Sweet notes
People with diabetes have trouble maintaining healthy levels of insulin in their blood, which requires them to externally supplement through injections or a pump. To make that process easier, researchers have been investigating implanting insulin-producing designer cells in capsules that can be controlled through signals, such as light, temperature or electric fields.
In the latest effort, they’ve tried music with sound frequencies and volume levels acting as the triggers. The approach appears to be promising, especially using some types of music. In experiments, Queen’s “We Will Rock You” was particularly effective.
Body of knowledge
The Egyptians, who encountered it while preparing mummies, called the appendix “the worm” for its small, squishy, tubular shape.
Get me that. Stat!
Low-dose aspirin has been linked to anemia in older adults. A study found that otherwise healthy adults in Australia (over age 70) and in the U.S. (over 65) who took a regular low-dose aspirin to reduce risk of heart attack or stroke were 20 percent more likely to be anemic than a group taking a placebo.
The anemia was likely caused by minor internal bleeding over time.
Counts
Stories for the waiting room
Diabetes will be the defining disease of the 21st century, with the number of people having the chronic condition more than doubling to 1.3 billion by 2050. By that time, it’s predicted that about 1 in 10 people around the world will have the disease, representing a 60 percent surge in prevalence, according to a recent Lancet study.
Doc talk
Mania of the week
Best medicine
First person: As part of my new diet, I removed all of the food from my house.
Second person: Congratulations. It must have been difficult.
First person: A little, but also delicious.
Observation
“I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count.”
Medical history
This week in 1878, warning against the use of tobacco, the senior physician to the Metropolitan Free Hospital wrote in The London Times about the huge health and social costs of tobacco consumption. “The use of tobacco is one of the most evident of all the retrograde influences of our time,” opined Dr. Charles Drysdale.
Earlier, Drysdale had published medical data noting excessive tobacco use was linked to jaundice and heart palpitations. In 1875, he wrote a booklet titled “Tobacco and the Diseases It Produces.”
Just 89 years later, the U.S. Surgeon General would famously declare that cigarette smoke causes lung cancer and probably heart disease.
Ig Nobel apprised
The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate achievements that make people laugh, then think. A look at real science that’s hard to take seriously, and even harder to ignore.
In 1998, the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology went to Peter Fong of Gettysburg College for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.
Sum body
Fifteen diseases by their old monikers and current names.
1. Ablepsy — blindness
2. Apoplexy — stroke
3. Bronze John — yellow fever
4. Congestive fever — malaria
5. Consumption — tuberculosis
6. Falling sickness — epilepsy
7. Green sickness — anemia
8. Grippe — flu
9. Leprosy — Hansen’s disease
10. Lumbago — back pain
11. Mortification — gangrene
12. Quinsy — tonsillitis
13. Scrumpox — impetigo
14. Shakes — Parkinson’s disease
15. Winter fever — pneumonia
Last words
“How did the Mets do today?”
LaFee is vice president of communications for the Sanford Burnham Prebys research institute.
