Health - How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? |
- How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?
- Chemicals Were Injected Into Wells, Report Says
- Patient Money: Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control Over Your Illness
- Vital Signs: Hazards: More Culprits in Hair Loss Than Just the Salon
- Vital Signs: Patterns: Treating Other Conditions May Stave Off Alzheimer’s, Study Finds
- Well: Sexism Charges Divide Surgeons’ Organization
- They Gather Secretly at Night, and Then They (Shhh!) Eat
- Breast Device Recall Made Most Severe
- Study Ties Suicide Rate in Work Force to Economy
- Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
- Advertising: A Younger Group for Feminine Products
- Well: Cooking With Sprouted Brown Rice
- Well: What's the Best Exercise?
- Well: Hypnosis as a Health Option
- Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?
- What’s the Single Best Exercise?
- How Language Heals
- What Grief Is Really Like
- Cultural Studies: The Sex Drive, Idling in Neutral
- The New Old Age: Dignity Lost in the E.R.
- Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl
- National Briefing | Health: Study Warns of Tainted Meat
| How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? Posted: 17 Apr 2011 04:42 AM PDT We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee. AMERICAN SLUMBER Number of hours of sleep (self-reported) on weeknights. Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world. In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab. Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects’ ability to sustain attention with what’s known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P.V.T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P.V.T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep. The P.V.T. is tedious but simple if you’ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic. Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day. The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. So, for most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the difference? What is the threshold below which cognitive function begins to flag? While Dinges’s study was under way, his colleague Gregory Belenky, then director of the division of neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md., was running a similar study. He purposely restricted his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hours — three, five, seven and nine hours — so that together the studies would offer a fuller picture of sleep-restriction. Belenky’s nine-hour subjects performed much like Dinges’s eight-hour ones. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P.V.T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be. Of course our lives are more stimulating than a sleep lab: we have coffee, bright lights, the social buzz of the office, all of which work as “countermeasures” to sleepiness. They can do the job for only so long, however. As Belenky, who now heads up the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane, where Van Dongen is also a professor, told me about cognitive deficits: “You don’t see it the first day. But you do in five to seven days. Unless you’re doing work that doesn’t require much thought, you are trading time awake at the expense of performance.” And it’s not clear that we can rely on weekends to make up for sleep deprivation. Dinges is now running a long-term sleep restriction and recovery study to see how many nights we need to erase our sleep debt. But past studies suggest that, at least in many cases, one night alone won’t do it. Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. (But deteriorate it will.) There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.) Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are. |
| Chemicals Were Injected Into Wells, Report Says Posted: 16 Apr 2011 10:10 PM PDT WASHINGTON — Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats. Questions, additional information or related tips can be sent to urbina@nytimes.com.Related
The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas. Hydrofracking has attracted increased scrutiny from lawmakers and environmentalists in part because of fears that the chemicals used during the process can contaminate underground sources of drinking water. “Questions about the safety of hydraulic fracturing persist, which are compounded by the secrecy surrounding the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids,” said the report, which was written by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado. The report, released late Saturday, also faulted companies for at times “injecting fluids containing chemicals that they themselves cannot identify.” The inquiry over hydrofracking, which was initiated by the House Energy and Commerce Committee when Mr. Waxman led it last year, also found that 14 of the nation’s most active hydraulic fracturing companies used 866 million gallons of hydraulic fracturing products — not including water. More than 650 of these products contained chemicals that are known or possible human carcinogens, regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, or are listed as hazardous air pollutants, the report said. A request for comment from the American Petroleum Institute about the report received no reply. Matt Armstrong, an energy attorney from Bracewell & Giuliani that represents several companies involved in natural gas drilling, faulted the methodology of the congressional report released Saturday and an earlier report by the same lawmakers. "This report uses the same sleight of hand deployed in the last report on diesel use -- it compiles overall product volumes, not the volumes of the hazardous chemicals contained within those products," he said. "This generates big numbers but provides no context for the use of these chemicals over the many thousands of frac jobs that were conducted within the timeframe of the report." Some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said. Many ingredients were “extremely toxic,” including benzene, a known human carcinogen, and lead. Companies injected large amounts of other hazardous chemicals, including 11.4 million gallons of fluids containing at least one of the toxic or carcinogenic B.T.E.X. chemicals — benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene. The companies used the highest volume of fluids containing one or more carcinogens in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. The report comes two and a half months after an initial report by the same three lawmakers that found that 32.2 millions of gallons of fluids containing diesel, considered an especially hazardous pollutant because it contains benzene, were injected into the ground during hydrofracking by a dozen companies from 2005 to 2009, in possible violation of the drinking water act. A 2010 report by Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, found that benzene levels in other hydrofracking ingredients were as much as 93 times higher than those found in diesel. The use of these chemicals has been a source of concern to regulators and environmentalists who worry that some of them could find their way out of a well bore — because of above-ground spills, underground failures of well casing or migration through layers of rock — and into nearby sources of drinking water. These contaminants also remain in the fluid that returns to the surface after a well is hydrofracked. A recent investigation by The New York Times found high levels of contaminants, including benzene and radioactive materials, in wastewater that is being sent to treatment plants not designed to fully treat the waste before it is discharged into rivers. At one plant in Pennsylvania, documents from the Environmental Protection Agency revealed levels of benzene roughly 28 times the federal drinking water standard in wastewater as it was discharged, after treatment, into the Allegheny River in May 2008. The E.P.A. is conducting a national study on the drinking water risks associated with hydrofracking, but assessing these risks has been made more difficult by companies’ unwillingness to publicly disclose which chemicals and in what concentrations they are used, according to internal e-mails and draft notes of the study plan. Some companies are moving toward more disclosure, and the industry will soon start a public database of these chemicals. But the Congressional report said that reporting to this database is strictly voluntary, that disclosure will not include the chemical identity of products labeled as proprietary, and that there is no way to determine if companies are accurately reporting information for all wells. In Pennsylvania, the lack of disclosure of drilling ingredients has also incited a heated debate among E.P.A. lawyers about the threat and legality of treatment plants accepting the wastewater and discharging it into rivers. |
| Patient Money: Using Hypnosis to Gain More Control Over Your Illness Posted: 15 Apr 2011 10:20 PM PDT KIRSTEN RITCHIE, 44, is no stranger to surgery — nearly 20 years ago, doctors removed four tumors from her brain. She remembers the operation and its aftermath as “horrific.” Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesDr. David Spiegel, director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine, said hypnosis can be an “effective and inexpensive way to manage medical care.†RelatedSo the news that she needed brain surgery again was hardly welcome. Determined to make her second operation a better — or at least less traumatic — experience, Ms. Ritchie, an insurance marketing representative in Cleveland, turned to an unusual treatment. At the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, she had four hypnosis sessions in the month before her procedure, during which she addressed her fear of the coming surgery. She also practiced self-hypnosis every day. Eventually, she said, “I got to a place where I felt a sense of trust instead of fear.” In February, doctors removed a plum-sized tumor from her brain. But there the similarity to her previous experience ended. Ms. Ritchie woke up from the procedure, she said, feeling “alert and awesome.” She ate a full dinner that night and went home in two days. “My neurosurgeon was stunned at how little medication I required before and after surgery, and how quickly I bounced back,” she said. Ms. Ritchie attributes her speedy recovery and calm state to her hypnosis sessions. Used for more than two centuries to treat a host of medical problems, particularly pain management and anxiety, hypnosis is now available to patients at some of the most respected medical institutions in the country, including Stanford Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai Medical Center and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Some critics find the research into mind-body therapies unconvincing, but their skepticism has not deterred patients like Ms. Ritchie. And there are researchers who say they believe that by helping patients feel in better control of their symptoms, hypnosis can reduce the need for medication and lower costs. “It is an effective and inexpensive way to manage medical care,” said Dr. David Spiegel, director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine and a leading authority on hypnosis. A study by radiologists at Harvard Medical School, published in 2000, found that patients who received hypnosis during surgery required less medication, had fewer complications and shorter procedures than patients who did not have hypnosis. In a follow-up study in 2002, the radiologists concluded that if every patient undergoing catheterization were to receive hypnosis, the cost savings would amount to $338 per patient. “When patients are groggy from anesthesia drugs, it costs more to recover them,” said Dr. Elvira Lang, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a lead author of both studies. “Hypnosis calms patients.” If you have a medical condition for which conventional medicine is not working, or you’d like to try a gentle mind-body alternative, hypnosis may be worth considering. Here are some things to keep in mind. THE THERAPIST There is no uniformly accepted definition of hypnosis, but most experts generally agree that it is an altered mental state in which a patient becomes highly focused and more receptive to social cues. During a session, the practitioner guides the subject into a relaxed state and then makes specific suggestions to help change a behavior, a perception or a physiological condition. Someone who is trying to quit smoking, for instance, might be told under hypnosis that cigarettes are poisons and that it’s important to care for and respect his body. Some patients find that hypnosis is a helpful adjunct to traditional psychotherapy. “Talk therapy engages the conscious mind, which is overwhelmingly facile at creating blocks to avoid hurtful problems,” said Dr. Tanya Edwards, director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “In hypnosis, the therapist is dealing with the subconscious mind and can get at core problems more quickly.” Whatever the approach, it’s important to find a highly skilled practitioner. “Hypnosis is like a surgeon’s knife,” said Edward Frischholz, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who has written more than 50 papers on clinical and experimental hypnosis. “In the right hands it can be life-saving, but in the wrong it could cause harm.” There is no universal licensing process for practitioners who do hypnosis, so look for a licensed health professional — for instance, a psychologist, medical doctor or social worker — who has been trained in hypnosis. Ask your doctors and therapists for recommendations, or go to the Societies of Hypnosis Web site, which allows you to search by ZIP code and specialty. THE SESSION At your first session, the practitioner will discuss your condition and may administer a short test to assess how hypnotizable you are. Most people are susceptible to hypnosis. But if someone is clearly not, then the therapist or doctor may try another technique or suggest a different approach to the patient’s problem. Most sessions last about 50 minutes. Specific conditions — like smoking, a fear of dogs or flying or temporary insomnia — may require just one session. In 2008, the personal health columnist Jane E. Brody recalled in this newspaper that her husband was able to stop smoking after just one session of hypnosis. “For very circumscribed disorders, hypnosis works very quickly or not at all,” said Dr. Frischholz. If your problem is more complex, like post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, it may require multiple sessions. “I might spend the first two sessions taking a history and learning about someone’s background,” said Carol Ginandes, an assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School who uses hypnosis in her private practice. “Then I would work with the patient in a very individualized way.” A session costs between $75 and $200, depending on where you live and the credentials of the practitioner. If the therapist or doctor is in your insurance network, then you may pay only a standard co-payment. Insurers do not cover hypnosis itself, however; it will have to be billed as a part of your counseling, or as an office visit. THE DO-IT-YOURSELF APPROACH If the thought of someone putting you in a trancelike state makes you uncomfortable, hypnosis with tape or CD at home may be a practical alternative. CDs made for a general audience, available at Web sites like HypnosisNetwork.com or HealthJourneys.com, may not be able to help you with a particular or complicated condition, like a lifelong struggle with depression, but they may help train you to calm down before a big test or surgical procedure. Some practitioners may send you home with a custom-made CD or tape that you can use on your own. Your therapist or doctor may also teach you self-hypnosis, as Ms. Ritchie’s therapist did. You learn how to put yourself in a deeply relaxed, receptive state in which you repeat statements such as “My body is strong and can handle this surgery,” or “I feel calm and relaxed.” “People think hypnosis is about giving up control,” said Dr. Spiegel. “But it’s actually giving control back to the patients.” |
| Vital Signs: Hazards: More Culprits in Hair Loss Than Just the Salon Posted: 15 Apr 2011 11:50 PM PDT Many black women suffer from severe permanent hair loss, but little research has been done on the causes of the problem, often dismissed as a cosmetic worry. Still, chemicals used to straighten hair have long been suspected of playing a role. Now, in one of the first attempts to assess the prevalence of hair loss among black women, researchers have reported that nearly one-third of a group of 326 black women had a type of central hair loss called central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia, or C.C.C.A., which is diagnosed almost exclusively in black women. The informal study, published online on Monday in Archives of Dermatology, also found that the women with the most extensive hair loss had higher rates of Type 2 diabetes and bacterial scalp infections than those with mild or no hair loss. Women with extensive hair loss also were significantly more likely to have used braids, weaves and extensions in their hair. Dr. Angela Kyei, the paper’s lead author and chief resident at the Cleveland Clinic Institute of Dermatology and Plastic Surgery, said the report was one of the first to provide insight into the scope of the severe hair loss and suggested the problem is not just skin deep. She said that while salon styles like tight braids and weaves may contribute to C.C.C.A., medical conditions like Type 2 diabetes might also play a role. People with diabetes tend to be susceptible to infections, including scalp infections, she noted. This may predispose some women to hair loss after salon treatments. “To dismiss hair loss as a mere cosmetic problem is the wrong approach,” Dr. Kyei added. |
| Vital Signs: Patterns: Treating Other Conditions May Stave Off Alzheimer’s, Study Finds Posted: 16 Apr 2011 10:14 PM PDT Older people suffering from mild memory and cognition problems may be less likely to progress to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease if they receive treatment for medical conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol, a new study has found. In 2004, researchers at Daping Hospital in Chongqing, China, began following 837 residents ages 55 and older who had mild cognitive impairment but not dementia. Of these, 414 had at least one medical condition that can damage blood vessels and impair blood flow to the brain. After five years, 298 of the study participants had developed Alzheimer’s. Subjects who had had high blood pressure or other vascular problems at the beginning of the study were twice as likely to develop the dementia, compared with those without these risks, the researchers found. Half of those with vascular risks progressed to Alzheimer’s, compared with only 36 percent of those without. Among those participants with vascular problems, those who received treatment were almost 40 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not, the study also reported. The researchers suggested that vascular risk factors may affect the metabolism of beta-amyloid plaque, which accumulates in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and seems to play a pivotal role in the disease. About 7 percent of older people with mild cognitive impairment progress to Alzheimer’s each year. The study was published Wednesday in the journal Neurology. |
| Well: Sexism Charges Divide Surgeons’ Organization Posted: 15 Apr 2011 09:26 AM PDT |
| They Gather Secretly at Night, and Then They (Shhh!) Eat Posted: 15 Apr 2011 08:17 AM PDT SAN FRANCISCO — Along with big-wave surfing and high-altitude ultramarathons, eating is an extreme sport here. Which explains why, on a recent Saturday night, Tipay Corpuz, 21, a technology specialist for Apple, took a break from blogging about her obsession with fried chicken and waffles to join 2,500 fellow food geeks at the Underground Night Market. MultimediaJim Wilson/The New York TimesFrom left Samir Bolar, Jessica Gaiber and Amy Rodriguez shared chicken satays and a whole wheat pasta dish they purchased while waiting to get into the club where the event took place. Jim Wilson/The New York TimesNeil Davidson prepared part of a Hawaiian breakfast dish for a customer. More Photos » At this quasi-clandestine monthly event, a tribal gathering of young chefs, vendors and their iron-stomached followers are remaking the traditional farmers market as an indie food rave. At midnight, the smell of stir-fried pork bellies was wafting through the Mission district. There was live music, liquor, bouncers, a disco ball — and a line waiting to sample hundreds of delicacies made mostly on location, among them bacon-wrapped mochi (a Japanese rice paste) and ice cream made from red beets, Guinness and chocolate cake. In a sense it is civil disobedience on a paper plate. The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmers markets. Here, where the food rave — call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become “members” (free) and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected. Members of the gathering have few qualms about the sampling. “I want something savory and awesome,” said David McDonald, who works with Ms. Corpuz and estimates that he spends 40 percent of his income on dinners. “I want food that will put me in a coma before I go to sleep.” Fueled by Twitter and food blogs, the market has spawned a host of underground imitators in places like Washington and Atlanta, where about 1,000 people showed up for the first of a series of monthly Saturday night craves — and where Tim Ho, a young Taiwanese-American who cooks part-time, boasted that his jellyfish salad has a crunch he compared to “tendons and ligaments.” There are outposts as far as London and Amsterdam. Even mainstream farmers markets are creeping toward nighttime, including a Friday evening market in Nashville near the State Capitol where homeward-bound workers can drink wine as they chat about kale. The “underground” strategy adds cachet. Participants “have to know the ins and outs of the belly of the city just to find the place,” said Roger Feely, a San Francisco chef well-known for giving “pop-up” dinner parties in alleyways. (New York City, too, has a plethora of pop-up restaurants of various kinds, but it has been less hospitable to unlicensed vendors.) Where psychedelic drugs famously transported another self-conscious San Francisco generation, the rebel act of choice by Valerie Luu, 23, a first-generation Vietnamese chef, is deep-frying string cheese in a cast-iron pan. “When I was their age I was doing drugs and going to rock shows,” said Novella Carpenter, an urban farmer and author who recently got into a spat with the City of Oakland for selling chard and other produce at a pop-up farm stand without a permit. “That’s not their culture,” she continued. “Their culture is food — incredible yummy-tasting food.” Some see the growth of the underground markets as part of a high renaissance of awareness for a Fast Food Nation generation, with its antipathy for the industrial food machine. In the recesses of the markets, a certain self-expressive, do-it-yourself “craftness” flourishes. “It connects the D.I.Y. movement with the locavore movement,” said Maya Robinson, an accountant who does work for the United States Treasury who founded Grey DC, an underground market in Washington modeled on the San Francisco idea. “That cross-section is what’s so exciting.” The underground market here, which also has a less chic daytime component, was started by Iso Rabins, 30, the founder of ForageSF, a company that began with foraging walks and dinners featuring dishes like wild nettle soup with crème fraiche. He started in 2009 from a private home after observing that many friends could not afford to sell at farmers markets, which requires business and product liability insurance (around $250), space rental ($40 to $55 a day), yearly member fees (around $110), and a health and safety permit (about $500). The use of commercial kitchens would cost an additional $45 to $75 an hour, Mr. Rabins noted, and making jam can take eight hours or more. “The small-batch economics just don’t work,” he said. The goal is to be an incubator for culinary start-ups, and be a profit-making venture. Vendors pay $50 to reserve a cooking space and return 10 percent of sales over $500 to ForageSF. “The feeling in the food community is that if you’re making money, it’s not something you’re passionate about,” Mr. Rabins said. “But if we actually want to change anything — dedicate our lives to it — we need to make money doing it,” he said. Amateur cooks around the country are pushing to have the right to sell unlicensed goods directly to consumers. So-called “cottage food” laws that allow products considered nonhazardous, like pies and cookies, exist in 18 states, with five more considering similar legislation. Anya Fernald, who produces the Eat Real Festival in Oakland and Los Angeles, sees the phenomenon as a search for healthier alternatives to commercial industrial food. At the San Francisco Night Market this month, which ran until 2 a.m. in a mammoth public events space, Ms. Fernald was serving up macaroni made of nutrient-rich spelt flour that she had smothered in cheese. Clad in a June Lockhart-style apron, she said cooks and consumers were “aware they need to do something. But undoing those choices is not very simple.” There were so many choices at the market that flitting from the Meatballer to the Pizza Hacker threatened to simulate the internal somersaults associated with an out-of-control Tilt-A-Whirl. While offbeat cooking remains just a hobby for some, Kai Kronfield of Nosh This said he was inspired by the economic downturn to forsake his old profession: designing houses in Pacific Heights and Pebble Beach. Mr. Kronfield now designs candies — black-pepper scented caramels, for instance, or toffees with sea salt and locally sourced bacon. He had never made a piece of candy until a year ago, he said, but learned the art by watching a lot of videos. He said he was heading next to the sold-out Baconfest Chicago celebration, billed as a “baconalia.” “I’m running with this,” he said. |
| Breast Device Recall Made Most Severe Posted: 14 Apr 2011 11:10 PM PDT The recall of a medical device that left particles of tungsten in women’s breasts has been classified as the most serious type of recall, one involving “situations in which there is a reasonable probability that use of these products will cause serious adverse health consequences or death,” the Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday. The device, the Axxent FlexiShield Mini, was a pad made of tungsten and silicone rubber that was temporarily placed inside breast incisions during an unusual procedure in which women were given an entire course of radiation treatment in one dose after undergoing a lumpectomy for cancer. The pads were used to help direct the radiation beam and shield healthy tissue. But the pads were flawed, and left the breast tissue and chest muscles riddled with hundreds of tungsten particles. It is not known if tungsten is dangerous because relatively little research has been done on its long-term health effects in humans. But it shows up on mammograms and may make them difficult to read, especially troubling for women who have had breast cancer and worry about recurrences. The metal particles resemble calcium deposits, which can indicate cancer. That the tungsten shows up on mammograms is what made the recall Class I, the most serious type, said Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration. She said the particles could interfere with diagnosis because they can be mistaken for cancerous calcifications or may hide real calcifications. Twenty-nine women are known to have been affected: 27 at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Calif., and 2 at Karmanos-Crittenton Cancer Center in Rochester Hills, Mich. So far, 16 have had follow-up mammograms six months after their surgery, and all 16 were found to have tungsten particles. Some of the women, concerned that the tungsten could be harmful, are considering having mastectomies to rid themselves of the particles. Seven are suing Hoag and the device manufacturer, according to Jeffrey Milman, a lawyer in Irvine, Calif., who is representing the women. Mr. Milman said that for the purposes of the lawsuits, the government’s decision to classify the recall as serious was “icing on the cake.” The device was made by a company called Xoft, which was subsequently bought by another company, iCad. The Axxent FlexiShield Mini had been cleared by the drug agency in June 2009 in an abbreviated process used for devices that are considered equivalent to products already on the market. That process, known as 510(k), takes less time than the procedure used to approve a new device, and it generally does not require tests on humans. The shields, taken off the market in February, were cut to fit each patient, and Ms. Riley said the tungsten particles were shed after the cutting. But why that occurred is not clear, because the shields were meant to be cut and were made with that in mind. |
| Study Ties Suicide Rate in Work Force to Economy Posted: 15 Apr 2011 11:20 AM PDT The suicide rate increased 3 percent in the 2001 recession and has generally ridden the tide of the economy since the Great Depression, rising in bad times and falling in good ones, according to a comprehensive government analysis released Thursday. MultimediaRelated
Experts said the new study may help clarify a long-clouded relationship between suicide and economic trends. While many researchers have argued that economic hardship can raise the likelihood of suicide in people who are already vulnerable — like those with depression or other mental illnesses — research has been mixed. Some studies have supported such a link, but others have found the opposite: that rates drop in periods of high unemployment, as if people exhibit resilience when they need it most. Using more comprehensive data to nail down economic trends, the new study found a clear correlation between suicide rates and the business cycle among young and middle-age adults. That correlation vanished when researchers looked only at children and the elderly. It may not be the case that economic troubles cause suicide attempts, but they can be factors. “They did a nice job of adding a piece to a very complex puzzle,” said Eve Moscicki, a researcher at the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education who was not involved in the study. “It may be that when people who are more vulnerable to suicide to begin with lose a job or get a pay cut, it adds one more stressor.” In the study, which appears in The American Journal of Public Health, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined suicide rates per 100,000 Americans for every year from 1928 to 2007. The overall rate fell by more than a third in that time, to 11.2 from 18.0, with most of the decline occurring before 1945. It fluctuated in the mid-1950s, trended upward through the late 1970s, and back down between the mid-1980s and 2000. Over the years, researchers have attributed this general downward trend to improved access to care, rising standards of living and better drugs, among other things. To investigate the effect of business cycles, the researchers calculated the average rate during periods when the economy contracted and compared it with the average during the years leading to downturns. The sharpest increase occurred at the start of the Great Depression, when rates jumped 23 percent — to 22.1 in 1932, from 18.0 in 1928. The study found smaller bumps during the oil crisis of the early 1970s and the double-dip recession of the early 1980s, among other economic troughs. The suicide rate generally fell during periods of economic expansion, with some exceptions. Rates among people in their 30s and 40s went up during the booming 1960s and actually decreased among the elderly in the severe recession of the mid-1970s. Cultural factors played a role, the authors argue. “The social unrest and tumult of the 1960s may have added to young people’s mental stress and therefore contributed to their continually rising suicide rates,” they wrote. “For the elderly groups, the rapid increase in Social Security benefits in the late 1960s may have provided a safety net in hard times.” Feijun Luo, the lead author of the study, said, “The findings suggest the potential to see a big increase in the rates during this current recession.” His co-authors were Curtis S. Florence, Myriam Quispe-Agnoli, Lijing Ouyang, and Dr. Alexander E. Crosby, all of the C.D.C. Suicide is impossible to predict, and rare even in the most dire circumstances, which is why prevention programs and early treatments have had mixed results. Most address specific problems like substance abuse, depression, isolation and troubled family relationships. But this study should give communities and doctors a better sense not only of when risk is high, but in whom — working-age adults, in this case. “Once people age out of the work force, there seems to be no relationship between the business cycle and their vulnerability,” Dr. Florence said. |
| Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born Posted: 15 Apr 2011 01:55 PM PDT A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. MultimediaThe finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists. The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most. Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes. This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science. Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time. Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists. In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. The tree indicated that Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists. “We’re uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don’t understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson’s new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship. “I think we ought to take this seriously, although there are some who will dismiss it out of hand,” Dr. Joseph said. Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “It’s too early to tell if Atkinson’s idea is correct, but if so, it’s one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics that I’ve seen in a decade.” Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language “is not something my method can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said. His study was prompted by a recent finding that the number of phonemes in a language increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group. Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists. For either kind of reduction in diversity to occur, the population budding process must be rapid, or diversity will build up again. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa was very rapid at each stage. The acquisition of modern language, or the technology it made possible, may have prompted the expansion, Dr. Atkinson said. “What’s so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn’t change all that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson. Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe. “Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species,” he said. In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Advertising: A Younger Group for Feminine Products Posted: 16 Apr 2011 05:00 PM PDT “Some girls get their period as young as 8,” begins a section for mothers on a Web site by Kotex, the feminine products brand. “Have you had the talk?” U by Kotex Tween, a new line of feminine care products aimed at 8- to 12-year olds, is encouraging young women to share accounts of their first periods. The site, Kotex.com/tween, urges mothers to pick a date soon to explain menstruation, and clicking on “get the right products” takes mothers to a page promoting the brand’s newest offering: U by Kotex Tween. In what the brand says is an industry first, the pads are designed specifically for 8- to 12-year-olds and are 18 percent shorter and narrower than other Kotex pads. Sold in glittery boxes decorated with hearts, stars and swirls (which are also printed on the pads themselves), the products would look at home on the set of “Hannah Montana,” the Disney Channel show that starred the actress Miley Cyrus. “These pads are designed to fit smaller girls’ body size, with bold and glittery packages” that also appeal to them, said Melissa Sexton, a marketing director in the adult feminine care division at Kimberly-Clark, which owns the brand. On the site, Dr. Lissa Rankin, a gynecologist and author of “What’s Up Down There?: Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist if She Was Your Best Friend,” is featured in a video encouraging mothers. “A lot of moms have a hard time even talking to their own peers about this issue and have to get over their own embarrassment so they can have a candid, fun and supportive conversation with their daughters,” Dr. Rankin said in a phone interview. On another area of the site, intended for prospective users, UbyKotex.com/HelloPeriod, visitors share videos and written accounts of their first periods. One out of three females has no idea what is happening when her first period arrives, while four out of five mothers feel ill-prepared to educate their daughters about menstruation, according to surveys commissioned by Kotex. The sites for both mothers and their daughters are by Organic, part of the Omnicom Group. • Susan Kim, co-author of “Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation,” was initially startled by the introduction of U by Kotex Tween. “What punched me in the gut is that the age of menarche had dropped so precipitously,” said Ms. Kim, using the term for first menstruation. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, a period kit for an 8-year-old — eek!’ ” But she does not dispute the need for products that cater to girls that young, and lauded the brand’s approach. “It was not that long ago that girls used to pass around the Judy Blume book, ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,’ ” because it addressed stigmatized topics including menstruation, Ms. Kim said. “It was such contraband material, so I liked that on the preteen site that it very much was a place for girls to share, with firsthand testimony.” From 1920 to 1984, the average age of menarche dropped from 13.3 to 12.4, according to a 2007 article in the Journal of Adolescent Health. A study published in Pediatrics last year found that in the United States, 15 percent of American girls begin puberty by age 7. The U by Kotex line was introduced in 2010 with a marketing campaign aimed at women 14 to 22 that skewers feminine care companies, including Kotex itself, for the typically euphemistic tone and dainty tropes of their ads. “The ads on TV are really helpful because they use that blue liquid,” says a woman in her early 20s in the first U by Kotex commercial, as blue liquid is poured on a pad. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s supposed to happen.’ ” The commercial, by JWT, which is a part of WPP, has been viewed more than 1.2 million times on YouTube. With the motto “Break the Cycle,” the brand uses humor to challenge the stigma around menstrual products in Web-only videos, also by Organic, including one in which a woman standing with her bike outside a drugstore asks men to go in and buy her tampons because she forgot her bike lock. While some offer to watch her bike, none will make the purchase. Over the 52 weeks that ended March 20, the share of all Kotex products in the $634 million tampon category increased 4.1 points, for a 15.9 percent share, while in the $893 million sanitary napkins and liners segment, the brand increased 1.7 points, for a 19.4 percent share, according to Symphony/IRI Group, a market data firm whose totals do not include Wal-Mart. U by Kotex spent $23.2 million on advertising in 2010, eclipsing the $4.1 million Kimberly-Clark spent on the older Kotex brand, according to the Kantar Media Unit of WPP. Tampax, by Procter & Gamble, which dominates the tampon segment with a 47.2 percent share, spent $49.9 million. • U by Kotex recently began addressing the look of feminine care products, which have traditionally been plain white, by printing various designs on pads. With what the brand calls a “limited-edition designer series,” prints like “poptimistic” and “punk glam,” will be introduced for U by Kotex products in July. Meanwhile, an online pad design contest, Ban the Bland, began April 4 and has drawn more than 1,600 submissions. Three contestants with the most online votes will be flown in September to New York, where they will collaborate with Patricia Field, the costume designer for “Sex and the City.” “Why should we settle for feminine care being dull and white and boring?” said Ms. Sexton about the designs on both the U by Kotex and U by Kotex Tween pads. “Every day when we get dressed, we have a choice of what we wear, and when we have our periods we should still have that choice.” |
| Well: Cooking With Sprouted Brown Rice Posted: 15 Apr 2011 12:21 PM PDT |
| Well: What's the Best Exercise? Posted: 15 Apr 2011 10:38 AM PDT |
| Well: Hypnosis as a Health Option Posted: 15 Apr 2011 09:55 AM PDT |
| Posted: 16 Apr 2011 07:40 PM PDT DR. LEVINE’S MAGIC UNDERWEAR resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting. MultimediaJames Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. To help me understand some of the key findings, he suggested that I become a mock research trial participant. First my body fat was measured inside a white, futuristic capsule called a Bod Pod. Next, one of Dr. Levine’s colleagues, Shelly McCrady-Spitzer, placed a hooded mask over my head to measure the content of my exhalations and gauge my body’s calorie-burning rate. After that, I donned the magic underwear, then went down the hall to the laboratory’s research kitchen for a breakfast whose calories were measured precisely. A weakness of traditional activity and obesity research is that it relies on self-reporting — people’s flawed recollections of how much they ate or exercised. But the participants in a series of studies that Dr. Levine did beginning in 2005 were assessed and wired up the way I was; they consumed all of their food in the lab for two months and were told not to exercise. With nary a snack nor workout left to chance, Dr. Levine was able to plumb the mysteries of a closed metabolic universe in which every calorie, consumed as food or expended for energy, could be accounted for. His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight. “We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,” explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. “The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t. People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. The posture of sitting itself probably isn’t worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching “Wheel of Fortune.” But for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary. Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives. Another study, published last year in the journal Circulation, looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11 percent. The study author David Dunstan wanted to analyze whether the people who sat watching television had other unhealthful habits that caused them to die sooner. But after crunching the numbers, he reported that “age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, waist circumference, body-mass index, glucose tolerance status and leisure-time exercise did not significantly modify the associations between television viewing and all-cause . . . mortality.” Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.” The good news is that inactivity’s peril can be countered. Working late one night at 3 a.m., Dr. Levine coined a name for the concept of reaping major benefits through thousands of minor movements each day: NEAT, which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. In the world of NEAT, even the littlest stuff matters. McCrady-Spitzer showed me a chart that tracked my calorie-burning rate with zigzagging lines, like those of a seismograph. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of the spikes, which indicated that the rate had shot up. “That’s when you bent over to tie your shoes,” she said. “It took your body more energy than just sitting still.” In a motion-tracking study, Dr. Levine found that obese subjects averaged only 1,500 daily movements and nearly 600 minutes sitting. In my trial with the magic underwear, I came out looking somewhat better — 2,234 individual movements and 367 minutes sitting. But I was still nowhere near the farm workers Dr. Levine has studied in Jamaica, who average 5,000 daily movements and only 300 minutes sitting. Dr. Levine knows that we can’t all be farmers, so instead he is exploring ways for people to redesign their environments so that they encourage more movement. We visited a chairless first-grade classroom where the students spent part of each day crawling along mats labeled with vocabulary words and jumping between platforms while reciting math problems. We stopped by a human-resources staffing agency where many of the employees worked on the move at treadmill desks — a creation of Dr. Levine’s, later sold by a company called Steelcase. Dr. Levine was in a philosophical mood as we left the temp agency. For all of the hard science against sitting, he admits that his campaign against what he calls “the chair-based lifestyle” is not limited to simply a quest for better physical health. His is a war against inertia itself, which he believes sickens more than just our body. “Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.” |
| What’s the Single Best Exercise? Posted: 16 Apr 2011 07:50 PM PDT Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control. ENERGY WELL SPENT In METs (metabolic equivalent to task), a measure of energy exerted for a given activity. So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science at Liverpool John Moores University in England and a past Olympian in the modern pentathlon, known for his swimming. The butterfly, he said, is “miserable, isolating, painful.” It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury. Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.” And sticking with an exercise is key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The health benefits of activity follow a breathtakingly steep curve. “The majority of the mortality-related benefits” from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise, said Timothy Church, M.D., who holds the John S. McIlhenny endowed chair in health wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent. So the one indisputable aspect of the single best exercise is that it be sustainable. From there, though, the debate grows heated. “I personally think that brisk walking is far and away the single best exercise,” said Michael Joyner, M.D., a professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a leading researcher in the field of endurance exercise. As proof, he points to the work of Hiroshi Nose, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of sports medical sciences at Shinshu University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, who has enrolled thousands of older Japanese citizens in an innovative, five-month-long program of brisk, interval-style walking (three minutes of fast walking, followed by three minutes of slower walking, repeated 10 times). The results have been striking. “Physical fitness — maximal aerobic power and thigh muscle strength — increased by about 20 percent,” Dr. Nose wrote in an e-mail, “which is sure to make you feel about 10 years younger than before training.” The walkers’ “symptoms of lifestyle-related diseases (hypertension, hyperglycemia and obesity) decreased by about 20 percent,” he added, while their depression scores dropped by half. Walking has also been shown by other researchers to aid materially in weight control. A 15-year study found that middle-aged women who walked for at least an hour a day maintained their weight over the decades. Those who didn’t gained weight. In addition, a recent seminal study found that when older people started a regular program of brisk walking, the volume of their hippocampus, a portion of the brain involved in memory, increased significantly. But let’s face it, walking holds little appeal — or physiological benefit — for anyone who already exercises. “I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and an expert on the effects of resistance training on the human body. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.” It’s simple. “Just fold your arms across your chest,” he said, “bend your knees and lower your trunk until your thighs are about parallel with the floor. Do that 25 times. It’s a very potent exercise.” Use a barbell once the body-weight squats grow easy. The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.” Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition.
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| Posted: 15 Apr 2011 09:31 PM PDT Diane Ackerman and Paul West have combined brilliant literary careers with the most enviable of marriages, a “decades-long duet.” Speculating on their longevity as a couple in “One Hundred Names for Love,” Ackerman writes: “We stayed together for the children — each was the other’s child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. . . . All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.” ONE HUNDRED NAMES FOR LOVE A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing By Diane Ackerman 322 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. Related
Excerpt: ‘One Hundred Names for Love’ (Google Books) As a young man, West had been an R.A.F. officer and a collegiate and county cricketer, and had graduated with a first from Oxford, something achieved through impressive feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle — he managed both. A novelist by the time he and Ackerman fell in love in the early 1970s, he “had a draper’s touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons,” Ackerman writes. Indeed, words were the oxygen of their love. Every morning, she knew she’d “find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away. . . . A new note appeared almost every day for decades.” Thus it was particularly tragic when, in 2003, West suffered a stroke that left him with global aphasia: an inability to produce words or to understand words spoken to him. “He had chosen to live the proverbial ‘life of the mind’ to the exclusion of all else, reserving his energy for writing and for his equally word-passionate wife,” Ackerman writes. “Taking words from Paul was like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical to loved ones and stealing his manna.” His new vocabulary consisted of only one word, a meaningless syllable that he repeated, raising the volume when he was frustrated: “MEM, MEM, MEM. . . .” Ackerman is an unwavering presence at her husband’s side. As a naturalist, she produces observations that make this book so much more than a pathography, or a narrative of illness: “In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it’s easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul’s old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share.” West’s every utterance becomes an exhausting guessing game. Years later, after he has recovered the ability to speak and write — though “aphasia still plagues him with its merry dances, . . . its occasionally missed adverbs and verbs, its automatically repeated words or phrases,” Ackerman explains — he is able to describe his own efforts. “On rare occasions,” he tells his wife, “the word I sought lay like an angel, begging to be used, even if only to be used in spirit ditties of no tone. I had the beginnings of a word, . . . maybe miles away, maybe too far for customary use, and it would remain, a delusive harbinger of night, a word unborn, doomed to remain unsaid as humm — or thal — unable to complete itself because of my aphasic ineptitude.” A speech therapist working with West at home points to a picture of an angel, and West says “cherubim,” which the therapist thinks is a nonsense word. Ackerman corrects her, then decides to devise her own exercises “tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending.” She realizes, too, that he has a great desire to write again, and she helps him at first by taking dictation — a hugely difficult task. Eventually, as he gradually improves, he begins to write on his own. Why would West want to write when he is already expending huge energy trying to convey the simplest of desires? “Because of the huge gap between what he could say and what he could think,” Ackerman recalls. “Ideas inched through his speech, but they whipped around his thoughts like ice yachts.” Or as she quotes West explaining it: “The contrast reassured me as to what lay ahead. It was merely a matter of lining up the two in sync, making a match between my pall-mall thought and aphasia. Would it take six months or a year, or never happen at all? This was the great unknown of my life.” As in her previous work — “A Natural History of Love” and “A Natural History of the Senses” being my favorites — here, Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination: “Creativity is an intellectual adventure into those jungles where the jaguars of sweet laughter croon, with a willingness to double back, ignore fences or switch directions at the drop of a coconut.” The book’s title stems from the fact that “once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo.” The stroke has left him struggling to say his wife’s name. When a friend asks him, “Do you have a pet name for Diane?” his face falls “as if touched by a Taser,” Ackerman writes. “ ‘Used to have . . . hundreds,’ he said with infinite sadness. ‘Now I can’t think of one.’ ” Ackerman begins teaching him the names again, beginning with the simplest, “swan, pilot-poet,” and he recognizes them. She coaxes him to invent new ones, a morning ritual, and slowly “names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as ‘Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory.’ ” An appendix lists the One Hundred Names, which Ackerman notes “continue to flow and flower, some funny, some romantic, some playfully outlandish — all a testament to how a brain can repair itself, and how a duet between two lovers can endure hardship. This is what we have made of a diminished thing. A bell with a crack in it may not ring as clearly, but it can ring as sweetly.” I will confess I was deeply affected by “One Hundred Names for Love.” Ackerman and West’s is an extraordinary love story, and that a devastating stroke intervened has made it only more moving. Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof. |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2011 09:31 PM PDT The Christmas that Meghan O’Rourke was 5, her mother gave her a journal — a whole world of blank pages, puzzling to the child but not to the mother. Barbara O’Rourke explained to her daughter that the book was a place for her to put her thoughts: “You’d write something like ‘Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street.’ ” Courtesy of Meghan O'RourkeMeghan O’Rourke with her mother, Barbara O’Rourke. THE LONG GOODBYE By Meghan O’Rourke 306 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95. Multimedia In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here. Related
Purple hair! For Meghan O’Rourke, who would grow up to be a poet and professional thought-putter, it was a revelatory instruction: that the world was a thrilling place, that it might be her pleasure and prerogative to capture it in words. Appearing halfway through “The Long Goodbye,” the moment also provides a glimpse of Barbara O’Rourke and her generous vision. She was a woman who loved fireflies and golden retrievers, a teacher and headmaster who didn’t believe in God but who counted daily on the transcendent possibilities of art and laughter and purple-haired hope. Given a diagnosis of late-stage colorectal cancer when she was 53, she died less than three years later, on another Christmas Day, in 2008, leaving her husband and three children to make sense of a paler world without her. “The Long Goodbye” is O’Rourke’s anguished, beautifully written chronicle of that passage, from the innocence of a relatively privileged life to the wider and more desolate country that great loss imposes. So there are two main characters in this story, a wisely determined balance that allows us to care for the mother as well as the narrator, rendered helpless in the wake of death’s dominion. A poet and critic with a considerable résumé for her years (an acclaimed book of poems, “Halflife,” as well as editorial stints at The New Yorker and The Paris Review), O’Rourke grew up in Brooklyn. Her father, an Egyptologist and classics teacher, and her mother, who had been his student, both taught for decades at the prestigious St. Ann’s School. O’Rourke was 30 when she learned her mother was dying — when she realized that the “stealthy, quilled creature” of fear had taken up residence in her days and nights. “I know this may sound melodramatic,” she writes at the start of her memoir, aware that the territory of grief in which she found herself is both cruel and commonplace. Still, the difference between acknowledging the inevitability of loss and actually experiencing it is a bit like seeing a photo of the moon before visiting there. “In the last year of her illness, I got to know my mother as never before,” she writes. “Knowing that I was one of the lucky ones didn’t make it much easier.” As any poet or psychologist will tell you, memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain. Taking its narrative cues from the jagged path of O’Rourke’s experience, “The Long Goodbye” begins and ends with the death of the mother — who made “a madrigal of quiet sounds” on the day she died, who kept her daughter close throughout the workaday horrors of her illness and told her she was not afraid to die. O’Rourke steeled herself through oncologist appointments and tumor-induced dementia and her father’s heartbreaking efforts to stay functional; she took a dinner knife to her forearm one night in an effort to trump the psychic pain she was in. Believing with the lunacy of early grief that she could stave off the inevitable if she flung herself far enough away from it, she married her longtime boyfriend, left him within months, quit a job, had an affair. These brush fires did not spare her the greater calamity, which came on its own schedule, accompanied by death’s usual mix of sacred and mundane. “Time does not obey our commands,” O’Rourke realizes after a day of watching episodes of “Lost” at the hospital while her mother is in surgery. “You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.” A cultural critic for Slate, O’Rourke wrote an autobiographical column there in the aftermath of her mother’s death, much of it transformed into this narrative. This immediacy is reflected in the real-time portrayal of her experience, although a surfeit of detail sometimes threatens to muffle the story’s power: the day-to-day panic, the bartering with some unknown god for a few more days of life, the well-intentioned fools who offer empty condolences. Unsparing in its description of the process of dying and the world that catapults past, “The Long Goodbye” hardly suggests that people — physicians, friends and family, the narrator herself — know how to behave in the face of death. One doctor, caught unawares by the metastases in Barbara O’Rourke’s brain, announced to Meghan that this new turn was “fascinating”; O’Rourke argued with her mother’s friend over who got to feed her, and fought with her father, who was near collapse, over the use of a car. Grief doesn’t necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear, and O’Rourke captures that emotional violence with elegant candor. “The Long Goodbye” also traces the second crossing that death mandates: the architecture of mourning that enables survivors to go on. In search of a different landscape, O’Rourke traveled west to the Mojave Desert. “I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life,” she writes. Nothing had prepared her for the physical goneness of her mother, or for the dearth of ritual and understanding that would acknowledge her loss. She immersed herself in the literature of grief — in Freud and Bowlby, poetry and “Hamlet,” fiction and history and clinical works. Her crash course in bereavement study is synthesized here with equivocal results. That sangfroid doctor might consider it “fascinating,” but I often found it a distraction from the glinting edge of O’Rourke’s own story. What she learned from her research was not so much grim as bracing, articulated point-blank in her italicized notes: “There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.” O’Rourke’s greatest amulet, of course, will be the mother herself, classic and eternal, “the shell,” as O’Rourke writes, “in which you divide and become a life.” In Barbara O’Rourke’s last days, Meghan tells her, weeping, “I’m going to miss you so much” — expecting tears and consolation in return. Instead her mother is still. “I know,” she tells her, then says it again. This bare-bones scene reminded me of the young child who takes a painful fall and then wails for reassurance. You’re O.K., the good-enough mother will say. You’re O.K. “The Long Goodbye” is an elegiac depiction of a drama as old as life, wherein the mother’s first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her. |
| Cultural Studies: The Sex Drive, Idling in Neutral Posted: 16 Apr 2011 05:10 PM PDT THIS is the story a friend told me: One night at a gathering at an apartment in New York City, a woman blithely announced, “I would pay someone to have sex with my husband.” There were snorts and yips of laughter. I believe one woman even clapped. “What did they mean?” I asked my friend. “ ‘Here’s to no sex with our husbands ever again?’ ‘Here’s to the end of sex?’ ” She couldn’t really tell me. It wasn’t exactly a Bund rally she’d attended, but it was something. Even if these women weren’t planning to fob their own husbands off on helpful neighbors or prostitutes, they were in agreement that at a certain point in a long relationship, a woman might very well just want less of “that part” of her life (“that part” being the linguistic first cousin to “down there”). The biological imperative for sex had receded, and was now as distant as the memory of, say, once having gone to Epcot with one’s parents (you know you were there because of the snapshots of you and your family in lederhosen; just as, in the case of sex, you know you once prolifically and creatively partook, because you — or perhaps, horribly, your children — have unearthed from a drawer a tiny bottle of some dried gray substance called Love Pollen, older even than the Robitussin PE that haunts your medicine cabinet.) Suddenly, being touched by one’s husband or partner could seem so ... last year. I began to imagine that a kind of sex-themed Andromeda Strain had fallen upon the post-30s female population of Earth, causing them to turn away from men. But no, said another friend; sexual disengagement was an equal-opportunity employer when it came to gender, not to mention age. She pointed me to a recent article in The New York Observer that featured young hipsters who leave parties at dawn uncoupled but sated; and another one in New York magazine about guys who’ve been gorging on Internet pornography suddenly finding that they no longer have much appetite for the nonvirtual. After all that passive watching, a real breast rising up in the dim light of a bedroom might seem as cold and surreal as a moonscape. A male friend told me he thought he understood why pornography could be preferable to some people; watching pornography, he said, is like going to a Wikipedia page. You search for a specific thing, a specific feeling, a specific result, and that’s exactly what you find. Yet even as saying no to sex with actual partners is being acknowledged more openly, I think the culture is still weirdly prurient about the idea of other people — particularly women — not having sex. There’s a peculiar interest in certain female public figures, who, at least as far as we think we know (and God knows we might be very, very wrong), appear unattached and less than active. Think of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor or the former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I can picture either woman in a big, beautiful bed with great sheets, the duvet scattered with legal briefs or policy papers. The bedside lamp burns a peachy, erotic glow all night as she works. But look at the way Bill Clinton’s and John F. Kennedy’s brains seemed fueled by sex; maybe sex is what got the Family and Medical Leave Act passed, or finessed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why, a powerful woman who is sexually unengaged cannot be allowed to make vital decisions about the security of the United States! This kind of thinking is offensive and, actually, insane; sex isn’t the anti-kryptonite. But because we’re all post-Freudians, it’s as if we still believe sex equals strength, health and life; and therefore, not-sex equals weakness, illness and death. I have no idea of what goes on inside the marriage of the woman who made the crack about her husband. All relationships are mysteries. When no one else is there to watch, a couple might put on wigs and prance around, or engage in Santeria rituals. The woman’s husband might have been a lout. She might have been one, too. Perhaps they had never been well matched. Or maybe it was the fatigue of familiarity, and she was simply bored. Regardless, it seems to me that the woman who made the comment about her husband was most likely taking a defeatist position that degrades both of them. But there are enviable noes, too, and these include the ones you utter when you just want privacy. No can mean: not right now. The desire to be left alone can lead to solitude, which in turn leads to great work ideas and, ultimately, freedom. My first experience with an enviable no took place back in the 1970s, when I was around 14, and fell in love with a soulful boy who lived in a nearby suburb. Around that time, everyone was talking about the “bases,” that crude system for organizing sexual activity, and my boyfriend became absorbed with the idea that we would “go to third,” which embarrassed and thrilled me. During our phone conversations, we’d talk about mutual friends, TV shows and Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” which we were both reading for English, and suddenly he would say, “So, will you go to third?” Often, I pretended I hadn’t heard him; other times I cryptically said, “We’ll see.” One day, I seem to recall, a letter arrived on heavy stationery, written with the calligraphy set he’d received as a present for his bar mitzvah. In Magna Carta handwriting, my boyfriend wrote something like, “Willst thou go to third with me ... milady?” He was unrelenting in his quest, and finally a plan was made. The following weekend there was to be a party at his house, and afterward I would spend the night in his family’s rec room. On Saturday night, I lay down on the Castro convertible beneath a framed poster of “Christina’s World,” until my boyfriend appeared at the top of the stairs in a belted velour bathrobe, looking like a miniature Hugh Hefner; he should have been swirling a brandy snifter. “So, Meg,” he said. “Are you ready to go to third?” After a beat, I said to him, “No.” He tied the belt of his robe tighter and said, “But it’s what we agreed.” Still I said no, sorry, I wasn’t ready after all. We broke up the next morning, and then got back together again days later, and then broke up a few more times. I eventually did go to third; yes, I did. I grew up; I got married; I had children; decades passed, and I lived through personal happiness and disappointment, and I barely thought about this little moment again until recently. What I had given myself, in saying no back then, was the luxury of time — time to figure out what I wanted, what felt best. No is like being in graduate school; you’re allowed to think for a while, and not be in the world. While some noes are event-specific and others are more of a general position, loss of interest in sex has become, paradoxically, a hot topic. Though no may now be more co-ed than ever, and may have a particularly contemporary, techno-sheen to it, I don’t think the situation is radically different from how it ever was. Once, women were told they had to say no; then they were told they had to say yes. And now women (and men, too) are allowed to think about the implications of yes or no, and talk about them in ironic, defensive voices, or else more thoughtfully. But perhaps the hardest part of all this has to do with aging. As you get older, you do tend to live more narrowly, and that can be sad. Lately, when I hear people speak about lack of desire, I think they may really be speaking about energy. There are just so many seductions — Facebook! Wikipedia! Pornography! “Far From the Madding Crowd”! Love! Pepperidge Farm! Hulu! Curriculum Night! Art! — and we are human, and mortal, and inevitably we have to choose. Is this really the end of sex? Just when I think maybe it is, someone breaks out the Love Pollen, and what do you know, there’s still something in the bottle. |
| The New Old Age: Dignity Lost in the E.R. Posted: 15 Apr 2011 06:00 AM PDT |
| Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl Posted: 11 Apr 2011 10:35 PM PDT TOKYO — Japan has decided to raise its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday. MultimediaRelated
Koichi Nakamura/Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated PressOfficials, monks, military officers and other emergency workers observed a moment of silence on Monday in Natori, Japan. The decision to raise the alert level to 7 from 5 on the scale amounts to an admission that the accident at the nuclear facility, brought on by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, is likely to have substantial and long-lasting consequences for health and for the environment. Some in the nuclear industry have been saying for weeks that the accident released large amounts of radiation, but Japanese officials had played down this possibility. The new estimates by Japanese authorities suggest that the total amount of radioactive materials released so far is equal to about 10 percent of that released in the Chernobyl accident, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Mr. Nishiyama stressed that unlike at Chernobyl, where the reactor itself exploded and fire fanned the release of radioactive material, the containments at the four troubled reactors at Fukushima remained intact over all. But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric and Power, said, “The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.” On the International Nuclear Event Scale, a Level 7 nuclear accident involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.” The scale, which was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and countries that use nuclear energy, leaves it to the nuclear agency of the country where the accident occurs to calculate a rating based on complicated criteria. Japan’s previous rating of 5 placed the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Level 7 has been applied only to the disaster at Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union. “This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.” Mr. Nishiyama said “tens of thousands of terabecquerels” of radiation per hour have been released from the plant. (The measurement refers to how much radioactive material was emitted, not the dose absorbed by living things.) The scale of the radiation leak has since dropped to under one terabecquerel per hour, the Kyodo news agency said, citing government officials. . The announcement came as Japan was preparing to urge more residents around the crippled nuclear plant to evacuate, because of concerns over long-term exposure to radiation. Also on Monday, tens of thousands of people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 p.m., exactly one month since the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami brought widespread destruction to Japan’s northeast coast. The mourning was punctuated by another strong aftershock near Japan’s Pacific coast, which briefly set off a tsunami warning, killed a 16-year-old girl and knocked out cooling at the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi power station for almost an hour, underscoring the vulnerability of the plant’s reactors to continuing seismic activity. On Tuesday morning, there was another strong aftershock, which shook Tokyo. The authorities have already ordered people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to evacuate, and recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of 18 miles. The government’s decision to expand the zone came in response to radiation readings that would be worrisome over months in certain communities beyond those areas, underscoring how difficult it has been to predict the ways radiation spreads from the damaged plant. Unlike the previous definitions of the areas to be evacuated, this time the government designated specific communities that should be evacuated, instead of a radius expressed in miles.
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| National Briefing | Health: Study Warns of Tainted Meat Posted: 15 Apr 2011 11:00 PM PDT Half of the meat and poultry sold in supermarkets may be tainted with Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can make people sick, a new report suggests. The estimate, by the nonprofit Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, is based on 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from grocery stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Flagstaff, Ariz., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The study found that more than half of the samples contained the bacteria, and that half of those samples had a form of the bacteria that is resistant to at least three kinds of antibiotics. Proper cooking kills the germs, and federal health officials estimate that staph accounts for less than 3 percent of all food-borne illnesses. In a statement Friday, the American Meat Institute said the study was misleading. |
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