Exercise
Sickle Cell on the Football Field
In 2006, Rice University football player Dale Lloyd II collapsed during a practice and later died. The cause of death was acute exertional rhabdomyolysis, a sudden breakdown of muscle tissue into the blood brought on by strenuous exercise. But the trigger for Lloyd’s death may have been sickle cell trait, the name for when a […]
Burn Off More Fat with More…Sleep?
Losing weight can be described at its simplest as a matter of counting calories during the daytime. Consume fewer calories and burn more through activity and exercise, and you’re likely to lose weight. Eat more high-calorie foods and sit on the couch all day watching football, and you get the opposite effect. But according to […]
Videos: Heart Health & Risk
Last October, a group of Illinois legislators visited the University of Chicago Medical Center for two days of education and discussion about cardiovascular medicine and health care reform, part of a nationwide “Legislator in the Lab” program. In addition to laboratory tours and panel discussions, the legislators and their staffs heard a series of brief, […]
Primary Care Triumphant in Minneapolis
General internal medicine might seem like an awfully vague term. But assuming the health care reform bill signed by President Obama in March will be fully implemented, the general internists will finally have their day. Many of the bill’s provisions are focused on a reshuffling of the American medical landscape, which is currently dominated by […]
The Dangerous Edge of Gene Doping
Please welcome Laurel Mylonas-Orwig, author of today’s post and a new contributor to the blog! Every two years, the best athletes in the world gather to compete in the modern Olympic Games. Against a backdrop of sand or snow, these seemingly superhuman competitors push their bodies to perform feats that would be impossible for the […]
Lifestyltrin Part 2: The Test Subjects
The massive, long-term Diabetes Prevention Program study has now found (twice!) that altering one’s lifestyle in terms of diet and exercise is more effective than a common prescription drug in delaying the onset of the disease. To power this study and its recently published follow-up, dozens of medical centers conducted multiple examinations each year on […]
Lifestyltrin: The New Anti-Diabetes Drug
Pharmaceutical companies often make up trade names for new drugs that semi-subliminally evoke their purpose – some of my favorites are Boniva, for osteoporosis, or Ambien, the sleeping pill that sounds like it was named by Brian Eno. It’s kind of a silly practice, motivated mostly by marketing reasons, because all of these drugs already […]
Breast Cancer & “The Good Life”
On Monday we previewed Dr. Funmi Olopade’s public lecture at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago titled “Nature, Nurture and Breast Cancer.” For that post, I talked about some recent work from Olopade’s research group that compared the types of breast tumors found in West African women with the tumors seen most often in […]
Late Linkage: Futurity
I apologize for the lack of a Linkage post last Friday – instead of blogging, your editors were learning about Chicago’s downtown architecture as we floated along the green if not Green Chicago River on one of summer’s final days. But like the reversed flow of that waterway, the science never stops, and last week […]
