People who experience a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, are more likely to develop a subsequent sleep disorder, say researchers who monitored nearly 200,000 people in the Veterans Affairs health system for 14 years. Half had TBIs; none had previous sleep issues.

After adjusting for factors that affect sleep, like diabetes and tobacco use, the researchers found that the TBI group had a 40% greater risk of sleep disorders. Surprisingly, milder injuries like concussions were more strongly linked to insomnia, sleep apnea, sleep-related movement disorders and excessive daytime sleepiness than more serious injuries, which may be due to their diffuse nature and more widespread inflammation.

Body of Knowledge

There are so many nerve cells in the human brain (approximately 100 billion) that it would take almost 3,000 years to count them aloud.

Get Me That, Stat!

The overall national rate for suicide fell 2% from 2018 to 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That doesn't sound like much, but it's the first decline after 13 years of annual increases. More than 47,500 deaths were attributed to suicide in 2019, half involving guns.

Stories for the Waiting Room

Babies born to people evicted from their home during pregnancy are more likely to have a lower birth weight and be born earlier or prematurely than those whose parents were evicted at other times, according to newly published research.

Doc Talk

Alopecia totalis: complete loss of hair on the scalp, i.e. complete baldness. Total hair loss on the body is called alopecia universalis.

Mania of the Week

Catapedamania: obsession with jumping from high places (presumably with a parachute).

Never Say Diet

The Major League Eating speed-eating record for crawfish is 6.5 pounds in 10 minutes, held by Sonya Thomas. Warning: Most of these records are held by professional eaters, the rest by people who really should find something better to do.

Observation

"I walk around like everything's fine, but deep down, inside my shoe, my sock is sliding off." — Anonymous

Medical History

This week in 1959, a 25-year-old patient named David Carr, an apprentice printer, entered the Royal Manchester Infirmary in England with unusual symptoms, including purplish skin lesions, fatigue and weight loss. He died four and a half months later for reasons not understood at the time.

His preserved tissue samples were examined in 1990. In a letter to The Lancet journal, Gerald Corbitt, director of clinical virology at the hospital, suggested Carr could be the earliest known AIDS case. Later investigations, however, found that the detected HIV was a relatively modern strain and Carr's tissue samples had been contaminated.

The first known case of HIV in a human occurred in a man who died in the Congo, also in 1959. Preserved blood samples later confirmed his cause of death.

Ig Nobel Apprised

The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate achievements that make people laugh and then think, a look at real science that's hard to take seriously and even harder to ignore.

In 1998, the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine went to Patient Y and his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly and Peter Holt of the Royal Gwent Hospital in Wales, for their report: "A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years."

Med School

Q: When should the "recovery position" be used?

a) For someone who is unconscious but breathing

b) For someone healing from surgery

c) To slow one's heart rate after exercise

d) When sitting with an injured ankle

A: a) In first aid, the recovery position is for people who are unconscious but breathing and free from spinal injuries. By rolling the person onto his or her side, one ensures that saliva or vomit won't obstruct the airways.

Curtain Calls

Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) is regarded as one of chemistry's giants, a Swedish investigator who discovered oxygen (though not properly credited) as well as citric, uric, lactic and tartaric acids. Plus, he was the first to describe molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen and chlorine.

Scheele had the unwise habit of tasting and smelling all new substances he discovered, and he died of kidney disease, undoubtedly due to his cumulative exposure to multiple toxic compounds including arsenic, lead and mercury.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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