faetal on 19/4/2015 at 00:17

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Actually, since the US tends to dispense with fancy spelling of English words (foetus = fetus, sulphur = sulfur, colour = color etc...), you're probably not wrong.

What do I think of humira? Well I had to look it up. It's an inhibitor of TNF-a which is a very upstream precursor of generalised inflammation, so seems potentially legit. The question is unlikely to be if it works so much as if it works the right way. Inhibiting anything at all is essentially fucking with a system which has evolved over 4bn years, hence why most medicines have side effects. The question with medicine is always "do the effects outweigh the side effects?". Something which inhibits a high level inflammatory mediator may give relief to sufferers of AI disorders to an extent that the side effects they get from an abnormal inflammation response are worth dealing with. I'd need to do a bot more reading to comment more. How much do you care? If much, then I'll do that and report back.

[EDIT] Decided to at least read the wikipedia entry. This:

Because adalimumab suppresses TNF, which is part of the immune system, latent infections, such as tuberculosis, can be reactivated, and the immune system may be unable to fight new infections. This has led to fatal infections.

makes me think that the disease would need to be fairly severe to risk it. That's the thing with drugs in general - your body fights off most stuff, so anything you chuck on top needs to do something pretty special. This is kind of why pharma exaggerates so much. There's really a much smaller market for their products than they'd like.

faetal on 19/4/2015 at 21:06

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This is why I just don't bother with science in the media. Writing an article for publication is a lengthy process, it takes months. The document goes through iterations of quality control, often with the the input of several authors. The media however employs people who write x articles per week, so will read research and then vomit out an article which they think sums it up. Because all of the experts tend to not read these outlets as much, this means that the articles don't get as much scrutiny, so inaccuracies will often pop up.

Long story short - if you, an untrained individual can see an inconsistency in an article, then the odds are that either you've not understood somehow (some genuine phenomena read like contradictions if you don't understand the underlying processes) or that the author of the article has misinterpreted the research. It is very (very) rarely,in the case of peer-reviewed research that an inconsistency which is so obvious would make it through an iterative drafting process, multiple authors and a journal review panel.

faetal on 19/4/2015 at 23:59

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I'd say that it's worthwhile reading the media outlets for a general feel of what's going on and if something really interests you, then maybe find some more in-depth reading to do. Basically don't form strong opinions or confident theories from media science. I didn't really appreciate the difference before my PhD, now I realise it's huge.

It's not realistic to expect everyone to read all of the research, but in terms of particular areas which people wish to develop solid knowledge on (e.g. earlier in this thread and in others, climate change and vaccines), then you should either properly develop your knowledge in a non-biased fashion, or just defer to the opinion of those who already have.

Too many people don't want to put in the time to develop the expertise, but still want equal standing for their opinions. I don't really understand theoretical physics in any kind of depth. I've read Brief History of Time and The Elegant Universe, plus dipped into a bunch of interesting articles over the years on various cool theories and I feel comfortable enough to throw around ideas or attempt to answer hypothetical questions which are associated with physics (almost always with a caveat that someone should correct me if I'm wrong as it isn't really my area). More often than not, someone comes along and confirms or refutes the things I've said and if this person knows more than I do about the subject, then I will defer to them, since I don't really *know* to the extent which they do (though it's something of a skill to realise that someone knows more than you, because obviously, if you don't know what they know, you equally don't know if what they know is correct, if that makes sense).

In summary - pick something (or a few things) to get good at, be happy with that and defer to experts in areas you don't have time to also get good in. Like this, we all benefit each other - just need to figure out better ways to separate the bullshit from the facts. More critical thinking classes in education might be a start.

DDL on 20/4/2015 at 12:25

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Ah, a muscle study. These are always fun.

First thing you'd do is see where the study was carried out, and where it was published.



So, food researchers, publishing in an online only (I assume) edition of a journal dedicated to obesity.

This doesn't tell you that they're bad scientists obsessed with fat and diet, but it does suggest that they will be analysing their data with fairly specific foci. Data is data, but the questions you ask of that data, and the interpretations you draw from that data, will inevitably be coloured by your research focus, your time budget, and frankly, how much money you have.

Secondly: it's a muscle study in humans that used muscle biopsy analysis. This pretty much always means either students or patients with a neuromuscular disease, because muscle biopsies are fucking painful. Either you're dying of some horrible muscle wasting condition and prepared to put up with it, or you're a student willing to have small chunks of quadriceps punched out of you in exchange for large sums of cash.

So as this isn't a disease study, be aware that the sample group is young, healthy, and almost certainly entirely male. And probably quite small, because paying people for muscle biopsies is expensive.

Heh: actually, click on the link at the bottom of the article, and lo:


So: 12 dudebros, basically. And if you read the materials and methods, it's actually 12 subjects TOTAL, and different ones for each study, so each study is just 6 dudebros.


Thirdly, what they are actually showing is that muscle responds (and adapts) to your dietary intake. Which shouldn't really come as a huge surprise to anyone, but still.

In essence, if you have a big meal, you'll effect short-term up-regulation of various genes in your muscles associated with metabolism, since your muscles will be taking in a whole load of sugar (for oxidation and storage as glycogen) and fat (for oxidation). The type and extent of these short term responses is subject to longer-term control that reflects your diet, but will (this study shows) modulate to reflect your diet over a comparatively short timescale (5 days).

In other words, eat lots of fat for 5 days, and your body starts expecting to get lots of fat. Muscle still responds to insulin entirely adequately, but simply exerts a smaller sugar-focussed gene expression programme, because you're not giving it as much sugar. Saying it is "starting to protest" is just silly. Muscle loves fat, fat is a super-effective energy source (it's just not as quick to mobilise as sugar).

What they also don't appear to look at is persistence of this effect: i.e. when your diet returns to normal, how long do these blunted sugar-focussed metabolic responses continue? This is probably because
A)this would require more muscle biopsies ($$$$)
B)it would almost certainly reveal that muscle returns to reflecting your normal diet, not least because frankly, can you imagine finding 12 dudebros who have NEVER in their entire lives been through a prior period of extended high-fat diet? (Dude, do you even pizza?) The very existence of a 'normal, pre-high fat diet' response implies that this is a state muscle can return to despite dietary fluxes.


So take home message: the metabolic focus of muscle post-postprandial gene expression adapts to dietary load over as little as five days, but insulin sensitivity does not.

demagogue on 20/4/2015 at 15:14

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This reminds me of Thomas Huxley's (Darwin's bulldog) famous quote: "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."

Edit: Unfortunately the something I'd really like to know everything about, the human mind and language, is in such infancy that there's not much to really know yet. :erg:

Interestingly, lawyers are trained to be jacks of all trades, especially environmental & health law. You only have to learn just enough economics to know when a company is in a position to assert a monopoly in a market for antitrust law, or when two products are really competing with each other for antitrust or trade law, or just enough of the physical, economic, and social effects of an environmental phenomenon of, e.g., persistent organic pollutants (POPs) or sulphur dioxide emissions to know whether regulation is making things better or worse, or just enough about the bottom end of a dose-response curve of, e.g., benzene to know what's a reasonable line to draw for ppm in the water supply in health regulation, etc. It means every time you start work on a new case, you read up on an entirely new field you didn't know much if anything about before. That's one part I like about it.