Researchers have noted that relapses among people with multiple sclerosis often seem to be linked to stress, so two Israeli scientists decided to use the Persian Gulf war to run an experiment intended to explore connections between stress and the disease.
Thirty-two MS patients living in Tel Aviv were monitored by researchers from Tel Aviv University during the month in 1991 when their city was under attack from Iraqi missiles.
Analysis of medical records for the two years before the missile attacks showed that the MS patients enjoyed better health during the attack period and the following two months than at any other time.
“Our results suggest that a severe stressor in some way protects patents for at least a limited period,” the researchers wrote in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology. They speculated that the psychological stress may have triggered some immune response in the patients that protected them against relapses.
VESSEL TISSUE STUDIED FOR RACIAL DIFFERENCES
When surgeons perform heart bypass operations, they remove vessels from one part of a patient’s body and graft them to the heart, providing a new route for blood that bypasses clogged coronary arteries.
As part of this procedure, the surgeons must snip off pieces of the vessels involved, and they normally throw them away. But now researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to recycle these pieces of vessels.
The scientists bombard vessel tissue with various chemicals to study their reactions. They hope to isolate the difference between tissue taken from blacks and whites and men and women to provide clues as to why blacks are more susceptible to coronary disease than whites.
“We really don’t know the reasons for the racial differences in cardiovascular disease,” said Dr. Randall Tackett, who is heading the project to search for racial differences in vascular reactivity.
EEL SKIN LEATHER WON’T DAMAGE CREDIT CARDS
Some people have been warned against putting their credit cards in eel skin wallets because the thin leather somehow can damage the magnetic stripe on the back of those credit cards, but such warnings are bunk, researchers report.
Edward Melvin, a fisheries biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, was given the eel skin warning when he told a bank clerk that his automatic teller machine card wasn’t working. Eel skin leather comes from the Pacific hagfish, a specialty of Melvin’s research.
“As I checked around to other banks, invariably the customer service personnel told me that eel skin leather damages credit cards,” Melvin said.
No leather can harm credit cards, but some eel skin purses came with magnetic clasps, said Joseph Sheppard, chairman of the magnetic stripe technical committee of the Automatic Identification Manufacturers.
“These clasps are magnetically strong enough to cause data damage if the credit card is accidentally brought in contact with them,” Sheppard said.
Magnetic clasps on purses made from cloth or plastic also can harm credit cards, he said.
DOCTORS MAY CHARGE PATIENTS FOR RESEARCH
As research funding becomes scarce, more and more physicians who do research projects may be charging patients or their insurance companies for work done primarily for study purposes rather than for patient care, scientists from Brown University have found.
The Brown researchers analyzed articles published in 23 leading medical journals during October, 1991. They found that 151 of 196 articles were based on research sponsored by money from the federal government, the drug industry or not-for-profit foundations. But that left 45 studies without outside funding.
“Who is paying for this unfunded research?” asked the authors of the study, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Costs of tests such as cervical cultures, thyroid exams and electroencephalograms needed to provide data cited in the articles probably was substantial, noted the Brown authors.
“While some of these direct costs may have been absorbed by generous laboratories giving free work for research purposes,” said the authors, “part of the cost may have been passed on to study participants or their third-party payers, perhaps unknowingly.”
BABIES `LISTEN UP’ AT AN EARLY AGE
Babies apparently start to develop affinity for their native language at a very early age, a series of studies suggests.
The insights come from several experiments in which infants of various ages sat on a parent’s lap in a booth while words were spoken through loudspeakers in English, Dutch and Norwegian. Each baby’s attention was monitored by scientists led by Peter W. Jusczyk, a psychologist from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
At 9 months of age, American babies tended to pay attention to words spoken in English and ignore Dutch words. The reaction of 9-month old Dutch babies was just the opposite.
At 6 months of age, the American babies tended to pay more attention to English words than to Norwegian words, which have a different rhythm.
LONG-TERM STUDY OF NARCOTICS ADDICTS
A long-term study of 581 California narcotics addicts paints a gloomy picture about their future.
The narcotics users were admitted to the California Civil Addict Program from 1962 through 1964. When the group was then studied in 1985 and 1986, Dr. Yih-Ing Hser of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 27.7 percent had died and three-fourths of the living group tested positive for opiates.
Substance use and criminal involvement remained high among the subjects into their late 40s, and in any given year less than 10 percent participated in a drug treatment program, he reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
“The results suggest that the eventual cessation of narcotics use is a very slow process, unlikely to occur for some addicts, especially if they have not ceased use by their late 30s,” he said.
TROPICS HAVE HISTORY AS A BREEDING GROUND
The tropics are a hot bed for evolutionary changes and every effort should be made to preserve this unique species-breeding ground, University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski reported in the journal Nature.
His study of marine invertebrates over the past 250 million years revealed that the tropics had a history of spectacular diversity that was unmatched by areas to the north and south.
What is driving this fantastic evolutionary engine is unknown, but it may be that the tropics were subjected to more cycles of extinctions followed by new species filling in the gaps.
MAN’S LEAD CONTENT PUZZLES SCIENTISTS
The dangers of lead poisoning are well known to science, and public health authorities have taken several steps to minimize the amount of lead in our environment, including banning the use of lead-based paints in residences and eliminating the heavy metal as a gasoline additive.
So physicians at Ohio State University were puzzled at the referral of a 46-year-old man with high levels of lead in his blood and some symptoms of lead poisoning such as memory loss and numbness in his fingers and palms. Even after treatment lowered his lead levels, later tests showed they were again high.
After extensive questioning, the man, a microwave technician, mentioned that he habitually chewed on the plastic insulation that he stripped off the ends of electrical wires. Analysis found extremely high lead content in the colored coatings.
Since the man stopped chewing on the plastic insulation, his symptoms have subsided and lead levels in his blood have dropped, the physicians report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
