Coffee addicts...

New research appears to suggest that the pick-me-up that we get from a cup of coffee isn't real. This has been reported in lots of places including the BBC, Times and Daily Mail.

The research is presented by most as showing that coffee does nothing to wake you up, but that is not quite what the actual study found. The paper can be found here.

What is really interesting about the study is that they tested two groups of participants: a no or low consumption group and a medium to high consumption group. After being without coffee for 16 hours, they were then either given a shot of espresso or a shot without caffeine (a placebo).

They found totally different results for each group. For the medium to high consumption group, tiredness and headaches were reported after the placebo coffee and no change after the real coffee. What was really interesting was that after the real coffee, the alertness levels in the medium to high group were similar to the no/low group who had the placebo.

So - rather than suggesting that coffee does nothing, it seems that coffee very much does something for frequent coffee drinkers. It keeps you at "baseline" and you slip below this and suffer tiredness and headaches without it.

Maybe coffee doesn't really perk us up? Maybe it is more that with regular use, coffee is needed just to reach "normal" levels of alertness and attention.

This would fit well with anecdotal evidence that people really suffer when giving up coffee, but once the cold turkey is finished they have high levels of energy again without coffee assistance.

OK - now I fancy a coffee...

Funding mental health research...

Very scary statistics reported today about the funding of mental health research.

As the article points out: "Only 5% of medical research in the UK is into mental health, despite 15% of disability resulting from disease being due to mental illness."

Statistics in the media...

Generally there are two problems with the way that science is portrayed in the media. First, it is over simplified and this can lead to serious misinterpretation of the research done and the "real world" implications it has. Second, the presentation of the statistics often is wildly inaccurate and leads to scare stories.

Occasionally the BBC publishes fantastic articles about how to interpret statistics and science in the media. This is a great article about the recent scare story about the relationship between eating sausages and increased risk of heart disease.

Autism and migration...

A very interesting piece of research has suggested that the risk of a child developing autism if the mother has immigrated into the UK.

This was one of those studies that I initially was quite sceptical about - but toward the end of the report, they say the following...

"One theory is that the stress of migrating could act as a "trigger" for the disability, a factor discovered in similar studies looking at the causes of schizophrenia."

This is a really interesting idea, and it could explain the relationship that the researchers report. Going even further than they do - stress is associated with hormonal fluctuations, and there is research showing that there is a higher risk of autism if the child is exposed to higher levels of testosterone prenatally.

So, the news article reports the relationship between autism and migration as a relatively direct one. However, there may actually be four, or even more, stages...

Migration > Higer levels of stress > Changes in hormonal levels > Increased risk of autism.

A lovely example of the "correlation does not imply causation" mantra!!!

Lies...

Apparently men lie more than women.

It's probably best for me not to comment on that...

But can you study that???

This newly published research examined how people judge research that opposes their own views.

Interestingly they found that people are likely to entirely dismiss the research and claim that "the topic could not be studied scientifically"!!!

Nice - if I like it we can study it scientifically, if I don't then you just need to trust me...

TV junkies...

A study has apparently shown that young children who watch too much TV are likely to suffer from a whole load of negative consequences later in life.

Interesting, and I don't doubt the studies findings, but I do think this could be an interesting example of "correlation does not cause causation". Just because there is a relationship, it doesn't mean that toddlers watching lots of TV causes them to have higher BMI's, poorer performance at school, etc.

It could be that watching lots of television may also be one of the outcomes of some other causal factor. What might cause a child to watch lots of TV, be overweight and do poorly at school? Now that would be an interesting study...