cardiovascular disease
dr. dolittle | April 27, 2017
Here are the highlights from the final day of the meeting:
Carbon monoxide (CO) is not all that bad: Michael Tift, graduate student at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, described how the body naturally produces CO when red blood cells are broken down and CO can actually be protective against inflammation at low doses. His research was focused on measuring whether species that have more hemoglobin (from living in hypoxic environments) also have more CO. As it turns out, people native to high-altitude Peru do have higher CO levels than those living at lower elevations. Likewise, elephant…
dr. dolittle | November 24, 2015 Image of chicken egg from Wikimedia Commons.
Turns out the egg is an important phase. A new study published this month in American Journal of Physiology - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology looked at what happens in the egg when a chicken fetus was exposed to low oxygen (hypoxia) conditions. In mammals, this can occur as a result of maternal hypoxia, preeclampsia as well as anemia in the fetus resulting in less red blood cells that can carry oxygen. Understanding this is important as restricted fetal growth is associated with an increased risk for developing cardiovascular…
dr. dolittle | August 3, 2015I came across this neat video from Mayo Clinic researcher Dr. Michael Romero, a comparative physiologist interested in how the kidneys work. In this video he describes discoveries made in zebrafish that relate to human kidney function:
kkrisberg | January 31, 2014In a first-of-its-kind study, a researcher has estimated that the health-related economic savings of removing bisphenol A from our food supply is a whopping $1.74 billion annually. And that’s a conservative estimate.
“This study is a case in point of the economic burden borne by society due to the failure to regulate environmental chemicals in a proactive way,” study author Leonardo Trasande told me.
With evidence mounting that bisphenol A (BPA) exposure is a serious health risk, Trasande, an associate professor in pediatrics, environmental medicine and health policy at New York University,…
oracknows | April 9, 2013If there's one thing that a certain subset of people who view themselves as reasonable and science-based don't like, it's harshness: Harshness in criticism, harshness in discussion, or—horror of horrors!—anything they view as "incivility." That's all well and good as far as it goes, but the problem is that sometimes there are things that demand a harsh response because they are just that bad. For instance, when the government spends $30 million on a clinical trial to test a wildly implausible treatment that is not without risks for no good scientific reason and no real reason other than that…