Now, scientists in San Francisco say a more effective treatment might be on the way.

Three months after being injected with three genes, the hearts of mice that had suffered a heart attack pumped as much blood as a normal heart. Credit: Gabriela Quirós, QUEST

The researchers from the Gladstone Institutes, affiliated with the University of California-San Francisco, reported today that using a new genetic technique, they have succeeded for the first time in repairing, from within, the hearts of mice weakened by heart attacks.

“There are a variety of approaches we use right now to help people who are left with damaged hearts,” said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, senior author of the paper and director of cardiovascular research at the Gladstone Institutes, “but none of them actually get to the root of the problem, which is replacing that damaged heart muscle. And that’s where our focus has been.”

The scientists injected three genes into the hearts of research mice that had been given mild heart attacks. Within three months, the genes transformed non-beating cells in the heart into cells that looked and acted just like beating heart muscle cells. These new beating cells restored the heart’s ability to pump blood to the rest of the body.

Human hearts have billions of non-beating cells, which support the beating cells by forming the heart’s structure, Srivastava said. Mice have millions of these support cells too. When a heart attack happens, the support cells rush to the site of the damage and form scar tissue, which preserves the heart’s structure, but doesn’t help it pump blood.

“We’ve found a way to take these support cells that should normally never become muscle, and convert them into new muscle cells that actually integrate with the rest of the heart, contribute to the force that it generates, and allow us to regenerate the heart from within the organ itself,” said Srivastava.

Non-beating heart cells became beating heart cells like these. Credit: Li Qian, Gladstone Institutes

The new research appears in the April 18 online edition of the journal Nature and was led by Li Qian, also from the Gladstone Institutes.

Heart attacks and other heart disease kill 600,000 people each year. Many more survive, yet lead diminished lives. Some 5.7 million people live with damaged hearts that pump less blood, making it difficult for them to climb a flight of stairs or walk across a parking lot.

During a heart attack, clots block one or several coronary arteries and cut off blood flow. By rushing patients to the operating table and unclogging their arteries with catheters and stents, doctors are able to save all but 5 percent of victims who make it to the hospital.

“While we’ve been doing better at saving lives, each time we save a life the patient still loses some of their muscle,” Srivastava said. “So the number of people who are left with damaged hearts is actually growing, even though the number of people who die from heart attacks is getting smaller.”

Treatments for humans could be six to seven years away, he added. The next step will be to test the treatment on pigs. Scientists still need to figure out if cell reprogramming is safe for humans; how to deliver the genes into the heart, and how to produce enough new beating heart cells to repair a human – rather than a mouse – heart.

Nevertheless, the research is drawing the attention of other heart researchers.

“It’s a major discovery and certainly suggests a new approach to treat injury that previously had been thought to be irreversible,” said Dr. Eduardo Marbán, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.

Marbán said it’s been “a long-held dogma” that once scar tissue has formed in the heart, it can’t change into heart muscle. This finding in mice, and recent research by Marbán’s team on a small group of human patients, challenge that belief, he said.

Although the cell reprogramming research doesn’t involve stem cells, the Gladstone scientists used techniques that were discovered through stem cell research.

The scientists said their work was inspired by the discovery in 2007 that a few genes can transform an adult skin cell into a cell with the properties of a human embryonic stem cell. Researchers have been intensely interested in embryonic stem cells as a possible source of treatments for diseases like Parkinson’s because they can be coaxed to turn into virtually any type of cell in the body. But because embryonic stem cells are plucked from embryos left over from fertility treatments, and require the destruction of these embryos, their study has been controversial.

An alternative to embryonic stem cells came with the skin cell breakthrough five years ago. Then, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, of the Gladstone Institutes and Kyoto University in Japan, inserted four genes that are present in embryonic stem cells into adult skin cells. The four genes reprogrammed the skin cells to become embryonic-like stem cells.

That led scientists to look for a way to transform one type of adult cell into another type of adult cell without the need to create stem cells at all.

“Yamanaka opened up the idea that adult cells weren’t permanently fixed,” said Srivastava. “That led us to ask whether or not we could convert one of these heart support cells into a heart muscle cell.”

Bypassing the creation of stem cells has several advantages. Though stem cells are versatile, when they’re introduced into the body they can behave as cancer cells and form tumors.

“It’s a dramatic and heady possibility that vindicates for the first time the idea that we might be able to harness truly regenerative medicine,” Marbán said.

People often think of medicine as hard work, but an emerging group of tech-savvy entrepreneurs is looking to re-shape people’s perspectives and turn health, and health research, into a form of play.

At the Game Developers’ Conference here in San Francisco this week, computer scientist Jérôme Waldispühl showed off a project that he and colleagues at McGill University just published in PLoS ONE. (KQED QUEST blogger Dr. Barry Starr wrote about this game in December.)

It’s called Phylo, and it turns the puzzles of biology into a game anyone can play.

Phylo takes a fresh approach to sorting through the data produced by the Human Genome Project, some three billion bits that spell out the instructions for how to make and maintain a human being.

Researchers are continuously looking through this genetic code to search for genes that may make us susceptible to a particular disease. Finding that needle in the haystack takes time, as scientists must look at each piece of data to evaluate its potential to wreak biological havoc. They also need context to understand the significance of each gene’s sequence.

“By themselves, sequences tell us nothing,” Waldispühl said. To make sense of this data, researchers are interested in comparing human DNA to that of other animals, like monkeys or mice. This gives us a window into evolution – if the exact same sequence ended up in horses and humans, then it is probably important, and a change, or mutation, would be bad news.

Waldispühl turned these inter-species comparisons into a game by color-coding the DNA and laying out human and animal sequences on top of each other, the way many scientists do to make sense of it.

“In the puzzle, you’re trying to make columns of the same color, [and] you’re finding evolutionarily conserved regions.”

The result is a game that looks something like a mash-up of Tetris and a Rubik’s cube. To play, you try to arrange the rows to get the same color going down across different species, and you can introduce gaps if necessary. The computer’s score is the ‘Par’, and your goal is to beat it.

Competing with the computer may sound daunting at first. After all, this process seems like something computers should be really good at. But for this kind of pattern recognition, humans turn out to be much smarter than computers at figuring out which mutations can be thrown away, and which may be a red flag for disease.

For all the nuances of the science behind the game, it should ultimately still be fun to play. I asked Jon Bernstein, a doctor and researcher at Stanford, to try it out. “I thought it was very interesting – it was visually appealing, the interface was nice, and fun to play around with.”

The game is focused on genetics, Dr. Bernstein’s area of expertise, but that didn’t mean it was easy. “Many of the levels were pretty challenging.”

The game is timely, as DNA sequencing is becoming more and more useful in terms of diagnosing and treating all sorts of illnesses

“There are many, many situations in which genetic information is helpful in understanding the cause of human disease,” said Bernstein. “There are many cases in which it impacts how you take care of people and the counseling you can provide them.”

But as Bernstein told me, some forms of sequencing are still very expensive, on the order of $10,000. “And most of the cost is really the interpretation, not running the test itself.”

Games like Phylo are an effort to help scientists interpret these data. By making these problems fun, easy to play with, and accessible to anyone in the world, game designers like Waldispühl are essentially crowd-sourcing solutions to complex problems in health.

And there are plenty of gamers who would be willing to help out. Waldispühl told me that McGill put out a press release on the game and got a much larger response than they expected.

“A couple of hours after we launched the game, the server was saturated and we put all of the department in an emergency state because everything was blocked,” he said.

“We had basically a puzzle downloaded every half-second. It was just crazy.”

Finding innovative ways to quickly make sense of genetic data is becoming more important as sequencing becomes faster and more widely used. However, there are many questions that come up between sequencing a person’s DNA and pinpointing the cause of their disease, and Phylo may be answering the wrong one.

“This particular game is about aligning DNA sequences. In clinical medicine, a lot of questions are asked and answered at the level of protein,” Stanford’s Bernstein said.

DNA is the blueprint for protein, and bad proteins can cause disease. Looking at information from the protein perspective would be much more useful to doctors, and games like Foldit are already looking at some aspects of that problem.

Foldit is a science-focused game that was first released to the public in 2008, and it has had considerable success since then. It allows players to virtually interact with proteins and solve puzzles about their shape. Foldit was able to harness the power of the game-playing masses to determine the shape of the AIDS virus in rhesus monkeys, a problem that had eluded researchers for 15 years. They even published their findings in a sub-journal of Nature.

Phylo may not be as useful as Foldit in its current incarnation, but it does have potential. Since its launch in November 2010, Phylo has contributed to 450,000 solutions through the work of 20,000 registered players and thousands more who play anonymously. Its interface could easily be adopted to compare proteins instead of DNA sequences, but the challenge would be in making it enjoyable for anyone to play.

“We really wanted to make a casual game – that people can play it without thinking they are solving a problem,” Waldispühl said. “People want to have fun. And we can reuse the energy they spend gaming to do something useful.”

An X-ray showing Hugo Campos's ICD. (Courtesy of Hugo Campos)

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are implanted with tiny, battery-controlled devices that regulate the beating of their hearts. Those devices transmit streams of medical data directly to doctors.

Many of these are ICDs – implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. They’re miraculous, life saving devices.

Consider what happened one October afternoon to 45 year-old Hugo Campos, who lives in Oakland.

Campos was in San Francisco’s Mission District on his way to meet a friend for lunch, when suddenly he felt weak, as if about to faint.

He was on the corner of 16th and Valencia Streets, “not a pretty place to pass out,” he says.

“My concern was not falling where people had spit! I'm facing death and I'm worried about falling where there's spit.”

He felt an urgent need to call his partner, tell him where he was. But there was no time. Campos’s brain was shutting down.

“So I leaned against the wall and I expected to fall. And then it passed. It went away.”

Campos has a genetic heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a thickening of the heart muscle that can prevent the heart from effectively pumping blood to the brain and body.

Luckily for Campos, his doctors were able to diagnose the disease before it suddenly killed him, as it does in many young athletes, for example. In 2007, Campos had the ICD implanted in his chest.

Hugo Campos

On that October afternoon, the device had two options: It could deliver a powerful jolt of electricity – like those defibrillator paddles you’ve seen on TV. Instead, it acted like a pacemaker, delivering small electrical pulses that coax the heart back to its normal rhythm.

The ICD probably saved his life.

“All systems are go again,” he says, recalling that moment. “You feel the blood rushing to your head. It feels great. Life feels great. It feels outstanding.”

While life-saving, the ICD comes with a downside. When the device performs its defibrillator function, the shock is powerful and can be excruciating. Some ICDs have been known to defibrillate spontaneously, an experience patients describe as traumatic.

The fear of a shock, along with the ever-present possibility of sudden heart failure and death, has changed Campos.

It’s given him a fervent desire to know, and to control as best he can, what’s happening inside his body.

Campos is a web designer, and you could describe his attitude as a Silicon Valley approach to heath: He’s had his genome sequenced. He sleeps with a Zeo sleep monitor, and goes nowhere without his FitBit pedometer. Last December, Campos photographed every morsel of food he ate, for a month, removing meat and dairy from his diet.

Campos wants the same access to what’s happening inside his ICD. He doesn’t want to have to go to his doctor for the occasional print out of his intracardiac electrogram. He wants the complete raw data, on demand.

In 2009, Medtronic, which makes Campos's ICD, told him that the data was only available through his doctor. Since then, he’s met with Medtronic officials and made his case widely in the media (including this recent Mercury News story) and online, in a widely-watched TedX talk. Another inquiry to Medtronic, in 2011 generated a similar response.

Meanwhile, other patients, like Karen Sandler, of Massachussets, make Campos’s demands look modest in comparison. A freedom of information lawyer, Sandler wants the full source code for her ICD.

“We are seeing a cultural shift,” says Paul Tang, a physician in Palo Alto who has advised the White House on health information policy.

Tang believes this whole issue of data and access is just starting to unfold.

He says soon, many more of us will have devices in our lives that can monitor our health and transmit that information to our doctors. Our iPhones can tell doctors how much we're exercising. The bathroom scale can report weight gain. Credit card companies could even tell our doctor what kinds of food we're buying.

“In the future,” says Tang, “I think we’re going to take advantage of much more of these signals that either emanate from your body, or can be determined noninvasively, and provide feedback on how the things you do in everyday life affect your health.”

Tang sees this new age of medical data as a boon for patients, a way to fully engage people in their health, so that they can see the way day-to-day decisions affect their body.

He says the The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in 2010, will give patients far more access to their medical data than every before.

But Campos worries that the sheer volume of new data being created, as well as the ability to remotely transmit that data directly to physicians, could end up shutting patients out of their own healthcare, even replacing traditional visits to the doctor's office.

He says unless patients start demanding full access to their medical data now, they risk being left out of the loop.

“I should be in charge of it in the same way I'm in charge of my financial information,” he says. “It’s just a matter of putting the patient in the center of their own care.”

Meanwhile, Campos’s ICD crusade seems to be working. A spokesman for Medtronic says the company is now willing to give Campos his raw data, and is working on ways to make this happen. The spokesman added that the company is willing to do the same for other ICD patients who request to see their raw data, as well.

Campos says he’ll believe it when he sees it.

Stem cells in the gut of Drosophila divide in response to food. Photo courtesy of John Tann

Researchers investigated how stem cells in the gut of the fruit fly respond when different amounts of food are present. They found that when food is abundant, stem cells in the gut divide more rapidly, increasing the size of the gut as long as food continues to be available. When food is removed, the cells stop dividing and the gut shrinks down again.

“The real surprise was that the fruit fly intestine is capable of secreting its own insulin,” said principle investigator David Bilder in a press release. “This intestinal insulin spikes immediately after feeding and talks directly to stem cells, so the intestine controls its own adaptation.”

Insulin is also the primary signaling molecule for converting blood sugar into usable energy in muscles, and storing it as fat.

What the current findings mean for human physiology or chronic overeating is still unknown, but it raises many new questions regarding the role of intestinal stem cells and metabolism.

Image courtesy of cessable

For better quality of life as you age it’s important to keep the fire burning, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

Researchers at the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UC San Diego looked at data from 1,235 post-menopausal women participating in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study. The women were asked questions about their health, both physical and mental, as well as sexual activity and functioning.

Though aging was associated with an expected decline in physical health and sexual frequency, overall sexual satisfaction did not decline with age. Additionally, having a satisfying sex life was also associated with indicators of successful aging and high quality of life.

“Feeling satisfied with your sex life—whatever you levels of sexual activity—is closely related to your perceived quality of life,” says Wesley K. Thompson, co-author of the study. “While we cannot assess cause and effect from this study, these results suggest that maintaining a high level of sexual satisfaction may positively reinforce other psychological aspects of successful aging.”

Is it time to start bringing home flowers and candles in addition to the extra calcium and fish oil supplements? Let’s hope so.

By one estimate, there are 10 million alcoholics in the US. Photo Credit: Ralf Roletschek

Joseph McHugh is an artist who lives in San Francisco. Like his father before him, Joe had always been a drinker. But recently, it started to pick up.

“It sort of got out of control,” he says. “It wasn’t starting at five o’clock, it was starting at noon, when I’d have a couple shots and so forth.”

He was having blackouts, he says. He remembered nothing, but people would tell him stories of what he’d done. “Like what?” I ask him.

“Things I don’t want to even mention, ok?”

What brought McHugh VA Medical Center in San Francisco was a heart attack. It literally terrified him into sobriety. He's been dry a month now, slogging through recovery with other men whose lives have also become simply untenable.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Search for Alcoholism's Miracle Drug

McHugh’s story is a familiar one to doctors who treat alcoholism, like Peter Banys, Director of Substance Abuse Programs at the VA.

“It's always a crisis,” Banys says. “And it can be a marital crisis, a family crisis, or job termination.”

Alcoholism is a very treatable disease, says Banys. Because of all the recent research, people like McHugh have more options than ever, including AA, therapy, and medication, which can be effective in preventing relapse.

Still, there are some challenges. First of all, the meds are a tough sell, Banys says. He says his patients often think of their alcoholism as a moral weakness.

“One of the things we hear a lot,” he says, “is I don’t want to depend on a drug. They’ve been depending on a drug for 25 years, they don’t want to depend on ours.”

Another problem is that drugs that once seemed promising have often fallen short.

Take Naltrexone, which was approved in 1995. Naltrexone blocks the brain’s opioid receptors, which make alcohol feel good.

“That was the great hope,” says Banys. “It kind of crumbled in our hands.”

On many people, Natrexone has no effect all. They’re just wired differently.

And that’s proven to be a useful insight.

“One of the things that we have to make clear is that alcoholism is almost certainly not a single disease or disorder. I believe that in the near future, we will be talking about “the alcoholisms.”

The fact of these “alcoholisms” means that researchers are now targeting specific kinds aspects of brain chemistry that might be involved in alcoholism.

Howard Fields directs Human Clinical Research at the Gallo Center in Emeryville, an institute devoted to alcoholism and addiction, affiliated with The University of California, San Francisco.

What interests him is something familiar to many of us: Impulsivity. Different people are impulsive to different degrees, just like rats, and other animals. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense.

“You want someone who would throw themselves on the hand grenade and save the lives of other people,” says Fields. “The same people who wind up in prison might be completely different in a battlefield situation. They might be the heroes.”

But in regular life, impulsivity can be a dangerous trait to have, says Fields. “If you score high for impulsivity, you are at greater risk to actually become an abuser or an addict. There’s no question about that.”

Fields says that in some people, impulsivity can be traced back to a specific gene. If you have it, you’re more likely to be impulsive. And it turns out, there is already a drug on the market that targets a function of this gene. It’s called tolcapone, and it’s prescribed to people with Parkinson’s disease.

So what Fields aims to find out is whether tolcapone might actually make people less impulsive. And if that’s true, whether it can help people limit their drinking. This research is now in human clinical trials.

Of course, even if the drug works for some people, it won’t work for everyone. The fact that there are “alcoholisms,” as Peter Banys put it, means that there may never be a single miracle drug.

But whatever the future holds, the goal of treatment will always look more or less the same: More people like Joseph McHugh, who have made the life-changing decision to get and stay sober.

McHugh says it’s hard to know what things will be like, once he’s out of rehab and back with his family. But he’s optimistic.

“I’m sort of glad that everything is where it is now. Because it is a change. It’s a necessary change."

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The nose of the star-nosed mole is much more sensitive than the human hand. Credit: Dr. Ken Catania, Vanderbilt University

Pain is the most common reason for trips to the doctor's office. So it makes sense that pain treatment is a huge part of our healthcare system, costing more than 100 billion dollars a year. But how exactly pain works is still a mystery in many ways.

Like any normal 9-year-old, Maddie Burkhardt was playing outside with her friends last summer, racing around in a pedal go-cart.

"And my foot slipped and it went under the go-cart. Like it got bent backwards," she says.

Maddie broke a bone in her foot. So, her mom, Danielle, took her to see a podiatrist, who put her in a series of casts.

"And every time he took the cast off, he said 'ok, you should feel much better now.' And she was just like 'no, it's killing me," says Danielle.

As the weeks went by, it became clear that Maddie's pain wasn't normal. "She would not allow anything to touch her foot at all. And we didn't really know what was going on," says Danielle.

Listen to the QUEST radio story The Science of Pain

Even a light touch, like the wind blowing, was incredibly painful. "It felt like there was knives in my foot. Like a big elephant smashing on your foot or something," says Maddie.

Maddie was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome and ended up in a special treatment program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.

Dr. Elliot Krane, who heads the program, says "most of the time, pain is the signal that there's a problem and it's a useful sensation to have and a protective one."

But sometimes, our body's warning system goes haywire, like in Maddie's case. Nerve cells send out pain signals even when there's no reason to.

"It's a terrible pain problem," says Dr. Krane. "And it's one that we really don't understand the origins of. And because we understand so little about it, our therapy of it is also very rudimentary.

Krane says Maddie, like most patients, went through a slew of treatments, like physical therapy and pain medication. It took months to recover. "I can't exactly run really yet, but I can walk faster and I can play with my friends and do a lot more," Maddie says.

For the most part, doctors rely on opiates like morphine to control pain. But those drugs aren't very targeted. The challenge is that pain is very difficult to study. "There's other things and other processes in the body which are measurable in some objective fashion: heart rate, blood pressure, temperature. But how do you measure pain?" asks Dr. Krane.

Looking to Nature for Solutions

In a lab at the University of California-Berkeley, Diana Bautista has the same questions about pain. "Many people are trying to figure out how to do this. And we decided to look to nature to solve this problem."

Bautista is an assistant professor of biology at the University of California-Berkeley. She's peering into a large plastic tub filled with dirt.

A star-nosed mole at UC Berkeley. Photo: Kristin Gerhold, Bautista Lab.

"So, if you look here in the corner of the dirt, you can see that there's a star-nosed mole. Pretty interesting looking, right?"

Star-nosed moles have a very unique look. Their large pink nose has 22 finger-like tentacles that they use to feel for food in the dark tunnels where the live.

"What we don't see, that you need special high-speed video to see, is that they're actually tapping very rapidly the surface," says Bautista.

Compared to our fingertips, the mole's star has 10 times more nerve cells. "It's much more sensitive than the human hand."

That lack of sensitivity in human skin makes it difficult to study pain, because our nerve endings are so spread out.

We also have about 20 different kinds of nerve cells. Some detect pain, some detect light touch. Others detect hot and cold. "And so it's very difficult to study one in isolation or to separate the pain cells from the light touch cells."

That's where the star-nosed mole comes in. Its star is densely packed with light touch cells, but not a lot of pain cells. So Bautista says, studying tissue samples of the mole's star can reveal the differences between nerve cells.

"How does one cell feel the prick of the pin and the other feel the feather? We don't know what happens in those nerve endings," says Bautista.

Bautista says knowing what happens in normal nerves can tell a lot about when nerves don't work normally – like when diabetes patients experience numbness or cancer patients have hypersensitivity. That comes down to the biochemistry inside the cells. For that, Bautista is also studying another organism.

Peppers Targeting Nerve Cells

"These are Szechuan peppers that are from the Chinese prickly ash," Bautista says, handing me the peppercorns.

"Chew them a little bit in the front of your mouth."

As I chew, my tongue becomes slightly numb. "It feels like a little buzzing, tingling sensation," says Baustista.

The peppercorns aren't hot, but they do have chemicals that are working on my sense of touch. "We know that they target special receptors and cause those nerves to be excited just as if somebody was tickling your tongue," says Bautista.

That's a trick that humans could copy. "By indentifying the molecular mechanisms, we could really go in and design better drugs and come up with better therapies and alternatives for treating conditions like chronic pain," she says.

Bautista hopes the research will lead to more targeted pain drugs, so patients like Maddie Burkhardt will have an easier recovery.

Check out the star-nosed mole in action:

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How do we make healthy eating cool? Image courtesy of f_mafra.

People who immigrate to the United States from traditionally healthy cultures usually develop Western disease patterns within one or two generations. Since genetic changes cannot occur this rapidly, environmental factors, particularly diet, are considered to be primary the reason for the shift.

While it has been proposed that dietary changes are the result of having access to less healthy foods, new research suggests that poor food choices are often made not from preference but from pressure to fit in as an American.

In a new study to be published in the upcoming issue of Psychological Science, researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley explored the eating choices made by Asian-American and white college students when put in situations that threaten their American identity.

The first part of the experiment asked students to write down their favorite foods, but first prefaced some of the students with the question, "Do you speak English?" All the students could speak fluent English, but of the Asian-American students that were asked the question 75% included a stereotypical American food in their food preferences, compared to 25% who had not been asked the question. There was no difference in preferences of white students with or without the question.

To test if cultural pressure affects eating habits directly, researchers performed a similar experiment but offered students dishes from typical American and Asian restaurants. Before the experiment, however, some students were told, "Actually, you have to be American to be in this experiment."

Asian-American students who were asked the question were more likely to choose the American food options than the students who were not asked the question. Subsequently their choices were less healthy and they ate an extra 182 calories in the meal.

Attitudes about food and social pressure can greatly impact eating habits, and this study is consistent previous findings that overweight people tend to have overweight friends. Bad eating habits aren't just individual choices, but reflect societal pressures and group psychology.

But the question remains, how do we make healthy eating cool?

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"Minuscule" amounts of iodine-131 was found in milk from Washington state. Image courtesy of stevoarnold.

Reuters reports that trace amounts (0.8 pCi/L) of radioactive iodine-131 was found in milk from cows in Washington state, though officials stress this is nothing to be alarmed about.

"These types of findings are to be expected in the coming days and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children," said the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency in a joint statement.

Though the levels found in the US are 5,000 times below the FDA's standard, this particular isotope of iodine is not normally present in milk. When milk is contaminated, iodine-131 can accumulate in the thyroid and lead to cancer.

US officials have been monitoring radiation levels in milk and drinking water since the radiation leak at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after the March 11 earthquake.

Fortunately the half life of iodine-131 is quite short, only 8 days, meaning the vast majority of the dangerous isotope should be degraded in 2 weeks time so long as there is not additional exposure.

US citizens are at extremely low risk of radiation exposure due to the events in Japan, but officials will continue to monitor the situation.

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Prudent, persistent children ultimately live longer than their happy-go-lucky peers. Image courtesy of Meanest Indian.

Happiness is tied to good health later in life, but childhood happiness does not predict longevity—in fact it does the opposite, according to a new report.

Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin, researchers from UC Riverside, analyzed and supplemented data collected by the late Stanford University psychologist Louis Terman in a new book titled The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study.

Terman followed 1,500 children from age 10 beginning in 1921, tracking them through their lives and collecting many details and data points including work life, relationships, personality, hobbies, pets, education and professional successes.

“Probably our most amazing finding was that personality characteristics and social relations from childhood can predict one's risk of dying decades later,” Friedman said in a press release.

But the findings aren't what most people would expect. The researchers discovered that the most cheerful children ended up taking more risks with their health as they got older.

“We found that as a general life orientation, too much of a sense that 'everything will be just fine' can be dangerous because it can lead one to be careless about things that are important to health and long life,” said Friedman. “Prudence and persistence, however, led to a lot of important benefits for many years.”

Other of Friedman's findings are counter to conventional wisdom as well, like the idea that less work and stress contributes to a longer life. Those who were the most productive and committed to their jobs lived significantly longer than those who took it easy.

“It turns out happiness is not a root cause of good health. Instead happiness and health go together because they have common roots,” according to Friedman.

Friedman's work implies that good decisions are more important than disposition for health and longevity, meaning that any one can learn to make better choices and take steps to lengthen their life.

Workaholics rejoice!

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