Links for Tuesday, November 7, 2017: hacking the genome, ammonia in the NFL, and community health workers for hypertension

Body hacker Josiah Zayner wants us all to use CRISPR to modify our bodies

And give ourselves cancer. I think he forgot the cancer part. From author Rowan Jacobsen:

"Let’s be clear: don’t try this at home! Although hundreds of gene-therapy trials are under way, and many experts believe they will eventually transform almost every aspect of human health, few have been proven safe. When you start scrambling your DNA, very bad things can happen. You can get cancer. Your immune system can attack the unfamiliar DNA, as happened when an 18-year-old with a rare metabolic disorder died during a University of Pennsylvania gene-therapy trial in 1999."

You may recall a link I posted to this guy giving himself a DIY fecal transplant. I'll give him an A+ for marketing. You can't beat the name Gut Hack:

NFL players have decided (not recently, it seems) that inhaling ammonia is performance-enhancing

Instead of something sinister, though, what the widespread use of smelling salts really reveals is the increasingly bizarre culture created by the NFL's (win-at-all-costs pressure cooker. Extreme parity, the minuscule margin of error, the constant threat of injury and million-dollar stakes all push players to exploit any shortcut, no matter how weird, gross or pitiful. More than a century ago in major league baseball, players like Hall of Fame pitcher Pud Galvin thought consuming ground-up monkey testicles was the answer (seriously). A decade ago, football found deer antler spray. Now it's smelling salts.

Not coke, but smelling salts in a cup. I think I would actually prefer ground-up monkey testicles.

More evidence that community health workers improve the care of certain patient populations

(paywall, but the abstract is free)

The proportion of patients with controlled hypertension increased from 17.0% at baseline to 72.9% at 18 months in the intervention group and from 17.6% to 52.2% in the usual care group; the difference in the increase was 20.6% (95% CI, 15.4%-25.9%; P < .001).

Are triathlons dangerous?

First things first: I've never done a triathlon. I swim like a St. Bernard. But I've done a lot of endurance bike racing, and I've been at more than one event with a death, the most recent the 2017 Dirty Kanza. So I was interested that in the latest Annals of Internal Medicine, investigators looked into a sudden death database to identify 135 race-related deaths and cardiac arrests in American triathlons between 1985 and 2016. Interestingly, right at two-thirds of deaths and arrests happened in the swim part of races, which usually comes first, before the bike and run. The editorialists spend a lot of energy trying to link swimming to some special form of stress from cold water or other factors that might be extra-dangerous. But to me, the swimming link seems consistent with the finding that in autopsies, about half of subjects had cardiovascular abnormalities, most often old-fashioned atherosclerotic disease. Swimming caught most of these people simply because it was the first event. Had running or cycling come first, I suspect one of them might have been the death leader. I'm not convinced by their observation that most marathoners die toward the end of races; anyone who's seen the scrum at the beginning of a triathlon knows that it's inherently different than the often walking pace seen at the start of a marathon: 

From http://www.zwemza.com/?p=5515, triathletes tempting fate. 

85% of victims were male, but I'm not sure the significance of that number, since >60% of participants (at least in pro Ironman races) are male:

From https://www.outsideonline.com/1964906/fight-gender-equality-ironman

And if you look at total Ironman competitors, the distribution of sex comes much closer to the death/cardiac arrest statistics:

But sex aside, we're forced to see that cardiac arrest and death are not rare among triathletes. Between 2006 and 2016, their incidence was 1.74 per 100,000 participants in the study. The risk of death increased with increasing age, unsurprisingly. Don't let this dissuade you from being more active. The benefits of physical activity far, far outweigh the risks in almost everyone. If you're inactive now and thinking of becoming active, or if you're active now and thinking of doing really hard-core things like triathlon, consider taking the American College of Sports Medicine's new-ish algorithm to your doctor and talking it over before you hit it really hard:

We don't know how really weird stuff like performance enhancing drugs effects this. My suspicion is that it's not good. 

Linque dump March 29, 2017

Whaaa? Joakim Noah was suspended for using an androgen receptor modulator, and he don't care who knows it. The science of these is fascinating. LGD-4033 is one of several new-ish compounds designed to stimulate the anabolic effect (think muscles) of the androgen receptor without tickling the androgenic effects (think beards and penises). It will not surprise you to know that they are meant for treating muscle-wasting diseases and not NBA players with bad haircuts in career downturns. 

When CVS stopped selling cigarettes, it dropped the smoking rate by 1% in the states CVS operates in. “It shows that responsible behavior by a pharmacy has public health benefits for the whole population,” Stanton Glantz said...

Is it more dangerous to be a black pedestrian in the US than it is to be a white pedestrian? "...when the women were in the middle of the road, cars in the high-income area with the faster, wider road were seven times less likely to yield to the black pedestrian than the white pedestrian."

There are at least 79 rare genetic syndromes that have obesity as a feature. This finding underscores the likelihood that in the future, much diagnostic work will be done genomically and not clinically. Real-life paper here.