Big-Brained Athletes

I'm a little late posting this one here, but last month I wrote a story for Wired Playbook on how athletes, much like musicians, seem to have brains that are beefier in certain areas.

Instead of just comparing the brains of athletes to non-athletes -- a correlation that wouldn't necessarily show if sports causes the brain to gain mass or if people with a thicker cortex in these areas are more likely to excel in athletic competition in the first place -- the researchers determined how each year of practice correlated to changes in the brain:

However, in one of the brain areas studied, the researchers found that the number of years each athlete competed as a diver nearly predicted how thick the subject’s brain would be. If the results of this small study hold, there may be some biological truth to the adage, “practice makes perfect.” It’s as if each year of sports experience becomes neatly folded as a new layer of neurons atop previously mastered skills, physical knowledge, and competition know-how that have already been crammed into the brain.

I think it's interesting to think about how these findings could impact sports statistics in the future. I mused:

These findings provide a small glimpse of how biometric and neurological data may one day be used to gauge a player’s ability and performance. Granted, there’s still a lot of work to be done in understanding exactly what’s going on in an athlete’s head.

Read the entire story here.

Photo via Flickr / alandberning

Wei, G., Zhang, Y., Jiang, T., & Luo, J. (2011). Increased Cortical Thickness in Sports Experts: A Comparison of Diving Players with the Controls PLoS ONE, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017112

Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.

Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.

Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.

Monitoring patients' health remotely

Over at Wired Playbook, I wrote a piece about a group of researchers using ECG sensors, GPS, accelerometers, and a mobile phone to accurately monitor a patient with heart trouble, in real-time, during their prescribed exercise routine.

...[E]ven in this small pilot study, the device proved some worth: On two separate occasions, the researchers noted distinct abnormalities in a patient’s ECG and consulted with a cardiologist. While the cardiac events turned out to be benign, the fact that such subtleties could be picked up with remote monitoring holds much promise for the tech. Had a more serious medical emergency transpired, the researchers could have summoned an ambulance to the scene using the transmitted GPS data.

Though this was a small pilot study, the proof-of-concept research was a cool step forward for remote monitoring of health.

Read the entire article here.

Photo via Flickr / rwk

Worringham, C., Rojek, A., & Stewart, I. (2011). Development and Feasibility of a Smartphone, ECG and GPS Based System for Remotely Monitoring Exercise in Cardiac Rehabilitation PLoS ONE, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014669

Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.

Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.

Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.

The continuing plight of the Sioux

Sad statistics, laid out in a provoking article from The Atlantic.

Despite sitting on a trust fund that's worth over $1 billion in equity from a "purchase" of the Black Hills that the tribe never agreed to, the Sioux are suffering from chronic disease and have what's sure to be one of the lowest ethnic life expectancies in the United States:

According to Oglala President John Yellow Bird Steele, almost half of Oglala Sioux over 40 have diabetes, and in the Western Hemisphere, few countries have shorter life expectancies (for men it is 48; for women, 52).

Photo via Flickr / cm195902

Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.

Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.

Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.

Poppy Biofeul

Little known fact: The first diesel engine was able to run on peanut oil.

With petroleum putting the squeeze on the environment and our pocketbooks, the push to create sustainable biofuels with commodity crops is increasing.

There’s an intriguing prospect in the March issue of The Atlantic by Nicholas Schmidle about efforts to turn the poppy fields of Afghanistan into a source of biodiesel fuel that will not only benefit the gas-guzzlers of the world, but the Afghan people themselves.

Michael Bester, a former Army soldier, is leading a team of visionaries trying to sway poppies away from the traditional opium trade, and towards the sustainable energy domain. Their project, not surprisingly, has met with a bit of resistance.

During the Bush administration, the White House felt that the only way to beat the opium trade was to raze the poppy fields. When Obama took office, the government’s commitment to aerial spraying of the poppy crop ceased, but Bester has yet to convince the military brass that his program will work for the US Department of Defense.

As The Atlantic reported, Marine commandant General James Conway and his Colonel (ret.) Bob Charette are committed to finding alternative fuels to sustain military operations in the Middle East. But they aren’t convinced that poppies are the way forward.

But even for Charette, poppy’s political problems loomed too large. “It just doesn’t sound good, the United States using poppy oil,” Charette told me.

Even though poppy oil is far more efficient, and its production would directly aid the people of Afghanistan, the Marine Corps aren’t buying what Bester’s selling. But to their credit, they have instead agreed to mix 20% cottonseed oil with JP-8 jet fuel. Granted, this is a huge step forward for biofuel acceptance and utility, but it’s irksome to see preconceived notions once again trump reality, science, and data.

Photo via Flickr / Christopher_Hawkins

Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.

Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.

Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.

Helmets make sports less safe

That was the gist of a headline I read on The Atlantic this morning.  

At first blush, I thought the commentary by Edward Tenner on a recent NYT report was overreaching a bit.  How could helmets, which protect the head, make sports more hazardous.  But as I read on, I saw the point he was trying to make.

In certain situations, helmets may give an athlete a false sense of security.  With their noggin firmly secured in a near-indestructible plastic casing, the theory goes, some contact sport athletes might deliver hits they'd otherwise shy away from.

The NYT article focuses on women's lacrosse, where helmets are currently only worn by goalkeepers.  In fact, the other players are banned from wearing helmets.  And many of the sport's competitors would like to keep it that way.

But the crusaders are facing an uphill battle because the idea that players engage in riskier behavior when they wear helmets, well, that's difficult to prove.  Most of the evidence presented is anecdotal -- like the fact that hockey and football hits became noticeably more vicious after the professional leagues instituted helmet policies.      

Everyone knows I'm a staunch supporter of protective headgear for snowsports and bicycling.  But I can see the points being made for continuing bans on head gear in certain sports.  Strap a helmet on or lacrosse player and the game dynamic changes a bit.  Why worry about finesse and skill when you can just bowl your opponent over?  

Perhaps we need to better define which sports draw higher risks for head injury by their very nature, opposed to those where the head protection creates the danger in the first place.    

Doctors and sports officials need to seriously consider the increasing evidence that concussions are associated with cognitive decline in later life, and the fact that concussions are on the rise in contact sports, a topic I've written about before.

Riddell, a football helmet manufacturer, isn't standing around idly either, and has been working on next-generation gear that might reduce the impact a crushing hit has on the brain.  The company placed tiny accelerometer sensors inside the helmet, and collected a drumbeat of data on what happens inside, presumably where your brain would be -- when the headgear is subjected to blows from various angles.

All steps in the right direction, though everyone agrees more data is needed.  And not just for technological shift, but a deeper understanding of athlete behavior is needed, too.  

Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.

Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.

Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.

Going upstream in the scientific process, literally.

My latest post for Wired Playbook reports on a new idea that two UK researchers have proposed for keeping tabs on which Olympic athletes are using performance-enhancing drugs.

Rather than having the athletes pee in a cup or get blood drawn just before competition, the researchers believe that searching for drug metabolites in the wastewater that flows from the Olympic village might be more effective, especially if used in conjunction with current screening methods.

As I wrote:

These studies indicate that fancy chemical analysis techniques can indeed detect drugs in wastewater, but claiming that some fraction of Olympic athletes uses PEDs, based on data showing traces of illegal substances in the sewer water? Well, that wouldn’t make Olympic officials blink. Unless researchers can hone in on who was using them, the idea simply won’t fly.

Katsoyiannis admits that while solid research supports their theoretical claim, the actual practice of monitoring wastewater in an Olympic Village to specifically target illicit drug use hasn’t been tested. But he plans to harness localization techniques developed during years of environmental research that could isolate the origin of certain organic pollutants that contaminate water supplies through rigorous sample collection and old-fashioned detective work.

I went "upstream" on this piece, and not just in the, er, wastewater vernacular sense. But upstream in that it's reporting science at the beginning of the process, when the idea was just that, an idea. No data had been collected. No analysis completed.

Most science coverage waits until the end of the study to simply relay results. But in an effort to try new formats and techniques, I decided to cover the very early stages of discovery.

A budding theme from the Science Online conference in North Carolina last month was how to improve science journalism. John Rennie challenged the crowd to fight the "paper-of-the-week" model that resounds through most media outlets, where the same big paper -- most often touted by press release (another problem I'd like to cover in more detail soon) -- is more or less covered in the same way by multiple sites, with only minor changes in words or tone differentiating one from the other.

This was my humble attempt to try something new, to challenge the status quo. On one hand, it could stimulate cool discussions about the growing possibilities of this research, or even spark conversations about its challenges. For instance, the privacy concerns of a system that constantly monitors people's pee for illicit drugs is, well, kind of sketchy. Even the researchers themselves joke that the system is like "Big Brother".

On the other hand, because there are no results presented here for this exact system, there's still a lot of speculation. But I still have to wonder, as long as it's sparked the conversation, does it really matter?

Photo courtesy London 2012

Katsoyiannis A, & Jones KC (2011). An anti-doping sampling strategy utilizing the sewerage systems of sport villages. Environmental science & technology, 45 (2), 362-3 PMID: 21142144

Schröder HF, Gebhardt W, & Thevis M (2010). Anabolic, doping, and lifestyle drugs, and selected metabolites in wastewater--detection, quantification, and behaviour monitored by high-resolution MS and MS(n) before and after sewage treatment. Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry, 398 (3), 1207-29 PMID: 20652555

Zuccato, E., Chiabrando, C., Castiglioni, S., Bagnati, R., & Fanelli, R. (2008). Estimating Community Drug Abuse by Wastewater Analysis Environmental Health Perspectives, 116 (8), 1027-1032 DOI: 10.1289/ehp.11022

Stress and Neurodegeneration

I have a new feature at Scientific American, describing recent research that shows how stress is linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

In the past, we have feared Alzheimer's, because people rarely get better once they find out they have the disease. We watch in horror, as our aging relatives slowly become different people, donning new personalities, or forgetting who we are. And as more and more Alzheimer's drugs fail clinical trials, there is certainly a bleak outlook for new emerging treatments.

But when our environment or lifestyle factors into the disease, suddenly we regain control. For instance, thanks to years of rigorous work, we know that by cutting fats and salts from our diets, and getting lots of exercise, we can often keep heart disease at bay. Granted, we understand the effects of lifestyle on the heart much more than how it impacts the brain, but new studies are trudging forward, offering glimpses of hope:

More or less, all of the primates raised in normal size cages had the same amount of plaque. The monkeys housed in smaller cages as youngsters, on the other hand, had much more variation in their plaque level, suggesting stress may affect individuals in different ways. For some, it’s detrimental, while others appeared to take it in stride.

Clearly, these results only provide a correlative link between early life experience and measures of cognitive function, a retrospective peek that implies stress may be more than an emotional burden. But, as Plassman pointed out, we don’t know whether the brain changes the authors observed translated into true cognitive slips. Tuszynski’s team reported that they were simply not able to run tests on cognitive function for this particular experiment, because some of the older monkeys were brought to them just a few weeks before they died.

While a causal link between stress and Alzheimer’s Disease remains elusive, a bevy of research has shown that moderate stress can in fact make the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases worse – not just in Alzheimer’s, but in animal models of Parkinson’s Disease, too.

Click here to read the full article.

Photo via Flickr / alancleaver_2000

References: Merrill DA, Masliah E, Roberts JA, McKay H, Kordower JH, Mufson EJ, & Tuszynski MH (2011). Association of early experience with neurodegeneration in aged primates. Neurobiology of aging, 32 (1), 151-6 PMID: 19321231

Tran TT, Srivareerat M, & Alkadhi KA (2010). Chronic psychosocial stress triggers cognitive impairment in a novel at-risk model of Alzheimer's disease. Neurobiology of disease, 37 (3), 756-63 PMID: 20044001

Smith LK, Jadavji NM, Colwell KL, Katrina Perehudoff S, & Metz GA (2008). Stress accelerates neural degeneration and exaggerates motor symptoms in a rat model of Parkinson's disease. The European journal of neuroscience, 27 (8), 2133-46 PMID: 18412632

Decision Tools For IVF

I know that I've been slow on updates recently -- for lack of a better excuse, I'll blame it on the holiday season. But things are back in full swing now, and I'll have a number of new stories in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for Slate's DoubleX blog, on a PLoS Medicine study where researchers created a prediction model that they say will accurately determine if someone will get pregnant with in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Rather than externally validating their model, the researchers are crowdsourcing their new tool, and have opened it up on the web and a soon-to-be-released iPhone app. I wrote:

By answering nine questions about pregnancy history, the source of the eggs, and the types of fertility medications used, couples can find out their odds of successful IVF, as well as learn how each variable affects their risk profile. For instance, imagine a 33-year-old woman who’s never been pregnant and is using IVF for the first time after a year of trying to get pregnant on her own. Her fertility problems are caused by cervical issues, but she’s still using her own eggs (and has had gonadotropin hormone therapy treatment). According to IVFPredict, her chance of having a baby with her partner via in vitro fertilization is 13 percent. If the couple decides to go with intracytoplasmic sperm injection instead of the normal IVF method of combining multitudes of sperm and eggs in a dish, their odds jump to 42 percent, according to the model.

It's great to see clinical decision/patient education tools emerge for couples trying to get pregnant, especially those turning to IVF -- a procedure that costs about $12,000 for each procedure, and is often not covered by health insurance.

Image via Flickr / Yutaka Tsutano

Why I Run

On a guest post for Mary Knudson's HeartSense blog, I talk about why I started running:

Being a sprinter, I had never done much long distance work. In the past, making it around the 400m track just once was an accomplishment for me. Plus, my closest friends from college are hard-core distance runners. And by that, I mean they are really, really fast. Like 2:30ish marathon fast. Top 50 in the Boston Marathon fast. Fast fast. You get the point. So getting into this road racing business was a bit intimidating. I didn’t even tell my best friends what I was doing until shortly before my first race.

I started out slow, running just twice per week, a sluggish mile or two at a time. Week by week, runs became easier, and I found myself starting to push myself to go further, and faster. I started watching what I ate, making smarter choices on trips to the refrigerator. As the months passed, I began feeling better than ever, and had wrangled my waistline back to its proper diameter. My annual physical revealed more good news, as my cholesterol and blood pressure were now held in check.

You can read the full post here.

Using Blood Pressure Cuffs to Enhance Sports Performance

Over at Wired Playbook, I have a new article highlighting a sports performance-enhancing technique where blood flow is temporarily reduced to a limb, in order to prime the muscle for future stress during exercise:

The study builds off research first conducted in the 1980s by cardiovascular pioneer Keith Reimer that examined infarcts, areas of dead cardiac tissue that resulted after heart attacks, when blood flow (and, hence, oxygen) were cut off for extended periods of time. Reimer and his colleagues discovered that much less heart muscle deteriorated when the tissue had previously experienced a few training sessions where blood flow was slightly reduced.

It was as if practice makes perfect, and the previous bouts of low blood flow, which researchers refer to as ischemic preconditioning, primed the heart muscle to endure more serious, even catastrophic, events. When a life-threatening heart attack transpired, instead of shriveling away, the preconditioned heart muscle seemed to stand strong.

Read the full story here.

Photo via Flickr / jasleen_kaur

Jean-St-Michel E, Manlhiot C, Li J, Tropak M, Michelsen MM, Schmidt MR, McCrindle BW, Wells GD, & Redington AN (2010). Remote Preconditioning Improves Maximal Performance in Highly-Trained Athletes. Medicine and science in sports and exercise PMID: 21131871