romeotuma wrote: 

romeo,
Thanks for posting this update...as a microbiologist/molecular biologist, this is stuff I follow...

mk...

Troubled not just at night, insomniacs may be in a "state of hyperarousal" because they don't have an adequate supply of a certain inhibitory neurotransmitter, according to new research...

Insomnia Tied to Lack of Brain Chemical

Who the heck named this thread?  "Other Medical Stuff"?  As in, "Things That Are Not, Cancer, Autism, or Women's Issues, and Don't Neccessarily Make You Go Wow"? 

Edit:  Oh, you named it, HC.    Sorry. 

But still....  

No Mug? Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors

To Lehman Brothers, Linens ’n Things and the blank VHS tape, add another American institution that expired in 2008: drug company trinkets.

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians. But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.

“It’s not just the pens — it’s the paper on the exam table, the tongue depressor, the stethoscope tags, medical calipers that might be used to interpret an EKG, penlights,” said Dr. Robert Goodman, a physician in internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

In 1999, Dr. Goodman started No Free Lunch, a nonprofit group that encourages doctors to reject drug company giveaways. “Practically anything you can put a name on is branded in a doctor’s office, short of branding, like a Nascar driver, on the doctor’s white coat,” Dr. Goodman said.

The new voluntary industry guidelines try to counter the impression that gifts to doctors are intended to unduly influence medicine. The code, drawn up by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group in Washington, bars drug companies from giving doctors branded pens, staplers, flash drives, paperweights, calculators and the like.

The guidelines also reiterate the group’s 2002 code, which prohibited more expensive goods and services like tickets to professional sports games and junkets to resorts. And it asks companies that finance medical courses, conferences or scholarships to leave the selection of study material and scholarship recipients to outside program coordinators.

Diane Bieri, the executive vice president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the updated guidelines were not an admission that gifts could influence doctors’ prescribing habits. Instead, she said, they were meant to emphasize the educational nature of the relationship between industry and doctors.

“We have never said and would never say that a pharmaceutical pen or notebook has influenced any prescription,” Ms. Bieri said.

But some critics said the code did not go far enough to address the influence of drug marketing on the practice of medicine. The guidelines, for example, still permit drug makers to underwrite free lunches for doctors and their staffs or to sponsor dinners for doctors at restaurants, as long as the meals are accompanied by educational presentations.

“Pens or no pens, their influence is not going to be diminished,” said Dr. Larry M. Greenbaum, a rheumatologist in Greenwood, Ind. He has made a point of collecting ballpoint pens advertising formerly heavily promoted medications, like the painkiller Vioxx, that were later withdrawn after reports of dangerous side effects.

Last year, besides giving away nearly $16 billion in free drug samples to doctors, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $6 billion on “detailing” — an industry term for the sales activities of drug representatives including office visits to doctors, meal-time presentations and branded pens and other handouts, according to IMS Health, a health care information company.

The industry code also permits drug makers to pay doctors as consultants “based on fair market value” — which critics say means that companies can continue to pay individual doctors tens of thousands of dollars or more a year.

“We have arrived at a point in the history of medicine in America where doctors have deep, deep financial ties with the drug makers and marketers,” said Allan Coukell, the director of policy for the Prescription Project, a nonprofit group in Boston working to promote evidence-based medicine. “Financial entanglements at all the levels have the potential to influence prescribing in a way that is not good.”

About 40 drug makers, including Eli Lilly & Company, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, have signed on to the code. Representatives of several pharmaceutical makers said their companies intended to comply with the guidelines, but they declined to discuss past marketing programs involving branded gifts.

The restrictions come as a blow to the makers and distributors of promotional products, an industry with an annual turnover of about $19 billion, according to Promotional Products Association International, a trade group. Such companies, accustomed to orders of up to a million pens a drug, stand to lose around $1 billion a year in sales as a result of the drug industry’s voluntary ban, the group said.

The sudden scarcity of free goodies, though, could enhance the cachet of collections that some doctors have assembled over the years as a mocking countermeasure to drug marketing. Dr. Nathan Anderson, a resident in internal medicine at a hospital in Texas, has posted photographs of the various items he has received on his blog, drugreptoys.blogspot.com.

Dr. Jeffrey F. Caren, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, has collected more than 1,200 pens and mounted them on a pillar in his office.

While some doctors applaud the gift ban, others seem offended by the insinuation that a ballpoint pen could turn their heads. “It seems goofy to us; we like getting our pens,” Dr. Susan B. Hurson, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Washington, said in a telephone interview.

Dr. Hurson said she paid no attention to the logos on the pens she carries around in her doctor’s coat.

Prompted by a reporter’s question, she pulled out a handful of pens from her pocket and read off the drugs advertised: Clindesse, a cream for vaginal infection; Halo, a system for detecting breast cancer, and Evamist, an estrogen spray. “It’s hard for me to believe it influences what you prescribe.”

But Dr. Phillip Freeman, a psychiatrist in Boston, said that physicians who contended that the giveaways were benign might be suffering from denial.

“The need to deny influence is damaging to the soul,” Dr. Freeman said. He suggested that doctors would feel less conflicted if they simply wore drug company patches on their white coats.

The year in weird science and myth-busting

Researchers debunk conventional wisdom about poinsettias, sugar and holiday suicides — and note that Coca-Cola can only do so much.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

Contrary to popular belief, poinsettias are not toxic to people or animals, suicides do not increase over the Christmas holidays, and sugar does not make kids hyperactive. Also, Wales winning the rugby grand slam does not influence the death of popes, and douching with Coca-Cola is not an effective contraceptive method.

Those are some of the conclusions of reports in the British Medical Journal's annual Christmas issue, a compilation of the weird and lighthearted papers its editors accumulate over the year. In a related vein, a report in the journal Lancet details the curious case of a woman who fainted every time she ate a sandwich.

The supposed toxicity of poinsettias has been a subject of warnings ever since the red and white flowers have been associated with the Christmas holiday, but numerous reports from poison control centers do not support the warnings, according to Drs. Rachel C. Vreeman and Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine. 

They reviewed nearly 900 calls to such centers reporting poinsettia consumption and found that none of the incidents resulted in serious illness and few produced any symptoms at all. Moreover, experiments with animals show no effects even at very high consumption, they found.

Similarly, researchers reviewed data on suicides in the United States for the last 35 years and found no increase before, during or after the holidays. In fact, despite widespread talk about winter gloom's effects on humans, they found that suicides peak in the summer and are lowest in winter. They conclude that people actually receive additional emotional and social support during the holidays, which decreases suicidal thoughts.

Other common beliefs are also not supported by fact, they said. Studies showed that children who consume large amounts of sugar are no more hyperactive than those who don't. But parents who think their kids have eaten sugar, even when they haven't, tend to rate them as being hyperactive. 

The ill-mannered behavior, the authors wrote, was "all in the parents' minds."

Other myths that have been disproved: Not wearing a hat causes one to lose excessive body heat, and eating at night makes you more likely to pack on the pounds. Also, they found, there is no consistently effective cure for a hangover.

Coca-Cola douches for pregnancy prevention were a part of folklore in the 1950s and 1960s, before the contraceptive pill. People thought that the acidity of the soda would kill sperm and that the classic Coke bottle provided a convenient "shake and shoot" applicator.

Dr. Deborah Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine had previously reported that Coke can impede the mobility of sperm in a test tube. But further study, she said, shows that sperm get to the cervical canal so quickly that postcoital spritzing is ineffective.

For it to work, she wrote, the soda would have to be put in the vagina before sex, "but that would undoubtedly be messy."

(Full story)

 

If I had known that in high school, it would have spared my girlfriend the ludicrous experience of climbing into a laundry room basin with a soda bottle following a broken condom episode!   

 hippiechick wrote: 
Oh, yeah... let's find new ways to justify male genital mutilation. Real smart. The transmission of both of these aforementioned diseases are preventable by the use of condoms.

 romeotuma wrote: 
The trend is to not have your baby boys circumcised, so here is a case for doing so.

Male circumcision lowers cervical cancer risk: study

---

By Maggie Fox, Health
and Science EditorPosted 2008/12/17 at 4:41 pm EST

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2008 (Reuters) — Three studies published on Wednesday add to evidence that circumcision can protect men from the deadly AIDS virus and the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

The reports in the Journal of Infectious Diseases are likely to add to the debate over whether men — and newborn boys — should be circumcised to protect their health and perhaps the health of their future sexual partners.

Dr. Bertran Auvert of the University of Versailles in France and colleagues in South Africa tested more than 1,200 men visiting a clinic in South Africa,

They found under 15 percent of the circumcised men and 22 percent of the uncircumcised men were infected with the human papilloma virus, or HPV, which is the main cause of cervical cancer and genital warts.

"This finding explains why women with circumcised partners are at a lower risk of cervical cancer than other women," they wrote in their report.

A second paper looking at U.S. men had less clear-cut results, but Carrie Nielson of Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues said they found some indication that circumcision might protect men.

The circumcised men were about half as likely to have HPV as uncircumcised men, after adjustment for other differences between the two groups.

PREVENTING AIDS

In the third report, Lee Warner of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and colleagues tested African-American men in Baltimore and found 10 percent of those at high risk of infection with HIV who were circumcised had the virus, compared to 22 percent of those who were not.

"Circumcision was associated with substantially reduced HIV risk in patients with known HIV exposure, suggesting that results of other studies demonstrating reduced HIV risk for circumcision among heterosexual men likely can be generalized to the U.S. context," they wrote.

Studies supporting circumcision to reduce HIV transmission had all been done in Africa and U.S. studies were less clear.

Dr. Ronald Gray of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues said they found the reports encouraging.

"In the United States, circumcision is less common among African American and Hispanic men, who are also the subgroups most at risk of HIV," they wrote in a commentary.

"Thus, circumcision may afford an additional means of protection from HIV in these at-risk minorities."

But they noted that the American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend routine circumcision for newborns.

"As a consequence of this AAP decision, Medicaid does not cover circumcision costs, and this is particularly disadvantageous for poorer African American and Hispanic boys who, as adults, may face high HIV exposure risk," Gray and colleagues wrote.

"It is also noteworthy that circumcision rates have been declining in the U.S., possibly because of lack of Medicaid coverage."

Medicaid is the state-federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled.

Thirty-three million people globally are infected with AIDS, which has no cure and no vaccine. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the world, with 20 million people in the United States infected. It causes cervical cancer, which kills 300,000 women globally every year.

The Virtues Of Going Barefoot...

As we age, or gross motor (GM) coordination tends to decline, which leads to decreased mobility, a loss of balance, and a risk of falling...  one cause of this is wearing shoes, because over time, the identical sensation from our shoes dulls the sensory input from our feet...  shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brains...

if we go barefoot, our brains will receive many different kinds of input as we walk over uneven surfaces...  shoes are a flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are artificial and flat...  this leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control...

people may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady themselves, and by resorting to these compensations instead of exercising the sensory input abilities of people's bare feet, they hasten their decline...

for example, as people age, they tend to look down while walking, because they are not getting much information from the stunted sensory tools in their feet...  this sensory compensation with vision causes even more decline in sensory input from sheathed feet...  go barefoot when you can, people...  feel your way with your bare feet, because this will develop the sensory map for each foot, instead of letting it waste away... 

 romeotuma wrote:
Seems I heard somewhere that sniffing glue helps

 hippiechick wrote: 

hc,
Does appear to be a study of the obvious. But in medicine, there is often a trailing period between what is thought on the street and what is shown in a study.
In my opinion, birth control pills quite possibly play a role in women who without any obvious physical or physiological reasons, can not become pregnant or tend to lose their pregnancies in above normal numbers. Has there been a study on that since bc pills first hit the public? I don't doubt we're poisoning ourselves: a hormone for this, an antibiotic for that. Then there's the stuff we dump in our food chain, the goodies we feed our cattle and the like.

mk...

 musik_knut wrote: 
Well, no duh! Women have known this for several years. I took HRT for almost 10 yrs, but the smallest dose I could get away with, because I started asking women that I knew had breast cancer if they took HRT, and most of them had.

So, what about birth control pills? And what about the ones that stop women from menstruating? More hormones?

New study firmly ties hormone use to breast cancer

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.
Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.

Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women.

It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's not like smoking where you have to wait 10 or 15 years for the risk to come down."

Study results were given Saturday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

They are from the Women's Health Initiative, which tested estrogen and progestin pills that doctors long believed would prevent heart disease, bone loss and many other problems in women after menopause. The main part of the study was stopped in 2002 when researchers saw surprisingly higher risks of heart problems and breast cancer in hormone users.

Since then, experts have debated whether these risks apply to women who start on hormones when they enter menopause, usually in their 50s, and take them for shorter periods of time. Most of the women in the federal study were in their 60s and well past menopause.

So the advice has been to use hormones only if symptoms like hot flashes are severe, and at the lowest dose and shortest time possible. The new study sharpens that message, Chlebowski said.

"It does change the balance" on whether to start on treatment at all, he said.

Even so, most women will not get breast cancer by taking the pills short-term. The increased cancer risk from a couple of years of hormone use translates to a few extra cases of breast cancer a year for every 1,000 women on hormones. This risk accumulates with each year of use, though.

The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts. In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro - estrogen and progestin - or dummy pills.

This part was halted when researchers saw a 26% higher risk of breast cancer in those on Prempro.

But that was an average over the 5½ years women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.

They saw a clear trend: Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others.

Think of it as President Bush's public approval rating, said another study leader, Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"Bush's popularity may be 50% on average, but it might have been descending the whole time he was president," Ravdin said.

In the second part of the federal study, researchers observed just 16,121 women who had already been on hormones for an average of seven years and another group of 25,328 women who had never used them. No results on breast cancer risk in these women have been given until now.

Plotting cases over time, researchers saw in retrospect that hormone users had started out with twice the risk of breast cancer as the others, and it fell as use declined. Among those taking hormones at the start of the study, use dropped to 41% in 2003, the year after the main results made news.

In the general population, use of hormone products has dropped 70% since the study, said another of its leaders, Dr. JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

That corresponds with big drops in breast cancer cases, but some scientists have said this could be due to a fall-off in mammograms, which would mean fewer cancers were being detected, not necessarily that fewer were occurring.

The new study puts that theory to rest. Mammography rates were virtually the same among those taking hormones and those not.

"It is clear that changing mammography patterns cannot explain the dramatic reductions in breast cancer risk," Manson said.

"The data are getting stronger," said Dr. C. Kent Osborne, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Women who do need the pills should not panic, though the doubling of risk - a 200% increase - for long-term users is quite worrisome, cancer specialists say. Although the new study does not calculate risks in terms of actual cases, previous research showed that the average increased risk of 26% meant a difference of a few extra cases a year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.

"Hormone therapy remains a good health care choice to relieve moderate to severe menopausal symptoms," says a statement from Wyeth, which made the pills used in the study.

"Most women should be able to discontinue hormones in three to four years," or at least reduce their dose, Manson said.

A future analysis will look at other women in the study who took only estrogen, generally women who have had hysterectomies.

 romeotuma wrote: 
I can still remember my kids' names, so it must work for me!

 romeotuma wrote: 
sorry I reread your post.  I'm gonna look more at the book. 

 meower wrote:  

I never said white noise is a cause— I said it was a major contributor to triggering autism...  things like autism are so complex that it is unlikely there is a single cause, but a complex combination of factors... here, I will quote directly from a hard copy of the book—

During the critical period BDNF turns on the nucleus basalis, the part of our brain that allows us to focus our attention — and keeps it on, throughout the entire critical period...

Merzenich's work on the critical period and BDNF helped him develop a theory that explains how so many different problems could be part of a single autistic whole.  During the critical period, he argues, some situations overexcite the neurons in children who have genes that predispose them to autism, leading to the massive, premature release of BDNF.  Instead of important connections being reinforced, all connections are.  So much BDNF is released that it turns off the critical period prematurely, sealing all these connection in place, and the child is left with scores of undifferentiated brain maps and hence pervasive developmental disorders.  Their brains are hyperexcitable and hypersensitive.  If they hear one frequency, the whole auditory cortex starts firing...

If the BDNF release was contributing to autism and language problems, Merzenich needed to understand what might cause young neurons to get "over excited" and release massive amounts of the chemical.  Several studies alerted him to how an environmental factor might contribute.  One disturbing study showed that the closer children lived to the noisy airport in Frankfurt, Germany, the lower their intelligence was.  A similar study on children in public housing high-rises above the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago, found that the closer their floor was to the highway, the lower their intelligence...

White noise consists of many frequencies and is very stimulating to the auditory cortex.

 romeotuma wrote: 
i skimmed it, and will look more intently later, but it seems to me that this guy isnt saying that white noise is a cause of autism (and I didnt see anything about lower IQ's of kids) but that white noise is a factor in why it is hard  for these kids to process language. 
Big Difference no?

 meower wrote: 

Sure...  here's the best reference to it online that I can find—

from The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge which is also available at the RP link to Amazon...

 romeotuma wrote: 
can you cite this please?  thanx 

 romeotuma wrote: 
Scientific studies have shown that they can make great strides with children with autism/retardation by starting to work with them at birth. It's a wonderful breakthrough.