by Tiffani Washington

Whether it’s from a movie, celebrity hearsay or some other largely fictional account, most of us can recall a tale of someone experiencing a heart attack in the throes of passion. In reality, only about 1 percent of all heart attacks occur during sex, and far less than 1 percent of heart attack survivors die due to a sexual encounter. Still, it’s easy to see why a recovering heart attack survivor might be a bit timid rekindling romance without a doctor’s green light.

Supporting that notion, a new study finds that patients who were sexually active before suffering a heart attack were one and a half times more likely to recapture their sex lives if they received guidance on the topic before leaving the hospital.

While it’s no surprise that sexual activity tends to decline slightly for both men and women during the year following a heart attack, or acute myocardial infarction (AMI), researchers found that many patients who said they did not get medical counsel prior to hospital discharge either unnecessarily delayed or refrained from sex.

In a survey of 1,879 heart attack patients, less than a half of men and roughly a third of women recall receiving instructions about when to safely return to sexual activity before leaving the hospital. After a year of follow-up, only 41 percent of men and 24 percent of women reported having a discussion with their doctor about sex since their heart attack.

Results from the study published  in The American Journal of Cardiology are in line with early findings presented at an American Heart Association conference in 2010. Lead author, Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago Medicine, said the study underscores the need for more doctors to address sex as an important part of overall physical function, even after a life-threatening event such as a heart attack.

“Doctors need to understand the significant role they play in helping AMI patients avoid needless fear and worry about the risk of relapse or even death with return to sexual activity,” said Lindau, a renowned expert on helping women with complex illnesses maintain sexual function. “Receiving instructions, prior to hospital discharge, about resuming sex was a major predictor of whether patients resumed sexual activity in the year following AMI. For women, this was the only significant predictor. The discharging cardiologist has detailed knowledge of the patient’s condition, has provided life-saving care and is best positioned to advise on the safety of engaging in physical activity, including sex.”

Without counseling, patients are left to make their own, often flawed, assumptions about risk associated with sexual activity. Multiple studies have shown that sex puts less of a strain on the heart than people might think.

“This study may help doctors address issues that they’re traditionally reluctant to discuss,” said study author, Harlan Krumholz, MD, professor of medicine and epidemiology and public health at Yale University School of Medicine. “We’re showing that addressing sexual health may make a difference to long-term outcomes.”

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By Matt Wood

The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a strikingly common sexually transmitted disease associated with cervical cancer. More than 25 percent of women ages 14-59 are infected with HPV, but it gained greater attention in the United States in 2006 when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first vaccine for it.

African American women and those living in low-income environments are at greatest risk for HPV infection and cervical cancer, and while some studies have looked at vaccination rates among adolescents, few have studied the unique effects of race and income level. To address this gap, a developmental psychopathologist at the University of Chicago recently studied the vaccination rates in a large, representative sample of girls 12- to 15-years old. She found that African American girls are far less likely to be vaccinated than European Americans, even when controlling for income level, exposing a significant disparity for those most at risk from HPV.

Kathryn Keenan, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, had been working with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh on a long-term study of the development of behavioral and emotional problems of almost 2,500 girls and their caregivers. In 2008, two years after the FDA approved the HPV vaccine, she and her colleagues took the opportunity to survey this group about initiation of the HPV vaccine.

The sample of girls in this study is unique because it is representative of the city of Pittsburgh and includes equal numbers of African Americans and European Americans. Because data had been collected annually since the study began in 2000, Keenan and her colleagues were able to identify predictors of which girls were most likely to get the vaccine.

In their latest study, published in Health Psychology, they found that about 60 percent of the girls had gotten the first of three shots for the HPV vaccine in the previous year, far below the goal of 90 percent set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). African American girls were close to 40 percent less likely to have received the vaccine than European-American girls. The likelihood of vaccine uptake also increased with the level of sexual activity.

Keenan said these findings are troubling for a number of reasons. “African American women are more likely to suffer high levels of morbidity and mortality from cervical cancer than European American women,” she said. “So now we have something that in some ways should be deployed even more aggressively in that community and it’s not happening.”

The CDC recommends that all 11- or 12-year-old girls get the vaccination to protect against cervical cancer, but these recommendations have become a political issue as many parents and politicians object to the idea of protecting young children from a sexually transmitted disease. Unfortunately, this obscures the need for better education about HPV.

“Talking about sex and sexual activity when it comes to younger girls is still a huge taboo,” Keenan said. “I think we’re very uncomfortable thinking about sexual behavior in children. There are myths about how talking to children about sex gives them permission to have sex, and the data don’t support that at all.”

Keenan said that this fear overshadows the risks of HPV, because the public still has difficulty connecting it to cervical cancer. That confusion can give people the impression that there is a choice. “If you don’t have a good sense of the threat, it’s pretty easy to just say, ‘Well, it’s my choice,’” she said.  “I think we have to do a better job of making it clear that this is a real risk, and this is a real threat, because I don’t think that message is getting out.”

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By Tiffani Washington

Chances are you don’t spend much time, if any, sharing the intimate details of your sex life with your doctor. Though the topic is difficult to avoid when walking past a newsstand or watching any given hour of primetime TV, sex remains a matter of great sensitivity in our personal lives. Approaching this taboo territory during a doctor visit can be difficult - for both the patient and the doctor.

The problem with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is that when doctors avoid asking questions about the sexual activities of their patients, they may miss an important link to overall wellness.

Results of a new comprehensive national survey of U.S. obstetrician-gynecologists on their communication with patients about sex have found that too often doctors aren’t having “the talk” with their patients. And when the topic of sex does find its way into a doctor’s office or exam room, chances are the discussion only skims the surface.

The report, “What We Don’t Talk about When We Don’t Talk about Sex,” uncovers the shortfalls in doctor-patient communication around sexual matters and examines the barriers that may be limiting the range of dialogue in a typical evaluation of a woman’s general health. The study was published online last week in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The survey, conducted by a team of University of Chicago researchers, found that while nearly two-thirds of OB-GYNs routinely inquire about patients’ sexual activity, other aspects of female sexuality are not routinely addressed. Only 40 percent of those surveyed routinely ask questions to assess for sexual problems or dysfunction. Far fewer, 29 percent, routinely ask patients about satisfaction with their sexual lives and only 28 percent routinely confirm a patient’s sexual orientation.

Given the well-established link between sexual function and overall health, the study’s authors say their findings point to a clear need for stronger medical guidelines on conducting a thorough sexual history.

“As a practicing OB-GYN, many of my patients say I’m the first physician to talk with them about sexual issues,” said Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago Medicine, and the study’s lead author. “Sexuality is a key component of a woman’s physical and psychological health. Obviously, OB-GYNs are well positioned among all physicians to address female sexual concerns. Simply asking a patient if she’s sexually active does not tell us whether she has good sexual function or changes in her sexual function that could indicate underlying problems.”

There is strong evidence of a high prevalence of sexual function concerns among women. Recent studies estimate that roughly a third of young and middle-age women and about half of older women experience some sort of sexual problem such as low desire, pain during intercourse or lack of pleasure.

For most, the concerns go beyond physical — in fact, the impact of sexual dysfunction can be far reaching. In addition to strained relationships, many women experience worry, shame, guilt and feelings of isolation. If the doctor doesn’t ask, patients often assume the topic is not welcome for discussion.

“Many women are suffering in silence,” Lindau said. “Patients are often reluctant to bring up sexual difficulties because of fear the physician will be embarrassed or will dismiss their concerns. Doctors should be taking the lead. Sexual history taking is a fundamental part of gynecologic care. Understanding a patient’s sexual function rounds out the picture of her overall health and can reveal underlying issues that may otherwise be overlooked.”

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People are used to feeling uncomfortable at the dentist, whether its suffering the drill or trying to make conversation with a gloved finger in your mouth. Given this baseline, perhaps the dentists’ office is the perfect place for another awkward experience: testing for HIV. This intriguing proposal has been made by public health advocates since the 2004 FDA approval of the rapid saliva HIV test, which produces reliable results in less than 20 minutes. Combining that convenient test with a check-up that’s a yearly tradition for most people — one that offers no shortage of saliva — could help spot HIV cases earlier and more often. But there’s a cognitive dissonance to the idea of sexually transmitted disease testing in the dental office that’s weird for more than just the patients, as a recent survey of dentists discovered.

The medical role of the dentist has expanded in recent years, as many dentists go beyond your standard tooth-cleaning and cavity-filling to screening for oral cancers, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Would adding an HIV test to their repertoire be feasible? That’s what a team of researchers from around the country, including the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack, asked 40 dentists in phone interviews in a paper for the American Journal of Public Health. The study found that many dentists saw the value of helping potentially infected patients discover their disease status, and thus start treatment earlier than they might have otherwise. But there were also several objections raised about offering the HIV test alongside teeth-whitening in their offices.

Surprisingly, only 1 of the 40 dentists had even heard about the rapid saliva test before the phone call. Alongside the concerns about the test’s accuracy and reimbursement for the time it takes, the dentists voiced concerns that reflect the still-touchy topic of HIV. Many said that they wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to patients about the test or its results, worrying that older or more conservative patients would be offended by even offering an HIV test. “I think most of my patients would feel insulted or that I was overstepping my bounds,” said one dentist.

If the test should come back positive, some interviewees said they were nervous about being “the bearer of bad news” in disclosing the result before referring the patient to a medical doctor. A primary care physician might be better equipped to handle both the clinical questions and emotional fallout that could result from a positive HIV test.

“This is only my opinion, but it would seem very odd for the first person to tell the patient they were HIV positive would be the dentist,” one respondent said.

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By Dianna Douglas

Maybe you’re the type of person to see a tiny nonsensical phrase in the credits of a movie and actually dig into it online. Be careful—you might find yourself sucked into a mystery story. Over the course of a week, you get a text message from someone you’ve been mindlessly Googling, you get an email with a riddle, and you find a chatroom with hundreds of people asking questions about clues they’ve found. You pick up more hints in this puzzle—on your phone, from YouTube, in your inbox, on a major website like Amazon. By the time you have solved the mystery, you know that the entire cloak-and-dagger game was orchestrated by the movie studio to create buzz. And it worked.

Instead of marketing the next summer blockbuster, Melissa Gilliam, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medicine, wants to deploy these tools to keep urban kids from getting pregnant or contracting infections. If this goal hardly distinguishes her from a million other people working with disadvantaged youth, her methodology certainly does: she is inviting them to play a secretive, science-fiction transmedia game on their computers to get them to rethink contraception, STIs and the cycle of poverty.

“Playing games can shape social attitudes and transform behaviors,” Gilliam said. “But I am not certain if anyone has tried to use a transmedia game in this context with urban youth.”

First, an explanation: A transmedia game is a story that unfolds across multiple digital technologies. It is usually designed by a video game, movie, or television show creator for that subset of the audience who wants to take the experience out of the screen and into everyday life.

This transmedia game is being orchestrated by Gilliam and her colleague Patrick Jagoda, PhD, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of New Media in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. It will launch on March 12th, and will be live for two weeks. They and their team of game developers will drop clues online and in the real world during that time, leading young players on a scavenger hunt for health and science knowledge and letting the players create content for each other.

The first hint in the game is already being planted at various places across Chicago. The developers are also drawing players into the game with Facebook and Google advertisements. The ads will direct these curious people to a website. Right now, the website is just a countdown clock to March 12. When the game starts, it will be a hub of clues.

(The plot and characters are under wraps until it’s over, so don’t look here for spoilers.)

“We don’t know who will play the game,” said Ainsley Sutherland, the research coordinator for the project. “But it was designed by 14 to 17 year olds, for their friends and peers.”

The research group plans to collect demographic information, to survey the people who play, and to monitor the online forum to see what they learn by playing. Gilliam is hopeful that the game will reach the target audience of poor, urban young people of color.

“I hope they realize that their course doesn’t have to be determined for them,” Gilliam said. By helping the young players think critically about health disparities and increase their health literacy in an augmented reality game, Gilliam hopes they’ll feel empowered to choose their sexual path in real life.

“Sexual and reproductive health is about your sense of relationships, and where you fit in the world. Young people who reach their full potential know what dangers they face and what hinders them. And they learn to reach beyond it.”

Will they play? Will they run away at the faintest whiff of being educated by an academic medical center? Will they think more critically about their social and cultural pressures to make poor reproductive choices?

And the million dollar question: Will their sexual behaviors change? read more

As another year comes to a close we’d like to look back at the fascinating research breakthroughs and inspiring patient stories from 2011. ScienceLife ran 168 posts this year, and while we wish we could highlight all of them, here are a handful of our favorites from each month.

January

Patrick Wilson found out that the H1N1 virus could end up helping us fight all types of flu. Stephen Pruett-Jones studied how some male birds mimic the sounds of predators to pick up the ladies (with an audio clip). We interviewed David Gozal about his study on the link between childhood obesity and lack of sleep, and took a look at NCAA regulations mandating sickle cell testing for athletes.

February

Harold Pollack gave a lecture on why violent crime in urban, minority communities should be considered a public health epidemic. Siri Atma Greeley studied the actual medical benefit of widespread genetic testing. Stacy Lindau wanted to know why so few women get help for sexual problems after surviving cancer. We talked to Bana Jabri about the causes of celiac disease, and Sliman Bensmaïa showed us how the brain processes the basic elements of touch very much like it handles visual information.

March

Sola Olopade educated women in Nigeria about using clean-burning stoves to prevent indoor pollution. Stefano Allesina and Jonathan Levine looked at how rock-paper-scissors helps explain evolution. Joshua Miller went to Yellowstone Park to see what stories the ghostly bones of animals can tell, and Scott Eggener questioned the wisdom of indiscriminate prostate cancer screening.

Photo by Gerald Waddell

Andrea King studied the wide range of responses to drinking alcohol, and why it can be fun for some people and a bummer for others. Cheryl Reed took a ride in a helicopter with our UCAN nurses. Kamal Sharma looked at the genes that control animals’ gait, and Ningqi Hou studied how urban environments can dictate how much exercise people get.

May

Daniel McGehee looked at the long-term effects of nicotine on the brain. Habibul Ahsan went to Bangladesh to study the health impacts of accidental exposure to arsenic in drinking water. The brain’s overlooked supporting cells got their due at a conference on neuroscience, and we remembered a landmark discovery about a once popular drug taken during pregnancy that we now know can cause cancer.

June

As we headed into summer, Diana Lauderdale used Google to track MRSA. We learned about an extraordinary transplant where a man received a new heart, liver AND kidney. Daniel Geynisman gave us the rundown on whether or not cell phones are killing us (they’re not, as long as you don’t use them in the car), and some UChicago undergrads studied what happens to gorillas on the birth control pill.

July

We spoke to Donald Jensen and Andrew Aronsohn about the new outlook for patients with hepatitis C. Igor Schneider made a time machine to find the genetic switch for limb development. Farr Curlin led a study about the benefits of addressing spiritual needs alongside medical care, and Adam Cifu looked at the phenomenon of scientific study reversals.

August

Stefano Allesina dug into the long, shady history of nepotism in academia in Italy. John Schneider talked about his work addressing sexual health and stigma in India. Michael Becker discovered a new treatment for the Royal Disease, and we had the rare chance to name check a Spiderman villain in a post.

September

Martha McClintock and Suzanne Conzen studied the connection between social isolation, stress and breast cancer. Gallego Romero traveled to India to search for the origins of lactose intolerance. Stephanie Dulawa developed a mouse model for OCD, and Paul Vezina looked at a different kind of obsession, compulsive gambling.

October

Arshiya Baig started a pilot project to help people learn about life with diabetes through pictures. Manyuan Long found that some of the youngest genes are in the brain. Jens Ludwig and Stacy Lindau published a landmark study about the connection between neighborhood poverty and health, and Issam Awad studied a rare brain disease that soon could be treated with a drug instead of surgery.

November

Cathy Pfister and Tim Wootton figured out how to use seashells to track climate change over the years. Lianne Kurina found a link between loneliness and sleep quality. Shantanu Nundy, Monica Peek and Marshall Chin developed a program to send text message reminders to people with diabetes, and Pan Chen looked at the links between childhood abuse and aggressive behavior in adults.

December

Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety and Peggy Mason discovered that rats can show empathy for their fellow rats in distress. Maciej Lesniak performed a scary but amazing brain surgery on a patient who was awake. Cathryn Nagler searched for the source of food allergies within our bodies, while Stafano Guandalini uncovered the challenges in educating doctors about one of those allergies, celiac disease.

Whew. Hope you were able to click through at least a few of those. We look forward to another great year of research in 2012. We’re taking a break next week, but we’ll be back on January 5. Happy holidays!

By Dianna Douglas

The goal of World AIDS Day 2011 is not to make the public aware of the disease. That was the goal in 1988, back when the international health threat was still new, infections were rising every year, and there was no hope of a treatment in sight. This year, World AIDS Day marks the sunset of the public panic about the virus. The stated goal this year is “getting to zero” — or bringing the number of AIDS-related deaths and new HIV infections down to zero and ending all discrimination against people living with the virus.

The University of Chicago has various ways of reaching that goal here in Chicago. There’s the STI/HIV Intervention Network (SHINE) based at the School of Social Service Administration, which brings interventions to neglected groups such as men who have sex with men, people in the criminal justice system, minority youth, and young couples. There’s also the Medical Center’s Living Positively program, in which HIV-positive young people act as advocates to their peers who are at risk.

Now, in honor of World AIDS Day, the Medical Center is trying an innovative approach to this public health issue. Instead of doing what he calls the “typical academic thing for World AIDS Day” — a panel of researchers talking about AIDS in Africa in an auditorium full of other researchers — John Schneider, MD, MPH, has organized a ball. “This year, we want to collaborate and fully engage with the community,” he said. In gay culture, a ball is where people dress in drag to show off their moves, a lot like a fashion show. The community he hopes to reach with this ball is the young GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer) minorities who have the highest HIV infection rates in the city.

While the tide may have turned in the AIDS epidemic, the infection rates of several groups remain stubbornly high. Around 22,000 people in Chicago live with HIV or AIDS, and the infection rates among African Americans and gay men are particularly sobering. Since 2005, 57 percent of new HIV infections in men have been a result of men having sex with infected men. Among African Americans, the HIV infection rate since 2005 is more than double the general population’s infection rate.

A partnership with the young people striking a pose at underground balls may seem unusual, but it may also be the best way to reach Chicago’s most vulnerable populations. “We know where the epidemic is, and we have the tools to take care of it. What is needed now is hard work using traditional case-finding methods to reach these vulnerable groups with health services,” Schneider said.

The ball tradition, subject of the award-winning documentary Paris is Burning, has long been a safe place for young black gay and transgendered people to express their creativity and build communities. The World AIDS Day mini-ball will celebrate the support that the members of this subculture offered each other during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s.

“These are the people most impacted by AIDS in the United States,” said Keith Green, MSW, co-director for the Chicago Black Gay Men’s Caucus and a co-sponsor for the event.

Everyone at the ball will see their peers promoting safe sex and healthy behavior.

Contestants — many of whom are gay, transgender or bisexual — will compete against one another in the lobby of the School of Social Service Administration this Friday night. Participants will display their dance skills, costumes and attitude in a variety of events, similar to a runway show. In some events, they will be judged on the “realness” of their drag. In others, on the beauty of their clothing and overall style. Each of the seven walk competition categories has a cash prize for the winner.

“Every category requires the creative integration of the AIDS ribbon, the color red, or latex,” said Matt Richards, outreach program manager for pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

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Last November, a barrier was broken in the prolific Bollywood film industry of India. A film called Dunno Y featured the first on-screen male-male kiss - a provocative scene in a country that only the year before repealed a law making homosexuality illegal. Many tagged the film as India’s version of Brokeback Mountain, a controversial and progressive step in depicting male-male romance in popular culture that reflected a growing social acceptance of homosexuality. But the full significance of those cultural changes in the South Asian country have yet to be studied, and will require perspectives from law, anthropology, medicine, and more.

Just such a discussion will take place this Saturday morning at the University of Chicago and on the internet in the roundtable event, “Sexual Identity, Health and Stigma in India: Traditional Statuses and Western Influences.” Organized by John Schneider, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center and director of Global Health Programs, the discussion will be available worldwide on a webcast broadcast by the UChicago Facebook page, the Global Health Initiative website, and here on ScienceLife (watch this space).

“What I tried to do is bring together scholars from a number of different disciplines to make this a truly interdisciplinary discussion,” Schneider said. “I want it to be like a Sunday morning news program - but smarter - where a topic area is chosen and everybody fires away with their background about it, leaving room for remote viewer input.”

The central topic of whether sexual identity in India is truly shifting can be addressed from any number of angles. There’s the legal status of homosexuality after the 2009 repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code by the High Court of Mumbai. Or the sexual and mental health consequences after centuries of stigmatization of men having sex with men, including the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Or the pop culture ripples, such as Dunno Y, that may reflect changing attitudes and sexual roles in Indian culture. All of which are set against the backdrop of a country rapidly modernizing and playing an increasingly powerful role in global economy and society.

“I think that India is going through tremendous social and cultural changes as it emerges from what would be, in old terms, a less-developed economy to now becoming something of an economic powerhouse,” said Niranjan Karnik, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience and another participant in the event. “This has the potential to really change the dynamics of the society and change the way people see themselves and behaviors.”

The participants in the roundtable are all accomplished researchers and experts on India. The keynote speaker, Lawrence Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley, studies medical anthropology in the country, and has written on homosexuality, aging, and organ transplant markets. Philip Kumar and Sanjay Srivastava are researchers based in India studying sexuality and advising the government on health issues related to men who have sex with men. Schneider himself has an extensive project underway in Indian truck drivers, where he is using cell phones in building a network of men who have sex with men to study their behavior and identify potential peer outreach points.

“One of the issues we are looking at is what changes in sex position roles might be occurring over time in India,” Schneider said. “Is a Western identity rubbing off on India, or is it developing a new identity? My work will help address those questions because of the cell phone network data that triangulates often sensitive self-reported data,” Schneider said.

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In zoos, keepers strive to preserve as much of the natural experience as possible for their animals. But not everything can be left up to nature behind zoo walls. While encouraging reproduction can be a zoo mission for captive endangered species, other species can’t be allowed to procreate without limits, lest the zoo run out of room for booming families. In primates, zookeepers turn to a familiar method of birth control - the same hormone-based contraception developed for humans. But does putting a gorilla on “the pill” change more than the animal’s ovulation cycle?

This unusual topic was the basis for University of Chicago graduate Anna Sarfaty’s undergraduate research project. For over a year, Sarfaty and her co-authors closely observed four female gorillas at Lincoln Park Zoo, keeping score of sexual, social, and aggressive behaviors to see if hormonal birth control disrupted their normal activity. Published in the journal Zoo Biology with co-authors Susan Margulis and Sylvia Atsalis, the results offer new information for zookeepers on the effects of contraception.

“Zoos don’t want to separate males from females,” Sarfaty said. “So hormonal birth control is a great option, and we know that it works since it’s been given for many years. But researchers like to understand how animals may be acting differently and understand how the behavior we’re seeing might be different from the natural world.”

Unlike most published studies, Sarfaty’s paper can name names - the stars of the experiment were Rollie, Tabibu, Madini, and Bulera, four of the seven females in the zoo’s gorilla population. Each female gorilla received birth control pills on the same schedule that a female human does - three weeks of estrogen and progestin, followed by one week of placebo pills. Under normal conditions in the wild, gorillas are known to increase certain types of sexual activities known as “estrous behaviors” in the second week of their cycle, near the time of ovulation. So researchers watched their four subjects for 20 minutes a day, four to five times a week, for over a year, to see whether the same behavioral patterns were preserved in the captive, contraceptive-fed females.

Behaviors were scored according to an “ethogram” - a dictionary of behaviors that is “more difficult to write than you would think,” Sarfaty said. The catalog, reproduced in the article, is extensive: listing everything from social play and grooming to biting and chasing to more risque actions such as mounting and masturbation. The researchers also monitored how much time the females spent in the vicinity of the group’s dominant male silverback gorilla, which is a provocative move in gorilla culture.

“Because the gorilla social system is so strict, just sitting close to the silverback male and doing nothing is still a big deal,” Sarfaty said.

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By Dianna Douglas

More research practically begging people to get a good night’s sleep has come out of the sleep labs at the University of Chicago. Eve Van Cauter and Rachel Leproult have discovered that a week of inadequate sleep means less testosterone in young men.

A lot less.

In the study, ten healthy young men gave blood samples after a week of sleeping just five hours a night. By the end of the week, they had 15 percent less testosterone than normal. “This is not an insignificant amount, since it is about the amount that occurs with normal aging by 10 to 15 years,” Van Cauter said. As a man ages, testosterone production decreases by 1 to 2 percent a year.

The lack of testosterone affected not only the reproductive function of these young men, but their happiness as well. Testosterone is a vital hormone for a man’s physical and mental health, and is released into the body during sleep.

“Low testosterone levels are associated with reduced well being and vigor,” Van Cauter said, explaining why the young men said they felt grumpy and lethargic, and their mood worsened as the study progressed.

Low testosterone is associated with low energy, reduced libido, and poor concentration. Consumer Reports Health found in a recent survey that feeling too tired is the reason men cite most often for a low sex drive.

This isn’t just a lab exercise - sleep loss is endemic in modern society. At least 15 percent of the adults in the US get less than 5 hours of sleep a night. Shift workers are especially at risk for lost sleep. The average American got nine hours of sleep in 1910 and got seven in 1975. The cumulative effects of short sleep are still being discovered, and they’re all bad. People who don’t get enough sleep are fatter, more likely to have diabetes, have all sorts of learning and cognitive problems, and die earlier. Van Cauter says that a nation that doesn’t sleep enough has an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

“As research progresses, low sleep duration and poor sleep quality are increasingly recognized as endocrine disruptors,” Van Cauter said. Mess with the delivery of hormones throughout the body, and people become hungrier and sadder. Their blood pressure goes up and their insulin production goes haywire.

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Teaching with Treadmills

Inside the Biological Sciences Learning Center on the Medical Center campus is a laboratory that looks more like a gymnasium. Six state-of-the-art treadmills and six futuristic exercise bikes sit around the room, each connected to a computer alongside modified oxygen masks and suction cup sensors. Instead of dissecting frogs or mixing chemicals, students show up to lab sections in shorts and running shoes, prepared to sweat for science. In Mark Osadjan’s “Metabolism and Exercise” course, part of a two-quarter Exercise and Nutrition sequence, there’s no sitting on the sidelines.

Since joining the University of Chicago as a senior lecturer in 2003, Osadjan has designed courses that teach undergraduates about biology by connecting with what most college students care about: keeping fit, and sex. As part of the UChicago core curriculum, every undergraduate must fulfill a biology requirement, even if their interests lie in political science, music theory, or philosophy. With his “Metabolism and Exercise” and “The Biology of Gender” courses, Osadjan has met these science-shy students halfway, filtering instruction on evolution, physiology, and genetics through their own personal hobbies and interests. The efforts have been such a success that Osadjan’s courses fill up soon after registration is opened.

Today, Osadjan was announced as one of this year’s recipients of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an esteemed UChicago honor that goes back to 1938. Last week I met with Mark to talk about his award and his career path, from a graduate student studying Antarctic fish to an instructor of graduate-level science to his current position, teaching predominantly undergraduate non-biology majors.

“It’s always a trick to figure out how to teach with enough enthusiasm, such that it spills over to the students,” Osadjan said. “It’s our challenge not only to teach these students a certain number of facts, but to show them why those facts are important, relevant, and worth thinking about throughout life.”

You can read more about Osadjan and the other Quantrell winners in the award package at The University of Chicago news site.

Elsewhere…

Most college students spend their summers traveling the country or working an internship, but 20-year-old Rachel Garneau had other plans: donating a kidney. On Tuesday morning, Garneau came to the Medical Center and made the rare gift of an altruistic kidney donation, triggering a kidney swap chain that helped patients in need of the organ in New York and Madison. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times followed the story before and during the surgery, and got some great play-by-play commentary from Yolanda Becker, professor of surgery and director of the kidney and pancreas program.  For instance: “‘The pancreas is the bitch of the abdomen,” she confided.’”

Are clinical trials handicapped by their own success? A new analysis from Anup Malani and Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago Law School finds that trial enrollment for a given disease plummets when a treatment is found to be effective, using AIDS clinical trials after the approval of anti-retroviral therapy to illustrate the point. Richard Schilsky, professor and section chief of hematology/oncology at the Medical Center, agreed with the findings at Nature News: “There are so many options that patients are not flocking to get into clinical trials like they used to.”

Read how turtles move to warm areas to bask - even in their own eggs as embryos. Adorable photos and interesting commentary (are they determining their own sex?) at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

That news about the World Health Organization adding cell phones to their list of possible carcinogens? Here’s an article from Cancer Research UK to reassure your fears. Another reassuring fact: it was placed by the WHO into the same risk category [pdf] as coffee, dry cleaning, and pickled vegetables.

Can jazz musicians tell the difference between another musician improvising or following composed music? A new study finds the answer, and a ScienceNOW article gives you the chance to test yourself.

Did you know UChicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin does a regular science news roundup on local newsmagazine show Chicago Tonight called Scientific Chicago? Well he does, and the latest edition discussed a story familiar to readers of the blog: the mass extinction 360 million years ago that ended “The Age of Fishes.” Watch the video here.

llustration by Meike Köhler/Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

Just in time for Easter, a team of scientists digging on a Spanish island have discovered the fossils of a prehistoric rabbit of unusual size: 26 pounds, more than six times the size of today’s bunnies. Called Nuralagus rex - the “king of the hares” - the big guy definitely did not hop when it lived 5 million years ago. While it might resemble more of a rodent than a rabbit to the untrained eye (and its discoverers originally thought it was a tortoise?), experts in the field are convinced that it’s an ancestral figure in the line. “Really, this is a rather typical rabbit head [albeit large] stuck on an atypical rabbit body,” Brian Kraatz, an expert in rabbit evolution at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, told National Geographic. (Kraatz seems like a funny guy - he also told Discovery News “It’s unclear whether their feet would have been decent good luck charms.”). Oh and before you start writing that giant bunny horror movie script, Brian Switek reminds us that it’s already been done.

Scientists in England find they can change the sexual preference of male mice by deleting genes related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. As you might expect, the study has led to some interesting headlines. For a more thoughtful take, science writer Ed Yong asks whether they are truly affecting sexual preference or whether they are merely making indiscriminately friskier mice.

Are people with strong religious beliefs at higher risk for obesity? A study by our friends at Northwestern University suggest that’s the case, finding a correlation between obesity and attendance at religious activities when other factors (such as age, race, sex, education, and more) are controlled for. One interesting take-home message from, suggested by the Medical Center’s Daniel Sulmasy in a HealthDay News article, is that religious activities might be a good place for potential anti-obesity interventions to take hold. No more donuts after Sunday services, bummer.

A scientific skirmish has erupted over a paper by co-authored by famed biologist E.O. Wilson disputing the existence of kin selection, a extension of Darwin’s theory of natural selection that has helped scientists explain the evolution of everything from homosexuality to child-rearing to altruism. Kin selection is the idea that an individual will help protect and nourish relatives beyond their direct offspring because even nieces, nephews, and cousins share some a significant portion of an individual’s genetic background. As recapped by Carl Zimmer, the current debate began with the publication of Wilson’s paper questioning the evidence of this process by Nature last August, a paper that was roundly criticized by the evolutionary biology community (my favorite quote Zimmer received for his original article: “This paper, far from showing shortcomings in inclusive fitness theory, shows the shortcomings of the authors.” Zing!). This week, Nature published several rebuttals to the original paper - one signed by 137 scientists - and the authors’ re-rebuttal. Jerry Coyne, one of the original critics of the paper on his blog, examines the latest salvos in the argument and what it says about the role of professional reputation in scientific publication.

The nuclear reactor situation in Japan appears to have fortunately become less alarming this week. But just in case you are still concerned about radiation traveling over thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean to the United States, here are reassuring comments from David Grdina, professor of radiation and cellular oncology at the Medical Center, given to Fox Chicago News. Also, to put reports on the amount of radiation being measured from Japan to O’Hare Airport into perspective, keep this awesome chart from science comic xkcd handy.

We are pleased to announce a new way to keep up with research news from the University of Chicago Medical Center, in the form of a regular audio podcast. Because we are all about evolution at ScienceLife, we will start by posting the pilot episode - Episode #0, if you will - and asking for help in shaping the podcast’s development. For starters, the podcast needs a name; if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments or e-mail us at robert.mitchum@uchospitals.edu and/or dianna.douglas@uchospitals.edu. We would also love to hear what you want in a University of Chicago Medical Center podcast: more research news, patient stories, Q&As with doctors and scientists, or other segment ideas. Whether you’re in your car, in your office, or on the treadmill, enjoy listening to our debut effort!

In the pilot episode of the podcast to be named later, hear from Dianna Douglas and Rob Mitchum about the inaugural symposium of the new Sleep, Metabolism, and Health Center (SMAHC), a study of sexuality in female cancer survivors, and the identification of new targets in celiac disease.

University of Chicago Research Podcast Episode #0 by robmitchum

Stacey Sandbo and Stacy Lindau counsel a patient at the PRISM clinic. (Photo by David Christopher)

If your oncologist is worried about your sex life, you’re probably a man.

Stacy Lindau, associate professor of obstetrics/gynecology and geriatrics, has been researching how often women get help for sexual problems after surviving cancer, and the data are grim. Almost none of the women in her study got treatment, and half of them said they wanted it.

Breast or gynecologic cancer is rough on a woman’s sexuality. It often means hormone treatments, chemotherapy, or surgical disfigurations. Cancer could take a breast, the ovaries, or most of the reproductive tract.

Typical results: severe pain during sex, dryness, and difficulty with arousal and orgasm. A mastectomy or hysterectomy will often leave scars that make a woman feel less feminine and attractive. Add that to frequent bladder infections or incontinence after sex, and women find they’re facing some complex problems in bed after cancer. Sometimes the problems persist for years.

Despite abundant research about the negative effects of breast and gynecologic cancers on a woman’s sexuality, a 2002 survey found that physicians generally do not discuss it with their patients. This is in stark contrast to prostate cancer, Lindau said, where men and their doctors talk early and often about preserving sexual function. The dialogue usually begins as soon as a man is diagnosed with prostate cancer, and continues through treatment and beyond.

Lindau, who made national headlines in 2007 by telling Americans about the active sex lives of senior citizens, surveyed hundreds of survivors of breast and gynecological cancer for a study published in Cancer. She asked them who wanted a physician’s advice for sexual problems. Forty-eight percent of young cancer survivors said they did. Interest peaked in women between 48 and 55 - over 52 percent.

It dropped to a fifth among the women over 65. Still, that’s a lot of older women wishing a physician would explain to them why their sex life stalled after cancer and how to get their groove back.

So if women want this help from their physician, why aren’t they asking for it?

One reason is that patients overwhelmingly prefer for their doctor to initiate the discussion. That, however, is a can of worms that physicians won’t open without somewhere to refer their patients for treatment.

“There are few clinics in the United States with the expertise to treat sexual problems in women and girls with cancer,” Lindau said. The University of Chicago has the only one in Illinois, and one of few in the country - the PRISM clinic (Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine for Women and Girls with Cancer).

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Janet Rowley rides her bike in front of the Gwen & Jules Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery. (Photo by Jason Smith)

It never gets old hearing the story of how Janet Rowley found the first genetic cause for cancer in the early 1970’s, so it’s a delight to read this week’s New York Times conversation between Rowley and reporter Claudia Dreifus. The interview retraces Rowley’s steps from working with mentally disabled children at Cook County Hospital through her almost accidental training in cytogenetics and her most famous discovery - the chromosomal translocation that causes acute myeloid leukemia. While Rowley has been repeatedly honored for her contribution to the concept of cancer as a genetic disease (and continues to remain a yearly subject of Nobel speculation), she remains understated in looking back at her life’s work.

“People accuse me of being too humble. But looking down a microscope at banded chromosomes is not rocket science. If I hadn’t found it, somebody else would.”

To go with the New York Times interview, the University of Chicago Facebook page put out a call for questions to Rowley, and have received some interesting thoughts. There’s still time to get your question in there for one of the most respected cancer researchers in the United States and a key figure in the history of genetic disease research. [See also Lisa Belkin's post on the New York Times parenting blog about recent research on barriers against women in science, in which she cites Rowley's example.]

Elsewhere…

As a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I remember being trained in emergency procedures for the seemingly infinitesimal chance of a Midwest earthquake originating in the New Madrid fault in Southern Missouri and Illinois. But despite recent rumbles in the Chicago area, it’s been 200 years since the last New Madrid quake to get into the 7’s on the Richter Scale, according to this nice New Madrid By the Numbers post by natural science blog +/- Science. Perhaps those school drills weren’t so crazy after all - the blog points out that in 2003 the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a 7 to 10 percent chance of a major New Madrid earthquake in the next 50 years.

Blue penguins, and what they have to say about how feather color is produced.

Things are finally getting back to normal in Chicago after last week’s blizzard, but amazing stories of Chicagoans helping each other out during the storm continue to pop up. Here’s one story, from Medill Reports, of a woman who delivered her baby at the Medical Center in the midst of the blizzard Wednesday.

Hillary Rosner, one of the many cool people I met at Science Online 2011, has a new blog at PLoS with the excellent name of Tooth & Claw (from Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” often associated with natural selection). In her first post, she brings up a fascinating fruit fly name from our own Manyuan Long - “jingwei,” named for a Chinese myth of a woman who drowns and is reincarnated as a bird to have her revenge on the sea. As the 1993 study describes, the gene was once thought to be a “pseudogene” without function, but was later revived and used by Long to study the origin of new genes - an area he still studies today.

Finally, what better way to prepare for Valentine’s Day than reading Brian Switek’s article on dinosaur sex at Smithsonian Magazine. I love the lede.