Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
As we discussed in the last post, illness is accompanied by a dramatic decrease in eating, but also an increase in carbohydrate secretion in the gut. These events point towards a coordinated adaptive response to infection and illness that might improve survival when sick. So, should we give our patients […]
A study by Pickard and colleagues in Nature showed that exposure to lipopolysaccharide, LPS, causes anorexia. This component of sickness behavior is well known, and LPS administration is a commonly used model for illness anorexia. The figure below shows a dramatic decrease in energy intake after receiving LPS: In a […]
The gut microbiome is the most important force driving the evolution of dietary inflammation. Humans have coevolved with commensal organisms and pathogens since our distant ancestors became multicellular. Today, our bodies are a habitat for a multitude of microbes and viruses, the majority of which inhabit the gut, making up […]
Never more timely from Samuel Shem’s 1978 classic, the House of God, Fat Man’s Rule #13: The delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible As we have covered on this site, many examples of aggressive treatments aimed at fixing abnormal results have proved useless […]
Light exposure enables night shift work, but also has body wide effects on circadian gene expression. This gene-environment mismatch contributes to cancer, depression, and cardiovascular disease. The harmful effects of artificial light were explored in Stevens and Zhu in this month’s Philisophical Transactions B. From the abstract: “Over the past […]
In cancer, clonal cells evolve ways to escape restraints on growth and motility. These evolved traits favor the fitness of the clones (in the short term anyway) usually to the detriment of the organism that gave rise to the neoplasm. However, cancer lineages are usually dead ends, so that adaptations […]
It would seem to make sense that injured and bleeding patients need fluids, don’t they? Blood or saline can replace lost blood and restore normal cardiovascular function and oxygen delivery, according to traditional teaching. When your bleeding patient is pale and has a low blood pressure and a weak pulse […]
Has natural selection shaped human physiology so that blood loss anemia is better tolerated than we thought? A recent article in Nature reports that physicians give far too many blood transfusions. This piece gives strong voice to the argument that we often harm when we think we are helping. My […]
A building body of work indicates that the oral microbiota is intimately connected with human cardiovascular physiology. It was already known that poor oral health, especially gingivitis, is linked with atherosclerosis and heart attacks. A report the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine suggests that too much oral hygiene might […]
In a cool new finding, Kelly and colleagues recently reported that malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum, produce volatile compounds in blood that are attractive to mosquitoes. These sweet smelling volatiles are similar to terpenes produced by plants. The evolutionary origin of these compounds is intriguing to consider. Are they attractive to […]
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