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Sweets and StressA few years ago, the University of Pittsburgh’s JanetAmico noticed how women she saw as patients wereresponding to stress and anxiety. She’d sometimes hearthem talking about grabbing sweets or carbs to alleviatestress. Men, however, never seemed to talk about that.Since then, Amico, an MD professor of medicine andof pharmaceutical sciences, and Regis Vollmer, a PhDprofessor of pharmaceutical sciences, have shown thatoxytocin, a hormone associated with maternal bonding aswell as dampening the blow of stress and anxiety, couldhave a role in keeping us from grabbing another slice ofpie. The researchers monitored the feeding behaviors ofa colony of normal mice and another of genetically engineeredmice without the hormone. When the researchersaugmented the animals’ water with sugar, the oxytocindeficientmice went on a binge, consuming four to fivetimes as much water as they normally would. They alsooverdid it with carbohydrate-enriched water.Amico and colleagues have also identified moreanxiety and greater stress responses in female, butnot male, oxytocin-deficient mice versus normal mice.She has broadened her studies to explore whether theenhanced consumption of sugar and carbohydrate solutionsand greater responses to stress and anxiety aresomehow related.“It’s still early to speculate,” says Amico, about thehormone’s role in humans, but the research suggests thatsome people’s inability to say no to dessert could stemfrom an oxytocin problem. —Erica LloydCATHERINE LAZUREIS RICKETS ON ITS WAY BACK?PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC.Our modern indoor lifestyles couldbe contributing to a reemergenceof rickets.Rickets is usually associatedwith developing countries. InNorth America, first with theaid of cod liver oil supplements,then ultraviolet lampsand vitamin D–enriched milk,the bone-softening diseasefound in children was all buteradicated by the 1930s.Kumaravel Rajakumar,assistant professor of pediatricsat Pitt, has foundevidence that leads him tobelieve it might be on the risehere again. Half of the AfricanAmerican Pittsburgh-areachildren he studied (a sampleof 42 between the ages of 6and 10) were vitamin D deficient. If years go by without children gettingenough of the vitamin, they can develop rickets.“Rickets is back in North America in waves,” Rajakumar says,even in sunny regions. Though rickets is not a disease physicians arerequired to report to health authorities, small studies like his ownhave brought Rajakumar to this conclusion.“People with darker skin are more susceptible, needing up to sixtimes the amount of sunlight required to generate an adequate supplyof vitamin D in a light-skinned person. People in general aren’t gettingenough sunlight, mothers are depleted of vitamin D [through breastfeeding],and children don’t get enough of it in breast milk and developrickets,” says Rajakumar.Children and breast-feeding mothers should get more sunlight andconsume more vitamin D–rich foods like fortified milk and other dairyproducts, he says. Vitamin D deficiency can also make one more susceptibleto prostate cancer, multiple sclerosis, breast cancer, and diabetes.Rajakumar received National Institutes of Health funding to monitorvitamin D levels in light- and dark-skinned children. —JMSUMMER 2007 5