Moment of beauty III

This is a photo from the UN flickr site, showing the lake this past weekend near Geneva. It has been bitter cold and windy, and that makes the ice do weird things as it sprays up onto the shore.

More images of frozen cars, trees and benches like this one can be seen at 9gag, just type “Lake Geneva” in the search window.

I’ll take this opportunity to pass along a few more links:

Out with a bang

fireworksHappy New Year, everyone. Looks like the world made it through another revolution around the Sun, despite Harold Camping’s careful calculations.

I have it on good faith, however, that it really is going to end in 2012. Yes, it’s more eschatological stuff, this time from the “Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar” (e.g. the Mayans). So set your clocks for December 21, 2012, and get all your unfinished business out of the way by then. I know I’m going to finish this novel and to hell with everything else. Taxes, schmaxes. What a colossal waste of time.

One thing I might do to get ready is memorize the Scrabble dictionary. If I end up in heaven with a lot of time on my hands, I don’t want to be at a disadvantage like I was this Christmas. On the other hand, that would be a pretty convincing version of hell — being in an endless Scrabble game with three other people who know every single esoteric word in the Scrabble dictionary. Of course ‘ka’ is a word! Isn’t it just too bad that it blocked you from putting ‘quiz’ on the triple word score…

I think I’ll play it safe and do the memorizing.

Looking back at 2011, I’d have to say it was a watershed year. Here are some highlights:

  • I started the Gydle publishing empire. I have written more original words this year than ever before in my life.
  • My world was rocked when I figured out that we are being crowdsourced by bacteria. I certainly hope yours was, too.
  • My bare feet discovered that the ground is a surface that can bite back.
  • I finally gave myself permission to live my lifelong dream – (the novel).
  • I learned that I’m not 25 anymore thanks to a surprise sucker punch from a blood pressure monitor.
  • I finally broke my jelly belly addiction. I may have to change the banner on the blog. Sugar snap peas? Carrots?

What about you? What did you do in those precious months after May 21, when the world was supposed to end? I certainly hope you made the most of it.

In the meantime, since I’m clearly too late for any preventive measures, before you go to bed tonight, take a vitamin B supplement and an advil. It might help with tomorrow’s hangover, according to a press release from the Loyola University Medical System.

And if the world is spinning because you drank too much? Here’s why.

On a final note in this final hour of the penultimate year of human existence, I’d like to thank all of you for coming here. Thanks for your attention and support. Thanks for your comments, your suggestions, your ideas. Thanks for making all my efforts so very worthwhile. Thanks for joining me in my many-flavored world and for making it so much more interesting!

See you in 2012!
Photo Credit: sunsurfr via Compfight cc

What’s the poop?

One of my favorite topics at the moment is the human microbiome. That’s the part of us that’s not human. Back in May, I wrote a post about it:

A human body has about 10 trillion cells in it. And that very same human body (yours, for example), is also home to 100 trillion bacteria. Your mouth, your nose, your armpits, your navel, your skin and especially your gut are teeming with thousands of different species of bacteria. If you could separate out all those bacteria from the rest of you, they’d weigh 2 kilos.”

I was suggesting (only partially in jest) that we’re actually being crowdsourced by a superior form of collective intelligence. Just last month, I wrote another post about how the gut microbiome plays an important role in mental health.

I was wrong on one count. I mentioned a study that had found that excessive use of antibiotics can permanently damage your gut flora. It turns out there’s hope after all. Here’s the story:

Antibiotic overuse can allow a particularly nasty (and appropriately named) microbe, Clostridium difficile, to set up shop in the gut. This critter makes you really miserable – recurrent bouts of  severe diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting. It stubbornly resists treatment – well, most treatments. There is one that works.

A fecal transplant.

It turns out that the gut flora from a healthy human donor can outcompete C. difficile, restoring gut health in no time flat. (Ce n’est pas si difficile…)

And where can this gut flora be found? Right. Someone else’s poop. Wait. Don’t go away. Bear with me for a minute, this is really interesting stuff (this is a picture of some E. coli, magnified 10,000 times, originally from the USDA).

 

gut bacteria

Dave brought it up this morning in our regular chat.

Dave: Apparently it works.

Me: works for what?

Dave: (sends a link) It cures gut infections caused by antibiotic therapy.  Gives new life to the phrase “eat shit”

Me: I see. repopulating the gut microbiome. I can write about that.

Dave: That’s why I instantly thought of you when I read about it. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it)

Yes, indeed. The article he sent me describes the case of 75-year-old Pat Shoop, who had a nasty C. difficile  infection. Her husband valiantly offered to provide a batch of bacteria from his own, healthy gut.

… Bob was under pressure to produce a usable stool sample within 15 minutes of her scheduled appointment. […] He complied and the pair rushed to the clinic, where Dr. Rubin snaked a tube through Shoop’s nose and into her stomach. “It was 20 minutes,” she said. “He told me, ‘You’re not going to taste it, you’re not going to smell it.’”

Apart from the obvious question of what constitutes “usable” – consistency? size? – one wonders why Bob had to be under so much pressure. Couldn’t he just refrigerate his offering? Another thing not mentioned in the article was exactly how the sample was prepared. I had to go elsewhere to find that information:

An article in the Scientist describes how Australian gastroenterologist Thomas Borody did his first transplant (in the mid-1980s) :

…He collected stool from the woman’s brother, and after screening it for known pathogens, he stuck it in a blender, added some brine, and filtered it to get rid of any undigested material. The stool, now turned into slush, was administered to the patient — who had her gastrointestinal tract previously flushed — via two enemas over the course of two days.

In only days, the patient was cured. Her colitis never returned.

In fact, a recent study shows that fecal transplants (which often go under the more palatable monikers of fecal bacteriotherapy, intestinal microbiota transplantation or human probiotic infusion) successfully cure more than 90% of intractable C. difficile cases and many other cases of irritable bowel disease (IBD) and ulcerative colitis. The transplant is administered either via enema, or, as in Pat Shoop’s case, via a nasogastric tube.

Borody oversees 5-6 fecal transplants a week, mostly for patients with IBD. It’s catching on in the US, as well:

Currently, while most fecal transplants in the U.S. are performed exclusively to treat C. difficile, a growing list of doctors, […] are beginning to expand to other gut disorders such as inflammatory bowel diseases. Because stool is not yet a marketable biologic product, the procedure is not federally regulated.”

Note the use of the word “yet” in that last sentence. I sense an entrepreneurial opportunity here. If I weren’t so damn busy translating…

It’s considered a treatment of “last resort,” which is also a bit odd, seeing as it has been used in veterinary practice for ages to calm the bellies of ruminants. In fact, come to think of it, don’t animals regularly partake? Could it be they know something we don’t?

Lest you be tempted to get out the blender and take matters into your own hands, be aware that this is a job for professionals only. The wikipedia page on fecal bacteriotherapy says that “The best choice for donor is a close relative who has been tested for a wide array of bacterial and parasitic agents.The enemas are prepared and administered in a hospital environment to ensure all necessary precautions.” 

The page goes on to describe a new “safer, more effective, and easier to administer” form of fecal bacteriotherapy that’s being developed, which requires the patient to keep a refrigerated sample on hand. In the event that he/she develops a C difficile infection, the sample is extracted with saline, filtered, freeze dried and put into capsules. The patient can then repopulate her gut with her own microbiome just by popping a pill! Now that’s a win-win.

One obvious question arises, however: How many of us are paranoid enough to prepare ahead for a C. difficile infection?  

And another, given the current lack of federal regulation:  What’s the refrigerator shelf-life of a shit sample? 

You might be wondering what all this has to do with mental health.

In January 2011, an article appeared in NewScientist magazine, which you can’t read unless you have a subscription 🙁 , telling the story of an elderly Parkinson’s patient who came to her doctor with a horrible case of constipation and an infected colon. I think the doctor treated her with a fecal transplant from her son, but I don’t know for sure, since I’m not a subscriber. Anyhow, rumor has it her Parkinson’s symptoms miraculously disappeared along with her gut infection.

What I do know is that Borody is currently doing a clinical trial on 18 Parkinson’s patients using C. difficile antibiotics. It will be very interesting to see what happens. Could it really be as straightforward as swapping out our shit? Like I said in my earlier post, maybe it’s time we paid more attention to all those freeloaders in our bellies.

About that gut feeling

More news on the microbiome. As I explained in my post about bacterial crowdsourcing, each and every one of us hosts about 100 trillion microbes in and on our bodies. This population is known as the “human microbiome.” They’re everywhere – armpits, butt cracks, skin, nostrils… and guts. Our guts alone harbor more than 1000 different kinds of bacteria.

The microbiome is a very hot area of research right now, and rightly so, in my opinion. The US National Institutes of Health is pouring money into the Human Microbiome Project in much the same way they funded the Human Genome Project starting in 1990. Understanding our own cells isn’t enough, see, cuz guess what? All those critters probably aren’t just sitting there doing nothing.

Recent research bears this out. A team from University College Cork recently reported on research in which they fed mice probiotic bacteria for six weeks and then observed their behavior.  The mice receiving the probiotics exhibited fewer signs of stress and anxiety. They spent more time exploring nerve-wracking places like elevated walkways and had a smaller spike in their stress hormones when placed in water, another really scary mouse experience. Lead researcher John Cryan was psyched:

“This was really exciting because it tells us the animals are more chilled out and don’t mount the same stress response.”

Even more interesting is that when the researchers cut the vagus nerve (which connects the nerve cells in the gut with the brain), all these beneficial effects vanished. The probiotics aren’t affecting the brain chemistry directly, they’re affecting the gut chemistry, which then gets transmitted somehow to the brain.

Jonah Lehrer wrote about the research in the WSJ, “The Yogurt Made Me Do It.” He proved once again why he’s my all-time favorite science writer by focusing on the study’s philosophical implications. Most of us “feel” like our minds are different than our bodies. But if we extrapolate from that mouse study and assume the premise might also hold true with humans, then what we’ve got in our guts affects how we feel, and how we experience the world. You should really read the whole article, but here are a couple juicy snippets if you don’t have time:

There’s nothing metaphorical about “gut feelings,” for what happens in the gut really does influence what we feel.

This research shows that the immateriality of mind is a deep illusion. Although we feel like a disembodied soul, many feelings and choices are actually shaped by the microbes in our gut and the palpitations of our heart. Nietzsche was right: “There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”

In another piece of recent research, scientists show that antibiotics can permanently destroy some species of our gut flora. Maryn McKenna writes about it in her Wired blog Superbug. We’ve evolved along with our microbiome in a lovely symbiotic adaptation that’s gone on over countless millenia. Are we eradicating all that hard work in just two generations by flagrantly overtreating common, non-life-threatening infections?   Connect these two pieces of research and see what you get. Good gut bacteria = good mental health. Antibiotics kill gut bacteria permanently. Depressed, anyone? Stressed? My question: can yogurt offset this? Are my children going to spend years in therapy or pop Prozac for the rest of their lives because of all that pink antibiotic they swallowed when they were babies? Is the whole thing just a Big Pharma Plot?

As I dug through these fascinating bits of evidence of the microbiome’s importance in human health, I ran across yet another connection. Last June, NewScientist magazine reported on research that found that autistic children had a different “gut bacteria signature” in their urine than normal children.

“It adds another link to the gut bacterial involvement in the onset of disorder,” says Glenn Gibson of the University of Reading, UK, who has previously identified abnormally high levels of clostridium bacteria in children with autism.

One possibility is that the gut bacteria in children with autism are producing toxins that might interfere with brain development. One of the compounds identified in the urine of autistic children was N-methyl-nicotinamide (NMND), which has also been implicated in Parkinson’s disease.

They were hopeful that this could be used as a sort of diagnostic tool, in the hope that addressing the problem earlier, even before behavioral traits showed up, would be beneficial. I hope they go further than this, and try and figure out a way to restore the health or these kids’ gut microbiomes, rather than just help them cope with the effects of toxic ones.

All this research illustrates that the gut microbiome plays a critical role in far more than just our gastrointestinal health.  I already wrote about the possibility that the microbiome very likely plays a role in cancer. It’s a good thing that we’re broadening scientific inquiry beyond the limited scope of the human genome. There’s a whole lot more in our navels (and our breakfasts) that merits a good, long gaze.

Cancer and coincidences

Sometimes coincidences just jump out and tackle you. Yesterday, as I was perusing the New York Times, I came across an article entitled “Cancer’s secrets come into sharper focus” and I was hit with no less than five (5) amazing coincidences. Continue reading

Crowdsourcing, Part III

Saturday I wrote a post about how I wasn’t aware of what was going on in my body, and how unsettling that felt. So unsettling, in fact, that I wasn’t able to write the post I had been planning for several days, and had to gaze intensely at my navel for a whole weekend instead.

That was probably a good thing, because it gave me some new insight into this post. Navel gazing isn’t all bad. Turns out there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there.

Last fall I translated an article by Daniel Saraga for Reflex Magazine about the gazillions of bacteria we have living on and in our bodies. The title (in English) was “Me, Myself and I – and a million other germs.” It should actually have been “Me, Myself and I  – and 100 trillion other germs.” Continue reading