It’s a Fat Fat World
Worldwide, there has been a startling increase in rates of obesity and overweight in both adults (28 percent increase) and children (up by 47 percent) in the past 33 years, with the number of overweight and obese people rising from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013, according to a major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013, published in The Lancet.
Over the past three decades, the highest rises in obesity levels among women have been in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Honduras and Bahrain, and among men in New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the USA.
In high-income countries, some of the highest increases in adult obesity prevalence have been in the USA (where roughly a third of the adult population are obese), Australia (where 28 percent of men and 30 percent of women are obese), and the UK (where around a quarter of the adult population are obese). Currently, 62 percent of the world’s obese people live in developing countries.
Stress degrades sperm quality
Psychological stress is harmful to sperm and semen quality, affecting its concentration, appearance, and ability to fertilize an egg, according to a study led by researchers at Columbia University. Results are published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility.
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, infertility affects men and women equally, and semen quality is a key indicator of male fertility.
“Men who feel stressed are more likely to have lower concentrations of sperm in their ejaculate, and the sperm they have are more likely to be misshapen or have impaired motility,” writes senior author Pam Factor-Litvak, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. “These deficits could be associated with fertility problems.”
Most physicians would forgo aggressive treatment for themselves at the end of life
Most physicians would choose a do-not-resuscitate or “no code” status for themselves when they are terminally ill, yet they tend to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing the same prognosis, according to a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine to be published May 28 in PLOS ONE.
It’s a disconnect that needs to be better understood, said VJ Periyakoil, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine and lead author of the study.
“Why do we physicians choose to pursue such aggressive treatment for our patients when we wouldn’t choose it for ourselves?” writes Periyakoil. “The reasons likely are multifaceted and complex.”
Universal antidote for snakebite
A team of researchers, led by Dr. Matthew Lewin of the California Academy of Sciences and Dr. Stephen P. Samuel of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland has taken another promising step toward developing a universal antidote for snakebite. Last summer, the team tested the effectiveness of a nasally administered antiparalytic drug on mice injected with high doses of Indian cobra (Naja naja) venom. Mice injected with otherwise fatal doses of venom outlived and in many cases survived after being treated with the antiparalytic agent, neostigmine. These findings support the team’s idea that providing fast, accessible, and easy-to-administer treatment can increase survival rates in victims of venomous snakebite.
The results of this pilot study were recently published in the Journal of Tropical Medicine.
Snakebite is one of the most neglected of all tropical diseases, with nearly 5 million people bitten by snakes each year. The number of fatalities globally is up to 30 times that of land mines and comparable to AIDS in some developing countries. Lewin’s new approach may dramatically reduce the number of global snakebite fatalities, currently estimated to be as high as 94,000 per year.