Text me in the morning

As a person with Type 1 diabetes, I'm always happy when some new gadget comes along to help control blood sugars and make life a little easier.

So, it's doubly refreshing when someone finds a new way to use the existing technology... like the cell phone.

Dr. Jennifer Dyer, an endocrinologist at Nationwide Children's Hospital, has taken to texting her teenage patients, and they've responded by taking better care of themselves. Texting patients reduced the number of times they forgot to give themselves insulin during a meal from 9 a week to 3.

Texting is a much better way of communicating with doctors than I've experienced: faxing blood sugar sheets back and forth. Bravo, Dr. Dyer. I hope your extended study goes well. And I hope that more endocrinologists realize that standing at a FedEx Kinkos' fax machine is not how any diabetic wants to spend her afternoon.

Here's an interview with Dr. Dyer.

A little bit pregnant

Having just returned from my wedding and honeymoon, I was quite struck when the following University of Nebraska study popped up in my email.

The bullet point: one in four American women don't really care if they get pregnant.

REALLY!

"Among women who had no children, 60 percent said they were trying to not get pregnant, 14 percent were trying to get pregnant and 26 percent responded that they were "OK either way."

And lest you think some of that 26 percent was taking a laissez-faire approach to their fertility, stop right there. Although a portion of them "want a baby" at some point, they did not mean now.

The researchers noted that physicians should start targeting that middle ground of women for important pre-conception practices like taking folic acid.

I, however, am still awed that these women are out there AND that they make up such a large portion of my friends and neighbors. I also question why U.S. birthrates are not higher if this additional 25 percent of fertile females is running around sans contraception.

Mom's only a little bit right about eating your veggies.

People want to live as long as they can and stay healthy as long as they can. Nothing new there.

But the lifestyle changes many of us try to implement to thwart cancer, obesity and heart disease are often less effective than we've led ourselves to believe.

Yesterday a study from Mount Sinai School of Medicine added to the evidence that the impacts of eating five plus servings of fruits and vegetables had a very little effect on the chance of developing cancers.

Specifically, eating 200 additional grams of fruit and vege every day reduced your cancer rate by 3 percent over a lifetime.

(Per my trusty food scale, a dozen strawberries, 2 medium sized pears or 40 teeny-tiny stalks of asparagus are all about 200 gram servings.)

The researchers didn't break down the results by types of cancer, except for those caused by heavy drinking. In drinkers, increased produce eating had a stronger effect on boozing related cancers.

Even though the study included more than 400,000 people followed over 8 years, the effects were so small that researchers caution reading too much into their results.

I think these results should point to changing the few behaviors we KNOW cause cancers: unprotected sex, boozing, too much sun and smoking--this sounds like Jersey Shore--and stop worrying too much about the rest.

The interaction between our genetic predispositions and our environmental exposures may always dwarf the small lifestyle changes we can make.

But, please continue eating your fruits and vege and strive to include more. By eating all of these foods you may end up too full for that cheeseburger and consume fewer calories, lowering your chance of becoming obese, which the National Cancer Institute says significantly increases your risk for many types of cancers.

Man's impact on earth epoch?

British researchers say that than man's impact on the earth during the last 200 years has brought the planet into a new geological age, the Anthropocene (new man) epoch.

The reasons? Mind blowing population growth, sprawl of large cities, fossil fuel use and subsequent atmospheric changes and what may be the sixth largest mass extinction of species. These behaviors, the scientists argue, could alter the planet for millions of years to come.

"Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet," the scientists wrote in the Earth Day issue of Environmental Science & Technology.

The authors acknowledge that the Anthropocene is a controversial idea. I think it's provocative, and will form the meat of many a good science fiction novel in the future... and several already written.

Comparing global warming to the (probable) asteroid impact that ended the dinosaur's reign seems like apples and oranges. These scientists argue they are perhaps equivalent. That's a pretty sour notion.

Read the full commentary here.

Bad news for generics

The Association of Healthcare Journalists just released their award-winning stories for 2009.

I've been working my way through them, but was particularly struck by Katherine Eban's story Bad Bargain about the lack of FDA oversight for generic drug production, much of which is done outside of the U.S. The story appeared in SELF magazine.

I am an avowed proponent of generic medicines and had only heard of problems with the drugs one other time from my new endocrinologist.

He said generic forms of Synthroid (prescribed to people who's thyroid gland has stopped functioning)can contain 40 percent less of the active ingredient than Synthroid. He actually asked me to switch! I wrote him off as someone who regularly golfs with pharmaceutical reps, but reading Eban's article last week put me on the hunt.

But the most recent article I could find was based on an email survey sent to 18,000 members of the American Thyroid Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, and The Endocrine Society.

Although the authors didn't report how many of their colleagues wrote back (at least in the abstract), they only found 198 "adverse events" associated with generic Synthroid--177 reported when a patient switched from brand name to generic and 52 from one generic pill to another.

I'm not too concerned. It's my thyroid. It gets checked every 3 to 6 months. There are significant cost savings in question and limited risk of serious side effects.

However, if I were one of the patients mentioned in Eban's article who had arguably more serious conditions and irrefutably more serious generic-related effects (suicide being a big one), I might be pushing for the brand name.

And, I would hope to have the kind of physician who would look for those symptoms if I did switch to a generic, not like the toad in Eban's article.

Different strains of fanaticism start to look similar

These two stories are sitting next to each other on the top of the New York Times webpage:

Suicide Attacks in Moscow Subways Leave Dozens Dead

and

9 Tied to Militia Charged in Plot to Murder Officers

The militia in question is based in Michigan.

What is going on here? Why are people susceptible to this kind of fundamentalism... the kind the comes with guns and bombs in addition to religious texts? Are some more susceptible than others? Is this a question of faulty dopamine systems?

What I found was a dearth of research on the issue... More to come as scientists get back to me.

human reservoirs, piggy viruses?

A threesome of papers were out in this week's issue of Science that explained how the H1N1 virus that swept the globe in 2009 is structurally similar to the 1918 virus.

Where was that bad boy for those 91 years? Pigs.

Actually, it's more a question of time scale. Humans, who get flu every year or so, the virus changes shape quickly, which changes what antibodies can bind to and destroy the virus. Human immunity for the seasonal flu changes quickly to keep up, but abandons the old antibody shapes. So, it's really no wonder that most of us didn't have antibodies that could react to a virus that looked like the 1918 flu.

Pigs, with shorter lifespans than humans, don't see as many infections in their lifetimes so there is less changing of shape, called "drift." Pigs had inadvertently "archived" a virus that looks much like the 1918 virus, now affectionately known as H1N1, just because the infection rate and subsequent mutation rate were kept down.

So, in 2009 the pigs' version of the virus started infecting probably what might of been just a few people and then took off like wildfire, causing an impressive pandemic.

All this has me thinking if humans could be "archivers" of animal viruses. Or, based on the theory of quick vs. slow drift, if we are harbingers of doom who change viruses so quickly pig (or other animals) immune systems can't keep up.

When the vino doesn't veritas

Timing can be everything with a good wine... though probably not so much for the $10 magnums that young journalists love so much.

However, for those oenophiles that spend thousands procuring just the right collectible bottle from well-established vineyards, the year those grapes were grown is key.

But how can one tell if an unscrupulous winemaker may have snuck drought-starved grapes from 1977 into a bottle and labeled it from soggy 1976?

Apparently atomic bombs can help, according to chemist Graham Jones.

Starting in the 1940s, atomic bomb explosions forced a lot of carbon-14 into the air.
Carbon-14 can be detected through carbon dating, a process that compares the amount of carbon-14 to the amount of normal carbon-12 in a material. This is how scientists can tell how old stuff is on the millions of years scale.

Basically, carbon-14 atoms have two extra neutrons than carbon-12 atoms, and those neutrons degrade over time and scientists measure the degradation.

Plants growing during the period of atomic testing absorbed the bomb-blast carbon-14 as they took carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But that absorption happened to lesser and lesser degrees as time went on and the bomb-blast carbon-14 degraded back to the normal form of carbon, carbon-12.

So, Jones thought, a wine from 1968 would have a larger amount of carbon-14 isotopes compared to a wine from 1987, but hopefully less than a wine from 1967 if everything was labeled appropriately.

Jones also compared the carbon-14 in wine with that in the atmosphere and found that the trends matched closely.

Now, I probably won't be wasting any of my vino on this process, but it could help fight fraud for higher-end customers. And if any of you uses this technique and finds a fallacious bottle, I will be happy to dispose of the waste for you.

Kelp with your cheeseburger?

Yes, Please!!

A key carbohydrate in kelp, alginate, can stop absorption of up to 75 percent of fat in a meal.

Alginate is a natural type of fiber, and in this case it is very effective at keeping the body from breaking down the fats in foods before sending them--and the calories they contain--on their merry way down the digestive tract and into the toilet.

This is how some weight-loss medications work, but not to the same extent. Alli, an over the counter weight loss drug, can block 25 percent of fat from being absorbed according to their website, www.myalli.com. The effective ingredient in Alli is orlistat, which is a drug, not a fiber like alginate.

Researchers Iain Brownlee and Jeff Pearson from Newcastle University tested dozens of fibers in a fake gut, and alginate came out on top in terms of fat-blocking potential.

The scientists suggested that shoving alginate in goodies and other food products might be a solution for some people who have trouble losing weight via diet and exercise--say 98 percent of the population.

Brownlee and Pearson went so far as to run some preliminary taste tests for alginate containing bread. The doctored dough was rated better than regular ole' white bread for texture and richness... no word on taste.

The next step will test alginates with human subjects to see how the fiber preforms in live bellies.