhood vaccination against chickenpox might ironically be leaving some people more vulnerable to the adult disease, which it said was "far more serious than childhood varicella usually is". And experts are also raising questions about waning post-vaccine immunity to other diseases. Not all vaccines offer lifelong protection and many of the newer ones have just not been around long enough for us to know how effective they are long-term. We know for example that immunity following a vaccination for pertussis - whooping cough - usually lasts only around five to 10 years.

Recently-released draft Australian immunisation guidelines are already suggesting that, contrary to current practice, children might need a second dose of chickenpox vaccine before 13 years of age, and receive their first dose six months earlier, to give them earlier and more sustained protection. "Waning immunity is often under-recognised," says Peter Eizenberg, a Melbourne GP who sits on several national immunisation committees. "It is an important issue in the community, particularly among the elderly, but not just the elderly. People get vaccinated and they forget that only a few of the vaccines give long-term immunity."

The NEJM recently revisited the topic, suggesting again that varicella vaccination could lead to a shift in the disease burden to older people (2007;356:1121-9). "Waning of immunity is of particular public health interest because it may result in increased susceptibility later in life, when the risk of severe complications may be greater than in childhood," the authors say.

Professor Lyn Gilbert, director of the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Westmead Hospital's Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research, says the combination of mass childhood vaccination and waning immunity might see an increase in cases of shingles - a painful condition caused by the re-activation of the varicella zoster virus, which continues to lurk in nerve cells after a childhood infection. Shingles has its own set of complications. It can sometimes cause permanent, painful nerve damage and can actually transmit the chickenpox virus itself to people who aren't immune. "Shingles . . . is potentially a time bomb waiting to happen," Gilbert says.

The theory is that because mass childhood vaccination greatly reduces the amount of "wild" virus circulating in the community, it means that people's immunity to varicella is no longer being constantly "topped up" by re-exposure to it. "There is a very plausible model that suggests that if you reduce the incidence of infection in children through mass vaccination and older people are not exposed to wild virus, they are likely to have reactivations," Gilbert says. For the elderly, there may be hope of protection with a new shingles vaccine manufactured by drug giant Merck. Zostavax was licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration last year for use in people over 60. It's not yet available in Australia, but there are hopes that it soon will be.

Director of the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance professor Peter McIntyre says the vaccine would initially be used in the over-60s, but may in future be used for younger patients. Gilbert says in the long term, those vaccinated for varicella in childhood will probably require boosters as they age. But she says uncertainties over whether boosters are needed or not tend to muddy the waters on the true costs of a government funding of vaccines.

And funding of new vaccines doesn't come cheap. In the last financial year, the federal Government spent about $250 million on vaccines. Cabinet this week agreed to spend $124.4 million over five years to immunise babies against rotavirus, which hospitalises 10,000 children a year. Estimates are that this could save the health system some $30 million annually by preventing illnesses.

One disease where waning immunity issues pose a significant challenge is the highly infectious whooping cough (or pertussis), which is on the rise worldwide. It is less dangerous to adults than it is to young babies, for whom it can cause brain damage and even prove fatal. Adults can develop hernias and rib fractures from the coughing, but a particular problem in adults is that it might not be recognised as pertussis at all - missing an opportunity to limit transmission. Most babies are immunised against pertussis, but protection is not achieved until after the third dose at six months of age, so waning immunity to the vaccine and resulting infection in adults is putting these children at risk. "Pertussis is a number one problem," Eizenberg says. "It is in epidemic proportions . . . we have around 10,000 cases a year notified to the department of health and that probably under-represents the true numbers by 3-4 times because mild cases can be hard to diagnose but remain very infectious."

There's still uncertainty over how many pertussis boosters are needed, because the adult booster, called Boostrix, is only relatively new. While the federal Government funds Boostrix for 15 to 17-year-olds, there is no public funding for pertussis vaccination of older adults. Eizenberg would like to see national, publicly-funded routine immunisation with the combined diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis vaccine for all eligible 50-year-olds. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), which advises the federal government, is looking at whether there is a case to recommend a routine pertussis booster in middle age, a decision that would be a world first. "The unknown question is, how long will the vaccine last?" says ATAGI chairman professor Terry Nolan. "There is a possibility that progressive boosting will be needed to protect throughout life."

Another problem is measles, which in the 24 years from 1976 to 2000 caused nearly 100 deaths in Australia. While this figure is small, experts are still concerned. Small outbreaks continue to occur around the country and immunisation levels aren't as high as they could be, particularly in young adults who may not have been fully vaccinated in childhood. As for how long vaccine protection lasts, it has been thought that immunity was long term. But some experts believe that waning vaccine-induced immunity could become an issue. Introduced measles is a particular threat - from Australians who travel overseas."A classic situation is an unimmunised young Australian male, goes to Bali, picks it up there and comes back and infects all his mates," Gilbert says.

Experts say funding issues do make a difference to vaccine uptake and the battle to maintain levels of disease protection. "I think there is a culture amongst a lot of people that if a vaccine is not 'free' then it can't be important," Eizenberg says. This sort of attitude can make it hard for GPs to convince people who don't feel sick that they need a booster jab. McIntyre says although diphtheria/tetanus or diphtheria/tetanus/pertussis is recommended at age 50 (but not publicly funded), "the chances are most people don't do it". "We think most people don't get around to it and doctors forget to remind people and it's not free." Eizenberg says a national adult immunisation register could keep track of all vaccinations and trigger reminders.

It seems the Federal Government agrees in principle. In the last budget it allocated $1.2 million to explore redeveloping the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register into a whole-of-life register that included adult immunisation. Health Minister Tony Abbott is due to see a report on the concept some time this year. According to Gilbert, adult immunisation is becoming much more of an issue. "Increasingly, people are beginning to recognise better the burden of illness in older peo ple." But difficulties in reaching younger adults and unanswered questions about waning immunity means the cost-effectiveness of paying for immunisation programs from the public purse might be doubtful. It seems a big question for the future is, to whom should we give boosters, and can we afford it?

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

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