Category: Health/Fitness

Your DNA, Please

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The Economist:

Rapid advances in genetic testing promise to transform medicine, but they may up-end the insurance business in the process
“IF YOU can make a good soufflé, you can sequence DNA.” That assertion sounds preposterous, but Hugh Rienhoff should know. When his daughter was born about three years ago, she suffered from a mysterious disability that stunted her muscle development. After many frustrated visits to specialists, Dr Rienhoff, a clinical geneticist and former venture capitalist, decided to sequence a specific part of her genome himself. He discovered that her condition, which most resembled a rare genetic disorder known as Beals’s syndrome, was probably due to a new genetic mutation. “Without a lab and for just a few hundred dollars, you can contract or outsource almost all the steps,” he explains.
What a well-connected and highly motivated scientist in California can do today the rest of the world will be able to do tomorrow. Indeed, a number of firms are already offering tests for specific ailments (or predispositions to ailments) directly to the public, cutting out the medical middle-man. Dr Rienhoff, for his part, will soon launch MyDaughtersDNA.org, a not-for-profit venture intended to help others to unravel the mysteries of their family’s genes in the way that he unravelled those of his own.

Time is All We Have: 3 Ways to Increase Return on Investment

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John Wesley:

Do not squander time for that is the stuff life is made of.
– Benjamin Franklin
Return on investment (ROI) is a term you hear frequently, usually in relation to business and finance. The goal (obviously) is to maximize return on the money you invest. The implications of this concept go much deeper when you start to think of time as your primary investment rather than money. Everything you do is an investment of time. When you watch television, you’re making an investment in entertainment. If you watch a show that sucks, you’ve made a bad investment and receive a poor return for your time.
In many ways time is more valuable than money. You’ll always have the opportunity to make more money, but once time has been spent it’s gone forever. When you think of time as a commodity, and all of your actions as investments, it changes the way you approach every day decisions.

Sinus Congestion & Travel

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Dave mentioned that he arrived in Rome “clogged up“. During a recent trip to Southeast Asia, I found the following items essential to long distance, dry air travel (I’ve had allergies over the years):

  • Sinucleanse twice daily. Works better, for me, than any of the allergy meds.
  • A bottle of nasal saline solution. I used this at least hourly on the long flights and found that it made a big difference.
  • I drank a great deal of water (and made sure that I purchased a large bottle at the airport prior to departure). Airlines can sometimes (often?) skimp on water.
  • I also carried some aspirin.
  • I did not pack all that well for the long dry air, but fortunately found some Hall’s drops in Tokyo

Quantas airlines has a useful page on long distance flight health tips.

Bedbugs Bounce Back

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Meredith May:

Walter has stopped hugging his friends. He is throwing out his clothes and furniture, and he rarely comes out of his Tenderloin hotel room anymore.

He’s not suicidal, but darn near. He has bedbugs.

Nearly eradicated in the United States 50 years ago, resistant strains of “super” bedbugs are infesting mattresses at an alarming rate. In what’s being touted as the biggest mystery in entomology, all 50 states are reporting outbreaks of the blood-sucking nocturnal critters.

Pest control companies nationwide reported a 71 percent increase in bedbug calls between 2000 and 2005. Left alone, a few bedbugs can create a colony of thousands within weeks.

“We never treated bedbugs until 2002. Now we have a dedicated bedbug crew working on this every day,” said Luis Agurto, president of Pestec in San Francisco.

Agurto’s arsenal includes a vacuum, steam heat to cook the bedbug eggs and targeted spraying of insecticides. It takes three, eight-hour visits and about $500 to $750 to exterminate one room. A whole house would cost closer to $5,000.

Garlic Does Not Lower Cholesterol in Study

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Carl Hall:

Garlic may be good for a lot of things — spicing up your diet, for sure — but it seems to be no good at all at lowering your cholesterol.


After conducting one of the most elaborate studies yet on garlic’s effect on cardiovascular health, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine said Monday that they could find no benefit in terms of reduced levels of LDL cholesterol, the “bad” form linked to heart disease.


Christopher Gardner, a Stanford assistant research professor and lead author of the six-month study, said he was disappointed by the results, describing himself as a garlic lover whose office is an hour’s drive from Gilroy, the generally acknowledged “garlic capital of the world.”


“We really thought this was going to work,” he said. “I was going to get the key to the city of Gilroy. I was going to get ‘Dr. Garlic’ license plates.”

Another balloon pops. Perhaps the garlic farmers will need a subsidy of some sort to recover?

Requiem for Magic Bullets

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Steve Silberman:

The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.


By 1950, 40 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, which is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic, is responsible for the majority of tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in U.S. hospitals alone.



Bacteria develop immunity to antibiotics by rapidly evolving genetic defenses against the drugs or by acquiring pieces of DNA and RNA from organisms that are already resistant — even from other bacterial species. Bacterial pathogens that have learned how to survive in hospitals have an evolutionary advantage, because there are plenty of other resistant organisms in the environment from which they can borrow resistance factors.

The Surgeon Undergoes Surgery

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Lawrence Altman:

Dr. DeBakey, one of the most influential heart surgeons in history, assumed his heart would stop in a few seconds.

“It never occurred to me to call 911 or my physician,” Dr. DeBakey said, adding: “As foolish as it may appear, you are, in a sense, a prisoner of the pain, which was intolerable. You’re thinking, What could I do to relieve myself of it. If it becomes intense enough, you’re perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain.”

But when his heart kept beating, Dr. DeBakey suspected that he was not having a heart attack. As he sat alone, he decided that a ballooning had probably weakened the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart, and that the inner lining of the artery had torn, known as a dissecting aortic aneurysm.