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Children who are bullied in fifth grade are more likely to become depressed and experiment with drugs and alcohol during their teen years than their peers who weren’t victimised by other kids, a US study suggests. 

Researchers followed almost 4,300 students starting in fifth grade, when they were around 11 years old. By tenth grade, 24 per cent of the teens drank alcohol, 15 per cent smoked marijuana and 12 per cent used tobacco. 

More frequent episodes of physical and emotional bullying in fifth grade were associated with higher odds of depression by seventh grade, which was in turn linked to greater likelihood of substance use later in adolescence, the study found. 

“We drew on the self-medication hypothesis when trying to understand why peer victimisation may lead to substance use over time,” said lead study author Valerie Earnshaw, a human development and family studies researcher at the University of Delaware in Newark. 

“This suggests that people use substances to try to relieve painful feelings or control their emotions,” Earnshaw said by e-mail. “So, youth who are bullied feel bad, or experience depressive symptoms, and then may use substances to try to feel better.”

For the study, researchers examined data from three surveys conducted from 2004 to 2011 among students at schools in Houston, Los Angeles and Birmingham, Alabama.

Students were asked if they had used tobacco, alcohol or marijuana in the past 30 days and how often they had been victims of bullying by their peers in the previous year. Questions on peer victimisation touched on both physical aggression like shoving and kicking as well as emotional taunts like saying nasty things about them to other kids. 

At the start of the study in fifth grade, about 10 per cent of participants said they had been victims of bulling. This was more common among kids who had chronic illnesses, sexual minorities and boys. 

By seventh grade, almost 2 per cent of the students reported symptoms of depression. 

And by the end of the study in tenth grade, substance use was more common among the kids who had previously reported bullying and depression. 

The study isn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove that bullying directly causes depression or that mental health issues directly cause substance use. Another limitation of the study is its reliance on teens to accurately report any episodes of bullying, symptoms of depression or substance use, the authors note. 

It’s also possible that teens who are bullied may later wind up drinking or using drugs because their peer groups include many adolescents who do both of these things, whether on sports teams or among crowds of particularly aggressive kids, said Bonnie Leadbeater, a psychology researcher at the University of Victoria in Canada. 

“Being ‘trapped’ in these networks can be particularly problematic in high school, where you see the same people every day,” Leadbeater, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by e-mail. 

“Youth with multiple networks beyond school through sports, music, art, religious activities, volunteering and work are more apt to find friends and others who see their talents, strengths and abilities,” Leadbeater added. “These strengths are often established in late elementary school.”

The trouble with bullying that leads to mental health problems is that teens with depression and anxiety are more likely to withdraw from peers and lack interest in most things.

“Young teens need to have ways of dealing with peer conflict before it becomes bullying,” Leadbeater said. “Young teens need to believe that getting help is normative and that bullying is not.”

Even though I have a pretty strong junk mail filter installed on my computer, every now and then some spam messages manage to permeate through the shield and appear in my inbox folder. And then I was hooked, because unlike other normal people who delete them immediately, I find myself scrutinising the correspondence in inordinate detail.

Out of all the various chain mails that I ended up reading, my absolute favourite were the ones that alerted me of an imminent heart attack. For instance, the recent missive I received had all the usual warning signs I should watch out for, like: shortness of breath, fullness in chest, heaviness in right arm, shoulder, jaw and so on but the primary threat, marked in block letters was, “an abrupt change in how you feel”! 

I mean, for females, especially the fifty plus types, that was one sentiment we were all too familiar with. So were we, the entire tribe of abruptly changing feelers, in the unfortunate situation of facing a potential heart failure any minute?

Another warning that caught my eye was labelled under number five, and cautioned against “a sense of impending doom”! This one universally applied to everybody in the world, particularly after the new American President was sworn in earlier this year. Therefore, were we to assume that we were jointly in the process of experiencing a collective cardiac arrest? Was that it? 

A strange thing about these messages was that the symptoms I was supposed to recognise if I was having a stroke, changed on a daily basis. Along with the tingling sensation in my toes, sometimes yawning for long periods or even sneezing without a reason would be added to it. In most cases, without even stretching my imagination, all of them could be linked to me, and I was advised to seek medical help immediately.

If I made the effort of examining these mails till the very end, they would also tell me about what happened to the people who did not heed the signs, and how losing valuable time, lost a precious life.

Now, as if the above frightening scenarios were not sufficiently scary, the senders of these spam mails stressed that I had to share the message with five hundred people in the next three minutes or a deadly calamity would befall me. Someone should have asked them, was suffering a heart attack not calamitous enough? Also, what could possibly be deadlier than that?

The writers of these chain letters love exclamation marks and the mail themselves were riddled with typos. Most people I spoke to confessed that they hit the forward button because they preferred to annoy a friend rather than take a chance at being killed by someone who was murdered but whose ghost evidently still lived in the basement. 

When the immense fortune of Bill Gates was being distributed via chain mail, I did not follow any of the instructions to double my wealth, but as soon as the tenth misspelled stroke alert, in italics, appeared in my mail notification, I became worried. 

“I might have a cardiac arrest in four hours,” I told my husband that morning. 

There was no response. 

“I didn’t forward the heart attack symptom mail to fifty people you see,” I explained. 

“That was spam and should have gone into your junk folder,” he said. 

“Maybe I will visit the heart specialist today,” I muttered. 

“I would recommend the computer specialist,” he stated.

People who do not have conditions like celiac disease tend to adopt gluten-free diets because of perceived overall health benefits, but a new study says cutting the protein from diets certainly won’t benefit heart health.

In one analysis, researchers found that gluten-free diets were tied to greater heart risk among people without celiac disease, gluten sensitivity or wheat allergies.

“I think it’s important to realise that just because there is a notion that gluten-free is healthy doesn’t make it so,” said lead author Dr Benjamin Lebwohl, of the Celiac Disease Centre at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York.

He and his colleagues write in the journal BMJ that about 1 per cent of people in the United States have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune response that damages the lining of the small intestine when the body encounters the protein gluten that is found in wheat, rye and barley.

People with celiac disease are at an increased risk of heart disease but, the researchers point out, that risk is reduced by their switching to a gluten-free diet.

Despite no evidence that people without celiac disease and similar conditions benefit from cutting out gluten, some people believe that eating the protein may increase the risk of poor health outcomes, including obesity and heart disease.

Most people who follow gluten-free diets have celiac disease, the study team notes. Still, one national survey in 2013 found nearly a third of people in the United States said they were trying to minimise or avoid gluten.

For the new study, the researchers used data collected from a group of 121,700 female nurses followed since 1976 and a group of 51,529 male healthcare workers followed since 1986.

In addition to collected data on their health, the participants filled out food questionnaires every four years between 1986 and 2010.

People were separated into five groups based on the amount of gluten in their diets. People who ate the least gluten consumed about 3 grams of the protein each day, compared with people in the who ate the highest amount, between about 8 and 10 grams each day.

Overall, there were 352 coronary heart disease events like heart attacks per 100,000 people per year among those who ate the least gluten. That compared to 277 events per 100,000 people per year among those who ate the most gluten.

After adjusting for known risk factors, the researchers write that there was no statistically meaningful difference between the two groups.

“We think this is very important, because this boom in gluten-free diets and all these claims that it’s beneficial to an individual’s health to be on a gluten-free diet are not based on science,” said Dr Peter Green, a co-author of the study and director of Columbia’s Celiac Disease Centre.

After adjusting the data to account for the amount and type of grains people consumed, the researchers did find a slightly decreased risk of heart disease events among people who ate the most gluten compared to those who ate the least.

“People who had a low-gluten diets tended to have a diet that was low in whole grains,” said senior author Andrew Chan, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. “That does have health implications.”

Specifically, the researchers write, the risk of heart attacks and other events tend to decrease as people eat more whole grains.

“If people are restricting their diet, there is always the possibility that their diets become deficient in things that we know are beneficial,” Chan told Reuters Health.

Green also said gluten-free diets may lack fibre and B vitamins and may increase the risk of heavy metal toxicity.

“If someone is on a gluten-free diet, they should be under the guidance of a registered dietician,” he said.

Somewhere between hot hatch and rally car in character and a practical premium crossover SUV in execution, the Audi RS Q3 Performance is a prodigiously powerful trendsetter in the compact crossover SUV segment, with nary a rival, besides the Mercedes-AMG GLA45. First introduced in 2011, updated in 2015 and with the most powerful Performance arriving last year, the RS Q3 comes courtesy of Ingolstadt’s recently renamed Audi Sport skunkworks division. And, just like Audi’s early and now iconic Quattro and RS2 high performance models, the RS Q3 boasts a brawny, distinctly gurgling and award-winning turbocharged 5-cylinder engine powering all four wheels.

Pouncing posture

Also scooping the Middle East Car of the Year’s Best Compact Premium SUV award for 2017, the RS Q3 is based on a wider and taller version of Audi’s RS3, and shares both much of the driving agility and purposefully eager demeanour of its lower mega-hatch sister. A practical and utilitarian crossover SUV with good cargo space, manoeuvrability and ground clearance to easily dispatch, lumps, bumps, cracks and unpaved roads, the RS Q3 Rides on matt titanium finished 50cm alloy wheels, shod with 255/35R20 tyres, and kitted with 8-piston callipers and drilled ventilated wave design front brake discs for better heat dissipation and fade resistance.

A more aggressive take on the garden-variety Q3 compact crossover SUV, the RS Q3 most notably features more muscular bumpers with larger, hungrier front intakes with lateral slats, and heavily profiled rear air splitter with large oval exhaust tip, which lends it a ready-to-pounce demeanour. Dominated by Audi large signature single frame grille with black honeycomb design, the RS Q3 slim browed headlights are framed by an LED strip for a moodier appearance, while its slanted roofline is finished off with a large tailgate-top spoiler. Meanwhile, the driven model’s “java green” customised paint finish well-reflected the RS Q3 performance’s exuberant character.

Swift and snarling

Powered by a charismatic 2.5-litre turbocharged direct injection 5-cylinder engine mounted transversely and powering all four wheels through a Haldex-derived “quattro” system rather than Audi’s more traditional and signature in-line Quattro system, the RS Q3 is offered in two states of tune. Developing 335BHP and 331lb/ft in base guise and a blistering 362BHP at 5550-6800rpm and 343lb/ft throughout a broad 1625-5550rpm band in Performance spec, as driven, the RS Q3 is among the world’s quickest production SUVs. Digging its four driven wheels tenaciously into tarmac and with quick spooling turbo and succinct and swift shifting 7-speed dual-clutch automated gearbox, the RS Q3 launches viciously from standstill, and pulls with consistent verve to high speeds.

Quicker accelerating than many more expensive and powerful sports SUVs including the Porsche Macan Turbo and Range Rover Sport SVR, the lighter, smaller and nimbler Audi RS Q3 Performance dispatches the 0-100km/h dash in just 4.4-seconds and with optional speed de-restriction, can attain a 270km/h top speed. Snarling, gurgling and growling with a unique off-beat 5-cylinder note, the RS Q3 Performance suffers virtually no turbo lag. Pulling hard from low revs and with an avalanche of mid-range torque, it pulls with muscular confidence and urgency at virtually any speed or gear, while power wells up is a progressive yet prodigious burst, under-written by its generous mid-range and peaking at a broad top-end.

Versatile and agile

Versatile at mid-range and punchy at top-end, the RS Q3’s gearing features a short and aggressive first ratio to help achieve its remarkable acceleration, and long and relaxed sixth and top gears for refined motorway cruising and moderate 8.6l/100km combined fuel consumption. Delivering power to all four wheels with a front-bias in normal conditions, the RS Q3’s centre multi-plated clutch differential can re-allocate power between front and rear to ensure traction and grip is available where required through corners and on loose surfaces. Gearbox shift modes include a more aggressive “dynamic” mode for quicker responsiveness, while one can also use steering wheel-mounted paddles for more engaging sequential manual shifts. 

Riding on MacPherson strut front and multi-link rear suspension with standard fixed rate, or optional adaptive, dampers, the RS Q3 is certainly on the firm side to maintain good body control through hard-driven and tight corners, but nonetheless remains settled at speed, comfortable for daily driving and forgiving over imperfections. Driven with fixed rate dampers, the RS Q3 finds a happy medium for sporty driving and usability. Brutishly swift though eager and nimble, the compact RS Q3 may not be as agile as its lower and lighter RS3 sister, and is as close to a hatch as tall SUVs get, with its manoeuvrability through winding roads and tight corners.

Eager and engaging

With relatively short wheelbase and wide track, the RS Q3 turns-in with eager poise, gripping hard on the way in and out, all the while turning with ease and agility as power is reallocated rearwards before it pounces out onto the straight. Meaty and quick at 2.7-turns lock-to-lock, the RS Q3’s electric-assisted steering is direct and precise. It is more refined than textured in terms of feel for the road, but allowing one to keep both hands at quarter-to-three through even the tightest corners. Committed, composed, reassuring and somewhat playful when through corners, the RS Q3 is nevertheless settled and buttoned down on rebound, while cabin and ride refinement is commendable.

Accommodating, user-friendly, sporty and luxurious inside, the RS Q3 Performance’s cabin is more generously spaced than anticipated. Front seating is well-adjustable, supportive and comfortable, with a commanding, alert and engaging driving position, while rear seats feature better rear headroom than expected and boot volume increasing from 356- to 1261-litres with rear seats folded. 

Intuitively layouts include clear large instrumentation, thick flat-bottom steering when and pop-up infotainment screen from which driving modes are accessed. Contrast stitched leather upholstery, carbon-fibre trim and soft textures are plenty, while standard and optional equipment is extensive, including panoramic roof, Bose surround sound, adaptive lighting, Bluetooth interface and parking system with reversing camera, in addition to much more.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 2.5-litre, transverse, turbocharged 5-cylinders

Bore x stroke: 82.5 x 92.8mm

Compression ratio: 10:1

Valve-train: 20-valve, DOHC, direct injection, continuously variable valve timing

Gearbox: 7-speed automated dual clutch, four-wheel-drive, electronic multi-plate clutch and differential lock

Ratios: 1st 3.563; 2nd 2.526; 3rd 1.679; 4th 1.022; 5th 0.788; 6th 0.761; 7th 0.635; R 2.789

Final drive, 1st, 4th, 5th, R/2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th: 4.733:1/3.944:1

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 362 (367) [270] @5550-6800rpm

Specific power: 146BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 221.7BHP/tonne (unladen)

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 343 (465) @1625-5550rpm

Specific torque: 187.5Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight: 281Nm/tonne (unladen)

0-100km/h: 4.4-seconds

Top speed: 270km/h

Fuel consumption, urban/extra-urban/combined:

11.8/6.8/8.6-litres/100km 

CO2 emissions, combined: 203g/km

Fuel capacity: 64-litres

Wheelbase: 2603mm

Track, F/R: 1571/1577mm

Unladen/kerb weight: 1655kg/1730kg

Steering: Variable assistance rack & pinion

Lock-to-lock: 2.7-turns

Turning Circle: 11.8-metres

Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/multi-link

Brakes, F/R: Perforated, ventilated discs, 365 x 34mm/310 x22mm

Brake calipers, F/R: 8-/1-piston

Tyres: 255/35R20

The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly

By Hashem Gharaibeh

Translated by Nesreen Akhtarkhavari

US: Michigan State University Press, 2017

Pp. 150

Nothing about this novel is exactly what one expects. Such is the originality of Jordanian writer Hashem Gharaibeh’s thinking and the prose in which he expresses himself in this fictionalised account of his own experience. “The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly” is billed as a prison novel but has little of the heaviness usually associated with the genre. 

As another noted Jordanian writer, Samiha Khreis, writes in a blurb on the back cover: “The author ignores his personal wounds to embrace the beauty of humanity inside the prison walls, forgiving society its transgression against him, and soaring free, celebrating his humanity and the humanity of others. He takes the prison novel to a new height.”

The protagonist, Imad, is still a student at Yarmouk University, when he is arrested and imprisoned for being a communist in the late 70s. The novel covers a year and a half in Irbid Prison, not far from his native village, Hawara. At first, his daydreams centre on his university friends: their “optimistic thoughts of freeing Palestine, Arab unity, social justice, his strong belief in the right to free expression, and the freedom to change.” (p. 18)

Soon, however, he turns his attention to his fellow prisoners, recording fascinating vignettes of thieves, murderers, drug dealers, gangsters and former government officials accused of corruption. Each has a tell-tale nickname, personality and story all their own — how they landed in prison, their dreams and idiosyncrasies, how they treat others. Most interesting is Gharaibeh’s sketch of the hierarchy that exists among them, and how Imad felt most at home with the low-ranking prisoners. “Imad thought that this sinful group of people knew how to practise solidarity and advocacy and were able to stand their ground better than educated elites, frustrated politicians, and politicised party members.” (p. 58)

Chief among them is “The Cat”, a particularly agile thief whose “lightheartedness was contagious and transformed the ward” as he “entertained them with folksongs and tales.” (p. 32)

He is also frequently punished for sneaking into the forbidden area by the gate for a glimpse of freedom: “How beautiful was Irbid, surrounded by its villages like a necklace. Hanging gardens, crimson roofs, walls of figs and olive trees, and a sea of wheat.” (p. 46)

From “The Cat”, Imad learns to free his mind and soul, to be as free as one can be in prison, to plot an escape. Together, they initiate a protest whereby the prisoners refuse to return inside after the Maghrib prayer. “Comrade Imad felt the cloud of fear inside him vanish, and felt the jasmine bloom in his soul.” (p. 50)

The inner freedom he attains is the main factor in his stubborn refusal to renounce his communist affiliation, although this would secure his release. Despite initial confusion, Imad develops a rock-solid integrity, a combination of naiveté and wisdom that governs all his dealings.

If flying and the striving for freedom that it represents is the overarching theme of this novel, the major metaphor is jasmine. When arrested from his home on an early spring morning, Imad clutches a branch of jasmine plucked from the plant by his front door. “The scent of jasmine, embroidered with frozen dewdrop crystals, spread and filled his soul with a determination to resist.” (p. 24)

Images of jasmine reoccur in the novel alluding to all that he misses, all that is soft, warm and welcoming — his mother, village life, the beauty of the bits of nature he can glimpse from the prison windows, a girl he falls in love with. “The fragrance of jasmine spreads with its astonishing simplicity. His mother’s presence with her thick braids, dangling like a lifeline, appears.” (p. 29)

The close connection between Imad’s nostalgia for everyday things and his determination to resist attests to how firmly grounded his convictions are (and, by extension, those of the author). He is not so much committed to an abstract ideology as to life itself.

In this novel, Gharaibeh merges the universal with the local, paying tribute to humanity’s striving for freedom and to all that he loves in Jordan, particularly the way of life in the North. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by translator Nesreen Akhtarkhavari’s introduction about Gharaibeh’s life, and by the author’s essay on how he wrote “The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly”, which was first published in Arabic (Dar Fada’at, 2010). Gharaibeh concludes by saying: “I still dream of flying.” (p. xxviii)

PARIS — A huge range of organisations and companies around the world have been affected by the WannaCry ransomware cyber attack, described by the EU’s law enforcement agency as “unprecedented”.

From “cyberwar” to “hacktivism”, here are some of the major cyber attacks over the past 10 years:

Cyberwar

One of the first massive cyber attacks to hit a state occurred in spring 2007 in the Baltic nation of Estonia, when a spate of intrusions forced the closure of government websites and disrupted leading businesses.

The assault paralysed key corporate and government web services for days and knocked out the national emergency hotline for more than an hour. Estonia, which was in the midst of a diplomatic dispute with Russia, blamed Moscow for the attacks, which it denied.

A year later, Georgia suffered similar attacks which crippled its official presidential website and the main broadcast networks during the South Ossetia war. The attack was attributed to Russian nationalists.

In July 2009, a dozen US government websites, including those of the White House, Pentagon and State Department, were targeted in a coordinated cyberattack which also struck sites in South Korea.

South Korea was again the victim of a cyber attack in March 2013 amid tensions with North Korea. The attack paralysed the websites and tens of thousands of computers at several TV stations and banks for hours.

In November 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment became the target of the biggest cyber attack in US corporate history, linked to its North Korea satire “The Interview”.

The hackers — a group calling itself Guardians of Peace — released a trove of embarrassing e-mails, film scripts and other internal communications, including information about salaries and employee health records.

Washington blamed Pyongyang for the hacking, a claim it denied — though it had strongly condemned the film, which features a fictional CIA plot to assassinate leader Kim Jong-un.

And in 2010, a computer virus called Stuxnet attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, setting back the country’s atomic programme. 

Although hackers of Russian, North Korean or Chinese origin are often cited, many believe the attack was orchestrated by the United States and Israel, but they have never acknowledged responsibility.

Hacktivism

The loose-knit piracy collective Anonymous, arguably the most well-known hacking group, has targeted a number of organisations under its mantle of fighting injustices, including the Pentagon, the Church of Scientology, the Daesh  group and Mastercard.

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, founded 10 years ago by Australian Julian Assange, specialises in the release of classified materials.

In 2010, it published 251,000 classified cables from US embassies around the world and thousands of military documents on Afghanistan.

Last year it published files and communications from the Democratic Party, damaging presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. US intelligence officials said the release was part of a Russian plot to aid the eventual election victor Donald Trump.

In March, the group released a large number of files and computer code from the CIA’s top-secret hacking operations, showing how the agency exploits vulnerabilities in popular computer and networking hardware and software to gather intelligence.

A similar election attack targeted the campaign of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron barely 24 hours before the final round of voting in April, when thousands of documents from his En Marche! (On the Move!) movement were dumped online.

The campaign denounced the “massive and coordinated hacking attack”, calling it an attempt at “democratic destabilisation, like that seen during the last presidential campaign in the United States”.

Cyberterrorism

In January 2015, a group declaring support for Daesh terrorists hacked into the social media accounts of US Central Command (CENTCOM), an embarrassing setback for Washington in its war against IS in Syria and Iraq.

A black-and-white banner with the words “CyberCaliphate” and “I love you ISIS” replaced CENTCOM’s usual logo on Twitter and YouTube before the pages were suspended.

Two months later, a group calling itself the “Islamic State Hacking Division” published what they said were the names and addresses of 100 military personnel and urged supporters to kill them.

It posted information about members of the air force, army and navy, including photos and ranks.

There have also been countless criminal attacks around the world, with hackings of online payment systems costing more than $300 million (275 million euros) of losses for about a dozen top US and European companies between 2005 and 2012.

Major companies and media houses have also been targeted, including Yahoo!, which was targeted by hackers seeking personal data on millions of users in both 2013 and 2014.

In April 2015, France’s TV5 Monde television suffered a major hacking by self-proclaimed Daesh militants, but an investigation later revealed that the hackers were Russian.

Hackers managed to shut down transmissions for several hours and hijacked the channel’s website and social networks.

They say that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. But this is definitely not true of the vagus nerve, which wanders from the stomach to the brain, passing through the heart, oesophagus and lungs along the way.

A new study offers fresh support for an intriguing theory about the vagus nerve’s role in Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder that causes tremors, gait difficulties and sometimes dementia in roughly 1 million Americans and as many as 10 million people worldwide.

This theory suggests the vagus nerve may be more than a highway for signals to travel to the brain from the many organs it touches. It may also be the conduit for transporting the protein alpha-synuclein from the stomach to the brain, where it forms telltale clumps in Parkinson’s sufferers.

If true, this theory would pinpoint a possible origin of the degenerative brain disorder — in the gut. It would also confirm the centrality of this mysterious protein, whose precise role in Parkinson’s is not well understood.

And finally, it would suggest a possible way to block the progression of Parkinson’s: a surgical procedure currently used to treat people with gastric ulcers that involves cutting the vagus nerve to sever the pathway from gut to brain.

This last point is where the new research begins.

The study authors, from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, the University of Southern California and elsewhere, combed through a comprehensive registry of Swedish medical records to compare rates of Parkinson’s disease among people who got that surgical procedure, called a vagotomy, and those who had not.

They wondered if, incidental to a vagotomy’s role as a treatment for peptic ulcers, it might also drive down the risk of Parkinson’s by blocking alpha-synuclein’s route to the brain.

What they found did not appear, at first blush, to be telling: Sweden’s 9,430 vagotomy patients were statistically no less likely to develop Parkinson’s over time than were the 377,200 non-vagotomised Swedes that made up the comparison group.

But not all vagotomies are equal, and when the researchers looked at the subset of patients who got the most drastic version of the procedure, they saw a difference.

Among patients who got a truncal vagotomy — which removes the vagus nerve from contact with the stomach, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, small intestine and proximal colon — many years of follow-up showed that Parkinson’s disease was 22 per cent less common than it was among people in the comparison group.

While the theory that Parkinson’s starts in the gut is controversial, there is some evidence for it in mice, in laboratory cells and in humans. Alpha-synuclein protein clumps have been detected in the guts of humans with very early Parkinson’s. And in mice that had alpha-synuclein from the brains of human Parkinson’s patients implanted in their intestinal wall, researchers later found movement of those proteins in the vagus nerve.

This latest study, published in the journal Neurology, offers epidemiological evidence to support that theory.

“If this is true,” the study authors wrote, “resection of the vagus nerve may stop or delay the spreading” of the proteins that gum up the works in the brains of Parkinson’s patients.