Polar Vortext. Blah blah blah… Save the children, keep them inside, literal life-threatening cold — Literal!
Good grief. You’d think school children in Fairbanks must be a different species altogether:
Outdoor recess is only cancelled when the temperature reaches -20 °F.
Outdoor recess! Nevermind waiting to get on the bus to get to school in the first place.
Buck up, mid-western kiddies, buck up.
…
Working against a deadline to finish my book chapter to be published by Springer later this year. The likely audience of readers will be medical oncologists and researchers in human colorectal cancer (cheery, right?). I need to be careful to get the biology right, and to be as clear and as simple as possible, in keeping with an ideal often attributed to Einstein: “Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler.” This means avoid wandering explanations of mass spectrometry, gel electrophoresis, or worse, abstruse mathematics when I discuss the predictive value of our approach. Not that the latter is irrelevant; to the contrary, it’s the likely the reason I was invited to author the chapter, but you don’t want the novelty to get lost in its explanation.
Another mistake to avoid is underestimating the knowledge of your readership, knowingly or not. Years ago, while I was still a grad student, I wrote a review of biomarkers in colorectal cancer, elements of which I expect I’ll be drawing on quite a bit as I write this chapter. I recall that the peer review of that paper was fair, but quite critical of several things I’d left out which the reviewers argued, correctly I agreed, belonged in any broad review of the field. It was as if I’d written a review of the auto industry and omitted any mention of Ford. Well, not that bad, but you get the idea. I revised the manuscript accordingly, made it a better paper, and it passed muster on the second review and was published. Getting a paper published is very satisfying, but what’s more satisfying if you ask me is having the paper cited by others, and I see today this one has been.
When temperatures of -20F are common, it is reasonable to expect people to clothe their children appropriately.
When it is rarely below freezing for long, people might not have the right clothes for their bairns.
Hard, tough, Alaskan uberchildren will frostbite at the same temperatures as their soft, midwestern unterchild cousins, given the same attire.
I lived in Milwaukee the 1st 25 years of my life, more recently 5 years in Cleveland. Got cold in the winter in those places, sometimes very cold. That was (and still should be) expected in the Midwest. Many kids (me included) walked to school most years K-8, and reasonable parents bought their kids a winter coat, hat, and gloves, surely enough to keep them from “literally freezing to death.”
Point being, kids in Alaska (Fbanks especially) aren’t uberchildren, they’re just beyond the reach (thankfully) of the lower 48 coddlesphere.
Yesterday’s high temperature is the lowest daily high in Milwaukee since 1912. You wear the years gracefully, sir. 😉
Yes, a lot of this is because people are more liability conscious these days, and I walked to school in a few Chicago winters myself, and I understand the urge to yell “Get offa my lawn!” as much as anybody. Carry on. 🙂
(Interestingly, when I first moved up to Indy, they had recently extended the school year. It was a hot summer that year. A few schools couldn’t start at the same time as the others because the sixty-year-old buildings didn’t have AC. My Atlanta-raised self found this strange.)
This is one Midwesterner, or his kids, you won’t hear whining about the cold. Last night’s and this morning’s walks were definitely brisk, though.
On to colorectal cancer. Back in the mid 70s, when my dad almost died from a ruptured appendix when we were living in Philly, I was sitting with my dad while he spoke with his longtime Doc. The subject was bowel movements, as my dad had been unable to produce one, after going through peritonitis and numerous other complications. Anyhow, the Doc asked my dad how frequently he normally had a bowel movement and my dad informed the Doc at least two times per day, and often three times, to which his Doc replied, “Well, I don’t think you’ll ever have colorectal cancer then, Jerry.”
Based on your knowledge in the subject, Rod, have you ever heard any other practitioners in the field make such an utterance? The Doc’s statement seems to have some common sense validity to it, frequent evacuations of the bowel, but I wonder if there is any medical validity to it.
Can’t say for sure, John, I’m a molecular guy, Happy Wife’s the clinical guru around here (a point she sometimes smart alecky makes, “Yes, he’s a doctor, but not the kind that helps people.”). Haha. Very amusing.
Anyhoo, found this at pubmed. Evidently, frequent BMs are significantly associated with a lower incidence of CRC occurrence in Japanese women, but not significantly in Japanese men:
Bowel movement frequency and risk of colorectal cancer in a large cohort study of Japanese men and women.
Abstract (emphasis mine)
The relationship between bowel movement (BM) frequency and the risk of colorectal cancer was examined in a large cohort of 25 731 men and 37 198 women living in 24 communities in Japan. At enrolment, each participant completed a self-administrated questionnaire on BM frequency and laxative use. Incidence rate ratios (IRR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated using Cox’s proportional-hazard model. During the follow-up period (average length 7.6 years), 649 cases of colorectal cancer, including 429 cases of colon cancer, were identified. Among women, subjects who reported a BM every 2-3 days had the lowest risk of developing colorectal (IRR=0.71, 95% CI=0.52-0.97) and colon cancer (IRR=0.70, 95% CI=0.49-1.00), whereas those reporting a BM every 6 days or less had an increased risk of developing colorectal (IRR=2.47, 95% CI=1.01-6.01) and colon cancer (IRR=2.52, 95% CI=0.93-6.82) compared with those reporting >or=1 BM per day. A similar, but nonsignificant, association between the frequency of BM and cancer risk was observed in men. There was no association between colorectal or colon cancer risk and laxative use. Regulating BM frequency might therefore have a role in the prevention of colorectal cancer.
Again, can’t speak for your dad specifically, but it is generally believed, I think, that infrequent BMs or constipation, which keep the poop in the colon longer, may make the formation of precancerous polyps more likely.
Interesting, Rod, though I can’t help but be a bit disturbed by the study’s stating that the lowest cancer incidence rate was observed in individuals who only had a BM every 2-3 days versus a daily (if I’m reading that correctly). I wonder on what basis my dad’s Doc based his statement in the late 70s. I’ll bookmark that link you put up for later reading.
Say, were you living in Milwaukee in the years 1972 – 1975? That’s when I was living in Sturtevant, just outside Racine. If so, there’s a chance we could’ve crossed paths.