On science blogs this week: Miscellany

TALL TALES ABOUT HORMONES. Marissa Cevallos writes about the new paper showing that the taller a woman, the greater her chance of developing cancer at the Los Angeles Times's Booster Shots blog. At ScienceShot, Jocelyn Kaiser suggests a possible explanation: hormones that promote growing tall may also promote growth of cancer cells.

The study confirms previous work suggesting the same, but has grabbed headlines because the new data come from the UK's giant Million Women Study, and the big numbers help boost its credibility. There aren't many very large epidemiological studies — the U.S. Women's Health Initiative is another — and they are the very devil to put together and ride herd on, but they generate valuable data for a very long time.

Some years back, for instance, the Million Women Study was the first to hint that a woman's risk of developing disorders possibly related to post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy depended on which drug formulations — with or without progestins, for instance — she was taking. Today that formerly radical idea is very nearly conventional wisdom.

BIRTH CONTROL WANTS TO BE FREE. Contraception should be free, a new report from the Institute of Medicine argues. Insurers should be required to offer contraception with no co-pay under the new U.S. health care law, its report says. This is a pretty big deal, IOM being an arm of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and all.

The reasoning is, Jenny Gold writes for the Kaiser Health News Capsules blog, that unintended pregnancies are more likely to have bad outcomes, such as health and developmental problems, and the costs of dealing with them often must be borne by taxpayers. So subsidies for birth control pills ($25 per month) and condoms will save the citizenry money in the long run. (Probably a substantial amount of heartache too, but that's not quantifiable.) For the same reasons, the report also urged other free services: screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer and screening for other sexually transmitted infections too. It also urges promotion of breast-feeding and other health-related services. See Kate Pickert at Time's Swampland.

But forget about benefits to taxpayers. Just point out to insurance companies how good The Pill is for their bottom lines. At the Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski shows that underwriting contraception pays off nearly immediately for the insurance company itself because there's a huge gap between the low cost of birth control and the high cost of births. In 2008, Medicaid

paid an estimated $257 per client on contraceptive care and an estimated $12,613 per birth (including prenatal care, delivery, post-partum, and first-year infant care.)

BUT THE PILL WILL MAKE ME FAT! No, it won't. Here's an older post debunking that claim from Scicurious, before her recent move to SciAm.

COFFEE PREVENTS ALZHEIMER'S? I seem to be linking to Scicurious every week, and this week make it twice, see above. Turning now to her analysis of a recent a paper declaring that drinking coffee might prevent Alzheimer's disease. Expect to see her here again, because she is so very good at deconstructing (and often debunking) high-profile papers beloved of the news.

Also Alzheimer's prevention?

Deconstructing (and sometimes debunking) high-profile papers is one of the very best services that science blogging provides for science writers. Scicurious (and a small number of other science bloggers) give us context for understanding papers, context that's available in no other way. Even if the paper under scrutiny isn't in your bailiwick, reading one of these top-drawer blog posts will teach you a great deal about how to do your own paper-deconstructing (and sometimes debunking.)

The Scicurious caffeine post, for example, is a short course on Alzheimer's and approaches to studying the disorder, including a brief lesson on mouse models. It will also fill you in on past studies of the relationship (if any) of caffeine use to preventing Alzheimer's. It will explain why the researchers did what they did and the lab methods they used to do it.

She also details why the paper does not prove the case for coffee as an Alzheimer prevention, but that conclusion is almost beside the point. What's even more valuable here, at least for science writers, is the swell tutorial on how to read a paper.

ONCE MORE, EARLY MAMMOGRAMS. At his HealthNewsReview, Gary Schwitzer tackles the broadcast media's response to the new recommendations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that women should have mammograms every year beginning at age 40 — this despite the fact that an expert committee put together by the government has said that most women in their 40s probably don't need them. The frank advocacy on display from so-called journalists, he says,

reflects the polarization we often see in politics now creeping (leaping?) into health care and into health care journalism.

THE SCIENCE BLOGGING REDOUBTABLES. Oy. The redoubtable Ed Yong has quit his day job and is now a full-time freelance. Yes, all ye of normal metabolism, for several years Yong brought forth his superior blog Not Exactly Rocket Science and his stream of other superior writing despite a full-time day job. We can only imagine what he will accomplish now that he has several more hours a day to accomplish it.

All other science writing freelances should be shivering with competitive terror. Except maybe the other redoubtable, Carl Zimmer. Here is Zimmer on how Google+ helps him procrastinate.

I don't believe it for a moment.

MORE ON GOOGLE+. GET YOUR INVITE HERE. In our last episode, I explained that Richard Grant had kindly sent me an invitation to join Google+ and I was about to see if I could make it work. (People have reported trouble getting Google to accept them even after they've been invited.)

Well, I did make it work, possibly thanks to a tip from Richard saying the keys to the kingdom were apparently being given to those who filled in Google's demand for information about gender. I did and I'm in. I am guessing that might mean Google+ is short on women, which almost certainly it is, and so two X chromosomes (or maybe just no Ys) would be favored. Whether that's true I have no idea, I'm just extrapolating here. Maybe Google doesn't care which gender, they just want to know if you have one.

However, one of the joys of this event is that I can now share Google+ invitations with you. So just ask. The comments below are a good way to do that.

NOTE ADDED 7-23-11. My Invite button doesn't seem to be working this morning, so it may be that Google+ has shut down Inviting again.

July 22, 2011

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