MEDICAL MATTERS: Writing a Monday column means facing some challenges during the year, such as what to write about that is suitably light for the scattering of bank holidays, writes Dr Muiris Houston
Having exhausted all my chocolate angles and unable to think of a medical theme that would encompass the Easter bunny, I hope the following hits the right note.
Most medical research is appropriately serious, but as the following snippets illustrate, even the most academic professor is tempted to pursue the occasional quirky topic. Such offbeat efforts find a ready home in an annual issue of the British Medical Journal set aside for the bizarre.
With the recent run of good weather, ice cream could be a popular treat today. The following may help you decide how to eat your favourite. Ice Cream Evoked Headaches (ICE-H) Study: A Randomised Trial Of Accelerated Versus Continuous Ice Cream Eating is the title of a Canadian academic's paper.
Ice-cream headaches are medically labelled "cold stimulus" headaches. Previous research suggests that about a third of us are prone to blinding but short headaches that affect one or both temples. Dr Janusz Kaczorowski of the department of family medicine at McMaster University in Canada enrolled 145 middle-school students for a study of ice-cream headaches.
He split the group in two; one received 100mls of ice cream each and was told to eat it in more than 30 seconds. The other was given the same amount but told to eat it in less than five seconds. More than a quarter of the accelerated-eating group reported ice-cream headache, compared with 13 per cent in the continuous-eating group. Sixty per cent of the headaches lasted for less than 10 seconds.
The doctor, who carried out all the proper statistical tests to validate the research, concluded: "These findings confirm that cold stimulation of the palate induced by gobbling up of ice cream more than doubles the likelihood of developing ice-cream headache among middle school students."
Can we expect health warnings on ice-cream wrappers after this ground-breaking research?
Staying with matters gastronomic, many of us indulge in a late cooked breakfast for a bank- holiday treat. And so to some research from a consultant gastroenterologist. According to Dr Neil Haslam, the town of Bury, in Lancashire, is the black-pudding capital of the world. Leaving aside the possibility of a challenge to this title from other European cities, he tells readers that black pudding is a regional delicacy consisting of congealed pig's blood, fat and rusk encased in a length of intestine.
Because of the pig's blood, Dr Haslam and his colleagues were concerned that black pudding might lead to false positive results when people's faeces were checked for blood, as they are in the Haemoccult test, which is routinely used in an effort to pick up early cancer of the bowel.
Colon cancer usually develops first as a polyp, or benign growth, in the bowel wall; if doctors look for the occasional leakage of blood from this growth, they can detect the cancer at an early and curable stage.
The Bury clinical trial involved only 10 patients; the authors do not say why more healthy volunteers could not be recruited in the black pudding capital of the world. Participants ate seven ounces of local black pudding, then offered stool samples for testing. None of the 10 volunteers tested positive in Haemoccult tests before they ate it. After tucking into the local delicacy, however, four tested positive.
Behind the quirkiness of this research is a serious message. If you eat black pudding regularly, you could find yourself having unnecessary tests for cancer. And anybody planning to screen people for the disease should find out whether they have eaten black pudding recently, to avoid generating inaccurate results.
Humour is sometimes undervalued, perhaps even more so in the stressful environment shared by doctors and patients. Quirky research has a place in helping to preserve humour in an increasingly politically correct world. Have a nice bank holiday, and enjoy the ice cream, black pudding or whatever other treat is in store for you today.
You can e-mail Dr Muiris Houston at mhouston@irish-times.ie. He regrets he cannot answer individual queries