Sound Medicine -- February 23, 2002

Barbara Lewis and Dr. David Crabb talk to physicians and researchers about:

Music & the brain

Pheromones

The ABC's of hepatitis

Music & the brain

Ever get chills down your spine listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture? Do your eyes well up to the theme song of "Love Story?" Now there may be science behind the sentiments. Researchers are finding evidence of specific reactions in the brain to music -- that are the same areas stimulated by good food and sex.

Dr. Robert Zatorre, a neuropsychologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, and Dr. Anne Blood of Massachusetts General Hospital presented a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences in September of last year, showing off their use of Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans, to find which regions of the brain experience increased activity when the subjects listened to music they found "chillingly beautiful."

Resources

Visit Dr. Zatorre's Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in Montreal, Quebec, to read more about his study.

An interesting read is "Neurological Aspects of Music Processing" by Professor Sue Hallam of the Institute of Education, London. Her full study appears on the Power of Music study Web site. The "directory" section is an excellent bibliography on this topic.

University of California Irvine supports MuSICA -- the Music and Science Information Computer Archive -- a bibliographic research database of information on music as relates to behavior, the brain, and related subjects.

Pheromones

In the 1992 movie "Scent of a Woman," Al Pacino plays a blind man following his nose towards beautiful women. Today researchers are delving into the science behind this Hollywood plot, investigating the role our sense of smell plays in choosing a mate and even adjusting our biological cycles. The microscopic cupids behind it all are called pheromones and are excreted by mammals via their sweat glands.

Dr. Martha McClintock is director of the Institute for Mind and Biology and professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. She's performed studies on women's menstrual cycles and how they adjust to an environment and most recently on the phenomenon of inherited preference of mates based on smell.

Resources

Read more about Dr. McClintock's research at her lab based in the Institute of Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago.

 

ABC's of hepatitis

Navigating medical language can be confusing, especially when faced with acronyms, abbreviations and similarly named diseases. Today we talk about hepatitis, a virus that affects the liver and appears in a whole alphabet of varieties, from A to E, each slightly different, and no one cure or vaccine covers them all. Hepatitis A, B, and C are the most common varieties in the United States, with B and C the most dangerous, often leading to liver cancer or cirrhosis.

Here to clarify the confusion surrounding this disease is Dr. Paul Kwo, assistant professor of clinical medicine at IUSM. Dr. Kwo specializes in gastroenterology and hepatology with a particular interest in liver transplantation and the treatment of viral hepatitis.

Resources

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provides comprehensive hepatitis information for patients and physicians.

The National Institutes of Health also provides excellent information on the treatment of hepatitis C, particularly for patients.

Hepatitis-Central is a homegrown Web site run by a woman living with Hepatitis C. This quirky but useful site is well-maintained and provides good information on all forms of hepatitis. It offers technical articles, an email mailing list, links to support groups, help for veterans, and drug treatment information.

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A. None. Medical teams dispense acetaminophen.
B. 10,000 tablets.
C. 70,000 tablets.

What's the answer?

The National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse (part of the National Institutes of Health) lists these groups at risk:

• People who had blood transfusions before June 1992;
• people who have frequent exposure to blood products, including patients with hemophilia, solid-organ transplants, chronic renal failure, or cancer requiring chemotherapy;
• health care workers who suffer needle-stick accidents;
• injection drug users, including those who used drugs briefly many years ago;
• infants born to HCV-infected mothers.
Other groups who appear to be at slightly increased risk for hepatitis C are:
• People with high-risk sexual behavior, multiple partners, and sexually transmitted diseases.
• People who use cocaine, particularly with intranasal administration, using shared equipment.

For twenty-five years the IU Burn Center at Wishard has saved thousands of lives and helped burn victims through the painful recovery process. It is the only regional adult burn center in southern and central Indiana. The current facilities are outdated and inadequate to meet the growing demand for services.