PHOTO: MATTEO PESCARIN
A couple days ago I read this BBC report about a study showing that obese people tend to under-report their sugar consumption on food frequency questionnaires, which could have grave consequences on the validity of epidemiological studies of diet and health. Here’s a link to the actual study.

It just made me think about the OBESITY IS CONTAGIOUS brouhaha a while back and the instantly glad that the copy editors decided not to headline the story OBESE ARE LIARS ABOUT FOOD or something. I guess they learned something.

But seriously, why DO obese people under-report sugar intake? Unconscious wishful thinking? Ignorance about the foods they consume? Extra-bad estimations of portion size? It’s weird, because people in diet/food research know that EVERYONE is pretty bad at this kind of stuff. So it’s strange that they founds such an effect for obese people and not non-obese.

WONDER WHAT HE WOULD SCORE?
Why yes, yes you can. Autism is a spectrum disorder, encompassing a range of severity of symptoms; this likely reflects how we still have no freakin’ clue as to what’s going wrong with the brain in autistic kids.

M’anyway. Defining someone as slightly autistic has become common place in popular culture - those brilliant types who seem to be lacking in the social skillz department. I’ve thought it about a former boss of mine. A family member here or there...In fact, it seems, that everyone has just a little shade of the characteristics that define this disorder.

And now, to find out how autistic you really are...take this quiz. It’s was developed by the researchers at the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, including Simon Baron-Cohen...Borat’s cousin.

(p.s. I scored 22)

(PHOTO: DAVE DI BIASE)

Computers can now “laugh”, so to speak, at jokes, thanks to clever programming. Its rudimentary and simple sense of humor is good enough to chuckle at this one:

Mother: “My, you’ve been working in the garden a lot this summer.”
Boy: “I have to because teacher told me to weed a lot.”

Julia Taylor and Dr Lawrence Mazlack from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, put together some software that checked to see whether each work in a joke fit with the context of the sentence. When it finds a work that’s out of place, it then runs that word against similar sounding words to suss out the word play.

According to The Telegraph:

Taylor is now working on personalising the programme to take into account variation in the user’s sense of humour. She said: “If you’ve been in car accident, you probably won’t find a joke about a car accident funny.”

Me? I want a Will Ferrell robot! That plays the cowbell!! That would make me laugh way more than any punning piece of tin.

via New Scientist

However I am sorely tempted. Sorely tempted. But, you know, there is TOTALLY science in here: the complexities of inter-species communication, entwined with the history of domestication, the evolutionary biology of symbiosis! OH THE SCIENCE!

ME, I LOVE ANY EXCUSE TO GIVE MY FAVORITE GIRL RAP GROUP A SHOUT OUT

German scientists decided to see whether playing some romantic tunes would kick start the flagging libidos of captive sharks. Apparently it did.

Here are the top five shark love songs:

1.  Salt’n Pepa -Push It
2.  Joe Cocker - You Can Leave Your Hat On
3.  James Last - Traumschiff (German version of Love Boat)
4.  Justin Timberlake - Rock Your Body
5.  Bob Marley - No Woman, No Cry

VIA Digital Journal

The last year or so that I was living in Britain, you couldn’t watch the news without seeing at least one story about a woman campaigning their local National Health Service to receive the wonder breast cancer drug Herceptin. The drug was new and very costly ((21,000 pounds per year in the UK, around $50,000 in Canada) and not yet approved in the UK. But Roche, who makes the drug, had its PR claws out, informing women about the treatment, who then took their cases to the highest courts in the land (the media, of course); in one case the health minister actually intervened to give a woman Herceptin. It was a PR nightmare. The drug was approved months later by NICE, the body that decides which drugs are cost effective enough to be offered on the NHS.

While controversies still swarm around the drug in both Canada and the UK - mostly due to its high cost and how to fund it - one thing is certainly not debated: current evidence suggests that Herceptin really works. This 2005 analysis from the New England Journal of Medicine found that Herceptin and chemotherapy together could reduce recurrence by 52% and death by 33% in two years of follow up. In January of this year, a study from the Lancet in the UK found that women given Herceptin for early stage breast cancer found similar results (34% reduced risk of death, 36% reduction in risk of new cancer events). 

I mean WOW! 50% reduction in future cancer events. That’s awesome!

But what about the fact that you can also get a 50% reduction in relapse of breast cancer just by eating at least 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day and doing 30 minutes of walking, six times per week. Yes, you heard me...the WHEL study, (this segment on about 1500 women) on dietary patterns and breast cancer survival, found that women who follow this moderately health lifestyle (about a third of their group did) can do just as much for their cancer survival prognosis as by taking Herceptin. Their 10-year morality rate was just 7% - half that of women who ate less fresh produce and/or did less exercise.

But, you see, there is no miracle pill here. There is no powerful pharmaceutical company with a multi-billion dollar marketing budget to ACTUALLY CALL UP WOMEN PERSONALLY and tell them what a healthy lifestyle can do for them. Nope. And really, it’s pretty hard to get people excited about incredibly boring sensible advice. Wouldn’t it be hilarious to see a lawsuit from women who said that gym memberships were too high? Work days too long? Vegetables and fruits prohibitively expensive? The streets not safe enough for walking after dark? A dearth of bike paths?

I am not saying that women should be told just to exercise, eat an apple and pray; Herceptin can obviously save the lives of women facing more very aggressive cancer. But the imbalanced perception of a “miracle” drug versus the impact of lifestyle changes kind of cheeses me off.

(PHOTO: Julia Freeman-Woolpert)

A while back, when I was groaning over the crappiness of the Democratic Presidential candidates’ health care plans, I came across an intriguing comment on a blog. The woman basically said that health care is always doled out, controlled and limited - whether that limitation is a waiting list, common in socialized medicine, or by price, where people who can’t afford a treatment can’t get it - the most popular method in America. I’d never thought about it like that and it made me go herm.

I am, of course, a die hard devotee of single payer health care. I like to think of it as Winston Churchill thought about democracy, which according to him is “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Though its necessary bulk could drown a water buffalo in bureaucracy and budgetary excess, in order for public health care to work at all administrators must also be lean and efficient. They have to be kind of stingy. On principle, they can’t fritter away money on treatment that just don’t work or don’t work that well enough. Sort of like how there is an age cut-off for getting IVF on the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. Or how most plastic surgery isn’t covered in Canada. Yes, some people will be left out in the cold for a treatment that might do them some good, but that’s how the cookie crumbles.

Today, I think the NHS won a wee victory in the interest of wider public health. UK courts ruled to uphold a decision to stop offering popular Alzheimer’s drugs, including the blockbuster Aricept, to patients with mild cases of the disease. The original decision to pull the drug was made by NICE, the body that decides which drugs are cost effective and provide enough of a boon in quality of life to be covered. Their decision was based on studies of mild Alzheimer’s which showed little increase in cognitive functions by taking the drug early in prognosis. The drug manufacturer, Eisai, challenged the decision and took it to court.

One of the most influential studies on this topic was published in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine. It followed 769 people for three years: one third received no treatment, one third got vitamin E supplements and the last third got Aricept (generic name donepezil). After one year, patients on Aricept were less likely to have progressed to clinical Alzheimer’s than the other two groups. They also scored fractionally higher on cognitive function tests, such as the MMSE (Mini Mental State Examination, which scores from 0 - 30 points); Aricept patients lost 0.31 points, whereas control group lost 0.80 points.

These small differences disappeared after the first year of comparison. Assessing this and similar studies, NICE concluded that the small benefit, which vanishes very quickly, doesn’t warrant coverage on the NHS. According to the Times article above, 96,600 people in the UK who have mild AD will now not get medication. For one year, at 2.50 pounds per person per day, that’s a saving of 87.6 million pounds.

From what I can see, NICE made a hard, but defensible call. And, unlike the doctors of the NEJM study, they weren’t paid by the drug company. They are literally the last wall of protection that Britons have against the onslaught of Big Pharma’s direct marketing and their influence over clinical trials. Had the judge found in favor of Eisai, it would have been a devastating blow for NICE in the ability to do their job. I mean HONESTLY. Since when did drug companies make decisions based on what is best for the health of the entire population of 60 million Britons? It’s a shit job, for sure, but that is exactly what NICE does.

Of course it’s a bitter pill to swallow for people with AD and their family members, who, of course, believe their their husband or their Nana will stay themselves for just a little longer if given this wonder drug - even if the studies say it probably wouldn’t do much, if anything at all. Statistics mean absolutely nothing to a grieving person in need of a miracle. But when it comes to keeping a whole country afloat, the cold hard numbers are all you can go by.

I’ve got incorrigible friend crushes on Tom Eykemans and Gwynne Siak, the artist duo from Seattle who run the artshop Monocol. Why? Mostly because they make and sell the uber intelligently designed Darwin and Finchy pillows:

Life’s hard and times are tough when you’re a 21st Century thinker in 1800’s England. Darwin is a limited edition of four hand screened 12x16” pillows with his trusty Finchy to keep him company in ostracization and religious-scientific crisis.

Use him to deflect the blows of Christian Scientists or to cobble the knees of non-evolution minded friends—defense or offense? Religion or Science? You decide.

You too can own such dazzling creative genius for a mere $35 at Etsy. Genius, genius, I tell you.

That’s right people. DARPA needs more wacky brainpower to fuel their raving visions of cutting edge military science. And they’ve got all these videos of project manager testimonials reinforcing just how RAD working at DARPA is. It’s got this really hot little soundtrack that echoes early ‘90s exercise videos.

Daniel Engber over at Slate reports on the murky organization’s recent DARPATech meeting in Anaheim, California in his article ”I Want To Be a Mad Scientist.”

But it sure is interesting learning about the inner workings of the Pentagon’s crazy zany R&D dept. which has brought us such goodies as remote-controlled sharks and cyber-insect armies.

If anything, it looks like a bureaucratic nightmare led by a nano-managing boss according to some of the cutting comments on Wired Blog’s coverage of the conference.

(Also, along the lines of military recruitment, check out these recruitment videos for Japan’s Navy that channel the village people AND the Power Rangers.  They should keep you smiling ‘til Monday.)

You know how American politicians (at least the Democrats) and health care advocates are always on about what an AWESOME deal Canada gets on its prescription drugs because of collective government bargaining with drug companies instead? Well....now Canadians are all going on about how much better the New Zealand government haggles with BigPharma because they do it on a NATIONAL level and Canadian drug programs are administered by individual province. I guess the grass IS always greener. Especially when comparing yourself to a small island nation with annual rainfalls in excess of 10,000 millimeters per year in some places.

I digress. This nation-wide bargaining has obvious payoffs: on average, New Zealanders pay 50% less for common medications such as cholesterol-lowering statins and SSRI antidepressants than Canadians. That’s a big ol’ difference and if Canada can adopt a national registry of drugs, then DO IT.

But see here’s what I think. Big Pharma is all about being nice to a nice country hanging out alone at the bottom of the Pacific. Reducing prices even further for a country that likes to sell its already pretty cheap drugs via the internet to the Cash Cow* that is their southerly neighbor? Not so much.

*moo