GENERAL MEDICAL NEWS
The staff of The Reproductive Times here offers brief referenced notifications on interesting general medical news. Some of these short news items may become subjects of more detailed reporting in The Reproductive Times on a later occasion.
Do you know what preprints are?
If the answer is no, you are not alone; only about one-third of survey respondents (an obviously evenly favorably selected group) correctly described preprints as unreviewed research findings.1
NIH Institute Director on involuntary leave
It appears that at NIH you can just go on leave forever: Facing according to a report in Science allegations of workplace misconduct,2 Rena D’Souza, Director for the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research has been on involuntary paid administrative leave since last April. And now she is suing the agency for discrimination! We don’t envy the incoming new NIH boss!
And more on the NIH
The NIH is, indeed, getting a new boss. His name is Jay Bhattacharya, MD and he used to be rather unpopular in leading NIH circles, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he refused to follow the politically-correct opinions of – then – big NIH boss, Francis S. Collins MD, a geneticist who really did not know very much about pandemics but, of course, was a brother-in-arms with by now quite notorious Anthony Fauci, MD (who, indeed, is an infectious disease expert).
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD (in economics) a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine in the Department of Health Policy and formerly in the Department of Medicine.
Those two bigshots were very upset when three prominent public health experts—among them Bhattacharya—disagreed with their public policy on lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and formally criticized it in an open letter, known as the Great Barrington Declaration.
In a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal, John Sailer, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, noted that the NIH has been creating career pathways built on race rather than merit and expressed hope that Bhattacharya—who really seems to be an unusually nice and smart guy—“can bring science back to the NIH.”3 We are quite certain he will! What makes us believe that he, indeed, will is the fact that he announced plans to link NIH grants to gauges of academic freedom at academic institutions. This, for example, for Harvard University could have quite devastating consequences, considering it has in recent years always come out dead last among leading universities on this gauge.
Sleep helps the heart heal
A recent paper and commentary in Nature magazine reported that deep sleep helps the heart to heal.4,5 It appears that after a heart attack, immune cells travel to the brain and induce sleep with the purpose of suppressing inflammation in the heart and aid in its recovery. If sleep is disrupted, excessive inflammation worsens cardiac function and slows healing. One wonders whether that does not also apply to other injuries of the body. So much for the 6AM wake up calls in hospitals!
Finally, somebody speaks out about the absurd flood of systematic reviews in medical journals
It is high time that somebody says it: worthless b.s. systematic reviews have been flooding the medical literature but that is not even the main problem, as a recent article in Science magazine points out; we are dealing with a chain of corrupted events.5 Fake papers, often produced by papermills, are flooding the literature. The only study a fake scientist can produce at his desk without ever planning and executing a real study is a meta-analysis of published literature. But if the data on the subject is fake, even the best research synthesis will be unable to discover a really valuable result. And the combination of fake papers and b.s. systematic reviews become a deadly threat for medical publishing. But here is one more point to consider; this is also the material that currently trains all the A.I. programs for medicine. God may help us!
We just overlooked thousands of new human genes
Yes, hard to believe there is a “dark proteome,” driven by thousands of new human genes. So-far overlooked segments of the human genome, as it turns out, code for a multitude of tiny but important proteins.7 Quoting a scientist from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in la Jolla, CA, the article notes that “unless we know what the proteins in the dark proteome are, and how they contribute, our ability to treat diseases will remain limited.”
Is the risk of metastatic disease with cancers inherited?
This is what—per Rockefeller University’s News Highlights—a new study scheduled to appear in Cell suggests.8 Roughly 90% of cancer deaths are due to metastatic spread of the cancer and not due to the primary tumor. For the longest time such metastatic spread was considered dependent on selected cells within the primary tumor. Now this paper suggests that there may be a potential second mechanism by which metastatic disease occurs, a hereditary disorder where the cancer’s hosts own tissue – and not the primary cancer – is the culprit. Their still preliminary data in breast cancer suggest that patients with a variant PCSK9 gene have a 22% risk of metastasis over 15 years, while the risk in cancer patients without this variant is only 2%. These findings, quite obviously, open up some interesting potentially new treatment options.
The Rockefeller University researchers, Wenbin Mei, a graduate fellow in theTavazoie lab at Rockefeller University in NYC, and Sohail Tavazoie., MD, PhD, Leon Hess Professor at the University (Credit, Lori Chertoff, Rockefeller University News Highlights)