Climate Change and Your Health
When I hear the continuing arguments about climate change, I often fancy that I can in the far distance hear Nero playing his lyre while Rome burns. In March the BBC reported faster than expected warming of the Antarctic over the last 30 years. This report was based on a paper in the journal Science by a team from the British Antarctic Survey.
Gradual climate change is drawing particular attention in Europe, where the climate is exquisitely dependent on the Gulf Stream. In some places records have been kept for centuries, and there seem to have been genuine changes in a short space of time. A few years ago I was in Stockholm in the week before Christmas, and it was so warm that I was able to walk around in my shirtsleeves. That made it the warmest December in almost 800 years. People notice things like that, and governments and populations are eager to do something before the Arctic is reduced to a puddle.
Even if we are just seeing a natural climatic cycle, the consequences could be disastrous. Leaving aside the obvious matter of a rise in sea level, there is also the impact of global climate change on health. Earlier this year the BBC reported a speech by Professor Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, to the Society of Applied Microbiology at the Royal Society in London. He pointed out that global warming, with hotter summers and more frequent and heavy rainfall and storms, would create the right conditions for an increase in food poisoning and other gastrointestinal upsets caused by microorganisms.
Global warming could also create conditions favorable for a return of malaria to the United Kingdom. Professor Hunter has published papers on this important topic before. He is no alarmist, and his work underscores the way in which our environment and we are closely interlinked, and even small climatic changes may have major effects on illness.
We could discuss this topic in a great deal of detail. Suffice to say that it is more important than ever for all of us to get into the habit of washing our hands, ensuring the cleanliness of food, and even more so of the water that we use, and that we do all that we can to build our resilience.
There is also another matter of equal importance, and that is the dwindling supply of fresh water around the world. The number of us is growing fast and our water use is growing even faster. A third of the world’s population now lives in water-stressed countries, and it is expected that this will rise to two-thirds by the year 2025. The cruelty of the situation is that there is altogether more than enough water available for everyone’s basic needs. The water is in the wrong places and much of it is unusable.
The United Nations recommends that people need a minimum of 50 liters of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation. Global water consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 – more than double the rate of population growth – and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.
As important as quantity is quality – with pollution increasing in some areas, the amount of useable water declines. Each year, more than five million people die from waterborne diseases, which is 10 times the number killed in wars around the globe. Most of the victims are children.
Seventy percent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture. Much more will be needed if we are to feed the world’s growing population, which is predicted to rise from about six billion today to 8.9 billion by 2050. And consumption will further increase as more people expect Western-style lifestyles and diets. Here is a useful statistic: one kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic meter of water, while a kilo of cereals needs only up to three cubic meters. Many futurists are already predicting that water will become as much of a strategic issue as oil is today, with wars being fought over the water supply.
As of today, we should all start thinking about ways in which we can reduce our own water consumption and make provision to collect and purify water ourselves.
“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” — Charles Dudley Warner (American Author, 1829-1900)
Technorati tags: global warming, water, Environment, Climate Change, pollution
Further Evidence for Attention Deficit Disorder
You may think it surprising that I would even raise the question about whether ADD and ADHD exist. But when I was trained in the UK, there was still a lot of skepticism about the diagnosis, and there was the constant question about whether Americans physicians, educators and psychologists were simply using a medical label for an undesirable behavior, rather than it being a separate clinical entity. There are still some people – apart from Tom Cruise(!) – who cling to the notion that ADD is not a scientifically valid illness, despite the fact that treatment can transform lives. I recently received an extraordinary article claiming that there’s no scientific basis to psychiatry. Though written by a someone with a medical degree, I found at least twelve factual errors in the article, before he moved on to tell us how to use some natural methods for treating these non-existent conditions!
I have always been strongly opposed to turning natural life events and individual styles into new illnesses, something about which I shall have more to say on another occasion. But for all the people who claim that ADD does not exist, here is a video which helps prove that it does. To me it is even more convincing, because the work was done at my alma mater in London, and the research arose out of that skepticism.
Neurogenesis 101
The great Spanish histologist and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, was probably the first modern scientist to say that neurons in the adult brain did not divide. In other words, humans are born with a finite number of brain cells and an individual cannot develop/grow/replicate new cells over the course of their adult lives. This is an axiom that underlies some parts of the stem-cell debate.
There is emerging research that seems to refute this notion. I have written a long article for my friends over at Psychiatric Resource Forum discussing the research indicating that humans may have the ability to produce new neurons in key regions of the brain throughout life, a process called neurogenesis. I also discuss what this means for field of psychiatry.
The concept of neurogenesis also engenders hope for the fields of personal and spiritual development. I will discuss these at a later date. I just wanted to link to this article because it provides (along with the links) a good primer on neurogenesis that will be helpful as I write new posts.
Technorati tags: neurogenesis, personal growth, Self Improvement
Scientific Sensationalism
Earlier today I found myself in the audience for a really excellent seminar. But there was one thing that left me troubled. The presenter, who has published a great many successful books, suggested using the services of a research professional in a library to hunt down publications that could be used in books and articles. That’s great advice, but ONLY if the writer then goes and checks all the data in the articles. I have several times highlighted the problems of published research that has been reported in the media, but which turns out has fundamental flaws.
One of the jobs of reporters is to bring us information as quickly and as accurately as they can. I have known a great many people in the media, and they are almost all very smart and inquisitive. They are usually excellent at asking good questions. But nobody can be an expert on everything. I have written articles here about studies that have been reported around the world, but turned out to have great big holes in them that make data interpretation a precarious business! But it is my business to analyze papers in the biomedical field. I’m pretty good at working out the pros and cons in my own fields. But ask me to do a detailed review of a paper in higher mathematics, and I’ll quickly need someone to start administering oxygen to me!
The BBC carried a story About a report from the British Social Market Foundation, which can be downloaded here. The Foundation has warned about something that has been on concern to many of us working in science and medicine, that irresponsible reporting can undermine public confidence in science. The problem is the science rarely produces certain answers: it is painstaking, step-by-step process. There’s an old Yugoslavian proverb: “Grain by grain a loaf, stone by stone, a castle.”
And it’s quite correct: that’s how science progresses. On the other hand, the media has to put out stories quickly, and is less tolerant of the uncertainties inherent in science.
This is also why blogs like this one will, I hope, help the public understanding about science. I’m also going to continue to highlight other blogs and websites that are providing quick, accurate reports of new scientific findings. Let me know how I’m doing!
Glucosamine and Chondroitin
A study has been published in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine that seems to show that there’s no advantage in taking the popular dietary supplements glucosamine and chondroitin. Indeed that’s what has been reported in the media . But notice that I said, “Seems to show,” for on closer examination there is more to this paper than it appears.
The investigators are to be congratulated for doing the study in the first place. What they did was to take a large group of 1583 patients who all had osteoarthritis of the knees, and divide them into five groups:
- A placebo group
- A group that took celecoxib (Celebrex) 200mg/day
- 1500mg of glucosamine/day
- 1200mg of chondroitin/day
- A combination of 1500mg of glucosamine/day and 1200mg of chondroitin/day
The study lasted 24 weeks, and the main outcome measure was pain in the knees. The study showed that although patients on Celebrex did very well compared with the placebo group, those on glucosamine and chondroitin did not do better than placebo, although the combination was better than using either supplement alone. But one of the odd things was that people with moderate to severe pain WERE helped by the combination, and in fact the combination out-performed Celebrex!
Not only does the combination seem to help people with the biggest problems with pain, but also there are some other important points:
1. The worse someone is, the bigger the room for improvement. If someone only has mild pain, you need a lot more patients to find a statistically significant improvement.
2. As in most studies, multiple measurements were done, and Celebrex was no better than placebo in 12 out of 14 of them. So if the “active comparison” failed on multiple measures, we need to be very cautious about how we interpret the study.
3. The placebo response rate in the study was 60%, while the average is 30-35%. This is a huge difference. This may be because the patients knew that they had a four in five chance of getting a treatment that might help them, so they went into the study with high expectations.
4. This is only one study, concerning one type of joint problem. There are more than 30 others that have in general been even more positive then the findings in the moderate to sever group, including a very long-term study that showed that over an eight-year period, the combination dropped the rate of knee replacement by almost 75%. It is crucially important to examine the results of any study in the context of everything else that has been known and discovered. Every type of study has to be checked, and verified.
5. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and is the first of two parts, with a second study of the impact of the treatments on X-rays of the knees still pending.
6. None of the groups had many side effects, but it is worth remembering that medicines of the Celebrex type are under intense scrutiny because of the possible association with cardiovascular disease.
7. Many specialists use anti-inflammatory medicines together with glucosamine/chondroitin, at least at the beginning of a course of treatment. And that makes good sense.
8. What about the dosing of the supplements? Although those are the doses used by most people, they may not always be enough. In patients who weigh more than 200 pounds, many experts recommend 2000mg of glucosamine and 1600mg of chondroitin. It is also wise to take the supplement in divided doses with food. (I have sometimes also found it very useful to add Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM), 1000mg/day to the glucosamine and chondroitin, though there is little research to support it.)
None of these treatments can be given to pregnant women or nursing mothers.
One other small caveat, if you are having surgery make sure that you tell you surgeon if you are taking these supplements. Chondroitin has minor anticoagulant activity , and so may glucosamine.
And remember that the maintenance of joint health is not just a matter of taking some supplements. It is a judicious mixture of taking the right medication when needed, together with supplements, a healthy diet containing some omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants, exercise, management of posture, particularly of the spine, and weight management. To say nothing of ensuring that joint problems are not being compounded by psychological and relationship problems, and disturbances in the subtle systems of the body.
Technorati tags: glucosamine, chondroitin, knee pain, arthritis
The Naked Ape
When I am looking for new articles to analyze for you, gentle reader, I am very fortunate that Carol Kirshner, my web mistress (is that the politically correct term??), is also a researcher, and she does a great job of finding new items that are relevant to our basic themes. But sometimes I wonder if she is kidding me, as happened when she pulled up an article with the enticing title: “All the better to see you blush, my dear…”
Researchers from the California Institute of Technology just published a study in the Journal Biology Letters in which years of painstaking neurophysiological research lead them to speculate that the reason that primates evolved complex color vision was not, as previously thought, so that they could find the most tasty ripe fruit, but so that they could detect a blush on someone else’s face or, ahem, their posterior.
The main color sensing cells in the retina are the rods and cones, and it turns out that the cones are exquisitely sensitive to skin tones. The trouble with the old theory about color vision and fruit is that there has never been much evidence for it, and as someone who lives with horses, I know that they have some quite sophisticated color vision, yet are more than happy to munch away on grass.
This new study shows that primates have three-color vision, and the system seems extremely well adapted to pick up colors that are prevalent in the skin, in particular the amount of oxygenated hemoglobin in the blood. This three-color recognition system can signal a primate if a potential partner might be having a rush of emotion in anticipation of mating. It might also be the mechanism for telling if an enemy’s blood has drained out his face because of fear. And rosy cheeks, like smooth skin, are subconscious signs of health and vitality in a potential mate.
As the principle investigator – Mark Changizi – points out; old-world primates are all unique in that they have bare faces and bare posteriors. After all, there’s not much point in being able to see miniscule changes in skin color if the key areas are all covered up. So there seems to have been some co-evolution of the ability to see color modulations in the skin and the loss of fur.
Could this be the real reason for humans being the “Naked Ape?”
And I think that I shall leave it for you to consider all the implications of hiding a signaling system that has evolved over millions of years…
More on Scientific Misconduct
Today there have been reports from Reuters and the BBC that South Korean prosecutors have started questioning the disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk. The reason for their interest is that his fraudulent research was largely funded by public money. Thus he could be accused of misusing government funds.
The shock waves from this sordid scandal are still spreading.
A report has just been published by a panel at the University of Pittsburgh that has cleared Gerald Schatten, director of its department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, of any scientific misconduct in his collaboration with Hwang Woo-suk. However, the University panel decided that although he was not involved in the falsification of data, he should have taken greater steps to ensure that the data were correct. The panel decided that Dr. Schatten was guilty not of research misconduct, but of “research misbehavior.”
Five years ago a former colleague of mine who has had a distinguished scientific career, became mired in scandal. Not because of something that he had done wrong, but because of something that he failed to do right, some ten years earlier. A young researcher in his department was cooking up research data, and even when the first suspicions were brought to his attention, for some reason he failed to check it out.
It is the responsibility of everyone involved in a research project to ensure that everything is correct. After that is the responsibility of reviewers to re-check everything. We owe that to patients, their families, and the public who pays for this research.
I just hope that one day Dr. Hwang will tell everyone why he felt that it was okay to betray the trust of millions of people around the world.
Addendum: It is a little late, but I recently found a interesting podcast done on Feb 8, 2006 by the good people over at Scientific American that discusses the Stem Cell/Korean debacle. I’m linking it here in case you want to have a listen.
Technorati tags: scientific misconduct, Hwang Woo-suk, research
Nonlocal Interactions and Entangled Neurons
“Nonlocal” has become a bit of a buzzword recently, so let me explain what it means and why it so very important. It is an idea first proposed by the Irish physicist, J.S. Bell, in the 1960s, that at the microscopic quantum level particles that have been in contact remain permanently connected.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated in the laboratory, but for a long time seemed no more than a curiosity, the effect being infrequent and unstable, and only occurring at the quantum level. But then data started coming in from surprising sources: The “distant viewing” experiments of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in the 1970s, and work reported from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. Then some exquisitely clear-cut research by Dean Radin, first while he was at the University of Nevada, and now at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and finally data on distant healing. Together these have really made it seem very clear that these nonlocal effects do indeed occur in the world of large physical objects. Not surprisingly, this research is so important for our understanding of the world, that it has all been viciously attacked. But the fact is that the data keep coming in, and keep resisting the most ferocious attacks.
Larry Dossey, an important voice in medicine for more than two decades, asserts that we are now seeing the emergence of what he calls Era III or nonlocal medicine that acknowledges that your thoughts and intentions may affect the functioning of other individuals, at any distance, and with or without the awareness of the recipient.
The same Dean Radin whom I just mentioned, has recently suggested the existence of entanglement in biological systems. A study published by a group of scientists from the University of Milan is intriguing. The investigators used cultures of human neurons derived from neural stem cells. What they did is fascinating and important. They split the neurons into two little dishes, and equipped each dish with tiny electrodes to record the electrical activity of the cells. I remember doing something similar back when the world was new, and I was a physiology student. But what we did not do back then is this: one of the dishes was shielded from electrical or optical inputs, so that there could be no ordinary influence of one dish on the other. However, when cells in the unshielded dish were stimulated with a laser beam, the cells in the shielded culture responded at the same time. The team took every possible precaution to ensure that there was no known way of one dish or cells influencing the other, and yet the stimulation of one dish caused the other to respond. This experiment was repeated and repeated over a three-year period. This provides evidence for some form of nonlocal linkage or entanglement between the cells in the dishes.
Interestingly, the authors themselves remain very cautious and despite repeating the experiment in a number of different ways, still worry that some of the laser light might somehow have leaked and stimulated the cells in the shielded dishes. The prospect that they have genuinely found a new force at work in biology is enough to worry anyone whose future is in the hands of grant givers.
Technorati tags: Nonlocal medicine. Larry Dossey, nonlocal, medicine, neurons, intentions
The Ethical Brain
There is a nice blog, Brainethics, that discusses an interesting new book Hardwired Behavior by Laurence Tancredi. This really is an outstanding piece of work. The author is both a psychiatrist and a lawyer who argues that Society’s assumptions about free will and individual responsibility must be drastically revised in the light of scientific discoveries about the brain.
This is part of a large debate that is going on within psychiatry and psychology and within the legal profession. As an example, at what age should a young person be able to drive a car or be legally liable for their decisions? The driving question comes up because the brain and nervous system of a fifteen-year-old is still far from being fully mature, and may lead to poor coordination and decision-making. Can an eighteen-year-old be held liable for his behavior, at a time that his brain is not fully formed? Yet he is able to fight for his country. You will see that your answers to those questions are likely to be a mixture of political positions and personal experience. But there is also no doubt that the explosion of knowledge about the brain will be factored into some future legal decisions.
In Tancredi’s book, he applies knowledge derived from recent research to such traditional moral concerns as violence, sexual infidelity, lying, gluttony and sloth, and even financial fraud and gambling. For anybody working in the field, it is very clear that hormones, nutritional status, drugs, genetic abnormalities, injuries and traumatic experiences all have profound effects on the structure and functioning of the brain. Therefore they may all have an impact on our moral choices. Some experimental work implies that our actions are initiated by pre-conscious and unconscious processes in the brain before we are consciously aware of them. Does that mean that our sense of moral agency is a retrospective illusion? And what about free will?? Is that an illusion too?
I like this book, and also the recent book by Michael Gazzaniga, entitled The Ethical Brain. But I need to sound a note of caution: we are bewilderingly complex creatures, and there is powerful evidence for the existence of systems that can over-ride some of the neurological ones. So even after reading and studying hundreds of books and scientific papers and talking to hundreds of scientists around the world, I remain convinced that free will is not an illusion, and that there really is a genuine morality which is a great deal more than the firing of neurons in the brain.
Meditation and the Brain
1. There are many types of meditation: many are a form of intense concentration, others are a witnessing or watching of thoughts, yet others are a form of profound devotion. So it is no surprise that different forms will produce different effects in the brain.
2. The fact that the brain can be trained to produce certain types of electrical activity is in line with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that the brain is not the static structure that we used to think it to be: it can learn and develop. We already knew that with motor functions and some cognitive abilities, but now we can extend those findings into the emotions: feelings of love and empathy can be developed, expanded and deepened. The old metaphor that the brain can be exercised like a muscle may not be a metaphor after all, but a biological fact.
3. The fact that there are neurological correlates of meditation or of any emotional or psychological state does not mean that we can reduce the experience to the firing of some neurons or the synchronization of regions of the brain. Some of this research has been misinterpreted to mean that meditative states or mystical insights are no more than the calming of neural activity. It is vital that we also acknowledge the subjective experiences and reports of individuals and recognize that they are as valid descriptors as changes in the brain.
4. Meditation has been shown to have a great many physiological and psychological effects, from lowering blood pressure, to improving the performance of sleep-deprived individuals, reducing age-related cortical thinning and ultimately leading to demonstrable psychological and spiritual development. So the neurological and psychological findings provide a partial explanation for those observations.
Technorati tags: meditation, Dalai Lama, brain, Neuroscience
