Monthly Archives: September 2010

Focus on biomedical art

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nm0910-944-I2.jpgScience is an art, but that doesn’t mean that all scientists are artists. So, researchers often collaborate with skilled designers to place scientific ideas and results within the social framework in which we live. To explore this unique partnership, we asked eminent museum curators and art instructors from around the world to identify the people they see as leading innovators at the interface of art and medicine. In the September issue of Nature Medicine, we present four such individuals or design teams who are challenging established scientific orthodoxy and furthering our understanding of the role of biomedical research today.

Plus, in the blog post below the jump, we highlight a fifth artist in a Web-only bonus mini-profile written by Gary Lees, chair and director of the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

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Getting to the root of heart attacks

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hairpalm.jpgDiagnosing a patient’s risk for a risky heart condition just got a bit more cutting edge.

The journal Stress has a study showing that cortisol levels found in a hair test could serve as a diagnostic marker for heart attack risk. The researchers compared hair strands of 56 men recently hospitalized after a heart attack to samples from 56 men hospitalized for other reasons. After controlling for other factors like high blood pressure and smoking, a higher level of cortisol in the hair sample was the strongest predictor of which patients were admitted for a myocardial infarction.

A distinct advantage of hair analysis is that it offers a long-term portrait of cortisol levels. The hair strands used by the researchers in the Stress paper represented three months’ worth of cortisol levels, whereas blood and urine tests only provide evidence for the cortisol levels at the time of the test.

Hair analyses are already used by many employers to screen their employees for signs of drug and alcohol use.

They’re also used in forensic analysis to find traces of toxic substances, either from drug overdose or poisoning.

Image by xJasonRogersx via Flickr Creative Commons

Lifting the lid off tupperware party-style drug promotion

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pillstupperware.jpgYour average modern-day “”https://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/“>mad man” is more likely to be shilling for medicine than for cigarettes. In 2009, pharmaceutical companies spent around $4.8 billion dollars on direct-to-consumer advertising in the US, according to tracking firm Kantar Media.

Though it has pledged to crack down on misleading drug advertising, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is finding it hard to effectively police the field, especially as marketing campaigns shift to as-yet unregulated platforms like Twitter, which leaves little space for cautionary blurbs about side-effects.

And there’s still some questionable drug marketing being conducted offline, too.

A report from Reuters describes how, in 2009, Bayer Healthcare invited a group of young mothers to a Tupperware party-style brunch that featured a nurse who extolled the virtues of Mirena, an intrauterine device (IUD) that just happens to be manufactured by Bayer:

“Here you have a company hiring a third-party to invite people into a home like a Tupperware party,” Thomas Abrams, director of the FDA division that oversees drug advertising and communications, told Reuters. “That was extremely, extremely concerning to us because this product has risks — risk of infection, loss of fertility. Huge risk.” The nurse reportedly did not mention any of Mirena’s potentially harmful side effects at the party.

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(Don’t) be still, my beating heart

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Since its inception in the 1970s, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become invaluable for an array of diagnostic procedures. And, since MRI uses an electromagnetic field to generate the image, rather than radiation, it’s assumed to be safer than other techniques like CT scans. Until recently, creating the images required the patient to remain motionless, and it was impossible to get a clear picture of a constantly moving organ like the heart.

In a report published in NMR in Biomedicine, scientists from Göttingen, Germany describe how they drastically reduced the amount of time needed to capture an image &mdash down to one-fiftieth of a second. As a result, MRI can now capture movement with much greater fidelity, allowing doctors to create videos of organs moving in real-time.

The researchers write that they hope this technology can improve medical knowledge about diseases of the joints and heart. It could also make the MRI procedure more comfortable for future patients, who won’t have to worry so much about sitting perfectly still.

After the jump, we’ve got two videos demonstrating the new MRI technique:

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Dude, what happened to my pain resistance?

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Joint(detail)

Marijuana is known to dull the senses when you’re high. But smoking dope may have much longer effects on pain perception, according to a new study presented yesterday at the World Congress on Pain in Montreal.

Laura Mitchell and her colleagues at the Glasgow Caledonian University recruited around 90 regular recreational cannabis users, most of whom were in their 20s or 30s, and studied their ability to withstand the pain of dipping their hands in ice cold water.

They found that heavy male weed tokers had a significantly lower pain threshold than non-pot smokers, and these potheads kept their hands in the freezing cold water for much shorter durations than either non- or light-users.

If you smoke too much grass, it seems, your ability to withstand certain types of pain might go to pot.

Image: Wikimedia