Public Health

Scholars have linked higher IQ at early school age to weight gain and increased head size in the first month of a baby's life. The results were determined - as apparently intelligence is - by analyzing data from more than 13,800 children who were born full-term.   The findings in Pediatrics were that babies who put on 40% of their birth weight in the first four weeks had an IQ 1.5 points higher by the time they were six years of age, compared with babies who only put on 15% of their birth weight. Those with the biggest growth in head circumference also had the highest IQs.…

Age of Herbals somewhere  during  1565 in this part of globe saw many medical man searching for medicines for relieving patients of pain.  The surgery  was done without anesthesia.    Plants provided narcotics, sedatives, stimulants. Opium probably provided morphine and some other chemicals of interest. Recently Australian Society of Anaesthetists an exhibition at University of Sydeney, Australia (as reported in Nature vol 496 18th April, 2013). Literature spanning  more than 5 centuries and illustrations document quest to alleviate pain and agony.  …

Deciding who gets a lung transplant - and thereby who doesn’t - is not easy.  Lungs can only be transplanted from people who are organ donors, who are brain dead, and who died in such a way that their organs remain intact.  Problem is, there are not enough people marking the “organ donor” box on their driver’s license to give everyone on the transplant list a chance to live. The current lung allocation system was revamped in 2005 to try and make it more fair.  Previously, your place in line was determined by how long you had been waiting.  That system incentivized people…

The sign pictured above claims that there is a "chemical-free park" in Durango, Colorado.  Durango is a beautiful place, but unless this park is a hologram, it is made of chemicals.  In fact what makes the Durango area so beautiful are the chemicals that make up the mountains, rivers, trees and flowers.  Even the nice smell from the pine trees comes from terpenes.  A chemical. Maybe the makers of the sign meant "synthetic chemical free," but the paint on the sign and any plastic parts of the baby strollers or running shoes that come to the park would be among the many…

If you are a patient in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), try to have surgery on a Monday instead of a Friday, says a paper in the British Medical Journal. The authors analyzed over four million elective procedures conducted in NHS hospitals in England between 2008 and 2011. They found that 27,582 patients died within 30 days of surgery and the mortality rate was lowest for patients having operations on Monday. Mortality increased for each subsequent day of the week. The odds of death were 44 per cent higher for operations on a Friday than a Monday. The risk of dying was…

Men who experience sexual harassment are far more likely than women to induce vomiting and take laxatives and diuretics - purging - in an attempt to control their weight, according to a new psychology paper. The survey was one of the first to examine the effects of sexual harassment on body image and eating behaviors in both women and men, and to learn that men are significantly more likely to engage in purging "compensatory" behaviors at high levels of sexual harassment.  It's no surprise that women self-report more sexual harassment and greater overall weight and shape concerns and…

When I was a lad, I was fascinated by plant classification, enjoying the beds in our school botanic garden laid out according to different plant families.  Flowering plants (angiosperms) appeared to be neatly divided into two groups, monocots and dicots, based on whether their newly germinated seedling had one or two ‘seed leaves’ or cotyledons.  But these days, we have additional information from molecular phylogenetics which has led to the APG III system (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group III system) of flowering plant classification, which is the third version of a modern, mostly…

 Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is now considered a highly curable disease, thanks to the emergence of powerful, targeted CML therapies known as tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) that allow patients to manage their disease with few symptoms by taking a well-tolerated pill. Since the introduction of TKI therapy more than a decade ago, the annual mortality of patients with this disease has declined from 10 to 20 percent in the early 2000s to just 2 percent today and the estimated 10-year survival of CML patients has increased from 20 percent to more than 80 percent. Patients with CML…

Organic food labeling is almost dizzying. Despite the claims of this $29 billion industry that it is 'organic' and therefore nutritionally and environmentally and medically superior to nasty regular food of the last few centuries, it is really only 95% organic - and the list of dozens of synthetic ingredients that are exempted is truly difficult to fathom. The United States Department of Agriculture says food can't be "organic" if antibiotics were used during its production but the bacterial pathogen known as fire blight got an exception for apple and pear growers and use of the antibiotic…

Why can you not stop eating until you scarf down a whole bag of Doritos?  Is it a special gene? Epigenetics, like your mom ate one when she was pregnant with you, or is Frito-Lay just fiendishly clever? Ban-happy critics blame fat and carbohydrate content but a new study found that was not the case. If it were, we could just add ingredients to unpopular foods like Brussels sprouts and affect the rewards center in the brain positively so people eat more of those.  At the ACS meeting in New Orleans, Tobias Hoch, Ph.D., tackled the causes of a condition (because everything is a…