New Scrutiny of the Dangers of Mixing Alcohol and Painkillers

from scientificamerican.com

The mystery of Whitney Houston's death will not be solved for several weeks, as the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office awaits a full toxicology report. But many experts speculate that the singer's tragic demise involved a deadly cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs, including Xanax.

Houston wouldn't be the first star to suffer such a fate: Heath Ledger, Michael Jacksonand Anna Nicole Smith are all thought to have died in part from prescription drug overdoses, which can involve painkillers, sedatives and stimulants, often in combination with alcohol. But the problem extends far beyond Hollywood. In 2007 some 27,000 Americans died from unintentional prescription drug overdoses—making prescription drugs a more common cause of accidental death in many states than car crashes are.

A slippery slope
Although sedatives are thought to have played a role in Houston’s death, most prescription drug overuse involves opioid painkillers. Approximately 3 to 5 percent of people who take pain medication eventually end up addicted, according to Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an arm of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. And "individuals who have a past history of a substance-use disorder—from smoking, drinking or other drugs—are at greater risk," she says. Addiction to other classes of prescription drugs such as sedatives, stimulants and sleep medications is thought to be less common—but it occurs, and even users who do not become compulsively addicted can, over time, become physically dependent and experience intense withdrawal symptoms when their prescriptions run out. They might also develop drug tolerance, the need to take higher doses over time to feel the same effects.

Other people start taking prescription drugs just to get high, perhaps in part because they have the (false) notion that prescription drugs are safer to experiment with than are illicit drugs. "They take them for recreational purposes, and then a portion of them find 'Wow, I can't stop using this,'" says Jon Morgenstern, director of addiction treatment at the Columbia University Medical Center.

It is unclear how Houston developed her substance problems, but like many other addicts, she eventually began mixing drugs along with alcohol. Many prescription drug users who are not addicted or dependent consume alcohol concurrently as well, despite medical advice against it. According to a 2008 study published by researchers at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, 60 percent of people who regularly take prescription drugs known to interact with alcohol also drink, and 5 percent have at least three drinks in a row when they do.

Prescription drugs and alcohol can be a dangerous combination, Volkow says. Painkillers and booze are perhaps the worst to mix, because both slow breathing by different mechanisms and inhibit the coughing reflex, creating "a double-whammy effect," she says, that can stop breathing altogether. Alcohol also interacts with anti-anxiety drugs (including Xanax), antipsychotics, antidepressants, sleep medications and muscle relaxants—intensifying the drugs' sedative effects, causing drowsiness and dizziness, and making falls and accidents more likely. A 2010 study published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health reported that automobile drivers were much more likely to weave and speed if they were under the influence of drugs like Xanax in addition to alcohol than if they had consumed alcohol alone. And according to a 2011 study published in the AmericanJournal of Therapeutics, people who visited an emergency room after taking too much of the sleeping drug Ambien were more than twice as likely to end up in an intensive care unit if they had also consumed alcohol, compared with Ambien-takers who had not had anything to drink.

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Steve Jobs, Vegan Cupcakes and a Birthday

Is there any trend this man did not foresee?  Vegan cupcakes were apparently Steve Jobs' sweet of choice--long before they won cupcake wars and became de rigueur at celebrity shindigs--and so truckloads will be on hand (along with black turtlenecks and Dylan music) at the unofficial gathering outside the Apple flaship store on Fifth Avenue in New York today to commemorate what would be Steve Jobs' 57th birthday.  

These saintly cupcakes are less a dietary eccentricity than a way of sticking it to the man.

Vegan cupcakes are made without eggs, butter, cream or anything else an animal may have labored to produce. Even honey is out because someone might have exploited the poor bees (never mind about the people who make the iphone.) These saintly cupcakes are less a dietary eccentricity than a way of sticking it to the man.

By not eating (or even wearing) anything an animal had to die for--or even lift a feather to provide--vegans protest not only cruelty to animals but also corporate and government control of the food supply. Born out of the punk movement in the 1970s and early 1980s, vegans tend to question everything, especially the status quo.  A fitting food movement for Mr. Jobs.

Cynics might say his dietary politics didn't do much for his health.  But in as much as veganism is a state of mind, he seems to have achieved a pretty high level of clarity. The crowd outside the Apple flagship today (organized by Dr. Brendan and Stackexchange--both involved in troubleshooting Apple products) can only hope someone else will come along to carry on the revolution.

Twitter Reveals People Are Happiest in the Morning

“Happy hour” is not when you might expect it to be, according to a new analysis of about half a billion Twitter messages from around the globe. On average, people are chipper when they wake up and become grouchy as the day wears on. This pattern holds true on weekends, too, but is delayed by about two hours—a trend confirmed in tweets from the United Arab Emirates, where the workweek is Sunday through Thursday. The data suggest that sleep schedules strongly influence mood cycles. The duo at Cornell University who carried out the research, published last September in Science, say that the rising popularity of online social media is allowing scientists to study human behavior in surprising new ways.

from scientificamerican.com

Get Up Offa That Thing!

Man's best friend may also be his best excersize inspiration. Witness:

What Price Success? Investment Bankers at Risk of Poor Health

from wsj.com

Add investment banking to the list of things that could be dangerous to your health.

A University of Southern California researcher found insomnia, alcoholism, heart palpitations, eating disorders and an explosive temper in some of the roughly two dozen entry-level investment bankers she shadowed fresh out of business school.

Every individual she observed over a decade developed a stress-related physical or emotional ailment within several years on the job, she says in a study to be published this month.

Investment banking has long been a beacon for ambitious people who crave competition, big money, steak dinners and paid-for town-car service. The 100-hour workweek, these ironmen and ironwomen tell themselves, is just the opening ante in a high-stakes game.

But investment bankers, salespeople and traders are only human. Under the immense stress of their jobs, many suffer personal and emotional problems that escalate into full-blown crises, with some bankers developing conditions that linger long after they have left the industry.

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