Mary Leigh Meyer: Welcome to Sounds Like Health, I’m Mary Leigh Meyer.

Christina Sumners: And I’m Christina Sumners.

Mary Leigh Meyer: We are here with Dr. Hector Chapa, a board certified OB-GYN, Clinical Assistant Professor at Texas A&M College of Medicine, and the Assistant Clerkship Director for OB-GYN for the College of Medicine. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Hector Chapa: Hi, team. We’re here and I’m excited to talk about a very, very interesting topic, because this isn’t just for females, I don’t want everybody to think about OB-GYN, this affects males and females. So, this is broader than just women’s health, because our topic today is…

Mary Leigh Meyer: Contraceptives!

Hector Chapa: Birth control, that’s right. So everyone is interested and everyone has some form of experience with birth control, so in just a minute, we’re gonna go into some specifics.

Christina Sumners: That sounds great. So, just kind of in general, what should people know about which contraceptive to use?

Hector Chapa: Alright, so birth control’s really changed throughout the years. I’m sure you guys know, and if you don’t know, well you should, because it’s definitely not your grandmother’s birth control. So let’s go over a couple of things first.

First of all, guys, birth control is so necessary for proper family planning. Because, remember that in the U.S., still in 2018, based on who you read, you have different stats. But anywhere from 45 to 49 percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. are mistimed. Now, I didn’t say undesired, we just said not planned, not timed well. And, you know, that could change your school plans, your college plans, your work plans. This is a big deal. That’s why using an effective contraception, using it correctly, and tailored to you for your needs is so vital. So birth control as a medical concept, we’ll get into barrier types that are not medicated in a little bit, but talking about hormonal birth control, you know this is nothing that started five or ten years ago.

The first birth control pill was actually in the 60’s and that birth control pill had some issues as things do initially when they first come out. And some of those myths and some of those precautions are still lingering today, although they shouldn’t. So, lemme clear that up real quick. One of the first birth control pills that came out was called Mestranol. Can’t get it anymore, it’s obsolete. But in the 60’s, the amount of estrogen, which is one of the hormones in birth control pills taken by mouth, was literally about three or four times the amount that’s found in birth control pills today.

So what happened? Some women had strokes, heart attacks, some women had blood clots. And we’re still having to deal with that bad representation of the pill even now in 2018. So lemme talk everybody off the ledge, those risks are still possible but they’re really, really rare. Because, once again, this is not your grandmother’s birth control pill.

Mary Leigh Meyer: You mentioned a little bit about the different kinds, barrier methods versus… Can you tell us kind of a little bit more about?

Hector Chapa: So, guys, as main categories lets put this into perspective. So if you’re a young woman, if you’re a young man, if you are an older woman, an older male, this still applies. Because we have to have this conversation to pick what’s right for you. So, let’s do the general categories.

First of all, we have non-medical birth control, right? So what is that? Well those are things like barr

Christina Sumners: Welcome to Science Sound Off; I’m Christina Sumners, and with me today are two assistant professors from the Texas A&M College of Medicine, Robert Watson and Kristin Patrick. They’re also husband and wife. Welcome, Dr. Watson and Dr. Patrick.

Kristin Patrick: Thanks for having us.

Robert Watson: Thanks, we’re excited to be here.

Christina Sumners: Well, maybe could we just start by talking a little bit about yourselves? What is your background, and what is your lab like?

Robert Watson: Since it’s the Patrick Watson Lab, I think Kristin should go first.

Kristin Patrick: Well, for alphabetical order’s sake. I am an RNA biologist by training, so I’m interested in fundamental aspects of gene expression, how our cells go from DNA to RNA to protein. Since we’ve been here for about three and a half years now, at A&M, we’ve been working together to combine my interest in fundamental basic science, with Robbie’s interest, as he’ll tell you in a second, in the innate immune response. We’re interested in how gene expression changes when your cells become infected.

Robert Watson: My background is host pathogen interactions, and my training basically is looking at how intracellular bacteria or bacteria interact with our cells and with our immune system, and how they can get around these things and make us sick. We look at the molecular details of those interactions, and we understand what the host developed in order to kind of kill the bacteria and control bacterial infection, and what specific adaptations the bacteria have evolved, co-evoled with humans with, to make us sick and to establish an infection. That’s my interest and that’s how we’re combining our interests together into one super lab.

Kristin Patrick: I like that, super lab.

Christina Sumners: Fantastic, so maybe …You just had a paper published in the Cell Systems journal. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. What did y’all find?

Kristin Patrick: Yeah, so this paper is a long time coming. I’ll give you a little bit of background. Robbie and I came up for the concept of the screen, this paper is based on, what, like seven or eight years ago now? It was a while.

Robert Watson: Three plus, yeah, probably seven or eight years ago.

Kristin Patrick: Over a bottle of Malbec in Mendoza, Argentina, and we were just talking about ways that we can combine our science, and during my postdoc at University of California San Francisco, I did this yeast genetic screen. To explain what a yeast genetic screen is, in the most basic terms, it’s basically taking two mutant yeast and then, who each have a defect in one gene, and then combining them so you end up with a double mutant yeast. Based on how that yeast grows, you can identify relationships between genes. To give you an example, you have a computer, right? We all use a laptop computer. If you have a problem with your R button and a problem with your touch pad, now your computer is a little bit janky, right? You have trouble typing, you have some typos, you can’t really use the mouse, but you can still get around it. If you had a problem with your touch pad, and your external mouse broke, now you have a pretty much broken computer, right? You can’t use your cursor at all. It’s the same way when we study mutations in yeast.

If you have mutations in two things that are similar, you end up with a very sic

Mark Faries: Welcome to Health Hullabaloo. I’m here with Tim Schnettler. Hey Tim.

Tim Schnettler: Hey Dr. Faries, how are you?

Mark Faries: Good. Again, my name is Dr. Mark Faries and we are trying to find some clarity in the commotion and confusion related to health and fitness medical type myths. Hullabaloo, Tim, do you know it means noisy, uproar?

Tim Schnettler: Yes, sir.

Mark Faries: We see that right? We see stuff on the internet, we read things, we hear things, it’s good one day, it’s bad the other. It doesn’t cause cancer and then one day it does cause cancer. And so, we really want to focus on trying to, again, dispel some of these myths, or determine if it’s a myth at all. Sometimes we think it’s a myth and it’s not. So, the one today is can you be fat but fit? You’ve heard this before?

Tim Schnettler: I’ve heard this before, and as a former fat kid, I’m really interested in this topic.

Mark Faries: Well, there’s some other folks that we just talked to that are interested as well. It’s interesting for numerous reasons I think. One, I think, because weight loss is so hard for some people and the idea that, oh wait, I could be fit and not have to lose weight, it’s almost like a relief at times. But also, because of that difficulty, it’s bothersome because then you’re saying that maybe it removes any of the health risk from being overweight or having excess fat which I think can be somewhat dangerous. Now, there’s confusion even on this topic to some degree at the academic researcher expert clinical level. So that bleeds down to all of us as well. Where did this all get started? There was, I guess three decades ago now, the Aerobic Center longitudinal study. Cooper Clinic in Dallas did a study where they followed over ten thousand men and over three thousand women and they were followed for eight years. And so the better cardio respiratory fitness, so that’s the fitness part that we’ll talk about in just a second. That was associated with a decreased risk of what they call all cause mortality, so dying from anything within that eight year span. So again, what they’re referring to they’re calling cardio respiratory fitness, or aerobic fitness, it’s the ability of our lungs, so to speak, to pull in air, grab the oxygen out of that air, get it into the blood and then get it to the muscle. That muscle then can get the oxygen from the blood into itself and then use it for whatever reasons that it needs, usually to actually function and do aerobic based activities. So the idea is a more fit person will breathe in likely more air but specifically get more oxygen from the air into the lungs, into the blood, and then subsequently into the muscle than an unfit. So what they do is they put people on a treadmill. It’s a graded exercise test where every few minutes…Have you all done this?

Tim Schnettler: I’ve done one. I actually did a study with the Health and Kinesiology Department here where they put us on treadmills and raised it as we went along.

Mark Faries: That’s it. So, there’s different protocols and you go until what?

Tim Schnettler: Til you can’t do it anymore

Mark Faries: You bonk. You go until you just can’t go

Tim Schnettler: You go until you pass out

Mark Faries: And so, it’s an odd test but what that’s getting is what’s called max VO2, volume of oxygen. So they’re looking at, as you do that, they’re measuring the oxygen that you breathe in and the oxygen that you breathe out. The difference between those two things rep