Grass is bad for kids' brains

A well-done study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has concluded that using marijuana lowers IQ if it’s started at an early age – teen years – and if the use of marijuana continues for many years afterwards.

But interestingly, heavy regular marijuana use had no effect on IQ in this study if it’s use started during the adult years.

Why the difference?

Well, as many other studies have shown, a young developing brain is generally more susceptible to toxic effects from any source than an already fully-developed brain (although one could argue, based on listening to call-in talk shows, especially sports call-in shows that most adult brains have a long way to go before they can be considered “developed”).

The neat thing about this study, by the way, is that it did a good job in controlling for factors that have often bedevilled other studies looking at marijuana effects, such as for example, different education levels (in this study, high school graduates and those who didn’t finish high school both had a drop in IQ if they started smoking dope as teens).

And the effect on teenage brains was not minimal: there was an IQ drop of 8 points in smokers, which is quite substantial, compared to a rise in the IQ scores of kids who never used marijuana.

Anyway, just another reason to advise your kids to avoid using marijuana.

And you should keep telling them that because studies show that despite what they may tell you, kids actually listen to their parents.

Cutting to the chase

Disclaimer: I had one.

Plus, I’ve long believed they do no harm and can only do some good.

What am I talking about, you are probably screaming at this item right now?

Circumcisions, of course.

I know some of what you just read tells you more than you want to know (TMI) but these days a health reporter has to lay his or her cards on the table (so to speak) so that’s what all that is about.

And the reason it comes up is that the very prestigious American Academy of Pediatrics has just done a roughly 180 degree about-face on its decade-long anti-circumcision stance and has announced that it no longer recommends against circumcision as a routine procedure, although it doesn’t actually recommend doing it, either.

Why the change? And huh?

The first part is easy: because, the APA says, there is much stronger pro-circumcision data than anti-circumcision data in the medical literature - in common-speak, the benefits clearly outweigh the risks.

So is the APA for circumcision?

Nope. It doesn’t go that far probably, I’d guess, because it doesn’t want to face the vituperative counter-circ campaign that a pro-circumcision position would undoubtedly produce - this is an issue about which some people feel very, very strongly, and it’s likely that even this change in policy is going to produce a strong reaction.

So the people at the APA have elected to sit on the fence and simply advise prospective parents that the benefits of a circumcision in preventing several different STDs including HIV, herpes, and HPV clearly outweigh the risks and to make up their own minds about what this might mean for their kids’ futures.

My position? Been there, had it done, done it, too, and believe that unless there are strong reasons not to do one (and this includes the “feelings” of the parents, of course) a circumcision should be the standard choice for boys.

Unlikely to happen, though.

Eat less first, do more second

Among the great unsolvable issues out there – eggs first or chickens? Vanilla or chocolate? White meat or dark? – one of the most contentious (and incredibly important) is this: are we getting so fat so quickly because we don’t work as hard as we used to? Or are we getting so fat so quickly because we eat way more than we used to?

It’s probably both but my bias has long been that if we had to pin our huge public health programs on one side of that ledger – and if it were me and I wanted to reduce my weight with the highest probability that I could keep those lost pounds off - it would be to get reduce calorie intake, whether by eating less (fat chance) or by eating better (slim chance) or preferably by doing both.

And according to a recent study, that is the best way to go – eat less first, do more second – because by comparing vastly different cultures, this study argues that “modern, lazy people” are actually burning as many calories as people who are still mostly hunter-gatherers.

And when you consider energy expenditure, this should come as no surprise surprising since – after they’ve taken care of finding dinner by chasing down some animal - hunter-gatherers (and no, I don’t speak from experience)  probably spend most of their time sitting around and – if they’re men – bragging about their hunting prowess.

In other words, whether you work in an office or you still chase meat in the wild, your energy expenditure in a day is not that wildly different.

What is hugely different is our access to food, especially crap, and that – more than not working out enough – is what is most likely making us fat so quickly.

Keeping the doctor away

You know how this goes: an apple a day . . .

So, yet another study – there been lots of these - has found a benefit from a diet that includes apples regularly.

In this study, published online in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, researchers found that women who ate dried apples every day for a year experienced a drop in their cholesterol levels, while women who ate prunes (I wonder if they were coerced into that arm of the study) didn’t.

Are apples a miracle product, then, to lower cholesterol levels?

Of course not, but a diet with lots of apples in it clearly can’t affect you adversely (unlike one with lots of prunes) and might help a bit.

More prostate cancer screening confusion

If you truly wanna know just how confusing the PSA screening (that’s the blood test to screen for prostate cancer) muddle can be,  and if you have the patience to wade through the often cumbersome writing, then get ahold of the recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, although you might first want to fortify yourself with a tranquilizer or a big glass of wine (not both, though, because the negative effects on alertness are additive).

Basically, what the authors have done is try to make this issue much more understandable, to eliminate some of the confusion, but what they’ve really managed to do, I think, is make it even harder for an individual to figure out what to do about screening.

So while the authors conclude that having regular PSA screening up to the age of 69 can – on average - add a few years of life to the men in a large population of guys that age (as Homer Simpson says, “That’s good”), they also add that the harm to a lot of men from over-treatment and over diagnosis can really detract from the quality of the extra time they get (Homer: “That’s bad.”)

And unfortunately,  we don’t really know – there’s no way to gauge ahead of time – whether you will be one of the lucky guys whose life is extended by 6-8 good quality years or one of the guys whose life is not extended, perhaps even shortened, and who ends up ruing the day he got his PSA measured.

This study, in other words, changes very little: it’s still an every-man-for-himself decision, with no good formula, actually no formula at all, to follow. 

Is everyone a celiac

No, but lots of us are and we don’t know it.

Thus, yet another study (in the American Journal of Gastroenterology) has concluded that 1 % of non-Hispanic Americans (would be the same up here) have celiac disease.

Yet as always, these researchers also conclude that the great majority of celiac patients still don’t know they have this potentially serious and certainly uncomfortable condition.

Bottom line: if you think you have any of the long list of celiac-related symptoms, ask your doctor for an easy-to-get screening blood test for celiac disease, although if you have already started on a gluten-free diet, bear in mind that that change can alter the accuracy of those tests.

Not just for kids only

The (US) FDA issued a warning recently about a potentially fatal risk associated with the use of codeine in kids who’ve just undergone a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, and the wearning consisted of this advice vis-à-vis the use of codeine in kids, that children in that category should receive only the lowest effective dose of codeine, for the shortest time, and only on an as-needed basis.

Know what?

That’s the same advice that should be followed for every single drug anyone takes: the lowest effective dose for the shortest amount of time possible, and only if the benefits clearly outweigh the never-absent risk.

Pin that advice on your fridge.

Better yet, just memorize it and repeat it when getting any new prescription or selecting any new over-the-counter med.

Ten minute workouts

An article by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times cited a study that everyone should find interesting and useful.

IT’s from Arizona State University and involved a group of volunteers who were told to do a half-hour of moderate level exercise a day consisting of a brisk walk to determine what that did to their blood pressure – these people were all healthy but had “prehypertenion” which is a BP between 120/80 and 140/90.

We know from previous studies that such people are not only at significantly higher risk of ending up with high blood pressure eventually but that such people also suffer a significant number of BP spikes during the day and clearly that couldn’t be a healthy thing to have happen.

These volunteers were then told to break their exercise routine into 3 10-minute sessions of similar intensity and according to this report, the latter regime – doing the same amount and intensity of exercise but in 3 short segments rather than one large segment – led to much better overall levels of BP during the day, which is not only healthier but presumably is also linked to less of a risk of eventual high BP.

Bottom line: any extra exercise is good, and curiously, short bursts of exercise more often during the say may be better than one prolonged session.

Another myth about allergy prevention bites the dust

In a study that involved 62000 Danish mothers, the researchers concluded that those mothers who avoided eating peanuts and tree nuts while pregnant (that was for a long time the advice given by doctors to try to minimize the odds that a pregnant woman’s baby would develop allergies and/or asthma) actually had more babies diagnosed with asthma than did moms who did not avoid eating peanuts and tree nuts during their pregnancies.

The real bottom line here is that with certain minor exceptions, we know practically zilch about how to prevent asthma and allergies (we’re somewhat better at treating both those problems, although not nearly as good as we should be) so any advice a pregnant woman gets about what to do to prevent an allergy in the baby she is carrying should be taken with a very large grain of salt.