Link Roundup: Comeback Edition

Alpha: JJ Abrams is going all kinda crazy on the new Star Trek movie. Brilliant casting movies include: Zachary Quinto (Sylar, from Heroes) as an iteration of Spock, Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead!) as Scotty, and John Cho (Harold, not Kumar) as Sulu. Could a Star Trek movie be a date movie? And can a Korean guy really play a Japanese guy in the 23rd century?

Beta: Wii Goodness: Wii Fit will be released in the states in 2008, giving West Virginia law makers something other than DDR to put in schools. I welcome my Nintendo weight-loss overlords, having just played some Wii Sports for the first time last night.

Gamma: Damn you, Jared! Cornell researchers find that folks underestimate the number of calories in a meal from Subway compared to McDonald's, because Subway is "healthier."

"We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy, such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131 percent more calories than when they go to restaurants like McDonald's that don't make this claim," said Brian Wansink, Cornell's John S. Dyson professor of marketing and applied economics and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, in a news release.

"In estimating a 1,000 calorie meal, I've found that people on average underestimate by 159 calories if the meal was bought at Subway than at McDonald's," said Wansink.

That extra 159 calories could lead to an almost five-pound weight gain over a year for people eating at Subway twice a week compared to choosing a comparable meal at McDonald's with the same frequency, he said.

Delta: File under "study that has lots of data but no useful or surprising information." The Office of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Statistics issued a report stating that "personal care," "food preparation and serving," "community and social services," and "health care" workers have the highest rates of depression (and women are about twice as depressed in most of those fields as men). "Installation, maintenance and repair" and "engineering, architecture, and surveyors" have the lowest rates of depression. Self-selection much?

Epsilon: File under "stuff people didn't pay nearly as much attention to as they should have." A Pittsburgh physician (NOT associated with WPIC) was finally charged in August with involuntary manslaughter after a boy died of cardiac arresting while receiving chelation therapy for autism. It looks like the kid died from a possible mix-up:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the boy was given a synthetic amino acid to rid his body of heavy metals, instead of a similar chemical with a calcium additive. Both are odorless, colorless liquids and may have been confused, the CDC found.

When you make a mistake giving real medical care, it's a tragedy, but bad things do happen to good people. When you kill someone with fake medical care that preys upon the hopes and vulnerability of loving parents, you deserve criminal charges, and a firm kick in the nuts.

Link Roundup, my computer is making angry sounds at me edition

I'm somehow surprised everyday that goes by that my old Inspiron 8200 doesn't burst into flames. Blogging and other work has taken a backseat to research and more board exam prep, but these links are burning holes in my Firefox pocket.

1. Sweden's #1 tobacco product, Snus, is getting headlines all the sudden because a recent study found an increased rate of pancreatic cancer for users, even though that rate is still well below that of smoking. The Swedish figured out a long time ago that smokeless tobacco, stored properly with very specific manufacturing techniques, is so much less dangerous than cigarette smoking that converting all smokers to chewers would have health benefits far outweighing our current methods of offering smoking cessation to an unwilling population. But that's the Swedish for you.
2. Fresh Air turns 20: listen to Oliver Sacks and Tom Wolfe.
3. Fruit juice doesn't make kids fat? Haven't seen the actual paper, but can't help feeling suspicious that this study didn't do a very good job controlling for other family health habits. We would expect parents who give their kids a lot of fruit juice to be a little more health conscious overall, and might not be surprised to see that kids who get their calories from fruit juice don't get excess calories from other poor diet choices. For some reason I just doubt that fruit juice calories don't count, which is the latent message in the press release.
4. Parody abounds: Microsoft Firefox ("where am I today?") and the Onion's anti-abortion pill, UR-86, that kills the mother and saves the fetus.
   
5. Oral sex increases the risk of a certain throat cancer from ultra-low to slightly-less-ultra-low:

   And those people who had had more than six oral sex partners were 8.6 times more likely to develop the HPV-linked cancer.

   Hear that, kids? You only get to have oral sex with five partners! Choose them wisely. Seems like an interesting take on those cellphone commercials. "Who's in your five?"
   
6. Cervical cancer vaccine less effective in sexually active. I'd hope this would come from the "no shit" research files, but sadly, the obvious does need to be stated for the anti-Gardasil crew who don't want their daughters turning into sluts because their risk of dying of a preventable cancer might be reduced.
7. Psychiatrists are evil and give your kids deadly medications because the drug companies pay them off in smoky, dimly lit rooms! MWAHAHAHA! This is one of the most manipulative, poorly written anti-psychiatry articles (even in the NYT, which manages to run plenty of anti-psychiatry drivel) I've seen in awhile, and I just can't bring myself to fisk it. If you're reading this, you probably already have the cognitive function available to see the gaping holes in the story.
   

Link Roundup, listening to Nirvana edition

I fail miserably every time I try to expand my listening tastes into Nirvana's whole catalog. Back in my Baptist brainwashing days, I wasn't allowed to listen to the band with the baby dick on the cover, so I missed the boat the first time around, and in 8th grade when Kurt did his thing, I was largely confused. God, those t-shirts everybody wore were just ugly as hell, and the people that wore them, on average, wore nothing else and stunk of patchouli oil, like about 40% of my high school did anyway.

The only band I'd really effectively sneaked through the decency barrier was R.E.M., just because my parents couldn't understand most of the curse words on Automatic for the People, and if you didn't listen to Nirvana or Pearl Jam in middle school, you just weren't cool (and thus, I wasn't). I only ever bought "Ten" because the girl I wanted in middle school couldn't stop talking about it.

For some reason, R.E.M, Weezer, and Radiohead, the bands I preferred instead, just weren't cool. A friend of mine who went to a local county school was called 'gay' every time he wore an R.E.M. shirt, as we'd largely found the band together (in that, ya know, heterosexual sorta way). So it goes.

So Nirvana is just weird for me. I could probably mention about 15 songs that I thought were all genius, and then anything else I ever hear by them sounds like cats scratching a chalk board. Usually there's some middle ground, but Nirvana for me is either rock-out or suck-out.

1. If benzylpiperazine is going to be the next ecstasy, its really going to have to work on some new nicknames. 'The piper' seems cute. Has anybody heard what this stuff is called on the street? The wiki articles says it's called "The Lovely" or something stupid like that in Canada. They would.
2. Stuff Medicare won't cover: carotid artery stents and vagus nerve stimulators for chronic depression. The article for the latter mentions quite a few reasons why vagus nerve stimulators aren't trusted by the psychiatry community, although its hard to think that the "implantable psychiatrist" approach might not be a valid approach someday.
3. This article suggests that girls abuse prescription drugs more than boys, and then mentions tranquilizers and antidepressants. How the hell do you abuse an antidepressant? It's like trying to abuse bread. Sure, you can make yourself sick by taking a bunch of them, and in the case of TCAs, which are rarely prescribed for adolescents, you could really hurt yourself. But chewing a pencil would be more exhilarating than dropping Prozac on the weekend. Note: I only post this article because it's a great example of the way the media can write something without actually conveying any actual information.
   
4. Penn folk say that psychotherapy can't extend the life of cancer patients. If I track down the pdf, I might plunge into this in a post on its own, since the review flies in the face of about 15 years of assumed truth.
5. Gulf War Syndrome patients have some pretty weird findings on neuroimaging compared to other Gulf War vets without symptoms. Corpus Callosum posts a quote from one of the authors being a good neurologist by frankly criticizing psychiatric illness in general:

   Study coauthor Dr. Ronald Killiany, PhD, from Boston University School of Medicine, told Medscape that these data are an "important first step for Gulf War veterans as well as the scientific community in validating the fact that so-called 'soft' neurological conditions can have a pathological basis."

   Can have a pathologic basis? Those are fighting words.
6. Oxytocin for autism? Stranger things have happened. Here's one of the best quotes I've seen in a long time from a medical journalism article:

   While it is hardly implausible that a hormone involved in orgasm would have positive effects on anyone, these findings of improvement in adults with autism given oxytocin are based on measurable changes in behavior as well as visible changes in their brains as seen through functional magnetic resonance imaging.

   Can't argue with that logic. At least, not without giggling.
   
7. Just a brief overview of bipolar disorder in kids, which may be much more common that thought, especially in those mistakenly diagnosed as ADHD.
   

Link Roundup, random med news buffet edition

1. Do fictional diseases increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Probably not. So Restless Leg Syndrome probably isn't a fictional disease. I get so tired of the "nobody'd ever heard of RLS until just a few years ago, but now because some drug company can make money, everybody has it!" argument. That's not to say that I don't think problems like this get over diagnosed after physicians and patients are suddenly inundated with a new possible answer to old problems, but that doesn't mean RLS isn't a real entity.
2. The NHS has just NOW apparently figured out that it's not a good idea for patients and doctors to be inserting probes into one another for procedures that they can't bill for.
   
3. Alpha-blockers for nightmares in PTSD? Will urological psychiatry become a new fellowship?
4. Glucosamine/Chondroitin Sulfate still doesn't do shit except take your money.
5. Jonathan Cohn Jonathan Cohn Jonathan Cohn. I'm going to have to read his stupid book before I go nuts hearing something new about it three times a day. He sounds sensible enough on NPR.

Link Roundup, Baseball and Robots edition

Baseball's "hitting slump" probably isn't due to de-juiced balls or steroid deterrents, but about the ever-widening strike zone. Which makes sense, since the vast majority of baseball hits are not homeruns. And anybody that's watched Barry Bonds work the count has to wonder if anything that doesn't hit Barry's bat would ever be called a strike.

And more on the neuropsychology of hitting a baseball. Nerdy, but essential for the baseball-watching neuro-fan.

Check out the Top 10 80's Robots (We Expected to Exist By Now). Embarrass-your-self-at-work funny for the people who found link 2 interesting.

Darshak Sanghavi takes Jerome Groopman to task in Slate's book club for his focus on the efforts of individuals in improving health care, which has become an inherently systems-based practice. Groopman's been on a handful of NPR segments to blast doctors for being arrogant and tunnelvisioned, but I've struggled to really put my finger on what about Groopman's arguments really bugged me. Sanghavi proves why he gets to write on Slate, and I get to write on Sparkgrass.

And, from the somebody-had-to-do-the-study department, having a gun at home increases the risk for a death by suicide.

Link Roundup, Drug-Withdrawal edition

Pergolide, dopamine agonist used as an adjunct to L-Dopa and Carbidopa, is withdrawn voluntarily when evidence showing that the drug increases the risk of damage to heart valves puts the drug on tremulous ground. *Rimshot*

In crappier news, IBS pro-motile drug Zelnorm apparently increases the risk of pretty much everything. FDA asks Novartis nicely to please quit selling people heart attacks and strokes.

Some NIH folks figured out that when monkeys concentrate voluntarily, their prefrontal cortex is in charge, while distractions activate the parietal cortex. ADHD neuroscientists start writing new grants furiously, buying extra bananas.

Nature addresses the growth of dichloroacetate sales (for veterinary uses *wink nudge*) on the internet for cancer patients, and how such activity, besides being illegal, throws a huge monkey wrench into the process of actually testing DCA in real clinical trials.

While the FDA hasn't found anything particularly wrong with Pfizer's inhaled insulin formulation Exubera, doctors and insurance companies just aren't impressed.

Sunday Link Roundup

1) Jay Farrar and Son Volt's new album The Search on All Things Considered.

2) Because of some loophole in a new Medicaid rebate law, pharm companies now have no incentive to offer OCPs cheap to universities. Because pregnant college girls are good health policy. Obviously.

3) But maybe that's okay in Texas. State Rep Dan Patrick (R-ealAsshole) wants to offer pregnant women considering abortion 500 bucks not to get abortions. Hey, Texas girls, have twins, and you might be able to pay for your books next semester!

4) Patients really don't give a flip if you wear scrubs, a white coat, or monkey boxer shorts. They do care if you are a douche nozzle. (For a history of the "douche nozzle," Ctl-F the term here.)

5) Docs around the world are calling for a boycott of Reed Elsevier (they publish the Lancet, among other obscure journals to which your EBM searches inevitably lead you), since apparently they have something to do with arms fairs to showcase cluster bombs, or something sketchy like that.

6) Disaster averted: Emma Watson will play Hermione through Film 7. Reports last week said she wanted to bail.

7) Creepy much?

In what is becoming a trend among conservative Christians in the United States, girls as young as nine are pledging to their fathers to remain virgins until they wed, in elaborate ceremonies dubbed "Purity Balls."

"Since I'm just the return on Daddy's investment into Mommy's sperm bank, he owns my hymen until he tells some boy its okay for him to have it." Eww.