Alice Walker

A recent report on the health of Canadians commissioned by the CBC highlights some unpleasant truths about the country’s perception of health and wellness.

Among the key findings of the report was the revelation that while 77 per cent of those surveyed believe that they generally live a healthy lifestyle, eat healthier than the average Canadian, and maintain a healthy weight, 51 per cent of them are overweight or obese.

The report, titled Canada Weighs In, is part of the CBC’s ongoing Live Right Now campaign, which aims to motivate Canadians to live healthier.

The multiplatform initiative came up during the development of the CBC’s new Village on a Diet program, a primetime show which follows residents of a British Columbia town as they collectively try to lose weight while being helped by a team of experts.

“We saw an opportunity to do a broader project than just a TV show —one that all Canadians would benefit from,” said Jeff Keay, head of media relations for the CBC. “The facts are shocking—today’s generation may well live shorter lifespans than their parents’ generation.”

The campaign is similar to the CBC’s 2008 environmental initiative, the One Million Acts of Green challenge, which was sponsored by The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.

Treading topics including food and nutrition, sleep, and visiting health professionals, the survey explores motivations for making or not making healthy choices.

Most respondents cited lack of time as justification for why they aren’t healthier, with 37 per cent reporting not enough time to make meals, 42 per cent reporting not enough time to get vigorous exercise regularly and 36 per cent noting not enough time to sleep. About half of those surveyed also reported feeling overwhelmed by all the information available about healthy eating.

When asked how to make sense of a myriad of differing sources on health, Katherine Gray-Donald, an associate professor in McGill’s School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition, recommended sticking to reliable sources.

“[Dependable sources] may seem dull as they do not jump on every shred of evidence, but wait until facts are well established,” Gray-Donald said in an email to the Tribune. “In Canada, our straightforward resource is the Canadian Food Guide for Healthy Living, [which] has been updated and is a good interactive program.”

Where to find information on healthy living was a survey topic that yielded differing views between adults and youth. Adults consulted health professionals, magazines, and online health sites more often than anything else in the past year, while youth depended on friends and family members, TV, and health professionals.

Youth also differed in their responses to questions on smoking, with smoking being far less common among younger age brackets, and in their responses to exercise, with youth being much more likely to exercise regularly.

The report seems to have had quite an impact on Canadians who have come across it, according to Dave Scholz, the executive vice-president of Leger Marketing, which conducted the sampling.

“I have received a number of emails from respondents and people who wish they could have been respondents about the study and [commented] on the CBC poll — adding their stories to the mix,” he said in an email. “It has certainly resonated with Canadians.”

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Being admitted to a private room in a hospital’s intensive care unit can dramatically decrease the likelihood of a patient contracting an infection, a recent McGill study suggests.

About one in three patients admitted to hospital ICUs contract some sort of infection, which increases the length of the average hospital stay by eight to nine days. In the United States, this is estimated to cost health care providers $3.5 billion each year.

But putting patients in private rooms, rather than in shared rooms with curtain partitions, can cut the rate of infection by certain types of bacteria in half.

“There are three types of bacteria that are really at the focus of infection control efforts: Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile and vancomycin-resistant enterococci,” said Dana Teltsch, a McGill PhD candidate who was the study’s lead author. “For the three of them combined, the reduction was 54 per cent, and this is a very serious reduction.”

Teltsch’s study, published last week in Archives of Internal Medicine, detected decreases in 12 types of bacteria, six of which were large enough to be statistically significant. While other studies have investigated the effect of making rooms private, Teltch said, hers compared a greater variety of bacteria, with more conclusive results.

To conduct the study, Teltsch compared data from the Montreal General Hospital and the Royal Victoria Hospital over a period of five years during which the Montreal General Hospital carried out renovations that made all ICU rooms private. The Royal Victoria Hospital, however, had a mixture of shared and private rooms in its ICU.

“The two populations are, by and large, comparable in the severity of illness,” said Dr. Peter Goldberg, the director of adult critical care at the McGill University Health Centre and a co-author of the study. This similarity made the two hospitals ideal for purposes of comparison.

Because both hospitals are part of the MUHC, Teltsch said, they also followed the same infection-control management and other practices, enabling her to hone in on one variable: the types of rooms.

In the time since Teltsch’s data set was collected, the Royal Victoria Hospital has switched to private rooms in its ICU as well, Goldberg said. That makes the two centres exceptions among Montreal hospitals, however, most of which still use shared rooms.

“Hospitals with a mix of private and shared rooms still confine patients with infections to individual rooms,” Goldberg said. But it can take doctors up to 72 hours after a patient is admitted to determine whether or not he has an infection.

“In that 72 hours, you may have come into contact with many people: staff, other patients,” Goldberg said. “By putting a patient straightaway into a private room, you have essentially put them in isolation, so that they don’t have the ability to transmit.”

Teltsch’s study may encourage more hospitals to abandon shared ICU rooms, but that may also fuel a rise in costs for hospitals. In addition to the cost of renovations, Goldberg said, hospitals may need to hire more nurses in order to monitor patients in individual rooms, rather than a single shared one.

Separate rooms may also change doctors’ and nurses’ practices in the ICU, Goldberg added. If  patients are treated in separate rooms, he said, nurses may be more inclined to wash their hands as they move from patient to patient.

“Private rooms are not only barriers [to infection],” Goldberg said. “They are also instigators of different behaviours.”

Those who experience euphoria when listening to their favourite music could be achieving the same pleasure as that which comes from good food, sex, or drugs, a McGill study has found.

In a first in the field, neuroscience researchers at McGill have discovered a connection between the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical known for its rewarding “feel-good” effects, and its musically triggered release. The team, led by neuroscientist Robert Zatorre, found that music is physiologically linked to providing rewards, highlighting the importance of music to individual well-being.

Dopamine release has previously been linked with activities one finds pleasurable or rewarding. Drugs like cocaine are addictive due to their manipulation of the dopamine release system, but music can provide a similar high with none of the destructive health effects. Music was found to elevate dopamine release up to nine per cent, which is slightly higher than the effects of food.

Valorie Salimpoor, the lead investigator for the study at the Montreal Neurological Institute, said music is a “cognitive reward that we can have access to at any time,” and  one that “works on the same regions associated with other addictive substances.”

“Music makes people happy, and this feeling has been linked to other feelings of intense euphoria, like cocaine,” Salimpoor said. Adding that behaviours that are around for this long usually are biologically adaptive, necessary for survival, or evolutionarily significant.

While music may not be essential to survival as a species, it’s a “cognitive and intellectual reward,” Salimpoor said.

“It seems as if our thinking centres are tapping into these reward centres,” she added. “It is just the way you perceive it that makes it pleasurable.”

Is music addictive? Salimpoor doesn’t have a definitive answer, but said, “If it feels good … if dopamine is released, the brain tells you to ‘make sure it happens again.'”

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Science Outreach’s Cutting Edge Lectures welcomed the University of Alberta’s Professor Marianne Douglas to McGill’s Redpath Museum last Thursday to present her research on climatic warming in the Canadian High Arctic. Her recent research suggests that environmental warming is occurring at an alarming rate in certain arctic regions.  

“I think many people are aware that High  Arctic regions are changing, and they are changing very quickly,” Douglas said as she went on to identify evidence of the various environmental effects of warming Arctic temperatures, which include: coastal erosion, shrinking of ice over, earlier onset of spring conditions, increased plant productivity, new animal distributions, and net evaporation of shallow bodies of water.

“Understanding these changes provides insight into what future arctic conditions may prevail,” Douglas said. She outlined the many consequences of a warming Arctic for infrastructure (pipelines), vegetation, and animal distributions.  

Douglas specializes in paleolimnology, a method of research which examines lake sediments as a way of comparing past Arctic environmental conditions to the present. For scientists like Douglas, reading the data stored in these sediments is like reading a storybook that tells how a particular region has changed through the decades.  

“It’s like going back through time,” she said.

According to Douglas’s findings, temperatures show greatest warming at high latitudes like the Canadian Arctic because as sea ice melts, the region absorbs more summer heat. Lake sediments on Ellesmere Island in northern Nunavut indicate that several thousand years of cold environmental conditions radically changed in the 1990s to conditions typical of a warmer environment.  

Douglas projected that warming at the end of the century will add roughly 30 days of growing season in places like Ellesmere Island.     “But, I think we are already there,” she contends.  

Third-year McGill political science student Caitlin MacDonald was surprised by the drastic environmental changes Douglas described in her lecture.  

“We always hear about the seriousness of climate change, but are rarely presented with these kinds of eye-opening statistics,” MacDonald said.  

MacDonald said it’s important to increase awareness of these issues among students, adding that “it is our generation that will be most affected by Arctic warming and other environmental changes.”

Science Outreach Coordinator Ingrid Birker viewed Douglas’ slecture as a chance for McGill students to learn about cutting edge research on important scientific breakthroughs on climate change. She hopes the lecture will increase awareness, and put into perspective the significance of past and present research in the field.

 “I hope students can take away greater understanding and appreciation on the complexity of work like Dr. Douglas’s in investigating climate issues,” Birker said.