The US Preventative Services Task Force concluded last week that men over 75 years old should no longer be screened for prostate cancer. Furthermore, they conclude that “the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of prostate cancer screening in men younger than age 75 years.”

As I have written before, while we in the US like to get as much care as possible, there are situations when more care isn’t necessarily better, and that in many cases, patient factors should help decide the course of treatment. Prostate cancer screening is a prime example of a situation in which screening can lead to a whole host of uncomfortable and potentially life altering consequences (e.g. invasive procedures, impotence), and may or may not lead to a longer life.

While there are certainly many situations in which the best treatments are clear and effective, in cases where the relationship between cause and effect, and treatment and health, are murkier, more may not be better, and in fact may be worse.

A recent article in the New York Times reported results from an APA study that concluded that abortion does not cause mental illness. The full title of the article is “Abortion Does Not Cause Mental Illness, Panel Says.” Maybe I am being paranoid, but somehow that title calls the results into question (as in, “a panel claims this, but we’re still not sure”). However, in the brief summary, the author points out that these results are the same as results from a large scale review of evidence in 1990. So, why are we continuing to ask this question? Is it because conservative forces are hoping that we’ll find something that gives credence to the idea that women shouldn’t have control over their own bodies? Given that this finding has been replicated in two large studies now, for my money, I’d rather invest in exploring mental health consequences of issues that have less to do with partisan politics and more to do with actual risk.

Since this website is supposed to be about sound as well as science, I’m excited to announce that most of the slides and podcasts for the Neuroimaging Training Program Summer Course at UCLA are up on the web!  Enjoy the sound and slides of experts from around the world as they discuss methods relevant to neuroimaging research.

The itunes link is here.  Note, slides and podcasts from last year’s course are available at the iTunes link as well.

I recently posted a summary of an article that I found interesting and likely to bring out some healthy controversy at PsychInAction. The article was about differences in the ways that liberals and conservatives process information (in the brain). The basic finding was that people who identified as conservative (compared to those who identified as liberal) showed less activity in a brain area that has previously been related to cognitive control during a task that requires one to inhibit a certain prepotent response (basically, you need to switch gears and restrain yourself from the habitual response). In concluding, the authors suggest that while liberals performed better on the laboratory task that required response inhibition, the conservatives in their sample would likely perform better on a task where a fixed response style is optimal.

As with many brain studies, there are several caveats and logical fallacies that are easy to fall into (see here for a discussion of what we can and can’t say with brain data), but in an informal lecture, even scientifically-conservative Russ lamented recently that in order to get papers in places like Nature, we, as scientists need to argue for why our findings are cool and worth the space they take to print in the absence of space to list all of the constraints, assumptions, and other details that might help people fully understand all of the limitations of a given dataset. So, while we should stick closely to our data and not make wild claims about what the brain has to tell us about social scientific questions, using brain data to generate new hypotheses (that are later tested) is how science can move forward.

The study described above is not perfect (would be interesting to see with a larger sample and to know more about third variable personality factors), and it is interesting to consider counter examples (as one colleague pointed out, it would be easy to argue that some religious conservatives show incredible flexibility in taking from the Bible), but I think as scientists, in addition to poking holes in the methods of others (a necessary set of checks and balances), we should also be considering how different methods can inform one another and how to test alternative hypotheses if we don’t believe the findings of published work.

There are direct relationships between where you fall in the socioeconomic hierarchy and your health. There are also relationships between whether you are a man or a woman, and where you fall on this hierarchy. Lastly, there are relationships between gender and health. How do gender and socioeconomic status interact to give some people a better shot at a healthy life? The attached files are from a talk I gave on this topic, as well as a reference list to accompany the slides. Please feel free to email or post with questions.

SES, Gender and Health (Slides)

SES, Gender and Health (Outline and Biblio)