A little health secret: gratitude

I always thought this was a bit corny, but having an "attitude of gratitude" is very real.

Gratitude has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked.

How do you get started? One suggestion: start with “gratitude lite.” 

That’s the term used by Robert A. Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, for the technique used in his pioneering experiments he conducted along with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami. They instructed people to keep a journal listing five things for which they felt grateful, like a friend’s generosity, something they’d learned, a sunset they’d enjoyed. 

The gratitude journal was brief — just one sentence for each of the five things — and done only once a week, but after two months there were significant effects. Compared with a control group, the people keeping the gratitude journal were more optimistic and felt happier. They reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out. 

Further benefits were observed in a study of polio survivors and other people with neuromuscular problems. The ones who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling happier and more optimistic than those in a control group, and these reports were corroborated by observations from their spouses. These grateful people also fell asleep more quickly at night, slept longer and woke up feeling more refreshed. 

“If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep,” Dr. Emmons advises in “Thanks!” his book on gratitude research.

I'm going to give this a try. I'm grateful that I came across this article.

Throw grandma under the bus

I often write about breakthroughs in medical research. Innovation is the only way out of our healthcare mess: new discoveries in the lab and new ways of getting them to people.

Unfortunately, the new bureaucracies rising up under Obamacare are going to hurt this.

Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, writes:

Obamacare established the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to “conduct research to provide information about the best available evidence to help patients and their health care providers make more informed decisions.” What could be wrong with that? CER is supposed to be “a rigorous evaluation of the impact of different options that are available for treating a given medical condition for a particular set of patients.” 

Alas, there is a problem: The federal government does not have patients. Instead, it has interest groups engaged in a long twilight struggle over shares of the federal budget pie. Less for one group means more for others, and even modest reductions in the huge federal health-care budget are a tempting goal for other constituencies.

In other words, there can be no such thing as unpoliticized science in the Beltway, he writes. 

It is inevitable that political pressures will lead policymakers to use the findings yielded by CER analyses to influence decisions on coverage, reimbursement, or incentives within Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs.

Consider the new environment confronting would-be investors in new and improved medical technologies, examples of which are pharmaceuticals and medical devices and equipment. One cannot know in advance either how CER analyses of interest will turn out or how the findings will be used. Indeed, the uncertainties are enormous.

This is staggering:

Recent research from the Pacific Research Institute examined the likely effects of these CER implications for R&D investment in new and improved pharmaceuticals and devices and equipment. Using data from the National Science Foundation and other sources, R&D investment would be reduced by about $10 billion per year over the period 2014 through 2025, or about 10-12 percent. Based upon the scholarly literature on the benefits of medical innovation, this reduction in the advance of medical technology would impose an expected loss of about 5 million life-years annually, with a conservative economic value of $500 billion, an amount substantially greater than the entire U.S. market for pharmaceuticals and devices and equipment.

This adverse effect would be concentrated upon technological advances likely to serve the needs of smaller subgroups within the overall patient population, upon riskier investments among new treatments, and upon drugs and equipment expected to prove relatively less profitable.

Well, if people die the cost of their healthcare drops to zero. So there's a solution.

Eat less, think more, live forever

Many studies suggest that obesity is bad for our brain, slows it down, causes early brain aging, making it susceptible to diseases typical of older people as the Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. In contrast, caloric restriction keeps the brain young. 

Nevertheless, the precise molecular mechanism behind the positive effects of an hypocaloric diet on the brain remained unknown till now.

Now a team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome have discovered that this molecule, called CREB1, is triggered by "caloric restriction" (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. They found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain.

Here's some good news for all of us: "Our hope is to find a way to activate CREB1, for example through new drugs, so to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet," Dr Giovambattista Pani, researcher at the Institute of General Pathology, said.

Yeah, you can keep slurping that pasta.

I've been trapping lots of mice in my attic. Guess they eat too much, because they're pretty stupid. Of course, I'm luring them with peanut butter with the correct mixture of omega fatty acids, so they may not be so dumb after all. Just nutrionally-correct dead.

What's in that expresso?

A study of 20 commercial expresso coffees in Scotland reveals a 6-fold differences in caffeine levels, a 17-fold range of caffeoylquinic acid contents, and 4-fold differences in the caffeoylquinic acid : caffeine ratio.

Yikes! I had no idea that stuff was in there.

These variations reflect differences in batch-to-batch bean composition, possible blending of arabica with robusta beans, as well as roasting and grinding procedures, but the predominant factor is likely to be the amount of beans used in the coffee-making/barista processes. The most caffeine in a single espresso was 322 mg and a further three contained >200 mg, exceeding the 200 mg day upper limit recommended during pregnancy by the UK Food Standards Agency.

This snap-shot of high-street expresso coffees suggests the published assumption that a cup of strong coffee contains 50 mg caffeine may be misleading. Consumers at risk of toxicity, including pregnant women, children and those with liver disease, may unknowingly ingest excessive caffeine from a single cup of espresso coffee. As many coffee houses prepare larger volume coffees, such as Latte and Cappuccino, by dilution of a single or double shot of expresso, further study on these products is warranted.

Starbucks had the lowest amount of caffeine.

One way we'll control the cost of healthcare

More than 3,000 people in England with diabetes, heart failure or COPD (a serious lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) took part in a recent two-year trial of telehealth technology for monitoring people who are chronically ill.

According to the results of the trial, published by the Department of Health, telehealth can reduce mortality, reduce the need for admissions to hospital, lower the number of days spent in a hospital bed and cut the time spent in A&E.

Here's how it works.

First thing in the morning, Terry Munro always puts the kettle on. "Then I take my blood sugar, take my blood pressure and my weight and in that time the kettle's boiled.
"And I've got a record of it on my TV. It's marvellous, it really is." 

Terry, who is 67 years old and has diabetes, has been keeping tabs on his own health using nothing more than his television. The testing equipment uses Bluetooth so when Terry has taken his daily measurements they are automatically uploaded to the TV. 

A trained nurse can access and monitor the readings from a central location and make decisions about potential changes in treatments. "I like walking, but I used to go out and go hypo. Now I know I can't go out if my blood sugar is too low, so I am more aware now. 

"It's like having a doctor there all the time."

Patients like Terry are constantly being watched by nurses, albeit at a distance. Any unusual readings entered onto the TV are picked up straight away and will prompt a visit by a nurse or an alert to the patient's doctor.

Your amazing brain

Your brain know a lot more than you realize, neuroscientist David Eagleman writes, He explores the processes and skills of the subconscious mind, which our conscious selves rarely consider.

Are there transvestite chicks?

Let's start with chickens.

When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing gender is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, which will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, which are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike. 

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which experts could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique. 

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in. 

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level.

And let's conclude with baseball.

On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, The Guinness Book of Records clocked Nolan Ryan’s fastball at 100.9 miles per hour. If you work the numbers, you’ll see that Ryan’s pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate—60 feet, 6 inches away—in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to hit the batter’s eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual system at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and modify the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But even more surprising is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it.

Think I'd rather be a baseball player than a chicken.