Kick to the Head

A new study finds that high school football students already have differences in their brains compared to swimmers, cross-country runners and tennis players, contrary to thinking that suggested it takes years of head impacts to change brain structure.

Football players had cortical thinning and changes in brain folding as well as lower brain signaling and coherence in frontal and medial parts of the brain, but they had increased signaling and coherence in the occipital lobe.

"These findings suggest playing football may be associated with a different trajectory of cortical maturations and aging processes," the authors noted.

Body of Knowledge

The sternum is a three-part structure at the midline of the chest. It helps protect organs such as the lungs and heart, and it connects the ribs. In children, the parts of the sternum are joined by flexible cartilage to accommodate growth, but these slowly turn to bone called the xiphoid process.

Get Me That, Stat!

One in eight Americans have hearing loss, depending on where they live and work, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hearing loss was more prevalent among men, Hispanic people and rural residents. After mining, working in retail or restaurants were the two occupations tied most closely to hearing loss.

West Virginia, Alaska, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Arizona had the highest rates of hearing loss; the District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Connecticut had the lowest. Noise in big cities appeared to be less harmful than a rural life spent working outdoors with heavy machinery, riding ATVs or hunting with firearms, reported STAT.

Doc Talk

Dyscopia -- difficulty coping at home; often used by internists to imply that the patient requires admission to hospital despite having no obvious acute illness

Mania of the Week

Typomania -- an extreme desire to print or publish one's lucubration, not to be confused with verbomania, which is, in part, an obsession with using words nobody knows. Not that this a problem here.

Food for Thought

We all know about the weird stuff purposefully put into foods, such as red dye from cochineal beetles or sand (fancy name: silicon dioxide) used as an anti-caking agent. Then there are the presumably unintended ingredients. These are all reported cases: a black widow in grapes, a frozen frog in a bag of vegetables, a live frog in a bag of fresh spinach, a dead mouse in a can of Mountain Dew, severed human fingers in frozen custard and chili, a tooth in a candy bar, condoms in French fries and clam chowder, a live bullet in a hot dog and syringes poking up all over the place.

Best Medicine

When you get older, "one for the road" means peeing before you leave the house.

Observation

"Doctors is all swabs." -- Billy Bones, shipmate to Jim Hawkins in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island" (1883)

Medical History

This week in 1987, the FDA approved the sale of AZT (azidothymidine), an antiviral drug believed to prolong the lives of some AIDS patients. By 2000, an estimated 50 million people were infected with HIV worldwide. AZT was the first authorized antiretroviral AIDS drug. Combined with recently approved antivirals, AZT's effectiveness has been increased, and AIDS today meets the criteria for a chronic disease.

Self-Exam

Match these medical root words with what they refer to:

1. Encephalo

2. Myo

3. Osteo

4. Sclerosis

5. Rhino

a) Hard or hardening

b) Nose

c) Muscle

d) Brain

e) Bone

Answers: 1d. 2c. 3e. 4a. 5b.

Medical Myths

In the late 1990s, advice generally running around was that exercising too late in the evening would disrupt subsequent sleep. More recent studies, however, have concluded that's this is not generally the case, with the exception of perhaps vigorous activity just before you go to bed.

A 2018 metasurvey of 23 studies found that not only did evening exercise not affect sleep, but it also seemed to help people fall asleep faster and spend more time in deep sleep. The exception were folks doing high-intensity exercise, such as such as interval training, less than one hour before bed. They took longer to fall asleep and had poorer sleep quality.

Med School

Q: What is the difference between sebum and cerumen?

A: Sebum is the oily substance produced to protect hair and skin and keep skin moisturized. It's made up of a collection of fat molecules, waxes and squalene, an oil compound. Cerumen is ear wax, intended to protect the skin of the external ear canals from water damage, infection, trauma and foreign bodies. Cerumen is a mixture of secretions from the sebaceous and ceruminous glands in the ears and desquamated skin, which basically means skin that has been shed.

Epitaphs

"Steel true, blade straight." -- On the headstone of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), British writer and physician, most famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes

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To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.