The Vaccine vs Joint Pain (And More)

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Vaccine may put an end to chikungunya-related inflammatory joint pain!

Researchers (Dr. Nivethika Sivakumaran et al.) have developed experimental adjuvant-free biopolymer particles designed to prevent chikungunya infection and the months-or-years of joint pain that often follow it.

How the vaccine works: Dr. Sivakumaran and her team engineered E. coli to assemble synthetic particles displaying chikungunya surface antigens that closely mimic the virus without causing disease.

This is important, because chikungunya commonly causes severe joint and muscle pain, and up to 60% of patients develop chronic joint symptoms that can persist for months or years and resemble rheumatoid arthritis.

Next, she plans to move things into clinical development, starting with safety trials of course, before progressing to studies that test how well the vaccine prevents infection and long-term joint damage on a larger scale.

Read in full: Chikungunya vaccine update: Experimental adjuvant-free particles aim to prevent months of joint pain

Related: Why Rheumatoid Arthritis Often Defies Drugs (& What Else you Can Try)

Nestlé doing another recall, this time Danone is too

Commercial giants Nestlé and Danone have recalled infant formula across more than 60 countries since December, due to possible toxin contamination.

The toxin in question, cereulide, isn’t destroyed by cooking or preparation and can cause nausea, vomiting, and abdominal cramps if consumed.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said the issue is linked to arachidonic acid (ARA) being used in the manufacturing process. The FSA also says that investigations are ongoing, and that the manufacturers must explain what went wrong and show how they’ll prevent a repeat.

Read in full: More baby formula products recalled over toxin fears

Related: Breast Milk’s Benefits That Are (So Far) Not Replicable

Body composition changed by changing hormones

It turns out that if you change the hormones that are responsible for changing body composition, body composition changes!

When you put it like that, it may not seem like breaking news, and in a way it shouldn’t be, but a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine analyzed 52 studies, with 43 included in a meta-analysis covering 6,485 participants aged 14–41 years. In total this pooled sample included 2,943 transgender women, 2,309 transgender men, 5,68 cisgender women, and 6,65 cisgender men.

In this current age, the US has recently adopted the stance first imposed on the Olympics by Nazi Germany in 1936, that is to say, that trans women must not be allowed to compete.

So, where does the science stand on this? Head to head…

Transgender women vs cisgender women: no statistically significant differences were found in relative fat mass, relative lean mass, upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or aerobic capacity, and after 1–3 years of hormone therapy, transgender women generally showed increased fat mass and decreased lean mass and upper-body strength.

Could we have known this before? Well, maybe. Most Americans have seen pictures of the famous Nazi book burnings. Most don’t know what those books were; it was the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, containing most of the world’s scientific research so far assembled on what Dr. Magnus Hirschfield called “sexual intermediacy”, which covered a lot of matters of primary and secondary sexual characteristics, the influence of various factors on various outcomes, and also the sciences of diverse traits such as homosexuality, intersexuality, and transsexuality. But, to the Nazis, this research was all “Jewish sexual degeneracy”, so they burned it all.

A great loss for science, and here we are, nearly 100 years later!

Read in full: New meta-analysis challenges claims of athletic advantage for transgender women

Related: ROAR – by Dr. Stacy Sims ← an excellent book on female athleticism, hormones, body composition, hormone-modulated physical performance, and more

Enjoy!