Next time you pull out your wallet to hand over some of your hard-earned money, you'd be wise to spend it on experiences rather than possessions. For as research on happiness and spending habits has demonstrated repeatedly in recent years, buying life experiences tends to makes us happier than buying things.

What hasn't been as clear, however, is why some individuals are more likely to use their disposable income on, say, camping in the Boundary Waters or catching a show at the Jungle Theater than shopping at the Mall of America.

In fact, psychologists know very little about habitual "experiential shoppers." A recent study, however, appears to have unlocked some clues.

For the study, a team of psychologists from San Francisco State University and the University of Southern California analyzed data from online surveys taken by nearly 10,000 volunteers. The participants answered questions about their shopping habits, values and purchasing choices. They also answered questions that measured what are called the "Big Five" dimensions of personality: extroversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

Extroverted, open to new experiences
The data revealed that people who habitually choose experiences over material stuff tend to have several specific personality characteristics: Most notably, they are more likely to be extroverted and open to new experiences.

"Considering that compared to material items, life experiences are likely to result in more social engagement, it is reasonable that extroverts prefer experiential purchases," the authors concluded. "Openness to experience may be related to experiential buying due to the diversity and variability associated with life experiences. Unlike material purchases that are mass-produced and easily replicated, every vacation, every show, and every meal provides an individual with a different experience that cannot easily be repeated again."

"This is a robust, replicable finding that appears to be quite strong," said Kathleen Vohs, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Business, in an e-mail interview. Vohs was not involved in this latest research but has conducted her own studies on the psychology of money and spending.

The current study also shows, said Vohs, "that you can measure this phenomenon precisely and that people of different personality characteristics are more or less likely to show the effect."

A detailed survey
The study reveals some fascinating details about the differences between experiential and materialistic shoppers. On an emotional level, for example, experiential shoppers are more fun seeking. They tend to enjoy "acting on a whim" and are more likely to "get caught up in the excitement when others are celebrating." They also report a deeper affinity with "natural, artistic, and moral beauty."

People with materialistic spending habits, on the other hand, score higher on a variety of negative emotions, like attachment anxiety ("I worry a lot about my relationships"), personal distress ("I sometimes feel helpless in the middle of a very emotional situation"), and something psychologists call disgust sensitivity ("It bothers me to hear someone clear a throat full of mucous").

Could it be, though, that the greater life satisfaction reported by extroverts is due to their personality rather than to their shopping habits?

"Well, yes," said Vohs, "extroverts seem to have greater life satisfaction, but that's not what this study is looking at. It's possible that extroverts are happier and therefore buy more experiences — but the data here don't seem to suggest that's the case."

What these findings do suggest, she stressed, is "that buying experiences makes you happier than [buying] products."

In other words, even non-extroverts report that experiences bring them more happiness than stuff. They are just less likely to routinely make those choices.

Purchases seen as an opportunity
Of course, some purchases, like a bicycle or a television, can be considered either a product or an experience. But you'll be happier, said Vohs, if you view those items as being an opportunity to have an experience rather than to possess a product.

So, why do so many people continue to behave as if buying things will make them happier?

"I think that's a cultural effect, partly," said Vohs, "meaning that North American culture promotes materialism as a value that people should adopt and pursue. Moreover, the things that we buy are all around us, prompting many more memories about their role in our happiness, whereas experiences are ephemeral and therefore not all that easy to recall how happy they made us."

The study was published in the January-February issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology. Its authors have set up a website called "Beyond the Purchase," where you can take several surveys and find out what kind of shopper you are. You can also receive feedback on "maximizing the benefits of your spending." The site is an academic one, the authors stress, with no fees or advertising.

The Star Tribune has published a troubling two-part series of articles on how the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice is less likely than most other state medical boards to take strong disciplinary action against doctors who have committed medical mistakes or misconduct.

The series also point outs that Minnesotans are less able than residents in many other states to access disciplinary and malpractice information about the state’s 20,000 doctors.

Write Strib reporters Glenn Howatt and Richard Meryhew:

The board’s executive director, Robert Leach, doesn’t agree. He told Howatt and Meryhew that he is “satisfied the public is protected in Minnesota — very satisfied.” 

“Remember,” Leach added, “that part of public protection is ensuring an adequate supply of health care practitioners to the public. You can’t take everybody out of practice just because they had a problem. That’s why we’re not in the business of removing credentials unless absolutely necessary. We want to be remedial.”

Leach told the Strib that Public Citizen's report fails to take into account Minnesota's non-punitive, corrective-action approach to disciplining doctors.

"We don't discipline for a single issue usually," Leach said. "Docs make mistakes and when they do sometimes people get hurt. But we have to look and see if this is a pattern of practice. Is this an aberration?"

Apparently, the board often doesn't act even when a doctor's employer or another state board has imposed discipline.

"In dozens of cases," report Howatt and Meryhew, "the board took no action when doctors lost privileges at hospitals or clinics in Minnesota. In 2005, for example, a doctor voluntarily surrendered his hospital privileges after his employer put restrictions on his practice. The doctor later settled a malpractice case for nearly $1 million over a 2007 incident at another hospital involving a patient who was left a quadriplegic with brain damage requiring lifelong care. Neither incident sparked board action."

You can decide how satisfied you are with the board’s corrective-action approach to disciplining doctors by reading the Strib’s series, which appears in the paper’s Sunday and Monday editions. It includes several stories (with some disturbing photos) of Minnesotans who took doctors to court for medical malpractice. It also includes a searchable list of disciplined Minnesota doctors.

It looks like Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s defunding of Planned Parenthood's breast cancer services may have finally yanked the curtain aside and revealed what’s really been going on behind the scenes of that powerful and well-funded breast cancer organization.

As many women’s health advocates have been pointing out for years, Komen has acted questionably before on issues that affect women’s health — including their breast health.

And many of those actions seem to be driven not by the needs of women, but by the needs of Komen’s corporate sponsors.

Last fall, for example, Amy Silverstein reported in Mother Jones about Komen’s tendency to downplay or even deny science that suggests a link between breast cancer and bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used in plastics and other products.

In fact, as Silverstein pointed out, Komen has a history of downplaying all findings linking environmental toxins to breast cancer.

Could Komen’s stance on this issue, Silverstein asked, be because the organization receives funding from such companies as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M and Georgia Pacific (a subsidiary of the Koch Industries), which use those chemicals in their products?

Then there’s the phenomenon of pinkwashing, which Komen unabashedly created and encourages. Pinkwashing is the term used to describe when corporations claim to care about breast cancer by promoting “pink” products or a “pink ribbon” campaign (especially each October during “Breast Cancer Awareness Month”) while continuing to sell products that are linked to the disease. (One notorious example from a few Octobers ago was a company that promoted "Pinky" vodka to women. Alcohol consumption is generally considered a risk factor for breast cancer.)

Komen has even engaged in some pinkwashing itself. For several years, Komen — with the help of TPR Holdings, a New York-based company that makes many colognes and cosmetics and which donates $1 million a year to the charity — has marketed its own perfume, “Promise Me.” It turns out, however, that the perfume contains several toxic chemicals (not listed on the label), including ones suspected of being carcinogenic. (Confronted with these findings, Komen said last fall that it is reformulating the perfume.)

But “Promise Me” has another problem. Like so many of the other pinkwashing products hawked by companies, not much of the perfume’s purchase price actually goes to breast cancer research. According to the math done by one group of anti-pinkwashing activists, 3 percent of the perfume’s $59 price tag ends up being spent on breast cancer research. That’s $1.51 per bottle.

No wonder many breast cancer activists and survivors see red whenever they see pink.

Nor do Komen’s corporate-tie problems show any sign of waning. Here’s the latest example, which was pointed out by Linda Hirshman in an article posted on the Atlantic magazine’s website Wednesday:

“In a ghastly coincidence, the same day Komen pulled the money from Planned Parenthood because [Florida Republican Congressman Cliff] Stearns thought they were spending federal funds on abortions, the Journal of the America Medical Association published a damning study that almost half of women receiving second surgeries after lumpectomies didn't need the procedure,” Hirshman writes. “Painful, disfiguring, unnecessary surgery. At least three of the four sites studied in the JAMA report — the University of Vermont, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, and the Marshfield Clinic — has a relationship with the Komen Foundation. Kaiser Permanente is a ‘corporate campaign partner,’ the University of Vermont received a research grant, the Central Wisconsin Komen affiliate sponsors programs at the Marshfield Clinic.”

“Maybe,” adds Hirshman, “Komen should concentrate their granting criteria on whether the recipients are actually helping cancer patients.”

Komen is, I think, in much more serious trouble than its founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, is admitting. Because once the curtain is pulled aside, we never see the person (or organization) behind it the same anymore.

University of Minnesota bioethics professor and journalist Dr. Carl Elliott (“White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine”) has begun a weekly online column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, one of the most interesting magazines being published these days.

His first contribution, which appeared Wednesday, takes on a dark topic that many academic researchers in university medical centers are unwilling to discuss, at least publically: how, in their increasingly desperate need to compete with private companies for Big Pharma clinical-trial money, many of them have had to give up much of their academic independence and become, essentially, contract researchers.

“Contract researchers, unlike traditional academic researchers, do not typically design studies,” explains Elliott. “They do not analyze the results of trials, or interpret them, or help write them up for publication. In fact, they make little if any intellectual contribution to the studies. They simply recruit subjects and oversee their medical status in the trial, which may well be conducted at dozens of different locations. Like drones responding to the queen bee, the contract researcher just follows instructions issued from central command.”

Thirty years ago, drug companies relied almost exclusively on universities to test their new drugs in humans. The universities "gave drug companies prestige, technical expertise, and most importantly, a deep well of human subjects," notes Elliott.

On the company's terms
But those days are gone. “These days,” writes Elliott, “if universities want to compete for clinical trials, they have [to] do it on terms set by market forces. Their faculty members have to be better recruiters than private trial sites. Their Institutional Review Boards have to give ethical approval to trials faster than for-profit IRBs. They have to conduct their trials faster and cheaper than their counterparts in the private sector, or else the drug companies will simply take their business somewhere else. Ten years ago that might have meant a converted motel in Miami or a strip mall outside Philadelphia. These days it is just as likely to be a clinic in Warsaw, Manila, or Bhopal.”

Why are universities so willing to be part of this? One reason, says Elliott, is their enduring faith in medical research — a faith, Elliott points out, that “has been undeterred by a spectacular string of fraud scandals involving drugs such as Vioxx, Bextra, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Avandia, Paxil, and Neurontin, many of which implicated academic medical researchers and caused the needless deaths and injuries of unwitting human subjects.”

The role of money
But money is the real driving factor being academia’s willingness to become contract researchers, Elliott says.

“In medical schools, faculty members are often expected to generate their own salaries, either by seeing patients or getting grants and contracts,” he writes. “Likewise, academic departments are often expected to be financially self-sufficient, with as little support as possible from central administration. ‘Eat what you kill’ is the phrase used, without irony, by medical school deans and department heads. And if you are not killing it with NIH grants, you probably need to be killing it with AstraZeneca or Pfizer.”

The academic chase for BigPharma money has consequences for consumers, of course. The fewer truly independent researchers we have, the less we can trust what our medical studies tell us about various drugs and other medical treatments.

You can read Elliott’s inaugural column on the Chronicle of Higher Education web site.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found a way to get more school kids to eat veggies: Line their lunch trays with photographs of those foods.

That simple tactic more than doubled the number of kids eating green beans and more than tripled the ones eating carrots in a study the researchers conducted last spring at an elementary school in the Twin Cities suburb of Richfield.

The study's findings were published online today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

"We expected this to work because there are other studies in the literature showing that small changes to the eating environment can lead to big changes in behavior," said Traci Mann, an associate professor of psychology at the U of M and one of the authors of the study.

"We also expected it to work," Mann added, " because we were inducing a norm. We were giving kids the impression that [filling a particular part of their tray with a particular vegetable] was what people did. And norms have a powerful effect on behavior."

Still, the researchers were surprised to see how well their tactic worked. "Tripling the number of kids eating carrots is amazing," Mann said.

And, unlike other interventions — such as bringing in trained instructors to teach kids about the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables — this one was inexpensive to implement. It involved no special training and cost very little: about $3 for photocopying and 20 minutes of labor time per 100 trays.

How it was done
The study was conducted at the Richfield S.T.E.M. School (a K-5 school formerly called Richfield Intermediate) on two days last year when the school was serving identical meals. On both days, the students were able to help themselves to servings of applesauce, orange slices, green beans and carrots, while the kitchen's staff served them the rest of the meal. But on one of the days, the compartments on the kids' lunch trays were lined with photographs of carrots and green beans.

During each meal, the researchers counted how many kids selected beans and carrots. Then, after the meal was over, they gathered up all the veggies that were left in the lunchroom — on the trays, on the table and, yes, even on the floor.

"We collected all that up — yum, yum — and weighed it," said Mann.

They found that on the control day, 6.3 percent (42 of 666 kids) took green beans compared to 14.8 percent (96 of 647 kids) on the intervention day. The photos made carrots an even bigger culinary hit. Some 11.6 percent (77 of 666 kids) put them on their trays on the control day compared to 36.8 percent (238 of 647 kids) on the intervention day.

Now, getting the kids to take the beans and carrots was one thing. Getting them to eat the veggies was another. The kids ate about the same amount of beans (an average of 19 grams per child) on both days of the experiment. And they ate slightly less carrots on the intervention day (an average of 27 grams per child, which compared to 31 grams per child on the control day).

"It was just the teensiest bit less per student, but it was more students," said Mann. "We're still happy, especially because three times as many students ate those 27 grams."

Barriers to implementation
Deb LaBounty, nutrition services supervisor at the Richfield Public Schools was happy, too. She thought the photo idea would work from the moment the U of M researchers contacted her about testing the tactic in one of her schools.  

"Kids are always looking for examples," LaBounty said in an interview Tuesday.

LaBounty also understands how small changes can alter eating behavior. Her school district was able to get kids to eat more applesauce by simply increasing the serving size from half a cup to a cup, she said. "Even adjusting the lighting to make the food look better, like they do in restaurants," can encourage kids to eat more healthful foods, she added.

But LaBounty is not yet sure how she'll be able to translate the current study's findings into practical action. She said she talked to a vendor who supplies kitchen trays and "he just didn't think they could get [the photos] to work on plastic trays," she said.

She's currently exploring the option of using recyclable cardboard trays, which would work with photos.

"It's just figuring out the logistics of making it happen," she said.

Mann and her coauthors, who come from U of M's departments of marketing, applied economics, and food science and nutrition as well as psychology, have been researching other tactics for getting school kids to eat more healthful foods. They'll be publishing the results of those studies later in the year, she said.

The JAMA study was funded in part with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The idea that people can be divided into two personality groups, introverts and extroverts, is not universally accepted, but it’s an interesting idea nevertheless — and, apparently, a popular one. One of The Atlantic magazine’s most-downloaded-and-talked-about essays in recent years is "Caring for Your Introvert," written in 2003 by writer (and self-proclaimed introvert) Jonathan Rauch.

I have to say, as someone who leans toward introversion, I found that article both reassuring and amusing (although I’m not sure how scientific). Here’s Rauch’s description of the difference between introverts and extroverts:

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay — in small doses."

Second-class citizens?
And now there's a new book on the topic, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking" by attorney-turned-writer Susan Cain. Like Rauch, Cain argues that our culture has an extroversion bias, which puts introverts at a distinct disadvantage. (Rauch used the word "oppressed.")

"Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts," Cain said in a recent interview in Scientific American's "Mind Matters" column. "Introverts are to extroverts what American women were to men in the 1950s — second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent."

Whoa. That seems like an unfortunate and hyperbolic analogy. For one thing (and how quickly we forget), women faced formal barriers to using their intellectual talent in the ‘50s — such as quotas on how many could be admitted to medical and law schools. I don't see schools placing quotas on the number of introverts they admit. In fact, if, as Cain claims, introverts are able to concentrate more easily than extroverts, then they may have an advantage when it comes to succeeding at education.

Cain interested me more in the interview when she talked about the discoveries of evolutionary biologists that there are "introverts" and "extroverts" throughout the animal kingdom.

"Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson speculates that the two types evolved to use very different survival strategies," she said. "Animal "introverts" stick to the sidelines and survive when predators come calling. Animal "extroverts" roam and explore, so they do better when food is scarce. The same is true (analogously speaking) of humans."

You can read the full interview on the Scientific American website. And if you aren't sure whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, you can take Cain's quiz here. (Caution: I have no idea how valid it is.)

In a provocative essay in Sunday’s New York Times, L. Alan Sroufe, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and an expert in child development, argues that recent parental concern about a shortage of Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs used to treat children with attention problems is misplaced.

Instead, he says, parents — and the rest of us — should be concerned about why we're so heavily invested in giving these drugs to our kids. 

For, as Sroufe points out, although there's been a 20-fold increase in the use of stimulant drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) during the past three decades, there's no good evidence that these drugs offer long-term help to children.

"Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams," he writes. "But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth. Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs."

Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall become less effective over time because children (like adults) build up a tolerance to them — a factor that, ironically, causes parents to strengthen their belief in the drugs' usefulness, says Sroufe.

"Many parents who take their children off the drugs find that behavior worsens, which most likely confirms their belief that the drugs work," Sroufe explains. "But the behavior worsens because the children's bodies have become adapted to the drug. Adults may have similar reactions if they suddenly cut back on coffee, or stop smoking."

Environmental factors are overlooked
The prevailing belief about the cause of ADHD — that it's "a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin" — is itself built on sand, Sroufe argues. Large-scale epidemiological studies, including those he and his colleagues at the U of M's Institute of Child Development have conducted over the past 40 years, suggest that the child's environment is a much greater factor than any inborn chemical imbalance.

"Putting children on drugs does nothing to change the conditions that derail their development in the first place," he writes. "Yet those conditions are receiving scant attention. Policy makers are so convinced that children with attention deficits have an organic disease that they have all but called off the search for a comprehensive understanding of the condition. The National Institute of Mental Health finances research aimed largely at physiological and brain components of [ADHD]. While there is some research on other treatment approaches, very little is studied regarding the role of experience. Scientists, aware of this orientation, tend to submit only grants aimed at elucidating the biochemistry."

Sroufe believes that neurological studies are unwisely being used to "prop up the argument for drugs to treat the hypothesized 'inborn defect.'"

"While the technological sophistication of these studies may impress parents and nonprofessionals, they can be misleading," he writes. "Of course the brains of children with behavior problems will show anomalies on brain scans. It could not be otherwise. Behavior and the brain are intertwined. … [But] these studies tell us nothing about whether the observed anomalies were present at birth or whether they resulted from trauma, chronic stress or other early-childhood experiences. One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience."

If we don't change course
Our present way of thinking about ADHD, Sroufe concludes, poses several risks:

First, there will never be a single solution for all children with learning and behavior problems. While some smaller number may benefit from short-term drug treatment, large-scale, long-term treatment for millions of children is not the answer.

Second, the large-scale medication of children feeds into a societal view that all of life's problems can be solved with a pill and gives millions of children the impression that there is something inherently defective in them.

Finally, the illusion that children's behavior problems can be cured with drugs prevents us as a society from seeking the more complex solutions that will be necessary. Drugs get everyone — politicians, scientists, teachers and parents — off the hook. Everyone except the children, that is.

Men may be more vulnerable than women to developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as they age, according to new research from the Mayo Clinic.

MCI — defined as a decline in thinking and memory skills that's more pronounced than that typically associated with aging — is often considered a precursor to dementia and Alzheimer's disease, although that view remains controversial. 

The finding that more older men than older women develop MCI was "very surprising" because women are generally believed to have higher rates of dementia, said Dr. Rosebud Roberts, an epidemiologist at Mayo and the lead author of the study, in a phone interview Thursday.

The finding suggests, she added, that the progression from MCI to dementia may be different for each gender.

Confirmation of previous finding
If this study's results seem like déjà vu to you, it's because Mayo researchers reported in 2010 that the prevalence of MCI was higher in men than in women. But that finding reflected only a snapshot of what was happening in a population at a single moment. The current study followed healthy people for several years and observed how many developed MCI.

"This is a more robust type of study, a more definitive study," said Roberts.

For the study, Roberts and her colleagues followed 1,450 residents of Minnesota's Olmstead County. The participants, aged 70 to 89 at the study's onset, were given neurological tests and evaluations every 15 months for an average of about three years. All were free of signs of cognitive decline at the start of the study. 

By the study's end, 296 had developed MCI — and the rate of those cases was significantly higher among men (72 per 1,000 people) than among women (57 per 1,000). 

The study found that individuals who were unmarried or who had not attended college were also more likely to develop MCI, but the more-men-then-women finding is the one that has researchers perplexed.  

As Dr. Kenneth Rockwood, a professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhouse University in Nova Scotia, notes in an editorial accompanying the Mayo study, "it is unclear how to square more men in the at-risk state not translating into more men with dementia."

After all, studies have generally not found men to have the higher risk of dementia. In Olmstead County, said Roberts, the dementia risk is the same for men and women, but other research, particularly from Europe, suggests the risk is higher in women.

"We are now trying to find out what happens when men and women develop MCI," Roberts said. "One of our hypotheses is that women could possibly progress faster to dementia once they develop MCI, whereas men might stay in the MCI phase for longer. We are currently studying this."

"If women progress faster," she added, "then even if men are staying at the same rate, we might find that there is no sex difference in dementia or we may find women may have a higher incidence of dementia. That's the next story that remains to be told."

A valid predictor?
Of course, the Mayo study is built on the assumption that MCI is a valid predictor of dementia. But not everybody accepts that idea, as I reported when the 2010 Mayo study was published.

"[MCI] is an example of labeling what is a continuum of brain aging that we all go through," Dr. Peter J. Whitehouse, a neurologist and founder of the Memory and Cognition Center at Case Western Reserve University and one of MCI's leading skeptics, told me at the time. (Whitehouse is in Europe this week and was unavailable for an interview.)

No one can say with any certainty, he added back then, which people with MCI will go on to develop dementia and which ones won't.

As Roberts herself acknowledged, only about 10 percent of people with MCI go on to develop full-blown dementia. That compares to about 1 percent of people without MCI, she said.

That means, of course, that 90 percent of people with MCI will never develop dementia.

There's also the problem of reversion. In the current Mayo study, for example, one-third of the people diagnosed with MCI (or 12 percent per year) were later diagnosed at least once during the study as not having the condition.

In his editorial, Rockwood speculates that the positive reversal of symptoms seen in the Mayo study may indicate that "cognitive aging represents not just relentless decline — the brain as innocent bystander — but the outcomes of a struggle between insults and repair mechanisms."

Or could the reversion simply indicate, as Whitehouse claims, that MCI is so ill-defined that it is meaningless as a quantifier of dementia risk?

A need for prevention
One thing that everybody involved in dementia research can agree on is the need for more prevention, which includes reducing the incidence of the usual suspects: obesity, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

"If we could reduce the burden of these diseases in the population, we hope we can reduce the risk of MCI and dementia," said Roberts.

The Mayo Clinic study appears in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Neurology.

It was an odd place to find it, but while reading the New York Times chess column last weekend I stumbled across a report on an interesting recent study that wades into the murky and highly charged waters of gender and math achievement.

In the column, Dylan Loeb McClain suggested that because the disciplines of math and chess share many similarities, the findings from this new study may help explain why so few women (22) are currently found among the world’s top 1,000 chess players.

That explanation, if the study’s findings are correct, appears to have more to do with cultural factors than with any innate biological differences.

A cross-cultural analysis
Published in the January issue of the journal Notices of the American Mathematical Society, the study was conducted by a husband-wife team of University of Wisconsin professors, Janet Mertz (oncology) and Jonathan Kane (mathematical and computer sciences). Using datasets of the results of internationally standardized math exams, the two set out to test some of the popular theories about why boys tend to outperform girls in math tests.

“They examined student assessment scores from 86 countries,” writes McClain, “and found that although boys outperformed girls in some countries, girls outperformed boys in others. That clearly suggested that the differences were the result of cultural factors. Mertz and Kane concluded that math performance for boys and girls improves when there is greater gender equality.”

In the study, Mertz and Kane debunk two well-known hypotheses about the supposed gender gap in math achievement. One is the “greater male variability” theory infamously used in a 2005 speech by Larry Summers, who was then president of Harvard University, to explain the dearth of tenured math professors at his and other Ivy League colleges. (That speech ended up costing him his job there.)

According to this long-held hypothesis (Mertz and Kane trace it back to 1894), more boys than girls break from the mean at both the high and the low end of the mathematical-achievement spectrum. Thus, more boys than girls become math’s super-performers.

Mertz and Kane found, however, that boys do not show greater variation in their math scores in all countries. In fact, in some places, like Tunisia, girls showed more variation than boys. If greater variation in math abilities were biologically innate, then it would have shown up everywhere.

Another popular hypothesis about gender and math achievement, one whose best-known advocate is probably economist Steve Levitt of “Freakonomics” fame, points to coeducational schools as the cause of the math gender gap. Levitt notes, for example, that in Muslim countries — where most boys and girls attend separate schools — there is no gender gap in math, despite the low status of women.

But Kane and Mertz found that girls do not score well in all Middle Eastern countries dominated by single-sex schools.

A matter of equity
We don’t need single-sex classrooms to boost the math scores of girls, Kane and Mertz conclude in their study. Instead, we need more and better-trained (math-certified) math teachers in middle and high schools. And we need programs that decrease child poverty — and increase gender equity.

For they found that in countries where there was gender equity in terms of income, education, health and political participation, the variation in math scores were similar for both genders.

In fact, in countries where gender equity was high — where women were well-educated and earned good incomes — both girls and boys did better at math.

As Mertz and Kane point out at the end of their study, “[W]ell-educated women who earn a good income are much better positioned than are poorly educated women who earn little or no money to ensure that the educational needs of their children of either gender with regard to learning mathematics are well met.”

They also offer this warning: "Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology."

You can download their study in full here.

The New York Times ran an interesting article Tuesday that summarizes what scientists are learning about the small amounts of “brown fat” that scientists have recently recognized exist in the adult human body.

As Times reporter Gina Kolata points out, the heat-generating brown fat “burns calories like a furnace.” Until a few years ago, researchers believed this type of adipose tissue was found only in rodents and human infants, both of which are unable to shiver and, thus, need the brown fat to keep warm.

But, then, the stuff was discovered in human adults, albeit in small amounts. One form was found in small deposits under the collarbone and in the neck, spine and upper back, while a second form was found co-mingling with white fat elsewhere on the body.

Studies showed that the brown fat, at least that in the upper body, was absorbing glucose, but did that mean it was actually burning calories? A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests the answer may be “yes.”

The cold details
In the study, a team of Canadian researchers exposed six healthy men (23 to 42 years old) to cold temperatures, but not to the point of shivering. (Shivering itself burns calories.) Using a technique that involved a radioactive chemical and a special type of scanning device, the researchers watched what the brown fat did as the men’s bodies chilled.

The study found that the men’s metabolic rates — the amount of calories they burned — increased by about 80 percent. The brown fat burned, on average, about 250 extra calories during a three-hour period. Furthermore, the more brown fat a man had, the longer it took for him to begin to shiver.

Intriguing? Yes. Definitive? No. The study was very small and had no controls. And, as ABC reporter Dan Childs points out, the study measured the brown fat’s metabolic activity only indirectly.

“So if you’re looking for proof of the existence of brown fat in humans, you might need to wait a little longer,” he writes.

“The ultimate question is, ‘how big a factor is this when it comes to weight?’ ” Dr. David Katz, founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Conn., told Childs. “As best I can tell, we can’t answer that questions yet; we’re looking at studies that are very small.”

Other research — but only involving mice — has found that exercise appears to convert white fat into brown fat, which then burns extra calories. If something similar happens in humans (and that’s a big “if” at this point), it may explain, one researcher told Kolata, “why calories burned during exercise exceed the number actually used to do the work of exercising.”

A magic weight-loss pill?
All these findings have naturally ignited the interest of pharmaceutical companies, who, of course, wonder if a drug might be devised that could stimulate the human body to produce more brown fat and thus burn more calories.

But such applications are a long, long way off — and may, in the end, prove neither safe nor effective.

“The history of better weight management through pharmacology is obviously littered with unintended consequences,” Katz told Childs. “As we explore esoteric means of weight loss, we run into one debacle after another.”

One of the authors of Tuesday’s study is slightly less pessimistic. “There is still a lot of research to do before this strategy can be exploited clinically and safely,” Dr. André Carpentier told the Times’ Kolata.

In the meantime, we’d all do well to follow Childs’ advice: “Exercise, control your calories, and avoid the other kind of brown fat … the kind that’s in that extra slice of chocolate cake.”