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April 02, 2007

How to Look Good

I'm off to a late start this morning. In terms of blog meat, I'm tempted by many, but called by few.

For example, I love this story on the therapeutic powers of dirt. Getting down and dirty boosts your mood, improves your immune system, and gives new resonance to the phrase "happy as a pig in shit."

Then there's the National League Championship Series, Game 8, otherwise known as baseball's opening night. The Mets looked good and the Cards looked bad. It was essentially an even game in terms of the number of runners on base (each team got 13 hits and walks, although one additional Met reached when the Cards' left fielder dropped a ball any of us reading this could've caught). But the Mets managed to score five more runs. The Cards hit into four double plays, lost a runner at third on a failed bunt attempt, and had another thrown out at the plate ... with Albert Freakin' Pujols on deck.

Diamond Mind Baseball, a traditionally accurate computer simulation game, picks the Cards to win 85 games this year and the Mets to win just 82, with the Cards winning their division and the Mets finishing out of the money. But if the Cards have many more games like last night's, they'll be home watching the playoffs this October. And my guess, based on the way the Mets turned what should've been a very close game into a blowout, is that the Mets will be one of the eight teams the 2006 World Champions are destined to watch.

But the tastiest blog meat this Monday morning is a story about politics and the human decision-making process, which, if you'll indulge a digression, has resonance to me in other areas.

Apples, oranges, and rotten peaches

Recently, someone of my acquaintance, a pre-adolescent male, started asking me some tough questions about how to meet, converse with, and, in a perfect world, impress a pre-adolescent female. Anybody who knew me in my youth would tell this pre-adolescent male that he's asking the wrong person.

But I happened to be the only one in the room, so I was obliged to answer. I fumbled around through all the lessons I learned the hard way ("it's not what you say, it's what she hears"; "chicks dig the long ball"; etc.), and finally came up with a riff that went something like this:

"Attraction is really a mystery. It's almost magical when it works out that two people meet and end up liking each other more or less equally. Most of the time, the girls you like won't feel the same way about you. And the girls who do like you won't necessarily be the ones you find attractive. So when it works out and you're attracted to each other, you have to enjoy it while it lasts."

When I repeated that conversation to my wife, she told me it was too negative a message to give to someone contemplating the man-woman thing for the first time. Why scare him off now? There's plenty of time for that later.

So I shifted from probable outcomes to tactics. I emphasized the need to be excellent. If a girl figures out you like her, but isn't sure yet if she likes you, just about anything you do might tip the balance. If you call attention to yourself, make sure it's for something that shows you at your best -- being good, being kind, being funny or proficient. Don't let the first impression be the deal-breaker.

My guess is that he found all that more bewildering than helpful. After all, when you're 11, what can you do that's excellent? How much control do you have over those brief, transient moments when you're in the spotlight?

Fortunately, this morning's Washington Post has the ultimate take on tactics. It's a political story, as I said, but the potential applications are much more universal:

Front-runners are usually focused on racing each other. They often do not realize that when people cannot decide between two leading candidates -- and it doesn't matter whether we are talking about politicians or consumer appliances -- our decision can be subtly swayed by whoever is in third place.

Psychologists call this the decoy effect: In a perfectly rational world, third candidates should only siphon votes away from one or both of the leading contenders. Under no circumstances should they cause the vote share of either front-runner to increase. In the actual world, however, third candidates regularly have the unintended effect of making one of the front-runners look better than before in the minds of undecided voters.

Joel Huber, a Duke University marketing professor, showed how the decoy effect works with restaurants. Huber asked people whether they would prefer to eat at a five-star restaurant that was far away or at a three-star restaurant nearby. As with many choices in life, each restaurant had different advantages. If the better restaurant was also nearby, there would be no dilemma. But the question forced people to compare apples and oranges -- trade off quality against convenience -- which ensured no automatic answer.

The human brain, however, always seeks simple answers. Enter the third candidate. Huber told some people there was also a choice of a four-star restaurant that was farther away than the five-star option. People now gravitated toward the five-star choice, since it was better and closer than the third candidate. (The three-star restaurant was closer, but not as good as the new candidate.)

Here's how I think it could work in our Wonder Years example. It's not an exact comparison, but it exploits a similar decoy effect:

Let's say Boy A likes Girl A. Girl A doesn't yet know this, but occasionally seems to notice Boy A. He catches her looking at him from time to time, and thinks that there might be a chance. The problem is knowing how to get her attention on his own terms.

So Boy A recruits Boy B, a person of lesser stature, intelligence, charm, and/or hygiene. Boy B approaches Girl A, but does so awkwardly, in a way that's guaranteed not to work. Girl A looks for any excuse to get away from Boy B, and Boy A just happens to catch her eye at that moment. She wasn't prepared to make a choice before Boy B commanded her attention, but now that she's on the spot, hey, Boy A is looking damned good.

Would it work? If I'd tried it at that age, probably not. And if anyone else tried it, I get a sneaking suspicion that I'd have been cast as Boy B, wittingly or otherwise.

Still, I'm intrigued by the question: If a teen or preteen really were devious enough or desperate enough to try to set up a favorable-comparison scenario, would the object of his affection fall for it? Would she see through it and be angry? Or would she see through it, but be charmed that he went to so much trouble just for her? Or, in the Hollywood scenario, would she end up falling for Boy B, since he's the plucky underdog?

What do you think?

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:46 AM | Comments (4)

March 29, 2007

No!

Who would've guessed that getting kicked in the head repeatedly would cause brain damage?

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2007

Married to the Media: A Bad Deal All Around

Rannoch Donald sends along this study from my alma mater:

A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.

"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory." ...

The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from interventions aimed at decreasing the effects of the media, regardless of weight.

So how do you "intervene" when it comes to the media? Lock the women up in a dungeon with no access to the Internet or cable TV?

I was also curious about how "all women" are defined (the study's abstract isn't any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were "European-American" -- white chicks.

If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:

According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to "better connect with themselves." ...

It found that 56 percent of sexually active women could reach orgasm every time they masturbated, while only 24 percent of the women with partners could bring themselves to orgasm.

Looks like all us married guys owe our wives an apology, assuming that 100 percent of us can reach orgasm 100 percent of the time during masturbation, and that that doesn't change with marriage.

Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:

[M]en's self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men's body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.

So we're all screwed, which is only fair.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2007

Why Angels Are Incapable of Multitasking

Did you know our concept of angels was based on castrati?

[T]he eunuchs of antiquity were models for our depiction of angels. God is thought to surround himself with angels as advisers and emissaries, who are identical in appearance to males castrated before puberty: tall, beardless, nonsexual beings with voices like the legendary castrati.

It appears that from the Judeo-Christian standpoint, the occupants of heaven were exalted eunuchs. In turn, earthly rulers aspired to reach this divine ideal. In The Perfect Servant (University of Chicago, 2003), Kathryn M. Ringrose notes that by the 10th century the Byzantine court was "perceived to be an earthly replica of the court of heaven where the emperor functioned as Christ’s representative on earth and was attended by an 'angelic' corps of eunuchs."

The author is a medical doctor who underwent chemical castration as part of his treatment for prostate cancer. That led him to this discovery:

Understanding angel (and eunuch) psychology has even helped me overcome the cognitive side effects of hormonal therapy. Angels may be omnipotent, but they undertake just one task at a time. According to the Talmud, they are not permitted to attempt more. Biblical angels blessed, cursed, relayed messages and even killed, but they were never on two missions at once. It seems that thousands of years ago it was already recognized that androgen deprivation makes multitasking difficult -- but doesn’t prevent one from accomplishing a single task well.

Speaking of multitasking, here's another New York Times story on that subject, this one advising us to be more angelic in our work habits:

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:39 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2007

Real Men Recover Faster

Last week I teed off on this story in the Washington Post, a generic run-down of men that started with the conclusion that we would do ourselves a favor if we started acting more like women.

I like women just fine -- I'm married to one, and we're raising a crop of our own -- but I think there's a reason why men and women developed distinct gender traits. And researchers at my alma mater may have discovered one of them:

While many scientists have considered these masculine tendencies to be barriers to health and recovery, a small study of about 50 men suggests the opposite.

The man-of-steel mentality, often associated with military men and those in other high-risk occupations, can boost and speed up a guy's recovery from a serious and/or traumatic injury.

"It has long been assumed that men are not as concerned and don't take as good of care of their health [as women]," said lead study author Glenn Good of the University of Missouri, Columbia, "but what we're seeing here is that the same ideas that led to their injuries may actually encourage their recovery."

The researchers looked at middle-aged men with traumatic brain and spinal-cord injuries. Here's what they found:

[M]en who focused on their careers, success, power and competition ... showed greater improvement a year after their hospitalization. Perhaps, the scientists report, an inner narrative is the engine behind the boost in health.

For example, a brawny boy might think, "Yeah there are tough challenges, but nothing will stop me from reaching my goal," the scientists state in a report of this study published in a recent issue of the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity.

I guess you could say those traits fall into the general category of "positive attitude." A guy who's aggressive and ambitious would probably have a better attitude toward his work in general, and perhaps toward his specific job. Chances are he's pushing forward and making his own breaks within his company, so it's sort of logical that he'd want to recover faster from his injuries.

This study isn't exactly comparable, but it shows that "job satisfaction" plays a role in how quickly workers return to their jobs following medical leave for lower-back injuries. (It also suggests that the attitude of the doctor treating the worker matters; the more positive the prognosis, the faster the worker returns to the job.)

I quickly scanned through some other studies on injury and recovery, and didn't find anything that adds a lot to this discussion. Employees who see themselves as overworked will take longer to recover from injuries, as will those who smoke or see themselves as having poor health in general. I don't see any big surprises there.

So I guess the news here is that there's some benefit to being ambitious, competitive, and career-focused: When the shit lands on your head, you'll dig out faster than someone who doesn't have those traits.

It makes intuitive sense, but it's also nice to see it quantified.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2007

Thursday Blog Meat: It's All in the Timing

Here's the most useless advice you'll get all week -- if you're going to have a heart attack, try to have it on a weekday:

People who have weekend heart attacks are more likely to die than those admitted to hospitals during the week, largely because they're less likely to get care that meets scientific guidelines for saving lives, a study reported Wednesday.

"One of every hundred heart patients over a weekend will die unnecessarily," which amounts to several thousand people each year, says lead author William Kostis of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. "Once you lose those people, you don't get them back."

The stats: About 12 percent of weekday heart-attack patients die, vs. 12.9 percent on weekends. The reason seems to be that fewer doctors are in the house on weekends, which means it takes longer for them to get to the patients, and fewer angioplasties are performed.

Granted, the timing of your heart attack isn't under your control; that's why it's called an "attack," as opposed to "a scheduled visit."

But here's some advice you can use:

Nevertheless, Kostis says, "we don't want people to think that if they have a heart attack on Sunday they should wait until Monday. Absolutely not."

Do the wrong thing

If you've ever wondered how someone could do something that's morally reprehensible, the answer might have nothing to do with his upbringing or exposure to video games:

Army researchers found that when they subjected a group of volunteers to two sleepless nights, the lack of shut-eye seemed to hinder participants' ability to make decisions in the face of emotionally charged, moral dilemmas.

The dilemmas in this case were hypothetical scenarios, and not actual events. But the study authors say the findings could have implications for people who are both routinely sleep-deprived and often need to make quick decisions in a crisis -- such as soldiers in combat and medical professionals. ...

It's possible, they speculate, that sleeplessness slows the brain's ability to integrate cognitive and emotional information, which is needed to address serious moral dilemmas.

Then again, one's upbringing might factor into it, even with 53 hours of sleep deprivation. Subjects who had high emotional intelligence scores before the experiment began still made "morally appropriate" decisions.

Sleep was in the news for other reasons this week, with the FDA issuing new cautions on sleep drugs like Ambien, and this guy showing what happens when you don't get enough sleep at night.

"Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk I'm a woman's man, no time to talk ..."

It's not what you have, it's how you move it:

New York University researchers have found that to be found attractive, a woman had to move in a feminine way -- swaying her hips. Men, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper found, were more attractive if they moved with a "shoulder swagger."

You probably wonder how researchers could come to this conclusion -- assuming they didn't just sit outside on a warm day and watch people walking past them. Here's how they managed to quantify what every libidinally cognizant human on the planet could've figured out without conducting scientific research:

The team carried out a series of studies involving over 700 participants who were shown a variety of animations and videos of people moving. Some showed shadow figures, where it was not possible to see if it was a man or a woman, while others obviously showed a man or a woman.

No matter which format was being used, the participants rated women or "female" figures as more attractive if their hips swayed as they walked, while men were more attractive if they had the characteristic shoulder movement.

Come on, science guys:

If half your theory can be summed up in a Bee Gees song, and the other half in a song recorded by the Rolling Stones when they were at their most besotted and depraved, you have to figure that the result was predictable.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:11 AM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2007

Sixteen (Roman) Candles

I had a bit of a dust-up this weekend with my eight-year-old daughter. She was convinced a neighbor boy had stolen one of our balls, and she was probably right; another neighbor gave us a bucket of softballs last year, and chances are good the boy thought he could get away with swiping one, since we have so many. The problem is that there was no way to prove the softball he had came from our cache, and the kid's father and other adults were in the vicinity and presumably would've intervened if they'd thought a crime had been committed.

My wife and I both told her to let it go, but she couldn't. Her last words to me, before we got into the house and my expressions of dismay over her behavior melted tile grout in multiple rooms, were that I'm "a lousy excuse for a parent." I should note that she said this loud enough for the aforementioned adults to hear.

If that's a sample of what we're in for when she hits her teen years, we're doomed:

Scientists have found that the mechanism normally used by the brain to calm itself down in stressful situations seems to work in the opposite way in teenagers, making them even more anxious.

When the brain senses a stressful situation, it reacts by switching on receptors, using a range of chemicals, including a steroid called THP. In an adult or even a younger individual, THP would reduce anxiety. But in experiments on adolescent mice, THP increased anxiety.

The experiments, by Sheryl Smith, a physiologist at the State University of New York, offer the first physiological explanation for adolescent mood swings. Previous work has focused on analysing behavioural changes in teenagers during adolescence. Her results are published today in Nature Neuroscience.

In teenagers, the behavioural response to the increased anxiety due to THP would result in even more acute stress, said Prof Smith. How individuals reacted would depend on their personality -- where some people might cry, others would get angry.

And we still have five years to go before she's officially a teen. Looks like Daddy's going to be drinking early and often.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2007

To Sleep, Perchance to Smell

I wonder if the problem with Scooter Libby's memory could've been helped by this:

German scientists used medical students as their guinea pigs, having them play a computer version of a common memory game: They turned over pairs of cards to find each one's match.

Some played in a rose-scented room. Later that night, while they were in a deep stage of sleep known as slow-wave sleep, researchers gave them another whiff of roses.

The next day, the rose-scented sleepers remembered the locations of those cards better than people who didn't get a whiff -- they answered correctly 97 percent of the time compared with 86 percent.

People exposed to the odor during the lighter dream stage of sleep known as REM sleep saw no memory boost. ...

What happened? Anyone who's ever gotten a whiff of a particular odor and flashed back to an emotional memory -- grandma's apple pie, say -- knows that scent and memory can be intertwined.

With the card game, the odor reactivated the day's new memories of object placement, allowing a now-resting brain to consolidate them, the researchers wrote.

In other sleep-related news this week, we've learned that ...

* A woman who's spent the past six years in a coma-like "minimally conscious state" woke up for three days.

* 60 percent of American women say they don't get enough sleep.

* The average person who snores loses two years of sleep in his lifetime.

I'm starting to yawn, so I'd better stop there. Let this be a lesson to all self-employed journalists: People who work at home should avoid writing about sleep. That bed is just too damned close to the office.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

The Juice is Goosed

I'm on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good.

You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida.

Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn't just used steroids, he'd used them in massive doses.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:

My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.

"The changes in his foot and head size," they write, "were of special interest: medical experts said overuse of human growth hormone could cause an adult's extremities to begin growing, aping the symptoms of the glandular disorder acromegaly."

I'm a sucker for a good acromegaly reference. Photos here.

Wonderful you

In related news, a new study says that college students are more vain than in previous generations:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

This is my favorite part:

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before, said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

Now, I don't mind if a researcher publishes a major study with the goal of validating a conclusion she's already reached in a book she's already published. But I wonder if she's pointing her accusing finger in the right directions.

For example, she blames the "self-esteem movement" of the 1980s as being responsible for this epidemic of narcissism, along with more permissive parenting. So, clearly, it's the fault of the hippies and parents, especially, I assume, hippies who then became parents.

But couldn't someone argue that powerful forces in society are more responsible than a bunch of pacifist utopians whom none of us paid much attention to in the first place?

For example, could the fact that good-looking people make more money play into an increase in self-consciousness about one's looks?

Could the fact that even relatively prosperous people feel increasing anxiety about their economic security have an effect on their kids, making them focus more on wealth and fame than on goals that might contribute something useful to society?

No, no, talking about that stuff would cause too many of us to question our assumptions about the direction our country has taken in the past quarter-century. It makes us wonder if perhaps we've placed too much emphasis on wealth and status and not enough on what used to be called the common good. It makes us reassess our worship of presidents like Reagan and Clinton, who were celebrated for unleashing the forces of prosperity, and makes us wonder why in the world our celebrity journalists poked such vicious fun at Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, the only two political leaders in a generation who stood for anything besides unmitigated greed and personal power.

No, we can't think along those lines. We can't stop and wonder who decided it was so important to focus on Al Gore's wardrobe and waistline in the 2000 election campaign, rather than on what he might actually do for the country as its chief executive. Or on what his opponent might not do (pay attention to warnings about imminent terrorist attacks, for example).

It's a lot easier to just blame the hippies. They're too busy tending to their patchouli to even notice.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2007

Two-for-One Diagnostic Special!

Asperger's disorder isn't just for kids anymore -- parents of the kids getting diagnosed with this type of high-functioning autism are also finding that the diagnosis fits them.

But with so many people receiving a diagnosis (1 in 150 kids is now considered autistic, as I noted here), you have to wonder if diagnoses themselves are taking on a life of their own. Do the labels help explain the kids, or are the kids being defined by their labels?

This is something that's troubled my wife and me ever since we entered the alphabet-soup world of childhood mental disorders. Knowing your kid has Asperger's vs. ADHD vs. PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified) is only mildly helpful. Yeah, you know there's something wrong, and you get an official reprieve from the "bad parenting" label, and you know it's not just a mean teacher who's keeping your child from doing well in school. But the diagnosis doesn't tell you how to deal with your own child's development in the best possible way.

We wasted a lot of time and effort with Harrison doing variations on physical and occupational therapy to help him with basic skills like handwriting. The problem, though, wasn't with his physical coordination; it was with his mental coordination. Once we started him on medication, his handwriting improved dramatically.

My wife currently runs the local chapter of SEAS (Support and Education for Asperger's Syndrome), and if you put a group of those kids in the same room, you can't fathom any single strategy that would help them all. Sometimes it's hard to believe they've all received the same diagnosis.

The Washington Post article I linked to above gets into some of that:

As Schwarz says: "It's not the label that's the problem, but the baggage associated with it."

Dan Grover, an 18-year-old college student in Boston, co-founded WrongPlanet.net, a site for teens on the autistic spectrum. He was 10 when his Asperger's syndrome was diagnosed. "Sometimes people distance themselves from you when they know," he says. "It's both good and bad -- good because it definitely explains some things and gives you some perspective, but at the same time it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Being aware of [traits related to the label] can magnify them."

Another 18-year-old, David Dunnington of Yorktown, Ind., told me via e-mail that his Asperger's label "used to send me through the roof" because adults would treat him like an infant, but that he now values the photographic memory and problem-solving skills associated with the condition.

One 13-year-old from New York who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder e-mailed me recently that "labels make me see myself as a painting that didn't come out right, and it makes me feel really bad. I think that having these labels is negative because it categorizes children into groups. These labels can be very hurtful, and they don't truly reflect a person's true personality."

And that's the real problem -- handing out diagnoses like party favors is the start of the journey. What you do with the information is what matters.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2007

Monday Linkage

Just because I'm too busy to organize these stories with a unifying theme ...

Why extreme stress makes you stupid

This story shows that when you lose sleep, your brain stops making new brain cells.

This test was pretty extreme, since it kept subjects awake for 72 hours. In real life, that would only happen in times of war, personal tragedy, or natural disaster. And it doesn't really say anything about what happens to brain cells when people just lose a few hours of sleep here and there.

But the news is still kind of scary: If you're involved in something so traumatic that you don't sleep for 72 hours, it takes two full weeks for your brain to catch up.

Sleep it off

It's not news that sleep is important to weight control. So this short item about kids and sleep isn't surprising, but it reinforces what we already know:

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used detailed diaries kept by families to examine children's sleep behavior and its relationship with weight. They determined that an extra hour of sleep cut the likelihood of being overweight from 36 percent to 30 percent in children ages 3 to 8, and from 34 percent to 30 percent in those ages 8 to 13.

Not a huge difference, but it's still something. Parents, turn off the TV or computer or PlayStation, and enforce a consistent bedtime. And if you have any of those things in your kids' bedrooms, where you can't monitor whether they're on or off, get them out.

And make sure they get a good breakfast when they wake up.

There. I just solved the childhood obesity problem in two easy steps.

Cut it out

I meant to blog last week about the rise in obesity surgeries for teenagers. But like so many things, I never got around to it. So this morning's L.A. Times has a handy roundup story about how weight-loss surgery is getting safer across the board:

What really improved safety, experts say, was the introduction, in 1994, of laparoscopic procedures into weight-loss surgery. Using lasers and cameras, surgeons make a few small incisions and perform procedures without cutting a person's belly.

Between 1998 and 2004, the death rate of patients undergoing obesity surgery dropped 80 percent, according to a 2006 report by William Encinosa of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Md. -- probably due to simpler surgery.

Maybe someday surgery will be as common for people tired of being overweight as Lasik is for people who're tired of wearing glasses. If it's truly as safe as it now seems, it's hard to argue against it.

Use it ... and lose it anyway

I spent the weekend watching my older daughter skate. She probably skated four hours on a friend's frozen pond on Saturday, and then another three hours Sunday at an indoor rink -- she had her regular lesson, then tore around on the ice with friends for another hour and change.

At 50, I'm lucky if I get in three hours of exercise a week, but for her that's just a regular old Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I'm only doing what my body tells me to do -- I'm supposed to slow down with age. This is a process that occurs naturally in every species. It's not just activity levels that downshift. Performance declines as well after about the age of 30, even with elite-level talent and serious conditioning.

A new study sheds some light on why our bodies persist in getting older and slower:

The team from the Howard Hughes Medical School at Yale University School of Medicine compared the skeletal muscle of three-month-old rats and two-year-olds. They found that a process called AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) slowed down in the older animals.

AMPK's role in skeletal muscle is to stimulate the body to burn off fat and to fuel cells, via the production of mitochondria -- cells' power sources. ...

The animals were exposed to a chemicals which stimulates AMPK and were also fed more food, which also stimulates the process. They found that the older rats had lower AMPK activity than the younger animals.

What's funny about this story is that it portrays this loss of muscle function as all-or-nothing:

Dr. Anne McArdle, an ageing specialist at the University of Liverpool, said: "Loss of skeletal muscle mass and function as we age is a major problem which has a significant effect on quality of life of older people." ...

But she added: "The data suggest that the ability to increase AMPK activity is completely abolished and so there is little evidence to suggest that 'working harder' would overcome these deficiencies."

There's still a pretty big gulf between "doing nothing" and "working harder." No one walking around with a 70-year-old body thinks he just needs to work a little harder to make his body perform like a 20-year-old's. But there's plenty you can do that falls in between the extremes. Some exercise is always better than none, and exercise in combination with a good diet will do wonders to delay the inevitable -- to slow the slowdown.

So what'll you bet the next time we see the acronym "AMPK" in a news story, it'll be about a drug company that's invented a product to increase AMPK activity in older people? "It's Viagra for your muscles!"

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2007

One in 150

According to this, 1 out of every 150 children and young adults in this country has some form of autism. The previous set-your-hair-on-fire estimate was 1 in 166. This new estimate means there are likely to be 560,000 autistic people in America, 50,000 more than was previously suspected.

Why so many? Pick your favorite:

[T]he study does not answer whether autism has recently been on the rise -- a controversial topic, driven in part by the contention of some parents and advocates that it is linked to a vaccine preservative. The best scientific studies have not borne out that claim. ...

Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at Yale University, said the educational records researchers relied on in some states may be misleading. Sometimes, if a child has problems that seem like autism, parents will push for an autism label to get additional educational services, he said. ...

The study was not an effort to find the cause of autism, still a point of debate. While many advocacy groups blame the vaccine preservative thimerosal, scientists are putting more focus on possible genetic causes, according to a recent Stanford University study.

If you're wondering whether or not you fall into the autistic spectrum, you can take this test from Wired magazine, circa 2001. (I scored a 31, just below the threshold score of 32.) And if you've never read Wired's groundbreaking autism story, "The Geek Syndrome," by Steve Silberman, I highly recommend it.

(Thanks to Rob Duffield for the heads-up on the news story, and to Tina B. for the link to the test.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2007

Monday Link Dump

Kevin Drum asks if Roger Federer is the greatest tennis player in the universe.

I have a humbler suggestion: Tiger Woods is the best athlete in America right now.

It seems odd to talk about tennis and golf during Super Bowl Week, but really, does anyone dominate any sport the way these two dominate theirs?

The tooth is out there

Straight teeth don't make you any happier, according to this:

A 20-year study found that orthodontic treatment had little positive impact on future psychological health.

But what about future earnings? You can't tell me that having messed-up teeth won't affect your career path. Just try getting on TV without perfectly straight and glow-in-the-dark-white teeth.

Acceptance

I've never once seen an episode of House, but now, thanks to the vagaries of channel-surfing, I've seen Hugh Laurie accept two major awards -- the Golden Globe and one from the Screen Actors Guild.

Speaking of acting awards:

Forest Whitaker is considered the frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar. As it happens, over the weekend, I saw much of Platoon on cable. He only had a minor role, but you always notice him when he's on screen.

By contrast, he shared several scenes in Platoon with Johnny Depp. But if you didn't know it was Depp, you'd never pay any attention to that character. He's just a guy in the background. Whitaker had a different kind of presence, even then. Even when he's in the background, you notice him.

I can't quantify this is any way -- writing about movies is pretty far from my paying gig -- but I think I can remember more minor roles by Whitaker than by just about any other actor.

The bit he did in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as the force-of-nature football player, was just a cartoon, like a purely physical version of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli (interesting that neither actor ever played similar characters again), but in The Color of Money and The Crying Game, I remembered his scenes more clearly than I did just about anything else in the movie.

And who says there aren't any good roles for overweight black men with weird eyes?

The big picture

In this massive essay in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, argues that nutrition science misses the forest for the trees.

I can't argue with his point that eating real food is better than eating anything "enriched" or "fortified." I made the case for "clean eating" in New Rules of Lifting, although I suspect I'm more enthusiastic about protein supplements than Pollan is.

Right on cue, I found a news report this morning that bolsters Pollan's argument that we spend far too much time looking at the bits and pieces of nutrition, instead of the big picture:

Children who eat too little fat can end up overweight, a new study has found. Researchers in Sweden discovered that eating the right sort of fat kept the weight of children down.

Those who were significantly overweight consumed low amounts of unsaturated fat, the type found in fish, olive oil and vegetables.

Another point that could be made is that these bitsy-piecey studies do all tend to point to the same place -- eat more fruits, vegetables, and other whole foods, and skip anything that comes in a box.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:22 AM | Comments (2)

January 15, 2007

Monday Blog Meat

If it's Monday, that means there's a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it's Martin Luther King day. Next month it'll be Presidents' Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut.

I'm not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids' Christmas vacation.

I don't say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It's just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and all their great achievements.

Then, in November, we use that holiday for a National Day of Voting. Call it Democracy Day, perhaps. In even-numbered years, the adults vote for congressmen, governors, and the occasional president. In odd-numbered years, the children vote in non-binding polls on the things they'd like their country to do. The point is that everyone celebrates the great individuals of our country's history on a single day in February, and then in November everyone practices what those great Americans gave us: democracy.

Anyway, my point is that the kids are home from school today, I'm on deadline, and I have to travel later this week. So today's blog is a link dump, without a unifying theme.

Downward-facing devil

When Rannoch Donald sent along the link to this story, his only comment was, "I'm not sure what to make of it."

A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.'s Cariboo region. They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn't be taught in public schools.

Chelsea Brears, who has two children in the school system, said her son was asked to do different poses and "to put his hands together." Brears, a Christian, said she doesn't want her children exposed to another religion during class time.

"It's not fair to take prayer out, and yet they're allowing yoga, which is religion, in our schools."

Local rancher Audrey Cummings doesn't believe Christian children should be doing yoga at all. "There's God and there's the devil, and the devil's not a gentleman. If you give him any kind of an opening, he will take that."

This is a new one on me. I guess there's a line of thought in contemporary fundamentalist Christianity that insists every idea not mentioned in the Bible is a competing belief system. Evolution isn't discussed in the Bible, so it must be a competing religion. Jesus and the Apostles didn't practice yoga, so it must be a competing religion.

It reminds me of the Harry Potter flap, with Christians arguing the books are an endorsement of paganism and witchcraft ... which of course are competing belief systems.

Personally, I think the Potter books are profoundly moral. There's good and there's evil. Harry, at various points, is tempted with worldly riches and social position, but shows no interest in either. He spends most of his time either being a kid or saving the world.

Granted, there's no God in Harry's world, even though they celebrate Christmas. The magic is controlled by mortal beings. In that sense, it's like Star Wars. There's The Force, and some are better at using it than others. But there's no God or gods who can save the mortals from their own dilemmas.

What all that has to do with yoga, though, is beyond me.

Eat a steak, save your brain

According to this, low levels of LDL -- the "bad" cholesterol -- are linked to Parkinson's, a secondary symptom of which is dementia. That's right: Low levels of cholesterol are linked to a debilitating disease.

Another way to prevent dementia -- learn a foreign language:

Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn't, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Previous studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as physical activity, social involvement and education may improve overall brain health. Bilingualism may help the brain build what is called a cognitive reserve, which may provide protection against the onset of dementia, the Canadian researchers said.

"There are no pharmacological interventions that are this dramatic," Morris Freedman, director of the Memory Clinic at Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto, said in a statement today.

The difference in dementia onset remained even after the researchers factored in the possible influence of culture, immigration, formal education, employment and gender on the results, the study said.

Since I only speak one language, I sure hope those cholesterol-raising steaks are enough to protect me.

The height of fashion

I've been reading more and more about height the past few years -- and blogging about it from time to time -- so it's no surprise the L.A. Times would devote a major health feature to the topic, including this:

Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn't exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.

"There's still a widespread perception that male success is measured in stature," says Dalton C. Conley, chairman of the sociology department at New York University. "But in terms of total income, earnings and occupational outcomes, the male height issue is really a red herring."

Other widely held notions about short people do hold up. Based on history, there can be no doubt that Americans like their presidents tall. And on the dating scene, women go for taller men. When it comes to romance, height is often a deal-breaker.

What I didn't know is that some parents are giving normal, healthy kids drugs to make them taller:

Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller -- but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.

The added height comes at a cost of $52,634 per gained inch, according to a study in the March 2006 issue of the same journal. About 410,000 U.S. children qualify under the FDA guidelines. If they were all treated with growth hormone, the total healthcare cost would be more than $8 billion a year, wrote Dr. Leona Cuttler, pediatric endocrinologist at Rainbow Babies and Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, in a February 2004 editorial in the journal.

I look at that as a parent who gives one of his children powerful stimulant medication to help him function normally. Nobody who saw our son in school before he started taking the meds doubted that he needed them. We waited as long as we could before starting the treatment. It's helped him in profound ways, but we still struggle with issues the drugs can't treat. That's fine; it's the deal you accept when you decide to become parents.

But to take those kind of risks with children just because they're short? And to spend that kind of money to make it happen? Holy cow.

That said, I do understand that it's kind of disappointing to realize your kids aren't going to be tall. My wife and I are dead-solid-average for American adults -- I'm 5-10, she's 5-4. I'm two inches shorter than my dad, and she's about the same height as her mother.* Both of us have taller siblings, which gave us hope that our kids would be taller than us. Our son may end up being taller than me -- he's about average for his age right now, but started out above average and may end up there again -- but both of our daughters remain stubbornly short for their ages.

Our siblings' children are mostly taller than them, so in that sense we wonder what the hell we did wrong. Two of our kids figure to be smarter than us, and the third is stronger and faster and more athletic than either of us even dreamed of being when we were that age. So why did they get the short end of the stick?

I have no idea how to answer my own question, but it would never in a million years occur to us to try to change that genetic roll of the dice with powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. I hate to judge other parents' decisions, but this is a tough one to understand.

* Actually, she's the same height as her 65-year-old mother now. Her mother was actually 5-6 for most of her adult life, two inches taller than my wife. So each of us is two inches shorter than our same-sex parent, which is bad enough. But now our daughters may end up even shorter than my wife. Where's regression to the mean when you really need it?

UPDATE: Water, water everywhere, but don't let any of it out unless you want to lose the contest

Craig Ballantyne wondered how I could possibly miss this story about a 28-year-old woman who died after a water-drinking contest she'd entered for the chance to win a video-game system for her three kids.

I didn't actually miss the story; I just found it too damned depressing to write about on a Monday morning.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2006

Off the Meds

The L.A. Times has a feature this morning on teens and young adults with ADD who choose to stop taking medications to treat the condition.

The story itself is kind of odd; the reporter seems to work a bit too hard to hit on the controversy, and imply that medication is forced too easily on kids today. I think that's an increasingly difficult case to prosecute. Deciding to medicate your kids isn't easy; it's the most wrenching choice my wife and I have had to make so far, and continue to make. I don't doubt that some parents out there were too quick to jump at the pharmaceutical solution, but I also see parents who refuse to acknowledge that their children are troubled and in need of some kind of help.

To me, it comes down to this: Is your child the person she wants to be? Is she happy? Does she have some control over her actions and emotions? When things go to shit, does she remember what she did or said, and why?

The myth is that the drugs are about the parents and teachers wanting conformity and control, about pounding square pegs into round holes. But the reality -- or, I should say, my family's reality, and the reality of families we know in similar situations -- is that the kids deserve a chance to make normal progress through life. You can't convince me that a kid who's unable to sit still has made a reasoned and deliberate decision that he's happier with his hyperactivity than he would be with an alternative. You can't convince me that, given a choice, most of these children would prefer to be disruptive and the constant focus of negative attention.

Another myth is that the meds exist to make kids what they aren't, to change their personalities or short-circuit their creative and nonconformist impulses. I call bullshit on that one. It's like saying that giving a kid glasses is denying him the chance to be his true, myopic self. You're simply giving him a chance to see what the human eye is supposed to be able to see.

Stimulant medications work the same way. It's like repairing a broken fan belt on a car engine. Nobody would argue that the car operates better without the fan belt. Similarly, the brain with ADD has a glitch that medications can help alleviate.

Are they the only solution? No, of course not. That's where the comparison to car engines isn't particularly helpful. With or without drugs, kids and adults with ADD have to learn to navigate situations that are simple and straightforward for neurotypical people. Like I said, the medications don't change anyone's personality. If you're the type of person who naturally blurts out the first thing that pops into your head, no matter how odd or off-putting or inappropriate, the meds don't change that instinct. They just make it easier to manage. So a little voice in your head might stop you from saying the crazy thing that would offend or insult or just bewilder the person with whom you're chatting. But the meds don't tell you what to say instead. You still have to figure that out. Trust me: The challenge never goes away.

The best part of the Times article is the sidebar, in which four young adults with ADD tell before-and-after stories -- what life was like with meds and without them. Two chose to go back to using stimulants, and two didn't.

I think all four help me make my point about happiness and personal satisfaction being the real issues. Two of the people interviewed seem to have those qualities without medicine, but two of them found they needed the drugs to be the people they wanted to be.

Once you get past the myths and politics and accusations, that's really what matters. The bottom line is simple, even if the decisions are anything but.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:15 AM | Comments (2)

December 17, 2006

Scrooge on the Couch

A year ago, I wrote about two characters from A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim. I linked to a story about the possible root of Tiny Tim's illness, which included the possibility that it was rickets, a deficiency of vitamin D. If that had been the case, the thick, sunlight-blocking cloud of industrial pollution covering 19th-century London would've made the disease nearly impossible to cure.

Here's what I wrote:

So Tim may still have been a goner, even with the best medical care of that era.

One possible solution -- and this is just off the top of my bald head, with no particular insight into 19th century medicine -- is that if Scrooge had somehow arranged to send Tim out to the countryside for treatment, he might've gotten somewhat better with exposure to sunlight, a better diet (with perhaps more protein), and regular exercise (to help strengthen his growing muscles and bones).

Again, that's just a guess.

And it wasn't a bad guess, if I do say so myself. Here's Lisa Sanders, M.D., writing in today's New York Times Magazine:

In A Christmas Carol, much attention has been paid to Tiny Tim. What did he have that could cripple him, that could kill him, but that could be treated at a time when very few effective therapies were available? The two theories most discussed postulate that he had tuberculosis or a deficiency of vitamin D. Either would have responded to the most likely treatment of the day -- a visit to a sanatorium.

Assuming that sanitorium would have been outside the city, where's there's more sunshine and cleaner air ... well, give me props: That's a pretty good guess for a guy who wasn't even accepted into his high school's advanced biology class.

But the really interesting aspect of Dr. Sanders' story is the new diagnosis of Scrooge. I didn't know before reading her story that Charles Dickens is well-known among modern doctors for describing diseases and conditions long before they were diagnosed. She gives example of an obese man with sleep apnea in The Pickwick Papers, and of a shop owner with dyslexia in Bleak House.

Which breaks her to Scrooge. What did he have? A year ago, I guessed that he had a type of high-functioning autism, which, combined with an abusive upbringing, left him without empathy for his fellow humans. But Dr. Sanders' nephew, neurologist Chance Algar, M.D., thinks Dickens could've been describing something much more interesting:

This was dementia, he told me, but not the most common forms -- not Alzheimer’s or a dementia caused by multiple small strokes. No, this was a recently described variety known as Lewy body dementia.

Symptomatically, this disease lies at the intersection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and was first fully recognized in 1996. Although I saw Scrooge as a man without any medical problems, Chance explained, I had missed some subtle clues in Dickens’s description. The words used to portray Scrooge might apply to many with Parkinson’s disease: expressionless, rigid, nearly immobile. Dickens writes, “The cold within him froze his old features ... and stiffened his gait.” He also has a tremor, a symptom common in Parkinson’s as well as in this strange dementia.

But the hallmark of Lewy body disease is the real clincher in this diagnosis: vivid and detailed hallucinations featuring friends and relatives are common. And like Scrooge’s visions, these phantasms are distressing, often terrifying. Finally, in Lewy body dementia, hallucinations occur early in the disease, frequently before the cognitive deficits are apparent.

Alas, there was no 19th-century sanitorium in which Scrooge might've recovered from this illness.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2006

Brain Drain

The human brain is what drove a relatively hairless and defenseless mammal with a singular advantage -- opposable thumbs -- to the top of the food chain. Our brains transformed us from four-cylinder foragers to ... well, let's hear it from the master:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!"*

The organ that turned half-assed apes into full-assed homo sapiens uses 20 percent of an adult's daily energy, and 50 percent of a child's. That's right: Half of their daily calories are consumed by their rapidly developing brains. By comparison, a monkey brain might use just 8 percent of its total energy, proof that it doesn't take a lot of cognitive power to throw your own feces at whatever you find annoying.

You'd think that such a magnificent energy-sucking machine as a human brain would function best with plenty of energy to suck. But according to this, in the New York Times Magazine, the opposite is true:

The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better -- basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

A team led by Tamas Horvath, chairman of Yale’s comparative medicine program, had been analyzing the pathways followed in mouse brains by ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach lining, when the stomach is empty. To the scientists’ surprise, they found that ghrelin was binding to cells not just in the primitive part of the brain that registers hunger (the hypothalamus) but also in the region that plays a role in learning, memory and spatial analysis (the hippocampus). ...

The finding was startling, but “it makes sense,” Horvath says. “When you are hungry, you need to focus your entire system on finding food in the environment.” In fact, some biologists believe that human intelligence itself evolved because it made early hominids more effective hunters, gatherers and foragers.

The final line of the short piece, though, puzzles me:

Since overweight kids have suppressed ghrelin levels, Horvath theorizes that perhaps the obesity epidemic has contributed to declining test scores and other American educational woes.

If that's true, then wouldn't we create smarter kids by denying them breakfast? Obviously, we wouldn't; and we shouldn't. This study, for example, shows that Spanish schoolchildren who ate the most food for breakfast (at least 20 percent of their total daily calories) had the best performance on the "reasoning" portion of their standardized tests.

I'm just guessing here, but I assume that a standardized test would be taken in the morning. Logically, would the researchers look at the relationship between breakfast and cognitive performance if the test were taken after lunch?

So here we have at least one link between food eaten (we have to assume) shortly before a test and performance on that test.

I understand that Dr. Horvath is talking about learning, and a standardized test would measure what one has learned. So it could be that the two things aren't related -- maybe the brain learns better when the gas tank is empty, but regurgitates information better when it's full.

Then again, the breakfast clubbers in the Spanish study did better on the "reasoning" portion of the test, which would seem to indicate that a full stomach didn't help them dredge up facts or calculate figures. But it also doesn't seem to have hurt them do those things; the researchers didn't mention any differences in those areas of performance between subjects who ate big breakfasts and those who ate little or nothing in the morning.

And yet ... well, maybe there is something to the idea that a starving brain is a better brain. I was clicking around PubMed, looking for studies linking nutrition to cognitive performance, when I found this one.

The study looks at thyroid function, rather than nutrition. But thyroid hormones are linked to food. If you starve yourself, the hormones drop, slowing down your metabolism to keep your body from burning through too much of its energy reserves before you can find something to eat. Hypothyroidism is a condition in which your thyroid hormones are chronically depressed, which has the big negative effect of making people gain weight no matter how little they eat.

But in the study I mentioned, published earlier this year, young teenagers with low thyroid functioning scored better on standardized tests of reading and "block design" (I assume that's a measure of three-dimensional spatial relationships) than those with normal or elevated thyroid function.

So, what the hell, maybe starving your kids might make them smarter. I don't recommend it, and I'm not going to test the theory on my own kids. But you never know.

* Huge digression, having nothing to do with hunger and brain function:

Shakespeare has Hamlet say the lines I quoted while describing his deep and seemingly inexplicable depression to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

The line preceding this is more harsh than anything Al Gore says in An Inconvenient Truth: "This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire -- why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."

Whenever I feel good for having written what strikes me as a clever line, I remind myself that I've never put together any string of words as memorable and vivid as "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors."

But it's not just the words, it's the context. It would be one thing if Shakespeare were making fun of a political speech by the Elizabethen equivalent of some asspipe like Rick Santorum or Bill Frist.

Instead, he was describing the joyless void within the mind of someone who's clinically depressed. I've had my blue moments, but I've never been that deep into the funk, and this snippet of Hamlet, written more than 400 years ago, still gives us insight into what it must feel like when your mind goes from blue to pitch-black.

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:23 AM | Comments (1)

December 06, 2006

Wednesday Weirdness

A bunch of stuff that defies categorization:

Parental guidance

Andy Scharlott sent this one along from The Smoking Gun, calling attention to the age of the child and his mother:

A South Carolina boy, 12, was arrested Sunday morning after his mother called police to report that he had unwrapped a Christmas present without her permission. According to a Rock Hill Police Department report [a copy of which you'll find if you click the link above], the child opened a Nintendo Game Boy, though he had been directed not to by family members. When the boy's mother learned that the $85 gift had been opened, she called cops, who charged the juvenile with petty larceny. In an interview with The Herald newspaper, the boy's mother, a 27-year-old single parent, described her son as a disruptive child, noting that she hoped his arrest would serve as a corrective to disorderly behavior at school and home.

I guess she's the last parent in America who hasn't heard of Ritalin ... for herself, if not for her son.

Another contender for worst parent of the year:

For nearly 20 years -- ever since Pete Costello was 8 -- his mother has collected disability benefits on his behalf. In meetings with Social Security officials and psychologists, he appeared mentally retarded and unable to communicate. His mother insisted he couldn't read or write, shower, take care of himself or drive a car.

But now prosecutors said it was all a huge fraud, and they have video of Costello contesting a traffic ticket to prove it. "He's like any other person trying to get out of a traffic ticket," Assistant U.S. Attorney Norman Barbosa said Tuesday. ...

The indictment accuses Costello of faking -- or at least exaggerating -- retardation since August 1997, because that is what prosecutors are confident they can prove, Barbosa said. But the pair first received benefits 10 years before that. The benefits cited in the indictment totaled $111,000.

You know, I have to think that a guy who spends 20 years pretending to be mentally challenged, and then drops his act to contest a traffic ticket while being videotaped, can't be all that bright. At the very least, give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him "certifiably stupid." If that's not an official diagnosis in the DSM IV, it ought to be.

(Thanks to Rannoch Donald for the heads-up.)

You know what they say about idle hands ...

My wife likes to build my self-esteem by sending me stories like this one, about husbands who're demonstrably worse than me:

A man who pleaded guilty to molesting two girls told a judge he did it because of his wife's excessive bingo playing. "My wife was never home," Floyd Kinney Jr. said during his plea hearing Friday.

Kinney's explanation did not sit well with Northampton County Judge F.P. Kimberly McFadden. "Some people, when their wives are not home, decide to do other things, like clean their living rooms," McFadden said. "Your behavior is beyond the pale."

Spamalotmore

It's not your imagination -- there really is twice as much spam as there was a year ago:

Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

I like Kevin Drum's comment:

The internet is arguably the apex of human technological development, the most complex and paradigm-changing invention so far in the history of homo sapiens. And what do we mostly use it for? Porn, Justin Timberlake downloads, and penny stock scams. Makes you proud, doesn't it?

In totally unrelated financial news, the rich are getting richer:

Two percent of adults have more than half of the world's wealth, including property and financial assets, according to a study by the U.N. development research institute published on Tuesday.

While global income is distributed unequally, the spread of wealth is even more skewed, the study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the U.N. University said.

"Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and high income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90 percent of total world wealth," the survey showed. ...

"We've estimated that the richest 2 percent of adults own more than half of global wealth, while the bottom half own 1 percent," said institute director Anthony Shorrocks.

He likened the situation to that where, in a group of 10 people, one person has $99, while the remaining nine share $1.

The cutoff for inclusion in the top 1 percent: net assets of at least $1 million, as of 2000. (I assume it's higher now, but the people who had a million six years ago probably have added whatever wealth it takes to stay in the top percentile.) But this should make you feel better: If you have assets of just $2,200, you're in the top 50 percent of the wealth distribution.

(Thanks again to Andy Scharlott for this one.)

Smells like terrorism

On the bright side, at least she didn't ask anyone to pull her finger:

Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority. ...

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal body odor, Lowrance said. The woman lives near Dallas and has a medical condition.

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane. "American has banned her for a long time," Lowrance said.

(Thanks again to Rannoch, who also gets the hat tip for the next one.)

Beyond Gruntgate

Yes, there's another health-club controversy, and this time it has nothing to do with grunting:

Fitness USA, a gym chain, is investigating an alleged civil rights violation involving a local Muslim woman who says her afternoon prayer was interrupted by a fellow patron, and that her complaint to management about the situation was rejected.

"The manager told me, 'You have to respect her (the patron), but she does not have to respect your God,'" said Wardeh Sultan of Dearborn. "I've had my membership for seven or eight years, and I've never had a problem with praying there.

"I told that manager, 'I can't believe you said that'" Sultan said. "Honestly, I feel humiliated and I feel ashamed, right now, to go back to Fitness USA."

I can't understand or justify the motives of whoever interrupted her prayers, but still ... have you ever seen anyone praying in a gym? I've belonged to health clubs almost continuously since 1980, and that's a new one on me.

Speaking of Gruntgate: My friend Nick Bromberg quoted me in this story for the Columbia Missourian.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2006

Monday Math

A handful of fun and interesting stories to check out this morning:

TV + exercise = weight loss.

A schizophrenia drug + a blood-pressure drug = an ejaculation-preventing contraceptive pill for men.

Slow reaction times + poorly functioning memory = heart attacks.

Making more money may or may not = more happiness. (And check out this New York Times story on how the really rich are separating themselves from the merely successful and affluent. Is anyone happier because he's making millions instead of hundreds of thousands?)

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:51 AM | Comments (1)

November 22, 2006

Pick Your Parents Well

I love health stories where the bottom line is that you can't do a damned thing to act on the information.

Consider:

Firstborn children of women younger than 25 are nearly twice as likely to defy the average life span and go on to live beyond 100, according to a new study.

Leonid A. Gavrilov and his colleagues at the University of Chicago's Center for Aging have relied on a wealth of Internet data -- including genealogy websites and federal death indexes -- to figure out why so many firstborns seem to outpace their younger siblings in the longevity race.

Although there is no clear answer yet, scientists believe the phenomenon may be related to the physical youthfulness of young mothers and the eggs they produce. ...

Besides the youthfulness of the eggs, another theory, still unexplored, is that younger women haven't been exposed to as many viruses and diseases as older women, which in turn makes for a healthier uterine environment.

So I'm screwed, because I was the third child, born when my mother was 30. All three of my children are screwed, because my wife was 33, 36, and 38 when they were born. Not a single one of 'em enjoyed that "healthier uterine environment."

But then there's this:

People from broken homes may be more prone to psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia, research suggests. Researchers said their findings suggest the illnesses are not simply brain diseases, but linked to factors such as social adversity. ...

[T]hey found that separation from one or both parents for more than a year before the age of 16, as a consequence of family breakdown, was associated with a 2.5 fold increased risk of developing psychosis in adulthood.

Which raises this question: Aren't women who marry and have children at the youngest ages the most likely to get divorced, and thus raise the risk of psychosis in their children?

According to this (which is from the very conservative Focus on the Family, so it may not be entirely trustworthy), a handful of factors are consistently shown to contribute to marital longevity. Among them:

* higher family income (over $50,000)

* being older than 25 when you get married

* having some college education

All three of those -- especially the obvious one in the middle -- would mitigate against the success of a marriage in which children were born before the mother turned 25. So that "healthier uterine environment" comes with the baggage of a greater chance that the child will be raised by a single parent and/or as part of a stepfamily -- and, thus, have a greater chance of serious mental illness.

Isn't that just great to know, especially the day before the ultimate family holiday?

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2006

The Whole Package

A chain of grocery stores in New England has decided to start calling out allegedly "healthy" foods on their true health-promoting qualities. I don't think the results are much of a surprise:

The chain, Hannaford Brothers, developed a system called Guiding Stars that rated the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you.

These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar). Whole milk? Too much fat -- no stars. Predictably, most fruits and vegetables did earn three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal.

My eyes kind of glazed over as I was reading the story in the New York Times this morning. Sure, warning consumers about added salt and sugar is perfectly fine, but something tells me that parents who feed their kids yogurt or Healthy Choice soups aren't the ones responsible for this:

American children and teens are growing ever-fatter tummies, a bad sign that means they are at even more risk of heart disease and diabetes, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

They found that the belly fat of children and teenagers had increased by more than 65 percent since the 1990s -- directly in line with rising obesity rates.

The study measured waist circumference, and the researchers determined that the growth in American waistlines is a sign of increased visceral fat, the type that accumulates around internal organs, beneath the abdominal muscles, as opposed to the squishy subcutaneous fat that grows between the muscles and skin.

This is a small quibble -- and it's really more of a question -- but how do we know that a waist-size measurement is an indicator of increased visceral fat? Lots of kids these days look to me as if they're carrying extra fat all over. If their bellies are bigger, is it because they have more visceral fat, or because they're just accumulating more subcutaneous fat from too many calories and not enough exercise?

But, realistically, it's probably a combination, and the researchers are right to raise the alarm.

Still, I've been giving these nutrition questions a lot of thought lately -- call it the Halloween effect. There's so much candy these days, so many treats, and at the same time so little chance for the kids to go out and run around and burn off the excess energy they're ingesting that it's no surprise they're getting fatter.

And that brings me back to the grocery chain trying to help its customers decide what's healthy and not. Given the inevitability of excess calories, is there any way to minimize the damage those calories cause?

Last week we were talking about resveratrol, but Greg Critser brought up something else this weekend in the L.A. Times, a nutrient that might have an even bigger impact on our health and quality of life. His subject is Alzheimer's, but there are farther-reaching implications:

On the other end of the new research wave are academic entrepreneurs who are asking: Can we find a public health intervention that can slow the growing dementia rates in large populations? To that end, the National Institutes of Health has begun trials on omega-3 oils. But it is California -- and particularly Los Angeles -- that is at the leading edge of such work.

A number of promising experiments are underway, including the work of Greg Cole, a professor of medicine and neurology at UCLA, on the use of curcumin, a spice in curry powder, and its ability to retard dementia-linked changes in Alzheimer's-prone rats. USC has a number of experiments underway as well, many inspired by the pacesetting work of Caleb Finch, arguably the world's leading gerontological thinker.

Caleb Finch has been one of my academic heroes ever since I read a profile of him in a USC alumni magazine a few years ago. He said that, based on everything he knew about aging in general and dementia and Alzheimer's in particular, he thought the ideal dinner included a good steak and red wine. Yes, he thinks red meat is a key to lifelong cognitive health.

My kind of guy!

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2006

Paris Bedlam

It's not just Bill O'Reilly. France really does make people crazy. Some people, anyway:

Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

Already this year, Japan's embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors -- including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

Read the entire thing. My favorite part is the Japanese tourist who thinks he's Louis XIV. Why him? Why not Edith Piaf?

But it raises another question: Why is it Paris that makes some Japanese tourists freak out? A Japanese woman is quoted in the story
as saying that there's too big a disconnect between the image of France as a place of elegant, stylish people and the reality of purse-snatchers and rude shopkeepers.

So why don't they freak out when they visit the U.S.? Are they expecting a place where things like this happen?

(Thanks to Mike Navin for the last link.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 03:01 PM | Comments (1)

Veggie Tales

This isn't much of a surprise:

New research on vegetables and aging gives mothers another reason to say "I told you so." It found that eating vegetables appears to help keep the brain young and may slow the mental decline sometimes associated with growing old.

On measures of mental sharpness, older people who ate more than two servings of vegetables daily appeared about five years younger at the end of the six-year study than those who ate few or no vegetables.

Green leafy vegetables including spinach, kale and collards appeared to be the most beneficial. The researchers said that may be because they contain healthy amounts of vitamin E, an antioxidant that is believed to help fight chemicals produced by the body that can damage cells.

But this part caught my attention:

Vegetables generally contain more vitamin E than fruits, which were not linked with slowed mental decline in the study. Vegetables also are often eaten with healthy fats such as salad oils, which help the body absorb vitamin E and other antioxidants, said lead author Martha Clare Morris, a researcher at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center.

The fats from healthy oils can help keep cholesterol low and arteries clear, which both contribute to brain health.

One big, open question: Can any of these benefits be achieved with supplements? That is, would supplements of, say, vitamin E and fish oil slow down mental decline as well as vegetables and salads?

Normally, I think most of us would assume that there's something about whole foods that offers benefits beyond what you'd get from supplements. But if whole fruits didn't provide the same benefit as whole vegetables, and the vitamin E and healthy fats in the greens and salad dressings is thought to make the difference, maybe supplements would make a difference.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2006

This Diagnosis Is Totally Schizo

There's a long list of once-popular medical terms that are no longer used. Just for starters, you have apoplexy (stroke), consumption (tuberculosis), la grippe (flu), and French pox (venereal disease).

Some now want to add schizophrenia to the roster:

Schizophrenia represents a complex mental health disorder. Symptoms vary from person to person, but include delusions, hallucinations and disordered perceptions of reality. It is estimated that one in 100 people will develop schizophrenia at some point in their lifetime.

But experts, speaking on the eve of World Mental Health Day, are calling for the term to be scrapped.

Richard Bentall, professor of experimental clinical psychology, from the University of Manchester, said: "We do not doubt there are people who have distressing experiences such as hearing voices or paranoid fears.

"But the concept of schizophrenia is scientifically meaningless. It groups together a whole range of different problems under one label -- the assumption is that all of these people with all of these different problems have the same brain disease."

Calling so many people "schizophrenic" leads to often inappropriate uses of medication -- it works for some, but not for others, who'd be better off getting psychological services, rather than going straight to pharmacology.

However, there's no agreement on what words to use instead of schizophrenia. In Japan they put the conditions into a catch-all category called "integrative disorder," but it seems to me that's like using "pervasive developmental disorder" instead of "autism." It may be more descriptive, but it doesn't get people's attention. And when you're talking about getting help for a mental illness or permanent condition, you have to get someone's attention first:

Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at the Institute Of Psychiatry, said: "We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water, as despite its limitations, a diagnosis can help people access much needed services.

"What all of us have to remember is that these are people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, not 'the schizophrenic'."

Here's something I didn't know until a few years ago: Remember the movie A Beautiful Mind, in which math genius John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) nearly derails his career because he sees people who aren't there? His condition is always described as schizophrenia, but a shrink explained to me that schizophrenics don't actually have visual hallucinations. They hear voices and develop extreme paranoia -- I would too, if I started hearing strange people talking inside my head -- but actually seeing things is a different condition. He said it's more likely Nash had a severe form of bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes.

Another clue that he didn't fit the classic diagnosis, the shrink told me, is that schizophrenics tend to deteriorate quickly and die 10 or more years earlier than people without the condition. Nash is still alive at 78, and still doing research at Princeton. If he genuinely suffered from schizophrenia, you'd think he would've succumbed to consumption or la grippe by now.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:16 AM | Comments (1)

October 03, 2006

Tuesday Blog Meat

So many good stories, so little time.

Health tied to wealth

People in poverty have the highest levels of C-reactive protein, which signals inflammation and is a pretty good predictor of heart disease, according to this piece in the New York Times:

About two-thirds of the high levels could be attributed to acute or chronic illness, obesity and lack of exercise. The explanation for the rest was unknown. Dawn E. Alley, the study’s lead author, said, “People in poverty are more susceptible to infection, and because they lack health care and have other social stresses, they are less likely to recover.”

The short article raises more questions than it answers. Are people poor because they suffer poor health -- that is, they descend into poverty because their bodies break down? Are people who're already impoverished more likely to suffer health problems because of their poverty? Or is there a genetic component -- people born into poverty tend to suffer poor health because they're genetically predisposed to poor health?

If it's the last one on the list, it really explains a lot about the intractability of poverty in a wealthy country like ours.

Out of my mind

Another story in today's Times explains out-of-body experiences. Allow me to throw in a plug here for Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach. It has to be the most entertaining book I've ever read that sets out to explain obscure scientific concepts.

Old school

According to this Washington Post story, older antipsychotic drugs are better than the newer, more expensive ones. So now you know what not to get for that schizophrenic on your Christmas shopping list.

Somebody stop me!

Speaking of shopping: According to this, men are almost as likely as women to become addicted to spending. It's just harder to identify the problem in men, since we don't spend our money on shoes.

Another addiction story:

Eating can be a form of addiction for obese people, suggests a new study that used a device to monitor stomach-to-brain signals.

"We found that areas of the brain that received signals were the hippocampus, which is involved in memory and emotion, and also the frontal cortex," said Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, head of the medical department at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. He's also lead author of a report on the findings, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The hippocampus is known to be involved in drug addiction, Wang noted.

"An obese person, even if he becomes lean, still has the signals in the area of the hippocampus, so there is a high likelihood that he will relapse," Wang said.

The idea here seems to be that surgery is the only answer -- remove the stomach, solve the problem.

But this story suggests that there might be a pharmaceutical solution. Looking at a different part of the brain (hypothalamus, vs. hippocampus), the researchers found that by manipulating a chemical called nesfatin-1, they could get rats to eat less and lose weight, or eat more and gain weight.

So whoever can figure out how to replicate that in a pill for humans stands to make tens of billions of dollars. Or, better yet, two pills: one for obese people trying to lose weight, the other for AIDS patients and others suffering from wasting disorders to help them gain weight.

And, keeping it even simpler, maybe there's a set of dietary choices that will make a difference -- maybe protein and fat send different signals than carbohydrates. If any scientist figures that one out, I volunteer to be the coauthor on the million-selling book.

Big men on campus

Finally, Men's Fitness magazine has identified the fittest and least fit colleges in America.

I was amused to see that the University of Missouri-Rolla is on the list of least fit. When I was in college, at the University of Missouri-Columbia, my friends at UMR told me there was nothing to do there but study and drink. The school was best known for its engineering programs, so the ratio of men to women was outrageous. Nice to know things haven't changed in the quarter-century since my days on campus.

(Thanks to Mike Navin for some of these links.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2006

If I'd Known Then ...

If you have a minute, check out this Washington Post story on hindsight bias. The story concerns the Iraq war, but, really, what it says applies to just about everything in life:

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.

So, since baseball is on my mind this morning, let's see how my biases have played out. Here's what I wrote on opening day, way back in April:

[T]he Cards' lineup isn't nearly as good as it's been in past seasons. Albert Pujols is still the best non-juiced hitter of the decade, and Jim Edmonds has that beautiful uppercut stroke that can produce 30-plus home runs even in an off-year. But Scott Rolen, according to reports, had yet to regain his power following a 2005 season ruined by two shoulder surgeries. He didn't hit a single home run in spring training.

I'll stand by that one. I vaguely remember predicting to someone -- probably in an email -- that I thought the Cards would win their division but not get anywhere near 100 victories. But I could be wrong about the specificity of that prediction, displaying my own hindsight bias.

Here's something I wrote half in jest, after noting the double-digit scores in several opening-day games:

[I]f I had to make a prediction based on a day's worth of games, I'd say that baseball fans won't miss the steroids this season.

Considering that Major League Baseball set a new attendance record, I think that one stands up, even if I was joking when I wrote it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2006

Addiction and Fundamentalism

Every time I write about substance abuse, legal or illegal, a little voice in the back of my head reminds me of something an addiction researcher told me once in an interview: About 10 percent of people exposed to any given substance or practice will become addicted to it. That is, whether we're talking about cocaine or Internet pornography, about 10 percent of the people who give it a shot will get hooked.

I assume the numbers will go higher or lower for different intoxicants or obsessions (it's hard to believe that 10 percent of people who exercise will get addicted to it, for example, and I'd think that more than 10 percent of people who try heroin will have a problem), but as an average across all types of things that it's possible to get hooked on, the number probably works pretty well.

The researcher, Ruth Engs, also mentioned religion -- about 10 percent of people exposed to it will develop behaviors that look a lot like addiction.

Here's something I didn't know until I read this: About 20 percent of the members of any given religion will be fundamentalists. And the fundamentalists in any given faith have more in common with each other than they do with moderates within their own belief system:<