The end of the NFL could be beginning

by somegeekintn

NFL’s concussion concerns hit home for parents of young players, clouding football’s future
[Via The Washington Post ]

Already uneasy about the idea of letting her 7-year-old son Jason start playing tackle football, Elizabeth Giancarli made up her mind when former NFL star Junior Seau committed suicide.

While many of her son’s friends are moving on to tackle, he’ll be playing another year of flag football.

 “I just couldn’t put him in tackle football, only because of everything that’s been going on,” Giancarli said. “I think that the Junior Seau suicide really hit home, too. So we decided to put him in another year of flag, because the impact is significantly less.” 

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I wrote about this earlier - the loss of fresh faces playing football could dry up the pool of talent for the pros.

The next step will be insurance and liability suits. Then we might see High Schools dropping football.

And we are seeing pro football players becoming leery of their own children playing football. That’s going to have a huge effect.

Until we get a better handle on the exact path of problem, these might be the sorts of actions we see.

We’re all mutants now

We’re all mutants now
[Via Ars Technica]

The field of study called population genetics has played a critical role in the development of modern biology, helping unite Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution into one coherent framework. In most genetics classes, though, it typically gets plowed through in a simplified form in a single lecture. I suspect this is because it involves a lot of math, and most biologists like being in the field precisely because it’s generally possible to avoid all but the simplest math.

Nevertheless, population genetics has some critical insights to offer in the area of modern genomics, as evidenced by a paper that appeared in this week’s edition of Science. Some population geneticists have looked into the results of the search for mutations in genome data. Their conclusion: the human population explosion has led to the appearance of many new, rare mutations in the human population, and it’s throwing all the math off, which has some serious implications for medical research.

At the simplest level, population genetics can help us predict how often a mutation should be present in a specific population. Feed its equations things like the population size, how harmful or beneficial the mutation is, the typical mutation rate, and so forth, and it will spit out a nice prediction of what the final frequency of the mutation should be. It nicely demonstrates why even harmful mutations stick around at low levels in a population, even as evolution is doing its best to get rid of them.

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Important point – in a rapidly expanding population, there is not much fixation of mutations. This means that DNA changes have not spread very far around the population because there has not been enough time. So the changes we see are pretty much tied to families and nothing else – the so-called founder effect. For complex traits, there may not be a set of genes that are all changed the same way. There may be a lot of genes that are all changed somewhat differently. This makes finding out what is going on much tougher.

The TSA could have killed her

by gyro2

Savannah Barry, Diabetic Teen, Blames TSA For Broken Insulin Pump (VIDEO)
[Via Huffington Post]

Savannah Barry, a 16-year-old diabetic, is criticizing the TSA after an agent incorrectly instructed her to walk through a body scanner despite the fact she was wearing an expensive insulin pump. The pump stopped working shortly after the security check.

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The pump is not supposed to be put through the body scanner because it can stop working – a life threatening event.

But the TSA officer told her it was safe to do so. Idiot. And not trained properly.

The report said the TSA went  off the deep end when they saw her carry on with needles and juice containers.

Putting 18 month olds on the no fly list and destroying important medical devices. All part of the TSA.

And of course this shows that those body scanners are not totally safe for everyone, at the very least.

The beginning of the end of football?

by IsaacMao

More players file concussion lawsuits against the NFL – CNN.com
[Via CNN.com]

More than 100 former professional football players, including former Atlanta Falcons Jamal Anderson, Chris Doleman, and O.J. Santiago, are adding their names a growing list of players suing the NFL. They join more than 1,500 other players who claim that the National Football League hid the dangers of concussions from them.

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My thinking about this started when I read an article last week called ” What would the end of football look like?” It discussed what happens when insurance companies no longer provide policies for High School football.

Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time.

As it loses it access to young talent, as college football programs disappear, pro football begins to decline. Few people want to play a sport where traumatic brain injury can so easily happen.

I think this is not likely to happen at all but a few of these lawsuits and it could be in real trouble. But, like hockey, the violent nature of the game could become a hinderance in the future.

The suicide of Junior Seau has generated a lot of interest. I’ve written about the problem of concussions in football before and the almost terminal damage it can cause.

One of the interesting aspects of all this publicity is more and more football players are donating their brains to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy because the disease can only be diagnosed post-mortem.

Thus we see this – Dave Duerson committed suicide last year by shooting himself in the chest. He was suffering from the disease. He was 50.

A year earlier, a 21-year old lineman for Penn State hanged himself. He had the disease.

Junior Seau shot himself in the chest.

Football players are not shooting themselves in the head – they are killing themselves in a way to preserve their brain for diagnosis. Without any other test for the disease, this is their only course.

Football players already die at a higher rate and a younger age than other athletes. Life expectancy for American men is over 77 years. For all NFL players, some studies suggest it is 55. For linemen it is 52.

A 1994 study of several thousand football players found that, while they have lower chances of dying from many sorts of things than the average male, they did have one little bit of a problem that stands out now.

Players who participated in 5 or more seasons had almost twice the chance of developing neurological disorders than expected. This was not statistically significant because of the few cases at the time – they were all diagnosed as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Interestingly, it appears that chronic traumatic encephalopathy can often be confused with ALS.

A lot of parents have to wonder about having their children play football. Here are some stats: at least one concussion occurs in every High School football game; there are 10 times as many concussion in football than in baseball; lacrosse is approaching the concussion levels of football; one-third of the players report two or more concussions a season.

I see many people moving their kids to lacrosse, but that will not stem the problem from concussions in children’s sports. What needs to be done is to really change the culture about the prevalence of concussions and what to do. There need to be clear standards to allow kids back into the game.

But even then, there will be lawsuits and it is entirely possible that insurance affects could change the games.

Not all mammals are not like us

Kangaroos have three vaginas
[Via Not Exactly Rocket Science]

We interrupt your regularly scheduled news programming to bring you this wonderful piece of trivia about kangaroo genitals.

Regular readers will know of my love for Inside Nature’s Giants, the British documentary where anatomists cut up large animals to examine how their bodies work and evolved. It’s a truly incredible show, combining unbridled joy at the natural world, drama, and solid educational value.

So far, it has brought us the horrifying throat of a leatherback turtle, the mysterious bloodsweat of a hippo, and the exploding insides of a beached whale. But this week’s episode may have topped all of that with the triple vaginas of the female kangaroo. The diagram above (an annotated screengrab from the show) explains the complicated plumbing.

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I thought we had complicated plumbing. But the kangaroo has three vaginas and two uteruses. And the ureters go right through the reproductive system.

But this system allows the kangaroo to always be pregnant. A joey that is just barely developed moves out into the pouch while a new joey develops.

Wow.

Life expectancy going backwards for many women in america

Girls born in 2009 will live shorter lives than their mothers in hundreds of US counties
[Via Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation]

Nationwide, women’s lifespans are improving at a much slower pace than men, and in hundreds of counties women are living shorter lives today than they did two decades ago, according to new county-by-county estimates of life expectancy released today by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The new data also show that life expectancy for black Americans – both men and women – is improving at a faster rate than for white Americans, especially in large urban areas in New York and California.

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In over 600 counties in the US since 1999, the life expectancy dropped or stayed the same. For males, there were only 166 counties.

And, interestingly, the gap between the longest – now 81.6 years – and the shortest – now 66.1 – life expectancies for men has hardly moved since 1989. But for women, this gap has increased from 8.7 years in 1989 to 11.7 in 2009.

And as can be seen by this visualization, life expectancies are much lower in the South.

Now have some real fun at this interactive page.

Here is an example, looking at both male and female life expectancy:

As you can see, similar sized cities – Los Alamos, NM and McDowell, WV – had very different trajectories on life expectancies from 1989 to 2009. The boxes point to the data from 1989. Los Alamos had an ever increasing line for both men and women.

Not so for McDowell. it saw a slight increase in lifespan for men but a decrease for women.

Some large cities were not doing well in 1989 – the Bronx was worse for both sexes in 1989. Yet by 2009, it was doing almost as well as  the other cities.

Here is the data for women by counties.

And for men:

The takeaway from this is not to live in the South. Although looking at this, it seems that living close to the Mississippi is most detrimental.

We are killing our mothers

by karindalziel

The Real War on Moms Has a Mortality Rate
[Via Political Animal ]

Despite what Dave Weigel says, the fates seem determined to drag the Ann Romney/Hilary Rosen/war on women/war on moms debate into the weekend, so I guess I might as well, too. One response to the War on Moms claims—well-made by Salon’s Irin Carmon here—is that, Mommy Wars rhetoric, aside, the Republican policy agenda actually offers bubkes in the way of practical support to moms (and dads, who, let’s not forget, are parents too) struggling to raise their kids up right. I’d concur and add:

One of the distasteful things about the tendency to label all sorts of debates or initiatives as “wars” is that in real wars, people die. But the reality is that a shockingly high number of American moms are dying for preventable reasons. The U.S. Maternal Mortality Ratio (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births) is shockingly high, well above the average for the developed world, and higher than virtually all of Western Europe as well as some countries in Asia and the Middle East. Even more troubling, U.S. maternal mortality has increased in the last two decades, and is now more than twice as high as it was in the late 1980s.

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The report is depressing.

You can check out all this with an interactive graph from Google. See how other developed countries compare with us. And how poor we have done over the years.

Maternal mortality rates in the US are double what they are in the United Kingdom, and almost 5 times higher than Sweden. America kills mothers at over 10 times the rate that Greece does.

And this has been the result of  things we have done over the last 15 years or so.

In 1990, there was little difference between the US and others (12 per 100000 for us and 10 for the United Kingdom). In 1995, we were at 11. In 2000, we were up to 14. But by 2008, we were at 24 per 100,000. We had doubled in the number of mothers that died in the US in a 13 year period.

Our healthcare has been going backwards, getting worse for mothers as the years went by.

Meanwhile, most of the developed world saw decreases in mortality to levels well below what we now see in the US.

In fact, virtually every other country showed a large decrease in maternal mortality over this time period. While Canada did not, however, its rates went from 6 to 12 deaths per 100,000. I wish I ived in a country that had such a low rate.

I used to. Just 20 years ago.

No other developed country comes close to our diminishing ability to protect mothers.

Mothers die in America that do not have to. And apparently we prefer it that way, seeing how the winds are blowing. Things are getting worse, not better. and there is little being done, it seems, to change our continuing trends.

We could and should do better but that does not seem to be the worry for much of America.

The complexity of Whooping Cough

 

by Nathan Reading

Whooping cough outbreak in Boulder
[Via Bad Astronomy]

Medical officials are saying that there have been 37 cases of pertussis — whooping cough — reported in my hometown of Boulder so far this year.

We’re not even 100 days into 2012 yet. [Note: Washington State is in the midst of an actual epidemic of pertussis.]

How serious is this? 30 of those Boulder cases are in children under the age of 18… and it almost took the life of six week old Natalie Schultz. The local news reported on this:

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Anti-vaxxers and those opting out of vaccines are a problem, especially as they reduce the herd effect making it more likely unprotected members of the community become sick.

But things may be a little more complex than just blaming anti-vaxxers. Not enough to let them off the hook at the front lines of these problems but maybe enough to see that everyone may have a role here.

Whooping cough is highly infectious – one person can pass it on to 12-17 and requires vaccination rates of over 90% for herd immunity to work.

But it can be more complex than that. Pertussis is a sneaky disease. Even natural infection does not provide lifelong immunity. Vaccination provides perhaps 10 years of protection and booster shots are needed, even in adults.

Few adults get booster shots yet may not be protected, especially with spreading the disease.

Also, some of the newer vaccines  while having fewer side effects and adverse reactions, may not even be providing as many years of immunity as the older vaccine. So boosters every 5 years may be recommended.

In fact, it has been recommended that all adults be vaccinated against whooping cough. So some of the loss of herd immunity may come from waning immunity is previously vaccinated adults, who then help spread the disease. Because whooping cough in adults may be underreported as it seems much more like a normal cough.

Even more worrisome is that because protection against whooping cough is short-lived, natural selection may be helping the bacteria evolve into forms that could evade the vaccine.

Influenza virus evolves rapidly to evade our immune system, meaning that we have to get new vaccines every year. While the bacteria that causes whooping cough may never become that revolutionary, there are indications that some strains are evolving ways to evade the immune system.

So while the major problems with whooping cough  are social in nature and can be dealt with – no opting out and adult vaccination – there needs to be some recognition that even that might not eradicate the disease if we are also applying Darwinian pressure for the bacteria to evolve.

We will just have to be ‘smarter’.

Keeping healthy people healthy – the transformation of medicine

by MikeBlogs

Nonlinear Thinking: The Future of Medical Services
[Via The Big Picture]

This is one of the most potentially transformative,  disruptive, and exciting technologies we’ve come across in some time.

Qualcomm has teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation to promote innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies.   They’re offering $10 million in prize money to the team of entreprenuers who create a mobile device which is easy for individuals to use and is capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases

Qualcomm further defines the concept and competition on their website,

Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, wireless sensing, imaging diagnostics, lab-on-a-chip, and molecular biology will enable better choices in when, where, and how individuals receive care, thus making healthcare more convenient, affordable, and accessible. The winner will be the team whose technology most accurately diagnoses a set of diseases independent of a healthcare professional or facility, and that provides the best consumer user experience with their device.

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A handheld device that keeps track of your personal health – tracking thousands of data points daily. The cost of DNA sequencing is moving towards $0. Labs on a chip will be able to perform diagnostics on almost any sample we can provide.

microRNAs have been seen to be involved in cholesterol metabolism, cancer and in heart attacks.

What happens when we can collect data on our health daily, when we are healthy, and then really understand in the individual when those data points move away from baseline.

And then really understand in the individual how medications move those data points back to normal.

Combine that with IBM’s Watson as an entry point and we could have total control over our health, when we are healthy.

It is much cheaper to keep healthy people healthy than to try to heal sick people.

How social science results can be biased through no one’s fault

Perception and Publication Bias
[Via NeuroLogica Blog]

The psychological literature is full of studies that demonstrate that our biases affect our perception of the world. In fact psychologists have defined many specific biases that affect not only how we see but how we think about the world. Confirmation bias, for example, is the tendency to notice, accept, and remember data that confirms what we already believe, and to ignore, forget, or explain away data that is contradictory to our beliefs.

Balcetis and Dunning have published a series of five studies that add to this literature by showing what they call “wishful seeing.” In their studies they found that people perceive desirable items as being physically closer to them than less desirable items. This finding is plausible and easy to believe for a skeptic steeped in knowledge of cognitive flaws and biases. But is this finding itself reliable? Psychologists familiar with the history of this question might note that similar ideas were researched in the 1950s and ultimately rejected. But that aside, can we analyze the data from Balcetis and Dunning and make conclusions about how reliable it is?

Recently Gregory Francis did just that, revealing an interesting aspect of the “wishful seeing” data that calls it into question.  Ironically the fact that Balcetis and Dunning published the results of five studies may have weakened their data rather than strengthen it. The reason is publication bias.

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Read the whole article because it does a nice job demonstrating one of the reasons to be skeptical of small studies. And it helps explain things lke why successful Phase 2 clinical trials – small trials looking for efficacy – fail in Phase 3 – large scale trials.

Small studies should have greater variation in them. So if you repeated the same small study multiple times, you should get them varying on both sides of the ‘real’ value.

As you increase the size, the variation decreases and you get closer to the real value.

Think of flipping a coin. Let’s do it 6 times. You might get 2H-4T. Do it again. 3H-3T. Again, 1H-5T.

Even though we know the real answer should be 3H-3T we have a wide variety of results around this value.

Now imagine that if you had a 1H-5T result you could get it published while a 5H-1T would not be. That is publication bias.

Only further research would reveal that the 5H-1T result was not correct.

This is why most scientists hold little belief in a single small study. We have seen too many of them that eventually revert to the ‘real’ value which is often uninteresting.

It has to be the totality of several investigations into a complex area to get their attention.

The problem is that the media simply responds to publication. They never withhold judgement.

Feeling better

Well, for the first time in almost 3 weeks I feel better.

My ankle had been ding better then on Tuesday started swelling up again, It was on the other side of the ankle and hurt almost as much as the initial injury.

So went to the doctor yesterday and he thought, given my history, it was some sort of arthritic flare due to all the wacky stuff going on in the leg.

He gave me a week’s course of my favorite drug – prednisone. This steroid – which is a really heavy duty anti-inflammatory – knocks the pain down in an hour or so.

The swelling is still there this morning but the pain is virtually gone.

And for the first time in a while, I don’t have the fog that taking percoset produces. Here’s hoping this all works out.

Too sedated during colonoscopy?

by ex_magician

Too many colon tests use costly sedation: Study
[Via CTV News]

Few people want to be wide awake during their colonoscopy exams, but new research suggests too many are getting extra sedation treatment, costing as much as $1 billion yearly in potentially needless services.

Use of anesthesiologists to monitor sedation during colonoscopies and other digestive imaging tests has more than doubled in recent years, and they’re used most often for low-risk patients who typically don’t need the extra help, the study authors said.

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I was lightly sedated for my colonoscopy with the best drugs ever. I had a great time, gave the single polyp they found a name and found having a long tube stuck up my butt a lot of fun.

Best high I have ever had and something that really made the pre-procedure process almost bearable – drinking a gallon of liquid to clean everything out of the colon.

I’ve always thought the drug was the wonderful payoff that would keep you coming back. Now I read that some people don’t even get that and are very heavily sedated.

I think it is more likely that the doctors just do not like dealing with al those talkative, loopy patients. While I had a fun time, I am sure the doctors did not find me nearly as entertaining.

MRIs while using a iPad

Using an iPad while getting an MRI
[Via Edible Apple]

There’s nothing fun about getting an MRI, and if you happen to be even a little bit claustrophobic, the experience can quite easily be jarring. So to help alleviate the emotional stress that can accompany an MRI, GE and PDC are exploring ways to integrate the iPad into the MRI experience.

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I had an MRI on my knee last year. It was about 40 minutes of torture. Having your leg immobilized for that time, with only a few minutes to attempt a few wiggles, almost borders on the inhumane.

Juts like standing up of r long periods of time can be unexpectedly debilitating, so can having a body part kept in the same immobile position for 30 minutes.

They gave me some headphones to listen to music and a timer that told me how much time was left.

Would an iPad have made any difference? Perhaps, especially is there were some good games.

But if I ever have to have my head done, I’m getting sedated.

This retraction is a good thing as it exposes the real liars

This American Life retracts hugely popular episode on Apple and China
[Via Ars Technica]

Well-loved radio show This American Life—spawned from station WBEZ right here in Chicago—has some “difficult news” about one its most popular shows, an episode on Apple and labor conditions in China. The episode “contained significant fabrications,” writes TAL host Ira Glass today on the show’s blog. He is devoting this week’s entire episode, called “Retraction,” to the story.

The original TAL episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” aired on January 6, 2012, and included portions of the one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” by Mike Daisey. (We attended a performance last year.) It proved hugely popular, but recently a reporter for another public radio show tracked down one of the interpreters Daisey used on his own visit to a Shenzhen factory that makes Apple gadgets, a visit recounted in his show.

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The things to remember here is that the problems arise from things said by the creator of a one-man stage show. He claimed these things had happened, lied about them whan asked, and permitted journalists to continue those lies.

Not everything in the program’s broadcast was based on just this guy’s word. There were some important facts there but not necessarily the emotional notes that Daisey’s ‘theater’ provided.

The producers got caught up in a great narrative and mistakenly let some thing slide. Now they are the ones who have having to do some real backfilling and mea culpas. Humans make mistakes and good humans admit those mistakes. They try to rectify the situation.

As for Daisey, he appears to be doing no such thing, essentially saying that he needed to lie in order to enhance the real truth underneath.

Yeah, his stuff may be ‘art’ but great art is not based on lies. I expect that there will be many fewer people attending his ‘play.’

We have our health, sometimes

by Foxtongue

This has been a tough week for me physically. You get to a certain age and your body just  breaks for no good reason.

I can try and say that it happened while I was fighting off coyotes from my dogs. But actually, I just stepped wrong on soft ground.

It has been a week of doctor’s visits, medical services, blood tests and drugs. Waiting rooms and hospital diners. High tech approaches and low tech solutions.

I’m doing better, mostly because of the tremendous help from family and friends.

But what I am really struck with is that I have a very, very good health insurance plan – one I pay for totally out of my pocket.  It let me get thought this thing without the added worry of wondering how I was going to pay for al the medical help.

We can debate whether I should have one, how health insurance should be paid for and what society should provide.

And I am sure we will all come up with something different.

I am simply glad I have been able to find some way to keep this plan going so I could get the best help without having to wonder what bills would do to me.

Essentially what this plan does is allow me to get all my treatment without having to pay a lot upfront. Cheaper plans usually mean that more costs have to paid upfront via co-pays.

I expect I will get some big bills later. Even expensive plans – even ones I pay myself – still result in me paying a lot of the cost myself.

But the main reason I paid for this expensive plan is NOT to have to worry about the bills until after I am better and can deal with them.

I hope that will only be a couple of weeks.