Clinical Research

UV-B radiation in sunlight is the most important factor for the production of vitamin D, and that is why some people suffer from low levels of vitamin D during the winter months. Many foods contain vitamin D, though not all have enough to make food an adequate supply. Some studies have indicated that low vitamin D levels are related to cardiovascular disease such as high blood pressure, along with other diseases such as diabetes mellitus, autoimmune diseases and even cancer. Vitamin D deficiency leads to stiffening of the blood vessels The two primary authors of a new paper on the subject,…

Type 2 diabetes, which is blamed for over three million deaths each year, is on the increase and various food pundits and politicians say they can cure it if people would just ban trans fats or sodas or whatever they happen to be against this year. And then there is genetics. There are genetic variants that have been associated with it but why wouldn't they have been eliminated by natural selection? Obviously if they had some other value but it has been shown that genetic regions associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes were unlikely to have been beneficial to people at…

Because caffeine is a mild diuretic, there is a common assumption that caffeinated beverages, such as coffee, also have this effect. The problem is that a kernel of scientific knowledge can be misconstrued in news outlets. As we discussed on Thanksgiving, everything in a Thanksgiving dinner contains chemicals found by someone somewhere to be a carcinogen in rats and could therefore be banned if they did not occur naturally.  The dose matters, though telling that to people who insist they are allergic to genetically modified corn is probably a waste of time. Conflating pure caffeine with…

It's well established that as people's waistlines increase, so does the chance for the incidence of type 2 diabetes. Scientists from Denmark have found that in mice, macrophages, a specific type of immune cell, invade the diabetic pancreatic tissue during the early stages of the disease then these inflammatory cells produce a large amount of pro-inflammatory proteins - cytokines - which directly contribute to the elimination of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas, resulting in diabetes.  The scientists compared obese mice that spontaneously developed diabetes to healthy mice.…

A systematic review of 66 research papers focused on the treatment of skin ulcers suggests that most are so technically flawed that their results are unreliable, and even of those that aren't flawed only weak evidence that alternative treatments work better than standard compression therapy or special stockings.  Chronic wounds are a global problem. In addition to obesity and diabetes worldwide, skin ulcers occur as a consequence of neurological problems, rheumatological illnesses, blood vessel inflammation and infection. Non-healing wounds cause not only pain, but also loss of mobility…

Cranky old people might think that mellow crooning is less damaging to the voice than beatboxing, with its harsh, high-energy percussive sounds. Not so, according to a paper in the Journal of Voice.  Beatboxing may be harder on the ears, that is why Michael Bublé gets more downloads than Killa Kela, but it may actually be gentler on vocal cords, which are already injury-prone. His findings were published Dec. 23 online in the Journal of Voice. If you are not familiar with Beatboxing, it is a type of vocal percussion in which performers imitate drum sounds with the voice.…

Determining how proteins misfold to create the tissue-damaging structures that lead to type 2 diabetes is complicated. These amyloid fibrils are also implicated in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and in prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jacob and mad cow disease.    An amyloid fibril is a large structure consisting of misfolded proteins. Such fibrils form plaques, or areas of tissue damage, that researchers can observe with microscopes. Fibrils are believed to arise when proteins deviate from their normal 3D structures and instead adopt misfolded…

A paper in the International Journal of Obesity has found that even weight loss can be discriminatory;  African-American women may need to eat less or exercise more than European-American women to lose the same amount of weight. Some studies have suggested that women of color don't lose as much weight as white women even in response to the same behavioral interventions of calorie restriction or increased physical activity.  "At first, it was thought that perhaps the African-American women didn't adhere as closely to their calorie prescriptions or that the interventions were not…

Each year, someone writes a book scaring people about food and that gets covered in the New York Times and then a whole rash of junk science studies get produced affirming exactly what the book said. This has been  a tradition since the 1960s, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a book of anecdotes and scary claims about how someone she heard of sprayed DDT in her cellar and died, surrounded by science jargon about carcinogens. Most recently, mainstream media is at war with both sugar and wheat but it won't be long before the cycle swings back to artificial sweeteners again. When…

A new technique will significantly decrease pain for children following high-risk urology surgeries, according to a paper in the Journal of Pediatric Urology. The research team evaluated continuous infusion of local anesthesia using the ON-Q pain relief system to improve pain control in children undergoing urological procedures. While the ON-Q system is well-established as an effective pain management technique for adults, this is the first study that evaluates its pain management effectiveness in children. Study results found that the ON-Q pump system decreased the amount of pain experienced…