Week of March 13, 2023
Naming my replacement succulents has been more challenging than I expected. Unlike ZZ Plant and San Pedro Macho, "Mammillaria bombycina" does not lend itself to a witty or obvious choice. Nevertheless, my new cactus deserves a clever name. See the picture below. My kids are teenagers (you can imagine their ideas), and Chat-GPT offered only bad puns. So, I am crowdsourcing - loyal readers, send me a suggestion!
A version of my (currently) innominate cactus:
https://www.plantsmap.com/plants/92619
---
Case rates, hospitalizations, and ICU rates are trending toward the lowest since June 2021. Average deaths (a lagging metric) are still 400 people per day in the U.S.
N.Y. Times Tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
------
A preprint article from the Lancet looking at using Metformin (a prevalent, low-cost oral medication for diabetes) early in the diagnosis of COVID demonstrated some interesting and impressive reductions in long COVID symptoms. Per the commentary below:
"Around 10.6% (1 in 9) of patients in the placebo group were diagnosed with Long Covid compared with 6.3% (1 in 16) of patients who took Metformin for two weeks following their initial SARS-CoV-2 diagnoses. [This 42% reduction in Long Covid translates to a number needed to treat of 23; for every 23 Covid-19 patients prescribed Metformin, one Long Covid diagnosis is prevented]."
Preprint article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4375620
Interview with authors and commentary:
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/metformin-found-to-reduce-long-covid
It is also worth looking at the referenced randomized controlled trial published in August 2022 in which Metformin (compared to Ivermectin and fluvoxamine) demonstrated a slight improvement in emergency department visits, hospitalizations, or deaths in the immediate phases of a COVID infection.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201662
Dr. Eric Topol highlighted (both literally and in the broader sense) an excellent editorial from Nature on how the word endemic (if we are ready to use such a word) does not mean benign.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1634358401521303552
Medical Trends and Technology
A potpourri of articles this week:
The AMA summarized recent studies exploring the "dose" of exercise needed to maximize cardiovascular risk reduction:
"The study found that those who worked out two to four times beyond the minimum physical activity recommendations had a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Those who worked out two to four times above the moderate activity recommendations—about 300 to 599 minutes each week—saw the most benefit. Adults who worked out two to four times more than the vigorous physical activity recommendations—about 150 to 299 minutes per week—had 21% to 23% lower all-cause mortality and 27% to 33% lower cardiovascular mortality, respectively, and 19% lower non-cardiovascular mortality." Bottom line - 150 minutes of mixed vigorous + moderate physical activity weekly minimizes the risk of many bad outcomes across all age ranges.
Australian epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is a fantastic medical writer offering critical views of articles and data. His review of an article looking at the "benefits" of cold immersion therapy is an excellent example of how to parse medical literature. Here is one takeaway - studies require control groups for data to be meaningful.
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1633318873352241152
Happy March. Daylight savings time is still unhealthy. I never imagined I would have opinions on this topic.
Infographics
Business Insider publishes an infographic of cognitive biases about once every 2-3 years. I found the one from 2015 hiding on the Australian Life Hacker website.
Things I learned this week
Camels have incredible kidneys, red blood cells, and immune systems. Of course, camel kidneys are just one of the many adaptations for living in deserts with wild swings in water availability.
https://twitter.com/c0nc0rdance/status/1634014633785716738
and
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/june/camel-kidneys.html
While discussing camel (and llama and alpaca) biology, these animals' specialized single-stranded antibodies (called nanobodies) are worth noting. These small antibodies may be better at fending off viruses. Sharks and cartilaginous fish also (convergently) developed single-strand antibodies.
Thanks to 17th-century Croatian mercenaries, King Louis XIV, and King Charles II (not the III!), I had to wear neckties in medical school. Concerns over spreading bacteria and a general shift toward more informal dress saved me (and my sartorial budget), but the history of how neckties became a thing is interesting:
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1634775553378066432
Bonus round: learn to tie your 19th-century cravat in the infamous pamphlet Neckclothitania (which I note would be a good 70's prog rock band name):
https://teainateacup.wordpress.com/tag/neckclothitania/
A quick review of the medical literature reveals that the "necktie as a source of infection transmission" concern may be unfounded.
https://www.cmajopen.ca/content/6/1/E26
Living with A.I.
I found some maturing technology that allows you to build custom chatbots based on a provided data set (such as a group of .PDFs or a website). For example, if a weekly newsletter author uploaded two to three years of newsletters, this chatbot could answer questions and mimic the author's writing style.
This website is just one publicly available example. More are private, and I suspect many more of these tools will be coming.
Chat GPT-4 (an upgrade from 3.5) will be released this week (at least as part of Microsoft products).
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/chatgpt-4-everything-we-know-so-far/
Chat GPT-4 will, apparently, be able to generate videos. New desktop tools merging computer-generated characters into live-action videos are coming, making a costly process much more cost-effective.
Here is some related tech:
https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1634647018726465537
A.I. art of the week
"oil painting cactus, shark, llama, and camel wearing neckties playing poker"
https://labs.openai.com/s/0M7DoJnwm0ix8deolLA2kNsZ
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
Comments
Post a Comment