Health – Page 81 – artdiamondblog.com

Senile Mice Benefit from Cellphone Radiation

“Mice seem to reap cognitive benefits from cellphone electromagnetism.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) Alzheimer’s and Cell Phones: Radiation associated with long-term cellphone use appears to protect against and reverse Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in mice, according to a study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Mice genetically engineered to develop brain impairments similar to Alzheimer’s in humans were divided into two groups. One group was exposed twice daily to hour-long electromagnetic fields akin to those created during cellphone use. Mice in the other group were not exposed to the radiation. After seven months, young mice in the first group fared significantly better on cognitive tests than their unexposed littermates. Older mice, which had already developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s, exposed to the radiation for eight months in a subsequent experiment also performed better than older nonexposed mice. Mice, younger and older, not engineered to develop Alzheimer’s also appeared to benefit from the radiation. Biopsies suggested such exposure might fight Alzheimer’s by inhibiting the buildup of certain protein plaques in the brain, the researchers said.

For the full story, see:
JEREMY SINGER-VINE. “RESEARCH REPORT; NEW MEDICAL FINDINGS; Cellphone Radiation Aids Sick Mice.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., JANUARY 12, 2010): D4.

World’s Poor Care More About Food and Illness than Global Warming

(p. A21) The saddest fact of climate change–and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response–is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering.

In the run-up to this month’s global climate summit in Copenhagen, the Copenhagen Consensus Center dispatched researchers to the world’s most likely global-warming hot spots. Their assignment: to ask locals to tell us their views about the problems they face. Over the past seven weeks, I recounted in these pages what they told us concerned them the most. In nearly every case, it wasn’t global warming.
Everywhere we went we found people who spoke powerfully of the need to focus more attention on more immediate problems. In the Bauleni slum compound in Lusaka, Zambia, 27-year-old Samson Banda asked, “If I die from malaria tomorrow, why should I care about global warming?” In a camp for stateless Biharis in Bangladesh, 45-year-old Momota Begum said, “When my kids haven’t got enough to eat, I don’t think global warming will be an issue I will be thinking about.” On the southeast slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, 45-year-old widow and HIV/AIDS sufferer Mary Thomas said she had noticed changes in the mountain’s glaciers, but declared: “There is no need for ice on the mountain if there is no people around because of HIV/AIDS.”

For the full commentary, see:
BJORN LOMBORG. “OPINION; Time for a Smarter Approach to Global Warming; Investing in energy R&D might work. Mandated emissions cuts won’t..” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., DECEMBER 15, 2009): A21.

Heart Disease Is Not Just a Malady of Modern Societies, But “Is Part of the Human Condition”

“Scientists scanned 20 mummies, and examined scans of two more, for the study.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) ORLANDO, Fla. — Researchers said they found evidence of hardening of the arteries in Egyptian mummies dating as far back as 3,500 years, challenging longstanding assumptions that cardiovascular disease is mainly a malady of modern societies.

A team of heart-imaging experts and Egyptologists examined 22 mummies from the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo in a CT scanning machine, looking for evidence of calcium buildup that could indicate vascular disease.
They were able to identify the hearts, arteries or both in 16 of the mummies, nine of whom had deposits of calcification. An analysis determined the deposits were either definite or probable evidence of atherosclerosis, the condition that leads to heart attacks and strokes.
“Not only do we have atherosclerosis now, it was prevalent as long as 3,500 years ago,” said Gregory Thomas, a cardiologist and imaging specialist at University of California, Irvine, who was principal investigator of the study. “It is part of the human condition.”
The research was presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association scientific meeting here. A report is also scheduled to appear in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For the full story, see:
RON WINSLOW. “Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., NOVEMBER 18, 2009): A5.
(Note: the online version of the article has a date of NOVEMBER 19, 2009 and is titled “Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies.”)

Malaria “Weakly Related to Temperature”; “Strongly Related to Poverty”

(p. A17) In the West, campaigners for carbon regulations point out that global warming will increase the number of malaria victims. This is often used as an argument for drastic, immediate carbon cuts.

Warmer, wetter weather will improve conditions for the malaria parasite. Most estimates suggest that global warming will put 3% more of the Earth’s population at risk of catching malaria by 2100. If we invest in the most efficient, global carbon cuts–designed to keep temperature rises under two degrees Celsius–we would spend a massive $40 trillion a year by 2100. In the best case scenario, we would reduce the at-risk population by only 3%.
In comparison, research commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center shows that spending $3 billion annually on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays, and subsidies for effective new combination therapies could halve the number of those infected with malaria within one decade. For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives. . . .
Malaria is only weakly related to temperature; it is strongly related to poverty. It has risen in sub-Saharan Africa over the past 20 years not because of global warming, but because of failing medical response.

For the full commentary, see:

BJORN LOMBORG. “Climate Change and Malaria in Africa; Limiting carbon emissions won’t do much to stop disease in Zambia.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., NOVEMBER 2, 2009): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated Nov. 1st.)

Government to Decide Who Lives and Who Dies

“The Reaper Curve: Ezekiel Emanuel used the above chart in a Lancet article to illustrate the ages on which health spending should be focused.” Source of caption and graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House’s health initiative.
. . .
In the Lancet, Jan. 31, 2009, Dr. Emanuel and co-authors presented a “complete lives system” for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others. “One maximizing strategy involves saving the most individual lives, and it has motivated policies on allocation of influenza vaccines and responses to bioterrorism. . . . Other things being equal, we should always save five lives rather than one.
“However, other things are rarely equal–whether to save one 20-year-old, who might live another 60 years, if saved, or three 70-year-olds, who could only live for another 10 years each–is unclear.” In fact, Dr. Emanuel makes a clear choice: “When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get changes that are attenuated (see Dr. Emanuel’s chart nearby).
Dr. Emanuel concedes that his plan appears to discriminate against older people, but he explains: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. . . . Treating 65 year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

For the full commentary, see:
BETSY MCCAUGHEY. “Obama’s Health Rationer-in-Chief; White House health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the ‘overuse’ of medical care.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 27, 2009): A15.
(Note: first ellipsis added; second and third ellipses in original.)

The article that was the original source for the graph above, is:
Persad, Govind, Alan Wertheimer, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” The Lancet 373, no. 9661 (Jan. 31, 2009): 423-31.

Videos of Routines Are Better than Focus Groups and Surveys

Source of book image: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b75569e20120a5fa1e26970c-800wi.

(p. W8) Mr. Brown argues . . . emphatically for the close observation of users in their natural habitats. Traditional market-research tools–focus groups, surveys–rarely produce breakthrough findings, he claims. IDEO and others follow users around–making video recordings of them as they go about their routines, recording conversations with them–to build an understanding of what they really need. An IDEO employee in the health-care area, for instance, pretended to have a foot injury and checked himself into an emergency room with a hidden video camera to get a better view of the patient experience. This anthropological form of market research, Mr. Brown notes, has been adopted by companies such as Intel and Nokia.

For the full review, see:
DAVID A. PRICE. “The Shape of Things to Come; Design is more than aesthetics and ease of use. It’s a way of doing business.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 9, 2009): W8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Reference the book being reviewed:
Brown, Tim. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperBusiness Publishers, 2009.

“A Foolish Faith in Authority Is the Worst Enemy of Truth”

(p. A21) Several years ago I grew concerned about my postmenopausal mother’s risk of osteoporosis. I tried to convince her to initiate hormone replacement therapy. She didn’t listen to me. Instead, she spoke with her gynecologist, who–contrary to best medical evidence at the time–recommended against such treatment. I would eventually be thankful my mother listened to the gynecologist who had known her for decades instead of me and the published medical reviews I was relying on. Some years later my mother was diagnosed with early breast cancer. Had she been on estrogen replacement, it is likely that her tumor would have progressed more rapidly. The gynecologist likely saved my mother’s life.

Studies published in the medical literature are mostly produced by academics who face an imperative to publish or watch their careers perish. These academics aren’t basing their careers on their clinical skills and experiences. Paradoxically, if we allow the academic literature to set guidelines for accepted practices, we are allowing those who are often academics first and clinicians second to determine what clinical care is appropriate.
Consciously or not, those who provide the peer review for medical journals are influenced by whether the work they are reviewing will impact their standing in the medical community. This is a dilemma. The experts who serve as reviewers compete with the work they are reviewing. Leaders in every community, therefore, exert disproportional influence on what gets published. We expect reviewers to be objective and free of conflicts, but in truth, only rarely is that the case.
Albert Einstein once noted that “a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

For the full commentary, see:

NORBERT GLEICHER. “‘Expert Panels’ Won’t Improve Health Care; Government reliance on medical studies will make it harder to discard false prophecies and dogmas.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A21.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated Sun., Oct. 18.)

John Mackey: “I Believe in the Dynamic Creativity of Capitalism”

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. Source of the caricature: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) “I honestly don’t know why the article became such a lightning rod,” says John Mackey, CEO and founder of Whole Foods Market Inc., as he tries to explain the firestorm caused by his August op-ed on these pages opposing government-run health care.
. . .
. . . his now famous op-ed incited a boycott of Whole Foods by some of his left-wing customers. His piece advised that “the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us closer to a complete government takeover of our health-care system.” Free-market groups retaliated with a “buy-cott,” encouraging people to purchase more groceries at Whole Foods.
. . .
What Mr. Mackey is proposing is more or less what he has already implemented at his company–a plan that would allow more health savings accounts (HSAs), more low-premium, high-deductible plans, more incentives for wellness, and medical malpractice reform. None of these initiatives are in any of the Democratic bills winding their way through Congress. In fact, the Democrats want to kill HSAs and high-deductible plans and mandate coverage options that would inflate health insurance costs.
. . .
Mr. Mackey’s latest crusade involves traveling to college campuses across the country, trying to persuade young people that business, profits and capitalism aren’t forces of evil. He calls his concept “conscious capitalism.”
What is that? “It means that business has the potential to have a deeper purpose. I mean, Whole Foods has a deeper purpose,” he says, now sounding very much like a philosopher. “Most of the companies I most admire in the world I think have a deeper purpose.” He continues, “I’ve met a lot of successful entrepreneurs. They all started their businesses not to maximize shareholder value or money but because they were pursuing a dream.”
Mr. Mackey tells me he is trying to save capitalism: “I think that business has a noble purpose. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with making money. It’s one of the important things that business contributes to society. But it’s not the sole reason that businesses exist.”
What does he mean by a “noble purpose”? “It means that just like every other profession, business serves society. They produce goods and services that make people’s lives better. Doctors heal the sick. Teachers educate people. Architects design buildings. Lawyers promote justice. Whole Foods puts food on people’s tables and we improve people’s health.”
Then he adds: “And we provide jobs. And we provide capital through profits that spur improvements in the world.
. . .
“I don’t think anybody’s too big to fail,” he says. “If a business fails, what happens is, there are still assets, and those assets get reorganized. Either new management comes in or it’s sold off to another business or it’s bid on and the good assets are retained and the bad assets are eliminated. I believe in the dynamic creativity of capitalism, and it’s self-correcting, if you just allow it to self-correct.”
That’s something Washington won’t let happen these days, which helps explain why Mr. Mackey felt compelled to write that the Whole Foods health-insurance program is smarter and cheaper than the latest government proposals.

For the full interview, see:
STEPHEN MOORE. “The Conscience of a Capitalist; The Whole Foods founder talks about his Journal health-care op-ed that spawned a boycott, how he deals with unions, and why he thinks CEOs are overpaid.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., OCTOBER 3, 2009): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)

New Scientific Optimism on Life Extension

Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet.

It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.
This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, like roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single genes has brought noticeable increases in life span.
With theorists’ and their gloomy predictions cast in the shade, at least for the time being, experimental biologists are pushing confidently into the tangle of linkages that evolution has woven among food intake, fertility and life span. “My rule of thumb is to ignore the evolutionary biologists — they’re constantly telling you what you can’t think,” Gary Ruvkun of the Massachusetts General Hospital remarked this June after making an unusual discovery about longevity.
Excitement among researchers on aging has picked up in the last few years with the apparent convergence of two lines of inquiry: single gene changes and the diet known as caloric restriction.
. . .
In the view of evolutionary biologists, the life span of each species is adapted to the nature of its environment. Mice live at most a year in the wild because owls, cats and freezing to death are such frequent hazards. Mice with genes that allow longer life can rarely be favored by natural selection. Rather, the mice that leave the most progeny are those that devote resources to breeding at as early an age as possible.
According to this theory, if mice had wings and could escape their usual predators, natural selection ought to favor longer life. And indeed the maximum life span of bats is 3.5 times greater than flightless mammals of the same size, according to research by Gerald S. Wilkinson of the University of Maryland.
In this view, cells are so robust that they do not limit life span. Instead the problem, especially for longer-lived species, is to keep them under control lest they cause cancer. Cells have not blocked the evolution of extremely long life spans, like that of the bristlecone pine, which lives 5,000 years, or certain deep sea corals, whose age has been found to exceed 4,000 years.
Some species seem to be imperishable. A tiny freshwater animal known as a hydra can regenerate itself from almost any part of its body, apparently because it makes no distinction between its germ cells and its ordinary body cells. In people the germ cells, the egg and sperm, do not age; babies are born equally young, whatever the age of their parents. The genesis of aging was the division of labor in the first multicellular animals between the germ cells and the body cells.
That division put the role of maintaining the species on the germ cells and left the body cells free to become specialized, like neurons or skin cells. But in doing so the body cells made themselves disposable. The reason we die, in the view of Thomas Kirkwood, an expert on the theory of aging, is that constant effort is required to keep the body cells going. “This, in the long run, is unwarranted — in terms of natural selection, there are more important things to do,” he writes.
All that seems clear about life span is that it is not fixed. And if it is not fixed, there may indeed be ways to extend it.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging.” The New York Times (Tues., August 18, 2009): D1 & D?.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: thanks to Luis Locay for calling my attention to the article quoted above.)

How “Free” Government Health Care Works

“Michael Kellerman and daughter Jovi, 1, wait in line near 69th and Underwood for a flu shot Thursday morning.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

Thousands turned out this morning for Douglas County’s first public clinic for H1N1 flu vaccinations.

The line ran out of the First United Methodist Church to the east, then down 69th Street before hooking west along Cass Street toward 72nd Street.
Police estimated that 4,000 people had gathered by 9:20 a.m.
Phil Rooney of the Douglas County Health Department said the turnout was no surprise.
“There hasn’t been a clinic this size done in the county or in the surrounding counties recently, so we were prepared for a very large crowd, and that’s what we’ve got,” he said.
He said 252 people were vaccinated in the clinic’s first hour. “The pace the first hour was slower than we wanted, so we’re trying to pick that up,” he added.

For the full story, see:
John Keenan and Rick Ruggles. “Long line for flu shots.” Omaha World-Herald online edition (Thurs., Nov. 5, 2009).
(Note: as far as I can tell, having checked several online e-editions for Nov. 5 and Nov. 6, this version of the article was never published in any of the print editions of the paper.)
(Note: at some point the title of the online version of this article was changed to “Flu shot seekers turned away.”)

“A Man of Science Past Sixty Does More Harm than Good” (Unless His Name is “Avery”)

(p. 421) . . . , in 1928, Fred Griffith in Britain published a striking and puzzling finding. Earlier Griffith had discovered that all known types of pneumococci could exist with or without capsules. Virulent pneumococci had capsules; pneumococci without capsules could be easily destroyed by the immune system. Now he found something much stranger. He killed virulent pneumococci, ones surrounded by capsules, and injected them into mice. Since the bacteria were dead, all the mice survived. He also injected living pneumococci that had no capsules, that were not virulent. Again the mice lived. Their immune systems devoured the unencapsulated pneumococci. But then he injected dead pneumococci surrounded by capsules and living pneumococci without capsules.
The mice died. Somehow the living pneumococci had acquired cap-(p. 422)sules. Somehow they had changed. And, when isolated from the mice, they continued to grow with the capsule–as if they had inherited it.
Griffith’s report seemed to make meaningless years of Avery’s work– and life. The immune system was based on specificity. Avery believed that the capsule was key to that specificity. But if the pneumococcus could change, that seemed to undermine everything Avery believed and thought he had proved. For months he dismissed Griffith’s work as unsound. But Avery’s despair seemed overwhelming. He left the laboratory for six months, suffering from Graves’ disease, a disease likely related to stress. By the time he returned, Michael Dawson, a junior colleague he had asked to check Griffith’s results, had confirmed them. Avery had to accept them.
His work now turned in a different direction. He had to understand how one kind of pneumococcus was transformed into another. He was now almost sixty years old. Thomas Huxley said, “A man of science past sixty does more harm than good.” But now, more than ever, Avery focused on his task.

Source:
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: italics in original.)