Immune cells called T cells battle infections and guard against cancer. But first they need to be tipped off about the threat. The informants are a group of cells called dendritic cells, which chew up infected and damaged cells and present the regurgitated pieces to T cells. If the T cells judge the pieces to be foreign or in need of removal, they reproduce, forming an army of clones that hunt down infected and rogue cells in the body.
--Dan Ferber, ScienceNOW Daily News

But here's the best news if you happen to be somewhere in the country right now that's getting a little sun. That which calls the T cells into army action is none other than a sunbeam producing a little vitamin D. Once the T cells are all over D'd, "the altered T cells make a beeline for the outer layer of the skin, where they began destroying defective and infected cells."

So yesterday p.m. I got outside in short sleeves and destroyed some defective cells with sunshine. I also chopped up a bit of ice on our front sidewalk and succeeded in turning our bumpy, navigable path into a skating rink.

All those months without caffeine for nothing.

A large Danish study just concluded that I could've spent those 18 pregnant months drinking my coffee with cream and impunity. They supplied 1200 women and their unborn children with packets of instant coffee--caffeinated or not--over 2 years time, and followed the gestational outcomes. Mattered not whether the women brewed leaded or unleaded, the babies came out the same.

Not enough evidence to wish another pregnancy in my life, but nice to know that those who do now have a new morning choice.

All aboard the sperm train*

Studly rodents, as in those most successful at spreading their seed through the murine world, do so with the sharpest hooks on their little pirates. This configuration "allow groups of up to 100 sperm to attach to each other, and these 'sperm trains' moved faster than sperm swimming alone."

*What will those crazy research scientists study next?

Let it never be said that I don't practice what I preach. Since falling ill to a nasty and fluish sort of virus six days ago, courtesy of a patient who didn't cover her mouth while coughing, I've taken:


1. Tamiflu (just in case it was the flu)
2. Robitussin with codeine (only way to sleep through the night with total body misery plus cough)
3. Levaquin (just one--wanted to start antibiotics the moment the sinuses gave way to infection)
4. Biaxin (the choice of Dr. Ed Hepworth--Denver's top sinus doc--because it not only kills bad bugs hiding in dark moist places, but also decreases the inflammation of those infected spaces)

This afternoon, I finally felt well enough to eat two dark chocolate turtles on top of the a.m. Starbucks coffee cake. Back to business as usual!

Traction Action

What's up with this weather? I'm home, laid low with the flu (and I even had a flu shot!), watching the Weather Channel and stupid movies on TNT when I'm not watching the inside of my eyelids.

The entire mid-section of the nation is slipping into something dangerous. This past week alone, I've seen four people who lost their footing on ice and went to ground. One false step could change your life forever!

Check out Yaktrax. These dandy little slip-ons will help you get a grip and never slip.

Thanks Jean for kicking me out of the Harry Potter book (read all of Book IV and most of Book V during blizzards one and two) and back to the blog. And thank you for braving the icy streets of Aurora and Denver today to get to the office!

The latest trend in neuroscience is to stick volunteers inside MRI machines and see which part of their brain lights up as they undertake various tasks. They've found the area of the brain that makes you feel like you're being followed, the bit o' gray matter that provides for mystic religious experiences, and the neurons that over-react to scary movies if you happen to be the kind of person--like myself--who walked out of "The Ring" the moment they showed the little dried up girl crouched in the closet corner.

Scanning my brain this past week may have revealed very little activity. Yesterday I put my stethoscope on someone's chest and heard nothing. It took me more than one moment to realize that I had not yet stuck the ear pieces in my ear.

If I access my frontal lobe later today, I'll tell you what happens to people's brains when they shop.

My new AIM buddy icon based on status of my brain cells. Per my brother:

"Greek tragedy meets acid indigestion."

Tired, grumpy, facing another blizzard in the forecast and the end of my daughter's visit, I dressed without care for the drive to the airport this a.m. Gray fleece, black pants, red and green striped socks, blue suede shoes. Never thought how that would appear to Subaru service department which was stop number two after dropping off the kid at DIA.

Worse yet, problem with rear window defroster was merely this...I was pushing the wrong button. Dressed like a middle-aged frump AND pushing the wrong button! Am I losing my buttons here?

Turns out what I always told my children as they slinked self-consciously through adolescence is true: No one cares how you look. The service rep never even looked up from his computer screen as I sheepishly retrieved my car.

It may take a village to make you overweight. New evidence suggests that those bacterial hangers-on living in your gastrointestinal tract may be partly to blame for the state of your waist.

Microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis checked out the gut bugs in mice of various sizes. The docs found that the resident GI fauna differed predictably based on the size of the host.

Furthermore, when the researchers analyzed the intestinal microbes of obese people, they found the population skewed heavily towards Firmicutes and short on Bacteroidetes compared with normal weight controls. After weight loss, the little Firmicutes lost ground to a growing group of Bacteroidetes, assuming a pattern more consistent with that of their leaner colleagues.

If mousy microbes are at all indicative of those that we carry through life, here's what your little gut friends may be doing to you:

Microbes from the obese mice had more genes for processing starches and complex sugars and produced more simple sugars and fatty acids--that is, calories--for the gut to absorb.

Things to do in Denver when you're snowed in

If we go back on our four legs and get down on the ground, we may be able do things we had no idea we could do.
--Neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd, Yale University

Dr. Shepherd was commenting on a recent informal study out of California that tested a group of undergrads with respect to their ability to track prey using their sense of smell. The Berkeley researchers conducting the experiment dipped 10 meters of twine in a distinctive scent and outfitted the 32 volunteers in earmuffs, gloves and kneepads so they couldn't use sensory cues other than smell.

Two-thirds of these game subjects successfully followed the 'game' trail, scooting on hands and knees across the grassy knoll like dogs in pursuit of a squirrel (There's actually a brief film clip of the merry chase on the ScienceNOW web-site!).

And the scent? Chocolate, of course. So if you ever need to track a chocolate bunny in the night, chances are good you'll not go hungry.

Happy Hanukkah from Femail Doc and her brother Bob

Attention can act as a beam of spotlight. A good mood broadens that beam.
--Psychologist Adam Anderson of the University of Toronto

So if you don't want a broad beam? Narrow it, says Dr. Anderson, by working yourself into a nasty snit, then go balance your checkbook. Or help your son study for his anatomy test. Or do the day's charting. Bring 'em on, I'm in the mood.

Nofallingnofallingnofallingnofalling

My friend Anita says this should be an inner mantra for aging ladies. Yesterday, I forgot to be mindful of toe positioning at the Cherry Creek Mall, and got caught up instead with the shopper's mantra: IwannagohomeIwannagohomeIwannagohome

Worse yet, was carrying a shopping bag with six champagne flutes when I hit the unforgiving floor in front of six thousand other people (many of whom were kind enough to inquire about my well-being post-kneeplant). Now, IgottagobackIgottagobackIgottagoback.

This from Dr. Peter Ravdin of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center on newly released data that showed a decreased incidence of breast cancer within one year of the termination of the Women's Health Initiative hormone therapy study:

What we think is going on is that about half of the cancers that were just below the detection range in 2002 in women who were taking hormone replacement therapy actually stopped growing or regressed when they stopped [HRT].

Big news about hormones and breast cancer today. For more information, see Not forever, not for everybody.

Good genes, bad circumstances

I had the pleasure of eating lunch out today with a friend. We sat on an enclosed patio, roasting pleasantly under a heat lamp, chatting over a delicious lunch of pasta and bread. This is not your ancestors' dining experience.

The human genome was perfected during the Ice Age, and the humanoids that survived to pass their perfected genes on to future generations assembled genetic material perfectly suited to cold, famine, and obligatory exercise.

So toasty, overfed, and happily seated is not what brings out the best in our bodies. Good for the soul, however.

Screening wars

And forty-something breasts caught in the crossfire. A large study of nearly 17,000 UK women in their 40's again highlights the risk/benefit considerations of regularly screening youngish women--with smaller cancer risks--for breast cancer.

The benefit, of course, is the chance to catch a cancer before it catches on. The risks include the significant possibility of 'false positives,' cancerish sorts of changes on the mammogram that turn out, after much anxiety, expense, and biopsy procedures, to not be cancer. But here's a comment from the commenters (editorialists in the Lancet journal about another dilemma:

Every woman, with her physician's guidance, should decide whether regret will be greater if she develops breast cancer that could have been detected earlier by screening mammography, or if she develops breast cancer later in life as a result of screening mammography itself.

Greens against cancer

Gotta love those greens. Per the women of the Iowa Women's Health Study, those in the highest quartile of greens consumption had less than half the ovarian cancer risk of those eschewing greens.

But there's the problem, how to cook the greens so you can chew them? A patient of mine says boil them for 2 and 1/2 hours. She favors turnip greens, or green turnip green pudding after cooking that long. After all that cook cook cooking, is there any goodness left for the fight against cancer?