Archive for March 27th, 2009
Broken-heart syndrome can be fatal
"Broken heart syndrome" is still a mystery to many in the medical community, but new data from researchers at The Miriam Hospital may shed some light on the clinical characteristics and outcomes of this relatively rare, life-threatening condition. Researchers created a registry of 70 patients with the syndrome, known medically as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, who were diagnosed between July 2004 and April 2008. Two-thirds of the patients – almost all post-menopausal women – had experienced a very stressful physical or emotional event just before arriving at the hospital with heart attack-like symptoms. Although 20 percent were critically ill and required emergency treatment to keep them alive, all patients survived the first 48 hours and experienced a full and complete recovery,
The report is published in the April 1 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.
"It can be difficult for cardiologists and emergency room physicians to diagnose and manage patients with broken heart syndrome. However, this data will helps us better understand the disease process and could play a major role in developing and tailoring more effective short and long-term treatment strategies," says lead author Richard Regnante, MD, an interventional cardiology fellow at The Miriam Hospital and a teaching fellow in medicine (cardiology) at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
Broken heart syndrome was first described by Japanese researchers in the early 1990s. Symptoms typically mimic a heart attack and tend to follow exposure to an intense physical or emotional event. Experts believe these symptoms may be brought on by the heart’s reaction to a surge of stress hormones, like adrenaline, causing a part of the heart to temporarily weaken or become stunned (cardiomyopathy), although the exact mechanism is unknown. However, it appears that broken heart syndrome is temporary and completely reversible.
Quails get super fit from omega-3 diet
When tiny semipalmated sandpipers embark on their annual odyssey from the Canadian Arctic to their winter residences in South America, they set out on one of the world’s longest migrations. On the way, the tiny birds stop off at the Bay of Fundy on the Canadian east coast, where they spend two weeks gorging on a superfood, Corophium volutator (mud shrimps), which have some of the highest levels of n-3 fatty acids (better known as omega-3 fatty acids) of any marine animal. According to Jean-Michel Weber from the University of Ottawa, omega-3 fatty acids have some rather astonishing effects. In humans they reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and alleviate depression. But it was not their potential medicinal properties that intrigued Weber; it was their ability to increase aerobic capacity, much like endurance training. Could the sandpipers be building up for their endurance challenge by simply eating? All the evidence suggest so, but Weber needed to test the miraculous fatty acids’ effects on less athletic birds, bobwhite quails, to be sure. Could he boost the couch potato quails’ endurance by simply feeding them omega-3 fatty acids? Weber and his team publish their discovery that quails can get fit simply by eating a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids on 27 March 2009 in The Journal of Experimental Biology http://jeb.biologists.org.
Teaming up with student Simba Nagahuedi, Weber fed three groups of the sedentary quails a tightly regulated omega-3 diet of n-3 eicosapentaenoic acid, or n-3 docosahexaenoic acid, or a 50/50 mixture of the two oils for 6 weeks. Then Nagahuedi checked the quails’ pectoral muscles to see if their capacity to consume oxygen to produce energy had improved. Measuring the activity levels of four oxidative enzymes the duo found that the enzymes’ activity levels had increased by between 58 and 90% to levels normally only seen in the migrating sandpipers. Weber admits that he was astonished by the increase. Even top human endurance athletes only improve their oxidative enzyme activities by 38 to 76% after 7 weeks of hard endurance training. But the quails had done even better without getting off their bottoms; they had got fit by simply eating omega-3 fatty acids.
Want to get fit? Use public transit.
A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia suggests taking public transit may help you keep fit. The study, published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, finds that people who take public transit are three times more likely than those who don’t to meet the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada’s suggested daily minimum of physical activity.
Doctoral student Ugo Lachapelle and Assoc. Prof. Lawrence Frank of the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning used 4,156 travel surveys from metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, to examine whether transit and car trips were associated with meeting the recommended levels of physical activity by walking.
Because transit trips by bus and train often involve walking to and from stops, the study found that users are more likely to meet the recommended 30 minutes of moderate physical activity a day, five days a week.
According to the study, people who drove the most were the least likely to meet the recommended level of physical activity.
"The idea of needing to go to the gym to get your daily dose of exercise is a misperception," says Frank, the J. Armand Bombardier Chairholder in Sustainable Transportation and a researcher at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. "These short walks throughout our day are historically how we have gotten our activity. Unfortunately, we’ve engineered this activity out of our daily lives."
The researchers conclude that making transit incentives more broadly available may produce indirect health benefits by getting people walking, even if it’s just in short bouts.
"This should be appealing to policy makers because it’s easier to promote transit incentives – such as employer-sponsored passes or discount fares – than to restructure existing neighbourhoods," says Frank.
The research could have major implications for urban planning and public transit development, Lachapelle says.
"You don’t necessarily have to rebuild communities or make major investments in infrastructure to promote public health," he says. "There are things we can do in the interim, such as encourage people to drive less, and adapt their lifestyles which will get people more physically active and generate fewer greenhouse gasses."
Source: University of British Columbia
Shampoo/conditioner as cause of eczema
Considerably more people than previously believed are allergic to the most common fragrance ingredient used in shampoos, conditioners and soap. A thesis presented at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden found that over 5% of those who underwent patch testing were allergic to the air oxidized form of the fragrance ingredient linalool. "I would suspect that about 2% of the complete population of Sweden are allergic to air oxidized linalool. That may not sound very much, but it is serious since linalool is so widely used as a fragrance ingredient. Linalool is found in 60-80 percent of the perfumed hygiene products, washing up liquids and household cleaning agents that can be bought in the nearest supermarket, and it can be difficult for people who are allergic to avoid these products", says dermatologist Johanna Bråred Christensson, author of the thesis.
Around one person in five in Sweden has some form of contact allergy. Nickel is by far the most common substance that causes eczema, but the thesis shows that oxidized linalool occupies third place in the list, after nickel and cobalt.
In the study, oxidized linalool was added at patch testing for more than 3,000 patients who wanted to find out what was causing their eczema. Between 5% and 7% proved to be allergic to the oxidized form of the fragrance ingredient.
"Linalool is present in many products around us, and this is probably the reason that contact allergy to this material is so common. Some people can shower with shower cream that contains linalool but never develop contact allergy, but we know that the risk increases as the exposure to t! he substance increases", says Johanna Bråred Christensson.
Good pointers on tense discussions
The rules are simple: don’t talk about politics, religion, sex, certainly not masturbation, and definitely don’t question how someone parents their children. After all, what are you going to do if the person you’re talking to is unwilling to appreciate your point of view? Can you handle a violent argument or an exhausting bout of strained silence? Out of fear, people hide from a number of important issues and a lot of relationships never build the strength to tolerate the intense emotions that arise during disagreements. As a clinical psychologist, I can tell you that handling conflict is essential to our well-being, healthy relationships, healthy workplaces, and healthy communities.
The truth is conflicts are inevitable. Human beings were never designed to live in the densely packed settings of modern society. With so many people in our personal space, so many emotions to read from so many faces, disagreements and arguments are unavoidable. It could be a romantic couple bickering on a regular basis about how to discipline their children. It could be a financially unstable business trying to negotiate a purchase with a stubborn buyer. It could be two nations that are inches away from war. Usually there is some value in negotiating some common ground to prevent conflicts from escalating into violent endings.
Researchers at Stanford University tested a simple idea for how to create successful outcomes during tense negotiations or conflicts. The reason that arguments can quickly turn ugly is that people don’t feel as if they’re being understood. Thus, make sure that each party feels as if they are being carefully listened to.
If people show that they are curious and willing to learn more about someone else’s opposing view, this might be the key to diplomacy. That is, ask a single clarifying question about what another person’s view is about. That’s it. One question with a few important guidelines: …
Post on the Freeman Dyson article
This post points out that the interviewer knows no more about climate change than Dr. Dyson.
Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy
The site is here, and from it, this post:
The Final Report of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy
After a year of researching, interviewing experts, holding meetings and debates, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy publishes its final report, evaluating the current Drug Policy and its impacts on the Region. From the struggle against narcotics to the international interactions associated with this issue, including the efforts to curb illicit drug production, transportation and commerce, this document sets the Latin American countries in the international drug trafficking context, exposing failures and successes, and shedding light on ways to end this scourge.
War on drugs has failed
An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal written by: Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former president of Brazil; César Gaviria, a former president of Colombia; and Ernesto Zedillo, a former president of Mexico. It begins:
The war on drugs has failed. And it’s high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.
Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven’t worked. Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade remain critical problems in our countries. Latin America remains the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and cannabis, and is fast becoming a major supplier of opium and heroin. Today, we are further than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs.
Over the last 30 years, Colombia implemented all conceivable measures to fight the drug trade in a massive effort where the benefits were not proportional to the resources invested. Despite the country’s achievements in lowering levels of violence and crime, the areas of illegal cultivation are again expanding. In Mexico — another epicenter of drug trafficking — narcotics-related violence has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past year alone.
The revision of U.S.-inspired drug policies is urgent in light of …
Behind reconciliation, a key healthcare demand
Jefferson Morley in the Washington Independent:
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Bloomberg today that “it’s absolutely essential that we come out of this year with a substantial health-care reform,” and “the best prospect for that to happen is to do it under reconciliation” — the process by which legislation would only need 51 votes to pass, rather than the 60 votes ordinarily required to end debate — she was obliquely referring to what is fast emerging as the central issue in health care reform: the so-called “public plan.”
President Obama laid out the idea in his “Open for Questions” online town hall Thursday.
If you’ve got a preexisting condition you’re not going to be excluded but you’re going to be able to obtain health insurance. And if you can’t obtain it through a private plan then there is going to a public plan that is available in some way to give you insurance, or insurers are obligated to provide you with insurance in some way. Now that’s a principle.
It’s a principle that opponents of the strongest health care reform plans hate. While supportive of the general idea of expanding coverage, leaders of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries stepped up their attacks on the public plan concept this week. It’s also why Howard Dean’s Democracy for America launched its health care reform campaign yesterday with the demand that the inclusion of a public plan in any upcoming health care legislation must be “non-negotiable.”
For Obama and sympathetic left-liberal policy wonks, the question is what form the public plan should take in order to insure congressional approval. Ezra Klein of the American Prospect sketched three options, while Harold Pollack, University of Chicago researcher and blogger for The New Republic, identified the central political reality:
“Among the many components of candidate Obama’s proposed healthcare plan, the public plan is the one most likely to be thrown under the bus in negotiations seeking a final bill.”
The public jockeying over the idea of packaging health care reform in a budget resolution that doesn’t require 60 votes for Senate consideration is the opening phase of these negotiations. With Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) opposed to a public plan, any reform package that includes it is unlikely to get 60 votes — but it might get 51. To put it another way, if Obama forgoes the reconciliation process in pursuing health care, the public plan is much more likely to go under the bus.
Britain moves ahead with investigations
While the US buries its head in the sand. Glenn Greenwald notes:
One of the problems for the U.S. Government in releasing Guantanamo detainees has been that, upon release, they are free to talk to the world about the treatment to which they were subjected. When the Bush administration agreed to release Australian David Hicks after almost 6 years in captivity, they did so only on the condition that he first sign a documenting stating that he was not abused and that he also agree — as The Australian put it — to an "extraordinary 12-month gag order that prevent[ed] Hicks from speaking publicly about the actions to which he has pleaded guilty or the circumstances surrounding his capture, interrogation and detention," a gag order which "also silence[d] family members and any third party."
Last month, in response to increasing pressure in Britain over reports of British resident Binyam Mohamed’s deterioration in Guantanamo, the Obama administration released him back to Britain. Ever since, he has been detailing the often brutal torture to which he was subjected over several years, torture in which British intelligence officials appear to have been, at the very least, complicit. As a result, despite the efforts of both the British Government and the Obama administration to keep concealed what was done to Mohamed, the facts about his treatment have emerged and a major political controversy has been ignited.
That’s because torture is illegal in Britain, as it is in the United States. But unlike the United States: Britain hasn’t completely abandoned the idea that even political officials must be accountable when they commit crimes; their political discourse isn’t dominated and infected by the subservient government-defending likes of David Ignatius, Ruth Marcus, David Broder and Stuart Taylor demanding that government officials be free to commit even serious war crimes with total impunity; and they don’t have "opposition leaders" who are so afraid of their own shadows and/or so supportive of torture that they remain mute in the face of such allegations. To the contrary, demands for criminal investigations into these episodes of torture (including demands for war crimes investigations from conservatives) span the political spectrum in Britain: …
Wonderful column
I discovered this jewel via Michael O’Hare’s post on The Reality-Based Community.
YouTube’s educational channel
Check it out. More info (and additional educational resources) here.
Kindle vs. Netbook
A while back I blogged a link to a guy who became more interested in the Kindle once he viewed it as a text-oriented Netbook with free wireless. Now MakeUseOf.com has an interesting post on the opposite tack: view a Netbook as a Kindle with computer capabilities. Go read. Ponder.
Black bean soup with spinach
This sounds absolutely delicious:
12 ounces black beans, washed and picked over for stones, soaked in 2 quarts water for six hours or overnight
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 teaspoons lightly toasted cumin seeds, ground
4 large garlic cloves, minced
Salt, preferably kosher salt, to taste
2 canned chipotle chiles in adobo, seeded [? she must be kidding – LG] and finely chopped
12 ounces (two bags) baby spinach
1/2 cup chopped cilantro, plus additional for garnish if desired1. Soak the beans in the water for at least six hours. If they will be soaking for a long time in warm weather, put them in the refrigerator.
2. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven, and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until it begins to soften, about three minutes, and add half the garlic and the cumin. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about one minute, and add the beans and soaking water. They should be covered by two inches of water. Add more water as needed, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, and skim off any foam that rises. Cover and simmer one hour.
3. Add the salt, chipotles, remaining garlic and half the cilantro. Continue to simmer another hour, until the beans are quite soft and the broth is thick and fragrant. Taste and adjust seasonings. Let sit overnight in the refrigerator for the best flavor.
4. Partially purée the soup using an immersion blender, or puree 2 cups of the beans with a small amount of broth in a blender or a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Stir back into the soup. Bring to a simmer. Add the spinach, a handful at a time, and simmer for five minutes. Stir in the remaining cilantro, and taste and adjust seasonings. Serve with warm corn tortillas, garnishing each bowl with queso fresca.
Yield: Serves six
Advance preparation: The cooked beans will keep for three to four days in the refrigerator, and they freeze well. Bring back to a simmer and add the spinach before serving.
Review of the new 50-mpg Prius
Good review of the new Prius. Many nice refinements, plus better mileage.
McCain admits GOP can’t logically oppose use of budget reconciliation
Of course, that probably won’t stop them, but still… This is from ThinkProgress:
President Obama has signaled that he is open to using the tactic of budget reconciliation to advance health care reform and cap-and-trade. Reconciliation allows some legislation to be protected from filibusters and passed by a simple majority vote. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) conceded that when Republicans were in power, they had laid the “groundwork” for reconciliation by frequently employing the procedure to pass major Bush agenda items:
MCCAIN: I fully recognize that Republicans have in the past engaged in using reconciliation to further the party’s agenda. I wish it had not been done then, and I hope it will not be done now that the groundwork has been laid.
Watch it:
McCain has a mixed record on reconciliation bills. Though he opposed the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts passed through reconciliation, he supported other Bush agenda items passed through reconciliation, such as legislation to reduce spending on Medicaid.
McCain’s comments today stand in stark contrast with the central argument being made by other Republican Senators on reconciliation — that it is somehow a radical shift in Senate procedure. For example, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), the GOP ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, compared reconciliation to “running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.”
McCain is right that Republicans laid the groundwork for using reconciliation. Since 1995, Republicans have pushed everything from the Contract with America, to welfare reform, to tax cuts targeted at the rich, to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, using reconciliation. Republican leaders even fired successive Senate parliamentarians who disagreed with their use of reconciliation.
Will other Republican Senators wake up from their political amnesia and accept that they have no standing to reject budget reconciliation now?
UK investigating its role in US torture program
Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:
It’s interesting to note the contrast when someone charges government complicity with torture in the United Kingdom, versus here in the United States.
Ever since Binyam Mohamed — the Ethiopian-born Guantanamo detainee who claims he was tortured as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program (and whom I’ve written about previously here) — was returned to Britain, his case has caused an uproar there because he claims that the British intelligence agents colluded with the United States government in his torture.
Today, Baroness Patricia Scotland QC — said she would refer the evidence, both classified and not, to the police, to begin an investigation.
“I have expressed to the Commissioner the hope that the investigation can be taken forward as expeditiously as possible given the seriousness and sensitivity of the issues involved,” she said in a statement released today.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, despite repeated calls for the attorney general to launch an investigation into the CIA’s extraordinary rendition practices and the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General Eric Holder has equivocated (as has President Obama) and no such criminal investigation has begun. (The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on the other hand, is investigating the CIA’s practices, as I’ve reported, but not for criminal culpability. And a previous Senate Armed Services Committee investigation, despite damning results that orders for abusive and inhumane conduct came from the highest levels of the Bush administration, has likewise not led to a criminal investigation.) …
Super-smooth Friday
A really terrific shave today. The lather, from Vintage Blades’s own shaving soap worked up with the Rooney Style 2 Finest, was excellent, but the star of the show was the aged Gillette NEW, 88 years old this year, with a Gilolette blade. I’m now thinking that the Gillette NEW, with the longer comb (as shown), might be the best beginner razor, since the comb seems more protective than the straight bar. Just a notion, not a fact. At any rate, the razor did a superb job, and Stetson’s Sierra was a fine finish—I really like that fragrance.
