UC Science Today

Marijuana may be a recreational drug for some, but it's a human carcinogen and adds to the risk of heart disease. This, according to Stanton Glanz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Glantz says that cannabis legalization gets so much positive attention from the media, that people forget about how bad it can be for their health.

"There should be a large general market media campaign like the media campaign that we run against tobacco."

Which means - no cannabis cartoon characters on TV, smoke-free laws and policies that would protect non-users.

"And if you look at the way that marijuana is being legalized, it’s generally prioritizing business interests and business development over public health. And the proper way to legalize marijuana would be to treat it the way we treat tobacco. We have a large demand reduction program, we have substantial taxes on it and we have a situation where people simply don't want to buy it."

Want your children to be asthma and allergy free? You may want to consider getting a dog. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has discovered this connection while studying microbes in newborn babies’ bodies.

"Exposure in early life to a greater breadth of organisms seems to be beneficial and allows the system to accumulate a greater diversity of organisms, which really means a greater diversity of the microbial functions."

In other words, the mixture of home dust and dog’s dander, can help a child become immune to asthma later in life. This seems to contradict a well-known fact that pets can trigger allergies? But Lynch says timing is everything.

“In later life for example, if asthma or allergies have developed, then exposure to a dog will clearly will trigger allergies.”

So to prevent these immune diseases – a pet should be brought home when a child is no older than one month.

Editor's note: special thanks to Emma for taking the time out of her busy day to pose for the accompanying picture.

About 10 to 25 thousand cases of stroke, aneurysm or epilepsy may go undetected each year in the United States. This, according to Anthony Kim, director of the University of California, San Francisco Stroke Center. Kim has been studying misclassified cases of neurological death, which were erroneously thought to be sudden cardiac death.

"If you think about the deaths that occur, for instance, in patients that are enrolled in clinical trials or patients that die out-of-hospital, before they can even make it to the hospital, it would account for a substantial proportion of those cases. So, it has kind of implications on the public health estimates. It has implications on the interpretations of death outcomes, in large cardiovascular trials."

Kim says it also has implications on diagnosis, as well as the way medical experts look at the risks and benefits of cardiovascular treatment, such as blood thinners. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.

We interview a lot of researchers at the University of California, and one thing we hear about a lot is how beneficial it is for researchers to have students and interdisciplinary faculty at their fingertips. Biomedical scientist Gabriela Loots of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is no exception. Loots and her team found that a specific protein inhibits prostate cancer metastasis to the bone and says collaboration has been crucial in this work.

"Around 2005, I started interacting with scientists at UC Merced and then I was interested in having a more formal affiliation with them in the Qualitative Biology Program. And so now I have graduate students who will rotate in my laboratory. And it’s been working out great. So with the UC Davis Cancer Center, we have started interacting with some of the scientists there because of my interest in prostate cancer and now we’re growing to other types of cancer research. And so we just started communicating with some of these scientists and we started collaborating."

Their current research may lead to better prevention and treatment of aggressive forms of prostate cancer that spread to the bone.

Will marijuana become a "new version" of cigarettes? Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says public health experts need to be cautious about the negative effects of cannabis.

"The historical situation where tobacco was the gateway to marijuana where kids started with tobacco and then graduated to marijuana, that situation’s now totally reversed. Kids think marijuana is harmless and even good for you. They start with marijuana and then move on to tobacco. So the marijuana and tobacco epidemics are really inextricably tied to each other."

Glantz suggests that a better way to approach legalization of marijuana would be to focus on minimizing cannabis use and prioritizing public health over commercial interests and tax revenue generation.

Did you ever wonder what happens in the brain when we finish our friends' sentences or answer fill-in-the-blank questions? A University of California, Berkeley study has found that while looking for the right words, we engage our hippocampus, an area of the brain that stores our memories. Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight says that until now, linguists were not paying attention to this connection.

"What's happened historically is the language has operated independent of the memory field. We have the metaphor that two ships are sailing. You had a language ship sailing and a memory ship sailing. Turns out they are getting berthed at the same port."

This discovery allows scientists to take a closer look at abnormalities in the brain rhythms and this may help patients with different types of brain disorders.

"It might give us some insight as to whether your kid is going down a wrong language development path or it might give us some idea about the problems with accessing semantic knowledge in older person - either which is age- related cognitive decline or maybe something portending or having Alzheimer's disease."

Studies show that about 10 percent of Americans are diagnosed with asthma each year. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco studied the microbiome to hone in on why asthma and allergies are so widespread in Western nations.

"Some of the risk factors for allergic asthma include very early life exposure such as a lack of the mother's exposure to livestock or furred pets while she is pregnant, formula feeding, Cesarean section delivery and antibiotic use during pregnancy or very early life of post natal period. And so those risk factors suggest that these factors may influence the microbes in the community of microbes that exist in humans and particularly in very early life."

Knowing this, Lynch says to prevent these immune diseases, scientists and parents should focus on changing children's microbiological development very early in life.

This week on Science Today. Studies show that about 10 percent of Americans are diagnosed with asthma each year. We spoke to a gastroenterologist Susan Lynch of UC San Francisco and learned that they’ve been studying the microbiome to hone in on why asthma and allergies are so widespread in Western nations. She says some of the risk factors include a lack of a mother’s exposure to livestock or furred pets while pregnant.

"And so those risk factors suggest that these factors may influence the microbes and the communities of microbes that exist in humans and particularly in very early life."

This understanding could lead to focusing more on changing a child’s microbiological development very early in life. While at UCSF, we also chatted with Stanton Glantz a professor of medicine. Now that California has joined other states in the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana, Glantz suggests that public health experts be cautious about the negative effects of cannabis.

"Kids think marijuana is harmless and even good for you. They start with marijuana and then move on to tobacco, so the marijuana and tobacco epidemics are really inextricably tied to each other."

And finally, we reflect on the value of doing research within a university system – it’s something we hear about time and time again while interviewing researchers. Biomedical scientist Gabriela Loots of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says her team has greatly benefited from having students and interdisciplinary faculty at their fingertips.

"It’s been working out great. With the UC Davis Cancer Center, we have started interacting with some of the scientists there because of my interest in prostate cancer and now we’re growing to other types of cancer research and so we just started communicating with some of these scientists and we started collaborating."

Find out what other researchers are up to with the University of California system. Tune in to Science Today on iTunes or follow us on Soundcloud - you’re bound to learn a lot. Thanks for listening, I’m Larissa Branin.

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After a ‘soda tax’ took effect in low-income neighborhoods in Berkeley, California, researchers discovered the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages took a steep dive in these communities. Study author Kris Madsen of the University of California, Berkeley says instead, those surveyed in these neighborhoods, which often have high rates of obesity and diabetes, reported making healthier choices like drinking more water. Madsen says this is an encouraging sign from a public health perspective.

“Look, it is a little bit like a luxury tax on alcohol or cigarettes. It’s fine. It is your choice. But clearly it should only happen occasionally. We tried to reduce smoking in the United States for many years, and it really was only effective once the tax went into effect.”

Madsen adds that such taxes are successful examples of intervention since it has an impact on people’s health and generates revenue.

"I feel like we’ll continue to look for the tools that are the most effective tools to change, to improve population health.”

When epidemiologists study cohorts – or rather, a group of people who have commonalities such as age, ethnicity or social class – they can often garner information that’s beyond their original research. Janet Wojcicki of the University of California, San Francisco, has been following a Latina cohort that was recruited in pregnancy and followed for a number of years.

"Our primary outcome was really to better understand factors that are related to obesity and development of chronic disease in early childhood, but we also measured telomeres – the protective cap of the DNA."

Shorter telomeres are associated with chronic disease development. Wojcicki found in this cohort that early, exclusive breastfeeding of infants was linked to longer telomeres. She says they are now looking into why this particular cohort has a very high rate of asthma.

"So we’re trying to understand, is it because we have a lot of obesity in our cohort? Is it something about the neighborhoods that families are living in, where they have environmental exposure? So, that’s something else."