All Posts Tagged With: "Health"

Common chemical may cause obesity

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French fries and pizza might not be the only culprits behind the infamous ‘Freshman 15.’

A new study in PLoS ONE has strengthened the link between bisphenol A (BPA) and weight gain.

It showed that exposure to the chemical results in significantly heightened insulin levels. Over time, increased insulin levels can lead to weight gain and Type 2 diabetes, as the body becomes desensitized to the persistently high concentrations of the hormone.

Modern chemicals with potentially adverse health effects are nothing new—it seems like researchers are warning us about yet another carcinogen every day. But BPA is an especially serious threat for two reasons: it’s nearly everywhere, and even minuscule amounts may impact on your health.

Continue reading Victim of the Freshman 15? Blame toilet paper.

Research shows links to mental illness, lung capacity

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When sociologist and drug-policy expert Andy Hathaway surveyed one of his first-year classes at the University of Guelph last fall, 80 per cent of students reported experience with cannabis.

Hathaway cautions that it was only a small pilot study (around 100 responses), and it took place at Guelph, which is, let’s face it, “a bit granola.”

Still, that 80 per cent figure isn’t surprising.

When twelfth graders are asked if they’ve tried marijuana, roughly half say yes.

Provincial rates of lifetime usage now range from a low of 40 per cent of Albertan twelfth-graders to a high of 63 per cent of those in Nova Scotia, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. And that’s before university.

Smoking pot can’t be considered deviant anymore, says Hathaway. It’s simply the new normal.

A loosening of cultural attitudes, particularly in the media, helps explains the shift. “We had Cheech and Chong in the 1970s, but that was a very stereotypical portrayal,” says Hathaway. “Now we have shows like Weeds that show use of marijuana by very regular people—soccer moms and dads.”

But as attitudes toward marijuana soften, some campus health experts report that they’re more worried about students using the drug than ever. That’s because research increasingly shows links between marijuana and the number one health problem on Canadian campuses: mental illness.

Dr. Elizabeth Osuch, a psychiatrist who runs the First Episode Mood and Anxiety Program at a hospital in London, Ont., encounters mentally ill students who offer their own evidence of marijuana-related problems. “I hear the story frequently about how ‘I get paranoid when I smoke pot’, ‘I get anxious when I smoke pot’, or ‘I’ve been smoking pot a long time and now I’m depressed’,” she says.

That’s not surprising to Dr. Osuch. What’s surprising to her is how surprising that is to others.

“I’ve given talks across this community and when I talk about the effects of marijuana, it’s news to people,” she says, “unless I’m talking to a group of clinicians who interact with people in a medical or counselling setting. They know, because they’ve been seeing this for years.”

The best-established risk is that marijuana can trigger or exacerbate psychosis in a small number of people who are susceptible, based on their genes. To some, the link is not even debatable. “A number of prospective epidemiological studies put it beyond doubt that cannabis use increases the subsequent risk of schizophrenia,” wrote the authors of a 2007 review in Addictive Disorders.

Devastating as psychosis may be for those who experience it, diseases like schizophrenia only affect a small proportion of the population. But Dr. Osuch warns that marijuana may also be contributing to the most common health problems on Canadian campuses: depression and anxiety.

One study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2007 followed a group of 14 to 17-year-olds over a decade, checking up on their mental health and drug use along the way. They found that depression, bipolar disorder and, to a lesser extent, anxiety disorders, all coincided with previous cannabis use—and more use predicted more illness.

But that’s only the beginning. “I would predict that there will be more and more information out there in the coming years looking at the problematic effects of what’s no longer a ‘soft drug’,” says Dr. Osuch, who notes that there’s more Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in in marijuana today than ever.

Dr. Osuch is currently the lead researcher on one such study exploring the links to depression. She explains the theory behind that possible link: “Marijuana is very active on the neurocirciutry of reward processing. Anything that you do because you like doing it activates reward processing in the brain,” she says. “And if you slam that neurological system daily with a chemical [like THC], it becomes very difficult for the person to feel reward from doing normal things,” she adds.

Dr. Osuch is quick to point out that not everyone who smokes pot will have a problem. “But a significant percentage of them will,” she says, adding, “as long as you know what those percentages are, or a sense of what the risks are, you can make an intelligent decision.”

Right now, the students she meets when giving talks at the Western University in or London, Ont. high schools haven’t gotten the message. They perceive pot-smoking as low risk.

Part of the confusion is the conflicting messages young people get when they type “marijuana health effects” into Google. “What they’re getting is all kind of sites that say marijuana is great,” says Dr. Osuch, “what they aren’t getting is the scientific research.”

There are, of course, some well-funded and easy-to-find meassages about the risks online—those from the federal government. But Hathaway, the drug policy researcher at Guelph, says the federal government’s anti-drug messages aren’t trusted by youth, because they exaggerate the risk.

In one of the federal ads, called Fast Forward, a blonde boy refuses a puff on a joint after he envisions a life of violence and trouble with the law. In another ad, called Mirror, a girl in her bedroom ends up cutting her arm with a piece of glass after taking some unidentified drugs.

Such scare tactics cause teens to tune out drug messaging entirely, says Hathaway. “If you’re sending inaccurate messages about marijuana when they have enough experience to know this is basically propaganda, they’re going to have doubts about any message of that kind,” he explains.

Although Hathaway doesn’t advocate abstinence like Dr. Osuch, he does believe there’s room for better education about marijuana. “Effective social policy would account for the small minority who may run into trouble with drugs and be candidates for some kind of intervention,” says Hathaway.

The government might do better to educate youth about the dangers of smoking tobacco along with marijuana, for example, says Hathaway. Tobacco is known to reduce lung capacity and increase the risk of cancer. Meanwhile, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January showed that smoking two to three joints actually increases lung capacity.

But because the JAMA article portrays marijuana as less harmful, it’s unlikely to would make it into the government’s messaging. Once again, the science is unlikely to reach young Canadians.

And if there’s one thing Dr. Osuch and Prof. Hathaway agree on, it’s that young people need better access to the facts. That way, they can determine the risks for themselves—whatever they may be.

Death not suspicious: police

A male body was found on the University of Manitoba’s Fort Garry campus on Monday around 1 p.m. and Winnipeg Police closed off a pedestrian walkway between the engineering building and the University Centre to investigate. A police spokesperson told The Maintoban that they’re treating it as a “sudden death” investigation, rather than a suspicious death.

Cigarette smoking plummets

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A survey administered to nearly 10,000 teens in Ontario shows big drops in the use of most drugs when compared to similar teens 12 years ago.

The Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey found an especially encouraging drop in the number of students who smoke cigarettes. In 1999, 28 per cent of students in grades seven to 12 said they smoked in the past year and 22 per cent smoked at least one cigarette daily. In 2011, only nine per cent said they smoked in the past year and only four per cent said they smoked daily. The rates are higher in northern Ontario, where eight per cent smoked daily in 2011.

Continue reading Big drop in drug use among teens

“Likely mechanism is openness to experience”

A large British study has found that having a higher IQ at age five and/or 10 is correlated with an increased likelihood that a person will have tried certain recreational drugs by age 30.

For example, women who had scored in the top third on intelligence tests at age five were more than twice as likely to have tried cocaine or marijuana by age 30 than those in the bottom third.

The most intelligent male children were 50 per cent more likely to have tried amphetamines and 65 per cent more likely to have tried ecstasy (MDMA) by their thirtieth birthdays.

Researchers controlled for socioeconomic status. The study involved interviews with 7,900 people who were part of an 11,600-strong cohort of British people born in early April 1970 and IQ-tested five and 10 years later. The study appears in the Journal of Epidemiology & Public Health.

So why might smarter people try drugs when drug-taking is widely considered stupid? ”The likely mechanism is openness to experience,” lead author James White of Cardiff University told Time.com, explaining that researchers already know more intelligent people score higher on openness. He also posited that more intelligent people have more educated views of risks.

Another theory: White says the lack of subtlety in government anti-drug ads may have been unconvincing to smarter Brits. If that’s true, the researchers’ observations may apply to Canada too; our federal government’s anti-drug ads aren’t exactly praised for their subtlety.

Rare disease kills one in 10 who get it

Thompson Rivers University is warning staff and students after a fourth-year theatre student, Bradley Munro, died of what appears to have been meningitis. Meningitis is a swelling of the brain that is caused by viruses or bacteria. The more rare bacterial form (Meningococcal meningitis) causes death in roughly 10 per cent of those who get sick and permanent damage, such as deafness, in another 10 per cent. There are between 160 and 350 cases reported in this country each year, says Health Canada. The disease is contagious and signs of infection include vomiting, fever, severe headache and stiff neck. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed a law earlier this year that will make his state the first to require that all university and college students be vaccinated against the disease.

Stem cell donor drive grows in 2011

Hundreds of students at the University of Windsor are expected to “get swabbed” on Tuesday. It’s part of an effort to help find stem cell donors for the nearly 1,000 Canadians, mainly cancer patients, who are likely to die without transplants from genetically similar donors. More than 20 universities in Canada are participating in One Match’s Get Swabbed! Challenge this year, up from 15 last year. It doesn’t take long, but students must be willing to donate their cells if a match is found. Last year more than 5,700 students participated.

Student tests positive

Up to 300 students and five faculty members at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John will be tested for Tuberculosis (TB) after a classmate tested positive for the airborne disease.

Public health officials notified the university on Monday morning that a student had tested positive for the infection, reports the Telegraph-Journal. The university notified the public Tuesday.

Kevin Bonner, director of student services, told the paper that skin tests will be available in the university’s gymnasium on Friday. Results are often available in just a few days.

Health Canada reports that TB, although serious, is not very contagious. “A person usually has to have frequent exposure to someone with active TB,” says its website. “For example, spending several hours a day with a person with active TB could put you at risk of infection.”

There are approximately 1,600 new cases of TB reported in Canada every year. Health Canada says it usually attacks the lungs, but can also impact the lymph nodes, kidneys, urinary tract and bones. It is easily cured with antibiotics, but still kills almost two million people worldwide each year.

What researchers are doing on Facebook

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Students who post on Facebook about “getting drunk” or “blacking out” or “getting wasted” might want to change their privacy settings.

U.S. researchers have determined that if you post about getting wasted you’re at a higher risk for alcohol abuse. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which funded the study, suggests schools consider creeping students’ public profiles to “identify and intervene with college students who are at risk for alcohol use problems,” said director Kenneth Warren.

Researchers looked at the public Facebook profiles of more than 300 undergraduate students and invited the students to use an online version of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, or AUDIT, a screening tool that clinicians use to measure problem drinking. “We found that underage college students who referenced dangerous drinking habits, such as intoxication or blacking out, were more likely to have AUDIT scores that indicate problem drinking or alcohol-related injury,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An AUDIT score of 8 or higher means the person is at risk of a problem drinking. Underage students who referenced “being drunk” or “getting wasted” in the study had audit scores of 9.5 on average. Students who had no references to alcohol scored 4.7 on average. In other words, the tool could work.

But what about protecting students’ privacy from creeping admins? Someone should study that too.

Universities and parents have a duty to educate

Photo by Dave Chidley/CP

From the editors of Maclean’s

Some predictions can be made with absolute certainty. The tides will shift. The sun will rise. And young university students will drink to excess.

From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Animal House, exuberant drinking by underage students has long been a part of the experience of going away to school. Realistically, there is little society can do to change this fact of life. But what can we all do to cut down on the harm it may cause?

Last week, Canada’s university community was shocked by an orientation-week death at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S. A first-year student from Calgary, just 19 years old, was found unconscious in a basement dorm room at the school suffering from severe alcohol poisoning. He later died in hospital. Fellow students told reporters he’d been playing a competitive drinking game called “flip cup” and had consumed an estimated 40 ounces of alcohol during the night.

This follows two student deaths at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., last year that the provincial coroner’s office attributed, in part, to a “culture of drinking on campus.” Both men, aged 18 and 19, fell to their deaths after drinking, one from a residence window, the other from the roof of a library.

The accidental death of a son or daughter is an unimaginable tragedy. But the death of a freshman student during their first few weeks away from home seems particularly difficult for any mother or father. While a university can never become a surrogate parent, it is nonetheless expected that campus residences will be a sufficiently safe place for teenaged students to live as they make their final strides to adulthood.

The recent deaths thus raise two difficult questions: who bears responsibility for instructing teenagers in the risks of alcohol abuse; and how should schools deal with students’ inevitable desire to party.

The obvious place to begin educating about alcohol is at home, as it is with most other topics. Someone needs to let every teenager know that drinking 40 ounces of alcohol in one night is reckless and dangerous behaviour, and parents are the obvious candidates. A full and frank discussion on drinking and its consequences is as necessary before heading off to school as packing sufficient underwear and pens.

In fact, many parents believe monitored underage drinking at home is the best way to teach teens about learning your limits. Depending on the situation and teen involved, this may make considerable sense, and be entirely legal. Of course there are serious risks to this sort of parental permissiveness as well. This month, an Orillia, Ont., mother found herself facing criminal charges in New York for providing alcohol to her 14-year-old son. After being served a few beers by his mother while camping, he wandered off at night and drowned.

As for universities, most now recognize an important obligation to protect the youngest students from their wildest instincts, at least during those first few days away from home. The initial week of school was once a time of unremitting partying. Today many universities have banned alcohol entirely from campus during this time. Most have also changed the name from frosh week to orientation week to make this distinction clear.

Going further, some forward-thinking universities have declared first-year residences to be dry throughout orientation week. The University of Guelph has had such a policy in place for the past two years. Where kids once showed up at university residence with a case of beer among their luggage, Brenda Whiteside, assistant vice-president for student affairs at Guelph, says those days are now over. The new week-long regime “sends a strong message about creating a new culture in our residences,” she says. During orientation week at Acadia, on-campus activities were alcohol-free, but the residences were not, as the flip cup games attest.

It seems reasonable that every Canadian university should set an appropriate tone for the school year by eliminating alcohol from first-year residences during orientation week. And some schools should be encouraged to experiment with the more drastic step of banning alcohol entirely from all first-year residences—particularly given that a large number of those students will be underage. This might even become a marketing advantage, at least from the perspective of nervous parents.

University students will drink, and it is naive to ignore this fact. But parents and universities—and the students themselves, who have an equal responsibility to look out for one another—must find ways to make our campuses safer, regardless of life’s inevitabilities.