Chloroquine-induced psychosis

In the past few days, a new hot subject has gripped the attention of various media and concerned the medical doctors, as if they don’t have enough to deal with: chloroquine. That is because the President of the U.S.A., Donald Trump, endorsed chloroquine as treatment of COVID-19, a “game changer”, despite his very own director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci, very emphatically and vehemently denying that the promise of (hydroxy)chloroquine is beyond anecdotal (see the White House briefing transcript here).

Many medical doctors spoke out urging caution against the drug, particularly against the combination the President endorses: hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin. As I understand it, this combo can be lethal as it can lead to fatal arrhythmia.

As for the (hydroxy)cloroquine’s possibility to help treat COVID-19, the jury is still out. Far out. Meaning that there have been a few interesting observations of the drugs working in a Petri dish (Liu et al. 2020, Wang et al., 2020), but as any pharma company knows, there is a long and perilous way from Petri dishes to pharmacies. To be precise, only 1 in 5000 drugs get from pre-clinical trials to approval and it takes about 12 years for this process to be completed (Kaljevic et al., 2004). The time is so long not because red tape, as some would deplore, but because it takes time to see what it does in humans (Phase 0), what doses are safe and don’t kill you (Phase 1), does it work at all for the intended disease (Phase 2), compare it with other drugs and evaluate the long-term side effects (Phase 3) and, finally, to see the risks and benefits of this drug (Phase 4). While we could probably get rid of Phase 0 and 4 when there is such a pandemic, there is no way I would submit my family to anything that hasn’t passed phases 1, 2, and 3. And those take years. With all the money that a nation-state has, it would still take 18 months to do it semi-properly.

Luckily for all of us, chloroquine is a very old and established anti-malarial medicine, and as such we can safely dispense of Phases 0, 1, and 4, which is fine. So we can start Phase 2 with (hydroxy)chloroquine. And that is exactly what WHO and several others are doing right now. But we don’t have enough data. We haven’t done it yet. So one can hope as much as they want, but that doesn’t make it faster.

Unfortunately – and here we go to the crux of the post -, following the President’s endorsement, many started to hoard chloroquine. Particularly the rich who can afford to “convince” an MD to write them a script for it. In countries where chloroquine is sold without prescription, like Nigeria, where it is used for arthritis, people rushed to clear the pharmacies and some didn’t just stockpiled it, but they took it without reason and without knowing the dosage. And they died. [EDIT, 23 March 2020. If you think that wouldn’t ever happen in the land of the brave, think again, as the first death to irresponsible taking chloroquine just happened in the USA]. In addition, the chloroquine hoarding in US by those who can afford it (is about $200 for 50 pills) lead to lack of supply for those who really need it, like lupus or rheumatology patients.

For those who blindly hoard or take chloroquine without prescription, I have a little morsel of knowledge to impart. Remember I am not an MD; I hold a PhD in neuroscience. So I’ll tell you what my field knows about chloroquine.

Both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine can cause severe psychosis.

That’s right. More than 7.1 % of people who took chloroquine as prophylaxis or for treatment of malaria developed “mental and neurological manifestations” (Bitta et al.,  2017). “Hydroxychloroquine was associated with the highest prevalence of mental neurological manifestations” (p. 12). The phenomenon is well-reported, actually having its own syndrome name: “chloroquine-induced psychosis”. It was observed more than 50 years ago, in 1962 (Mustakallio et al., 1962). The mechanisms are unclear, with several hypotheses being put forward, like the drugs disrupting the NMDA transmission, calcium homeostasis, vacuole exocytosis or some other mysterious immune or transport-related mechanism. Because the symptoms are so acute, so persistent and so diverse than more than one brain neurotransmitter system must be affected.

Chloroquine-induced psychosis has sudden onset, within 1-2 days of ingestion. The syndrome presents with paranoid ideation, persecutory delusions, hallucinations, fear, confusion, delirium, altered mood, personality changes, irritability, insomnia, suicidal ideation, and violence (Biswas et al., 2014, Mascolo et al., 2018). All these at moderately low or therapeutically recommended doses (Good et al., 1982). One or two pills can be lethal in toddlers (Smith & Klein-Schwartz, 2005). The symptoms persist long after the drug ingestion has stopped (Maxwell et al., 2015).

Still want to take it “just in case”?

P.S. A clarification: the chemical difference between hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine is only one hydroxyl group (OH). Both are antimalarial and both have been tested in vitro for COVID-19. There are slight differences between them in terms of toxicity, safety and even mechanisms, but for the intents of this post I have treated them as one drug, since both produce psychosis.

REFERENCES:

1) Biswas PS, Sen D, & Majumdar R. (2014, Epub 28 Nov 2013). Psychosis following chloroquine ingestion: a 10-year comparative study from a malaria-hyperendemic district of India. General Hospital Psychiatry, 36(2): 181–186. doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2013.07.012, PMID: 24290896 ARTICLE

2) Bitta MA, Kariuki SM, Mwita C, Gwer S, Mwai L, & Newton CRJC (2 Jun 2017). Antimalarial drugs and the prevalence of mental and neurological manifestations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Version 2. Wellcome Open Research, 2(13): 1-20. PMCID: PMC5473418, PMID: 28630942, doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.10658.2 ARTICLE|FREE FULLTEXT PDF

4) Good MI & Shader RI. Lethality and behavioral side effects of chloroquine (1982). Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, 2(1): 40–47. doi: 10.1097/00004714-198202000-00005, PMID: 7040501. ARTICLE

3) Kraljevic S, Stambrook PJ, & Pavelic K (Sep 2004). Accelerating drug discovery. EMBO Reports, 5(9): 837–842. doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400236, PMID: 15470377, PMCID: PMC1299137. ARTICLE| FREE FULLTEXT PDF

4) Mascolo A, Berrino PM, Gareri P, Castagna A, Capuano A, Manzo C, & Berrino L. (Oct 2018, Epub 9 Jun 2018). Neuropsychiatric clinical manifestations in elderly patients treated with hydroxychloroquine: a review article. Inflammopharmacology, 26(5): 1141-1149. doi: 10.1007/s10787-018-0498-5, PMID: 29948492. ARTICLE

5) Maxwell NM, Nevin RL, Stahl S, Block J, Shugarts S, Wu AH, Dominy S, Solano-Blanco MA, Kappelman-Culver S, Lee-Messer C, Maldonado J, & Maxwell AJ (Jun 2015, Epub 9 Apr 2015). Prolonged neuropsychiatric effects following management of chloroquine intoxication with psychotropic polypharmacy. Clinical Case Reports, 3(6): 379-87. doi: 10.1002/ccr3.238, PMID: 26185633. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

6) Mustakallio KK, Putkonen T, & Pihkanen TA (1962 Dec 29). Chloroquine psychosis? Lancet, 2(7270): 1387-1388. doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(62)91067-x, PMID: 13936884. ARTICLE

7) Smith ER & Klein-Schwartz WJ (May 2005). Are 1-2 dangerous? Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine exposure in toddlers. The Journal of Emergency Medicine, 28(4): 437-443. doi: 10.1016/j.jemermed.2004.12.011, PMID: 15837026. ARTICLE

Studies about chloroquine and hydoxychloroquine on SARS-Cov2 in vitro:

• Liu, J., Cao, R., Xu, M., Wang, X., Zhang, H., Li, Y., Hu, Z., Zhong, W., & Wang, M. (18 March 2020). Hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, is effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro. Cell Discovery, 6 (16), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41421-020-0156-0 ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
• Wang, M., Cao, R., Zhang, H., Yang, X., Liu, J., Xu, M., Shi, Z., Hu, Z., Zhong, W., & Xiao, G. (18 March 2020). Remdesivir and chloroquine effectively inhibit the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in vitro. Cell Research, 30: 269–271. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41422-020-0282-0. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

First study about chloroquine and hydoxychloroquine on SARS-Cov2 in vivo below. Unfortunately, it has some methodological flaws, see here and here, which hopefully will be corrected once the peer-reviewers will take a closer look at it. UPDATE [31-3-2020]: It seems the article is flawed in more than one way, with serious ethical issues (timeline of treatment doesn’t match the methods reported, patients appear and disappear from data points, graphs different depending on the venue, published in the same journal where the author is editor, no peer-review, no blind, no placebo, controls barely tested, plus, no reputable researcher should announce that they are the genius that cured COVID-19 on a YouTube video, particularly when they get to publish in 24 hours anyway).

Anyway, here it is:

• Gautret P, Lagier J-C, Parola P, Hoang VT, Meddeb L, Mailhe M, Doudier B, Courjon J, Giordanengo V, Esteves Vieira V, Tissot Dupont H,Colson SEP, Chabriere E, La Scola B, Rolain J-M, Brouqui P,  Raoult D. (20 March 2020). Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial. International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, PII:S0924-8579(20)30099-6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

These studies are also not peer reviewed or at the very least not properly peer reviewed. I say that so as to take them with a grain of salt. Not to criticize in the slightest. Because I do commend the speed with which these were done and published given the pandemic. Bravo to all the authors involved (except maybe the last one f it proves to be fraudulent). And also a thumbs up to the journals which made the data freely available in record time. Unfortunately, from these papers to a treatment we still have a long way to go.

By Neuronicus, 22 March 2020

Pic of the day: African dogs sneeze to vote

Excerpt from Walker et al. (2017), p. 5:

“We also find an interaction between total sneezes and initiator POA in rallies (table 1) indicating that the number of sneezes required to initiate a collective movement differed according to the dominance of individuals involved in the rally. Specifically, we found that the likelihood of rally success increases with the dominance of the initiator (i.e. for lower POA categories) with lower-ranking initiators requiring more sneezes in the rally for it to be successful (figure 2d). In fact, our raw data and the resultant model showed that rallies never failed when a dominant (POA1) individual initiated and there were at least three sneezes, whereas rallies initiated by lower ranking individuals required a minimum of 10 sneezes to achieve the same level of success. Together these data suggest that wild dogs use a specific vocalization (the sneeze) along with a variable quorum response mechanism in the decision-making process. […]. We found that sneezes, a previously undocumented unvoiced sound in the species, are positively correlated with the likelihood of rally success preceding group movements and may function as a voting mechanism to establish group consensus in an otherwise despotically driven social system.”

REFERENCE: Walker RH, King AJ, McNutt JW, & Jordan NR (6 Sept. 2017). Sneeze to leave: African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) use variable quorum thresholds facilitated by sneezes in collective decisions. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biological Sciences, 284(1862). pii: 20170347. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0347. PMID: 28878054, PMCID: PMC5597819, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0347 ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

By Neuronicus, 1 August 2019

High fructose corn syrup IS bad for you

Because I cannot leave controversial things well enough alone – at least not when I know there shouldn’t be any controversy – my ears caught up with my tongue yesterday when the latter sputtered: “There is strong evidence for eliminating sugar from commonly used food products like bread, cereal, cans, drinks, and so on, particularly against that awful high fructose corn syrup”. “Yeah? You “researched” that up, haven’t you? Google is your bosom friend, ain’t it?” was the swift reply. Well, if you get rid of the ultra-emphatic air-quotes flanking the word ‘researched’ and replace ‘Google’ with ‘Pubmed’, then, yes, I did researched it and yes, Pubmed is my bosom friend.

Initially, I wanted to just give you all a list with peer-reviewed papers that found causal and/or correlational links between high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, metabolic and endocrine anomalies and so on. But there are way too many of them; there are over 500 papers on the subject in Pubmed only. And most of them did find that HFCS does nasty stuff to you, look for yourselves here. Then I thought to feature a paper showing that HFCS is differently metabolized than the fructose from fruits, because I keep hearing that lie perpetrated by the sugar and corn industries that “sugar is sugar” (no, it’s not! Demonstrably so!), but I doubt my yesterday’s interlocutor would care about liver’s enzymatic activity and other chemical processes with lots of acronyms. So, finally, I decided to feature a straight forward, no-nonsense paper, published recently, done at a top tier university, with human subjects, so I won’t hear any squabbles.

Price et al. (2018) studied 49 healthy subjects aged age 18–40 yr, of normal and stable body weight, and free from confounding medications or drugs, whose physical activity and energy-balanced meals were closely monitored. During the study, the subjects’ food and drink intake as well as their timing were rigorously controlled. The researchers varied only the beverages between groups, in such a way that one group received a drink sweetened with HFCS-55 (55% fructose, 45% glucose, as the one used in commercially available drinks) with every controlled meal, whereas the other group received an identical drink in size (adjusted for their energy requirements in such a way that it provided the same 25% of it), but sweetened with aspartame. The study lasted two weeks. No other beverage was allowed, including fruit juice. Urine samples were collected daily and blood samples 4 times per day.

There was a body weight increase of 810 grams (1.8 lb) in subjects consuming HFCS-sweetened beverages for 2 weeks when compared with aspartame controls. The researches also found differences in the levels of a whole host of acronyms (ppTG, ApoCIII, ApoE, OEA, DHEA, DHG, if you must know) involved in a variety of nasty things, like obesity, fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, even Alzheimer’s.

This study is the third part of a larger NIH-funded study which investigates the metabolic effects of consuming sugar-sweetened beverages in about 200 participants over 5 years, registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01103921. The first part (Stanhope et al., 2009) reported that consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans” (title), and the second part (Stanhope et al., 2015) found that “consuming beverages containing 10%, 17.5%, or 25% of energy requirements from HFCS produced dose-dependent increases in circulating lipid/lipoprotein risk factors for cardiovascular disease and uric acid within 2 weeks” (Abstract). They also found a dose-dependant increase in body weight, but in those subjects the results were not statistically significant (p = 0.09) after correcting for multiple comparisons. But I’ll bet that if/when the authors will publish all the data in one paper at the end of clinical trials they will have more statistical power and the trend in weight gain more obvious, as in the present paper.  Besides, it looks like there may be more than three parts to this study anyway.

The adverse effects of a high sugar diet, particularly in HFCS, are known to so many researchers in the field that they have been actually compiled in a name: the “American Lifestyle-Induced Obesity Syndrome model, which included consumption of a high-fructose corn syrup in amounts relevant to that consumed by some Americans” (Basaranoglu et al., 2013). It doesn’t refer only to increases in body weight, but also type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertriglyceridemia, fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis, gout, etc.

The truly sad part is that avoiding added sugars in diets in USA is impossible unless you do all – and I mean all – your cooking home, including canning, jamming, bread-making, condiment-making and so on, not just “Oh, I’ll cook some chicken or ham tonight” because in that case you end up using canned tomato sauce (which has added sugar), bread crumbs (which have added sugar), or ham (which has added sugar), salad dressing (which has sugar) and so on. Go on, check your kitchen and see how many ingredients have sugar in them, including any meat products short of raw meat. If you never read the backs of the bottles, cans, or packages, oh my, are you in for a big surprise if you live in USA…

There are lot more studies out there on the subject, as I said, of various levels of reading difficulty. This paper is not easy to read for someone outside the field, that’s for sure. But the main gist of it is in the abstract, for all to see.

P.S. 1. Please don’t get me wrong: I am not against sugar in desserts, let it be clear. Nobody makes a more mean sweetalicious chocolate cake or carbolicious blueberry muffin than me, as I have been reassured many times. But I am against sugar in everything. You know I haven’t found in any store, including high-end and really high-end stores a single box of cereal of any kind without sugar? Just for fun, I’d like to be a daredevil and try it once. But there ain’t. Not in USA, anyway. I did find them in EU though. But I cannot keep flying over the Atlantic in the already crammed at premium luggage space unsweetened corn flakes from Europe which are probably made locally, incidentally and ironically, with good old American corn.

P.S. 2 I am not so naive, blind, or zealous to overlook the studies that did not find any deleterious effects of HFCS consumption. Actually, I was on the fence about HFCS until about 10 years ago when the majority of papers (now overwhelming majority) was showing that HFCS consumption not only increases weight gain, but it can also lead to more serious problems like the ones mentioned above. Or the few papers that say all added sugar is bad, but HFCS doesn’t stand out from the other sugars when it comes to disease or weight gain. But, like with most scientific things, the majority has it its way and I bow to it democratically until the new paradigm shift. Besides, the exposés of Kearns et al. (2016a, b, 2017) showing in detail and with serious documentation how the sugar industry paid prominent researchers for the past 50 years to hide the deleterious effects of added sugar (including cancer!) further cemented my opinion about added sugar in foods, particularly HFCS.

References:

1. Price CA, Argueta DA, Medici V, Bremer AA, Lee V, Nunez MV, Chen GX, Keim NL, Havel PJ, Stanhope KL, & DiPatrizio NV (1 Aug 2018, Epub 10 Apr 2018). Plasma fatty acid ethanolamides are associated with postprandial triglycerides, ApoCIII, and ApoE in humans consuming a high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened beverage. American Journal of Physiology. Endocrinology and Metabolism, 315(2): E141-E149. PMID: 29634315, PMCID: PMC6335011 [Available on 2019-08-01], DOI: 10.1152/ajpendo.00406.2017. ARTICLE | FREE FULTEXT PDF

2. Stanhope KL1, Medici V2, Bremer AA2, Lee V2, Lam HD2, Nunez MV2, Chen GX2, Keim NL2, Havel PJ (Jun 2015, Epub 22 Apr 2015). A dose-response study of consuming high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened beverages on lipid/lipoprotein risk factors for cardiovascular disease in young adults. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 101(6):1144-54. PMID: 25904601, PMCID: PMC4441807, DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.114.100461. ARTICLE | FREE FULTEXT PDF
   

3. Stanhope KL1, Schwarz JM, Keim NL, Griffen SC, Bremer AA, Graham JL, Hatcher B, Cox CL, Dyachenko A, Zhang W, McGahan JP, Seibert A, Krauss RM, Chiu S, Schaefer EJ, Ai M, Otokozawa S, Nakajima K, Nakano T, Beysen C, Hellerstein MK, Berglund L, Havel PJ (May 2009, Epub 20 Apr 2009). Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans. The Journal of Clinical Investigation,119(5):1322-34. PMID: 19381015, PMCID: PMC2673878, DOI:10.1172/JCI37385. ARTICLE | FREE FULTEXT PDF
   

(Very) Selected Bibliography:

Bocarsly ME, Powell ES, Avena NM, Hoebel BG. (Nov 2010, Epub 26 Feb 2010). High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior, 97(1):101-6. PMID: 20219526, PMCID: PMC3522469, DOI: 10.1016/j.pbb.2010.02.012. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

Kearns CE, Apollonio D, Glantz SA (21 Nov 2017). Sugar industry sponsorship of germ-free rodent studies linking sucrose to hyperlipidemia and cancer: An historical analysis of internal documents. PLoS Biology, 15(11):e2003460. PMID: 29161267, PMCID: PMC5697802, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460. ARTICLE | FREE FULTEXT PDF

Kearns CE, Schmidt LA, Glantz SA (1 Nov 2016). Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents. JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(11):1680-1685. PMID: 27617709, PMCID: PMC5099084, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394. ARTICLE | FREE FULTEXT PDF

Mandrioli D, Kearns CE, Bero LA (8 Sep 2016). Relationship between Research Outcomes and Risk of Bias, Study Sponsorship, and Author Financial Conflicts of Interest in Reviews of the Effects of Artificially Sweetened Beverages on Weight Outcomes: A Systematic Review of Reviews. PLoS One, 11(9):e0162198.PMID: 27606602, PMCID: PMC5015869, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162198. ARTICLE | FREE FULTEXT PDF

By Neuronicus, 22 March 2019

No licorice for you

I never liked licorice. And that turns out to be a good thing. Given that Halloween just happened yesterday and licorice candy is still sold in USA, I remembered the FDA’s warning against consumption of licorice from a year ago.

So I dug out the data supporting this recommendation. It’s a review paper published 6 years ago by Omar et al. (2012) meant to raise awareness of the risks of licorice consumption and to urge FDA to take regulatory steps.

The active ingredient in licorice is glycyrrhizic acid. This is hydrolyzed to glycyrrhetic acid by intestinal bacteria possessing a specialized ß-glucuronidase. Glycyrrhetic acid, in turn, inhibits 11-ß-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (11-ß-HSD) which results in cortisol activity increase, which binds to the mineralcorticoid receptors in the kidneys, leading to low potassium levels (called hypokalemia). Additionally, licorice components can also bind directly to the mineralcorticoid receptors.

Eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks (which is roughly equivalent to 2 mg/kg/day of pure glycyrrhizinic acid) is enough to produce disturbances in the following systems:

• cardiovascular (hypertension, arrhythmias, heart failure, edemas)
• neurological (stroke, myoclonia, ocular deficits, Carpal tunnel, muscle weakness)
• renal (low potassium, myoglobinuria, alkalosis)
• and others

Although everybody is affected by licorice consumption, the most vulnerable populations are those over 40 years old, those who don’t poop every day, or are hypertensive, anorexic or of the female persuasion.

Unfortunately, even if one doesn’t enjoy licorice candy, they still can consume it as it is used as a sweetener or flavoring agent in many foods, like sodas and snacks. It is also used in naturopathic crap, herbal remedies, and other dangerous scams of that ilk. So beware of licorice and read the label, assuming the makers label it.

Licorice products (Images: PD, Collage: Neuronicus)

REFERENCE: Omar HR, Komarova I, El-Ghonemi M, Fathy A, Rashad R, Abdelmalak HD, Yerramadha MR, Ali Y, Helal E, & Camporesi EM. (Aug 2012). Licorice abuse: time to send a warning message. Therapeutic Advances in Endocrinology and Metabolism, 3(4):125-38. PMID: 23185686, PMCID: PMC3498851, DOI: 10.1177/2042018812454322. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

By Neuronicus, 1 November 2018

The FIRSTS: The cause(s) of dinosaur extinction

A few days ago, a follower of mine gave me an interesting read from The Atlantic regarding the dinosaur extinction. Like many of my generation, I was taught in school that dinosaurs died because an asteroid hit the Earth. That led to a nuclear winter (or a few years of ‘nuclear winters’) which killed the photosynthetic organisms, and then the herbivores didn’t have anything to eat so they died and then the carnivores didn’t have anything to eat and so they died. Or, as my 4-year-old puts it, “[in a solemn voice] after the asteroid hit, big dusty clouds blocked the sun; [in an ominous voice] each day was colder than the previous one and so, without sunlight to keep them alive [sad face, head cocked sideways], the poor dinosaurs could no longer survive [hands spread sideways, hung head] “. Yes, I am a proud parent. Now I have to do a sit-down with the child and explain that… What, exactly?

Well, The Atlantic article showcases the struggles of a scientist – paleontologist and geologist Gerta Keller – who doesn’t believe the mainstream asteroid hypothesis; rather she thinks there is enough evidence to point out that extreme volcano eruptions, like really extreme, thousands of times more powerful than anything we know in the recorded history, put out so much poison (soot, dust, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur, carbon dioxide, mercury, lead, and so on) in the atmosphere that, combined with the consequent dramatic climate change, killed the dinosaurs. The volcanoes were located in India and they erupted for hundreds of thousands of years, but most violent eruptions, Keller thinks, were in the last 40,000 years before the extinction. This hypothesis is called the Deccan volcanism from the region in India where these nasty volcanoes are located, first proposed by Vogt (1972) and Courtillot et al. (1986).

So which is true? Or, rather, because this is science we’re talking about, which hypothesis is more supported by the facts: the volcanism or the impact?

The impact hypothesis was put forward in 1980 when Walter Alvarez, a geologist, noticed a thin layer of clay in rocks that were about 65 million years old, which coincided with the time when the dinosaurs disappeared. This layer is on the KT boundary (sometimes called K-T, K-Pg, or KPB, looks like the biologists are not the only ones with acronym problems) and marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogenic geological periods (T is for Triassic, yeah, I know). Walter asked his father, the famous Nobel Prize physicist Louis Alvarez, to take a look at it and see what it is. Alvarez Sr. analyzed it and decided that the clay contains a lot of iridium, dozens of times more than expected. After gathering more samples from Europe and New Zealand, they published a paper (Alvarez et al., 1980) in which the scientists reasoned that because Earth’s iridium is deeply buried in its bowels and not in its crust, this iridium at the K-Pg boundary is of extraterrestrial origin, which could be brought here only by an asteroid/comet. This is also the paper in which it was put forth for the first time the conjecture that the asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, based on the uncanny coincidence of timing.

The discovery of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico followed a more sinuous path because the geophysicists who first discovered it in the ’70s were working for an oil company, looking for places to drill. Once the dinosaur-died-due-to-asteroid-impact hypothesis gained popularity outside academia, the geologists and the physicists put two-and-two together, acquired more data, and published a paper (Hildebrand et al., 1991) where the Chicxulub crater was for the first time linked with the dinosaur extinction. Although the crater was not radiologically dated yet, they had enough geophysical, stratigraphic, and petrologic evidence to believe it was as old as the iridium layer and the dinosaur die-out.

But, devil is in the details, as they say. Keller published a paper in 2007 saying the Chicxulub event predates the extinction by some 300,000 years (Keller et al., 2007). She looked at geological samples from Texas and found the glass granule layer (indicator of the Chicxhulub impact) way below the K-Pg boundary. So what’s up with the iridium then? Keller (2014) believes that is not of extraterrestrial origin and it might well have been spewed up by a particularly nasty eruption or the sediments got shifted. Schulte et al. (2010), on the other hand, found high levels of iridium in 85 samples from all over the world in the KPG layer. Keller says that some other 260 samples don’t have iridium anomalies. As a response, Esmeray-Senlet et al. (2017) used some fancy Mass Spectrometry to show that the iridium profiles could have come only from Chicxulub, at least in North America. They argue that the variability in iridium profiles around the world is due to regional geochemical processes. And so on, and so on, the controversy continues.

Actual radioisotope dating was done a bit later in 2013: date of K-Pg is 66.043 ± 0.043 MA (millions of years ago), date of the Chicxulub crater is 66.038 ±.025/0.049 MA. Which means that the researchers “established synchrony between the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary and associated mass extinctions with the Chicxulub bolide impact to within 32,000 years” (Renne et al., 2013), which is a blink of an eye in geological times.

Now I want you to understand that often in science, though by far not always, matters are not so simple as she is wrong, he is right. In geology, what matters most is the sample. If the sample is corrupted, so will be your conclusions. Maybe Keller’s or Renne’s samples were affected by a myriad possible variables, some as simple as shifting the dirt from here to there by who knows what event. After all, it’s been 66 million years since. Also, methods used are just as important and dating something that happened so long ago is extremely difficult due to intrinsic physical methodological limitations. Keller (2014), for example, claims that Renne couldn’t have possibly gotten such an exact estimation because he used Argon isotopes when only U-Pb isotope dilution–thermal ionization mass spectrometry (ID-TIMS) zircon geochronology could be so accurate. But yet again, it looks like he did use both, so… I dunno. As the over-used always-trite but nevertheless extremely important saying goes: more data is needed.

Even if the dating puts Chicxulub at the KPB, the volcanologists say that the asteroid, by itself, couldn’t have produced a mass extinction because there are other impacts of its size and they did not have such dire effects, but were barely noticeable at the biota scale. Besides, most of the other mass extinctions on the planet have been already associated with extreme volcanism (Archibald et al., 2010). On the other hand, the circumstances of this particular asteroid could have made it deadly: it landed in the hydrocarbon-rich areas that occupied only 13% of the Earth’s surface at the time which resulted in a lot of “stratospheric soot and sulfate aerosols and causing extreme global cooling and drought” (Kaiho & Oshima, 2017). Food for thought: this means that the chances of us, humans, to be here today are 13%!…

I hope that you do notice that these are very recent papers, so the issue is hotly debated as we speak.

It is possible, nay probable, that the Deccan volcanism, which was going on long before and after the extinction, was exacerbated by the impact. This is exactly what Renne’s team postulated in 2015 after dating the lava plains in the Deccan Traps: the eruptions intensified about 50,000 years before the KT boundary, from “high-frequency, low-volume eruptions to low-frequency, high-volume eruptions”, which is about when the asteroid hit. Also, the Deccan eruptions continued for about half a million years after KPB, “which is comparable with the time lag between the KPB and the initial stage of ecological recovery in marine ecosystems” (Renne et al., 2016, p. 78).

Since we cannot get much more accurate dating than we already have, perhaps the fossils can tell us whether the dinosaurs died abruptly or slowly. Because if they got extinct in a few years instead of over 50,000 years, that would point to a cataclysmic event. Yes, but which one, big asteroid or violent volcano? Aaaand, we’re back to square one.

Actually, the last papers on the matter points to two extinctions: the Deccan extinction and the Chicxulub extinction. Petersen et al., (2016) went all the way to Antarctica to find pristine samples. They noticed a sharp increase in global temperatures by about 7.8 ºC at the onset of Deccan volcanism. This climate change would surely lead to some extinctions, and this is exactly what they found: out of 24 species of marine animals investigated, 10 died-out at the onset of Deccan volcanism and the remaining 14 died-out when Chicxulub hit.

In conclusion, because this post is already verrrry long and is becoming a proper college review, to me, a not-a-geologist/paleontologist/physicist-but-still-a-scientist, things happened thusly: first Deccan traps erupted and that lead to a dramatic global warming coupled with spewing poison in the atmosphere. Which resulted in a massive die-out (about 200,000 years before the bolide impact, says a corroborating paper, Tobin, 2017). The surviving species (maybe half or more of the biota?) continued the best they could for the next few hundred thousand years in the hostile environment. Then the Chicxulub meteorite hit and the resulting megatsunami, the cloud of super-heated dust and soot, colossal wildfires and earthquakes, acid rain and climate cooling, not to mention the intensification of the Deccan traps eruptions, finished off the surviving species. It took Earth 300,000 to 500,000 years to recover its ecosystem. “This sequence of events may have combined into a ‘one-two punch’ that produced one of the largest mass extinctions in Earth history” (Petersen et al., 2016, p. 6).

By Neuronicus, 25 August 2018

P. S. You, high school and college students who will use this for some class assignment or other, give credit thusly: Neuronicus (Aug. 26, 2018). The FIRSTS: The cause(s) of dinosaur extinction. Retrieved from https://scientiaportal.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/the-firsts-the-causes-of-dinosaur-extinction/ on [date]. AND READ THE ORIGINAL PAPERS. Ask me for .pdfs if you don’t have access, although with sci-hub and all… not that I endorse any illegal and fraudulent use of the above mentioned server for the purpose of self-education and enlightenment in the quest for knowledge that all academics and scientists praise everywhere around the Globe!

EDIT March 29, 2019. Astounding one-of-a-kind discovery is being brought to print soon. It’s about a site in North Dakota that, reportedly, has preserved the day of the Chicxhulub impact in amazing detail, with tons of fossils of all kinds (flora, mammals, dinosaurs, fish) which seems to put the entire extinction of dinosaurs in one day, thus favoring the asteroid impact hypothesis. The data is not out yet. Can’t wait til it is! Actually, I’ll have to wait some more after it’s out for the experts to examine it and then I’ll find out. Until then, check the story of the discovery here and here.

REFERENCES:

1. Alvarez LW, Alvarez W, Asaro F, & Michel HV (6 Jun 1980). Extraterrestrial cause for the cretaceous-tertiary extinction. PMID: 17783054. DOI: 10.1126/science.208.4448.1095 Science, 208(4448):1095-1108. ABSTRACT | FULLTEXT PDF

2. Archibald JD, Clemens WA, Padian K, Rowe T, Macleod N, Barrett PM, Gale A, Holroyd P, Sues HD, Arens NC, Horner JR, Wilson GP, Goodwin MB, Brochu CA, Lofgren DL, Hurlbert SH, Hartman JH, Eberth DA, Wignall PB, Currie PJ, Weil A, Prasad GV, Dingus L, Courtillot V, Milner A, Milner A, Bajpai S, Ward DJ, Sahni A. (21 May 2010) Cretaceous extinctions: multiple causes. Science,328(5981):973; author reply 975-6. PMID: 20489004, DOI: 10.1126/science.328.5981.973-aScience. FULL REPLY

3. Courtillot V, Besse J, Vandamme D, Montigny R, Jaeger J-J, & Cappetta H (1986). Deccan flood basalts at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary? Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 80(3-4), 361–374. doi: 10.1016/0012-821x(86)90118-4. ABSTRACT

4. Esmeray-Senlet, S., Miller, K. G., Sherrell, R. M., Senlet, T., Vellekoop, J., & Brinkhuis, H. (2017). Iridium profiles and delivery across the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 457, 117–126. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2016.10.010. ABSTRACT

5. Hildebrand AR, Penfield GT, Kring DA, Pilkington M, Camargo AZ, Jacobsen SB, & Boynton WV (1 Sept. 1991). Chicxulub Crater: A possible Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary impact crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. Geology, 19 (9): 867-871. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(1991)019<0867:CCAPCT>2.3.CO;2. ABSTRACT

6. Kaiho K & Oshima N (9 Nov 2017). Site of asteroid impact changed the history of life on Earth: the low probability of mass extinction. Scientific Reports,7(1):14855. PMID: 29123110, PMCID: PMC5680197, DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-14199-x. . ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF

7. Keller G, Adatte T, Berner Z, Harting M, Baum G, Prauss M, Tantawy A, Stueben D (30 Mar 2007). Chicxulub impact predates K–T boundary: New evidence from Brazos, Texas, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 255(3–4): 339-356. DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2006.12.026. ABSTRACT

8. Keller, G. (2014). Deccan volcanism, the Chicxulub impact, and the end-Cretaceous mass extinction: Coincidence? Cause and effect? Geological Society of America Special Papers, 505:57–89. doi:10.1130/2014.2505(03) ABSTRACT

9. Petersen SV, Dutton A, & Lohmann KC. (5 Jul 2016). End-Cretaceous extinction in Antarctica linked to both Deccan volcanism and meteorite impact via climate change. Nature Communications, 7:12079. doi: 10.1038/ncomms12079. PMID: 27377632, PMCID: PMC4935969, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12079. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF 

10. Renne PR, Deino AL, Hilgen FJ, Kuiper KF, Mark DF, Mitchell WS 3rd, Morgan LE, Mundil R, & Smit J (8 Feb 2013). Time scales of critical events around the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Science, 8;339(6120):684-687. doi: 10.1126/science.1230492. PMID: 23393261, DOI: 10.1126/science.1230492 ABSTRACT 

11. Renne PR, Sprain CJ, Richards MA, Self S, Vanderkluysen L, Pande K. (2 Oct 2015). State shift in Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, possibly induced by impact. Science, 350(6256):76-8. PMID: 26430116. DOI: 10.1126/science.aac7549 ABSTRACT

12. Schoene B, Samperton KM, Eddy MP, Keller G, Adatte T, Bowring SA, Khadri SFR, & Gertsch B (2014). U-Pb geochronology of the Deccan Traps and relation to the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Science, 347(6218), 182–184. doi:10.1126/science.aaa0118. ARTICLE

13. Schulte P, Alegret L, Arenillas I, Arz JA, Barton PJ, Bown PR, Bralower TJ, Christeson GL, Claeys P, Cockell CS, Collins GS, Deutsch A, Goldin TJ, Goto K, Grajales-Nishimura JM, Grieve RA, Gulick SP, Johnson KR, Kiessling W, Koeberl C, Kring DA, MacLeod KG, Matsui T, Melosh J, Montanari A, Morgan JV, Neal CR, Nichols DJ, Norris RD, Pierazzo E,Ravizza G, Rebolledo-Vieyra M, Reimold WU, Robin E, Salge T, Speijer RP, Sweet AR, Urrutia-Fucugauchi J, Vajda V, Whalen MT, Willumsen PS.(5 Mar 2010). The Chicxulub asteroid impact and mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Science, 327(5970):1214-8. PMID: 20203042, DOI: 10.1126/science.1177265. ABSTRACT

14. Tobin TS (24 Nov 2017). Recognition of a likely two phased extinction at the K-Pg boundary in Antarctica. Scientific Reports, 7(1):16317. PMID: 29176556, PMCID: PMC5701184, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-16515-x. ARTICLE | FREE FULLTEXT PDF 

15. Vogt, PR (8 Dec 1972). Evidence for Global Synchronism in Mantle Plume Convection and Possible Significance for Geology. Nature, 240(5380), 338–342. doi:10.1038/240338a0 ABSTRACT

How to wash SOME pesticides off produce

While EU is moving on with legislation to curtail harmful chemicals from our food, water, and air, USA is taking a few steps backwards. The most recent de-regulation concerns chlorphyrifos (CFP), a horrible pesticide banned in EU in 2008 (and in most of the world. China also prohibited its use on produce in 2016). CFP is associated with serious neurodevelopmental defects in humans and is highly toxic to the wildlife, particularly bees.

The paper that I’m covering today wanted to see if there is anything the consumer can do about pesticides in their produce. Unfortunately, they did not look at CFP. And why would they? At the time this study was conducted they probably thought, like the rest of us, that CFP is over and done with [breathe, slowly, inhale, exhale, repeat, focus].

Yang et al. (2017) bought organic Gala apples and then exposed them to two common pesticides: thiabendazole and phosmet (an organophosphate) at doses commonly used by farmers (125 ng/cm²). Then they washed the apples in three solutions: sodium bicarbonate (baking soda, NaHCO₃, with the concentration of 10 mg/mL), Clorox (germicidal bleach with the concentration of 25 mg/L available chlorine) and tap water.

Before and after the washes the researchers used surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (which is, basically, a special way of doing microscopy) to take a closer look at the apples.

They found out that:

1) “Surface pesticide residues were most effectively removed by sodium bicarbonate (baking soda, NaHCO3) solution when compared to either tap water or Clorox bleach” (abstract).

2) The more you wash the more pesticide you remove. If you immerse apples in backing soda for 12 minutes for thiabendazole and 15 minutes for phosmet and then rinse with water there will be no detectable residue of these pesticides on the surface.

3) “20% of applied thiabendazole and 4.4% of applied phosmet penetrated into apples” (p. 9751) which cannot be removed by washing. Thiabendazole penetrates into the apple up to 80μ, which is four times more than phosmet (which goes up top 20 μm).

4) “the standard postharvest washing method with Clorox bleach solution for 2 min did not effectively remove surface thiabendazole” (p. 9748).

5) Phosmet is completely degraded by baking soda, whereas thiabenzole appears to be only partially so.

True to my nitpicking nature, I wish that the authors washed the apples in tap water for 8 minutes, not 2, like they did for Clorox and baking soda in the internal pesticide residue removal experiment. Nevertheless, the results stand as they are robust and their detection method is ultrasensitive being able to detect thiabendazole as low as 2μg/L and phosmet as low as 10 μg/L.

Thiabendazole is a pesticide that works by interfering with a basic enzymatic reaction in anaerobic respiration. I’m an aerobe so I shouldn’t worry about this pesticide too much unless I get a huge dose of it and then it is poisonous and carcinogenic, like most things in high doses. Phosmet, on the other hand, is an acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitor (AChEI), meaning its effects in humans are akin to cholinergic poisoning. Normally, acetylcholine (ACh) binds to its muscarinic and nicotinic receptors in your muscles and brain for proper functioning of same. AChE breaks down ACh when is not needed any more by said muscles and brain. Therefore, an AChEI stops AChE from breaking down ACh resulting in overall more ACh than it’s good for you. Meaning it can kill you. Phosmet’s effects, in addition to, well…, death from acute poisoning, include trouble breathing, muscle weakness or tension, convulsions, anxiety, paralysis, quite possible memory, attention, and thinking impairments. Needles to say, it’s not so great for child development either. Think nerve gas, which is also an AChEI, and you’ll get a pretty good picture. Oh, it’s also a hormone mimicker.

I guess I’m back buying organic again. Long ago I have been duped for a short while into buying organic produce for my family believing, like many others, that it is pesticide-free. And, like many others, I was wrong. Just a bit of PubMed search told me that some of the “organic” pesticides are quite unpleasant. But I’ll take copper sulfate over chlorphyrifos any day. The choice is not from healthy to unhealthy but from bad to worse. I know, I know, the paper is not about CFP. I have a lot of pet peeves, alright?

Meanwhile, I gotta go make a huge batch of baking soda solution. Thanks, Yang et al. (2017)!

REFERENCE: Yang T, Doherty J, Zhao B, Kinchla AJ, Clark JM, & He L (8 Nov 2017, Epub 25 Oct 2017). Effectiveness of Commercial and Homemade Washing Agents in Removing Pesticide Residues on and in Apples. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 65(44):9744-9752. PMID: 29067814, doi: 10.1021/acs.jafc.7b03118. ARTICLE

By Neuronicus, 19 May 2018

The FIRSTS: The roots of depressive realism (1979)

There is a rumor stating that depressed people see the world more realistically and the rest of us are – to put it bluntly – deluded optimists. A friend of mine asked me if this is true. It took me a while to find the origins of this claim, but after I found it and figured out that the literature has a term for the phenomenon (‘depressive realism’), I realized that there is a whole plethora of studies on the subject. So the next following posts will be centered, more or less, on the idea of self-deception.

It was 1979 when Alloy & Abramson published a paper who’s title contained the phrase ‘Sadder but Wiser’, even if it was followed by a question mark. The experiments they conducted are simple, but the theoretical implications are large.

The authors divided several dozens of male and female undergraduate students into a depressed group and a non-depressed group based on their Beck Depression Inventory scores (a widely used and validated questionnaire for self-assessing depression). Each subject “made one of two possible responses (pressing a button or not pressing a button) and received one of two possible outcomes (a green light or no green light)” (p. 447). Various conditions presented the subjects with various degrees of control over what the button does, from 0 to 100%. After the experiments, the subjects were asked to estimate their control over the green light, how many times the light came on regardless of their behavior, what’s the percentage of trials on which the green light came on when they pressed or didn’t press the button, respectively, and how did they feel. In some experiments, the subjects were wining or losing money when the green light came on.

Verbatim, the findings were that:

“Depressed students’ judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired” (p. 441).

In plain English, it means that if you are not depressed, when you have some control and bad things are happening, you believe you have no control. And when you have no control but good things are happening, then you believe you have control. If you are depressed, it does not matter, you judge your level of control accurately, regardless of the valence of the outcome.

Such illusion of control is a defensive mechanism that surely must have adaptive value by, for example, allowing the non-depressed to bypass a sense of guilt when things don’t work out and increase self-esteem when they do. This is fascinating, particularly since it is corroborated by findings that people receiving gambling wins or life successes like landing a good job, rewards that at least in one case are demonstrably attributable to chance, believe, nonetheless, that it is due to some personal attributes that make them special, that makes them deserving of such rewards. (I don’t remember the reference of this one so don’t quote me on it. If I find it, I’ll post it, it’s something about self-entitlement, I think). That is not to say that life successes are not largely attributable to the individual; they are. But, statistically speaking, there must be some that are due to chance alone, and yet most people feel like they are the direct agents for changes in luck.

Another interesting point is that Alloy & Abramson also tried to figure out how exactly their subjects reasoned when they asserted their level of control through some clever post-experiment questioners. Long story short (the paper is 45 pages long), the illusion of control shown by nondepressed subjects in the no control condition was the result of incorrect logic, that is, faulty reasoning.

In summary, the distilled down version of depressive realism that non-depressed people see the world through rose-colored glasses is correct only in certain circumstances. Because only in particular conditions this illusion of control applies and that is overestimation of control only when good things are happening and underestimation of control when bad things are happening. But, by and large, it does seem that depression clears the fog a bit.

Of course, it has been over 40 years since the publication of this paper and of course it has its flaws. Many replications and replications with caveats and meta-analyses and reviews and opinions and alternative hypotheses have been confirmed and infirmed and then confirmed again with alterations, so there is still a debate out there about the causes/ functions/ ubiquity/ circumstantiality of the depressive realism effect. One thing seems to be constant though: the effect exists.

I will leave you with the ponders of Alloy & Abramson (1979):

“A crucial question is whether depression itself leads people to be “realistic” or whether realistic people are more vulnerable to depression than other people” (p. 480).

REFERENCE: Alloy LB, & Abramson LY (Dec. 1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108(4): 441-485. PMID: 528910. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441. ARTICLE | FULLTEXT PDF via ResearchGate

By Neuronicus, 30 November 2017

The FIRSTS: Dinosaurs and reputation (1842)

‘Dinosaur’ is a common noun in most languages of the Globe and, in its weak sense, it means “extinct huge reptile-like animal that lived a long-time ago”. The word has been in usage for so long that it can be used also for describing something “impractically large, out-of-date, or obsolete” (Merriam-Webster dictionary). “Dinosaur” is a composite of two ancient Greek words (“deinos”, “sauros”) and it means “terrible lizard”.

But, it turns out that the word hasn’t been in usage for so long, just for a mere 175 years. Sir Richard Owen, a paleontologist that dabbled in many disciplines, coined the term in 1842. Owen introduced the taxon Dinosauria as if it was always called thus, no fuss: “The present and concluding part of the Report on British Fossil Reptiles contains an account of the remains of the Crocodilian, Dinosaurian, Lacertian, Pterodactylian, Chelonian, Ophidian and Batrachian reptiles.” (p. 60). Only later in the Report does he tell us his paleontological reasons for the baptism, namely some anatomical features that distinguish dinosaurs from crocodiles and other reptiles.

“…The combination of such characters, some, as the sacral ones, altogether peculiar among Reptiles, others borrowed, as it were, from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles, will, it is presumed, be deemed sufficient ground for establishing a distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.” (p.103)

At the time he was presenting this report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, other giants of biology were running around the same halls, like Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley. Indisputably, Owen had a keen observational eye and a strong background in comparative anatomy that resulted in hundreds of published works, some of them excellent. That, in addition to establishing the British Museum of Natural History.

Therefore, Owen had reasons to be proud of his accomplishments and secure in his influence and legacy, and yet his contemporaries tell us that he was an absolutely vicious man, spiteful to the point of obsession, vengeful and extremely jealous of other people’s work. Apparently, he would steal the work of the younger people around him, never give credit, lie and cheat at every opportunity, and even write lengthy anonymous letters to various printed media to denigrate his contemporaries. He seemed to love his natal city of Lancaster and his family though (Wessels & Taylor, 2015).

Sir Richard Owen (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892). PD, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Owen had a particular hate for Darwin. They had been close friends for 20 years and then Darwin published the “Origin of Species”. The book quickly became widely read and talked about and then poof: vitriol and hate. Darwin himself said the only reason he could think of for Owen’s hatred was the popularity of the book.

Various biographies and monographers seem to agree on his unpleasant personality (see his entry in The Telegraph, Encyclopedia.com, Encylopaedia Britannica, BBC). On a side note, should you be concerned about your legacy and have the means to persuade The Times to write you an obituary, by all means, do so. In all the 8 pages of obituary written in 1896 you will not find a single blemish on the portrait of Sir Richard Owen.

This makes me ponder on the judgement of history based not on your work, but on your personality. As I said, the man contributed to science in more ways than just naming the dinosaur and having spats with Darwin. And yet it seems that his accomplishments are somewhat diminished by the way he treated others.

This reminded me of Nicolae Constantin Paulescu, a Romanian scientist who discovered insulin in 1916 (published in 1921). Yes, yes, I know all about the controversy with the Canadians that extracted and purified the insulin in 1922 and got the Nobel for it in 1923. Paulescu did the same, even if Paulescu’s “pancreatic extract” from a few years earlier was insufficiently purified; it still successfully lowered the glicemic index in dogs. He even obtained a patent for the “fabrication of pancrein” (his name for insulin, because he obtained it from the pancreas) in April 1922 from the Romanian Government (patent no. 6255). The Canadian team was aware of his work, but because it was published in French, they had a poor translation and they misunderstood his findings, so, technically, they didn’t steal anything. Or so they say. Feel free to feed the conspiracy mill. I personally don’t know, I haven’t looked at the original work to form an opinion because it is in French and my French is non-existent.

Annnywaaaay, whether or not Paulescu was the first in discovering the insulin is debatable, but few doubt that he should have shared the Nobel at least.

Rumor has it that Paulescu did not share the Nobel because he was a devout Nazi. His antisemitic writings are remarkably horrifying, even by the standards of the extreme right. That’s also why you won’t hear about him in medical textbooks or at various diabetes associations and gatherings. Yet millions of people worldwide may be alive today because of his work, at least partly.

How should we remember? Just the discoveries and accomplishments with no reference to the people behind them? Is remembering the same as honoring? “Clara cells” were lung cells discovered by the infamous Nazi anatomist Max Clara by dissecting prisoners without consent. They were renamed by the lung community “club cells” in 2013. We cannot get rid of the discovery, but we can rename the cells, so it doesn’t look like we honor him. I completely understand that. And yet I also don’t want to lose important pieces of history because of the atrocities (in the case of Nazis) or unsavory behavior (in the case of Owen) committed by our predecessors. I understand why the International Federation of Diabetes does not wish to give awards in the name of Paulescu or have a Special Paulescu lecture. Perhaps the Romanians should take down his busts and statues, too. But I don’t understand why (medical) history books should exclude him.

In other words, don’t honor the unsavories of history, but don’t forget them either. You never know what we – or the future generations – may learn by looking back at them and their actions.

By Neuronicus, 19 October 2017

References:

1) Owen, R (1842). “Report on British Fossil Reptiles”. Part II. Report of the Eleventh Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Plymouth in July 1841. London: John Murray. p. 60–204. Google Books Fulltext 

2) “Eminent persons: Biographies reprinted from the Times, Vol V, 1891–1892 – Sir Richard Owen (Obituary)” (1896). Macmillan & Co., p. 291–299. Google Books Fulltext

3) Wessels Q & Taylor AM (28 Oct 2015). Anecdotes to the life and times of Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892) in Lancaster. Journal of Medical Biography. pii: 0967772015608053. PMID: 26512064, DOI: 10.1177/0967772015608053. ARTICLE

Play-based or academic-intensive?

The title of today’s post wouldn’t make any sense for anybody who isn’t a preschooler’s parent or teacher in the USA. You see, on the west side of the Atlantic there is a debate on whether a play-based curriculum for a preschool is more advantageous than a more academic-based one. Preschool age is 3 to 4 years;  kindergarten starts at 5.

So what does academia even looks like for someone who hasn’t mastered yet the wiping their own behind skill? I’m glad you asked. Roughly, an academic preschool program is one that emphasizes math concepts and early literacy, whereas a play-based program focuses less or not at all on these activities; instead, the children are allowed to play together in big or small groups or separately. The first kind of program has been linked with stronger cognitive benefits, while the latter with nurturing social development. The supporters of one program are accusing the other one of neglecting one or the other aspect of the child’s development, namely cognitive or social.

The paper that I am covering today says that it “does not speak to the wider debate over learning-through-play or the direct instruction of young children. We do directly test whether greater classroom time spent on academic-oriented activities yield gains in both developmental domains” (Fuller et al., 2017, p. 2). I’ll let you be the judge.

Fuller et al. (2017) assessed the cognitive and social benefits of different programs in an impressive cohort of over 6,000 preschoolers. The authors looked at many variables:

• children who attended any form of preschool and children who stayed home;
• children who received more (high dosage defined as >20 hours/week) and less preschool education (low dosage defined as <20 hour per week);
• children who attended academic-oriented preschools (spent at least 3 – 4 times a week on each of the following tasks: letter names, writing, phonics and counting manipulatives) and non-academic preschools.

The authors employed a battery of tests to assess the children’s preliteracy skills, math skills and social emotional status (i.e. the independent variables). And then they conducted a lot of statistical analyses in the true spirit of well-trained psychologists.

The main findings were:

1) “Preschool exposure [of any form] has a significant positive effect on children’s math and preliteracy scores” (p. 6).

2) The earlier the child entered preschool, the stronger the cognitive benefits.

3) Children attending high-dose academic-oriented preschools displayed greater cognitive proficiencies than all the other children (for the actual numbers, see Table 7, pg. 9).

4) “Academic-oriented preschool yields benefits that persist into the kindergarten year, and at notably higher magnitudes than previously detected” (p. 10).

5) Children attending academic-oriented preschools displayed no social development disadvantages than children that attended low or non-academic preschool programs. Nor did the non-academic oriented preschools show an improvement in social development (except for Latino children).

Now do you think that Fuller et al. (2017) gave you any more information in the debate play vs. academic, given that their “findings show that greater time spent on academic content – focused on oral language, preliteracy skills, and math concepts – contributes to the early learning of the average child at magnitudes higher than previously estimated” (p. 10)? And remember that they did not find any significant social advantages or disadvantages for any type of preschool.

I realize (or hope, rather) that most pre-k teachers are not the Draconian thou-shall-not-play-do-worksheets type, nor are they the let-kids-play-for-three-hours-while-the-adults-gossip-in-a-corner types. Most are probably combining elements of learning-through-play and directed-instruction in their programs. Nevertheless, there are (still) programs and pre-k teachers that clearly state that they employ play-based or academic-based programs, emphasizing the benefits of one while vilifying the other. But – surprise, surprise! – you can do both. And, it turns out, a little academia goes a long way.

So, next time you choose a preschool for your kid, go with the data, not what your mommy/daddy gut instinct says and certainly be very wary of preschool officials who, when you ask them for data to support their curriculum choice, tell you that that’s their ‘philosophy’, they don’t need data. Because, boy oh boy, I know what philosophy means and it ain’t that.

By Neuronicus, 12 October 2017

Reference: Fuller B, Bein E, Bridges M, Kim, Y, & Rabe-Hesketh, S. (Sept. 2017). Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 52: 1-11, doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2017.05.001. ARTICLE | New York Times cover | Reading Rockets cover (offers a fulltext pdf) | Good cover and interview with the first author on qz.com

Pic of the day: the biggest machine

Source: CERN

By Neuronicus, 10 September 2017

Old chimpanzees get Alzheimer’s pathology

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia with a progression that can span decades. Its prevalence is increasing steadily, particularly in the western countries and Australia. So some researchers speculated that this particular disease might be specific to humans. For various reasons, either genetic, social, or environmental.

A fresh e-pub brings new evidence that Alzheimer’s might plague other primates as well. Edler et al. (2017) studied the brains of 20 old chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) for a whole slew of Alzheimer’s pathology markers. More specifically, they looked for these markers in brain regions commonly affected by AD, like the prefrontal cortex, the midtemporal gyrus, and the hippocampus.

Alzheimer’s markers, like Tau and Aβ lesions, were present in the chimpanzees in an age-dependent manner. In other words, the older the chimp, the more severe the pathology.

Interestingly, all 20 animals displayed some form of Alzheimer’s pathology. This finding points to another speculation in the field which is: dementia is just part of normal aging. Meaning we would all get it, eventually, if we would live long enough; some people age younger and some age older, as it were. This hypothesis, however, is not favored by most researchers not the least because is currently unfalsifiable. The longest living humans do not show signs of dementia so how long is long enough, exactly? But, as the authors suggest, “Aβ deposition may be part of the normal aging process in chimpanzees” (p. 24).

Unfortunately, “the chimpanzees in this study did not participate in formal behavioral or cognitive testing” (p. 6). So we cannot say if the animals had AD. They had the pathological markers, yes, but we don’t know if they exhibited the disease as is not uncommon to find these markers in humans who did not display any behavioral or cognitive symptoms (Driscoll et al., 2006). In other words, one might have tau deposits but no dementia symptoms. Hence the title of my post: “Old chimpanzees get Alzheimer’s pathology” and not “Old chimpanzees get Alzheimer’s Disease”

Good paper, good methods and stats. And very useful because “chimpanzees share 100% sequence homology and all six tau isoforms with humans” (p. 4), meaning we have now a closer to us model of the disease so we can study it more, even if primate research has taken significant blows these days due to some highly vocal but thoroughly misguided groups. Anyway, the more we know about AD the closer we are of getting rid of it, hopefully. And, soon enough, the aforementioned misguided groups shall have to face old age too with all its indignities and my guess is that in a couple of decades or so there will be fresh money poured into aging diseases research, primates be damned.

REFERENCE: Edler MK, Sherwood CC, Meindl RS, Hopkins WD, Ely JJ, Erwin JM, Mufson EJ, Hof PR, & Raghanti MA. (EPUB July 31, 2017). Aged chimpanzees exhibit pathologic hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Neurobiology of Aging, PII: S0197-4580(17)30239-7, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2017.07.006. ABSTRACT  | Kent State University press release

By Neuronicus, 23 August 2017

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Midichlorians, midichloria, and mitochondria

Nathan Lo is an evolutionary biologist interested in creepy crawlies, i.e. arthropods. Well, he’s Australian, so I guess that comes with the territory (see what I did there?). While postdoc’ing, he and his colleagues published a paper (Sassera et al., 2006) that would seem boring for anybody without an interest in taxonomy, a truly under-appreciated field.

The paper describes a bacterium that is a parasite for the mitochondria of a tick species called Ixodes ricinus, the nasty bugger responsible for Lyme disease. The authors obtained a female tick from Berlin, Germany and let it feed on a hamster until it laid eggs. By using genetic sequencing (you can use kits these days to extract the DNA, do PCR, gels and cloning, pretty much everything), electron microscopy (real powerful microscopes) and phylogenetic analysis (using computer softwares to see how closely related some species are) the authors came to the conclusion that this parasite they were working on is a new species. So they named it. And below is the full account of the naming, from the horse’s mouth, as it were:

“In accordance with the guidelines of the International Committee of Systematic Bacteriology, unculturable bacteria should be classified as Candidatus (Murray & Stackebrandt, 1995). Thus we propose the name ‘Candidatus Midichloria mitochondrii’ for the novel bacterium. The genus name Midichloria (mi.di.chlo′ria. N.L. fem. n.) is derived from the midichlorians, organisms within the fictional Star Wars universe. Midichlorians are microscopic symbionts that reside within the cells of living things and ‘‘communicate with the Force’’. Star Wars creator George Lucas stated that the idea of the midichlorians is based on endosymbiotic theory. The word ‘midichlorian’ appears to be a blend of the words mitochondrion and chloroplast. The specific epithet, mitochondrii (mi.to′chon.drii. N.L. n. mitochondrium -i a mitochondrion; N.L. gen. n. mitochondrii of a mitochondrion), refers to the unique intramitochondrial lifestyle of this bacterium. ‘Candidatus M. mitochondrii’ belongs to the phylum Proteobacteria, to the class Alphaproteobacteria and to the order Rickettsiales. ‘Candidatus M. mitochondrii’ is assigned on the basis of the 16S rRNA (AJ566640) and gyrB gene sequences (AM159536)” (p. 2539).

George Lucas gave his blessing to the Christening (of course he did).

Acknowledgements: Thanks go to Ms. BBD who prevented me from making a fool of myself (this time!) on the social media by pointing out to me that midichloria are real and that they are a mitochondrial parasite.

REFERENCE: Sassera D, Beninati T, Bandi C, Bouman EA, Sacchi L, Fabbi M, Lo N. (Nov. 2006). ‘Candidatus Midichloria mitochondrii’, an endosymbiont of the tick Ixodes ricinus with a unique intramitochondrial lifestyle. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, 56(Pt 11): 2535-2540. PMID: 17082386, DOI: 10.1099/ijs.0.64386-0. ABSTRACT | FREE FULLTEXT PDF 

By Neuronicus, 29 July 2017

Pic of the day: Skunky beer

 

REFERENCE: Burns CS, Heyerick A, De Keukeleire D, Forbes MD. (5 Nov 2001). Mechanism for formation of the lightstruck flavor in beer revealed by time-resolved electron paramagnetic resonance. Chemistry – The European Journal, 7(21): 4553-4561. PMID: 11757646, DOI: 10.1002/1521-3765(20011105)7:21<4553::AID-CHEM4553>3.0.CO;2-0. ABSTRACT

By Neuronicus, 12 July 2017

The FIRSTS: Increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere results in global warming (1896)

Few people seem to know that although global warming and climate change are hotly debated topics right now (at least on the left side of the Atlantic) the effect of CO₂ levels on the planet’s surface temperature was investigated and calculated more than a century ago. CO₂ is one of the greenhouse gases responsible for the greenhouse effect, which was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 (the effect, that is).

Let’s start with a terminology clarification. Whereas the term ‘global warming’ was coined by Wallace S. Broecker in 1975, the term ‘climate change’ underwent a more fluidic transformation in the ’70s from ‘inadvertent climate modification’ to ‘climatic change’ to a more consistent use of ‘climate change’ by Jule Charney in 1979, according to NASA. The same source tells us:

“Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect”.

But before NASA there was one Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927). Dr. Arrhenius was a Swedish physical chemist who received the Nobel Prize in 1903 for uncovering the role of ions in how electrical current is conducted in chemical solutions.

S.A. Arrhenius was the first to quantify the variations of our planet’s surface temperature as a direct result of the amount of CO₂ (which he calls carbonic acid, long story) present in the atmosphere. For those – admittedly few – nitpickers that say his views on the greenhouse effect were somewhat simplistic and his calculations were incorrect I’d say cut him a break: he didn’t have the incredible amount of data provided by the satellites or computers, nor the work of thousands of scientists over a century to back him up. Which they do. Kind of. Well, the idea, anyway, not the math. Well, some of the math. Let me explain.

First, let me tell you that I haven’t managed to pass past page 3 of the 39 pages of creative mathematics, densely packed tables, parameter assignments, and convoluted assumptions of Arrhenius (1896). Luckily, I convinced a spectroscopist to take a crack at the original paper since there is a lot of spectroscopy in it and then enlighten me.

The photo was taken in 1887 and shows (standing, from the left): Walther Nernst (Nobel in Chemistry), Heinrich Streintz, Svante Arrhenius, Richard Hiecke; (sitting, from the left): Eduard Aulinger, Albert von Ettingshausen, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ignaz Klemenčič, Victor Hausmanninger. Source: Universität Graz. License: PD via Wikimedia Commons.

Second, despite his many accomplishments, including being credited with laying the foundations of a new field (physical chemistry), Arrhenius was first and foremost a mathematician. So he employed a lot of tedious mathematics (by hand!) together with some hefty guessing along with what was known at the time about Earth’s infrared radiation, solar radiation, water vapor and CO₂ absorption, temperature of the Moon,  greenhouse effect, and some uncalibrated spectra taken by his predecessors to figure out if “the mean temperature of the ground [was] in any way influenced by the presence of the heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere” (p. 237). Why was he interested in this? We find out only at page 267 after a lot of aforesaid dreary mathematics where he finally shares this with us:

“I certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them. In the Physical Society of Stockholm there have been occasionally very lively discussions on the probable causes of the Ice Age”.

So Arrhenius was interested to find out if the fluctuations of CO₂ levels could have caused the Ice Ages. And yes, he thinks that could have happened. I don’t know enough about climate science to tell you if this particular conclusion of his is correct today. But what he managed to accomplish though was to provide for the first time a way to mathematically calculate the amount of rise in temperature due the rise of CO₂ levels. In other words, he found a direct relationship between the variations of CO₂ and temperature.

Today, it turns out that his math was incorrect because he left out some other variables that influence the global temperature that were discovered and/or understood later (like the thickness of the atmosphere, the rate of ocean absorption  of CO₂ and others which I won’t pretend I understand). Nevertheless, Arrhenius was the first to point out to the following relationship, which, by and large, is still relevant today:

“Thus if the quantity of carbonic acid increased in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression” (p. 267).

P.S. Technically, Joseph Fourier should be credited with the discovery of global warming by means of increasing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in 1824, but Arrhenius quantified it so I credited him. Feel fee to debate :).

REFERENCE: Arrhenius, S. (April 1896). XXXI. On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (Fifth Series), 49 (251): 237-276. General Reference P.P.1433. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14786449608620846. FREE FULLTEXT PDF

By Neuronicus, 24 June 2017

Arnica and a scientist’s frustrations

When you’re the only scientist in the family you get asked the weirdest things. Actually, I’m not the only one, but the other one is a chemist and he’s mostly asked about astrophysics stuff, so he doesn’t really count, because I am the one who gets asked about rare diseases and medication side-effects and food advice. Never mind that I am a neuroscientist and I have professed repeatedly and quite loudly my minimum knowledge of everything from the neck down, all eyes turn to me when the new arthritis medication or the unexpected side-effects of that heart drug are being brought up. But, curiously, if I dare speak about brain stuff I get the looks that a thing the cat just dragged in gets. I guess everybody is an expert on how the brain works on account of having and using one, apparently. Everybody, but the actual neuroscience expert whose input on brain and behavior is to be tolerated and taken with a grain of salt at best, but whose opinion on stomach distress is of the utmost importance and must be listened to reverentially in utter silence [eyes roll].

So this is the background on which the following question was sprung on me: “Is arnica good for eczema?”. As always, being caught unawares by the sheer diversity of interests and afflictions my family and friends can have, I mumbled something about I don’t know what arnica is and said I will look it up.

This is an account of how I looked it up and what conclusions I arrived to or how a scientist tries to figure out something completely out of his or her field. First thing I did was to go on Wikipedia. Hold your horses, it was not about scientific information but for a first clarification step: is it a chemical, a drug, an insect, a plant maybe? I used to encourage my students to also use Wikipedia when they don’t have a clue what a word/concept/thing is. Kind of like a dictionary or a paper encyclopedia, if you will. To have a starting point. As a matter of fact Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, right? Anyway, I found out that Arnica is a plant genus out of which one species, Arnica Montana, seems to be popular.

Then I went to the library. Luckily for me, the library can be accessed online from the comfort of my home and in my favorite pajamas in the incarnation of PubMed or Medline as it used to be affectionately called. It is the US National Library of Medicine maintained by the National Institutes of Health, a wonderful repository of scholarly papers (yeah, Google Scholar to PubMed is like the babbling of a two-year old to the Shakespearian sonnets; Google also has an agenda, which you won’t find on PubMed). Useful tip: when you look for a paper that is behind a paywall in Nature or Elsevier Journals or elsewhere, check the PubMed too because very few people seem to know that there is an obscure and incredibly helpful law saying that research paid by the US taxpayers should be available to the US taxpayer. A very sensible law passed only a few years ago that has the delightful effect of having FREE full text access to papers after a certain amount of months from publishing (look for the PMC icon in the upper right corner).

I searched for “arnica” and got almost 400 results. I sorted by “most recent”. The third hit was a review. I skimmed it and seemed to talk a lot about healing in homeopathy, at which point, naturally, I got a gloomy foreboding. But I persevered because one data point does not a trend make. Meaning that you need more than a paper – or a handful – to form an informed opinion. This line of thinking has been rewarded by the hit No. 14 in the search which had an interesting title in the sense that it was the first to hint to a mechanism through which this plant was having some effects. Mechanisms are important, they allow you to differentiate speculation from findings, so I always prefer papers that try to answer a “How?” question as opposed to the other kinds; whys are almost always speculative as they have a whiff of post factum rationalizations, whats are curious observations but, more often than not, a myriad factors can account for them, whens are an interesting hybrid between the whats and the hows – all interesting reads but for different purposes. Here is a hint: you want to publish in Nature or Science? Design an experiment that answers all the questions. Gone are the days when answering one question was enough to publish…

Digressions aside, the paper I am covering today sounds like a mechanism paper. Marzotto et al. (2016) cultured a particular line of human cells in a Petri dish destined to test the healing powers of Arnica montana. The experimental design seems simple enough: the control culture gets nothing and the experimental culture gets Arnica montana. Then, the authors check to see if there are differences in gene expressions between the two groups.

The authors applied different doses of Arnica montana to the cultures to see if the effects are dose-dependant. The doses used were… wait, bear with me, I’m not familiar with the system, it’s not metric. In the Methods, the authors say

“Arnica m. was produced by Boiron Laboratoires (Lyon, France) according to the French Homeopathic pharmacopoeia and provided as a first centesimal dilution (Arnica m. 1c) of the hydroalcoholic extract (Mother Tincture, MT) in 30% ethanol/distilled water”.

Wait, what?! Centesimal… centesimal… wasn’t that the nothing-in-it scale from the pseudoscientific bull called homeopathy? Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there are some other uses for it and becomes clear later:

“Arnica m. 1c was used to prepare the second centesimal dilution (Arnica m. 2c) by adding 50μl of 1c solution to 4.95ml of distilled ultra-pure water. Therefore, 2c corresponds to 10−4 of the MT”.

Holy Mother of God, this is worse than gibberish; this is voluntary misdirection, crap wrapped up in glitter, medieval tinkering sold as state-of-the-art 21st century science. Speaking of state-of-the-art, the authors submit their “doses” to a liquid chromatograph, a thin layer chromatograph, a double-beam spectrophotometer, a nanoparticle tracking analysis (?!) for what purposes I cannot fathom. On, no, I can: to sound science-y. To give credibility for the incredulous. To make money.

At which point I stopped reading the ridiculous nonsense and took a closer look at the authors and got hit with this:

“Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This study was funded by Boiron Laboratoires Lyon with a research agreement in partnership with University of Verona. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter our adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors.”

No competing interests?? The biggest manufacturer of homeopathic crap in the world pays you to see if their product works and you have no competing interest? Maybe no other competing interests. There were some comments and replies to this paper after that, but it is all inconsequential because once you have faulty methods your results are irrelevant. Besides, the comments are from the same University, could be some internal feuding.

PLoS One, what have you done? You’re a peer-reviewed open access journal! What “peers” reviewed this paper and gave their ok for publication? Since when is homeopathy science?! What am I going to find that you publish next? Astrology? For shame… Give me that editor’s job because I am certain I can do better.

To wrap it up and tell you why I am so mad. The homeopathic scale system, that centesimal gibberish, is just that: gibberish. It is impossible to replicate this experiment without the product marketed by Boiron because nobody knows how much of the plant is in the dose, which parts of the plant, what kind of extract, or what concentration. So it’s like me handing you my special potion and telling you it makes warts disappear because it has parsley in it. But I don’t tell you my recipe, how much, if there anything else besides parsley in it, if I used the roots or only the leaves or anything. Now that, my friends, it’s not science, because science is REPLICABLE. Make no mistake: homeopathy is not science. Just like the rest of alternative medicine, homeopathy is a ruthless and dangerous business that is in sore need of lawmakers’ attention, like FDA or USDA. And for those who think this is a small paper, totally harmless, no impact, let me tell you that this paper had over 20,000 views (real science papers get hundreds, maybe thousands).

I would have oh so much more to rant on. But enough. Rant over.

Oh, not yet. Lastly, I checked a few other papers about arnica and my answer to the eczema question is: “It’s possible but no, I don’t think so. I don’t know really, I couldn’t find any serious study about it and I gave up looking after I found a lot of homeopathic red flags”. The answer I will give my family member? “Not the product you have, no. Go to the doctors, the ones with MDs after their name and do what they tell you. In addition, I, the one with a PhD after my name, will tell you this for free because you’re family: rub the contents of this bottle only once a day – no more! – on the affected area and you will start seeing improvements in three days. Do not use elsewhere, it’s quite potent!” Because placebo works and at least my water vial is poison free.

Reference: Marzotto M, Bonafini C, Olioso D, Baruzzi A, Bettinetti L, Di Leva F, Galbiati E, & Bellavite P (10 Nov 2016). Arnica montana Stimulates Extracellular Matrix Gene Expression in a Macrophage Cell Line Differentiated to Wound-Healing Phenotype. PLoS One, 11(11):e0166340. PMID: 27832158, PMCID: PMC5104438, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166340. ABSTRACT | FREE FULLTEXT PDF 

By Neuronicus, 10 June 2017

EDIT [7 December 2022]: Look at that! There is a warning after the DOI that appeared on my website through no involvement of my own saying the paper has been retracted roughly 2 years after publication. Good! The official reason for retraction? They used nothing to find nothing, their “findings” are just “standard noise”. Told you so! PubPeer link here.

This is what PLoS One is saying about it (my highlights):

The PLOS ONE Editors have discussed the study design and results reported in this article with experts in RNA-seq analysis, statistical analysis and members of our Editorial Board. Based on our assessment and the advice received, and in light of the above concerns, we have determined that the results presented in this article do not provide sufficient support for claims about effects of Arnica m. on gene expression. Hence, we are retracting this article due to concerns about the study design and about the validity and reliability of the reported conclusions. We regret that these issues were not fully addressed during the article’s pre-publication peer review.
In addition to the above, the PLOS ONE Editors hereby notify readers that the Competing Interests statement was incorrect for this article and should have explicitly stated that Boiron Laboratories, a company that provided funding support for this study, markets homeopathic products including various dilutions of Arnica m.
MM, CB, DO, EG, and PB did not agree with retraction. AB, LB, and FDL did not respond.

Pic of the day: Call me Ponder

By Neuronicus, 16 May 2017.

The FIRSTS: Magnolia (1703)

It is April and the Northern Hemisphere is enjoying the sight and smell of blooming magnolias. Fittingly, today is the birthday of the man who described and named the genus. Charles Plumier (20 April 1646 – 20 November 1704) was a French botanist known for describing many plant genera and for preceding Linnaeus in botanical taxonomy. His (Plumier’s) taxonomy was later incorporated by Linnaeus and is still in use today.

Plumier traveled a lot as part of his job as Royal Botanist at the court of Louis XIV. Don’t envy him too much though because the monk order to which he belonged, the Minims, forced him to be a vegan, living mostly on lentil.

Among thousands of other plants described was the magnolia, a genus of gorgeous ornamental flowering trees that put out spectacularly big flowers in the Spring, usually before the leaves come out. Plumier found it on the island of Martinique and named it after Pierre Magnol, a contemporary botanist who invented the concept of family as a distinct taxonomical category.

Excerpts from the pages 38, 39 and plate 7 from Nova Plantarum Americanum Genera by Charles Plumier (Paris, 1703) describing the genus Magnolia.

Interestingly enough, Plumier named other plants either after famous botanists like fuchsia (Leonhard Fuchs) and lobelia (Mathias Obel) or people who helped his career as in begonia (Michel Begon) and suriana (Josephe Donat Surian), but never after himself. I guess he took seriously the humility tenet of his order. Never fear, the botanists Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and the much more renown Carl Linnaeus named an entire genus after him: Plumeria.

Of interest to me, as a neuroscientist, is that the bark of the magnolia tree contains magnolol which is a natural ligand for the GABA_A receptor.

REFERENCE: Plumier, C. (1703). Nova Plantarum Americanum Genera, Paris. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.59135 FULLTEXT courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

By Neuronicus, 20 April 2017

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Vanity and passion fruit

Ultraviolet irradiation exposure from our sun accelerates the skin aging, process called photoaging. It can even cause skin cancers. There has been some considerable research on how our beloved sun does that.

For example, one way the UV radiation leads to skin damage is by promoting the production of free radicals as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which do many bad things, like direct DNA damage. Another bad thing done by ROS is the upregulation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway which activates all sorts of transcription factors which, in turn, produce proteins that lead to collagen degradation and voilà, aged skin. I know I lost some of you at the MAPK point; you can think of MAPK as a massive proteinaceous hub, a multi-button console with many inputs and outputs. A very sensitive and incredibly complex hub that controls nearly all important aspects of cell function, with many feedback loops, so if you mess with it, cell Armageddon may be happening. Or nothing at all. It’s that complex.

But I digress. What MAPK is doing is less relevant for the paper I am introducing to you today than the fact that we have physiological markers for skin aging due to UV. Bravo et al. (2017) cultured human skin cells in a Petri dish, treated them with various concentrations of an extract of passion fruit (Passiflora tarminiana) and then bombarded them with UV (the B type, 280–315 nm). The authors made the extract themselves, is not something you just buy (yet).

The UV produced the expected damage, translated as increased matrix mettoproteinase-1 (MMP-1), collagenase, and ROS production and decreased procollagen. Pretreatment with passion fruit extract significantly mitigated these UV effects in a dose-dependant manner. The concentration of their concoction that worked best was 10 μg/mL. Then the authors did some more chemistry to figure out what in their concoction is responsible, or at least probably responsible, for the observed wonderful effects. The authors believe the procyianidins and flavonoids are the culprits because 1) they have been proven to be strong antioxidants before and 2) this plant has them in very high amounts.

Good news then for the antiaging cosmetics industry. Perhaps even for dermatologists and their patients.

Reference: Bravo K, Duque L, Ferreres F, Moreno DA, & Osorio E. (EPUB ahead of print: 3 Feb 2017). Passiflora tarminiana fruits reduce UVB-induced photoaging in human skin fibroblasts. Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology, 168: 78-88. PMID: 28189068, DOI: 10.1016/j.jphotobiol.2017.01.023. ARTICLE

By Neuronicus, 13 February 2017

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Aging and its 11 hippocampal genes

Aging is being quite extensively studied these days and here is another advance in the field. Pardo et al. (2017) looked at what happens in the hippocampus of 2-months old (young) and 28-months old (old) female rats. Hippocampus is a seahorse shaped structure no more than 7 cm in length and 4 g in weight situated at the level of your temples, deep in the brain, and absolutely necessary for memory.

First the researchers tested the rats in a classical maze test (Barnes maze) designed to assess their spatial memory performance. Not surprisingly, the old performed worse than the young.

Then, they dissected the hippocampi and looked at neurogenesis and they saw that the young rats had more newborn neurons than the old. Also, the old rats had more reactive microglia, a sign of inflammation. Microglia are small cells in the brain that are not neurons but serve very important functions.

After that, the researchers looked at the hippocampal transcriptome, meaning they looked at what proteins are being expressed there (I know, transcription is not translation, but the general assumption of transcriptome studies is that the amount of protein X corresponds to the amount of the RNA X). They found 210 genes that were differentially expressed in the old, 81 were upregulated and 129 were downregulated. Most of these genes are to be found in human too, 170 to be exact.

But after looking at male versus female data, at human and mouse aging data, the authors came up with 11 genes that are de-regulated (7 up- and 4 down-) in the aging hippocampus, regardless of species or gender. These genes are involved in the immune response to inflammation. More detailed, immune system activates microglia, which stays activated and this “prolonged microglial activation leads to the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines that exacerbate neuroinflammation, contributing to neuronal loss and impairment of cognitive function” (p. 17). Moreover, these 11 genes have been associated with neurodegenerative diseases and brain cancers.

These are the 11 genes: C3 (up), Cd74  (up), Cd4 (up), Gpr183 (up), Clec7a (up), Gpr34 (down), Gapt (down), Itgam (down), Itgb2 (up), Tyrobp (up), Pld4 (down).”Up” and “down” indicate the direction of deregulation: upregulation or downregulation.

I wish the above sentence was as explicitly stated in the paper as I wrote it so I don’t have to comb through their supplemental Excel files to figure it out. Other than that, good paper, good work. Gets us closer to unraveling and maybe undoing some of the burdens of aging, because, as the actress Bette Davis said, “growing old isn’t for the sissies”.

Reference: Pardo J, Abba MC, Lacunza E, Francelle L, Morel GR, Outeiro TF, Goya RG. (13 Jan 2017, Epub ahead of print). Identification of a conserved gene signature associated with an exacerbated inflammatory environment in the hippocampus of aging rats. Hippocampus, doi: 10.1002/hipo.22703. ARTICLE

By Neuronicus, 25 January 2017

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