Tag Archives: longevity

maternal mortality

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I’ve talked recently about the happy statistics on child mortality globally – not only did it drop dramatically worldwide in the 20th century, but the progress has continued to be dramatic this century. Now, NPR has another happy statistic – moms are doing well too.

Since 1995 the rate of women worldwide who die in childbirth has dropped by more than 40 percent.

When you look deeper into that statistic, there’s even more reason to celebrate. Sometimes a rosy global health statistic can overstate the extent of change. A few large countries that improve their situation pull up the average, masking the fact that everyone else has stagnated or worse. But the maternal mortality rate has plunged by 40 percent or more in at least 76 countries — that’s close to half of the world’s nations…

Improving maternal health worldwide will require a heavy focus on sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 62 percent of annual deaths. Southern Asia is the other hotspot — a fourth of maternal deaths occur there.

human head transplants

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Human head transplants may be possible this century, neuroscientist says

Sometimes a headline says it all. The article says this technology is not far off, although it would be expensive.

The separation of head and body would have to occur on two humans simultaneously, Canavero writes… The procedure, Canavero writes, would have to take place within an hour… He adds that the surgery would take a team of 100 surgeons roughly 36 hours to complete, at an estimated cost of £8.5-million ($128-million).[*]

“The problem” of this surgery, Canavero told ABCNews.com, “is not really technical but is completely ethical.”

It’s hard to imagine any situation where this would be ethical. To have a donor, someone would have to die in a way that leaves their otherwise healthy body completely intact, except for the head. Grafting heads onto executed prisoners might solve the ethical problem for some, but not for me. All I can think of is if we could grow human bodies with no brain at all, or all but the most primitive part of the nervous system that keeps basic organs functioning. Even that sounds ethically dubious. But you figure, if there is a black market for individual organs now, some dying rich person somewhere will try this eventually whether it is ethical or not. I wonder, if we somehow solved all non-brain-related diseases like heart disease and cancer, and we perfected the technology of cloning brainless bodies in some ethical way, how long could we live? How long could the brain actually last, considering that we hear constantly that we start losing brain function as early as our 30s?

I can’t help thinking of the awful 1991 movie Body Parts, in which this sort of thing doesn’t turn out well, and that was just an arm!

* yes if the operation cost 8.5 million British pounds, it should be 12.8 million US dollars above, not 128 million. Either that, or they meant 85 million pounds. It doesn’t really change the point of the article.

health care cost-effectiveness

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Here is an interesting blog post on the “forbidden topic” of health care cost-effectiveness. It’s hard because at the personal, human level life and health are of course priceless. But at the scale of a country or civilization with limited resources, there are choices to make, and better information should allow better choices.

Research in this area can be difficult to perform. One of the reasons is that it’s not always easy to measure health outcomes. Some things, like death, can be relatively easy to define, but how do you quantify having diabetes,asthma or a seizure disorder?

A robust methodology exists for doing so, based upon the expected utility theory of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Asking people to consider what risks they will take to avoid certain health states, a technique known as the “standard gamble,” can yield what we call a utility value. Another method, which asks people to think about the trade-off between a shorter life in perfect health and a longer life in an unhealthy state (this is a “time-trade-off”) can also be used to determine a utility value.

When you take a utility value and multiply it by a number of years, you can calculate “quality-adjusted life years,” or QALYs. So if interventions improve quality or add years of life (or both), the number of QALYs goes up. Taking the cost of a therapy and dividing it by the number of QALYs gained results in a measurement of cost effectiveness.

nanotech “pill”

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According to Wired, Google X is working on nanotechnology that can swim around in your blood and tell you what it finds:

“Because the core of these particles is magnetic, you can call them somewhere,” Conrad said, indicating that you could use a wearable device to gather them in the superficial veins on the inside of your wrist. “These little particles go out and mingle with the people, we call them back to one place, and we ask them: ‘Hey, what did you see? Did you find cancer? Did you see something that looks like a fragile plaque for a heart attack? Did you see too much sodium?”

freezing eggs

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It’s becoming more common to freeze human eggs. The implications are interesting. A woman can freeze eggs when she is young for later use, obviously. What if a young woman learns that she is not able to have children? Could she choose to be implanted with eggs her sister has frozen? Sure, that seems okay. What about eggs her mother chose to freeze decades earlier? The baby could be someone’s daughter and granddaughter at the same time. But still just a baby. I imagine these things will all happen within families, if they haven’t already. What about buying and selling eggs though? What about a couple paying a stranger to have their genetic child because they are just too busy or don’t want to be bothered with a pregnancy. That’s slightly more troubling, but I’m sure that too will happen if it hasn’t already.