A sweaty crowdfunded misfire of science

Team aerobic.jpg
"Team aerobic" by Berner Kantonalturnfest 2010 (Utzenstorf, Bätterkinden, Kirchberg, Koppigen).
Original uploader was Equilibrium suisse at de.wikipedia - Transferred from de.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Boteas using CommonsHelper.
(Original text: http://www.ktf2010.ch). Licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0-de
via Wikimedia Commons.

Few people know better than I that times are tough in the world of biomedical research. It’s been eight or nine years since the “hard landing” that occurred after the near doubling of the NIH budget that occurred between FY1998 and FY2003, a crash that was exacerbated when the housing bubble burst in 2008, plunging much of the developed world into a steep recession that the US is only now emerging from nearly six years later. Although it’s not quite as bad as a couple of years ago, funding rates for NIH grants are quite low. Unfortunately private foundations haven’t taken up the slack, mainly because they can’t. So scientists scramble for money. In such an environment, it’s not at all surprising that scientists are becoming more—shall we say?—creative in finding ways to fund their research.

Given the rise of “crowdsourcing” and “crowdfunding,” its also not surprising that some scientists want to tap into the power of the Internet as a way to raise funds. The projects can be worthy, like this one:

One of the most successful drummed up $3.6-million to revive dormant research into a cancer-eating virus. Another raised over $300,000 for a stem-cell process that could repair the brains of MS patients.

Or this one:

A team at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Ontario’s MaRS Innovation raised over $50,000 last year for WaveCheck, an ultrasound device wedded with innovative software that can show early on whether chemotherapy is working — saving valuable time if a different treatment approach is needed.

I can understand the impetus to use such unconventional methods. It can be a choice between “crowdfunding” and not doing the research, although the amounts of money typical for such projects (an average of $46,000) would not be enough to keep a lab going for very long; indeed, it would be barely enough to pay a decent technician, counting taxes and fringe benefits, for a year. So I can see the potential value of such small amounts of money to kickstart projects, allowing the investigator to produce enough data to be competitive for larger grants sufficient to fund a full research project. At least, that’s the idea.

Unfortunately, crowdfunding isn’t the same as peer review, which means that the quality of the science is rarely the determinant of who gets funded. Rather, it’s who’s most persuasive and whose project sounds the best to nonscientists. Sometimes, one finds real howlers. I came across this one because I saw it being Tweeted and showing up on Facebook. It’s an example of some jaw-droppingly bad science, at least a jaw-droppingly bad scientific rationale for the proposed work. In other words, even if the methods are relatively sound, the entire rationale is not. I’ll show you what I mean.

The project is entitled Can Women’s Sweat Treat Low Testosterone in Men?, and it’s proposed by someone named Thomas David Kehoe, who boasts in his profile that he has more than 20 years of experience in medical technology and about 20 published studies> He founded Casa Futura Technologies, which he describes as “the leading manufacturer of devices for treating stuttering and the speech disorders associated with Parkinson's.” Whether it’s true or not that Casa Futura Technologies is such a leader, on the surface it all sounds, as I would put it, not too shabby. Unfortunately, Kehoe also brags that he “can ‘think outside the box’ to solve a medical problem in ways others can't or won't consider. What he proposes might be “thinking outside the box,” but not in a good way, as it’s so outside the box that it might as well be on another continent.

He first identifies a problem that is probably not a problem, namely low testosterone, or, as it’s commonly called these days, “low T,” a phenomenon that I characterized as a pharmaceutical company-invented diagnosis whose purpose is profit. So right away, Kehoe is researching a “problem” that is not really a problem for the vast majority of men, recent medical fads notwithstanding. But let’s for the sake of argument, momentarily take his claims of an epidemic of low testosterone at face value. Here’s where he goes off the rails, basing his hypothesis on an anecdote:

When I was 37 my testosterone was 378 (the normal range is 270-1070). Then I took a summer dance class at a university, three times a week for eight weeks with a dozen sweaty young women. My testosterone rose to 871, or more than doubled.

His conclusion that led to his hypothesis? That exposure to female sweat caused his testosterone to rise dramatically? Perhaps it had something to do with the exercise he was getting? Did that possibility even occur to him? He explains further in a video in which he explains his research proposal. Basically, he proposes to give young women scrunchies for them to wear before ovulation and during exercise, so that they pick up the women’s sweat, then have men apply the sweat un their upper lip so that they get the odor. (As my wife would say, ewwww.)

In fairness, Kehoe doesn’t just base his hypothesis on his one anecdote, but on some studies, starting with this one:

Ellison (2002) compared testosterone levels in men ages 15 to 60 in four populations: Lese farmers in the Congo, Tamang farmer-herders in Nepal, and Ache hunter-gatherers in Paraguay, and Americans in the Boston area. The researchers found that American men had the highest testosterone when young (average 335 in the 15- to 29-year-old age group) and a 29% decline to 238 in the 45- to 60-year-old age group. Congolese young men were 286 and declined 14% to 247. Nepalese young men were 251 and declined 10% to 225. Ache young men were 197 and declined 2% to 192. In the 45-60 age group all four groups had similar testosterone levels. American young men had 70% more testosterone than Ache young men. It appears that American young men have unusually high testosterone levels, which decline to normal levels with age. This may be because American high schools and colleges put hundreds, even thousands, of young men and women in close contact. In contrast, a hunter-gatherer may only occasionally meet an unrelated person of the opposite sex.

Or it might be diet. Or it might be lifestyle. Or it might be an environmental factor. Or it might be biological. Or it might be a combination of all of these things. Yet Kehoe zeroes in like a laser beam on his preferred hypothesis and, instead of letting the evidence lead him where it will, he starts with his hypothesis and then chooses studies to support it.

The first study to which Kehoe refers is this one. Of note, the authors don’t make a single mention of female sweat as a cause for the higher testosterone levels in young males in the US. Rather, they point out that the testosterone levels in all of the populations they studied converge on the same level with oder age, regardless of whether they started higher or lower in adolescence and young adulthood. They speculate that “set-points for muscle anabolism and bone mineral density are established relative to testosterone levels in young adulthood, a steeper decline in testosterone from higher young-adult levels might result in more rapid age-related changes in male body composition, bone mineral density, and related health risks.”

So where does Kehoe get the idea that it might be female sweat? Admittedly, it’s not entirely implausible. It’s just that the studies Kehoe marshals in support of his hypothesis after having taken an observation and proposed an explanation for it while ignoring all the others are, taken together, so damned unconvincing. The studies are either irrelevant or conflicting. For instance, Kehoe notes that non-human animal studies have observed increases in testosterone after exposure to females’ bodily secretions, such as urine or vaginal fluid. In humans, however:

Miller and Maner (2010) reported two studies in which young men were exposed to women's sweat. In the first study, four young women (18- and 19-year-old college students) wore t-shirts during ovulation, and then a second t-shirt during their luteal phase (far from ovulation). The women were not on hormonal contraceptives; showered with unscented soaps; refrained from using perfumes, deodorants, and antiperspirants; avoided odor-producing foods (e.g., chili, garlic, pepper, vinegar, asparagus); and didn't use drugs. The women wore the t-shirts while sleeping for three nights, then put the t-shirts into freezer bags and gave them to the experimenters, who then froze the t-shirts. Within six days the t-shirts were defrosted for the experiment. 37 young men (18- to 23-year-old college students) smelled one t-shirt each. Testosterone was measured via saliva before the experiment and fifteen minutes after smelling a t-shirt. The results showed a very small (0.5%) increase in testosterone after smelling the t-shirts worn during ovulation; and a more substantial (18%) decrease in testosterone after smelling the luteal phase t-shirts.

In Miller and Maner's second study, eleven young women (18- and 21-year-old college students) wore t-shirts during ovulation, and then a second t-shirt during their luteal phase. A third set of t-shirts was not worn by anyone. 68 young men (18- to 23-year-old college students) smelled one of the three t-shirts. In this study, testosterone dropped for all three groups. The ovulation group dropped 7%; the luteal phase group dropped 20%; and the control group dropped 17%. This study also asked the men to rate odor; the results were that men preferred the odor of the t-shirts worn around ovulation.

Kehoe mentions a third study, where young women wore gauze pads taped under their arms after they had “broken into a sweat” while walking around the campus and young men smelled them or “placebo” pads soaked in water. The result? No effect on testosterone. He is, however, undaunted:

These results suggest that women's sweat isn't an effective way to boost men's testosterone. However, our study will differ from the above studies in several ways:

  • Our male subjects will be middle-aged, low-testosterone men. The above studies used young men who are in daily contact with many young women and presumably have high testosterone levels.
  • The above studies looked at short-term testosterone changes (15 minutes to 60 minutes after exposure). We intend to test long-term testosterone changes after a month of exposure to women's sweat. Again, this would likely show null results with college students who are in daily close contact with many young women, but could show positive results with middle-aged men.
  • Our methods for collecting and preserving women's sweat will be different. T-shirts are too big to handle so we'll use scrunchies. If we get enough volunteers we could compare gauze pads to scrunchies. Freezing makes shipment difficult so we'll use desiccant, vacuum storage, and UV sterilization. If we get local volunteers we'll run a group that gets fresh scrunchies delivered the same day to test whether preservation diminishes effectiveness. We could even ask one group of men to take partner dance classes for a month.
  • Our methods for delivering women's sweat will be different. Roney and Simmons (2012) may have proven only that smelling sweat diluted in water eliminates effectiveness, i.e., each gauze pad may have had less than 0.1 grams of sweat, and if each bottle had 100 grams of water, the dosage may have been diluted 1000x or even 10,000x. Miller and Maner's male subjects smelled the women's t-shirts but didn't physically contact the women's sweat. Our plan is for male subjects to slightly dampen the scrunchies, then rub the scrunchies on their upper lips. This should increase the dosage of sweat by a factors of thousands. (Don’t worry, Miller and Maner's second study found that young men rated ovulating young women’s sweat as attractive. And we all remember that a woman’s hair can smell like heaven.)

Well, yeah, maybe.

While what Kehoe proposes might be a mildly interesting basic biology experiment, where he goes wrong is in (1) assuming that “low testosterone” in middle-aged and older men is such a huge problem; (2) ignoring all the other potential causes for higher testosterone levels in young men in the US; (3) assuming that young men come into contact with sweaty young women who are ovulating nearly as frequently as he seems to think; (4) assuming that so many older men even need their testosterone levels boosted. Indeed, regarding #4, the first study Kehoe cites suggests that it’s completely normal for older men to have lower testosterone, as testosterone levels in all the populations studied converged with age on very similar levels.

I also wonder if Kehoe realizes what it would take to carry this study out. He’s only asking for $2,140, which sounds like far too little to do a study involving 24 men and 120 women. Come to think of it, I don’t see any justification for these numbers. I understand that this is not a formal grant application and that a statistical power analysis would likely confuse potential donors, but at least a mention of how much variability is expected in testosterone levels and what the power to find a certain difference is. Finally, although I realize that this isn’t federally funded research, it is human subjects research and should be approved through an IRB. Given how small it is and how it’s not done by an entity subject to the Common Rule, that probably won’t be that big a deal, but nearly all decent journals require evidence of IRB approval before they will publish the results of human subjects research.

In other words, this is a project that oversells a mildly plausible hypothesis and shows no real applicability in the real world, no wonder Kehoe couldn’t get funding elsewhere. In fact, it looks as though he can’t even get funding here. He’s only racked up $237 the last time I checked.

More like this

‘think outside the box’
Our cats do that sometimes, with annoying consequences.

All Kehoe's observations are compatible with the hypothesis that the sight of sweaty scantily-clad young women is what raises male testosterone. He seems to have decided that we are a hormonal species, at the mercy of pheromones, communicating at an unconscious level by olfactory signals, so visual stimuli can simply be ignored. Which might be true, but until he tests it, it's an ideological stance -- or an episode of Fringe or X-Files -- rather than a scientific one.

By herr doktor bimler (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

Our cats do that sometimes, with annoying consequences.

A second litter-box might solve that.

but nearly all decent journals require evidence of IRB approval before they will publish the results of human subjects research.

It's okay. There's always PNAS.

By The Grouchybeast (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

The mechanism isn't completely implausible. Witness the Japanese phenomenon of burusera (if you don't know what that is, you probably shouldn't Google it from your work computer). But my first thought is that it might be some pheromone in the sweat. I noticed that of the studies mentioned in the post, the ones that had apparent positive results were careful to distinguish between ovulation (where there was an effect) and the luteal phase (where there wasn't). I presume that in a class setting (dance class or high school), the distribution of women's menstrual cycle phases is at least approximately random, so there would always be some fraction of females in the ovulation phase. Depending on residential arrangements, this may not be true of universities; I recall hearing of a tendency for young women living in very close proximity (e.g., a dormitory or a sorority house) to have their menstrual cycles synchronized.

But HDB's theory also fits the known facts. I've noticed that at least around the college campus where I work, many women will wear as little as weather conditions and local laws permit. Shorts come out in late March/early April and aren't put away until late September/early October (this is in northern New England). Some kids will even wear flip-flops in 30 degree weather, if it isn't raining or snowing.

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

@ Eric Lund:

Right. I was also reminded of the studies of male sweat as an aphrodisiac for women.
Although I really don't want to think of it.
Ms.Orac is correct.- I'll second that "Ewww!"

By Denice Walter (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

How do you tell a female (Mrs. Orac) box-of-blinking-lights from a male box-of-blinking-lights?

I once dated someone who sniffed my underwear, but not for long. Perhaps I misjudged him and he was only doing “research”.

That is too funny. I hear all the time that smell is important and I believe it to a certain extent. I have been known to send my husband to the showers on occasion. For me the best smell is 'clean'. I certainly wouldn't want to sniff around my hubby after a few hours of yard work.

“the leading manufacturer of devices for treating stuttering and the speech disorders associated with Parkinson’s.”

It seems odd to be touting the profitability of his medical company as a reason why people should give him money to conduct his medical research.

By herr doktor bimler (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

I recall hearing of a tendency for young women living in very close proximity (e.g., a dormitory or a sorority house) to have their menstrual cycles synchronized.

That was the McClintock effect. McClintock's report from 1971 is pretty much debunked now, and four decades of attempts to replicate the effect all failed -- no synchrony.

By herr doktor bimler (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

I was also reminded of the studies of male sweat as an aphrodisiac for women.

I daren't look to see what TVTropes has to say on the subject (that site is a dangerous time-sink), but pheromones have a big place in popular culture. Perhaps they tap into a social anxiety that we're not as in control as we like to think; that our consciousness selves are just observers, along for the ride while biology steers.* Anyway, as part of that, every few years someone will market an aftershave or perfume supposedly laden with male or female pheromones to make the wearer irresistible to the intended target.

People have been looking for human pheromones for 50 years now without finding any... but when you have evo-psych explanations for a phenomenon, it doesn't seem to matter whether the phenomenon actually exists.

* See also the acceptance of stories about 'mind-controlling parasites' in the absence of strong evidence.

By herr doktor bimler (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

This is off topic but important enough to send. Natalie Stavas, M.D. on the blog site Medicalbag has written a very insightful paper. Using the same methods as Jenny McCartney et. al. she clearly demonstrates the true correlation of the increase in autism is to increased gun ownership. Such findings need further investigation, perhaps extended to fishing tackle and skis. More research is needed and grant funds are requested urgently.

@ legaldoc, I don't know if you were just being provocative or really believed the first few paragraphs of her blogpost but it is quite the opposite of what you represented.

By Science Mom (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

@ herr doktor bimler:

We have no need of pheromones because we are able to invent intriguing novel fragrances using combinations of plant, animal and artificial scents with which to adorn ourselves provocatively and appeal to our unique sensibilities.

Some of my perfumes contain almond, tea, neroli, musk, sandalwood, tonka bean, vanilla, patchouli, sea salt, amber, pepper, cardamom, cedar, various fruits and flowers, absinthe and oakmoss.
Which probably makes me smell like a grocer's and a North African bazaar combined.

There is a perfume that smells of tobacco called 'Venezia' ( which it doesn't smell like)

I had a gay friend whose family was in the business and he most enjoyed creating artificial smelling scents which were often used in cleaning products. Go figure.

By Denice Walter (not verified) on 24 Jul 2014 #permalink

@ hdb

McClintock’s report from 1971 is pretty much debunked now, and four decades of attempts to replicate the effect all failed — no synchrony.

Oh. I hear about the claim in the 90's, indeed in a book full of pheromone stories (the Ant series by Bernard Werber)
Time for a brain update.

@ Denice

Which probably makes me smell like a grocer’s and a North African bazaar combined.

These could be good places to be next, from an olfactory point-of-view. Well, from my subjective point-of-view.

By Helianthus (not verified) on 25 Jul 2014 #permalink

The women were not on hormonal contraceptives; showered with unscented soaps; refrained from using perfumes, deodorants, and antiperspirants; avoided odor-producing foods (e.g., chili, garlic, pepper, vinegar, asparagus); and didn’t use drugs.

Giving up BC, antiperspirants, tasty food, and recreational fun. You'd have to pay me awfully well to participate.

For me the best smell is ‘clean’.

If you want to be generally sexually appealing, I really think that's the 'cant' go wrong' choice.

By Roadstergal (not verified) on 25 Jul 2014 #permalink

[...] pheromones have a big place in popular culture. Perhaps they tap into a social anxiety that we’re not as in control as we like to think; that our consciousness selves are just observers, along for the ride while biology steers.

That, or they tap into a more sociopathic assumption that while the person interested in pheromones is an individual, everybody else is simply directed by chemistry and easily steered. I wouldn't be surprised if the 'pheromone-based' aftershaves sell well to the same sort of people who go in for the pick-up artist approach. There seems to be a lot of belief in some circles of 'perform XXX rituals, receive sex' while ignoring that it takes two to tango, and the other person may have their own ideas.

By Jenora Feuer (not verified) on 28 Jul 2014 #permalink

I'm sorry, but I have to say it - the first thing that popped into my head with the claim of such a phenomenal rise of testosterone levels after being in a room with 12 sweaty women...
Is he sure that's not the only thing that rose?

(I know, I know, apologies)