Body by Darwin: How Evolution Shapes Our Health and Transforms Medicine (Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith) - Hardcover

Taylor, Jeremy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022605988X ISBN 13: 9780226059884

Verlag: The University of Chicago Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions—whether it’s a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows in Body by Darwin, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future.
 
In Body by Darwin, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimer’s disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis.  Throughout, he not only explores the impact of evolution on human form and function, but he integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health.
 
As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our body’s performance is shaped by its past, Body by Darwin draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge.

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Jeremy Taylor was previously a senior producer and director for BBC Television, and he has made numerous science films for the Discovery Channel and Learning Channel, among others. He is also the author of Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. He lives in London.

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Body by Darwin

How Evolution Shapes Our Health and Transforms Medicine

By Jeremy Taylor

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 Jeremy Taylor
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-05988-4

Contents

Introduction, 
Absent Friends How the Hygiene Hypothesis Explains Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases, 
A Fine Romance How Evolutionary Theory Explains Infertility and Diseases of Pregnancy, 
The Downside of Upright The Relationship between Bipedalism and Orthopedic Illnesses, 
DIY Eye How Developmental Biology Cures Blindness and Rebuts Creationism, 
Hopeful Monsters Why Cancer Is Almost Impossible to Cure, 
A Problem with the Plumbing Why the Evolution of Coronary Arteries Makes Us Prone to Heart Attacks, 
Three Score Years — And Then? How Evolution Is Breathing New Life into Moribund Dementia Research, 
Acknowledgments, 
Suggestions for Further Reading, 

CHAPTER 1

Absent Friends

How the Hygiene Hypothesis Explains Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases

Throughout the 1990s the Johnson family was being ripped apart by the increasingly violent, self-abusive, uncontrollable behavior of their son Lawrence. He was a very disturbed child and would become highly agitated, smash himself in the face, bang his head against walls, try to gouge out his eyes, and bite his arms until he bled. At age two and a half, he was diagnosed with autism, and as he got older, things got worse. If traffic lights failed to change according to his inner timetable as he passed them while walking down the street, he would explode with rage. He could not deal with crowded places like restaurants or movie theaters, and frequently had to be physically restrained from hurting himself. His doctors tried anti-depressive medication, anti-seizure drugs, anti-psychotics, and lithium, among others, to no avail.

His parents were at their wits' end. But because Lawrence's father, Stewart, is an active, coping, problem-solving sort of man, he tried to think his way through his son's illness and became a self-taught scholar on autism. A clue soon emerged. "We noticed that when Lawrence had a fever, all that would go away. And it was true 100 percent of the time. If his temperature went up and he had a fever from a cold, flu, or sinus infection, he would stop hitting himself, he would be calm, he was like a different child. We talked to other parents with autistic kids, and they all said the same thing."

Was it simply the lethargy of feeling poorly that damped down Lawrence's bad behavior? Some scientists have suggested that fever changes neural transmission in the brain, while others have invoked changes in the immune system. No one knew for sure. But everybody who either had to live with Lawrence or care for him said the same thing: "We're very happy when he gets sick, because life is wonderful!" However, whenever his fever subsided, the frightening behavior returned. By 2005, when Lawrence was fifteen, Stewart and his wife decided they could no longer take care of Lawrence on their own. While Lawrence was away at a specialized summer school, they reluctantly applied to have him taken into care for the rest of his life. "Lawrence was going to go and be somebody else's problem because he was killing our whole family."

It was at that precise moment, with Lawrence's dismal future decided, that they received a phone call from summer camp. They feared the worst. "But they said, 'We don't know what's going on, but Lawrence is behaving completely normally. He's fine, he's not freaking out, he's not hitting himself, he's not throwing his food, he's participating in all the activities, he's interacting....'" Stewart drove up to the camp to find his son perfectly calm, engaged with the other children, and pleased to see him. They got into the car for the two-hour drive home, and Lawrence announced that he wanted to go out for dinner. He hadn't been to a restaurant in two or three years. "But now he wants to go to this place that's extremely noisy and crowded, which is a place we'd normally cross the street to avoid. He would normally never wait in line, but we waited forty-five minutes, we got served, he ate, we had a wonderful dinner!"

Stewart drove the family home, his mind whirling. Later that night he was helping Lawrence get undressed for bed when he noticed that he was completely covered in chigger bites from his thighs to his ankles. Chiggers, biting mite larvae, are very common in the summertime where the family lived, and Lawrence had been bitten by the chiggers in the long grass of summer camp. What could be the link between chigger bites and the total remission of Lawrence's autistic symptoms? It drove Stewart back into the literature to discover that chiggers elicit a very powerful immune response as they drill into the skin and release saliva to digest host tissue. They then drop off, leaving a patch of hardened scar tissue that itches for days until the immune reaction subsides. For ten days, while Lawrence's immune system fought the chigger infection instead of him, they had a wonderful time, but as the bites faded and the itching stopped, he returned to his violent and self-destructive behavior. "I immediately said, 'That's it. I've seen enough. There's an answer here. At least some part of my son's symptoms are an aberrant immune response.'"

Stewart knew that his son's physician, autism expert Dr. Eric Hollander of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, had done research showing that there was nine times the incidence of autoimmune disease in the first-order relatives of autistic children, compared to those of normal children. Lawrence has a peanut allergy; Stewart suffers from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that causes fatigue and weakened muscles; and his wife is asthmatic. His family medical history was consistent with research that links autism to autoimmunity and allergy. Back in 1971, researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported on a family study where the youngest son in the family had a multiple diagnosis of autism, Addison's disease (an autoimmune condition affecting the adrenal glands), and candidiasis (infection with the opportunistic yeast, Candida albicans). The next older brother had hypoparathyroidism, which can have autoimmune origins, Addison's disease, candidiasis, and type 1 diabetes. The next older brother had hypothyroidism, Addison's disease, candidiasis, and alopecia totalis — an autoimmune condition that causes the loss of all head hair. The oldest son, and firstborn, was symptom-free, like his parents.

In 2003 Thayne Sweeten, from Indiana University School of Medicine, reported that the rate of autoimmune disorders in the families of children with autism was even higher than in the relatives of children with autoimmune diseases. Disorders included hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's thyroiditis (where the thyroid gland is attacked by autoantibodies and immune cells), and rheumatic fever. Sweeten said that the finding of increased autoimmune illness in grandmothers, uncles, mothers, and brothers of autistic children "suggests a possible mother-to-son transmission of susceptibility to autoimmune diseases in the families of autistics," and speculated that autoimmunity or chronic immune system activation could account for some of the biochemical anomalies seen in autistic individuals, including high uric acid levels and iron-deficiency anemia, which are also seen in autoimmune disorders. Research conducted on Danish children between 1993 and 2004 by Dr. Hjördis Atladóttir agreed with Sweeten by finding...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022605988X
• ISBN 13: 9780226059884
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar