A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery.

Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.

Critics of DCD contend that some patients may still be alive five or even 10 minutes after cardiac arrest because, theoretically, their hearts could be restarted, and some of their brain function might still remain. In such cases, critics assert, the patients were clearly not dead because their condition was reversible. Advocates of DCD counter that do-not-resuscitate orders from a patient or family render the argument about irreversibility moot.

In any case, there would be little debate about DCD if organs in a body remained viable for transplantation 20 or 30 minutes after heart and lung failure. But they become damaged quickly, so surgeons have to act fast — ideally, within about 10 minutes of cardiac arrest.

According to the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which was drafted about 30 years ago and has since been adopted, in some form, by all of the states, you can be declared dead in one of two ways: Your brain can irreversibly cease functioning, or your heart and lungs can irreversibly stop working. “Irreversibly,” in this context, has fueled the controversy. Does it mean the heart is unable to spontaneously start by itself? Or does it mean that even resuscitation efforts fail to restart the heart? (…)

More than 100,000 potential organ recipients idle on the waiting list maintained by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the U.S. transplant system. An average of 18 people on the list die each day because of a shortage of donor organs.

{ Stanford Medicine | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank, London, 1952 }

Researchers looked at the role tomato products play in health and disease risk reduction. Results indicate that eating more tomatoes and tomato products can make people healthier and decrease the risk of conditions such as cancer, osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease.

{ SAGE Insight | Continue reading }

Jeannie asks, “Why are you here?” and Charlie, dead-panned, replies, without regret: “Drugs.” And then he slowly disarms her bitchiness with his outrageously sexy insouciance, transforming her annoyance into delight (they end up making out).

That’s when we first really noticed Charlie Sheen, and it’s the key moment in his movie career (it now seems to define and sum up everything that followed). He hasn’t been as entertaining since. Until now. In getting himself fired from Two and a Half Men, this privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted prankster. And now Sheen has embraced the post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity means in that world. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. (…)

Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity. He’s always been a role model for a certain kind of male fantasy. Degrading, perhaps, but aren’t most male fantasies? (I don’t know any straight men who fantasize about Tom Cruise’s personal life.) Sheen has always been a bad boy, which is part of his appeal—to men and women. There’s a manly mock-dignity about Sheen that both sexes like a lot. What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified is the moment in the culture when not giving a fuck about what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy). It’s a different brand of narcissism than Empire narcissism.

{ Bret Easton Ellis | Continue reading }

Forty years ago, on March 21, 1971, Hunter S. Thompson and a Chicano activist attorney named Oscar Zeta Acosta drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to talk over an article Thompson was writing about the barrios of East L.A. When the account of their journey appeared in Rolling Stone in November of that year, Thompson and Acosta had morphed into Raoul Duke and his 300-pound Samoan attorney and the trunk of their car, the Great Red Shark, had become a rolling drug dispensary. (…)

Fear and Loathing compresses two separate trips Thompson took to Las Vegas that spring – the first to cover a motorcycle race called the Mint 400, the second to cover the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Drug Abuse – into a single hellish week of drug consumption and debauchery.

{ The Millions | Continue reading }

On 29 April 1971, Thompson began writing the full manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time. (…)

In November 1971, Rolling Stone published the combined texts of the trips as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream as a two-part article illustrated by Ralph Steadman. (…)

The New York Times said it is “by far the best book yet on the decade of dope.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Thompson and Acosta, 1971 }

How do you distill the past 40 years addiction research into ten essential messages? (…)

1. Addiction is fundamentally about compulsive behavior
In normal behaviors, the control in our brains is top down. In addiction the cortex (the decision making bit of the brain) becomes ‘eroded’ to a ‘dehumanised’ compulsion.

(…)

2. Compulsive drug seeking starts outside conscious thought

(…)

3. Addiction is about 50% inherited, but it’s much more complicated than that…


(…)

4. 75-90% of those asking for help from services have diagnosable mental health problems including depression, social phobia and post traumatic stress disorder.

(…)

5. Addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder in the majority


(…)

6. Different therapies appear to produce similar treatment outcomes 


(…)

7. “Come back when you are motivated” is no longer an acceptable therapeutic response


(…)

10. Change takes time


{ Binge Inking | Continue reading }

screenshot { The Naked Gun, 1988 }

Preventing preterm births just got 150 times more expensive, now that KV Pharmaceuticals has gained exclusive rights to produce a progesterone shot used to prevent premature births in high-risk mothers.

Although the shot has been available in unregulated form from specialty compounding pharmacies for years for $10 a pop, the Food and Drug Administration recently granted KV Pharmaceuticals sole rights to produce the drug, which will be marketed as Makena and cost $1,500 per dose — an estimated $30,000 in total per pregnancy. (…)

Because FDA laws prohibit compounding pharmacies from making FDA-approved products, doctors will be legally obligated to stop using the cheaper version of this drug.

{ ABC News | Continue reading }

photo { Julie Anderson and E.J. photographed by Tyen }

“Worrying is always bad for your health.” Wrong. A study lasting for more than 80 years debunks conventional wisdom.

(…)

Philip was one of 1,500 bright children who were tracked for more than 80 years in a massive longitudinal study begun in 1921 by psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman and his successors—he died before many of the children—collected millions of details about these subjects, including whether they were breast-fed, how much they exercised, what their marriages were like, how satisfying their sex lives were, how satisfying their jobs were. (…)

Optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details, meaning they don’t follow doctor’s orders correctly or lead themselves into unhealthy situations or addictions. It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer, write Friedman and Martin, researchers at the University of California, Riverside. And, their studies show, some of what we think will benefit our children may actually rob them of years later in life. In the Terman study, precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

polaroid { Melvin Sokolsky | more }

Q. Is anesthesia like a coma?

A. It’s a reversible drug-induced coma, to simplify. As with a coma that’s the result of a brain injury, the patient is unconscious, insensitive to pain, cannot move or remember. However, with anesthesia, once the drugs wear off, the coma wears off.

{ Interview with Dr. Emery Neal Brown, professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School | NY Times | Continue reading }

quote { Eulogy for Things Left Unsaid | video }

In the mid 1920s, Berger invented the electroencephalagraph (EEG), a technique for measuring the electrical activity of brains. Unfortunately, Berger didn’t understand electricity very well, so didn’t have a clear understanding of what his recordings might mean. But he revolutionized the study of human brains.

Perhaps nowhere was Berger’s invention put to greater use than in the study of sleep. Before that, what did we know of brains while we slept? (…)

Berger’s invention continues to deepen our understanding of sleep, nearly a century after its invention, as shown by a new paper by KcKinney and colleagues.

{ NeuroDojo | Continue reading }

related { Short on sleep, the brain optimistically favors long odds }

painting { John Kacere }

It should be so easy: Buy toothpaste. But few shopping trips are more bewildering.

An explosion of specialized pastes and gels brag about their powers to whiten teeth, reduce plaque, curb sensitivity and fight gingivitis, sometimes all at the same time. Add in all the flavors and sizes, plus ever-rising prices, and the simple errand turns into sensory overload.

Manufacturers acknowledge the problem and are putting the brakes on new-product introductions. Last year, 69 new toothpastes hit store shelves, down from 102 in 2007. (…)

Stores are trying to simplify, too. Last month, 352 distinct types or sizes of toothpaste were sold at retail, down from 412 in March 2008. (…)

With some 93% of U.S. adults using toothpaste, according to Mintel, there’s little room to recruit new users.

Even through the recession, when unit sales of toothpaste actually dipped, prices kept rising. The average price of toothpaste last year reached $2.83, up 8% over the past four years.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Blue whales can weigh over a thousand times more than a human being. That’s a lot of extra cells, and as those cells grow and divide, there’s a small chance that each one will mutate. A mutation can be harmless, or it can be the first step towards cancer. As the descendants of a precancerous cell continue to divide, they run a risk of taking a further step towards a full-blown tumor. To some extent, cancer is a lottery, and a 100-foot blue whale has a lot more tickets than we do.

Aleah Caulin of the University of Pennsylvania and Carlo Maley of the University of California, San Francisco, have done some calculations of the risk of cancer for blue whales thanks to their huge size. We don’t know a lot about cancer in blue whales, because blue whale oncology wards would be a wee bit awkward for everyone involved. So Caulin and Maley extrapolated up from humans.

About thirty percent of all people will get cancer by the end of their life. (…)

Blue whales do get cancer, but it’s hard to believe that they get it at the rates that come out of Caulin and Maley’s calculations. Blue whales are known to live well over a century. Bowhead whales have reached at least 211 years. If blue whales really did get cancer as fast as the models would suggest, they ought to be extinct.

The failure of the model means that blue whales must have some secrets for fighting cancer. (…)

The mere existence of whales is the most glaring example of what biologists call Peto’s Paradox. There seems to be no correlation between body size and cancer rates among animal species. We run a thirty percent risk of getting cancer over our life time. So do mice, despite the fact that they’re 1000 times smaller than we are.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

related { When the end of life comes later in life, the consequences are often unexpected — and often painful. | The Walrus }

Jay Traver had begun to notice an uncomfortable crawling sensation under her skin. Scalp spots had bothered her for years but despite her best efforts – she was, after all, a renowned professor of zoology – she couldn’t identify the parasites.

Over the seasons the bugs had spread across her body and eventually invaded her eyes, ears and nostrils, raising her discomfort to fever pitch. Doctors seemed mystified but by the summer of 1950 she had made a breakthrough.

Strong caustic soaps seemed to help control the infestation and she had dug some of the bugs out of her skin with her nails to identify them as dermatophagoides – a mite never previously known to infect humans.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

photo { Süleyman Gezgin }

{ Back to the 50’s }

The current pace of population aging is without parallel in human history but surprisingly little is known about the human aging process, because lifespans of eight decades or more make it difficult to study. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have replicated premature aging in the lab, allowing them to study aging-related disease in a dish.

In the February 23, 2011 advance online edition of the journal Nature, Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, Ph.D. a professor in the Salk Institute’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and his team report that they have successfully generated induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from skin cells obtained from patients with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome—who age eight to 10 times faster than the rest of us—and differentiated them into smooth muscle cells displaying the telltale signs of vascular aging. (…)

Progeria’s striking features resemble the aging process put on fast-forward and afflicted people rarely live beyond 13 years.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Brandon Pavan }

Call me an insomniac.

I don’t like the name, but I’m not alone. According to studies from the National Institutes of Health, one in three Americans has some kind of insomnia, and one in 10, like me, has chronic insomnia.

Lack of sleep is so widespread that NIH has an entire unit, the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, devoted in part to figuring out why Americans aren’t getting enough shut-eye. And the Department of Health and Human Services last year added sleep as an essential ingredient to maintaining good health in its Healthy People 2020 report.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Research has demonstrated that more than leaving you feeling rested, sleep actually improves your memory.  Even better, a new study suggests that sleep actually helps you remember exactly what you need to remember.

{ ionpsych | Continue reading }

photo { Jill Freedman }

The idea that an individual has power over his health has a long history in American popular culture. The “mind cure” movements of the 1800s were based on the premise that we can control our well-being. In the middle of that century, Phineas Quimby, a philosopher and healer, popularized the view that illness was the product of mistaken beliefs, that it was possible to cure yourself by correcting your thoughts. Fifty years later, the New Thought movement, which the psychologist and philosopher William James called “the religion of the healthy minded,” expressed a very similar view: by focusing on positive thoughts and avoiding negative ones, people could banish illness.

The idea that people can control their own health has persisted through Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” in 1952, to a popular book today, “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne, which teaches that to achieve good health all we have to do is to direct our requests to the universe.

It’s true that in some respects we do have control over our health. By exercising, eating nutritious foods and not smoking, we reduce our risk of heart disease and cancer. But the belief that a fighting spirit helps us to recover from injury or illness goes beyond healthful behavior. It reflects the persistent view that personality or a way of thinking can raise or reduce the likelihood of illness.

The psychosomatic hypothesis, which was popular in the mid-20th century, held that repressed emotional conflict was at the core of many physical diseases: Hypertension was the product of the inability to deal with hostile impulses. Ulcers were caused by unresolved fear and resentment. And women with breast cancer were characterized as being sexually inhibited, masochistic and unable to deal with anger.

Although modern doctors have rejected those beliefs, in the past 20 years, the medical literature has increasingly included studies examining the possibility that positive characteristics like optimism, spirituality and being a compassionate person are associated with good health. And books on the health benefits of happiness and positive outlook continue to be best sellers.

But there’s no evidence to back up the idea that an upbeat attitude can prevent any illness or help someone recover from one more readily. On the contrary, a recently completed study of nearly 60,000 people in Finland and Sweden who were followed for almost 30 years found no significant association between personality traits and the likelihood of developing or surviving cancer. Cancer doesn’t care if we’re good or bad, virtuous or vicious, compassionate or inconsiderate. Neither does heart disease or AIDS or any other illness or injury.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { David Maisel }

How long does it take for a liter of water to go through our body?

For normal people it should take about 2 to 3 hours…

But it depends on several things.

First, the water has to be absorbed. For example, if someone has really bad diarrhea or is vomiting, the fluid won’t be absorbed.

Second, it depends on what is in the water. If it is pure water rather than water with salt in it, the pure water will be excreted faster than salt water.

Third, if someone is dehydrated, say, was playing soccer for two hours and sweated out two more litres water than he drank, the fluid would stay in his body and his rate of urine production will stay really low until he drinks more.

Fourth, it depends on the time of day. Usually, people’s rate of urine production decreases in the middle of the night and increases around the time we wakes up.

Finally, it depends on the state of health of the person. If a person has kidney disease, the urine production might not increase as much. If a person has heart disease, the fluid May build up in his tissues instead of being excreted.

The reference is a paper where students drank water in the morning and determined how long it took for the water to be excreted. In this paper, it looks like they urinated out about 400 or 500 ml of water over about 2 hours, before the rate of urine production slowed down.

{ MadSci }

The water runs down the throat, past the epiglottis (which is closed so that water doesn’t end up in the lungs) and down through the oesophagus into the stomach.

In the stomach, water is needed to assist in the processing and digestion of food. So far, the body has not absorbed any water. The only thing that has happened is that any thirst was probably quenched and the amount of saliva has increased.
The water and food are mixed into a dough and kneaded out into the intestines.

In the small intestine, the body starts to absorb fluid, as well as vitamins and other nutrients from the dough. These nutrients are absorbed by the blood and transported to all the body’s cells…

The large intestine’s task is to absorb as much liquid as possible from the thin batter, so that the body can make use of this liquid and achieve a proper balance of body fluids. This is Important, as 60% of the human body is made of water.

The liquid is absorbed by the blood vessels in the large intestine and transported by the blood to the kidneys. In the kidneys, blood is purified and water is converted into urine which flows through the ureters to the bladder. When the bladder contains about 200 - 400ml of urine, signals are usually sent to the brain to promote urination.

{ lofric }

A shortage of a drug used in executions in the United States has sent U.S. states scrambling to find supplies, or alternative drugs. Among the 35 states in which capital punishment is legal, some–including Arizona and California–had been sourcing a key execution drug, sodium thiopental, through a company in London–until UK government officials put a stop to its export. The only U.S. company making the drug, which sought to move its manufacturing base to Italy, has now given up producing sodium thiopental because it cannot assure Italian officials that it won’t be used for executions.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Tierney Gearon }

Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.

But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. (…)

“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Elkie Vanstiphout }