Celiac disease linked to common chemical pollutants:
According to NYU Grossman School of Medicine researchers who led the study, people with the immune disorder have severe gut reactions, including diarrhea and bloating, to foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. The only treatment is a gluten-free diet, with no bread, pasta, or cake, says lead investigator and doctoral student Abigail Gaylord, MPH.
Reporting in the journal Environmental Research online May 12, the NYU Langone team found that children and young adults with high blood levels of pesticides -- and with high levels of pesticide-related chemicals called dichlorodiphenyldichlorethylenes (DDEs) -- were twice as likely to be newly diagnosed with celiac disease as those without high levels.
The study also found that gender differences existed for celiac disease related to toxic exposures. For females, who make up the majority of celiac cases, higher-than-normal pesticide exposure meant they were at least eight times more likely to become gluten intolerant. Young females with elevated levels of nonstick chemicals, known as perflouoroalkyls, or PFAs, including products like Teflon, were five to nine times more likely to have celiac disease.
Young males, on the other hand, were twice as likely to be diagnosed with the disease if they had elevated blood levels of fire-retardant chemicals, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs.
Abigail Gaylord, Leonardo Trasande, Kurunthachalam Kannan, Kristen M. Thomas, Sunmi Lee, Mengling Liu, Jeremiah Levine. Persistent organic pollutant exposure and celiac disease: A pilot study. Environmental Research, 2020; 109439 DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.109439
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @05:04PM (4 children)
need I say more?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kitsune008 on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:05PM
No, that's enough to illustrate your ignorance and prejudice.
You can shamble back under your bridge now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:09PM (2 children)
I think you've got this one upside down.
We need to inject men with estrogen to protect them from COVID-19, and we need to inject women with testosterone to protect them from pesticides.
I believe that solution is superior in every way to all the alternatives like single-payer healthcare and reducing the use of pesticides or eliminating DDEs. Those will make the invisible hand angry with us. However, I'm certain that the invisible hand will be pleased with my modest proposal.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:51PM (1 child)
The invisible hand expects to have its palm greased. Your sacred duty to prove your devotion when the right (pun intended) party is in power.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:29AM
The invisible hand would be selling metric shit tons of hormone pills, the hand is happy.
(Score: 1) by frrubi on Tuesday May 19 2020, @05:53PM (7 children)
I been sayin this crap for years, and finally vindicated. Whew, too bad this doesn't count for anything. :/
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:35PM (2 children)
Yes, I've long suspected that the role of pollutants on public health has been neglected if not actively covered up. Blaming everything on the misfortune of being born with the "wrong" genes has been way overused. Gets the polluters and junk food producers off the hook very nicely. The history of Bisphenol A is a case study of industry connivance to keep certain questions from being asked or explored. "Doubt is our product."
Maybe we should read a little more into these findings? DDT has been banned for almost 50 years, Been at least a decade since Teflon use was cut way down. States began banning PDBEs 12 years ago. The findings, you see, cover chemicals that have already been on the outs for at least a decade. What might they have found if they had checked other chemicals still in heavy use? Chemicals such as Bisphenol S, for instance?
I should very much like cures for food allergies. One thing I have heard is that diesel fumes sensitize and prime people to become allergic. Shouldn't eat peanuts while at a truck stop, maybe?
The cracks in this dam on information have grown too big. This study is a little late to the party. But still helpful. In 2014 in the US, allowable amounts of lead in plumbing brass was lowered from 8% to 0.25%. Good, but lead in plumbing should have been discontinued a century ago, or never begun in the first place. The Romans eventually figured out that lead was unhealthy, near 2000 years ago. And, the 2014 regulation has a huge loophole. It applies only to "drinking water" taps, and bathtub and outdoor taps don't count as "drinking" water. Mercury thermometers are long gone. Lots of heavy metals are no longer used in ways that obviously get them inside bodies.
Who recalls that for many years, there were no red m&m's? The red dye they had been using was found to cause cancer. The weird part about that was that there were surely other food coloring dyes that could produce red. It just seemed more an industry hissy fit, an attempt to stir sympathy for them and against evil government regulations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:59PM
Max von Sydow, as the Tracker, in "What Dreams May Come"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:30AM
Dead doctors don't lie - some doctor who worked with ADD kids for years. He harped on food colorings and preservatives, and especially on red food colorings as a primary cause of ADD and ADDHD. I'm of the opinion that food contaminants, such as those food colorings, may cause ADD, but once you have it, it's too late to remove the stuff.
Joel Wallach is the name - a site dedicated to his work - http://kingmaker.net/DeadDoctorstxt.html [kingmaker.net]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:59PM (3 children)
The canaries have been dying to warn us of the dangers of Teflon, but nobody listens.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:01AM
To be fair, the canaries have also been warning us about wifi and 5G towers so...
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:44PM (1 child)
People say a lot of bad things about Teflon, but none of it sticks.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:48PM
Canaries with Teflon problems end up sleeping with the fishes... that's why nobody hears them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:53PM (2 children)
How could chemical pollutants, of any kind, be harmful to humans? Or any other organisms.
Such wrongthink could lead to even worse ideas like (gasp) Regulation which would be going way too far.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:30PM (1 child)
Nice, but you've made a tautology. Pollution is, by definition, harmful.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday May 21 2020, @02:07PM
Your definition is obviously from the Oldspeak dictionary comrade.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:05PM (2 children)
Is there anything you can't prove with a small sample size? Assuming at least two races, we have at least eight categories to further marginalize any statistical significance of this study. And of course, correlation doesn't imply causation. Let's read about the sample from the actual paper [sciencedirect.com]:
So first thing, this wasn't an unbiased sample. 88 (not 90) children/young adults came to this hospital for some reason which is ignored by the study. Second, "(OR = 13.0, 95% CI = 1.54, 110)" which is given without explanation means [ucla.edu]
Notice how huge those intervals are and how close the bottom is to 1. This is meat and drink for the anti-NHST (null hypothesis significance testing) guy. Where is he?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @09:57AM (1 child)
They went there because they thought they had digestive problems. That is not in itself a problem.
Sadly, this is what happens when you get studies like these and especially without access to the actual paper. But yes, 90 is not very many subjects. This does not mean there is no effect but you need to get more data. The unfortunate thing is that then people jump to conclusions.
This reminds me of a research paper from Taiwan by some anti-nuclear folks. You could actually look in the author's history and just find more of these useless papers. He had things like counting incidence of cancer in buildings that had Cobalt-60 source in the steel by accident. The total number of cancers were actually down by 2 standard deviations (something like 45 vs. 64 expected) and the only cancer that was slightly increased was leukemia. I think it was 2 or 3 standard deviations above background incidence. But what was his conclusions? That radiation causes (I make up numbers here, but you'll see uselessness of comparisons here) eye cancers (3 vs. 0.2 expected) or ovarian cancer (4 vs. 1.2 expected)... and of course you can't do that. Might as well say that radiation prevents penile cancer because there was none detected but 0.1 was expected :)
Anyway, most researchers are rather bad at this. They have pressure to have results which means they should have paper published, even if they don't have enough data to draw conclusions some conclusion must be drawn. So basically, this is probably not a bad paper but you probably can't draw conclusions from it like in the article. You need MORE data and research like this should be more prioritized.
PS. khallow is not a troll here but he's getting trolled by moderators that maybe have expectations bias about results of science.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @10:38PM
Not a troll, but doesn't know enough to launch the criticisms he thinks he is. The most obvious example is "how close the bottom is to 1." On the scale that he is referencing, an OR of 1.54 is farther away from 1 than an OR of 110 is from 167. Another is exactly what you point out about this being a pilot study. They are designed differently than the kind of studies he is thinking about because they have a different purpose.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:53PM
Does a potion of zinc and hydroxychloroquine turn one's skin orange?
Asking for a friend...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:33AM
The chemical pollutant called "snowflake."