Created by medical student Avash Kalra and founded withShamie Das and Lakshman Swamy , medical students at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton Ohio, Radio Rounds is the first and only radio show in the United States that is hosted and produced entirely by medical students.
Radio Rounds was founded specifically to promote the qualities of empathy and humanism in medicine, to showcase the art behind the science of medicine, to provide insight into the medical profession, and to connect all levels of the medical profession across the nation — from medical students to practicing physicians. Radio Rounds explores the qualities of humanism in medicine through different perspectives — those of world-renowned physicians, authors, students, patients and health care leaders. In short, Radio Rounds tells today's stories in medicine, through the lens of tomorrow's doctors.
http://radiorounds.org/
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Consumer Reports Tackles Cancer Screening Tests - ABC News
You trust Consumer Reports when it comes to buying your next car or fridge. But now, for the first time ever, consumers can get ratings of cancer screening tests the same way they do for their toaster.
Of the 11 common screenings evaluated by the consumer watchdog group, only three were recommended -- and even then, only for certain age groups. Specifically, Consumer Reports gave their most positive ratings for cervical cancer screening in women age 21 to 65 and colon cancer screening in people age 50 to 75. They gave a slightly less enthusiastic endorsement of breast cancer screening for women 50 to 74.
As for screenings for bladder, lung, skin, oral, prostate, ovarian, pancreatic and testicular cancers, none garnered the group's recommendation.
The ratings come at a time of mammogram parties, mobile prostate screening vans, and services offered directly to consumers by screening test companies. Many medical experts, however, urge that patients make cancer screening decisions in close consultation with their physician. This way, they maintain, patients are able to ask their doctors which tests are and aren't right for them -- keeping in mind more isn't always better.
The Consumer Reports recommendations are based on evidence-based reviews from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). USPSTF is an independent panel of prevention and evidence-based medicine experts appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency makes the evidence-based recommendations physicians look to when treating and advising patients. However, these messages have not traditionally targeted patients. That, said Dr. John Santa, is the point of the Consumer Reports rating guide.
"The USPSTF has great evidence-based data, the contents of which was not being translated to patients," said Santa, who runs Consumer Reports' Health Ratings Center. "We saw there was a need to get this information to consumers, so we did."
The way they opted to convey this information was by using their traditional rating system, applying it to screening tests. In this case, the guide rated tests on whether the benefits of having the screening outweigh the harms.
ABC News Chief Health and Medical Editor Dr. Richard Besser said the straightforward and understandable rating system is useful for consumers.
"I like the way Consumer Reports uses their typical rating system -- the same symbols you'd see applied to a car or a vacuum cleaner," he said. "This is a system consumers know and are comfortable with. It is so much more user friendly than the materials that doctors usually provide."
In addition to relying on the USPSTF guidelines, the Consumer Reports group analyzed research from leading journals and organizations, consulted with patients and medical experts, and surveyed thousands of their own readers. They found that too many people were getting unneeded tests, while too few were getting appropriate screening.
While the dangers of not being screened are obvious, the dangers of unnecessary screening are often not recognized -- a product, some doctors say, of a nothing-to-lose, everything-to-gain message. Some screening tests, such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer, often don't have the ability to detect the disease at a curable stage. Unnecessary use of other tests, meanwhile, can lead to excess treatments and biopsies that are not without their own risk for complications.
"Many doctors and patients are attached to testing," Besser said. "There has been so much marketing around cancer screening in particular."
Besser added that he feels the consumer-level ratings guide may add some balance to the picture.
"Only get a test when the results are more likely to improve your health than to produce harm," Besser said. "Sometimes, it's not as straightforward as you might think. Just because a doctor orders a lot of tests doesn't mean that doctor is practicing smart medicine."
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/consumer-reports-tackles-cancer-screening-tests/story?id=18359910
Of the 11 common screenings evaluated by the consumer watchdog group, only three were recommended -- and even then, only for certain age groups. Specifically, Consumer Reports gave their most positive ratings for cervical cancer screening in women age 21 to 65 and colon cancer screening in people age 50 to 75. They gave a slightly less enthusiastic endorsement of breast cancer screening for women 50 to 74.
As for screenings for bladder, lung, skin, oral, prostate, ovarian, pancreatic and testicular cancers, none garnered the group's recommendation.
The ratings come at a time of mammogram parties, mobile prostate screening vans, and services offered directly to consumers by screening test companies. Many medical experts, however, urge that patients make cancer screening decisions in close consultation with their physician. This way, they maintain, patients are able to ask their doctors which tests are and aren't right for them -- keeping in mind more isn't always better.
The Consumer Reports recommendations are based on evidence-based reviews from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). USPSTF is an independent panel of prevention and evidence-based medicine experts appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency makes the evidence-based recommendations physicians look to when treating and advising patients. However, these messages have not traditionally targeted patients. That, said Dr. John Santa, is the point of the Consumer Reports rating guide.
"The USPSTF has great evidence-based data, the contents of which was not being translated to patients," said Santa, who runs Consumer Reports' Health Ratings Center. "We saw there was a need to get this information to consumers, so we did."
The way they opted to convey this information was by using their traditional rating system, applying it to screening tests. In this case, the guide rated tests on whether the benefits of having the screening outweigh the harms.
ABC News Chief Health and Medical Editor Dr. Richard Besser said the straightforward and understandable rating system is useful for consumers.
"I like the way Consumer Reports uses their typical rating system -- the same symbols you'd see applied to a car or a vacuum cleaner," he said. "This is a system consumers know and are comfortable with. It is so much more user friendly than the materials that doctors usually provide."
In addition to relying on the USPSTF guidelines, the Consumer Reports group analyzed research from leading journals and organizations, consulted with patients and medical experts, and surveyed thousands of their own readers. They found that too many people were getting unneeded tests, while too few were getting appropriate screening.
While the dangers of not being screened are obvious, the dangers of unnecessary screening are often not recognized -- a product, some doctors say, of a nothing-to-lose, everything-to-gain message. Some screening tests, such as ovarian and pancreatic cancer, often don't have the ability to detect the disease at a curable stage. Unnecessary use of other tests, meanwhile, can lead to excess treatments and biopsies that are not without their own risk for complications.
"Many doctors and patients are attached to testing," Besser said. "There has been so much marketing around cancer screening in particular."
Besser added that he feels the consumer-level ratings guide may add some balance to the picture.
"Only get a test when the results are more likely to improve your health than to produce harm," Besser said. "Sometimes, it's not as straightforward as you might think. Just because a doctor orders a lot of tests doesn't mean that doctor is practicing smart medicine."
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/consumer-reports-tackles-cancer-screening-tests/story?id=18359910
The Boy With a Thorn in His Joints - NYTimes.com
I assumed that Shepherd would warm to his soccer lessons the next time around. He and Beau still donned their jerseys at bedtime and talked each night about "soccer school" at the dinner table. But the following Saturday, Shepherd burst into tears the moment he started to run.
That week we saw our pediatrician, who referred us to an orthopedist. When no injury showed up on the X-ray, the doctor said that arthritis was most likely the issue. Arthritis in a 3-year-old? It sounded more odd than alarming at first, but over the next few weeks, we watched Shepherd spend more and more time on the couch. His stiff-legged walk became more pronounced, though he claimed that he was just walking like a penguin. Then he started having trouble getting out of bed.
A month after our first appointment, we went to see Philip Kahn, a pediatric rheumatologist at NYU Langone Medical Center, who gave Shepherd a diagnosis of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (J.I.A.), an autoimmune disease that causes painful swelling in the joints. J.I.A. can lead to stunted growth, disability and, rarely, blindness.
When Dr. Kahn tested his joints, Shepherd denied that it hurt even as he teared up in pain. Our son was stoic, Dr. Kahn said, as the kids he treated often were. Shepherd turned out to have arthritis in both knees and both wrists, as well as in his left shoulder and elbow. It was only when I started working on this article that a particular memory came back to me, its attendant guilt still intact: we'd bribed him to go to that last practice with the promise of ice cream.
Before driving home, all four of us stopped for lunch at a hummus place that Dr. Kahn recommended. We sat outside on the sidewalk, and Darin and I pretended that we were celebrating. This is great news, we told Shepherd. Now that we know what's wrong, you can take medicine that will make you feel better. Darin remembers thinking that we were lying to him, but he was trying to be more optimistic than he felt, for Shepherd's sake and for mine. Shepherd barely ate his lunch.
When we got home, I called my sister, Rae. She knew that overwhelmed feeling of getting a child's diagnosis all too well; she'd been through it with her daughter, also 3, who had severe asthma and 14 food allergies. Rae talked about how that moment when you receive the diagnosis eclipses everything, but she tried to reassure me that if an illness isn't life-threatening, the fear eventually dies down, and coping with it becomes routine.
Before we hung up, she mentioned that her sister-in-law had a friend who sent her own son's arthritis into remission with alternative medicine. Her name was Char Walker, short for Charlotte. Did I want to talk to her? I told her that I didn't, that we liked Dr. Kahn and wanted to follow his advice for now. We were starting Shepherd on a course of naproxen, a relative of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory ibuprofen. We didn't want to mess around with something that might not work, when conventional treatments were known to be effective. What I thought that day but didn't say to Rae was, We don't want to waste time talking to a kook.
While he was taking the naproxen, Shepherd's arthritis spread. Joints in his fingers and thumbs ballooned, and he developed nodules on his knuckles, suggestive of serious rheumatic disease. He started wetting his pants more frequently because, we realized, his fingers hurt too much for him to pull his pants down. We went back to Dr. Kahn, who said it was time to try methotrexate, an immune suppressant that is the most commonly used treatment for juvenile idiopathic arthritis. In significantly higher doses, it is used as chemotherapy. At the dose Shepherd would be getting, a minuscule fraction of that, methotrexate can still cause nausea, dizziness and drowsiness. The list of more serious possible side effects was terrifying — including liver damage and increased risk of lymphoma — even though Dr. Kahn told us that those risks were practically nonexistent. Kids like Shepherd, with polyarticular J.I.A. — meaning five or more joints affected — are unlikely ever to outgrow it; he would probably be on medication for life. What were the long-term effects on 3-year-olds taking this drug? It was a question I tended to visit in the middle of the night, when Dr. Kahn's reassurances that methotrexate was completely safe gave the least amount of comfort.
When I first gave Shepherd his methotrexate pills, he was enthusiastic about taking them. The pills were orange, his favorite color. The real coup: Beau didn't get to take them. But watching my son gulp them down defeated me. It reinforced an image of Shepherd as sick, forever dependent on a drug I felt afraid of, however unreasonable a doctor might tell me that fear was.
One morning, while the boys were at preschool and Darin was out of the house, I decided to call Char Walker. She answered the phone, and within minutes I was crying to this woman I had never met. Walker told me that when her son Shane was a month old, he started waking up seven or eight times a night screaming and crying, which he continued to do for a year and a half. He didn't have any symptoms that she could see. What was wrong? Soon she was crying every night, too. And then at around 18 months, he learned to talk and told her what hurt: his leg, his hip and his wrist. Once they had the diagnosis, Walker realized he'd probably been in pain every night of his life.
Walker is a social worker and massage therapist who works with cancer patients at NorthShore University HealthSystem outside Chicago. When Shane's rheumatologist presented methotrexate or steroid injections as the only choices, she was horrified. Because she worked in the integrative medicine department — a combination of alternative and conventional treatments — she knew there were other things to try. She dug into medical-literature databases. She learned about a centuries-old, anti-inflammatory Chinese concoction called four-marvels powder from a visiting naturopath. And she sought guidance from her colleague, Dr. Leslie Mendoza Temple, the head of the hospital's integrative medicine program, who, while wary of the risks, had been comfortable giving Walker's program a three-month trial. "I tried everything that I knew was safe to see what would work," Walker told me.
I grabbed my pen and paper and started taking notes. No gluten. No dairy. No refined sugar. No nightshades, a group of plants that includes potatoes and tomatoes, which are thought by some to be potentially inflammatory, as is sugar. Every day, Shane took a probiotic. Plus two tablespoons of sour Montmorency cherry juice and at least 2,000 milligrams of omega-3's from fish oil, known for their anti-inflammatory properties. Instead of naproxen, Shane took a combination of ibuprofen and Tylenol to lower his overall intake of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, which can be hard on the gut. And a quarter teaspoon, daily, of the four-marvels powder.
Walker said she believed that her son's arthritis was caused by something I had never heard of before — leaky-gut syndrome, a concept that has been accepted in alternative circles for years despite a name that asks you not to take it seriously. The idea is that inflammation in the gut causes the tight junctions between the cells that make up the intestinal lining to loosen. Then, like a lax bouncer, the barrier starts letting through undesirables, various proteins or bacteria that would normally be rebuffed; they then leak into surrounding tissues. The uninvited guests, the hypothesis goes, then trigger an offensive by the body, which uses inflammation to try to get rid of them. That sustained inflammatory response characterizes autoimmune disease.
What could have caused the inflammation in Shane's gut in the first place? Walker suspected an allergy or sensitivity to gluten and dairy (common perpetrators). She also implicated antibiotics, since they can decimate protective, good bacteria along with the bad. A week before he started waking up so frequently, Shane was given antibiotics for a 104-degree fever. By the time he was 1, he would have at least five more courses for urinary tract infections. After Walker told me this, I noted that Shepherd had started limping not long after taking amoxicillin for pneumonia. There's no proof of causation, of course, and lots of children take antibiotics and don't get arthritis, but it was an intriguing detail.
Six weeks into the alternative therapy, Shane started feeling better. After three months, his arthritis pain was gone. He'd been in remission for almost two years, Walker told me, much better than anything we were told to expect.
A week later, we told Dr. Kahn about Shane's story and floated the possibility of following the same course. He wasn't familiar with leaky gut but agreed that it wouldn't be harmful to try Walker's regimen. He was adamant, though, that we not quit the medication. In fact, he wanted to up the dose of methotrexate from 10 milligrams to 15 milligrams, because we were seeing the full effects of the initial dosage and Shepherd was still in pain. He now sobbed in the middle of the night, saying his ankle hurt. Arthritis had now leached into his toes. He hadn't grown in at least four months, and so Dr. Kahn was opposed to cutting two major categories of food out of Shepherd's diet. But he was O.K. with the rest of Walker's regimen as long as it was complementary to the methotrexate, not used in place of it. He jotted down "four-marvels powder" in Shepherd's chart with a good-natured smile. He once told us about a patient of his whose Chinese grandmother was giving him a tea along with his medication that appeared to be helping. He was a believer, he said, in anything that worked.
I was nervous about keeping Shepherd on methotrexate, but Darin didn't share my squeamishness. He has always been more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general. As we talked it over on the way back from Dr. Kahn's, Darin agreed that if Walker's treatment worked for her son, there was certainly a chance it could work for Shepherd. But we both had to admit it was iffy. I was desperate to find a way to solve Shepherd's problems without the drugs; maybe my hope was misplaced. What if Darin was right and methotrexate was the only effective course? Darin worried that I might start insisting on no medication at all, and that I'd win. We compromised by trying Walker's regimen while we continued with the drug. Walker said it took six weeks for Shane to start feeling better. Dr. Kahn and Darin agreed to hold off on increasing the methotrexate until we gave the experiment that much time.
But after five weeks on Walker's regimen and the initial dose of methotrexate, Shepherd seemed to be getting worse. He was already nauseated and could barely eat for two days after taking his weekly pills. He now spent entire afternoons on my lap. He started using a stroller again, and we went to physical therapy, occupational therapy or a doctor's appointment almost daily. Conversations with Darin became pain diaries. I would report on everything that hurt Shepherd that day, whether he could walk home from the playground or not. We no longer slept, and we moved through our days in a fog of depression. Beau started pointing out that he was stronger than his brother, who'd always been his almost literal equal.
Three months after Shepherd first saw Dr. Kahn, we sought a second opinion from Lisa Imundo, director of pediatric rheumatology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Imundo wanted to more than double the dose of methotrexate. She had treated thousands of kids with arthritis, she said, and diet changes did not work. I tried to explain leaky gut, but I'm sure I was stammering and blushing. She handed me a piece of paper with a list of hospital resources that included a name next to the words "complementary medicine."
After the drubbing Walker's regimen took from Dr. Imundo, Darin was in a froth. A top doctor in New York had just said Walker's regimen wouldn't work, so it must be true. In general, Darin is almost pathologically easygoing. Now he was cornering me in the kitchen to press his case. Shepherd is in bad shape, you are in bad shape, I am in bad shape, he said. What the hell are we doing? I promised that I would agree to up the dose immediately after the six-week deadline, if he would give it until then. Darin says now that I was steely and shut down, and he remembers worrying that this was the kind of thing that breaks up marriages, that if Shepherd didn't get better, he didn't know what would happen to us. That month, I lost my purse, then my suitcase, and then I got into a car accident. Though it wasn't serious, the boys were in the back seat, and I was shaken. I called Darin and cried. "I can't handle it. I can't handle it. I can't handle it." He brought home a pink orchid that night. I made an appointment with a therapist.
A couple of days shy of six weeks, with Shepherd still struggling, I heard back from Elena Ladas, the complementary-medicine researcher Dr. Imundo passed me off to. Her message was simple and direct. Yes, she said of Walker's regimen, if it seems to be helping, keep going. We weren't fools after all, I thought. That short phone call was the thing that got us all to the finish line.
At six weeks — to the day — Shepherd woke up and, for the first time in months, got out of bed himself. I'd gone into his room to help, as I did every morning, and found him standing in his pajamas. "Mommy," he said, "my knees don't hurt anymore." He was probably wearing the pajamas with the skateboarding monkeys. Beau was probably groggy, still in bed. Honestly, I really don't know. When I think of it, there's only Shepherd, standing there, not crying. I was too stunned to say anything back before he scampered out to the kitchen for breakfast. Within several months his arthritis pain was gone.
Shepherd has now been weaned off the methotrexate entirely. The guy we think of as "the old Shepherd" is back, the goofball with the high-beam smile. He initiates running races — and isn't always the most gracious when he wins. He improvises what he thinks is karate. He pirouettes. While his brother was sick, Beau shot past him in height. Now Shepherd is taller, and he's closing the gap in weight. On medication, he got sick twice as often as Beau. That side effect is gone now.
He has had five flare-ups since going into remission a year ago. Two of them followed courses of antibiotics. The other three came on the heels of his accidentally eating gluten. He had a chocolate-chip cookie, a couple of bites of toast, less than a quarter of a sandwich on sourdough. Each time, he felt pain within 24 hours, and it lasted as long as two weeks.
To be clear: There is no proof that it was Walker's regimen that drove away Shane's and Shepherd's arthritis. Shane's case makes a stronger argument, since he didn't take methotrexate. Still, his arthritis may have gone into spontaneous remission, and a study of one is not much of a study at all.
Methotrexate works for many kids, and its effects can kick in later than the expected four-to-six-week window. We tried so many things at once for Shepherd that there's no way to know for sure what worked, or what combination of things had an effect. Dr. Imundo remains unmoved. But Dr. Kahn says he believes the dietary regimen may have contributed to his recovery. "I'm mystified by children on a daily basis," he told me. "I've seen kids paralyzed, unbelievably critically ill. I don't know why they get better. The main thing is, if a kid's better, run with the football, you know? I'm thrilled."
One thing we do know is that there is a link between the gut and inflammation, and we've known it for some time. During visits over the last year, amid his serious talks with Shepherd about Batman — If he can't fly, why does he have a cape? — Dr. Kahn told us about a colleague who was researching how the gut and inflammation worked together. When I called José Scher, the director of the Arthritis Clinic at the N.Y.U. Hospital for Joint Diseases, he rattled off four different kinds of arthritis that are connected to inflammatory responses in the gut, including one linked to celiac, a gluten intolerance. He told me he'd also seen some of his autoimmune arthritis patients improve by removing gluten from their diet.
Early on, a celiac blood test came back negative for Shepherd. But could he still have a sensitivity, something short of full-on celiac, that triggers a similar inflammatory response? A small, 2006 study published in the journal Gut (you probably subscribe) points to a possible yes. The researchers found significantly elevated antibodies to various foods in the digestive tracts of rheumatoid-arthritis sufferers but not in their blood. So not only were many of the arthritis patients found to have some level of intolerance to certain foods, but it wouldn't necessarily have been detected by a blood test.
Leaky gut, meanwhile turns out not to be conjecture after all. "A lot of doctors and people may think that leaky gut itself is sort of a froufrou alternative concept," says Sanford Newmark, a clinical professor at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "The real name is 'increased intestinal permeability,' and it is a definitive, scientific fact." It's not known if increased intestinal permeability causes autoimmune arthritis, but some scientists in the field say it's possible.
Many autoimmune arthritis researchers are less focused on the stealthy bacteria of a leaky gut than on the community of gut microbes as a whole. Their work is an outgrowth of the Human Microbiome Project, a National Institutes of Health initiative to catalog all the microbes in our system. What's already clear is that changes in our bacterial populations are associated with changes in our health. In a still-unpublished study, Dr. Scher and his team identified a particular microbe that was common in a large cohort of rheumatoid-arthritis patients but was much less prevalent in the healthy group. In two related studies, researchers discovered a microbe that can activate an immune response; in germ-free mice that were genetically predisposed to autoimmune arthritis, it was enough to cause the disease.
"Traditionally we've thought about disease as being caused by a specific bacteria," says Dr. Julie Segre, a senior investigator at the N.I.H.'s National Human Genome Research Institute. But now some scientists think it is more about the balance of a bacterial community. "It may be that if you have a disease-associated bacteria within a healthy population, then the other members of the community may keep that 'bad' bacteria in check."
And if you throw off the delicate ratios in that community, the bad actors might get too much leeway. An example of how this works is Clostridium difficile, or C. diff., a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea. People don't get sick from acquiring the bacteria — it's already in the gut of some healthy individuals, kept in line by other bacteria. It's only when something like a course of antibiotics wipes out the peacekeepers that C.diff. can turn pathogenic.
The same balancing act could be at play with inflammation. If some bacteria in the gut activate immune cells, and others get them to settle down, an imbalance of these microbes could contribute to the sustained inflammation that characterizes autoimmune arthritis. "So probably the ratio, the combination of bacteria in the gut will determine whether you will get disease or not," says Ivaylo Ivanov, an assistant professor in microbiology and immunology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
Some researchers are optimistic that probiotics, which contain various strains of bacteria, could one day help restore a balanced population. A couple of different ones have been shown to reduce joint inflammation in mice, says Fergus Shanahan, the chairman of the department of medicine at University College, Cork, in Ireland, and a leading probiotics researcher.
Probiotics may also help to tighten up a hyperpermeable gut barrier, says Robert J. Shulman, a professor of pediatrics with a specialty in pediatric gastroenterology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He has an N.I.H. grant to study the effects of a probiotic called VSL No. 3 (which is the kind we gave Shepherd) on gut bacteria and gut-barrier function in children with irritable bowel syndrome, a disorder in which changes in the gut bacterial population are associated with inflammation in the colon.
Another potential method of recolonizing the gut, which is gaining ground, is the fecal transplant. It is exactly what it sounds like. People infected with C. diff. have responded well when they've been given stool from healthy individuals (usually via colonoscopy). There's enough excitement about the therapeutic potential of stool that when I spoke to Martin J. Blaser, a professor of medicine and microbiology and the director of the Human Microbiome Program at NYU Langone Medical Center, he suggested I stash some of Beau's and Shepherd's in our freezer, which I will do, right next to the peas.
Data on diet and supplements are lacking, at least partly because they are hard to get. It's hard to design a great study around something with so many variables, like the food we eat. Pharmaceuticals, on the other hand, lend themselves easily to randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Plus, anti-arthritic drugs are great for business. Together, the top two sellers, Humira and Enbrel, took in more than $8 billion in 2012, not including December, according to IMS Health, a health care technology and information company. At the N.I.H., the complementary-and-alternative center's budget is 0.4 percent of the entire N.I.H. pie.
And yet, if you look hard enough, evidence that diet and supplements can work does exist. In a study published in The Lancet more than 20 years ago, a group of rheumatoid-arthritis sufferers was isolated on a "health farm" and, after a week of fasting, were fed a gluten-free, vegan diet. After four weeks, they showed "significant improvement," compared with the control. In 2001, a study in the journal Rheumatology echoed the positive effect of a similar diet. A 2011 case study in The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine closely tracks Shepherd's story. The evidence for omega-3's also looks strong. Even if we can't know what helped Shepherd for sure, at home, we believe Walker's regimen is what did the trick.
Sunday night has always been pizza night in our family, but now it's dairy-free-mozzarella-and-sausage-on-corn-tortilla-night. And these days, everyone also takes fish oil and probiotics. Shortly after Shepherd started his regimen, Darin went off gluten and dairy in solidarity. Now 5, Shepherd often has more energy than Beau. Even so, I don't think I ever look at Shepherd without scrutinizing how he's moving. This will most likely be true for a long time, I realize, but for now, every time I look, I never see anything but a gleeful little boy.
It was almost a year ago that Dr. Kahn examined Shepherd and found that he had no active arthritis. That night when I kissed Shepherd good night, I told him to give me five. "For the no arthritis?" he asked. I nodded, holding out my hand. He slapped my palm again and again, over and over. It sounded like clapping.
Susannah Meadows writes the Newly Released column for The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/the-boy-with-a-thorn-in-his-joints.html?src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=all
Health Care’s Trick Coin - NYTimes.com
THIS month, Johnson & Johnson is facing more than 10,000 lawsuits over an artificial hip that has been recalled because of a 40 percent failure rate within five years. Mistakes happen in medicine, but internal documents showed that executives had known of flaws with the device for some time, but had failed to make them public.
It would be nice to imagine that this kind of behavior is exceptional, but in reality, the entire evidence base for medicine has been undermined by a casual lack of transparency. Sometimes this is through a failure to report concerns raised by doctors and internal analyses, as was the case with Johnson & Johnson. More commonly, it involves the suppression of clinical trial results, especially when they show a drug is no good. These problems would be bad enough on their own, but they are compounded by a generation of "fake fixes" that have delivered false reassurance, and so prevent realistic public discussion.
The best evidence shows that half of all the clinical trials ever conducted and completed on the treatments in use today have never been published in academic journals. Trials with positive or flattering results, unsurprisingly, are about twice as likely to be published — and this is true for both academic research and industry studies.
If I toss a coin, but hide the result every time it comes up tails, it looks as if I always throw heads. You wouldn't tolerate that if we were choosing who should go first in a game of pocket billiards, but in medicine, it's accepted as the norm. In the worst case, we can be misled into believing that ineffective treatments are worth using; more commonly we are misled about the relative merits of competing treatments, exposing patients to inferior ones.
This problem has been documented for three decades, and many in the industry now claim it has been fixed. But every intervention has been full of loopholes, none has been competently implemented and, lastly, with no routine public audit, flaws have taken years to emerge.
The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 is the most widely cited fix. It required that new clinical trials conducted in the United States post summaries of their results atclinicaltrials.gov within a year of completion, or face a fine of $10,000 a day. But in 2012, the British Medical Journal published the first open audit of the process, which found that four out of five trials covered by the legislation had ignored the reporting requirements. Amazingly, no fine has yet been levied.
An earlier fake fix dates from 2005, when the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors made an announcement: their members would never again publish any clinical trial unless its existence had been declared on a publicly accessible registry before the trial began. The reasoning was simple: if everyone registered their trials at the beginning, we could easily spot which results were withheld; and since everyone wants to publish in prominent academic journals, these editors had the perfect carrot. Once again, everyone assumed the problem had been fixed.
But four years later we discovered, in a paper from The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the editors had broken their promise: more than half of all trials published in leading journals still weren't properly registered, and a quarter weren't registered at all.
Even if these fixes had been successful, we would still be decades away from knowing the full truth about our medical treatments, because today's decisions are informed by the trials of the past, on drugs that were first researched and approved in 2007, 2002, 1998 and earlier. None of the reforms has even tried to ensure public access for these results, and so they remain buried in dry storage archives, deep underground.
All of these problems are perhaps best illustrated by the case of Tamiflu, which governments have spent billions of dollars stockpiling, in the belief that the drug will reduce the rate of complications from influenza. But roughly half the trial results have never been published, and researchers trying to obtain the full Clinical Study Reports have been stonewalled by the manufacturer, Roche.
This cannot be acceptable. Withholding data not only misleads doctors and patients; it's an insult to the patients who have participated in clinical trials, believing that they were helping to improve medical knowledge.
Medicine routinely overcomes enormous technical challenges, and there is nothing complicated about the changes needed to prevent Johnson & Johnson, or Roche — or anybody — from withholding information. The F.D.A. has proposed reforms to its systems for assessing artificial hips. And a campaign, supported by the National Physicians Alliance, has begun at alltrials.net demanding that results be publicly reported for all trials, dating back to at least the 1990s, on all treatments currently in use. We need competent legislation, enforcement and leadership from medical academic bodies, all clearly stating that nonpublication of trial results is nothing less than research misconduct.
This will take place against a clamor from industry stakeholders. They have worked hard to silence discussion on these problems, by pretending that the flaws have already been fixed. Why? Because this strategy is their only hope. There is no defense for withholding information on treatments used by patients around the world.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Some service members sleep too little | Body & Brain | Science News
Some members of the armed forces are strikingly short on sleep, according to a review of medical records of U.S. military personnel.
The study, which appears online January 31 in Sleep, uses data from active-duty military people who sought out, or were referred to, a clinic because they had a sleep complaint. Even though the study is not a random sample, some scientists believe the low levels of sleep found in the records raise serious questions about the health of the armed forces. Sleep problems in the study sample were often associated with conditions such as chronic pain, anxiety, brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scientists know that sleep deprivation can affect mood, concentration, reaction time and cognitive function. But little information is available specifically about sleep loss in the military.
"It's really the first study to take a good epidemiological look at sleep in military personnel," says Alan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who wasn't involved in the study.
Researchers reviewed the charts of every person who was admitted to Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2010 for sleep-related complaints and underwent polysomnography, a diagnostic test that measures physiological changes during sleep. The 725 people whose records were analyzed served in the Army, Navy or Air Force and had an average age of 36. The vast majority of the medical charts belonged to people who had been in combat, and many had been deployed to war zones multiple times.
Of the people, 85 percent had sleep problems meriting treatment, with sleep apnea and insomnia the most common. Both can cause daytime sleepiness and fatigue. People who didn't have a sleep disorder mainly snored or had other mild symptoms.
Nearly 42 percent of the people in the study said they got five hours of sleep or less per night on average, and another 26.5 percent reported only six hours, the reviewers found. "That was the most surprising finding," says study coauthor Vincent Mysliwiec, a pulmonary and sleep physician at Madigan.
The risks of sleep deprivation in combat might seem obvious but actually aren't well understood, he says. "When you're getting shot at, you just don't fall asleep," soldiers have told him.
The findings suggest that the military needs to think about sleep as a resource that has value, much like fuel or water, he says. Vehicles need fuel and soldiers need water, and neither is sent into combat without enough, he says. "Sleep should be viewed with the same perspective."
Instead, soldiers are taught to find downtime to catch up on sleep. "All soldiers need to rest and recover," Mysliwiec says. "How much is possible in a wartime environment depends on the unit you're deployed with."
Caffeinated beverages such as coffee or so-called energy drinks may contribute to sleep problems as well, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in November. A survey of service members deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 found that those who consumed three or more such beverages per day were more likely than those who drank two or fewer to experience sleep disruption or to fall asleep in briefings or on guard duty – but not while riding in convoys.
Researchers have long known about the military's culture of insufficient sleep, say Nita Lewis Shattuck and Stephanie Brown of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., writing in the same issue of Sleep. "For many individuals in the military, sleep is considered a luxury or even a weakness." The new findings highlight the need for policy changes, they conclude.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/347980/description/Some_service_members_sleep_too_little
The study, which appears online January 31 in Sleep, uses data from active-duty military people who sought out, or were referred to, a clinic because they had a sleep complaint. Even though the study is not a random sample, some scientists believe the low levels of sleep found in the records raise serious questions about the health of the armed forces. Sleep problems in the study sample were often associated with conditions such as chronic pain, anxiety, brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scientists know that sleep deprivation can affect mood, concentration, reaction time and cognitive function. But little information is available specifically about sleep loss in the military.
"It's really the first study to take a good epidemiological look at sleep in military personnel," says Alan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who wasn't involved in the study.
Researchers reviewed the charts of every person who was admitted to Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2010 for sleep-related complaints and underwent polysomnography, a diagnostic test that measures physiological changes during sleep. The 725 people whose records were analyzed served in the Army, Navy or Air Force and had an average age of 36. The vast majority of the medical charts belonged to people who had been in combat, and many had been deployed to war zones multiple times.
Of the people, 85 percent had sleep problems meriting treatment, with sleep apnea and insomnia the most common. Both can cause daytime sleepiness and fatigue. People who didn't have a sleep disorder mainly snored or had other mild symptoms.
Nearly 42 percent of the people in the study said they got five hours of sleep or less per night on average, and another 26.5 percent reported only six hours, the reviewers found. "That was the most surprising finding," says study coauthor Vincent Mysliwiec, a pulmonary and sleep physician at Madigan.
The risks of sleep deprivation in combat might seem obvious but actually aren't well understood, he says. "When you're getting shot at, you just don't fall asleep," soldiers have told him.
The findings suggest that the military needs to think about sleep as a resource that has value, much like fuel or water, he says. Vehicles need fuel and soldiers need water, and neither is sent into combat without enough, he says. "Sleep should be viewed with the same perspective."
Instead, soldiers are taught to find downtime to catch up on sleep. "All soldiers need to rest and recover," Mysliwiec says. "How much is possible in a wartime environment depends on the unit you're deployed with."
Caffeinated beverages such as coffee or so-called energy drinks may contribute to sleep problems as well, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in November. A survey of service members deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 found that those who consumed three or more such beverages per day were more likely than those who drank two or fewer to experience sleep disruption or to fall asleep in briefings or on guard duty – but not while riding in convoys.
Researchers have long known about the military's culture of insufficient sleep, say Nita Lewis Shattuck and Stephanie Brown of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., writing in the same issue of Sleep. "For many individuals in the military, sleep is considered a luxury or even a weakness." The new findings highlight the need for policy changes, they conclude.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/347980/description/Some_service_members_sleep_too_little
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Significant relationship between mortality and telomere length discovered - Science Daily
A team of researchers at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has identified a significant relationship between mortality and the length of telomeres, the stretches of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes, according to a presentation on Nov. 8 at the American Society of Human Genetics 2012 meeting in San Francisco.
While a reduction in telomere length is regarded as a biomarker of aging, scientists have not yet determined whether it plays a direct causal role in aging-related health changes and mortality or is just a sign of aging.
In their prospective study of 100,000 multi-ethnic individuals whose average age was 63 years, the researchers determined that an association between telomere length and mortality existed and persisted even after the data were adjusted for such demographic and behavioral factors as education, smoking and alcohol consumption, said Catherine Schaefer, Ph.D., director of the Kaiser Permanente (KP) Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health (RPGEH).
Dr. Schaefer and Neil Risch, Ph.D., director of the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics, are principal investigators of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Study on Adult Health and Aging (GERA). UCSF professor and Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., led the research on telomere length measurement.
The telomere research, part of the GERA project, has genotyped over 675,000 markers of 100,000 KP Northern California patients and linked them with health data from their electronic medical records. To obtain DNA for genotyping and telomere measurement, the researchers collected saliva samples from the patients, who volunteered for the project and provided scientists with access to their electronic medical records.
Two years prior to the saliva collection, the researchers conducted a detailed survey of the patients' demographic and behavioral factors, providing a unique opportunity to address questions of telomere epidemiology and aging.
"With these data, we examined demographic relationships with telomere length, behavioral influences and relationship of telomere length with all causes of mortality following sample collection," said Dr. Schaefer. "Although we found that shorter-than-average telomeres were prospectively associated with mortality, only those with the shortest telomeres were at increased risk of death."
Dr. Risch added, "While this could indicate a direct effect of telomere length on health, it will also be important to examine the extent of pre-existing diseases in these individuals to understand their possible role in the biological connection between telomere length and longevity."
Dr. Risch said that he and the other scientists expected to and did find that telomere length was inversely correlated with age, and women had longer telomeres than men except as young adults. All analyses controlled for age and gender.
Harvard Medical School scientist Cynthia C. Morton, Ph.D., who was not involved in the study, commented, "The GERA study is especially impressive for the large resource of DNA samples and corresponding electronic medical records available from KP patients, and for the outstanding group of scientists collaborating in the research.
"The intriguing findings on telomere length in the GERA cohort are no doubt among many yet forthcoming, prompting further investigations into the basis for ethnic differences in telomere length such as whether specific oral environmental exposures in ethnic groups might account for differences in telomere lengths in saliva DNA samples," added Dr. Morton, William Lambert Richardson Professor in Harvard's department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology.
Like several other investigations, GERA detected significantly longer telomeres among African Americans than other groups, but did not reveal a significant difference between European-Americans, Latinos and Asians.
According to the GERA results, telomere length was positively correlated with such factors as level of education and body mass index (BMI), and negatively correlated with cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption. However, telomere length was not associated with major depression or stress-related disorders, although other studies have reported an association between telomere length and depression and stressful events.
Links between shorter telomeres and risks for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers, depression, pulmonary fibrosis, vascular dementia, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis have been detected by Dr. Blackburn, one of three scientists honored with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and her research group as well as other labs. Telomeres are special DNA sequences attached to the ends of each of the 46 chromosomes in human cells. When telomeres become too short, cells can no longer multiply.
NFL team doctors: The problem with pro football’s medical sponsorship deals - Slate Magazine
The NFL season ends Sunday, as it always does, with two teams of the walking wounded pounding each other one last time. This year it's the Baltimore Ravens against the San Francisco 49ers—or if you're inclined to credit their respective medical teams, it's MedStar Union Memorial vs. Stanford Hospital & Clinics. The Ravens and 49ers are among the 23 NFL teams with "official" health care providers. (That figure is a hand count that the league declined to confirm.) These arrangements differ, but the standard deal includes reduced-rate medical care and/or a payment from the hospital to the team in exchange for the medical provider getting to ballyhoo the affiliation in its marketing. "The halo effect is huge," Lew Lyon, vice president of the Ravens-affiliated MedStar Sports Medicine, tells me. "Friends will call me and say, 'Can you get me into see one of the Ravens docs?' And they're very accessible. They have private practice like other physicians."
But the opacity of these marketing arrangements should give you pause as you're weighing whether to drag your balky knee to the local jock docs. For one, by league policy, individual players are free to opt out of any official team arrangement and see another medical provider, as the Ravens' Ray Lewis did this year when he had surgery on his triceps (and when the linebacker allegedly ingested deer-antler spray to aid in his comeback). More fundamentally, fans ought to think through the inherent conflicts of interest at play when a doctor serves both a team and a patient who happens to be that team's employee.
To a lot of us freelance contractor types, the idea of an employer covering our health care sounds like a Cadillac plan fit for a CEO. But consider the logjam for a physician in this setting. Privacy, confidentiality, speed of recuperation, treatment regimens—all of them stand to suffer when players see a doctor employed by an organization that prefers they return to work ASAP. Then imagine this added conflict: The doctor who just cleared you for duty was so thrilled to have the gig that she paid your employer for the privilege. Now you're getting closer to the situation many pro athletes face. Put yourself in their cleats for a moment. Would you want to be treated by a doctor who had your employer's profitability anywhere on her list of concerns? And further, would you be forthcoming about your health problems to someone with a direct pipeline to managers with the power to effectively fire you for poor health?
The expansion Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars signed the first known medical sponsorship deals in the mid-'90s. Since then, health care providers have been cutting deals with teams for the right to advertise themselves as the franchise's "official" choice—even paying millions for those marketing rights.
Medical ethics codes expressly forbid conflicts that could place financial gain ahead of patient welfare; the 1,500-year-old Hippocratic Oath protects patients against "harm and injustice." Yet it's standard for teams to sell their affiliations to the highest bidder. After the New York Yankees won the 1999 World Series, the team solicited $1.5 million for its health care marketing rights. Among the hospitals to decline that honor was the Yankees' longtime care provider, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Its executive vice president told the Daily News: "Even if we were flush, I'm not sure I would do it. I'm not comfortable with that kind of deal, and I don't think it would necessarily be good for the institution." Other doctors have voiced similar concerns. Then-Atlanta Falcons team doctor Andrew Bishop told the New York Times in 2004 that he would resign if the team entered a hospital sponsorship deal: "It compromises you as a physician. The perception is that if this individual was so eager to do this he's willing to pay to do it, then he's going to do whatever management wants to keep the job he paid for."
Perhaps no conflict was as glaring as that of the Boston Red Sox when Arthur Pappas, the team's longtime orthopedic surgeon, was also part-owner. Marty Barrett, a player and a patient, tore his ACL during the 1989 pennant race, and later won a suit against Pappas in which the player claimed that the doctor/owner disclosed to Barrett neither the extent of his injuries nor the time needed for proper recovery. A 1995 Sports Illustrated report on Pappas and other team docs cited a Chicago Bears doctor who botched a knee operation and then tried erasing part of a videotape of the surgery so as not to lose his contract with the team. No less than Bill Walton, Dick Butkus, and Carlton Fisk also believe their injuries worsened when team physicians hustled them back into the lineup. (Pappas was Fisk's doctor as well.)
In 2002, former Jaguars offensive lineman Jeff Novak won a malpractice suit against Stephen Lucie, who had been the Jaguars' team doctor since the team's founding. (Lucie's employer,Jacksonville Orthopaedic Institute, is still the team's "exclusive sports medicine partner" after winning its bid for that right.) Novak suffered a bone bruise that the lawsuit claimed Lucie squeezed and scraped at. Novak played hurt, which led to infection, profuse bleeding and, ultimately, his retirement. John Jurkovic, a teammate of Novak's in Jacksonville, described the health culture that coach Tom Coughlin fostered there: "[The team trainer] would never intervene on a player's behalf. He was browbeaten. Coughlin controlled him. That's who has no spine. He's a puppet." Novak said Coughlin was prone to kvetching that injured players were "sick, lazy and lame." Far from becoming a pariah, Coughlin has since won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants.
Only when health outcomes turn into news are these marketing deals exposed for the morass they are. Weeks before St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile died of a heart attack during the 2002 season, the team's official health care provider had published a publicity shot of him with a Washington University doctor as evidence of the hospital's bona fides. The doctor, George A. Paletta, explained soon after Kile's death that a normal battery of tests for a 33-year-old athlete wouldn't have caught the 90 percent blockage in two of Kile's arteries. ESPN.com found doctors who disagreed, saying Kile's father's fatal stroke at 44 should've prompted a stress test for the pitcher. Cardinals manager Tony La Russa took the opportunity to advise his players to retain a physician unaffiliated with the team to administer off-season tests, as La Russa himself did.
None of this is meant to impugn every team doctor. But it's worth noting that there's a lot at stake here beyond merely keeping players upright. These multiyear contracts include marketing components such as gate sponsorship, in-stadium signage, presence at league health events, training camp sponsorship, training facility sponsorship, athlete and coach endorsements, as well as medical components beyond just caring for players and their families. MedStar, for example, also has the contract to provide medical services at Ravens home games, a setting that MedStar Sports Medicine VP Lew Lyon describes as a war zone, albeit one imagined by Joseph Heller. He recalled one incident in which a woman aspirated on a chicken bone and went into cardiac arrest. The medics got the bone out and got her heart going again. When they tried to move her to a hospital, she threw a fit, saying she'd paid to see the game. "They didn't even sell chicken wings at the stadium," Lyon said. "She had brought in a bucket under a jersey or something."
Serving as the official bone-removal crew for dying Ravens fans—now there's a real endorsement. But if players have reason to prefer doctors of their own hire, why don't players hire the doctors in the first place? When contacted for this story, an NFL spokesman would say only that the league does not allow marketing contracts that require a team to hire a partner hospital's doctors exclusively.
It's time for the NFLPA and other unions to go further, and to insist on hiring players' main sports medicine physicians. Steve P. Calandrillo suggested as much in a 2006 Saint Louis University Law Journal article about sports medicine conflicts of interest; he says malpractice insurance may even be cheaper without the perception of divided loyalties, and that teams could thus shed worker's comp liability.
Until the players are choosing the doctors, leagues should bar sponsorship deals that let hospitals describe themselves as an "official" health care provider for this or that team. You don't assume that all NFL players drink Bud Light or drive GM trucks just because those brands sponsor the league, and no one is harmed if you're that gullible anyway. Health care is different. Such branding implies that players trust those doctors with the most vital service they can get in a high-risk occupation. The truth is something else. Players may have their own favorite surgeons. Or they may not trust the doctors' competing allegiances to patient health and management's demands. How could you blame them?
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety - NYTimes.com
Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.
The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn't informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people's willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.
What they found was reassuring.
To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity - I'm an ungainly novice snowboarder - the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn't fracture his skull.
Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.
Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.
In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.
In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.
But wearing a helmet did not increase people's speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.
Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.
Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.
But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers' peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.
Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.
So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?
"The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall," says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. "That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners."
But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.
The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. "Helmets are safe. They don't seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries."
The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that "all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets," making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.
Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. "As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain," he said. "So everyone I care about wears a helmet."
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Jared Diamond’s Guide to Reducing Life’s Risks - NYTimes.com
You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I'm 75.) Among my wife's and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall.
"Really!" you may object. "What's my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?" My answer: Perhaps, but that's not nearly good enough.
Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That's not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I'm to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I'd die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475.
This calculation illustrates the biggest single lesson that I've learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.
I first became aware of the New Guineans' attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.
Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.
I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.
Consider: If you're a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you'll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I've survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.
I now think of New Guineans' hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as "constructive paranoia": a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I've adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends. But three of them who practice constructive paranoia themselves — a pilot of small planes, a river-raft guide and a London bobby who patrols the streets unarmed — learned the attitude, as I did, by witnessing the deaths of careless people.
Traditional New Guineans have to think clearly about dangers because they have no doctors, police officers or 911 dispatchers to bail them out. In contrast, Americans' thinking about dangers is confused. We obsess about the wrong things, and we fail to watch for real dangers.
Studies have compared Americans' perceived ranking of dangers with the rankings of real dangers, measured either by actual accident figures or by estimated numbers of averted accidents. It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control ("That would never happen to me — I'm careful") and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way.
Having learned both from those studies and from my New Guinea friends, I've become as constructively paranoid about showers, stepladders, staircases and wet or uneven sidewalks as my New Guinea friends are about dead trees. As I drive, I remain alert to my own possible mistakes (especially at night), and to what incautious other drivers might do.
My hypervigilance doesn't paralyze me or limit my life: I don't skip my daily shower, I keep driving, and I keep going back to New Guinea. I enjoy all those dangerous things. But I try to think constantly like a New Guinean, and to keep the risks of accidents far below 1 in 1,000 each time.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the new book "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?"
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