Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Collateral Brain Damage

FDA drug warning could affect Bales’ sentencing in Afghan massacre
The FDA said Monday that an anti-malarial drug can cause neurological side effects, and the lawyer for a soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians says his client took the medication and that will likely be raised at his sentencing.
I weep for this man.   A prisoner of what he cannot see.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Puppy Time

Low carb, Grain Free.


















(We all seem to have white paint on our hair lately.)

Yo Stanford

Wanna Rumble?
My Sleep Lab vs. Yours?


















I actually had my best idea while making the bed, not sleeping in it.  Go figure.
(edit:  The best part is I have a motorized window shade.   I can open it before I have to get up.    Love it Love it Love it.  I am paralyzed by darkness.)

Christina painted her dreams for me.  And mine.
It's freakin awesome.



Friday, July 26, 2013

Aren't They All Though

Zombie Donut Shop

Quote of the Day

"Previously, we had not considered the intestine as a major glucose-utilizing organ [but] we have found this process is exactly what happens after surgery,"

Nicholas Stylopoulos, MD

Seriously.  They had to mutilate a million people to think of it.

Things that make me laugh

Succinct Cereal

Thursday, July 25, 2013

I Told You So

Drinking coffee may reduce risk of suicide in adults

Coffee is the main reason I am still alive.

related post

This is Why

I choose to be fat
Doctors have bullied me about my weight for years, but obesity has given me the armor I needed to survive.
I call Bullshit.    This is learned helplessness and oppositional defiance.  Their "treatments" are futile and you have finally realized it.
But you still blame yourself.

Not complying with their advice does not mean you choose to be fat.
One Thousand Dollars says given the right information you would decide not to be fat or depressed.
And you would blame the right people.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Homework Assignment

Ha.  Just kidding.

Sarah's treadmill dance workout

This girl has some great videos.  Will give you an idea how to start.  Get comfortable forward, practice some backwards, then put them together for a turn...  get used to the sides and how to jump onto them when you lose balance.
I don't use the handholds or jump or do kicks like that.   My ankles are already toast.
I had to put socks over my rubber soles to do spins.  

I would recommend a longer track, hers is pretty short.

Do the Math

Skipping breakfast may be healthy way to shed weight
The researchers either fed or withheld breakfast from a group of volunteers, half who were regular breakfast eaters and half who regularly skipped breakfast. They observed how much the participants ate the rest of the day. Although the breakfast skippers were hungrier than the breakfast eaters, they did not eat more at lunch or at any other eating occasion. In fact, by the end of the day, the breakfast skippers consumed an average of 408 fewer calories.
These findings, say Pacanowski and Levitsky, are consistent with previous studies on the effects of skipping breakfast and subsequent intake. The Cornell researchers challenge the common belief that eating breakfast daily is essential for weight management. People who skip breakfast consume fewer calories and may reap health benefits by eating less.
Eating breakfast daily is essential for Cereal Company Management, not health.

The thing about breakfast skippers-  even if we eat less we merely maintain our weight. 
Funny that.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Liars and Criminals

Big pharma mobilising patients in battle over drugs trials data
Leaked memo from industry bodies reveals strategy to combat calls by regulators to force companies to publish results
The strategy was drawn up by two large trade groups, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), and outlined in a memo to senior industry figures this month, according to an email seen by the Guardian.
The memo, from Richard Bergström, director general of EFPIA, went to directors and legal counsel at Roche, Merck, Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Novartis and many smaller companies. It was leaked by a drugs company employee.
The email describes a four-pronged campaign that starts with "mobilising patient groups to express concern about the risk to public health by non-scientific re-use of data". Translated, that means patient groups go into bat for the industry by raising fears that if full results from drug trials are published, the information might be misinterpreted and cause a health scare.
Yo Narcolepsy Network- they are talking about you.  
Brain Dead Zombie Puppets...

related post

Extreme Pile Management

We're having the oak floors refinished.  I purged, plastered and painted four rooms.  Half my house is now stashed in the other half of my house.
Can't wait to  put it all back next weekend.

Library before





Library Now


Kitchen Before.


Kitchen Now.


















The guys are sanding now.   I am going to eat those gummi bears I have stashed in my closet and take a swirly nap.   Heh.

Underwear Gnomes

Step Two:

Should insurers cover obesity now that AMA says it's a disease?

Step Three:  Profit!!!!

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Research Assistant

Puppy in the kitchen


Just Saying

On this day, in 1969, I had my first sleep test.

And 44 years later, still no doctor has figured out what the problem was.

Quote of the Day

"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire --any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other."

Edgar Allen Poe- The Purloined Letter

Friday, July 19, 2013

Technical Difficulties

Okay, that last post locked up my work computer and now it says "Operating System Not Found".

That's bad.   And I gotta paint another room before the floor guys come on monday.
Have a better weekend than me...

An Infectous Idea

Boy Scouts turn each other into "zombies" at Jamboree
It's part of an educational game Virginia Tech researchers designed to show how disease spreads.
The Virus Tracker combines technology with the age-old game of tag. At the 10-day Jamboree, Scouts can earn points by "infecting" other players through a "virus" on bar-coded labels that are attached to their Scout IDs. Codes can be activated at scanning stations or by smartphones that have downloaded the Virus Tracker app. Individuals and troops that amass the most points each day win.
The goal is to stay human.
Yes, yes it is.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Duh Science

Studies show memory lapse as early warning for Alzheimer's

Seriously.  Is is really this difficult for doctors to just believe their patients reports?

Funny thing about memory- you don't notice what you don't remember.  By the time you notice your own lapses-  you are pretty freakin impaired.  

I got my own age wrong for a while.   I was born in December, so for eleven months have to subtract a year from the math.  Totally forgot that part.   My sleep specialist noticed, but never followed up.

It's Everywhere

Social Media Helps Pin Down Source of Foodborne Strep Throat Outbreak

Terrifying. 

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Zombie Spotting

Narcolepsy and odor: Preliminary report.
OBJECTIVES:
This study has been carried out to test the clinical hypothesis of personal smell as a hint to the diagnosis of narcoleptic patients.

METHODS:
Sweat samples from narcoleptic and healthy controls were tested independently by two trained dogs and their positive or negative detection compared to the gold standard diagnosis for narcolepsy. Neither trainer nor dog knew the source of the sample selected or its placement in the search device. Twelve narcoleptic patients, both sexes and various ages, recruited from April 2011 to June 2012 and diagnosed according to standard criteria, through their clinical records and nocturnal polysomnography plus multiple sleep latency test, made up the patient group. The control group was made up of 22 healthy volunteer without sleep disorders, both sexes and various ages. Sweat samples from both patients and controls were collected following the same protocol to avoid contamination, and tested independently by two trained dogs.
RESULTS:
Eleven narcoleptic were detected positive by the dogs while only three controls.
CONCLUSION:
It seems that narcoleptic patients have a distinct typical odor that trained dogs can detect. The development of olfactory test could be a useful method in the screening of narcolepsy which opens a new research area.

Very interesting.   It's a small sample, but I bet these numbers are as accurate as a MSLT.
11/12= 92% recall
19/22=  86% precision

How did they train the dogs to distinguish?   Let them hang out in a room full of narcos for a while?
They can already smell low blood sugar-  maybe it's that....   heh.

Holy Frak.  Now we really have to dismantle the matrix before they literally find us in the streets and put us on low fat diets.  

Everything Old is New Again

People With Impaired Glucose Tolerance Can Show Cognitive Dysfunction
Louise Dye, Ph.D., professor of nutrition and behavior in the Human Appetite Research Unit at the Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, presented research in which she examined 31 previous studies regarding cognitive performance under various dietary conditions. She found that the impaired glucose tolerance group showed difficulties in 12 of 27 cognitive test outcomes, including word recognition, visual verbal learning test, visual spatial learning test, psychomotor test and Corsi block-tapping. The impaired glucose tolerance group was made up of all middle-aged women who appeared to be in general good health.
"There was significant impairment in those women who were impaired glucose tolerant," Dye said. "To me, that feels like a ticking time bomb. We need to use food -- the diet and food industry -- to help us shift these people back from impaired glucose tolerance. By the time they get to Type 2 diabetes, the impairments are much more evident."
She pointed to a 2009 Japanese study of 129 people in their 80s, 55 of whom had impaired glucose tolerance or Type 2 diabetes. All the subjects in the study consumed more than 30 grams of dietary fiber per day and exercised two to four times per week over a two-year period. Within that timeframe, the 36 people with impaired glucose tolerance showed improvements in delayed recall and block design tests. The Type 2 diabetes group showed improvement in dementia, delayed recall and their mental state.
Hey, thanks.
It's only been about a hundred years since that theory was postulated.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

My Three Cents

Hyperinsulinemia.   Periodontitis.   Righteousness.

Short Version

Persistent strep infection is the trigger.  
Gluten makes it worse.  
Both of them trash your sugar metabolism.

Monday, July 15, 2013

One More Time

The pathology always always always comes first.

Physical punishment in childhood tied to health woes as adults
Researchers found that of more than 34,000 U.S. adults in a government health study, those who said they were harshly disciplined as kids had slightly higher risks of obesity, arthritis and heart disease.
That's because impulse control problems are just a behavioral symptom of the same infection that causes those three physical ailments.
People who are prone to violence have immune problems that they pass on to their children.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Your Weekly Puppy

We're painting.

Dreams Come True

Watch the video.   Behold the power of dopamine in all it's glory.
Memory, creativity, motivation, perserverence, motor neuron stimulation, and world class oppositional defiance.

Human-powered helicopter hovers accurately for 60 seconds, beats 'impossible' challenge

See the Matrix

Just thought I would mention-
Your congressmaniacs voted to give MORE money to the Grain Companies That Make People Sick and Crazy-
And LESS money to people who can't afford food because they are too sick and crazy to hold jobs.

Their vision of your future.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Free Range Zombies

Oh, #Florida! What’s the weirdest place in the weirdest state?

Yoo hoo, Christina...

Old Song of the Day

Ode to Impulse Control Problems

Brain Eating Zombie of the Day

Jeremy Coid

Gang violence cause of high levels of mental disorders
Young men in gangs are significantly more likely to suffer from a mental disorder and need psychiatric help than other young men, says a UK study. It surveyed 108 gang members and found that half had an anxiety disorder, more than 85% a personality disorder and 25% screened positive for psychosis.

Prof Jeremy Coid, lead study author and director of the forensic psychiatry research unit at Queen Mary, University of London, explained the likely cause.
"It is probable that, among gang members, high levels of anxiety disorder and psychosis were explained by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the most frequent psychiatric outcome of exposure to violence."
See Rule #1.
Bullshit explanations like this perpetuate adverse outcomes like that.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Brain Eating Zombie of the Day

Ali Mokdad

US waistlines expand despite more exercise
Although Americans are exercising more, the obesity epidemic continues to expand, University of Washington researchers report.  Their nine-year study of data from two US health surveys suggests that physical activity alone is not enough to combat the problem.
"While physical activity has improved noticeably in most counties, obesity has also continued to rise in nearly all counties," said lead researcher Laura Dwyer-Lindgren, from the university's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The obesity problem is directly related to how much Americans eat, said senior author Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
"Americans are not doing enough to control what they eat," he said. "They still consume more energy than they burn off through exercise."
He takes some new data and comes to the same old conclusion.
This is endocrinology not mathematics.
The obesity problem is about WHAT KIND of food people eat, not HOW MUCH.
As long as they are eating carbs and overproducing insulin-  they won't lose weight even if they do exercise.  Cause and Effect.

No Frakking Excuses

Mother's Immune System Might Play Role in Certain Cases of Autism
Some mothers of children with autism appear to have immune system antibodies in their blood that attack brain proteins in their fetuses, a new study finds.
They named the form of autism linked to these antibodies Maternal Autoantibody-Related (MAR) autism, and they believe it could account for up to 23 percent of all cases of the condition.
In the study, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 246 mothers of children with autism and from 149 mothers of children without autism. Compared to mothers of typical children, mothers of children with autism were more than 21 times as likely to have the MAR antibodies in their systems that reacted with fetal brain proteins (antigens).
...
In related research involving monkeys, another team at the UC Davis MIND Institute also found that specific antibodies in a mothers' blood cause brain changes in offspring that cause behavior and development problems.

Considering this data from Dr. Alaedini shows that at least some of those antibodies are IgG Antigliadin-
I never want to hear one of you pregnant girls say you'll give up gluten after the baby is born.
Never again...effin ay...

As I was saying

Mexico takes the cake in overweight list
Mexico heads the list of the world's most overweight industrialized nations.
Speaking of population genetics- people with native American descent seem to have the worst problems with a western diet. Terrible glucose control problems.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Maniac of the Day

I Measure Every Single Thing My Child Does
And I track it on spreadsheets. Really—every single thing. Even every poop. And it makes me a better parent.
And you write about it.  And you publish it.
Sounds reasonable to me...

The Circle of Insanity

Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, is pushing legislation that would cut funding to schools that punish students for playing with imaginary guns.The Student Protection Act would crack down on schools with policies that hamper “harmless expressions of childhood play,” and teach students to “be afraid of inanimate objects that are shaped like guns.” 
This is what happens when some of us are sick and twisted and we can't figure out which ones.
Insanity squared.

Rule #1

The pathology always always always comes first.

Martyr myth: Inside the minds of suicide bombers

My My My

A raging UTI.
Osama occasionally complained of pain in his kidneys, but never visited a doctor.
Must go weep now.
Maybe vomit too.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

I'm Tellin Ya

Puppies are the cure.
Is cat poop dangerous?

Basic Population Genetics

Ethnic background influences immune response to TB
Your ethnic background could influence the way in which your body fights tuberculosis. Over the thousands of years that humans have been infected with TB, people of different ethnicities have evolved different immune mechanisms for handling the bacteria, a finding that could affect the outcome of planned trials for new TB drugs.
...
Normally such variations in immune response result from differences in the strain of the bacterium causing the infection, says Martineau. But the contrasting changes in markers in the two groups did not relate to the strain of TB involved. They did, however, correlate closely with an individual's genetic variant of a protein that carries vitamin D in the blood, and that is also involved in several immune reactions. This protein varies between ethnic groups. What's more, the differences in immune reactions between Africans and Eurasians in Martineau's study became even more pronounced when they started taking medication for their TB.
Vitamin D production is inversely related to melanin concentration in the skin.   Melanin also has other immune properties.  Varying immune response between differently pigmented populations is what one should expect for most diseases. 

Huh

Compare:
BMI-independent metabolic alterations and the relative hypophagia of patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy, as compared with patients with idiopathic hypersomnia without long sleep time, suggest that orexin-A influences the etiology of this phenotype. Moreover, considering that these dysmetabolic alterations are present from a young age, a careful metabolic follow-up of patients diagnosed with narcolepsy with cataplexy is mandatory.  
Sleep 2009

 Contrast:
"There may be there is dysregulation of blood sugar control but we haven’t looked into it."
2012 NN Patient Conference

Monday, July 8, 2013

Definition of the Day

Petard-
A small bomb that often blew up the bomber instead of the intended victim.

(evil grin)

Friday, July 5, 2013

Things that are worth living for

It's a good day.
Happy Summer Everyone.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

American Exceptionalism

Thomas Jefferson was a control freak
Keeping track of minutiae was a lifelong preoccupation. Jefferson kept in his pocket an ivory notebook—a kind of proto-iPad on which he could write in pencil; and when he returned to his study, he would then transfer his data to one of his seven permanent ledger books. In his Garden and Farm books, which he kept for more than fifty years, he recorded all the goings-on at Monticello. “[H]ad the last dish of our spring peas,” he wrote on July 22, 1772, in a typical entry in the Garden Book. And in his account books, which he maintained for nearly sixty years, he kept track of every cent he ever spent. “Mr. Jefferson,” the overseer at Monticello once observed, “was very particular in the transaction of all his business. He kept an account of everything. Nothing was too small for him to keep an account of it.”
When it is good it is very, very good.

Happy Fourth Everyone.

Quote of the Day

The World According to Holder
"See, we've been going all Copernicus when we need to get all Galileo up on this bitch, ya feel me?"
The Killing S3E5

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Under your Nose

The Economics of Mad Geniuses
Is it possible that untreated mental illness is not entirely bad for the economy, that mental illness could in some cases improve worker productivity?
Snort.  Untreated mental illness IS the economy.    It's a perpetual insanity machine.
Slightly sick people making decisions about what to do with the really sick people.
And extracting money every step of the way.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Monday, July 1, 2013

Don't Cheer

Some good news-  The FDA did not approve that Orexin blocking drug.  For Now.
But you can be sure Merck will keep trying.  More tests in the works.

FDA does not approve Suvorexant
FDA staff and a panel of outside experts reviewed detailed data on patient testing by Merck at those doses. While both groups of experts determined suvorexant pills were effective at each dose, there were significant safety concerns with the 30- and 40-milligram doses.
Those included daytime drowsiness, trouble staying alert while driving and suicidal thinking. Those problems, hallucinations and traffic accidents all have been linked to other prescription sleep medicines, although Merck had been telling investors that suvorexant would cause less next-morning grogginess.
EDS, sleep-driving, and suicidal ideation.  Sounds like narcolepsy to me.
Go figure. Shocking.  Nobody could have predicted.

Maybe we should tell people it will impair their metabolism and make them fat too.

Quickie Correlation

Lithium Reduces Risk of Suicide in People With Mood Disorders
The authors say the drug "seems to reduce the risk of death and suicide by more than 60% compared with placebo" and suggest this review "reinforces lithium as an effective agent to reduce the risk of suicide in people with mood disorders."
Lithium Increases Susceptibility of Muscle Glucose Transport to Stimulation by Various Agents 
Lithium markedly increased the sensitivity of glucose transport to insulin, so that the increase in glucose transport activity induced by insulin was ∼2.5-fold greater in the presence of lithium than in its absence.