Thursday, September 24, 2020

Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese


sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center. He was young—in his late 30s—and adored his wife and small children. And he had been healthy, logging endless hours running his own small business, except for one thing: He had severe obesity. Now, he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was increasingly short of breath.

He was admitted directly to the intensive care unit (ICU) and was on a ventilator within hours. Two weeks later, he died.

“He was a young, healthy, hardworking guy,” recalls MaryEllen Antkowiak, a pulmonary critical care physician who is medical director of the hospital’s ICU. “His major risk factor for getting this sick was obesity.”

Since the pandemic began, dozens of studies have reported that many of the sickest COVID-19 patients have been people with obesity. In recent weeks, that link has come into sharper focus as large new population studies have cemented the association and demonstrated that even people who are merely overweight are at higher risk. For example, in the first metaanalysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people with obesity who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.

A constellation of physiological and social factors drives those grim numbers. The biology of obesity includes impaired immunity, chronic inflammation, and blood that’s prone to clot, all of which can worsen COVID-19. And because obesity is so stigmatized, people with obesity may avoid medical care.

“We didn’t understand early on what a major risk factor obesity was. … It’s not until more recently that we’ve realized the devastating impact of obesity, particularly in younger people,” says Anne Dixon, a physician-scientist who studies obesity and lung disease at the University of Vermont. That “may be one reason for the devastating impact of COVID-19 in the United States, where 40% of adults are obese.”

People with obesity are more likely than normal-weight people to have other diseases that are independent risk factors for severe COVID-19, including heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes. They are also prone to metabolic syndrome, in which blood sugar levels, fat levels, or both are unhealthy and blood pressure may be high. A recent study from Tulane University of 287 hospitalized COVID-19 patients found that metabolic syndrome itself substantially increased the risks of ICU admission, ventilation, and death.

Sunday, June 7, 2020

Sleep Essential To The Elimination Of Reactive Oxidative Species


medicalexpress |  The first signs of insufficient sleep are universally familiar. There's tiredness and fatigue, difficulty concentrating, perhaps irritability or even tired giggles. Far fewer people have experienced the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, including disorientation, paranoia and hallucinations. 

Total, prolonged , however, can be fatal. While it has been reported in humans only anecdotally, a widely cited study in rats conducted by Chicago-based researchers in 1983 showed that a total lack of sleep inevitably leads to death. Yet, despite decades of study, a central question has remained unsolved: why do animals die when they don't sleep?

Now, Harvard Medical School neuroscientists have identified an unexpected, causal link between sleep deprivation and premature death. In a study on sleep-deprived , researchers found that death is always preceded by the accumulation of molecules known as reactive oxidative species (ROS) in the gut.

When fruit flies were given that neutralize and clear ROS from the gut, sleep-deprived flies remained active and had normal lifespans. Additional experiments in mice confirmed that ROS accumulate in the gut when sleep is insufficient.

The findings, published in Cell on June 4, suggest the possibility that animals can indeed survive without sleep under certain circumstances. The results open new avenues of study to understand the full consequences of insufficient sleep and may someday inform the design of approaches to counteract its detrimental effects in humans, the authors said.

"We took an unbiased approach and searched throughout the body for indicators of damage from sleep deprivation. We were surprised to find it was the gut that plays a key role in causing death," said senior study author Dragana Rogulja, assistant professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

"Even more surprising, we found that premature death could be prevented. Each morning, we would all gather around to look at the flies, with disbelief to be honest. What we saw is that every time we could neutralize ROS in the gut, we could rescue the flies," Rogulja said.

Scientists have long studied sleep, a phenomenon that appears to be fundamental for life, yet one that in many ways remains mysterious. Almost every known animal sleeps or exhibits some form of sleeplike behavior. Without enough of it, serious consequences ensue. In humans, chronic insufficient sleep is associated with , type 2 diabetes, cancer, obesity, depression and many other conditions.

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Swear to Gawd I Can Smell the Cancer and Diabetes...,


medicalexpress |  Non-communicable diseases including heart disease, cancer and lung disease are now the most common causes of death, accounting for 70 percent of deaths worldwide. These diseases are considered "non-communicable" because they are thought to be caused by a combination of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors and can't be transmitted between people. 

A new research paper in Science by a team of fellows in CIFAR's Humans and the Microbiome program throws this long-held belief into question by providing evidence that many diseases may be transmissible between people through microbes (including bacteria, fungi, and viruses) that live in and on our bodies.

"If our hypothesis is proven correct, it will rewrite the entire book on public health" says B. Brett Finlay, CIFAR Fellow and professor of microbiology at the University of British Columbia, who is lead author on the paper.

Connecting the dots
The authors base their hypothesis on connections between three distinct lines of evidence. First, they demonstrate that people with a wide range of conditions, from obesity and inflammatory bowel disease to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, have altered microbiomes. Next, they show that altered microbiomes, when taken from diseased people and put into animal models, cause disease. Finally, they provide evidence that the microbiome is naturally transmissible, for example: Spouses who share a house have more similar microbiomes than twins who live separately.

"When you put those facts together, it points to the idea that many traditionally non-communicable diseases may be communicable after all," says Finlay.

Eran Elinav, an author on the paper, CIFAR fellow, and professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, sees the proposed connection between these points of evidence as an argument for thinking about disease more broadly. "This may represent new opportunities for interventions in some of the world's most common and bothersome diseases," he says. "We can now think about modulating and the , not just about targeting the human host."

Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Digestible, Even on the Bottom...,


theconversation |  When Crisco launched in 1911, it did things differently. 

Like other brands, it was made from cottonseed. But it was also a new kind of fat – the world’s first solid shortening made entirely from a once-liquid plant oil. Instead of solidifying cottonseed oil by mixing it with animal fat like the other brands, Crisco used a brand-new process called hydrogenation, which Procter & Gamble, the creator of Crisco, had perfected after years of research and development. 

From the beginning, the company’s marketers talked a lot about the marvels of hydrogenation – what they called “the Crisco process” – but avoided any mention of cottonseed. There was no law at the time mandating that food companies list ingredients, although virtually all food packages provided at least enough information to answer that most fundamental of all questions: What is it?

In contrast, Crisco marketers offered only evasion and euphemism. Crisco was made from “100% shortening,” its marketing materials asserted, and “Crisco is Crisco, and nothing else.” Sometimes they gestured towards the plant kingdom: Crisco was “strictly vegetable,” “purely vegetable” or “absolutely all vegetable.” At their most specific, advertisements said it was made from “vegetable oil,” a relatively new phrase that Crisco helped to popularize.

But why go to all this trouble to avoid mentioning cottonseed oil if consumers were already knowingly buying it from other companies? 

The truth was that cottonseed had a mixed reputation, and it was only getting worse by the time Crisco launched. A handful of unscrupulous companies were secretly using cheap cottonseed oil to cut costly olive oil, so some consumers thought of it as an adulterant. Others associated cottonseed oil with soap or with its emerging industrial uses in dyes, roofing tar and explosives. Still others read alarming headlines about how cottonseed meal contained a toxic compound, even though cottonseed oil itself contained none of it.

Instead of dwelling on its problematic sole ingredient, then, Crisco’s marketers kept consumer focus trained on brand reliability and the purity of modern factory food processing. 

Crisco flew off the shelves. Unlike lard, Crisco had a neutral taste. Unlike butter, Crisco could last for years on the shelf. Unlike olive oil, it had a high smoking temperature for frying. At the same time, since Crisco was the only solid shortening made entirely from plants, it was prized by Jewish consumers who followed dietary restrictions forbidding the mixing of meat and dairy in a single meal.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Blood Now Accounts for 2% of Murica's Exports -- More than Corn or Soya


mintpressnews |  For much of the world, donating blood is purely an act of solidarity; a civic duty that the healthy perform to aid others in need. The idea of being paid for such an action would be considered bizarre. But in the United States, it is big business. Indeed, in today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left. 

The number of collection centers in the United States has more than doubled since 2005 and blood now makes up well over 2 percent of total U.S. exports by value. To put that in perspective, Americans’ blood is now worth more than all exported corn or soy products that cover vast areas of the country’s heartland. The U.S. supplies fully 70 percent of the world’s plasma, mainly because most other countries have banned the practice on ethical and medical grounds. Exports increased by over 13 percent, to $28.6 billion, between 2016 and 2017, and the plasma market is projected to “grow radiantly,” according to one industry report. The majority goes to wealthy European countries; Germany, for example, buys 15 percent of all U.S. blood exports. China and Japan are also key customers.

It is primarily the plasma– a golden liquid that transports proteins and red and white blood cells around the body– that makes it so sought after. Donated blood is crucial in treating medical conditions such as anemia and cancer and is commonly required to perform surgeries. Pregnant women also frequently need transfusions to treat blood loss during childbirth. Like all maturing industries, a few enormous bloodthirsty companies, such as Grifols and CSL, have come to dominate the American market.

Go Head On and Eat that "Impossible Meat", I'll Watch....,


phys.org |  If you were to believe newspapers and dietary advice leaflets, you'd probably think that doctors and nutritionists are the people guiding us through the thicket of what to believe when it comes to food. But food trends are far more political – and economically motivated—than it seems. 

From ancient Rome, where Cura Annonae – the provision of bread to the citizens—was the central measure of good government, to 18th-century Britain, where the economist Adam Smith identified a link between wages and the price of corn, has been at the centre of the economy. Politicians have long had their eye on as a way to shape society.

That's why tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and grain were enforced in Britain between 1815 and 1846. These "corn laws" enhanced the profits and political power of the landowners, at the cost of raising food prices and hampering growth in other .

Over in Ireland, the ease of growing the recently imported led to most people living off a narrow and repetitive diet of homegrown potato with a dash of milk. When potato blight arrived, a million people starved to death, even as the country continued to produce large amounts of food – for export to England. 

Such episodes well illustrate that food policy has often been a fight between the interests of the rich and the poor. No wonder Marx declared that food lay at the heart of all political structures and warned of an alliance of industry and capital intent on both controlling and distorting food production.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Bone-in-the-Nose Medicine "Finds" New Organ Underlying Taoist Alchemy/Chi


Nature |  Confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) provides real-time histologic imaging of human tissues at a depth of 60–70 μm during endoscopy. pCLE of the extrahepatic bile duct after fluorescein injection demonstrated a reticular pattern within fluorescein-filled sinuses that had no known anatomical correlate. Freezing biopsy tissue before fixation preserved the anatomy of this structure, demonstrating that it is part of the submucosa and a previously unappreciated fluid-filled interstitial space, draining to lymph nodes and supported by a complex network of thick collagen bundles. These bundles are intermittently lined on one side by fibroblast-like cells that stain with endothelial markers and vimentin, although there is a highly unusual and extensive unlined interface between the matrix proteins of the bundles and the surrounding fluid. We observed similar structures in numerous tissues that are subject to intermittent or rhythmic compression, including the submucosae of the entire gastrointestinal tract and urinary bladder, the dermis, the peri-bronchial and peri-arterial soft tissues, and fascia. These anatomic structures may be important in cancer metastasis, edema, fibrosis, and mechanical functioning of many or all tissues and organs. In sum, we describe the anatomy and histology of a previously unrecognized, though widespread, macroscopic, fluid-filled space within and between tissues, a novel expansion and specification of the concept of the human interstitium.

Independent |  The team behind the discovery suggest the compartments may act as “shock absorbers” that protect body tissues from damage.

Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center medics Dr David Carr-Locke and Dr Petros Benias came across the interstitium while investigating a patient’s bile duct, searching for signs of cancer.

They noticed cavities that did not match any previously known human anatomy, and approached New York University pathologist Dr Neil Theise to ask for his expertise.

The researchers realised traditional methods for examining body tissues had missed the interstitium because the “fixing” method for assembling medical microscope slides involves draining away fluid – therefore destroying the organ’s structure.  

Instead of their true identity as bodywide, fluid-filled shock absorbers, the squashed cells had been overlooked and considered a simple layer of connective tissue.

Having arrived at this conclusion, the scientists realised this structure was found not only in the bile duct, but surrounding many crucial internal organs.

“This fixation artefact of collapse has made a fluid-filled tissue type throughout the body appear solid in biopsy slides for decades, and our results correct for this to expand the anatomy of most tissues,” said Dr Theise.


Sunday, March 18, 2018

Why Bone-in-the-Nose Medicine Trumps Medical Science Most of the Time...,


medium  |  A fundamental tenet of science is that findings must be reproduced. One experiment does not establish new truths. The results have to be replicated by others using the methods described by the original investigators. Replication is key to ensuring that conclusions aren’t spurious. Nevertheless, science is currently plagued by hordes of irreproducible study results.
“ More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”
Certainly, misidentification of cells is a major contributor to the replication crisis in basic biological science. However, statistics and publication bias combine to form another formidable pseudo-scientific edifice that churns out irreproducible results across scientific genres and misleads the public.

The infamous P-value lies at the heart of the matter. Simply put, the P-value is an arbitrary estimate of the likelihood that results of a given experiment are due to chance. The cutoff widely accepted across scientific disciplines is 5%. In other words, as long as the statistics say that the likelihood a given result is due to chance alone is 5% or less, then the result is considered “significant.” That might sound good at first glance, but when examined a little more closely, in conjunction with the concept of publication bias, the limitations rapidly mount.

The significance of the 5%, or .05, P-value is utterly arbitrary. A man named Ronald Fisher made it up back in the 1920s. It’s based on the rough approximation of how much of a normal (Gaussian) distribution will fall within two standard deviations of the mean — about 95%. (I’m not going to get into the problems with the normal distribution in this post, but I will recommend that anyone interested in this concept read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan.)

A P-value of .05 implies that one result in 20 will be due to chance. But how many millions of results are obtained from scientific experiments each year around the world? An incalculable number. It’s virtually guaranteed that thousands of results due to chance alone emerge from the realm of theory and intrude on what we presume to call reality each year. And those are the results that get published.

Scientists working in academia must, as the saying goes, publish or perish. And the journals in which those anxious scientists try to publish their results need to make money, which necessitates reader interaction. Results that are not “statistically significant” are boring. No reader wants to pay for a journal full of articles that say “we did this study using really careful methods, and nothing happened, it didn’t work. End of story.” If science were fully transparent, and results of all experiments were published, however, this is exactly what the vast majority of papers would say.

The failure of negative study results to ever see the light of day creates staggering wastes. It’s likely that many basic experiments have been repeated over and over again, with uninteresting results, and subsequently never published. Then, another research group comes along and does the experiment again (because they didn’t know about the previous null results) and, by chance alone, finds a positive result. Of course, that result is interesting and gets published. This basic cycle is why John Ioannidis’s now-famous 2005 paper was titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

Friday, January 26, 2018

Alzheimer's Is Type 3 Diabetes...,


theatlantic |  In recent years, Alzheimer’s disease has occasionally been referred to as “type 3” diabetes, though that moniker doesn’t make much sense. After all, though they share a problem with insulin, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, and type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease caused by diet. Instead of another type of diabetes, it’s increasingly looking like Alzheimer’s is another potential side effect of a sugary, Western-style diet.

In some cases, the path from sugar to Alzheimer’s leads through type 2 diabetes, but as a new study and others show, that’s not always the case.

A longitudinal study, published Thursday in the journal Diabetologia, followed 5,189 people over 10 years and found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar—whether or not their blood-sugar level technically made them diabetic. In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.
“Dementia is one of the most prevalent psychiatric conditions strongly associated with poor quality of later life,” said the lead author, Wuxiang Xie at Imperial College London, via email. “Currently, dementia is not curable, which makes it very important to study risk factors.”

Melissa Schilling, a professor at New York University, performed her own review of studies connecting diabetes to Alzheimer’s in 2016. She sought to reconcile two confusing trends. People who have type 2 diabetes are about twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s, and people who have diabetes and are treated with insulin are also more likely to get Alzheimer’s, suggesting elevated insulin plays a role in Alzheimer’s. In fact, many studies have found that elevated insulin, or “hyperinsulinemia,” significantly increases your risk of Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, people with type 1 diabetes, who don’t make insulin at all, are also thought to have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s. How could these both be true?

Schilling posits this happens because of the insulin-degrading enzyme, a product of insulin that breaks down both insulin and amyloid proteins in the brain—the same proteins that clump up and lead to Alzheimer’s disease. People who don’t have enough insulin, like those whose bodies’ ability to produce insulin has been tapped out by diabetes, aren’t going to make enough of this enzyme to break up those brain clumps. Meanwhile, in people who use insulin to treat their diabetes and end up with a surplus of insulin, most of this enzyme gets used up breaking that insulin down, leaving not enough enzyme to address those amyloid brain clumps.
According to Schilling, this can happen even in people who don’t have diabetes yet—who are in a state known as “prediabetes.” It simply means your blood sugar is higher than normal, and it’s something that affects roughly 86 million Americans.

Schilling is not primarily a medical researcher; she’s just interested in the topic. But Rosebud Roberts, a professor of epidemiology and neurology at the Mayo Clinic, agreed with her interpretation.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

We Told You Facebook Is Evil - Damn Near As Evil As Weed


WaPo |  Chamath Palihapitiya began working for Facebook in 2007 and left in 2011 as its vice president for user growth. When he started, he said, there was not much thought given to the long-term negative consequences of developing such a platform.

“I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen,” said Palihapitiya, 41. “But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”

 That changed as Facebook’s popularity exploded, he said. To date, the social network has more than 2 billion monthly users around the world and continues to grow.

But the ability to connect and share information so quickly — as well as the instant gratification people give and receive over their posts — has resulted in some negative consequences, according to Palihapitiya.

“It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are,” he said. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.”

Facebook has pushed back on the former executive’s comments, saying in a statement Tuesday that Palihapitiya has not worked there for more than six years and that it was “a very different company back then.”


Monday, November 6, 2017

Opioid Crisis: Nobody is Talking About Sugar


theconversation |  Could a diet high in refined sugars make children and adults more susceptible to opioid addiction and overdose? New research, from our laboratory of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Guelph, suggests it could. 


Nobody is talking about sugar. 

And yet there is substantial experimental evidence that refined sugar can promote addictive behaviours by activating the brain’s rewards centres in much the same way as addictive drugs. Opioid abuse is also associated with poor dietary habits, including preferences for sugar-rich foods, as well as malnutrition. These connections have led to questions of whether excessive consumption of refined sugar may affect vulnerability to opioid addiction. 

To explore the possible role of a sugar-rich diet in opioid addiction, we investigated whether unlimited access to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) altered rats’ neural and behavioural responses to the semi-synthetic opioid, oxycodone. 

Our findings suggest that a diet high in corn syrup may dampen the reward associated with oxycodone and may therefore encourage consumption of higher quantities of the drug.  Fist tap Dale.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Engineering $$Billion Behavioral Addictions


medium |  Yin asked not to be identified by her real name. A young addict in her mid-twenties, she lives in Palo Alto and, despite her addiction, attends Stanford University.

She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succumbs to her habit throughout the day. She can’t help it; she’s compulsively hooked.

Yin is an Instagram addict. The photo sharing social network, recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion, captured the minds of Yin and 40 million others like her.

The acquisition demonstrates the increasing importance–and immense value created by–habit-forming technologies. Of course, the Instagram purchase price was driven by a host of factors including a rumored bidding war for the company.

But at its core, Instagram is the latest example of an enterprising team, conversant in psychology as much as technology, that unleashed an addictive product on users who made it part of their daily routines.

Like all addicts, Yin doesn’t realize she’s hooked. “It’s just fun,” she says as she captures her latest in a collection of moody snapshots reminiscent of the late 1970s. “I don’t have a problem or anything.
I just use it whenever I see something cool. I feel I need to grab it before it’s gone.”

Monday, October 9, 2017

The Brain's Lymphatic System


theatlantic  |  Reich started his search in 2015, after a major study in Nature reported a similar conduit for lymph in mice. The University of Virginia team wrote at the time, “The discovery of the central-nervous-system lymphatic system may call for a reassessment of basic assumptions in neuroimmunology.” The study was regarded as a potential breakthrough in understanding how neurodegenerative disease is associated with the immune system.

Around the same time, researchers discovered fluid in the brains of mice and humans that would become known as the “glymphatic system.” It was described by a team at the University of Rochester in 2015 as not just the brain’s “waste-clearance system,” but as potentially helping fuel the brain by transporting glucose, lipids, amino acids, and neurotransmitters. Although since “the central nervous system completely lacks conventional lymphatic vessels,” the researchers wrote at the time, it remained unclear how this fluid communicated with the rest of the body.

Reich reasoned that since this fluid exists in human brains, and the conduits exist in mice, the conduits likely exist in humans, too. After two years of work and inordinately complex physics calculations, Reich’s team found the vessels. When Reich started telling colleagues what his team found, he got two reactions: “No way, it’s not true,” and “Yeah, we’ve known that.”

There are occasional references to the idea of a lymphatic system in the brain in historic literature. Two centuries ago, the anatomist Paolo Mascagni made full-body models of the lymphatic system that included the brain, though this was dismissed as an error. A historical account in The Lancet in 2003 read: “Mascagni was probably so impressed with the lymphatic system that he saw lymph vessels even where they did not exist—in the brain.”

No one had published definitive evidence of lymph vessels in any brain until the Virginia mouse study and a concordant Helsinki one in 2015. “You could say that was the discovery,” Reich said. “Did Newton discover gravity? I mean—not to equate these two discoveries—but obviously people knew that things fell before Newton’s apple.”

His team’s discovery, though, not only shows that the vessels exist in people, but just how elaborate the system is.