Newswise BOSTON (March 6, 2017)An epidemiological analysis of data from more than 6,000 American and Canadian women with breast cancer finds that post-diagnosis consumption of foods containing isoflavonesestrogen-like compounds primarily found in soy foodis associated with a 21 percent decrease in all-cause mortality. This decrease was seen only in women with hormone-receptor-negative tumors, and in women who were not treated with endocrine therapy such as tamoxifen.

The study, led by nutrition and cancer epidemiologist Fang Fang Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, was published March 6 in Cancer.

At the population level, we see an association between isoflavone consumption and reduced risk of death in certain groups of women with breast cancer. Our results suggest, in specific circumstances, there may be a potential benefit to eating more soy foods as part of an overall healthy diet and lifestyle, said Zhang, who is also the 2016-2017 Miriam E. Nelson Tisch Faculty Fellow at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life and an adjunct scientist in nutritional epidemiology at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts.

Since we only examined naturally occurring dietary isoflavone, we do not know the effect of isoflavone from supplements. We recommend that readers keep in mind that soy foods can potentially have an impact, but only as a component of an overall healthy diet, she adds.

Isoflavones have been shown to slow the growth of breast cancer cells in laboratory studies, and epidemiological analyses in East Asian women with breast cancer found links between higher isoflavone intake and reduced mortality. However, other research has suggested that the estrogen-like effects of isoflavones may reduce the effectiveness of endocrine therapies used to treat breast cancer. Because of this double effect, it remains unknown whether isoflavone consumption should be encouraged or avoided by breast cancer patients.

In the current study, Zhang and her colleagues, including Esther John, Ph.D., senior cancer epidemiologist at the Cancer Prevention Institute of California, analyzed data on 6,235 American and Canadian breast cancer patients from the Breast Cancer Family Registry, a National Cancer Institute-funded program that has collected clinical and questionnaire data on enrolled participants and their families since 1995. Women were sorted into four quartile groups based on the amount of isoflavone they were estimated to have consumed, calculated from self-reported food frequency questionnaires. Mortality was examined after a median follow-up of 9.4 years.

The team found a 21 percent decrease in all-cause mortality among women in the highest quartile of intake, when compared to those in the lowest quartile. The association between isoflavone intake and reduced mortality was strongest in women with tumors that lacked estrogen and progesterone receptors. Women who did not receive endocrine therapy as a treatment for their breast cancer had a weaker, but still significant association. No associations were found for women with hormone-receptor-positive tumors and for women who received endocrine therapy.

While the study categorized women in the highest quartile as those who consumed 1.5 milligrams or more of isoflavone per dayequivalent to a few dried soybeansthe authors caution that individuals tend to underestimate their food intake when filling out questionnaires.

The comparisons between high and low consumption in our study are valid, but our findings should not be interpreted as a prescription, Zhang said. However, based on our results, we do not see a detrimental effect of soy intake among women who were treated with endocrine therapy, which has been hypothesized to be a concern. Especially for women with hormone-receptor-negative breast cancer, soy food products may potentially have a beneficial effect and increase survival.

The large size and diverse racial/ethnic makeup of the Breast Cancer Family Registry allowed the researchers to evaluate mortality risk across different subtypes of breast cancer and subgroups of patients, and adjust for confounding factors. However, the authors note that dietary isoflavone intake was correlated with socioeconomic and lifestyle factors, which may also play a role in lowering mortality. In particular, women who consumed higher levels of dietary isoflavone were more likely to be Asian Americans, young, physically active, more educated, not overweight, never smokers, and drink no alcohol. Although the team controlled for these factors in the analyses, the possibility of a partial confounding effect on the associations identified in the study cannot be ruled out.

Whether lifestyle factors can improve survival after diagnosis is an important question for women diagnosed with hormone-receptor negative breast cancer, a more aggressive type of breast cancer. Our findings suggest that survival may be better in patients with a higher consumption of isoflavones from soy food, John said.

Additional authors on this study are Danielle E. Haslam, nutritional epidemiology doctoral candidate at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Mary Beth Terry, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, Julia A. Knight, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System in Toronto, Irene L. Andrulis, Ph.D., professor of molecular genetics at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System in Toronto, Mary Daly, M.D., Ph.D., chair and professor in the department of clinical genetics and director of risk assessment program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Saundra S. Buys, M.D., medical director of Huntsman Cancer Institute's high risk breast cancer clinic and a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

This work was supported by an award from National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (CA164920).

Zhang, F. F., Haslam, D. E., Terry, M. B., Knight, J.A., Andrulis, I. L., Daly, M., Buys, S.S., and John, E. M. (2017). Dietary isoflavone intake and all-cause mortality in breast cancer survivors: the Breast Cancer Family Registry. Cancer. Published online: March 6, 2017. DOI: 10.1002/cncr.30615. URL upon publication: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/cncr.30615

About the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University

The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University is the only independent school of nutrition in the United States. The schools eight degree programs which focus on questions relating to nutrition and chronic diseases, molecular nutrition, agriculture and sustainability, food security, humanitarian assistance, public health nutrition, and food policy and economics are renowned for the application of scientific research to national and international policy.

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Excerpt from:
Isoflavones in Food Associated with Reduced Mortality for Women with Some Breast Cancers - Newswise (press release)

By suggesting low-cost adjustments to existing programs, the new team is showing how a better understanding of human behavior can improve performance across government.

People do strange things.

To help explain why, in February, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney's Policy Office launched GovLabPHL, a multi-agency team for developing "innovative and evidence-based practice" in city government.

The team aims to increase participation in government services and remove barriers to access by studying the minds and actions of its citizens. Born initially out of a Living Cities grant awarded to the city in September 2014, GovLabPHL codifies and expands the creation of a team that puts human behavior first. Now with workshops, a 10-month speaker seriesand six projects underway covering topicsfrom bike share to littering the team is gaining interest from agencies across the city thatwant the low-cost human-centric treatment.

Prior to the formal launch of the team, GovLabPHL proved its efficacy by targeting the Department of Revenue's senior citizen water bill discount program. There were some who were eligible but no matter what the city did, it couldn't get those residentsto apply. The team did research and put out surveys to discover that people thought the paperwork was too confusing. So the city began sending out paperwork with pre-populated fields. It tried different sized envelopes to see which people responded to most. Ittried hand-writing addresses on the envelopes instead of printing them. The team found what worked and that became the new way of doing things.

Agencies are interested because the team is finding low-cost tweaks to improve theirmissions without turning anyone's office upside down, explained Anjali Chainani, director of policy at the mayor's office.

"We want to ensure we're getting our best return on investment, and what that means is that we have people on the ground from the front lines all the way through to the service delivery folks that are engaged in the process of how that program or how that service is actually being designed," Chainani said.

Six projects underway now include:

Chainani reported that about 20 other agencies have expressed interest in partnering with the team and its allies. GovLabPHL pairs behaviorists from five universities who are donating their time to help agencies achieve their program goals. The five partner universities are University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Drexel University, Princeton University, and Swarthmore College.Dan Hopkins from University of Pennsylvania and Syon Bhanot from Swarthmore College are the program's lead academic partners.

The program can be broken into three components helping citizens and city employees to learn, piloting new programs and increasing engagement.

"We want to work with behavioral scientists and design experts in looking at the barriers we may unknowingly put up that may prevent residents from connecting with the city or engaging with a particular program," she said. "If there's a messaging campaign already invested in and going out, we layer that with design methods and we layer it with behavioral science to really look at what evidence has already told us about what motivates people's actions and how to keep people engaged."

Philadelphia follows similar programs launched in cities and federal agencies under the Obama administration. The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, includes more than a dozen federal departments and agencies who completed more than 30 pilots. The United Kingdom runs a similar office called The Behavioral Insights Team. The Office of the City Administrator's Lab @ DC has embedded more than 30 researchers inside Washington, D.C., government.

"There are so many triggers in our environment that lead us to take a specific action that we don't really pay attention to and then there are equally enough things that we just ignore because there's mass information that comes to us," Chainani said. "We're looking to really be innovative in a government that's investing all this money in these programs, and is really able to reach a level that is comfortable for the citizens and where they feel comfortable approaching the city and applying for these programs."

Editor's Note: Minor edits were made to quotes for readability.

Original post:
Philadelphia launches GovLabPHL to improve agency performance with behavioral science - StateScoop (registration)

Ad will collapse in seconds CLOSE bad science March 2, 2017 03/02/2017 11:26 a.m. By Jesse Singal

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Late in January, the researchers Jordan Anaya, Nick Brown, and Tim van der Zee identified some fairly baffling problems in the research published by Cornell Universitys Food and Brand Lab, one of the more famous and prolific behavioral-science labs in the country, and published a paper revealing their findings. As I wrote last month, the problems included 150 errors in just four of [the] labs papers, strong signs of major problems in the labs other research, and a spate of questions about the quality of the work that goes on there.

Brian Wansink, the labs head and a big name in social science, was a co-author on all those papers, and refused to share the underlying data in a manner that could help resolve the situation, though he did announce certain reforms to his labs practices, and said he would be hiring someone uninvolved with the original papers to reanalyze the data. Wansink, whose lab is known for producing a steady stream of catchy, media-friendly findings about how to nudge people toward healthier eating and habits in general, has also openly admitted to a variety of data slicing-and-dicing methods that are very likely to produce misleading and overblown results.

Wansinks problems just got a lot worse. Today, Brown, a Ph.D. student at the University of Groningen, published a blog post highlighting many more problems with Wansinks research practices. First, it appears that over the years, Wansink has made a standard practice of self-plagiarism, regularly taking snippets of his text from one publication and dropping them into another a practice that, while not as serious as outright data fraud or plagiarizing someone elses material, is very much frowned upon. And sometimes it was more than snippets. Brown includes the following image of one Wansink article in which all of the yellow material (plus three of the four figures, which Brown said he couldnt figure out how to highlight) is lifted from Wansinks own previously published work:

In another instance, Brown writes, Wansink appears to have published the same text as two different book chapters at around the same time. Each chapter is around 7,000 words long, he writes. The paragraph structures are identical. Most of the sentences are identical, or differ only in trivial details.

Brown both offers a compelling case that this sort of self-plagiarism was a pattern for Wansink, and that he may have engaged in more serious misconduct as well. Summing up Browns findings in The Guardian, Chris Chambers and Pete Etchells write:

Its important to note that Wansink published these studies before coming to the Food and Brand Lab, but still this is entirely bizarre. Its a really, really hard thing to explain, and Occams razor doesnt point to any explanations that dont involve, at best, negligence that would likely derail the careers of most young researchers, and at worst outright data fraud.

Its now even more urgent for Wansink and Cornell to offer up a meaningful response to this steady drumbeat of serious allegations. As I argued last month, 150 errors in four papers would on its own be a reason not to trust anything produced by the Food and Brand Lab not until Wansink can explain exactly what happened. Now, though? What possible reason is there to trust this labs output at all, let alone for journalists to continue to publicize its findings?

Up to this point, it appears Cornell has given Wansink near-full discretion over how to handle all this. While Cornell encourages transparent responses to scientific critique, we respect our facultys role as independent investigators to determine the most appropriate response to such requests, absent claims of misconduct or data sharing agreements, John J. Carberry, the universitys head of media relations, said in a statement emailed to Science of Us last month.

That sentence has not aged well. Maybe its time for Cornell to seize the reins rather than act as though whats going on here is just normal scientific back and forth that Wansink can address on his own. Until the universitys administrators do, this growing scandal will continue to inflict serious damage on Cornells reputation as a research university.

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Cornell's Food and Brand Lab Appears to Be Melting Down - New York Magazine

Posted by Carly Burgess on March 3, 2017 Leave a Comment

Jesse Tucker/Collegian

Miriam Ticktin, associate professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York and co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, spoke to a crowd of faculty members and students about the politics of migration and border walls during her lecture on March 2.

The talk, titled Border Walls and the Politics of Becoming Non-Human, was sponsored by the anthropology department as a part of the Social Science Matters lecture series coordinated by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Elizabeth Krause, a professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, began the event by explaining the goal of the lecture series, which focuses on migration.

Our goal is to add perspective to the national conversation on migration, Krause said.

She went on to talk about the tense political environment in the U.S. regarding immigration policy, citing the recent immigration ban and initiative to build a border wall on the border with Mexico.

Krause then introduced Ticktin, who has published two books and over 30 peer-reviewed articles on humanity.

Ticktin started her lecture by talking about the ways in which border walls not only work to defend certain territories, or keep things in place, but also to decide who belongs and who does not. As being tied to both racism and white supremacy, border walls, along with their developing technology, both define and redefine how certain bodies should be treated.

Ticktin stated that border walls are not new, but were popular even before President Donald Trump brought them to the forefront of the U.S. political agenda.

Fifteen new border walls were built in 2015, said Ticktin. Trump comes very late to the game on this.

She went on to talk about how U.S. quarantine and inspection stations at the U.S-Mexico border reshape border walls in a way that makes humans synonymous with pests. In other words, humans are becoming treated like animals who contain some sort of threat or disease.

Ticktin emphasized the importance of how borders walls are being designed. She mentioned how U.S environmental groups, in an attempt to protect wildlife zones at border walls, pushed the government to create small openings in border walls for the safe passage of animals.

While people continue to show great concern about the safety and livelihood of animals, migrants and refugees are not receiving this same sympathy and treatment.

Here, Ticktin stressed, the design of the wall determines which lives matter.

Additionally, Ticktin mentioned that although current policies allow for the easy flow of goods across borders, its not comparable when it comes to people.

Goods pass across borders more easily than people, Ticktin said.

Cary Speck, a graduate student at UMass studying anthropology, came to the event interested in hearing what Ticktin had to say. Considering his current research on refugees and forced migration in central Europe, Speck found the talk relevant to his studies.

Its nice to see a comparative perspective, said Speck.

Toward the end of her lecture, Ticktin talked about the new border wall being built in Calais, France, near what was once the Calais migrant camp, also known as the Jungle. This refugee camp was bulldozed and replaced with a container camp designed to house migrants in shipping containers normally used to transport goods.

Ticktin criticized container camps as limiting the mobility, individuality and freedom of migrants, while also hiding why these people are there in the first place.

The choice to use containers for migrants is politically meaningful, said Ticktin.

Ticktin ended her talk with a message of hope and positivity. As a proponent of open borders, Ticktin pushed the audience to be creative and imagine how borders can be reconsidered in a different form and facilitate new interactions between people and countries.

Lets take what we have and turn it into entirely something new, Ticktin said.

Shawn Provost, a senior majoring in civil engineering and political science, mentioned he saw the information for the event online and felt compelled to attend because of whats taking place in the U.S.

Its very relevant with whats happening in the new administration, said Provost.

Carly Burgess can be reached at cburgess@umass.edu.

Filed under Campus News, Headlines, News, Politics, Scrolling Headlines Tagged with amherst, cary speck, department of anthropology, elizabeth krause, Massachusetts, miriam ticktin, shawn provost, UMass, umass amherst, University of Massachusetts

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Ticktin discusses the politics of border walls as part of Social Science Matters series - The Massachusetts Daily Collegian