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Video Workouts: Turns Out They're Not So Sweaty
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2009 Comment (5)By getting gamers up on their two feet, Nintendo's Wii workouts are a healthier take on video games than anything that came before (and the cost of the console is dropping). My generation was the first to grow up glued to game graphics, and some of us have the spines to prove it. In medical journals these days, early case reports of "Wii knee" and other orthopedic traumas have been fast followed by serious efforts to understand just how much our bodies stand to gain from Wii workouts. It is already known, as colleague Katherine Hobson reported last year, that in a dual between real and virtual sports, virtual doesn't cut it. But how about basic fitness? Can the Wii give you your daily dose of physical activity? Yes—and no. As it turns out, the Wii offers the real deal for some and little more than virtual exercise for others.
Motohiko Miyachi, a scientist employed by Japan's National Institute of Health and Nutrition, unveiled the latest and most definitive Wii research at the American Heart Association's scientific conference this week. The study was funded by Nintendo, which will use the data in game updates. The report conveniently went public just as the company releases the new edition of its hit exercise program, Wii Fit Plus. Other scientists who have tried to calculate how much energy people burned while playing Wii games didn't use ideal techniques, says Miyachi. Scientists have to measure the oxygen and carbon dioxide players exhale to calculate the energy being burned. That means tying players to cumbersome gas masks, which can limit movement and the degree to which players get into the game.
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Phthalates Threat: Less Boy, More Girl
Tweet Share on Facebook November 17, 2009 Comment (10)Last week we learned that male factory workers exposed to large amounts of BPA, a chemical in some plastics, had abnormally high rates of erectile dysfunction and other sexual performance problems. This week the news is about phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates). Researchers reported in the International Journal of Andrology that this family of chemicals, used in manufacturing polyvinyl chloride plastics, seems to make little boys behave a bit more like little girls. This small study isn't as worrisome as the headlines suggest. Its main public-health value may be in spurring more pregnant women to avoid processed foods—a worthwhile choice anyway, for other reasons.
The finding hinges on the credibility of a questionnaire—the "Pre-School Activities Inventory" (PSAI), which mothers fill out in describing their child's behavior. It is a psychometric tool, developed in 1993 and considered the most scientific approach available for parsing out masculine boys from feminine boys. Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the University of Rochester, led the study, which is part of a series she's conducting on phthalates. Phthalates are plastic softeners found in food-processing plants (hence they're in your food) and in hospitals—and in your carpeting, your wallpaper, and until recently many of your children's toys. Toy companies have already started removing phthalates now that a new federal law goes into effect in February.
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The PSA Test: 7 Reasons It Still Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2009 Comment (12)The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force asked doctors last year to stop checking PSA levels in elderly men—the very men who are most likely to have prostate cancer. By age 75, the officials reasoned, doctors are more likely to keep tinkering with their patients until they die of treatment side effects or something other than prostate cancer altogether. This spring, the New England Journal of Medicine published two long-term studies that questioned whether knowing a man's PSA level actually helps men survive. Healthcare commentators say that PSAs set off a cascade of overtreatment, endangering patients and tolerating wasteful medicine, and that patients should be wary.
You might expect that the surgical specialists at the center of prostate cancer treatment would have reined in their PSA testing, but they haven't. The American Urological Association actually lowered its recommendation for the age at which doctors should start offering patients the PSA test from 50 to 40. It was the first revision of the guidelines in nearly a decade. The next one, says Kirsten Greene, a urologist who worked on the committee, should take just a year, in light of the accelerating data and heightened public debate.
"The key change is how we react to abnormal tests and to a cancer diagnosis, which is generally less aggressively for some men than in the past," says Gerald Andriole, chief of urologic surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital/Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Andriole says that men shouldn't be afraid to get diagnosed; good urologists avoid overtreating less-dangerous cancers. Active surveillance or targeted attacks on very small tumors that spare healthy prostate tissue are both popular options.
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Sex and BPA Don't Mix, Say Researchers
Tweet Share on Facebook November 11, 2009 Comment (2)Bisphenol-A, better known as BPA, is the building block of polycarbonates and epoxy resins, plastics that have facilitated modern life. (They're in microwave containers, baby bottles, laptops, and even canned foods.) Tiny amounts circulate in the bodies of more than 90 percent of Americans. And now a team of Chinese and U.S. scientists says it has linked the stuff to sexual dysfunction in men. Even before today's news, plenty of people were getting the willies about BPA. Should this news make you feel less virile? Let's take a closer look.
Six years ago, De-Kun Li, a senior scientist at Kaiser Permanente's research arm, and his colleagues were already alarmed about BPA because of a steady stream of studies showing that BPA alters tissues in the reproductive organs and offspring of rats and mice. But there's a heated debate among statisticians, toxicologists, and endocrinologists about which animal models are relevant to human disease and about the paradoxical way BPA seems to work. Unlike typical poisons or carcinogens, more is not always worse and less is not always better. In many of the studies, BPA changes animal tissues only at specific low concentrations and only at particular stages of the life cycle.
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