Simply washing your hands can reduce the reduce respiratory illnesses, such as colds, in the general public by 21 percent, cut the number of people who get sick with diarrhea by 31 percent and lower diarrheal illness in people with weakened immune systems by 58 percent, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite these compelling facts, and many years of global awareness campaigns, hand-cleaning rates remain far below full compliance — particularly in low-income, developing world settings. But using video surveillance to observe hygiene practices can offers insights that may help improve design, monitoring and evaluation of hand-washing campaigns, according to a new Stanford study.

For the study, researchers installed video cameras at the washing stations outside latrines of four public schools in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. Teachers were informed in advance and parents and administrators granted their permission for the experiment. Their findings were highlighted in a Stanford News article published yesterday:

• Both video observation and in-person observation demonstrated longer hand cleaning times for hand washing with soap as compared to rubbing with sanitizer.
• Students at schools equipped with soap and water, instead of sanitizer, were 1.3 times more likely to wash their hands during simultaneous video surveillance and in-person observation when compared with periods of in-person observation alone.
• Overall, when students were alone at a hand-cleaning station, hand cleaning rates averaged 48 percent, compared to 71 percent when at least one other student was present.

Based on their findings, study authors recommended the following approaches for boosting hand washing:

• Placement of hand cleaning materials in public locations
• Scheduling specific times for bathroom breaks between classes
• Designating specific students to be hand hygiene “champions”
• Formation of student clubs to demonstrate and promote hand hygiene to classmates

Previously: Examining the effectiveness of hand sanitizers, Survey outlines barriers to handwashing in schools, Examining hand hygiene in the emergency department, Good advice from Washyourhandsington and Hey, health workers: Washing your hands is good for your patients
Photo by Amy Pickering

Gesamkunstwerk, my favorite German word and a term commonly associated with the operas of Richard Wagner, can be translated as a “total work of art” playing to many of the senses and synthesizing numerous art forms. The word came to mind as I read about a pilot study using theater as an environment for children with autism-spectrum disorders  to explore “communication, social interaction, and imagination skills – the ‘triad of impairments’ seen in autism,” a New Scientist piece notes, “engaging all the children’s senses at once.”

Twenty-two children ages 7-12 attended one weekly 45-minute session for 10 weeks involving improvisation exercises led by trained performers in enclosed make-believe environments such as a forest or outer space.

From the piece:

As well as looking at whether behaviours used to diagnose autism changed after the drama sessions, the researchers also assessed emotion recognition, imitation, IQ and theory of mind – the ability to infer what others are thinking and feeling. Subjective ratings were also gathered from parents and teachers and follow-up assessments were conducted up to a year later.

…

At the early assessments, all children showed some improvement. The most significant change was in the number of facial expressions recognised, a key communication skill. Nine children improved on this. Six children improved on their level of social interaction. The majority of these changes were also seen at the follow-up assessments.

The project’s lead psychologist, David Wilkinson, PhD, at the University of Kent, told New Scientist, ”It’s an opportunity for children to create their own narratives in an unconstrained, unfamiliar environment.” He continued, “They find this empowering, and we know from the psychology literature that individuals who are empowered enjoy increased attention skills and an improved sense of well-being.”

Previously: Making museums more inviting for autistic children and their families, Stanford study reveals why human voices are less rewarding for kids with autism, Director of Stanford Autism Center responds to your questions on research and treatment and A mother’s story on what she learned from her autistic son

So you want to be happy. Can you be more specific? A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that concrete, rather than abstract, goals for happiness tend to be more successful. Jennifer Aaker, PhD, Stanford social psychologist and marketing professor, and colleagues performed six field and laboratory experiments and found that participants who performed specific acts of kindness – such as recycling or making someone smile – reported greater happiness than participants whose prosocial goals were less precise – such as helping the environment or people more broadly.

From a Stanford News article:

The reason is that when you pursue concretely framed goals, your expectations of success are more likely to be met in reality. On the other hand, broad and abstract goals may bring about happiness’ dark side – unrealistic expectations.

Acting directly and specifically in service to others brings greater happiness to the giver, the study found. The piece continues:

For example, an experiment involving bone marrow transplants focused on the whether giving those who need bone marrow transplants “greater hope” – the abstract goal – or giving those who need bone marrow transplants a “better chance of finding a donor” – the concrete goal – made a giver more happy.

The answer: Helping someone find a donor resulted in more happiness for the giver. This, the researchers wrote, was driven by givers’ perceptions that their actual acts better met their expectations of accomplishing their goal of helping another person.

Previously: Study shows happiness and meaning in life may be different goals, Are you happy now? Stanford Roundtable spotlights the science of happiness and wellbeing and Stanford faculty and students launch social media campaign to expand bone marrow donor registry
Photo by Iryna Yeroshko

We’ve partnered with Inspire, a company that builds and manages online support communities for patients and caregivers, to launch a patient-focused series here on Scope. Once a month, patients affected by serious and often chronic diseases share their unique stories. Our latest comes from 15-year-old Morgan Gleason, who lives with the autoimmune disease juvenile dermatomyositis. 

Before June 18, 2010, the day I was diagnosed, I knew the medical system the way that most kids do. I went to the doctor for immunizations, physicals, sore throats and bones that might be broken. Then, I developed a rash on my joints. I started sleeping more than normal, was very weak in my muscles, and experienced frequent stomachaches and headaches.

At the age of 11, after a year of these symptoms, I was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease called juvenile dermatomyositis. I suddenly was in a whole new medical system. I had to learn to swallow pills, wait for hours in doctors offices, spend nights in the hospital, worry about what was happening, deal with some not-so-nice doctors and nurses, and endure a lot of pain. I also watched my parents get frustrated with figuring out medical bills and trying to understand all of the claim statements and appeal denials.

Now I take 21 pills a day, get two infusions a month by an IV, and give myself an injection once a week. I have more specialists than my grandparents, and I spend a lot of time as a patient.

This January, I was hospitalized for the second time in four months for meningitis due to a reaction from a treatment I received. After four days of little sleep and an excruciating headache, I made a video about my hospital experience and posted it online. To my surprise, the video got a lot of attention. Forbes, Time, the Huffington Post and other outlets wrote about it. I believe that the video was popular because my experience was a common one and struck a nerve with others.

I am appreciative of the care I have been given. I love the hospital where I get my treatment, and I think it’s a great hospital. The medical students, residents, attending physicians, and specialists are great doctors. The nurses are also really great. This is not an issue with the individual people or hospitals. The issue is much bigger, and it’s the way the system as a whole is designed.

My video had a few main points. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get any rest in the hospital. The system is designed around the schedules of the doctors and the desire to discharge patients by noon instead of around the circumstances and needs of the patient. Second, the doctors come in individually instead of coming together and addressing all the concerns at one time. Third, when patients are awoken from deep sleep, they’re not going to be as engaged as they would be when they are alert and comfortable. Finally, patients, and even children and teenagers, appreciate having the doctor talk with them instead of having the doctors talk over them or away from them in the hallway.

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Since the early 1990s, when Duke University neurologist Allen Roses, MD, first broke the news, it’s been known that a person carrying the gene variant known as ApoE4 is at elevated risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease. To this day ApoE4 is the strongest known single genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s, a progressive neurological syndrome that robs its victims of their memory and reasoning ability.

But only now is it looking certain that the increased Alzheimer’s risk ApoE4 confers is largely restricted to women. Men’s fates don’t seem to be altered nearly as much by the genetic bad penny that is ApoE4, according to a new Annals of Neurology study led by Mike Greicius, MD, medical director of the Stanford Center for Memory Disorders.

Accessing two huge publicly available national databases, Greicius and his colleagues were able to amass medical records for some 8,000 people and show that initially healthy ApoE4-positive women were twice as likely to contract Alzheimer’s as their ApoE4-negative counterparts, while ApoE4-positive men’s risk for the syndrome was barely higher than that for ApoE-negative men.

What the heck is ApoE4 for, anyway? In my release on the new study, I wrote:

The ApoE gene is a recipe for a protein important for shuttling fatty substances throughout the body. This is particularly important in the central nervous system, as brain function depends on rapid rearrangement of such fatty substances along and among nerve cell membranes. The ApoE gene comes in three varieties — ApoE2, ApoE3 and ApoE4 — depending on inherited variations in the gene’s sequence. As result, the protein that the gene specifies also comes in three versions, whose structures and fatty-substance-shuttling performance differ. Most people carry two copies of the ApoE3 gene variant (one from each parent). But about one in five people carries at least one copy of ApoE4, and a small percentage have two ApoE4 copies. Numerous studies … have confirmed that ApoE4 is a key risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, with a single copy of ApoE4 increasing that risk twofold or fourfold. Carrying two copies confers 10 times the risk of Alzheimer’s.

Early hints in the medical literature that the ApoE4 variant exerted differential effects on women’s versus men’s brains were largely ignored until now, says Greicius. He says that’s because most of the seminal ApoE4/Alzheimer’s genetics research was conducted as case-control studies: The ApoE4 gene version’s frequency in people with Alzheimer’s was compared to its frequency in people without the disease. (About half of those with Alzheimer’s, but only about 15 percent without it, are positive for ApoE4.)

But that method has limitations, says Greicius: “About 10-15 percent of ‘normal’ 70-year-olds will develop Alzheimer’s if you wait five or ten years.” Their lurking in the “normal” group dilutes the results. Moreover, Greicius says,“these kinds of genetic studies are looking for needles in a haystack, so they require large numbers of subjects – thousands – to achieve statistical significance. If you want to further examine male/female differences, you have to double the sample size.” That’s costly.

And that’s how come the large government- and industry-supported repositories to which Greicius and his team resorted are such a great idea.

Previously: Estradiol – but not Premarin – prevents neurodegeneration in women at heightened dementia risk, Common genetic Alzheimer’s risk factor disrupts healthy older women’s brain function, but not men’s, Hormone therapy halts accelerated biological aging seen in women with Alzheimer’s genetic risk factor and A one-minute mind-reading machine? Brain-scan results distinguish mental states
Photo by Sean Michael Ragan

Winners have been announced for Stanford Center on Longevity‘s first Design Challenge, which launched last fall. As previously written about on Scope, 52 teams representing 31 universities in 15 countries submitted entries, all of them centered on improving the daily lives for people with dementia as well as their families and caregivers.

Stanford News reports:

There were seven finalists, including one student team from Stanford.

Sha Yao from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco won the $10,000 first place prize for her project, “Eatwell,” which involved the design of tableware specifically for people with Alzheimer’s.

For example, blue was chosen as the color of the insides of bowls because dementia sufferers can become confused when food and bowl have similar colors, according to Smith. As spills are common when bowls are tipped to get the final bits out, Yao designed a slanted bottom that eliminates the need to tip. The cups have low centers of gravity and are difficult to knock over.

The piece describes runner-up prize winners and the center’s new design contest, themed “enabling personal mobility across the life span.”

Previously: Finalists announced for Stanford Center on Longevity’s Design Challenge and Soliciting young minds to help older adults

Stanford scientists have shown that it’s possible to simultaneously screen for dozens of cancer-associated mutations from a single blood sample using a multiple-gene panel. The research is published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (subscription required).

As I describe in my release:

Gene panels allow researchers to learn the sequences of several genes simultaneously from a single blood sample. It stands to reason that screening for mutations in just a few select genes is quicker, easier and cheaper than whole-genome sequencing. The technique usually focuses on fewer than 100 of the approximately 21,000 human genes. But until now, few studies have investigated whether homing in on a pre-determined panel of suspects can actually help people.

The researchers, medical oncologists and geneticists James Ford, MD and Allison Kurian, MD, used a customized 42-gene panel to investigate the presence of cancer-associated mutations in 198 women with a family or personal history of breast or other cancers. The women had been referred to Stanford’s Clinical Cancer Genetics Program between 2002 and 2012 to undergo screening for mutations in their BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. They found that the panel was  a useful way to quickly screen and identify other cancer-associated mutations in women who did not have a BRCA1/2 mutation. From our release:

Of the 198 women, 57 carried BRCA1/2 mutations. Ford and Kurian found that 14 of the 141 women without a BRCA1/2 mutation had clinically actionable mutations in one of the 42 genes assessed by the panel. (An actionable mutation is a genetic variation correlated strongly enough to an increase in risk that clinicians would recommend a change in routine care — such as increased screening — for carriers.)

Eleven of the 14 women were reachable by telephone, and 10 accepted a follow-up appointment with a genetic counselor and an oncologist to discuss the new findings. The family members of one woman, who had died since giving her blood sample, also accepted counseling. Six participants were advised to schedule annual breast MRIs, and six were advised to have regular screens for gastrointestinal cancers; many patients received more than one new recommendation.

One woman, with a history of both breast and endometrial cancer, learned she had a mutation that causes Lynch syndrome, a condition that increases the risk of many types of cancers. As a result, she had her ovaries removed and underwent a colonoscopy, which identified an early precancerous polyp for removal.

The study shows that gene panels can be a useful tool that can change clinical recommendations for individual patients. It also indicates that patients are willing and eager to receive such information. As Ford explains in the release:

Gene panels offer a middle ground between sequencing just a single gene like BRCA1 that we are certain is involved in disease risk, and sequencing every gene in the genome. It’s a focused approach that should allow us to capture the most relevant information.

Previously: Whole genome sequencing: the known knowns and the unknown unknowns,  Assessing the challenges and opportunities when bringing whole-genome sequencing to the bedside and Blood will tell: In Stanford study tiny bits of circulating tumor DNA betray hidden cancers.

Here’s a scary statistic, included in a recently published Newsweek article: “Each year, smoking-related illnesses kill more black Americans than AIDS, car crashes, murders and drug and alcohol abuse combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).” And then there’s this: “More than four in five black smokers choose menthol cigarettes, a far higher proportion than for other groups… By mitigating the harshness of cigarettes and numbing the throat, menthol makes smoking more palatable, easier to start – and harder to quit.”

The article discusses advocates’ call for a ban on menthol cigarettes (all other flavored cigarettes were banned in 2009) before going on to describe the history of African Americans and menthol-cigarette use, and tobacco companies’ aggressive marketing tactics. (“The tobacco industry… positioned itself as an ally of the very community it was seducing,” writes Abigail Jones.) It also quotes Stanford’s Robert Jackler, MD, founder of Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising, who expresses his concerns with ads that appear in a prominent African-American publication:

…[Jackler] has analyzed Ebony magazines since the 1940s and discovered it ran 59 cigarette ads in 1990, 10 in 2011 and 19 last year.

Ebony published 21 articles about breast cancer and 11 about prostate cancer between 1999 and 2013 but did not publish a single full-length story on lung cancer in that 15-year period. “Tobacco advertising is a huge revenue stream,” says Jackler. “Ebony professes itself to be the so-called ‘heart and soul and voice of the African-American community,’ and it completely neglects smoking.”

Previously: E-Cigarettes: The explosion of vaping is about to be regulated, What’s being done about the way tobacco companies market and manufacture products, Menthol “sweetens the poison,” attracts more young smokers, Menthol cigarette marketing aimed at young African Americans and NPR’s Picture Show highlights Stanford collection of cigarette ads
Photo by Classic Film

Adolescent girls in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, are frequent targets of sexual harassment and assault: Nearly one in five of them is raped each year. When these crimes are perpetrated against Nairobi’s teen girls, they’re often expected to react with shame and silence.

But a small non-governmental organization, No Means No Worldwide, has a strategy to change that. The co-founders, Jake Sinclair, MD, and Lee Paiva, an American husband-and-wife team, developed a curriculum of empowerment training to teach girls that it’s OK to say “no” to unwanted sexual advances. The training also gives girls specific verbal and physical skills to defend themselves, as well as information about where to go for help after a rape or other sexual assault.

The results are impressive. Stanford researchers who work with Sinclair and Paiva report today in Pediatrics that the empowerment training cut annual rates of rape by more than a third. Among the group of 1,978 girls trained during the study, more than half used their new knowledge to fend off attempted rape, and 65 percent stopped instances of harassment, halting hundreds of incidents.

From our press release about the research:

“Clearly, girls should never be placed in these situations in the first place,” said Clea Sarnquist, DrPH, the study’s lead author and a senior research scholar in pediatrics at Stanford. Changing males’ attitudes and behavior about assault is an important area for the team’s current and future work, she said. “But with such a high prevalence of rape, these girls need something to protect them now. By giving them the tools to speak up and the knowledge that ‘I have domain over my own body,’ we’re giving them the opportunity to protect themselves.”

The video above, one of a series of testimonials that No Means No Worldwide has collected from Nairobi girls, shows the power of that sense of domain over one’s body. In the video, a schoolgirl named Catherine tells how she stopped a male student from harassing her. When the video begins, it’s impossible not to notice how young and vulnerable she seems. But then she recounts how, when this boy followed her and demanded sex, she remembered her self-defense classes.

“I stood and maintained eye contact,” she says in the video. “I warned him that day and told him he should never in his life dare follow me.”

As she says the words, her demeanor transforms: She draws herself up straight, looks directly in the camera, and raises her index finger in a gesture of commanding attention.

Maryanne Wangui, a young Kenyan woman who recorded many of the testimonials, said something to me that resonates with Catherine’s account and sticks in my mind: “If you give girls the right skills, they know what to do. It doesn’t matter the age of the girl or the size of the girl; they’re all powerful inside.”

Previously: Self-defense training reduces rapes in Kenya
Video courtesy of No Means No Worldwide

The five most-read stories this week on Scope were:

Stanford bioengineer develops a 50-cent paper microscope: Manu Prakash, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering, has developed an ultra-low-cost paper microscope to aid disease diagnosis in developing regions. The device is further described in a technical paper.

Music box inspires a chemistry set for kids and scientists in developing countries: Manu Prakash has also developed a chemistry set that can be built with materials costing about $5. The device won a contest from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public to “Reimagine the chemistry set for the 21st century.”

Blood will tell: In Stanford study, tiny bits of circulating tumor DNA betray hidden cancers: A blood sample may one day be enough to diagnose many types of solid cancers, or to monitor the amount of solid cancer in a patient’s body, researchers in the labs of Stanford radiation oncologist Maximilian Diehn, MD, PhD, and hematologist and oncologist Ash Alizadeh, MD, PhD, have shown.

Art and anatomy: Decades-old collaboration brings augmented reality into the hands of Rodin: Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center launched a first-of-its-kind exhibit, “Inside Rodin’s Hands: Art, Technology, and Surgery,” which uses 21st Century technology to look inside the works of Rodin’s 19th Century sculptures.

Bad news for pill poppers? Little clear evidence for Vitamin D efficacy, says Stanford’s John Ioannidis: A large study of vitamin D led by John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, found that more well-designed studies and trials are necessary before firm conclusions can be drawn about its efficacy.

And still going strong – the most popular post from the past:

What are the consequences of sleep deprivation?: Brandon Peters, MD, an adjunct clinical faculty member at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, explains how lack of sleep can negatively affect a person’s well-being in this Huffington Post piece.