https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16102328
There's an alternative solution for the stomach lining issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbasalate_calcium
Which reminds me, this testicle study seems to fail to distinguish Dex(tro)ibuprofen from Levoibuprofen. That seems rather disappointing, as we've known about the difference between the two for quite a while.
This continued ignorance of medical science when it comes to (stereo)isomers never ceases to amaze me. I mean... You'd think they'd have learned their lessons by now.
(Then again, we also still fail to employ multi-compartment models of pharmacology in the vast majority of studies. And... ugh. I'll avoid ranting on how shitty medical science seems to me and just leave it at this.)
[btw., if you wonder why you can't get your hands on Dexibuprofen in the US:
"Open committee discussion. The committees will discuss new drug application (NDA) 20–373, S+ Ibuprofen (dexibuprofen, Sterling Winthrop/ Bayer) 200-milligram caplet, indicated for the temporary relief of minor aches and pains associated with the common cold, headache, toothache, muscular aches, back ache, menstrual cramps, minor pain of arthritis, and for the temporary reduction of fever for OTC status." From the Federal Register, from 1996. It never got approved, and one can't even find the application on the FDA page, thus one can't find out more about why it never made it to market!]
Perhaps the data is the result of the experiments that have been paid for by a third party, fine, but please mention that! People might be willing to pay for it, for example, me!
What's wrong with "Here's the raw data, here's how we measured it, Here's how we've shown the data, and look you can see for yourself that we are right! oh and the data costs $$$ much." ?
I understand experiment reproducibility is not incentivised in academia, but then why make it hard for an external party to reproduce it/study it?
Do we have to go through the usual "Contact the academic, maybe they answer, and maybe you'll get the same (version of) data that they used in that experiment, maybe you'll have to go through Elsevier, oh and you must have .edu/.ac.uk address to be taken seriously through all those requests."
What a chore. Just adds to the hate towards 'experts' and their opinions.
The journal should mandate data access, then it will get done. This is crucial for human experiments, if only because the authors can lose the data and it will be gone forever.
I'm not sure who is responsible for making a better way. Probably no one. Change is often a matter of someone taking initiative and there are a few parties that could, if they consider it important.
IMO, the "replication crisis" should be having a more far-reaching effect on the institution of science. In some fields, the crisis means that the efforts of an entire generation were largely wasted. In those same fields, it is almost business as usual, with new unreplicable experiments being published. Knowledge was not actually being built. In some fields, the institutional scientific method (journals, peer review..) was not really practicing the scientific method, not practicing science.
I don't know what the solution is, but whatever it is I cannot imagine that it does not involve working scientists making choices. What is tenure for, if not allowing senior researchers the independance to do this.
https://www.crossref.org/blog/how-do-you-deposit-data-citati...
https://www.crossref.org/blog/the-research-nexus---better-re...
(I work for Crossref)
Well, what with the current replication crisis, maybe some researchers feel it's safer not to make it too easy... /s
(Not impugning the integrity of the authors in question here, of course, just musing on this widespread phenomenon in general...)
Note: I remember taurine had protective effect on testicular function in men treated in 19-nor derivatives. Maybe worth checking out if it does so also for ibuprofen :)
The problem with energy drinks is that they're alike to a bottle of all things that may be fuel, combined. I've seen recently a tin of Monster that had 0.5g of caffeine. That's insane. And caffeine pills are even more insane. You can drop 1g of caffeine like it's M&Ms.
At this rate we're going to have coke and amphetamine in those next year. And, you know, you can go on a limb and say that some of the modified amphetamines or phenidatess or what not maybe should be on the market. In Canada they have effedrine in OTC supplements and people don't die from overdose.
But the thing is, we either demonise or just assume something is safe. How many people knows that acetaminophen (APAP, paracetamol) is liver toxic? And how many people knows that NAC is the antidote (N-acetylo-cysteine, popular OTC expectorant)?
Ibuprofen being a cause of lower sperm counts could be the missing piece of the puzzle. It's also a big deal because Tylenol has been pushed aside for the last 20 years as being more unsafe for children than Ibuprofen.
http://wgntv.com/2018/01/08/ibuprofen-linked-to-male-inferti...
That could be true, but of course, there's some self-interest in that statement. Bringing long-term harm to your study participants is not exactly a good move for a medical researcher.
> One group of subjects received ibuprofen, 2 × 600 mg/d, (Ibumetin; Nycomed Denmark Aps) for a period of 6 wk
Yeah, that's a lot of Ibuprofen for a long time
But it's not a dose people will commonly take in their "day to day" activities and ideally not something that is done without medical supervision
6 weeks is a long time to be popping 1200mg/d!
From an article at https://www.inquisitr.com/4757173/the-human-race-could-be-in... dated just a few days ago
To me it's emblematic of the Safety State: a (relative) few die from mattress fires, so now everybody is gassed with possible or probable toxins in hyper-response.
PSA: Careful of those new mattresses…
My point here is that it's possible that there are many circumstances accumulating but that doesn't discredit efforts for finding the biggest contributors.
You can easily smuggle a couple of razors between the paper sheets.
What are your thoughts on synthetic hormones, e.g. used in farming or in contraception? Those enter the water supply and are not broken down.
I've felt compelled to say to more than one person: probably shouldn't take that much ...
Of course, there are folks who take over-the-counter meds as though it is safe at any dose and frequency. That might warrant a nudge toward reading the label about safe dosage, or a mention of a recent study on the subject.
This makes it different to Paracetamol, where you only have to double or triple the standard dose to cause temporary liver damage, and increasing it only slightly further puts you in danger of death.
A lot of people who exercise multiple times a week take "Vitamin I" every day. So do people who have frequent headaches, back or joint pain, etc. I probably came close to these levels during a bout of plantar fasciitis, though I've since switched to naproxen in such cases. It might not be common in your immediate circle, but in the broader world it's not rare enough to raise any eyebrows.
A large drop in global fertility rates is attributable to lower infant mortality, better access to healthcare, contraception, and education about using it. Also, as levels of education in general rise, people tend to have fewer children.
Maybe decreased desire even leads to count and motility decreases?
I specifically work on the Loom Viewer[1], a SPA that we're trying to design in such a way that it will be really easy and cheap for research groups to host and share these loom files themselves. This would make easy for other groups to ask simple questions about each others data, and in the worst case the raw loom file is always available for download.
We're already hosting some of our own published datasets with this viewer, you can check it out here[3].
To lower expectations a bit: the viewer is not trying to be comparable to the big atlases like [4] or [5] (I mean, it's being developed by one dude - me - so by comparison it's a no-budget OSS project). It's much simpler and basic - the idea is that if you use the Loom file format in your pipeline in a sensible manner, the viewer will more or less know what to do with the data.
[0] https://github.com/linnarsson-lab/loompy
[2] https://github.com/linnarsson-lab/loom-viewer
[3] http://loom.linnarssonlab.org/
It's one of the things that I'm most worried about: I've been working pretty isolated for the last year and a half, and lack a background in biology or bioinformatics, and did not even have webdev experience when I took on this project (plenty of embarrassing proof of that in the code). Kudos to Sten Linnarsson, the PI of the group and my boss, for taking a gamble and hiring me anyway.
> I really liked the ease with which one's workflow can integrate into the data analysis.
Just to make this clear: the file format is a "dumb" data storage, and the viewer a "dumb" plotter of that data. To do more in-depth analysis requires loading the file in python, R, or anything else that might support the files in the future. The idea is to then store the results of this as attributes in the file. For example, the tSNE plot here[0] is just pre-calculated x/y data stored as two attributes.
Currently there is an issue with fully integrating the viewer into such a work-flow: for performance reasons, it caches accessed data from the file. This cache needs to be refreshed manually.
Sten recently added library support for keeping track of file modifications[1]. That enables me to make the viewer automatically update stale cache whenever a file is modified, making it even easier to integrate. Currently working on that.
There's still a ton of polishing and bug-fixing to do. Feedback, suggestions and help are always welcome!
[0] http://loom.linnarssonlab.org/dataset/cells/Dentate%20gyrus/...
The viewer is a specialised application: it has a server and client. The server extracts (meta)data requested by the client from a loom file, and serves it as JSON. The client then uses this metadata to generate plots. The off-line viewer is actually just running that server locally and opening it on localhost:8003.
That makes it better for sharing raw data on-line: most of the time, people do not need the full dataset of 27k+ genes, they're only interested in a dozen or so. This makes it easy to access that.
Hosting your own viewer is quite simple:
# this also installs the loom CLI
pip install loom-viewer
# start the server
loom --dataset-path [DATASET_PATH] --server --port [PORT_NUMBER]
We don't use a database; instead the server looks for loom files in a dataset folder like this:
[DATASET_PATH]\[PROJECT_FOLDER]\[LOOM FILE]
This probably not web-scale or really safe or anything, but we're talking small labs sharing data with other labs - the risks are different. These viewers will be accessed by a few biologists. Using files in a folder structure keeps it simple enough to set up for the less tech-savvy.
In theory, a third work-flow is also possible: having Jupyter open in one tab and manipulating the loom file from there, and the viewer in another.
There are three blocking issues for that, however:
- the stale cache problem I mentioned in the other comment,
- single writer/multiple reader support,
- the server needs to be an isolated sub-process due to gevent monkeypatching messing with Jupyter
Main issue here is dev-team of one person so... this might take some time.
Construction workers, manual laborers, etc.
A lot of people I know that powerlift do 4 x 800mg for 5 days or so. I think the thinking is to give the injury a "blast" of ibuprofen to bring the swelling down fast, rather than a lower dose for a longer period.