Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …e X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains. Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • Two Science Online 2012 sessions for your consideration

    …ese are welcome! Finally, when we do use links in our online writing– what consitutes a quality link? ——————————————— Saturday, 10:45 a.m.: Advocacy in medical blogging/communication. Can you be an advocate and still be fair? There is already a session on how reporting facts on controversial topics can lead to accusations of advocacy. But what if y…

    Authored by on January 17, 2012

  • After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

    Protip: Don’t diagnose based on speculation. by Jessica Wright                Attention journalists: If you’ve been calling people “nuts” or “deranged” in your stories, the Associated Press is recommending that it’s time you stopped. This guideline — along with the common-sense assertion that writers shouldn’t diagnose individuals with a mental illness based entirely on speculation — is part of a new recommendation added to the AP styleboo…

    Authored by on March 27, 2013

  • Depressing genes

    …ch experience — yet it was obvious he didn’t have the knack for it. This student’s dogged pursuit of a mental health career made me wonder what kind of emotional turmoil he experienced which would make him think, at age 19, that psychiatry was the only vocation worth working towards. Then there were the two graduate students who both worked incredibly hard and were both prone to obsess about their experiments. Each burned off stress in quit…

    Authored by on May 17, 2013

  • Autism and the DSM-5

    …questions in the context of these criteria. I’ve expanded on a couple of these reports at length elsewhere, as have others with an interest in the subject. The short version is that studies overall indicate that at the least, 10% of people who would currently have an autism diagnosis under the DSM-IV-TR criteria would lose that diagnosis under the DSM-5, and some studies go as high as 55% in their estimates. Even more troubling? The committee’s s…

    Authored by on April 23, 2013

  • Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

    …nt movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was used with mammography. Approval of a device of this nat…

    Authored by on September 21, 2012

  • Science, health, medical news freaking you out? Do the Double X Double-Take first

    …nded diagnostic inclusion, better identification, and, ironically, greater awareness of autism. In countries that have been able to assess overall population prevalence, such as the UK, rates seem to have held steady at about 1% for decades, which is about the current levels now identified among 8-year-olds in the United States.  What anyone needs when it comes to headlines honking about a “link” to a specific condition is a mental ch…

    Authored by on April 27, 2012

  • The real scandal: science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®

    …ween the two extremes. These are the ones most likely to be helped by screening mammography, and they’re the lives that mammography saves. How many? For women age 50 to 70, routine screening mammography decreases mortality by 15 to 20% (numbers are lower for younger women). One thousand women in their 50′s have to be screened for 10 years for a single life to be saved. So let’s recap. Getting “screened now,” as the Komen ad instructs can lead to…

    Authored by on February 11, 2012

  • Pregnancy 101: It Hurts Where?

    …during or after pregnancy. Studies report that approximately 20 percent of women experience these symptoms with pregnancy. For most women, the pain goes away within a few months of childbirth. But for somewhere between 7 and 10 percent of them, it doesn’t. A combination of factors appears to contribute to this pain. During pregnancy, a hormone called relaxin softens the ligaments that reinforce a woman’s joints, including the three pelvic joints…

    Authored by on February 10, 2013

  • Women know something you don’t

    …ford it. But it’s also true that divorce rates dropped, too, as couples couldn’t afford either another child or maintaining separate households. How did my great-grandparents and the others who contributed to this 15% drop in population do it, especially in an age without 99% effective birth control? I can’t speak for my great-grandparents, but the realistic explanation for having one child over decades of marriage is either c…

    Authored by on March 26, 2013

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