Day: July 22, 2002

The BBC reported last week on an independent review board set up in Scotland to look at a bizarre issue — who should get the organs of children after they die in Scottish hospitals?

The only thing more bizarre than a commission to look into that question is the practice that led to it — several Scottish hospitals were caught storing the organs — including brains — of children whose deaths had been ruled the result of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (referred to as “cot death” in Scotland). Many of the hospitals never bothered to notify the parents, much less obtain their consent, or used consent forms that were apparently designed to hide the fact that the parents were consenting to have their children’s organs removed and stored.

Frankly, I think doctors on both sides of the Atlantic tend to underestimate the willingness of families to voluntarily participate in practices such as this. If properly framed as being part of research efforts to better understand — and hopefully prevent — such deaths, I suspect many families would consent. Doing this sort of thing on the sly, however, just reinforces patient suspicions when the practice is inevitably publicized (and in today’s world, such a practice will become public knowledge eventually — it’s impossible to keep something like this secret today).

Source:

New rights over organ retention. The BBC, July 19, 2002.

Organ retention policy review. The BBC, Sept. 22, 2000.

A couple months ago the media was trumpeting research claiming too much sleep could shorten a person’s life span. Now researchers at Pennsylvania State University claim that women are much better sleepers than men and speculate this might explain why women live so much longer, on average, than men.

The Pennsylvania study, which only examined a total of 25 men and women, found that men who missed two hours of sleep per night had elevated levels of tumor necrosis factor, which may (or may not) contribute to obesity and diabetes. The study also found that women experienced “deep” sleep for 70 minutes per night compared to only 40 minutes of “deep” sleep for men.

The BBC actually managed to get an incredibly silly comment from Neil Stanley, of the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit at Surrey University, who said that it was difficult to generalize from such a small study, but then went on to suggest that the widespread 24/7 culture in Western industrialized nations is bound to cause problems. According to Stanley,

We are going against nature, and if we do that, then we are always like to have to pay a price.

Please, give me anything but the silly “it’s not natural argument.”

The reality is that while there are likely to be sexual differences that affect lifespan, in Western industrialized nations men and women’s life expectancy are gradually closing with each other. In Great Britain, women on average now only live six years longer than men. If factors such as disproportionately male representation in dangerous occupations were factored in, the differential would be even closer.

Source:

Sleep ‘key to longer life’. The BBC, July 15, 2002.

Here’s one way that appears more and more likely to increase your life span — eat as few calories as is possible while still maintaining a “healthy” diet. I put healthy in quotes there on purpose, because in many ways health is a subjective criteria and many people might not be willing to give up some of the things that seem to come with this approach.

Calorie restriction’s impact on lifespan was first demonstrated in laboratory mice. Nobody’s quite sure why mice fed low calorie diets live longer, although there is speculation that a calorie restricted diet may better reflect what mice in the wild typically eat (i.e., laboratory mice may, in general, be overfed compared to their wild cousins much like the average Westerner eats far more calories than their ancestors did just a few hundred years ago).

Studies of calorie restriction in primates is starting to be published suggesting that the process also works in monkeys. Monkeys fed diets with 30 percent fewer calories both live significantly longer and develop fewer diseases than do monkeys fed “normal” diets.

A small number of human beings have adopted low calorie diets based on these results, and low calorie doesn’t have to mean feeling hungry all the time, especially if you adopt a diet involving a lot of vegetables. CBS News talked to a man who claims to eat 6 pounds of vegetables a day to supplement small quantities of animal protein such as fish.

But there are side effects to such a diet. In mice, for example, the animals on calorie restricted diet have levels of chemicals associated with stress that are through the roof. The man who told CBS News of his veggie eating ways, also admits that such a diet will result in brittle bones and a decline in libido.

At which point, frankly, the value of such a method for life extension really loses almost all of its attraction to my mind, especially given that biological health is only one of many factors that will determine how long an individual will live. The real value of these calorie restriction studies in animals is to get a better handle on aging so that medical science can move closer to developing effective anti-aging therapies. Except for a few brave souls, calorie restriction as a life extension strategy is really a non-starter.

Source:

Key to long life: near-starvation diet?. CBS News, July 8, 2002.