"Copia" is Latin for "abundance," and this blog explores my belief that abundance is all around us. We live in a world of infinite possibilities, and we have the ability to choose our own paths. I write about a wide range of topics, and common themes are politics, civil liberties, health, the environment, and science. Who am I? I'm Torq Anvil...
Saturday, May 05, 2012
Depression and Junior Seau
Bonnie Bernstein has a thoughtful post out on Junior Seau and depression:
Depression is a disease. One frequently accompanied by feelings of
shame, particularly among men, because society still struggles to
differentiate between sadness and a condition that often requires
medication to treat effectively. In severe cases, thought processes are
so distorted, the only thing in focus is despair. It is incomprehensible
that there’s anything positive in life to latch onto or anyone who
cares enough to listen and help. Meld the ball and chain of depression
with a prideful man like Seau, and it’s no wonder he didn’t confide in
friends or loved ones about his inner demons.
Life can bestow unexpected gifts, and sometime in her late 40s, Martin, a real estate agent living on Long Island, a busy working mother who had never been in a track meet, discovered a glorious secret hidden away in her body. Not only was she a good runner, she was also an outstanding one. In fact, she was one of the most remarkable female distance runners in the world.
This discovery of greatness in her legs came too late for the kind of dreams a younger woman might have: intercollegiate championships, Olympic glory, being the absolute fastest of the fast. As decades pass, maximum heart rate slows, aerobic capacity wanes, muscle mass tends to dwindle.
But Martin has been redefining what is possible for an older body, setting a string of formidable national and world records.
Before I rode in the week long AIDS/LifeCycle five years ago, I'd hardly spent anytime on a bike since high school. And after only putting in the bare minimum amount of training, I wasn't too sure midway through day 2 (my first 100+ mile ride) if I was going to survive the experience. But I got a second wind in the afternoon; by day 5, I was flying. I thought to myself, "This would have been the sport I'd have excelled at had I thought to try it when I was younger."
And now Kathy Martin comes along to remind me that it's not too late.
Really good news today on the benefits of taking a low dose (81 mg) aspirin every day. Not only does it reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, researchers at the University of Oxford report that in as little as three years, aspirin can significantly cut the risk of cancer and its spread. From the New York Times:
Researchers at the University of Oxford found that after three years of daily aspirin use, the risk of developing cancer was reduced by almost 25 percent when compared with a control group not taking aspirin. After five years, the risk of dying of cancer was reduced by 37 percent among those taking aspirin.
A second paper that analyzed five large randomized controlled studies in Britain found that over six and a half years on average, daily aspirin use reduced the risk of metastatic cancer by 36 percent and the risk of adenocarcinomas — common solid cancers including colon, lung and prostate cancer — by 46 percent.
The University of Oxford also notes that one risk of taking daily aspirin--the possibility of stomach bleeds--reduces over time and is clearly outweighed by the benefits. Their story here.
ALSO ON THE CANCER RESEARCH FRONT, here's an interesting article on the use of viruses to fight tumors:
Cancer cells are able to replicate wildly, but there’s a trade-off: They cannot ward off infection as effectively as healthy cells. So scientists have been looking for ways to create viruses that are too weak to damage healthy cells yet strong enough to invade and destroy tumor cells.
One man's experience: living with HIV for 30 years
In today's New York Times, Mark Trautwein shares his experience of being infected with HIV for the last 30 years. From the early days of uncertainty, fear, and death and the years of juggling complicated pill regimens, Trautwein has learned some lessons about life:
The dead don’t have problems, so I was grateful for mine. I was alive and my deathly companion less insistent. AIDS and I have been together for almost 30 years now. My relationship with AIDS is one of my most enduring ones, and has both enriched and beggared my life. It robbed me of friends and loved ones, and with them memories we would have had and repositories of my own history. It ended a career I loved. It cost me a marriage. My intimacy with health care in America has been costly and exhausting. I know these are small prices to pay for life.
What I’ve gained is precious. Above all, the constant companionship of plague has taught me that life is about living, not cheating death. Fighting disease is required and struggling with life inevitable. But I accept the outcomes now, whatever they are. My disease does not make me special, nor does my survival make me courageous.
On that day I walked from the hospital knowing I had “it,” I was given a great gift: the realization that we all dangle from that most delicate of threads and that the only way to live a life is to love it.
I haven’t died on schedule, and I’ve been learning not to live life on one either
Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the first report in the medical literature of the disease that was to become known as AIDS. From the CDC's MMWR Weekly:
In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died. All 5 patients had laboratory-confirmed previous or current cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and candidal mucosal infection. Case reports of these patients follow.
I was fifteen at the time, still struggling in a small Midwestern town with my conflicted sexuality. It would be four more years before Rock Hudson died of AIDS and brought the disease home to me personally, leading me to slam shut a door I was just on the verge of opening. I remember riding around in my car one warm summer night, taping myself on my cassette recorder: Why did this have to happen now? Just when I was thinking that I could finally express who I am? Will I have to hide forever?
Thirty years. In those three decades I've come out. Demonstrated with ACT-UP and Queer Nation. Had countless friends test positive and several diagnosed with AIDS (though miraculously, only a couple have died). I've walked to raise money. Danced to raise money. Rode to raise money. I've studied the disease in classes. Been tested for it dozens of times. I've seen infection with HIV transition from being a death sentence to something much more manageable... and watched attitudes shift as well. Throughout these years the virus and the disease have been constants in my life as a gay man. Something to be afraid of. Something to fight. Something to assimilate as a fact of life. But it's never over, and each year brings a change in how this disease affects my community and how it affects me.
THE TENTH ANNUAL AIDS/LIFECYCLE begins tomorrow: a couple thousand riders and many hundreds of volunteers making the 545 mile journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I rode that route in 2007, and last year I volunteered for the medical team. I so wish I were going to be there this year!
To all my friends who will be: "Know that you are heroes for countless people. Ride safe and don't forget to use the hand sanitizer. :-) But most of all, when the going gets tough, remember that I love you. I'm so very proud of all that you're doing."
(Click to see a larger image)
And as a reminder of the long road from where this all began to the future we still hope for, here's the "I just wanna be there" scene from 1989's Longtime Companion.
Writing in the January issue of The Journal of Gerontology B, the authors conclude that people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but because they survive longer with disease.
As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally.
Turns out that up to a fifth of breast milk is indigestible for an infant. So what are those complex sugars doing? Some serve as food for a strain of bacteria that coats the newborn's gut. Others mimic the surface structure of the intestines, tricking undesirable bacteria into attaching to them and thereby sweeping them out of the digestive system. Together these effects help protect the baby at a time when his or her immune system is still very undeveloped.
Here's an interesting article that clarifies the difference between food allergies and food intolerance:
Part of the confusion is over what is a food allergy and what is a food intolerance, Dr. [Matthew J.] Fenton said. Allergies involve the immune system, while intolerances generally do not. For example, a headache from sulfites in wine is not a food allergy. It is an intolerance. The same is true for lactose intolerance, caused by the lack of an enzyme needed to digest sugar in milk.
And other medical conditions can make people think they have food allergies, Dr. Fenton said. For example, people sometimes interpret acid reflux symptoms after eating a particular food as an allergy.
The Panel's cover letter to President Obama (my emphasis):
The President The White House Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
Though overall cancer incidence and mortality have continued to decline in recent years, the disease continues to devastate the lives of far too many Americans. In 2009 alone, approximately 1.5 million American men, women, and children were diagnosed with cancer, and 562,000 died from the disease. With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action. The Administration’s commitment to the cancer community and recent focus on critically needed reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act is praiseworthy. However, our Nation still has much work ahead to identify the many existing but unrecognized environmental carcinogens and eliminate those that are known from our workplaces, schools, and homes.
To jumpstart this national effort, the President’s Cancer Panel (the Panel) dedicated its 2008–2009 activities to examining the impact of environmental factors on cancer risk. The Panel considered industrial, occupational, and agricultural exposures as well as exposures related to medical practice, military activities, modern lifestyles, and natural sources. In addition, key regulatory, political, industrial, and cultural barriers to understanding and reducing environmental and occupational carcinogenic exposures were identified. The attached report presents the Panel’s recommendations to mitigate or eliminate these barriers.
The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated. With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread. One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), is still found in many consumer products and remains unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between BPA and several diseases, including various cancers.
While BPA has received considerable media coverage, the public remains unaware of many common environmental carcinogens such as naturally occurring radon and manufacturing and combustion by-products such as formaldehyde and benzene. Most also are unaware that children are far more vulnerable to environmental toxins and radiation than adults. Efforts to inform the public of such harmful exposures and how to prevent them must be increased. All levels of government, from federal to local, must work to protect every American from needless disease through rigorous regulation of environmental pollutants.
Environmental exposures that increase the national cancer burden do not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer. However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program. The American people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures. The Panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.
Fungal infections are one thing when they're between your toes or on your jockstrap. When they're in your lungs or bloodstream, they can be deadly. A new, highly virulent strain has shown up in Oregon and killed about 25% of those infected (which luckily hasn't been a lot of people as of yet). It's expected to migrate into California next.
I was skeptical when I read the first paragraph of this article, but it ended up being fairly informative. Apparently exercise heightens women's appetites but not those of most men. And while exercise alone is not always a great way of losing weight, it's highly important for keeping it off.
It's all about inertia. Your body generally wants to stay at the weight it's used to. Working out the body helps to reset that baseline.
Read the full New York Times Magazine article here.
This chart helps to explain why a Big Mac is cheaper than a salad: look how the federal government allocates agricultural subsidies compared to recommendations for a healthy diet. Ridiculous.
More here and here. For more information on the cost of producing various meats, check out this old post.
Andrew Sullivan is one of the most prolific bloggers around; he and his team post an amazing number of entries a day. Here are three from today's bunch that remind me of why blogging at its best is a valuable dialogue... and why The Daily Dish is clearly blogging at its best:
One: A response to Dick Cheney's latest criticism of President Obama, and a comment on the failure of the media to question authority
Two: A response from a reader which makes the point that in 1958, the financial sector's debt was 6% of GDP. Fifty years later it's 115% of GDP.
Three: A re-post of a brilliant HIV/AIDS awareness ad.
If your wondering about those new recommendations about women getting fewer cancer screen procedures (mammograms and Pap smears), it's important to keep in mind that there is some evidence that more screening often results in unnecessary treatment (here and here) and that all procedures have some risk. The latter point seems to underly the fact that studies show that in places where doctors perform more tests and procedures, people are sometimes less healthy.
You can read more about vitamin D here. It's hard to get enough from food, and many parts of the country don't have enough sunshine, especially in the winter, for people to make enough on their own.
Sometimes I'm intense, sometimes effervescent. After 16 years in the SF Bay Area, I moved to Portland for four years, and fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. After a couple of years back in SF and a couple more in the clean, beautiful desert air of Nevada (yes, Las Vegas, but just minutes from beautiful Red Rock Canyon), I'm back in Oregon. I grew up in a town of 800, went to Stanford, did the corporate thing at Oracle, became a circuit boy, and now finally think I'm settling down a bit. I like a lot of stimulation and a lot of variety... you might find me camping in the woods, dancing all night, or deep in conversation over coffee or cocktails. I'm a science buff, especially biology and cosmology. I like being a prankster... goofy things amuse me. Travel is great, whether it's my favorite city (NYC) or a tropical island.
>>> WHAT DO I BELIEVE? That life can be absurd and random, and those qualities give it much of its beauty. That we have choice in our lives. That there is no way that things are supposed to be; there's only how they are. That vampires exist. That this, too, shall pass. And don't worry, it only seems kinky at first. ;-)
Subscribe to this RSS feed
