Features

By Ryan Faughnder

LOS ANGELES — Film franchises are having a chilly summer at the box office. “Transformers: The Last Knight” stalled out, “The Mummy” got buried, and “Alien: Covenant” drifted off into space.

Now it’s up to the yellow Minions of “Despicable Me 3” to help cure the malaise.

The cartoon comedy is expected to gross $90 million to $100 million in the United States and Canada this weekend, according to people who have read audience surveys, which would make it one of the top summer openings this year.

A strong launch could boost summer ticket sales that are down 7 per cent this year compared with the same period last year. Other than superhero movies “Wonder Woman” from Warner Bros. and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” from Disney, the season’s biggest movies have mostly failed to live up to expectations. The fifth “Transformers” film, for example, grossed a weak $69 million debut in the United States and Canada.

Elsewhere at the multiplex, two R-rated original films will seek grown-up moviegoers: Edgar Wright’s action flick “Baby Driver” and New Line’s parents-gone-bad comedy “The House”.

Anticipation for the next “Despicable Me” is high, according to analysts. A strong debut for “Despicable Me 3”, the latest in the computer animated series from Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment, would be the latest success for Illumination, which had a huge hit last summer with “The Secret Life of Pets”. However, it’s not expected to reach the $116 million the 2015 spinoff “Minions” grossed in its first weekend.

Illumination has proved a formidable competitor in the crowded animation business by making successful movies that cost about $75 million to produce — considerably less than Pixar and DreamWorks Animation films. The gibberish-speaking, pill-shaped Minions have proved inescapable marketing devices, taking over New York cabs and the stars on Amazon’s customer review system. The tiny henchmen propelled “Minions” to more than $1 billion in global receipts.

“Despicable Me 3” again stars Steve Carell as the voice of criminal mastermind Gru, as well as his long-lost twin brother Dru. The film also features the voices of Kristen Wiig and Trey Parker.

As the cartoon sequel dominates, “Baby Driver” will test moviegoers’ appetite for a well-reviewed, high-concept action comedy. The latest from British director Wright, about a young getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who needs to constantly listen to music to overcome chronic tinnitus and do his job, is expected to gross $15 million to $22 million domestically in its first five days after opening on Wednesday.

That would be a solid debut for the movie that cost $34 million to make after factoring in rebates from filming in Atlanta. The movie, from Media Rights Capital and Sony Pictures’ TriStar unit, marks a relatively large commercial debut for Wright, best known for quirky spoofs such as “Shaun of the Dead” and “The World’s End”.

Meanwhile, New Line Cinema and Village Roadshow Pictures are aiming for a $12 million opening for “The House”, starring Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell as parents who start an illegal casino to send their daughter to college. R-rated comedies have struggled for attention this summer amid the big-budget action at the multiplex. Audiences recently gave the cold shoulder to Scarlett Johansson in “Rough Night” and Amy Schumer in “Snatched”.

WASHINGTON — The rich variety in shapes of the eggs that birds lay — elliptical, pointy, spherical — seems to be linked to how well a given bird flies, researchers report.

The recently released  study which appeared in the US journal Science stems from the most extensive research yet on a mystery that has flummoxed biologists for centuries.

“In contrast to classic hypotheses, we discovered that flight may influence egg shape. Birds that are good fliers tend to lay asymmetric or elliptical eggs,” said Mary Caswell Stoddard, a biologist at Princeton University and one of the lead authors of the study.

Another finding is that the flexible inner membrane of the egg, not the hard outshell, is what generates the diversity of eggs out there in nature.

Until now, scientists have put forth a variety of theories about the variety of egg shapes. One says that the place where a bird nests is what determines the egg shape.

This line of thinking held that birds that nest near a cliff often lay eggs that are cone-shaped so that if they roll, they do so in a tight circle and do not fall off the precipice.

In order to settle the debate, researchers looked at the shape of 49,175 eggs from around 1,400 species of birds, some of them extinct. This came from a database at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The eggs were classified according to how asymmetrical and elliptical they were, and by biometric and environmental parameters. 

The researchers then created a mathematical model bringing together all of the variations in shape and other factors.

They were then able to study the links between egg shape and physiological traits of birds, and determined that one of the best parameters for predicting egg shape is a bird’s skill at flying.

Bottom line: the most aerodynamic birds tend to lay eggs that are long or pointy.

“Variation across species in the size and shape of their eggs is not simply random but is instead related to differences in ecology, particularly the extent to which each species is designed for strong and streamlined flight,” said co-author Joseph Tobias of Imperial College London.

Regardless of age gap people can easily discuss arts, politics, education, social issues, love, the news in general, and countless other matters without a problem. They would usually understand each other. When it comes to IT, however, things are not as simple as that.

Keeping up with the fast pace of evolving technology is already hard enough. Being able to discuss it with those who are in an age bracket much different from yours sometimes proves to be as hard.

Dealing with the change is important, but talking about it and communicating with the others is as important. Actually discussing technology evolution and innovations with our peers is part of the process and helps to understand technology better, to make better use of it.

So how does someone who for instance is 60 talk about Whatsapp with someone who is 18? It does not always go without saying, and the difficulty has nothing to do with the people’s IQ or background; the difficulty is only related to the age difference, to the way different people perceive, approach and use technology.

The first person has seen the technology evolve over the years, has kept reading and learning about it, sometime has put effort experimenting with it, and eventually ended up with a good understanding of it. The second was practically born with it and sees it as a perfectly natural thing, as something that is to take for granted.

The first is always in awe of Whatsapp, how amazing it is, the fact that it is free, and usually wonders how we used to do without it just a few years ago. The second does not see anything extraordinary in it — quite the opposite; it is seen as very ordinary. A discussion about Whatsapp between such two people would be odd to say the least. They cannot look at it with the same eyes. Whatsapp is only one example of course.

There is also another factor: it is the speed at which the young and the “less young” would learn new IT tricks. This is obviously another gap and it does not make discussions any easier.

A few days ago I had the chance to see what a 3-year little girl learnt very quickly and how she adapted to a new thing in a few seconds.

She “already” knew how to use a tablet to select YouTube clips featuring songs for children. Naturally, with the tablet she would use her finger to tap on the touch screen to select and to play the video. That day the tablet was not available and her father had to run YouTube for her on his laptop computer, a model that did not have a touch screen.

The little girl tried a couple of times to select a video with her finger, as if the computer had a touch screen. When this did not work, her father showed her the mouse attached to the laptop, how to place the cursor on the video and to click the mouse to run the clip. It did not take more than that, a couple of seconds and virtually no words spoken, and it was all understood and applied, without any difficulty. I still remember how hard it was for adults (well, some of them at least…), years ago, to learn how to use a mouse and to feel comfortable with it.

If you are above say fifty and want to discuss any IT topic with someone who is much younger than you are, be it for fun, for social talk or for professional reason, you have to do some adjustment to your reasoning, your wording, your arguments and to the way your present your topic. You must also keep in mind that whatever seems amazing, awesome, extraordinary for you is something very common and ordinary for the other party. You learnt it the hard way; they were practically born with it.

On the other hand, if you are much younger than those you are discussing high-tech with, just be kind and patient. Even if they are as smart as you are, and maybe even smarter, they may not be as fast as you may be. It is just about age, not IQ.

Kids may develop an implicit bias against overweight and obese people early in childhood that leads them to make quick judgements based only on size, a small experiment suggests. 

The study tested snap judgements made by youngsters ages 9 to 11 right after they’d seen pictures of children with varied body shapes.

Participants were briefly shown pictures of older children who were similar to each other in age, race and sex but of different weights. Right after that, they briefly viewed images of meaningless fractals and were asked to rate these abstract geometric patterns as “good” or “bad”.

After seeing pictures of healthy weight children, the participants gave 64 per cent of the fractals a “good” rating, compared with just 59 per cent of the fractals they saw after looking at overweight children.

If the participants had no implicit weight bias, researchers would expect them to rate half of the fractals “good” and the other half “bad,” the study authors say. A difference in the proportion of “good” ratings after pictures of healthy weight versus overweight children, however, indicates implicit bias.

“What’s surprising here is that the bias is similar to that seen for race, and shows us that even kids already have strong preferences based on weight,” said lead study author Asheley Cockrell Skinner of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 

The children had to make their judgements in a hurry. They only saw pictures of other children for 350 milliseconds, followed by an image of a fractal for 200 milliseconds. 

Each participant viewed eight pairs of images. Pictures showed children engaged in a variety of activities like reading, running, standing and studying. In the pictures, children wore similar outfits and had similar facial expressions. 

The difference in percentages of “good” fractal ratings — that is, the degree of young participants’ implicit bias — depended on how much the participants themselves weighed.

Overall, the implicit bias rate was 5.4 per cent, researchers report in Paediatrics. But among healthy-weight participants, the implicit bias rate was 7.9 per cent, compared with 1.4 per cent for overweight participants. 

“It’s possible children with obesity have greater exposure to other people, such as family members, who have obesity; [they] may be more accepting of obesity; or healthy children may not see children with obesity as `like them,’ which affects their preferences,” Skinner said by e-mail. 

Beyond its small size, other limitations of the study include its group of mostly white, affluent participants recruited from a single location, the authors note. This might mean the results would be different in a more diverse group of children. 

Still, the findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that weight bias starts early, said Rebecca Pearl, a researcher at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who wasn’t involved in the study. 

“Prior research has shown that children as young as preschool age show preferences for thin versus overweight peers,” Pearl, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. 

Parents can influence this, however, said Dr Anne McTiernan, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre.

“Parents should teach their children to be accepting of people of all sizes,” McTiernan, who was not involved in the study, said by email. “They can also screen for images their children see on TV and on the Internet.”

They should also lead by example, said Justin Ryder, a paediatrics researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School who wasn’t involved in the study. 

“Using terms like fat, unhealthy, lazy, bad, ugly, etc. in reference to a person struggling with being overweight or obese is likely to build a negative attitude toward that people of that body shape over time,” Ryder said by e-mail. “Parents likely do not realize their own implicit bias towards persons who are overweight or obese, making this a challenge.”

Catching up on lost sleep over weekends may help people keep their weight down, according to a study in South Korea.

Not getting enough sleep can disrupt hormones and metabolism and is known to increase the risk of obesity, researchers write in the journal Sleep.

“Short sleep, usually causing sleep debt, is common and inevitable in many cases and is a risk factor for obesity, hypertension, coronary heart disease, as well as mortality,” lead author Dr Chang-Ho Yun of the Seoul National University Budang Hospital told Reuters Health by e-mail.

Sleeping in may be better than napping, as the sleep may be deeper and follows the body’s sleep-wake rhythms more closely, Yun said.

To determine how weekend sleep is related to body weight, the researchers used data from a nationwide survey of more than 2,000 people who ranged in age from 19 to 82 years old. 

In face-to-face interviews, researchers asked participants about their height and weight, weekday and weekend sleep habits, mood and medical conditions.

The study team used this information to determine body mass index (BMI), a measure of weight relative to height, and whether participants engaged in catch-up sleep on weekends.

Weekend catch-up sleep was defined as sleeping more hours on weekend nights compared to weekday nights.

On average, the participants slept 7.3 hours per night and had BMIs of 23, which falls in the healthy range.

About 43 per cent of people slept longer on weekends by nearly two hours than they did on weekdays.

People who slept-in on weekends tended to sleep shorter hours during weekdays, but slept more hours overall across the week.

The researchers’ analysis found that those who slept-in on weekends had average BMIs of 22.8 while those who didn’t engage in catch-up sleep averaged 23.1, which was a small but statistically meaningful difference.

In addition, the more catch up sleep a person got, the lower their BMI tended to be, with each additional hour linked to a 0.12 decrease in BMI.

“Short sleepers tend to eat more meals per day, snack more, engage in more screen time and may be less likely to move due to increased sensations of fatigue when not rested,” said Jean-Philippe Chaput of the University of Ottawa in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Chaput noted that getting 30 minutes of heart-pumping exercise per day can help improve sleep. 

“Sleep experts say that if people need an alarm clock to wake up it is a sign that they don’t sleep enough,” Chaput said by e-mail.

“The more good behaviours we can have every day [and sustain for the rest of our lives] the better it is for the prevention of chronic diseases and optimising health. Sleep should be one of these priorities,” he said.

“If you cannot sleep sufficiently on workdays because of work or social obligations, try to sleep as much as possible on the weekend. It might alleviate the risk for obesity.”

PARIS — As obesity expands waistlines in the Western world, a silent killer linked to the condition nicknamed “human foie gras” is spurring a potential bonanza worth billions for drugs giants.

The disease, formally known as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), is caused by a buildup of fat in the liver. It is already the leading ailment cited in requests for liver transplants in the United States, Cecile Rabian of France’s Gilead laboratory told AFP.

“We imagine that this will also be the case in Europe very soon,” she added.

The GlobalData research group estimates that NASH could underpin a market worth more than $25 billion (22 billion euros) by 2026.

And the market should grow by a healthy 45 per cent each year in the initial phases of the rollout of drugs to counter the disease, GlobalData says — with the main customer base in the United States, western Europe and Japan.

Epidemiological studies suggest that 12 per cent of Americans and six per cent of Europeans already suffer from the condition.

Abnormal fat accumulation

NASH can lead to scarring of the liver, which in turn leads to cirrhosis.

Abnormal accumulation of fat in the liver can set off the first stage of the disease, characterised by a chronic inflammation of the liver.

Fatty liver in ducks and geese produces the prized French delicacy of foie gras — a natural phenomenon with migrating birds that is controversially replicated by poultry farmers who force-feed their fowl.

In humans, the inflammation slowly eats away at the liver’s cells, causing scar tissue to form known as fibrosis.

This can result in either liver cancer or what is known as non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.

NASH recently hit the headlines in France when a sports journalist suffering from the disease received a double liver and kidney transplant.

The pharmaceuticals giants began ramping up their response to NASH in 2015. 

US giant Allergan acquired Californian biotech firm Tobira for $1.7 billion last year, and recently hooked up with Switzerland’s Novartis to carry out clinical trials.

Danish diabetes giant Novo Nordisk is also interested — among many others.

“Since NASH goes through several stages, it will probably be necessary to bring together several action mechanisms — bi-therapies or tri-therapies — to try to be even more effective,” Rabian said.

Final trials

Three companies are leading the pack, with candidate drugs already in the final third phase of development: Gilead, US firm Intercept and French biotech firm Genfit.

Shares in Genfit, based in the northern French city of Lille, have skyrocketed amid acquisition rumours, and the company’s value now exceeds 900 million euros.

“There’s still a very high probability of being acquired by a big pharmaceutical group,” Genfit’s CEO Jean-Francois Mouney told AFP. “But we’re not idly waiting for customers to knock on our door, we’re moving forward. And the more we move ahead, the more we are attracting attention.”

The preliminary results of the phase-three trials are expected in mid-2019 for Genfit’s drug Elafibranor, which is designed to reduce if not halt inflammation and degeneration of liver cells.

The drug targets two receptors in the cell’s nucleus that regulate the genes that are key to its functioning.

Mouney hopes the green light will come for the drug to go on the market in Europe and the United States by the end of 2019 or early 2020. 

For now health authorities have approved only one diagnostic tool for NASH — a biopsy of liver tissue, which is a costly procedure, difficult to implement on a large scale and not without risk for the patient.

Prevention

The industry is looking to develop diagnostic tools for NASH such as blood tests or imaging techniques, without which the market will face a “bottleneck”, Arnaud Guerin, an analyst with the brokerage firm Portzamparc, told AFP.

The market should eventually rival that of oral anti-diabetes drugs, which cost $13,000-15,000 annually in the United States — about half that in Europe, Mouney said.

Some laboratories have mooted an annual cost of up to $50,000 per NASH patient.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 30 per cent of the world’s population was overweight in 2015. 

In view of the increase in NASH sufferers, health authorities say prevention is the best cure, and also the cheapest: a low-sugar diet accompanied by regular exercise.

When Jeff Bezos first launched Amazon.com in 1994, he gave himself a 30 per cent chance of success — slightly better than the 1 in 10 odds for Internet startups.

“That’s actually a very liberating expectation, expecting to fail,” he told Time magazine when it named him Person of the Year in 1999.

By then, sales had ticked past $1 billion, but the company had yet to turn a profit. Some analysts remained sceptical that Bezos could deliver on his plan to sell everything and anything. (“Anything with a capital A,” he told Time.)

But two decades after its launch, Amazon has conquered online retail, racking up $136 billion in sales in 2016. It is also taken on cloud computing, tech gadgets and the entertainment world. With its blockbuster announcement Friday that it is buying upscale grocery chain Whole Foods, Amazon now plans to upend yet another industry: grocery stores.

As consumers increasing rely on the Seattle-based e-commerce giant, it’s hard to remember a time when Amazon sold only one product: books.

“There’s virtually nothing left that they haven’t touched,” said Kelly O’Keefe, a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcentre.

Books

Amazon.com launched its online bookselling site at a time when bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks and Crown Books were familiar storefronts in US shopping malls.

Promoting itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore”, Amazon opened for business in July 1995, using major book distributors and wholesalers to rapidly fill its orders. “The idea of selling books online was a foreign one, it took a while to take off,” O’Keefe said.

But not long. Not beholden to the physical constraints of a bricks-and-mortar shop, Amazon was carrying more than 2.5 million titles by 1997, and its sales totaled $148 million that year. The company had 1.5 million customers in more than 150 countries.

The company went public May 15, 1997, with its stock priced at $18 a share and a market capitalization of roughly $438 million.

The stock closed Friday at $987.71, giving Amazon a total market value of $475 billion.

Amazon’s success with books allowed the e-commerce behemoth to expand far beyond its origins.

Selling electronics helped the company grow rapidly and put traditional electronics stores such as Circuit City out of business. It’s also possible that consumers learned new ways to price-shop; they “unintentionally were able to leverage brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms for their own products”, O’Keefe said.

From computers and home goods to toys and shoes, there’s not much that Amazon doesn’t offer shoppers these days.

Web services

In the early 2000s, Amazon realised it had been sitting on a technology gold mine. The computer systems that powered its online shop were so robust that Amazon figured it could expand its network and be the backbone of many more online stores.

The idea of a company trusting a third party to store its proprietary data didn’t take off overnight. But Amazon can thank Apple’s iPhone for unleashing a tsunami of small companies trying to build apps for the device. Many of those apps, including dating service Tinder and the “Candy Crush” games, tapped Amazon’s systems because they were simple and affordable. As the iPhone became ubiquitous by 2010, so had Amazon Web Services.

Alibaba, Google, Microsoft and IBM have offered stiff competition. But Amazon has established itself as a leader in cloud computing, and this year it could generate $15 billion in sales.

It’s setting itself up to be a major foundation — though with unproven financial returns — for the next generation of technology by allowing software developers to build on virtual assistant Alexa and machine learning, or automated computing, tools.

The computing infrastructure also has helped Amazon quickly launch an advertising technology business that helps businesses identify potential customers based on their interests. With just over $1 billion in ad sales, Amazon is not making a big dent in the businesses of industry leaders Google and Facebook. But advertising experts say Amazon has the data and software expertise to catch up fast.

Hardware

The company gave the world a glimpse of its enormous ambition when it starting making its own tech devices.

It launched the popular Kindle e-reader in 2007, a product that has gone on to be a category leader. Morgan Stanley estimates that the company sold $5 billion in Kindle devices in 2014.

It also got in on the tablet market with the Amazon Fire HD in 2012, and the video and audio streaming market in 2014 with the Amazon Fire TV — both with moderate success.

Its 2014 Fire Phone — meant to compete with the iPhone and Android phones — was a flop, though, and the company took a $170 million hit. It discontinued the phone a year later.

Instead of being burned by its smartphone venture, the company launched its digital home assistant device, the Amazon Echo, in 2015. The company was the first to release such a device, which doubled as a home speaker and came packaged with Alexa, the voice-commanded Artificial intelligence that can answer questions, make orders on Amazon and play music.

Though the Echo was initially slow to gain traction, the launch of similar devices from Google and Apple introduced more customers to the relatively new product category.

Analysts describe voice-enabled assistants as the next frontier, and the Echo as the front-runner. 

Patrick Moorhead, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, once described the Echo as a “Trojan horse”.

“You bought it to do a few simple things and be a speaker, then they get you comfortable and send you weekly updates to let you know what you can do with it, and ultimately once you go out and get those smart lights or smart door locks, you will be comfortable telling it to do things,” Moorhead said.

Entertainment

When Amazon Studios launched in 2010, few in Hollywood knew what to make of the nascent production company’s ambitions. The fledgling division solicited online script submissions, receiving thousands of screenplays for feature films and television pilots but developing few of them.

Run by former Walt Disney Co. executive Roy Price, Amazon’s foray into original programming started modestly, with series including the John Goodman political satire “Alpha House” that premiered in 2013, and the detective drama “Bosch” in 2015. Though its quirky “Mozart in the Jungle” and “Transparent” won industry plaudits, Amazon was still seen as an also-ran to Netflix’s booming original content strategy.

Then in 2017, Amazon made history by becoming the first streaming company to score an Oscar nomination for best picture, with the Casey Affleck drama “Manchester by the Sea”. Amazon paid an eye-popping $10 million for the domestic rights to the film at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

“To imagine two or three years ago that Amazon would have a film in Oscar contention would’ve been almost unthinkable,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at comScore, said at the time.

AmazonStudios, nominated for seven Academy Awards, ultimately took home three wins — with “Manchester by the Sea” being recognised for best original screenplay and best actor and “The Salesman” getting the nod for best foreign film.

The company’s media division has also grown through acquisitions. Buying Twitch gave Amazon a video rival to YouTube best known for live streams of video-game matches. Amazon Prime subscribers get access to special features on Twitch, which has seen an uptick in productions from other genres. That includes cooking shows, marathons of TV shows such as “Mister Rogers” and live sewing demonstrations.

Amazon also purchased a video-game studio that’s begun releasing a slate of games, including the team brawler “Breakaway”. And for a brief time through Twitch, it owned an e-sports team.

More recently, job postings show Amazon is looking for news editors to produce digests of trending topics that probably would be fed into Alexa, the virtual assistant found on Echo speakers.

Last year, the company also launched a music-streaming subscription, Amazon Music Unlimited, to compete with Pandora and Spotify.

Groceries

Amazon has long had aspirations as a grocer, starting in 1999 when it invested millions in HomeGrocer.com, a first-of-its-kind online supermarket that was ultimately doomed by the dot-com bust.

It wasn’t until 2007 that the company launched its first grocery delivery service, AmazonFresh, rolling it out slowly by invitation only to residents of the affluent Seattle suburb of Mercer Island. Pickup locations were later added in nearby Kirkland and Bellevue.

In 2013, AmazonFresh expanded to Los Angeles and San Francisco. More cities have been added, including San Diego, New York and Philadelphia as well as Tokyo and London.

The service was initially met with scepticism given the difficulty getting perishables to customers on time — particularly in cities known for traffic gridlock. And for all the convenience AmazonFresh provides, it often remains pricier than your neighbourhood market. Subscribers must be Amazon Prime members, which costs $99 a year. AmazonFresh is an additional monthly membership for $14.99.

The $13.7 billion Whole Foods deal marks Amazon’s biggest foray into groceries.

“The final was always food,” O’Keefe said. “It’s a smart deal for continuing the sales of online groceries, and it is likely that we’ll see them grow rapidly.”

What’s next?

Amazon’s deal-making team, led by Senior Vice President for Business Development Jeffrey Blackburn, does not appear to be slowing down. Amazon has showed interest in acquiring workplace chat app Slack in a deal that could value the startup at $9 billion, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Another possible next venture for Amazon is same-day delivery services such as GrubHub or Postmates, some analysts say.

“The next logical move is… strategic partnerships that allow Amazon to streamline the consumer experience from delivery to in-store shopping experience,” said Tom Ball, co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures.

For some, Amazon’s acquisitions signal lower costs for all the products consumers use on a daily basis. But Lloyd Greif, chief executive of Greif & Co., warns that: “Amazon is an octopus and it has its tentacles everywhere. Once it’s completed its mission, then you’re going to have the price inflexibility that’s not in the consumers’ interest.”

Chronic lower back pain is equally likely to improve with yoga classes as with physical therapy, according to a new study.

Twelve weeks of yoga lessened pain and improved function in people with low back pain as much as physical therapy sessions over the same period.

“Both yoga and physical therapy are excellent non-drug approaches for low back pain,” said lead author Dr Robert Saper, of Boston Medical Centre.

About 10 per cent of US adults experience low back pain, but not many are happy with the available treatments, Saper and colleagues write in the Annals of Internal Medicine. 

The American College of Physicians advised in February that most people with low back pain should try non-drug treatments like superficial heat or massage before reaching for medications.

Physical therapy is the most common non-drug treatment for low back pain prescribed by doctors, according to Saper and colleagues. Yoga is also backed by some guidelines and studies as a treatment option, but until now no research has compared the two.

For the new study, the researchers recruited 320 adults with chronic low back pain. The participants were racially diverse and tended to have low incomes.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. One group took part in a 12-week yoga programme designed for people with low back pain. Another took part in a physical therapy program over the same amount of time. People in the third group received a book with comprehensive information about low back pain and follow-up information every few weeks.

At the start of the study, participants reported — on average — moderate to severe functional impairment and pain. More than two-thirds were using pain medications.

To track participants function and pain during the study, the researchers surveyed them at six, 12, 26, 40 and 52 weeks using the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ). 

Scores on the RMDQ measure for function declined — meaning function was improving — by 3.8 points over the 12 weeks in the yoga group, compared to 3.5 points in the physical therapy group. Participants who received education had an average RMDQ score decline of 2.5.

Statistically, participants ended up with similar functional improvements whether they underwent yoga, physical therapy or education.

More people in the yoga and physical therapy groups ended up with noticeable improvements in function, however.

People would feel a noticeable improvement with a four to five point drop on the RMDQ, write Dr Douglas Chang, of the University of California, San Diego and Dr Stefan Kertesz of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in an accompanying editorial.

They write that 48 per cent of yoga participants and 37 per cent of physical therapy participants reached that goal, compared to 23 per cent of people who were in the education group.

For achieving noticeable differences in pain, physical therapy was again no better or worse than yoga. After 12 weeks, people in the yoga group were 21 percentage points less likely to used pain medications than those in the education group. That difference was 22 percentage points for physical therapy versus education.

The improvements among the people in yoga and physical therapy groups lasted throughout the year, the researchers found.

“If they remain the same after one year, it’s a good bet that their improvement will continue on,” Saper told Reuters Health.

One treatment method won’t help all or even most patients, wrote Chang and Kertesz in their editorial.

“Nevertheless, as Saper and colleagues have shown, yoga offers some persons tangible benefit without much risk,” they write. “In the end, however, it represents one tool among many.”