HEALTH AND FITNESS IN BRIEF | The Chronicle Herald ...

Young people good at detecting ?old people odour?

Did Grandma?s house smell funny? Chances are it did, and researchers may have discovered why: Old people have a different body odour from younger people, and young people are good at detecting it.

Researchers had 41 healthy people in three age groups ? young (ages 20 to 30), middle-aged (45 to 55) and old (75 to 95) ? put absorbent pads in their armpits for five nights to collect odours. Then the scientists asked people in their 20s to smell the pads. The results appeared online last week in the journal PLoS One.

The smellers were asked to distinguish old from young in various ways ? by making a choice between two pads, by sorting pads into age groups and by guessing the age as the pads were presented randomly. They were also asked to rate the pleasantness and intensity of the odours.

Analysis showed that smellers were able to discriminate between age groups and place the old-age pads together at rates significantly greater than chance. For most of the young people, the smell of old people was not particularly intense or unpleasant.

?We definitely have an old people odour,? said the senior author, Johan N. Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Center in Philadelphia and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The smell seems to be unoffensive, he added, when sniffed in the absence of any particular person.

Fever in pregnancy linked?to autism spectrum disorders

Running a fever during pregnancy is associated with a risk of autism spectrum disorders and developmental delays in the offspring, a new study reports.

Previous research has suggested a connection between autism and various infections during pregnancy, including measles, mumps, rubella and influenza.

In the new analysis, researchers studied 701 children with autism spectrum disorders or developmental delays and 421 normal controls. After adjusting for age and other health and socioeconomic variables, they found that women who reported having had a fever during pregnancy were more than twice as likely as those who did not to have a child with a developmental disorder.

Among women whose fever had been treated with drugs like Tylenol or Advil, the risk was indistinguishable from that of mothers who reported no fever.

?Fever is an acute inflammatory response,? said the senior author, Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the Mind Institute of the University of California, Davis. ?So there is a suggestion that inflammation of some sort may play some role in autism causation. Untreated fever seems to be the place where the risk is.?

The scientists were unable to determine whether a fever at a specific time during pregnancy might alter the risk. They acknowledge that their data depend on self-reports, which are not always accurate.

The study was published online May 5 in The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Better odds in long-acting reversible contraceptives

Intrauterine devices, under-the-skin implants and Depo-Provera injections ? the long-acting reversible contraceptives ? are much more effective in preventing pregnancy than the transdermal patch, the vaginal ring or the birth control pill, a new study reports.

Researchers provided 7,486 volunteers with the contraceptive of their choice, then followed them for up to three years. (Women using condoms, diaphragms and natural family planning were not included in the analysis.) There were 334 unintended pregnancies.

Failure rates for pills, patches and rings were more than nine per cent by the end of the study, compared with less than one per cent for the long-acting reversible methods. The study appeared in the May 24 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

There was no difference by age in unintended pregnancies among women using long-acting contraceptives, but young women who used the pill, patch or ring were much more likely to have an unintended pregnancy than older women using those methods.

?When women say to me that they want to use the pill, I say, ?That?s fine, but it?s 20 times less effective than an IUD,? ? said one of the co-authors, Dr. Jeffrey F. Peipert, of Washington University in St. Louis. ?Clinicians have been reluctant to prescribe IUDs, but if we want to get a handle on unintended pregnancy in our country, we have to first offer the most effective methods.?

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