Category: Health and Medicine

Sciencebase news and views on health and medicine, including posts on Covid-19, bird flu, cancer, asthma, obesity, vaccines, and much more.

Being a ray of sunshine even when it is dark and dull outside

TL:DR – Tips on how to cope with feeling gloomy when the weather is dull.

A friend over on Mastodon was telling us how it’s been dull and gloomy in her hometown for 15 days on the trot. That’s miserable, it’s not easy jumping out of bed with any kind of enthusiasm when the day ahead looks dull and grey. She wanted some advice on how to break through the gloom.

I don’t like it when it’s dark either, only thing I could suggest is to set an alarm and have some specific small task to do each morning. Switch on the lights, throw the curtains wide, jump to your feet, make a start on the task, get it done and dusted quickly and then get on with the rest of the day!

Tasks could be something mundane like cleaning, reordering a bookshelf, swapping pictures and photos from room to room doing the NYT mini, Wordle, Heardle or some other puzzle as fast as you can, tuning the radio to a station you don’t normally listen to and dancing to the first song that comes on, maybe even , descaling the kettle, bundling up the laundry and getting it in the machine, doing a couple of sets of crunches and press-ups, a quick sun-salutation (one can always hope). Just a few ideas, anything to give you the initial kickstart that gets you going and moving more sprigtly through the day.

I confess that the only time I feel enthusiastic about getting out of bed especially on a dull day, is if I a big writing project to start, I have a song on the go that needs new parts added or a mix redone, or there’s a bird species in the neighbourhood that I haven’t seen before, and I want to photograph…but that can be enough. I need to take my own advice, now that I’ve typed it up!

How to cook a delicious and cheap pilchard curry

TL:DR – A delicious but inexpensive recipe for pilchard curry.

When Mrs Sciencebase was a student, she used to make an inexpensive curry: tin of pilchards, tin of tomatoes, chopped onion, crushed clove of garlic, teaspoon each of cumin, coriander, and turmeric powder, salt & pepper, and a half a teaspoon of chili powder. Served on a bed of whole-grain boiled rice.

It sounded a bit grim, but wasn’t too bad. (Brown-bread icecream for pudding or Granny Grape Pudding). It was all certainly a whole lot more adventurous than the boiled noodles and soy sauce I once cooked her because I had nothing else in the cupboard. Don’t know if it compares well with a camping meal we once had together, which amounted to half each of a raw calabrese head, half a bag of Bombay Mix, and half a bottle of red wine. Oh, how the other half live, I hear you exclaim.

Chopping weapons-grade, home-grown Scotch Bonnet chili peppers
Chopping weapons-grade, home-grown Scotch Bonnet chili peppers

Anyway, back to that “curry”. The powder mix works well with other main protein ingredients, but at some point, having taken on the mantle of chief-curry-cook in our house, I wanted to stretch out the recipe a little further. I began adding various other spices, crushed cardamom seeds, cinnamon, grated fresh ginger, cloves, and mustard powder. Over the years, the list grew and grew. At some point, I used to make up a jar of the mix that would last several weeks and it usually contained well over 40 different ingredients. Ludicrous. I think at one point I was even adding garam masala as well as frying and crushing whole seeds of coriander and cumin. The curries I produced always tasted pretty good. I think…

Grinding cumin seeds with a pestle and mortar
Grinding cumin seeds with a pestle and mortar

Time went by, we got busier, there was little time for such lengthy curry powder recipes, we didn’t always have all the ingredients I needed, I simplified the blend. It wasn’t quite the three-chord-trick that Mrs Sciencebase came up with for her pilchard curry, but it was a shadow of its former self, perhaps half a dozen ingredients rather than a couple of score. It always seemed to taste about the same as the more complex blend.

Then one day, around the time covid started, we were on very limited shopping opportunities and Mrs Sciencebase simplified the shopping list to the minimum…and a tub of mild madras curry powder was purchased. It contained maybe half a dozen different ingredients, the ones from the student pilchard curry recipe and a couple of others. The new curries I made with this pre-mixed powder didn’t seem to lack anything, in fact, they were pretty much the same to taste as the original pilchard and anything that I put together with four different spices in the pot. So, we’ve stuck with that. It doesn’t feel quite as Zen to use a pre-mixed powder, so I do often add some extra chili powder and grated coconut, occasionally some lime juice. One thing I don’t ever use these days…and maybe only ever did once, are tinned pilchards.

Supplementing physical and mental health

TL:DR – Anecdote is not evidence, but I feel like I gained some benefit from taking a multivitamin supplement, it probably compensated for poor absorption of iron and perhaps other vitamins caused by one of my prescription medicines.

I’ve always been wary of taking vitamins and other supplements. There are good reasons not to do so, if you have a reasonably balanced diet. Excesses of some vitamins and minerals can lead to problems like kidney and liver damage, kidney stones, and some can interfere with the absorption and activity of prescription medicines.

However.

I have been feeling rather tired in recent months, becoming unaccustomedly exhausted after even light activity. I’m talking after a short walk, but sometimes even just after a shower. Was it long-COVID, was it my medication, was it just me getting older?

Mrs Sciencebase had an iron and vitamin supplement for an unrelated reason and suggested I try it, see if it would help.

Well, I took the recommended dose for a few days, not expecting to experience much improvement. Amazingly though, I felt a remarkable change in what people commonly refer to as “energy levels”. Activities that had started to become a tiring chore became a lot easier, I hopped on my bike and did a decent half an hour’s cycling without breaking a sweat, a couple of days after that I did an hour, at speed, and aside from being thirsty when I got back to base, I was fine.

I know anecdote is not evidence, but honestly, it seems like too much of a coincidence that I felt like I had recovered from apparent chronic exhaustion within three days or so of taking the supplement. Moreover, when I look at the side effects of one of my medications, it does suggest that tiredness and various other side effects are associated with reduced absorption of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). So, I’m sticking with the supplement for a while longer.

Intriguingly, the effects do not seem to have been wholly physical though. Most people have had a tough few years, but there has been significant family loss and stress here that happened in the middle of covid, is ongoing, and I have not been what you might call the happiest bunny in the warren, for a long tim, I must confess. Stuff that I usually really enjoy has not, on too many occasions, brought me much joy in recent months. I shrugged it off as being the grief and worry…but…a few days ago, I felt like the proverbial cloud had lifted, and even though it was a drizzly day, the sun seemed to be shining again.

Could this too have been a supplement fix? Well, there are many, many biochemical pathways that are linked to mental health, disturbance in some of those are known to be connected to depression. These various pathways need various micronutrients to work properly. Might I have been deficient in an essential biochemical component? Have I now replenished my supplies and rebooted those pathwats?

Perhaps the brain, when faced with deficiency, goes into some kind of lockdown to make you mope, reduce motivation, and so activity? And, when that lockdown is prolonged and deep, could it also begin to impinge on other pathways to the detriment of mental health. If so, I wonder if this is exacerbated in the wake of a double-dose of grief accompanied by a lot of not unwarranted stresses and anxieties.

I don’t know. Like I say, anecdote is not evidence. I’d rather not take the supplements for a prolonged period of time, so I will be having a chat with my doc at my annual review about my current medication. I will tell them that what I do know is that I’ve been taking a daily dose of micronutrients and feel physically much fitter than I have for a long time and mentally far brighter.

As a footnote, I shared this post on my Mastodon and a couple of people suggested that my experience may be due to my “taking control” or simply a placebo effect. Well, that is a possibility, of course. However, I’ve had symptoms for a long time that coincide with several mentioned on the documentation accompanying one of my medications and I feel that reversion to the mean/norm (basically, the placebo effect) was so sudden and coincided with taking the supplement that there must have been a physical effect of doing so rather than my spontaneously recovering…but, again, anecdote is not evidence, either way. One cannot do double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on oneself.

Hands up, who hasn’t had COVID-19?

TL:DR – I disappointingly succumbed to a COVID-19 infection in February 2022.

So, mid-February 2022 I got a sniffle and a bit of a sore throat, like a common cold coming on. Did a lateral flow test and what do you know – positive for SARS-CoV-2, dammit. Ten days of isolation and an awful sore throat, an unsleepable sore throat, in fact, but thankfully no breathing problems. I’ve managed to take a couple of walks since and a bit of a bike ride, but they’re very stop and start, albeit managing about 3 miles. My lungs aren’t working at full capacity, I must admit, and I feel a bit post-viral.

I feel lucky and privileged to have been doubly vaccinated and also to have had a booster shot*, all of which was free at point of access on the NHS. I don’t know how well I would’ve fared if I hadn’t been vaccinated, but I doubt it would have been well given my underlying conditions. By coincidence, I have a free consultation with the doctor later this week to check lung function and other stuff. Hopefully, the doc will tweak my NHS-subsidised prescriptions a little and I’ll be on my way and good to go.

Thank you NHS.

*Not a jab, a shot, I hate that word “jab”.

Incidentally, despite proclamations by our government to suggest that the pandemic is behind us, I know more people who have the disease right now than the total number I knew who had it in the two years previously.

It’s not all Greek to me

TL:DR – At the time of writing, people around the world were trying to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and getting to grips with Greek letters.

UPDATE: By the way, it’s pronounced “Oh-me-cron” with the emphasis on the “Oh”, it’s not Ommy-Cron or any other variant on that theme. And, this isn’t just me making some random pronouncement, that’s how it was taught throughout science, classicists might beg to differ with their “oh-My-cron”, but that’s the Ancient Greek way, not the scientific way. More to the point, Oxford’s Professor Aris Katzourakis, an expert in SARS-CoV-2 and a Greek speaker, by virtue of his Greek parents had this to say in the Telegraph recently: “English speakers should aim for oh-me-cron, with the emphasis on the o.”

By now, we’ve all heard the phrase “variant of concern” referring to a new form of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Technically, these variants have mutations that alter how well the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus infects our cells. If the new form of the virus is of concern it is usually because the mutations in the spike protein on the surface of the virus are likely to make it more infectious, faster spreading and/or to worse symptoms or lead to more deaths.

The national and international health organisations assess new variants of which there are known to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on the basis of whether they show increased transmissibility, increased morbidity, increased mortality, increased risk of “long COVID”, ability to evade detection by diagnostic tests, decreased susceptibility to antiviral drugs, decreased susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies, ability to cause reinfections, ability to infect people who have been vaccinated, increased risk of multisystem inflammatory syndrome and long-haul COVID, increased impact on particular demographic or clinical groups.

The new variants were initially referred to by the name of the place where they were first identified, although each was given a technical name too to represent their genetic lineage. However, those scientific names, for example, B.1.1.529, are not particularly media friendly nor memorable to non-experts. As such, in May 2021, the World Health Organisation decided that variants of concern would be given a shorthand name using a letter of the Greek alphabet.

Readers will by now be fairly familiar with the first few letters of the Greek alphabet, if they weren’t already as we have already seen the following variants of concern, which used the first four letters of the Greek alphabet:

Alpha – B.1.1.7 (first identified in the UK)
Beta – B.1.351 (South Africa)
Gamma – P.1 (Brazil)
Delta – B.1.617.2 (India)

The current variant of concern that is spreading around the world is Omicron – B.1.1.529 (first identified by scientists in South African).

I’ve been asked several times by people who have some familiarity with the Greek alphabet as to why the WHO made a leap from Delta to Omicron. Well, there wasn’t a “leap” as such, there were variants that were labelled with some of the intermediate letters that didn’t turn out to be as problematic as anticipated and were not highlighted in the mainstream media. So, we did have the following variants: Epsilon (lineages B.1.429, B.1.427, CAL.20C), Zeta (P.2), Eta (B.1.525), Theta (P.3), Iota, (B.1.526), Kappa (B.1.617.1). Lambda (C.37), and Mu (B.1.621)

Nu and Xi have been skipped deliberately, the former because English speakers may pronounce it like the word “new” (it’s actually pronounced “nih” or “nee” and Xi because it resembles a common surname).

The next variant would likely be Pi, although that is a rather familiar symbol to many people and so they may well skip that one too. The last letter of the Greek alphabet is Omega (“big O” compare that to Omicron “little o”.

But, let us hope that we stifle this virus long before we run out of Greek letters…

File:Greek alphabet (Jason Davey).png

Calories in, calories out

I’m halfway through Tim Spector’s excellent book Spoon Fed, which is a bit like a food and nutrition version of my 2012 book Deceived Wisdom in which he debunks pretty much all of the myths we’ve been told over the years about cholesterol, fat, caffeine, gluten, reduced-fat foods, diet drinks etc.

Spector points out that we are all different, our genes play a major part in our response to food and that most of the claims about this or that food or drink are mainly driven by the marketing departments of the food and drink manufacturers who spend millions on advertising and lobbying policymakers to put messages out there that fundamentally conflict with good advice to sell more of their products.

One of the big myths Spector debunks is with regard to exercise and weight loss. The bottom line, as it were, is that we should exercise for general physical and mental health, but exercising does very little to help you lose weight. In fact, exercising may see you gain weight as you add muscle mass but more likely because it makes you hungry and you end up eating more than you need to after exercising (often in the form of “health” smoothies, protein bars, energy boosters and the like). Your body also slows your metabolic rate after exercise in the short term so that you end up storing more of your food intake as fat.

On what basis does he make this claim? Well, in one sense basic thermodynamics, but he puts it more simply in terms of the way the body uses energy.

We get all of our energy, 100% from food.

We “burn” 70% of that energy just saying alive, metabolic resting rate.

10% of our energy is used to digest the food we eat.

20% is used for physical activity. However, 10% of that is used just sitting, standing, or fidgeting.

The last 10% of the energy we burn can be manipulated through exercise. That’s a tenth of the energy we take in being available to us to burn through exercise.

If you’re an average overweight bloke running an hour a day four times a week, then at best you can knock off 2 kilograms a month. That sounds great, I could get to my ideal weight within a year doing that. But, in order to make this work, you have to NOT overcompensate for the fatigue by eating or drinking more and you have to avoid the extra storage, the slowing of metabolism and the bounceback if you lapse on your calorie counting (You have to be strict with yourself and not eat more even if you feel tired and hungry). It’s mostly sugary-rich food and obesity in a bottle smoothies that are the problem…and alcoholic beverages.

Exercise is a potent drug we all need to take in moderation regularly. Moderate exercise is not a weightloss drug. The only way to lose weight is to eat less and to choose foods better matched to your own metabolism and gut microbes, Spector writes. (There are exceptions to the rules, in the same way that everyone knows a chainsmoking whiskey drinker who died in bed with their mistress aged 97.

As to all that nonsense about 10000 steps? Well, that spurious health notion was invented by a Japanese company that made and sold pedometers in the 1960s…based on nothing more scientific than that 10000 is a nice round number and although it is quite large it is not unachievable in a normal day for a lot of people. But, recent studies have shown that people using pedometers and smart health watches and the like actually gain more weight over the course of a year than those who don’t use these gadgets.

If you’re overweight it would seem that you can’t win…unless you eat less…you can win, if you eat less. It’s not the calories out that count, it’s really just the calories in.

Covid answers

Which is the best vaccine against Covid?

What does “95 percent effective” mean?

Can you still get Covid if you have had the vaccine?

Does the vaccine stop you being infectious if you catch Covid?

Do you need to be vaccinated if you have had the disease?

Do the vaccines developed in 2020 work against the new variants that have emerged?

Answers from the experts this week in Scientific American here.

A little less nervous about Covid

TL:DR – Concerns about a connection between Guillain-Barre syndrome and COVID-19 infection and/or vaccination, put to rest.

The rare and potentially lethal neurological disorder, Guillain-Barre syndrome, is not triggered by Covid nor by vaccination against Covid, recent research suggests.

There was concern during the early months of the Covid pandemic based on anecdotal evidence that there had been an increase in the incidence of a potentially lethal neurological disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS). In this disease, the body’s own immune system attacks peripheral nerves causing numbness, pain, and paralysis. It can be fatal if not treated promptly.

Pain and numbness often spread upwards from the soles of the feet or the hands but can also begin in the scalp and spread downwards. Damage to the nerves involved in breathing can lead to suffocation.

In December, Stephen Keddie* and colleagues published evidence that shows there is no obvious link between infection with the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes Covid. Indeed, their evidence (published in the journal Brain) suggests that GBS incidence has been lower than usual during the pandemic.

Lockdown measures, social distancing, face coverings, and hand-washing have been a common feature of the pandemic for the majority of people in the UK. This, Keddie and his colleagues suggest has also led to a decline in the incidence of gastrointestinal infection, such as Campylobacter jejuni and infection with other respiratory viruses. There is evidence that GBS is sometimes a reaction to infection with C. jejuni where the immune system mistakenly attacks nerve cells instead of the bacterium. Far rarer is the incidence of GBS following vaccination against influenza.

Supplementary work from Keddie and his colleagues has also shown that there is no risk of GBS associated with Covid vaccination.

I think if anything, like the flu vaccine, that risk would be about one in a million, Keddie told Sciencebase. We know the risks of COVID are far higher. I have spent time recently working on neurology wards and visiting the intensive care departments and the risks of not getting the vaccine are very clear to see, he adds.
*Department of Neuromuscular Diseases, University College London and National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Midline Glioma – research fundraiser

UPDATE: December 2021 – Exceeded 100k! Research has already been funded from your donations, so thank you!

UPDATE: Emily was hoping to reach her target by Xmas Day, she went storming past that number on the 23rd December – £50615 raised from just over 1700 donors, which is fantastic. She originally set 10k as a target, then moved it up to 25k, passed that and moved it to 50k, which is when I first mentioned the cause here, on Twitter, and on Facebook. She was at the half way to the 50k at that point just over a week ago. Hopefully, we can draw in more donations from a few of my followers. Thank you! Keep those donations coming in.

Diffuse Midline Glioma, H3 K27M Mutation is not a phrase you want to hear from a doctor. It’s a type of tumour that most commonly affects people under about the age of 25 years but over 3 years. It’s very rare – 100 people in the UK annually – but always lethal, sadly. The tumour grows rapidly within the Central Nervous System and has a devastating effect on the spinal cord or the brain depending on precisely where it grows.

I must admit I’d heard of spinal tumours, but don’t think I’d heard this full phrase until a friend posted about it on social media as their daughter had started a fundraiser to raise funds for research. Emily passed her initial fundraising target quite quickly and has upped the ante, now aiming for £50000. She’s more than halfway there with well over 1000 donations so far. Sciencebase is happy to give this worthy cause a mention in the hope that a few readers take her plea to heart.

I’ve written generally about rare diseases several times over the years and how they are often neglected by mainstream medical research and the pharma industry because by definition they each only affect a small number of people. Of course, there are many, many rare diseases and the total numbers of people that are affected are large. At the other end of the scale though, is often a terrible tale of someone afflicted by something rare and untreatable, which is precisely why we need to raise funds for the individual cases. So, here’s the link to Emily’s JustGiving page. Please dig deep, as they say.