Author Archives: Ebenezer Berhanu

Could Labeling Sugar-Sweetened Beverages, Push Parents From Not Buying Sugary Drinks For Their Kids

In today’s day and age, many children are consuming way too much sugar than the recommended Dietary Guidelines for Americans. As a result of this high consumption of sugar, many children are at risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Medical researcher’s from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania were interested in finding out if warning labels on sugary beverages would have an effect on parents in whether if they would be less likely to buy those beverages for their kids. Despite the fact that some states are required by law to have warning labels on sugary beverages, there isn’t much evidence which shows how those labels influence purchasing habits of parents. Since 50% of children under the age of eleven drink sugary sweetened beverages often, many worry about the adverse effects linked with the consumption of those beverages, according to Christina Roberto, PHD. According to Dr. Roberto and her researcher’s because of the believe that certain types of sugary sweetened drinks like flavored waters and other sport drinks are healthier options by parents, those need to be labeled as well.

In conducting the study, Dr. Roberto and her researchers carried out an online survey of 2,381 parents, who had a child between the ages of six to eleven years of age. Moreover, most of these participants came from diverse racial and ethnic minorities. The parents were divided into six groups. These groups were a calorie group, which saw a label that showed the amount of calories in that beverage, a control group, which didn’t see warning labels on beverages, and four warning label groups, which saw one of four kinds of warning labels that warned about the possible negative consequences of drinking sugary sweetened beverages. After categorizing them in groups, the participants were asked to choose a beverage for their kid. The results of their choices, depicted that they were similar to those on effects of tobacco warning labels. To be specific, 40% of parents in the health warning label groups said that they would choose a sugary sweetened beverage for their kids as opposed to 60% of the participants who didn’t look at the labels said that they would also choose a sugary sweetened beverage for their kids. Not only that, but 53% of the participants who looked at the the calorie labels also said that they would choose a sugary sweetened beverage for their kids. Overall these results show that including health labels on sugary sweetened beverages is can be a very crucial and influential method in educating parents about the negative health outcomes linked with sugary sweetened beverages, and therefore push them to make less of those purchases for their kids. Also, 75% of those parental participants supported to have them included on sugary sweetened beverages, when they were evaluated for consumer support.

The link between labeling sugary sweetened beverages and parents being less willing to buy those drinks for their kids is connected with smoking and lung cancer in 1950. In 1950, three scientific papers were published in hopes to persuade Americans that smoking was directly and indirectly correlated with cancer, the scientific papers depicted how the from the preceding fifty years of 1950 that lung cancer rates as tobacco consumption increased, illustrated that the biological mechanism to developing lung cancer was due to smoking, it also showed that hospital patients who smoked heavily were more than likely to develop lung cancer than those patients who smoked lightly and didn’t smoke. Because of these undeniable facts about the connection between smoking and cancer, the US Surgeon requires cigarette companies to have warning labels on their products. In the same way, just like cigarettes there’s been a persona in the US and other parts of the world that soda or other sweetened beverages aren’t harmful to people, but with adverse health effects from consuming these products being more and more prevalent in kids in the US in this case, many parents are being more cautious about making purchasing choices on sugary sweetened drinks. Thankfully, warning labels on these beverages has helped many parents in this study make healthy purchasing choices for their kids, and hopefully this will be a continuous thing all around the world. Personally, growing up, my dad would always emphasize to me not to drink soda and other sweetened beverages often, and because of this I’ve been able to maintain a life free of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
Sources:
The influence of sugar-sweetened beverage health warning labels on parents’ choices, Christina A. Roberto et al., Pediatrics, published online January 2016, abstract.
Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania news release, accessed 14 January 2016 via Newswise.
CDC, Consumption of added sugar among U.S. children and adolescents, 2005–2008, accessed 14 January 2016.

Is`the overuse of antibiotics linked to antibiotic resistance in the human body

Antibiotics are drugs that are effective in killing off bacterial infections rather than viral infections. Therefore, when an antibiotic is taken by someone for the purposes of killing off a viral infection; it ends up attacking healthy bacteria. The killing of harmless bacteria leads to antibiotic resistance in the body. Sadly, doctors are responsible for this issue because 10% of doctors write out prescriptions to 95% of patients who visit them with an acute respiratory infection. The reasons as why this occurs is due to a couple of possible reasons according to Mayo Clinic. First, doctors may prescribe antibiotics before receiving test results that show an infection is viral instead of bacterial. Second, doctors may be pressured by patients to be prescribed antibiotic medications.
In this study Dr. Barbera Jones, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Utah and clinician at the VA (Veteran Affairs) Salt Lake City Health Care System, UT along with her colleagues analyzed the Veteran Affairs electronic health record. This health record involved 1,044,523 patient visits only for acute respiratory infections (ARIs). The purpose of this study was to get a better understanding in antibiotic prescribing methods among physicians. One of the first things that the researcher’s found out was that antibiotics were prescribed in 68% of all patients who were visiting a physician for an acute respiratory infection. Outside of that, Dr. Jones and her researcher’s found out that there was a 10% increase in the amount of macrolides being prescribed to patients with an acute respiratory infection. This is disappointing to say the least, because of current medical guidelines, which recommends against the use of macrolides as a primary treatment for most acute respiratory infections. Furthermore, what is more shocking is that the study revealed a great difference in prescription practices among physicians. In this case 10% of physicians prescribed antiobiotics for 95% of patient visits for acute respiratory infections, but only 10% wrote an antibiotic for 40% patient visits for acute respiratory infections. To find out the reasons behind the differences in antibiotic prescribing practices, Dr. Jones and her colleagues carried out an additional analysis of 480,575 patient visits for acute respiratory infection. The results from this analysis showed that 59% of the variation was due to prescribing habits, 13% of the variation was due to differences in prescribing practices in hospital centers, and 28% of the variation was linked with differences in prescribing practices among clinics. Based on all of these results, Dr. Jones and her colleagues believes that by improving and comprehending how physicians make decisions about antibiotic prescribing can assist in helping to reduce antibiotic overuse as time goes on.
Antibiotic resistance in the body due to the inaccurate prescribing of antibiotic prescriptions by physicians, reminds me of the time when physicians used blood letting as a means to treat patients. This was done primarily because of the fact that doctors believed that it was better to do something than nothing. For example, during the time of the Yellow Fever epidemic, Benjamin Rush found a report that stated that Yellow Fever was caused by too much blood. Because of this assumption 2.5 L of blood was taken out by Yellow Fever victims, which unfortunately killed many of them. The point is that those Yellow Fever patients of the past as well as the the acute respiratory infection patients who are not being prescribed accurate antibiotic prescriptions need to be understand that human intuition including doctor’s are lousy, but need to be aware of soft end and hard end points. Personally, I’ve experienced this kind of thing from a physician about a year ago; he wrote me a prescription right away for two antibiotics, when I went to his office, and told him that I had a stomach virus.
Sources:
Variation in outpatient antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory infections in the veteran population, Barbara Jones et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, published online 21 July 2015.
University of Utah Health Sciences news release, accessed 20 July 2015 via Newswise.
Mayo Clinic, Antibiotics: misuse puts you and others at risk, accessed 20 July 2015.

Are ADHD medications linked to sleeping patterns and dietary issues

According to a peer reviewed study carried out by the Cochrane: Developmental, Psychosocial and Learning Problems Group, researchers are claiming that the drug Methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin is used to treat ADHD in children is linked to non-serious adverse effects, particularly problems with having an appetite and sleeping.  The study was a randomized control study that included 12, 245 children and or adolescent’s that had ADHD.  One confounding variable among-st these participant’s is that most came from a high socioeconomic status, which is very odd. I say that, because it’s people from low socioeconomic backgrounds who face prolonged health effects. This is especially true when we learned in class that kids who are infested with worms “wormy kids” come from poor countries from areas of Africa and south East Asia, because the livelihood of kids with worms living in third world countries is based on their low socioeconomic status. Saying this, you would think that these 12, 225 participants would refrain from continuing to use methylphenidate, but it could be that they can’t realize that for themselves since many of them are so young and that they associate sleeplessness and dietary problems as being a part of their lives just like the kids with worms in developing countries do unfortunately. However, in all of the 185 randomized control trials, researchers found that all of them were at high risk for bias. As we learned in class, bias studies are designed to spread a cause many times coming from the funder of a study. In this particular study, Copenhagen University Hospital was one funder along with Region New Zealand, and the University of Southern Denmark. One indication that the funders of this study had an impact in the level of bias in this study, is that it was impossible to assess the long-term effects of methylphenidate because those randomized trials were too small and of low quality.
However, primary and secondary outcomes were present in the study. Findings from the primary outcome of if Methylphenidate can improve ADHD symptoms from the prospective of a teacher show that Methylenidate can help to improve hyperactivity and impulsivity in ADHD children. Findings from the secondary outcome which were the group of children prescribed with Methylenidate show that Methphenidate doesn’t increase the risk of developing a life threatening disease only taking the drug for six months, but it’s linked to ADHD children developing sleeping problems and a deceased appetite.  I personally agree to this because I’ve seen my ex room-mate who had ADHD at times display a decrease in his appetite, and complain about sleeping patterns. In a similar study, one study linked ADHD medications to lower bone density. This study was led by Dr. Jessica Rivera, an orthaepedic surgeon with the US Army of Surgical Research and her fellow researcher’s. Dr. Rivera and her collegeues assessed 5,315 children in the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) by comparing the children who were taking ADHD medications with children who were not ADHD medications. The ADHD medications that the ADHD children were using were lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse), methylphenidate (Ritalin), atomoxetine (Strattera), dexmethylphenidate (Focalin), and dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine). From their assessment on these children, Dr. Rivera and her medical colleugues found that 25% of the children who took ADHD medications met the necessary guidelines for osteopenia, which is characterized by low bone density in the body. Specifically, those 25% on ADHD medications who met the criteria for Osteopenia, had lower bone density in the lumbar spine, femur, and femoral neck compared to the children who were not on ADHD medications. From the findings of these results, Dr. Rivera says that the even though a connection between Osteopenia in childhood and osteoporosis in later life hasn’t been confirmed; the issue is that low bone density in ADHD children could have adverse long term effects as these children age. This is because increases in bone mass and strength is primarily obtained in childhood. The possible biological mechanism as to why ADHD children who take ADHD medications experience low bone density is because the medications that they use can cause gastrointenstinal problems. These gastrointenstinal problems result in some experiencing a decrease in appetite, and therefore an upset stomach, which can lead to some children having a poor diet and a decrease in calcium intake. This study reminds me of topic discussed in class about corticosteriods being proscribed to head injury patients in order to prevent the swelling of the skull, and about anti-arrhythmic medications being prescribed to patients experiencing heart problems. In both situations, the corticosteriods as well as the anti-arrhythmic medications did more harm than good for patients, to the point where it was killing them. In the same way, ADHD medications are having more adverse effects on users than good effects, many are experiencing sleeping problems, a decreased appetite, and therefore a low bone density.

Sources:

American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons news release, accessed 3 March 2016 via EurekAlert.
CDC, ADHD, accessed 3 March 2016.
Methylphenidate for children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Ole Jakob Storeb et al Cochrane Review, doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD009885.pub2, published online 25 November 2015.

 

IS There a Link Between Parental Depression and Children Getting Bad Grades

According to JAMA Psychiatry, there seems to be a connection between depressed parents and their children exhibiting poor academic performance in school. Depression is a mental illness that affects 7.6% Americans who twelve years of age and older, and out of that twelve percent, three percent of them severe depressive symptoms according to the CDC. Individuals from a low socio-economic status are more likely to go have depression, and it is more common in women in the forty-fifty nine age bracket. More specifically, forty-three percent of individuals who have mild depressive symptoms, and ninety percent of individuals with severe depression come across with issues in their daily lives, such as social activities, home, and work. Furthermore, depression increases the chances to experience early death, a disability, and illness, and have a toll on loved ones. According to Brian K. Lee, PHD, of the Drexel University of Public Health in Philadelphia, PA, and other researcher’s, there seems to be a link between depressed parents, and their children performing poorly in their academics. Research was conducted on Swedish youth who were born between 1984-1994, and research was focused on those youth who left school at sixteen years of age. Brian K. Lee, PHD, and other researchers looked for connections that showed a linking between diagnoses of parental depression from inpatient and outpatient records with school grades for Swedish children born between 1984-1994. They also scrutinized the Swedish national data, which consisted of over 1.1 million children, 33,906 mothers, and 23,724 fathers who had depression before a child reached the end of compulsory schooling. What the researcher’s found was that 2.1% of fathers, and 3% of mother’s experienced depression before the final years of their child’s compulsory schooling. Therefore, from these findings, researcher’s were able to affirm that there is a link between maternal and paternal depression during anytime before a child finished compulsory education. However, there isn’t a statistically significant difference between postnatal depression and maternal and paternal depression, but girls were more negatively affected than boys when their mother’s were depressed. There also seems to be a biological mechanism as why girls were more depressed than boys when their mother’s were depressed. According to researchers from the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) led by Dr. Fumiko Hoeft, PHD, an associate professor of psychiatry, they found that gray matter volume found in the corticolimbic systems of mother’s and their daughters to be similar through conducting an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). This similarity was not seen among mothers and sons, fathers and sons or fathers and daughters. The corticolimibic system is located in the brain, which includes the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, ventromedial, and anterior cingulate cortex. It’s function is to assess danger, and processes and regulates emotions. Mood disorder’s such as depression cause structural changes in the corticolimbic system. However, environmental factors such as socioeconomic status does play a role in children developing depression. Gregory B. Couch, PHD, of psychiatry at Washington’s School of Medicine and his colleagues conducted a study on 105 prechool children aged 3-5. His team used a income-to-needs ratio to assess the socioeconomic status of those preschool children. During the time of the study $24,250 a year for a family of four was considered to be at the poverty level. Children from the ages of 7-12 went through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), which allowed the researchers to analyze the hippocampus, and the amygdala. Analyzing those two parts of the brain the researcher’s found that children from lower-income families showed weaker connections between the left hippocampus and the right superior frontal cortex, but also weaker associations between the right amygdada and the right lingual gyrus compared to preschoolers from higher-income families. These weaker connections in the brain of children coming from lower-income families is unfortunately linked to those children developing clinical depression between ages 9 or 10. This reminds me of the topic discussed in class about the wormy kids, because the kids who were infected with worms were the ones who came from a low socioeconomic status, and coming from poverty not only put them at risk to be infected with worms, but caused them to perform badly in their academics. Personally, I can speak for myself in that I grew up in a family with very little money to spare, and from my experience I have seen that coming from a low socioeconomic status that it did have a toll on me in being able to academic perform well, and it still does today. Whoever said that money does that bring happiness, just didn’t have of it. Having money can and does make all the difference in life.
Sources
Associations of parental depression with child school performance at age 16 years in Sweden, Hanyang Shen et al., JAMA Psychiatry, doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2015.2917, published online February 3, 2016.
CDC, Depression in the US household population, 2009–2012, accessed 2 February 2016.
Female-specific intergenerational transmission pattern of the human corticolimbic circuitry, Bun Yamagata et al., Journal of Neuroscience, doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4974-14.2016, published 26 January 2016, abstract.
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis news release, accessed 19 January 2016.

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Can Meditation reduce pain in patients

Meditation is a mental practice of the mind and body that has long been used to create relaxation human beings. According to a study carried out by researcher’s from the Duke Cancer Institute in Durnham, NC, there seems to be a link between women undergoing breast cancer biopsies who practice meditation, experiencing a reduction in pain, fatigue, and anxiety. Breast cancer biopsy is a painful procedure for women who go through it. It involves the removal of of breast tissue. Women often times experience pain during after the breast biopsy. In this study, Dr. Soo and her colleagues randomized 121 women who were going through breast biopsies into three groups: guided meditation, music, and a control group. During the breast biopsy, the women in the meditation group listened to audio recorded that was embedded in love and kindess. The goal was for those women too obtain positive emotions and release negative emotions. Then, the women in the music group were listening to relaxing music from either choice of world music, instrumental jazz, flute, classical piano, nature sounds, and classical piano. The women in the control group just received supportive words from the medical biopsy team. Also, before and after the breast biopsy, the 121 women filled out questionnaires that was used to measure their anxiety and nervousness by ranking their biopsy pain from zero to ten, and gauged their feelings of fatigue and weakness. The results from the questionnaires depicted that the women the music and meditation groups showed more post-biopsy reductions in fatigue and anxiety compared to the women in the control group who reported increased pain, fatigue, and anxiety. Moreover, the women in the meditation group experienced much more less pain during the breast biopsy, compared to the women in the music group. From these results Dr. Soo, and her colleagues believe that mediation and music is good alternative instead of the use of drugs on breast biopsy patients, because the drugs administered on breast biopsy patients sedates them, and therefore often times requiring someone to drive the women home after the procedure. Besides mediation and music being an effective alternative to sedative drugs, meditation and music is much cheaper and simpler to administer than sedative drugs.

In a similar study to the breast biopsy study, research findings by scientists at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC, reveal positive patterns in brain activity produced by meditation to be different than those created by a placebo. In this study, seventy-five pain-free participants were categorized into one of four groups: placebo meditation (relaxation), mindfulness mediation, placebo analgesic cream, or the control group. Pain was administered by using a thermal tube to heat an area of the the participants skin to 120.2 degrees Fahrenheit, which a a temperature level most human beings find to be painful. Then, the study participants their pain unpleasantness (emotional response), and pain intensity (physical sensation). After rating those things, the participants brains were scanned with an arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI), before and after the four days of interventions. The results revealed that the mindfulness meditation group experienced a pain intensity reduction by 27% and associated emotional response of pain to be reduced by 44%, but the placebo cream only caused a reduction in the sensation of pain by 11% and the emotion response to pain to be reduced by 13%. Further more, the placebo mediation group revealed a nine percent reduction in pain rating, but a 24% in pain unpleasantness. The biological mechanism to the reduction in pain by those participants who practiced mindful meditation is due to the the activation of anterior cingulate cortex and orbitofronal brain regions, which are both associated with self-control of pain, whereas the placebo cream only lowered pain reducing brain activity in the secondary somatosensory cortex. The somatosensory cortex is an area of the brain the processes pain the body. The other thing to is that the thalamus was deactivated in the mindful meditation group, which may have caused the incoming signals of pain to not be felt by the participants in that group.
Both of these studies remind me of the discussion that was held in class when we learned that Leibovici in 2001 published a paper in the British Medical Journal that concluded that prayer could retrospectively improve the health of patients with blood poisoning. His paper proved to be false, but I think this happened because the hospital patients were not doing the prayer for themselves and were therefore not in a “mindfulness meditative state”, but rather other individuals were praying for them. The other possible reason as to why prayer was impossible prove to it improving the health of the blood patients has to do with amount of faith that these blood patients had that they would be healed. Faith is often times dictated by people’s life circumstances. In this case, the blood poisoned patients are in a life or death situation, so for a patient of that kind to have the faith that he or she would be healed from it is very hard for a person of that kind to accept and believe, compared to the women believing that they would go through their breast biopsy without experiencing pain.
Sources:
Imaging-guided core-needle breast biopsy: impact of meditation and music interventions on patient anxiety, pain, and fatigue, Mary Scott Soo et al., Journal of the American College of Radiology, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2015.12.004, published 4 February 2016, abstract.
Duke Health news release, accessed 4 February 2016 via Newswise.
NIH, Meditation: in depth, accessed 4 February 2016.
Mindfulness meditation-related pain relief: evidence for unique brain mechanisms in the regulation of pain, F. Zeidan et al,Neuroscience letters, doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2012.03.082, published online 6 April 2012.
Mindfulness meditation-related pain relief: Evidence for unique brain mechanisms in the regulation of pain, F. Zeidan et al.,Neuroscience letters, doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2012.03.082 , published 29 June 2012, abstract via Elsevier
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center news release, accessed 13 November 2015.

 

Are sugary sweetened beverages linked to obesity

Based on one study, there seems to be connection between drinking sugary sweetened drinks, and an increase in visceral fat in the body, which predisposes one to be at risk for heart disease and diabetes. Visceral fat bad form of fat located around the abdominal cavity, and this fat also is embedded around the intestines, the liver, and the pancreas.Visceral fat is found in all human beings in small amounts, but an excess amount puts one in danger for having heart disease and type II diabetes.According to John Hopkins Medicine, men who a waist that’s 35 inches or more, and women who have a waist of 40 inches or more are at a higher risk in developing health problems because of too much visceral fat. This study was carried out by Dr. Caroline Fox, who was a special volunteer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with her colleagues in the sole purpose of investigating how sugary sweetened beverage consumption is linked to the development of visceral fat. Dr. Fox and her fellow researcher’s analyzed the data of 1003 participants who were on average aged 45 years old. These people were part of the Framingham Heart Study, which was a continuous project backed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. During the initial and ending of the six year follow-up period this study, the participants went through a computed tomography (CT) scans, which were used to measure alterations in visceral fat, and on top of that the participants completed food questionnaires. In those questionnaires, the participants wrote their consumption of sugary sweetened beverages and diet soda. Then, these participants were placed in four sections. These sections were non-drinkers of sugary sweetened beverages, occasional drinkers of sugary sweetened beverages (drank once month), frequent drinkers of sugary sweetened beverages (drank once weekly), and those who drank sugary sweetened beverages once or more daily.

The results showed that the participants who drank sugary drinks daily had the most amount of visceral fat at 852cm, whereas non drinkers of sugary drinks had the lowest amount of visceral fat in the body at 658 cm. On the contrary, occasional drinkers of sugary beverages had a visceral fat increase of 649cm, but frequent drinkers of sugary beverages had a 707 cm increase of visceral fat. These results remained to be standard even after keeping in mind of confounding variables, such as BMI, age, level of physical activity, and gender. While there is no plausible biological mechanism as to what causes visceral fat, one possibility is that the added sugars in these beverages plays a part in insulin resistance, leading consumer’s of those drinks to be at risk for heart disease and type II diabetes. Furthermore, there was no link between drinking diet soda and visceral fat. This study is linked to the sugary randomized control trial experiment in adolescent Hispanics, and the Amsterdam randomized control study on the consumption of sugary drinks. In both of those studies, bottom line was that even a modest consumption of sugary drinks is linked to weight gain and other obesity related diseases such as type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease. I believe that people need to understand that obesity and it’s associated diseases hits anyone, and in order to prevent that from happening people need to realize that “you are what you eat and drink, and its potential implications.”

Sources:
Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is associated with change of visceral adipose tissue over 6 years of follow-up, Caroline Fox et al., Circulation, published online 11 January 2016.
AHA news release, accessed 8 January 2016 via AlphaGalileo.
CDC, Consumption of sugar drinks in the United States, 2005-2008, accessed 8 January 2016.
Johns Hopkins Medicine, The skinny on visceral fat, accessed 8 January 2016.
Sugary Drink FACTS, Sugary drink facts in brief, accessed 8 January 2016.

Are ADHD medications linked to sleeping patterns and dietary issues?

According a peer reviewed study carried out by the Cochrane: Developmental, Psychosocial and Learning Problems Group, researchers are claiming that the drug Methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin is used to treat ADHD in children is linked to non-serious adverse effects, particularly problems with having an appetite and sleeping.  The study was a randomized control study that included 12, 245 children and or adolescent’s that had ADHD.  One confounding variable amongst these participant’s is that most came from a high socioeconomic status, which is very odd. I say that, because it’s people from low socioeconomic backgrounds who face prolonged health effects. This is especially true when we learned in class that kids who are infested with worms “wormy kids” come from poor countries from areas of Africa and south East Asia, because the livelihood of kids with worms living in third world countries is based on their low socioeconomic status. Saying this, you would think that these 12, 225 participants would refrain from continuing to use methylphenidate, but it could be that they can’t realize that for themselves since many of them are so young and that they associate sleeplessness and dietary problems as being a part of their lives just like the kids with worms in developing countries do unfortunately. However, in all of the 185 randomized control trials, researchers found that all of them were at high risk for bias. As we learned in class, bias studies are designed to spread a cause many times coming from the funder of a study. In this particular study, Copenhagen University Hospital was one funder along with Region New Zealand, and the University of Southern Denmark. One indication that the funders of this study had an impact in the level of bias in this study, is that it was impossible to assess the long-term effects of methylphenidate because those randomized trials were too small and of low quality.

However, primary and secondary outcomes were present in the study. Findings from the primary outcome of if Methylphenidate can improve ADHD symptoms from the prospective of a teacher show that Methylenidate can help to improve hyperactivity and impulsivity in ADHD children. Findings from the secondary outcome which were the group of children prescribed with Methylenidate show that Methphenidate doesn’t increase the risk of developing a life threatening disease only taking the drug for six months, but it’s linked to ADHD children developing sleeping problems and a deceased appetite.  I personally agree to this because I’ve seen my ex room-mate who had ADHD at times display a decrease in his appetite, and complain about sleeping patterns.

 

Link

Hello SC 200!,

My name is Ebenezer Berhanu, and I’m a senior majoring in Kinesiology taking SC 200 primarily for two reasons. First, I need the course to fulfill a GN course requirement for my Kinesiology bachelor’s degree. Second, I decided to take this course because when I read the course description about SC 200; I liked how it’s a course not intended for science majors. Science has never been a strength of mine. Courses that I took in the past from physics to chemistry, and biology were courses that I was never able to enjoy through learning and understanding, but only done so by cramming information for exams and other assignments. That being said, in taking this course I hope that it will open up my mind and heart to appreciate the sciences by learning about science from a different and interesting prospective that SC 200 offers. As I had partially mentioned, because science is a field that doesn’t seem to come naturally to me to reason with, it is not an academic discipline that I intrinsically enjoy nor good at academically, so I’m not majoring in the sciences. This link below directs you to Dutch Wonderland, which is an amusement near my house in Lancaster, PA. https://www.dutchwonderland.com/

 

If I were ever a scientist. this picture below depicts me:

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