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A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

NOTE: "No trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat".

"What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum

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30 November, 2007

IQ: DESPERATION TO BELIEVE MYTHS LEADS TO FALLACIOUS REASONING YET AGAIN

What nonsense below! Are these guys seriously arguing that because genes with high relevance to IQ have not yet been found then there are none? I hate to repeat an old saw but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Genes relevant to IQ are being discovered all the time. One with a big link to IQ could be just around the corner. Though it is most probable that high IQ is the result of an accumulation of many "good" genes -- which is why high IQ people tend to be healthier and live longer etc.

A team of scientists led by Professor Robert Plomin, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, identified only six genes linked with intelligence to any degree of significance, but even those accounted for just 1 per cent of the differences in IQ between individuals. Experts said upbringing, education and a healthy diet in early life had important roles to play in helping to nurture intelligence. The research also means testing the potential intelligence of new-born babies - or improving it with genetic engineering - could be impossible.

The researchers said a study of the human genome revealed hundreds of genes which contribute to IQ, but their individual effects are barely detectable. Previous studies on twins and adopted children have established that about half of the variation in intelligence is down to environment, but almost all of the genetic component has yet to be uncovered.

Prof Plomin said: "If the biggest [genes] only account for 1 per cent of the variance [in intelligence], there's a long way to go. The most striking result is there are no large effects." However, this does not mean intelligence is not inherited. Many experts believe IQ is due to the cumulative effect of a combination of genes.

The study, published in the journal Genes, Brains and Behaviour, involved obtaining intelligence scores for 7,000 seven-year-olds and DNA samples. Dr Robin Campbell, an expert in intelligence and child development at Stirling University, said: " [This research] leaves it open that nurture, education and good early nutrition have an important role." [Of course they do. Nobody has ever said otherwise. But genetic inheritance is the major determinant]

Source




Success Depends on Others Failing

There may be something in the theories below but, with a only 19 units of analysis, it seems most unlikely that the findings were statistically significant. Nor can we rule out cultural and sub-cultural influences. The generalizability of these contrived experiments is also unknown but probably slight -- as I showed long ago in another field

Reward mechanisms in the brain depend on how well you think other people are doing, a new neurological study suggests. The findings, published in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal Science are the first to lend physiological proof to a longstanding theory among contemporary economists: that people are affected not only by their own achievements and income, but also by how they stack up against their neighbors.

The study, by cognition experts and economists at the University of Bonn in Germany, looks at the brain regions that process reward. Nineteen pairs of subjects performed a series of tasks, estimating the number of dots on a screen, while their brains were scanned. Each time a subject answered correctly, he or she won a cash prize but the prizes were not always the same. Players could see whether their opponents had answered correctly, and how the prize money was distributed.

The researchers were especially interested in the set of outcomes where both players answered correctly. For any given prize value, the brain's reward response was bigger if the other player earned less. Players on average were more pleased with a 60 euro prize when the other player got just 30 euros, for example, than they were if both players earned 60 euros, or if the other player got more.

"In a sense it goes back to Aristotle," says the paper's senior author, Armin Falk, an economist. "The fact that we are social beings is a well-known fact." But the idea that rewards are context-dependent challenges a key assumption behind most traditional of economic theories: the premise that humans are essentially self-interested, that they care about their own work, income, achievements, and purchases, and that whatever other people do is, if not irrelevant, at least not going to have a consistent or predictable effect on decision-making.

Instead, the brain scans from this study support a mountain of survey data collected by modern economists and psychologists that suggests people care very much about keeping up with the Joneses. In the past, researchers have often struggled to work out how much they could trust that data, not sure whether survey-takers might be changing their response consciously or unconsciously based on what they thought was socially acceptable. The Science findings give further empirical evidence that people compare their gains to others'. "If you look at the brain reaction, it's a relatively immediate physiological reaction," says Falk. "It shows on a deeper level, in the brain, these things really matter."

The practical implications? Many scholars believe that social comparison helps to explain why, even as much of the world gets ever richer, people today don't report being happier than people did 50 years ago. We might not be happy now if we had to give up the amenities of the last half-century computers, air conditioners, a bedroom for every child, and more - but back when no one else had them either, life was okay.

There's also a lesson here for company managers, says Falk. A wage scale should reflect job and performance differences fairly, or else firms risk alienating their staff. "It's extremely important for companies to understand it's not just a matter of justice, but it's also a matter of efficiency," he says. It turns out the negative response to earning less is usually stronger than the positive response to earning more or as Falk says, "The pain of having less is much stronger than the joy of having more." Workers who discover they're earning more for the same work may be happy, but those who earn less can quickly feel slighted, killing motivation and often the quality of their output. It doesn't take a brain specialist to understand how that affects a business.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



29 November, 2007

CONFUSED RESEARCH ON DISRUPTIVE CHILDREN

IQ ignored again! Has nobody ever told these idiots that high IQ children can be disruptive out of boredom? Failing to control for IQ in this field is brain-dead. Breaking out the data in terms of IQ might have told us something but this is just one big conflation. Disruptive kids kept up ON AVERAGE. Big deal! The average would have been made up of smarties and dummies. So what does that tell us? Nil. And the ones who did badly in later life would mostly have been the dummies

New research suggests that children entering school with behavior problems, as a rule, can keep pace with classroom learning, but persistent behavior problems can be a strong indicator of how well these students adapt to the work world.

Two studies entirely funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Developmental and Learning Sciences program uncovered these results. Researchers working through the Center for the Analyses of Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood (CAPCA) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., conducted both studies.

The findings may help parents, teachers and social and behavioral scientists improve educational and occupational outcomes for disruptive students. "Every student deserves a good education and an opportunity to have a fulfilling work life," said NSF Developmental and Learning Sciences Program Director Amy Sussman. "These findings can help us understand how to make that goal a reality for even the most difficult-to-reach students."

One study examined data from six large-scale studies of almost 36,000 preschoolers in which the same subjects were observed repeatedly over time. The research included two national studies of U.S. children, two multi-site studies of U.S. children, one study of children from Great Britain and one study of children from Canada.

Using various statistical methods to synthesize research results, Greg Duncan, human development and social policy professor at Northwestern University, along with the study's 11 co-authors, found that, surprisingly, difficulty getting along with classmates, aggressive or disruptive behaviors, and sad or withdrawn behaviors in kindergarten did not detract from academic achievement in childhood and early adolescence.

The study's researchers examined several indicators, including picking fights, interrupting the teacher and defying instructions. They found that kindergartners who did these things performed surprisingly well in reading and math when they reached the fifth grade, keeping pace with well-behaved children of the same abilities.

Although Duncan's study found no predictive power in early behavior problems for later learning, another CAPCA study, which examined older children, found such a connection. According to CAPCA investigator Rowell Huesmann, persistent behavior problems in eight-year-olds are a powerful predictor of educational attainment and of how well people will do in middle age.

If behavior problems of the kind seen in younger children continue until age eight, they can create other challenges, said Huesmann. He noted that while a small group of children fall into this category, their behavior has the potential to lead them to lower occupational and academic achievement than that of their better behaved counterparts.

Huesmann based his conclusion on a prior research study and a recent analysis by CAPCA researchers Eric Dubow, Paul Boxer, Lea Pulkkinen and Katja Kokko. That team studied two longitudinal data sets from the United States and Finland. Analysis of data from 856 U.S. children and 369 Finnish children showed that children who engaged in more frequent aggressive behaviors as eight-year-olds had significantly lower educational success by their 30s and significantly lower status occupations by their mid-40s. The results were published in Developmental Psychology. "It makes perfectly good sense that persistent behavior problems would have a substantial impact on later success," said Sussman. "When interviewing for jobs and progressing through one's career trajectory, personality and other characteristics that are not measured by tests certainly come into play."

There's a good chance that personality traits also come into play in the classroom. Huesmann and his colleagues hypothesize that children with persistent behavior problems lasting into the third grade are those who cannot be easily socialized to behave well and who therefore are more likely to experience a "hostile learning environment."

They speculate that teachers and peers likely "punish" these children, reducing or eliminating positive support for learning. But researchers note that if a child's aggression is short-lived, it is unlikely to have the same long-term consequences. "Socialization of disruptive preschoolers by teachers and peers may ensure that a child's behavioral problems do not affect his or her educational achievement," Huesmann said. "Attending class, spending time with classmates, observing the rewards of proper behavior, and being told, 'No,' to correct disruptive behavior can benefit unruly children."

Researchers also noted that popularity and positive social behavior in childhood and adolescence predicted higher levels of educational attainment in early adulthood. They said it is possible that children with stable positive social skills experience a supportive and conducive learning environment.

Duncan's study of kindergartners did not address what types of preschool curricula might be most effective in reducing aggression or promoting school readiness. But researchers pointed out that play-based activities, as opposed to "drill- and practice-based" activities, foster academic and attention skills in ways that are engaging and fun.

Source




Obesity, BMI and political correctness

It has been reported by the Trust for America's Health that West Virginia has the third highest level of adult obesity in the nation at 27 percent and that 65 percent of Americans are overweight. This report ended with a recommendation that more money should be spent for those who do research for nutritional health and for green projects. These claims were made using the body mass index to calculate obesity. We will see that the BMI as used today has little to do with medical science and much to do with political correctness.

The BMI was developed in 1850 by Adolphe Quetelet - a mathematician and sociologist. The BMI is a number derived by taking the weight of a person in pounds and dividing it by the square of their height in inches (weight divided by height times height). This number is then multiplied by 703. This gives the BMI value. A value lower than 18.5 is considered by some to mean that a person is underweight. Normal weight is a value between 18.5 and 25, overweight if more than 25 and obesity if more than 30. Yet, who decides that these values determine if one is underweight, overweight or obese?

The first thing that many of you have already noticed is that the BMI does not take into account sex, body frame, actual fat, muscle mass, ethnic norms or health. What is considered normal is derived by looking at the average weight and height of sedentary to average city dwellers. The problem with this approach is that this makes the socialist assumption that we are sexless, have the same body frame, same ethnicity, same muscle mass and are all sedentary. This is all done without actually measuring fat.

Men, athletes, American rural populations, blacks and those who are active all tend to have higher muscle mass and bone density than the theoretical sexless white collar urbanites have. Thus, all these groups will tend to have an overestimated amount of obesity.

The average BMI the United States used to define being overweight was more than 27.8 - significantly higher than today's 25. However, under pressure from the World Health Organization - which defined the number 25 as being the upper-limit for normal weight - it was based on their evaluation of world populations including Africa, India and other Third-World areas where there is endemic malnutrition if not outright starvation. Based on this evaluation, our government changed what it called overweight to mean a BMI value of 25. Thus, with the wave of the wand 30 million Americans were made overweight in one day.

As Americans we tend to have increased in size because of our majority European heritage, promotion of school athletics and improved health and nutrition. Is it then fair to say that we are fat and unhealthy because we are larger than our smaller counterparts' worlds without taking into consideration heritage, lifestyle, muscle mass and actual fat?

Indeed, a recent study published by Journal of the American Medical Association, using the current defined limits of what is considered normal by the BMI, actually found that those who were overweight actually had less cancer, less infections, less respiratory disease, less mental illness and arguably less neurological disease and cancer than those who were so-called of normal weight or underweight, according to today's BMI values.

The BMI tends to overestimate being overweight and obese in Americans, athletes, racial minorities, American rural populations, the working class and others. Unfortunately, it seems that the current politically correct BMI values may end up killing thousands of Americans.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



28 November, 2007

Cupcake saviour

Weeks have passed since Michael Benjamin's fling as a cable news sensation, but the Democratic assemblyman from the Bronx insists he hasn't figured out why people cared so much about his battle to save the cupcake.

When he first heard that several Long Island school districts were forbidding parents from bringing the frosted treats to their children's birthday parties, Mr. Benjamin never anticipated that his decision to take action would forever brand him as the nation's leading cupcake advocate.

"I was ticked that people had the temerity of banning food products," he said in a recent interview. In his opinion, the Long Island superintendents were "robbing children of pleasant childhood memories."

His solution was, of course, a legislative one. He cranked out a bill to make cupcakes the official state children's snack and thereby thwart the bans. In days, he was passionately standing up for the little cupcake before a national audience, appearing on Fox News, NBC Nightly News, and the "The Daily Show."

Source




A third of passive smokers have lung damage

These findings don't seem very robust: Small sample; doubtful diagnoses; no real baseline

One third of people who breath in high levels of secondhand smoke have damage to their lungs similar to that seen in smokers, doctors say. They used a special kind of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scan to look at the lungs of non-smokers who had high exposure to other people's cigarette smoke and found evidence of the kind of damage that causes emphysema. "We interpreted those changes as early signs of lung damage, representing very mild forms of emphysema," said Chengbo Wang, a magnetic resonance physicist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who led the study.

"Almost one third of non-smokers who had been exposed to secondhand cigarette smoke for a long time developed these structural changes," Dr Wang said. "To our knowledge, this is the first imaging study to find lung damage in non-smokers heavily exposed to secondhand smoke. "We hope our work strengthens the efforts of legislators and policymakers to limit public exposure to secondhand smoke."

Dr Wang, who presented his team's findings to a meeting of the Radiological Society of North American in Chicago, said 35 per cent of US children lived in homes where someone smoked regularly. The team studied 60 adults between ages 41 and 79, 45 of whom had never smoked. The non-smokers were considered to have high exposure if they had lived with a smoker for at least 10 years, often during childhood. "It's long been hypothesised that prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke may cause physical damage to the lungs, but previous methods of analysing lung changes were not sensitive enough to detect it," said Dr Wang.

His team used a technique called long-time-scale, global helium-3 diffusion magnetic resonance imaging. "With this technique, we are able to assess lung structure on a microscopic level," Dr Wang said. They found 57 per cent of the smokers and 33 per cent of the non-smokers with high exposure to secondhand smoke had signs of early lung damage as measured by the scan. In February, US researchers reported that up to 20 per cent of women who developed lung cancer have never smoked.

Source




Australia: Kids must not run in park

Obesity, anyone?



A GROUP of children have been nabbed for running around a park and threatened with fines by their council. Glen Eira Council has ordered these cute "crooks" out of a Caulfield park and threatened to hit each one with a $250 fine if they return. The children and their parents are furious after they were challenged by Glen Eira officers last Thursday and ordered out of Princes Park during after-school exercise.

The council says it is trying to protect the drought-affected park by making it off limits to any organised sporting groups without a permit. However local families say the fun police are a bad joke. In recent weeks, about eight children and parents from the three families have been meeting at the park after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The energetic youngsters run a lap of the three-oval park and play games.

Dad Grant Cohen said they were approached last week by a Glen Eira local laws officer who told them organised groups weren't allowed on the grounds. "It's ridiculous -- we're just three families who all live five minutes away," Mr Cohen said. "We started coming down here because the kids would be getting home after school and playing computer games all arvo. We wanted to give them a chance to run around. "This park should be full of kids doing exactly that."

Now the kids have gone from running around to being on the run -- forced to be fitness fugitives. "We rang the council and they said that even if we went down the road to Caulfield Park, as long as we were in a group we'd still be fined," Mr Cohen said. The group were told even a single family of eight kids would not be allowed to run around together.

Glen Eira director of community relations Paul Burke said the by-law banning unauthorised groups from parks had been in place since 2000, and council had stepped up enforcement because of the drought. While Mr Burke wouldn't say the minimum number that constituted an organised group, he stuck by the decision to ban the kids.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



27 November, 2007

Global Warming May Trigger Rise in Heart Deaths

The fact that there are many more health problems in winter than in summer must not be mentioned of course. Both warm and cold weather can have their problems but, on balance, warm weather is better for you. People in frail health don't usually go to Iceland. They go to warmer places. But I guess we ought to feel sorry for all those elderly people who retire to Florida. The government should FORCE them to go to Alaska instead -- for their own good, of course

Soaring temperatures and high ozone levels work together to boost death risks from heart disease and stroke, researchers report. They believe that global warming -- which brings more heat and more ozone -- may further increase the number of people who die of cardiovascular events. "Temperature and ozone are strong factors in cardiovascular mortality during June to September in the Unites States," noted the study's lead author, Cizao Ren, from the Department of Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. "Temperature and air pollution combine to affect the health of large populations," he added. Ren expects the problem will get worse as the earth becomes hotter. "Increases in temperature and air pollution will have a strong affect on health," he said.

His team based its findings on data on almost 100 million people living in 95 different areas across the United States from June to September. These Americans were included in the National Mortality and Air Pollution Study, which tracked links between health and air pollution for the years 1987 to 2000. Four million deaths from heart attacks or strokes occurred during the study period. Ren's team compared death rates against changes in temperature during one day.

Ozone was a common link, they found. In fact, the higher the ozone level, the greater the risk of cardiovascular death attributable to high temperatures, Ren's team concluded. Ozone levels ranged from an average of 36.74 parts per billion to 142.85 parts per billion, while daily temperatures ranged from 68 to around 107 degrees Fahrenheit. When the ozone level was at its lowest, a 10-degree increase in temperature was associated with about a 1 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and stroke. However, when the ozone level was at its highest, there was a more than an 8 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and stroke, Ren's group found.

The findings are published Nov. 21 in the online edition of the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Ozone is a pollutant strongly linked to weather conditions, particularly the amount of ultraviolet light in the atmosphere. Ozone is generated by a reaction between airborne nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and oxygen in sunlight. Exposure to high levels of ozone can affect the airways and the autonomic nervous system, making people more susceptible to the effects of temperature changes, Ren's team explained.

One expert agreed with the team's conclusions. "This paper reinforces what we know -- that both temperature and ozone affect health, even to the extent that they affect mortality," said George Thurston, an associate professor of environmental medicine at New York University. Global warming will increase both temperatures and pollution, Thurston added, because higher temperatures are conducive to the production of ozone. "This will be a growing problem," he said. For the general public, the study raises questions about pollution and climate change, Thurston said. "The health effects may be even worse than thought," he said. "There are health benefits to reducing climate change." Cutting back on the use of fossil fuels will help, Thurston said. "Reducing fossil fuel combustion will reduce climate change and pollution," he said. "We have seen the problem, and it's fossil fuel combustion. Now, all we have to do is come up with an alternative," he said.

Source




AND GRASS IS GREEN

Amazing stuff you get in the medical literature sometimes. The study below proves that more active parents tend to have more active children. Who would have thought? Is the deteriorated quality of the BMJ becoming so well known that lightweight submissions like this are needed to fill their pages?

Note also that the speculative last sentence below shows that the authors do NOT believe that personality characteristics are genetically transmitted -- despite the overwhelming evidence from the behaviour genetics literature showing that they are. The BMJ seems to have become a propaganda sheet for some weird Leftist cult rather than a worthwhile medical journal

Early life determinants of physical activity in 11 to 12 year olds: cohort study

By Calum Mattocks et al.

Objective: To examine factors in early life (up to age 5 years) that are associated with objectively measured physical activity in 11-12 year olds.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Setting: Avon longitudinal study of parents and children, United Kingdom.

Participants: Children aged 11-12 years from the Avon longitudinal study of parents and children.

Main outcome measure: Physical activity levels in counts per minute (cpm) and minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity for seven days measured with a uniaxial actigraph accelerometer.

Results: Valid actigraph data, defined as at least three days of physical activity for at least 10 hours a day, were collected from 5451 children. Several factors were associated with physical activity at ages 11-12 years. Regression coefficients are compared with the baseline of "none" for categorical variables: maternal brisk walking during pregnancy (regression coefficient 5.0, 95% confidence interval -8.5 to 18.5; cpm for <1 h/wk and ~ 2 h/wk of physical activity 24.2, 7.8 to 40.7), parents' physical activity when the child was aged 21 months (28.5, 15.2 to 41.8 and cpm of physical activity for either parent active and both parents active 33.5, 17.8 to 49.3), and parity assessed during pregnancy (2.9, -7.6 to 13.4 and cpm of physical activity for 1 and ~ 2 parity 21.2, 7.1 to 35.3).

Conclusions: Few factors in early life predicted later physical activity in 11-12 year olds. Parents' physical activity during pregnancy and early in the child's life showed a modest association with physical activity of the child at age 11-12 years, suggesting that active parents tend to raise active children. Helping parents to increase their physical activity therefore may promote children's activity.

BMJ, 23 November 2007

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

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



26 November, 2007

Thanksgiving for fast food

We can thank Thanksgiving for the TV Dinner. The ‘TV Dinner’ was a brand of frozen ready meal invented in 1953 by CA Swanson, a major American food company. The story goes that they had massively overestimated how many turkeys they would need to meet Thanksgiving demand. How to get rid of the excess? The company realised that packaging the whole Thanksgiving meal on one, compartmentalised aluminium tray that you could pop in the oven, then tuck into in front of the television, might be popular with customers. They reckoned they would sell 5,000 in the first year. They sold 10 million. As one wag wrote in the Christian Science Monitor a couple of years ago: they came, they thawed, they conquered.

Then there’s the man who invented mass production of frozen food in 1923 - Clarence Birdseye. (Unfortunately, Birdseye wasn’t a ship’s captain with a gnarly voice and a crew of child pirates who ate fish fingers all the time, but an American inventor.) By being able to store food until it is required, we’ve been able to get away from the drudgery of the daily shop.

The king of fast food was Ray Kroc, who realised that the restaurant set up by the McDonald brothers in California in the Fifties would fit in with the American desire to eat out, but without the formality that Europeans were used to. He worked with, then bought out, the brothers and through a ruthless approach to sales and a thoroughly efficient operation, McDonald’s gave people quick, cheap, tasty food and revolutionised the food business.

For all the snootiness of food critics, and the panics about obesity, fast food has freed people - and that pretty much means women - from the need to spend hours in the kitchen. It means we have affordable, hot food anywhere, anytime. For every evening I’ve needed a snack while rolling home merry, for every TV show I’d have missed if I’d had to cook instead of waiting for the microwave to go ‘ping’, I’d like to salute these great American pioneers.

Source




Food fanatics now targeting hospitals

Apparently adults have to have their decisions made for them by these Fascists too

CANCER Council Victoria is heading an alliance of key health groups accusing the Brumby Government of failing to fight obesity by refusing to ban junk food in hospitals. The cancer council, Diabetes Victoria, Vic Health and Deakin University - which form Victoria's Obesity Policy Coalition - want to ban junk food in vending machines and canteens.

The New South Wales Government has done so, but a spokesman for Victorian Health Minister Daniel Andrews said canteen and vending machine food was a matter for individual health services to address.

Health groups say hospitals should be leading by example. "In hospitals we are dealing with the effects of chronic diseases, conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer which are all affected by weight," OPC senior policy adviser Ms Jane Martin said. "These conditions are a big burden on hospital budgets yet chocolate bars, sugary drinks and chips are available in vending machines 24 hours a day. "We have seen changes made in school canteens and suppliers to schools have been able to make this shift. "It is not difficult to refrigerate vending machines in order to supply healthy choices."

Hospitals were also one of the first places to go smoke-free and tackle tobacco, she said. "We need to treat being overweight like tobacco," Ms Martin said. "It's about doing the right thing for people who are sick and their families." "Patients, visitors and staff need to be surrounded by the right messages."

Department of Human Services spokesman Bram Alexander said hospital canteens did provide a range of healthy choices, but they could not make people buy them

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



25 November, 2007

THE OBESITY WARRIORS NEVER STOP TRYING

I guess it makes me weird but I do find the medical literature to be a barrel of laughs. They are so determined to come to their predetermined conclusions and the data keeps letting them down so badly! Read either the media summary below or the conclusion to the journal abstract also below and you will be left with the impression that being overweight is a bad thing. Read the bit I have highlighted in red and I think you will have a little laugh, though. Even in this highly selected group, fatties were NOT likely to die sooner. They did have more trouble with their prostate cancer but they obviously had less trouble with other things!

Excess weight a risk to surviving cancer

A new study has found that overweight or obese men are at greater risk of death following prostate cancer treatment. Published online this week in the journal Cancer, the study involved 788 men with prostate cancer who were followed for more than eight years. Compared to men with a normal body mass index (BMI, calculated as the weight in kilograms divided by the squared height in metres) of less than 25 at the time of diagnosis, men with a BMI between 25 and 30 were more than 1.5 times more likely to die from their cancer following treatment. Similarly, men with a BMI of 30 or more were 1.6 times more likely to die from the disease. Further research is needed, say the authors, to test whether losing weight after cancer diagnosis could improve survival time.

Source

Obesity and mortality in men with locally advanced prostate cancer

By Jason A. Efstathiou et al.

BACKGROUND: Greater body mass index (BMI) is associated with shorter time to prostate-specific antigen (PSA) failure following radical prostatectomy and radiation therapy (RT). Whether BMI is associated with prostate cancer-specific mortality (PCSM) was investigated in a large randomized trial of men treated with RT and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) for locally advanced prostate cancer.

METHODS: Between 1987 and 1992, 945 eligible men with locally advanced prostate cancer were enrolled in a phase 3 trial (RTOG 85-31) and randomized to RT and immediate goserelin or RT alone followed by goserelin at recurrence. Height and weight data were available at baseline for 788 (83%) subjects. Cox regression analyses were performed to evaluate the relations between BMI and all-cause mortality, PCSM, and nonprostate cancer mortality. Covariates included age, race, treatment arm, history of prostatectomy, nodal involvement, Gleason score, clinical stage, and BMI.

RESULTS: The 5-year PCSM rate for men with BMI <25 kg/m2 was 6.5%, compared with 13.1% and 12.2% in men with BMI 25 to <30 and BMI 30, respectively (Gray's P = .005). In multivariate analyses, greater BMI was significantly associated with higher PCSM (for BMI 25 to <30, hazard ratio [HR] 1.52, 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.02-2.27, P = .04; for BMI 30, HR 1.64, 95% CI, 1.01-2.66, P = .04). BMI was not associated with nonprostate cancer or all-cause mortality.

CONCLUSIONS: Greater baseline BMI is independently associated with higher PCSM in men with locally advanced prostate cancer. Further studies are warranted to evaluate the mechanism(s) for increased cancer-specific mortality and to assess whether weight loss after prostate cancer diagnosis alters disease course. Cancer 2007. c 2007 American Cancer Society.

Source




Dads 'make young sons dumber'

The original paper is here. It is a long (155 pages), verbose and exhausting paper to read and I do not remotely have the time to read it all but two things I note is that we are primarily talking about lower class (unemployed) fathers here and that the analysis was very "lumpy". Appendix D shows that only two categories were used to examine the amount of time fathers spent with children. That very effectively obscures any possibility of discovering curvilinear relationships -- which are certainly not a possibility that can be excluded a priori in this case.

I also note that the author seems to contradict herself in the first and last paragraphs below. Amusing. Easy to see why, though. We are not allowed to come to conservative conclusions and the paper does come to the thoroughly conservative conclusion that children are best cared for by their mothers! Horrors!

YOUNG boys end up being dumber when it is the father who looks after them as toddlers, a study from Bristol University in the UK has found. A researcher from the University of Bristol in the UK has found that boys are doing worse at school when it was their fathers who spent at least 15 hours each week taking sole care of them.

According to Elizabeth Washbrook's study of more than 6000 children found that "some fathers appear not to provide the same quality of intellectual stimulation as mothers, at least to their sons". "I find robust evidence that boys - but not girls - who spend at least 15 hours a week in paternal care when they were toddlers performed worse on academic assessments when they started school," Ms Washbrook wrote in the Research in Public Policy journal. "This cannot be explained by the economic or psychological characteristics of parents in these families, nor by the characteristics of the child."

Ms Washbrook said that the findings suggest that fathers may be more inclined to believe that taking care of their son was more about "monitoring the child" than devising creative activities. She said that two possible reasons why daughters were not affected by similar time with their fathers were because dads may behave differently around them and girls may be less sensitive to a lack of creative activities - although she also said that there was no definitive proof that supported either argument.

But Ms Washbrook said that the introduction of paid paternity leave in the UK may have led to greater social abilities in children of both genders. "If paternity leave encourages fathers to undertake moderate childcare responsibilities when their children are toddlers, this may have beneficial effects on children's social development."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



24 November, 2007

Another confirmation that middling weight is best

It's been a tough time the last little while for the fatties among us -- which is supposedly most of us. According to the just released report from the American Institute for Cancer Research being fat and eating certain foods increases our risk for cancer. The secret to a long life according to the report's authors is to be as thin as you can, while avoiding red meat, processed meats, alcohol, French fries, milk shakes and, well, you get the picture.

But in contrast to the cancer report, which received enormous and largely uncritical media attention, a new study about obesity by Katherine Flegal and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute made few waves. Yet Flegal's quiet and careful study could do much to calm our growing national hysteria about obesity.

Flegal used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is a representative sample of the US population, to find the connections between being underweight, overweight and obese and cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer and many other causes of death. The results are startling since they confound much of the received wisdom about being fat in America.

Flegal discovered that being overweight (BMI's of 25-30) was not responsible for increased mortality. In fact for CVD, cancer and all other causes, being overweight actually increased one's chance of living longer. In total, overweight was associated with a total of 138, 281 fewer deaths. Being overweight is not likely to kill you.

She found that being obese increased the risk of premature death for the most part in only the most obese, that is those with BMI's over 35. In other words, even modest obesity is not a death sentence. For example, those with BMI's of 30-35 aged 25-69 did not have a statistically significant increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Indeed, for cancer the results are even more startling since even those with BMI's in excess of 35 did not have a statistically significant increased risk of dying. And for all other diseases other than CVD and cancer, obesity up to a BMI of 35 was modestly protective -- that is, likely to result in a longer rather than a shorter life.

She also found that being underweight carries substantial risks. Whereas obesity accounts for 95, 442 deaths, being thin is associated with 46, 398 -- almost half as many deaths as obesity. But then one is unlikely to ever hear about the risks of being thin or the mortality toll associated with underweight.

Nor are these findings a fluke. In 2005 Flegal and the same team found that being overweight reduced one's chances of dying, that the majority of deaths due to obesity were in the morbidly obese, and perhaps most surprisingly, that there was no statistically significant increased risk for death associated with even modest obesity.

The implications of these findings, which barely registered in the news cycle, are significant. They suggest that most Americans need not worry about being too fat, since most mortality is associated with BMI's in excess of 35. They suggest that the continual message from the government and the public health community to lose weight or to be as thin as possible lacks a credible scientific basis. And they suggest that it is those who weigh too little whose plight also deserves some attention.

Source




A guy who is drunk as a skunk gets aggressive and it is a a drug that he is taking (not the booze) that is to blame??

Why are tales of side-effects so often plagued by such bogus causal reasoning? You can draw NO valid causal inferences from rare episodes. Coincidence is not cause

Government scientists are investigating whether a drug from Pfizer used to help smokers quit cigarettes also increases suicidal thoughts and violent behavior. The Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday that it had received reports of mood disorders and erratic behavior among patients taking Chantix, Pfizer’s prescription drug used to help quit smoking.

The F.D.A. said it was still gathering information about the drug, but advised doctors to closely monitor patients taking Chantix for behavior changes. Sales of the drug totaled $101 million last year. The agency said it was investigating at least one incident involving Chantix and a violent death.

Family members of a musician in Dallas, Carter Albrecht, recently said that Chantix might have caused the rage that led to his death. Mr. Albrecht was shot in the head in September by his girlfriend’s neighbor as he tried to kick down the man’s door. An autopsy report showed that Mr. Albrecht’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit.

The agency said it had asked Pfizer for information on additional cases that might be similar. Regulators said it was unclear if Chantix was directly responsible for the behavior, because nicotine withdrawal often aggravates existing mental problems. Pfizer, which is based in New York, also submitted reports to the agency on increased drowsiness among patients taking Chantix.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



23 November, 2007

Smoking and mental illness

Smoking correlates with ALL indices of social disadvantage. You mostly have to be dumb, poor or mad to smoke these days

Virtually everyone knows about the connection between smoking and health. Smoking causes 440,000 deaths a year in the United States (50,000 of which are from exposure to secondhand smoke) and 5 million worldwide. It shortens smokers' lives by 10 to 15 years, and those last few years can be a miserable combination of breathlessness and pain.

But few are aware that smoking is concentrated among people with mental illness, often compounded by substance-abuse disorders such as alcoholism. Go to most Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the room will be so full of smoke that you can cut it with a knife. Ask the members, and they will tell you that it was much easier to stop drinking than to stop smoking. Indeed, nicotine, the addictive component of tobacco smoke, is as habituating as cocaine or heroin, and it has a similar effect on chemical receptors in the brain.

The facts about smoking and mental illness are stark. Almost half of all cigarettes sold in the United States (44 percent) are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day - often three packs. Furthermore, smokers with mental illness are much more likely to smoke their cigarettes right down to the filters.

Yet for years, mental health professionals ignored smoking. Why did patients, their families and clinicians do nothing to help smokers quit? One reason is well-intended but uninformed compassion. The reasoning goes something like: "Poor Joe is suffering so much from his illness and gets such pleasure from his cigarettes that I don't want to take them away from him."

Another reason lies in the extent to which smoking is integrated into mental health treatment. In psychiatric hospitals the denial of the opportunity to take a smoke break is used as a disciplinary tool, and cigarettes have become part of the culture - often being traded for goods or sexual favors as a form of currency.

Another factor is that many clinicians who work with people with mental illness have themselves recovered from psychiatric conditions, including substance abuse, but have not been able to stop smoking. They feel hypocritical about trying to help patients quit when they are unable to do so themselves.

After years of tolerating, and even encouraging, smoking among people with mental illness, mental health professionals are beginning to recognize the hazards of smoking. Two things have been especially powerful: the spread of facts about secondhand smoke dangers and a recent analysis showing that people with chronic mental illness die 25 years earlier than the rest of the population, with many of those lost years attributable to smoking.

So, what can be done to help people with mental illness stop smoking? Despite strong addictions or concerns about patients' quality of life, this isn't a futile effort. Like the general population, most smokers with mental health conditions would like to quit. Although their odds of actually quitting are not as high - about half that of smokers who don't have mental health conditions - there are many success stories.

Opportunities exist in both hospital and community settings. There is a growing trend to make mental health hospitals smoke-free, both indoors and on their campuses. For the first time ever, more than half of these institutions in the United States are now smoke-free, and those numbers are increasing. Predicted complications of increased violence and the need for disciplinary actions in the wake of going smoke-free have proved false. In fact, removing smoking as a cause of staff-patient friction has meant fewer violent incidents and more opportunity for staff to interact therapeutically with clients. Tools to help smokers quit - including counseling and drugs such as nicotine replacement, buproprion and varenicline - are available but are still greatly underused.

It will not be easy to reverse the long alliance of smoking and mental illness. But the fact that mental health clinicians and patient and family advocacy groups have recognized the problem and are willing to address it is an essential first step toward wellness.

Source




Researchers strike gold in meningococcal disease fight

Meningococcal disease can strike with frightening speed. Its victims can present with symptoms in the morning and be dead by nightfall. But now, a breakthrough by researchers might go some way to reducing meningococcal fatalities by making it significantly easier to detect the bacteria. It involves the use of nanotechnology, and more specifically, the use of small gold particles being injected into suspected sufferers.

Larraine Pocock knows more about meningococcal disease than most. But it hasn't always been that way. It wasn't until her 21-year-old son Troy travelled to England for a working holiday that she began learning all about the deadly disease. "We got a call from Chelsea Hospital - he'd been admitted and he was critical," she told AM. "We were to ring back in an hour, and I asked them what they thought it was and they thought it was meningitis, and I just realised how serious that was, so I rang back in an hour and he was actually on life support. "So, we rushed to Sydney to try and get to London, but he was to pass away that night."

Ms Pocock now runs a meningococcal foundation named in honour of her son, the Troy Pocock Foundation, based on the New South Wales south coast. She has welcomed the news that new technology might be able to detect the disease within 15 minutes, a far cry from the current testing procedure, which can take up to 48 hours. "Meningococcal disease attacks very quickly and you can be well at breakfast, and you can be actually dead by dinnertime," she said.

Meningococcal disease affects 700 people in Australia each year and 10 per cent of those who contract meningococcal will die from the disease. About 20 per cent of those who contract it will have permanent disabilities.

A prototype device has been developed for the new technology, which involves molecular-sized flecks of gold being covered with antibodies that will attract the protein present in meningococcal bacteria. Jeanette Pritchard is involved in the development of the new technology, which has been designed by Melbourne's RMIT University. She says it has already proven highly successful in tests, and could pave the way for a significant reduction in deaths from meningococcal. "The test result will show either a yes that bacteria are present in the sample, or no the bacteria aren't present," she said. "So, it will basically given an indication that yes, treatment needs to be administered." She says the technology is still in development, but could be in clinics within three years.

Ms Pocock says that while the development of the new technology is welcome, it's far from being a panacea. "We've still got to like raise the awareness for the parent or the teacher or the carer to, you know, take the child to the doctor or the hospital first," she 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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



22 November, 2007

USING YOUR BRAIN A LOT DOES HELP PROTECT YOU FROM ALZHEIMER'S -- BUT WE STILL DON'T KNOW HOW

The study below had a fairly good range of controls, though the reliance on self-report is troubling. Nonetheless the controls used do confer some authority on the conclusion. A bit puzzling that they observed no brain changes that could explain the effect, however. More fine-grained brain observations may be needed or the reliance on self-report abandoned. Peer ratings would be one alternative to self-reports. Abstract below

Relation of cognitive activity to risk of developing Alzheimer disease

By R. S. Wilson et al.

Background: Frequent cognitive activity in old age has been associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer disease (AD), but the basis of the association is uncertain.

Methods: More than 700 old people underwent annual clinical evaluations for up to 5 years. At baseline, they rated current and past frequency of cognitive activity with the current activity measure administered annually thereafter. Those who died underwent a uniform postmortem examination of the brain. Amyloid burden, density of tangles, and presence of Lewy bodies were assessed in eight brain regions and the number of chronic cerebral infarctions was noted.

Results: During follow-up, 90 people developed AD. More frequent participation in cognitive activity was associated with reduced incidence of AD (HR = 0.58; 95% CI: 0.44, 0.77); a cognitively inactive person (score = 2.2, 10th percentile) was 2.6 times more likely to develop AD than a cognitively active person (score = 4.0, 90th percentile). The association remained after controlling for past cognitive activity, lifespan socioeconomic status, current social and physical activity, and low baseline cognitive function. Frequent cognitive activity was also associated with reduced incidence of mild cognitive impairment and less rapid decline in cognitive function. Among 102 persons who died and had a brain autopsy, neither global nor regionally specific measures of neuropathology were related to level of cognitive activity before the study, at study onset, or during the course of the study.

Conclusion: Level of cognitively stimulating activity in old age is related to risk of developing dementia.

NEUROLOGY 2007;69:1911-1920




Cannabis compound 'halts cancer'

I kinda think I have heard all this before

A compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer spreading throughout the body, US scientists believe. The California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute team are hopeful that cannabidiol or CBD could be a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy. Unlike cannabis, CBD does not have any psychoactive properties so its use would not violate laws, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics reports. The authors stressed that they were not suggesting patients smoke marijuana. They added that it would be highly unlikely that effective concentrations of CBD could be reached by smoking cannabis.

CBD works by blocking the activity of a gene called Id-1 which is believed to be responsible for the aggressive spread of cancer cells away from the original tumour site - a process called metastasis. Past work has shown CBD can block aggressive human brain cancers. The latest work found CBD appeared to have a similar effect on breast cancer cells in the lab.

Lead researcher Dr Sean McAllister said: "Right now we have a limited range of options in treating aggressive forms of cancer. "Those treatments, such as chemotherapy, can be effective but they can also be extremely toxic and difficult for patients. "This compound offers the hope of a non-toxic therapy that could achieve the same results without any of the painful side effects."

Dr Joanna Owens of Cancer Research UK said: "This research is at a very early stage. "The findings will need to be followed up with clinical trials in humans to see if the CBD is safe, and whether the beneficial effects can be replicated. "Several cancer drugs based on plant chemicals are already used widely, such as vincristine - which is derived from a type of flower called Madagascar Periwinkle and is used to treat breast and lung cancer. It will be interesting to see whether CBD will join them."

Maria Leadbeater of Breast Cancer Care said: "Many people experience side-effects while having chemotherapy, such as nausea and an increased risk of infection, which can take both a physical and emotional toll. "Any drug that has fewer side-effects will, of course, be of great interest." But she added: "It is clear that much more research needs to be carried out."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



21 November, 2007

Health Fascism in America

Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse today to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the youngsters submitted to the needle. The get-tough policy in Prince George's County was one of the strongest efforts made by any U.S. school system to ensure its youngsters receive their required immunizations.

Two months into the school year, school officials realized that more than 2,000 students in the county still didn't have the vaccinations they were supposed to have before attending class. So Circuit Court Judge C. Philip Nichols ordered parents in a letter to appear at the courthouse today and either get their children vaccinated on the spot or risk up to 10 days in jail. They could also provide proof of vaccination or an explanation why their kids didn't have them.

By about 8:30 a.m., the line of parents stretched outside the courthouse in the county on the east side of Washington. Many of them complained that their children already were properly immunized but the school system had misplaced the records. They said efforts to get the paperwork straightened out had been futile. "It was very intimidating," Territa Wooden of Largo said of the letter. She said she presented the paperwork at the courthouse today and resolved the matter.

"I could be home asleep. My son had his shots," said Veinell Dickens of Upper Marlboro, who also blamed errant paperwork. Aloma Martin of Fort Washington brought her children, Delontay and Taron, in 10th and 6th grade, for their hepatitis shots. She said she had been trying to get the vaccinations for more than a month, since the school system sent a warning letter. She had an appointment for Monday, but came to the courthouse to be safe. "It was very heavy handed," she said of the county's action. "From that letter, it sounded like they were going to start putting us in jail."

School officials deemed the court action a success. School system spokesman John White said the number of children lacking vaccinations dropped from 2,300 at the time the judge sent the letter to about 1,100 Friday. After today's session, 172 more students were brought into compliance, including 101 students who received vaccinations at the courthouse and 71 whose records were updated. That still left more than 900 students out of compliance with vaccination requirements, White said. "Obviously, we still have some more work to do," he said.

Any children who still lack immunizations could be expelled. Their parents could then be brought up on truancy charges, which can result in a 10-day jail sentence for a first offense and 30 days for a second. Prince George's State's Attorney Glenn Ivey couldn't say today whether he would prosecute parents who fail to comply. "We have to sit down with school and health services," he said. "We haven't ruled anything out. We need to figure out where we stand."

White said the school system, with about 132,000 students, has been trying for two years to get parents to comply with state law. That law allows children to skip vaccines if they have a medical or religious exemption. It was unclear how many medical or religious exemptions were involved.

Maryland, like all states, requires children to be immunized against several childhood illnesses including polio, mumps and measles. In recent years, it also has required that students up to high school age be vaccinated against hepatitis B and chicken pox.

Nichols said nobody actually came before him today, but he was there if any parent asked to see him. The judge noted the unhappy looks of some of the kids in line waiting for vaccinations. "It's cute. It looks like their parents are dragging them to church," Nichols said.

Several organizations opposed to mass vaccinations demonstrated outside the courthouse. While the medical consensus is that vaccines are safe and effective, some people blame immunizations for a rise in autism and other medical problems. "People should have a choice" in getting their children immunized, said Charles Frohman, representing a physicians' group opposed to vaccines.

Source




Parents no longer needed

Comment on the story above. Excerpt:

"An incredible story in the The Washington Post reports that the parents of around 2,300 Maryland suburban students who failed to get needed vaccinations may now face a $50 a day fine and up to 10 days in jail if their children fails to meet the state's immunization requirements. ...

My wife and I would not allow our doctor to stick a needle into our two little girls with hepatitis B vaccine, not because we're anti-vaccine, but because we deemed this vaccine unnecessary at such a young age. But even if Prince George parents are wrong about the shots effectiveness and worth, are we now a country where an attorney general coerces parents to inject pharmaceuticals into their children? If parents fail to walk lockstep will they now regularly be threatened with prison?"

Source




A Lesson in economics for the food freaks

Boulder Weekly covers the city public schools' burgeoning black market in ... wait for it ... candy. Black market in candy? Yep -- it's all courtesy of a new school district policy "that has removed all unhealthy, sugar-laden snacks and sodas from vending machines in schools. The new policies are part of a national trend, in which foods are forbidden at schools if they don't meet strict nutritional criteria that limit calories coming from sugar and fat."

How restrictive is the policy? Boulder's new policies apply to vendors of food services, snack and beverage vending machines, student stores, fundraisers and "any regularly offered food during a child's school day." The policy allows water and seltzers, low-fat milk, fruit juice (no less than 50 percent real juice), and electrolyte sports drinks with 42 grams or less of added sweetener per 20-ounce serving. Allowed snack items include nuts, seeds, dairy products, fresh fruits and vegetables, dried fruits and vegetables, and some packaged fruits. Other food items are allowed only if calories are comprised of 35 percent or less fat, 10 percent or less of saturated fat plus trans fat, and if sugar comprises 35 percent or less of the total weight of the product.

All very well-intentioned, I'm sure. But school administrators clearly forgot one of the iron laws of economics: If you ban it, they will come ("they" being underground entrepreneurs, of course).

The money to be made sounds pretty impressive. The story details kids buying iPods and new clothes -- and even taking their own parents out to dinner -- from the profits made off marking up candy bought in bulk at Costco. At least one set of parents actually bankrolled their entrepreneurial offspring.

The laws of economics rule across the board, of course. Profit margins have apparently drifted down because of the influx of competition from other kids who have turned their lockers into convenience stores. Unsurprisingly, similar black markets have appeared elsewhere when school administrators imposed nutritional restrictions that ran contrary to consumer tastes. Huh. These modern kids have it so easy. In my day, we had to sell dope to make a buck between classes.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



20 November, 2007

Talking to blondes makes you dumb?

According to the study reported below, men know less after talking to a blonde woman. Those of us who have been married to a blonde lady sure must have had a tough time in life! I am not going to question the findings at this stage as the article had not yet appeared in the online version of the journal at the time of writing, but if it is like most articles in the journal, it is not based on a representative sample of any known population so has no known generalizability. The people studied appear to have been French but it may not even apply to all Frenchmen.

What I DO want to do, however, is highlight the fallacy of the explanation given. The explanation in terms of stereotypes accepts the old view that stereotypes are in some way imprisoning. Studies of stereotyping have however long ago shown just the opposite: that stereotypes are highly flexible and responsive to new information. See here and here.

That some psychologists still believe the old myths about stereotyping is true to form, however. Psychologists tend to live in an eternal present with very little awareness of the research literature on the subjects they discuss. See here.

A more plausible explanation would be that brown-haired people are very often blonde in childhood so blonde is a signal of childhood and we have evolved to interact differently with children. But the best explanation should I think be obvious: For whatever reason, blondes are seen as more sexually attractive and sexual arousal is notorious for addling the brain -- particularly among Frenchmen, perhaps?

When men meet fair-haired women they really do have a "blonde moment". Scientists have found that their mental performance drops, apparently because they believe they are dealing with someone less intelligent. Researchers discovered what might be called the "bimbo delusion" by studying men's ability to complete general knowledge tests after exposure to different women. The academics found that men's scores fell after they were shown pictures of blondes.

Further analysis convinced the team that, rather than simply being distracted by the flaxen hair, those who performed poorly had been unconsciously driven by social stereotypes to "think blonde". "This proves that people confronted with stereotypes generally behave in line with them," said Thierry Meyer, joint author of the study and professor of social psychology at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. "In this case blondes have the potential to make people act in a dumber way, because they mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blonde." The research adds to a body of evidence that people's behaviour is powerfully influenced by stereotypes. Previously scientists have found that people walk and talk more slowly in front of the elderly, while other studies have revealed that unconscious racial assumptions and prejudices emerge in written tests.

Researchers believe that blondes have been particularly vulnerable to stereotyping over the past century. The image of the dizzy blonde came to prominence in the 1925 Anita Loos novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Film stars including Marilyn Monroe, Suzanne Somers and Goldie Hawn further popularised the "dumb blonde". The persona has more recently been boosted by celebrities such as Paris Hilton, the member of the hotel family nicknamed the "heirhead", and Jessica Simpson, the singer.

Others believe its origins go far deeper. According to researchers at St Andrews University, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

Psychologists have suggested that because white babies are often born blond, there is a primal association between blondness and childhood, encouraging people to admire and fawn over the pale-haired.

The new peer-reviewed study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, was based on two trials. In all cases those participants exposed to images of blondes recorded the lowest scores.

Source




FAT GENE DISCVERED

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 FTO gene rather than another are 70 per cent more likely to be obese, British scientists have discovered. One in six people have the most vulnerable genetic makeup and weigh an average of 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 any common gene and obesity, and could eventually lead to new ways of tackling one of the most significant causes of ill health in developed countries such as the UK. One in four British adults is now classified as obese, and half of men and a third of women are overweight. Obesity is a major cause of heart disease, cancer and type-2 diabetes, and an adviser to the Government's health spending watchdog described it recently as a bigger national hazard than smoking, alcohol or poverty. If the biological function of the FTO gene 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," said Professor Mark McCarthy of the University of Oxford, who led the research. "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 scientific 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 ordinary people's risk of becoming obese or overweight has remained elusive.

The effect of FTO emerged from a major 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 actually influenced obesity instead, and they followed up their theory in a further 37,000 people.

FTO comes in two varieties or "alleles", and everyone inherits two copies of the gene, one from each parent. The team found that people 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 allele. 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, which are published in the journal Science apply to both men and women, and to children as young as seven.

FTO will not be the only gene that influences obesity, and inheriting a particular variant will not necessarily make anyone fat. "There are going to be lots of slim people with two copies of the bad allele, and if people who have the more favourable version overeat or don't exercise they are still going to become obese," Professor McCarthy said. "This is not a gene for obesity, it is a gene that contributes to risk." The biological function of FTO remains unknown, and the scientists now plan to study this by creating genetically modified mice in which the gene is knocked out.

Professor McCarthy said the gene is highly active in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain involved in appetite control, suggesting that one potential way it might have its effect. The gene could also influence how readily fat cells are laid down.

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. Andrew Hattersley, who headed the Exeter group, said it might nevertheless explain how people with apparently similar lifestyles differ in their propensity to put on weight. "Our findings suggest a possible answer to someone who might ask: `I eat the same and do as much exercise as my friend next door, so why am I fatter?'" he said. "There is clearly a component to obesity that is genetic."

Professor McCarthy played down the idea of screening people for FTO, so they can change their diet or exercise habits if they are found to be at higher risk. "We are not pushing genetic testing here. A 3kg increase is significant, but it is not 30kg, and there are always going to be other genes and environmental factors involved. The best way of predicting who is becoming obese is to weigh them."

Independent obesity experts said the discovery was 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. By studying the action of this gene we may learn more about the detailed causes of obesity."

Professor Steve O'Rahilly of Cambridge said: "It is unlikely to be the only such genetic variant, but it is the first to be discovered. Unfortunately we have no idea what this gene actually does to alter our degree of fatness. It is made in every cell in the body and doesn't look like any genes whose functions we understand so we have very few clues as to how it might affect a person's risk of obesity. This is a very exciting first step but there is much work still to do."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



19 November, 2007

IS KINDERGARTEN GOOD FOR BEHAVIOUR PROBLEMS?

Popular summary followed by journal abstract below. The conclusions below meet conventional expectations but they conflict with other findings (e.g. here) showing that kindergarten INCREASES aggressive behaviour in children. There are however lots of problems with the study. The effect found was very weak; Reports by the mother again seem to be relied on; The aggregation of care at kindergarten with care by relatives is stupid etc. There would surely be large differences between care given by relatives and care given by teachers. So why did the researchers aggregate them? No mystery. There would have been NO visible effect if they had been treated separately

Children of mothers with a low education level may be less likely to have behavioural problems if they receive regular care from other adults during pre-school years. In the Archives of General Psychiatry this week, a new study has found that non-maternal care -- including centre-based childcare and family arrangements -- can reduce physical aggression problems in these children.

Researchers followed 1691 children from age five months to five years. Mothers were interviewed at regular intervals about their children's behaviour, including frequency of hitting, kicking, biting and bullying. Overall, 17.5 per cent of mothers had not finished high school. Among their children, those who started regular childcare before the age of nine months were 80 per cent less likely to have high levels of aggression compared to those who did not receive such care.

Source

The Role of Maternal Education and Nonmaternal Care Services in the Prevention of Children's Physical Aggression Problems

By Sylvana M. Cote et al.

Context: Physical violence is an important health problem, and low maternal education is a significant risk for the development of chronic physical aggression (PA). We hypothesized that nonmaternal care (NMC) services could prevent the development of childhood PA problems, depending on the age at which the services are initiated.

Method: Children who followed a trajectory of atypically frequent PA between 17 and 60 months of age among a population sample of 1691 Canadian families were identified. Maternal education and NMC were considered in predicting group membership while controlling for confounding family characteristics.

Results: Children of mothers with low education levels (ie, no high school diploma) were less likely to receive NMC. Those who did receive such care had significantly lower risk of a high PA trajectory. Results from logistic regressions indicated that NMC reduced the risk of high PA, especially when initiated before age 9 months (odds ratio, 0.20; 95% confidence interval, 0.05-0.90). Children of mothers who graduated from high school were less at risk of PA problems, and NMC had no additional protective effect.

Conclusions: Nonmaternal care services to children of mothers with low levels of education could substantially reduce their risk of chronic PA, especially if provided soon after birth. Because children most likely to benefit from NMC services are less likely to receive them, special measures encouraging the use of NMC services among high-risk families are needed.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007;64(11):1305-1312.




Apparently everyone in our society is vulnerable and millions are harming the health of others. Really?

Forget about the hypothetical risks of a human bird flu epidemic or terror attacks on cinemas. The scariest thing I saw this week was the demand from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics for more “coercive” public health policies to protect “vulnerable people”. The influential Nuffield experts propose the sort of measures once considered the preserve of “health fascists”: even higher taxes on alcohol, shorter licensing hours, a ban on smoking in your home, denying or delaying health treatment for unrepentant smokers and drinkers, compulsory food labelling, even anti-obesity architecture. Their report confirms that public health policy now means not just providing clean air or water, but policing personal behaviour.

Worse, they justify this as the “liberal” approach - a word that, like the “public” in public health, now seems to mean its opposite. The Nuffield report rejects the old “nanny state” label and champions a “stewardship model”. The job of the steward State should be to “reduce the risks of ill-health that people might impose on each other”, and “pay special attention to the health of children and other vulnerable people”.

Unless you really are a health fascist - and bioethicists are no Nazis - there are limits to what you can make people do “for their own good”. Thus the report concedes that the State should “not attempt to coerce adults to lead healthy lives”. But the trick is that, by adopting the stewardship model, it can coerce us not to lead lives that are deemed risky to the health of others.

The illiberal liberals even wheel on J.S.Mill to support coercion. The summary claims that Mill's “classic harm principle” (I thought his classic principle was liberty, but still), backs state intervention “where an individual's actions affect others”. It is hard to think of any non-hermit who does not “affect others”. In fact, what Mill said in On Liberty - quoted in the full report - was that to justify compulsion, an individual's conduct “must be calculated to produce evil to someone else”. It seems that the definition of calculated evil is now to smoke in your living room, feed your family burgers or drink more than a couple of glasses of wine.

And who are the vulnerable people that the steward State must protect? More to the point, who aren't they? Those labelled “vulnerable groups” now include children, women, the elderly, ethnic minorities, disabled people — in short, most people. So, we supposedly live in a society where almost everybody is vulnerable, and millions are harming the health of others. No matter that we are actually living longer and healthier lives than ever before.

As a man of the libertarian Left who believes that autonomy and freedom from coercion are the basis of a healthy society, I recall how that passage in Mill's On Liberty ends: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Bioethicist, steward thyself.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



18 November, 2007

PREGNANCY AND ALCOHOL REVISITED YET AGAIN

We must stop the peasants from drinking! Popular summary below followed by Abstract. This is in most ways an unusually high-quality study. They actually made an attempt at community sampling and controlled for a few obvious things! Wow! Most unusual in the medical literature. But the heading on the journal article rightly shows an awareness that the causal inferences are still a problem.

The findings about attention deficit disorders are particularly interesting. What looks at first like an alcohol effect was shown on closer examination to be a family effect. Conduct problems generally, however, could not be ruled out as a family effect. This fits in with a view that attention-deficit syndrome is more strongly genetically determined than are conduct problems generally.

A major weakness of the study, however, is its reliance on maternal reports. This makes it particularly important that there was a failure to control for many possibly relevant psychological variables in the mother. To expect that there are not important psychological differences between mothers who drink daily and mothers who do not drink at all would be naive in the extreme -- yet it seems primarily to be the difference between the children of those groups of mothers upon which the researchers hang their hat.

It could be asserted, for instance, that neurotic (or depressed, or introverted or abused or ....) mothers were both heavier drinkers and more likely to report problem behaviour in their children. In that case, the alcohol would NOT be the causal variable in the observed correlation. Only a study that used direct observation of behaviour could rule out such possibilities -- though use of a comprehensive personality inventory would go some way towards alleviating doubts.

It may be worth noting that the conclusions below do not necessarily conflict with the recent study that found binge drinking to be harmless -- as the study below focuses on chronic alcohol use. The contrast with the findings of the binge-drinking findings does however suggest that the generalizations permitted by the study below may be too crude to be useful. The question clearly now is HOW MUCH and WHEN drinking is harmful and the study below lacks the detail that would enable an answer to that

In the Archives of General Psychiatry this week, researchers report that women who drink alcohol during pregnancy increase the chances of their children having conduct problems. The study involved 4912 mothers and 8621 of their children. Mothers were surveyed about their substance use during each of their pregnancies, with average intakes ranging from zero to six standard drinks per day. Children were assessed every second year between ages 4 and 11 for behavioural problems.

For each additional day per week that mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy, their children showed a significant increase in conduct problems. And the findings held true even after accounting for other factors, including the mothers' drug use during pregnancy, education level and intellectual ability.

Source

Causal Inferences Regarding Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and Childhood Externalizing Problems

By Brian M. D'Onofrio et al.

Context: Existing research on the neurobehavioral consequences of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has not adequately accounted for genetic and environmental confounds.

Objective: To examine the association between PAE and offspring externalizing problems in a large representative sample of families in the United States using measured covariates and a quasi-experimental design to account for unmeasured genetic and environmental confounds.

Design: This study combines information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The analyses statistically controlled for measured characteristics of the mothers and families and exposure to other prenatal psychoactive substances. In the primary analyses, siblings differentially exposed to prenatal alcohol were compared.

Setting and Participants: Women were recruited from the community using a stratified and clustered probability sample and were followed longitudinally. The sample included 8621 offspring of 4912 mothers.

Main Outcome Measures: Maternal report of conduct problems (CPs) and attention/impulsivity problems (AIPs) during childhood (ages 4-11 years) using standardized assessments related to psychiatric diagnoses.

Results: There was an association between PAE and offspring CPs that was independent of confounded genetic and fixed environmental effects and the measured covariates. The CPs in children of mothers who drank daily during pregnancy were 0.35 SD greater than those in children whose mothers never drank during pregnancy. Although AIPs were associated with PAE when comparing unrelated offspring, children whose mothers drank more frequently during pregnancy did not have more AIPs than siblings who were less exposed to alcohol in utero. Additional subsample analyses suggested that maternal polysubstance use during pregnancy may account for the associations between PAE and AIPs.

Conclusion: These results are consistent with PAE exerting an environmentally mediated causal effect on childhood CPs, but the relation between PAE and AIPs is more likely to be caused by other factors correlated with maternal drinking during pregnancy.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2007;64(11):1296-1304




A bit more support for the expected influence of caloric restriction in humans

Eating little may help people live longer, a study has found, offering support for an idea that has tantalized scientists for decades.

Researchers have long known that cutting animals' food supply to nearstarvation levels gives themfor reasons still unclearlonger lives and healthier old age. Studies have found that in humans, too, sharply reduced eating is associated with healthier aging, as long as nutritional balance is maintained.

But whether this practice could actually lengthen our lives has remained uncertain.

Some scientists have argued that it's doubtful, because humans already live unusually long. Only one small past study in humans offered weak evidence that people eating less lived longer, according to its authors, who were also involved in the new research.

The new study is the first to probe the claim by comparing human populations, wrote the American and Japanese scientists in a report on their findings.

Moreover, they added, it's "the first study that has shown extended average and maximum life span in a human population that is potentially due to" reduced eating. The practice is known as caloric restriction.

The researchers studied residents of the Japanese island of Okinawa, known through much of the last century both for exceptionally longlived inhabitants and for very spare, though balanced diets. The investigators said they found evidence that the two things are at least partially related.

Although that conclusion might seem obvious to somegiven the past researchthe scientists wrote that to reach it, they had to account for some factors that had hampered systematic analysis. For one, Okinawan diets have changed, becoming richer since about the end of the 1960s. Also, it wasn't clear how to best assess historical dietary intake and compare it to that of other populations.

The findings, by Bradley Willcox of the Pacific Health Research Institute and John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu and colleagues, appear in the November issue of the research journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Animal tests have found that the extreme dieting of caloric restriction entails cutting some 40 percent of calories to get the strongest lifeextending effects. Animals placed on such regimens live up to 40 percent longer than normal, as long as the diet remains nutritionally balanced. (Some scientists proposeagain based mostly on animal teststhat taking a substance called resveratrol may replicate caloric restriction's benefits, without the unpleasantness.)

Willcox and colleagues found that at least from the mid20th century through the 1960s, the Okinawan diet was about 11 percent short of what would normally be recommended to maintain body weight. As of 1995, the average Okinawan lived about five years longer than the average American, and about 18 months more than the average Japanese.

The islanders' spartan diets may have been a legacy of "periodic crop failures that occurred in Okinawa in the early 20th century and a long history of marginal food supply," the researchers wrote.

The study had some weaknesses, they added; for instance, it couldn't rule out that Okinawans lived longer because of the types of nutrients they ate, rather than the amount. Nonetheless, the "tentative" findings fit with a broad array of animal studies, and point to a need for still more research, Willcox and colleagues wrote.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



17 November, 2007

Why poor kids may make sicker adults

I had a little bet with myself when I saw this article that it would not mention genetics. I was right. The article essentially explains nothing. It just confirms that poor people are in general less healthy

Scientists have long known that the poor suffer worse health and shorter lives than the rich. Now, researchers have identified what they say are key mechanisms in 13-year-olds that may help explain why this occurs. The longer 13-year-olds have lived in poverty, the less efficient their bodies become in handling environmental demands, investigators found in a new study.

This "may be related to the fact that children who grow up in poverty have a steeper life trajectory of premature health problems than other children," regardless of later successes in life, said Gary Evans of the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University in New York. The study, coauthored by Evans and Cornell graduate student Pilyoung Kim, appears in the November issue of the research journal Psychological Science.

"Muted responses of stress regulatory mechanisms, which are part of the cardiovascular system, not only compromise the ability of the adolescents' bodies to respond to such stressors as noise, poor housing and family turmoil but also indicate they are suffering from more stress-induced physiological strain," said Evans. "It's very costly to society that low-income children end up getting sick prematurely and die younger."

Evans and Kim assessed markers of stress regulatory systems by measuring overnight levels of a stress hormone, cortisol, and blood pressure reactivity and recovery after a stressor -- being asked unexpectedly to do mental math problems. The assessments were conducted in 217 low and middle-income white adolescents at age 9 and again at 13 in rural New York.

The researchers assessed cumulative physical and social risk exposure by measuring crowding, noise and housing quality along with maternal and youth reports of family turmoil, separation from family and exposure to violence. "The study provides yet another piece of evidence that poverty and other chronic risk factors induce physiological changes that appear to be related to longterm health problems," said Evans. He also summarized his findings and made policy recommendations before the planning committee of the Robert W. Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America on Oct. 17 at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Source




Alzheimer's "vaccine" seen to help mice

It's a long way from specially-bred mice to people but the longest journey starts with one step

A vaccine might blunt or even prevent the deadly, memory-robbing devastation of Alzheimer's disease, a study has found. Scientists immunized mice with a molecule thought to play role in the illness. The treated mice, they said, showed better cognitive performance than unvaccinated mice, and a significant reduction in the buildup of protein plaques believed to cause brain cell death and dysfunction in Alzheimer's. "These results are extremely exciting," said Jordan Tang of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, a nonprofit research institute, who led the study. The findings appear in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

Alzheimer's gradually ravages victims' memories and personalities by killing brain cells. The disease affects more than 5 million Americans, including nearly half the population over 85, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

Tang and colleagues previously had identified a moleculean enzyme called memapsin 2that cuts a protein into fragments which, in turn, are believed to cause Alzheimer's. In the new study, the group used memapsin 2 as a vaccine for mice genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer's symptoms. The mice "developed 35 percent fewer plaques," said Tang.

Tang's previous work also has led to the creation of an experimental drug that would treat Alzheimer's by inhibiting memapsin 2. Human clinical trials on that began last summer. Tang said a vaccine would be a supplement to, not a substitute for, other treatments of this nature. "Alzheimer's is a complicated, multifaceted disease," he said. "We cannot rely on a `onesizefitsall' strategy, because what works in one patient will not necessarily work in another."

Vaccination strategies, designed to stimulate the immune system to fight the plaques, have been considered a promising way forward, but their success has been limited, Tang said. In 2002, for example, the pharmaceutical company Elan halted trials of a different vaccine after 15 patients suffered swelling of the central nervous system.

But the new vaccine "stimulates the immune system more gently than previous Alzheimer's vaccines, so we are optimistic about its prospects," said Stephen Prescott, president of the foundation in Oklahoma city. The next step, said Tang, will be to progress toward human trials. "There currently is no effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease," he noted, "so we must explore every possible option."

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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



16 November, 2007

Here we go again: Binge-drinking 'may not hurt the unborn'

Is there ANY medical "wisdom" that does not get reversed sooner or later?

PREGNANT women can indulge in binge-drinking without doing any harm to their unborn child, new research suggests. Oxford University's Jane Henderson and Ron Gray, along with the Danish researcher Ulrik Kesmodel from the University of Aarhus, argued that there was not enough evidence linking alcohol to fetal problems.

In their Systematic review of the fetal effects of prenatal binge drinking report published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, the researchers said that they examined thousands of papers on the subject. A number of studies have linked heavy drinking on a regular basis during pregnancy to stunted growth, birth defects and brain development problems. Less clear is the effect of occasional binge drinking, which amounted to about five drinks in one session in the studies Mr Gray and his team reviewed.

The researchers initially identified more than 3500 scientific papers between 1970 and 2005 looking at pregnancy and alcohol, which they winnowed down to 14 focusing on binge-drinking. They found little substantive evidence binge drinking once in a while caused problems such as miscarriage, stillbirth, abnormal birth weight, or birth defects such as fetal alcohol syndrome. But one study suggested binge-drinking could damage brain development resulting in reduced verbal IQ, learning problems and poorer academic performance. "However, this study only counted women as bingers if they binged throughout pregnancy, not just on a single occasion," the researchers wrote.

Animal studies had shown harmful effects from binge-drinking, which meant pregnant women should still take care no matter how much they consumed, Mr Gray said. At the same time, until researchers had more evidence, women who binge-drink on occasion should not fret unnecessarily about potential harm they were causing to their fetuses, he said. "When pregnant women report isolated episodes of binge-drinking in the absence of a consistently high daily alcohol intake, as is often the case, it is important to avoid inducing unnecessary anxiety as, at present, the evidence of risk seems minimal," the researchers wrote.

Adelaide-based National Organisation for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Related Disorders (NOFASARD), pregnant women should not drink at all, let alone go on a binge. "The alcohol will reach your unborn baby within one minute and she/he will have exactly the same blood alcohol content as you do (and) the alcohol also stays in your baby longer than it does in you," the NOFASARD said. "Your baby's brain is developing before you are sure you are pregnant, the whole way through your pregnancy and continues to develop after it has been born. "Because researchers are not sure how much alcohol might cause harm most say it's safest not to drink any alcohol during this time."

Source




HOW TO STUDY CANCER WITHOUT STUDYING CANCER

There is a fuller description of the study summarized below here -- showing that the researchers' theories were not fully confirmed. Some types of cell were affected by administration of a derivative of vitamin A called retinoic acid but others were not. The important point to note, however, is that no actual cancer cells seem to have been detected. So the results are interesting but nothing more. Somewhat amusing that there is in the same issue of the journal an article about vitamin D and cancer. Vitamin D is much favoured by the antioxidant freaks. The article found that vitamin D had NO overall effect on cancer deaths

Lung cancer in former smokers could be prevented by a form of vitamin A called retinoic acid, concludes a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute this week. Former smokers remain at increased risk for lung cancer even after quitting, as lung cells that were damaged during years of smoking may continue to grow and become cancerous many years later. Researchers recruited 225 former heavy smokers and randomly assigned them to receive a daily oral dose of retinoic acid alone, retinoic acid plus vitamin E, or a placebo for three months. Small pieces of lung tissue were collected from participants before and after treatment, and examined for lung cell growth. Compared to placebo, both treatments reduced lung cell growth, suggesting that they could be beneficial for former smokers at increased risk of lung cancer.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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





15 November, 2007

THE GOOD OLD RED WINE STORY -- NOT SO GOOD THIS TIME?

As a frequent drinker of Australia's excellent wines, I am strongly disposed to believe good things about wine. But the story sure is not straightforward. The study below looks at blood vessel growth (angiogenesis) and shows that chemicals similar to those found in wine have very complex effects when administered to rats. Low doses promote healing generally but leave you more open to cancer. But high doses slow down both cancer and healing. So which way do you jump? I guess if you have cancer you booze like mad and hope you don't get any other problem that requires healing. It seems, however, that the average guy should AVOID wine -- as it may make it easier for cancer to attack you. Nasty! It does seem to be something of a boot in the rump for the antioxidant believers.

As it is only a rat study and did not use actual wine, however, we should not jump to conclusions yet. It should also be noted that the doses used were fairly extreme. One wonders why. Is is because doses in the normal range have no effect? Popular summary below followed by journal abstract

Chemicals found in red wine, fruits, vegetables and green tea may prevent both cancer and heart disease, depending on the dose, claims a new study in the FASEB Journal this week. Red wine in particular contains high levels of these chemicals, called antioxidant polyphenols. By studying the effects of polyphenols on rats, scientists discovered that very high doses could prevent the formation of new blood vessels, while very low doses increased blood vessel growth. So high doses of polyphenols -- which could be given in tablet form -- have the potential to shut down the growth of cancerous tumours by reducing their blood supply. And low doses of polyphenols, equivalent to one of a glass of red wine per day, could be beneficial for those with diseased hearts and circulatory systems.

Source

Effects of red wine polyphenols on postischemic neovascularization model in rats: low doses are proangiogenic, high doses anti-angiogenic

By Celine Baron-Menguy et al.

Polyphenols, present in green tea, grapes, or red wine, have paradoxical properties: they protect against cardiac and cerebral ischemia but inhibit angiogenesis in vitro. So we investigated the effects of polyphenols in vivo on postischemic neovascularization. Rats treated with low (0.2 mg kg-1 day-1) or high (20 mg kg-1 day-1) doses of red wine polyphenolic compounds (RWPC) were submitted to femoral artery ligature on the left leg. Two wks after ligature, high doses of RWPC (i.e., 7 glasses of red wine) reduced arterial, arteriolar, and capillary densities and blood flow in association with an inhibition of a PI3 kinase-Akt-endothelial NO synthase (eNOS) pathway, decreased VEGF expression, and lower metalloproteinase (MMP) activation. Low doses of RWPC (i.e., 1/10th glass of red wine) increased the left/right (L/R) leg ratio to control level in association with an increased blood flow and microvascular density. This angiogenic effect was associated with an overexpression of PI3 kinase-Akt-eNOS pathway and an increased VEGF production without effect on MMP activation. Thus, low and high doses RWPC have respectively pro- and anti-angiogenic properties on postischemic neovascularization in vivo. This unique dual effect of RWPC offers important perspectives for the treatment and prevention of ischemic diseases (low dose) or cancer growth (high dose).

FASEB Journal. 2007;21:3511-3521




ANOTHER NASTY ONE FOR THE BREASTFEEDING LOBBY

Journal abstract here. The study summarized below looks pretty bad. It says that asthmatic mothers permanently damage the breathing of their children if they breastfeed. As some degree of asthma is pretty common, that throws a lot of mothers onto the bottle. I am a bit skeptical about the study, however. It relies on self-report of breastfeeding and who knows how accurate that is and which social classes are more likely to distort it? Breastfeeding was not as fashionable 16 years ago (the period studied) so maybe the long breastfeeders were working class and the health effect seen is simply a class effect. Who knows? But it does sound a note of caution to those who tyrannize women who use the bottle from an early age. It looks like the tit can pass on bad things as well as good things

Breastfed babies breathe better in later childhood, except when mum has asthma, concludes a study in the latest issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The study involved 679 children who performed lung function tests at ages 11 and 16. Compared to children who stopped exclusively breastfeeding before two months of age, those breastfed for four months or more had increased lung capacity. But this was only true in the children of non-asthmatic mothers. Babies with asthmatic mothers showed no improvement in lung capacity with longer breastfeeding. In fact, the children of asthmatic mothers showed a significant reduction in lung airflow if they were breastfed for four months or more. The authors stress, however, that more research is needed before changing breastfeeding recommendations, especially considering the many health benefits of breast milk.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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





14 November, 2007

British Nanny State on the march

Higher alcohol taxes, halting 24-hour drinking, banning smoking in people’s homes and adding fluoride to water supplies are justified intrusions to improve public health, senior academics said yesterday. A report by the well-respected Nuffield Council of Bioethics concludes that the Government and industry are not doing enough to prevent binge drinking or obesity and should promote healthy lifestyles through stricter measures and deterrents.

The authors, a group of doctors, lawyers, philosophers and other experts, argue that the much-maligned “nanny state” should be replaced by a new, more sensitive idea of “stewardship”. Campaigners described the report as a potential manifesto for a bully state and industry groups bristled at the prospect of tighter regulation.

The council, which considers ethical questions raised by advances in medical research, looked at alcohol, obesity, smoking, infectious disease and fluoridation of water. It identified alcohol consumption as a huge public health problem and said that the Government could do more. “Increasing tax on alcohol and restricting hours of sale have been shown to be effective in reducing alcohol consumption,” its report states. “Yet the Government’s alcohol strategy has focused on public information campaigns and voluntary labelling schemes, measures that have been shown not to be effective.”

Lord Krebs, who chaired the report committee, said yesterday: “People often reject the idea of a nanny state but the Government has a duty to look after the health of everyone and sometimes that means guiding or restricting our choices.”

The central concept of stewardship differed from the nanny state by being “more sensitive to the balances between public good and individual freedom,” he said. The report concludes: “The stewardship model provides justification for the UK Government to introduce measures that are more coercive than those which currently feature in the National Alcohol Strategy.”

Lord Krebs said that ministers should revisit the decision to introduce 24-hour licensing laws in 2005. At a briefing yesterday in London, he said: “The Government should implement tougher measures to tackle excessive drinking. There is also an urgent need for an analysis of the effect of extended opening hours on levels of alcohol consumption, as well as on antisocial behaviour.”

He added: “When 24-hour drinking was introduced, it was suggested to create a continental-style café culture. If you walk down any of the main streets of Oxford at 11 o’clock — one is known as ‘Vomit Alley’ — we all see a conspicuous absence of continental café culture.”

The report, in preparation since February last year, recommends that producers and sellers of alcohol should take more responsibility for preventing harm to health. It also says that the arguments used to justify banning smoking in enclosed public spaces would “also apply to banning smoking in homes”. This would be extremely difficult to enforce, but local authorities and the courts could preside over exceptional cases where children with a respiratory illness could be at such a risk that intervention may be ethically acceptable.

The Nuffield report comes as a coalition of 21 organisations headed by the Royal College of Physicians prepare to form a new Alcohol Health Alliance, which plans to lobby for a 10 per cent rise in alcohol taxes and tighter regulation of the drinks industry. Details of the Alcohol Health Alliance are expected to coincide today with a conference organised by the college on reducing the harm caused by alcohol.

The UK Public Health Association welcomed the report, saying that it represented an evidence-based approach that could counter health inequalities, but Simon Clark, director of the smokers’ lobby group Forest, said: “Politicians should take care not to overindulge in social engineering. Potentially, this report is a manifesto for a bully state in which people are increasingly forced to behave in a manner approved by politicians and evangelical health campaigners who want unprecedented control over our daily lives.”

Jeremy Beadles, from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, added: “The people clamouring for an increase in taxes and regulation on the drinks industry ignore the fact that alcohol consumption is actually falling. Increasing the cost of alcohol will just hit the vast majority of people who enjoy a drink in moderation.”

Dawn Primarolo, the Health Minister, said that the Government’s strategy to tackle harmful drinking was comprehensive and included an independent review of alcohol pricing.

Source




Brown's 'get fit' towns: Kim Jong-il would be proud

With its new towns that will force people to keep fit, Britain's New Labour is pushing an authoritarian health agenda that will be the envy of tinpot dictators

Gordon Brown's UK government will now try to design urban areas that force us to exercise more - and that's official. To tackle obesity with what he called a `large-scale' approach `across the whole community', Brown's health secretary Alan Johnson has said that he wants to `make physical activity a normal part of everyday life'. (1) So before you go to work, school or your leisure destination, remember that your personal trainer, Alan, has instructed you to walk, run or pedal there.

Johnson's `fit towns', as they have been called, are enough to leave you breathless. Yet although his announcement was picked up by mass media as far afield as China and India (2), it was - like so much of Labour policy - not entirely new. As spiked pointed out nearly six months ago, when Brown announced his plans for five eco-towns, the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) had committed itself to urban growth based on public transport, cycling, walking and a reduced need to travel, `especially by car' (3). Moreover the CLG's July Eco-towns Prospectus registered a desire to `deliver physical and mental health benefits', offer `choices for healthy living', and go about `encouraging healthy behaviours' (4). So what has Johnson added? You could say that he has formally medicalised urban design, annexing it as a Department of Health issue, and you'd be right. But the real novelty of Johnson's innovation is his drive to get us stretching our limbs at Labour's behest.

Barely two weeks ago, Johnson insisted that Britain's potential obesity crisis is one that's on the same scale as the crisis of climate change. That comparison was ridiculous enough (5). Now, he has said that both Labour's eco-towns and other urban areas should be adapted to improve people's health. Through their layout, facilities and construction, eco-towns could also be `healthy towns'. If successful, such an approach `could also apply to areas undergoing housing growth and renewal' (6).

This is a regime for national fitness worthy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Not for nothing has Johnson claimed a past allegiance to Stalinism (7). In an absolutely illiberal and inhumane manner, Johnson wants urban areas designed so that people's behaviour cannot at all consist of their own freely decided `choices'. Instead, behaviour will be relentlessly controlled by the state. What the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov did to salivating dogs, or the stimulus-response experiments conducted by US psychologist BF Skinner did to hungry rats, Johnson wants to do to us. Johnson's view of human freedom is degraded. The confusions within Labour's urban policy, and the logic of Johnson's approach, make his proposal ludicrous and unworkable. But that should not blind us to his authoritarianism.

For some time now, Labour has crammed what few new houses it has built into the same fenced-in urban areas, so as to keep the masses in their place, protect Britain's rural spaces and lower vehicle emissions as a means of saving the planet. And Labour's brownfield brutalism does not stop there. So ludicrously convinced is Johnson that architectural space really does determine physical slimness, we might expect him to contradict his boss, Gordon Brown, sooner or later.

When Brown first floated the idea of eco-towns, he said that their homes, roads and bus routes should be constructed `in the most environmentally sustainable way' (8). But if obesity is, as Johnson says, on a par with climate change, then dispensing with roads and public transport altogether would be the best way to reduce people's waistlines. And why doesn't Johnson decree that the whole of Britain become a TV-free zone, too? After all, TV supposedly encourages us to be couch potatoes, so giving the National Health Service more fatties to treat.

In the walk-to-work office blocks of Johnson's vision, perhaps there should be no lifts. Lifts would only encourage sloth - especially among slackers who are over 60. And surely doorways should be specially narrow, so as to encourage dietary restraint?

In announcing his intellectual breakthrough, Johnson made much of the flab-fighting successes of cities in Australia, Finland and especially France. Yet in fact Obesogenic Environments: Evidence Review, a highly relevant and recent report commissioned by the Foresight programme of the UK Office of Science and Innovation, makes no mention of either Finland or France. The report records that in Perth, Western Australia, there is evidence that, `after adjustment for confounding factors', being overweight is associated with living on a highway and living on streets with no pavements and with a perceived lack of paths within walking distance. Being obese in Perth is likewise associated with perceived lack of paths within walking distance, poor access to four or more recreational facilities, and with a lack of pavements or shops within walking distance. But that's about it. Indeed with regard to obesity, the report concludes that, `influences of the environment are probably small and mechanisms remain unclear. At present, there is scant evidence on whether the environment might have different effects on people with contrasting levels of physical activity and body weight.' (9)

Clearly Johnson can't be bothered with such a careful analysis. His intent, rather, is simply to stigmatise those who cannot afford to eat well and subject them to a kind of sweaty urban treadmill. The government's attempt to make us live zero-carbon, zero-carbohydrate lifestyles squeezes two ridiculous aims into a failed policy - housing. Recently, Labour has engineered a decline in the number of new homes built in Britain; but its ambitions to police us all through social engineering know no limits. The construction of towns around the tyranny of health is a frightening new departure. Yet we have not heard the last of the Johnson doctrine. Britain's 2012 Olympics doesn't just advertise itself as a low-carbon affair, but insists that it will increase Britons' `awareness' of cycling and walking as healthy means of travel (10). In Labour's camp, no aspect of our public or private lives escapes the government guards - or Alan Johnson, the demented doctor.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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





13 November, 2007

Health checkups not such a good idea

Britons now spend a staggering 99million pounds a year on DIY diagnostic kits (home-use tests that can 'detect' diseases such as diabetes), a rise of 30 per cent over the past five years. But it's not just the cheap end of the market that's flourishing; more people than ever are now undergoing CT and MRI scans. Once the preserve of patients with serious illnesses such as cancer, these scans can cost up to 3,000 a time, yet companies that offer them report a major surge in demand.

Some experts are worried that these health tests are causing unnecessary anxiety - a health problem in itself. They are also concerned that the tests can lead to people having further investigations they don't need, and that these tests also pose an unnecessary risk. 'It's certainly true that we are more anxious than ever about our health because we feel more vulnerable than we used to,' says Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, a London GP and author of a book on public fears about health.

Part of the blame lies with health promotion campaigns - and the growing phenomenon of 'awareness' weeks, he says. 'With last month's breast cancer month, for example, you have girls in their teens and 20s coming to see you, terrified that they have it, when there's more chance of them being struck by lightning.' The availability of information is also fuelling this anxiety, says Professor Michael Hyland, a professor of health psychology at the University of Plymouth. 'We have always been a nation of worried well, but now technology means we have a lot more access to information about disease that only medics had access to previously - and people worry about it.'

Younger patients in particular are becoming 'health obsessed', says Dr Fitzpatrick. 'In the past ten years, the number of fit and healthy 25-year-old men demanding a "full health check-up" has soared - but they need nothing of the sort,' he says. 'They should be enjoying themselves, not testing their cholesterol.'

One issue is the quality of some DIY tests - talk to most specialists and they'd argue it's always better to have a proper medical test than to spend 10 pounds on a home test with questionable results. GPs are seeing an influx of people after self-diagnosis who are worried about their results when there is no need for them to be, says Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association. The other concern is that home testing kits only encourage 'preoccupation with health that isn't conducive to good health,' says Dr Fitzpatrick. 'Personally, I wouldn't do any of this sort of testing or screening - it's unnecessary. These companies are feeding off people's anxieties and making a vast income from something of dubious value.'

However, the greater concern, say some experts, are body scans. Typically these use MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), although you can also have CT scans, which involve a powerful beam of X-rays over the body. These scans are used to identify health problems such as heart disease or tumours - sometimes before symptoms have developed.

Dr Sebastian Kalwij, a GP in Central London and doctor at Prescan, a private clinic where body scans are offered, says demand is rising. 'I used to see two or three patients a week at the beginning of this year but it's now around two or three a day,' he says. 'We find life-threatening health abnormalities in around two per cent of patients and, for the rest, the scan puts their mind at rest that there is nothing sinister going on inside.' Prescan's typical customer, he says, is someone who wants to take control of their own health. 'They may not like their GP, or can't face the long NHS waiting lists, or want their results quickly. Either way, they can afford not to have this frustration.'

But while it's important we take an interest in our health, these tests 'very rarely' pick up anything significant, says Dr Vivienne Nathanson. 'More often, people are just left worried by them. We must understand the limitations of these tests - MRI and CT scans are brilliant when you have some idea what is wrong with you and are looking for an abnormality which has caused a symptom. 'But these scans also pick up a lot of abnormalities which we class as unimportant and as posing no danger to your health - such as cysts and blood vessels taking an abnormal route, which would be simply regarded as not relevant. 'The danger then is that people start worrying about things which are just natural variations in how we're made up and looking for diseases and symptoms which aren't there. 'This leaves them open to physical risks - if they have further examinations such as exploratory procedures like a colonoscopy - and higher financial costs, as well as more emotional worries about their future health.'

There are risks with unnecessary exposure to radiation during CT scans, she adds. 'Radiation is like a poison - the level of risk is associated with the dose. When you expose yourself to radiation unnecessarily, you start to reduce the amount you can have safely at other times when you really need it, say, in hospital.'

GPs are often left picking up the pieces. 'Some people are told there could be something wrong with them but are then given no treatment plan or advice.' This, in turn, creates its own anxiety, suggests Professor Paul Salkovskis, the director of the Maudsley Hospital Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma. 'Telling someone they are "probably okay", as these places sometimes do - because there is never any guarantee that you are 100 per cent okay - is not reassuring, so people go on to pursue their potential problem further. This is often counterproductive and makes people anxious.'

Source




Noise just sickening

SICK to death of noisy neighbours? More than you realise, probably. Researchers have linked exposure to chronic noise with a range of serious ailments including sleep disorders, learning difficulties, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and depression. Griffith University School of Environment lecturer Deanna Tomerini said it was clear from the Environmental Health Council of Australia study that "unwanted sound" was as detrimental to public health as air and water pollution, and that the problem was growing. "Higher-density living, population growth, the increase in road and air traffic - it's evident noise problems are increasing. More people are being affected by noise," she said.

Ms Tomerini warned that governments could expect health problems to increase as noise problems worsened. "Noise should be given the same priority as any other health issue," she said. "Noise just has to be up there at the same level. We need to identify the extent of the problem now. Many of the things to be done to prevent noise need to be done at the planning stage."

Inner-city resident Marion Brown, 59, said there was no doubt her health had suffered after two years of enduring the "neighbours from hell". She said she regularly experienced chronic headaches and anxiety and was now set to sell her house to escape. "It's got to the point where I've been so tired from being unable to sleep because of their noise, I've slept in the car," she said. "I didn't want to sell, but I felt like I had no other choice."

Ms Tomerini said Ms Brown's case highlighted the frustration people had with noise and their reluctance to report it. "Sometimes people don't complain about noise because they think nothing will be done, or they get passed from agency to agency," she said. Ms Tomerini said it would be helpful to have a more integrated approach, including a single agency to receive complaints.

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].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

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





12 November, 2007

Flabby claims about food and cancer

A widely publicised report says that having a 'spare tyre' and consuming anything from bacon to milkshakes could increase your risk of cancer. Fat chance. Professor Patrick Basham and Dr John Luik, authors of "Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade", pick apart two deliberately misleading reports on food and cancer that hit the headlines around the world last week. They reinforce what has already been said on this blog about the reports concerned

Scientists find link between body fat and cancer risk', declared the UK Independent. `Cancer study sparks bacon sandwich backlash', said the Melbourne Herald Sun. `To avoid the Big C, stay small', warned The Economist. Publications around the world summarised the findings of the latest report on cancer to tell us that bad diets and expanding waistlines are a public health disaster.

But before committing ourselves to a dietary life of little red meat or alcohol, and few fizzy drinks, milk shakes, crisps or other such `bad' foods, let's look behind the scary headlines and ask whether the scientific evidence really supports these cancer truths. The catalyst for these stories was the World Cancer Research Fund's new report, "Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective". The report proclaims three truths about cancer, fat and food. First, being fat increases our risk for cancer; second, eating certain foods gives us cancer; and third, cancer is `mostly preventable'.

The report's authors tell us they looked at over half a million studies, and then concentrated on the 7,000 that were most relevant. That is not quite true, for they actually reference slightly fewer than 2,500 studies on diet and disease. More importantly, they conveniently omit many major studies that don't support their three truths theory.

Crucially, they almost exclusively reference epidemiological studies, which inherently cannot establish that being fat or that eating red meat gives you cancer, as that's not what this type of study does. Instead, such studies look for associations between various factors and the risk of disease. For example, this report was interested in whether the variation in people's weights or their diets were correlated with the development of cancer. But the very nature of epidemiological studies means that the margin of error arising from the nature of the data almost invariably exceeds the supposed relationships that the study has found. Only in a very few cases - like the link between active smoking and lung cancer - is the association between a lifestyle factor and disease strong enough for us to be reasonably sure that one causes the other.

What about the headline-grabbing claim that being fat gives you cancer? The report actually claims that being overweight or obese increases your risk for six cancers - cancers of the oesophagus, pancreas, colon/rectum, breast, endometrium (the inner lining of the womb), and kidney. However, when you look at the report's support for this conclusion, the evidence is extremely thin.

Take pancreatic cancer, for example. The report cites 20 case control studies. (These are studies where groups who already have a disease are compared to reasonably matched people who do not, in order to look for possibly significant differences. Case control studies have a greater risk of bias than cohort studies.) Only three of these studies show a statistically significant association between obesity and pancreatic cancer. Similarly, of 42 cohort studies (where you start with a group of healthy people and see who develops the disease) on colorectal cancer, only 13 show a link with obesity.

Of the 16 studies that the report documents on the relationship between breast cancer and obesity, only three are statistically significant, while eight actually show a decreased risk between breast cancer and obesity. Even for oesophageal cancer, the increased risk was largely confined to the morbidly, as opposed to the moderately, obese. With endometrial and kidney cancers, the relative risks were below two. According to the US National Cancer Institute, such risks are so small that they may be due to `chance, statistical bias or the effects of confounding factors'. Such results should be treated with extreme caution.

The just-published Million Women Study from the UK, which examined the evidence for a link between 17 of the most common cancers and Body Mass Index (BMI), the conventional yardstick for measuring overweight and obesity, found a similar pattern of results. In this study, 10 of the cancers do not show a statistically significant association with either higher levels of overweight or obesity. Of the remaining seven cancers, the association between overweight and the cancer is non-significant in four, and where the results are significant, the risks (except for endometrial and oesophagal cancer) are never stronger than two, except among the obese. [See the comments about weak statistical relationships in the above study made here on 8th]

A new study from the National Cancer Institute and the US Centers for Disease Control also contradicts the obesity-cancer link. This study found that being overweight was not associated with those cancers previously considered obesity-related. The study found `little or no association of excess all-cancer mortality with any of the BMI categories'. Indeed, the study suggests that overweight might in fact be protective against cancer.

Is the second truth in the World Cancer Research Fund's report - that eating certain foods increases our risk for cancer - really true? Of the 17 cancers discussed in the report, virtually all have statistically non-significant associations with every type of food, which means that they provide no evidence of a link between a particular food and a particular cancer. For example, of the 17 studies cited which assessed the link between colon cancer and processed meat, 13 are not statistically significant. Despite those scary headlines about red meat, the report concludes that `there is limited evidence.suggesting that red meat is a cause of oesophageal cancer'. Again, `there is limited, inconsistent evidence.that grilled.or barbecued animal foods are causes of stomach cancer'. And `there is limited evidence suggesting that processed meat is a cause of stomach cancer'. Given the limited nature of this evidence, it is difficult to see how the report authors justified the advice to avoid red and processed meat.

Are these anomalous findings? On the contrary. Consider, for example, the American Cancer Society's 2001 study of diet and stomach cancer, which looked at 436,000 men and women and found no increased risk of stomach cancer associated with eating processed meats. What that study did find, however, was an increased risk of stomach cancer with women who consumed more vegetables!

What of the report's claim that cancer is `mostly preventable'? This is perhaps the most curious claim since there is massive evidence of the best kind that suggests that it is simply not true. The Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial is the most recent, and one of the largest and most expensive, randomised controlled studies of the effect of diet and weight on breast cancer, colon cancer, heart disease and stroke. It studied 49,000 American women over an eight-year period. The women in the intervention group ate diets that were low fat and high fibre with six servings of grains and five servings of vegetables and fruits per day.

There were no statistically significant differences between the intervention group and the control group in the incidence of breast cancer, colon cancer, strokes or heart attacks. Ironically, the women following the `healthy' diet designed to reduce cancer and heart disease didn't even weigh less than they did at the beginning of the study, or less than the women in the control group who continued to eat as they always had. Unlike the epidemiological studies cited in the World Cancer Research Fund report, this gold standard, randomised, controlled intervention found no evidence to support the claim that there is a connection between eating certain foods and being a certain weight and preventing cancer.

This study is not unique. A newer one, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute analysed data from 14 studies involving 756,000 men and women who were followed from six to 20 years. The study found that fruit and vegetable intake was not associated with a reduced colon cancer risk. Some cancer prevention! Contrary to recent media headlines, the World Cancer Research Fund report does not prove there is a causal connection between cancer and being fat, or cancer and eating certain foods, or diet and cancer prevention. Rather, the report merely demonstrates that, as epidemiologist Petr Shrabanek observed, `people who eat, die'.

Source




Curvy women are cleverer too

This I believe. It is just natural selection. Cleverer men get more attractive wives so the offspring tend to be both clever and attractive. It's got sod-all to do with the sacred Omega3s

It was already known that men find curvy women more attractive and that they live longer. Now research suggests that women with an hourglass figure are brighter and have cleverer children, too. The study found that women with large hips and small waists are more intelligent than those with either “apple-shaped” or linear bodies. The paper, to be published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour this week, suggests that such women give birth to more intelligent children - possibly a result of higher levels of omega3 fatty acids on the hips.

The researchers believe that the results offer a new explanation for why many men find curvy women more alluring. Nigella Lawson, the cookery presenter and Oxford University graduate, has one of Britain’s most famous hourglass figures, while Rachel Weisz, the curvy actress who won an Oscar for her role in The Constant Gardener, completed an English degree at Cambridge University while embarking on the first stages of her acting career.

In the research, scientists at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California, Santa Barbara, used data from a study of 16,000 women and girls, which collected details of their body measurements and their scores in cognitive tests. They found that those women with a greater difference between the waist and hips scored significantly higher on the tests, as did their children. Such women are not necessarily skinny. What is important is that their waist should be smaller than their hips, with the ideal ratio being between 0.6 and 0.7.

The researchers suggest that the fat around fuller hips and thighs holds higher levels of omega3 fatty acids which are essential for the growth of the brain during pregnancy. Fat around the waist may have higher levels of omega6 fatty acids, which are less suited to brain growth. Waist fat can also be a contributory factor in diabetes and heart disease. Thinner or linear-shaped women would simply lack enough of either type of fat.

Although these theories await confirmation, Paula Hall, a sexual and relationship psychologist with Relate, said: “Having research that proves you can be sexy and intelligent is really positive. It shows that curvy women may be better at things other than raising children and doing cooking and housework.” The research may also explain why children born to teenage mothers do worse in cognitive tests: their mothers may have had insufficient stores of the best fatty acids. “The cognitive development of their children is reduced, and their own cognitive development is impaired compared with those mothers with a later first birth,” say the researchers. What utter Bollocks! Teen mothers tend to be dumber and their children inherit that] The study noted, however, that children born to teenage girls with traditional hourglass figures seemed to be protected from this phenomenon and did better in tests.

A number of scientific studies have shown that men are “hard-wired” to find women with a greater waist-hip differential the most attractive. No one has yet been able to explain this, although theories include enhanced fertility, better childbearing abilities and longer life expectancy.

Dr Harry Witchel, a senior lecturer in physiology at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and a body language expert on the television programme Big Brother, said: “Until this point the only thing we have accepted is that they [curvy women] are at an advantage in contemporary western society. What these people are saying is that they also have an advantage biologically.”

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



11 November, 2007

Fake facts about tanning and cancer

Post below lifted from Free students. See the original for links



Here's an example of how wrong "facts" get into the popular culture and are used to increase the levels of government regulation. The London Times is one of the premier newspapers in the world and they recently ran an article about new things that the Nanny state will most likely ban. Included in the list was a ban on teens using tanning beds. They mentioned how one politician in Scotland has already introduced legislation to ban tanning beds -- something the UN's World Health Organization is pushing. In this article the Times claims: "An estimated 100 people die in Scotland each year of skin cancers caused by the use of sunbeds."

The Progressive-Vision blog notes that no source is given for this claim. And they looked at the actual numbers. It turns out that this claim is totally bogus. The total number of skin cancer deaths in Scotland for individuals of all ages, from all causes, is 158. As they note "This would require two-thirds of all skin cancer deaths to be caused by tanning beds which is highly unlikely." In fact most people with skin cancer are the elderly. And I can't imagine (nor want to) the geriatric set in their bikinis and Speedos down at the tanning salon.

The truth is that most these people have skin cancer because of decades of exposure to the sun. The Skin Cancer Foundation says that more than 90% of all skin cancer is caused "by sun exposure". Apparently one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world repeated this "fact" without bothering to verify it. And no doubt others will repeat the claim as a result.




Both conventional and "alternative" back pain therapy is ineffective - study

GOING to a chiropractor or a physiotherapist to treat lower back pain may be a waste of time, according to research that shows having your spine manipulated does not speed recovery. A study by the University of Sydney has shown that expensive and potentially risky treatments, such as spinal manipulation and the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as diclofenac or ibuprofen, are no more effective than paracetamol.

Current guidelines for acute lower back pain recommend as the first line of care that GPs advise patients to remain active and avoid bed rest, and that paracetamol be prescribed. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and spinal manipulative therapy are recommended as a second-tier option to speed recovery. But the study found that neither diclofenac nor spinal manipulative therapy significantly reduced the number of days until recovery, when compared with a placebo drug or placebo manipulative therapy.

The 240 patients in the study were put into four treatment groups and given either 50 milligrams of diclofenac twice daily and placebo manipulative therapy; a placebo drug and spinal manipulative therapy; diclofenac and manipulative therapy; or placebo manipulative therapy and a placebo drug.

Chris Maher, of the back pain research group at the university, said half of those who underwent the active manipulation therapy completely recovered after 15 days and half of those who had placebo manipulation treatment also recovered after 15 days. "The active treatment didn't shorten recovery time," said Associate Professor Maher, a co-author of the study published in The Lancet. "It means that for most people with back pain it is a sensible option to start with advice from your doctor and paracetamol."

Overtreating lower back pain can be expensive and risky. Spinal manipulation costs from $50 to $70 a treatment and often requires multiple sessions, while non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs have been linked with gastric disturbance and, in some cases, heart attacks.

Associate Professor Maher said people tended to take paracetamol incorrectly, choosing to pop a pill until pain eased, instead of continuing treatment. "Try to take [paracetamol] in the same way you would take antibiotics - take the whole course until it is finished," he said.

A spokesman for the Chiropractors' Association of Australia, Patrick Sim, said paracetamol reduced pain but did not address the source. "We are particularly concerned if people are drugging themselves to stop pain," he said. "Chiropractors will look at why the pain is there in the first place, and fix that."

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



10 November, 2007

Middling weight wins again

Just in time for Thanksgiving comes the word we've been longing for: People who carry a little extra weight are dying at lower rates than their counterparts of "normal" size. The latest research, published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, stirs up unresolved conflicts about the true risks of those love handles.

For years, a public health drumbeat has argued we're eating ourselves into early graves, risking cancer, heart disease and other ills. Skinny mice live longer, we're told. Losing even a few pounds will improve your health. Yet a counter-rhythm also has been gaining volume, as studies of large groups of people document that moderately chunky folks aren't actually dropping dead as anticipated. They're outliving those of normal size. Even the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has flip-flopped, sharply lowering its estimates of obesity-related deaths over the past three years. Now federal officials are downplaying the death-risk angle and instead telling people that their daily lives and health care costs will improve if they weigh less.

Those who study obesity - and those who study obesity researchers - suspect two things are going on. First, the relationship between weight and health is much more nuanced and personal than can be explained with a simple weight chart or a single study. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, family health history and even waist circumference play a role.

And second, we have such a cultural horror of fat that we're predisposed to believe even a little is bad for us. "We see our data through cultural lenses, and the cultural lens that most of us wear in contemporary American society is one in which thin is better," said Abigail Saguy, a UCLA sociology professor who is writing a book on medical and political debates about weight.

Katherine Flegal, lead author of the latest study and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics, puts it differently. "The whole issue of weight and mortality is fairly complex. There's no simple, one-size-fits-all way to talk about this," she said. Flegal advises people to see their doctor for the best assessment of their personal health risk at any weight.

More broadly, the CDC now recommends that at all weights, people should exercise regularly and eat nutritiously to optimize health. Yet the CDC also promotes a weight range that is coming under increasing fire, from its own researchers and others.

At the crux of the debate is who is "overweight" and what the term really says about health. In 1998, in a controversial move that some argued played into the hands of the diet drug industry, the federal government toughened its guidelines, adding roughly 25 million Americans to the ranks of the dangerously hefty. Since then, the standard adopted by the National Institutes of Health says that those with a body mass index, or BMI, of 18.5 to 24.9 are "normal," with "overweight" ranging from 25 to 29.9 and "obese" starting at 30.

BMI is a ratio of weight to height, and for a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches tall, the standard says that anything between 108 and 145 pounds is normal, 146 to 174 pounds is overweight and 175-plus is obese. Yet doctors and researchers have argued about whether the data really support that description of "overweight." "Ultimately, we're going to have to do better than BMI," said Dr. Robert Lustig, who runs the pediatric obesity program at the University of California, San Francisco. A BMI between 25 and 30 actually can reflect three factors linked to improved health - muscle mass, bone density and subcutaneous fat, Lustig said. It also can capture one thing linked to bad health: visceral fat, which gathers at the abdomen and is metabolically active in dangerous ways.

Dr. Tom Hopkins, a Sacramento weight-loss specialist, shares the view that no well-documented dangers apply universally to everyone lumped into the "overweight" category. Hopkins doesn't worry about the faint hint of jowls at his jaw line, or the 205 pounds he carries on a 5-foot-11-inch frame, giving him a BMI of 28.6. "Fitness counts. Fatness doesn't," said Hopkins, who eats right and works out regularly.

The heavier people get, though, the more the ambiguities fade. By the time BMI tops 40 - for a 5-foot-4 woman that would be 233 pounds or more - much firmer links emerge with health problems.

In 2005, the same research team that conducted the newest study took a broad look at the issue, based on a large public health database. That study found unexpectedly low deaths among people who were overweight but not obese. This time, Flegal and three other researchers with the CDC and the National Cancer Institute delved deeper, seeking links between specific weight ranges and causes of death. Their conclusions:

* A little bit of pudge - BMIs of 25 to 29.9 - is correlated with lower death rates from respiratory disease, injury and a host of other ills when compared with people of normal weight.

* Merely overweight people appear to have no increased risk of death from cancer or heart disease, the two leading causes of death in America.

* A link between heart disease deaths and weight emerges only at BMIs above 30 and has been steadily weakening, possibly because of better treatments for cardiovascular disease.

* There is no link between weight and overall cancer death rates, but obese people do die more frequently from seven cancers considered weight-related, including colon, breast and pancreatic.

* The overweight and the obese, combined, have a higher risk of dying from kidney disease and diabetes.

Flegal stressed that no one really knows what is behind the statistical links between certain weights and certain fates. More study is needed. Researchers speculated that overweight people may be better equipped to withstand infections, injuries and medical procedures because they have greater nutritional reserves and often more lean body mass. For now, as the science unfolds, we're left with a broad consensus on basic health advice: Get plenty of exercise, eat your vegetables, and make sure your blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels are monitored and treated as needed. And maybe one day, the now quaint notion of pleasingly plump will give way to a trendy new concept: protectively plump.

Source




GROAN! SURGERY IN LATIN AMERICA IS RISKY! WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

There is a fairly reasonable argument that C-sections are overdone in some hospitals. So we have to prove that they are really frightening in order to stop women having them, apparently. The article below tries to do that by saying that C-sections are more likely to kill you than are natural deliveries. And that foremost medical propaganda organ -- the BMJ -- published it, of course. That the results might not generalize beyond Latin America is glided over. Popular summary below followed by journal abstract:

Women having a non-emergency caesarean birth have double the risk of illness or even death compared to those having a vaginal birth, according to a new study in the British Medical Journal. Researchers randomly selected 120 hospitals from eight Latin American countries. There were 97,307 births during the three-month study period -- 34 per cent were caesarean and 66 per cent vaginal. Compared to women who had a vaginal delivery, those having an elective caesarean had twice the risk of illness and mortality (including death, hysterectomy, blood transfusion and admission to intensive care) and five times the risk of needing antibiotic treatment after birth. The chances of the baby being admitted to an intensive care unit were doubled, and the risk of the baby dying in hospital was 70 per cent higher after a caesarean delivery compared to a vaginal birth. While caesarean delivery was beneficial for breech-born babies (born feet first), the authors conclude that there is no overall benefit in non-emergency caesareans, and they are likely to do harm.

Source

Maternal and neonatal individual risks and benefits associated with caesarean delivery: multicentre prospective study

By Jose Villar et al.

Objective: To assess the risks and benefits associated with caesarean delivery compared with vaginal delivery.

Design: Prospective cohort study within the 2005 WHO global survey on maternal and perinatal health.

Setting: 410 health facilities in 24 areas in eight randomly selected Latin American countries; 123 were randomly selected and 120 participated and provided data

Participants: 106,546 deliveries reported during the three month study period, with data available for 97 095 (91% coverage).

Main outcome measures: Maternal, fetal, and neonatal morbidity and mortality associated with intrapartum or elective caesarean delivery, adjusted for clinical, demographic, pregnancy, and institutional characteristics.

Results: Women undergoing caesarean delivery had an increased risk of severe maternal morbidity compared with women undergoing vaginal delivery (odds ratio 2.0 (95% confidence interval 1.6 to 2.5) for intrapartum caesarean and 2.3 (1.7 to 3.1) for elective caesarean). The risk of antibiotic treatment after delivery for women having either type of caesarean was five times that of women having vaginal deliveries. With cephalic presentation, there was a trend towards a reduced odds ratio for fetal death with elective caesarean, after adjustment for possible confounding variables and gestational age (0.7, 0.4 to 1.0). With breech presentation, caesarean delivery had a large protective effect for fetal death. With cephalic presentation, however, independent of possible confounding variables and gestational age, intrapartum and elective caesarean increased the risk for a stay of seven or more days in neonatal intensive care (2.1 (1.8 to 2.6) and 1.9 (1.6 to 2.3), respectively) and the risk of neonatal mortality up to hospital discharge (1.7 (1.3 to 2.2) and 1.9 (1.5 to 2.6), respectively), which remained higher even after exclusion of all caesarean deliveries for fetal distress. Such increased risk was not seen for breech presentation. Lack of labour was a risk factor for a stay of seven or more days in neonatal intensive care and neonatal mortality up to hospital discharge for babies delivered by elective caesarean delivery, but rupturing of membranes may be protective.

Conclusions: Caesarean delivery independently reduces overall risk in breech presentations and risk of intrapartum fetal death in cephalic presentations but increases the risk of severe maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality in cephalic presentations.

BMJ, published 30 October 2007

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

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



9 November, 2007

Stoned kids do better - study

Looks like some sort of social class effect again. Controls for class would have been a big help. My guess is that Swiss middle class kids are more likely to use MJ and all the other relationships observed among MJ users reflect their class origin

A STUDY of more than 5000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoke marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don't. But the same was not true for those who used both tobacco and marijuana, who tended to be heavier users of the drug, said the report by Dr J.C. Suris and colleagues at the University of Lausanne. The study did not confirm the hypothesis that those who abstained from marijuana and tobacco functioned better overall, the authors said.

In fact, those who used only marijuana were "more socially driven ... significantly more likely to practice sports and they have a better relationship with their peers" than abstainers, it said. "Moreover, even though they are more likely to skip class, they have the same level of good grades; and although they have a worse relationship with their parents, they are not more likely to be depressed" than abstainers, it said. It did not explain the reasons behind the apparent effect.

The study, published in the November issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, was based on a 2002 survey of 5263 Swiss students aged 16 to 20, of whom 455 smoked marijuana only, 1703 who used both marijuana and tobacco and 3105 who abstained from both. The report said that while marijuana use had declined among US adolescents, it had increased in recent years among the same age group in Switzerland and other European countries. The study said that while one theory held that using legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol opened the door to marijuana and other illegal drug use, recent research also had found marijuana might come first and it "may reinforce cigarette smoking or lead to nicotine addiction ...".

In the study, about half of the tobacco and marijuana group had used the latter drug 10 times or more in the previous month. That compared to 56 per cent in the marijuana-only group who had used the drug only once or twice in the same time period. "These findings agree with previous research indicating that (tobacco) smokers were significantly more likely to be heavy cannabis users than nonsmokers," the study concluded. In addition, those who use only marijuana were less likely to have started using that drug before the age of 15 compared to tobacco users, and the tobacco-marijuana group was more likely to have abused alcohol, the study said.

Source




Fast food stereotypes challenged

TWO South Australian researchers are not swallowing the stereotype view that people who often eat fast-food are from poor families. Fast-food customers are from all ages and backgrounds, say Adelaide University PhD researchers Emily Brindal and Kirsten Dunn. They have presented findings on attitudes and behaviour of customers at major fast-food outlets to the "Shape of Things to Come" obesity conference at the Adelaide Town Hall.

Ms Dunn has found half the respondents who eat fast food once a fortnight are not young, single students but time-poor people aged over 38. Her study of 66 people also showed those aged 38 ate almost as much fast food as younger people. About 60 per cent of people under 38 ate takeaway meals once to three times a week - compared with 50 per cent aged over 38.

Ms Dunn conducted a second study of 404 people in which two-thirds knew frequently eating fast food was poor nutrition. Meanwhile, Emily Brindal, says her on-line survey of 528 people aged 14 to 74 revealed diverse fast-food patronage but similar behaviour.

People who eat fast food apparently watch more television and eat less vegetables, Ms Brindal says. "And yes, people who eat more fast food gain weight," she says. [People who eat more of anything gain weight]

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



8 November, 2007

FAT WOMEN GET MORE CANCER -- Or so they say again

The medical researchers are always trying to prove it and some British statisticians have come up with some statistical jiggery-pokery that seems to indicate it. Report and abstract below.

For a start, what is NOT mentioned is very interesting: That fat women get LESS breast cancer overall and that it is people of middling weight who live longest overall. The latter finding is what statisticians call a curvilinear relationship and should in the circumstances have been tested for in the study below. That seems not to have been done. I suspect that the effects were too weak to allow for it.

At any event, if fatties DO get more cancer, they must get less of other things in order to live longer. No mention of THAT, of course.

But I suspect that the whole report is nonsense, anyhow. In order to get some detectable effect, they somehow put their women into groups of ten -- "relative risk per 10 units". What was wrong with just listing average mass indices in victim versus non-victim groups? I think I know: Minuscule differences. Grouping your data is ALWAYS bad statistics. It throws away information. So the professional female statisticians who did this study were very lax to do so. Such laxity had to be motivated.

Women who are overweight are at a greater risk of contracting a wide range of cancers, a study has shown. The authors calculate that 6,000 cancers a year - 5 per cent of all cancers in women - can be attributed to being overweight or obese.

The effect is greatest in cancers of the oesophagus (gullet) and endometrium (lining of the womb), where the risks are more than doubled. But there are also significant increases in the risks of contracting kidney cancer, leukaemia, multiple myeloma, pancreatic cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, ovarian cancer, breast cancer in older women and colorectal cancer in younger ones.

The team, led by Gillian Reeves of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at Oxford, analysed data from the Million Women Study. This is the largest study of the cancer risk for women, funded by Cancer Research UK. It involved 1.2 million women who were aged between 50 and 64 when they joined the study between 1996 and 2001, and who were monitored for an average of more than five years.

Information provided by the women at the start of the study included their height and weight, There were more than 45,000 cases of cancer and 17,203 deaths. The data allowed correlations to be observed between body mass index and cancer risk. The report, published in the British Medical Journal, showed that greater weight increased the risk of ten of the 17 cancers studied. It was calculated that an increase of 10 in the BMI measure - from 25 to 35, say - increased the risk of all cancers combined by 12 per cent. It almost tripled the risk of endometrial cancer and more than doubled that of oesophageal cancer.

Dr Reeves said: "Based on our findings, we estimate that being overweight or obese accounts for around 6,000 out of a total 120,000 new cases of cancer each year among middle-aged and older women in the UK. "Our research also shows that being overweight has a much bigger impact on the risk of some cancers than others. Two thirds of the additional 6,000 cancers each year due to overweight or obesity would be cancers of the womb or breast."

In some cases, the effect depends on the age of the woman. For example, being overweight only increases the risk of breast cancer after the menopause and the risk of bowel cancer before the menopause.

Sara Hiom, of Cancer Research UK, said: "This research adds to the evidence regarding the impact of being overweight or obese on developing cancer and dying from the disease. While most people readily associate carrying extra weight with being a general health risk, many do not make a specific link with cancer. These findings need to be taken into consideration alongside the established strong relationships between body fatness and other common illnesses, such as diabetes and heart attacks."

The link between cancer and being overweight is not new, but this is among the strongest evidence yet gathered in support of it. The study does not address reasons for the link, but a strong possibility is that extra fat generates greater quantities of the hormones that feed cancer. Excess body fat is not simply padding but active tissue producing hormones, so someone who has more of it runs a higher risk of cancer than a person of normal weight. In addition, overweight people are less likely to have healthy lifestyles. A healthy diet and regular exercise are acknowledged as factors that lower the risk of all cancers.

Source

Journal abstract:

Cancer incidence and mortality in relation to body mass index in the Million Women Study: cohort study

By Gillian K Reeves et al.

Objective: To examine the relation between body mass index (kg/m2) and cancer incidence and mortality.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Participants: 1.2 million UK women recruited into the Million Women Study, aged 50-64 during 1996-2001, and followed up, on average, for 5.4 years for cancer incidence and 7.0 years for cancer mortality.

Main outcome measures: Relative risks of incidence and mortality for all cancers, and for 17 specific types of cancer, according to body mass index, adjusted for age, geographical region, socioeconomic status, age at first birth, parity, smoking status, alcohol intake, physical activity, years since menopause, and use of hormone replacement therapy.

Results: 45 037 incident cancers and 17 203 deaths from cancer occurred over the follow-up period. Increasing body mass index was associated with an increased incidence of endometrial cancer (trend in relative risk per 10 units=2.89, 95% confidence interval 2.62 to 3.18), adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus (2.38, 1.59 to 3.56), kidney cancer (1.53, 1.27 to 1.84), leukaemia (1.50, 1.23 to 1.83), multiple myeloma (1.31, 1.04 to 1.65), pancreatic cancer (1.24, 1.03 to 1.48), non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (1.17, 1.03 to 1.34), ovarian cancer (1.14, 1.03 to 1.27), all cancers combined (1.12, 1.09 to 1.14), breast cancer in postmenopausal women (1.40, 1.31 to 1.49) and colorectal cancer in premenopausal women (1.61, 1.05 to 2.48). In general, the relation between body mass index and mortality was similar to that for incidence. For colorectal cancer, malignant melanoma, breast cancer, and endometrial cancer, the effect of body mass index on risk differed significantly according to menopausal status.

Conclusions: Increasing body mass index is associated with a significant increase in the risk of cancer for 10 out of 17 specific types examined. Among postmenopausal women in the UK, 5% of all cancers (about 6000 annually) are attributable to being overweight or obese. For endometrial cancer and adenocarcinoma of the oesophagus, body mass index represents a major modifiable risk factor; about half of all cases in postmenopausal women are attributable to overweight or obesity.

BMJ 6 November 2007




Blood transfusion row in Britain

People are focusing on one case where refusal of a transfusion appears to have caused death. What they are NOT mentioning is that in MOST cases refusal of a transfusion has a BETTER outcome than accepting it. And the reason why is now fairly clear. Blood loses its oxygen-carrying capacity shortly after donation. So even WITH a transfusion the woman would probably have died

A Jehovah's witness died shortly after giving birth to twins because her faith prevented her from having a blood transfusion. Emma Gough, 22, began haemorrhaging but because her beliefs did not allow her to receive blood she slipped into unconsciousness and died. As she suffered severe blood loss and her life ebbed away, medical staff urged her husband, Anthony, and her parents, all of whom follow the same faith, to overrule her decision and allow a transfusion which could have saved her, but they refused.

She gave birth naturally and all appeared well as she cuddled her baby son and daughter, but she suddenly began to haemorrhage. Her condition was complicated by the fact she was anaemic.

Mrs Gough signed a form prior to giving birth making it clear she should not be given blood in the event of an emergency, which also confirmed she understood the risks of her decision. But it is understood her family were unhappy with the hospital because they felt Mrs Gough should have been given a Caesarean section but was left to give birth naturally.

Mr Gough, 24, a central heating engineer who has been left to bring up the children, said: "We are coping the best we can. There will be an inquest and issues will arise from that." Mrs Gough, who died on October 25th, was cremated at Telford Crematorium on Monday.

She and Mr Gough, who married in Barbados in December 2005, were devout Jehovah's witnesses, as were their families, and they all worshipped in Telford, attending the Kingdom Hill halls. Peter Welch, who was the couple's best man, said: "Everyone is devastated by what has happened. We can't believe she died after childbirth in this day and age, with all the technology there is. "What makes it even more sad is Emma had time to hold and start to bond with her twins before complications set in."

The couple, who lived in Dawley, Telford, have been together since they were teenagers and friends said Mrs Gough, who worked at the town centre's Next, was "ecstatic" to be having twins. Mrs Gough always dreamed of a Caribbean wedding and Mr Gough organised it as a surprise, the couple marrying in the grounds of the Tamarind Grove Hotel in front of 30 family members and friends.

Jehovah's witnesses insist that passages from the Bible ban them from taking blood. The collection, storage and transfusion of blood are all forbidden. A member of the Kingdom Hill congregation in Telford, Shrops, who asked not to be named, said: "The basis of the faith is that we follow commands from the scriptures and it is a scriptural command to abstain from blood. "It is one of a number of things contained in the Scriptures about things you can and cannot do. It is, of course, up to the individual to decide how strongly to follow these requirements. I accept that the faith will receive criticism over this. Some of our beliefs do attract criticism."

He denied Mrs Gough was being selfish by putting her own beliefs before the needs of her children, adding: "Children are always a priority. We respect life. We seek the best medical attention we can get but the requirement we have is that we do so without receiving blood. It is very sad and there is a lot of support for the family." ....

A spokesman for the Shrewsbury coroner said that the cause of death was recorded initially as complications of profound anaemia due to haemorrhage and complications of twin delivery. An inquest has been opened and adjourned and investigations are continuing.

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



7 November, 2007

The breastfeeding crusade continues

Whoopee! A study that DOES consider social class. Sometimes lots of nagging does get results. It seems reasonable that breast is best -- if the mother finds it easy -- but proving it is another matter. Since social class is likely to influence who breastfeeds, it is important to separate out class effects from effects of feeding per se. The study below uses education as a proxy for class -- which is a good start. But education does not correlate strongly with other class indices -- and even the link to IQ usually covers only about 50% of the variance -- so the question still invites the old Scottish verdict of "not proven".

Another reason for skepticism is that the incidence of breast feeding was assessed by self-report rather than by observation. That invites a whole range of possible distortions. It is undoubted that some mothers might for various reasons distort the amount of breastfeeding they did -- and what are the characteristics of such women? I could go on to multiply hypotheses -- particularly with reference to the fact that breastfeeding was rather out of fashion at the time the adults concerned were born -- but what's the point? We just have an unknown

Breast-fed babies are less likely to be obese or have heart disease in later life than those who were bottle-fed, say researchers. In a large US study, middle-aged adults who were breast-fed as infants were found to be 55 per cent more likely to have high levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the so-called "good" cholesterol that protects against cardiovascular disease (CVD).

They also had a lower average body mass index (BMI) score - 26.1 kg/m2 compared with 26.9 - than those who were not breast-fed. A BMI score of more than 25 is considered to be overweight and a risk factor for heart disease. "This was a modest reduction in BMI, but even a modest reduction leads to a significantly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease-related death," the researchers say.

The study, reported yesterday at a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida, included 393 mothers enrolled in the continuous Framingham Offspring Study and 962 of their offspring. The average age of the offspring was 41 and 54 per cent were women. Although previous studies have hinted that breast-feeding produces health benefits in later life, much of the existing research was limited by a lack of adjustment for other factors, such as socioeconomic status.

Britain has one of the lowest breast-feeding rates in the industrialised world. Initiation rates currently stand at 76 per cent, meaning that a quarter of infants receive no breast milk at all.

Nisha Parikh, who led the latest study at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, in Boston, Massachusetts, said that having been breast-fed in infancy was associated with longer-term health benefits "even after accounting for personal and maternal demographic and CVD risk factors that could influence the results". Research also suggests that babies who are not breast-fed have a higher risk of infection.

Dr Parikh said that she had the idea for the study after returning from maternity leave. "The benefits of breast-feeding in infancy and childhood are well established. But I wondered if it were as helpful for health in adulthood," she said. For the study, mothers reported whether they breast-fed each of their children and for how long. Overall, 26 per cent of the participants' offspring were breast-fed.

After adjustment for factors including use of blood-pressure-lowering medication, maternal education, smoking and body mass index, breast-fed offspring had higher than average HDL-cholesterol levels in adulthood: 56.6 mg/dL compared with 53.7 mg/dL for the bottle-fed participants. HDL bonds with and transports cholesterol particles in the blood stream, and as such protects against heart disease and stroke by preventing blood vessels from becoming blocked and furred up (atherosclerosis). Lower HDL-borne cholesterol levels are known to increase the risk of heart disease.

"The findings show that early environmental exposures have long-term health effects," Dr Parikh added. "They also underscore that atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease are life-course diseases that have their roots early in life." Rosie Dodds, policy researcher for the National Childbirth Trust, said that the findings concurred with the World Health Organisation's own research into the long-term effects of being breast-fed as a child. "This study provides more evidence of the difference breast-feeding makes to blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and cholesterol levels," she said. "Women should be free to choose whether they breast-feed or not, but they should also have access to good information and support about their options. At the moment, that is what they are not getting in this country."

Source




Genes and breastfeeding

This could be a rather pesky finding for the breastfeeding enthusiasts. Its conclusion is that breastfeeding is helpful in only some cases. And it does appear to be a very well-controlled study. The abstract is here. The authors do however rather overgeneralize the significance of their findings. The last sentence of their abstract is particularly silly. It is: "It also shows that genes may work via the environment to shape the IQ, helping to close the nature versus nurture debate". Nobody has ever questioned that IQ is a product of both genes and the environment -- but you do have to have the right genes to start with for an optimal result. The study would in fact appear to have identified one of the genes concerned

Children who are breast-fed go on to have slightly higher IQs than those who are not, but only if they carry a particular genetic variant, a British-based research team has found. The findings, from a group at King's College London, also provide new evidence that breast milk's nutritional content has a positive effect on infants' intellectual development, if only in those whose DNA lets them benefit.

While previous studies have linked higher IQ to being breast-fed as a baby, questions have been raised as to whether breast-feeding itself is responsible for the increase. Mothers who themselves have higher IQs are more likely to breast-feed in the first place, creating the possibility that genes that directly influence intelligence explain the link.

The new research, led by Professors Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, makes it more likely that the nutritional content of breast milk has an active role, as it reveals a physiological mechanism that could account for the effect. The genetic variant carried by children whose IQ is improved when they are breast-fed is known to improve the way in which the body processes fatty acids that are critical to early brain development.

The findings suggest that a combination of the variant and breast-feeding increases the supply of these key acids to the brain, leading on average to greater intelligence. Without breast-feeding, or without the beneficial genetic variant, there is no effect. "Our findings support the idea that the nutritional content of breast milk accounts for the differences seen in human IQ," Professor Moffitt said. "But it's not a simple all-or-none connection: it depends to some extent on the genetic make-up of each infant. "There has been some criticism of earlier studies about breast-feeding and IQ, that they didn't control for socioeconomic status, or the mother's IQ or other factors. But our findings take an end-run around those arguments by showing the physiological mechanism that accounts for the difference."

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to the consensus that genes and the environment rarely work in isolation, but often combine to influence human development.

A separate study yesterday suggested that women who continued to drink alcohol during pregnancy would have badly behaved children. Brian D'Onofrio, of Indiana University, said that the children of mothers who drank less than once a week during pregnancy had virtually no behavioural problems, but women who drank on more than five days a week were storing up trouble for the future.

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



6 November, 2007

Avoiding chocolate is a bad move for dieters

Struggling to resist a chocolatey treat may do women more harm than good. Psychologists have found that suppressing the desire leads to a "rebound" effect in which a woman simply eats more when she gives in. Scientists at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain believe their findings may help explain why some women are prone to binge eating after cutting back. Their research reveals that women who were asked to suppress their thoughts about chocolate consumed 50 per cent more when offered it, compared with women who were told to express their feelings about chocolate.

Psychologist James Erskine believes the findings may help people who are struggling to give up unhealthy foods or smoking. "The act of avoidance appears to completely backfire," Erskine says. "The most harmful thing you can do is to tell people not to think about eating chocolate. We have to tackle behaviour itself by giving women alternatives instead of making them abstain."

Erskine studied 130 volunteers who were asked to eat chocolate after being told either to suppress or to express their thoughts about chocolate by talking aloud. Women who tried to suppress their feelings showed a clear rebound effect. Men who took part in the study were less prone to the effect, instead eating more when told to express their feelings about chocolate.

Erskine has also carried out similar research in people trying to give up smoking and found similar results in women that prove they are more vulnerable to rebound if they are trying to give up something they crave. He is now conducting research to try to understand why women are more prone to this rebound effect. "The rebound effect seems to be most prevalent when people are trying to suppress something that they see as problematic," he says. "It could just be that women see eating chocolate as more problematic than men do. We now need to find new ways to help women change their behaviour rather than just telling them not to eat things."

Lyzette Barnard, 36, a confessed chocoholic and a member of Weight Watchers, spent years as a yo-yo dieter fighting her cravings. "I have a real weak spot for chocolate," she says. "I would try to go without it but then when I caved in I would end up eating a whole bar rather than just a few pieces. "Diets make me think I can't eat chocolate any more but it just makes me want it more. I have found the best way is to find other things to replace chocolate so I don't get any cravings."

Diet specialists insist that the research supports evidence that eating sensibly rather than trying to eliminate "sinful" foods helps people to control their weight. Emma Hetherington, the head of program development at Weight Watchers UK, says: "We know if you set yourself an unrealistic goal such as 'I'll never eat chocolate again' or 'I'll never have a glass of wine', automatically that is all you will think about. It then becomes more likely that you give in to these cravings. "We advocate getting plenty of variety in your daily diet - that means all food groups - and this keeps you interested and focused and therefore maintains your weight loss."

Source




Sleeping pill Zolpidem awakens girl from coma

A girl who has spent six years in a coma is showing signs of life after taking a sleeping pill. Amy Pickard, 23, had lain in her bed, unable to eat or breathe for herself since falling unconscious in 2001. But after being enrolled in a study of the side-effects of the sleeping pill Zolpidem, her eyes have begun to sparkle and she has even managed to stand.

Amy's mother, Thelma Pickard, 54, has visited her every day at the Raphael Medical Centre in Tonbridge, Kent, and claims that she can see her "feisty and determined" daughter fighting her way to recovery. She reacts to strong-tasting foods, can breathe unaided, focus on objects in her room and is beginning to formulate words. When she takes the pill, I see her face relax and the old sparkle return to her eyes. It truly is remarkable," said Mrs Pickard.

Amy, who is the subject of a BBC1 documentary The Waking Pill to be broadcast tonight, was 17 and studying for her A-Levels at Filsham Valley School in East Sussex when she was persuaded to inject heroin by her then boyfriend. She is one of 360 people taking part in a worldwide trial of Zolpidem as a treatment for people in comas. Sixty per cent of patients taking part in the study have started showing signs of life.

The drug's side-effects were first discovered after a 24-year-old South African cyclist suffered a serious brain injury after being hit by a lorry in 1994. Doctors told his parents that he would never regain consciousness. Five years after his accident, nurses noticed he was involuntarily grabbing at his mattress and gave him Zolpidem to help him sleep more deeply. Instead, just 25 minutes later, he sat up in bed and said: "Hello, mummy."

The British firm ReGen Therapeutics began a trial and, as one of those involved, Amy's mother was flown to South Africa to meet other patients who had tried it. She said: "I've had so many disappointments in my life, so I didn't set my expectations too high. When I came back from South Africa, I was exhausted, but the hope in my heart was intense. "But the more I saw, the more I heard and the more I experienced, the more I realised Amy must try this new treatment."

Barely four weeks after taking her first pill, Amy, who has an older brother David, 27, is making good progress. Doctors have warned Mrs Pickard it could take months for a breakthrough, but she believes her daughter is already on the road to recovery. "When I look at her now I can see the old Amy coming through, fighting to get out. It's a day-to-day waiting game to see what will happen next, but I just know she's going to speak any day," she said. "Every day she takes the tablet, it gives me more and more hope. My life is better now than it's ever been over the past six years."

The story echoes the plot of the film Awakenings, which stars Robert de Niro and Robin Williams. It is based on real events, in which a research physician uses an experimental drug to "awaken" the catatonic victims of a rare sleeping sickness.

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



5 November, 2007

Food Nannies' Halloween Cancer Scare

From what I can gather, the comments below by Steven Milloy are a more detailed critique of a study that I laughed at on Nov. 2nd..

The latest food scare was announced, appropriately enough, on Halloween. But the science behind the scare is about as believable as are ghosts and goblins. "Landmark Report: Excess Body Fat Causes Cancer; Panel Also Implicates Red Meat, Processed Meat and Alcohol" blared the media release about a new report from the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR).

The massive 537-page tome "assembled over five years by nine independent teams of scientists, hundreds of peer reviewers and 21 international experts who reviewed over 7,000 large-scale studies" purports to be the "most comprehensive ever published on the evidence linking cancer risk to diet, physical activity and weight." "The most striking finding in the report is that excess body fat increases risk for numerous cancers... Even small amounts of excess body fat, especially if carried at the waist, increase risk," proclaimed the media release.

The report advises limiting the intake of hamburgers, French fries, milk shakes, pastries and soft drinks. It says that there is "no safe level of consumption" of processed meats a hysterical claim that is not even true for the most poisonous substances.

This certainly is a landmark report never before have so many scientists labored so long to embarrass themselves and their academic disciplines. There's not enough room in this column to debunk each and every claim made in the AICR report, but we'll look at some examples after considering some fundamental facts and principles.

First, scientists don't really understand carcinogenesis very well. It's known that the risk of cancer increases with age possibly because of the deterioration of DNA repair mechanisms and a few well-documented risk factors, such as family history of cancer, heavy smoking, and exposure to certain viruses and some exposures to radiation. Outside of those and perhaps a few other risk factors, the occurrence of cancer is largely inexplicable. Significantly, not a single case of cancer among the tens of thousands studied in the "7,000 large-scale studies" was definitively linked with any specific dietary factor. The AIRC report's claim to link diet with cancer largely amounts to post-facto guesswork abetted by statistical hijinks and imagination run amok.

A cardinal principle of epidemiology is that it is a very useful methodology when looking for linkage between high rates of rare diseases the sort of relationship classically found, for example, in outbreaks of food poisoning. But epidemiology is wholly incapable of identifying low risks of relatively common diseases or conditions, such as most cancers. The reason for this is simple: the margin of error in study data due to inaccurate and incomplete data collection is typically far greater than the size of any statistical relationship that may exist or be detected.

Accordingly, the rule of thumb in epidemiology, as famously espoused by the National Cancer Institute, is that, "In epidemiologic research, [increases in risk of less than 100 percent] are considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident." Further, just because a reported risk is greater than 100 percent, that does not necessarily indicate a cause-and-effect relationship. Such reported risks may be statistically insignificant (indicating they could have occurred by chance) or have wide margins of error (indicating flaky data). And, of course, for any statistical risk to have meaning, it must be backed up by biological plausibility. With these concepts in mind, let's consider the AICR report.

The vast majority of the results from individual studies between every type of food and every type of cancer cited in the report are either significantly below 100 percent and/or statistically insignificant. The relatively few cited risks that exceed 100 percent are typically not statistically significant or have wide margins of error. Consider the data presented for processed meat, which the AICR report claims to be too dangerous to eat.

Of the 17 study results concerning processed meat and colon cancer comparing high consumption to low consumption 15 are way below, and one is at the 100 percent-risk threshold. Thirteen studies aren't statistically significant. Not only is the lone study claiming a risk above 100 percent (a reported 250 percent increase in risk) barely statistically significant, it has a margin of error four times the size of the reported risk.

Of the seven studies reporting a cancer risk per serving of processed meat, all reported risks are substantially below the 100 percent threshold. Four results are clearly not statistically significant and two are borderline insignificant. On the basis of these dubious statistical results, the AICR report concludes that "processed meat is a convincing cause of colorectal cancer." This is an appalling and unsupported conclusion.

In the end, the AICR report isn't really science at all it's more of bloody crime scene where science got violently mugged by hoods costumed as health and nutrition experts and wielding statistical pepper spray. In some ways, this shoddy science isn't surprising when one considers that the AICR also pitches cranberry recipes and other culinary snake oil as a means of reducing cancer risk.

The AICR advocates against consuming fat, salt, sugar and alcohol-- an agenda worth $37 million in charitable donations in 2006. So we shouldn't be surprised when the food police issue a "report" advancing such a lucrative agenda.

Source




Humans go into heat after all, strip club study finds

Mammals go into heat. Except for humans, of courseit's just for animals. Right? That conventional wisdom seems to be wrong, a group of researchers has found.

The scientists collected evidence from some locales where sexual heat is most regularly on display, strip clubs. And they measured it with a tool that rarely lies in gauging the value people place on things: money.

Heat, or estrus, is a regularly recurring time period during which females are most sexually receptive and attractive to males, corresponding with the time at which they're most capable of conceiving. Human females have no obvious estrus, leading to biologists' traditional assumption that it was lost during human evolution.

But in a study published the Oct. 27 issue of the research journal Evolution and Human Behavior, the investigators found that such a cycle does continue in us. Surveying strip-club lap dancers, who perform erotic dances for for cash, they found that tips vary by an average of 45 percent depending on the time of the month, corresponding to the length of the ovulatory cycle. That's the onemonth cycle in which a ripe egg is released from the ovary, becoming available for fertilization.

During peak times of the cycle lap dancers made $335 per five-hour shift on average, compared to $260 during typical periods, the researchers found. During menstruation, the women made only $185 on average. The peak earnings during a crucial phase of the cycle could only lead to one conclusion: females were in heat, the investigators said.

"These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a realworld work setting," wrote the researchers, Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico and colleagues. By comparison, they found, dancers using contraceptive pills, which suppress ovulation, showed no earnings peak.

The team collected its information through a website where 18 dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days -- a total of 5,300 "lap dances."

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



4 November, 2007

Supermouse now: Superhumans soon?

This will undoubtedly be seized on by some government as a way to produce super-soldiers. Rather worrying. But their hyperactivity and hyperaggression could be their undoing too. Would they kill one-another before they got into the field? And their overall energy intake would probably need to be very high -- meaning that they could easily be starved. Second-guessing the tradeoffs nature has made is unlikely to be very smart

A genetically engineered "supermouse" has stunned scientists with its physical abilities. The mouse can run up to six kilometres at a speed of 20 metres per minute for five hours or more without stopping, British newspaper The Independent reports. Scientists say that's the equivalent of a man cycling at speed up an Alpine mountain without a break.

The engineered mouse also lives longer, has more sex and can breed well into old age, and eats more without getting fat, the paper reports. The "supermouse" is the creation of American scientists who are working to create a community of 500 of the rodents.

Scientists say the super abilities came about from a standard genetic modification to a single metabolism gene shared with humans. The genetic alteration to a gene involved in glucose metabolism appears to stimulate the efficient use of body fat for energy production, The Independent reported, citing a study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Also, the mice don't suffer from a build up of lactic acid which causes muscle cramps.

Richard Hanson, professor of biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio said the physical performance of the supermouse can only be compared to supremely fit athletes, such as cyclist Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005. "They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees. They utilise mainly fatty acids for energy and produce very little lactic acid," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "They are not eating or drinking and yet they can run for four or five hours. "They are 10 times more active than ordinary mice in their home cage. "They also live longer - up to three years of age - and are reproductively active for almost three years. "In short, they are remarkable animals." But he said the supermouse was "very aggressive" and scientists weren't yet sure why.

Prof Hanson said humans had the same gene that had been manipulated in the mice, but trying similar experiments on humans would be wrong. However, it may be possible for pharmaceutical companies to use the findings to develop new drugs that enhance muscle performance, which may benefit certain patients.

Prof Hanson said the mice were not intentionally bred to have "super" capabilities, but it was clear soon after they were born that they were different. "We could spot them at just a few weeks after birth," the paper quoted him as saying. "They popped around the cage like popcorn. "We found that they were about 10 times as active as ordinary mice."

Source




POORER HEALTH AND LOWER SOCIAL CLASS: MUST NOT MENTION GENETICS

The association between poor health and lower social class has often been documented. But what causes it? Is it something to do with the lifestyles of the poor? The article below uses education as a social class proxy and offers some pretty strong proof that lifestyle is not the cause of the association between class and health. So what are we left with? Are both poverty and ill health produced by less felicitous gene combinations? Could one cause the other or both have a common cause? I suppose that will be condemned as a "Nazi" suggestion but what if it is true? Very bright people DO live longer and 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. This article shows that people who are less well-functioning socially also have poorer health. It is in any case hard to dispute that genetics is the key to longevity. How often have we read interviews with centenarians whose lifestyle reports are not at all recognizable as particularly healthy?

Education and dementia: What lies behind the association?

By T. Ngandu et al.

Background: Low education seems to be associated with an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer disease (AD). People with low education have unhealthier lifestyles and more cardiovascular risk factors, but it is unclear how this affects the association between education and dementia.

Methods: Participants of the Cardiovascular Risk Factors, Aging and Dementia (CAIDE) study were derived from random, population-based samples previously studied in a survey in 1972, 1977, 1982, or 1987. After an average follow-up of 21 years, 1,449 individuals (72%) aged 65 to 79 participated in a re-examination in 1998.

Results: Compared to individuals with formal education of 5 years or less, those with 6 to 8 years of education had OR of 0.57 (95% CI 0.29 to 1.13), and those with 9 years of education or more had OR of 0.16 (95% CI 0.06 to 0.41) for dementia. The corresponding ORs for AD were 0.49 (0.24 to 1.00) and 0.15 (0.05 to 0.40). The associations remained unchanged after adjustments for several demographic, socioeconomic, vascular, and lifestyle characteristics. The results were similar among both men and women. ApoE4 did not modify the association, but the risk of dementia and AD was very low among ApoE4 noncarriers with high education.

Conclusions: The association between low education and dementia is probably not explained by the unhealthy lifestyles of the less educated compared with higher educated persons. Higher educated persons may have a greater cognitive reserve that can postpone the clinical manifestation of dementia. Unhealthy lifestyles may independently contribute to the depletion of this reserve or directly influence the underlying pathologic processes.

NEUROLOGY 2007;69:1442-1450

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

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



3 November, 2007

Australia: Trials begin on 'perfect tan in two days' pill



A pill that gives a perfect tan in two days [As above?] and may prevent skin cancer could be available within two years. A Melbourne biotech company is exploring the use of the drug CUV1647 to fight skin cancer as a way of convincing medical regulators to licence the compound. Trials of the drug will begin at Royal Melbourne Hospital from today to determine if its tanning properties protect transplant patients, who are among the most at risk of contracting skin cancer.

A pill the size of a grain of rice placed under the skin stimulates the body to produce more of the pigment melanin, producing sun-blocking tan from the inside out that lasts two months. While the tanning effect of the drug has been known since it was first developed in the US in 1995, cosmetic applications have not been enough to gain a regulator approval to market the product. But Clinuvel managing director Dr Philippe Wolgen said the medical applications of the treatment were more important than the cosmetic by-products. "There is clearly a great need to develop better protection against UV and the sun, especially in the changing environment of recent years," he said.

The trial will involve 150 kidney and heart transplant patients from Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Europe using CUV1647 for the next two years in two-monthly doses. Fair-skinned patients who have received organ transplants are up to 100 times more likely to contract skin cancer because of the immune suppressive drugs they must take every day. Trials to see if the sun-blocking drug can also protect against sun poisoning disease polymorphous light eruption (PLE) and a rare sun intolerance condition are also being conducted in Europe.

Source




Interesting new quick test for MS

Diagnosis of MS can be difficult in the early stages so this could be a big help

MRI brain scans have been used to calibrate and corroborate the results of a new eye-scanning technique that can diagnose multiple sclerosis in a few minutes. The technique, optical coherence tomography (OCT), scans the layers of nerve fibres in the retina to reveal nerve damage associated with the disease. The quick test will ultimately complement more detailed MRI studies of the brain should nerve damage be found.

Neurologist Peter Calabresi of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues studied forty patients with multiple sclerosis using a desktop machine similar to a slit-lamp to carry out the simple and painless OCT tests. By focusing on retinal nerve fibres, which have no myelin sheath, they could make a specific assessment of the patients' status without turning to a brain MRI scan, which would reveal an array of different types of tissue processes in the brain.

The team calibrated their OCT results with accepted norms for retinal fibre thickness and then compared to an MRI of each of the patients' brains. In a subset of patients with relapsing-remitting MS, the most common form of the disease, the correlation coefficient between OCT and MRI results was as high as 0.69, suggesting a strong association between the retinal measurements and brain shrinkage, or atrophy, associated with MS.

"This is an encouraging result," says Calabresi, "With OCT we can see exactly how healthy these nerves are, potentially in advance of other symptoms." The test makes it possible to focus solely on nerve damage, which is not possible with MRI. Calabresi adds that OCT scans take just a few minutes rather than an hour or two and so provide results at less cost and more quickly in tracking the effectiveness of new treatments for MS.

Calabresi adds that many of the disabilities suffered by MS patients - numbness, tingling, visual impairment, fatigue, weakness and bladder function disturbance - are the result of nerve cell degeneration, so a test that specifically measures nerve cell health is potentially the clearest picture of the status of the disease. He cautions, however, that optic nerve damage can point to a number of diseases and is not a unique diagnostic tool for MS.

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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



2 November, 2007

Here we go again

Another "expert panel", would you believe -- with TOTALLY predictable conclusions. The medical establishment has reasserted its current beliefs. A pity they regularly retreat from previous "wisdom", though. One has to laugh about the report being based on the "best 7,000" studies. Studies with pesky conclusions were no doubt excluded from being "best". The repeated finding that it is people of middling weight who live longest was obviously not "best", for instance

Being even slightly overweight can increase the risk of a range of common cancers including breast, bowel and pancreatic cancer, a landmark study has found. The largest review of links between diet and cancer, incorporating more than 7,000 studies, concludes that there is convincing evidence that excess body fat can cause at least six different types of the disease. The researchers give warning that everyone should be at the lower end of the healthy weight range.

Their recommendations include avoiding processed meats such as ham, bacon, salami or any other meat preserved by smoking, curing or salting; only consuming small amounts of red meat; moderate consumption of alcohol; and avoiding junk food and sweet drinks.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, who chaired the expert panel assembled by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) to review evidence on the dietary causes of cancer, said he had been shocked to find that weight was so important. A report by the fund published ten years ago linked only one cancer to being overweight. Professor Marmot said the evidence now showed that at least six - cancers of the oesophagus, pancreas, bowel, breast postmenopause, kidney and endometrium (womb lining) - were linked and that the risks were increased by even quite modest weight gains. The finding is particularly alarming, given the expanding girth of the British population. An official report last month gave warning that by 2050, 60 per cent of men, 50 per cent of women and a quarter of all children could be clinically obese. A healthy weight is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) below 25; BMI is calculated by dividing an individual's body weight in kilograms by the square of the height in metres.

Picture of a Marmot above. Is that you, Sir Michael?

Sir Michael said: "A BMI of 25 is fine, but it would be a bit finer if it was lower. The healthiest thing is to be as low as possible within the normal range." The report suggests moderation in the consumption of red meat, suggesting a limit of 500g (18oz) per person per week. A total avoidance of processed meats is recommended because of convincing evidence that eating meat increases the risk of colon cancer.

The WCRF report emphasises the benefits of exercise, for its direct effects on some cancers, and because it helps to prevent becoming overweight or obese. It made ten recommendations which do not, save in one case, conflict with advice given for the avoidance of other common causes of death, such as heart disease. The exception is alcohol, which Professor Marmot said had been shown to cut the risk of heart disease. For cancer prevention the optimum level is zero, but for heart disease it is two units a day for men and one for women, he said. The panel agreed that the levels set for minimum heart risk should be accepted.

The report is based on an analysis of cancer studies from around the world dating back to the 1960s. The initial trawl produced half a million studies, which was pared down to the best 7,000. The results were analysed by nine teams and then presented to a panel of twenty-one leading scientists for their recommendations. They looked at cancers at 17 different sites in the body and at a wide range of factors, mostly dietary, that can affect risk of developing the disease.

Professor Marmot said: "We are recommending that people aim to be as lean as possible within the healthy range, and that they avoid weight gain throughout adulthood. This might sound difficult but this is what the science is telling us more clearly than ever. The fact is that putting on weight can increase your cancer risk, even if you are within the healthy range."

Dairy foods, cheese, butter, coffee and fish get a clean bill of health. But sugary drinks - including fruit juices - can increase weight and are therefore not recommended. Nor are fast foods because they are energy-dense and lead to excess weight or obesity, which in turn increase cancer risks.

Professor Martin Wiseman, the project director, said: "This report's recommendations represent the most definitive advice on preventing cancer that has ever been available anywhere in the world."

Breast-feeding has a double benefit, the report says, protecting mothers against breast cancer and their babies against obesity. Mothers were advised to breastfeed exclusively for six months and to continue with complementary breastfeeding after that.

Dietary supplements for cancer prevention were not recommended, since there was evidence that at high doses they could have adverse effects. But selenium, in the diet or as a supplement, did appear to have benefits against lung, colon and prostate cancer.

Professor Mike Richards, the Government's clinical director of cancer, said: "The WCRF report is the most authoritative and exhaustive review done thus far on the prevention of cancer through food, nutrition and physical activity. For those of us wanting to lower our risk of developing cancer, it provides practical lifestyle recommendations."

Karol Sikora, Professor of Cancer Medicine at Imperial College School of Medicine, said: "The educational message for the public should be that there are healthy diets and unhealthy diets, but we should keep everything in perspective and not suggest rigid avoidance. Alcohol, red meat and bacon in moderation will do us no harm, and to suggest it will is wrong."

Chris Lamb, consumer marketing manager at the British Pig Executive, said that people should continue to eat bacon "in a responsible way as part of a balanced diet". Cancer was a "complicated subject" and could not be prevented simply by reducing intake of meat. "Two thirds of all cancers are not caused by diet. Just by addressing the meat issues, you are not necessarily going to prevent cancer," he said. Mr Lamb said that the average consumption of red meats was less than 500 grams per week in any case, so many people did not need to change their eating habits at all. He added that there were concerns amongst farmers that sales of processed meats could fall as a result of the report. "That is obviously a potential at the end of the day, but we're hoping that consumers will think about being responsible in overall terms.

Source




It's time to stand up to birth correctness

WHEN are the birth police going to stop making pregnant women feel guilty for using modern medicine to bring their baby into the world? Yesterday, we woke up to news from the British Medical Journal that women who have caesareans double the risk of death and illness to themselves and their baby. And this week, British home-birth guru Sheila Kitzinger is in Australia to scare pregnant women across the country into believing that only a "natural" birth is a good birth, and the best birth is at home.

Let's take the study first. I would have thought it was pretty obvious that women who have caesareans have more problems. That's the whole idea of caesareans. Most women end up having a caesarean because their planned vaginal birth went horribly wrong and the doctor needed to get the baby out - now. That sort of drama does tend to double the risk of death and illness to mother and baby. It's hardly rocket science. Women who opt for caesareans for social rather than medical reasons areas, the too-posh-to-push brigade, are the very, very small minority.

But I'm sure the Kitzinger devotees will seize on this study as yet another reason to blame evil doctors for wanting to cut babies out of their mothers so they can make their Wednesday golf game. Many women have been brainwashed into feeling traumatised and unable to bond with their babies because they didn't slip out with just the help of aromatherapy oil massages and deep breathing.

I was once under the spell of this cult. I believed with a religious intensity that I had to have a drug-free, natural birth. In my first pregnancy, I read every Kitzinger book and wrote out a drug-free birth plan that would guarantee me Earth Goddess bragging rights among my friends. Unfortunately, the baby hadn't read it and got awkwardly stuck after I'd laboured 18 long hours the Kitzinger way. When the anaesthetist arrived to give me an epidural for the dreaded "intervention" I felt a failure as a mother. If I couldn't even give birth right, how was the poor thing going to survive the next 20 years?

Luckily, once I saw the baby, I saw the light. Who cares how he came out? He was there, he was healthy and it was bloody fantastic. Nothing else mattered.

But ask around any new mother's group and you'll hear still hear plenty of victim stories. "I felt so violated when I had to have a caesarean"; "I felt a failure when they had to use the forceps", and all said while they bounce their healthy babies on their knees. Don't these women put two and two together?

Maybe some doctors do opt for a caesarean a little earlier than they used to. But no wonder they err on the side of caution when so many people are so quick to sue unless the end result is a perfect baby. It's time we pushed out a new birth message to counteract the zealots, who want to take us back to the good old days when everyone gave birth naturally and lots of women and children died. A successful birth is when mother and child are healthy. Period.

How the baby came out, and what the mother used to deal with the pain, are irrelevant. It's just one day, for goodness sake. Get it into perspective. There are so many opportunities to feel real guilt when you are a mother. Don't start feeling guilty on your first day on the job.

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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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1 November, 2007

CHINESE HERBS TRUMP WESTERN MEDICINE?

I hate to be skeptical of the study below. Where I grew up, if you were sick, you went to the doctor but if you were really sick you went to the Chinese herbalist. So I am not prejudiced against Chinese herbalism. I once used a Chinese herbal medicine to apparent good effect myself. And the study below is a Cochrane product so deserves some respect for that.

But having said all that, the reasoning below is peculiar. We are asked to believe that something of unknown and probably quite variable composition is more therapeutically efficient and side-effect-free in the given application than any known molecule. Even if true, that does not tell us much, as far as I can see. That users of Chinese medicines exhibit a particularly strong placebo effect would be my provisional interpretation of the results below. That would also explain the low rate of side-effects. I hope I will not be abused for suggesting that menstrual discomfort (which is what was studied) could be quite susceptible to placebo effects. I could only check my interpretation by re-doing the whole Cochrane study, however.

Since the authors themselves acknowledge "the poor methodological quality of the included trials", however, I doubt that anyone needs to do that. Not much to hang your hat on there at all. Rather surprising to see it under the Cochrane aegis. Even the Cochrane project is not immune from Leftist fantasies about the wonders of non-Western cultures, it would seem. Abstract follows:

Chinese herbal medicine for primary dysmenorrhoea

By X Zhu et al.

Background: Conventional treatment for primary dysmenorrhoea (PD) has a failure rate of 20% to 25% and may be contraindicated or not tolerated by some women. Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) may be a suitable alternative.

Objectives: To determine the efficacy and safety of CHM for PD when compared with placebo, no treatment, and other treatment.

Search strategy: The Cochrane Menstrual Disorders and Subfertility Group Trials Register (to 2006), MEDLINE (1950 to January 2007), EMBASE (1980 to January 2007), CINAHL (1982 to January 2007), AMED (1985 to January 2007), CENTRAL (The Cochrane Library issue 4, 2006), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, 1990 to January 2007), Traditional Chinese Medicine Database System (TCMDS, 1990 to Dec 2006), and the Chinese BioMedicine Database (CBM, 1990 to Dec 2006) were searched. Citation lists of included trials were also reviewed.

Selection criteria: Any randomised controlled trials (RCTs) involving CHM versus placebo, no treatment, conventional therapy, heat compression, another type of CHM, acupuncture or massage. Exclusion criteria were identifiable pelvic pathology and dysmenorrhoea resulting from the use of an intra-uterine contraceptive device (IUD).

Data collection and analysis: Quality assessment, data extraction and data translation were performed independently by two review authors. Attempts were made to contact study authors for additional information and data. Data were combined for meta-analysis using either Peto odds ratios or relative risk (RR) for dichotomous data or weighted mean difference for continuous data. A fixed-effect statistical model was used, where suitable. If data were not suitable for meta-analysis, any available data from the trial were extracted and presented as descriptive data.

Main results: Thirty-nine RCTs involving a total of 3475 women were included in the review. A number of the trials were of small sample size and poor methodological quality. Results for CHM compared to placebo were unclear as data could not be combined (3 RCTs). CHM resulted in significant improvements in pain relief (14 RCTs; RR 1.99, 95% CI 1.52 to 2.60), overall symptoms (6 RCTs; RR 2.17, 95% CI 1.73 to 2.73) and use of additional medication (2 RCTs; RR 1.58, 95% CI 1.30 to 1.93) when compared to use of pharmaceutical drugs. Self-designed CHM resulted in significant improvements in pain relief (18 RCTs; RR 2.06, 95% CI 1.80 to 2.36), overall symptoms (14 RCTs; RR 1.99, 95% CI 1.65 to 2.40) and use of additional medication (5 RCTs; RR 1.58, 95% CI 1.34 to 1.87) after up to three months follow up when compared to commonly used Chinese herbal health products. CHM also resulted in better pain relief than acupuncture (2 RCTs; RR 1.75, 95% CI 1.09 to 2.82) and heat compression (1 RCT; RR 2.08, 95% CI 2.06 to 499.18).

Authors' conclusions: The review found promising evidence supporting the use of CHM for primary dysmenorrhoea; however, results are limited by the poor methodological quality of the included trials.

Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 4. Art. No.: CD005288




TONSILLECTOMY COMEBACK?

Tonsillectomy was once a very common "solution" to recurrent respiratory tract infections in childen but was largely superseded by antibiotics and by a better understanding of the function of tonsils. It still however has some use where the tonsils are clearly chronically infected. The article below puts forward another possible indication for tonsillectomy in some rare cases.

It must be noted however, that the evidence presented below is seriously defective. Mothers who put their kids through a rather nasty operation said that it had done their kids good? Big surprise! Some allowance for a placebo effect should have been made. The results do record a substantial change but could still be within the range of a placebo effect

Improved Behavior and Sleep After Adenotonsillectomy in Children With Sleep-Disordered Breathing

By Julie L. Wei et al.

Objective: To determine changes in behavior and sleep in children before and after adenotonsillectomy for sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) using the validated Pediatric Sleep Questionnaire (PSQ) and Conners' Parent Rating Scale-Revised Short Form (CPRS-RS).

Design: Prospective, nonrandomized study.

Setting: Ambulatory surgery center affiliated with an academic medical center.

Patients: A total of 117 consecutive children (61 boys and 56 girls) (mean [SD] age, 6.5 [3.1] years) who were clinically diagnosed as having SDB and who had undergone adenotonsillectomy. Complete follow-up data were available in 71 of 117 patients (61%).

Interventions: Parents completed the PSQ and CPRS-RS before surgery and 6 months after surgery.

Main Outcome Measures: Changes in age- and sex-adjusted T scores for all 4 CPRS-RS behavior categories (oppositional behavior, cognitive problems or inattention, hyperactivity, and Conners' attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] index) were determined for each subject before and after surgery. Changes in PSQ scores from a select 22-item sleep-related breathing disorder subscale were also determined.

Results: Preoperatively, the mean (SD) T scores on the CPRS-RS for oppositional behavior, cognitive problems or inattention, hyperactivity, and ADHD index were 59.4 (13.7), 59.5 (13.6), 62.0 (14.4), and 59.9 (13.4), respectively. A T score of 60.0 in any category placed a child in the at-risk group. Postoperatively, T scores for each category were 51.0 (9.6), 51.2 (8.8), 52.4 (10.52), and 50.6 (7.8), respectively. All changes were statistically significant (P < .001) and clinically significant by approximating a change of 1 SD from the baseline score. For the PSQ, the preoperative and postoperative mean (SD) scores were 0.6 (0.1) and 0.1 (0.1), respectively, on a scale of 0 to 1, with scores higher than 0.33 suggesting obstructive sleep apnea. Correlations between sleep and behavior scores were statistically significant before surgery (P = .004 for ADHD index and cognitive problems, P = .008 for oppositional behavior) and after surgery (P = .049 for cognitive problems, P = .03 for oppositional behavior). Higher baseline T scores for the CPRS-RS were associated with larger changes in T scores for the CPRS-RS in all 4 domains (oppositional behavior, cognitive problems or inattention, hyperactivity, and ADHD index).

Conclusions: Children diagnosed as having SDB experience improvement in both sleep and behavior after adenotonsillectomy. The PSQ and CPRS-RS may be useful adjuncts for screening and following children who undergo adenotonsillectomy for SDB.

Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2007;133:974-979

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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].

And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This idea emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

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